radio414

Chris didn’t even register that Sergei had shifted the rat so his sword would strike true (or truer, like, he thought his aim was pretty good) until it happened. But the rat didn’t even have the good decency to die like it was supposed to! It just rolled into the wall and righted itself to go on the attack again. “Watch your feet!“ Estellise called out as a bolt of her light magic struck that same rat. For a moment, the magic illuminated the entire room, and Chris saw how feral the rat in front of him really was, its blood-crazed expression only exaggerated by its wound and its singed fur. The light faded quickly, though, and the way the rat was moving meant he had to act soon. What else could he do? He slashed his sword in a downward arc, aiming to take the rat out for good this time, or at least protect his ankles.

Can't believe I missed one but fortunately it gives me a chance to respond to a non-question so there's that. The question first, though: This was a difficult one because it was a Christmas tradition for my family (okay mostly my mom but everyone else helped (or "helped")) to make all kinds of cookies but I guess I can narrow it down to four: 4) Girl Scout Tagalongs. A semi-controversial pick, from what I understand. The internet, in it's effort to be as "unique" (scarequotes mine) as possible, has, from what I've seen, divided between Girl Scout Cookies being the best things ever or overpriced garbage funding a garbage institution, and of course it is only in extremes. But my aunt gets me a bunch every year so I have positive associations and the peanut butter and chocolate "Tagalong" buiscuts are the best ones they have (frozen Thin Mints are a close second) so I'm putting those here. 3) Chocolate Chip. The classic, but it's a classic for a reason, and despite the aforementioned tradition fading away as everyone got older, these are the ones that still get made every year. Not really much more to say about them, really. 2) Springerles. Speaking of tradition this is, like, actual recipe-passed-from-mother-to-daughter-type stuff. You said you bake a lot in your AMA, so I assume you know what these are, but in case you don't, they're these square (or ours were square) German biscuits that are firm and thick and have little designs stamped on them. The ones I remember had just a hint of sweetness which means I didn't always like them but now I really do. There's also a little bit of a "forbidden fruit" aspect to them for me because we were always welcome to have the other cookies we (mom) made but mom would only let us have a few of these. 1) Macarons. These count as cookies, right? I'm not French and Google says they're "confections" but I'm saying they count. Not something we made but something we were always excited to have, On the rare occasion I do get to have one, no matter the quality (I'm not a cookie or confection connoisseur), it's always difficult not to just stick the whole thing in my mouth. No, you got it. I mean, I'm not saying I'm not crazy when it comes to this specific sound. And I don't make a big deal of it to anyone when it happens because I know it's a silly thing to be bothered by, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still happen. The one way I can try to describe or explain it is that I've never liked the sensasion of erasing a chalkboard either (like, the physical action of doing so); the feeling of the eraser brush going over the board feels weird to me. So I may just have gotten those two feelings conflated in some way but that's why. It also doesn't help that I was taught in school on dry-erase boards so chalkboards were a bit more foreign to me growing up.

it's entirely possible; it's a pretty well-known song

Don't actually look for that stuff; it's mostly a gag I wanted to do since I said I want something "pretentious" (scarequotes mine) and the anime is anything but. If you are looking for "underlying themes", and again, this is certainly not part of what the author or animation team was going for, I spent some time in an early draft with a more in-depth analysis of exactly what Yokoi and Seki are ignoring. The phrase "I think Global Warming is an important issue" appears on a chalkboard at one point and there's a video about the dangers of smoking, so I was going to go into the glitz and glamor of media versus the existential threat of death on a both personal and societal level but it turns out that's not a very fun or funny thing to write about (I did want to be at least a little fun and/or funny) and the whole bit was taking up a larger percentage of the review than I was comfortable with so I cut it.

