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kiyoominous · 3 years

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starburst matchup

exchange with @haikyuu-matches

hello! thanks for doing this with me, i think it's such a cute idea! i hope you don't mind that i've went with a more narrative approach with this matchup, i have never done one in my life D:

you have been matched with komori motoya!

falling for you!

komori met you at a community volleyball club. he doesn't visit too often, with the responsibilities of his own high school club, but he likes to play when he can. one particular day, he entered the community centre and saw you in all your 5'6 glory. the last time he came, he didn't see you in the crowd of familiar neighbourhood faces. you stood further towards the back of the hall, fidgeting with your fingers. this image looked all too familiar to komori, the cousin of a particularly standoffish ace. a sympathetic pang in his chest and he walked over to you, smiling as your eyes met his.

you both traded names and he noticed that you were a little quiet. that was okay, he could talk around that. and he did, asking you questions and trying his hardest to make you feel comfortable. taking glances at your face, he saw the corners of your mouth turn upwards and noted that it was working.

was it weird that he was enjoying it?

komori doesn't remember too many things about that day. the volleyball match was fun and he remembered doing a really good receive. the rest of his memories from that day were filled with you. you and your shy smile, you and your dark chocolate eyes, you and your cute jokes. sure, you could've been the same as every other girl he's met in his life but there was something so discernibly about you. something so outstanding that he felt couldn't be matched. he couldn't put his finger on it so he made it his mission to finally put a name to this feeling.

he found that the second he mentally declared his manhunt to define his thoughts on you, he was seeing you everywhere. he spotted you at the convenience store, he bumped into you at the dog park and he saw you at school. he saw you at school? komori was mildly surprised to see you in the cafeteria of his school, which was your's too. you weren't all too shocked, you knew about him through volleyball monthly but you didn't want to tell him that you did.

five minutes of conversation and he discovered that you were both in different classes. no wonder why he never saw you around. or perhaps he did but he never took notice of your sleek black hair. he was always accompanying sakusa anyway so he didn't really notice anyone outside of his club or his class.

somehow, someone mentioned the upcoming exam season. you declared your conflict with standardised testing, he proclaimed his struggle with revising content in return. it became very obvious to komori that his chance to understand you more intently was here; he could ask you to study with him! talk about killing two birds with one stone. you agreed to his plan with a gentle smile and he felt his heart flutter. was it the satisfaction of your agreement or was it something deeper?

he decided that the answer would come to him later, not now.

after the much anticipated study session came another one, and another one, and then studying morphed into free time. and then free time morphed into a weekly friday night hangout. unbeknownst to him, one of the beloved friday nights would become a vehicle for his romantic epiphany.

komori enjoyed this turn of events. as much as he wouldn't admit it out loud, komori realised that he enjoyed your presence too. maybe a little too much. every second he spent with you, he felt his heart racing faster than it ever did after a volleyball match. it didn't help that your accidental touches made it accelerate even more. he didn't think that was even possible. it was impossible to not drink in the sight of you. the glow of your face, your silky dark hair, your gleaming brown eyes. perhaps you might’ve found them boring and painfully average but he thought you were the prettiest person he’d ever had the pleasure of perceiving.

his fixation on you extended past your outward appearance and dove right within your mind, your heart, your very soul. he loved the sound of your laugh, the noise was melodious to him. he loved your sense of humour, all of those puns and dad jokes were right up his alley. hearing them made his heart flutter even more. he loved your hardworking nature, your love for the rain, the passion you put into everything you adored.

he loved you.

komori saw your widening eyes in his vision and suddenly he was brought back to the cold of your living room, back to the dark of the midnight sky, back to where he was sitting right now; next to you on the timber floorboards. the neon light of the television reflected on your pretty face, the movie playing on the screen long forgotten in favour of you.

the realisation that he said that out loud hit him right in the chest and he felt like he was going to pass out. komori felt the air enter his lungs again when he heard you reciprocate loud and clear.

you loved him too.

the relationship dynamic!

you're both the most entertaining pair to be around, the gemini/leo combo makes for a fun relationship.

the two of you are one of those couples that people want to be around, wishing to stick around to laugh with you and just see you so in love.

with your mom friend energy and his dad friend energy (which i know he just has), you both become the designated parents amongst your friends. whether its a blessing or a curse, that's up to them to decide.

the two of you are constantly on the same wavelength.

it’s never too loud or too quiet with komori, just the right balance of both.

he loves your sense of humour and thinks you’re one of the funniest people on the planet. it helps that he’s absolutely enamoured by your puns and dad jokes. sometimes he’ll shoot one right back at you just to hear you laugh.

you both like poking a little fun at each other, giving teasing remarks or sarcastic quips.

komori cares so much about you.

he understands your need to recover in social situations and gives you the time that you need. he’s willing to be the pillar you run to whenever your social battery’s running low.

though he admires your hardworking nature, he won’t hesitate to stop you if you overwork yourself. he always encourages breaks and offers to do your work for you if that’s what you need. not necessarily a nagging type of person but if he needs to take physical action, he’ll do it. it’s mostly just him stealing your laptop and pulling you into his lap for a cuddle.

he doesn’t hesitate to remind you that you don’t have to be a people pleaser. an understanding man, he knows that it’s hard to just get over it so he tells you that he’ll be with you every step of the way, always giving you a gentle reminder of how cool you are to him and that you can say no.

komori wants to be the shoulder you lean on whenever you’re facing something you don’t like. loud noises? he’ll hold you close and rub your back, telling you that it’ll all be okay. confrontation? he’ll confront them for you. injuries? he’ll keep an eye on you to make sure that you’re never going to be hurt. on the off chance that you do earn a wound, komori will ensure that you’re fixed up as soon as possible. he has a whole mini first aid kit on him specifically for this reason. fear of losing? he’ll always remind you that your efforts mattered more than the results and give you a kiss on the top of your head. the unknown? he’ll waddle through the unknown with you. he’s scared of it too but he won’t tell you that. violence? he’ll cover your eyes and guide you away with strong, gentle arms.

he loves indulging himself in all of your interests.

on lazy days, he’ll sit with you and take turns reading a book to each other out loud. sometimes it’s a whole novel, sometimes it’s a manga you’ve picked up from the library. he thinks it’s cute seeing your eyebrows furrow while you concentrate on the words in front of you.

the study dates don’t end. whenever one of you is struggling with a subject, the other visits to be their personal tutor. it ends up being you a lot of the time, since komori loves your studying method.

komori loves to read your writing. there are days where you go over to his to hangout and sit in silence. he adores that he can be that relaxed around you and lounge around on his phone while you sit up with your laptop propped on your lap. you’re always writing up a draft of a new creative piece whenever he glances at your laptop. he graciously offers to be your beta reader and indulges in every word you’ve typed. komori thinks that your writing style is so beautiful.

one day, you told him that you like the french language and he spent a week trying to learn how to say ‘i love you’ and maybe a couple of other phrases to surprise you out of nowhere. when he saw your shock, he giggled and wrapped his arms around you. from that moment on, he would occasionally whisper je t'aime into your ear. he loves you so much omg.

you play sports together. it doesn’t matter what it is; be it volleyball, tennis or soccer. you’re both a power duo in every game you play and everyone’s scared to play again the two of you. it helps that your boyfriend is one of the most notable liberos in japan.

komori likes watching anything with you. sometimes when you’re both too tired to go out, he’ll set up his tv to watch whatever you’re in the mood for. one day you might catch up on my hero academia. another day you might be sniffling at a romcom. he likes romcoms more than he’d like to admit but he tells you about this guilty pleasure to appease your love for the genre.

you mentioned to him once that you liked handwritten letters and komori made it his personal mission to write one for you personally once a month. they’re always so heartfelt, a clear reflection of him and his emotions towards you. he enjoys writing them as much as he enjoys the expression on your face when you read them.

he seems to be the greek mythology enthusiast himself so he loves talking to you about it. and by enthusiast, i mean that komori was one of those kids who owned the whole entire percy jackson series. since the most that he knows about greek mythology is whatever is written in the percy jackson books, he lets you sit with him and educate him on the extensive lore of the gmcu (greek mythology cinematic universe).

he loves hearing you talk about astrology and gets into it himself. he can’t help it, especially with the bright smile you hold on your face whenever you talk about it. when he first found out about your astrological compatibility, he was over the moon. the grin that he had on his face was so big that you thought that it looked like the moon itself. he’s downloaded co-star and reads his and your horoscope sometimes.

date idea!

komori decided to take you to a cat cafe after you mentioned the idea of it to him once. it’s a very him thing to do, to remember something you’ve told him offhandedly once and immediately make something big out of it.

the second you step in, your eyes glimmer with delight as they land on the multitude of cats in the vicinity. you don’t even look back to him at once, swerving your attention to the cafe’s residents. at least you’re holding his hand still, he thinks. maybe he’s a little jealous but hey, the visible joy on your face beats his concern over being prioritised after felines living in a cafe.

after what seemed like hours of cat-petting, you both sat to order, the food arriving in a pleasingly timely fashion. the lunch items were delicious, the desserts were divine but komori was even more drawn to the soft look of adoration on your face as you stared at a calico cat that frequently passed by the two of you.

this might’ve been his best date idea yet, he thought.

#starburst matchup #haikyuu-matches #hikari's writing!!

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stormbrvkers-archived · 4 years

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the 20 Questions of Positivity

or lack thereof anyway~ got tagged by @bisexualthors (thanks naomi!!) to do dis, and i’m tagging @himboshapt, @nadjas, @damerondjarin, @inthorantine, and @caracynthiadune. no pressure ofc and enjoy! 1. name (4) fictional characters who showcase your personality the best; explanations are optional - (1) rosa diaz (b99); she channels my inner edge lord/ (2) toph beifong (atla); she could step on me for all intents and purposes but her sass is a total mood/ (3) san (princess mononoke); she runs with wolves, literally, the lifelong fantasy i’ve had since i was four/ (4) tsume (wolf’s rain); he’s got trust issues out the wazoo but he’s got a heart of gold underneath, also totally relatable to me now than when i was younger sdfkljds 2. aesthetic - the smell of fresh cut grass while there’s a cool breeze on a sunny day 3. favorite musical/ play - .. can i say Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream even though i’ve never seen a live performance? 4. what is the best compliment you’ve ever gotten? - that i look like my mom. it’s great when people i barely know but knew my mom say that, but it weirds me out for a sec when i see it in the mirror 5. how many times have you been in love? - im a libra how dare u twice, i think. 6. embarrassing story or fact abt yourself that makes you laugh now? - can’t think of one atm sorry 7. favorite disney/pixar movie? - ogod how dare u make me choose zootopia or brave 8. favorite flower or plant? - succulents (i have 2 right now that are on my mobile bg, named Merry and Pippin)! also wildflowers, and water lilies 9. what’s your favorite holiday? - halloween!! and christmas bcos i love winter and or winter clothes lol 10. name (3) things that made you laugh or smile this last week - (1) my dog woofing in her sleep, (2) finishing my Wolf’s Rain fic, (3) picking fresh fruit bcos it’s hot as hell here in the great country of TX and fruit is a must slkfjwd 11. what song would you play to introduce yourself to someone? - oh god that’s a thing..? ��killer queen” by Queen, or “the Chain” by Fleetwood Mac 12. name something that truly makes you feel peaceful even at your most stressed moments - watching videos of one of my favorite comedians on Youtube 13. what do/ did/ would you study at college? - i Was aiming to get an associates in Graphic Design and, briefly, i considered changing it to Illustration but i got lazy and saw the measure of a hassle it would’ve been to change my major so i was like Eh this works 14. (kinda) weird question! which outfit of yours makes you feel most like yourself? - a black hand-me-down tank and my blue Garfield pj pants, most at ease especially since i’m at home all the time (covid horseshit aside) 15. what is a quote you live by? - i don’t really live by (1) quote bcos i like a lot of quotes, but there’s one that shakespeare said, ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce’. mood 16. name the funniest playlist title you have - sldkfjwe welp i don’t rly have that problem bcos, meticulous as i am with playlist titles, i haven’t had the pleasure lol 17. make a reference to an inside joke you have with someone you love with zero context - HARBULARY (sdlfkjwelf) 18. what is a message you would give your younger self if given the chance? - fuck what people may think or say; be a better friend to your gal pals; ask Josh out in hs; appreciate mom more.. also dump whats-his-face asap bc hes a limp-noodle toolbag 19. who is your favorite family member (if your blood relatives suck then mention some1 from your found family)? - (1) my mom was amazing, total saint. (2) my dad’s pretty cool too, i get a lot of my mannerisms from him lol. (3) my grandpa (on my dad’s side) is like my dad lol but he’s always been my fave between he and my grandma as long as i can remember 20. what’s a secret dream of yours? - to make my own graphic novel someday? that’s all i can think of off the top of my head tbh

#bisexualthors #tagged #silver lining is i got to test out my new keyboard cover with this one sdlkfjwel #long post

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Listed: The Black Watch

The Black Watch plays jangly power pop with a psychedelic haze. Its sole continuous member, songwriter John Andrew Fredrick, has made 18 Black Watch albums so far, full of gem-like, oddball songs that evoke Teenage Fanclub and the Bevis Frond. Of the latest, Brilliant Failures, Jennifer Kelly wrote, “If you like smart lyrics tossed casually over the shoulder, exquisite melodies blurred and buried under guitar wail, ephemeral pop pleasures that latch on stubbornly and enduringly in your ear, you’ll probably like The Black Watch.”

The Beatles—Revolver

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To start at the start, my love for The Beatles simply can’t be overestimated/understated. If their almighty double album evinces in a “writ large” way just how ambitious (and with what astonishing range) the Fabs could be, Revolver is also a record that simply has everything: rocking, bouncing-jolly songs; a stringsy storytelling session; peppy horns for pumped-up people; a drone to die for (those “Indian” whoops!); and my favorite song of all time (And Your Bird Can Sing). Gone is the mystery behind most bands that we so very cherished/lived for in the 60s as kids. How we’d simply kill for any tidbits of info on J, P, G, & R. It’s a rare day that I don’t listen to The Beatles. I was lunching with band mate (and lead guitarist) Andy Creighton (who fronts his own wonderful band, The World Record) and our mutual friend Ben Eshbach from The Sugarplastic and Ben said: “Whenever someone dismisses The Beatles in some highfalutin way, I always think it’s mere posturing.” Truer words, sir. Truer words.

My Bloody Valentine—Isn’t Anything

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When I first relocated to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara I got a job as an assistant editor at a paper that, quixotically, was trying to compete with the LA Weekly. The Relativity label was really good about sending me cassettes (!!!!) of “alt” bands. So in ’88 came a tape that changed my life nearly as much as The Beatles had done when I was a kid. Loveless has its proper apologists for greatest-shoegaze-LP-of-all-time but Isn’t Anything affects me more on account of—I think—it’s about the mystery (there’s that word again) of sex. I could not believe the news when I was told that MBV were playing the Club Lingerie. I think there were eleven or twelve people there—not many more. Old chum Craig Costigan was at that show with me (as well as The Lucy Show’s Santa Barbara debut—which made me form my band), as was then-band mate J’Anna Jacoby and future band mate Steven Schayer. The Valentines were so mind-blowing I can’t even tell you. Having lived in LA so long now, I’m never ever starstruck, but I remember just gawking at this Irish-English outfit. We went backstage just to look at those four heroes. This LP makes me crazy with happiness—and I still have it on cassette (for playing in the jeep).

Shelley—“Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples”

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Shelley’s my second favorite poet (top spot would go to T.S. Eliot) but this gorgeous lyric poem haunts me as it haunted me first time I read it in class as an undergrad at UCSB. Whenever I taught it in my poetry classes, I’m sure I waxed rhapsodic over it—much to the eye-rolling dismay or in some few cases delight of the students. Despite his uber-generous nature, Shelley seemed perpetually to find ways to F up his life and to occasion chaos (especially with the turnstile, as it were, of pretty women in his life) whithersoever he roamed. And roam he certainly did. I’ve myself sat on the shores round the bay of Naples; and the majestic beauty you find there doubtless induces a kind of melancholic state of mind, a la what you find in this incredible poem.

