TVO Kids (Ontario, Canada) had an invention competition show. They would have 2 teams of teens/kids led by an older kid, and they had a whole stock of really weird craft stuff like pipe cleaners and plastic balls to make a Rube-Goldberg invention with. Then they would be given a mission (I remember one episode they had to make their machine make lemonade and another episode had to trap a toy wind-up mouse). They would usually make draw their plans out on a paper on the floor. Some people would judge the teams and the winning team would earn a trophy.

One of the first interviews after the matrix
ILoveNatPortman: Can you give any information on the sequels, or even confirm their existence?
WachowskiBros: Yes, we are working on them right now. Well, we would be working on them right now except we have to be here in the chat room right now, LOL.
blindrocket: Do you practice Martial Arts?
WachowskiBros: No, we do not, but we watch a lot of Kung Fu movies.
AgentMartin: Why didn’t you both do the commentry on the DVD, time restraints?
WachowskiBros: That’s a two part answer. Part one is that we believe that film is a collaborative media, that’s why we never take a film by credit. We think the other artists who help create a film are important and interesting, and for people who want to understand the process of filmmaking. And the second part is, that we were too tired.
Hiryu: Which Anime inspired you the most and why?
WachowskiBros: We liked Ghost in the Shell and the Ninja Scroll and Akira. in anime, one thing that they do that we tried to bring to our film was a juxtaposition of time and space in action beats.
AgentMartin: Is there anything in The Matrix which you weren’t too happy with, wished you could have done differently?
WachowskiBros: That would require the rest of the chat to answer! But, we’ll answer that in general we’re fairly happy with the way it turned out.
blindrocket: Would you consider yourselves computer nerds?
WachowskiBros: You got the second part right, just nerds! LOL.
AgentMartin: Were you excited about DVD as a medium for your movies to go to the homes of the masses?
WachowskiBros: As a technology, DVD is exciting medium. But like all technologies, it still needs to be developed by the users of the technology.
Enigma: What is the role or faith in the movie? Faith in oneself first and foremost – or in something else?
WachowskiBros: Hmmmm….. that is a tough question! Faith in one’s self, how’s that for an answer?
Peter: Will the be a directors cut of the matrix with any deleted scenes or out takes?
WachowskiBros: Nope, nope!Because we were pretty happy with the way it turned out.
AgentMartin: The two of you seemed to have a great relationship together for the making of this movie. Have you always been very close?
WachowskiBros: We just met actually. Tonight!
Sentinel: What comic books inspired the look of the Matrix?
WachowskiBros: The largest influence from the comic book world on the actual design would be the art of Geof Darrow.
Revenge: What did the humans do to scortch the sky??
WachowskiBros: We’ll answer that question later.
larrikin: How long did it take to film in Sydney? was the entire movie shot in Sydney?
WachowskiBros: 118 days, and yes. [On the screen, Neo is climbing out the window following Morpheus’s `orders’…] Actually, this is Keanu Reeves actually getting out onto an actual ledge, without a stuntman. He does this entire scene without a stuntman, and it’s 34 floors up..
hokeyboy: Were the filmmakers influenced by Alex Proyas’s similarly themed “Dark City”?
WachowskiBros: No, but we thought it was very strange that Australia came to have three films associated with it that with it that were all about the nature of reality. Dark City, The Truman Show and The Matrix..
Enjoythesilence: How would you say Bound and the Matrix are similar?
WachowskiBros: Both films examine the idea of an individual searching for their true selfwhile attempting to escape the box that we often make of our lives.
calla: What do the time 9:18 and the date 9/18 signify? Is this a personal reference?
WachowskiBros: That’s my wife’s birthday.
Inge: How long did the lobby scene take to shoot?
WachowskiBros: It took 112 days to shoot the lobby scene… It took 12 days, not 112!.
dm8: do we set the video to 16×9 or 4×3?
Akira702: you guys are cool. do you know that you are cool?
cecilc: Have you seen any of the fan sites that out there regarding The Matrix? And are there any out there that you think particularly represent the film really well?
Inge: Which scene are you guys most happy with? Favorite? For me it. Neo on his way to Morpheus the first time.
WachowskiBros: If you’re talking about the pill scene, that’s our favorite too.
Sealouse: Why was it filmed in Australia?
WachowskiBros: Costs.
calla: There are quite a few hidden messages in the movie that I notice the more I watch it. Can you tell me about how many there are?
WachowskiBros: There are more than you’ll ever know.
Inge: Did you guys take a nice holiday after the film had open? You deserve it!
WachowskiBros: Thank you very much! And we did.
Sentinel: What do you think of the fans of the Matrix??
WachowskiBros: We love them.
ToiletCommando: Are you prepared to become legends?
WachowskiBros: Legends of what?
MadMatt: You guys BIG Jackie Chan fans??
WachowskiBros: Yes, we love a lot of Hong Kong cinema. Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II is fantastic..
Specter’s question, asked by TheTrinityACMXCL: What about the animals in the Matrix? Are they real animals or just computer-generated images?
WachowskiBros: Sadly, they are all computer generated images.
ToiletCommando: Is it true that you got some of your ideas from the Vertigo comic The Invisibles?
WachowskiBros: We do enjoy that comic, but no.
ThedrickFel: What exacty was the mirror made of? Was it the same stuff they injected into morpheus? Why silver?
WachowskiBros: The mirror is actually a mirror. When Neo sees it it’s a hallucination, but it’s the direct result of the pill Morpheus has given Neo. Reflections in general are a significant theme in the film. The ideas of worlds within worlds..
AgentMartin: Are you suprised by the amount of internet life that The Matrix has spawned, fan sites etc?
WachowskiBros: Surprised? Yes, very, surprised. We are very, completely stupefied by the fan response to the film. [On the screen, Morpheus offers Neo the choice of the two pills…] WachowskiBros: The idea of the reflection, the two Neo’s in Morpheus glasses, is that that represents the two lives that Neo is leading. In the left lens, we see the blue pill and Thomas Anderson, and in the right lens, we see the red pill and Neo..
Jose: What kind of drug does the red pill contain?
WachowskiBros: It’s like a computer virus that’s meant to disrupt Neo’s life signal so that they can pinpoint where Neo’s body is in the power plant..
Renxo: Which is your favourite flick?
WachowskiBros: Too many to answer.
unholyTrinity: When did you think about making this movie for the very first time? Was there a kind of special inspiration given by any event, occasion or something like that??
WachowskiBros: It all happened very rapidly. We were working on another comic book, and a friend asked us if we had any ideas for a new series. And we said no, and then we just started talking about a couple of ideas that we had been working on in connection to cyberpunk fiction. And, a whole idea sort of exploded, over a period of about three days.. [Before they actually responded above, the pod scene was playing on the screen so they commented…] WachowskiBros: We’re pretty happy with the way this scene turned out. Keanu did some amazing work in this scene which included 6 hours every morning of prosthetic makeup. And he had to sit in a freezing cold vat of goo for another six hours..
Renxo: Where were you born?
WachowskiBros: Chicago.
Neo479: What are some of your favorite films from Honk Kong?
WachowskiBros: I was very happy with the Don Davis score in this scene, that included his use of a boy soprano, which I thought was very eerie. Don had a great idea, to use human voices choir in scenes like the power plant and scenes on the Neb to sort of suggest the plight of humanity..
Doc: So, WAS the Japanese animation Megazone 23 an inspiration for the Matrix? The stories seem very similar.?
WachowskiBros: I’ve never seen it. But send us a copy, it sounds good..
theman: How did you guys come up with the idea for the matrix? Playing video games? Shock therapy?
WachowskiBros: No, designer drugs.
Starr22: Are all the religious symbolism and doctrine throughout this movie intentional, or not?
WachowskiBros: Most of it is intentional. [On the screen, Neo is about to be plugged in for the first time ever…] WachowskiBros: One of the things we tried to do with the Neb for when we were shooting “in the real world” was use long lenses to separate the humans from the backgrounds as opposed to when we shot the Matrix we used short lenses to place the humans in specific deep spaces. We also tinted all of the lights blue in the “real world” and green in the Matrix.
Renxo: Do you reflect your personality on NEO’s character? Were you/are you… hackers?
WachowskiBros: We’re probably not good enough to call ourselves hackers, like NEO.. [On the screen… Morpheus shows Neo the desert of the real…] WachowskiBros: There have been many questions about the history that Morpheus suggests in this scene,and we have written the history in a fair amount of detail, and we often have hoped that if we did an anime series, we would tell the story of this history and the story of the first One. Somebody asked us about the liquification of humans, that’s what they feed the people in the pods, the dead people are liquified and fed to the living people in the pods. Always recycle! It’s a statement on recycling..
White_Beezatch: Will there ever be a Matrix video game?
WachowskiBros: Hopefully yes. If things work out the way we want them to, the video game will be released when the next movie comes out, and it will actually have something to do with the movie.
DrBasher: Who came up with the wardrobe, because Trinity’s outfits rocked? So did Morpheus and Neo’s. Was it part of the original script?
WachowskiBros: We described her as a woman in black leather in the script. But, mainly the costumes were designed by Kym Barrett..
Chandler: Since you have worked with the same composer and cinematographer (the great Bill Pope) did you find that it was easier to think ahead about a visual or musical style for the film?
WachowskiBros: Did Bill Pope ask this question? No, but it’s easier to execute them. You develop a shorthand language with people you’ve worked with before. You tell Bill, we need a B move, and he knows what to do..
pomru: My friends and I are wondering what anime you showed the producers to get this movie greenlighted?