Oh wow a threefer. Or, I guess, if you count all the follow-ups, that's, like, a six-or-seven-fer. I guess let's go one line at a time. The most annoying noise to me is, well, "nails on a chalkboard" is the classic simile, but what I really hate is the sound of an eraser on a chalkboard. It gives me goosebumps, and not the nice ASMR kind (also I don't really get ASMR so). This is compounded by the fact that, not only is this sound more common than nails, but there's also a texture to the sound that I can't really describe over text. It's the worst. The preamble to the song question, though, is where I listen to new music, and it mostly comes from twitch.tv/Kathleen_LRR, who runs an every Saturday pirate-radio music stream. She puts together a playlist of some new music she's gathered from, say Pitchfork or The Quietus and then some viewers suggest things and it amounts to twenty-or-so new songs a week that I listen to. There aren't any vods, so you're just going to have to tune in 21:30 Pacific (again, on Saturdays -- I'm actually tuning in right now as I type this) for that if you're interested, but the point is, with so many new songs, I've developed a pretty broad taste. Even things that would be outside the streamer's taste, I'm generally like, "Yeah, that wasn't bad" at worst. Even things that are artistically dissonant like the alarm clock at the beginning of Pere Ubu's Non-Alignment Pact or the flatline at the end of Mr. Bungle's Pink Cigarrette are things I've gotten used to over just, like, one or two listens. I guess poorly produced wobble-bass in the middle of a dubstep drop could make my ears bleed, but I don't have, like, a specific example of that. And even that is something I've gotten used to on occasion. The "memetically" annoying songs, too, are things I don't see a mood towards. Never Gonna Give You Up (yes that is a link, yes it goes where you think it goes) is more a banger than people who just think of it as a meme realize, for example, but more broadly, there's a sort of melodramatic charm to most of the songs that become memes. Something like Let It Go might be an outlier in this instance given how engineered it was to be the power ballad and smash hit of Frozen, but I somehow avoided the backlash to that specific song so it still holds a place in my heart. There are other examples there, but that's derailing the question again. Anyway, once we've dismissed the "songs with weird noises in them" and "songs that get/got overplayed," I guess all we're left with are the repetitive songs. Baby Shark, for example. But I've gotten more enjoyment out of Baby Shark than I have annoyance, even if some of that is the schadenfreude of other people listening, so I don't think that counts either. As an anechdote to sort of round out that particular question, a little bit after I heard John Mullaney's Salt and Pepper Diner comedy routine (if you're not willing to listen the setup is that he set a jukebox to play Tom Jones' What's New Pussycat twenty times in a diner jukebox), I decided to go through with listening to the whole playlist Mullaney describes. And the result? I mean, I didn't go insane or anything. In fact, I really just tuned it out after the first few repeats. And that's a pretty bombastic song to tune out. I guess I just have musical Stockholm Syndrome. Speaking of inflicting quote-unquote bad music on others, you're talking to someone who performed John Cage's 4'33" at two different talent shows. The thing about "boring songs," though, is that I really just don't remember them. I could tell you about this track on the Tokyo Flashback-Psychadelic Speed Freaks compilation album I listened too recently that I didn't like because it was a lot of chaotic noise and wailing, but that album has, like, twenty songs and averages five or six minutes a song so I'm not going to go digging back to find it. I could tell you how I tried to listen to noise music once and how that didn't do anything for me, but I'm not going to go digging for links there either. Another anechdote I'll share, though, is this moment from Cow's music thread where I would submit these almost-but-not-quite ambient/electronic songs and Cow would be like, "that was a lot of intro and no other part of the song" which meant it just did its thing for six-ish minutes and then faded out. Which I like. It makes good music to do other things to (though in retrospect, reviewing music, no matter how casually, is not something you want to be "doing other things to"). So that's not really going to bore me either. I'll listen to Justice's Planisphere and Fuck Button's Surf Solar as much as I like and be happy about it. If we're talking long songs, though, and to callback to John Cage, he does have Organ²/ASLSP, where ASLSP here means "As Slow As Possible". There's a project that wants to make it last 639 years, and if you're anything like me, you don't have that kind of time. It's kind of a joke answer, but it's the only thing close to an actual answer I've got. EDIT: Oh, actually, now that I think about it some more, when I was nine-ish my parents took my sister and I to see a touring production of Cats. I haven't gone back and listened to any of the music (and have continued to avoid it since the movie came out because... well, because cats) but I remember being bored out of my skull for however long that musical is so pick a song from that I guess. I haven't listened to Organ²/ASLSP all the way through, so I'll ignore that one. I mentioned a couple long songs up above, but also whenever I dip my toe into classical (I like to pretend I'm cultured even though I'm definitely not), I find these really long songs, so probably one of those. Yes, I know those are composed of multiple movements, but, like, Planisphere is technically four songs in its EP, but nobody -- especially me -- cares about any of that. The Surprise Symphony is, like, twenty minutes long, though, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Longer compositions exist but I can't name any especially long ones off the top of my head (again, definitely not cultured). The most recent long song I listened to in that vein (not longest, but maybe "longest-adjacent") is Tartini's Violin "Devil's Trill" Sonata in G minor. And there's also a thirty-minute version of Garcia Peoples' One Step Behind if classical isn't your speed. Plus those other two songs I mentioned above (though I know for a fact you've already listened to one of them). There's a whole variety of options out there if you're interested in looking for long things to listen to.

