reorganizing my dice collection between campaigns. I need another box, ideally one that will fit the bigger ones!

you don't like the ending (we'll find one that's yours)

“Logan,” Virgil says, softly, slowly, “you do know that you’re allowed to be a person, right?”

In the aftermath: Logan, Virgil, and things that have gone unsaid for far too long.

(ao3 link)

When all is said and done, Logan sits in his room for a little while, hands folded neatly in his lap, staring at the ceiling. It’s painted with a star map, charting the cosmos: Ursa Major by Ursa Minor, Perseus reaching for Andromeda, Canis Major ever lapping at Orion’s heels. They glow with a bright, otherworldly light against a black backdrop, and they change as the seasons turn, too, change and wheel overhead as the real night sky does. 

Though, of course, the night sky does not actually change. Just the human perspective of it. Stars are ever-constant; it is the Earth that is not, human perception that is flawed.

Roman helped him set it up, years ago. The remembrance lies bitter and heavy on his chest.

He is not hurt. He is not hurt, because he does not feel. There is a pounding in his head that refuses to abate and a stinging in his eyes that blurs his vision, but such physical reactions will stop eventually, if he ignores them for long enough. He is practiced in this, by now. He is not hurt. 

He firmly believes that there is nothing that cannot be solved with the application of the scientific method. This past hour is no different. As with all else, it can be analyzed through the lens of conducting an experiment.

He lays out the memories neatly in his mind for review.

Hypothesis: His physical presence and interaction with the other sides is not necessary for Thomas to maintain a healthily logical existence.

There are too many variables for this to be considered a controlled setting. All of the others have so many emotions, and as such, are prone to outbursts and unpredictability that may skew any data collected. He is accustomed to this, after all this time, and has learned to set his expectations accordingly. But there are two variables that can be defined with little difficulty: the independent and dependent variable. The variable that he manipulates, and the variable that changes due to this manipulation.

Independent variable: His presence in the discussion. Keeping in line with the video game theme the others seem to be holding to, he presents himself as an information-dispensing “NPC,” or “non-player character,” as he understands the definition to be, in an effort to be less intrusive in the conversation. Half the time, he does not bother to speak.

Dependent variable: How Thomas, Patton, and Roman react to this method of interaction.

It is difficult to collect data for this variable. There are no numbers to record, nothing that is quantifiable. He has to rely purely on qualitative data, collected based on observation and description. It is discomfiting, how much room for error and misinterpretation that leaves, but he is confident in his ability to be a passive, unbiased researcher. He records what he observes and nothing more.

Data: They seem tentatively interested in the beginning, curious about the novelty of his chosen method, if nothing else. Roman even takes the time to read the text box aloud. But the intrigue soon wanes. He is cut off both literally and figuratively, skipped, dismissed at every turn. When they allow him to speak, it is with begrudging toleration. When he offers silent information, they ignore him. When Deceit takes his place, they do not notice the difference.

His hands clench into fists, ever so briefly. He stares at the ceiling. At the shining stars that Roman helped him to paint so long ago as he grinned and chattered about nothing in particular, paint splattered on his clothes and all across his face. Roman is always so fussy about his appearance that Logan had thought that existing in such a disheveled state would irritate him, but when he pointed it out, Roman laughed, reached out, and swiped his paint-coated thumb across his cheek, loudly proclaiming that now, they matched. And Logan felt so warm, inside and out, despite the fact that he keeps his room at a cool twenty degrees Celsius.

This is a digression. Completely irrelevant to the experiment at hand. He pulls himself back to the pertinent memories.

From the data, results can be extrapolated. It is a simple matter of deciding whether the information gathered supports or refutes the hypothesis. He has collected more than enough observations to make a decision.

Conclusion: All data suggests

His mind stalls. He shakes his head. This should be easy. Data from experimentation, and conclusions from data. That is how the scientific method works.

Conclusion: All data suggests that the hypothesis is correct, and that his presence is neither necessary nor especially welcome amongst the others. His duty can be safely performed from a distance. Further experimentation will be needed to determine the best way in which to do so.

His eyes trace the patterns of the constellations, steadfast and sure, and he thinks about his failures. Thinks about how he attempted to be as unobtrusive as possible, how he ensured that if his input was unwanted, the others would be able to ignore him, to block him out. He gave them the option, so even if he were capable of feeling upset, he should not be. He should not care that they do not care, that they listen to him when it is convenient for them and discard him when it is not.

He doesn’t care. It was simply part of the experiment. It is simply one more hypothesis confirmed. Never mind that he was not actually attempting to conduct an experiment at the time. Approaching this issue in this manner imposes order on disordered, messy thoughts, forces him to think objectively.

Logan sits in his room, and he breathes.

Then, there is a knock at his door, rushed and urgent. He frowns. After how that disaster ended, he would have thought that Patton would be with Roman. And… he’s almost sure it wouldn’t be Deceit-- or should he be calling him by his name now? He is unsure; he was not present for the admission, which may imply a lack of permission, but Deceit confessed in front of Thomas, which may in fact imply blanket permission for all the occupants of his mindscape.

A dilemma to ponder later, perhaps. He stands, rolling his shoulders back, and crosses his room to the door. He opens it, and it’s not Patton, and it’s certainly not Deceit.

It’s Virgil.

He’s pale and hunched over, shoulders set defensively. His eyes are red, as if he’s been crying, and Logan opens his mouth to query as to whether there is something he can help him with. He did think it odd, that Virgil chose not to involve himself in the discussion at all, though clearly he has been affected by it to some degree. Of course, Patton is really the one to go to with issues of the emotional kind, but perhaps he tried and found Patton to be busy with Roman. Logan is a poor substitute, but if Virgil desires his help, then he will try his best.

“Virgil,” he says. “Is there something I can do for you?”

For a long moment, Virgil stares at him. Stares, and says nothing.

“Can I come in?” he asks at last.

Logan furrows his brow, but stands aside so that he is no longer blocking the door. “Of course,” he says, and Virgil slips past him and into his room. After a moment of hesitation, he closes the door behind him and turns to face Virgil, who stands in the center of the room, looking up at the ceiling. He looks small, somehow, and lost.

“How are you?” Logan tries. “I understand that there were some topics raised in that discussion that may have left you uncomfortable, assuming that you were listening to it, and I can’t imagine that you were particularly pleased with all aspects of the outcome. Is there anything that you would like to talk about?”

Virgil stares at the ceiling for a moment longer, and then looks to Logan. Logan is taken aback by the expression of devastation that flickers across his face, the sorrow in his eyes and downturned corners of his mouth.

He is expecting him to say something about Roman’s outburst, or about the perils of trusting Deceit as Thomas seems ready to do, but what comes out of his mouth instead is,

“Can I, um, hug you?”

Logan blinks. Plays back the memory in his mind to ascertain that no, he did not mishear. And then, uncertainly, he spreads his arms.

Virgil does not often ask for physical affection, though he is less shy about it now than he once was.

“Yes, certainly,” he says, “though, you know that Patton is--”

He is cut off by Virgil all but launching himself into his arms; all the breath escapes his lungs in a single gust. Virgil’s arms snake around his back, holding him tightly, and he buries his face in his shoulder. For a moment, Logan is completely at a loss; he does not seek out hugs because he does not need them, and typically, nobody asks him for one. In fact, he can’t quite recall the last time that he had such extended physical contact with someone.

It takes a few seconds for him to react, to bring his arms up to encircle Virgil in turn.

“I don’t want Patton,” Virgil mumbles into Logan’s shirt. “I want you.”

“I--” Logan blinks a few times, rapidly, in succession. Because surely, that does not make any sense. Patton is, objectively, the best at hugging out of all of them-- though, actually, now that he considers it, should Deceit be considered for the position, by virtue of having three pairs of arms? Would that make for a more efficient hug, if there were more arms to perform the action? How would one go about measuring such a thing?

Regardless, Patton is certainly the most practiced at giving comfort, and as the center of Thomas’ emotions, it can be assumed that he has the best mindset for it. Why, then, would Virgil claim to seek him for comfort rather than Patton?

“I’m not sure that I understand,” he admits softly, and Virgil pulls back a bit, enough so that they are face to face, though he doesn’t let go entirely. His hands are gripping Logan’s shirt so tightly that they are sure to leave wrinkles.

“I care about you,” Virgil says fiercely. “I care about you so goddamn much. And I want to spend time with you. I never, ever want you to spare me your company, or whatever the fuck that was all about in there.”

He feels a sudden, deep urge to adjust his glasses, to fiddle with his tie, to do something to place distance between himself and Virgil. But somehow, he can’t bring himself to let go of his grip on Virgil’s back. “I… see,” he says, a bit helplessly, even though he does not see, at all. “Is this about what I said to the others? That wasn’t--”

“That wasn’t what?” Virgil interrupts. “That wasn’t what you meant? Just because I wasn’t participating doesn't mean I wan’t listening. It was pretty obvious that you did mean it, Logan.”

Logan frowns. He is growing tired of being interrupted today. Logically, there is no difference between when the others did it and when Virgil does it, except for the fact that he is physically interacting with Virgil, so there is no reason for his sudden... exhaustion. That’s all it is. Exhaustion.

He’s not sure why he expected Virgil to let him finish his sentence.

“I was going to say that it wasn’t important,” he corrects. “I--”

“No,” Virgil cuts in again, and he must react visibly, because Virgil grimaces apologetically. “I’m sorry for talking over you,” he adds, voice a bit softer. “But I kinda don’t think you’re going to let me say what I need to say if I don’t, because you’re wrong, Logan. You are so, so important.”

“I was not attempting to imply otherwise,” Logan replies. “I never said that I wasn’t important. I am very aware that I am important. With an absence of Logic, Thomas’ life would surely devolve into chaos. I am well aware that my fulfillment of my duties is necessary for Thomas to live healthily and successfully.”

For some reason, this only seems to upset Virgil more. “No,” he repeats, frustrated. “I’m not talking about Logic. I’m talking about you, Logan, as a person. You are important.”

Is… he speaking circularly on purpose? What exactly is he trying to say? Usually, he finds Virgil to be refreshingly clear when compared to the other sides, so this interaction so far has been oddly frustrating.

“I’m not certain I understand what you’re attempting to convey.” He pauses. “What is the difference between me and Logic? I am Logic.”

“You’re Logic,” Virgil says, “but you’re Logan, too, and, and I just wanted to make sure that you were okay, because they kept talking over you and shutting you up and you didn’t even go and argue with them in person and then you said that, and I got--” He pauses-- “scared.”

Logan believes in the pursuit of knowledge, in enlightenment over ignorance. But somehow, some part of him dreads asking what Virgil means.

“Scared of what?”

For a moment, Virgil is silent, and something like panic flickers on his face. Then, he closes his eyes and breathes. Logan recognizes the pattern: in for four seconds, hold for seven, out for eight.

“I’m scared that you don’t know how much we love you,” Virgil says, opening his eyes. His voice is quiet and nervous and vulnerable. “How much I love you.”

For a moment, all he can register is Virgil’s arms around him: their weight, their warmth. That, and the silence in his room. 

Evidence shows that stars produce sounds, though not any that fall within the human range of hearing. The stars on his ceiling, however, are utterly mute.

“I don’t understand,” he says weakly. “I--”

“Logan--”

But no, he has had enough of being overridden. There is only so much he can take before something has to give, and he reached that limit over an hour ago, about when Roman slashed through his contribution like it meant nothing, when Patton pressed skip as if he meant nothing, when Deceit yanked him out of frame and replaced him, and he didn’t bother to put up a fight because no one was listening to him and if he couldn't accomplish anything by speaking, maybe he could by shutting up since that seemed to be what everyone wanted anyway--

And now Virgil is here, saying what? It doesn’t follow, logically, and if there is anything which Logan cannot abide, it is faulty logic.

“No,” he says, and Virgil, mercifully, allows him to talk. “No, that doesn’t make sense. If there is anything that has become glaringly apparent recently, it is that none of you want or care for my presence. No, I’m not done,” he adds, cutting off Virgil’s protest before it can begin. “I am not upset about it. I do not get upset. But logically speaking, the fact that I cannot impart even the most basic of facts before I am interrupted or overruled points to the conclusion that none of you particularly care about what I have to say. Which is, and I will reiterate this point, fine, as I do not need any of you to like me in order to perform my function adequately.”

Virgil stares at him, and then steps back, releasing Logan entirely.

“Oh my god,” he says. “That’s not fine.”

Logan sighs.

“Didn’t I just say that it is?” he asks. “There’s no need for you to be experiencing emotional distress over this matter, Virgil.”

“You just told me that you think none of us care about you, and you think I’m not going to experience some fucking emotional distress?” Virgil stops suddenly, shaking his head. “Wait, no, this isn’t about me. Logan, we’ve been treating you like shit. You’re… you can be upset about it. You know that, right? Because it’s not fine, it is so far past fine that we are in, like, Canada or some shit, and you don’t have to act like it’s fine.”

“I am not ‘acting like it’s fine,’” he says. “It is fine, and I’m not upset. I do not get upset. I’ve told you this. I don’t understand--”

“You do get upset, Logan, you are literally getting upset right now, and that’s okay, you can be upset, you have every right to be upset--”

It’s one interruption too many.

“I am not upset!”

The shout hangs in the air long after the words have left his lips. His chest is heaving, he notes dimly, and his hands are clenched. His ears are ringing, too, and his head pounds.

Oh.

Oh, no. He can’t do this. He can’t do this, and he especially can’t do this now, with Virgil in the room, because he is not supposed to be like this. He has tried so hard not to be like this, has tried so hard to be the cool, rational embodiment of logic that he is supposed to be, but somehow, he continually fails. But it is impossible to reverse time, impossible to erase the outburst now that it has been vocalized, so he stands there, shaking slightly, finding it harder and harder to meet Virgil’s eyes.

“I am not supposed to get upset,” he says eventually, to end the silence more than anything else. “I… apologize. That was unseemly of me.”

“Logan,” Virgil says, softly, slowly, “you do know that you’re allowed to be a person, right?”

He blanks.

“We’re not people,” he says weakly. “We are facets of the personality of a person. My job is to be logical. I’m just trying to do my job.”

Virgil closes his eyes and breathes in his pattern again. Then, he opens them and steps closer. He reaches for Logan’s hands, taking both of them in his own and worrying at the fingers until they begin to relax. Logan stares at them, at his hands in Virgil’s, at Virgil sweeping his thumb across his knuckles slowly and methodically.

“Then let’s look at it logically,” Virgil says. He speaks in that same low tone of voice. It reminds Logan of a nature documentary, one where the narrator uses a soothing, gentle cadence so as not to scare the animals. “Alright?”

Logan nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak.

“If we’re all just supposed to do our jobs,” Virgil says, “our jobs and absolutely nothing else, then I would be anxious all the time, right? I mean, I already am, mostly, but that would mean that I would only be able to feel anxious. No positive emotions, no happiness. Everything that’s been so good about the past few years, with you guys, I wouldn’t be able to have that. Do you think that’s how it should be?”

His voice remains gentle, but for their impact, he may as well be shouting.

“Of course not!” Logan says. The very idea is incredibly displeasing. “But that’s different.”

“Okay, how is it different?”

“Your ability to feel positive emotions does not hamper your ability to perform your basic function. You can be both happy and anxious, at the same time or at different times. The two are not mutually exclusive.” He shakes his head. “I need to be logical, to be rational, and that is everything that emotions are not. If I allow myself to feel, then I allow my judgement to be clouded, and Thomas cannot afford to have a Logic with clouded judgement.”

Virgil frowns. “But that’s just it,” he says. “You have emotions. You’re not stopping yourself from having emotions. No one can do that. You’re just refusing to acknowledge that you have them. Doesn’t that kind of repression cloud your judgement more?”

His mouth goes very dry. He feels as though his heart has stopped, which is ridiculous, because he knows full well that his heart is functioning properly. It seems to be the rest of him that has stopped working. Drawing breath is becoming increasingly difficult, for some reason, which is frustrating because there is absolutely nothing physically wrong with him and thus, no reason for this reaction.

Virgil… has to be wrong. He’s not repressing anything. One cannot repress something that one does not possess. But then, the point of repression is to make oneself believe that one does not possess something, or that one has not done something, so if one is skilled enough at repression, one might not know that they are in the act of repressing. Which would make one an unreliable narrator, which is a disturbing concept to contemplate, because if one cannot rely on one’s own perception of reality, then what can one trust?

Human perception is so, so flawed. He cannot afford flawed perception.

“I’m not repressing anything,” he says. His voice is a reedy whisper even to his own ears. He can’t imagine he sounds very convincing. “That’s what Patton does.”

Virgil quirks a brow. “Yeah, Teach, I don’t think that’s a, uh. What did you say? Mutually exclusive? I don’t think that’s a mutually exclusive thing. Patton doesn’t have a monopoly on repression.”

“But I’m Logic,” he insists. “There’s nothing there to repress.”

Virgil pauses, and for a moment, Logan thinks that he is about to concede the argument. For some reason, it feels like a hollow victory. 

But then, Virgil draws him into another hug. He leans into it, unresisting, but his arms won’t move to return it.

“You’re Logan,” Virgil says softly. “You’re not just Logic, and you’re not a robot. You’ve gotta let yourself be human, buddy.”

“I’m not-- I can’t--” His voice catches, breaks, and he realizes with a rising horror that he has begun to cry. He has begun to cry, and it’s humiliating, because he doesn’t know why, because he’s not sad, not at all, because he doesn’t--

He doesn’t--

He doesn’t feel--

Oh.

Oh, oh, oh.

Oh, god.

He’s such a failure.

“No, no, shh, you’re not a failure,” Virgil says, and that’s just another figurative nail in the figurative coffin, isn’t it, that he’s speaking aloud without even realizing that he’s doing it. “You are the furthest thing from a failure that I know. You’re so good, Logan. Feeling things isn’t a failure. You have to let yourself feel.”

“I don’t know how,” Logan says, broken, almost gasping. He doesn’t want to be saying these things. He feels like he’s losing control, and he’s so terrified. “I’ve never known how. I have to be taken seriously, Virgil, I can’t afford not to be taken seriously--”

There. The admission is out there, out in the world, out in this world that is just the two of them, just him and Virgil locked in an embrace, just him and Virgil as his tears leak onto the fabric of Virgil’s hoodie. Once spoken, they cannot be unspoken, and Logan feels--

He feels--

Oh, how he feels, and how wrong it is--

“I promise, that’s not going to happen,” Virgil says. “You’re allowed to have emotions. No one will think any less of you.”