WachowskiBros: If only it had been that easy. We had to draw the entire movie and Keanu Reeves had to agree to do the movie before anybody green-lit it.
DrBasher: Also, the special effects rocked, was the script conceived knowing the special effects were available, or were the special effects conceived to make the script possible?
WachowskiBros: Some of the special effects had to be invented, mainly Bullet Time.
yellerdog: What are the odds of the Wachowski’s directing a “straight up” live action adaptation of an anime?
WachowskiBros: I thought we did.
DrBasher: How long did it take to come up with the script, because it’s great?
WachowskiBros: We wrote the script before we had even directed Bound. And had been working on it up until the time of production.
TGee: When did you first think you would have such a huge hit on your hands?
WachowskiBros: It kind of was like a giant art house hit, in that it just kept going and going and people kept talking about it, and there was never a moment where people were like “it’s huge”. People liked it, and it just kept going. [On the screen, Morpheus is fighting Neo…] WachowskiBros: This scene took fifteen days to shoot, and about four months of training…This is all Keanu, this is Keanu running up the pillar and doing the full airborne 360.
ToiletCommando: Are you going to do any projects besides the Matrix?
WachowskiBros: Maybe. If we’re still alive.
ToiletCommando: Is it hard to work as brothers? Don’t you disagree on everything?
WachowskiBros: Mom flies down to the set everyday to settle every one of our arguments.
BigMac: Rumor has it that Cypher is not dead….is this true?
WachowskiBros: If you ask Joey Pants, it is. Joey Pants started that rumor..
garrett: Isn’t it rather ironic that Morpheus and his crew are completely dependent upon technology and computers, the very evils against which they are fighting?
WachowskiBros: Yes! [On the screen, Morpheus’ jump makes Neo go `Whoa’…] WachowskiBros: That shot, where Morpheus jumps up out of frame, we called “The Worst Camera Operator Shot in the World”.
ooo: What is the Matrix?
WachowskiBros: About 2 hours and fifteen minutes long…Those doors are actually made out of wood.
spark: What made you decide on the green tint for being in the Matrix?
WachowskiBros: It was a whole motif inspired by the phosphorous green of old PC’s. [On the screen, Morpheus says, `Freeze it!’ in the Agent training program…] WachowskiBros: People don’t realize how important this scene is. Because we are all staring at the woman in the red dress! There’s actually twins and triplets that we hired in that scene. And all of the clothes are based on black and white costumes, like nuns, chefs, brides, sailors. We had the idea that Mouse just doubled people instead of making originals. But we couldn’t afford to do it digitally, so we ended up hiring as many doubles, or as many twins, as we could find in Sydney. It was kind of like a bad dream on the set.
grey: How did you get the money for “The Matrix”?
WachowskiBros: Begged. And the big-hearted Warner Brothers came through..
Stone: Would you like to direct Jackie Chan?
WachowskiBros: Sure!
Lyn: Have you guys been approached to direct Batman?
WachowskiBros: Yes, but we thought we’d be busy doing the sequels.
AgentMarr: The film’s cast was quite diverse and yet the issue of race was refreshingly not an issue on screen. How did you accomplish this?
WachowskiBros: We’re pretty happy with the way the sentinels turned out. The digital artist that John Gaeta found did some amazing work..
WachowskiBros: Cypher, at the beginning of this scene, is setting up an automated system to allow him to go meet with Agent Smith. EZGuest316: Could you say a little about the sound design which was terrific such as the slomo bullet ripple effects, foley effects?
WachowskiBros: Jane Davis is a genius.. ..Dane Davis is a genius. He built all of these sound effects from all kinds of original sounds. He’d put bullets on strings and whirled them around his studio, he digitized raindrops against windowpanes to create the sound of the Matrix code.. [On the screen, Cypher is enjoying the fake steak…] WachowskiBros: By the way, this steak was one of the best steaks we had in Sydney. We got to eat all of the ones that Cypher didn’t finish.
JediKnight: Have you been approached with any sci-fi scripts and do you have plans to do any?
WachowskiBros: Right now, we’re focusing just on Matrix 2 and 3.
Freethinker: Just out of curiosity, do you guys hold to any religious beliefs?
WachowskiBros: Non-denominational. [On the screen, the breakfast of champions…] WachowskiBros: Several of the cast members actually got sick eating this stuff during this scene..
Astral_Traveler: How did you choose the music?
WachowskiBros: For the most part, we chose the music ourselves. But we hired a consultant DJ in LA named Jason Bentley, a musical whiz kid, who had a lot of swell ideas..
JimmyEO971: Will Joe Pantoliano be the DeNiro to your Scorsese, the Divine to your John Waters?
WachowskiBros: There is a court order against Joe Pantoliano for coming within a hundred feet of us.
biggysmalls: How many bluescreen/greenscreen shots are in this movie?
WachowskiBros: That’s a good question. There’s 450 digital effect shots, but green screen? Probably about 125..
wrygrass: Did ideas from Buddhism influence you in making the film?
WachowskiBros: Yes.There’s something uniquely interesting about Buddhism and mathematics, particularly about quantum physics, and where they meet. That has fascinated us for a long time..
gdreams: Will you use Yuen Woo Ping again?
WachowskiBros: Hell yes!
gtbpitt: Do you think The Matrix will develop a cult following in the decades to come?
WachowskiBros: We hope it’s as big as the Night of the Lepus.
WachowskiBros: This is my wife about to be on the screen here. She comes in right there!…. This kid is great!
letmein: The phrase “paying taxes” comes up a few times. Why?
WachowskiBros: Because we usually couldn’t afford to pay ours. It is an examination of what is and is not certain.
Tank: I am a computer artist and I am very interested in knowing what type of computers and software you used to create the 3D effects?
WachowskiBros: A lot of the guys at Manex wrote their programs with Softimage. We think.. [On the screen… the Oracle] WachowskiBros: Awesome actress!
Wesbran: Is the title “The Matrix” related to the mitochondrial matrix located in cells; the site of cell respiration, the creation of energy in humans?
WachowskiBros: Like the movie itself, there is a lot of word play, a lot of hidden other meanings, a lot of multiple meanings. Besides that, we also like the definition, the mathematical definition of the use of matrix, or the use of it in terms of a woman’s womb.
DVDReporter383: Do you surf fan sites? Do you have the time?
WachowskiBros: We’ve looked at a few. There’s some cool ones out there.
virtualMatrix: What is the significance of Neo eating the Oracle’s cookie?
WachowskiBros: There was a piece cut out of the movie that explained the significance more. It’s hard to explain.
agunn3: Have you ever been told that the Matrix has Gnostic overtones?
WachowskiBros: Do you consider that to be a good thing? I would.
RockyMtnBri: Any chance of novels being written above and beyond the movie, like Star Wars?
WachowskiBros: Maybe.
Freethinker: The Matrix was very-well received by critics, as well. Did that surprise you/How much stock do you hold in critics?
WachowskiBros: There were some critics that really didn’t like it. Did it surprise us that some liked it? You don’t really hold much stock in critics, you tend to make movies for first, yourselves, and second, your audience. And the greatest thing about critics is that sometimes they can help find your audience.
AgentMarr: What was the thinking behind the use of numbers that can be read both ways like 303 on the hotel door where Neo meets his destiny?
WachowskiBros: Like the wordplay, there’s a lot of numbers play in the movie as well.
Mike: What were your fondest moments while filming The Matrix?
WachowskiBros: Finishing! [On the screen… the escape from Lafayette Hotel…] WachowskiBros: This scene, this set right here, the wet wall, is something like forty-eight feet high, and they are actually really worming their way down with wires..
DVDReporter383: Do you surf the net? If so, where do you go?
WachowskiBros: We’re everywhere.
linusa: Do you believe that our world is in some way similar to “The Matrix”, that there is a larger world outside of this existence?
WachowskiBros: That is a larger question than you actually might think. We think the most important sort of fiction attempts to answer some of the big questions. One of the things that we had talked about when we first had the idea of The Matrix was an idea that I believe philosophy and religion and mathematics all try to answer. Which is, a reconciling between a natural world and another world that is perceived by our intellect.
WachowskiBros: That was a hard stunt.
godbox: Confronted with Neo’s choice, which would you choose?
WachowskiBros: Blue pill.
Fuchikoma: What response did you get from established film-makers upon the Matrix’s release? Any unexpected phonecalls etc?
Lincoln: What comment do you have to those who say that the Matrix will probably be recognised as the first C21st film?
WachowskiBros: Well, first we’d be grateful for the comment. Then we’d have to point out the clerical error that it’s in the 20th Century, and not the 21st until 2001..
wrygrass: Did you do camcorder films or other film practice that helped you direct?
WachowskiBros: No, nothing on video, but we did fiddle around with 16 mm film.
Revenge: What is the symbolism of all the analog rotery phones?
WachowskiBros: There’s a couple of meanings. We liked the analog nature of older technology. We liked the suggestion of old original phone hackers. It sort of suggested the big Rube Goldberg device that’s in the mirror scene.
Inge: What was it like seeing the movie with a audience for the first time?
WachowskiBros: Terrifying. [On the screen… Morpheus & the agents …] WachowskiBros: That’s the largest translight ever constructed. (interesting fact) … That is actual mercury in the hypodermic needle, by the way. It was considered one of our most dangerous sets, because we had mercury, it had to be poured into the hypodermic needle.
Stone: Was the Alice in Wonderland theme just whim, or do you guys have a big love of it?
