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from rC:\ Writing Portfolio

I Believe In the Fediverse

In 2022, tech magnate and bombastic personality Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, thumbing the scales of an already polarized social media website further toward censorship, misinformation and ideological warfare. Twitter once was—and arguably still is—the closest thing to an open forum on the internet with widespread participation among people of all social status, from A-list celebrities to run-of-the-mill crackpots. While this may be true, it hasn't stopped millions of people from completely abandoning the site as the quality of the user experience continues to degrade beyond our wildest imaginations.

The critical weakness of Twitter was exposed during the aftermath of this multi-billion dollar transaction: a forum cannot actually be open when it is owned and operated by a central authority with a transparent political agenda. Much digital ink has been spilled over when exactly Twitter was ruined, but it's hard to deny that it got there. People have begun to understand the need for an alternative, seeking it out in new and familiar destinations alike.

The new social web, in many ways, looks like the old social web. The kinds of people who were on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Vine in the early 2010s are likely spending more time on Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Bluesky in the mid-2020s. We're still tapping out ten-second, hundred-character ephemera into our pocket rectangles, the parameters have just shifted slightly. While I'm glad to see people recognize the need to cut ties with a burgeoning hotbed of reactionary ideology in the case of Twitter, I worry that many have not learned the correct lessons from this saga and are setting themselves up to repeat the same mistakes.

As we continue down a path toward tech oligopoly and unfettered transfer of wealth to the upper echelons of society, it should be clear that another centralized, corporate platform cannot be the key cornerstone of a free and open internet. An alternative will always be necessary when the entire infrastructure of a communication service can be acquired with a cash transfer. Enter Mastodon: an open-source, decentralized Twitter equivalent that could be a viable solution to this growing problem.

Mastodon is part of a vast social networking platform known as the fediverse. This platform makes use of the ActivityPub protocol, a framework for seamless communication between various interlinked, disparate services. In practice, a Mastodon user can see content and interact with profiles from all over the fediverse, well beyond anything that exists under the Mastodon umbrella. Fediverse servers (referred to as “instances”) are comparable to email servers, hosted by different kinds of people from around the globe and able to communicate with each other by design.

The fediverse is as much a part of the small web as your personal website or blog. Its utility in your life is as shallow or deep as you want; your experience will be the priority every step of the way. Fediverse services are never going to harvest your data, advertise to you or psychologically manipulate you into scrolling further—they only seek to connect you with other fediverse users. The fediverse is also literally a “small web” in the grand scheme of social media. Mastodon only has about 7,000,000 users, around half of the total Bluesky userbase and about thirty times smaller than the population on Meta's Threads app.

Threads is technically part of this federated network, though its users currently cannot follow or see replies from other fedizens, demonstrating Meta's lack of good faith commitment to the concept. Bluesky is another popular refuge for Twitter expats, developed on a similar protocol to ActivityPub. The Authenticated Transfer protocol is not linked to the fediverse or any other service outside of Bluesky, suggesting this for-profit service's touted openness could end up being more style than substance. It's possible to bridge profiles between Mastodon and Bluesky using hacky third-party methods, but this is not quite the same as the intercommunicability you'd find between fediverse instances.

Most people are not thinking too deeply about the technical minutiae, they simply go where other people are. Once you get used to a certain place, it's difficult to see the point of spending time anywhere else. Enmeshing yourself in any given service will eventually expose you to its limitations, there might be ways around them but you're going to be aware of them regardless. There's a certain Stockholm syndrome-like quality to social media partisanship; I can't confidently say I've been above it in all my years of using the internet.

I've always been fascinated with the abundance of social media apps that all end up doing the same thing. If social media is supposed to be a place on the web to share shortform text, pictures, video and audio clips, why do we need so many places to do it? At a certain point after uploading videos to Twitter, posting a Notes app essay on Instagram or publishing an animated photo album reel on YouTube, how have we not discovered that this is all the same?

The beauty of the fediverse is a distinct recognition of this fact; the entire utility of social media has been flattened into one logical, streamlined plane of deployment. The services that make up the fediverse aren't deadlocked in competition, instead collaborating with each other to popularize the ActivityPub standard. Rather than being driven by market forces that funnel development efforts toward unwanted features, fediverse apps endeavor to provide the best possible experience for their intended use cases and nothing more.

Mastodon is the premier service, it's practically synonymous with the fediverse among the uninitiated. There are also several other federated Mastodon-likes offering comparable features and exclusive benefits, such as Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica and Pleroma. Pixelfed is the designated Instagram replacement, about as straightforward as it gets. A TikTok competitor called Loops was also recently made available by the Pixelfed developers. Peertube remains criminally underutilized as people clamor for a viable YouTube alternative, though it can be challenging to find a suitable instance. Lemmy successfully gained a foothold among disillusioned Reddit users, but it's still too niche to be useful for certain interests due to lack of engagement. WriteFreely is a solid, if bare-bones choice for blogging in my experience, seemingly lacking functionality offered by other free services.

The fediverse as it exists today is clearly a mixed bag. It's nice that all of these services can talk to each other, but the practical application of this is questionable at best from my vantage point. Further buy-in is required from wealthy, technically-skilled people to keep the project sustainable. Prominent instances that serve a specific niche on the fediverse like botsin.space are forced to shut down due to lack of support, exposing a weakness of this concept and demonstrating why it might not actually be the one-size-fits-all solution needed to fix social media altogether.

It's been a great service for my specific interests as a tech blogger, but I worry the evangelists can't see past their nose when it comes to clarifying the benefits of joining for other kinds of people. The sign up process is notoriously confusing for those who are more familiar with conventional social media. The actual usability of fediverse apps is almost never a clear upgrade over their mainstream counterparts. We've reached a point with computing—and every experience downstream from it—where the focus has shifted away from providing a quality product and more toward extracting value out of those who are too dug in to learn a new way of doing things. The alternatives don't currently have the infrastructure or cultural cachet to compete, requiring more effort and compromise than the average person may be interested in.

All I can do is share bits of personal experience in hopes that it resonates with people. I've enjoyed my time on the fediverse, but I'm just not as deep into it as other folks. While I think it would be a fun project to start my own instance from home, I don't exactly have the time, money, housing continuity and technical competence to get it done right away. Still, the act of remaining on a large general-purpose instance like mastodon.social does not make me less of a fediverse user in the same way that relying on a desktop environment does not make me less of a Linux user—yes, it's true.

I decided to join Mastodon in the summer of 2023 when I became fed up with the direction of Twitter under its new leadership. By this point, Twitter had become more of a news tool than a social media site for my uses. I was drowning in a sea of voices; nothing I shared had any amount of penetration, and the mutual acquaintances I once kept up with grew distant or dropped off completely. I chose mastodon.social because it seemed like the most logical starting point for getting into an ecosystem I knew practically nothing about.

It took a period of months to start coalescing around like-minded individuals on Mastodon. Posting in several hashtags, monitoring the various timelines, filtering out obnoxious keywords and vigilantly muting obviously fake, spam-ridden and low quality accounts worked wonders for discovering people. I can proudly say I've made more genuine connections on Mastodon in under two years then I ever did on that Twitter account I made in 2009. Though I may not have the energy to post multiple times a day, every day, I'm likely to get something out of it when I do.

I believe in the fediverse as a Utopian concept for a social web unconstrained by corporate influence. I've been exposed to avant-garde ideas and artistic creations I wouldn't have encountered anywhere else. I've met some wonderful people who've encouraged me to be more creative, put myself out there, think in different ways and grow as an individual. There is a personal touch to the fediverse that can be difficult to describe. Fedizens appreciate your contributions in a way you won't find as easily in other communities focused on cultural narratives and clout chasing. It can be easy to forget how small Mastodon is when you're reaching an engaged audience without much barrier to entry.

That being said, it's important to recognize that the fediverse may never end up being a snug fit for everyone. It's not likely to win over anybody who is averse to using social media or those who struggle to find a healthy balance with online activities. While it's not as explicitly hierarchical and addicting-by-design as some of the other corporate services I briefly mentioned, the perverse incentive structures baked into the concept of social media are inextricably linked to fediverse apps as well. The ways that social apps shape our behavior are beyond the scope of this piece, but suffice to say, the fediverse won't likely be a panacea for anybody's social isolation or attention span issues. All the negative factors I've discussed add up to a potentially tough sell, hence why I don't normally extol the benefits of the fediverse to everyone I know.

The irony of this ambitious interlinked system of cooperative social media services ultimately having limited appeal beyond a thin slice of diehard enthusiasts is not lost on me, but at the same time, that lack of reach might actually be a good thing. The small web is experiencing a revival, in part because previous attempts to create a central location on the internet for every kind of person to mingle have mostly proven to be a failure, a net negative for society at large. The internet was always better when there were degrees of separation between demographics—the evolution of the new social web is bearing this out. It would be great if humans could get together, sing Kum Ba Yah and find ways to appreciate each others' differences, but that's simply not the world we live in. Until that day comes, I'll keep sharing periodical musings with the handful of people in my circle over here.

(Originally published in Ctrl-ZINE Issue #17: https://ctrl-c.club/~/loghead/zine/Ctrl-ZINE.issue.17.pdf)

 
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from Lucifer Orbis

Updating on my previous post, I finally – finally – finished The Mirror of Simple Souls by Margaret Porette. I’m so happy because it wasn’t easy and I may or may not have something to say about it. Maybe in general terms, but even to me it was too much. And not even on purpose, another book came out: Dissident women, beguines, and the quest for spiritual authority by Catherine Lambert. I’m going to read it after taking 1000 naps. I mean, the book title says everything. What I enjoyed the most about Margaret was precisely the independence with which she lived her faith, especially at a time when independence and women were mutually exclusive. I wrote the following text a while ago, but didn’t publish it because I didn’t think it was that good but here goes.


I was listening to a song called Ballad of the Prodigal Son. It's terribly beautiful and collected. It's actually funny that the story, being a joyful one, and with a happy ending, at least for the father and the son – the brother being rightfully pissed at the special treatment and kinda missing the point – the angelic voice shifted tone just in the right measure to bring tears to my eyes. I still have no idea why I listen to these things, but I do. Oh, it's late at night. Silence! And a midlife crisis.

Circling back, this is a very well-known story but as my memory fails me consistently, I don't recall it from my childhood; or maybe it was in a book a nanny gave me. I must have heard it, but without much contextual memory from those early years, I can only trust that the story reached me one day somehow. It’s common knowledge that the communion of saints is one of the fundamental principles of the Catholic Church. But why exactly do people need saints? What's a saint supposed to do? After all, Christ is Lord. He is, but sometimes you just need a little nudge to get there. The saints can do precisely that. So, a normal Catholic will tell you “we don't worship saints!” even though they may be talking with their favourite saints the whole day, but this is the part that they don't tell you so it can't get confused with “worshipping”. However, if they tell you that they're talking with other Catholics the entire day, it's not worshipping, it's a conversation. This is exactly what the communion of saints is – relishing in the very connection between earthly and heavenly things, and everything in between – that of holy people united by the sacraments and communion with Christ our saviour. Think about it as a connection between the human and the divine; the human turned holy, touched by grace and by the Holy Spirit which is common to us all. In other words, it’s being in touch.