Is this what devastation is? Is this what a tsunami feels like as it sweeps across the land, washing civilization away? His chest is tight and hot and his eyes are burning and his ears are ringing, and he’s felt this way all along but he’s refused to acknowledge that it was happening because he is Logic and Logic is not feelings, is not listened to even when he’s not displaying unbecoming emotions, so how can he possibly think that letting himself feel would be a good idea?

He doesn’t want to feel like this.

He’s felt like this for so long.

“You already think less of me!” he says. “You, you all, you never listen to what I say, you always tell me to shut up or you ignore me or I can tell that I irritate you even when I’m specifically trying not to be irritating and I don’t know what to do because nothing I try ever works.”

Virgil makes a wounded noise deep in the back of his throat, and his grip on Logan tightens.

“We owe you so many apologies,” he says. “I am so, so sorry, Logan. I am so sorry that we made you feel like we didn’t care. I am so sorry that we haven’t been listening. I am so fucking sorry that we made you feel like you needed to not have emotions just to be heard. I am so sorry.”

And Logan lets go. His breath hitches and chokes on a sob, and he doesn’t hold it back, doesn’t swallow it down and try to forget the urge was ever there in the first place.

He buries his face in Virgil’s shoulder and lets himself cry.

“I’m trying,” he gasps between sobs, “I’m trying so hard but I can’t--”

“I know,” Virgil says. “I know. You’re doing so good. I know we’ve all been shit at showing it, but we love you, Logan, really, and we’re here for you. We’re gonna do better, I swear.”

In this moment, Logan allows himself to believe that Virgil cares. He believes in what his senses can absorb, and the evidence is undeniable; it is in Virgil’s arms around him, holding him safe, in Virgil’s low, emphatic words and the way he sounds as if he, too, is near tears, as if Logan is someone worth crying over.

It occurs to him, then, that Virgil did not come here seeking comfort. He came here to offer comfort to him. All he has to do is accept it. And he shouldn’t need it, shouldn’t want it, because he is Logic and Logic does not need comforting or reassurance, but he’s far past that point already, is already weeping into Virgil’s shoulder, so perhaps it is too late to go back. The thought frightens him.

He doesn’t know how to feel. Has never known how to feel, has always thought that it would be better for himself and everyone, better for Thomas if he just. Didn’t. But Virgil says that he can, and though Virgil can be wrong, he despises deception. Virgil wouldn’t lie to him.

Perhaps this can be a start.

His arms come up, and he hugs Virgil back. Presses up close to him and revels in the warmth even as he cries.

“The others,” he says, “they don’t, they don’t like me and they don’t listen--”

“We’ll talk to them,” Virgil says. “You and me, once you’re feeling better, okay? We’ll make this right. Your feelings are valid and your contributions are important, and we’re gonna remind them about that.” His grip tightens, and when he speaks again, it’s in a whisper, as if to himself. “You’re not alone. I know how shitty it feels to think you are, but you’re not. And you’re not ever going to be.”

And Logan, shivering and shaking in Virgil’s arms, tears still crawling down his cheeks, looks up at the ceiling. At the stars, bright and constant, like a promise.

“Okay,” he whispers, and he decides to believe, if only this one more time.

Hypothesis: They care. And I am allowed to care, too.

Conclusion: Pending.

The Mandalorian... In Lego form

What can I add to the praise about the Disney Plus series, The Mandalorian, that has not already been said?

Yes, it is really very good, I was captivated within the first minute and was heart broken during the third episode, entitled The Sin, when the Mandalorian handed over the child to the Imperial officer, played so beautifully by Werner Herzog. Of them all, it is probably episodes three and four that are my favourites, showing the more gentle side to the character. But let us be honest, when choosing favourite episodes of this series, we the viewer have been rather spoilt because there is not a dud among them. Not even the sixth episode, which was a heist story and could easily have been done rather badly, but wasn’t and even included a fabulously dry Dave Filoni cameo as a New Republic pilot. No, not a single missed beat, bad line or failed joke throughout series one.

This is not to say that it does not have its cold brutal moments though, the Quarren being bisected in the first episode was utterly shocking, you even hear his legs heit the floor! Encasing the good natured Mythol in carbonite was really mean. Yet, they saved the humour of child abuse right up until the end and the speeder scouts indifference in violently handling the child. These moments of suffering are balanced so perfectly with real heart and leave a lump in the throat, even when dealing with an assassin droid walking into a lava flow. Terminator eat your heart out!

So, it must be time to combine some of the biggest loves of my rather childish, adult life into one hobby, namely my love of Star Wars and my love of Lego. With every new franchise released under the Star Wars banner, Lego get good dibs on making tie in sets. With the release of the Mandalorian, the Lego sets have been exceptional and if you have not yet seen them, you should go and have a look at the Brickset page.

The first set, number 75254 or AT-ST Raider is a glorious reworking of the beloved Imperial walker, as seen during the Battle of Endor, but here it comes with loose wiring and scratched paint. The colours are indicative of rust, repainting of old worn out parts and some battle damage, all achieved with coloured bricks and several stickers. The effect is really very pleasing and the walker stands at just over twenty five centimetres tall. All that it is missing is the red glow in the cocpit. The minfigs that come with this set just wonderful. Cara Dune, played so effortlessly well by Gina Carono in the show, is a really lovely minifig, although having a globally available minifig of your character must be exciting even for a movie star. Along with the walker come two raider pilots and then even Mando himself, in his dirty and mismatched armour, which is a little odd. By this point in the show, when he meets and briefly fights with Cara Dune, he already has his new Beskar cuirass of armour, complete in shining silver. So one has to ask why he is presented to us in the older colours of his armour that was destroyed by the Mudhorn in the second episode? Over all though, 75254 is a lovely set, even with the annoyance of having to apply stickers (which is a topic that takes on the additional needs of disability issues for me and my manky old lady fingers), rather than using printed pieces.

Set 75267, the Mandalorian Battle Pack is simple, cheap and rather pretty. This is a basic set with four minifigs, all in various colours of Mandalorian armour which may be different clans, with a small gun emplacement and speeder bike. The warriors are split equally male and female, but I have no idea which is which, due to the lack of lipstick, floral tops and flowing long hair, the usual key indicators used by Lego to show the gender split (stories of my subverting this by placing  the ‘male’ bodies with the ‘female’ heads, are very likely true!). Removing the helmets reveals an unprinted black head, which is slightly disturbing, but this is something that Lego had done for several years now.

The big set of this theme for 2020 has to be the fabulous ship used by the Mandalorian, the beautifully named Mandalorian Bounty Hunter Transport Ship… Oops yeah, it seems that somebody fucked up. Set number 75292, Razor Crest has in some cases been renamed following claims of trademark usage by another company, who just happen to make Lego compatible sets and some may claim have been guilty of cloning Lego sets without license. Oh dear.

I pre-ordered my set a good three months prior to release and thank the heavens that I did, because it was hopelessly delayed and finally cancelled three days after release and so I had to deal with Lego directly... during a pandemic outbreak... when every anguished parent with a Star Wars addicted child was no doubt screaming for their Mandalorian set too. Lego were hellishly busy and no doubt there were many like me, disappointed Amazon customers scrabbling to find the sets they had ordered weeks before. How many of those adults with debit cards were buying the toy for themselves though, remains a closely guarded industry secret.

When the set arrived, I was impressed by the actual size of the box which was huge and which my cat now uses for a bed! This was just the outer packaging used by Lego to ship the set, but the actual set box was still quite large and also beautifully printed, if surprisingly heavy.

Building the model was fun, even if there is a fair amount of repetition due to the chirality of the ship and the usual struggles with yet more bloody stickers! The engine nacelles are probably the least screen accurate feature, given the rough tooth like arrangement on the front intakes bares little resemblence to the smooth circular versions on the screen rendered ship. This is a tiny little complaint about an otherwise awesome model though. (I am just going to pause here for a moment. Are they really air intakes? Given that this is a spacecraft and it can travel at ‘light-speed’, why does it have these large open front intakes that resemble the compressor fan of a jet engine? Actually, that is a stream of thought that can only lead to sadness, especially with the roar of said engine as it flies across screen, supposedly in space, you know space. The place where NO ONE can hear you scream! But can hear if you miss a gear on your spaceship!)

Minfigs with this set are thoroughly cool, with our classic Mando himself, Din Djarin. He does of course have the child with him and the fidure of the child is adorable. This set also includes Greef Karga, a Scout Trooper and IG11… Um. Once again, this is a potentially confused set. Is this from the first episode or the last two? I don’t recall seeing the Scout troopers in the first episode so much, but they are present and a large part of the finale. Mando does of course have some serious issues with droids, having been orphaned during the Clone Wars, by a B2 Super Battle Droid (Speaking of droids and the Clone Wars, this does explain to me why when Luke and Obi Wan visit Mos Eisley, the cantina owner tells Luke that the droids are not welcome. It was a glaringly obvious issue that I never gave thought to, of course people would mistrust droids, the Clone Wars were a political tool used by a member of the elite, to secure their own power while creating political turmoil in which they could thrive and in which many thousands of innocent people lost their lives. I wonder if this was written to parallel real life, not that we have many examples of this in the real world), which is shown in heart breaking visceral detail during the several flashbacks we see. Again, this is just another element in this series that goes to such great depth to give the characters real heart. Anyway, back to my point, a part of his redemption was Mando coming to accept and even trust a droid, which he does with IG11, despite it being Mando himself who terminated the IG unit to begin with. So with a Scout trooper, IG11 and Greef Karga, would it be fair to say that with the child in hand, Mando should be in his silver Beskar armour? It would appear not and thus Mando is still in his dirty, rusted and damaged armour with this set. At some point they simply must release a set with him in shiny new Beskar, but maybe that will come with the release of Series two.

Over all, the sets released in this theme for 2020 have all been excellent and to an adult child like myself, well worthy of collecting, building and displaying… Because these are not  toys! They are valuable collectors pieces, future antiques and actually rather pretty. Which leads me onto my next section, how to display the models while making them look like something interesting and not just a pile of bricks. I had a space that you could have called a bookshelf, not a great space for books if I am honest, being slightly awkward and on top of my Lego desk. So I decided to fill this space with a Lego Diorama that measures one hundred and six studs wide and twenty four studs deep. It was a crap bookcase and my Lego books kept falling over or worse, falling off altogether to land on whatever I was working on at the time. The gloss painted finish proved to be be sticky, which damaged a couple of my instructions booklets and well, these are the issues you get when you design and build your own furniture, out of scrap wood and offcuts. Yes, the furniture is a bit mismatched in my office, but I made nearly all of it. Maybe one day I will do a show and tell.

The display started as a simple thing, a couple of enclosed boxes in which I could build a pair of scenes. My first scene was the Rebel Alliance looking at a hologram of the Death Star, while planning an attack on the technological terror. It is half based on Episode four with a dash of episode six. I added flickering lights and a large Death Star shell from the planets sets and stood back to admire my work. It was… OK-ish and sat like that for several months as I planned the next box and then what was to go above it.

With the release of the Mandalorian, I knew that the remaining box had to be the Covert, with the Armourer and her forge. I also knew that with the Razor Crest, I wanted some kind of scene above the covert to place both the ship and the AT-ST together, which while technically mixing a couple of episodes set on different worlds, could be seen in the soul of the show, rather than an accurate depiction of the Mandalorian itself. With the addition of some more lights it was all going so well and then I had to re-home Vader's castle, a task of Sisyphean proportions. 

Humour aside, I need a larger office. With my Solo, Rebels, Rogue One, Clone Wars, New Hope and final trilogy themes to my Star Wars Lego display, plus the collection of Technic lego so large it required specialist furniture to be built, I have run out of room. Vader’s castle is thankfully taller than it is wide and it fitted onto the shelf fairly well. It also took lighting effects really nicely and I was pleased with the results, in particular, the glowing hologram of the Emperor that appears in miniature in front of Vader's desk. However, it now looks like I have a nice castle, built on the edge of a run down city slum, with the sewers taken over by rogue blacksmiths and a group of noisy political activists. If any of you can spot the social commentary in here, well done you. Poor old Vader however can barely get any sleep, no wonder his mouse droid keeps leaping off the model and onto my carpet, it wants to escape for some peace!

So now that the office shelves are filled, what should I do next? Well actually, there are some things on the Razor Crest that I am not happy with, aspects that need some work to make it look a little better. First to go is that hideous hole in the top. Yes, it allows you to claw the pod out, but for display, rather than play, the hole is unacceptable. I made my own Moff Gideon (Using Winstone from Ghostbusters for the head and an Imperial Pilot body) and equipped him with a Darksabre. I added a pair of speeder bikes too, one for the scout that came with the Razor Crest and one for a scout that I added later.

I dread to think how much I have spent on this project, there is easily three hundred pounds in sets on my shelf alone, consisting of three large ships, one walker and a castle. There are also the various minifigs I bought from else where, such as the Rebel Alliance leadership and spare Mandalorian warriors. There are all of the lights, the wire and the switches, which cost about twenty pounds. It all adds up rather quickly and luckily for me, most of the Lego consists of bricks that I have collected over the years and a lot of those bricks were second hand.

Was it worth it? Yes it was. Not only was it a lot of fun to plan and build, but as a disabled person, it is nice to have a hobby that I can still manage and do fairly well. It is nothing like climbing a mountain, or wild camping with my mountain bike, but it stopped me going insane with boredom, especially during lockdown. Who knows what I can do next, but it is nice to be back on the technic and building actual gear boxes again.

ALL ABOUT SM GLOBAL PACKAGE & NEO CITY: SEOUL EXPERIENCE

by twitter user @sugnsook​ // @yudotaeil 

Hello~ so i am not that good at explaining/vlogging or writing stuffs but in this thread? or blogpost or wherever u guys reading this, i will try to describe my experience as much as I can. Also for now, I am dividing this post, FAQ-style  according to several topics, and I will put a separate detailed post on my own Neo City: SEOUL experience. I hope this will help for u guys deciding to splurge a bit on concert/global package!

Disclaimer: In the past, I got a few ccs complaining about my fangirl related-expensive expenses, I just want to note earlier here that as the whole prior to the actual concert, I was a part time student & working 30+ hours a week, working every chances I get. It was also my last semester of undergrad studies & I have been wanting to attend NCT’s first ever concert since 2017 and been really saved up since then, so I consider the large expenses is pretty much a treat for myself.

Tl;dr: if you worked hard enough and really wanted to attend your faves event, just go for it, as it was really worth it.

— General

What is included in Global Package?

Concert ticket (depending on days u wanna go), a good quality hotel for your stay, return transportation to & from the concert venue - hotel, preorder access to official merchandises, NCT 127 theme global package-special merchandises, NCT 127 theme snack boxes (after the concert), One themed lunch, a half day tour with tour guide before the concert, special event (varies according to what concert) - for NCT127’s we got a photoshoot session with NCT127’s life-size standee in SM’s infamous practice room itself.

How much does Global Package cost?

All i can say first thing first is….it IS costly. The ones I am paying is $949USD for Superior Single (Course C) as shown below:

The difference between the prices & packages are it depends on which hotel they will locate you & your seating in the concert. They also have Course A, Course B & Course C which depends on the concert days you are attending. Because I am flying out to Seoul just for the purpose of concert so why not just buy the two days ticket? And yeah that is why I chose Course C.

When does the ticketing open?

Usually the global package ticketing will only open at least one month prior to the actual concert, just like the concert announcement itself.  Basically right after SM announce the concert, just be prepared as the ticketing will be shortly after it, right before the general ticketing starts. My advice is just, save up save up and save up as it is really well-known super costly.

How competitive the tickets are?

It is less competitive than general ticketing for sure, but pretty competitive in between ifans itself. When I bought mine, I initially planned for just economy ones but the ticket sold out WHEN i clicked “payment”. So, be quick or you might need to wait a bit more. I’m the type to be anxious if I dont have my ticket yet so I really want my ticketing matters to be settled up as soon as possible so-- when I figured out the economy package got sold out I quickly clicked on superior option - impulsively hehs.

During that ticketing, SM allows you to hold your payment up to 2 hours, as for twin package buyers can split payment. So if the tickets sold out, you might be able to get it after 2 hours. NOTE THAT: SM changed the policy from 2 hours to 30 mins now.

Eventually SM will release more packages and you CANNOT change your options once you have buy it. The packages will be available up until a week/or two before the concert, but the type of packages is really depends. I would say, Course C - Economy package sold out pretty quickly because that is what most people aiming for.  

*also, keep refreshing the page if you are buying at the exact ticketing open time! The ticketing for mine opened 3 mins before the actual time so yeah….

How is the payment made?

Paypal only. Just be sure you have signed up to smtown travel account, and link you cards or have paypal balance to get your payment completed smoothly. Your package will only be confirmed once you get the payment confirmation so, having a working payment method is important. SM’s cancellation policy is ridiculous so I recommend everyone who is interested to join GP to do a thorough research beforehand.

Can international fans join general ticketing?

Yes, but not really feasible, as Yes24 sites require verification, unless you have connections with korean verifications or buy from 3rd party. The downside of 3rd party is you might get even more expensive ticket collectively compared to what Global Package has offered.

How good the seats are?

It depends on your luck as you will only draw your ticket basically the day before the concert. The more you paid for the package, the better the seats. For standing you might get a better queue number and in korea concerts you strictly go in by queue number. I chose seating, so for luckily one of my seat was right next to extended stage, and another seat was on the other side but center view. Also i luckily got both sides of seating so I can enjoy the concert with both views.

It is possible to trade your ticket between other global package holders tho - bcs i saw people did this at my hotel lol but you cannot ask sm to change your ticket. The concert ticket will be written as “해외팬투어” (intl fans tour), instead of your name.

My seat on the first day

My seat on the second day, center view

My seat on the second day, side view

Is there a customer service page i can rely to?

Yes. If there is one thing i would applaud SMtown travel for, it is for their customer service. I used a lot of their “Q&A” page and they typically will reply you within one business day. If you ask on weekend, they will respond to you as quick as on Monday. So if you have any like literally, ANY question about your package, just send a question to them and they will reply personally as soon as they can. And it is in english.

— Logistics

After you have bought your package, SM will update the logistics & schedule 2 WEEKS before the concert. So don’t worry if they ghosted you out before that 2 weeks lol.

Technically, they will divide the hotels according to the package type (dlx/superior/econ), then they will divide you into bus numbers, according whether you are seating/standing. Also your schedule will depends on the bus number you get. And this is non-exchangeable, as they prepared everything according to the list that they grouped you out.

How is the hotel?