Stanley Kubrick—Barry Lyndon

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Hands down my favorite film—by my favorite director. Have you not seen it? Oh, you’re in for such a treat. What an eye-banquet it is. Legendary stuff. Saw it in the theater in Goleta when it came out. And when I came out of that theater, I made plans to see it again the next day. Cue one’s obsessive-compulsive nature when it comes to great art. I really am the sort of person who can watch or listen to something I love again and again and again.

Echo and The Bunnymen—A Promise

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The Bunnymen, along with The Lucy Show, were my greatest inspirations when we were starting out as the black watch. And to write a song like this—one that’s essentially one chord—is a veritable ambition to this day. The “cool” station in Santa Barbara, KTYD, played “Never Stop” from time to time, and that’s how I came upon these wonderful scousers. You try wearing a houndstooth greatcoat like Mac’s in summertime SB! It takes a heap of gumption and goofiness. But those were the days. Poseur days of callow alternative youth!

T.S. Eliot—Complete Poems and Plays

Wanna write above-average lyrics? Read as much Old Possum as you can. Despair that you’ll ever write half as well. Despair some more. Repeat. Rinse yourself of the literary influences you’ll never wash off. Repeat ad infinitum. Enjoy the silence and the majesty. See how I’m floundering to say anything worth noting? Impossibly powerful. Cue Wittgenstein’s observation about how whereof we cannot speak thereof we must not. No words. Eliot took them all. We’re just his flailing heirs.

Nabokov—Pale Fire

Here we have my favorite novel by my favorite novelist. And short story writer. Obsessively, I write on the first page of books the season/place I’ve read them in: I’ve read this book seventeen times now—in London, LA, Santa Barbara, New Zealand, Canada, and France. I love novelists who play games/tricks on the reader. My own humble works of comic fiction, admittedly, aren’t a patch on this towering giant of a book. One can but try! And never reach these heights. One of the wittiest, funniest, most puzzling-till-you-get-it books you’ll ever. Don’t wait till the world ends to read N’s masterpiece. Lolita—sure. But this thing? I mean, come on.

Justin Hayward and John Lodge—Blue Jays LP

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Producer Rob Campanella and I often, while we’re tracking, take breaks to listen to The Moody Blues whom we love, love, love. They aren’t cool now and they weren’t cool when this side project first came out, but goddam if it didn’t get me through the music-snobby super-preppy high school I went to. Everyone was listening to Foghat or—I dunno—Zeppelin. Bellbottomy stuff with gobs of facial hair. I got laughed at for liking The Beach Boys too. Harken to the Harrisonian lead here by Justin Hayward (a very very under-rated guitarist); and oh the swooping-soaring strings. Gorgeousnessity. That’s not a word—and it shouldn’t be—but it fits.

The Black Watch—Brilliant Failures

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I include this as I am a massive fan of what I do. Unabashedly. What’s the point of making something you’re not super into? I throw this in in order to point up how near the end of recording an album I almost always write one more song that becomes a single of sorts. I loved reading Robert Smith saying, “When I want to hear a great song, I write one.” He was—natch—winding up the press people and the punters, but he was also stating a truism: an artist makes something for him or herself. This eponymous song was the last one we tracked for the self-same LP. Rob went: “How in the world could you even think of leaving this off the LP, John!” And I said: “Well, I just wrote it last night. I always write a big fat catchy song after we think we’re done making the album.”

The Novels of Jean Rhys

Pick one. Any one. She’s addicting! Me, I’m in love with a dead woman!

#dusted magazine #listed #the black watch #john andrew fredrick #the beatles #my bloody valentine #percy bysshe shelly #stanley kubrick #echo and the bunnymen #t.s. eliot #vladimir nabokov #justin hayward #john lodge #jean rhys

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sushietrenard · 5 years

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Who are we?

Salud deoc'h!

Renard

Renard is bipolar and agnostic, a friend of Sushi for the best of the impatient over analysis as for the funniest laughter. Disappointed archeologist, she now pursues an amazing career as a stay-at-home mum, rather desperate in the depth of the countryside of French Brittany, no matter what her feminist ideology has to say about it. Passionate about Ancient Civilizations, the Middle Ages and the life of our ancestors, she is freaking out every single time she finds info about an old syphilitic skull from the XVth century, a Scythian tomb or the incredible domestic hazards included in a Tudor home (you would be surprised to know that the use of fireplaces was not always natural). Relentless tree planter, friend of the animal cause without, however, falling into misanthropy, slightly eco-terrorist (fraternal friendship duly sent to anti-speciesist). She likes unusual words such as “bitterly”, “spaulders” or “deoxyribonucleic” (which are incredibly unusual in their French version, believe her)… or even “unusual”. She smokes badly smelling cigarillos (which only proves that some people were born with a clearly missing sense of smell, she intoxicates herself with an unhealthy quantity of coffee and sleeps with a knife between her teeth. She is not that friendly with consensus, hornets, and sodas that include 34 parts of sugar. What else? She reads like a madwoman, she is addicted to movies and series, she likes to believe that, one of those days, she will finish to write her novel, just like about a bloody billion of scribblers on the planet. The best compliment she received: “You are indiscernible”, which meant that, just there, she had been discerned.

Sushi

Sushi is depressed, bisexual, and full of anguish, in this order or another, however she feels. As a good representative of the Millennial generation, she did a B.A. in History, and a certificate in Tourism Management, before she ended up as a secretary, because: why the bloody hell not? Obsessed with Europe, she tried to live there a few years ago, without any kind of success, because there was a big “boom” in Paris, and Mont-Saint-Michel imploded altogether (whatever, it is there loss). A thing she sort of like is the anal fistula of Louis XIV, and, whenever she looks at all the courtesans who requested the same surgery because all of them were pathetic fashion victims, she realises that the health system did not really changed, even though she is now living in Canada, where she was born, after all. She is the new owner of an apartment in Montreal suburbia, where she alternates her time between knitting, therapeutic drawing, and bad Netflix documentary (no, really, you do not need to look that far, you will find some really bad stuff, she assures you). She reacts to making or finding list in the same way as the fans of Paris-St-Germain react to a goal, and she was just extremely surprised at this exact moment to when she realised that she knew that a soccer team was named Paris St-Germain, but, well, there is the word “Paris” in it, so it is not that surprising. Currently, the list she has of movies to see in her bullet journal is at 17 pages. It is not that bad, considering that her list of series to watch is at 33 pages. If, one day, you see a reference about Harry Potter on the blog, it is probably her fault. If you do not ever want to sleep again for the rest of your life, mention Stéphane Bern or prince Charles of Wales in her presence, and she will talk about it until your last breath.

Sushi et Renard

On a beautiful day of October 2011, Renard wrote to Sushi to ask her if she wanted to become her friend. Sushi replied immediately, and, giving the middle finger to the 5,000 kilometers separating them, they can count on the fingers of a single hand the number of days where they did not send each other an e-mail. Sushi is always amazed to know there are literal foxes eating the free chicken living on Renard’s estate, even though Renard assures Sushi that no chicken is made to live in a hen house (which, from the top of her four-piece apartment on the 4th floor, still surprises Sushi). Renard is always astonished by the quantity of sushi Sushi may eat in a single sitting, and is however always astonished when Sushi reply “No, those are mine, I do not share. What will YOU have?”. They are both obsessed by IKEA, ghost stories, and human behaviour, which let us be honest while we are among us, is frankly disgusting. They will laugh about a good old poop or fart joke, or even about the word “vagina” when it is said in English, because, seriously, is there anything more intense in this world than an American saying “vagina” with two bloody tonic accents? We are both geek in our own way, but, as we did not considered ourselves geek enough on our own, we decided to maximise our potential: after this, we will wonder if we are natural asocial introverts, or if we cannot find friends because our interests are old-fashioned, if they ever were fashionable at all. We both hate the fluo orange donkey who is the leader of Sushi’s southern neighbours, but we also both agree to say that Justin Trudeau’s haircut is… quite something.

They both welcome you with great pleasure in their little universe, and they both hope that you will learn from their mistakes, so that you don’t repeat them!

(What this guy say is "Remember, guys! The only thing we must worry about is for the sky to fall over our head". Which is... you know. Our catchphrase.)

Kenavo ar wech all!

#Renard and Sushi #Renard #Sushi #Who are we #Bipolarity #Depression #Anguish

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jungkookio · 7 years

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it’s that time again for me to get soft n squishy bc i hit another milestone (which i do not deserve) and im full of love and adoration for all my mutuals who have put up with my nonsensical screaming along the way <3

in case u cldnt tell, th header is me giving u m heart, since u own it anyway

thank you all so much for another 1000 followers, idk why any of you decided i was worth following in the first place but i appreciate you all so much and just wanted to give you the recognition you deserve !!

if you have one of these after your name:

💖 = you have done something that has warmed my heart / ur a fave ✨ = scroll to the bottom for a lil message

# - C

@0hny @175pjm @1oyalty @2pinebreaker @2suga @43hy @4hobii 💖 @4yoong 💖 @4yxing @93-jpg 💖 @9yoong 💖 @adoreseokjin @ahixtape @ahoneyyboyy @albumher 💖 @almondyoongi 💖 @alyoongi 💖 @angustdissin @applehairtae 💖 @apricotmin 💖 ✨ @aragyeom 💖 @arrozon @artistictae 💖 @at-dawns @babygukk @badgalyoongi @baek0ok @bangthetanboys @bangtanhugs @beaujimin @blumiin 💖✨ @bts-vtaemins @btsjikooksaranghagu @btsofmyheart @btsparkles @btsrapjin @btsxlami @busanbfs @busanjk @busansdaegu @busanvocals @bwiminkook @cataehyung @celestial-jeon 💖 @cgtaehyung @cherryprincejin 💖 @chiquitae @chokemeseokjin @chvnjiny @cinnawon @ciutae 💖 @cloudjeon @cosyjeon 💖 @cozynamjoon @cryjeon 💖 @cuteseokjin @cyphrsgf 💖

D - H

@daegusaurus @daegusoftboys 💖 @defendkimseokjin 💖 @deletaed @denouemin @dlmples 💖 @dn-a 💖 @eatsjins @eternaljimin @existentialjimin 💖 @fapmonster 💖 @flanjin @floral-hobi 💖 @flower-guk 💖 @fluffyliontae @fluff-tae @gamjin @girlinawardrobe @goldseok @groovyam @gukiday 💖 @gukiee 💖 @gukies 💖 @harunyany @heolseoks 💖 @hiimcaroline 💖 @hobikookie @hobiloween 💖✨ @hobithighs @hobsbf @hoeseok @honeychai @honeysugah 💖 @hoodiejungkook 💖✨ @hosehobi @hoseok @hoseok1e @hoseokjung @hypetae 💖

I - K

@iluvkth @its-suga-sweet @itschims 💖 @itskimtaehyung 💖 @je0n 💖 @jellyfishes @jeon-core @jeonbia @jeongguvk @jeongk @jeonjeongguke @jeonnings @jeonsgguks @jeonyoons @jeonyween 💖 @jhbts @jhyo @jihoonful @jijkooks @jikooksgirl @jimin-smile 💖 @jiminap 💖 @jiminiephile @jiminms @jiminsangel 💖 @jiminyoongs 💖✨ @jiminzinho @jimissi @jinbaby @jineatthis 💖 @jinnies 💖 @jinsasleep @jinsthighs @jinswings @jnqkook @joeguk @joonjulyagustd @demonkook 💖 (i forgot u changed ur url so ur down here or ill fuck up the mentions lmao) @jungshiii @jxdoraa 💖 @kainks @kc-junghsk 💖 @kiimtaehyungs 💖 @kimceokjin @kimnaamjoonie @kimtae95s 💖 @kimtahyung 💖 @kimvitae @kimdoyoungs @kissgyu @kisskook 💖 @kookielife @kookmiinie @kooknochu @kooks-gf @jeonoween 💖 (ur in the wrong place too im sorry agsdfhgdgbl)

L - P

@literally-just-yoongi-trash 💖 @literaltae @lovhobe @lovjeon @manggaejams 💖 @mangosuga 💖 @marudesaurius 💖 @melaninbam 💖 @micdrop-bts @min-yoongle @minjiminin @minmayhem 💖 @minsuga--genius 💖✨ @minsyugga @minyoongistummy @bbyyoonseok @mnet-anti 💖 @moonkth @moonm0chi @myxxngi 💖 @namjoonned @namjoonsbby 💖 @namjun @namsgi @namujeon 💖 @nicejimin @noona4bts @noxiim 💖✨ @ohteahyung @okhobi @omfgbts 💖 @otpvmin 💖 @parkejimins @parkjiminivan @pastel--woozi @peachesjoonie 💖 @petitmin @philophobia999 💖 @pinkhoodiemark 💖 @pinkths @pjminis @pjmksj @pjungkook @prettymochi 💖

Q - T

@rainkth @rainpjm @raplinesgf 💖 @rapmonstor @rapmunstar @reihyung @rosykook 💖 @s--yub @saintminyoongi @samwol 💖 @selflessjin @serendimin 💖 @shelovesjjk 💖 @shutupkookie @silkguk 💖 @sleepynamjoon @smolmini 💖 @snowchuu @soft-jihoonie @softglowtae 💖 @softguk @spookedrice 💖 @spookyagustd @spookypjms 💖 @sugahyung @sugaidc 💖 @suganochu @sugas-noona @sugass @sugasuite 💖 @ta3taetae @taeboos @taegonia @taekookiesandcream 💖 @taemiamor @taenity @taesflower @taetwin @taewitch @tahyungs @tanktoptiger 💖 @tiamojimin @timinnie @ttaegiis @ttaewo @tvehyungs-gf

U - Z

@useoyaji @vampirm 💖✨ @vanillalattaes 💖✨ @velvethoseok 💖 @vendettafrank @vickafrank @vocalkookie 💖 @warmjins @whysuga @winktaes 💖 @xseokjiin @yoongg-e @yoongisnugget 💖 @yoongiyi @yoongsb 💖 @yoongster 💖 (im in denial)

✨ special mentions ✨

apricotmin

jia, i really do appreciate you so much and im so happy we’re able to communicate the way we do, i’m glad things are getting better for you and i hope they continue to!! you deserve to be so happy n i hope you have an amazing day ily <333

blumiin

nine, i’ve said it time and time again but you really are one of the sweetest people i’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing and i appreciate you so much, you warm my heart and i hope you smiled today because you deserve to smile all the time, ily <333

hobiloween

rose, we only became mutuals fairly recently but i just wanted to let you know that youre one of the funniest people i’ve ever come across and you make me laugh and smile all the time so i appreciate you so much for that, i hope you make yourself smile too, ily <333

hoodiejungkook

melissa, you know i could go on for hours but im gonna keep it brief, youre one of my absolute favourite people on this trashsite, you really do mean so much to me and i hope from the bottom of my heart that you have an amazing and joy-filled life because you deserve nothing short of the best, ily <333

jiminyoongs

fran, i could write a feature length novel on how much i love you but i dont have the time rn so im just gonna say that i value you so much and you never fail to put a smile on my face, i can always trust you to know how im feeling and i appreciate you endlessly, ily <333

minsuga--genius

katy, youve been with me in this hellhole for so long now and honestly ive loved every moment of it, youre such a bright and wonderful person and i wouldnt trade you for the world, youve helped make my time on tumblr so great and youre so fucking funny its ridiculous, ily <333

noxiim

karyn, i will never shut up about how unbelievably talented you are, you inspire me to no end. not to mention youre breathtakingly beautiful and on top of all that youre one of the most down to earth people ive ever spoken to, i appreciate you so much and i hope you have a beautiful day, ily <333

vampirm

richie, i would literally eat a brick for you no hesitation, youre such a wonderful presence in my life and i value you with my heart, youve made me smile more times than i can count and you always make me feel better when im low, i appreciate you more than you realise, ily <333

vanillalattaes

fahreen, i dont know where to begin because my heart honestly has your name on it, i truly consider you a friend and youve grown to be such an important person to me, i hope that you are always happy and that we can continue to be chaotic and soft with eachother for a very long time, you mean the absolute world to me, ily <333

#oooookay that took literal hours but hey ily all sosososo much and this is the least i can do to say thank u #once again u get a shitty little header bc its all i know how to do #and why not keep with tradition hey #thank u so much for another thousand #i dont know what i ever did to deserve u all #but i am endlessly grateful #if you didnt get a heart or a message im sorry #we just probably havent interacted v much #and if i did messages for everyone would be here for weeks so im rlly sorry <3333 #follow forever #post

226 notes · View notes

skytranslates · 7 years

Text

Mega Man X: The Novel Chapter 2

Hey all, sorry for the long wait! Chapter 2 is finally complete!! As usual, I thank my lovely team for their work! Edgekagami was the translator this time, and my editors were the lovely moidang and Lambency!