WachowskiBros: Big fan! It is a brilliant book. Many of the themes we tried to echo in The Matrix..
Orange_Crush: I noticed that The Matrix is currently #30 in the IMDB top 250.. that’s quite an achievement. How do you feel about being classified with other legendary films and filmmakers?
WachowskiBros: Lucky.
Wesbran: What happens to all the gadgets in this movie after it is done filming?
WachowskiBros: Most of them are so fragile they break as soon as you’re done filming. And Joel Silver collects the rest.
Sinclair: Why were they only able to jack in through hard-lines, but still able to communicate over cell?
WachowskiBros: Sinclair, good question! Mostly we felt that the amount of information that was being sent into the Matrix required a significant portal. Those portals, we felt, were better described with the hard lines rather than cell lines. We also felt that the rebels tried to be invisible when they hacked that’s why all the entrances and exits were sort of through decrepit and low traffic areas of the Matrix.
The12thMonkey: The guy that played the lead agent was worryingly convincing, did it take a long time to find him?
WachowskiBros: Yes, actually,and that was one of the fortuitous things about going to Sydney, is that it led us to find Hugo.
wrygrass: You said in an interview that string theory might show up in the film, did it?
WachowskiBros: Maybe in the next one, I have just now begun to understand string theory.
whatismyname: whats your favourite music?
WachowskiBros: We love all music.
ZEUS: How did you finaly choose the names of the characters?
WachowskiBros: They were all chosen carefully, and all of them have multiple meanings.
Qualopec: How hard was it to get the kind of budget you wanted for this film?
WachowskiBros: We had to go across the world to secure that budget.
wrygrass: Do you have any funny stories from filming you’d share?
WachowskiBros: That newspaper had to be actually a giant piece of metal with newspaper glued to metal pages. How’s that for funny?
Lincoln: What is your fave line in the movie?
WachowskiBros: Dodge this. And “there is no spoon.” We also liked that one.
Mahy: Do all of the things that happen in the Matrix have some computer-based analogy…or did you just do some of it because it was cool?
WachowskiBros: Yes. We like to try and pack as much stuff as we can in when we do a movie. So some of the stuff we do relates to the narrative, and some of the stuff we do because we like.
biggysmalls: Do you like the Planet of the Apes?
WachowskiBros: Yes, love it! “Get your damned dirty hands off, you stinkin ape!”.
Enigma: The character Neo: Is Neo his real self and Thomas Anderson who he is “required” to be?
WachowskiBros: Neo is Thomas Anderson’s potential self.
Job: Do you realize that your new ideas have changed the way people will see movies in the future?
WachowskiBros: Really? [On the screen, the agents have fallen… “Get up, Morpheus…”] WachowskiBros: The idea of Bullet Time came about because we wanted to shoot an event at incredibly high speed which means slow motion, but move the camera at regular speed, which is impossible. The first theory for Bullet Time involved a rocket camera that was abandoned for safety purposes. Then, John Gaeta suggested a digital solution. Which brought it to the screen.
keanucarrie: Which scene was the hardest to shoot?
WachowskiBros: The subway fight scene. It was incredibly cold and everyone was very sick and it went ten days over schedule. And was particularly brutal to the two actors..
Dogma: Has there been any discusions with comic book companies to publish a monthly-type of comic based on the Matrix, not just an adaptation, perhaps with Darrow illustrating it?
WachowskiBros: We’re going to release another series of stories on the website. Geof Darrow is going to illustrate a couple more short stories written by Andy and I. And, we’ve toyed with the idea of continuing the story in comic book form when the movies are finished..
Trinity303: Do you like John Woo’s movies and style of shooting scenes of action?
WachowskiBros: John Woo was a genius. John Woo IS a genius..
tonka: what do you think about star wars?
WachowskiBros: It was one of the first films that we went berserk over when we were kids.
kr: How long had you been working on writing the story and was there re-writing going on while filming?
WachowskiBros: There was not much rewriting, a little bit. Somebody asked us about the street names in the movie and all of them are significant. They are all based on places in Chicago.
Santayana: I love the casting of this film. Specifically, Hugo Weaving. Why him?
WachowskiBros: We had seen the movie “Proof” and we flew Hugo into LA to meet and he did a phenomenal reading. And was willing to undergo the four months of training. He’s one of the finest actors we’ve ever worked with. .
Hiryu: Did you ever consider doing a cameo appearance in the movie?
WachowskiBros: We’re too ugly! [On the screen…Neo faces off w/ Smith…] WachowskiBros: This shot here, the showdown shot, is an hommage to Sergio Leone.
joe: I am amazed by the physical performance the actors had great training. What do you think?
WachowskiBros: We’re amazed as well. We think all four of them went beyond our expectations.
Revenge: Any influence from Blade Runner?
WachowskiBros: Blade Runner was a benchmark science fiction film, a masterpiece. Of course there’s influence. But we were like the only guys who liked that movie when we saw it, everyone else hated it..
Freethinker: Did you know right away that it would be a trilogy?
WachowskiBros: We knew we had too much material for one movie.
inkman: Do you two feel that sci-fi is overlooked in the “Awards” arena?
WachowskiBros: We don’t put much credence in the “awards” arena.. [On the screen…Neo is fighting Smith…] WachowskiBros: There are some fantastic stunts in this sequence like THAT one! Both the Australian stunt team and the Hong Kong stunt team worked very well together in this scene.
AgentMartin: Do you appreciate people dissecting your movie? Do you find it a bit of an honour or does it annoy you a little, especially when the person may have it all wrong?
WachowskiBros: There’s not necessarily ever an “all wrong”. Because it’s about what a person gets out of the movie, what an individual gets out of the movie..
Vindicator: The whole idea of electronic stimuli of atrophied muscles is great. Did you guys consult any medical experts for accuracy?
WachowskiBros: As a matter of fact, one of our best friends is a doctor. He was the first guy to show us our first autopsy. [On the screen… the market shootout…] WachowskiBros: Watermelons, that was an hommage to Gallagher. On the TV, when Neo goes by there’s an episode of “The Prisoner”.
Action: Am I really watching the movie right now, or am I in…The Matrix?
WachowskiBros: Take another blue pill and call me tomorrow.
rawdogg: Why did you never show Zion?
WachowskiBros: We’re saving it for Matrix 2.
Nebelis: What other projects did the camerman work on and where did you find him?
WachowskiBros: If you mean Bill Pope, he did our first movie “Bound” and the masterpiece “Army of Darkness”.
Pill: Do you plan to write any books about this?
WachowskiBros: There is a “Making Of’ book that’s coming out later this year.
virtualMatrix: Do you believe one day, intelligent machines with AI will actually rule the world?
WachowskiBros: Yes. If they don’t already!
AcesAreWild: Who Invented BULLET TIME PHOTOGRAPHY?
WachowskiBros: The original concept was ours, but the technical execution was from a company called Manex.
AgentMartin: Many take the Make of the Neb, “Mark 3, V.11” and quote it from the bible “Mark 3:11”. Was this intended or is it just the make and model of the Neb and nothing more subliminal than that?
WachowskiBros: The Nebuchanezzer is indeed a biblical reference, from the book of Daniel.
linusa: Will you ever tell the history of the Matrix in a novel?
WachowskiBros: Maybe.
Renxo: Are you doing any personal presentations, anywhere?
WachowskiBros: No.
NIKKI: Who unplugged Morpheus and told him about the matrix?
WachowskiBros: We hope to tell that story in another medium one day.
Neotek: How much of an influence was William Gibson in the production and design of this movie?
WachowskiBros: We’re big fans of William Gibson’s work.
Ronin: Your movie has many and varied connections to mythos and philsophies, Judeo-Christian, Egyptian, Arthurian, and Platonic, just to name those I’ve noticed. How much of that was intentional?
WachowskiBros: All of it.
WachowskiBros: Sorry we could only get to 1 percent of your questions. We do appreciate all of your support. And we’ll see you in three years.

The 33 Degrees of Eyes Wide Shut
FOREWORD
Since its 1999 release, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut has been evaluated as a dissection of marriage and modern sexual relationships, a sub-textual critique of consumer culture, an indictment of hierarchical class structures and much more. At its functional surface level, it is typically graded as a sort of Rube Goldberg machine built out of dream-logic vignettes for use as a psychometric tool on the audience.
True, Eyes Wide Shut is all of those things. But this is not one of those analyses.
As much as I love Kubrick the Social Commentator, he has been given his huge due for many years and there is little left for me to say about him. No– It is Kubrick the Codemaker who interests me here.
For over two decades, fans of the film who choose to take it at anything more than face value have been transfixed by it’s layered complexity– a nebulous network of double-meanings, multi-purpose metaphors and hidden symmetrical concepts; a subterranean labyrinth of symbolism and veiled intertextual references that seem to number in the hundreds. It is a fertile Petri dish for conspiracy theory that perpetually walks the line of ambiguity, keeping those who try to decode it left in the dark.
This guide is for those fans. It is not an introductory companion to Eyes Wide Shut. If you are new to the film, this will hardly make sense to you and I recommend that you start somewhere else.
If you are a devotee of this film who has been baffled by it, or you were once ensnared by it’s mystifying tangles and have long since given up trying to decode it, please read on. I believe I have the answers that you have been looking for– or at least some of them.