For me, i got located at Ibis Styles Ambassador Hotel in Gangnam. Because I got single package, i got the whole hotel room for myself, lol what a new experience, as for my solo travels i only go for budget hostels 🤣. The hotel location is only 15~20mins subway away from the venue, and it is walking distance from COEX. There are a bunch cafes & convenience store nearby so it is pretty easy to get something. The only thing is SM’s booth opens at 8pm, so because I arrived early, I just roamed around until the booth opens. At SM’s booth, it is where you pick up your preordered merchs, sm’s merchs and most importantly draw your tickets. Also I took the chance when gathering with fellow global package goers to trade anything i needed to exchange while everyone is there.

I dont know where to put this under, but for GP, We were given a greeting card from the boys, bunch of stickers, a letter set (with colour pencil), L-holders, bunch of posters and nct127’s moodlight. For the letter set, you can decorate and write fanletter to the members and hand it to your tour guide at the time they ask you. I bought some masking tape and stickers beforehand to decorate my letter, u can prepare it ahead too and transfer it to the letter they give as the time frame is really short.

Can I go to the concert by my own?

Yes you can~ Be sure to tell your tour guide so that they dont waste time waiting. You also have to tell them whether u want to go back to hotel with them or not, as that is when they will hand you the snack boxes. If you are not certain of travelling alone in Seoul, i recommend to travel by the bus they provide, because the tour guide will bring you right until the concert entrance. For me, I wanted to join fan-events and roam around the venue more, so I decided to go on my own. (Best thing about it was when you’re in a train with fellow NCTzens they just airdrop you a lot of nct related stuffs — including the selfies they airdropped at the venue!).

— Itinerary

How tight the schedules are?

It kinda not as tight as I thought? Except for pretty early schedule on the first day, also Maybe because I got a seating ticket so I dont go to venue after the tours right away (standing fans had to queue right away after the tour)

And for me, this was my schedule —

25th 8pm: pick up merchs, ticket etc from SM booth 26th 10am - gather at hotel lobby 10:30am - depart for lunch (at Bulgogi Brothers), it was NCT127-theme and they play nct’s songs! 11:50am - depart to COEX artium - u get 1 hr to roam around there, I chose to roam around smtown museum 1pm - depart to SM C&C building in cheongdam, for special event Around 2~ish - depart back to hotel

U get free time in between and gather back at 4:30pm to depart to concert venue as concert starts at 6. As concert ends around 8:30pm, they give you about 45mins~ to get back to the bus if you wanna go back with them. 27th Bus departs at around 2 pm if i recall, as concert starts at 4pm. I went out at 10am lols (also tell your tour guide!) and bus departs around 7:30pm after the concert. 28th - check out around 12pm.

Detailed itinerary will be updated in my experience post.

The best thing about the concert period was they give you discount on some SM-related stuffs. For example, they give 30% off (?) for beverages at sm cafe for ticket/GP holders, and also discounted smtown museum admission. There were also new merchs got released that time, and some other promotions going on.

Snack box after the concert!

Merchs I collected from kfans giveaways at the venue

The best part was NCTZens spreading out the fanproject - sing Paradise during Encore; using Airdrop. NEO indeed 😎

The amount of memes & stuffs being airdropped - lol 

— Budgeting

General budgeting for my trip:

Flight - around 1.6K MYR return trip with 20kg luggage & meal (AirAsia)

Hotel - i only went during my GP stay period so it was all inclusive (hotel + concert ticket) with that $949 USD

Other expenses (tmoney, food, additional merchs) - about $250 usd is enough for me for 4 days, considering I spent on buying cosmetics & merchs a lot. My own preordered merchs was separate amt too, it depends on what u do/willing to spend around that period.

— For Muslim Fans

Do they provide halal meals?

They dont provide halal meat, but you can request for vegetarian option or seafood. During lunch, I got vegetarian bibimbap set. And for the snack boxes, too bad SM provided ham/bacon in the sandwiches, which I am not confident in removing it so I decided to not eat, just eat the cookies. Also they offer late-night meals after the concert (separate pay), but I didnt opt for that one and only went to eat at nearby places.

Can I pray before the concert?

Yes~ as I mentioned earlier, there are a few hours gap before you depart to concert so you can pray at your hotel beforehand. Or if you dont mind, like I did as I went to venue early on the 2nd day, I went to pray at Olympic Park area itself, there are a lot of benches or u can walk a bit further to isolated places to pray. I just sat down at some bench and pray while sitting down.

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These are what I can think of, and as I said earlier I do have another separate post regarding my own NEO CITY: Seoul experience, and I will update under a thread. If you have any questions feel free to contact me via twitter (@sugnsook/@yudotaeil) or  curiouscat.me/6sungjae.  Also for neo city fancams/random pics about my trip, it will be updated eventually under the main thread where this entry is posted :) Hope it helps!

New Post has been published on https://vacationsoup.com/23-places-you-have-to-visit-in-the-uk-before-you-die/

23 Places You Have to Visit in the UK Before You Die

The UK is a stunning place to visit for a holiday, with a huge variety of tourism attractions, from cosmopolitan cities to rolling countryside, sensational coastlines to quaint country villages, so we’ve come up with our own list of top places to visit and see in the UK. The sights and experiences on offer differ wildly from region to region but there is always something for everyone, whether you’re in a big group of friends or celebrating a family occasion.

Our original blog on the 23 things to do and see in the UK before you die proved so popular that we’ve decided to update it with a few new ideas. We hope you enjoy the read and it inspires you to book a luxury holiday in one of our unique group accommodation properties around the UK.

EDINBURGH SCOTLAND

Edinburgh is Scotland’s compact, hilly capital, boasting a medieval Old Town and elegant Georgian New Town with gardens and neoclassical buildings. We at House Parties have several wonderful holiday properties in Edinburgh for you to rent, whether you’re looking for group accommodation or a smaller property in Edinburgh’s New Town.

The city’s beauty is both staggering and inimitable. Edinburgh Castle is home to Scotland’s crown jewels and the Stone of Destiny, used in the coronation of Scottish rulers. Arthur’s Seat is an imposing peak in Holyrood Park with sweeping views, and Calton Hill is topped with monuments and memorials. But what of its hidden gems?

Foodies who are willing to be daring should visit Aizle, where there is no traditional menu. Instead diners are presented with a list of potential ingredients and asked to cross off any they don’t like – your dinner is then created from this! If you’re looking for cocktails in Edinburgh, all (well, almost all) roads lead to The Lucky Liquor Co. Look out for the bright neon sign pointing to the entrance of this Queen Street bar. Lucky Liquor isn’t afraid to push the boat out with its flavour combinations and presentation so be prepared to be wowed. For larger group gatherings who may be coming together for a special 40th or 50th birthday party, for example, why not organise a surprise dinner at The Scottish Whisky Experience? Catering for parties of between 10 and 80 for a private dinner, what better way to celebrate during your weekend at one of our holiday properties in Edinburgh?

Indulge your inner childhood

For those with a more adventurous spirit, visit The Museum of Childhood. This is the first museum in the world dedicated to the history of childhood. Get rid of the iPads and instead indulge your memories in the little tin soldiers, trains, and spinning tops. See history from the mind of a child, and appreciate the impressive collection, which dates back several hundred years.

Staying with the children’s theme, Harry Potter fans can visit Nicolson’s Café, the place where J K Rowling, as a newly divorced single mother, wrote some of her first Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Please note that Nicolson’s Café has long since closed. The location was turned into a Chinese buffet restaurant but has more recently been turned into a bistro named Spoon.

The Kyoto Friendship Garden is located in the grounds of 16th century Lauriston Castle in Cramond. Opened in 2002, it was created to celebrate the twinning of Edinburgh with Kyoto in Japan. The garden has blossom trees, calming water features and zen galore for those lucky enough to find it. Scotland is all about tartan. The Tartan Weaving Mill occupies a building which used to be a reservoir. With five storeys to explore, the exhibition runs you through the entire process involved in tartan production and visitors can be fitted for full Highland dress.

YORKSHIRE

House Parties have several unique group accommodation holiday homes to rent in Yorkshire, the biggest county in England. For outdoor enthusiasts, Malham Tarn Estates is a must. This outstanding area of limestone pavements, upland hill farms and hay meadows provides a wonderful setting for outdoor pursuits such as walking, cycling or simply enjoying the great outdoors.

Then, there’s always Bolton Abbey. On the banks of the river Wharfe in the Yorkshire Dales, this country estate is the Yorkshire home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Visitors are drawn to the breath-taking countryside and impeccably well-maintained site. The surfaced paths along the riverside and through the ancient woodlands, offer walks to suit all ages and abilities, all year round. Visitors are invited to explore the Priory Ruins which stands proudly on the banks of the Wharfe and discover how it might have been in the thriving Priory Church. This is one of our favourite places in the Dales and should definitely make your list of places to see in England before you die.

The Yorkshire Dales are one of the best places in the UK to enjoy stargazing, with four designated Dark Sky Discovery Sites where you could see as many as 2,000 stars on a clear night. You might even catch a glimpse of the Milky Way, and if the conditions are right the Northern Lights. See more about how to go stargazing in Yorkshire.

THE CITY OF YORK

If you’re on a group or family holiday in York, why not try the York Maze for an exciting adventure? Billed as Europe’s largest maze, it promises a family fun-filled day out.

If you’re staying at one of our York properties and are looking for somewhere special to host a celebration dinner, why not try The Countess of York, a restored railway carriage situated in the South Gardens between Great Hall and Station Hall at The York Railway Museum.  According to the website, the opulent vintage décor and elegant furniture promises a wonderful private dining experience for 12-24 guests and is a lovely place to host a wedding dinner or milestone birthday, or to celebrate an anniversary or retirement.

York Chocolate Story – York is the home of chocolate in the UK (you learn something new every day!). Apparently, this wonderful tradition continues to this day and there are echoes of this sweet past all over the city. Wonderful if you’re taking an Easter break in the city but, if you’re there for a special 40th or 50th birthday celebration, they also do private dining experiences.

The Golden Fleece is said to be York’s most haunted pub. Built in 1503, it is not only one of the oldest pubs in York but also has a reported 15 resident ghosts! The most talked about is Lady Alice Peckett, wife to John who used to be the Major of York and also the owner of this pub. Many guests have reported seeing Alice wandering the corridors.

Another wonderful sounding experience for foodies in York. The Grand is a well-known landmark in the city and offers speciality cooking courses where you can choose from a selection of express, half and full-day courses which will not only be fun but will help to enhance your skills in the kitchen. Let the chefs guide you to culinary heaven. Perfect for an activity on a hen party weekend.

BRIGHTON

Brighton is a quintessential English seaside resort town, also known for its nightlife, attracting many hen and stag parties, arts scene, shopping and festivals. Also known for its culture, diversity and eccentricity, there are many historical and modern attractions within Brighton and Hove, but it may not come as any surprise that there are some more unusual things to do.

Take three hours out of your holiday to enjoy Chocolate Chuckles, the ultimate endorphin combination of Laughter Gym and a Love Chocolate Making Workshop. Billed as the cross between a stress busting, energy boosting laughter yoga session and an indulgent, educational and playful journey through chocolate, what more could you ask for on a weekend away in Brighton?!

For those looking for an even more unique experience (can you get such a thing?), try out the Bewilder Box Escape Room Experience. Bewilder Box escape rooms are puzzle-based adventure games in which you and your team race against the clock to complete challenges, whilst taking part in a tantalisingly silly and immersive story. Apparently ideal for families, friends, stag/hen parties and team building..

Fancy a wood-fired sauna spa right on the beach? Beach Box Brighton comes highly recommended – this is an all year round, wood-fired public beach sauna, set up on a secluded area of Brighton beach, and including a wood-fired sauna, changing area and showers, cold showers/buckets and chill-out area. Perfect for those morning-after mornings on a hen weekend! SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the British Isles, located in Scotland. Standing at 1,345 metres (4,411 ft) above sea level, it is located at the western end of the Grampian Mountains in the Lochaber area of the Scottish Highlands, close to the town of Fort William. There are a range of walks on offer, depending on experience. Fort William is known as the “Outdoor Capital of Scotland” but, if conquering the UK’s highest mountain isn’t at the top of your bucket list, there are other ways to enjoy magnificent mountain scenery.

The Fort William Treasure Trail is a fun and imaginative way to explore. Try the Fort William Treasure Trail, a two-mile walking route which takes around two hours to complete. The task is to follow the sneaky clues based on interesting and quirky permanent features – all you have to do is try and solve the puzzle.

A visit to Scotland wouldn’t be the same without a Whisky Distillery tour. With over 120 whisky active distilleries spread around Scotland, where a whisky is made can have a huge bearing on its flavour. Check out Scotland’s Whisky Map to see what tours are near your group accommodation.

Taking a train journey around Scotland is one of the best ways of seeing the magnificent vistas the country has to offer. There are overnight journeys which take you deep into the Highlands or you can do a quick round trip perfect for kids – try The Kyle Line which leads through charming Highland villages such as Achnasheen and Plockton before arriving in Kyle of Lochalsh, taking just two and a half hours.

When in Aberdeenshire, do as the locals do and think the sea. Footdee (‘Fittie’ as it is pronounced locally) is a quaint former fishing village tucked away off the main tourist route.

Today, it’s a vibrant area with an eclectic mix of cottages and other buildings and regarded as one of the most unique communities in the UK.

Fresh seafood is still a local speciality here, so why not try out the menus at Moon Fish Café? or for dining with a sea view try Silver Darling, they also have a private dining room seating up to 14 guests.

Up For adoption (the Holiday Edition)

Last year, I participated in the Fiddlestan Holiday Bonaza. I actually planned on doing all the days but only got three done. These are the left over scraps of half finished stuff.

If you wish to adopt them you may but I’m mainly posting them as look how far I’ve come kinda thing. And for you guys to get some enjoyment out of stuff I will never finish but at one point had big plans for them. 

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December 9th: Joy, Gold, Revelations 

-Not All Gold Shimmers-

Summary: Despite it being Fiddleford's favorite time of year, Stan notices a slow decline in his boyfriend's mental well being.

December 3, 1980

In any usual year, the little research shack in the heart of the Forrest would already be well into its seasonal make over. Last year, Stan hadn't been able to finish his third helping of Thanksgiving dinner before his boyfriend was dragging him into the attic to collect enough Christmas garbage to make Santa ask them to tone the decorations down a bit. Then adding the Hanukkah decor to the mix, that Stan had no idea where the love of his managed to drudge up in a sleepy country town where he and his brother were the only people of Jewish decent, it looked less and less like a place of research and more like one of those quaint Holiday stores that only existed to scam people like Fiddleford Mcgucket out of their hard earned money.

That's how it had been the last four years, any way. Stan would never forget the look on Fiddleford's face on their very first winter together. He had drug in three boxes worth of Christmas junk from his little beat up pick up and began happily describing where he wanted to hang everything only for Stan to make him drop his last box load of 'Holiday Cheer' as he called it, when he announced he and his brother were Jewish. He instantly began spluttering apologies about being insensitive and began looking desperately at an amused Ford silently asking him why he never told him. After smugly watching him gasp and gag on apologies like a fish asphyxiating on dry land and 'assuring' them he would take it all back to the store, Stan slung his arm around Fiddleford's shoulder and told him it didn't matter to him what they celebrated, he wasn't paying the electric bill, so go as nuts as you want with all the Christmas lights your heart desired. Ford of course disapproved about 'going nuts' but didn't seem to say much about it later when he saw how joyous his friend was with the finished decorations. Since then, they had been celebrating an unholy fusion of both holidays, complete with tacky sweaters and butchered Hebrew and just far too many sweets altogether.

It was nice over all though and Fiddleford's joyous nature at that time of year was contagious. It never mattered that their home was a glowing monstrosity or the homemade sweaters were itchy or that Fiddleford never made Latkes right and they always turned out way too salty, it was Stan's favorite time of year. Even if you would never hear him say that out loud.

That's why it came as such a surprise on the first day of Hanukkah that not a single decoration was to be found. Everything was still nestled away in the attic. Fiddleford hadn't been shopping all through November to get everything ready for his favorite time of year and not a single gift was poorly hid in their closet. If wasn't for the thick sheets of snow outside the window already freezing the interior of the cabin, you could easily mistake it for summer without the major landmarks indicating it was indeed December.

Stan sat in his favorite chair not paying attention to the tv already beginning to static over, contemplating hauling it all down himself just to get his boyfriend out the slunk he had found himself in over the past few months. He continued to sit there though watching the sappy soap opera he was too lazy to get up and find the remote to change come in and out of focus knowing decorating wouldn't be the same without Fidds by his side. He glanced over to the dark entrance way and wondered if they were still down in the lab. Fiddleford and Stanford had disappeared down to it at day break and it was nearing sun down and he hadn't seen them yet. Soon he would have to go down and make them call it day but for now he planned to just not move away from his warm spot until it was absolutely necessary.   

"---We still have so much to get done, Fidds," he glanced away from the now fully static TV screen  as he heard his brother's voice echoing from the next room.

"Tomorrow, Stanford Pines," he smiled at the hiss knowing you didn't argue with Fiddleford Mcgucket when he used that tone and your full name.    

(I don’t entirely remember where this scene was going)

---  

Something slamming into Stan's face rudely woke him up from his dream world.

(A scene I really like, talking about how this isn't the first nightmare and Fiddleford talking about how he just wants to get the portal done with.)

---

( I was going to put a series of scenes here where Fidds was becoming more and more stressed out with Ciphford harassing him and making him lose more interest in the holidays as they take place and Stan not knowing what it is going on. Things becoming more tense between the three.)

---

The day had at last come, the portal was finished but Fiddleford didn't seem very excited about his own announcement.

(When Fidds leaves after the portal incident. He tells Stan he doesn't know his brother as well as he thinks he does.)

--

It had been three days since Fiddleford had left and the shack had taken on an eery silence since then.  

(This where the revelation happens that Ford was worshiping a damn demon and his brother may have been tormenting his poor boyfriend.)

---

It didn't take that long for Stan to find his rusted over trruck parked under the neon glow of the little Holiday Inn a mile off from the bus station.

(This is where Stan wrestles the memory gun from Fiddleford and they have a cute conversation about the first time Ford called up Stan.)

"Welcome to 1981, Stan, ya made it," Fiddleford whispered between the sob stuck in his throat, leaning back into Stan's embrace.

Stan wasn't one for sappy emotional gestures but for Fiddleford  he always made the exception. He pulled him tighter against him and kissed him on the top of the head.

"Yeah, I guess we did make it. Here's to surviving another one..."