Of course I’m only mentioning this in very loose terms, not even explaining anything, but you get the idea. Where I want to get at is, as made abundantly clear in a previous post, I have a favourite saint. That person died 400 years ago. I could try to update myself a little bit and choose another saint as a guide but I can’t. My head is resting on the perfect lap, if I can be so candid. I can push it a bit further and say that my body is being held by the perfect pair of arms and my soul is being fed the most eloquent whispers. That my will is being guided by the wisest actions and my dreams are being set on fire by the most ferocious passion. Ok, I’ll stop here before this gets weird – and it does. Remember that angel? Where do you think that passion comes from? It came from God, it was infused into a human being who subsequently wrote a number of theological teatrises that pierced the soul of another human being 400 years later. Now think about this as a web of connections, of a pulsating heart from where all arteries and veins expand. This is just the power of one saint and her communion with Christ. Think how many individuals are connected to Christ through a web of connections with other people, and these, with others. It is, in other terms, a Church.

My head is resting on the perfect lap My body is held by the perfect pair of arms My soul is fed the most eloquent whispers My will is guided by the wisest actions My dreams are lit by the most ferocious passion

Hah, it almost looks like I’m in love! Teresa of Avila, in her younger years, got access to a number of books. One of them was Letters of St. Jerome. See, St. Jerome was an inspiration to her and a guide in her own faith. As such, I also started reading his letters, learning that he was the translator of the Bible to Latin and a few other facts about his life. I wanted to read his letters, because they lingered in the eyes of Teresa and his words flipped a switch some time later. One of his letters caught my eye – To Theodosius and the rest of the anchorites. It was there that I saw Luke 15:3-5 and ended up reading the whole passage. For context, St. Jerome wrote: “I am the prodigal son who although I have squandered all the portion entrusted to me by my father, have not yet bowed the knee in submission to him; not yet have I commenced to put away from me the allurement of my former excesses.” Oh Jerome, how much we have in common! And then, by some weird coincidence, the heavenly voice I mentioned in the first paragraph starts singing the ballad that gave melody to my ears, a ballad previously unknown to me, playing on shuffle on YouTube, echoing the Holy Spirit, echoing Luke’s gospel, echoing Jerome, echoing Teresa, and piercing me.

 
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from Lucifer Orbis

I am exhausted. It's a good kind of exhaustion, but still, I need naps. I've been able to juggle my job, drawing, reading, writing, playing video games and watching silly horror flicks. After all, it's October and I need inspiration to keep going after the cold and darkness sets in for good. Winter is coming, right? Last Winter, we had a lot of snow. Our little neighbourhood looked like a cosy postcard people used to send to their families during Christmas. Do people still do that? Things at work have been fine despite the fact that sometimes what I really, really need is silence. I've seen that silence these days can enter the realm of luxuries. Not everyone has access to it, not everyone can enjoy its all encompassing bliss, it's the realm of the privileged.

Silence, silence, silence. I need it so my soul can sing.

Maybe it's the reason why I sleep so little. I enjoy the early hours of the night to stay in absolute silence. During this time I get inspired to write or draw while processing the many thoughts flowing in waves through my head. Sometimes I get desperate! I need to do everything all at once and can't seem to find rest. At least, I don't have neighbours digging their heels on the upper floor, children practising the piano right above my bedroom. Beats all the neighbours I had before, though. These don't make free use of an hi-fi system or play video games at maximum volume during the night. I am very lucky and enjoy their presence even when we don't interact.

Following my last post, I wrote some ramblings in my journal about a somewhat new translation of Teresa's biography. I'd like to transcribe it here, but first I need to understand my own handwriting and second I need to edit a fair amount. So, I think the idea will stay inside the drawer alongside my journal. Writing about Teresa's works and ideas wasn't easy and I assume that when I start seeing what I wrote here, I'll probably bin the whole thing. The gist of the text is translation for authenticity vs. translation as experience. At first, I didn't understand the whole purpose of changing so many things in the original text “for a modern audience”. I also shouldn't fall into traditional bigotry over religious texts. It's exhausting and useless. I just got slightly annoyed because one part of me thinks the original text and respective direct translation (as far as possible) is the right thing to do, whereas the other part felt the new translation is the right way to take it in. Therefore, if you want to read the original text, as written, in all its authenticity and sweet imperfection, all well and good. If you choose instead to read something that is truly transformative, then the new translation is the way to go. Why, though, can't the old one be both? Well, it can. I’ve experienced it both ways and the conclusion I reached is, in order to grasp the old (original) discourse, the one thing we have to put in is work – a lot of it. And it's this work and effort that I miss when I’m reading the new translation. I must be very clear that this translation couldn't be more beautiful and rich – it’s the one I have in physical format – but it just did all the work for me.

In the end, I rambled intensely about this in my journal. I had to cross-reference some sources. I was comparing translations all the while reading about traditions on literature produced by women in the Late Middle Ages. It was over 4am, fortunately on a Friday. My brain was on fire. Then, not on the same day, I wrote about my progress with a book called The Mirror of Simple Souls, written by Margaret Porette. It's not an easy read, but the translation I got, from the University of Notre Dame Press, comes with a f a n t a s t i c introductory essay. Ah, joy! I'll transcribe what I've written here if the inspiration strikes again as I still have to finish the book and read another one about the Latin translation. What drives me to the Mirror is pure curiosity and it's a brilliant piece of spiritual literature from the Middle Ages. The essay focuses on what we know about the life of Margaret before being taken by the Inquisition, as well as theological themes, literary style and tradition, reception, custodial history and translation. A treasure, is what it is.

I finished reading River Kings – The Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman. Wonderful read about the exploits of the Viking Army and viking presence in Central and Eastern Europe, and then further East. I got a deeper look into their society, belief system, military operations, trade, expansion and connection with Constantinople. The book was recommended by someone who knows about my peculiar taste for badass saints and it presented me with a couple of pages about Olga of Kyiv, the scourge of the Drevlians. I wondered if she was the patron saint of widows, and that she is! It was a great way to finish the last chapters at the prow of trade currents possibly reaching Baghdad and further beyond, maybe.

After finishing this month’s Inktober event, I’ll be dedicating more time to Trails from Zero on Nintendo Switch and will hopefully write a few words about it on my blog. There’s a website that runs prompts like Inktober, except it’s year-round. In order to make some effort on that front I could challenge myself to create at least four or five drawings per month, just to train the line and eventually develop my skills. I like to draw on prompt; it’s easier to come up with something almost immediately, without having to waste a long time staring at a blank page. A prompt can either summon something of a creative nature or purely descriptive. I’m satisfied with whatever comes to mind. Time is something I don’t have when I feel that I already have so much going on. And time with silence, lesser still.

 
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from Crapknocker

A few times, I’ve had really great or interesting runs in FrogComPosBand, so if you’ll bear with me, I’ll reminisce about them a bit here.

Angel runs

Angels have a ton of advantages compared to other monster classes. They have all the normal human item slots, they get basic resistances as they level up and they get a bunch of useful spells without having to tote around any books. The only downside is the huge experience penalty, it takes them forever to level up. They have to grind grind grind to get anywhere, but once they get there they can usually kick ass.

I’ve done a ton of angel runs. Usually they end up the same way as most of my decent runs: dead around level 30 after I try to fly too close to the sun and get burned. The one I most vividly remember was popping around the lower levels of Angband when they encountered the legendary Metal Babble. This is one of those enemies from other videogames, this time the Dragon Quest series. In those games, this enemy is nearly unhittable but gives a ton of experience and items if you do manage to vanquish them. In Frog, it has its own aura of darkness and fires high-level spells with a ridiculously high speed. It took me a few rounds to figure out why my health was dropping considerably until I noticed the little guy teleporting about. Since I was low on health, I used the Globe of Invulnerability spell to keep myself safe from almost all attacks. I say almost because it was that day that I found out that the Psycho Spear spell is one of the few, if not only, spells that go through the globe of invulnerability.

Sometimes that’s how your knowledge of the game grows, through the blood of your previous characters.

Dragon runs

Dragon monsters are really fun to play as, but have a few quirks that make them stand apart. First is the equipment slots. Most of their resistances have to come from rings, as they only have amulet, light, cloak and helmet slots apart from their six rings they can wear. They also have the breath weapon you would expect as well as pretty good claw and bite melee attacks. They get to specialize in a particular domain later on, which gives you some flexibility in how you want to dragon.

Breath specialization gives you powers and shapes for your breath weapon. Armor gives you an AC boost and occasionally reflection. Attack ups your melee and gives you some related buffs. Craft gives you powers related to making and dealing with weapons, Lore gives you identification and detection powers. Domination gives you summoning powers. There are also a few realms restricted to certain types of dragon, namely Death and Crusade. Only Death dragons can choose the Death realm, which gives you some summoning and nether-firing options. Law dragons can use Crusade, which gives some light healing among other powers, similar to the magic realm.

My most memorable run was with a steel dragon, which doesn’t have a breath weapon but does have incredible AC and slightly better melee than your standard dragon. I somehow managed to drag this guy to the higher levels in the game, as his melee kept being awesome despite lacking any distance attack. Also, the high AC helps slightly lower the damage you’re taking in melee, which is where you’re strongest. If I slapped on a few rings of protection with AC bonuses, I became very hard to hit. 250+ AC!

But like so many of my characters, I think I got double-breathed on by big dragons. And no matter what your resistances or AC are like, you push your luck too many times and eventually you’ll lose.

Filthy rag runs

As I’ve said before, I love running Filthy rag monsters. For a long time, I tried to get one with the Lucky personality off the ground, thinking that the luck would help offset the need to dive deeper before certain resists showed up on dropped armors. Turns out, the class is very weak in the beginning, somewhat weak in the midgame and stronger in the end. Having the Lucky personality’s -2 to all stats makes the early game that much more difficult.

Filthy rags are a patient player’s game. You need to get resistances, but to get them you need to go deeper but the puny offense of the class means that you have a hard time killing monsters. Not to say that it’s impossible, there are several Lucky rags on the Angband ladder, but you have to grind, grind, grind and hope you get lucky with your drops.

The big bottleneck for these guys is Confusion resistance, at least when I play them. Base resistances show up fairly early on and you can get them here and there without too much trouble, but getting that first bit of confusion is much more difficult. You’ll probably be wanting it about halfway through the Hideout dungeon, thanks to the good ‘ol Variant Maintainer unique that shows up there. But the only armors that even have the potential to drop with that resistance are ego armors ‘of the imp’ that might randomly get a single high resist. So not only do you have to get lucky and have an enemy drop one of these, which is difficult in itself, but then it has to roll confusion resistance out of all the possible high resistances, which is also rather unlikely. And because of how the filthy rags acquire resistances, you have to do this three times or possibly more. Remember, rags can’t wear rings or jewelry and gloves or boots that have confusion resistance only start dropping in much much lower depths. Good luck!