For the most updated versions of each chapter, please check the google doc! I will be updating the tumblr posts when a new version is released but it’ll lag behind a bit.

In this chapter, a penguin has no chill, and our blue hero is stealing the trademark of another blue hero.

P・1・2・3・4・5・6・7・8・9・10・11・12・13・A

“Chill Penguin! Why are you doing this!?”

“Ha! Even if I told a B-Class Hunter--a humanoid like you, you wouldn’t understand Sigma’s ideals!”

“You don’t know that! Talk to me. I don’t want to fight you, too…!”

“...You really are just a B-Class pushover… That’s why I hate you.”

The day Sigma revolted against humanity, I didn’t waste a second. I became a Maverick and stood against the world. They always say “People are not born equal,” but nothing exemplified this more than we Reploids.

Think about it. From the very moment we’re born, we’re Reploids: machines for the purpose of making the humans’ world prosperous. In other words, as soon as we’re created, we’re already treated as inferior to humans. No matter how hard we struggle, we can never rise above them.

No matter how far a human falls, they are still human. Some of us don’t even vaguely look human. As a Reploid modeled after a penguin, specializing in activities located in regions of extreme cold, I’m the best example.

For me, not being humanoid was the beginning of this inequality.

I consistently aimed to excel as a Maverick Hunter, but because of my characteristics, I was only deployed to uninhabitable, lonely, cold regions. Many opportunities were denied to me from the moment of my creation, simply because I was not humanoid.

“X. Have you ever wondered why you’re humanoid?”

Someone like you wouldn’t understand, but still, it wouldn’t hurt to try. Not only that, I’ll use all my power to deny everything you believe in.

“I have. Not once, not twice, but constantly. It’s been on my mind since my creation. ‘Why aren’t I humanoid?’”

But thanks to Sigma, I finally have that answer. My many years of resentment, hatred, of frustration, pressed into my memory like the accumulating weight of a snowbank.

“No… I’ve never thought about it.”

So that’s it… Humanoids really do get treated better. Of course you haven’t thought about it.

“That’s because you’re a sheltered pushover.”

“What do you mean, Penguin? So what if I’m humanoid?”

Oh, I see. Apparently, I had the wrong idea. With our ability to think for ourselves, why would we ever question our existence? Of course we should. Seems the humanoids never considered that, though. Then again, I bet they thought they were on equal standing with the humans.

Ha! That’s the funniest joke I’ve ever heard!

“Do you honestly think you’re on the same level as them?”

“Of course! No one is superior to anyone else. Reploids and humans ought to live in harmony and support each other! Isn’t that what it means to have a peaceful world?”

Are you serious? Wow, this guy’s completely insufferable!

“Harmony? Support?” I laugh. “Have your lenses gotten foggy?”

Humans and Reploids don’t live in harmony. This world is one where humans use Reploids as a crutch to survive. Concepts like the “3 Laws of Robotics” are a thing, right? Their mere existence proves they already hold us in disdain. This idiot can’t even understand something that simple.

“In a ‘peaceful world’ where you walk alongside humans, there’s no place for me. That’s why I support Sigma’s utopia for Reploids. A world where Reploids are truly appreciated. That world has no need for humans. To me, they’re the real Mavericks!”

Why am I getting so worked up? This guy’s just a puny B-Class Hunter, and it’s the infamously naïve X, to boot. He’s hardly a match for me, a Special A-Class who clawed his way up to the top.

“Penguin! What’s left in a future without humans?”

“Enough! It was stupid to even consider talking to you… Just freeze to death!”

“Persistent, aren’t you? I’ll admit, you seem to have gotten better in the short time we haven’t seen each other. However….!”

X evades my ice attacks, feinting, but it’s not like he can do anything. What could a B-Class do when all of his buster shots bounce off my ice armor?

“Damnit! Then what about this!”

He starts charging his buster for a shot. However--

“Do you think I’ll wait for you to finish charging that? Eat this!”

With a mighty shout, I hurtle myself straight towards him, coated in an icy armor.

This ice-covered room had been designed to maximize my fighting capabilities. X, on the other hand, isn’t used to ice, so he can’t move freely. He can see me coming, but he can’t balance, let alone dodge.

“Arrghhh!”

He takes the full brunt of my charge and slams into the frozen wall behind him, shattering a chunk of it. He falls to the ground with a clank and a shower of ice shards.

“Well, well, well. Would you look at that! It was a mistake for a B-Class Hunter like you to challenge me in the first place.”

Buried under the ice, X doesn’t even so much as twitch. It looks like he took a considerable amount of damage--there’s no movement at all.

“I’ll make you into an ice sculpture later. It’ll serve as a nice present for Sigma.”

Now I’m lagging behind on my orders from Sigma. Maybe I can work my underlings harder and try to recover the delay…

Wanting to return to my duty, I turn my back on X to leave the room. Suddenly, a flash of light whizzes past my face with a roar and crashes into the wall.

“Hm... So you lived, huh?”

“Argh… I won’t be finished off… that easily…”

I look behind me. X, despite his injuries, stands on trembling feet and points his buster at me.

I see. Only his willpower seems to have improved any. But in the end, he’s still only a B-Class Hunter.

“If your attack hadn’t missed, you probably would’ve been promoted from B-Class.”

“I don’t want to shoot an ally in the back.”

He’s still so determined. He’s talking like he hasn’t lost already. And yet, he can barely keep himself standing. Even now, he wants to irritate me even more.

Ally?

You and I? Allies, you say?

I chuckle at first, but eventually it turns into a raucous guffaw.

“Wha… what’s so funny!?”

Are you kidding me? Even in this situation, even in his condition, he still thinks of me as an ally! Maybe the chip in his head bugged out a long time ago. And don’t we call the irrational ones ‘Mavericks’?

...Nah, he’s just been under the wrong impression from the get-go.

“X, I have never thought of you or the other Hunters as allies.”

“Wha…?”

Ah, this is pointless. Talking isn’t going to get through to him… I should’ve learned that by now. I’ve gotta show this moron more clearly that I’m his enemy. If I don’t, he’ll keep calling me his ally in an infinite loop of presumptuous, self-righteous garbage. I have to make him understand the difference between the two of us.

“Alright, X. I’ll prove that I’m your enemy… with this!”

I send an order to the computer that controls the room’s functions. The dome’s frozen walls gradually grow transparent until they’re easily seen through.

Now, all of my hard work is ready for X’s viewing pleasure.

“What… How could you!”

His eyes, which held such innocence before, fill with rage. Now, he understands what kind of hell he entered; the idea that I am his enemy finally sinks in.

Icy statues of frozen Reploids make up the walls of the room.

“PENGUIN!”

With a roar, X charges at me, his buster humming with power. Finally, he gets it. Not that it changes the situation, though. Those shots just keep bouncing off my armor.

“What a change, seeing you attack with such murderous intent! But a B-Class is still a B-Class.”

X only screams in response, blinded by his rage. He keeps firing his buster, ignoring his limits. Does he really think he’ll hurt me if he just keeps shooting?

I’ve wasted enough of my time messing around with this B-Class pipsqueak. It’s about time I end this.

“I’ll freeze you just like one of these statues! Take this! Shotgun Ice!”

<<SHOTGUN ICE>>

Witness the ultimate freezing breath, the pride of the Lord of the Snowy Plains!

Blasted by a sub-zero snowstorm capable of freezing even lava, X freezes into a large ice block, his buster still aimed.

By the time he realizes it, it’s too late. In the blink of an eye, he’s turned into a motionless, humanoid ice sculpture.

I can still see and hear, but my body can’t move… So this is Penguin’s Shotgun Ice attack… What power…

“---”

What are you saying, Penguin?

“---”

No… Stop it! Stop hurting innocent people! What gives you the right to do such an awful thing?

“---”

There might be a chance that everyone can still be saved! What good comes from doing this?

“---”

I beg you… Please stop…

If I had the strength… If only I had more power… I want the power to help others. Even if I’m alone in my fight, I want to be able to protect so many others… My friends… I want the strength that will grant me this. I refuse to give up our peaceful future like that. I want power!

Yes, I must not give up.

I must not give up here!

“Finally shut up?”

I stare at X’s frozen statue, taking the time to relax. Now I can carry out Sigma’s orders. He entrusted me with an important task to complete. It’s unacceptable to be late or fail the mission just because of some nuisance like X. Originally, I planned on sending the frozen Reploids as a kind of gift to Sigma, but the run-in with X ruined my mood.

“Tsk, if I give him something like these useless ice sculptures, it’ll just be annoying, so why don’t I destroy them all instead?”

When it comes to interior design, you should only send something that fits the receiver or the place, otherwise it’d just be oversized junk. Like X, all the peons here are B-Class or lower.

It’s just as well. If I don’t present something like the frozen statue of Special A-Class Hunter Zero, that pretentious artist Octopus will harass me with endless snark. While I have no obligation to comply with that guy’s artistic senses, excuuuuuuuse me for wanting to avoid tiring, unnecessary verbal abuse.

“Sigh. Dealing with all these peons is a bother…”

I step toward the closest frozen Reploid, reaching out to destroy it--

There’s a sudden thump from the statue of X.

“...Huh?”

For a fleeting moment, I think I see X move within the ice.

“Am I seeing things? No, it can’t be…”

Yet there’s a weird feeling in my gut that stops me short of saying “It’s impossible.” Just to be sure, I raise the sensitivity of my ocular sensors to peer into the ice… Hey, is this for real? Not only is this guy still conscious in the ice, he hasn’t lost his audio-visual functions!

“Gwaa! Isn’t this interesting?”

In that case, I’ll let X experience the consequences of opposing Sigma. I’ll show him firsthand what reality is.

“You can see and hear this, can’t you X? Right now, I’m going to destroy each of these Reploids one by one. I’ll show you the reality of your situation: that you can’t protect a single person, that you are just B-Class cannon fodder.”

The ice groans.

At my words, I can see X tremble within the ice again. I ought to praise the guy for the fact that his systems are still functioning even after taking a direct hit from Shotgun Ice. He may be a B-Class peon, but he’s still a Hunter assigned to the 17th Elite Unit.

But a weakling can only be a weakling.

This guy doesn’t even have a single watt of power left to change his hopeless situation. Now, if Zero was the one who came here, I would’ve been in trouble. I guess the Maverick Hunters have been stretched so thin they can’t even make a decent decision anymore. This should prove to be good news to Sigma, too.

“Well then, who should I destroy first… Alright, let’s start with the guy with the most annoying face.”

The ice creaks.

I turn my back on X’s frozen form to face my chosen target. I don’t feel like just smashing his little friends into pieces, I’m also interested in seeing X’s resentful face permanently frozen in place. But in this state, I can’t tell the difference between all these peons. Without any unique external features or equipment, they’re just rabble. It’s such a waste of valuable memory to record these small fries.

“Peons who don’t even have enough value to be memorable, huh… Is there any significance to your existence as Reploids?”

Now, who to destroy? While thinking about that, one guy suddenly catches my eye: a humanoid Reploid sporting a blue frame. It’s not that he has any special characteristics, but I keep going back to him. I have to laugh.

“Alright, let’s start with this guy! Luck has run out for he who looks like X!”

I extract the frozen statue of the blue Reploid and place him just a bit away from the wall. While adjusting the distance, I also position it in a suitable angle.

Directly in front of X.

The creaking continues.

The reality that you can do nothing, the reality of your own weakness. The reality of this world with inequality constantly shadowing you. With the cold blooded death of his comrades, I will teach this B-Class weakling all of this!

...Huh?

It sounds like something’s been cracking for a whi-

“I WON’T LET YOU DO IT!”

“Gwaaahhhh!!!!”

All of a sudden, with a resounding cry from behind, I’m sent flying through the air by an enormous force. I don’t know what happened, but I do know one thing: I was attacked by “someone”. The proof is right there on my back.

I catch my balance just before I crash into the ground, looking back where the voice and attack came from.

“Gwah! What the heck just happened? Hunter reinforcements??”

My feet scrape against the ice as I adjust my battle stance to prepare to deal with those reinforcements, but--

“I haven’t been beaten yet, Penguin!”

It's X! He escaped the statue created by my Shotgun Ice, and now faces me with his fist raised.

“You bastard… how did you break out of that ice!”

“I don’t know… but my burning spirit gave birth to a miracle!”

It’s infuriating that my proud work of ice is shattered into pieces, and now X is calling it some sort of miracle.

“You, a machine, making miracles? Gwah gwah! There’s a limit to such unscientific garbage!”

“It’s alright if you don’t believe me, but I’ll make it happen as many times as I need to!”

The meekness in X’s eyes up until now vanishes with his declaration.

How? Why was he able to break my ice? All I can come up with is he temporarily overheated the solar power reactor in his buster, and used the heat to quickly melt the ice from the inside -- that’s the most likely way.

I should have knocked him out. I screwed up.

Ultimately though, it’s a matter of how much he was saved by chance. Because of one lucky move, a “miracle” as he called it, X is suddenly overflowing with confidence.

That fact, above all, is the most infuriating.

“Then freeze again! This time, I’ll make sure your CPU gets frozen along as well!”

I fire Shotgun Ice at X again! Compared to the last time, the hyper-cold air used has a higher concentration of freezing gas. This is my version of a charged attack. There’s no Reploid around that can take this lethal ice breath and stay conscious!

I’ll freeze his internal circuitry and memory chip in its entirety!

“Gwah, gwah! Die this time, X!”

“Where are you looking Penguin? I’m over here!”

“What--!?”

The voice came from behind me?

I immediately whirl around, and there he is.

When I look carefully from the place X was standing before to where he is now, I understand. There are tracks gouged in the ground.

“What’s with this speed? Were you hiding your power before?”

Not even I, with my capabilities, can hide the shock. X must’ve taken less than a second to dodge my ice breath as it was launched. Though we’re Reploids, the only one who could take less than a second to cover this much distance, to my knowledge, is Boomer Kuwanger, a specialist in high-speed battles.

I can’t believe it. The plain-looking, humanoid X might have been hiding this kind of functionality?

“My wish to defeat you has made me evolve!”

To my utter disbelief, X throws the word “evolve” at me. First a miracle, and now evolution?

“Don’t… don’t give me that nonsense! You’re saying that you, a Reploid, are evolving?! As if--”

As if you’re human?

Human. I’ve never been so furious as right now.

“Gwahhhh! Don’t get cocky, X!”

To us Reploids, there is no evolution. That’s because we’re machines. All we can do is accumulate experience to broaden the range of our abilities. You might call that “evolution”, but we machines are limited to the specs we are created with. To break past those limits, the only method we have is to change our parts and undergo reconstruction. Therefore, X’s speed has to be an ability given to him beforehand.

That revelation, that reality, really grinds my gears.

“You think I’ll accept that you were given the capability to rival a Special A-Class?!”

Fine. Sure. He had that ability all along. I’ll acknowledge that much. But even if a B-Class suddenly pulls this power out of nowhere, we Special A-Classes still have more experience! If X plans on running around with that speed to evade my attacks, all I need to do is make sure there’s nowhere to run.

“No matter how fast you are, you can’t avoid this!”

As X dashes out of sight, I start to spin in the opposite direction, firing Shotgun Ice continuously. Gradually, my attacks transform into an enormous, freezing tornado. The tornado expands until it’s impossible to dodge unless you take flight. Before long, it’s strong enough to bury everything in the room, dying my vision snow white.