------

December 17th: Sweaters, Kiss, Flurries  

---

Ford wrinkled his nose as he took a sip of the juice Mabel had left in the kitchen. Upon further inspection he found  Christmas oranaments floating at the top of the punch bowel.

"I wouldn't drink that if I was you," he turned his head around to find Stan leaning smugly against the door way, arms crossed in a cassual manner,"Mabel loaded it down with so much sugar it may just stop an old man's heart."

"What is it? Its like if sugar procreated with my worst nightmares..." he groused dumping what was left in his cup down the sink.

"Its Mabel's 'famous' Christmas flurries," the sarcasm that oozed from the word 'famous' sent cold shivers down Ford's spine, he wondered if whatever came from that bowl was worse then anything Bill could ever conceive.

"Its made from snow blended with enough sugar to rot my dentures, hot chocolate, two pots of coffee, a case of red energy drinks she thought looked 'festive' and a bucket of green glitter. Then she put ornaments on top to put for a more Holiday feel...."

Ford stared with disgust down into the bowel wondering how that little girl could possibly drink that and if maybe he should start a new page in the journal dedicated to her.  

"Fidds drake a whole glass of it under Mabel's request this morning while you were down in the lab and he's so glittery he's took apart and put the TV back together like I don't know...a few hundred times..."

Under his casual facade Ford noticed genuine worry for his once again best friend in the subtle features on his face. There was a point in his life Ford thought his brother would look past his old research partner and not give him the time or day for his admitably strange mannerisms (that had become much much stranger with age). Then Weirdmagedon happened and the two had been close since then. Ford didn't quite understand when it happened or how it happened (and maybe didn't particularly want to for that matter) but his brother had decided to spend his golden years with Fiddleford and as long as they were happy Ford couldn't object. It was a strange life he lived, with or without the supernatural, nothing quite turned out the way he would have expected them to.  

"GRUNKLE STAN! HURRY BACK! WE'RE DECORATING THE TREE!"  

Stan tilted his head towards the yelling and jestered for Ford to follow him.

---  

As the twins entered the parlor, Ford took instant notice of Fiddleford's slow, lethargic way he hammered a nail into place on the chimney for the stockings. His eyes had a lack of foccus as he looked up to him and Stanly and smiled. He was coming down from Mabel's concoction it appeared...

"Well look who came out of labernation!" Mabel cried loudly setting her eyes sternly on Ford, hands on her hips in a manner he would take more serisously if he wasn't looking directly at the mistletoe she had tied to her forehead or wearing the ugliest Christmas sweater he had seen since his final Christmas with Fiddleford.

"You missed Hanukah! Your brains could have been useful to beating Grunkle Stan's cheating every time we played Dreidel!" She huffed, Ford had to take a cautios step backwards to keep her long fake Christmas themed nails from jabbing him in the stomache.

"Fat chance," Stan stated bluntly from the other side of the room where he had already settled next to Fidds, taking the hammer from him before he could accidently break his finger with it, "With gambling all you need is luck and I have all of it."

"You had a loaded dreidel," Dipper cut in entering the room with another box of Christmas decortations that he deposited next to the tree that was a bit too large for the room, its pointy top compacted tightly against the roof in an angle.

"Who does that? I mean serisouly, the kids are supposed to win. That's why we bet with candy..."

"Well, me and the pig done ate the candy," Fidds said casting a cheeky smile towards Stan who crossed his arm and he tried his best to glower at his boyfriend without breaking the mock anger but it broke the instant Fidds kissed him on the cheek (a shrill squee errupted from Mabel making Dipper cover his ears), "So I reckon I was the real winner any who."

Ford almost cast a thankful smile his friend's way for distracting his niece away from the reason she had been cross with him but the second the kiss was broke her attention was completly back on him.

"You're not missing out on anything Christmas related though, mister!" she stated her fake nail tapping against his chest in an uncomfortable manor as she stood on her toes trying to be eye level with Ford.

He glanced over to his brother and friend for help but they only seemed to giggle at his troubles as Mabel began to tick all the 'Merry Activities' he would be participating in. With or without his consent.

---

Decorating the tree was more exhausting then it had any right being. The lights kept going out. Leave it to Stanly to find the cheapest lights he could find in the five finger discount aisle. Ford didn't understand why the kids snickered at him when he asked Stanly to return them for better lights. It was sensible since the darn things didn't glow right. He even offered to scrounge up some new ones in the lab, with Fiddleford's help he could make lights that never lost their glow. Maybe even keep the room warm without running up the electric bill but Mabel denied him access to the lab. It was his house, he shouldn't be bossed around by a thirteen year old.

Yet as he watched her stand on the step ladder shaking her mistletoe head piece at Fiddleford and Stanly before slamming their faces together to kiss when they didn't do so fast enough. Then she proceeded to do the same to her brother and Waddles, who had been trying to eat the garland rope Dipper was trying to string together. He knew he didn't want to damper their Holiday any more then he already had. He may not say it out loud enough but the four people in this room where the ones that mattered most in his heart and he never wanted to hurt them again.

As the mid after noon rolled in, they decided to take a break from their decorating. It looked like a seasonal store had already thrown up on the parlor. If the tree wasn't already crunched so tightly against the ceiling, it may have become a fall hazard with all the ornaments packed into every inch of it. Some of the ornaments were made of old tools painted red, green and gold. When he inquired Fidds about it, he flushed a bright red and said he always felt artistic around this time of year. As much as Fiddleford had changed over the years, being a bit too overjoyed about the Holidays was not one of them it seemed.  

The only piece of furniture in the room was an old tattered up love seat that Fidds had scrounged up somewhere last weekend when he was Christmas shopping with Tate. The only way to describe it was it was a ghost of the seventies that was haunting this house. It was an ugly puce green with a tacky design Ford swore he saw on Fidds's favorite shirt back in college. Maybe that was what attracted his friend to it. It seemed he was always dragging anything home with him if it vaguely reminded him of some forgotten memory. Ford never said anything about it, he wanted him to get better and maybe one day fully recover from his ordeal and if that meant transporting the shack figuratively back to seventies, he was sure no one minded.

Stan and Fidds sat curled into each other on the sofa, Fidds already half asleep forcing himself to stay awake to listen to everything Mabel was saying on the floor in front of them creating a new sweater that seemed a bit big for her. Dipper sat next to her excitedly going through Ford's new research journal, lost in his own world. Ford smiled, Dipper may never become his apprentice and he had his own path set out in life with his sister always at his side but for now Ford could take pride in the fact that his nephew was still his number one fan.

---

Are you planning a trip to Portland, Oregon? The Pacific Northwest is a lovely region and there is so much to do that you’ll want to plan to make sure that you don’t miss out on seeing the major attractions. Portland is a clean and interesting city that sits near the Pacific Ocean. There is a lot to do, but you might not be aware of some of the more fun and interesting activities if you’re not from the area. We’ve prepared a list of the 20 best things to do in Portland for first-timers.20. Ride the MaxPortland, Oregon has a type of public transportation that is called the Metropolitan Area Express, MAX for short. It’s an economical and fast way to get around the city. The average fare cost is just $2.50 for two and a half hours riding time on the MAX routes. MAX is a light rail system and it can take you to the majority of the major attractions in the city of Portland. If you’re planning to make a day of it filled with site-seeing it cost just $5.00 to ride the MAX all day. The MAX also runs to nearby cities including Gresham, Clackamas, Beaverton, and Hillsboro.19. Visit Bailey’s Tap RoomBailey’s Taproom is a bar located in the downtown part of Portland. If you enjoy craft beer and/or hard cider this is a must-visit establishment. This is the place that craft beer enthusiasts gather because the bar features a total of 26 rotating taps of hard cider and craft beer. The servers and patrons are friendly and it’s a great place to meet new friends while you’re sampling the local brews. 18. Go to Powell’s City of BooksIf you’re an avid reader then you’ll feel as though you stepped into heaven at Powell’s City of Books. This retailer is the largest independent bookstore on the planet. They offer one of the largest collections of new and used books within the enormous structure. You might feel overwhelmed at the sheer size of the store and the volumes of books on the shelves, but the color-coding on the sections make navigating through the categories fairly fast and easy if you know what you’re looking for. There are even maps available as well as helpful staff members. They also have a rare book room. In addition to books, the store also sells notebooks, notebooks, journals, games, souvenirs and of all things, silly socks.17. Go to the Ground Kontrol Classic ArcadeGamers absolutely have to visit the Ground Kontrol. Imagine a two-story bar filled with pinball machines and video games. Now combine that with a full-service restaurant and bar and you have Ground Kontrol. They have some of the latest games but the real attraction is the games that go back to the 1970s. It’s a great place to stir up a sense of nostalgia and you can play the games. Even the bathroom in this classic arcade, bar, and restaurant features a Pacman theme.16. Visit Stumptown Coffee RoastersStumptown Coffee Roasters is located in downtown Portland. It’s a wonderful place to find your favorite caffeinated beverages. This retailer began as a single roastery in 1999 and it quickly grew into a chain throughout the entire country. This is one of the best places to find gift boxes for coffee lovers or find some new or unique blends for yourself. They’re open for business Monday through Friday from 8 am to 4 pm. The store and cafe are located just 3 blocks from the Waterfront in an interesting part of Portland in the Old Town District with a large cafe as well as a retail shop. It’s a great place to take a break and enjoy a latte, cup of coffee or other caffeinated beverage. 15. Eat at Lu Lac Vietnamese KitchenLuLac Vietnamese Kitchen is a great little restaurant and bar that offers a daily happy hour from 4 to 7 pm every day. Their pho is killer, along with sample plates for $2-$3 during happy hour. It’s one of the most highly recommended Vietnamese restaurants and bars in the city.14. Tour the Pittock MansionThe Pittock Mansion is one of Portland’s most famous attractions. It’s a historic building that was constructed in 1904 for Henry and Georgiana Pittock, Portland business moguls. Tours are given of the mansion which features rotating exhibits in the spacious rooms, photography, and artifacts. It’s an excellent way to learn the history of Portland and the state of Oregon as well.12. Take a Brewvana TourBrewvana takes you on a tour of some of Portland’s favorite breweries. The city is known for having more breweries than any other city in the world. There are more than 70. The Pacific Northwest is Best bus tour takes you to a variety of local breweries and pubs for a visit and a sample of some of the best locally brewed beers on tap. If you love beer and you like to try something new now and then we highly recommend this enjoyable tour. 10. Go to Voodoo DoughnutsVoodoo Doughnut is one of the most famous bakeries in the Pacific Northwest. People would stand in long lines to try their new Bacon Maple Bars when they were first released for sale. The Portland Cream is another favorite of patrons of this extraordinary donut bakery. There are over fifty different types to choose from and Voodoo Doughnut even has artists who are standing by to create custom doughnuts upon request. If you’re a vegan it’s not a problem because they will make them tailored upon request with a variety of different topping selections.9. Visit the famous Portland food trucksThere are more than 500 food carts within the city of Portland, Oregon at any given time. They are organized into what city officials call “pods.” A pod is a surface lot that is populated with several different food carts. The map of the food cart locations helps you to find some of the most unique food vendors and there is even an app for iPhone and Android with daily updates to let you know the current location for each cart.8. Visit Blue Star DonutsAnother popular attraction in Portland, Oregon is Blue Star Donuts. It’s nearly as famous as Voodoo. Blue Star Donuts was established when professional Chef and founder Katie Poppe created Blue Star Donuts to make her dream of owning an award-winning business come true. She and former quarterback Dennis Dixon had some unique ideas for donut magic. Blue Star, similar to Voodoo offers some of the most unique donut creations in the world and if you’re a fan of donuts, you’ll want to include a trip to one of the several locations in Portland, and give them a try. 7. Catch breakfast at Pine State BiscuitsPine State Biscuits is another highly popular place to visit for first-timers in Portland. It’s a restaurant chain that features Southern-style biscuits and gravy, along with biscuit sandwiches and a host of other southern style treats. While you’re enjoying the hearty fare, you can wash down the meal with your choice of locally roasted coffee brews or try one of their interesting cocktail creations. This is a restaurant that everyone who visits Portland must try at least once because that’s all that it takes to get you hooked.6. Visit the Lan Su Chinese GardenAnother popular attraction in Portland is the Lan Su Chinese Garden. It is an oasis with reflecting ponds, a traditional teahouse and some lovely and serene winding paths that get you back to nature for a bit of relaxation and repose. This is one of the most authentic Chinese gardens in the United States. The garden was created in a collaborative effort between the city of Portland and its sister city in China, Suzhou in the Jiangsu province of China. While you’re there you can visit the Tao of Tea teahouse, the Tower of Cosmic Reflections, learn about organic tea and traditional methods of making teas throughout different regions in China or if you’re there at the right time, you can even get in on a feng shui, Chinese brush painting or tai chi educational program. This visit is highly recommended for tea enthusiasts or anyone who has an interest in learning more about tea or Chinese customs for that matter.5. Visit Forest PartForest Park is one of the Pacific Northwest’s most beautiful natural attractions. Forest Park is filled with a wonderful collection of easy to access hiking and running trails. It’s a 5,100-acre lush space that is located on the northwest side of Portland with 70 miles of wooded space and trails. The park was first developed in 1903 and it stands as a natural sanctuary for wildlife and the plants and trees that are native to the Pacific Northwest. The Wildlife Care Center is located beside Forest park and they treat injured native wildlife at the site. There is a Nature Store, and occasionally there are birds of prey you can visit if there are any patients who are nearing the end of their treatment for release back into the wild.4. Visit Washington Park and the International Rose Test GardenNo trip to Portland is complete unless you’ve paid a visit to the International Rose Test Garden that is located inside Washington Park. If you’re visiting the area between May and September, you’ll find over 10,000 rose bushes that are in full bloom. You can easily drive to the location or even take the MAX Light Rail to Washington Park. There are 1.7 miles of wooded trails that lead from teh Washington Park stop to get to the rose garden. You can also rent bicycles to access the park from downtown or Northwest Portland. If you enjoy walks in serene settings, the walk is magnificent.3. Visit the Japanese GardenWhile you’re visiting Washington Park, another lovely attraction is the Japanese Garden. You can make a day of it at the Park and enjoy a quiet and calm retreat with the Zen garden, lush greenery and a variety of water features. The garden was recently expanded in April of 2017 with a multi-million dollar update that added a lot of amazing new features and it doubled the size of the already popular attraction.2. Visit the Crystal Springs Rhododendron GardenThis is yet another of Portland’s famous attractions. The Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden is located in the southeast part of town in the residential district. If you’re in Portland between late March or early April through the end of the summer months, this park features huge rhododendron bushes that offer a variety of vivid colors. There is also a lagoon in the garden that is filled with baby ducks in the spring. This is a wonderful place for families with children because the shady path that leads through the garden is kid-friendly and it’s a natural wonderland.1. Take the kids on the Hikes for TykesThe Tryon Creek State Natural Area is the best place to go if you have children. The area features approximately eight miles of trails for hiking and bicycling. Three miles of the winding paths are paved. While you’re there you’ll want to take the kids to the Junior Ranger educational program for kids through the on-site nature center.they also offer guided hikes of a variety of difficulty levels plus great educational opportunities for learning about the flora and fauna of the region.

http://www.globalone.com.np/2019/12/the-20-best-things-to-do-in-portland.html

Best Smooth Scrolling WordPress Parallax Themes | Templified

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Best Smooth Scrolling WordPress Parallax Themes

This collection of themes is perfect for those of you who love that cool, unique parallax scrolling style.

Divi

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Uncode

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Yosemite

It’s layout, nicely thought-out also it was inspired by Apple’s Yosemite OSX layout. Yosemite includes a newsletter plugin, Mega menu compatibility in addition to WP inspection Pro. It is a pretty WordPress theme your readers will surely love. This sleek-looking theme provides Parallax scrolling and provides a kind of 3d impact in your customers scroll through your articles or pages, which helps to raise the user encounter that this theme provides. I have seen lots of individuals utilize Yosemite as a private WordPress blog theme too.

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Motive

This theme is known as Motive and it had been created by Tesla Themes to be A straightforward and appealing parallax scrolling WordPress theme. Motive includes two primary styles, both packaged with a huge number of cool features. You have got Revolution slider to go together with the parallax wallpapers, multiple article formats, custom articles and tacky navigation also. There are many portfolio kinds as well that helps to provide a fantastic first impression for your site’s visitors. Modern and clean, the reason theme has excellent typography, quick page loading times and Tesla provides you a few of the very best service around. Motive can also be social media incorporated to keep in contact with your fans.

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Ananke

Ananke is a 1 page Parallax WordPress theme that has been downloaded More than a million times on themeforest. Thus far, its score is a 4.63, completely respectable. Ananke utilizes visual composer to permit you to construct a site which has all of the characteristics you need and not one that you don’t desire. It’s simple to edit the same using all the theme choices panel, it provides you total control over all aspects of your site. Ananke has both light and dark skins to select from, the service is always outstanding and this Parallax one page theme might be exactly what you want to improve your sites look and functionality. Here are a few more good one page WordPress themes.

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Float

This hot and intriguing looking WordPress group is named Float. The Parallax scrolling and interior layout is quite trendy at the moment and you’ll be able to view it Plenty of contemporary, interesting sites like Apple. If you’d like to you can import your pre-made design or layout a brand new one with Themify drag-and-drop builder. Then, all you need to do is pick the parallax scrolling choice. There is zero coding required. With Float you receive a completely responsive design, ideal for mobile devices. There are loads of pre-made demos to pick from, every one may utilize Parallax should you select. I really enjoy the appearance of The Parallax website that’s a zig-zagging design with articles on the right and left, it is definitely worth checking out. scrolling.

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Zelle Pro

Compatibility with numerous drag-n-drop page builders signifies that Zelle Pro may have as much performance as possible desire. All that in only 1 page. There are a lot of reasons that Zelle Pro is among the most popular online. By mega-menu assistance, to click upgrades and friendly assistance, to the movie tutorials which are included to help get you started with this particular name. Zelle Pro is optimized for Speed, has custom wallpapers for every page or post and the dwell customizer makes it possible to create your site look like you wanted to from colours to style details to the sequence of segments and lots more. All this and that SEO friendly WordPress theme is translation and RTL ready too so any language functions on this theme.