Same goes for gloves with bonuses to hit and damage. These also drop very rarely at the early levels and are your main source for increasing melee damage. And as you can’t equip a shooting weapon, your only other option are wands and rods which rags aren’t the best at. You can eventually find body armor and occasionally some boots with hit and damage boosts, but these are rare even at the deepest depths. Again, good luck.

So you have to grind to get exp to level up, which increases your life and melee damage. But you can’t dive too deeply since you don’t have the damage output to keep up. You could try and stairscum on high-level dungeons to maybe get some items just lying around, but this is even riskier.

I will say, I haven’t ever really gotten over this hump in my playthroughs. I once got a Lucky rag to level 30, but that was as far as he got as he (it?) was still missing tons of resists and had puny damage. One day I’ll roll that boulder up the hill, though, and it will stay at the top.

#FrogComPosBand

 
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from Lucifer Orbis

I’m not a practising Catholic but there’s aspects of Christian spirituality that I still feel somewhat drawn to. I don’t know if it’s like this or the other way around, but I usually am very critical of my beliefs. Faith and belief are two different things, but let's not go there. The only thing I know is that I’m definitely not an atheist, however it’s with atheists that I often talk about such things. I enjoy the pragmatism, the critical thinking, the freedom and the sense of humour that comes in conversation. But sometimes it's not enough and that’s why I read historical writings about the spiritual life of religious people. Some of these people were canonised and others were tragically condemned by the Inquisition. Both are equally valid to me if I happen to find inspiration in their writings.

The 15th October is the celebration day of St. Teresa of Ávila. She died exactly at the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, so either the 4th of October or the 15th of October 1582. It was, in any case, established the 15th of October as her celebration day. I’m writing this text mostly from memory and it’s possible that I’m not correctly getting some facts about her life, but that’s not the point. I'd like to praise her as a very important presence in my spiritual thinking. Even when I wasn't listening, I think her soul (or the Spirit dwelling within her) was somewhat passing through me, either as a warm and kind companion or blowing straight into my face. That came, however, a bit later.

Everyone from my Art History class knew about the seminal Bernini sculpture, a beautiful composition of two figures. One is an angel wearing a smile and holding a spear pointed towards a woman leaning against a rock, head bent backwards, eyes closed, lips slightly apart. The angel gracefully grabs the woman's vest, draped in such a way resembling the wild flames of desire. The altarpiece is a moving picture in itself; his eyes focused on her face, his spear pointed straight to her heart. Appropriately called “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa,” it decorates the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. The sculpture created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini was commissioned by the Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro for his own final resting place in the church. The work was completed around 1652.

Pope Gregory XV canonised St. Teresa in 1622, not long before the commission. It was only in 1970, however, that St. Teresa was declared a Doctor of the Church (DoC), the first woman to get the recognition, by Pope St. Paul VI. There are thousands of saints in the Catholic Church, thousands upon thousands, but only 36 are DoC. From these 36 only 4 are women: Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, Therese of Lisieux and the almighty Hildegard of Bingen.

At the time, when we saw Bernini's sculpture in our baroque art classes, we didn't know any of this, nor who the woman was. She was just another saint, and in our Catholic country, we knew there were many to speak of, almost all nuns and monks, and we wanted to go to the smoking room and there was still an hour left of class. Yes, I smoked at the time. For some reason my asthma wasn't so predominantly present in my life and smoking a cigarette after class was part of our little rituals. And, of course, an espresso taken from a real espresso machine!

We were observing the sculpture projected on the screen and wondering, “Is this like... religious?” And the teacher explained that the reception was a bit controversial and the reason why was blatantly obvious: to our younger minds (and to the minds of the older men who criticised it) it looked like the woman was having something closer to a sexual climax. It could have been a naughty artistic choice to imbue the sculptural elements with expressive theatrical features or it could have simply been what the artist envisioned when consulting Teresa's writings where she described her rapture in detail. The artist filled in the blanks and came up with what we, in the class, felt was a masterpiece. No matter what crossed our minds at the time, if the café was still open or if we had to smoke outside, the altarpiece made an impression on the younger me.

Only years later would I sit comfortably and read the story of Teresa’s life, written in her own words. By that time I had already forgotten about the sculpture and when I reached the part where she described her “visions” it wasn’t what Bernini created that I imagined, but it was likewise much closer than I thought, except a bit bloodier:

It was our Lord’s will that in this vision I should see the angel in this wise. He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful – his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all on fire: they must be those whom we call cherubim. Their names they never tell me; but I see very well that there is in heaven so great a difference between one angel and another, and between these and the others, that I cannot explain it. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to get rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray to God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I’m lying.

[There are many translations of this passage even though it sounds better in the original language. I picked a translation available at Project Gutenberg – Chapter XXIX]

It wasn't the visions and the validity she tried to justify to her confessors that struck me when I read her book. The raptures she experienced could have been induced by many things, both natural and supernatural, depending on who you ask. Even though she was writing under the vow of obedience we are able to capture, through her writings, a clear picture of her soul, her faith and conflict. What I mean is not a conflict of faith, on the contrary. It’s a devotion that communicates dynamism, movement, flow, stress, restlessness, desire, reach, like a courtship! A constant wanting to leap into the arms of another who’s not entirely within reach, not yet, but to whom we can say anything, to whom we can love how we love, unshackled and undressed and frail and unafraid. We as mere readers and testimonies of these writings are left with this incredible gift, an incredible mystical experience pushing the soul into every direction. Her experience and intellectual ability to absorb the church’s doctrine and transcend it through her own words didn’t come without scrutiny. I wonder what she would have done without such intense monitoring.

I don’t want to misstep and say that Teresa wasn’t worried about salvation or worried about good works for the Church which she loved so much, in good measure with some criticism, I may add. However, at least from my readings, the church was more in the way than anything else. It was the people she was concerned with, and the actions upon the world with the promise of bringing religious perfection onto God. In order to do that, she reformed a religious order and founded the Discalced Carmelites, proceeding to found 17 convents across 16th century’s Spanish territory. Perhaps her endeavours were even more daunting, not only because she was a woman navigating a patriarchal society, but because she had some serious health issues. And yet, despite the limitations of her body, she strove for perfection in the way that she instituted the principles of her order.

It’s interesting how she wanted to live among small groups of people, no more than 13 nuns. The convent of the Incarnation in Ávila had about 180 [I don’t remember the precise number; it was more than 100]. As someone suffering from social anxiety and concentration difficulties among large groups of people I can only imagine Teresa’s unfruitful attempts at mental prayer and contemplation while 180 nuns were having visits from their families, not to mention the chattering, the noise, the infighting and the bustle. Teresa believed deeply that God was guiding her steps and it gave her a sense of purpose and a mission. From an early age she knew that a life of marriage and motherhood wasn’t the right vocation for her, but neither was a life of just being inside a convent and begging to creepy noblemen for patronage, or spending the day visiting people’s houses for alms. Money was something she despised with a passion. She wanted her nuns (her daughters) to be as self-sufficient as they could possibly be, as physically and spiritually strong and independent as they could be, as united in the love of God through effective forms of prayer, but above all that this should be their choice and their vocation too, independently of their social origins.

The accounts of contemporary Discalced Carmelites describing their own enclosure elucidate the reasons for such a radical life decision. Very few, if any, aren't there because they couldn’t be somewhere else, much less in this day and age. This was the wish of Teresa for the future, that people could be free to choose but when they did, that they’d be working towards something and pursuing something, not running away from less savoury aspects of worldly life. This was also her conflict and she sacrificed her well-being to leave an opportunity in the open for religious women and men at the time – she also founded male monasteries with great support from St. John of the Cross in the reformation of the Carmelites.

I still have so much to learn about Teresa's mysticism and her life in more practical terms. I haven’t read her book about the foundations, her letters or her poetry. She had a worldview and I think I’ve found my little corner in it. She struggled to explain her experience of the divine because it’s something extremely personal and unique, meaning that if we haven’t experienced it ourselves most likely we won’t know what she’s talking about. It’s not only about what images she saw, perceived or thought – images that were already part of her tradition – but all the sensations vibrating through her at that moment and the way she interpreted these: as gifts and perfect communion.

It’s funny that I’ve been trying to figure out her work in isolation, and I have absolutely no idea if the message I get from her writings is true, false or in between. Did I nail it or did I miss the mark? It’s one of those rare cases where I read more of the primary source than the secondary interpretative essays. In most cases, I prefer to read alongside deep historical context, introductory essays, literature analysis, you name it. It helps a lot to go for mediaeval studies and proceed from there. I would avoid sources without any connections to University departments. It’s just that in this specific case I may have been looking for something else and my perspective as a reader was marked by intentions I wasn’t even aware of.

I have to thank Bernini for the figure immortalised in his sculpture and the little cherubim that almost killed our saint with passion. Some clergymen won’t get much praise here for distrusting the experiences of a religious woman to the point that she had to lay it out for everyone to see and analyse its validity. It seems like intense scrutiny is what validates a mystic. It was yet another sacrifice Teresa wasn’t entirely aware of as she was very picky as to who should read her writings. Well… that part didn’t go so well for her to the advantage of theologians, medievalists, feminists, lay people and even atheists.

 
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from how do you spell cool

promo image for the zine showing a picture of the zine superimposed multiple times with different coloring

The first issue of the official howdoyouspell.cool ZINE is now available for download!

Download here!

Featuring words from the following articles/authors:

  1. WE ARE BESET BY SUFFERING ON ALL SIDES by forrest @ Mastodon
  2. Long Weekend (Battles Without Honor and Humanity) by Hazardes @ Mastodon
  3. Misc. FrogComPosBand sentiments by CrapKnocker @ Mastodon
  4. Shonen Weekdays by DharmaDischarge @ Mastodon
  5. Hot Dark Love: Work Date by SodiumReactor @ Mastodon
 
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from dharmadischarge and his comics

Eternal Eclipse: Book One of The Brutal Song of Aziel Bartholomew

A prototype of my current main project which will be a comic. this is however a long fragment of a novel that will likely never be finished. I had typed nearly three thousand words by the time dawned on me that this is more visual and would work better as a comic.

Will try to only post comics and updates of making comics on this blog but thought I would share this because I dug parts of this and still do.

Chapter one

Drifting through the lake of stars. Out of the port hole of the celestial cruiser christened Giga-Death, we see a small starship large enough to hold a hundred persons drifting serenely through the lake of stars. Aziel Bartholomew lay in his bunk in his cell waiting for the trial that would lead to his execution. He knows that By the standard of the Scarlet Templars, he is guilty. He betrayed the royal family, and embarrassing the Royals is a cardinal mistake for anyone living around these parts.

The Celestial Dynasty is an empire in the galaxy known as the lake of stars. This empire has over a hundred thousand planets within its space. Each one has a king. Each king has an army. This is an age of fragile peace.

Every gambit of the political spectrum is expressed in how these planets are governed. Some near utopian democracies while others are prisons for breeding prisoners. The kingdom is diverse but power is the name of the game.