As best I can tell from searching the web, I appear to be the first to be privy to this information apart from Kubrick himself. While putting it together, I was ethically hesitant to share what I had found, since I know Kubrick liked to stay tight-lipped about his films and let the viewer figure things out on their own. But ultimately, I think that (A) 21 years is a damn long time to have a secret hidden in a major Hollywood movie seen by millions, (B) the reveal of the secret will open Eyes Wide Shut up to re-evaluation and fairer criticism than it has historically received, and (C) There are still more things hidden in the movie. I need your help to find them.
So here we go. Welcome to the end of the rainbow.
At its heart, Eyes Wide Shut is a code with a cipher, and that cipher is the 33 Degrees of the Scottish Rite.
From a full description of the Degrees at https://web.mit.edu/dryfoo/Masons/Misc/SRdegrees.html :
“The Degrees of the Scottish Rite are one-act plays often staged with costume, scenery, special effects, and the full rigging of any production. Their purpose is to examine different philosophies, ancient religions, and systems of ethics. Through all of these, people have tried to answer certain universal questions. The Degrees of the Rite do not tell a person what he should think about these questions. Instead, they tell him about what great thinkers and civilizations of the past have thought, and they try to create a situation in which the candidate or Brother can gain insight. Agreeing with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, the Rite helps with this self-examination by providing reference points.”
In Scottish Rite freemasonry, a mason progresses through 33 honorary stages, or degrees, by manifesting the virtues of the Rite. Each degree is associated with a set of moral or philosophical precepts. When he has spent sufficient time in a degree, the mason is inducted into the next, and is given a ceremonial masonic apron, which bears colours and symbols associated with that degree.
The Scottish Rite code in Eyes Wide Shut is far more encompassing than I anticipated when I started to uncover it. I’m still piecing many of the details together, but I have enough objective evidence to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that this code was deliberately included by Kubrick for reasons that should become relatively apparent.
The basic outline is that from the beginning of the film until the end, Bill Harford traverses all 33 of the Degrees of the Scottish Rite. Eyes Wide Shut is essentially a 32 act structure, ending at 33, where the educative associations of each Degree are encountered in chronological order, and provide a through-line and philosophical arc to the film. Whenever the next Degree is presented, it’s arrival is marked by hidden symbolism and Masonic colour schemes.
The Degrees in the film are also clearly delineated by their associated bodies: each body lines up with a distinctly segmented portion of the film. These are as follows:
The Lodge of Perfection (4° – 14°): This segment is from Ziegler’s party until the first arrival at Somerton.
The Chapter of the Rose Croix (15° – 18°): This segment is from the Somerton party, and goes through Alice telling her dream to the start of the next day. Technically, this is split into the “Third series” (two degrees at Somerton) and the “Fourth series” (2 degrees at dawn at the Harford house).
Council of Kadosh (19° – 30°): This segment goes from the start of the day after the Somerton party, when Bill starts revisiting the locations from the day before, up until his confrontation at Ziegler’s pool table.
The Consistory Degrees (31° – 33°): This segment goes from when Bill arrives home and confesses to Alice until the toy store at the end.
The Scottish Rite begins at the 4th degree so I’ll explain from there. I am still in the process of properly locating and unearthing most of the Degrees beyond the 8th, but I will still include some of the more obvious sequences from the second half of the film which cement my hypothesis beyond all doubt. Either way, there are probably a lot of things I have missed, so the game is still afoot.
Regarding the first three standard “Blue Lodge” masonry degrees (1° – 3°), these appear to be represented through the Harford family/household itself, in the opening scenes before the Ziegler party. That part will require a separate investigation, so I will give that it’s due analysis later.
I have found other amazing things outside of this Masonic arc, but let’s deal with this bombshell first and I’ll tackle them another time.
If you feel any of this is unconvincing, the most plainly self-evident of the degrees in the film are the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th and the 25th, all of which immediately follow one another**. The 8th, and the 15th going into 16th are also fairly patent. They are the ones that made me sure of this.**
I would also recommend checking with your copy of the film rather than just view the screenshots I have taken, as they will not always do the justice to the scene in question.
Let me know what you reckon.
Discovery of The Code
Like most of the secrets of this movie, a hint as to the existence of the code was hiding in plain sight the entire time; this time in Ziegler’s rumpus room.
Pay attention to the dialogue:
“Suppose I told you […] that everything that happened to you was staged“, says Ziegler (over a glass of 25 year old scotch,)
This describes Bill’s journey as echoing the staged morality plays of the Degrees of the Scottish Rite (as quoted in the description at the start of this analysis). Note that both Bill and Ziegler each specifically to the liquor as scotch; as in the Scottish Rite.
Now, if my rationale for this sounds flimsy or “reaching” to you, ask yourself: How come a big-shot like Ziegler doesn’t have a liquor cabinet? How come he has everything on a clustered table?
It’s because Kubrick wants us to see all the bottles.
The table contains exactly 33 bottles of scotch. Hence, The 33 Degrees of the Scottish Rite.
A quick note on the Degrees:
I have been mainly using a summary of the Degrees as a quick reference table to identify the appearance of the colours/symbols/philosophies of each degree. However, Eyes Wide Shut digs deeper than these summaries, and draws details from the actual text of the Degrees themselves.
Where appropriate, I may include such text from the original 1884 release, The Book of the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (or AASR for short). It would seem Kubrick, as a renowned bibliophile, has drawn from this directly; the earliest major collation of the Masonic traditions.
It can be accessed online here: http://www.phoenixmasonry.org/AASR_1884_/table_of_contents.htm
In the AASR, many of the chapters for the Degrees have a subsection called “The Apartment & It’s Decorations”, describing the appropriate adornment of Masonic lodges and apartments for the different degrees. Anyone who understands how Kubrick uses mise en scène in Eyes Wide Shut will also understand why this is relevant. There are draw-dropping connections in there, but for brevity I will again devote a separate investigation to these in future.
A quick note on Jewels and Constellations:
1) On top of colours and symbols, each masonic degree has a special jewel that is associated with it. In Eyes Wide Shut, although the colours and symbols always appear in the scene associated with that degree, it seems that the jewels of the degrees often appear in other scenes, spread throughout the film. The jewels are worn or connected to characters who are linked to the relevant degree.
2) There are multiple scenes in the film where soft lights are used to project constellatory dot patterns onto the clothes of characters from behind the camera. Judging by how these relate to the degrees of the scene they appear in, they seem to be representing stars. In at least one case, the lights are definitely referencing an astrological symbol associated with the relevant degree.
Ok. Enough preamble. Let’s start the scavenger hunt.
33degreesofeyeswideshut.wordpress.com

Hey everyone!
So I did a thing that has been pretty damn fun to play and thought I would share it here. Using the commanders [[Nadier]] and [[Tevesh Szat]] I built a deck that does it's best to approximate a food chain effect in mono black. Of course it is inexact, but the deck plays pretty well with a linear line to follow and lots of fun cards that I don't typically use in other places.
The line mainly is using any sac outlet + [[Nadier]] (with some increased powecounters or a recursion effect) + [[smothering abomination]] + [[pitiless plunderer]]
Since Nadier's power increases each time any token LEAVES the battlefield, your treasure tokens as well as creature tokens continually tick up the power. This engine lets you draw to your delight, recur the commander, and get to some aristocrat payoff while generating a ton of mana. It's a Rube Goldberg machine that is low on interaction but a total blast. One of the best things here is that you can sub out about all of the more expensive rocks/tutors for other cards and still have a working version, as most of the pivotal pieces are super cheap.
Hope some of y'all enjoy!
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/kTwPW4rByUaANqbsL1kkug

I’m not looking to change any cards, it’s more that my Kaho deck is one of my favorites but piloting it gives me headaches as I work through potential lines and how to navigate all the choices the deck gives me. While I designed the deck to be a bit of a Rube Goldberg, it’s so convoluted that I feel I’m always being extremely inefficient and not considering the right possibilities.
Kaho decklist
This is definitely a deck that isn't clear at a glance, she’s the most “Mental Magic” commander I’ve found yet in terms of having to conceptualize and plan out variable different lines throughout the game, and adapting them constantly, as you pull off a variety of loops- tutor loops, recursion loops, copy loops, untap loops, etc, and it’s built around one of my favorite cards in magic ever, [[Intuition]]. Most games I’ll activate Kaho and cast Intuition upwards of 5 times each. That’s 30 cards tutored out through those two alone, tons of decision points, variable play lines, and it always feels like I can improve as a pilot.
I built Kaho to create copy loops on the stack as a wincon, with [[Swarm Intelligence]], [[Lithoform Engine]], [[Mirari]], [[The Mirari Conjecture]], [[Twinning Staff]], [[Isochron Scepter]], [[Elite Arcinist]], [[Narset’s Reversal]].
You can of course build Kaho more effectively, this is just my pet brew as a Rube Goldberg machine where you play draw go mono blue control, but any time you aren’t dealing with an immediate threat, you’re tinkering with the cards you’re shuffling in and out of your deck, graveyard, hand, and the stack.
Here’s a sample play line to explain. In actual play, because it changes based off what you’ve drawn, played, what lines your opponents choose to send you down, and any possible interaction, the way it unfolds has to be adapted on the fly and you have to play Mental Magic working your way through your deck in your head and all the possibilities you could chain together.
Turn 1. Play out Kaho, tucking under her Intuition, Narset’s Reversal, and Essence Flux.
Turn 2. Cast Intuition off Kaho, tutoring up Snapcaster Mage, Mission Briefing, and Flood of Recollection. Opponents choose one of the 2 mana recursion spells to give you, other two go to your graveyard.
