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#which the author admits

tutyayilmazz · 8 months

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The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere, and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking — not literally everyone, of course, but statistically, as if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures and car horns known as “Italian.” To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.

There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Måneskin’s age. The guitarist Thomas Raggi played the riff to “Don’t Wanna Sleep,” the lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David — the band’s singer and, at age 24, its oldest member — charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, wore a minidress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raggi wore nonporous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Ethan Torchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise, they sounded as if Motley Crüe had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals.

That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Måneskin “only manage to confirm how hard rock & roll has to work these days to be noticed,” and a viral Pitchfork review called their most recent album “absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.” But this kind of thumbs up/thumbs down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin — the name is Danish and pronounced MOAN-eh-skin — you can fire up the internet and add to the more than nine billion streams Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. As for whether Måneskin is good, de gustibus non est disputandum, as previous Italians once said: In matters of taste, there can be no arguments.

You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience: the culturally-if-not-personally-familiar commodity of a stadium rock show, delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro — 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine — kicked in on “Gasoline,” a song Måneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus: “Standing alone on that hill/using your fuel to kill/we won’t take it standing still/watch us dance.”

The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock ’n’ roll, which has established certain conventions over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn’t have to be real — you probably don’t even want it to be — but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it.

The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation (I’m 46) experienced jazz. The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Måneskin will take this business on a multivenue tour of the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.

“I think the genre thing is like ... ” Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. “We can do a metaphor: If you eat fish, meat and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you’ll be like: ‘Wow, potatoes! I like potatoes; potatoes are great.’ But potatoes have been there the whole time.” Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy: The implication was that rock, like the potato, is here to stay; but what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone’s favorite?

Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is “Rocket 88,” recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythym band in 1951. It’s about a car and, in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock ’n’ roll emerged: a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously.

Although and possibly because rock started as Black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who), which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium/progressive era (Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner) that now constitutes the bulk of classic-rock radio gave way, eventually, to punk (the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat) and then glam metal: Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans.

It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock’s cultural hegemony began to wane. As the ’90s progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as “rock” to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the ’00s — the Strokes, the Killers, Kings of Leon — constituted rock’s last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than No. 4. Let us say, then, that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That’s a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock’s advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry; Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing Guitar Hero.

The members of Måneskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school; David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ad seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle-call audition for the Italian version of “The X Factor.” They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum.

In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song “Zitti e Buoni” (whose title roughly translates to “shut up and behave”) in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe, and Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and “I Wanna Be Your Slave” broke the British Top 10. A European tour followed, as well as U.S. appearances at festivals and historic venues.

This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovison live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage, and members of the media accused him of snorting cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It’s exactly this kind of incongruous detail — this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine — that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin’s presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States.

“They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much, and then it’s not pure rock ’n’ roll, because you’re not in a garage, looking ugly,” De Angelis says. “The more conservative side, they’re shocked because of how we dress or move onstage, or the boys wear makeup.”

She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics: the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous and the more tolerant if not downright desensitized American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because — like many rock stars before them — most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raggi told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university, “Just to try to understand, ‘What is that?’”

One question that emerged early in my discussions with Måneskin’s friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor Jeremy Larson wrote that their new album, “RUSH!” sounds “like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150” and “seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom” en route to a score of 2.0 (out of 10). While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.

Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” (score: 10.0) and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop/commercial elements of “RUSH!” (e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression) left him unable to do.

This perspective reflects the post-’90s rock consensus (PNRC) that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that rock is not just a structure of song but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock’s earliest days as Black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal; this adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the ’60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called “alternative.” Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.

In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian minitour, I had lunch with the band, as well as two of their managers, Marica Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on “The X Factor,” and Ferraguzzo was its musical director; around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moysa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue and “creative playground” that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for Moysa, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity — basically describing the concept of vertical integration.

Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of “RUSH!” along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moysa, Ferraguzzo played for me Måneskin’s then-unreleased new single, “Honey (Are U Coming?)” which features many of the band’s signature moves — guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style — but also has David singing in a higher register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo’s phone, and it sounded clean and well produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it.

“There’s hundreds of people working and talking about you and giving opinions,” De Angelis said at lunch. “So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything.” Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band — resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves — and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an M.B.A. make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass.

The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge of certain eras in American rock history but were only dimly aware of others. Raggi, for instance, loves Motley Crüe and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair-metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Måneskin’s timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock most respected by Anglophone critics was produced by independent labels that did not have strong overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the “emo” era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie/punk/D.I.Y. period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC.

The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That’s the whole point of being a snob. And snobbery is obsolete anyway; digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them. The longevity of rock ’n’ roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80, rendering the fan-versus-society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe. And the economics of the industry — in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music, and the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour — have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life.

Yet rock as a cluster of signifiers retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives, rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, et cetera. Also like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe.

In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin’s show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000 — was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted: Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60½ and said she had skipped a reservation to see da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in order to stay in line. “When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want,” she said.

The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black T-shirts on the pitch became a field of multicolored ponchos, and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” briefly rolling to his back, while De Angelis — who is very good at making lips-parted-in-ecstasy-type rock faces — played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr.

The rain stopped in time for “Kool Kids,” a punk-inspired song in which David affects a Cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock ’n’ roll: “Cool kids, they do not like rock/they only listen to trap and pop.” These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like “I like doin’ things I love, yeah” and “Cool kids, they do not vomit.”

“Kool Kids” was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance and then, as the band walked off, to make we’re-not-worthy bows around Raggi’s abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semichoreographed, but management assured me that the Kool Kids were not professional dancers — just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these Kool Kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.

The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sara, two young members of a Måneskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sara put it, “they allow you to be yourself.” When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorca — who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn’t — said: “Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself. But you don’t know that at first. You feel like you can’t.”

Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics, the part that is maybe independent from time itself: the continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned — when the response to your demand to rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day is, “Great, exactly, thank you.” In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century, to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that.

#måneskin #maneskin #i had a free nyt article so here you go #the article is so painfully a middle aged american perspective #which the author admits #and like thinking the fans on stage is staged?!??#or like how there can be no more authentic rebellion - maybe that's what it's like from your cushy position #but doesn't go into tdi at all #the stuff about the industry surrounding them i agree and its worth the read though

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wastrelwoods · 10 months

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Vimes really was dragged into financial stability kicking and screaming

HONESTLY I don't know which watch book this is specifically in response to but since my most recent reread was Feet of Clay its making me think about Vimes ditching his new expensive functional boots at the first hint of an opportunity and demanding someone nearby trade with him so he can wander around in the fog with the soles made of wet cardboard. And he starts naming the street corner he's on by the feel of the cobbles and the other guy is like. yeah? the street sign is right there Commander I know that?

#also the bit at the end abt being anti authoritarian even tho he is authority now. practically zen #it is so funny that instead of power being a corrupting influence he's always like. gritting his teeth through it #and admitting that it is helpful. which is the only reason he'll let himself be given a dukedom #but he WILLN'T wear the feathery hat #discworld #pigeon post

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lloydfrontera · 3 months

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"I don't run fast. I may be faster than ordinary people, but I am not confident I can outrun the locusts. But you are different. You are fast." “But with you on my back, I cannot ascertain that I will succeed. You could have easily run away if I stopped them in the front," Javier reasoned. "I'm doing this because I don't want that." “...” "Come on. Do you have some fantasy to become a hero in your head? Why do you keep trying to die so often? You did this back in Cremo as well." “...” "Let's just stretch the idea, and you stay behind so awesomely and die. And I live because of your sacrifice. You think that would make me feel good? Huh?" "Master Lloyd..." "I don't want that. So run faster. Come on! Giddy up!" [...] "Anyway, let's leave this place together alive. It won't be right if one stays and dies while the other runs away and lives. It's also just unfair." “...” Lloyd Frontera. Javier wondered how much truth was in his words. Sometimes, no, most of the time, the young master puzzled him. But he knew one thing for sure. He wanted to get out of this place alive together. "I like the sound of that."