Aziel killed two of his comrades in the Scarlet Templars. They were soldiers sent with him to purge a bloc in the urban mess that is Sprawl 4. A megacity in his home world of Lohiri. It was his first day on the job. He had made it back home after some combat in the orbit while on patrol near the Hopecraft's home world. He was a proud veteran of a conflict that did not require a duel between the royal families... and their Holy weapons the Panzer Striders. Yet when he saw what they did to that family... He lost it. Without hesitation nor with fear he executed both men with his Flail Blastor pistol... They were reapers of the law by all means he was guilty. So they sent him before a council of the royal family to be judged.

So he lay in his small cell till he heard an explosion. He walks over to the port hole looking out at the wreckage not knowing why the ship is shattered but still it drifts on the lake of stars and the corpses around it.

Then next to his reflection in the glass he sees a face. With a cone hat angled off to the side. The Bright red clown nose is bulbous and absurd. the black around his eyes like gothic tears contrasting with the white painted face. The clown's red and yellow jumpsuit with blue buttons is profane and grotesque.

Aziel turns around. staring at the terrifying fool.

“Well... Who are you?” Said, Aziel.

“I am the Yama Yama Man.” Said the Clown.

“Be you a Banished Heart? Or Hoblin from the abyss to torment me?” Said Aziel.

“I am a bringer of gifts,” said the clown.

Then fanning his fingers in a dance with a twist of his wrist and a clap of his hands. In his hand appears a bag. Knotted up and balled up it is empty. Yet still in escalating theatricality, he lays the bag down reaching into and pulling out a blade.

The black blade was fat with steel. Glittering red runes on both sides said something Aziel could not understand. The blade was a short sword barely longer than Aziel's forearm. Yet the object screamed authority.

“This is Eternal Eclipse, The cunning of oblivion.” Said the clown.

Then staring at the blade in the light he seemed almost reluctant to humor whatever was on his mind.

“This is a Rune Sword of channeling. A lighting rod for destiny. A blade that needs no sharpening. A gift or a curse.”

Then in his theatricality, he kneels as if presting the blade to a king.

“Take it,” he whispers.

With a vague second of hesitation, Aziel tries to discern if this is fancy or delirium caused by spun sugar withdrawals.

“Take it!” Says a demonic voice without subtlety only dominance.

Whether afraid or Obedient Aziel takes the blade.

The clown please smiles showing golden cavity teeth. His eyes Gnarley with terror. Then he picks up the sack he pulled the sword from and places it in oblivion... it returns to the void.

Aziel looks at his eye's reflection on the blade's edge and does not know what he is considering.

“you will need this.” Said the clown holding out a round canister of spun sugar.

Aziel takes it and while blinking the clown's hand is gone as is the rest of it. Not slowly fading into nothing. but is gone as timed with Aziel's lids closing.

As if waking from a dream He in his frustration clenches the can of spun sugar in his hand and whispers “Eternal Eclipse: The cunning of oblivion...“.

chapter two

Aziel is standing with the Rune Blade. He is feeling the handful of spun sugar dissolve on his tongue. He needs channeling rings. His freedom demands it. Yet he will have to make do.

Aziel holds up the Rune Blade pointing in with the tip at the cell door.

He commands the sword “Open the door.”

The first rune on the side of the blade begins to glow red and then after its glow is vibrant the next. With each Aziel feels like he is pushing a blouder destined to roll back down the mountain. Yet, (and this is the touch of destiny) with each Rune lighting up. The door and wall around it are bending. Through sheer psychic will, The warping of steel is growing in distortion. the steel ballooning away from him until glowing red like lava the door rips outward dissolving and pouring out into the hall.

The growing heat triggers the fire alarms. Hundreds of gallons of water start pouring throughout the Celestial Cruiser. the water sizzling the steel to coolness. Aziel does not hesitate he runs.

/v\/

He pushes his mohawk out of his eyes and off to one side and peeks out looking around the corner. Wearing his Black and white horizontal-striped prison jumpsuit he runs.

He does not make it far before he hears the chugging explosive blast of crusader rifles.

“Wump!-Wump!-Wump!” the rifles scream.

The bullets explode past his body being only saved by the quick use of the words “Protect me!” to the sword.

An inch-thick bullet of warbling steel. stops near his hip then explodes at the two Scarlet Templers. One of them dies instantly from where the bullet struck him. Left only with a fist-sized hole in his face. The other soldier stops firing and runs with a tomahawk at Aziel. His Crusader Rifle hanging from a strap on his side.

They fight without sizing up their opponent. a tomahawk swinging by aziel face. while the rune blade dances close too but is unable to connect a stinging blow to a plate exposure of his opponent's exoskeleton.

Till at last beneath his enemy's left armpit he pierces between the plates of armor. Sending the soldier towards his judgment. Aziel pulled out the blade, blood-stained but ready.

Taking from the dead men a crusader rifle and as much ammo as he could carry (Two belt straps thrown over his shoulders). He leaves at a jog. The wet floor from the sprinklers trips him more than once, as he goes sliding from one side to the other. Occasionally he will hear explosions that he assumes are out of the hull but other times he is not so sure.

He thinks “If by chance this is real I can not waste this opportunity.”

He walks for twenty minutes before running into another living being.

The Electric scorpion-like legs of a Delta Pulse Computer. Its pinchers are jittery and unpredictable in their automation. the Stillborn Fetus that houses the AI of the machine hovers in the scorpion tail. It looks at Aziel and starts squirming and spinning in its plastic and steel tomb. The machine starts to manually scan with a blue laser flickering out in triangles. Yet Aziel to it does not exist. only the baby's eyes notice it and that without understanding.

Aziel thinks “The unborn child is the machine's subconscious. It knows something is wrong but can not rationalize it.”

A door opens in the black halls of the ship. Eight feet from him stands a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She is wearing a toga.

Aziel thinks “A toga... not only is she a noble... but one that has committed adultery...”

“Don't kill me.” Says the woman.

“He might be my ticket out of here.” she thinks.

Aziel points the rifle at her.

“Please don't!” she screams.

The Delta Puls computer opens its claw revealing plasma blasters. and rotates on high alert back and forth dancing to find whatever has startled her, But, It can not.

“Stand down.” she says to the machine “Return for maintenance your not working properly.”

The delta prime says “As you will.” and wanders off while the fetus clings to the glass in fear, yet wanting to know what happens next.

Chapter Three

Captain Naomi Mercia Stood with her sword tightly clasped in her right hand as her other... the left palm (and artificial prosthetic going from her left fingertips to a surgical implant in her shoulder) rested on the one holding the hilt. Sheathed but dangerous, all attention was drawn to the rapier between her legs. using it to shift her weight forward the aurora of hostility backing it up more than her slight frame. Standing on the deck of Celestial Cruisor: Giga Death.

Her checkerboard short skirt is a Black and Green pattern though with golden shoulder boards. Her blouse was also the standard uniform of her rank. Black and button-up with medals and officer marking all around. Her hair hung loose bleached blonde combed to one side beneath a bicorne with plumes of red feathers out of the top. Polished to precision were black standard-issue-laced the edge of her knee boots.

“Captain!” Says an armored young soldier with his face visor raised.

“Speak.” Says Naiomi.

“The son of Young Bull....” He hesitates and struggles to find the words.

“Yes,” says Naomi

“He has... Taken your wife hostage.” Before he can finish the pronunciation of the word hostage she floors him with a straight jab from her left arm crushing his face and knocking him out cold.

“get this worthless... useless trash off of my deck.” Says Naomi.

Two soldiers drag off the young recruit by the legs leaving a trail of blood and teeth on deck.

“And get someone to clean this mess up,” says Naomi. wiping off the blood from her prosthetic arm with a handkerchief.

“Where is the slut?” Says Naomi.

“Captain we still can not locate the prisoner.” says someone looking at the screen of the scans from the Delta Pulse computers. “We're not seeing anything.” He continues.

“put a guard detail around the little punks Panzer Strider: Wizard Tusk. We may not know where he is but we know where he is going.” Says Naomi.

Then staring off into space she turns red in the face and screams with Rrimal glory an expression of not only what she was feeling but everything she could feel and it trailed off with guttural glory

“FUUUUUCK!”

(The Brutal Ballad of the Young Bull)

How am I to tell the ballad of the Young Bull? Well for one that was not his name. His name was Bartholomew Rainwater. He was the leader of a group known as the Battle-Axe Horde. A bunch of violent psychopaths Would tie their prisoner's hands with ropes soaked in gasoline and then set them alight.

They were a primeval kind of debauchery about the lifestyle of that gang. They aspired to be a crew of Star-Rogues but even if they were a major player on their block in the grand scheme of things Even if he was tribal king to millions... On his last day... He was a serf-like you or me. Property of the Royal Blood.

They planned a kidnapping that was not properly thought out. It never should have happened. They kidnapped a minor noble's daughter who has a small claim of blood to the Ashe birth line and its inheritance. When they sent the transmission saying they had the young women. the soldiers sent back the question “Who is the young bull that has my daughter.” Bartholomew Rainwater laughed and said, “I am the young bull”. He raped the poor women. He Got her pregnant and when the nobles sent word there would be no ransom paid. He decided to keep her as a concubine.

What he did not know was the nobles had been lenient for a thousand years. They let the cities be run how we the people saw fit. as long as our quota of product (whatever that be!) was met.

Within twenty-four hours the noble sent the whole fleet to orbit the planet shooting anything out of the sky that tried to leave orbit. A single ship. A celestial cruiser. opened its mouth and spit lightning and fire. With one blast megalopolis-4 was removed from existence taking billions of lives with it.

That would be the end of the story... except... the concubine of the young bull was smuggled out of the city to another of the megalopolis. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy... well... that's another story.

chapter four

“My name is Terry Mercia. My wife is captain of this vessel, as long as I am still breathing you can use me to get off of it.” Says the young woman.

Aziel says “The only way we're getting off this ship is with my Panzer Strider. Where is carrier bay?”

“How can you believe what I said... how can you trust me?” Says Terry.

“I don't. But I will kill you if you turn out to be lying,” says Aziel. “it's no skin off my teeth, either way.”

Terry nods in agreement. Then thinks “He is telling me the truth. Every word he has said is as honest as it could be.”

“It's an elevator ride away.” Says Terry.

Then she turns with Aziel following sword in one hand and a rifle hanging at his side. It is a short walk to the elevator. they get to the carrier bay without conversation or hitches. Crawling with Scarlet Templars. the bay could be a quarter mile with small fighter ships lining the floor and large carriers that are nearly twenty-five feet long.

“what are we going to do?” says Terry.

Aziel closes his eyes and points to Wizard Tusk his Panzer Strider. Seemingly on its own, it activates. Stomping and killing Dozens of soldiers bighting some in half and spitting out the mess. A twenty-five-foot tall psychically fueled weapon of mass destruction. Going into a full Rampage. Roaring with unnatural sounds like a whalesong or a gorilla's bark.

When most are dead it fly's over Aziel's chest opening after it sits in full lotus zazen posture he climbs on its legs. and into it's cockpit.

“You staying?” Says Aziel.

“No,” says Terry running at a full stride toga bouncing in the wind. she climbs onto his lap and the hatch shuts. inside there is little room. a locker opens where he places his weapons and they seemingly are swallowed by the Panzer. Even the seem disappears as they are locked away. an orb lowers in front of Terry and Aziel. He places his hands on it and possesses the Panzer.