Turn 3. Recur and cast Intuition again, this time targeting Recall, Bond of Insight, and Pull from the Deep. If our opponent gives us Recall, we need to cast Narset’s Reversal off Kaho and bounce it to hand- if they don’t, we’ll send it to our hand anyway with one of our other two recursion spells, picking up Intuition yet again along with our Recall.
Cast Essence Flux off Kaho to tuck Dramatic Reversal, Reset, Ghostly Flicker.
Turn 4. Cast Intuition targeting Isochron Scepter Twinning Staff, and Mana Crypt. Recall back up whichever two your opponent don’t give you, as well as Narset’s Reversal and Intuition again. Play out your mana crypt and staff, and imprint Narset’s Reversal onto Isochron Scepter. Cast Dramatic Reversal off Kaho, and then bounce it back to your hand using Narset’s Reversal off your scepter.
You’ll get two reversal triggers off the scepter because of your twinning staff, so you resolve the first to copy and bounce Dramatic Reversal, at which point your scepter and Kaho both untap with an extra Narset’s Reversal copy on the trigger; play Reset off Kaho and bounce it to hand using the reversal off the stack.
Now you can play out Dramatic Reversal and repeat the bounce, this time using the Ghostly Flicker off Kaho to reset, grab a new grip under Kaho, and untap your scepter, while bouncing Flicker to hand for any further needed uses. Use your infinite mana and looped spells to get Archmage’s Charm or Reality Shift and stack protection, deck out your opponents at instant speed, win game.
—
TL;DR Looking at the Kaho decklist above, how do you go from a neutral boardstate to eventually winning? What do you tutor under Kaho? What do you grab with your Intuition piles and recursion? How would you go about chaining all the spells the deck has available to reach a winning position?

Part 1 described Kevin and Karen as nightmare neighbours with the payback i was fortunate enough to serve them. I know i described them as a “Kevin and Karen” duo but only mainly mentioned Kevin in Part 1. That was intentional. My interactions with Karen at that point were minor and i wanted to keep the focus on Kevin. However, this entire story is about that one incident where Karen steps up and takes things to another level, and i foolishly take the bait. Someone else in my favorite military sub quoted Mark Twain: “Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience”.
I also mentioned a conversation i had with someone, where the person described Kevin and Karen as people who maybe likes being the big fish in a small pond, and thus picks on people who are visibly different, just like them. This is because Kevin and Karen are both of African ethnicity. This part will come up later and will play a pivotal part in the story.
Advance Warning: please, please, please keep your politics and any divisive personal biases OUT of my story and this sub. I only mentioned ethnicity and gender because the story itself is focused on that. Im a big girl, i can take care of myself, if you’re a shithead racist/homophobe and cant keep your racist comments to yourself, feel free to shoot me a PM but stick to that and dont litter this sub with your trash. Mods, if this gets out of hand and people start getting rowdy, please include in your options the possibility of deleting my posts. Id rather lose imaginary internet points than be the one that brought a pack of idjits to your doorstep. But please. This is a nice community modded and populated by nice people. Lets keep it that way.
DA STORY
February 1, 2020
Ahhhh. February 2020. Life is good as far as everyone is concerned. Apart from that one time where Kevin tried to call the military cops on me for assaulting a superior (were the same rank, in different chains of command, let alone different branches, and were fighting voluntarily in a sanctioned, supervised match), we had no more complaints filed against us at the HOA office. He had to undergo plastic surgery, but that’s mostly because his pre existing condition of a deviated septum was exacerbated when i TKO’d him by slamming my palm on his nose and breaking it.
The whole world would change in a few weeks, but at this time, Corona was still just another new and exotic thing that doom and gloom tv pundits wouldnt shut up about.
As i mentioned before, i am mixed race: mixture of German/Italian/Scottish/Irish and Hasidic Jew ethnicities on my mum’s side, and a mix of 3 Asian ethnicities: Chinese/Japanese/Korean on my dad’s side with Chinese being the predominant one.
As for visible appearances, im over 5 foot tall, slight build, dark brown hair, and slightly slanted gray coloured eyes. My eyes, lips, and my cheekbones are somewhat Asian, while there’s enough “white” on the rest of my appearance to make someone think twice if im just a really fair skinned Asian, or a white chick squinting and blinded by something.
Why is this important? As a result of my super melting pot heritage, there’s only enough Asian in me that i only look Asian to someone who doesnt know me while im wearing certain outfits, or if i choose to do so. This is a fact pointed out to me that while being a technical minority, i never had to endure the true hardships of what its like to be in a disadvantaged group. I had the safety of benefiting from having the physical appearance derived from a hybrid heritage as a “safe haven” from bigotry.
Until the following happened.
We were at a Chinese cultural centre celebrating Chinese New Year. I went to the event wearing my favorite cheongsam dress. Nothing special about it, you see Chinese women wearing it at formal events all the time, but im in full cultural regalia and had my Asian on. Milena, my partner, couldnt get in while wearing Chinese cultural attire and had to change into a white people outfit despite me giving the Shaolin bouncer, who trained for 30 years in the mountains under a waterfall in the art of “punch-a-hole-in-your-chest-and-rip-your-still-beating-heart-out-making-you-wonder-why-theres-a-sudden-draft-in-your-thoracic-cavity”, the head nod and going: “She’s with me bro. Be cool, ayt?” I jest, i jest.
It was a fun time. Plenty of delicious food and i get to have my fill of real proper and delicious soup dumplings and szchezuan style red snapper. Plenty of little kids going around running to adults and yelling “Kung Hey Fat Choi! (Happy New Year)” and us giving them blessings and the little red money envelopes we brought. We got to see a lion dance. No, there wasnt a single actual lion dancing. Its a bunch of grown up dudes who dance and jump up 5-10 foot tall playforms while wearing and carrying a two person lion costume. Its pretty impressive actually. Go look up lion dance examples on Youtube if you want.
The problem started when we got home.
DA PROBLEM
(Im running out of original ideas for titles)
We were already in our neighbourhood and pretty close to our home. As we were approaching our home, we just barely noticed in time that the road is blocked by a double parked car. Imagine your standard residential street. On both sides of the road are vehicles parked on the street. This normally two lane road is now reduced to a one lane road. On the lane ahead of us was a car that was double parked. The car was off with no lights on either. With it being winter, a snowstorm actively raging + poor street lighting leading to near zero visibility, the roads slick from built up snow, its a miracle i didnt rear end this grayish/silver coloured Fiat. I had already downshifted to the lowest gear, and I had to pump the brakes while my other hand was ready to engage the e-brake, swearing under my breath the whole time.
This is the point where i should have stayed put and just called the neighbourhood towing services while driving around to find alternate routes to get home. But i didnt. My gamble on people being rational ended up being a bust, and you now have this train wreck of a story worthy of a Jerry Springer episode.
I got out of the car and noticed that there was a woman sitting in the driver’s seat. I knocked on her window and politely asked her to move her car so i can pass. She slightly rolls the window down and says: “Just go around me!” I told her this was not possible. My car is a Toyota 4runner, refitted for true off roading, and there’s no way it could squeeze through the gap left by her shitty double parking job without hitting cars on either side. I asked her if she can at least move and give me enough space to squeeze through safely, or better yet, park in one of the open street side parking spots available just a few steps away. In response, she just goes: “i told you, just squeeze through!” and rolls the window back up.
Now, im pissed. I whip out my phone and take a picture of the driver and the license plate. I was intending on calling the towing service and sending a notice to the HOA. This is when i notice that the back of this car doesnt have our neighbourhood stickers. I go up to her window as she was just opening her door to get out.
Bitch: did you just take a fucking picture of me? Did you just fucking take a picture of me?
Me: yeah i did. You dont live here. So youre actually trespassing. And you dont have any expectation of privacy in such an open space. So now youre in the wrong on both counts. Im only going to ask you one last time to move your car, or better yet, get off the subdivision before i call the cops on you for trespassing.
Bitch: (sounds like she was just waiting for me to finish talking) you fucking bitch! Delete👏that👏picture👏now! You fucking monkey!
i was pulling up my camera app to record her public freakout when she swiped at my hands causing my phone to tumble into the snow
Milena has gotten out of the car and was approaching us as soon as our body language changed. She came close just in time to hear this “lady” call me a “fucking monkey.”
Milena: what the fuck did you just call my wife? Dont tell me you actually did cus thats a fucking hate crime!
Bitch: you heard me. I called her a fucking monkey! Fucking monkey! Fucking monkey! Fucking monkey! You fucking people go back to Asia and do your pussy eating there! And take your fucking Corona back with you!
My partner LOSES it. It took me all my strength wearing heels, standing in snow and ice, to restrain her from going after this woman. At the same time, Bitch was also trying to get at Milena so i had to free up one hand to keep her away. Everyone was yelling and screaming at this point. One of our neighbours, Todd, happens to be in his garage. He comes out and investigates what is all the commotion about. Did i mention he’s also of African ethnicity?
As soon as i saw him, i called out:
“Hey! Can you get her (referring to Bitch) off of me?”
Bitch: wait what? Did you just assume he’s my friend because were black? Yo! Hey! Help! Anybody! This fucking (anti asian pejorative word, similar in context to the english words “chink” or “gook”) just called me a n123er!
It was at this point that Todd decided to slap her that caused her to shut up but continue fake crying.
ENTER STAGE LEFT, KEVIN AND KAREN THEMSELVES
They were both talking, demanding whats going on and wrestling Bitch away from Todd at the same time.