heavy metal the song not the genre

heavy metal the song not the genre

Coach Clara glanced at Peter with a look that Peter felt could only be of disdain and said, “Good effort, but wrong.” So now he was zero for tw- okay, maybe if you put his actual card game victory in the wins column, he was one for three, but it still was a pretty good reason to just shut up and listen even if the team was asked another group question. Thankfully, none came, just instructions on how the rest of the meeting was going to go. More dueling, though with everyone just spread out amongst themselves while Makoto and Hana took center stage. Most of the team was pretty quick to latch on to other people besides Peter, which, well, he partly expected, given his recent performances. He stood up, hoping that it’d help him announce his availability, though he was still in a daze, and he found himself wandering over to Hana even though she obviously had a partner already. Blood sugar. That would help. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt to ask, right? He gestured at the boxes in front of Hana and asked, “You’re not- how many donuts did you bring?” Hana looked down at her boxes and paused as if she’d just realized something important, going as far as to even silently mouth out some numbers. The actual answer was right there: three boxes of a dozen each meant thirty-six, but Peter hoped that she’d gotten the actual meaning. When Hana finally came back up, she said, “I should've brought more, forgot that other people might want some,” she said, “but I don't mind if you take a few anyway!” Peter settled on a simple glazed donut, just the one, and took a bite. The sugar rush didn’t kick in right away, but the act of eating helped him calm down, and he quickly finished off the rest of the donut before turning around to look for a partn- “Well, you heard her, we should be dueling, so let’s have a duel!” It turned out, his partner had found him. Her name was Makoto if Peter was remembering the last meeting’s introductions properly. Between the donut and being sought out, that was two good things right in a row. It actually put him in just the right mood. He was ready now for whatever Makoto was about to throw at him. But first came the pleasantries. He brought a hand to his mouth so he could swallow the remnants of the donut, then said, “Sure, where do you want to, uh, just over here by the benches I guess?”