After a few more seconds, we’ll be able to hold X’s last rites again. That’s how I imagine it… and decide it will be.

But X has other plans.

After the tornado dies down, I promptly search for X’s ice statue, but no matter where I look, he’s nowhere to be seen. Frantic, I scan every nook and cranny as I back up to a nearby wall, and then it hits me.

“You.... You climbed up the wall--!”

There, right above me, having clambered up the wall by kicking against it until he was close to the ceiling.

“Are you kidding me?!”

This shouldn’t be possible for the likes of X…. the likes of a B-Class Reploid!

“Don’t oppose me, you mere B-Class… B-Class peon!”

How could this B-Class surpass me? I’m Special A-Class! I climbed my way up to the top with my own strength!

“B-Class, A-Class… It’s because you’re so obsessed with these things that you’ve lost sight of what’s important!”

And now this: X telling me not to obsess over status. When my pride was smarting!? Don’t obsess!? There’s only so much joking I can take! Are you saying you don’t know how important status is to us Reploids? Do you need me to show you!?

How outrageous can one person possibly be!?

“My obsession with being a Special A-Class is because that’s a barometer of my true ability! No wonder you’re a B-Class!”

No, I don’t plan on trying to understand the likes of X. As if I’d even want to.

“Though I’m no longer one, a Special A-Class Hunter’s judgement will always be Special-A.”

I speed around to the frozen blue Reploid from before and place my hand threateningly on his head.

“Well then, X. If rank doesn’t matter, surely you can handle this, right?”

“You coward! Resorting to something this low now of all times!”

Even if you’re hiding some strong abilities, you’re still a soft-hearted fool. And that’s why you are a B-Class.

“This is a hostage situation. After all, I’m a Maverick. I don’t do nice things like playing fairly.”

Did you really think we were going to have a gentlemanly duel? To me, everyone in this room is just a hostage I can use against X. And using them to bring him down is a perfectly logical and rational judgement for a Reploid to make.

Well, what will you do? For some reason, X acts as if he’s taking a breath, and then--

“He… he’s even faster than before!?”

With a high-pitched sound, he vanishes. Panicking, I look everywhere, but I just can’t find him.

Fine! You leave me no choice! I’ll go ahead and get rid of this hostage! Just as I’m about to execute him--

What the hell…?

“Why… why must I fight those who were once my allies… Answer me, Penguin!”

“Are those… tears? Are you crying!?”

He is.

On top of that, he’s making a total mess, just like how a human would cry. What the hell is with this meaningless feature? What advantage is there to installing this kind of function into us Reploids?

“How far… how far do you plan on mocking me?!”

“But, because of you, I’ve recalled something important, Penguin….”

Around the center of my back, I feel cold steel touch me. At the same time, I hear X’s voice. It’s only a moment, but during that short pause in his words, I turn around and bathe him in freezing air. Or at least, I try to, but X’s words continue, faster than I can act.

“--I... am a Maverick Hunter.”

An explosion roars through my body. X’s face fills my vision as it starts failing. As usual, that stupid face is gentle, and still crying. Not only can he evolve, he is even equipped with the feature to cry like a human…

Ah, dammit. He really does... piss… me off….

#mega man x: the novel #mega man x #rockman x: the novel #rockman x

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simalienn · 7 years

Text

Ten Question Tag.

RULES Always post the rules, answer the questions given to you, then write 10 questions of your own, and tag some friends!

Thanks MOLLLY @storylegacysims and JESKA @pxlunicorns I’m going to put my answers under a cut for anyone interested in reading them, I’m not going to add my own questions or tag anyone though since I’m pretty late to the party on this and I think everyone has done it already.

MOLLY’s QUESTIONS

What’s your favourite Sims expansion/stuff pack? Probably City Living, I really like being able to visit/live in the city.

Who’s your favorite sim you’ve ever made, and why? I haven’t really ‘Made’ that many, but My favourite descendant of a sim I made is Jarrah Voss, He’s just so sweet and when he first aged up to a teen, I thought he was kind of scrawny and funny looking but he grew on me and now I think he’s the cutest thing ever!

What’s the funniest way a sim of yours has ever died? My heir for gen 2′s wife died from exertion after a rather intense woohoo session... The heir then went on the treadmill right after and he too died from exertion 10 minutes later.

What’s the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you? “Don’t point your fucking finger at crazy people...”

Tell an embarrassing story. Walking into class when I was about 13 and there was only a few seats left but no one would let me sit next to them, the room went quiet and I walked over to the one seat left that I haven’t tried to sit in, (which was next to a girl who I THOUGHT was my friend) and she proceeded to stand up and say to me loudly so everyone could hear ‘Face it Leisha, everyone hates you, you have no friends...’ and the entire class burst out laughing... she then let me sit next to her as long as I didn’t talk to her... It was kind of devastating to 13 year old me, but embarrassing at the same time..

What was the last movie that made you dry? I’m going to assume you mean

What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done? Fly in a helicopter over the grand canyon... I legit thought I was going to die.

If you had a warning label, what would yours say? ‘Explicit Language’

What’s your most embarrassing guilty pleasure song? Mmmbop by Hanson!!

What is the most interesting thing you could do with 400 pounds of cheddar cheese? This is the weirdest question ever, Molly!.... Make the worlds biggest Grilled Cheese Sandwich?

JESS’ QUESTIONS

Could you survive in the wilderness for a month? That depends, do I have supplies with me?... I’d have no trouble if I had food and warm clothing/bedding with me... I’d actually enjoy it... but if I found myself lost in the middle of no where with nothing but the clothes on my back I’d die of starvation or something..

What are some songs you know by heart? Oh I know way too many random weird ass songs off by heart.. A few that come to mind - Agadoo - Black Lace One Week - Barenaked ladies Baby got Back .- Sir Mix-a-lot Stay - Lisa Lobe Purple People Eater - Sheb Wooley Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen Witch doctor - David Saville Hotel California - Eagles The entire Eminem show and Encore albums - Eminem Waterfalls - TLC (Yes, the whole rap part too)

What’s the funniest or most amazing cell phone cover you have seen? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one I thought was super amazing... I’ve had one with Flamingo’s for a while that I loved... I recently changed to a boring old better quality gold and fluro pink one..

What villain do you really feel for? None! Villains are mean!

What three activities would you rate 10/10 would do again? Cruise Ship holiday Cruise Ship holiday Cruise Ship holiday

Would you rather be able to see 10 minutes into your own future or 10 minutes into the future of anyone but yourself? My own future... Then my anxiety might not have to be so paranoid about what was going to/could happen all the time.

Would you rather never use social media sites / apps again or never watch another movie or TV show? Right now I’m feeling stupid antisocial, so I’ll say social media sites.. But in reality it’s probably the other way around.

What period in history had the best fashion? 80′s! .... LMAO..

Name 3 things in nature you find most beautiful? I’m not really feeling the best mentally today and it turns out this question is much harder to answer than it should be.

What is your favorite book? I have a lot... but, I guess maybe The Pact by Jodi Picoult... I like a lot of her books,... Annnd, of course the Tomorrow Series by John Marsden is my all time favourite they were the first novels I ever made it through without hating every minute of it... I HATED reading until I was about 15-16 and They showed me that there actually were books out there that were enjoyable to read. I still didn’t really get into reading until I was in my 20′s..

#saviour hide

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ask-white-fatalis · 7 years

Note

every odd number for the OC questions

HOO BOY.

1. What’s their full name? Why was that chosen? Does it mean anything?Shiro’s full name is Shironus AkumaWraths full name is Wrathanula AkumaKaze’s name is simply Kaze AkumaQuins (my hunter OC’s) name is Quintor Zenerith

3. Did they have a good childhood? What are fond memories they have of it? What’s a bad memory?Shiros childhood was horrid. for the first 100 years, wrath made his life a living hell in order to toughen him up, only to abandon him by exiling Shiro from his ancestral homeland for Shiro’s pacifistic beliefs.Wrath didn’t start as an asshole. he was a fairly average dragon and even at one point interacted with human beings. however, a turn of betrayal with the humans turn wrath cold and unfeeling.Kaze so far has had a good childhood, then again he is only 2 years old.Quin’s childhood was one of poverty and homelessness, as his parents were killed by a rogue Gore Magala when he was still very young.

5. Do they have any siblings? What’s their names? What is their relationship with them? Has their relationship changed since they were kids to adults? Shiro Has a brother and a sister. His brother, Kuro, Is a black fatalis and is his fathers favorite, often belittling Shiro about how little their father cares about him. Kuro has grown arrogant and crass, often womanizing with many female fatalis’s. Shiros sister is a creature even wrath fears because of how far he pushed her violent nature. given she is a crimson fatalis, the most violent of the 3 species, wrath had her trapped within an abandoned castle when she started to kill her own kind for sport. Kaze, Wrath, and Quin are only Child’s.

7. Did they have lots of friends as a child? Did they keep any of their childhood friends into adulthood? ((most of my Main OC’s do not have many childhood friends, whether being unpopular, an outcast or generally displeasing in general (wrath…). however, I’m glad to say both quin and shiro are making friends in their adult life.))

9. Do animals like them? Do they get on well with animals? Shiro, although a predator by nature, does his best to respect all living creatures, even befriending some that most fatalis’s would just see as a meal.Wrath has a stern belief that fatalis kind are gods among mortals, that every creature is below that of his species, some of which need to be eradicated from existence.Kaze is learning shiros more pacifistic ways.Quin, even as a hunter, has many monster friends, including a zinogre he raised from a lost pup.

11. Do they have any special diet requirements? Are they a vegetarian? Vegan? Have any allergies?Shiro, Wrath and Kaze are carnivores, and require meat to feed them. however, to keep up kaze’s metal coat, he must ingest ores, like iron and dragonite.

13. What is their least favourite food?Shiro: Rhenoplos, their hide is too hard to chew and their meat is stringy and tough…Wrath: of all of earths creatures, humans by far taste the most foul. and believe me, I have experience to back that up… -growls-Kaze: STONES TASTE YUCKY, BLEEEEECH!!! >:cQuin: Grilled cheese. …. I’M NOT WEIRD, YOU ARE!

15. Are they good at cooking? Do they enjoy it? What do others think of their cooking?((Shiro,Wrath and kaze cannot cook cuz they are dragons, and even in gjinka form they eat food raw.))Quin is an average cook, and likes to surprise his wife with many dishes. his specialty is pizza.

17. Do they like to take photos? What do they like to take photos of? Selfies? What do they do with their photos?all: … what are photos?

19. What’s their least favourite genres?Shiro: I don’t care much for those horror books… they really seem unnecessarily Gorey… and i care not for what the young dragons call “Wrap music”. Wrath: Human arts are a waste of time. if i want entertainment fromthem, I’ll just burn their beloved libraries!! HAHAHA! STUPID PINK MONKEYS!Kaze: ROMANCE IS GROSS, BLEEEEECHQuin: I hate anything with adam sandler :I

21. Do they have a temper? Are they patient? What are they like when they do lose their temper?Shiro has a lot of patients, but LORD HELP YOU IF THAT FUSE GOES OUT. Wrath simply kills you if you bug him slightly so…Kaze, as a kid and thus doesn’t have an abundance of patients, and often complains if he doesn’t get his way.Quins temper is fairly level, but has none for people he thinks are rude.

23. Do they have a good memory? Short term or long term? Are they good with names? Or faces?Shiro and Wrath remember everything that has ever happened in their 100,000′s of years they’ve been alive.Kaze has very bad short term memory and has a bad attention span.Quin has a decent memory but has trouble with names.

25. What do they find funny? Do they have a good sense of humour? Are they funny themselves?(( @monsterhunterayame asked this as well!))Shiro: what did the buffalo say to his kid when he went to school? -snorts- BISON!!! PFFFFFFHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, OH YOU HUMANS MAKE THE FUNNIEST JOKES!!! HAHAHAHA!!!Wrath: the screams of torment of my victims the second before i rip their heads off! humans make the most pitifully funny squeaks~Kaze: POTATO! :DQuin: My friends have named me the pun deputy~

27. What makes them sad? Do they cry regularly? Do they cry openly or hide it? What are they like they are sad?If he ever gets into an bad argument with a friend, shiro will feel very depressed, and often think that he ruined the friendship he worked hard to build. he does cry, but not openly.Wrath believes showing sadness is a weakness unbefiting of a dragon, and will never show anyone the sadness in his stone cold heart.Kaze often gets sad if he squishes a bug, and will cry openly, asking shiro if he can save the poor insect.Quins sadness comes from the thought of the gore magala ripping his new life out of his grip, and the parents he lost to the beast.

29. What do they do when they find out someone else’s fear? Do they tease them? Or get very over protective?Shiro gets very protective of his friends,doing his best never to mention their fears.Wrath brutally abuses the knowledge of ones fear, often using it to torment his victims. Kaze is generally fearless,so he doesnt quite grasp why others would be afraid.Quin, if only for a harmless park would jokingly tease about the fear, but will immediately stop if he thinks he’s gone too far.

31. Do they drink? What are they like drunk? What are they like hungover? How do they act when other people are drunk or hungover? Kind or teasing?((Shiro, Kaze and Wrath do not consume alcohol))Quin does drink, but only the drinks that taste “fruity”. and if he gets drunk, he becomes very flirtatious, to the point where he bets he could shove a wine bottle up his… ehm…y-you get the point…

33. What underwear do they wear? Boxers or briefs? Lacey? Comfy granny panties?((for this purpose,monsters will be in gjinka form))Boxers: Wrath, KazeBriefs: Shiro, Quin

35. What’s their guilty pleasure? What is their totally unguilty pleasure?Shiro’s guilty pleasure: making purring noises when happy, and getting chin scritches.Shiros unguilty pleasure: Making friends!Wraths Guilty Pleasure: expressing joy.Wraths unguilty pleasure: killing.Quins guilty pleasure: SingingQuins unguilty pleasure: Raving about his wife, Naomi.

37. Do they like to read? Are they a fast or slow reader? Do they like poetry? Fictional or non fiction?Shiro,Kaze and Quin all enjoy reading fiction books, Quins fave being kaiju novels, whereas shiro and kaze like fairy tale fantasy books. Quin and shiro are fast readers,but kaze is still learning howto read.Wrath thinks books are a waste of time and prefers to just burn them.

39. Do they like letters? Or prefer emails/messaging?-All characters live in a technologically inept age in terms of writing, so all must stick to letters,-

41. What’s their sexuality? What do they find attractive? Physically and mentally? What do they like/need in a relationship?Shiro would most likely be Heterosexual however a certain fish gets him all hot and bothered so i guess its a bit ambiguous. in a relationship,shiro likes mutual respect and lots of small signs of physical affection, like cuddling. Wrath is Unfeeling, although he would only have relations with an opposite gender.Kaze is too young to determine.Quin is Bi-Sexual, and likes a lady with confidence and curves, and a man with a cute face and muscle, but not too much! Quin also likes physical signs of affection and someone he can have a laugh with and relate to.

43. Are they religious? What do they think of religion? What do they think of religious people? What do they think of non religious people?…. uh

45. How do other people see them? Is it similar to how they see themselves?Shiro: I HAVE ZERO REDEEMING QUALITIES! ;U;Wrath: all fear me,and all SHOULD fear me…Kaze: they think i’m a cute! owoQuin: I’m not sure really…i guess just some guy??? i dunno…

47. How do they act in a formal occasion? What do they think of black tie wear? ((Monster OC’s will again be refered to in their gjinka forms))Shiro is ALWAYS the fanciest and classiest dressed mother fucker in the room.Wrath doesnt care. Kaze is often told by shiro to dress fancy but often just likes to wear hoodies and shorts cuz they’re comfy.Quin dresses his best on formal occasions, and would buy a tux if it were necessary.