[They were both dressed in nice clothes, so im assuming they were headed for a night out with this mystery racist]
Bitch: this asshole (points at me) called me a n123er and then this other fucking dyke (points at Milena) slapped me while this f123ot traitor (points at Todd) held me down!
Karen: what the fuck? Did you fucking call my daughter a n123er?! We dont fucking do that here you fucking monkey! (Nature vs nurture theorists, here’s a case study for you). Fucking go back to China and go fucking spread your diseases there!
Kevin: (walks up to Milena and with hands up and forward, appears to try to shove her but loses his balance in the snow). If you ever hit my child again, or disrespect anyone in my family, i swear to God, I will kill you!!!
Now is my turn to be held back by Todd this time. I dont remember saying these exact words, im only repeating them verbatim based off how Todd repeated them to me.
Me: you’re fucking trying to have a go at my wife?!? I just fucking kicked your ass last Christmas and now you want seconds?! What, are you fucking insane or just fucking stupid? IM not afraid to die! Ive killed pieces of shit who are still better men than you! For work! How many fucking people do you imagine you’ve killed while driving a desk, hmm? You fucking touch my wife or threaten her again and i will kill you for free!! Then ill rip your dick off and beat your wife to death with it! Fuck it, let me go Todd, ill make her (pointing to Bitch) an orphan right now.
cringgggeeeeee
Yeaaahhhhhh. I know. Even I am cringing as i was typing that. I cant believe i said those. Seriously hope that Todd was fucking around with me, but i know i tend to go high order when provoked in just the sweet spot. The words are already said, and once its out in the wind, theres no way for me to make people unhear what i said and stuff the words back in my mouth. 10/10 would NOT recommend doing anything like that. One of the moments im not quite so proud of myself. Its not an excuse, but i only have 2 triggers that i know of: when someone presents themselves as a valid threat to my loved ones, my family, or my troops, either through words or actions, and when i get dehumanized to the point that im not even a person anymore but just another statistic in whatever subset of society that they hate. This messed up family struck Bingo! on both counts. I know its unprofessional and having a temper in the military, let alone as a leader, is a huuuge problem, and i am currently working hard (with good results) to fix that. 😅
While this is happening, Todd’s wife is standing outside their garage and calling the MPs. They tell her they dont deal with “domestic spats” even if its involving military personnel, instead call the civillian cops, and hangs up on her.
Cops come with bells and whistles 30 minutes later. By this time, more people/neighbours had gotten involved and managed to separate both parties. Everyone had calmed down, we were hanging out at Todd’s garage, K&K + crotch goblin went back to their house, and were all just waiting for the cops to come.
Cops split up and go to take both parties’ statements + witness statements. Obviously, this is not gonna be a he said she said scenario. There are plenty of witnesses willing to testify as to what happened and the words said. The problem is that there isnt any witnesses for the beginning of the confrontation. That’s when i remembered that i have a dashcam in the car and i left the car running when i initially got out. I asked for the cops permission for one of them to accompany me. I drove us to my house where i got changed into something warmer, grabbed my laptop, and plugged the dashcam’s SD card in it.
We went back to Todd’s place to play it in front of the other officer and you could clearly see by Bitch’s body language that she was the original belligerent party. Whats more entertaining was that her voice was loud enough to be captured by the camera’s microphone when she yelled the “Go back to Asia you fucking monkey!” line at me. Todd also admitted that he was the one who slapped her but it was more of a “hey wake up!” slap instead of a real one. He demonstrated using me as a dummy, that while holding Bitch around the waist from behind, there’s no way he could have attacked her with a real slap. This was again, supported by the dashcam footage.
The cops left when we told them were not willing to file charges and it would be a waste of tax money for them to pursue a “trivial” domestic disturbance, but i want copies of their write ups and their contact info in case the obvious liars cooks something up.
I immediately regretted that decision the next day i came to work.
DA DAY I CAME BACK TO WORK
Monday. 03 February, 2020. I walk into work and find several messages handed to me by my assistant. In growing urgency, they were all along the lines of: “REPORT TO THE BOSS RIGHT MEOW!”
I had a feeling what this is gonna be about.
I walk up to the boss office, salute, announce myself, seek permission to enter, and stand in front of his desk. Without being told to relax and have a seat and talk to me like an equal, which is customary for personnel at my level, my boss formally informs me that a charge has been filed against me, a trial is most likely going to be held once current investigations are finished, that he has a list of JAG attorneys that can represent me, and that if i have anything to say for myself, now is the time say it.
Quickly but concisely, i laid out the facts as it actually happened to him, even mentioning that i have a copy of the cops’ write up, my dashcam SD card as evidence, and that military police hung up on our neighbour who called them in the first place.
The Boss was nodding throughout this and simply said: “That’s what i thought, im afraid. Unfortunately, id still have to take you off of any leadership positions you’re holding until we clear this up. Take the rest of the week off, but contact this JAG lawyer first before you go and do whatever she tells you to do.”
I did as The Boss told me to. I contacted the JAG lawyer through our secure lines and she simply asked me to write my own version of events and the original SD card from my dashcam and have it couriered to her. I turned over the running of my daycare centre for wild and wanton man whores to my second, and left for home.
I went back to work the next week and i was puzzled as to what happened since i was expecting to perform a hatless dance in front of my peers and subordinates. I never heard anything from the MPs, my boss, or anyone else. When i asked my boss about it the next week, my boss simply told me that it was a “misunderstanding” and they werent actually investigating me.
The following i was not present for but i learned through the grapevine.
-all charges and investigations against me were dropped as soon as they saw what was in the dashcam and in my statement.
-turns out that Kevin is a bit henpecked from what it sounds like as well. Several rumours run that all the complaints filed against me at work, that happened in a personal context/setting, were initiated not by another soldier, but by a civillian closely associated with the soldier. Go connect the dots on that one.
-during this time, anti Asian sentiment was heating up because of Corona virus. There has been several reports of unprovoked attacks on visible (Asian) minorities and the voices of order were having none of it. No sane investigator would prosecute an Asian woman, who it turns out was actually the victim of a hate crime. This is important to mention because for the past several years, the attitude and culture here has been slowly shifting to focus and correct the injustices done to people of African descent. As a result, more and more videos and incidents are emerging of African descent people having public freakouts and getting away with it despite being wrong because they uttered the magic words: “is it because im black?” You make a big and public enough issue centered around being black, and people will back off regardless of whos right or wrong. This is NOT my opinion, but this is the public sentiment. I dont agree with it, as there are still a lot of injustice that needs to be corrected, and you can see the potential for abuse and misuse in ANY example of correction of flawed historical public policy/beliefs but the attitudes of the other side when in the wrong, or the belief that these improvements sweeping the country is an automatic “get out of jail free” card for valid offenses isnt helping either.
-Kevin turns out to have been the star of his own hatless dance party. Once they proved that he was falsely accusing me and Milena of assault and racial attacks, and that him and his kin were the ones throwing racial and homophobic slurs all over the place, he was charged with all the military versions of those offenses + conduct unbecoming and misappropriating public resources (for filing false reports and making false sttements. More on that later). He admitted guilty on all counts in a trial and had to: be suspended from work with no pay for 6 months, pay a fine and hefty pay reduction for 6 months after that, with all records being expunged from his service file on 5 years + 1 day after he has carried out all the punishments.
-it also emerged that Karen was present at his trial and broke down crying and freaking out at his bosses when he was pronounced guilty. She had to be escorted out of the base and driven back home after being dosed with a sedative by a medic.
Karen ended up being the breadwinner for their household for 6 months while Kevin was reduced to earning peanuts. Since her MLM and “fitness lifestyle” influencer job was mainly catering to military spouses, her clientele quickly diminished as soon as word of their misdeeds spread around.
Another result of this Rube Goldberg-esque turn of events was that Kevin it turns out, has been conniving with a local office supplier company and has been taking some pretty creative liberties with his unit’s purse. Policy for public procurement is that everything has to go through a fair and competitive bidding process where service providers and suppliers get a fair shake at hawking their goods and services. With some exceptions, the policies for procurement can be skipped, like say, if theres no other competitor available for that particular product/service, or the need for an item/service is urgent, the bidding process is always followed to the letter.
Being a morale and welfare and procurement officer for his unit, Kevin managed to get himself in a whole another world of trouble by conniving with several suppliers into engaging their services in exchange for some personal “perks”. Kevin’s Unit is hosting a Christmas party and giving away door prizes and holding raffles? He skipped the bidding process and sales/promotions review and went straight to the local electronics store. He goes and buys all the electronic prizes from them, and in exchange gets to walk away with a brand new PS4 Pro and a Home Theatre bluetooth sound bar as a “lucky customer” who won their “random” draw.
Office running low on supplies and may need replacing some office equipment? Kevin goes to a local office supply shop and gives them the business. In exchange, his wife gets to “test” out a brand new high end gaming/office chair and keep the product for “free” after posting a review about it.
He may have turned out to have chosen the better deal, but the fact that he skipped the appropriate procedures and personally benefited from those misdeeds is what got him in real trouble.
Its actually the office supply shop that opened up this can of worms for him. With the wolf of economic disaster created by COVID hungry and at the doorstep, the proprietor of this business phoned his unit and asked if they need any more office supplies or upgrades to their equipment. With Kevin being suspended from work, there was no one to keep a lid on things. His replacement was puzzled and surprised.
“Whaa? Youre not in our system sir. In fact, our system shows that we have always gotten our supplies from X company, the one that won the bid and weve always used. When did you say we ordered from you and for how much?”