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Ronneby

Ronneby is a very powerful WordPress theme having tons and tons Of pre-made demo websites. It looks like there is a website for everybody with Ronneby. Ronneby has quite a large score on themeforest only over 4.8 total. That is on over 20,000 earnings in the time of this writing, which is quite striking for a theme that has only been available on the market for 3 decades. Ronneby is part blog and part corporate site, it is creative and provides complete screen or boxed designs. All that using the choice of a smooth Parallax scrolling encounter. If you would like to construct an extremely professional and effective site a theme like Ronneby provides you an enormous Head Start. It is even WooCommerce ready so that you can establish a store that appears clean and works flawlessly. That could help improve your revenue because Ronneby by provides such a fantastic user experience for each and every visitor or prospective client.

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Borderland

Borderland is among my favourite WordPress for portfolio themes that I have ever seen. The design is inviting and classic, it is provocative and contemporary at precisely the exact same moment. With lots of different designs to select from, many featuring a parallax scrolling alternative, Borderland enables you to tell a story using text and images alike.

Total screen sliders with assistance for the two video and images in addition to the parallax effect. There’s a strong admin panel for customizing your site, the image demo websites can be imported with only one click, which may save yourself a lot of time when placing up your website. Borderland may be utilized as a one-page website or a multi-page site, the decision is yours. Best of this theme is coded as well as it had been created. Here is our set of WordPress site themes if you are considering what else is on the market.

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Fortun

If You Would like to Construct an awe-inspiring site with breathtaking Graphics and magnificent design, Fortun might be a wonderful place to get started. Do it using visual composer, any type of web design is possible with all the Fortun WordPress team. This template comprises 18 contemporary and striking demo websites, it incorporates with each popular drag-and-drop builder and that helps to produce a distinctive looking site for individuals who wish to construct something pretty.

Concerning theme attributes, Fortun provides plenty of excellent ones. I Cited visual composer, however, Revolution Slider can also be included. You will find half a dozen distinctive hairstyles, so you may use any font that you would enjoy and a lot of Icon fonts are also included along with your download bundle. The theme choices panel is simple to use and strong enough to change virtually anything on the site which you enjoy.

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Unik

Tesla Themes presents a delightful one page theme Named Unik, a stunning, Professionally crafted WordPress theme for websites which wish to use only a single page to receive their content around. You are going to find a Visual Composer powered theme so any kind of design is possible with all types of features to help make your company an enormous success.

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Hermes

The Hermes WordPress theme seems fantastic and it is incredibly Professional, but it has the features that really put something apart. It is super quick loading, the service is incredible and it is flexible enough to work with for virtually any type of e-commerce site. What is more, the more steam lets you construct a great-looking Parallax bookmarking site. That is a cool and fun way to create your content stick out. With numerous e-commerce sites on the market, but creative and clean design that you simply lies as Parallax can be a fantastic way to help Market your products. Journeys provide is excellent customer care, flexibility and a quick loading site, I believe this multipurpose template is a strong one for making the most of your time.

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Emily Nolan

This theme offers lots of distinct characteristics to make it intriguing. This clean and innovative service theme is a contemporary and minimal, Parallax scrolling portfolio to match your imagination. There is one click presentation import, you receive a speedy load period thanks in part to Emily Nolan’s intuitive design. There are loads of themed choices that will assist you personalize your site and social media is constantly at your fingertips with powerful integration of the most common social networks. With loads of documentation and speedy support, you shouldn’t ever encounter problems establishing or customizing your site.

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Myth

Myth is a stunning WordPress theme Which Has a lively and Refined Grid design, and in addition, it supplies a parallax scrolling. I believe Myth is one of my favourite teams to come together lately. I believe that it’s fantastic for telling your story visually and together with your written articles. Your featured pictures are prominent with this particular theme, as they ought to be. With prominent positioning of these images and also an eye-catching parallax scrolling impact, you are going to provide a fantastic user experience that draw attention where you need it. This theme is especially well suited to sites which require equal access on mobile devices and conventional desktops, it is perfectly completely responsive and contains heaps of Taylor made options to make your site look great.

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Zuperla

This template uses only 1 webpage, at least for a number of its designs, even though it also comes with a multi-page installation. Firms who need a corporate and clean, trendy and contemporary WordPress theme to emphasize what they must provide will surely love this Zuperla WordPress theme. With this template, you receive bbPress service, woocommerce service and fantastic, completely responsive layout. You will find just eight ready-made templates to select from and more than 200 pre-built segments to assist Inspire your imagination. With the innovative grid system, your webpage construction skill is extended to the maximum allowable volume. There is in factn’t a maximum allowable quantity. Anyhow, overall, this is a remarkably customizable and high quality theme you should certainly think about.

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Shout

Meet Shout. Fantastic for magazines and blogs, lifestyle sites and More, this easy-to-use Parallax ready WordPress theme provides you a slew of chances for producing an amazing looking site. This item was assembled with page loading rates in mine also, helping to save you and your readers moment and that is an essential thing. Shout theme choices panel is remarkably easy to use and it is a highly effective approach to enable you to personalize your site. If you want to market products, then the woocommerce plugin can also be fully supported. This group has got a great 5-star score on themes and it shows no indication of slowing down anytime soon.

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Honshi

Honshi is a multipurpose creative portfolio theme That has quite a cool, sleek parallax Style. With the most recent version of the template, you receive 12 distinct preloaders, 21 portfolio cartoons, four different design modes 15 caption types. This can look like a great deal of alternatives, but it is all very easy to use. There is a straightforward installer included, a highly effective page builder to keep things clean and operational, the theme choices panel is user friendly and there is an impressive quantity of documentation to get you started. This is a completely responsive bootstrap theme that has been coded by the ground-up to load quickly and look good on all apparatus.

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NowaDays

Regardless of which sort of site that you would like to create, I believe this one will help provide you with a huge boost to the visual appeal of your site. You will find a great deal of different portfolio Designs, blog designs and much more to keep anybody happy. Builder and multi page and one page designs, Nowadays is a wonderful multipurpose theme with smooth scrolling Parallax layout and a good deal of visual design. This group has been continuously updated since its first release and it has still got a ideal 5-star evaluation on theme for all those also. That is a true testament to how adaptable, strong and just utilize this theme is. If you would like to get your hands dirty, you may use the drag-and-drop builder that’s included, it really can allow you to design pages that look like you would like them to appear. Every page that you make will probably be responsive and retina ready, you will find infinite colours and your site is guaranteed to load quickly because the code is totally free of any type of bloat. I enjoy they’ve utilized the Unyson frame, among my favorites which constantly produces a great-looking and quick loading site. Parallax layout too. This theme is acceptable for any sort of e-commerce website.

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BoxShop

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The 405 meets La Dispute: Jordan Dreyer gives us the inside story on the band's ambitious new album Panorama

When arriving to meet Jordan Dreyer to discuss La Dispute’s new album Panorama, it was hard to miss the giant brick of a book that he had sitting next to him on the table – and I immediately knew this was going to be a great conversation. Of course, having listened to La Dispute’s back catalogue and especially Panorama, I knew that Dreyer was a man of words and expression, but the honesty and clarity of his answers to my questions still went beyond my expectations.

What unfolded was a fascinating glimpse into the working of one of America’s most cherished bands, and particularly the machinations of their verbose singer. Without further delay, read on to find out the background behind La Dispute’s excellent new album Panorama.

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Panorama will be your first album on Epitaph, it's such a great label to be on at this point.

It's so cool. I did my own circling back when we made the decision [to sign with Epitaph] and realised how invariably woven my own musical history is with the label; they've put out so many records I've loved at different places in my life. I'd forgotten how many Epitaph releases I've loved with a fervour since I was a 13 year old. It's fucking cool, it's really an honour to be a part of the history and the roster right now. So many of our friends are on Epitaph.

It was a long break between albums for you guys, I'm guessing you weren't expecting to take so long?

No, I mean we toured fairly extensively when Rooms Of The House came out, so I think we needed time away to be with family and everyone had different things going on. We needed to decompress and work on other things. But it was the longest break by far we had taken, especially since we all live in different places now. When we all lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even if we weren't touring we'd see each other or we could practice and write music. So it took some adjustment getting back into the swing of things; it was a lot of time off from a thing that we'd done pretty much every week for 8 years of our lives.

Yeah because even between the other albums you'd have EPs or some kind of release.

We kinda always were doing different things, so to fully step away from it - not be playing shows, not be writing music, not be getting together and rehearsing - got a little stir crazy.

And then when it did come to recording you ended up scrapping the album, or a certain amount if it?

I think we maybe took too much time off. We had 3 months blocked off when we were all in Grand Rapids, or close to it, and we were going to work essentially 9-5 every day and crank out a record. We worked for 2 months, and I think all of us independently realised things weren't working, until it all came to a head. It just didn't feel right, and then we started over. I think part of it was taking so much time off, we forgot how to work effectively, and it took us failing for 2 months to get back to what felt natural.

Was it truly a complete restart?

We came back to certain things later on in the studio, but by and large we threw everything in the bin, which is kinda crazy to think about; 2 months and then... we had a decent amount written and then...

For you lyrically, was that when you shifted to what the album is now?

I think there were a few lyrical themes carried over, more so than the music did. I had a hell of a time myself in those 2 months trying to decide [what to write]; I had spent 3 years collecting information and hearing stories and when it came time to decide the particular vision conceptually and thematically for the record it was hard for me to pick and choose what I wanted to. So when we first sat down to write part of the problem was that I had all of these ideas and it was super scattershot, and maybe overly ambitious. So I think when we stopped and started over it helped me narrow my own focus and settle into one or two of those ideas rather than trying to shoehorn 9 or 10 into 45 minutes of music.

The final album is pretty much on one single topic, which is a pretty personal thing...

It just kinda happened that way too. It's funny, I don’t think I realised exactly how personal it was until a month after we finished and I could go back and listen to it again without hating it; because you spend so much time working on one thing you have a tumultuous relationship with it. I think when we started over and we just said "alright we're gonna start from the beginning of the record and we're just gonna write all our way through it," it forced me to do the same, and it kind of became this linear narrative - if there is a narrative at all - but this one theme emotionally carried on from beginning to end.

The musical element flows so well with the traumatic nature of the lyrics, did they write to your words, or how does that symbiotic relationship work?

I think in this particular instance it was much more the opposite direction; I had a very general theme and introduced that to everyone at the beginning, and they sort of worked on a sonic aesthetic to match the content.

How did you describe the theme to them at that point?

Similar to what it became in the end: loss and the grieving process, removed from the moment, and how memories can be transformative or can transport you to a moment from a long time ago. When we first hit the reset button and we all had a very honest conversation with each other about why it wasn't working and about what we all individually wanted from the record, sonically especially, we kinda came to a point where we were like "alright we want this record to be heavier, we want it to be more of a screamo record than Rooms Of The House was, but we also want it to be weirdly proggy and to experiment with additional instrumentation and kind of create this ethereal piece." That really helped me settle into focusing on those moments of transport where you are driving down a road and thinking about a car accident.

And it works so well! It's so evocative, the whole way through. The use of Michigan as a setting is integral to the lyricism - even though you live somewhere else now.

I moved to the West Coast, I live in Seattle with my partner who is in Grad School. Had she not been accepted into that programme I doubt that I would've ever explored. Michigan has been such a big part of our band, and continues to be, and I wrote over half this record living in a different state, which I think in some ways probably helped me - being not constantly inundated with it, and also being nostalgic for it. Homesickness played a weird role in me focusing on the setting, the environment where the record takes place. It's crazy how much Michigan has been a part of everything we've ever done.

Before we dive more into the details of the lyrics and the songs, let's talk about some of the surface level stuff: tell me about the cover art of the album.

It was a leap of faith; Adam, our bass player, has always managed the art direction of the band since really shortly after he joined almost 10 years ago. This time around, going into it he knew he wanted to outsource some things; you get to a point where - and I think it's always been an impetus for being creative for us, if you do things the same way you'll get more or less the same product, so we've always tried to introduce restrictions or forced ourselves to move in a particular direction in a particular way, so for this he wanted to pick another artist who did something beyond his own skill set and interests.

When we hit the reset button and we were talking about making a kind of proggy screamo record he printed off a whole bunch of images from artists that he enjoyed and posted them on the whiteboard that we always keep to write our notes on, so we had all these crazy science fiction video game images from Victor [Mosquera], who did the album artwork, and when we were talking about potential artists for making the cover he filtered through a few different ideas and artists he loved and we kept circling back to the one we had printed on the whiteboard. So Adam had a style book and an outline of the themes and he gave it to Victor. Victor sent us some black and white sketches and we picked a couple of particular things and he focused on that. It's been really cool to make this record and to flesh out the vision across mediums.

Like the videos too.

Yeah, the videos too. We were trying to really remain in the ethereal, other worldly landscapes. It's been really satisfying, especially because it's so outside of the box for us. I think the cover is really startling - at least it was for me seeing it at first. I think it needed to be that way; it needed to be shocking and it needed to be stark, and I think it fits some of the imagery on the record in a way that's not too literal, not too overtly "hey this is what the record's about." It was cool to make something that looks like a video game.

And tell me about the title, Panorama; is it because it's seen through your eyes?

Yeah, it's not mean to be super nuanced. I've kind of always described Wildlife as being this snapshot of the city, with similar themes of loss and grief and coping mechanisms, making sense of existence as a whole but told through neighbourhoods. On this record I wanted to be more focused on a synthesis of the last two records, where it's like dialling the microscope in from that theme on to a more specific relationship between individuals. I kept thinking about the drive that I would take, that was the initial spark for the record, seeing memorials along the road and hearing stories from my partner about people that she knew or people that her family knew. Everything in the record is taking place in this one long drive, it made sense to think of it as kind of either a panoramic photograph or a long tracking shot from a film, so it was really just meant to keep it to the idea of the record.

The album starts with the instrumental intro 'Rose Quartz', which is the first appearance of minerals and stones that crop up throughout the record; is that something you have experience with?

No. In talking about grief and the grieving process I wanted to talk about seeking external sources of comfort and I wanted a symbol for it, and I didn't want to talk about religion or something that felt too direct or too obvious - something that's so grandiose that it distracts by placing too much focus on that aspect. So I picked crystals. Initially when we first started writing that was a part of the theme and we were gonna do transitional tracks in between every few songs as benchmarks that guide you through the themes of the record, which stopped making sense when we decided that it would be one long continuous piece. I still wanted to incorporate that into the record, so it appears lyrically throughout as progress through the stages of healing. I did a lot of weird reading about the supposed healing properties of various stones and crystals.

Did it tempt you to actually try them out?

I never discount the possibility of something, but it's not for me. They're cool - they look cool! [Laughs]

'Rose Quartz' leads into the two-part 'Fulton Street'; Fulton Street is an important street in Grand Rapids?

It's a state highway, it runs all the way from the West Side of Michigan all the way across to Flint, Michigan, which is where I think it ends. It's a pretty significant street in the city of Grand Rapids, it runs from downtown out past where I lived for years with my partner, and then beyond that towards Lowell, Michigan, where she's from, so we would drive it pretty often. We spent a lot of time driving back and forth between where we lived out to Lowell.

And the songs are a narrative of that drive and the memories, which is very cool. But I'm particularly interested in the part where you mention "in the shadow of the pyramid"; what's that referring to?

[Laughs] Part of that drive is through Ada, Michigan, which is a little township between Lowell and Grand Rapids, that's generally fairly affluent. It's the headquarters of a national company called Amway, which is a multi-level marketing business - it's a pyramid scheme; it's a gigantic enormous pyramid scheme that has had an outsized influence in Grand Rapids because the two people who started it are two of the wealthiest families in the state of Michigan. The events in that point in that song take place less than a mile down the road from Amway International headquarters. The venue we play in Grand Rapids is called The Pyramid Scheme - it's a big thing.

What happens between 'Fulton Street I' and 'Fulton Street II', it seems like there's a change of perspective?

The first one is one narrative thought; the beginning is about a body that was found in the late 90s at a particular place on that stretch of road, and then it shifts into brief snippets of multiple stories meant to show that travel through time and space - memory being prompted by notable places. Then it shifts into a vision of my home life at the time that we were writing the record and the year or two leading up to it, and then returns back to the stories that I talk about at the end of 'Fulton Street I', but at a more emotional level. It kind of shifts from talking about the events to talking about the reaction to the events. The space in between was meant to show time elapsing.

There's a lot of darkness, obviously, in the lyrics, but one that stands out to me is "There is that phantom path carved in ghost steps, sloped down to a pond somehow still half-frozen, the evidence of struggle..."

That is a reference to another event on a stretch of road that we would drive to get to Fulton Street. Initially I had a few different stories that I wanted to speak about more specifically, again similar to the way that we did things on Wildlife, and then we shifted to making this sort of stream-of-consciousness narrative, and I decided that the right thing to do wasn't to have this song tell this story, but it still showed up on the record in a couple of different places. It's a reference to an accident that happened in the winter on the route out to Lowell, and it's another spot on the record where the character telling the story is meant to be transported from reality to a past instance - which connects to 'Footsteps At The Pond'.

The pond shows up a few times; is that a specific place?

Yeah. It's not from a story directly related to anyone I know; it was another death, another tragedy, that happened on that stretch of road. I feel like when you live in a city like Grand Rapids that isn't particularly populous, everyone has more direct connections with people who might have been involved in accidents or tragedies, you become more cognisant of the stories. That's what I couldn't stop thinking about when we'd pass that place, which is right in our neighbourhood, so [we’d pass it] all the time. There's a degree of talking about other people's tragedies to envision my own reaction to one in my life.

'Anxiety Panorama' is at the heart of the record, and is such a heavy listen - was it tough to write?

It was one of the harder ones to write, for sure. It was one of the last ones I finished. It went through various vocal incarnations, because I had such a difficult time figuring out how to capture what I wanted to capture mood-wise, and because it's a short song, relative to most of our songs, but it goes through so many different things, so finding ways to make my part contribute to the song without being fucking obnoxious was a little hard. At a certain point I had to stop trying to be specific and focus more on capturing how it feels to be anxious than trying to articulate. Rather than trying to be like "hey, here are x numbers of adjectives and metaphors and similes that tell you how it feels to be anxious," it was more like "let's try to make the song feel anxious."

It comes across as being so close to the bone.

Good. I hope so. That's another one where I was so involved in it in my own head that it wasn't until we finished and I could go back and listen to it that I realised how intense it was... maybe too intense. [Laughs]

Definitely not too intense! I love the line "I was building landmarks for my errors in your scars."

Thank you.

You intended to make one long piece of music, but did you think about the sides on vinyl? Because that is the perfect ending to side A.

Good, we made the right choice then. We debated for a long time about how we would break up the first half of the record, because initially I don't think that song was there, it was later in the record, and it felt off, and then it was Brad our drummer, who is the mastermind of those types of things, he was like "wait a minute, this song should be here, it should end the first part."