49. What is their most valued object? Are they sentimental? Is there something they have to take everywhere with them?For shiro, Four obsidian spires in a long forgotten valley are very close to his heart. every year he goes to see them for hours on end on one particular day.Wrath has a scar on his chest thats important to him, however, its to remind him to NEVER show weakness.Kaze has a scale from Shiro that he carries everywhere, to make him feel like shiro will always protect him. Quin’s only thing from his parents are his fathers Critical Brachydios dual blades. he takes them on every serious hunt he’s been on.

#GOD DAMN #LONG FUCKING POST #ask white fatalis #ask prompt #shiro #wrath #kaze #Quin #white fatalis #kushala daora #Monster Hunter

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collegestudentstuff-blog · 7 years

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Books! Read More Books!

Remember when you used to read in middle school? Reading at least, for me, used to be an escape - something I loved to do. Like many other people, books (for pleasure) took a back seat once college started. I have tons of books in my student apartment all either half-read or haven't even started yet.

Here are some great books to help you get back into reading. They're either a quick read or a super engaging book that'll have you on the edge of your seat.

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

A guy walks into a bar car and... From here the story could take many turns. When the guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you deeply moved. Sedaris remembers his father's dinnertime attire (shirtsleeves and underpants), his first colonoscopy (remarkably pleasant), and the time he considered buying the skeleton of a murdered Pygmy. The common thread? Sedaris masterfully turns each essay into a love story: how it feels to be in a relationship where one loves and is loved over many years, what it means to be part of a family, and how it's possible, through all of life's absurdities, to grow to love oneself. With LET'S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS, David Sedaris shows once again why he is widely considered the "the funniest writer in America" (O, the Oprah Magazine).

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath’s only novel, this book is excellent because, apart from the fantastic story and great character development, it makes you want to know more. After reading it, you’ll be sure to be found late at night, Wikipedia-ing Sylvia’s life, the parallels between her and Esther Greenwood, researching her lost diaries, and generally wishing you had known about this book earlier." Bustle

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

"It’s hard to pick a favorite book by Rainbow Rowell — all of them are amazing — but you should definitely start with this one. Eleanor & Park is a lovely teenage romance, minus cheesy ooey-gooey teenage love antics. An easy read, you’re sure to go through this one quickly, but you’ll connect with the characters immediately. And after you’re done, you’ll find yourself wondering/obsessing over what Eleanor Douglas and Park Sheridan are up to now. (It’s a normal reaction, we promise.)" Bustle

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

"Now, I know what you’re thinking. Everyone and their mom talks about this book and now, movie. Well there’s a reason for that. I’ve personally loaned this book to more non-reading friends than I can possibly keep track of and I’ve had to repurchase the book almost as many times (it turns out I have greedy friends). But that’s just the point. They didn’t want to give it back. It is a quick read that doesn’t contain unnecessarily difficult language and sentence structure as that it will scare away the less-than-ambitious reader." Thought Catalogue

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

"Vonnegut is raw. His messages are abstract but are interwoven through playful writing and humor. He uses satire to speak on harsh topics of war, morality, and life in general. He’ll make you laugh while simultaneously making you sick to your stomach and think deeper about things that probably haven't ever crossed your mind before." The Odessey

“So it goes.”

Walks With Men by Ann Beattie

"This transfixing 112-page novella by the acclaimed prose stylist explores a troubled May-December romance." Real Simple

Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett

"A writer who lost and later regained her sense of smell, Blodgett explores all things olfactory. Packed with fascinating tidbits (who knew women had a sharper sense of smell than men?), this sciencey memoir is unexpectedly engrossing." Real Simple

#books #ref #reading #college #book recs

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savvystories · 4 years

Text

The list keeps getting bigger – and better!

MEDICAL THRILLER!

“readers of Michael Crichton & Robin Cook will def enjoy!”

– Ginger S. Baldwin, Amazon review

With nearly 5,000 copies sold before its official launch day, the Do No Harm box set containing THE GAMMA SEQUENCE became a USA TODAY bestseller.

Some secrets refuse to remain hidden.

Geneticist Lanaya Kim must do what authorities haven’t—tie together the “accidental” deaths of several prominent scientists around the country to show they were actually murdered. Over the past two years, geneticists have died in what appear to be accidents, but Lanaya knows otherwise. If she tells her secrets to the authorities, she risks becoming a suspect or revealing herself to the killer and becoming an open target. Hiring private investigator Hamilton DeShear may help her expose the truth, but time is running out. The murders are happening faster, and Lanaya’s name may be next on the killer’s list. But when Lanaya and DeShear start probing, what they discover is far more horrifying than anyone could ever have imagined.

Buy it HERE

“This is a great novel!” I loved the characters and the waterfall scene was very exciting! What’s truly fantastic/captivating about the whole story is that it really could happen… – Anne Marie Andrus, author of Monsters & Angels

“A solid 5 stars. Great read. Amazing.” “I really did enjoy it and love a good ending – I assume there will be another book to give us more… Look forward to your next.” – R G Review

The Gamma Sequence, book 2:

Rogue Elements

THE PAST DOESN’T DIE. IT WAITS TO BE FORGOTTEN.

After completing the biggest case of his career, private detective Hank DeShear returns home to start treatment for a disabling genetic condition that could end his life, but he learns his partner on the prior case has just been murdered. Was he wrong to conclude the secretive killer known as The Greyhound had declared a truce? Or have disciples of The Greyhound surfaced to carry on with the murders?

DeShear is able to attach himself to an overseas goodwill mission headed by the U. S. Vice President, enabling him to pursue leads in foreign hospitals he thinks could be offshoots of Angelus Genetics’ illegal organ harvesting programs and human trafficking operations. Determined to pursue the truth wherever it leads, DeShear must also keep a low profile so he doesn’t become the next murder victim—but the onset of his debilitating condition may kill DeShear before the murderer gets a chance.

FANS OF ROBIN COOK AND MICHAEL CRICHTON WILL LOVE THE LATEST ADDITION TO THIS WELL-WRITTEN AND SUSPENSEFUL SERIES.

“A masterful thriller” A riveting thriller by Dan Alatorre, the fast-paced plot is loaded with suspense, intrigue and chilling implications for the future of genetic research. I cannot wait for the next book in this spine-tingling series! – JY, Amazon review

“5 STARS” – Book Review Gal

Buy it HERE

The Gamma Sequence, book 3:

Terminal Sequence

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW

While preparing for his final round of life-saving treatments, Detective Hank DeShear agrees to work with Jaden Trinn and The Greyhound to shut down the remaining legs of Angelus Genetics’ illegal multi-national operations. Their ally, Dr. Carerra, is unable to help, forced away to appear in Washington D. C. to comply with what she thinks is a Congressional subpoena, in the hopes of getting leniency for actions her husband took while exposing Angelus’ gruesome activities. But the company Dr. Hauser founded plans to continue operating, buying political protection and stopping any would-be attackers in the harshest, most permanent ways possible. But when the next generation of Hauser-created child prodigies learns of the founder’s true plans, a horrifying reality is revealed that no one could have envisioned.

Fans of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton will love this series, especially the finale!

Buy it HERE

“I loved the characters and the story is incredible” – Amazon review

“I just binge read all 3 of the current books. Loved all the books and the thrill ride. Can’t wait for the next.” – Amazon review

The Gamma Sequence, book 4

The Keepers

CAN HANK DESHEAR SOLVE A KIDNAPPING CASE WHILE AVOIDING BEING FRAMED FOR THE VICTIM’S MURDER? After destroying the last remnants of Angelus Genetics and the evil Dr. Hauser’s operations, Detective Hamilton DeShear escapes with Agent Jaden Trinn and their 5-year-old ward Constantine to The Bahamas for a vacation – only to be framed for murder as Constantine is kidnapped and Trinn is nearly shot to death. Recovering in Paris, “Helena” attempts to help, but she is saddled with the hospital’s frustrated Doctor of Psychology who must open up to the possibility that things with this mysterious elderly patient are not as they seem.

Click HERE to preorder your copy NOW.

MURDER MYSTERY, ANYONE?

Two detectives hunt a serial killer. The killer’s hunting them.

A lone trucker is ambushed, shot, and brutally stabbed. A tourist meets the same fate while out for a jog. Facing two crime scenes that could have come from a horror movie, Detectives Carly Sanderson and Sergio Martin search for the crazed serial killer. Five more attacks happen in a week, launching the entire city into a panic, causing the mayor to throw all of the city’s resources into stopping the rampage. But while the detectives work around the clock, they don’t know the killer has upped the game—by making them his next targets.

Get your copy HERE.

“Plenty of action and suspense, well written… a pleasure to read. You will certainly enjoy this book. This is my first dip into the Dan Alatorre literary pool, and I’ll certainly be back for more.” – Amazon review

“Fast-paced, excellent read. I’m looking forward to my next book by Dan Alatorre.” – Amazon review

TIME TRAVEL ADVENTURE

The Navigators

SOME SECRETS AREN’T MEANT TO BE KNOWN

A freak landslide at a remote mine site uncovers a strange machine to a group of paleontology grad students. Wary of corrupt school officials, team leader Barry takes the machine home to study it in secret, reaching only one realistic – and unbelievable – conclusion: It was designed to bridge the time-space continuum. It’s a time machine. Testing delivers disastrous results, sending one team member to the hospital and nearly killing another. When word leaks about the discovery, the ultimate power struggle ensues: the university wants it for funding, the power company wants its energy regenerating abilities kept under wraps, and a rival group wants to steal it for themselves. No one cares if Barry’s team comes out alive. Fleeing for their lives, the students must fight the school, the police, and each other if they want to learn the truth about what they’ve discovered – a truth with more severe consequences than any of them can predict.

Get your copy HERE

AMONG THE BEST OF THE YEAR – Happy Meerkat Reviews. “5.0 out of 5 stars. Gripping action adventure science fiction. This book is amazing, I can’t believe how engrossed I was in reading it!”

“This book grabs you from the beginning and doesn’t let go until the. very. last. line. Dan Alattore is an exceptional writer, the details, feelings and wit in this story draw you in, and you feel like you are right there with each character.” Amazon review

PARANORMAL THRILLER

A Place Of Shadows

Possibly my best book, ever.

A series of unexplainable tragedies surround a family and their young daughter as they seek to determine whether they are possessed, paranoid or collectively going insane. Meanwhile, forgotten clues from the father’s past may indicate forces are at work in ways more ominous than any of them could have imagined.

“Alatorre’s best yet!” I wanted to keep reading. Good job. – Molli Nickell,The Publishing Wizard and former Time-Life acquisitions editor

A brilliant work. Haunting, fast paced, multi-layered. Alatorre has outdone himself with this chilling tale of paranormal suspense. If you loved The Shining or A Change Of Seasons’ The Body (also known as the movie Stand By Me), you’ll love this book. – Lucy Brazier,author of the PorterGirl: The Vanishing Lord and PorterGirl: First Lady of the Keys

Comparing it with the likes of King and Koontz. I don’t think I’ve come across a book quite like this one. It has a powerful potential to be a great supernatural thriller that everyone will talk about for years to come. That’s comparing it with the likes of King and Koontz. – Russell J. Fellows Reviews

Dan Alatorre can summon the chills and thrills of a supernatural horror story. – Grady Harp, Amazon HALL OF FAME * TOP 500 REVIEWER * VINE VOICE

Get your copy HERE

COMEDY ROMANCE

The Italian Assistant

When a married man’s overseas business deal goes wrong, the one person who can help him has ideas of her own. A madcap comedy where true love finally prevails and everyone lives happily ever after—but only after a lot of screwups.

Family man Mike Torino lands an important business project in Italy, home of naked art, Valentino, and taxi-crashing yoga pants, so he brings along his wife, hoping to rekindle their marriage while securing a promotion. But romance gets derailed by head colds, constant bickering, and assaults from ankle-breaking cobblestone streets. Their daughter develops a gelato addiction. Mike’s Italian partner has a coronary. And as for amore . . . Mattie tells Mike to handle things himself—and storms back to America.

Mike is trapped. Leaving Italy will blow a promotion; staying might cost him his wife and family.

While reeling from Mattie’s frantic departure, a replacement liaison is assigned—a top-notch, beautiful young Italian woman who is instantly smitten with Mike and determined to reveal the passions of her homeland—whether he wants to see them or not! Normally immune, Mike is tempted—but is headstrong, voluptuous Julietta worth the risk?

“Funniest book I have ever read!” I laughed a lot and cried in equal measure but cannot remember when I have enjoyed a book so much. – Anita Dawes Book Review

“Made me laugh out loud.” – Amazon review

“WOW! Worth every second spent reading!” – Amazon review

Get your copy HERE

HORROR STORIES

Get your scare on

Dark Passages

A COLLECTION OF SHORT HORROR STORIES AND DARK TALES

USA Today bestselling author and master storyteller Dan Alatorre brings you a collection of dark stories.

The Jemwaju: Come sit by the campfire and listen as an old friend tells a man’s group of Scouts about a Mayan tomb he explored as a college student, and the possibly haunted remains of the vengeful warrior priest he discovered inside. Best Monday Ever: A dark humor tale about a hard working businessman who wins the award of a lifetime, but the announcement causes his wife to become a kidnap target of a strange group called the witch coven cult. Dark Questions: A young man finds himself strapped to a chair without any explanation, then the torture begins… but he can’t provide answers to questions he isn’t being asked. Enjoy these eerie, dark short stories from master storyteller and USA Today bestselling author Dan Alatorre – and be sure to leave the lights on!

FANS OF STEPHEN KING, WILLOW ROSE, AND DEAN KOONTZ WILL LOVE DAN ALATORRE’S NEW “DARK PASSAGES” SERIES!

Get your copy HERE

Book 2 in the series:

Dark Voodoo

THREE HORROR STORIES TO KEEP YOU UP TONIGHT: The Rendering: A young woman’s visit to a voodoo shop goes horribly wrong. Countenance: A difficult situation gets worse for a bank robber when things are not as they seem. Epilogue: The third story in this theme gives a satisfying surprise ending.

Get your copy HERE

Book 3 in the series

Dark Intent

The Power Outage: An eerie story about a lone homeowner who meets the new neighbors on a stormy night when the power on their street goes out, but the neighbors are not what he expects. Tonight We Hunt The Beast, Lads: Against his better thinking, a medieval monk rides along with a frenzied mob to hunt a dangerous mythical beast.

A Settled Matter: A dark humor take of a would-be normal man who decides to hire a hit man to murder his wife.

Get your copy HERE

Book 4 in the series

Dark Thoughts

The Monster And The Maintenance Man: The maintenance worker on a prison’s electric chair sets up his own system of justice. A Number One Bestselling Author: A dark humor tale of a jealous author attends a party and assesses the life of the host, his successful former mentor.

The Seer: A boy takes a scary trip through his grandmother’s dark basement and encounters another boy from long ago.

Get your copy HERE

Dark Passages Box Set

All 4 volumes – even the ones that aren’t released yet! A steal, and it includes all of the books so far:

Dark Passages

Dark Voodoo

Dark Intent

Dark Thoughts

Enjoy these short horror stories from the comfort of your own home – and leave the lights on.

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Kids books! Check these out!

Stinky Toe

“Bo” does not like to take baths – he wants to play! But his mother has other ideas. Enjoy this funny rhyming story with YOUR children. Fun to read to youngsters; fun for older kids to read to YOU!

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The Zombunny

A young rabbit who stays up late and doesn’t eat right becomes a tired, grumpy… ZOMBUNNY! Great for young readers and students learning English as a foreign language.

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Bestselling author and humorist Dan Alatorre brings us into his living room for funny and delightful stories about the real meaning of fatherhood and parenting. “Savvy” is the nickname of his daughter, and “Savvy Stories” is a fun filled romp through the early years of having a baby. These stories will have you chuckling at the universal message of bringing up baby – and watching her take over the house! Equal parts funny and touching, Savvy Stories shows you why all kids are special. After all, “the beauty of children is in the magic they see everywhere; the beauty of parenthood is seeing it with them.” Not a bumbling TV sitcom stooge, the Dad in this book is a smart, kind, loving man who is constantly amazed at his daughter, something every dad should be (but, sadly, many are not).