I feel pretty comfortable sharing this bit of gossip. Its a pretty open secret by now at our base that some Air Force dude just flushed his career down the toilet and has a pack of investigators and financial detectives waiting till he comes back to work so they can dissect his life and spending, and work it over with a fine toothed comb. And that he just managed to get a slap on the wrist from getting into trouble, and that there’s no way he will simply get another wrist slap from this one.
Right now, all is quiet. There is that one odd time when we saw Kevin disassembling and cleaning what looks like a gun in his backyard. Turns out it was a very realistic looking M4 style air rifle. As a result, both Milena and I have applied for permission from the local representative of the government to carry personal firearms. We dont take well to threats or implications of a threat. Were still awaiting for permission to be granted but believe me when i say we have been upping the intensity of our sparring sessions.
I am hoping it doesnt come down to that, but were ready if it does. In fact, i dont want it to escalate any more. Im sick of it. Personally, i believe it wont come down to that. Ive been in plenty of fights and spent enough time at 2 way ranges. I know what people who trully intend to use a firearm for its lethal purpose look like. They dont go around brandishing a gun and threatening to use it, before actually using it. People who fully intend to use a gun actually go ahead and use it from the get go.
But on the other hand, i wont let intimidation tactics make me cower and unhappy in my own home either. Milena and I love hosting parties. Before COVID shut gatherings down, we just wrapped up a weekend by being the final stop for a small hen party. Everyone had fun in the hot tub and had a safe place to go drink and sleep. Our neighbours have also come to love our summer barbecue shindigs. I can grill a mean steak and my surf and turf platters are just raved about. We both kind of are the unofficial mothers in our respective units. Whenever a new soldier or airman gets posted to our unit, we throw them a welcome party in our home. We continued and brought that tradition to our new home. Right now, im renovating my basement to be a retro style games room with vintage PacMan, PinBall, and other arcade game machines in one corner, a shelf full of board and card games, a full service mini bar, and a computegames room in our library. Were also planning on getting a pre fab shed and repurposing it into an axe throwing shed. We want our home to be a friendly base camp for any weary/homesick soldier, sailor, or airman that we have come to love and treat as our own siblings, or in some cases, children. No amount of intimidation will stop that from happening or take that away from us. Well, COVID probably would if this shite doesnt get any better.
For now, this is the end of the Kevin and Karen saga. Lets hope there isnt any more. Especially since the last time i checked, i was ahead and winning. 😂
PS
Sorry for the late post, i typed Part 1 and Part 2 in one go with the intent of publishing them one after the other. I had to put posting Part 2 on pause because I had to do some fact checking with some people to make sure im not recalling shit improperly.
PPS
Welp. Apparently i suck at messing with people. My one and only attempt and i sucked at it. Sorry for the links, its all Rick Astley links. I was trying to call induce a laugh but foiled tremendously because of that stupid ass thumbnail. Im so dumb. Im sorry. I suck. Ill go ahead and send myself to the time out corner.
PPPS
This is so dumb. Ill just strip the links. Thought it would be funny. Sorry folks. I got Rick Rolled by my own attempts to Rick Roll you guys. 😭

tl;dr: I worked S&F into my game world about a year and a half ago. It's great. You should do it if you haven't
[machines]
One of TTRPGs' most straight-up magical features is how, at their best, they can take a handful of mundane elements--a ruleset, randomizers, a handful of people, maybe a few genre assumptions--and produce atomic neon fun. It's like if a Rube Goldberg Device happened to yield cold fusion. "I dunno Jim, the mouse pushed the marble onto the track, which tripped the counterweight, which knocked over the glass of water and then BAM..... limitless energy at room temperature."
[genre assumptions]
I think MCDM is doing a number of cool things for the hobby, in real time as we watch. It's not that these things haven't been done before, just that MCDM happens to be doing them, well and visibly and right now, for the most popular iteration of fantasy TTRPGs in history. Colville is skillfully developing an actionable genre language for the pool of genre assumptions that players and DMs draw from to generate play. Defining things on the internet invites pedantry, so I won't attempt to give it a name, but I'll say only that to me MCDM's genre language is romantic, lightly historical, and very cinematic. It is a grimacing lord waiting to receive an envoy in her hall. It is the scuff of a boot on flagstones as a spy evades capture. It is cutscenes and trailers, and crying out to higher powers for aid at the nadir of a losing fight, and desperate troops rallying to their general. Lots of players out there are sitting on an emotional and aesthetic grammar for this stuff already, bequeathed to them by their taste in media. MCDM's products offer a way to tap into this. My players thrilled to many of the prompts that S&F gave them. Shit, this keep makes me lord now? I have the gestalt of the role, I can wing the details. Ok, I'm leading an army into battle? I sorta know what a fantasy general looks and sounds like. These shared genre touchstones aren't necessary for play, and they're fun to subvert, but they can be powerful facilitators. S&F is full of them.
[politics SPOILERS MAYBE?]
Man, I could NOT snag my players on the political hooks of my game. I took a break from trying. One day it occurred to me that I could, with some work, drop the adventure from S&F into my world. I wasn't thinking about politics, just needed something for the PC's to do. It was only after they'd cleared the castle and had received word of (my version of) Pelliton's march on their position -- "He would blot your names from the ledger of the world" -- it was ONLY then after they were freaking out and casting panicked druid utility spells they'd never used before in a gambit to reach their friends, that I realized the adventure had in its DNA what I had awkwardly been trying to shoehorn. If you are not interested in politics at the outset, you probably will be interested in some version of politics when a neighboring city-state is moving to erase the five of you huddling in a sloughing keep. I'm not forcing anything now; I learned a lesson. My players are the ones starting to move pieces on the board.
I remember reading a kinda sniffy early review of S&F that described the adventure as (paraphrasing) "just a typical 5e adventure". I disagree. Sure, its ticking clock and moving parts mean it is not the simplest adventure you'll ever run. But it is generous and well paced and has the calibrated dramatic precision of the Death Star strike in the first Star Wars. It is "linear" in the best way possible: thoughtfully and deceptively. Its engine is always churning toward tension.
[inspiration]
I have a few issues with S&F. I don't pay them too much mind. They're like old friends I like to gritch at. In short, many months in I still find the book to be full of galvanic landmines of the imagination. This is not a supplement that will simplify your game, I think Colville said or wrote that somewhere. It will messy it up in the best way possible and set you to the utterly joyous work of adaptive creation (if that's your thing -- I totally understand people who want to plug 'n play, because sometimes I do too).
After the battle at the castle (the PCs won) they held a feast for their allies, fallen and living, in the greathall. Totally rote fantasy stuff. You've seen it hundreds of times in movies. You've read this scene in dozens of books. The players ate it up. We ended the session. One of the players mentioned how much they liked the adventure; I pimped MCDM and S&F to the unfamiliar. One said Well yeah, that rocked. Then one of them started clapping. Another joined. Then all five were clapping. Not a jokey slow clap from 80's high school movies. Just a group of adults -- consultants, video editors, accountants, producers, marketers, dads and friends making a run at 40 years of age -- sustaining light but appreciative... applause for I dunno like three or four seconds. I've never seen anything like it. I'd post this to thathappened if I hadn't been there.

There isn’t always a clear cut answer with many decks, but it can be helpful to think about your collection in having a diverse playstyle spectrum, and whether your decks want to be the threat or the answer, whether it generally proactively develops it’s own gameplan or reactively interacts with others.
What do your decks look like? Which ones pack the most answers versus which ones are trying to force their own pieces through? Which of your decks are the most versatile and resilient?
So for example, here’s how I’d rank five of my most played decks from proactive to reactive:
Umori- Purely proactive, fast combo artifact storm that just wants to consistently jam it’s gameplan and flood the board with artifacts, it wants to overwhelm with speed and redundancy, it’s very greedy and wants to hoard resources
Subira- Very proactive, fast aggro combo hybrid that wants to race to the face with plenty of low to the ground bodies that turn into card advantage, it wants to go to combat and everything in the deck is fuel to keep the engine blazing until it explosively seals the game
Maralen- Mildly proactive, needs to play politics as it can only interact indirectly, but it does have interaction on player axis with gifted tutors, sculpting hands and the like, but it still is primarily a graveyard combo deck
Isperia- It is technically proactive but functionally reactive, using pre-emptive control elements to lock out pieces and play control on the hand axis using fliers, it’s very fair and designed to be lower powered
Kaho- A largely reactive deck that plays mono blue draw go control, with all the best free and cheap counterspells in the game used to protect a Rube Goldberg style complex tutor machine, used to establish a copy loop wincon

Hey everyone! It's time to get the first round of the tournament underway! There will be two rounds a day, so look for the other poll once you've voted. Also, please upvote so more people can see the poll and vote.
This matchup is the fifth of sixteen groups in the first round. The top four highest vote-getters will advance to the next round.
In this tournament, it's ok to vote against artists you haven't heard. But I encourage you to check out a song or two of an artist that grabs your attention! Or just add albums that appeal to you to your list and check them out whenever you have time!
Yesterday's results:
Group 3
Advanced:
1-seed: Gentle Giant (207 votes / 38.91%)
2-seed: Queen (112 votes / 21.05%)
3-seed: Devin Townsend (82 votes / 15.42%)
4-seed: Rick Wakeman (53 votes / 9.96%)
Eliminated:
Harmonium (49 votes / 9.21%)
Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (29 votes / 5.45%)
Although Harmonium is now out, I still recommend you listen to Les Cinq Saisons, it's one of the best prog albums ever made, especially if you like softer music.