And then it opens up perfectly on the second side with a more serene sound on 'In Northern Michigan'. It's further back in time than the rest of the record, and it seems happier.

I think the last two songs on the record are the "happiest."

But there are some happy memories on 'In Northern Michigan'.

Definitely, I guess in that respect yeah. I think the last part of the record is meant to offer some sort of statement of love and a conclusion of sorts. But as far as individual moments that's definitely the song that is remembering good things.

Which makes the harder parts hit harder when they're put right up against each other.

I think you need the contrast. You need to break things up. I say that, and then I think back on all our records, and there's a big disparity between happy and sad.

Is 'You Ascending' a peaceful ending?

I think it's a peaceful ending. It's been interesting when I have looked at what people are saying about the tracks we've put out so far, hearing their interpretations, because as intense as it is, as emotional as it is, it comes from by far and away the happiest period of time in my life, where things have gone exceptionally well for me, and I have wonderful people and a wonderful partner. Having said that, even in the happiest moments in your life nothing is uncomplicated, and that's part of finding contentment, learning to balance the difficult things with the good in your life.

So, if the record is kind of, at its bare bones, a journey between two people, one of their grief and the other's close proximity to it, the end is supposed to be a statement of love and a way to say that part of being in any relationship is agreeing to be there for someone's grief, to be there for someone's difficult moments. So in some ways I regret not being more explicit in that capacity, or not writing a coda to the record that says so. The end of 'You Ascendant', a visual of someone literally ascending, is a symbol of somebody assimilating their grief in a beneficial way, rising above it. The last part of the record is to say that no one is alone in that.

In the lyric sheet some parts are italicized and some aren't, is that meant to signify anything?

Yeah, I wanted to clue you into the difference between what's real and what's internalised. I tried at times to use my language as well, saying "nights" or "days" at the beginning of certain phrases, it was meant to evoke some sort of remembering; something happening in someone's head as opposed to happening in real life. In the [limited edition] book I annotated all the lyrics, and I might do so even more extensively in the future online, because we only had so much time - and I'll probably remember things that I forgot to include.

Have you guys discussed what you're going to do live; if you're going to play the whole record in full?

I think we're going to try to play every song, maybe someday play it in order. We've done it with every record at some point I think - I don't know if we've played Rooms front to back - I think this record probably ought to be. Not right off the bat, because if you put the record out and then went out on tour and only played these 10 songs I can imagine that would be an unsatisfying experience for people who haven't had an opportunity to sit with the record, or who don't like it and like other records - which is fine too. But I think at some point [we will].

We've got a friend coming on tour with us to help us perform the songs, because there's so much more than 5 people can do, so we've got a friend coming to play additional parts, and our tour manager's going to do our auxiliary percussion. The idea is to be able to play everything we wrote and performed on the record, at least as close as is physically possible with 7 people on a stage - and I'm not much help. At a certain point I think we'll play it front to back.

And finally, I can see from the book on the table that you're a reader, are there any books or writers that might have influenced the writing on this record?

Everything that I've done since Rooms of the House has been pretty heavily indebted to Don DeLillo, who's a favourite author of mine; when we did Rooms Of The House I read Underworld and a couple of his more recent works of fiction. This one I was reading a lot of William T Vollmann; some of the initial structural ideas that showed up on the record were borrowed from his books of fiction and short stories. A lot of this one too was film, we set out early on to make something cinematic in scope, so David Lynch, always been a big Stanley Kubrick fan, so there's some of that on the record. So not exclusively literature this time around, which was kinda fun.

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La Dispute’s new album Panorama is out now on Epitaph – read our review.

from The 405 https://ift.tt/2TPtlSC

Here we are in July. Hope everyone has been having a great half of the year and a good summer! Things are exciting in my end with a new job starting soon and will be having me moving halfway across the United States once again. As I prepare my move I figured I'd do another set of reviews. This one has less indie focus than previous entries but I think it'll be just fine. If you want to catch my last post just click here and hopefully my gibberish thoughts and opinions are of some interest. Also I changed these posts to be called Quick Thoughts since my posts aren't really in depth reviews. We'll see if I stick to it.Steamworld DigI’ve already played Steamworld Dig when it came out on the Wii U but I decided to pick it up for the Switch considering how much I enjoy the series and especially its sequel. Well I gotta say, the sequel is better in every single way after replaying this one but I do think the original is still worth your time. The basic premise is you dig. You dig for gems and power stones to upgrade your character so that you can dig faster and through tougher stones. There is a very simple plot with characters that have some personality but it isn’t much to be honest. The visuals are also just okay. To its credit the game was originally a 3ds game and then ported to other platforms. The style looks fine but it gets massively improved upon in future entries. Really the hook here the aspect of digging and gaining new skills as you unlock equipment in test rooms. You’ll unlock a double jump, power drill, and dynamite amongst other skills and items as you play. The test rooms are honestly some of my favorite parts of the game as it makes for some fun quick puzzles and platforming outside of the regular digging you will do. I should mention you will encounter some foes to bash with your pick axe but the combat is just all about holding “A” and dodging any attacks. You will also have to watch out for toxic water, spikes, and some other surprises the deeper in you go.The biggest thing holding the game back is the length and lack of replayability. You can easily clear this around 2 hours and that’s with doing all the test rooms you come across. There are some secret gears to collect in the rooms but it doesn’t add that much extra play time to go through and collect them. Honestly you can skip Steamworld Dig and just go into its sequel. But if you really want to play the game 10 dollars is a decent price but I’m sure during the holidays there will be a decent sale for a more reasonable price.Still it isn’t a bad game, it’s just too little of a game without its truly own identity since it plays so much like the old flash game Motherload. Now if only a sequel to Steamworld Heist would get announced!Price: $9.99 Time played: Less than 3 Hours Verdict: Wait for a sale Flint HookDamn. I really wanted to like Flint Hook but too many aspects just had me wondering why play it over the (personally) better roguelikes out there. I mean visually the game is outstanding. This is the same team behind Mercenary Kings so the pixel art and animations are top of the line. Its colorful, charming, and just fun to look at. The music is also outstanding. The main theme when the game starts up gets me pumped to do a run and has me forgetting all the reasons I didn’t enjoy this game but then I start playing it... The biggest hurdle I thin this game has is it should not have been a rogue like. The dig draw in this game is you have a grappling hook that can pop bubbles or grab onto certain locations to have you zip around really tiny levels. Already the bigger focus is on movement and platforming as you avoid cannons, lasers, spikes, spike balls, motion detection enemies, regular enemies, ghosts, fire, and so much more. This should have been a platformer with carefully crafted levels right from the beginning rather than what feels like an attempt to chase the indie roguelike genre.Just consider the actual content in the game. The way it works is you pick a boss bounty and and complete a few ships (levels) to get to the boss. During this time you will retread very similar rooms with no interesting abilities unlocked. Most are passive like more health, more gold, higher critical chance hits, or faster movement. Nothing that makes you excited to pick up and encourage multiple replays since these are minor passive change ups with no major adjustments to gameplay. The worst part is the obvious hook is the grappling hook but only 1 or 2 abilities you can find changes how it works. It’s like the devs made a really cool mechanic but didn’t know what to do with it. Also, the shooting and combat was clearly an after though as the majority of enemies stand still and do not move. Some don’t even attack and could just be replaced by targets that need shot. The ones that do shoot back have really basic attack patterns. The bigger challenge is moving around the screen with your hookshot and avoiding stage hazards. I honestly had way more fun traversing the maps in the game than fighting any enemy. That should have been the focus. Anyways, back to the content. The bosses you fight will always be the same no matter what. Attack patterns are the same and you will always fight the same boss when you reach the end of a run depending on the bounty. It makes runs feel like there are only 5 variants, one for each boss, as opposed to nearly limitless mix ups.The game contains a lot of collectibles in the form of lore and relics. Neither of which effects the abilities of the layer but rather add background to the game. I found these uninteresting as I do not find reading text on the screen about a watch exciting or a good way to provide purpose to a game’s universe. Relics at least offer XP to your character so that you can unlock new starting skills but again the skills are just not interesting that I did not care about this aspect. I know this mini review negative and disappointing but that is just how I felt when playing Flint Hook. It is a game with great visuals and charm but lacks in gameplay department. It isn't terrible but I think Gungeon, Isaac, Don't Starve, or a Robot Named Fight are way more interesting in what they offer. I really thought I was going to love Flint Hook but it just didn't mesh with me like I had hoped. Price: $14.99 Time played: 15 Hours Verdict: Wait for a sale Splatoon 2 with DLCSo Splatoon 2, it's good, really good. If you’re following Nintendo then you know this game is great. It has risen to being one f Nintendo’s big franchises. I mean this game has so much going for it. It is colorful, some great music, and such an interesting gameplay mechanic I can get my friends and family, that don’t play games, into a match and they’ll have a blast. While at the same time playing ranked can create an incredibly stressful few minutes. So obviously the multiplayer is excellent but single player wise can lease a bit to be desired. I love the hub world where you explore and select the next level to jump into. The traversal of the world by spraying ink is the best part. The enemies don’t really do much of anything in the base game that I’d rather for larger more interesting levels. Plus, the story is pretty simple and doesn’t offer that many exciting moments. Sure the boss fights are a highlight but there aren’t any character moments unlike the dlc, which i’ll get into. Overall with the base Splatoon 2 game the multiplayer is the main draw with the single player offering a decent one time though experience. Sure, you can replay levels with different weapons but nothing major changes that I wouldn't recommend it unless you are a huge fan of the single player.Splatoon 2’s DLC somewhat fixes a lot of the complaints I have with the base game. While it does not offer larger levels, instead smaller for focused challenges, this is still much better than the base game. These focused challenges (I think 80 or so?) levels are a lot of fun. Some will have you reaching a goal with no items, fighting waves of enemies, escorting a ball, shooting shapes out boxes, flying in a jet pack, and so much more. These are great bite sized missions that are vastly better than the single player missions. Sure, they aren’t large open levels to explore like I wish but they’re still great in their own way. The other big fun aspect of the dlc is how much character interaction there is. Pearl, Marina, and Cuttlefish, have a lot of dialogue between each other and they are swimming with personality. They’re a joy to read and watch as they interact with one another. Plus the ending sequence has an actual cutscene which adds a nice cinematic quality to the game. It makes me really excited with where Nintendo takes the single player.Splatoon 2 is a no brainer when it comes to the Switch. I didn't even get into Salmon Run which I have poured tons of hours into. This is easily my most played multiplayer game and maybe my most played game in general. Both the base game and DLC are well worth picking up. Price: $59.99 | DLC: $19.99 Time played: 140 Hours Verdict: Recommend Ys 8Ys 8 is the first game I played in this series and I gotta say I’m impressed. You play as Adol, the silent protagonist, who’s ship is mysteriously destroyed at the the beginning of the game. You wake up on a deserted island and have to reunite with other castaways to find a way off the island. I liked the aspect of finding survivors as they would be added to your base camp which would grow in size as you played. It has a nice sense of progress the more you play and the deeper you explore the island. Sometimes the base camp will come under attack and you will have to fight waves of monsters so be ready to have to travel back from time to time. The story and pacing however is pretty strange. It starts of with a nice hook of ending up on an island and a strange side plot about a mysterious girl who lives on the island. But by the halfway point the story kind of just disappears and you just gather survivors with the vague plot of “find a way off the island” is your only goal. There is no real antagonist throughout the game until the very end. This is where you are hit with heavy exposition and everything comes together and makes sense. It just would have been better if it was better spread out through the game rather just appearing at the very end.While Ys 8 might falter a bit around the plot department the gameplay is a high point. It is all real time and unlike most JRPGs you do not enter a battle arena upon fighting an enemy. You can attack as you please with no transitions and this makes combat fast. You attack with a single button to perform very simple combos but can perform a magic attack with on of the 4 face buttons. You’ll gain a lot in the game so there is a nice variety of moves you’ll perform. For example by the end my main moves for Adol were a vertical arching slash, magic tornado, a spinning air dash, and a long automated ground combo for heavy damage. There are tons more you unlock but that is just what I chose to use by the end. You can have up to 3 party members active at once and you’ll want to switch between them (this is done by pressing “Y”) to fight certain enemies as many are only weak to one type of attack which a party member will fall under (Air attack, smash, or slash). You’ll upgrade armor and weapons as you play but in order to change the visual appearance of characters you’ll need to trade for costumes ( as there is no currency in the game since you’re on an island) which I found disappointing. It did not feel like I had as much control over my character’s visual appearance which I really enjoy doing in these types of games. The last bit of gameplay is exploring the island which is somewhat metroidvania like. You’ll find new tools to let you get through swaps, climb vines, or double jump. Oh, and there is fishing which can be fun to get supplies.The soundtrack to Ys is solid albeit nothing amazing in my opinion. Only a few track really stood out and the rest sot of blended in with that jrpg electric guitar generic sound but nothing out right terrible. The only bad aspect of Ys is sometimes the frame rate and resolution can really dip. Grassy areas are hard on the eyes especially in handheld mode but it is still playable and there are varied environments that you can move to other parts of the game. Also, the translation is sloppy at times with some misspellings or forgetting words in sentences. It’s sloppy but I wasn’t too bothered, although for 60 dollars you’d expect a bit better. If you hate turn based jrpgs then this game might be what you’re looking for as long as you can deal with some anime tropes. There are a few in this game that had me cringe and feel mildly uncomfortable but overall not too bad. Definitely a fun game though and way better than I was expecting. I hope future entries release on the Switch.Price: $59.99 Time played: 40 hours Verdict: Recommend Wolfenstein 2Wolfenstein 2 is another technical marvel ported to the Switch thanks to the devs at Panic Button. Visually it is obviously going to be the weakest compared to the other platforms but it still is quite a game to look at. There were compromises to make it possible to run however. Frame rate is capped at 30 fps, textures can be blurry at times, motion blur is mandatory, and there is a subtle haze to limit the field of view. Still, the game has some great visuals considering the Switch’s limitations. In case you aren’t familiar with Wolfenstein 2 the premise is Nazis won WW2 and it’s time to start a revolution. You will kill a ton of Nazis and it is glorious. You’ll fight inside ruined American cities, Nazi airships, subs, secret bases and other locations. The story is really enjoyable with a great mix of absurdity but also a serious somber tone. There are only a moment or two I felt out of place but over all the game does a great job at setting up characters and moving the plot along. The game is not very long maybe about 10 hours but it’s a quality 10 hours.The weapons, while not as varied as I’d hope, control very well and provide excellent feedback and sound as you dual wield shotguns blasting Nazis to bits. Running and gunning is not the only thing you’ll do as there is some simple stealth in the game. In many situations you can sneak around with a hatchet and knives so you can eliminate Nazis without any hearing a sound. If spotted it just means reinforcements are called in on your area. Now when the game originally released I heard it was deemed to hard and maybe it was changed for the Switch but I’d say normal and hard are perfectly enjoyable experiences. Hard mode will have you hiding behind cover a bit more but it never reached a point where I was frustrated. Gyro aiming is also in the game which is great for fine tuning shots when aiming down sights. I do wish the game had more varied enemy types similar to how Doom does as encounters can sometimes feel too samey at times.In terms of extra content there are extra missions you can play that take place in levels you have already beaten. These are harder than the first time you play these and task you with eliminating a high ranking Nazi in the area. I have not beaten them all but from what I’ve played you have no checkpoints and need to beat it without dying. I wish there was a more arcadey mode in its place where you can just run around killing waves of Nazis as the game feels great and I’d rather just be able to jump in to play rather than having to select one of thee bonus levels but that’s a personal preference. Even with that small complaint Wolfenstein 2 is an excellent game and definitely should be played. If you only own a Switch I fully recommend it. If you have a PC, Xbox, or PlayStation pick it up there as it is cheaper and has better performance. But either way, play this game and enjoyable the world. Also, don’t forget to kill as many Nazis as you can.Price: $59.99 Time played: 10 hours Verdict: Recommend That finishes this set of games. Next time I do one of these I'll be in a new state so I don't know when I'll actually get around to it. I don't think it'll be too long but I'm not sure how many people will actually be missing me haha. Either way, take care and enjoy the rest of the summer months! via /r/NintendoSwitch

Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbot/Billy Bragg

Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire Friday 15th July 2018

Towards the top of the long steep hill, the road takes a sharp left turn where through a gap in the hedge we can look back at the lowlands we have left behind. The Severn glistens in the summer sun, swelled by the water that has drained into it to leave its mark on the landscape that it has shaped. Alongside it, a mosaic of green fields lie on the flood plain and beyond these rise the hills of the border region, lands that carry the memory of the brutality on which nations are built. Reaching the top, the road slowly descends, we have climbed the escarpment that forms its western edge and are now driving through the Cotswolds, the iconic English landscape of rolling hills formed by the distinctive yellow jurassic limestone on which it is built and chocolate box villages. In the fields, the lush summer grass has been collected into huge bales, wrapped up in green plastic and piled up in the corner and in the distance the needle of a church steeple can be seen against the blue sky. A perfect summers evening, everything should be right with the world: then a sharp reminder that even here, it may not be. As I take in the scene around me, I notice the angular shape of three swifts, the scythe of their wings working independently as they follow the flight of the insects on which they feed. This shouldn’t be unusual, the aerial ballet of swifts and their eerie cries should be familiar in the summer skies but these are the first I have seen this year. Cold weather in April and the loss of suitable nesting sites may have played their part but the main problem is that this pleasant green landscape around us is devoid of insects, inconvenient hindrances that have to be eradicated as the efficiencies of the production line are applied to agriculture. The scene may seem reassuringly familiar but it is one in which it is becoming increasingly hard for the natural world to find a niche. I already tell others about how I used to be able to sit in the back garden and listen to a cuckoo, something that is now only a distant memory. Maybe it wont be long before we all we have are memories of other summer visitors who made their epic journeys from Africa to raise their young amongst us.