Soon after some explosions, they are outside. making the jump

 
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from dharmadischarge and his comics

one-page comic with full description below for alt text.

comic-1.jpg

panel 1 “This is me renewing my dreams with a bootleg handheld game console.”

image a cartoon anthropomorphic cat playing a Gameboy clone in a computer chair. The cat looks kinda like Felix the Cat but with fur on his chest and a scar on his forehead. he has mischievous eyes and fangs on his mouth that are nearly always visible.

panel 2 close up of the cartoon cat staring off from his game remembering the past while the game still says beep boop while he is distracted.

panel 3 the cartoon cat as a kid watching roo rami (a legal parody of Toonami name but from a kind scooby doo influenced place in my heart.)

the text above the image says “When I was a kid I watched anime and played retro games.

panel 4 him sitting in in a side view

the cartoon cat says “it doesn't get better than this right guys?)

below the text says “those are my fondest memories.”

panel 5 the cat looks back at the reader and sees he is alone with the text “Where did you go? overlayed over his head.”

panel 6 The view is like panel 4 with the only difference the cat cartoon cat is crying while a Toonami promo plays and says “A boy has the right to dream.

 
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from Crapknocker

Just a few bits of general advice on playing #FrogComPosBand gleaned from dying over and over and over.

Once you’re deeper than level 30, watch out for summoners. Lots of different monster types can summon on you, which is generally a really bad thing to have happen. Watch out for qulythulgs, as that’s their main jam to summon nasty stuff right on top of you. Bigger demons can summon as well, which can also lead to chain-summoning which can royally ruin your day. Always have a means of escape; teleport scrolls work very well for this. You can also find ways to cast the genocide or mass genocide spells to clear things out, but be aware that for every monster you delete using these methods you lose 1 HP. When the dungeons fill with hundreds of monsters, this might do more than just sting. Also be aware that uniques are resistant to genocide.

Keep out of open areas, for the simple reason that monsters seeing you will begin to attack you. If you’re playing a stealthy class they might not see you until you’re closer or at all, which is highly to your advantage. Whenever you can choose the battlefield and tilt things to your advantage, you should do so. Open areas give the monsters the initiative to start chasing you, and many have very nasty distance attacks like Hell Lances or Mana Storms. Keeping out of sight of summoners can prevent them from summoning on you as well.

Buffing yourself up before a fight is almost always worth it. Potions of Speed, Heroism, Resistance, and temporary armor buffs like Stoneskin can make the difference between having to retreat and heal and sticking out that last turn and killing that tough unique. Eventually you will find a rod of Heroic Speed to hit you with both at once and perhaps save an inventory slot.

Always have a source of healing! Early on you will have to use potions of cure (light, medium, whatever) wounds but towards the midgame those won’t be as effective as you would like them to be. You can search for staffs of cure wounds that can have you back up in a jiffy, but as you go on, you will need to rely on potions and later staffs of Healing unless you have some healing magic to fall back on. Stockpile these potions! Buy them from black markets when you can. In the late game, staffs and rods of Angelic Healing can replace some of these needs, but having potions as your backup is a zero fail method you can always depend on. Potions do give you nutrition, so if you’re planning on chugging a bunch of potions, you may want to come on an empty stomach, as being Gorged slows you down significantly.

Always have a source of detection! Knowing what’s coming and how to deal with it is paramount. If there’s a tough unique up ahead, you would definitely rather know about it rather than just blindly getting ambushed. Furthermore, knowing the layout of the dungeon around you is helpful for the same reason. Taking a quick sprint across two tiles is much safer than walking up to that big summoning monster and just hoping they don’t get too many shots in before you get there. In the early game you will have to find or buy rods or staffs of Detect Monsters, scrolls of Magic Mapping and Detect Traps, but towards the midgame you will replace all these with rods of Detection, which rolls a bunch of useful things into one (monsters, traps, items, stairways). You will also find staffs of Clairvoyance later on to help map the terrain and light things up for you. You can also use potions of Enlightenment on levels you think will be tough to find out the whole layout at once.

Ideally, here’s how a battle against a difficult enemy would go: you use your rods or staffs or whatever to detect the enemy far off in the distance. You do a little magic mapping to see the terrain. You choose the best possible approach, one that keeps you out of line-of-sight until you’re right next to them. You buff up before you engage. Then you hit them until they drop all that delicious loot.

What actually happens in practice is that there’s some element you’ve forgotten or something unexpected occurs. For example, just out of range of your initial detection radius could be another difficult enemy that wakes up when you’re fighting the first, putting you at more of a disadvantage. The enemy could escape or even steal something of yours before running away. Enemies can also buff themselves with berserk rages and globes of invulnerability and the like. Some enemies can dispel your precious buffs or suck the charges from your wands, rods, and staves. One of your potions of speed might shatter after an enemy’s elemental attack, causing that enemy to be much faster than you were originally estimating.

You can always ‘l’ook at a monster and hit r to recall information you know about it. If you’ve seen that type of enemy before, you might know what it resists, what it’s immune to, it’s speed, it’s HP, lots of different information. This is invaluable, and you can turn on the ability to remember this info between characters in the settings. There’s a billion kinds of enemies, so having this info around can keep you out of the frying pan just a little while longer.

One last thing, don’t rush. The game doesn’t do anything on its own until you press a button to move or act. Take time to pay attention to what enemies are around you and what they might do in the next few turns. Other games may have conditioned you to push buttons quickly to get yourself out of danger, but doing this only gives enemies more turns to act while you might not be noticing what they’re doing. It’s tempting to start smashing the move buttons after an enemy gets you down to half health in one round, but acting without thinking, especially in the lower depths of the dungeon, will get you killed. If you get in a tough spot, think over your options before doing anything. Teleporting out is usually safe, unless there’s a big enemy you’ve passed by that’s awake somewhere else on the level that you might accidentally end up next to. Staffs and rods have a chance to fail and if you do in the midst of combat, the round you spent trying might be your last one. Keep low or no-fail options like scrolls or potions in your inventory as well.

Level feelings

I’ve you’ve been playing the game, you’ve probably noticed a message pop up, something like, “This level looks relatively safe.” This is the level feeling and can give you an idea of what’s waiting for you out there in the rest of the level you’re on. The color of the level indicator in the lower left of the main screen will change depending on what message you get. This only applies to the level you’re currently on, if you to a new level in a dungeon you’ll need to wait a bit there until you get a new feeling.

The level feeling takes around a hundred turns to pop up. But once it does there are several useful things you can take away from it that might change how you play the level. Possibly the best one is “There is something special about this level.” in a baby blue color. This means that somewhere on the level is an artifact, just waiting to be picked up. Depending on the level you’re on, this could be a huge find.

There are a few levels of messages that indicate how difficult the enemies you will be facing on the level are. The first, in light brown is something like, “You’re feeling nervous.” In the early levels (0-20), this probably means there’s a unique monster somewhere on the level. Next is, “You have a bad feeling about this level” in dark brown. That means there’s more difficult enemies waiting for you, probably still a unique or a few out of depth monsters waiting for you. The next level is in orange text and I can’t remember the message. The final one that I’ve seen is in dark red, indicating that there’s something extremely dangerous out there. Probably a vault or a bunch of out of depth monsters.

Line of sight

You’ve probably noticed that enemies don’t start firing distance attacks at you until they see you. There are a few ways to keep out of sight of monsters but still cause damage to them. The first is by using a rod, wand, or ammunition of exploding to fire an area of effect spell that hits the monster without you being in its line of sight. This becomes extremely useful when dealing with enemies like qulythulgs and druj (drujes?) that are immobile but can cause all sorts of problems for you if they see you. If you can avoid being seen by these guys and have enough charges or ammo, you can safely kill them from out of sight without them being able to do anything about it.

Personalities

These are options in character creation that can add some additional wrinkles to your run. A few of the easiest ones to ‘get’ are the Combat and Mighty personalities. They are trading your int and wis for additional strength, dex and con. If you’re planning a warrior-type, these can give you some extra early game oomph at the cost of higher device and spell failures in the lategame. On the flipside, there is Crafty or Shrewd, which somewhat does the opposite of the previous two mentioned.

Some of the wackier choices are Unlucky, which gives you a boost to all your stats, but makes it harder to get good drops, occasionally makes you miss in combat and gives you higher spell and device fail rates. The opposite of this is Lucky.

Sexy gives you a boost to a few stats but gives you inherent aggravation, which causes enemies to instantly wake up on level generation. This puts you at a serious disadvantage to start with, but can be mitigated a few different ways. And you can wear items that aggravate since you have it already.

The in-game help has good descriptions of how each of the different ones work, so check through the list and see if one might make an interesting twist on your character.

 
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from Lucifer Orbis

Some months ago, I bought a book called En Reise til Roma – I sporene til pilegrimen Nikolas Bergsson året 1152 (A Journey to Rome – In the footsteps of the pilgrim Nikolas Bergsson in the year 1152) by Hans Jacob Orning and Svein Harald Gullbekk. Both authors are history professors at the Oslo University and have made research in the fields of Norwegian and European history in the Middle Ages. Svein Harald did also run research projects in the area of numismatics. I think they must be a very interesting duo and their classes are surely packed with curiosities about history, big societal questions, nasty details about religious relics, period currency and also tips and tricks about bike maintenance. Yes, both gentlemen are passionate about cycling.

The book is about an Icelandic monk called Nikolas Bergsson and the pilgrimage he undertook from Iceland to Rome and then Jerusalem. He left a travel guide to help other pilgrims. The document is called Leiðarvísir og borgarskipan. As a trve icelandic man, Nikolas was sceptic of authorities, didn't dabble too much in political intrigue, still had the saga of Sigurd Fåvnesbane and Gudrun in his imaginary, had a special interest in saints and relics and whether or not he found what he was looking for in his pilgrimage is still a mystery. Of what is known, he managed to go safely back to Iceland. He became abbot of the benedictine monastery of Munkaþverá in Eyjafjörður.

So what did Hans Jacob and Svein Harald decide to do? Walk in the steps of Nikolas and see the world through his eyes to the best of their ability? Of course not! They would cycle! The book's title is A Journey to Rome because the authors opted to make the first half of Nikolas' pilgrimage from Iceland to Rome and experience the world from their bike seats. They had to make sporadic use of transportation and resort to current-day facilities but soon found themselves in Norway. Thus the book, in general terms, tells the story of what they are able to see and find in the places Nikolas visited at a time when most territories in Europe were part of the Western Roman Empire. What did Nikolas see? More than that, what was he aware of?