bk moon setting up that lloyd doesn't see javier dying for his sake as an aceptable price to pay all the way back in the giant locust attack,,, lloyd not wanting to sacrifice javier, not even for his own life, even back then,,,, this is a hundred chapters before lloyd even admits they're friends,,, setting up the crux of the conflict of the latter half of the story more than two hundred chapters before it's even introduced,,, ultimately foreshadowing the ending,,, sick and twisted and i really fucking dig it

#i talk a lot <3 #tged #the greatest estate developer #lloyd frontera #javier asrahan #llojavi #ch 107 #i gotta admit... the man does know how to write a good novel... which is more than i can say from so many other authors kajhdjksfsd

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archerofunspeakablelove · 3 months

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Russian Roulette update: Yassen's conversation with John towards the end of Командир (The Commander) genuinely made me tear up a bit. Y'all if I hadn't started shipping them at the start of Eagle Strike the first time I saw them interact this scene would've 100% convinced me because the way Yassen was so hesitant about working for Scopia at the start and had considered his other options, but now that John is tutoring him he desperately wants to prove his loyalty and competency. In the jungle John tells him he could leave if he wanted to, Scorpia had taught him enough about disguise - all this he had considered before himself, yet when John brings it up Yassen immediately shoots it down, becomes agitated. Why? Because he feels like John is questioning his competency. Remember what he said? "I can do this." John wants Yassen to not have to walk down the same path that he did, but ironically he is the reason Yassen even cares so much about succeeding in Scorpia in the first place. His cover worked a bit too well and now Yassen has a very fixed idea of who John is, and he will do anything to prove himself to his version of John.

You get it, right? The way they want completely different things out for each other, completely incompatible things, because they do not understand each other. These types of dynamics really just eat me up from the inside

#chaotic ramblings #alex rider #russian roulette #yassen gregorovich #john rider #man they really need a ship name i need SOMETHING to tag these posts with #the fact that yassen's relationship with john is very much personal to him even though he would never admit it #and it just so happens that to him john is basically an embodiment of scorpia #and he wants to impress john so by proxy he decides the best way to do that is to prove himself to scorpia #do you get it. do you get the dynamic #the tension in that scene was phenomenal i felt like i was reading fanfiction #which i suppose means that every fic author in this fandom does a wonderful job of capturing their relationship #just. the way yassen is so on edge whenever john says something about how he could still leave if he wanted to. before it's too late #the way he is so confused as to why john would bring this up because it doesnt fit with the very fixed idea he has in his mind about #who john is. the way he says “i killed some of them” as if to say see? i am like you. i can be like you. please give me a chance #his admiration for and attachment to john is so incredibly unhealthy which is unsurprising given that he has not had a normal #relationship of any sort since he was 14 and everyone he knew died #he wants so badly to be who he thinks john wants him to be. and that means that he will never be who he wants to be or who john wants him t #be or who he thinks john wants him to be. he is pursuing something that just doesn't exist #god i am so normal about these two

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rpfisfine · 1 month

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i would love some book recs linda since ur writing is so scrumptious

Omg...you really think so.. 💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕 thats so kind of you to say i really genuinely appreciate it more than i can express and i love answering asks like this one so of course no problem here are some of my fav books of all time:

lolita, despair, pale fire & invitation to a beheading by vladimir nabokov

pretty much everything by hunter s thompson but especially fear and loathing in las vegas & hell's angels

the legacy of luna by julia butterfly hill (i recommend this book with all my heart it will change your life!!!!)