Swifts, swallows, house martins: summer visitors more at home in the air than they are on land and all sadly becoming absent from our skies. And with a link so tenuous it is worthy of a cringe, it also takes us to the reason why we are making this journey through what is arguably the most green and pleasant part of this green and pleasant land. In the early 80s, a young man who liked to refer to himself as P D Heaton was dividing his time between writing songs and making a round trip of over 700miles from his home in Surrey every other weekend to watch Sheffield United. Relocating to Hull, he felt his work needed an audience and with a friend, Stan Cullimore, he began to busk around the shopping centres of the city. It may well be there that the first performance “Happy Hour” was greeted with indifference or irritation as shoppers desperately tried to avoid the eye contact that would oblige them to drop a few coins in a hat. The duo also recorded a demo tape, a copy off which, Heaton tells us tonight, they sent to Billy Bragg who, despite a reputation that now sees him introduced as the hardest working man in the business, found time to give it a listen and bring it to the attention of his record label. This interest required a rhythm section to fill out the sound, cue the arrival of the the future Fatboy Slim, and a name, which of course was The Housemartins. Bragg undoubtedly received such tapes by the sack full, most of which would offer little other than rudimentary punk thrashing and sixth form political slogans which meant that the sunny melodies, witty lyrics and Heaton’s clear high pitched voice would have immediately stood out. The lyrics, which cleverly and mostly discretely referenced marxism with a little Christianity thrown in, would have immediately captured Bragg’s interest but just to make sure, they included the song “Flag Day”; a wake up call where the feel good act of charity is used to avoid any real change in a society that can tolerate such high levels of inequality. It is a theme that is still very much on Heaton’s mind when tonight, he asks how many of the crowd will return the next day to see Gary Barlow. Few are but the mention of his name is enough to provoke a rant about his tax affairs and how in a few months time he will be appearing on “Children in Need” encouraging youngsters to empty their pockets to support a hospital that “wouldn’t have to close if he paid his fucking taxes”. 

Like The Smiths, The Housemartins eschewed the styles of the time to produce bright, guitar based pop that that often disguised a serious message. Also like the The Smiths, they were not built to last and after a few singles, a couple of albums and a Christmas number 1, they disbanded, although unlike their Manc contemporaries they apparently remain on good terms. Heaton reflects on these early days during this 90 minute sell out show at Westonbirt Arboretum, in addition to noting the support Bragg gave them as they were getting started, he also reminisces about their first appearance on “Top of the Pops” where, convinced that theirs would only be a temporary stay at the top, they pestered their fellow acts for autographs. A couple of his early songs also find their way into the set, the exhilaration of “Five Get Over Excited” disguises the sinister lyrics, “Feigning concern, a conservative pastime” seems particularly apposite now, as does the flock mentality in “Sheep” in an era fuelled by a growth of rampant nationalism. The songs are mostly left to speak for themselves but Heaton does set the context of “Caravan of Love”, the final encore, explaining how he still remains proud of this acapella version of the Isley’s song and how its message of hope is one that still resonates. The encores also include a wonderfully exuberant run through “Happy Hour”, complete with giant balloons that roadies had to continually bat back into the audience so that the song could continue unhindered. Again the bright pop of the music hides that the song isn’t really about what you think it is about; a brilliant take down of 80s yuppie culture that could equally apply to millennial hipsters; “I think I might be happy if I wasn’t out with them”. 

The Housemartins, for those of us who are of an age to appreciate the context, were important in showing that music could be much more than the programmed beats of Stock, Aitken and Waterman; something that dominated the charts then and the start of using technology to produce formulaic songs cynically built around familiar melodies and hooks. They are not, however, the main reason that so many have made their way to this Forestry Commission gig in rural Gloucestershire. Thanking the audience for their support, Heaton notes that of all the gigs on this forest tour, not only was this the first to sell-out but also that more tickets were released which were also quickly snapped up. This most conservative region of the country may not seem the natural setting for pop that makes little attempt to disguise its left wing inspiration, the car park is in the vast expanse of the grounds to the Westonbirt School hammering home the privilege against which much of the music is set, but comments by Heaton or Bragg on issues around Brexit, Trump, climate change, unions or inequality drew nothing but cheers from the crowd. Heaton does explain how in their gig at Thetford Forest, a fight had broken out between two people who had different views on Brexit, unfortunately, he notes, “the pro guy was ours”, but everyone in Gloucestershire was either on message or if not they kept their opinions to themselves. This popularity, even amongst those who do not share his politics, is because he would soon eclipse his early achievements by forming The Beautiful South from the remnants of The Housemartins. Still built around his distinctive voice and showing the same social and political context, the sound was, however, very different. The lyrics became more nuanced, often delivered in bittersweet tales that, despite being laced with irony, still managed to sound wistfully romantic. We cared about the subjects of these songs because their stories were told so clearly and the bright catchy melodies and beautifully inventive arrangements set them off perfectly. It proved to be hugely successful, their compilation “Carry On Up The Charts” gave him another Christmas Number 1 and they were soon to be found on the arena circuit. It is what has given those gathered here tonight a chance to relive their youth and half the set is made up of songs from the South.

“I’ll Sail This Ship Alone” is a reminder of just how well the songs can place themselves in the mind and how now they can stir such warm memories. Built around a mournful piano accompaniment, it is essentially a break up song where the hurt is carried through the sublime melody. Yet there is also defiance, this is not the end of the world, they will survive, they can be alone. The clarity and pitch of Heaton’s voice adds the melancholy that this gives the song its heart and, despite its size, the audience are quiet and appreciative allowing the words to drift out into the clear evening sky. The set is filled with many equally poignant moments, “One Last Love Song”, “Old Red Eyes in Back” and “Song for Whoever” all leave their emotional mark and even more upbeat songs such as “Good as Gold (Stupid as Mud)” and “You Keep It All In” carry an underlying sadness. The contribution of Irish singer, Briana Corrigan, to the South’s earliest songs persuaded them to promote her to a full band member, thus providing a female lead in the domestic dramas they were playing out. When she left in 1994, partly as a result of some of Heaton’s less than sensitive lyrics, she was replaced with a supermarket stacker from St Helens called Jacqui Abbott, thus starting a partnership that is still going strong tonight. Abbott covers Corrigan’s vocals well on “A Little Time” and “You Keep It All In” but her voice, fuller and with a more resonant lower range than Corrigan’s, gives the songs a slightly different feel. Despite suffering from a bad back, her movement is severely restricted throughout and she has to sit during the middle of the set, she is still wonderful on the two songs she originated, “Rotterdam” and the delightfully naughty “Don’t Marry Her”, Heaton checks before she sings this whether we are alright with the “explicit version”. 

With Abbott leaving the band in 2000, The Beautiful South continued for a few more years producing two more albums that showed that Heaton could still craft catchy and quirky songs, of which “Manchester”, a sodden tribute to his adopted home, is performed tonight. A conversation on Facebook, however, brought him back in touch with Abbott and a collaboration that is now into its fifth year and has produced three albums. Starting with “I Don’t See Them”, they play with the introduction allowing Heaton to act as the preacher building up the responses from the crowd. The band are quickly into their stride, tight and precise, the song driven along by the thumping beats that give the rhythm. The humour of “DIY” is fun, gently mocking men of a certain age who spend their weekends at B&Q, providing a companion to Billy Bragg’s “Handyman Blues” that he had performed earlier. Their most recent album, “Crooked Calypso” showed that Heaton retains the ability to write droll pithy lyrics that cover obesity, “Fat Man”, race and religion, “The Lord is a White Con” and inequality, “People Like Us”. Its not all about social injustice, however, with “I Gotta Praise” being a heart wrenching love song worthy of the South. They even managed to introduce a new song, a reflection on the music of artists such as Marvin Gaye that helped the young Heaton to form his own musical ideas. 

With so many gathered, the potential threat means that even in a remote location, there is still a high level of security to enter the site. This means that many are still queuing outside when Billy Bragg takes to the stage but the show must go on. Rather than a support act, he is probably more of a joint headline and a large group of fans have collected around the stage to give him an enthusiastic reception. Occasionally accompanied by the atmospheric slide provided by CJ Hillman, he is on fiery form, channelling his anger into songs that tackle environmental issues, “King Tide and The Sunny Day Flood”, immigration “Why We Build the Wall”, workers rights, “There is Power in a Union” and a state of the nation updating of Dylan’s “The Times They Are a Changing”. In between, he continues his role as the curator of Woody Guthrie’s legacy with interpretations of “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “She Came Along to Me” and there are plenty of favourites, “Levi Stubbs Tears”, “The Milkman of Human Kindness” and, of course, “A New England” complete with the Kirsty McColl verse. Introducing him at Latitude a few years ago, the announcer said that no festival is complete without Billy Bragg being on the bill and it is difficult to think of a park or field he hasn’t at some time played. Then he seemed a little restrained, toning down the politics and mainly focusing his songs that dealt with relationships. It would be nice to say that seeing him return to his impassioned best was something to treasure were it not for that the circumstances that have fuelled his anger are so desperate. 

There are many so many reasons to treasure a show as good as this, the inventive songs, the exquisite playing, the humour and the engaging personalities of the performers, but another is that it is difficult to think of younger performers who in future will, through their music, provide a commentary for the times in which we live. The other Forestry commission gigs this year include Gary Barlow, Paloma Faith and George Ezra who whilst they mostly make perfectly pleasant music, show little inclination to ask questions about the nature of the society in which we live; aside, of course, from Barlow’s tax status. Then, it is difficult to think of a young Bragg or Heaton being able to make their way in the music business today which seems to be ever more built around safety and predictability. There are no doubt those who try but to take their message beyond a dedicated few, they need the support that they are unlikely to get. Thus, as he has been doing for years, it is left to artists such as Billy Bragg to highlight to injustices heaped on the Windrush generation or the children taken from their parents at the US border. Music and the arts are central to our culture, both reflecting and shaping the world in which we live and in its way this tradition is as English as the Cotswold setting. And that is why we should be grateful that those we have seen tonight continue, as Heaton puts it, to be a thorn in the side of the Tories. Long may it continue. 

The Nintendo King and the Midlife Crisis

It was December in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, pitch-black hair sodden from the shower and writhing above his eyes. He was in front of a wall of practically 1,000 competitions for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever secreted; the wall, flooring to ceiling, was amazing to gaze, Contri as tiny as Ahab in front of his whale. He spoke from the stickers of gray-headed plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades collecting: Spy Hunter , with its Peter Gunn theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987; Jaws , which he picked up at a flea market with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a year or two eventually; Zelda II , video games he had his parents order from the Sears catalog in 1988, a game he cried over because it made perpetually to arrive. The wall was both a sanctuary to his life’s pastime and the backdrop for his use. For a decade, Contri has played a reputation called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000 spectators on YouTube. Supporters realise him at the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets, and he has become not only the panel of experts on Nintendo but a public look for anyone who grown up with the NES, anyone who’s worn a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the Super Mario Bros . theme song throbbing in their heart. The Punk is goofier than the real-life Contri–a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his id. Games are the Punk’s life, and remembers of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake him in sweat. Almost all of his videos, which run around 10 instants, focus on the Punk’s experience with a single NES game. Each is a compounding autobiography instruction and evaluation, handed with a narrative articulation that causes Contri( as scribe, superintendent, and wizard) show off his sense of humour, his knowledge of Nintendo, and rarely even the extents of his introspection–about being boxed into an endless infancy by videogames, about the inherent sadness of trying to fill a flaw in their own lives with them. See more from the Life Issue. April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Nik Mirus One of Contri’s better videos, a 12 -minute piece from 2013 devoted to the rare and expensive NES game The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak ! em >, starts with the Punk rustling awake from a excitement fantasy, strangling out “I need help.” And, looking at his plays: “What am I doing? They’re just videogames. I’m supporting like hundreds of thousands of bucks’ usefulnes right in my hands. That could be going to something handy, something memorable. Like a vacation! I could go anywhere I miss. Scotland. Italy. Tahiti … ” And there he pauses. “I wonder if there’s NES games in Tahiti.” It was a bit, predominantly, but as Nintendo celebrates the 33 rd birthday of its historic console–and as Contri approaches 38 — it was also a sign of the conflict within him. Like a lot of people who were born in the years just before and after the launch of the NES, he is no longer young and not nearly old-time, neither brand-new nor vintage, and it seems like he has started to feel a little bit lost in the in-between. “I don’t know if I want to be 65 years old speak about retro videogames, ” he told me. “I don’t wanted to go to be the only thing I talk about perpetually. I think sometimes,’ Is this where my flair begins and extremities? ’ ” He says he doesn’t dally NES videogames anymore–except when he’s in character–and that it’s different now: It’s work. He admits this in abdication, like it’s blasphemy, the man for whom Nintendo became a career. “There’s something a little self-deprecating about the Punk character, and about my reference too, ” enunciates James Rolfe, a 37 -year-old godfather of YouTube gamers who dallies a persona reputation the Angry Video Game Nerd and is a collaborator of Contri’s. “All these YouTube characters have some kind of component of sadness to them. Meditating back to childhood, were we consuming our times with competitions? Were we really entertaining ourselves? Were we really happy? ” Contri’s home library consists of nearly 1,000 NES games. SHAYAN ASGHARNIA Contri is a 3 7-year-old man who has been playing videogames his entire life. His cousin’s Atari 2600, when he was 4. His family’s PC-IBM XT. Then he was 7 when his mothers bought him an NES console, and preadolescent Pat started expend hours in his family’s rec room in front of a small Magnavox monitor. Later, in high school, he frisked Super Nintendo and then PC sports, and rediscovered the NES while he was in college. After he graduated, in 2002, he eventually settled into a chore in market research, acting 50 -plus hours a week in Princeton, New Jersey, and living in nearby North Brunswick. He detested it. One day in 2006, he came across the Angry Video Game Nerd’s grouchy game recollects, and the perception of a courage boozing beer and railing about video games Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest rang out to him. “I ascertained the AVGN doing well, but I discovered a lot of bad videos out there too, ” Contri says. “I’d watch them and think,’ Not simply does this person not know how to play the game, he didn’t include any history of it.’ At the least, I envisaged I could do better.” Contri became his first video, six and a half minutes of him as the Punk playing a couple of NES baseball games before acre on the best, Baseball Stars . He picked the moniker because he thought it had a ring to it, had an stance , and, well, ladies he’d dated told him he behaved like a punk. It also captivated the overwhelming compassion he got where reference is played video games; the NES compiled him glad, and the specific characteristics was a strange, joyful increase of who Contri really was. He procreated his second video a few months subsequently, about The Three Stooges , and then another one after that. He started running out videos, each loaded with enough feeling, temperament, and insider knowledge to set it apart from everything else online. In 2012, a few years after leaving New Jersey for San Diego, he discontinued his market research chore and started obligating videos full time. Related Stories Angela Watercutter I’m a Nintendo Switch N0 0b Who Just Got a Hands-On with Labo Julie Muncy Celeste Is Precisely How the Nintendo Switch Continues to Win Jim McLauchlin Oral History: How Marvel’s Creative Head Helped Bring Nintendo to America Today Contri gets flown across the country up to a dozen terms a year to accompanied videogame assemblies, where he often arrives sleep-deprived and accentuated, carving a smile in front of his followers. He schleps suitcases full of NES Punk wristbands and DVDs across dinner hallways and sits at a booth wearing a T-shirt and sandals, a guy with that everlasting five-o’clock darknes and the foppish hair, selling his product and indicating his word a hundred times on NES consoles and controllers and activity cartridges. He gives six figures a year, his receipt coming from stock and volume royalties; from YouTube ads and the sponsors of his two podcasts, Not So Common , which he hosts by himself, and the Completely Unnecessary Podcast , a testify he cohosts with a sidekick worded Ian Ferguson; from the Patreon allies whose monthly donations facilitate pay for his content. As of earlier this year, the NES Punk videos were the least advantageous and most time-consuming of all Contri’s projects. One of its recent videos, about a game called Stadium Events , made him more than 50 hours to create–much of that time spent researching the inscrutable scarcity of the game–and it allured exactly over 70,000 opinions at long last counting, earning him a little less than $400. A low-spirited income, by any measure, and he’s started to think more and more about withdrawing the character and maybe doing something else with his time. “For the last year and a half, I’ve never really known what he does for entertaining, ” pronounces Ferguson, who convened Contri in 2008. “I can’t think of one specific pastime aside from workout that he does that’s perfectly undone from slog. His drudgery was formerly his hobby, and now he’s married to that work.” Contri insists that he does, in fact, have other interests: “I like movies. I affection the zoo. I like watching boasts on Tv. I detest the Patriots, but who doesn’t? ” He’s never been married, has no teenagers, and lives alone, unless you count the Punk. “The Punk is just a reference, ” he mentions. “Sometimes people think it’s actually me. But at some phase this will end.” In the game room where he films the videos, Contri persisted over the wall of NES cartridge sports he no longer toys for merriment. “I don’t know if they give me a find anymore, ” he remarked. “And I don’t know if I’m still looking for that find. Most of us are well-adjusted adults now.” Maybe he intended the proposed establishment of adults who’d affection the NES as kids, or the obsessed beings like him who’d mustered the whole North American library( he stops three activities in a bank vault ), or the really maniac people who would want an old, mint-condition NES holographic cereal carton, which he proudly showed me. Pat Contri holding a jumbo-sized yield Donkey Kong plush from 1982 at his house outside of San Diego . div> SHAYAN ASGHARNIA Contri doesn’t know what to do–walk the Punk into the sunset, or kill the character off. Nintendo is as popular as ever, which isn’t fixing the decision any easier. The Switch–a Nintendo console designed for middle-aged people as much as it is for anyone–has sold more than 14 million units since it was exhausted last year. Stores spent a year selling out of the NES and SNES Classic. And in the summer of 2016, Contri liberated a 437 -page, $60 hardback coffee-table-sized bible called Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985-1995 , which took him nearly three years to finish 1 . It includes its further consideration of every mainstream NES game released in the US along with information and factoids and NES curio history. He wrote 450 of the 800 -plus recalls, then compiled everything there is before publicizing it himself. It suffocated him but turned into a amaze hit–with two etch flees totaling 10,000 copies–thanks in part to his meticulous research and the upsurge in those who are interested in retro NES games. It was a big reason why he was able to buy his house in San Diego, where Nintendo is on the walls and in the bedroom, on the floor and on the shelves, in the beady plastic hearts of the stuffed swine and on his personalized wristbands and the five-o’clock darknes that his YouTube character can never seem to get rid of. Nintendo forged him and allowed him the strange bonu of internet prestige , not to mention a ton of crazy nonsense he has collected for no other rationale than that it probably fixed him feel like a kid. He has already projected a sequel to the book, a template for the Super Nintendo library that he hopes to publish next year. “I am happy, I think–I’ll surely be joyous, formerly I finish the next record, ” he alleges. Contri’s hair is get a bit gray-headed, and he mentions that maybe the Punk might endure to have totally white hair–that maybe he could still be talking about plays 30 years from now, like aged adults talking about toy set lists in the regions of pattern ballrooms. He has enough recreations to make it all last-place eternally. The Punk, an age-old guy, hunched over, still collecting, still frisking the ancient sports, still living in a house full of Nintendo. Read More Real Wedding, Virtual Space* The Pursuit of Youth* The Digital Vision Problem* The True Screen Addicts* Rebooting Reproduction* Silicon Valley &# x27; s Brotox Boom* The Next Steve Jobs* Solving Health Issues at All Stages Justin Heckert (@ JustinHeckert ) is a writer living in Charleston, South Carolina. This is his first peculiarity for WIRED . em> 1 Correction appended, 3/27/ 18, 8: 28 PM EDT: Contri publicized his record, Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985-1995 , in 2016 , not 2017. Such articles appears in the April issue. Subscribe now . em> Related Video Gaming The History of Nintendo: By the Numbers With the announcement of the Nintendo Switch and the stop of the Wii U, let’s take a look at some of the numbers behind the mythical video game company. Read more: https :// www.wired.com/ story/ nes-punk-nintendo-gamer / http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/15/the-nintendo-king-and-the-midlife-crisis/

The Nintendo King and the Midlife Crisis

It was December in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, black hair wet from the shower and curling above his eyes. He was in front of a wall of nearly 1,000 games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever released; the wall, floor to ceiling, was amazing to behold, Contri as small as Ahab in front of his whale. He read from the spines of gray plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades collecting: Spy Hunter, with its Peter Gunn theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987; Jaws, which he picked up at a flea market with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a year or two later; Zelda II, a game he had his parents order from the Sears catalog in 1988, a game he cried over because it took forever to arrive.