The book is packed with historical facts and curiosities from the get-go and it can quickly get a bit overwhelming. The authors followed the guide very closely, informing the reader about the instances they deviated from and why. It's an astronomical amount of research that my brain, used to read texts focused on one aspect of historical thinking, struggled a bit to keep up. I can't say I didn't get distracted at times, but there was always something grabbing my attention a few sentences sooner or later. I think I saw a bit of myself in Nikolas, going back to something I've mentioned two paragraphs ago as is expressed here:

Det var helgener, relikvier og kirker han [Nikolas] var opptatt av, ikke paver, ei heller kirken som helhet eller ideologi. (p. 61)

“Nikolas was interested in saints, relics and churches, not popes or the church as a whole or as ideology.” I can see this. Do I share a bit with Nikolas? Maybe so. After what I learned about him I could see myself walking by his side and drinking some beers with him, exactly how Hans Jacob and Svein Harald imagined if they were in the same pilgrimage. I'm just not so sure, though. There's a lot of speculation about Nikolas' thinking – if there was some interest in the church as an institution it may be lost to us. However, it strikes me as odd if there's a total disconnect between a future abbot and his current-day church affairs. The authors don't seem to be very interested in the church as an ideology either, especially when there's emperors and politics to think about. In any case, in good academic spirits, it's always good to maintain some neutrality when it comes to matters of religion and faith, even in a book which is supposed to be about the complexity of the time period it illustrates, the travel and Nikolas pilgrimage. In the end the authors painted a very profound picture of the mentality of people in the Middle Ages, their interconnected webs of actions and reactions, the spiritual and the mundane connected, the supernatural realm and its impact and significance in the physical world. At times, I struggled to see the difference between this mentality and the unique experience of meeting (some) religious people today.

I continued reading the book and our friend Nikolas made his way through Speyer, he saw the Speyer cathedral – a massive building with cruciform plan, a central nave and two side aisles, the transeptum, a big vault and a deambulatorium. It's a large, earthly, serene, and powerful construction built with red sandstone and the final resting place of emperors. By the time Nikolas visited the cathedral Conrad II, Henry III, Henry IV and Henry V were already buried there. The authors were completely drawn to it and me too. I want to visit that cathedral for other reasons, not of the same world as our author’s, but now that I have a little more information, I also wish to take a look at the graves and marvel at them, not only at the Divine. I want to see the cathedral from the outside and see it, not only as the house of God, but as house-like, an oversized house that doesn’t project itself to the skies like a meteor.

The reaction of our travel companions to the Strasbourg cathedral was visceral to say the least (p. 134). Its rayonnant gothic architecture didn’t allow for an opportunity to rest the eye. Used to Protestant churches with minimal religious imagery, I can only imagine the overwhelming impact gothic architecture has on people who aren’t religious or are used to simplicity and practicality. I myself love gothic churches for their artistical, architectural and engineering value; they’re like a museum or an open book which tells many stories if we’re able to comprehend or identify them. I just don’t see them as optimal places of prayer. I never entered a gothic church and got that pull to sit in introspection or say a word of prayer. The reaction of our authors shocked me at first but now in hindsight I can see where it came from. Who were those bells and whistles made for anyway? How did people react at the time the rayonnant part was finished? Was the objective to disturb or to invite? Or both?

The chapters about the church, relics, and saints are among my favourites. The exciting practice of stealing relics from a city to considerably increase the economic power of another city is described in such a way that almost I forgot that stealing is wrong. Our authors call it kulturkriminalitet which dispenses any translation. The idea of cultural crimes is a relatively modern one and at the time of Frederik Barbarossa it meant serious business (p. 84). When his troops took over Milan they got access to massive loot. Among the goodies were the relics of the Three Kings. This was a wonderful score handed to the Archbishop Rainal of Dassel that made Cologne into one of the most important centres of pilgrimage. What I find most captivating are the discussions between both authors at the end of the chapters, where the subject shifts from a very compressed mixture of names, places, dates and events (all relevant and well structured) to little bits of introspection, analysis and reflection. They themselves reflected upon the relics and what they felt upon seeing them.

Many such stories, like the one I described, populate the book like illuminated manuscripts. Reflections about religion, doctrine, mentality, faith, fear, danger, wars, beauty and contemplation are present more or less prominently across the book, through Nikolas’ experience of the world around him, and the author’s experience from their informed perspective – rational, relevant and informed. A lot about Nikolas is clouded in uncertainty but of the many times Hans Jacob and Svein Harald stop to take a breather, they think about the motives of a pilgrimage, its biggest triumph, if it’s the higher heavens and salvation or something more. They left donations only to the small churches that were in most disrepair and need. They eventually met the heroes of this story – Andrea and his family. Isn’t this also a part of a pilgrimage? The human connection, the experiences and the edification (danning) we derive from it.

There will be a lot of back-and-forth in History to comprehend the world Nikolas moves in, his 12th century of constant clashes between papal and imperial powers. By the end of the book we find a modern translation of the Leiðarvísir with all the most likely locations Nikolas visited. They must have decided not to add the part from Rome to Jerusalem but it can easily be found online. There’s also a timetable with the approximate number of days the pilgrimage took. Also a bibliography with commentary from where I underlined about nine books to read.

As a closing note, both Hans Jacob and Svein Harald are research colleagues and they had the idea of writing this book after working on a project called Standardization in the Middle Ages supported by The Research Council of Norway. The research resulted in a book which is now in open access in its whole or in parts. The book En Reise til Roma was also supported by The Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association. It was published by Dreyers Forlag in 2024. I hope the book gets an English translation soon. If it does, I’ll read it again, maybe in ebook format. I can’t say that I didn’t get stuck at times. Norwegian is still a new language to me. Even though I speak it every day, I don’t make much use of it outside of my job, and my reading habits in the language have been very lacking. English is our Latin. Jumping right into an History book wasn’t the best idea, or maybe it was. I have read light romance novels where I didn’t struggle so much. My head is extremely tired but I am very satisfied with overcoming this reading without interrupting the flow to check the dictionary. This book was also a pilgrimage to me. I can’t wait to read some articles about standardisation in the Middle Ages!

 
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from Crapknocker

I can’t give too much advice on the endgame, having only gotten there a handful of times myself, but in general, be a coward. Detect everything as thoroughly as you can before ever entering a room. Kill every weak enemy you can for exp and use every cheesy strategy you can come up with. Dig holes in walls to draw out powerful monsters and fight them one on one. If you’re an archer, use scrolls of phase door to bounce around once a monster gets into melee range with you. Use every advantage at your disposal, because once you’re in Angband facing down monsters that breathe multiple elements simultaneously, can stop time, and summon enemies that then summon more enemies, you’ll wish you had practiced running away earlier.

In general, keep more items in your inventory than you think you'll need. When you have more than 300 HP, start carrying around potions of Healing for emergencies. Speaking of Healing and Healing potions, you'll want to hoard all you can of these to prepare for the final fight. Use them if you need to, it's stupid to die with an inventory full of healing potions, but keep as many as you can for later.

Check out the Angband ladder for FrogComPosBand https://angband.live/ladder/ladder-browse.php?v=FrogComposband&r=&c=&n=&e=&s=0, especially other characters of your class. Read spoilers on monster levels, spells, anything you can find.

Advice for quests found in towns: https://pastebin.com/ZLZZz45j

Demigod mutations: https://pastebin.com/hTi24Nky

Arena rewards and various other small spoilers: http://nikheizen.github.io/pages/rewards.html

Dungeons, dungeon guardians and quests: https://pastebin.com/AVsp31k8

One last bit of advice, maybe try the Munchkin personality if you get stuck in a rut. It gives huge boosts to your stats, makes it easier to level up, and starts you with a million gold. You can't really get credit for beating the game using this mode, but it is great for trying new character combos and learning how places you've never been work. It's worth checking out at least once, especially if you're learning the game. Preparing to fight big J

Some tips I've gleaned from excessively reading winning posts on the Angband ladder on what to do and how to prepare to fight the Serpent of Chaos:

Double breaths

You have to have a bunch of HP to even think of fighting the serpent. The main reason for this is that the big guy is super fast and even at +35 speed can get two moves on you before you have a chance to react. If the serpent decides to breathe some exotic element on you like chaos, it’s a problem. If he decided to do it twice in a row, it can be deadly. Having a big batch of HP is the best way to deal with this. That way, if you get taken down to minimal HP you can teleport out to heal before resuming the fight.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these double moves can occur halfway through the fight or when you’ve got him down to his last bit of health. You will need to keep your HP above a certain level to avoid instant death if the serpent gets a double move on you. The energy system underlying the turns in the game is somewhat randomized, so you won’t know this is coming until you get hit with it. Keeping your HP up is the best defense alongside having your resistances covered.

To help buoy your HP levels, you can do a bit of manipulation with your Life Rating. If you managed to come across a potion of Self Knowledge, you probably noticed you had something called a life rating. Here’s how I understand this system to work. Every level up, the game rolls some dice behind the scenes to determine how much HP you gain. Over the 50 levels you have available, a series of bad rolls can really hamper your total HP. To counteract this, you can drink potions of New Life, which reroll these dice and can give you a larger HP pool and potentially different stat maximums. Your life rating is a general feel of how high you could’ve gotten on these HP rolls. Anything over 100% is great here and potentially worth keeping. Basically if you stockpile enough potions, you can drink a New Life followed by a Self Knowledge to see how good your new life rating is. This can get you 50 or more HP in the endgame, which is nothing to sneeze at and may save your life.

Summon uniques

The Serpent of Chaos has a power that I think no other boss in the game has, to summon unique monsters. If you have gotten to him (it?), you have probably gotten surrounded by bunches of high level undead summons, dragon summons and tons of others. But summoning unique monsters is probably the most nasty one of them all. As you probably already know, unique monsters are some of the hardest to defeat in the game and can complicate any encounter they pop up in. This goes double if the encounter is with the toughest boss in the game, the Serpent of Chaos.

The quirk here is that the serpent will only summon uniques that are currently living, i.e. those that you haven’t defeated yet. The problem here is that there are a bunch of high-level uniques that can make your life hell in the lower depths of Angband. Some especially nasty ones are Godzilla and Nodens, both of which have boatloads of HP and devastating attacks so you don’t want to be engaging with them at the same time as the serpent.

One approach is to troll the lower levels of Angband in the 90+ range and try to kill all the uniques that pop up there. This is useful for two reasons, one it lowers the amount of uniques that the serpent can summon and two it gives you the really useful drops of the uniques from that low in the dungeon. Better equipment is always better.

Another way to deal with unwanted summoned uniques is to use scrolls or staffs of Destruction, which turn the usual dungeon terrain into random mashes of stone. Uniques caught in the radius of a destruction spell will be despawned from a level (not killed). However, if you accidentally catch the serpent in the radius of your destruction spell, he will also be despawned. But then he will immediately be respawned elsewhere in the level at full health, so you really don’t want to do this unless you’re trying to escape or something.

But destructing the level before the serpent finds you can be a useful strategy to limit line of sight and the summons that might occur. Enemies can only be summoned in the squares surrounding your @ character. If your back is to a wall, that’s a few less squares that bad guys can occupy trying to kill you. The only downside to this is that the serpent immediately knows where you are on the level as soon as you go down to 100 and will begin making his way toward you, smashing down any walls between you and him as he goes. Even if he tunnels through a few walls, taking control of the terrain you fight on can give you an edge in this battle of attrition.