a single man by christopher isherwood

the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby by tom wolfe

the stranger & the fall by albert camus

the unexpurgated diary (1931-1932) of anaïs nin

one hundred years of solitude & love in the time of cholera by gabriel garcía márquez

infinite jest by david foster wallace

three novels: molloy, malone dies + the unnamable by samuel beckett

catcher in the rye by joe salinger

to kill a mockingbird by harper lee (kind of a really obvious english major choice tbh but i just rly rly love it)

and the ass saw the angel by nick cave and the godfather by mario puzo aaaaand i think that's everything

#i will admit my book recs kind of look like those generic top 150 books you have to read in your life lists with practically no #female author in sight which is rly embarrassing for me but i just rly rly like gonzo journalism & most stream of consciousness writing #styles like i would genuinely be fine not reading anything else for the rest of my life although it would probably benefit me in some way #asks #also ive only just now started catch-22 and naked lunch and i love what im seeing so far so i would recommend those as well

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selkiecoded · 5 months

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law articles are always such a drag and also very funny sometimes. reading one for my sociology class that contextualizes itself by going "so when dobbs v jackson happened, we (the authors) theorized that abortion rights could be based in the equal protections clause instead of the 14th amendment. the judge said that didnt apply here. the judge also didnt acknowledge any of our many arguments about why actually, it would apply here! so we're going to talk about it more to reinforce what a fucking ignorant, misogynistic douchebag he is!" in so many words

#specifically judge alito cited a court case to dismiss the EPC that the authors proposed were superseded by two other cases lol #i cant handle reading law articles all the time but ill admit that they can be occasionally pretty interesting.#if youre willing to power through the legalese that is. which can be very strong or weak depending.

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shortfeather · 3 months

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the way the water echoes

did a little sprint based on that neverend mod idea, centered on cleo courtesy of @tripping-sideways. posting this mostly unedited; i think tumblr-only writing is gonna be more casual for me than AO3.

warnings: isolation, sort of imprisonment, liminal spaces, drowning, minecraft death mechanics including deliberately forcing a respawn

It doesn’t really hit her until she’s staring at the pit that leads to a second level, communicator hanging silent at her waist, how much trouble she’s in.

Cleo had been searching for an End portal a little closer to their base. Even with the Nether shrinking the distance eightfold, the main portal was ridiculously far from their home, and considering the amount of endstone she was going to be using this season it made sense to find one nearby. The stronghold had been half flooded, and they’d come close to death against the Drowned in the halls before finally making it to the portal room.

The lava was warm against their undead skin, even as the portal frame exuded a voidlike chill. To their delight, the frame had been mostly filled, just two eyes short. Cleo had popped them in, set a bed down for spawn, double-checked their gear, and hopped on through. Had bent their knees slightly, the way every new player is taught, so the jolt of the hard obsidian landing doesn’t do any damage.

Instead, she’d fallen far and landed in a deep pool of water, surrounded by white walls and with a beautiful blue sky shining down from above her. The exact opposite of what they expected.

Really, this whole dimension is about as different from the End as it gets. The End is all disconnected islands, here is a never-ending series of halls and rooms. The End is dark and cold, here is bright and pleasantly warm, enough for the cool water that covers the floor to feel like a comfort. The End is dead, and here there are bushes of something her inventory calls liminalgae, and occasionally, groups creatures similar to axolotls called poolfish. She can even pick them up, attracting them with the liminalgae like a cow to wheat. They're rather cute. The End is mostly void, here there is a beautiful flat ocean beyond the walls that an invisible barrier prevents her from reaching.

The End is a place Cleo knows how to leave, and here she does not.

She’s tried. The first thing she did upon scrambling out of the water was message X, only for her communicator to show a chat validation error. Their messages can’t go through, though waiting about ten minutes shows that they can still see the messages everyone else is sending. That’s comforting, to a degree; if they wait long enough, someone will realize something is wrong, and Xisuma can do his admin-y things and get them out of here. She’d told Joe what she was doing right before she found this dimension; maybe he’ll look into it even before someone thinks to call X in.