The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid? Psalm 27:1 (NIV)Melissa’s History teacher droned on and on and, as dutiful as she was, despite how hard she tried to concentrate on the lecture and her notes, two large obstacles stood in the way. The first was the cell phone in her left pocket, which actually wasn’t that large at all (even for a cell phone), but the fact that it might buzz at any moment, signifying Gabby’s response, kept breaking her concentration. She could have even sworn that it had a few times. The rational part of her brain tried to dismiss these signals. After all, shouldn’t she have been in class as well? Which teacher allowed students to text? And yet, well, among all the other notifications that were probably false, two stood out as being real, definite alerts. Probably. One of those, surely, was the answer she sought. She really wanted to believe that it had been a surprise to both of them and she was being stupid for even coming out and asking like she had. If it hadn’t, though, what did that mean? If Gabby had known, why hadn’t she sent a text letting her know, just like Connor had? But! Again, those were all thoughts she wasn’t supposed to be having right now. Right now was for the history of Ambrosia, not petty (and it was petty) relationship drama. Of course, the second big obstacle in her way then rushed in to fill in that attention gap. The second obstacle was that the sky had turned a familiar shade of magenta. Her classmates closest to the window noticed it first, obviously, but whispers had rippled straight down the line until everyone, including Melissa, couldn’t help but sneak peeks out the window searching for any signs of the duel going on. Melissa couldn’t see any, but then again, she was pretty far away from the window. The only one who wasn’t taking any peeks was the teacher, which was impressive, Melissa thought. They did snap at one student who’d taken too daring of a peek but they refused to hear out excuses, so they lectured on despite the curious nature of the sky. The only thing that did manage to interrupt them was someone saying “Mokey!” from the back corner of the class. Everyone, including the teacher, looked outside at once, and sure enough, a flock of Mokey Mokey floated into view. Most of the class cooed or waved, too. “Hi, Mokey!” somebody said. “What are you doing so far away from a duel disk?” The teacher tried to get back on track with a “Yes, it’s very cute but if we could get back to the sociological impact of ADMIN as modern Ambrosia was developing” but it was to no avail. Even the Mokey Mokey seemed to voice their displeasure with some of them tapping on the glass. The sound was an odd one. It was kind of, but not quite like rubber, and as more and more Mokey Mokey joined in, both the frequency of the sound and the volume increased. The Mokey Mokey were very much swarming the window now, and the sound had changed to something more like a roll of thunder. Nobody was cooing anymore; the mood had changed to nervous Then she noticed something. One of the Mokey Mokey was turning red, and the glass was starting to crack. She was out of her desk faster than she could think, and to the door in less than a second. She shoved it open and shouted behind her, “Everyone, this way!” Not everyone heard her, but those nearest her did, and they too rushed the door, then those closest to them, and so on. The teacher did their best to keep everyone orderly, but it was all Melissa could do to hold the door open and watch everyone scatter in whichever direction they could manage in their attempt to be as far away from the dreadfully angry Mokey Mokey. Melissa went back for her bag once everyone was out, but she immediately regretted the move as soon as she reentered the room. More of the Mokey Mokey were that angry red color now, and in one final shove, the glass shattered and they all started streaming inside. Panicked, Melissa swept up whatever was hers that she could manage in her arms and started to run. And there was really only one place she could think to run to: To the nearest bathroom. It was a men’s restroom, but Melissa was too terrified to care, and as soon as she locked herself in the stall furthest from the door, she rationalized it to herself that nobody else was probably going to care right now either. In fact, she was a little shocked to find herself the bathroom’s sole occupant. “Okay,” Melissa said. “Now what?” There was a low rumble and the faintest hint of a BOOM from somewhere outside the room. Several of them, actually, one after the other with barely a pattern to any of it. Melissa held herself in a ball and rocked back and forth on her toilet seat. What was going on? The only other thing she could think of was to make sure other people were safe, so she took out her phone. The first thing she saw was a message she’d gotten in class. Fairly certain you guys noticed it too...dunno what's going on, but this isn't a bad time to get used to Duel Space if you haven't already. Stuff like this, it's pretty much this club's element anyway! Souji wrote in the entertainment club’s chat. Was he serious? She almost texted him exactly that but managed to stop herself. He was okay, it sounded, at least for the moment. Instead, she wrote: From: Melissa To: Souji, Sai, Hoshiko, Kyouko, Akari I think I just heard a bunch of explosions. Is everybody alright? and I’m safe. She sent similar messages to Jun and Elizabeth (obviously without the plural pronoun), and then went to Gabby. But Gabby had already sent her a message, one concerning a topic she’d almost forgotten. Yes. My apologies. Melissa paused for a long while, but she tried -- really tried -- to not dwell at the moment. There were more important things to worry about right now. From: Melissa To: Gabriela I’m safe but I’m worried about you. Are you okay? There was nothing else she could do. Melissa double-checked that her phone was on vibrate (of course it was), set it on the ground, curled back up into a ball, and waited, hoping for something nice to happen for once.