The wall was both a shrine to his life’s hobby and the backdrop for his work. For a decade, Contri has played a character called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000 viewers on YouTube. Fans recognize him at the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets, and he has become not just an expert on Nintendo but a public face for anyone who grew up with the NES, anyone who’s worn a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the Super Mario Bros. theme song thumping in their heart.

The Punk is goofier than the real-life Contri—a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his id. Games are the Punk’s life, and thoughts of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake him in sweat. Almost all of his videos, which run around 10 minutes, focus on the Punk’s experience with a single NES game. Each is a combination history lesson and review, delivered with a narrative voice that lets Contri (as writer, director, and star) show off his sense of humor, his knowledge of Nintendo, and occasionally even the depths of his introspection—about being boxed into an endless childhood by video­games, about the inherent sadness of trying to fill a hole in his life with them.

See more from the Life Issue. April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Nik Mirus

One of Contri’s best videos, a 12-minute piece from 2013 dedicated to the rare and expensive NES game The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, begins with the Punk rustling awake from a fever dream, choking out “I need help.” And, looking at his games: “What am I doing? They’re just video­games. I’m holding like a thousand bucks’ worth right in my hands. That could be going to something useful, something memorable. Like a vacation! I could go anywhere I want. Scotland. Italy. Tahiti …” And there he pauses. “I wonder if there’s NES games in Tahiti.”

It was a bit, mostly, but as Nintendo celebrates the 33rd birthday of its historic console—and as Contri approaches 38—it was also a sign of the conflict within him. Like a lot of people who were born in the years just before and after the launch of the NES, he is no longer young and not nearly old, neither new nor vintage, and it seems like he has started to feel a bit lost in the in-between. “I don’t know if I want to be 65 years old talking about retro video­games,” he told me. “I don’t want that to be the only thing I talk about forever. I think sometimes, ‘Is this where my talent begins and ends?’ ” He says he doesn’t play NES video­games anymore—except when he’s in character—and that it’s different now: It’s work. He admits this in resignation, like it’s sacrilege, the man for whom Nintendo became a career.

“There’s something a little self-deprecating about the Punk character, and about my character too,” says James Rolfe, a 37-year-old godfather of YouTube gamers who plays a character named the Angry Video Game Nerd and is a collaborator of Contri’s. “All these YouTube characters have some kind of element of sadness to them. Thinking back to childhood, were we wasting our time with games? Were we really entertaining ourselves? Were we really happy?”

Contri’s home library consists of nearly 1,000 NES games.

SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

Contri is a 37-year-old man who has been playing video­games his entire life. His cousin’s Atari 2600, when he was 4. His family’s PC-IBM XT. Then he was 7 when his parents bought him an NES console, and pre­adolescent Pat started spending hours in his family’s rec room in front of a small Magnavox monitor. Later, in high school, he played Super Nintendo and then PC games, and rediscovered the NES while he was in college. After he graduated, in 2002, he eventually settled into a job in market research, working 50-plus hours a week in Princeton, New Jersey, and living in nearby North Brunswick. He hated it.

One day in 2006, he came across the Angry Video Game Nerd’s irascible game reviews, and the sight of a character drinking beer and railing about the game Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest rang out to him. “I saw the AVGN doing well, but I saw a lot of bad videos out there too,” Contri says. “I’d watch them and think, ‘Not only does this person not know how to play the game, he didn’t include any history of it.’ At the very least, I thought I could do better.”

Contri made his first video, six and a half minutes of him as the Punk playing a couple of NES baseball games before landing on the best, Baseball Stars. He chose the nickname because he thought it had a ring to it, had an attitude, and, well, women he’d dated told him he acted like a punk. It also captured the overpowering feeling he got when he played the games; the NES made him happy, and the character was a weird, happy extension of who Contri really was. He made his second video a month later, about The Three Stooges, and then another one after that. He started pumping out videos, each loaded with enough humor, personality, and insider knowledge to set it apart from everything else online. In 2012, a few years after leaving New Jersey for San Diego, he quit his market research job and started making videos full time.

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Today Contri gets flown across the country up to a dozen times a year to attend video­game conventions, where he often arrives sleep-deprived and stressed, carving a smile in front of his fans. He schleps suitcases full of NES Punk wristbands and DVDs across banquet hallways and sits at a booth wearing a T-shirt and sandals, a guy with that perpetual five-o’clock shadow and the foppish hair, selling his merchandise and signing his name a hundred times on NES consoles and controllers and game cartridges. He earns six figures a year, his revenue coming from merchandise and book royalties; from YouTube ads and the sponsors of his two podcasts, Not So Common, which he hosts by himself, and the Completely Unnecessary Podcast, a show he cohosts with a friend named Ian Ferguson; from the Patreon supporters whose monthly donations help pay for his content.

As of earlier this year, the NES Punk videos were the least lucrative and most time-­consuming of all Contri’s ventures. One of his most recent videos, about a game called Stadium Events, took him more than 50 hours to create—much of that time spent researching the mysterious rarity of the game—and it attracted just over 70,000 views at last count, earning him a little less than $400. A low return, by any measure, and he’s started to think more and more about retiring the character and maybe doing something else with his time.

“For the last year and a half, I’ve never really known what he does for fun,” says Ferguson, who met Contri in 2008. “I can’t think of one specific hobby aside from exercise that he does that’s completely disconnected from work. His work was once his hobby, and now he’s married to that work.” Contri insists that he does, in fact, have other interests: “I like movies. I love the zoo. I like watching sports on TV. I hate the Patriots, but who doesn’t?” He’s never been married, has no kids, and lives alone, unless you count the Punk. “The Punk is just a character,” he says. “Sometimes people think it’s really me. But at some point this will end.”

In the game room where he films the videos, Contri lingered over the wall of NES cartridge games he no longer plays for fun. “I don’t know if they give me a feeling anymore,” he said. “And I don’t know if I’m still looking for that feeling. Most of us are well-adjusted adults now.” Maybe he meant the generation of adults who’d loved the NES as kids, or the obsessed people like him who’d collected the whole North American library (he keeps three games in a bank vault), or the really insane people who would want an ancient, mint-condition NES holographic cereal box, which he proudly showed me.

Pat Contri holding a jumbo-sized vintage Donkey Kong plush from 1982 at his home outside of San Diego.

SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

Contri doesn’t know what to do—walk the Punk into the sunset, or kill the character off. Nintendo is as popular as ever, which isn’t making the decision any easier. The Switch—a Nintendo console designed for middle-­aged people as much as it is for anyone—has sold more than 14 million units since it was released last year. Stores spent a year selling out of the NES and SNES Classic. And in the summer of 2016, Contri released a 437-page, $60 hardback coffee-table-sized bible called Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985–1995, which took him nearly three years to finish 1. It includes reviews of every mainstream NES game released in the US along with information and factoids and NES curio history. He wrote 450 of the 800-plus reviews, then compiled it all before publishing it himself.

It suffocated him but turned into a surprise hit—with two print runs totaling 10,000 copies—thanks in part to his meticulous research and the surge in interest in retro NES games. It was a big reason why he was able to buy his house in San Diego, where Nintendo is on the walls and in the bedroom, on the floor and on the shelves, in the beady plastic eyes of the stuffed animals and on his personalized wristbands and the five-o’clock shadow that his YouTube character can never seem to get rid of. Nintendo forged him and allowed him the strange bounty of internet fame, not to mention a ton of crazy stuff he has collected for no other reason than that it probably made him feel like a kid.

He has already planned a sequel to the book, a guide for the Super Nintendo library that he hopes to publish next year. “I am happy, I think—I’ll definitely be happy, once I finish the next book,” he says. Contri’s hair is going a little gray, and he mentions that maybe the Punk might survive to have totally white hair—that maybe he could still be talking about games 30 years from now, like old men talking about toy train sets in the corners of convention ballrooms. He has enough games to make it all last forever. The Punk, an old guy, hunched over, still collecting, still playing the ancient games, still living in a house full of Nintendo.

Read More

Real Wedding, Virtual Space • The Pursuit of Youth • The Digital Vision Problem • The True Screen Addicts • Rebooting Reproduction • Silicon Valley's Brotox Boom • The Next Steve Jobs • Solving Health Issues at All Stages

Justin Heckert (@JustinHeckert) is a writer living in Charleston, South Carolina. This is his first feature for WIRED.

1 Correction appended, 3/27/18, 8:28 PM EDT: Contri published his book, Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985–1995, in 2016, not 2017.

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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All the Cannabis Legalization Measures in Play Right Now

Jay Lassiter of High Times Reports:

Compared to 2016, when Donald Trump won an upset presidential victory, four states voted to legalize the adult use of cannabis, and four more legalized medical use, 2017’s election season promises to be a much quieter affair.

In fact, this year’s most cannabis-relevant race may be the New Jersey governor’s race, which is notable for who isn’t running. That would be Gov. Chris Christie, the outspoken cannabis prohibitionist. The end of the Christie era could open the door for adult-use legalization via the state Legislature, which has been readying a measure for much of the past year.

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Otherwise, most of this year’s cannabis-related politicking involves laying the groundwork for 2018, when at least a half-dozen medical and adult-use measures may go up for a vote.

As the season opens, here are the most interesting races so far:

 Ballot Initiatives

Florida

Regulate Florida is circulating petitions to put an adult-use measure on the 2018 ballot. If successful, this measure would amend Florida’s constitution to end cannabis prohibition.

“Florida citizens have no other method for changing the laws besides a constitutional amendment,” Karen Seeb Goldstein, director of NORML Florida, told Leafly.

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“This petition is partially a reaction to the poor implementation of Amendment 2 [a 2016 measure to legalize medical cannabis], but there’s more to it than that. The war on drugs is a failure. Prohibition just doesn’t work.”

A Quinnipiac poll taken last spring found that 56% of voters support legalizing recreational cannabis.

 Michigan

The Michigan Regulation & Taxation of Marijuana Law is spearheaded by the Michigan Coalition to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol (CRMLA).

“We surpassed the 200,000-signature mark last week, and, assuming all goes well [over Labor Day] weekend, we expect to be well on our way to 250,000 by next week,” Josh Hovey, CRMLA spokesperson, told Leafly.

That 250,000-signature estimate comes tantalizingly close to the total of 252,523 verified signatures organizers must submit by Nov 22, 2017. To be safe, the campaign hopes to collect at least 360,000 signatures before the November deadline.

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“We have been thrilled to have nearly 60% of the public in support of legalizing cannabis in Michigan,” Hovey said. “But at the same time, this is far from a sure thing. There are big-money business interests that would love for us to fail, because they would rather see the law written in a way that allows them to monopolize the market.” His group’s initiative, he explained, is intentionally set up to benefit small businesses.

“There are also plenty of prohibitionists out there who will use Reefer Madness fear tactics to mislead the public,” Hovey said. “That’s why our coalition is working hard to raise the funds necessary to keep up our paid signature-collection effort to make the ballot and then run a professional, disciplined campaign that can win in November 2018.”

 Missouri

New Approach Missouri is actively gathering signatures to place a constitutional amendment on the 2018 ballot to permit medical cannabis in Missouri. Advocates have until May 6, 2018 to gather 160,199 verifiable signatures to qualify.

“We are circulating a petition for November of 2018 and currently have about 60,000 signatures, gathered by volunteers,” New Approach Missouri Campaign Manager John Payne told Leafly. “Our campaign got off to a great start with immense support from our volunteer base, and now we are about to shift signature collection into high gear by bringing in a professional signature-gathering company. Our current timeline calls for us to complete signature collection in January, well ahead of the May 6 deadline for signature submission.”

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The most recent statewide medical cannabis poll, conducted in June 2016, showed support for medical cannabis in Missouri at 62%. Only 27% of respondents singled a no vote.

 South Dakota

New Approach South Dakota is circulating petitions to place two marijuana-themed measures on next year’s ballot. One would legalize medical cannabis, while the other would permit recreational cannabis for adult use.

“Both measures require 13,871 (verified) signatures,” Melissa Mentele, who directs New Approach South Dakota, told Leafly. “I don’t have exact numbers, but we’re about two-thirds of the way there, roughly 6,000 signatures short for both of them, so South Dakota voters need to come out of the woodwork and sign my petition!”

“We’re exhausted and we’re sunburned, but we’re all working really hard to reach our goal of 25,000 total signatures for both petitions.”

Melissa Mentele, New Approach South Dakota

With a Nov. 8 deadline looming, advocates aren’t taking any chances. New Approach SD volunteers spent the past week “camping out” near the South Dakota State Fair in Huron, the group said. The fair was an organizing bonanza for both ballot measures.

“Our booth at the state fair is on point,” Mentele told Leafly. “We’re exhausted and we’re sunburned, but we’re all working really hard to reach our goal of 25,000 total signatures for both petitions.”

“I think that recreational, after what happened last time, honestly, this is going to be a hate vote,” Mentele said. Last year’s legalization measure was tossed from the ballot due to a clerical error. “So yeah, it’s gonna be a spite vote, and so far I’ve gotten a lot of spite signatures. Voters are mad, you have no idea!”

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 Utah

The Utah Patients Coalition is currently gathering signatures to place State Question 788 onto the 2018 ballot. Advocates need at least 113,143 verified signatures by April 15, 2018 to qualify.

Momentum for medical cannabis in Utah is strong, with 75% of Utah residents in favor of legalizing medical cannabis, according to a poll taken earlier this summer.

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 Legislative Action

In addition to the ballot measures described above, there’s momentum in several state capitals to end prohibition through legislation. Thus far in America, the path to legalization has been at the ballot box—at least in terms of adult use. Bragging rights are due to whichever state legislature that ushers in legal markets first.

Vermont

It may seem like the movie Groundhog Day in Vermont, where legalization has been on—and off—the table multiple times. “But it’s not Groundhog Day,” MPP’s Matt Simon told Leafly.

“I’m extremely optimistic progress will happen in January.”

Matt Simon, Marijuana Policy Project

Simon, a keen observer of Vermont’s many, many ups and downs, said he’s “extremely confident” that Vermont will pass a limited legalization bill that permits home cultivation and possession.

“The votes are there,” he said. “In fact, the House has passed [a similar bill] before and the governor has agreed. If he backtracks now, that’s really a major flip-flop. That’s why I’m extremely optimistic progress will happen in January.”

What about the multiple misses in Vermont already? “Sometimes you gotta lose before it’s your time,” Simon said.

 New Jersey

In a few months, Gov. Chris Christie will be gone. The most likely candidate to replace him is Democrat Phil Murphy, who’s been very vocal about drug reform while on the campaign trail. He says he’s motivated by both economics and social justice.

“By carefully watching what other states have already done, we can ensure a legalization and taxation program that learns from their experiences and which will work from the outset,” Murphy told Leafly. “But we must keep in mind this also is about social justice, and ending a failed prohibition that has served mainly to put countless people—predominantly young men of color—behind bars and behind a huge roadblock to their futures. New Jersey should choose to be a leader.”

Legislative leaders in Trenton are on board. State Sen. Nick Scutari chairs the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee. He’ll gavel in the first hearings on the topic. He’s also the prime sponsor of NJ’s cannabis legalization bill.

“In New Jersey, we now have a Democratic nominee, who I believe will be our next governor, who supports legalization,” Scutari told Leafly. “That’s why it is so important that we begin shaping our recreational marijuana program now, so that we are prepared to move forward with a program that ends the prohibition on marijuana and that treats our residents fairly and humanely. We’ve already done extensive research on how legal cannabis programs are faring in other states and are continuing the process of working on legislation to create the best recreational marijuana program for New Jersey.

 Delaware

Delaware has flirted with legalization for a while now. Could 2018 be the year?

“Delaware took one step closer to legalization last week with the first meeting of the Adult Use Cannabis Task Force,” said Zoë Patchell of the Cannabis Bureau of Delaware.

“To recommend a model of legalization that would best fit Delaware,” Patchell told Leafly. “The conversation for cannabis legalization has officially moved from an ‘if’ to a ‘how’, and we are confident that, with continued pressure, Delaware will legalize in 2018.”

What does Delaware’s new task force look like?

“Cyn Ferguson, John Sybert, and Tom Donovan [all of whom support cannabis reform] were appointed by the governor,” Patchell explained. “They represent cannabis advocates on this 25-member panel comprised mostly of various state agencies and stakeholders. The report is due Jan. 31, at the end of the first month Delaware’s legislative session reconvenes.”

 Rhode Island

Judging from the locals, it ain’t happening in Rhode Island—this year or next.

“Our laws will remain rooted in injustice and oppression in 2018,” Rhode Island legalization advocate Melissa Bouchard told Leafly. “Rhode Island won’t legalize cannabis until the small sector of hand-selected triple their money on their ‘medical’ dispensaries. Economies in neighboring states, like Massachusetts and Maine, will be supported by Rhode Island residents traveling across the border. Meanwhile, Rhode Island misses out on a huge opportunity by continuing to study this program. They are studying for a test they already failed.”

Mike Falade, another long-time New England cannabis reformer, offered a similarly dim forecast. “Rhode Island will legalize as soon as they figure out how to get ALL of the growers money and not just MOST of the growers money,” he said.

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