While she’d waited for other messages to come in, she’d taken a look around the room. Everything was made out of some variant of an unfamiliar block, similar in look to an iron block, but with a grid pattern and a feel like glazed terracotta. The entrance was decorated beautifully with bushes of the liminalgae stuff, which broke easily beneath her fist and stacked nicely in her inventory.

Which was also how she discovered her inventory was empty.

Around then, her communicator had displayed a message from Mumbo, something about server lag. Cleo ignored it for a moment, because their inventory was empty, even their armor slots and offhand—they’d been fully prepared to go End mining, going so far as to stick a carved pumpkin on their head. It’s all gone.

Then they process that their communicator buzzed, and the fact that it’s not completely broken isn’t nearly as relieving as it could have been. They still can’t send messages out, but they can see what their friends are coordinating, and be prepared for whatever rescue entails.

Whenever rescue comes.

It doesn’t take long to get bored, which is why Cleo starts exploring, despite the fact that their F3 screen only says no, lmao. X is going to get an earful for including whatever mod this is when she gets back—

For now, they wander. They find some bizarre architecture choices, and rooms full of poolfish and liminalgae both. They discover, with a deep sense of dread, that the beautiful view of the flat ocean outside is a mirage; exploration reveals a set of windows that theoretically should point directly into another hallway, but instead show that bright blue sky. Whatever’s out there…

Well, she’ll never know what’s out there, because the block refuses to break beneath her fist, no matter how long she punches at it. Same with the walls.

For untold days, she wanders. Without her F3 screen, there’s no way to be accurate about the time she’s spent here, but it feels like a week and a half. There’d been a jolt of hope when Joe asked if someone had seen them recently—but Tango had reminded him that they were End mining, probably deep in the grind by now. It’s been a week and a half, approximately, of ankle-deep water in hallways, and deeper water in grand, open rooms, and nothing to eat but liminalgae and nothing to do but walk around and breed poolfish. They’ve been staying close to the spawn room, unwilling to lose their one known location in this unknown dimension.

Their communicator buzzes more as time passes: Doc pranking Gem, Gem killing him in revenge. Xisuma reminding everyone to avoid the world border chunks until the next update. Grian pretending to be Iskall’s conscience, teaching him how to use boats. She mutes the communicator. It hurts to see everyone this way, while she’s stuck here.

She still checks it; she's not stupid. She just… can’t keep watching the texts fly by without her.

And then she finds the pit.

It’s a room unlike any other she’s seen so far. It leads down, deeper than even the deepest pool of water she’s encountered, and it’s filled with rows of stacked arches, bridging the gap. She crouches onto one and peers down. It’s darker, but not pitch black, and there’s a pool of water at the bottom, the same shape and size as the one they originally fell into.

In her inventory, her collection of favorite poolfish squirm. Cleo’s guts match the motion, because this is obviously where the dimension intends them to go. The pit yawns before her like a beckoning, like a challenge. But there’s no blocks here, no drops from poolfish or craftables with liminalgae. If Cleo jumps down, she has no way back up.

No way save dying, drowning or starving wherever she finds herself. Because that was the other thing she’d tried, when her messages refused to send and her inventory yielded nothing. Cleo had dove down to the bottom of the spawn room pool, and pushed all the air out of their lungs, and breathed in that cool water.

It worked everywhere else. It wasn’t pleasant, but it worked, and they were a grown-up who could work with something that wasn’t pleasant.

They’d respawned in free-fall and crashed into the very pool they’d just died in.

That had been a very brutal realization: they were stuck here. And yet it feels like that realization pales in comparison to the pit before her, the pit that calls to her so tauntingly with its insinuations. That there is more to this place than white walls and fake ocean and sunlight. That there is escape, if she’s willing to fight for it. Escape that may come quicker than her friends.

Cleo has always been a fighter. But they’re smart, too. Before committing either way, they check their communicator.

Unread messages:

<GoodTimeWithScar> DONT HOTGYU ME

<Grian> get gud

<iJevin> seriously, is cleo just living in the end at this point?