“Peter, you made a pretty big misplay with Maiden…” Charlie said. They kept going, but it was those words in particular that sent Peter digging back into his bag for his deck box, and, once he’d managed that, flipping through is cards one after the other until he found the card in question. He already knew what it did, of course -- how could he not? -- but he still had to physically reread it. He had to prove Maiden’s effect to himself, no matter what Charlie said. Of all the misplays, why did he have to miss that one? Peter felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment. Nobody was really looking at him besides Charlie and maybe Avriel and Coach Clara, but that didn’t really make matters any better. His inner monolog -- the internalized voices of his parents -- were going ballistic. His mother was just laying into him (“Come on, Peter, remember what we’ve taught you? Rhythm. Take some breaths before you play,” and so on), and all his father could say was a sarcastic, “Reading the card explains the card.” He wasn’t even happy that he’d won anymore. All that really did was deflect Charlie’s other criticism, that he played “too rigidly” whatever that meant, and that one probably wouldn’t have hurt at all anyway. Instead, when Charlie finished their lecture, he somberly nodded his head in acknowledgment, again when Coach Clara addressed them as a group, and packed up his back once dismissed without saying a word.The actual talk with his parents, given how frequently they called and how interested they were in his performance, but he also didn’t want the real-life lecture on top of his internalized one, a lecture that seemingly had not stopped playing since it started. Sure, it receded into the recesses of his mind during classes or the more important of his myriad extracurricular activities, but in those in-between moments, it came back in full force. “Do you remember what your cards do?” they said. “How about we go over it again one more time?” “Hello? Peter?” Peter snapped back to attention, and his wandering thoughts faded away. “Sorry, yes, I’m still here.” “Here,” once again, was pacing outside the door, phone to his ear, and a pair of concerned parents on the other end. Among the various updates, he’d told them that he’d beaten one of the co-captains at tryouts, and that he’d thought he’d learned something even though he’d won, and that thankfully had been enough to keep them from prying more of the details. They told him they were proud of him (“Keep chasing your dreams, honey!” they said, which stung a bit) and also updated him on their life, a process that was significantly more rambly and not really worth repeating to anyone outside of they were doing well as well. “We’re not making you late, are we?” his mother asked. “Second impressions are just as important as first impressions and if we’re holding you up we can just call again la-” “No, I’m not late,” Peter said, though it was starting to get pretty close. “I’m, yeah, no, I’ll be fine.” “Okay, well, anything else you want to tell us? Anything else going on in your life?” His father chimed in, “How’s that girl in your Community Service club doing?” “Dad!” “Teasing! Sorry! We’ll let you get to your team. Congratulations again on making it! We always knew you would.” “Love you!” his parents said in unison just before they hung up.Peter felt the same walking into the duel team’s gymnasium that he had the first day: nervous and wondering just how he was supposed to present himself. Was he supposed to have gotten over it by now, just a little bit wiser and more thorough in his card comprehension? Because that certainly wasn’t happening. He relaxed a little as he approached the bench, though. Coach Clara was casually on her phone, Hana was gorging herself on doughnuts, and everyone else seemed not to pay him any more mind than they had the previous day. Plus, as he sat down, he remembered he’d brought a set of bicycle playing cards this time. Just knowing that soothed his nerves a little. Coach Clara started the meeting moments later. “Who’s ready for some practice?” she asked, a question Peter hoped was rhetorical. He wasn’t going to have to do that whole “cheer and then the asker says, ‘Let’s try that again,’ and everyone cheers harder” thing, was he? The answer to that question was no, he didn’t have to, but that was just because it immediately lead to another question: How many people could duel in the gymnasium at once? It was a pretty easy question, Peter thought, and he raised his hand, though other people seemed content to just shout out whatever numbers they wanted. Hana had gone for the “you can have as many duels as you want” strategy, which was bold, while David’s more concrete answer still ended with him waffling about variables. “Two people,” Peter said once he’d finally accepted that putting his hand up was getting him nowhere. “One duel, two people, however you want that answer worded. Not really a variables sort of question, right?”