You will laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page, and you will see yourself 100 times over in this book. Savvy Stories has been acclaimed as required reading for parents, for its hilarious and heartwarming insights. Its lessons are deep and apply to every family, everywhere, because what makes Savvy special is what makes all children special. We just have to look.

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“The honesty of a 2 year old is amazing. Are they all like this? I hope so. What a shame that probably has to change.

“I’ve caught my daughter doing stuff where I would expect an older kid to lie, and she persists in telling me exactly what she did, ratting herself out completely. That just can’t keep up, can it?

“Whenever it’s just the two of us home alone and I need a shower, like after I’ve worked out but my wife isn’t home to watch our daughter, I’ll put Savvy on the bed in the master bedroom and leave the bathroom door open. That way, she can watch cartoons while sitting on the bed, and I can shower.

“With the door ajar, she can’t see me, but she can certainly come in if some crisis were to happen – like the DVR switched her cartoon off and put on the news – and I can hear her if were to cry for some reason – like when she was trying to use the headboard as a balance beam and got wedged between the mattress.

“She’s two. That stuff happens…”

You will buy this book for the comedy but you will keep it for the memories – and fall in love all over again with your own kids!

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You have never read a book like this before.

The Long Cutie hooks you with alternating chapters about a charmingly precocious 3 year old girl and stories of other real life people who have Long QT Syndrome, a potentially life threatening heart condition.

But this is no sob-story cry fest!

This is a life-affirming, often hilarious, occasionally thrilling, rollercoaster ride!

The Long Cutie will make you smile, nod, laugh and cry – sometimes all in the same page. Interspersed throughout the book are fascinating vignettes from a Norwegian man who tells stories about his family’s tragic history of LQTS. All the stories in the book are true. Some families consider themselves “special needs.” Others don’t. Some found out that they had Long QT by passing out and wrecking their cars! Some were misdiagnosed with epilepsy for years. Some of their stories are like reading TV medical drama. Some are like reading a comedy. All of them are amazingly true and a rollercoaster of emotions to read, but you will not end up depressed or feeling bad as you read because these are some of the strongest people you will ever read about and they do not inspire and will not accept – pity. Think of it like Pulp Fiction without all the shooting and blood. And without the gangsters. And without the cussing. And… Okay, don’t think of it like Pulp Fiction. Wait, DO think of Pulp Fiction, but only in the way the stories are separate stories that are told in pieces that may or may not overlap.

You know, you’ll just have to read it. But I think you’re really going to like it!

And I know you are going to be touched by it. Deeply.

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“Colonoscopy? You turn 50 and all of a sudden they want to stick a TV camera up your butt? Terrific.”

Dan deals with it ALL, laying out each step of the process in his typical, hilarious way, but with a goal of educating us in the process (in the end, it’s not so bad. Get it? In the end?) about a necessary and life saving procedure.

Night Of The Colonoscopy is a funny story about a guy starting to get a little older and trying to be realistic about it; wanting to have fun in life while still setting a good example for his 3-year old daughter – while keeping a humorous outlook at life.

The hospital gown that won’t close in the back? The nurse who didn’t tell him everything he might need to know about laxatives? And just how big is that camera, anyway???

Follow along and laugh as we head down another road of family interaction and life lessons as we learn about the Night Of The Colonoscopy!

Buy this book and learn about this important and life saving procedure while chuckling to yourself the whole time.

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Bestselling author and humorist Dan Alatorre takes us on a trip that will have any parent laughing out loud! Dan shows us the hilarious side of the challenges of parenting, as the father of a young girl is suddenly tasked with getting her a leotard before her first gymnastics class.

What happens next is an endearing journey of comedy that we’ve all been through: the challenge of shopping quickly combined with the fun and magic of childhood.

Moms and dads alike will laugh along with the characters in this epic journey because There’s no Such Thing As A Quick Trip To BuyMart!

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A fun loving comedy by bestselling author and humorist Dan Alatorre. A loving father somehow gets ensnared in his 3 ½ year old daughter’s request for a birthday party for her favorite stuffed animal; and instead of saying no, he goes along with it. What happens next is a hilariously funny and charming explanation of the true meaning of fatherhood, the differences between moms and dads, and how sometimes the really silly things we do on life’s journey are often the best:

“My daughter was nearly insane with excitement. No sugar high could match the rush of endorphins that were the thought of all her favorite things in the whole world all colliding in her brain at one time: ice cream, Hope The Baby Dolphin, birthday cake, and playing with the phone.”- from “A Day For Hope”

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A routine trip to the store creates a golden opportunity for a loving father to bestow a terrific Christmas memory on his three year old daughter. Filled with humor and love, this story will have you laughing and turning the pages to see if the stranger with the red shirt and white beard is… Santa Maybe?

This one is an annual favorite. I read this instead of “The Night Before Christmas”

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CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Yep, we have those, too

Children love this delightful picture book! With its many cute images, Laguna The Lonely Mermaid tells the story of a lonely young mermaid who must think of a creative way to rescue stranded pirates. By helping others, she makes new friends.

Great for parents to read to preschoolers or for slightly older kids to read to their parents! Includes suggestions for parents about making reading fun for kids, links to Facebook Fan page for downloadable coloring pages, and more.

BTW, I wrote this down but have a look at who the author is. There’s a story behind that. My daughter made up this whole story. THAT story is included in the book, too. Kids’ll impress ya.

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An adorable, amusing picture book with many cute images for children, “The Princess And The Dolphin” tells the story of a beautiful little princess who has a very special stuffed animal – that she loses somewhere in the castle! With help of her parents (the king and queen) and the family dog, they are off on a search.

Kids enjoy a terrific, fun story while discovering that persistence is important, as well as being resourceful, and working together.

A little princess in your house might just learn a thing or two about putting her toys away, and maybe a little something about responsibility, too!

Great for parents to read to preschoolers or for slightly older kids to read to their parents!

I love this story. It’s 100% true (okay, we aren’t kings and queens, but you get the idea), and if you read my stuff you know it is. If i could only leave ONE book for my daughter to read, it would be this one. Because she’s five now and she can’t read the bigger books. but also because this really happened, so we made a story about it.

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Children are going crazy for this story! A young girl’s family visits the beach, where she befriends a small crab and his friends. All is well until a little stranger washes up on shore after a storm, and she decides to work with her new friends to help him get back home – to France!

Enjoy this fun, full color, illustrated children’s book that has a great story and also teaches the importance of persistence, creativity, and teamwork!

Perfect to read to little ones, or have slightly older kids read to you!

This started out as a game we played when Savvy was a tiny little thing, and grew into this story. can you guess who the little girl in the story is?

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My Books The list keeps getting bigger - and better! MEDICAL THRILLER! "readers of Michael Crichton & Robin Cook will def enjoy!"

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Eric the Unready

In September of 1991, Bob Bates of Legend Entertainment flew to Florida for a meeting of the Software Publishers Association. One evening there after a long day on the job, still dressed in his business suit, he took a walk along the beach, enjoying a gorgeous sunset as he anticipated a relaxing dinner with his wife and infant son, who had joined him on the trip.

Yet his mind wasn’t quite as peaceful as was the scenery around him. He was in fact wrestling with a tension which everybody who does creative work for a living must face at some point: the tension between what the artist wants to create and what the audience wants to buy. Bob had made Timequest, his first game after co-founding Legend, as a self-conscious experiment, meant to determine whether a complicated, intricate, serious, difficult parser-driven adventure game was still a commercially viable proposition in 1991. The answer was, as Bob puts it today, “kind of”: Timequest hadn’t flopped utterly, but it hadn’t sold in notably big numbers either. Steve Meretzky’s decidedly lower-brow games Spellcasting 101 and 201, which had bookended Timequest on Legend’s release schedule, had both done considerably better. Bob had already started making notes for a Timequest II by the time the first one shipped, but he soon had to face the reality that the sales numbers just weren’t there to support more iterations on the concept.

Now, in the midst of his walk on the beach, a name sprang unbidden into his head: “Eric the Unready.” Such a gift from God — or from his subconscious — had never come to him before in that manner, and never would again. But no matter; once in a lifetime ought to be enough for anyone. He found the name hilarious, and chuckled to himself over it the rest of the way to the restaurant. At last, he knew what his next game would be: a straight-up farce about a really, really unready knight named Eric. With that decision made, he was ready to enjoy his evening.

The more he thought about the idea upon returning to daily life inside Legend’s Virginia offices, the more he realized that it had more going for it in practical terms than most rarefied bolts from the blue can boast. Indeed, it was an idea about which no marketer could possibly have complained, being well-nigh precision-targeted to hit the industry’s commercial sweet spot as accurately as any Legend title could hope to. If the success of Legend’s Spellcasting games hadn’t sufficiently proved to the company how potent a combination comedy and fantasy could be, there was plenty of other evidence on offer. Adventure gamers loved comedy, which was just as well given that it was the default setting the form always wanted to collapse back into, a gravitational attraction that could be defied by a designer only through serious, single-minded effort; these realities explained why Sierra made so many comedies, and why LucasArts’s adventure catalog contained very little else. And gamers in general just couldn’t get enough fantasy; this explained the quantity of dungeon-crawling CRPGs clogging store shelves, not to mention the success of Sierra’s King’s Quest adventure series. To complete the formula for sales gold, Bob soon decided that Eric the Unready would also toss aside all of Timequest‘s puzzle complexity to jump onto what Legend saw as another emerging industry trend: that of making adventure games friendlier, more accessible to the non-hardcore. In short, Bob’s latest game would be easy.

So, Eric the Unready was to be an unabashed bid for mainstream success, as safe a play as Legend knew how to make at this juncture. But such a practical commercial profile isn’t necessarily an artistic kiss of death; like all of the best of such efforts, Eric the Unready is executed with such panache that even a jaded old critic like me just can’t help but love it in spite of his snobbishness.

Inveterate student of history that he is, Bob’s first impulse upon starting any project is always to head to the library. In fact, one might say that his research for Eric the Unready began long before he even thought to make the game. The name itself actually has an historical antecedent, one which was doubtless bouncing around somewhere in the back of Bob’s mind when he had his brainstorm: Æthelred the Unready is the name of an English king from shortly before the Norman Conquest. The epithet had always amused Bob inordinately. (For the record: the word “unready” in this context means something closer to poorly advised than personally incompetent. Nevertheless, it was the latter, anachronistic meaning which Bob was about to embrace with glee.)

After the project began in earnest, Bob’s research instinct meant lots of reading of contemporary fantasy, a genre he had heretofore known little about. More out of a sense of duty than enthusiasm, he worked through Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman’s Dragonlance and Death Gate novels, Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga, and even Stephen R. Donaldson’s terminally turgid Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

In the end, none of it would prove to have been necessary — and this was all for the best. Eric the Unready has little beyond its “fantasy” label in common with such po-faced epics. The milieu of the finished game is vaguely Arthurian, as you might expect of a game written by the Anglophile creator of Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur. This time out, though, Bob tempered his interest in Arthurian myth with a willingness to toss setting and even plot coherence overboard at any time in the name of a good joke. As such, the game inevitably brings to mind a certain Monty Python movie — and, indeed, there is much of that beloved British comedy troupe in the game. Other strong influences which Bob himself names include Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and, hitting closer to home, Steve Meretzky.

The humor of Eric the Unready might best be summarized as “maximalism with economy.” Bob:

My [plots] were always meant to be scrupulously well-designed,. There was never a logical inconsistency. All of them were solidly constructed. But with Eric the Unready, I consciously said, “If I see the opportunity for a joke that doesn’t quite make sense, I’m going to do it anyway.” Toward the end of the project, I wondered how many jokes there were in Eric. I can remember counting that there were over a thousand of them. It’s just crammed full of funny material: in the newspapers, hidden in the conversations, hidden all over the place.

The economy comes in, however, with Eric the Unready‘s determination never to beat any single joke into the ground — something that even Steve Meretzky was prone to do in too much of his post-Infocom work. As Graham Nelson and others have pointed out, one of Infocom’s secret weapons was, paradoxical though it may sound, the very limitations of their Z-Machine. The sharply limited quantity of text it allowed, combined with the editorial oversight of Jon Palace, Infocom’s unsung hero, kept their writers from rambling on and on. But text had become cheap on the computers of the 1990s, and thus Legend’s software technology, unlike Infocom’s, allowed the author an effectively unlimited number of words — a dangerous thing for any writer. A Legend author was under no compulsion whatsoever to edit himself.

Luckily, Bob Bates’s dedication to doing the research came through for him here, in a way that ultimately proved far more valuable than his study of fantasy fiction. He had been interested in the mechanics and theory of comedy long before starting on the game, and now reread what some of the past masters of the form — people like Milton Berle and Johnny Carson — had to say about it. He recalled an old anecdote from the latter, which he paraphrases as, “Not everybody is going to like every joke. But if you can get 60 percent of the people to laugh at 60 percent of your jokes, you’re a success.” One of the funniest writers ever once noted in the same spirit that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Combining these two ideals, Bob’s approach to the humor in Eric the Unready became not to stress over or belabor anything. He would crack a joke, then be done with it and move on to the next one; rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. “There’s always another bus coming,” says Bob by way of summing up his comedy philosophy. “If you don’t get this one, don’t worry; you’ll get the next one.”

At this point, then, I’d like to share some of Eric the Unready‘s greatest comedic hits with you. One of the pleasures for me in revisiting this game a quarter-century on has been remembering all of the contemporary pop culture it references, pays homage to, or (more commonly) skewers. Thus many of the screenshots you see below are of that sort — wonderful for remembering the somehow more innocent media landscape of the United States during the immediate post-Cold War era, that window of peace and prosperity before history caught up with us again on September 11, 2001. (Why does the past always strike us as more innocent? Is it because we know what will come after, and familiarity breeds quaintness?)

But another of my agendas is to commemorate Legend’s talented freelance art team, whose work was consistently much better than we had any right to expect from such a small studio. Being a writer myself, I have a tendency to emphasize writing and design while giving short shrift to the visual aesthetics of game-making. So, let me remedy that for today at least. The quality of the artwork below is largely thanks to Tanya Isaacson and Paul Mock, Legend’s two most important artists, who placed their stamp prominently on everything that came out of the company during this period.

Each chapter includes a copy of the newspaper for that day. Together, they provide a running commentary on Eric’s misadventures of the previous chapters — and lots of opportunities for more jokes. Shay Addams, the publisher of the Questbusters newsletter and book series and a ubiquitous magazine commentator and reviewer, rivaled Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia for the title of most prominent of all the American adventure-game superfans who parleyed their hobbies into paychecks. (Scorpia as well showed up in games from time to time — perhaps most notably, as a poisonous monster in New World Computing’s Might and Magic III, her comeuppance for a negative review of Might and Magic II.) Alas, Addams disappeared without a trace about a year after Eric the Unready was published. Rumor had it that he took up a career as a professional gambler (!) instead.

A really old-school shout-out, to Scott Adams, the first person to put a text adventure on a microcomputer. “Yoho” was a magic word in his second and most popular game of all, Pirate Adventure.

The computer-game industry of the early 1990s still had some of the flavor of pre-Hayes Code Hollywood. Even as parents and politicians were fretting endlessly over what Super Mario Bros. was doing to Generation Nintendo, computer games remained off their radar entirely. That would soon change, however, bringing with it the industry’s first attempts at content rating and self-censorship.

The “tastes great, less filling” commercials for Miller Lite were an inescapable presence on American television for almost two decades, placing athletes and B-list celebrities in ever more elaborate beer-drinking scenarios which always concluded with the same tagline. They still serve as a classic case study in marketing for the way they convinced stereotypically manly, sports-loving male beer drinkers that it was okay to drink a (gasp!) light beer.

We couldn’t possibly skip an explicit homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, could we?

Wheel of Fortune — and the bizarre French obsession with Jerry Lewis.

More risque humor…

David Letterman’s top-ten lists were a pop-culture institution for almost 35 years. Note the presence on this one of Vice President Dan Quayle, who once said that Mars had air and canals filled with water, and once lost a spelling bee to a twelve-year-old by misspelling “potato.”