There are a few things you can do to help even the odds, though. The first, if you’re planning on fighting the serpent in melee is to have as much damage as you can without sacrificing too much in the way of resists. Having a few pluses to hit and damage on random bits of equipment can end up giving you hundreds of extra damage per round. You’ll want at least 500 damage per round to even stand a chance in melee, and the more the better.

A few notes about the Serpent of Chaos. First is that he’s not immune to stun, so if you have a weapon that stuns or a reliable stunning attack, you can make the fight much easier by keeping him stunned, which I believe increases his chance to fail casting any magic (including summons) and lowers his chance to hit you in melee. Second, he’s considered an evil, living monster so if you use gloves of slaying that do extra damage against either evil or living monsters, they will work on him as well. My third note is that he frequently breathes chaos, so bring along at least double chaos resist to help mitigate that damage. He also has an aura of shards, so don’t go up against him without resisting that.

There are a few other techniques to reduce or prevent the serpent’s summoning powers. If you can mix it into your equipment, there are amulets of anti-summoning that exist in the game (denoted by [Sm). Keep your eyes out for those. Some classes have access to anti-magic, which also helps prevent summoning, which is also available in amulet form ([M). You can also turn the tables and have your own summoned minions occupy all the spaces around you so that big J’s summoning is blocked that way. This can be doubly helpful if you bring heavy monsters of your own to fight on your behalf. Some classes can summon dragons and Great Wyrms of Power (GWOPs) and Steam-Powered Mechanical Dragons are two types that I’ve heard hold up decently against the serpent. Even non-summoning classes can get in on the act by capturing these monsters in the capture balls available in certain stores, then throwing them (‘v’) when you want to release them, Pokémon-style. But be aware, the chaos breath he breathes has a tendency to polymorph monsters occasionally, so your big badass summons might get turned into tiny, fragile rats.

 
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from Crapknocker

The midgame in FrogComPos Band is characterized mainly by trying to cover your resistances while still doing enough damage to be able to kill monsters. You'll also want to pick up as much speed as possible. But the main thing you'll be doing is exploring. While in town, go ahead and hit that < key and take a good long look at the wider world around you.

You'll notice other towns, dungeons and paths between cities. For now, try and stay on the path to reduce the chances of getting ambushed by random monsters. It might not be much more than annoying now, but later on in different zones the enemies can quickly ramp up in difficulty. For now, head to Anambar, the city in the northwest, and down to the troll / orc caves just southeast of it.

If you get stuck there, try some of the other dungeons around your level. Try to pick up useful detection staffs and rods, especially detect monster and detect traps. Keep potions of cure critical wounds on you at all times, just like teleport scrolls. Do the various quests found in different towns throughout the world. Be aware that these quests are usually quite a bit harder than the danger level indicates, especially the Cloning Pits quest.

Once you've got the cash flow, you can teleport between towns you've visited by using the option in the inns. This can be helpful when you're flush on dosh and would like to upgrade some equipment. Take a shopping trip to every city’s black market and you might find a handy ring or stat potion. Perhaps a staff of Enlightenment to map the dungeon for you? As you level up, the black market will offer better and better quality items to purchase.

You'll be towards the back end of the midgame when you're going through different dungeons, hunting dragons and other bigger monsters for their tasty item drops. Your resists will start to look good; you'll have something close to double coverage of your base resists and decent single coverage of some of the high resists. You’ll start swapping different sets of equipment in to try and get better combinations that will let you do more damage or have better resists. You’ll start thinking about diving down Angband to finish off the final bosses of the game.

The Endgame

I can’t give too much advice on the endgame, having only gotten there a handful of times myself, but in general, be a coward. Detect everything as thoroughly as you can before ever entering a room. Kill every weak enemy you can for exp and use every cheesy strategy you can come up with. Dig holes in walls to draw out powerful monsters and fight them one on one. If you’re an archer, use scrolls of phase door to bounce around once a monster gets into melee range with you. Use every advantage at your disposal, because once you’re in Angband facing down monsters that breathe multiple elements simultaneously, can stop time, and summon enemies that then summon more enemies, you’ll wish you had run practiced running away earlier.

In general, keep more items in your inventory than you think you'll need. When you have more than 300 HP, start carrying around potions of Healing for emergencies. Speaking of Healing and Healing potions, you'll want to hoard all you can of these to prepare for the final fight. Use them if you need to, it's stupid to die with an inventory full of healing potions, but keep as many as you can for later.

Check out the Angband ladder for FrogComPosBand https://angband.live/ladder/ladder-browse.php?v=FrogComposband&r=&c=&n=&e=&s=0, especially other characters of your class. Read spoilers on monster levels, spells, anything you can find.

Advice for quests found in towns: https://pastebin.com/ZLZZz45j

Demigod mutations: https://pastebin.com/hTi24Nky

Arena rewards and various other small spoilers: http://nikheizen.github.io/pages/rewards.html

Dungeons, dungeon guardians and quests: https://pastebin.com/AVsp31k8

One last bit of advice, maybe try the Munchkin personality if you get stuck in a rut. It gives huge boosts to your stats, makes it easier to level up, and starts you with a million gold. You can't really get credit for beating the game using this mode, but it is great for trying new character combos and learning how places you've never been work. It's worth checking out at least once, especially if you're learning the game.

#FrogComPosBand

 
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from hazardes

i bought a box set of three films directed by Takeshi Kitano (aka “Beat” Takeshi) “Violent Cop”, “Boiling Point” and “Sonatine

Kitano is very famous in Japan. for most of the 1980s he was known as a stand-up comedian and tv host before moving into film directing and acting. in 1989 he was set to star in “Violent Cop” with Kinji Fukasaku directing, however the scheduling didn't work out due to Kitano's tv commitments and Fukasaku dropped out of the project, leaving the film without a director. someone suggested to Kitano that he direct the film himself and that's what ended up happening

i watched Violent Cop last weekend expecting great things, and it certainly is a film about a violent cop. Kitano stars as Azuma, a police detective with a habit of using excessive force when dealing with criminals. Azuma is assigned to investigate the murder of a drug dealer and the film follows the investigation, and Azuma's life when he is off the clock. the plot is a fairly standard crime film along the lines of something like Dirty Harry but what makes it interesting is Kitano's direction. i mentioned Kinji Fukasaku was set to direct, and if you have read my earlier posts you'll know what i think of his yakuza movies like Battles Without Honour and Humanity, there is so much energy in them, particularly the action sequences, with the camera violently shaking all over the place. you can practically feel the energy crackling through the screen like a jolt of electricity

well, with Violent Cop it's like Kitano decided to do the exact opposite of what Fukasaku would've done. the camera hardly moves, and i don't even know if you could call the performances acting. there is virtually no emotion at all in the entire film, the actors deliver their lines in long drawn out scenes with no camera movement, long pauses, and sudden outbursts of extreme violence. it gives the film a very nihilistic tone, but it feels completely lifeless and when it finished i just kinda sat there feeling nothing at all about what i had just seen

i can kinda see what he was going for but it just didn't work for me. i didn't care about anything that happened. there's even a pretty nasty rape scene involving Azuma's disabled sister but it's filmed in such an emotionless dispassionate way that i sat staring blankly at the tv

weird as fuck

Boiling Point is Kitano's second film, about a hapless duo of lowlifes who work at a petrol station. their boss is beaten up by a local yakuza and they go on a trip to Okinawa in order to buy a gun and get revenge

filmed in exactly the same style as Violent Cop with all the same problems, lack of emotion, and nihilistic style. i enjoyed it a little more as the characters are more fleshed out and interesting, and there are a few moments of black humour

Sonatine is the final film in the set, and Kitano's fourth as director (his third, A Scene at the Sea is not included here) the plot follows a yakuza gang led by Kitano who are sent to Okinawa by their boss to help resolve a gang war

the plot reminds me of Fukasaku's yakuza movies, and is full of the same allegiances, betrayals, and violent revenge that characterised them, and it's definitely the most interesting film of the three. but again i just found it dispassionate, emotionless, and nihilistic due to the way it was shot

here's an example of an “action” scene from the film, to give you an idea of what i mean

Sonatine bar shootout

contrast it with this from Fukasaku

Battles Without Honor And Humanity Shuji Yano death scene

so yeah, Takeshi Kitano. definitely a unique director, but his style just doesn't work for me. like the characters in his films i just sit there expressionless while events unfold on the screen in front of me, feeling nothing. and when it's over i slowly walk over to my tv, take the disc out of my player, and put it back on the shelf

 
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from Crapknocker

So how do you actually play FrogComPosBand, and more importantly how do you win?

First off, you have some options in playing the game. I highly suggest you download the precompiled binaries from the author's GitHub. You can also compile directly from the source code, but unless you know exactly what this means and what it entails, don't do this. You can also play online through your browser via angband.live.

Visually, you have options too. You can try to use the graphical tiles option, but I've found that most unique enemies are not rendered correctly and end up basically invisible using this method. I therefore suggest going native and playing in good ‘ol ASCII mode. That way you get proper representation of your monsters and you can pack a lot of info on your main screen to boot.

Speaking of screens, since these types of games date back to the days of the terminal, you have some additional options that can make your life easier. You can freely resize your main window to show as much of the game as your resolution can handle, but you can also have additional windows that serve specific functions. In game, press the equals key (=) to go into that menu, by which I mean hold shift and press the + key at the same time. Yes, the game differentiates between lower case and upper case letters and the same goes for all the other keys on the keyboard. There are a lot of things you can do in this game, and there is a unique input for each one.

I like to have a window showing my inventory, one with my equipment, one showing the message log in case I missed something important and a final window showing the visible enemies in the area. This is mainly because the game is designed to fuck with you and occasionally throws things your way like the space monster, which is represented on screen by a blank space. Or the creeping coins, represented by a dollar sign that looks exactly like piles of treasure but these attack and poison you. Being able to tell foe from dungeon feature will save your life more than once.

The Early Game

If it's your first time playing, you'll have to create a character and I've already run through the ridiculous amount of options there. But for a first-timer I'll suggest a Mercury Demigod Warrior. Warriors are a pretty solid class, easy gameplay consisting of hitting monsters with the biggest weapon you can muster and the Mercury demigod heritage gives you some speed on top of all of that.

Once you actually pop into existence in the starting town of Outpost, you'll need to control your character. You move by using the number pad keys. You attack in melee by going up to a monster and ‘bump’ attacking them (moving into them), trading blows each turn until one of you backs off or dies.

There's also a bevy of shops and places to go in town, so I'll do a quick overview of those. Armor, weapon, potion, magic items and booksellers are in every town, as are a food and light source vendor, and a temple shop that sells healing potions among other things. Finally, there's the black market where you can buy rare and expensive items.

For your first purchases I recommend buying a brass lantern and a flask of oil to fill it, since that gives you an extra square radius of light compared to the torches you probably started with. You should also probably buy a few pieces of basic armor from the armor shop. This should improve your initial survivability.