<StressMonster101> Im sure theyll be back soon, luv

Without timestamps, it’s impossible to tell how recently Jev and Stress sent their messages, but they make Cleo waver. The safest option is to wait near the spawn room, where X or Joe will eventually spawn in and help her escape with their admin-y ways. With the poolfish and liminalgae, she can survive as long as necessary, although the liminalgae doesn’t seem to regrow. Still—up here, where she understands the terrain, is safest.

<iJevin> stress its been a MONTH

<iJevin> even for a megabase grind thats ridiculous

Cleo’s stomach falls out from under them.

A month?

They’ve been stuck in this endless pseudo-paradise for a month, and people are only just now worrying—

No. No, fuck this, fuck everyone except Joe who asked about them way back towards the start, except he hasn’t said anything since so actually fuck him, too. And fuck X for chatting about updates like everything’s normal, and Ren for saying innuendoes and double entendres like nothing’s wrong, and Grian and Scar for being Grian and Scar when she’s stuck in here—

Fuck Jevin especially, for saying that where they could see, where they could realize no one is coming for them.

Distantly, Cleo realizes that this is a bit much, that people do regularly go off and grind resources for absurd lengths of time, but that doesn’t stop her from beating back sobs by fostering the rage in her chest. Distantly, she realizes that this is all uncomfortably close to a breakdown, and they don’t get those. They don’t do those; they’re a fighter, someone whose first answer is violence and barbed words and arson.

So. Fuck their friends. Fuck them all. Cleo will rescue herself.

They double-check their poolfish and liminalgae count—enough to last another goddamn month, if need be—and jump into the dark waters far, far below.

#thank you tripping-sideways! cleo was not someone i would have thought to do but they're FUN #fwiw: they have actually been having a much worse time than they admit to themself. hence the IMMEDIATE descent into fury #but also like. they're smart enough to realize they're being dumb. unfortunately the one does not preclude the other.#TO BE FAIR IT'S BEEN A MONTH #in minecraft time! which is a long but not unheard of amount of time to grind resources #about the author #neverend mod au #my brain hurts too much to title this au so that's what it gets #might write other hermits experiencing neverend in the future? especially the last level #i think lots of hermits would have fun with the leviathan grandgousier is all.#hermitblr #zombiecleo #minecraft neverend

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fite-club · 3 months

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I’m honestly still embarrassed I believed what these people were saying for a moment, bc I swear they keep showing their transmisogynistic asses more and more as time goes on — it honestly reminds me of how my younger sister got suckered into alt-right and MRA rhetoric around ten years ago because youtube was pushing that stuff on her -greg

i really don’t want you or anyone else who used to believe in transandrophobia stuff to beat yourselves up about it— these guys have supporters and defenders for a reason, and the reason is that it appeals to your insecurities and validates certain kinds of fear and anger. that stuff can seem very appealing. and the transmisogyny is not always obvious! i know the terf comparisons get old but radfems draw people in by appealing to the justified fear and anger that women feel in society and talking vaguely about feminism. they will say many things you agree with, and once you’re around enough of those people, you won’t even notice how their ideology rubs off on you, and you’ll find yourself agreeing with things you don’t actually agree with. it just might be phrased in such a way that, for whatever reason, you feel compelled to agree with.

the difference between you and these other guys still fighting “against transandrophobia” is that you were capable of taking a step back and recognizing that it’s possible to be wrong or misinformed even when you have good intentions. these guys are not capable of that, either because they can’t get there yet or they refuse to even consider it.

#any decently-scientifically-minded person understands how admitting and accepting your wrongs are more important than ever being right #that gets lost on these people who equate ‘being a member of a group’ with ‘being able to speak for that entire group with authority’#which is why i often get mistaken for a trans woman when i speak up about transmisogyny #‘well theyre saying things about the transmasc experience i disagree with so they CANT be transmasc’#‘listen to X’ got co-opted so hard

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