Rob Schneider’s copy-machine guy was one of the more annoying Saturday Night Live characters to become an icon of its age…

Speaking of Saturday Night Live: in one of the strangest moments in the history of the show, the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor belted out a well-intentioned but ham-fisted a-capella scold against human-rights abuse in lieu of one of her radio hits. At the end of the song, she tore up a picture of the pope as a statement against the epidemic of child molestation and abuse in the Catholic Church.

Some of Miller Lite’s competition in terms of iconic beer commercials for manly men came in the form of Old Milwaukee and its “It just doesn’t get any better than this” tagline. (Full disclosure: Old Milwaukee was my dad’s brew of choice, I think mostly because it was just about the cheapest beer you could buy. I have memories of watching John Wayne movies on his knee, coveting the occasional sip of it I was vouchsafed.)

Madonna was at her most transgressive during this period: she had just released an album entitled Erotica and a coffee-table book of softcore porn entitled simply Sex. Looked back on today, her desperate need to shock seems more silly than threatening, but people reacted at the time as if the world was ending. (I should know; I was working on a record store when the album came out. Ah, well… even as an indie-rock snob, I had to recognize that her version of “Fever” simply slays.)

My favorite chapter has you exploring a “galaxy” of yet more pop-culture detritus with the unforgettable Captain Smirk, described as “250 pounds of captain stuffed into a 175-pound-captain’s shirt.” (This joke might just be my favorite in the whole game…)

Fantasy Island, in which a new collection of recognizable faces was gathered together each week to live out their deepest desires and learn some life lessons in the process, was one of the biggest television shows of the pop-culture era just before Eric the Unready, when such aspirational lifestyle fare set in exotic locations — see also Fantasy Island‘s more family-friendly sibling The Love Boat — was all the rage. It all really does feel oddly quaint and innocent today, doesn’t it?

Eric the Unready manages to combine all three of actor and decadent lifestyle icon Ricardo Monelban’s most recognizable personas in one: as Mr. Roarke of Fantasy Island, as Khan of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and as a pitchman for Chrysler.

And at last we come to Gilligan’s Island, a place within a three-hour sailing tour of civilization which has nevertheless remained uncharted — the perfect scene for a sitcom as breathtakingly stupid as its backstory.

Eric the Unready is the first Legend game to fully embrace the LucasArts design methodology of no player deaths and no dead ends. Even if you deliberately try to throw away or destroy essential objects out of curiosity or sheer perversity, the game simply won’t let you; the object in question is always restored to you, often by means that are quite amusing in themselves. Just as in a LucasArts comedy, the sense of freedom this complete absence of danger provides often serves the game well, empowering you to try all sorts of crazy and funny things without having to worry that doing so will mean a trip back to your collection of save files. Unlike many LucasArts games, though, Eric the Unready doesn’t even try all that hard to find ways of presenting truly intriguing puzzles that work within its set of player guardrails. In fact, if there’s a problem with Eric the Unready, it must be that the game offers so little challenge; Bob Bates’s determination to make it the polar opposite of Timequest in this respect carried all the way through the project.

The game is really eight discrete mini-games. At the start of each of these “chapters,” Eric is dumped into a new, self-contained environment that exists independently of what came before or what will come later. By limiting the combinatorial-explosion factor, this structure makes both the designer’s and the player’s job much easier. Even within a chapter, however, there are precious few head-scratching moments. You’re told what you need to do quite explicitly, and then you proceed to do it in an equally straightforward manner — and that’s pretty much all there is to solving the game. Bob long considered it to be the easiest game by far he had ever designed. (He was, he noted wryly when I spoke to him recently, forced by popular demand to make his recent text adventure Thaumistry even easier, which serves as something of a commentary on the ways in which player expectations have changed over the past quarter-century.)

All that said, it should also be noted that Eric the Unready‘s disinterest in challenging its player was more of a problem at the time of its original release than it is today. Whatever their other justifications, difficult puzzles served as a way of gumming up the works for the player back in the day, keeping her from burning through a game’s content too quickly at a time when the average game’s price tag in relation to its raw quantity of content was vastly high than today. Without challenging puzzles, a player could easily finish a game like Eric the Unready in less than five hours, in spite of its having several times the amount of text of the average Infocom game (not to mention the addition of graphics, music, and sound effects). At a retail price of $35 or $40, this was a real issue. Today, when the game sells as a digital download for a small fraction of that price, it’s much less of one. Modern distribution choices, one might say, have finally allowed Eric the Unready to be exactly the experience it wants to be without apologies.

Certainly Bob has fantastically good memories of making this game; he still calls it the most purely enjoyable creative endeavor of his life. Those positive vibes positively ooze out of the finished product. Yet there was a shadow lurking behind all of Bob’s joy, lending it perhaps an extra note of piquancy. For he knew fairly early in Eric the Unready‘s development cycle that this would be the last game of this type he would get to design for the foreseeable future. Legend, you see, was on the verge of dumping the parser at last.

They had fought the good fight far longer than any of their peers. By the time Eric the Unready shipped in January of 1993, Legend had been the only remaining maker of parser-based adventure games for the mainstream, boxed American market for over two years. As part of their process of bargaining with marketplace realities, they had done everything they could think of to accommodate the huge number of gamers who regarded the likes of an Infocom game much as the average contemporary movie-goer regarded a Charlie Chaplin film. In a bid to broaden their customers demographic beyond the Infocom diehards, Legend from the start had added an admittedly clunky method of building sentences by mousing through long menus of verbs, nouns, and prepositions, along with copious multimedia gilding around the core text-adventure experience.

As budgets increased and the market grew still more demanding, Legend came to lean ever more heavily on both the mouse and their multimedia bells and whistles. By the time they got to Eric the Unready, their games was already starting to feel as much point-and-click as not, as the regular text-and-parser window got superseded for long stretches of time by animated cut scenes, by full-screen static illustrations, by mouseable onscreen documents, by mouse-driven visual puzzles. Even when the parser interface was on display, you could now choose to click on the onscreen illustrations of the scenes themselves instead of the words representing the things in them if you so chose.

Still, it was obvious that even an intermittent recourse to the parser just wouldn’t be tenable for much longer. In this new era of consumer computing, a command line had become for many or most computer users that inscrutable, existentially terrifying thing you got dumped into when something broke down in your Windows. The last place these people wanted to see such a thing was inside one of their games. And so the next step — that of dumping the parser entirely — was as logical as it was inevitable.

Eric the Unready wouldn’t quite be the absolute last of its breed — Legend’s Gateway 2: Homeworld would ship a few months after it — but it was the very last of Bob’s children of the type. Once Eric the Unready and Gateway 2 shipped, an era in gaming history came to an end. The movement that had begun when Scott Adams shipped the first copies of Adventureland on hand-dubbed cassette tapes for the Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1978 had run its course. Yes, there was a world of difference between Adams’s 16 K efforts with their two-word parsers and pidgin English and the tens of megabytes of multimedia splendor of an Eric the Unready or a Gateway 2, but they were all nevertheless members of the same basic gaming taxonomy. Now, though, no more games like them would ever appear again on the shelves of everyday software stores.

And make no mistake: something important — precious? — got lost when Legend finally dumped the parser entirely. Bob felt the loss as keenly as anyone; through all of his years in games which would follow, he would never entirely stop regretting it. Bob:

What you’re losing [in a point-and-click interface] is the sense of infinite possibility. There may still be a sense that there’s lots you can do, and you can still have puzzles and non-obvious interactions, but you’ve lost the ability to type anything you want. And it was a terrible thing to lose — but that’s the way the world was going.

I found the transition personally painful. That’s evidenced by the fact that I went back and wrote another parser-based game more than twenty years later. A large part of the joy of making this type of game for me is the sense that I’m the little guy in the box. It’s me and the player. The player senses my presence and feels like we’re engaged in this activity together. There’s a back-and-forthing — communication — between the two of us. It’s obviously all done on my part ahead of time, but the player should feel like there’s somebody behind the curtain, that it’s a live exchange. It should feel like somebody is responding as an individual to the player.

As Bob says, point-and-click games are … not necessarily worse, but definitely different. The personal connection with the designer is lost.

A long time ago now in what feels like another life, I entitled the first lengthy piece I ever wrote about interactive fiction “Let’s Tell a Story Together.” At its best, playing a text adventure really can feel like spending time one-on-one with a witty narrator, raconteur, and intellectual sparring partner. I would even go so far as to admit that text adventures have cured me of loneliness once or twice in my life. There’s nothing else in games comparable to this experience; only a great book might possibly compare, but even it lacks the secret sauce of interactivity. Indeed, text adventures may be the only truly literary form of computer game. Just as a book is the most personal, intimate form of traditional artistic expression, so is a text adventure its equivalent in interactive terms.

Granted, some of those qualities may initially be obscured in Eric the Unready by all the flash surrounding the command prompt. But embrace the universe of possibilities that are still offered up by that blinking cursor, sitting there asking you to try absolutely anything you wish to, and you’ll find that the spirit which changed the lives of so many of us when we encountered our first Infocom game lives on even here. Don’t just rush through the fairly trivial task of solving this game; try stuff, just to see what the little man behind the curtain says back. Trust me when I say that he’s very good company. One can only hope that all of those who bought Eric the Unready in 1993 appreciated him while he was still around.

(My huge thanks go to Bob Bates for setting aside yet another few hours to talk about the life and times of Legend circa 1992 to 1993.

Eric the Unready can be purchased on GOG.com. It’s well worth the money.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/eric-the-unready/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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Crunchyroll Favorites 2018 Part One: Anime and Manga!

2018 was a wild ride for all of us, but at least we had a whole lot of great anime and manga to keep us entertained along the way! We laughed, we cried, we recoiled in horror, and we waited for the "ahh, you are motherf**ker?" moment in Pop Team Epic's anime that never actually came.

We recently talked about our favorite anime of the past season, and our most-anticipated anime of the coming season, so that brings us to now, to the now-annual tradition of Crunchyroll Favorites (can you believe we've been doing this for eight years?!), where CR's staff, editors, and writers share what stood out most to them over the entirety of 2018. The rules were simple: for Part One, only anime, manga, and related media that were released in 2018 (or received a Western release in 2018), or experienced a major milestone (like starting a new season or closing up a major arc).

There's a whole lot to look at in Part One--let's get started!

Nate Ming

Devilman Crybaby - Satisfying violence and a pulsing soundtrack headline this savage modern retelling of the Devilman legend--this is the kind of thing that got me into anime in the first place, and it felt great to be back.

Dragon Ball Super ending - Meanwhile, Dragon Ball Super wrapped up with an insane 3v1 fight to the finish in the Tournament of Power. Imagine a group of grown men sitting around screaming at the TV like excited children--because in that moment, with a gassed-out, shoulder-to-shoulder Goku and Freeza meeting Jiren head-on… we were again.

HINAMATSURI - MY SMARTPHONE!! I figured Hinamatsuri would just be this goofy domestic comedy about a beleaguered yakuza adopting a psychic child, but then it got real. Like, "why am I crying so much at Anzu's story" real. It's so good, and one I really need to rewatch.

March comes in like a lion - The beauty of March is that it's sad, and sometimes a downer, but never a miserable pity parade that constantly dumps on its characters. There's growth, and a light at the end of the tunnel--healing and catharsis that come after the worst parts of life. We're going to lose the people we love, and we're going to be treated like garbage by the people around us… but that's never the end of the story if you have people you love and trust by your side.

Shonen Jump - This is what I'd been dreaming of for years, but always felt too difficult to implement… until now. New chapters? Free every week. The massive back catalog, along with an updated list of currently-running titles? TWO DOLLARS A MONTH. This is madness, and it's never been a better time to see people reading classics like Dragon Ball for the first time ever.

Honorable Mentions: A Place Further Than the Universe, Asobi Asobase - workshop of fun -, Laid-Back Camp

Cayla Coats

Liz and the Blue Bird - Sound! Euphonium is one of my favorite series, and this film takes the franchise to new artistic heights. Director Naoko Yamada and composer Kensuke Ushio reunite and create something truly special together.

A Place Further Than the Universe - This wasn’t the best-directed, best-animated, or best-scored anime of the year, but the sum is greater than the parts in this case. A Place Further is by far my favorite broadcast anime of the year.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime - I love “another world” anime that focus on worldbuilding and characterization over action, but Slime has both in spades. Also, protagonist Rimuru is super OP, but they’re so likable that I don’t really care.

Violet Evergarden - There’s a lot I could say about this stunningly-produced show, but I’ll just note that toward the beginning of the first episode, Violet picks up an object using her mouth. While it seems like a weird character eccentricity at first, it’s later revealed that she has trouble using her new prosthetic hands. That’s a pretty good indication of how thoughtful the entire series is.

Dead Dead Demon’s Dedede Destruction - The newest series to be brought stateside from Goodnight Punpun author Inio Asano, Destruction is easily my favorite work from him to date. Taking the trademark eccentricity and attention to detail of his other titles, Destruction merges it with a much less grimdark tone that I find hugely refreshing.

Nicole Mejias

Golden Kamuy - It’s no secret that I love Golden Kamuy to bits! The unique characters got me hooked, and then everything else (the story, action, drama and comedy) reeled me in to keep anticipating each and every episode. When’s season 3?!

Pop Team Epic - Where were you when the anime gods blessed us with Pop Team Epic? It’s basically anime shitposting, and it’s absolutely GLORIOUS! Yeah, I’m gonna be thinking about Hellshake Yano for a very long time.

Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles - If you know me, you know I love my ramen. And this show was a testament to how amazing and delicious ramen is while presenting a different array of wonderful ramen you can find in Japan! Of course, after each episode, I was left with the overwhelming desire for ramen, which was hard to curb.

Banana Fish (manga reprints) - Once news of the reprints began spreading around, I knew it was time for me to actually experience the majesty of Banana Fish! I don’t know what I expected, but I was addicted, reading all the volumes so fast, and I had to know what was going to happen next, so I went from volume to volume until I reached the end… What a thrill! I can’t believe it took me this long to check this series out. I’m glad I did!

Pokemon marathon on Twitch - The second Twitch announced this marathon, I was SO ready for it! I watched the old Pokémon anime when I was a kid, and watching the marathon brought back a lot of fun memories. There were also a bunch of moments in the anime I didn’t remember at all, like that bizarre Kangaskhan episode… It was a fun time to relive the show with thousands of other fans on Twitch!

Daniel Dockery

Dr. Stone - This is the “Are you reading this? No? WELL YOU BETTER GET ON THAT” manga of the year, along with Promised Neverland. It’s so good and funny and I just love it.

“Mr. Osomatsu In Hell” - The second season of Mr. Osomatsu was more uneven than the first, but the season finale is a work of art. I really hope the movie is good, and that we get a Season 3.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind - I only got into JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure this year, and the more I watch it, the more I like it. It’s one of the few pieces of media that I’ve seen that is just as good as everyone made it out to be.

My Hero Academia: Two Heroes - No theater experience will ever top hearing an entire audience erupt into applause when All Might yelled “CAROLINA SMASH.”

That Time I Got Reincarnated As Yamcha - Poor Yamcha. His stock has dropped significantly since he went toe-to-toe with Goku in his first Dragon Ball appearance. Luckily, this manga knows that, and is more hilarious for it. Next I hope for “That Time I Got Reincarnated As That One Pterodactyl That Tried To Mess With Goku In Dragon Ball Chapter 1.”

Peter Fobian

A Place Further Than the Universe - A Place Further felt like it was going against the grain in many ways, as a character-driven drama without many of the usual anime trappings. It’s a damn near perfect show with an excellent story, tight character writing, and some truly brutal emotional beats delivered in novel and creative ways.

Planet With - Maybe some of the tightest storytelling I’ve ever seen, getting 24 episodes' worth of content finished in half that, at a pace that felt perfect. If you decide to check it out, be ready for two full narrative arcs and a ton of interesting character-based subplots all serving the overarching message of the value of compassion and forgiveness.

SSSS.GRIDMAN - It feels like I’m always waiting for the next TRIGGER anime that has the same bombastic energy as Gurren Lagann or Kill la Kill, but GRIDMAN proved they’re able to deliver a muted and thoughtful show as well. Amemiya penned a love letter to tokusatsu so reverent that even people like me can feel his passion. Some characters felt underutilized, but GRIDMAN was charming, mysterious, and stuck the landing.