There's also an inn and mayor’s office where you can accept quests. Quests are optional, usually single level challenges that come with a reward upon completion. The first two available in Outpost are the Thieves’ Hideout and the Trouble at Home quests. Do the Trouble at Home one from the inn first, as it's the easiest. Once you go down the stairs that have appeared in town (you have to enter > to go down the stairs, yes I mean shift plus period) you'll be faced with killing a few mean mercenaries. The good thing is that they don't come after you until you attack them. If you have a sling or other distance weapon, fire it to aggro one to you and get a free hit or two along the way. Get used to maximizing every advantage you can against the monsters, they definitely don't fight fair. You'll probably have to finish off the merc in melee, which will knock you down a few HP. Rest up between fights (either hit the 5 key a bunch of times or R to specify how long) and kill all the happy singing drunks that stumble about, there's no downside and they sometimes drop money. Finish off all the rest of the mercs and feel free to explode a bit before you take the stairs back up. There are a few potions and rations in the back you can nab to sell in town to get you a bit of extra gold. Sell all the potions, they aren't that useful. Keep the rations for when you get hungry later. Don't forget to get your reward from the inn when you're done.

The Thieves’ Hideout is a little tougher, you'll probably want to be level 3 before attempting it. What I like to do to make this leveling process a bit faster is to go on the stairs to the dungeon just outside of town, go down to see if there's anything interesting just within that first room and go directly up if not. People on forums and messageboards call this stairscumming and it's fairly useful throughout the game. Kill a few low level enemies, grab a few items to sell, level up and buy a ranged weapon if you don't have one and maybe better armor. Go down into the den once you're ready to take on the quest.

Don't move once you're down the stairs, you are surrounded by traps except for in one direction. Which direction you won't know immediately. The bad guys will start coming to you, so when you see them start shooting them with arrows or pebbles or whatever. They will probably hit you and steal a little gold then teleport away. This is irritating, but actually to your advantage right now. When they run up again you can shoot them a few more times until you wear them down and (hopefully) kill them all. But still, don't move. Hit the s key to search around you until you locate the traps. You can try to disarm them (D), but it might be easier to go around. There are several more traps throughout the level so search a bit before you step. Gather up the treasures remaining and head back up. Get your reward, probably a magic weapon, from the mayor and you're well on your way into the early game.

With the cash you get from that, it's time to buy some things that will save your life. First, healing potions. Go to the temple shop and buy 5-10 of the largest healing potions you can afford. Go to the potion / scroll shop and buy 5-10 scrolls of Teleportation. Use these liberally throughout your game! It may feel cowardly to run away, but it only takes one fatal mistake to end your entire run. Stay safe and live longer. They put that low HP warning in the game for a reason.

With those quests under your belt, you can start diving into the early dungeon right outside of town. Dive a few levels in, always resting up between combats, until the monsters start to feel hard. Once your inventory fills up with items, head back up to town to sell and clear up space.

This is a good time to tell you about item identification. As you probably noticed with the potions, you don't always know what an item can do upon first encountering it. You can drink a potion to identify it, but this can be a bad idea if it turns out to be a potion of Poison or Death. If you hold onto weapons for a while in your inventory, you will eventually get a feeling about the quality of the item. The game will pop up a message about this and the item will say something like {good} or {excellent} in your inventory. The good or excellent ones are magic, you can read a scroll of Identify on them to figure out their exact stats. Same goes for potions, but very early on that might be cost prohibitive so you can just sell one in a stack to find out what they all are. Same goes for stacks of ammunition. To get around buying all those individual identify scrolls, I like to make my next goal in the early game to get enough cash to buy a staff of identify, usually sold by the magic item shop in town. They go for 2-3k but recharge themselves for free, so save up.

Once your item identification needs are met, you've probably leveled up once or twice and are tired of going up and down all those stairs. Let me introduce you to the Scroll of Word of Recall. Reading it in town takes you to the lowest level of whatever dungeon you've visited. Reading it in the dungeon brings you back to the most recent town you were in. So helpful. This will be your main mode of transfer range back and forth throughout the game. Keep an extra one in your inventory in case your last one gets burned up.

Now that you've got easy access to the dungeon, you can resume diving to try and get down to the bottom of the Warrens and kill Mugash the Kobold Lord. He doesn't have any special powers, but he does hit hard and have a whole group of other kobolds along with him. Don't let them surround you, fight them one at a time and retreat and heal if you take too much of a beating. Once you take him down you'll probably want to use the stat point you get to up your strength. That lets you hit harder and carry more stuff in your inventory before you get overloaded and start to lose points of speed (always a bad thing).

Once you kill Mugash at the bottom of the dungeon you can continue your adventuring exploits in the Hideout dungeon to the southwest. It starts at level 9 and has more human-type enemies which results in much better drops. You will probably see your first excellent items down here and if you're lucky an artifact or two. There are also some heavy unique monsters that show up here, so beware.

One of the biggest pitfalls I've succumbed to again and again in this dungeon is lack of confusion resistance. One particular unique, the Variant Maintainer, causes confusion on hit but more irritatingly also summons software bugs that also confuse on hit and explosively multiply. There are also quiver slots that shoot arrows that confuse on hit, so without confusion resistance you'll be stuck with no means of escape. Keep an eye out for rings with confusion resistance while shopping throughout your early game playthrough.

Once you've conquered your second dungeon, you begin to enter the midgame.

#FrogComPosBand

 
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from hazardes

today was a public holiday here in the UK and i had the day off work. it's the end of the month and i have no money left so the plan for today was to sit around at home, do a couple of chores around the house, have some dinner, and then watch a load of films

mission accomplished!

i ended up marathoning the last three films in the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, which will come as a shock to you i'm sure. i said writing this blog would give me an excuse to watch them all again. i honestly don't think i've ever been as into a series of films as i am these, like i mentioned in an earlier post they're just so dense, and i really feel like i'm learning lots of things while watching them; language, history, culture, all of it very alien to someone who grew up half a world away

the third and fourth films; Proxy War and Police Tactics are the two films in the series that are the most closely linked together, Police Tactics follows directly on from the events in Proxy War, and tells how an all-out gang war erupted in Hiroshima between rival yakuza factions in 1963, and the subsequent crackdown from the authorities. the plot gets very heavy in these two, when i talked about the first film i mentioned that it can be hard to follow in places, and that is magnified here as there is so much going on, it all follows the familiar pattern of alliances, betrayals, and violent revenge, but i did find it a lot easier to keep track of who everyone was the second time round

it's funny, you'll spot an actor and be like “oh i recognise him he's so and so from the first film” but then you remember that the character he played two films ago was brutally murdered and that same actor is playing someone completely different now. this happens quite a lot

one actor i have to mention is the amazing Nobuo Kaneko who plays Boss Yamamori in all five films. i came to absolutely love him by the end, Yamamori is a slimy double-crossing cowardly snake, and Kaneko delivers such a memorable performance. he appears in loads of other Japanese films i've watched recently from around this time too, always playing similar characters – scheming bosses, corrupt politicians, he was definitely typecast, and he's great in them all. i looked him up on Wikipedia and he had a really long career, even hosting a popular cookery show on Japanese TV towards the end of his life. such a character

the fourth film Police Tactics was originally planned to be the final film in the series, and it's written that way, however it was such a success that Toei put up the money and got Fukasaku to direct one more. i'm glad they did because Final Episode is an absolute banger movie and a great send off for the series. set a few years after the events of Police Tactics, the public have turned against the yakuza and their constant violence forcing the gangs to try and rebrand as respectable businesses and a “political organisation” called Tensei. predictably this doesn't go well and infighting soon leads to more violence

you really get a sense of how tired of it all Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) is by the end, when he realises that he's become the boss sending the young footsoldiers out to die

so, which one of the five films is the best? i can't decide, please don't put a gun to my head and force me to choose, all five of them are simultaneously the best film i've ever seen, but Proxy War is probably my favourite

still can't believe i got the box set for twenty-five quid

 
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from hazardes

the hardest thing about writing this post was coming up with a title

rather than dedicate a whole blog post to one film, i thought i'd try writing about all the films i watched this week, in a sort of anthology post, let's see!

two films from Kinji Fukasaku, and one from Teruo Ishii. i'm new to Ishii, Blind Woman's Curse (1970) is the first film of his i've seen, and i enjoyed it a lot. a young Meiko Kaji in her first starring role as the dragon-tattooed oyabun of a yakuza clan, facing off against a rival gang in a surreal mix of traditional period ninkyo eiga yakuza movie and weird grotesque ghost story. this is par for the course for Ishii apparently, some of the titles of his other films are definitely interesting! Horrors of Malformed Men sounds wonderful. Blind Woman's Curse is quite bloody in places, with lots of red paint spraying everywhere in that style common to the early '70s (Lady Snowblood is great for that) i really liked how Kaji's gang all had matching back tattoos that lined up when they stood in formation, with Kaji at one end with the head of the dragon on her back. she is such a badass

it's easy to see why Meiko Kaji went on to become a star. she just has this aura about her, that mesmerising quality that makes it hard to focus on anything else when she's on screen. if i was 20 years older i definitely would've had a poster of her on my teenage bedroom wall (tbf i'd put one up now if i could find one)

Hiroshima Death Match (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1973) is the second film in the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, and is a slight departure from the first in that it mainly focuses on one character, the tragic yakuza hitman Shoji Yamanaka (played by Kinya Kitaoji) also starring Meiko Kaji (notice a pattern here) and Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba who gives an incredible performance as the psychopathic Katsutoshi Otomo. stylistically it's exactly the same as the first, which is hardly surprising as they were filmed back to back (the entire five film series was released in the space of two years) and features the same frantic fight scenes and documentary style that leaves you breathless. you remember how i said that i didn't know which of the five films was my favourite? well it might be this one, mainly because of Kaji and Chiba as they are both excellent

based on true events, with only the time period changed slightly so it would continue from the events of the first film rather than being set concurrently (plus production happened so quickly they couldn't rebuild one of the sets in time) Bunta Sugawara takes a back seat in this one. the real life Yamanaka was still held in great reverence by the yakuza of Hiroshima so screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara had to be careful and not change his story too much

i really love this series, there's so much density to it, so much to read about and learn, and it's a tragedy that it took so long to get the recognition it deserves outside of Japan

finally, this week i also watched another Fukasaku movie, Wolves, Pigs, and Men (1964) which has recently been released on blu-ray by Eureka. shot in black and white, this is a brilliant tale of the fallout of a heist gone wrong, starring one of the golden boys of Japanese cinema of the time period, Ken Takakura, playing a character called Jiro, who is an absolute bastard. quite a hard watch in places, this film is packed with social commentary about the downtrodden people forced to live out their lives in the slums of Tokyo, and their efforts to escape to a better life. one film that i am pretty sure was influenced by this masterpiece is Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs as they are quite similar in places (including some nasty torture sequences)

one word i would use to describe this film is “bleak” as there are no happy endings here, when a heist goes wrong things quickly devolve into paranoia and infighting, and when the yakuza get involved, well...

Fukasaku is quickly becoming one of my favourite film makers, everything i've seen of his so far has been fantastic, and each time they announce a new release of one of his movies it jumps right to the top of my must watch list. Arrow have one coming up, “The Threat” which is another one of his black and white earlier films, and i am looking forward to it immensely

 
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