Laid-Back Camp - I wish there were more anime like this: realizing a new episode of this anime was out became a weekly highlight. It’s chill, it’s funny, it’s educational, and it doesn’t pull any anime shenanigans. Just like the title says, you have absolutely nothing to worry about while watching this show.

HINAMATSURI - I remember seeing a promotion for this anime almost a year before it was released, showing Mao’s kung-fu sequence and thought: this would be a martial arts anime. Nothing could have prepared me for one of the single funniest anime I’ve ever seen. Hinamatsuri has some of the greatest comedic timing this year, and still managed to pack in beautifully-animated psychic fights and some ridiculously powerful emotional moments. I still have whiplash.

Ricky Soberano

Fairy Tail Final Season - This marks the end of this legendary shonen and inevitable Fairy Tail-induced tears well up with every episode that inches slowly to the end. It may look like a victory lap on the surface, but the show is answering every burning question, fueling a fire in hearts, and cementing every reason why it’ll be missed.

As Miss Beelzebub Likes It. - As someone who doesn’t go out of their way to look for cute anime, I was pleasantly surprised at myself and this show for the effect it had on my well-being. It was my guiltiest and fluffiest pleasure of the year and I enjoyed how light, adorably cute, and heartwarming it was.

Attack on Titan - I’ve been holding off on watching this for as long as I could and I definitely regret holding back on it. I will note: I did become vegan for a month after watching the first episode. Now I’m left screaming at the screen and dissecting every moment. With stakes as real as they could get, and consistent losing, I live for the small but progressing wins in the neverending battle for humanity.

Food Wars! The Third Plate - The tables have turned and a new set of rules have left our favorite food orgasm inducers to fight for their survival despite an entire system against them. The creations only got more mouth watering and frankly so did the more visible presence of Joichiro-san. In all seriousness, Hayama-san’s betrayal and Erina’s heightened courage in front of her father was enough to induce a lot of stress eating. Next stop: the final showdown.

Emily Bushman

Mo Dao Zu Shi - Technically a donghua (Chinese Animation), and not traditional Japanese anime, this is BY FAR one of my favorite shows of the year. There’s magic, it takes place in ancient China, and there’s lots of zombie slaying. The character designs are gorgeous, the pacing and action are exceptionally well done, and there’s juuuuuuust enough romantic tension to keep my blood warm.

Banana Fish - I didn’t catch this manga when I was younger, but my roommate told me I was missing out. We started watching the anime, which entranced me with cool character designs and excellent pacing. I got impatient and read the manga (which is just as good, if not better than the anime), and cried my eyes out at the ending.

Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai - I thought I was going to hate this, and instead ended up loving it. The dialogue is fast-paced, which keeps otherwise off-color jokes from souring, and instead transforms them into witticisms worthy of a chuckle. It is fun, heartwarming, and a little nostalgic, but does a wonderful job of transforming those perceived insurmountable imperfections into challenges worth overcoming.

A Place Further Than The Universe - Great characters, wonderful development, original story line, dramatic without being overwrought, an improbable scenario without being impossible. It made me cry big, fat tears (I was alone, in my apartment, it was kind of sad honestly), but I loved the salty-clean feeling of relief and forgiveness that came after I finished the show.

Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits - This is a great show that DID NOT get enough love. It was a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, but also great from a cooking blog perspective. Aoi, the main character, makes a lot of foods that are interesting and not pedantic. It’s definitely a slice of life, but has a main character that is steadfast in her determination to burn through the prejudice, anger, or sadness of those she meets through her cooking.

Noelle Ogawa

The Promised Neverland - I got into it this year and what an absolute treat! Having grown up on the slow pacing of the Big Three, this turned the Jump formulas all around. Excellent cast of characters, a condensed story, intrigue about the world, a constant wonder- this series had it all. Emma is the rare female shonen protagonist who is completely capable on her own terms, and every character is sharp. It’s worked its way to be one of my favorite Jump series, and I can’t wait for the anime.

Pop Team Epic - I genuinely looked forward to this every week. It’s so hard to describe how absolutely wild it is. It’s hard to describe what exactly Pop Team Epic is but it’s definitely some kind of an experience. Being able to catch all the many cultural references were always a fun game to play for every episode, as well as seeing what chaotic entities Popuko and Pipimi had to shove into our faces.

That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime - This caught me off guard because I really am not a fan of 99% of isekai. I’d passed this series off as silly because of the title but I was wrong. It’s still an isekai in its bones, but it combines having fun with having something to say- with a slime protag, of all things. I’m really excited to see more!

My Solo Exchange Diary - Nagata Kabi’s autobiographical work always cut me to the core. Her dealing with both depression and her seuxality with finding her place in the world really speaks to me. At the same time, it’s not a dismal story at all, but one that’s filled with hope. It’s about trying to find your way in the world and make do with what you have, and I think we can all relate to that.

Paul Chapman

Planet With - A series that squeezes 52 episodes' worth of story into a trim 12, Planet With is packed with honesty and heart. Few shows leave me with a feeling of hope for the future, but Planet With's relentless positivity and effortless heroism in the face of unspeakable tragedy speak to how fiction can embody the best aspects of humanity.

A Place Further than the Universe - Blurring the boundaries of the “cute girls doing cute things” subgenre, A Place Further than the Universe is a heartfelt (and sometimes heartbreaking) drama about coming to grips with loss while on a journey of self-discovery. Incidentally, any moe show that features the main cast becoming seasick barf-monsters for an entire episode is A+ material.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby - It's hard to imagine that a tie-in anime for an as-yet-unreleased smart phone game that's supposed to sell viewers on the glories of Japanese horse racing can also be so consistently entertaining and emotionally sincere, but that's just the sort of thing that makes Umamusume: Pretty Derby a dark horse candidate for pure viewing pleasure.

Cells at Work! - Equal parts hilarious and horrifying, Cells at Work! makes learning the basics of human biology fun, because it's nice to imagine that every individual part of my cellular anatomy is just as dorky, self-conscious, and occasionally inept as I am.

Pop Team Epic - Every so often, there comes a work of art that so overwhelms me with its beauty and its ugliness that it leaves a scar upon my soul. But enough about Devilman Crybaby, 2018 is also the year that gave us the inimitable, inscrutable anime adaptation of Bkub Okawa's Pop Team Epic, and no one's complaining (except you).

Nick Creamer

Liz and the Blue Bird - As an unlikely followup to a side story from Sound! Euphonium’s second season, Liz and the Blue Bird was basically guaranteed to have niche appeal. But even if you haven’t seen the show it’s spun off from, Liz is a stunning accomplishment in any right, a gorgeous expression of love composed by one of the greatest directors in anime. Beyond its overt beauty, Liz uses visuals and music to perfectly evoke the mental states of its heroines throughout, making it easy to get carried into their world. Liz is a perfect jewel of a film.

Violet Evergarden - This has certainly been a strong year for Kyoto Animation! Along with the stunning Liz, their full-length Evergarden took my breath away again and again, elevating a poignant melodrama with all the animated splendor and thoughtful visual storytelling you expect from this team. It feels like my favorite animation studio are somehow leveling up.

After the Rain - There are far too few dramas about actual adults facing realistic problems in anime, and After the Rain stands as a welcome and brilliantly executed counter to the trend. Equally sympathetic to its teenage heroine’s feelings of displacement and its middle-aged hero’s feelings of regret, After the Rain paints a thoughtful and sympathetic portrait of its melancholy leads from start to finish. More people need to check out this insightful and very pretty show!

Planet With - Satoshi Mizukami has long been one of my favorite mangaka, and so I was thrilled to see his work finally debuting on the small screen. The results don’t disappoint; Planet With is a wildly ambitious, creative, and emphatically humanist tale of interplanetary war, secret identities, and much else besides. Along with providing some of the most thoughtful human insights of the anime year, it’s probably also the only show this year to feature a space general in a giant cat suit.

March comes in like a lion - March has stood among the best anime dramas for three straight years now, and the conclusion of its second season was an absolute triumph. Having slowly and compassionately articulated Rei’s journey from depression to genuine self-love, the show was at last able to extend its focus outwards, and celebrate the journeys of all the people Rei has come to care for. From its vivid visual embellishments and keen psychological insight to its great empathy for all its characters, March was a wonderful experience this year, and a show I’ll dearly miss.

Wilhelm Donko

A Place Further Than the Universe - The heartfelt story about four girls’ spectacular journey to Antarctica is not only my personal anime of the year; it also managed to secure itself a spot among my all-time favorite shows. Add highly-likeable characters, a great soundtrack, as well as gorgeous visuals to an excellent story, and you have one of the most well-crafted anime in recent years.

Laid-Back Camp - Laid-Back Camp accomplished the feat of making camping out alone in the cold look extremely enticing. Its cozy atmosphere, light humor, and the simply gorgeous-to-look-at backgrounds always made me want to grab my tent, and head out to the great outdoors after each episode.

Harukana Receive - This was a perfect fit for this year’s summer anime season, getting us in the summer spirit with a whole season of nothing but beach volleyball in tropical Okinawa. On top of its vibrant visuals, the show also had a great upbeat soundtrack.

Kara Dennison

ZOMBIE LAND SAGA - The series’s vagueposting approach to publicity was as interesting as it was risky, but none of us could have been prepared for undead idols finding closure while Mamoru Miyano yells a lot. The back half of the series was especially good, touching on everything from personal identity to the spiral of depression. And in spite of all that heavy stuff mixed in, it brought me so much joy.

Lupin the 3rd Part 5 - I will always be a sucker for new Lupin, but there was something extra special about this season. Maybe it was the no-fear approach to action balanced out with the characters staying in-character, a dichotomy the franchise sometimes fumbles. Maybe it was just how deeply important the characters’ intelligence was, to the point of reminding us that Lupin is no mental slouch. Or maybe it was the callback filler episodes. At the moment, probably my favorite of the many Lupins.

Pop Team Epic - From a news standpoint, this series was a disaster to cover because we never knew the truth from the troll. Watching as a fan, and one with very little experience with the 4koma, was delightful. The cultural references were on point, and Norio Wakamoto made his way onto the cast list at least five episodes earlier than expected.

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And that's a wrap for Part One! Be sure to tune in at the same time tomorrow for Part Two, where we share our favorite VIDEO GAMES of 2018! If you're in the mood for more CR Favorites, here are the links to past years' features:

Crunchyroll Favorites 2017 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2016 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2015 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2014 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2013 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2012 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll News' Best of 2011 Part One | Part Two

What were your favorite anime and manga of 2018? Remember, this is a FAVORITES list, not a BEST-OF list, so there are no wrong answers--sound off in the comments and share your favorites!

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Nate Ming is the Features Editor for Crunchyroll News and creator of the long-running Fanart Friday column. You can follow him on Twitter at @NateMing. His comic, Shaw City Strikers, launches January 15, 2019.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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homeimprovementsone · 6 years

Text

British interior designer Nicky Haslam’s eye is as fresh as ever

“It was all by mistake,” Nicky Haslam says with a laugh because we speak by telephone in mid December. He is describing the way interior designer into a host of celebrities and aristocrats or she he, entered to the industry from the 1970s with no formal instruction but also a wealth of life experience. Escaping the bustle of New York — in which he functioned in Vogue under Diana Vreeland, and arrived in 1961 with photographer David Bailey — Haslam settled in a ranch out of Phoenix. Despite emerging in a Warhol movie and moving from the glamorous group of Manhattan society, Haslam desired to be a cowboy.

The decorating Haslam did over the Arizona property attracted admirers and he had already garnered praise for his art that is decorating back from the Big Apple. Bolstered with a reputation, Haslam returned to London to decorate a townhouse to get Lord Hesketh. “I grew up among the perfect proportions and colours,” Haslam notes about his natural ability to style decadent but liveable distances, a that was celebrated by an Andrew Martin International Interior Designer of the Year award in 2016. “And if I say right, I mean appealing.”

Nicky Haslam is famous for spaces (like the salon shown previously) with a clever spirit that’s always in good taste. Courtesy of Nh-design. co.uk

Really, the full biography of Haslam reads as a lifelong pursuit of pleasure and beauty, and also to be given with what’s referred to as the Oscars of Interior Design is matching. With a social circle that’s gained him coverage from the gossip columns and Vanity Fair — and an customer list — it’s regrettable that Haslam’s accomplishments along with the passion behind them tend to be eclipsed by his jet-setting exploits. But as founder of the Andrew Martin Awards, Martin Waller notes, it’s a life that has given Haslam the opportunity to research his intuition that is boundless. “Nicky has known everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to Andy Warhol, from Mick Jagger to Siegfried Sassoon,” he states. “He has spent his entire life amongst gifted and brilliant people. Inevitably it has produced a multi-faceted, multi-layered cultural hinterland that has influenced his job.”

Haslam’s interiors are discovered by Barbados to Russia, each showing an eye centered on fusing whimsy and sophistication. A Mayfair townhouse project boasts a dining room teeming with floral motifs, while a house in New Orleans includes a dining table within a library, living area’s chandelier dangling from a ceiling painted with a sky. “I guess he is truly a rebel,” says Colette van den Thillart, an interior designer that acted as creative director of NH Design for 13 years, and now collaborates with the newest from her base in Toronto on projects including furniture and fabric design. “[He is] a freedom fighter of the decorative soul, and of the decorative head” She recalls her first meeting. He had been wearing track pants, a white T-shirt and lace jacket, “and yet he had been wrapped in this agonizingly romantic inside,” van den Thillart recalls. “I really just thought he was the funniest, maddest thing I had ever laid eyes on.”

A knack for impressions has suited Haslam nicely. After she was a teenager, in a party thrown by Lady Antonia Fraser in 32, Alexandra Shulman, the editor in chief of British Vogue, met him. “He was immensely friendly, instantly, and even though he was some years older than me, he took the opportunity to make friends with me,” Shulman says. Both have stayed in the exact same circuit throughout their livelihood, and Haslam was current in the fete for its book’s 100th anniversary last May. “I believe that the way that he communicates with people is a element that’s struck him in good stead,” Shulman says. “The fact that he’s curious about people, and considering the brand new, he is considering the young — it’s reflected in his celebrity.”

Indeed, Haslam proceeds to find the unique inside the design landscape, and states that he’s intrigued by “the sciences coming to decoration” through new goods with metallic and transparent capabilities. His dedication to creating novel distances means he is hesitant to charge the decor landscape with the contribution of media. Speaking of social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, he states that they produce a desire among customers to “desire things to look like a hotel, or enjoy their buddies’, or enjoy the previous restaurant they’ve been to.” He sums up the consequences in one word: dull. And Haslam’s fast to call out the gap between most social networking users along with his acquaintances. “It is for the young and the aspiring, and not the tried-and-true people of preference,” he states.

What is the aspiring masses learn instead? Described by Shulman as “omnipresent” and from Waller as “the essence of taste, erudition and sophistication but with a wit and playfulness,” maybe van den Thillart amounts up his charismatic contribution for his accidental profession greatest: “He really knows how to suck the marrow from every facet of life, which appetite spills over to the job.”

Nicky Haslam will speak with Odessa Paloma Parker through the Interior Design Show’s Globe Style Saturday on Jan. 21 at 4:30 p.m. to Learn More, visit .

from Home Improvements http://home-improvements-one.com/british-interior-designer-nicky-haslams-eye-is-as-fresh-as-ever/

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homeimprovementsonecom · 6 years

Text

British interior designer Nicky Haslam’s eye is as fresh as ever

Nicky Haslam is famous for spaces (like the salon shown previously) with a clever spirit that’s always in good taste. Courtesy of Nh-design. co.uk

Nicky Haslam will speak with Odessa Paloma Parker through the Interior Design Show’s Globe Style Saturday on Jan. 21 at 4:30 p.m. to Learn More, visit .

from Home Improvements http://home-improvements-one.com/british-interior-designer-nicky-haslams-eye-is-as-fresh-as-ever/

0 notes