Here are the introductions for today's artists. I encourage you to write an introduction for some of your favorite artists that are coming up tomorrow!
Porcupine Tree
Subgenres: Psychedelic Rock/Alternative Progressive Rock/Space Rock/Progressive Metal
"I’ll take a stab at a PT profile for tomorrow. I’m sure there are many fans here, but here’s a brief write-up for the uninitiated:
Porcupine Tree is easily one of the top acts of the “third wave” of progressive rock that started in the 1990s. Steven Wilson created PT as a lark, meant to be a fictional psychedelic underground band in the mold of Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd. The music’s popularity led him to form an actual band to perform it (including Richard Barbieri from early 80s band Japan. Later joined by Gavin Harrison who now plays in King Crimson and the Pineapple Thief). Ultimately, PT grew to one of the top prog acts of the late 90s and early 2000s before Wilson embarked on his outstanding solo career.
Pink Floyd fans will probably enjoy their earlier albums, while those who like a harder edge will enjoy the later albums. Personally, I became a fan with Stupid Dream (favorite tracks include “Even Less” “Piano Lessons” and “Slave Called Shiver”), but IMO it’s the later albums where Steven Wilson moved the band to a new level. In particular, Fear of a Blank Planet is a masterpiece, start to finish. The last track, Sleep Together, is mind-blowing live. In fact, Wilson is a master at album closers: Fadeaway (from Up the Downstair), Dark Matter (Signify), Stop Swimming (Stupid Dream), Feel So Low (Lightbulb Sun), Collapse the Light Into Earth (In Absentia), and so on. Fair warning, many of these closers are extremely depressing, but that’s Steven Wilson for you. Wallow at your own risk.
Finally, PT was an outstanding live band. Check out some videos on YouTube if you get a chance. While I personally think Steven Wilson took his music to a whole new level in his solo work, I remain blown away by Porcupine Tree."
from u/AretZorn
(I'll add that Porcupine Tree is my favorite artist, and I'd recommend starting with In Absentia. But you really can't go wrong - they have the most consistent discography of any artist I know.)
Thank You Scientist
Subgenre: Progressive Rock/Metal/Jazz Fusion
"Thank You Scientist is a stunningly energetic modern progressive rock group with jazz fusion, funk influences and very catchy choruses.
It's drums, bass, guitar and vocals (standard) but no keyboard and full time sax, trumpet and violin players. All of them with serious chops (including the singer, Sal, who sounds super poppy but is very accurate and check out the note at the end of FXMLDR for his power.
Honestly, it's musical caffeine as it shifts from a section that could be Dream Theater into Zappa, Foo Fighters then Al di Meola - but it all works. Sometimes it's weird time signatures, other times it's 4/4 but so syncopated it might as well be 13.5/8.
The drumming is always groovy, the guitar has serious pyrotechnics and the trumpet/violin/sax switch between jazz/funk and metal seamlessly.
And above all the guys are FUN. They do crazy promotional videos, fake Cream Co answer phones and from all available data are just a bunch of talented guys working hard and being super likeable.
It's unlike anything else you'll hear - in a really good way.
Recommended (as well as FXMLDR above):
Mr Invisible (funky/poppy side with some zappa-y twists)
Anchor (more like a prog rock/metal epic)
My Famed Disappearing Act (frenetic, think Liquid Tension Experiment with catchy vocals)"
from u/BadAtBlitz
"Thank you scientist (jazz fusion): TYS is a jazz fusion septet formed in 2010. With mass appeal in the jazz, prog rock, and prog metal communities, there is bound to be something for everybody. There is blazing fretwork on guitar, energetic drum and bass playing, extremely high vocals, jazzy trumpets and sax, and finally some interesting violin. Three albums in, and they are already near the forefront of modern prog. They even draw from Middle Eastern folk at points in addition to their jazz rock. Each album has gotten more experimental than the last. Recommended tracks: blood on the radio, Rube Goldberg Variations, FXMLDR, Suspicious Waveforms"
from u/notyourlandlord
Kate Bush
Subgenre: Progressive Pop
"Here in the UK, Kate Bush is something of a national treasure, meaning I was always aware of her singles (and her music videos, which mildly terrified my childhood self) as well as her connections to prog titans David Gilmour and Peter Gabriel. However, it wasn't until I listened to her albums that I realised what an incredible and unique talent she is.
Her music is unlike anything else on this list and can be difficult to classify. While her work does contain the sort of interesting musicianship and epic tracks that we all know and love, these are always subservient to her songwriting and creative vision. She takes inspiration from a wide variety of sources, but her work is always imbued with a powerful human touch and a strong sense of empathy. These often intensely personal songs are then delivered in that dramatic and idiosyncratic (some would say acquired taste) voice.
Put simply, she can make you understand and relate to something you may never have experienced. You can really feel the emotion she puts in to tracks such as This Woman's Work, Cloudbusting and Hounds of Love. Her songs have an intimate and emotional edge which to me is missing from a lot of other prog artists and they have helped me through some tough times in the past. But it's not all doom and gloom: she's also done plenty of more upbeat stuff, ranging from the whimsical The Big Sky and the worldbeat-influenced Eat The Music to the completely insane Violin.
Her catalogue is so varied and of a consistently high quality that it can be hard to recommend albums (but I'll try anyway). Fans of classic prog should check out her first 4 albums. In particular, Never For Ever (my personal favourite) and The Dreaming are two of the most courageous, progressive and brilliant albums ever to be released in my opinion. Hounds Of Love and Aerial both contain a winning mixture of shorter and more accessible tracks and longer conceptual pieces, while The Sensual World and The Red Shoes are both sometimes unfairly overlooked and well worth checking out.
Finally, it's not particularly relevant to this tournament, but it's worth considering the impact that Kate Bush exerted on the wider music industry as a whole. She was the first woman to reach Number 1 with a self-penned song and the first female artist to have a Number 1 album. She also pioneered the usage of wireless microphone headsets on stage, thus laying the foundations for the ever-more-elaborate dance routines and general onstage shenanigans of the modern pop world. Ironically, she then gave up on touring entirely to focus on her studio output. She also took over production duties on her albums from The Dreaming onwards, exerting a rare level of creative control for a successful artist.
For me, she is a progressive artist in the truest sense of the word: always fearlessly pushing boundaries and moving forward with little regard for commerciality or the machinations of the industry, never content to sit still or be pigeon-holed and dedicated to producing the finest possible music. It also doesn't hurt that she's put out some amazing works of art along the way."
from u/Lagiacrus7
The Pineapple Thief
Subgenre: Progressive Indie Rock
"The Pineapple Thief - No Man's Land (from Your Wilderness album)
They are one of those bands that made me stop what I was doing when I first heard them ( same thing when I heard PorcupineTree or PearlJam to name a few). It's about the sincerity of Bruce Soord's singing (man that sounds corny). When you add their ability to build the tunes that complement his songwriting it's dope. It's all about the song, not the flashy musicianship. But having Gavin Harrison playing some killer grooves and the way they all play doesn't hurt. Maybe start with their last couple of albums with Gavin Harrison and go back in their catalog. Also, Bruce Soord's latest solo album is great too, it's more singer songwriter than progish"
from u/keysforpraise
Hawkwind
Subgenre: Space Rock
No introduction for Hawkwind, so I'll copy the bit from ProgArchives. If you want to write an intro for them in the comments, I'll put it here.
Over their 30-odd year history, HAWKWIND were probably the most famous underground rock band in the world. The group was formed in the late '60s by guitarist/singer Dave BROCK, guitarist Mick SLATTERY and saxman/flautist/singer Nik TURNER. Dave BROCK was the leader of HAWKWIND and he was the captain, as it were. The band never would have made it for 30 years without Dave.
HAWKWIND's history has been marked by a series of confusing line-ups through 40 or so personnel changes. Their sound has continued to metamorphose and evolve: an almost jazz feel ("Hawkwind"), the "experimental" & acoustic sounds of early releases ("In Search of Space"), changing to the metal sound of their days (mid 70's), and a modern electronic feel on the latest ("Electric Teepee"). Yes, one can detect definite evolutions. With the primary use of the synthesizer, heavy and delay with the touch of techno, HAWKWIND practically created a genre of music that be called: psychedelic space-rock. Their creativity seems to be in the use of the synths to add to the intense moods of their songs. They were the master of the acid-space rock genre.
Also worth noting that Lemmy from Motorhead was in this band.
Adrian Belew
I've actually never heard his solo work despite loving Discipline. Belew's first instrument of interest was the drums, as he soon kept the backbeat in his high school's marching band. But not long after his discovery of the Beatles, Belew picked up the guitar, teaching himself how to play and to write original songs. In 1975, he officially changed his name to Adrian (because he liked the name).
During the mid/late 70's, Adrian did work with FRANK ZAPPA, which in turn led to his meeting with BRIAN ENO, which in turn led him to his work with the TALKING HEADS. After the album that he worked on with the group came out, Robert Fripp approached Adrian and asked if he would like to join a new version of KING CRIMSON. "Discipline" came out in 1981, and the album featured Adrian's Roland Guitar Synth, which provided many bizarre sounds to the already stellar sound. His first solo album, "Lone Rhino" was released in 1982. In the following years, Adrian would release many other solo efforts, and would collaborate with such artists as David Bowie and Porcupine Tree.
Here are tomorrow's artists - write an intro if you'd like!

• Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (includes albums with and without the Mothers)
• Alan Parsons Project
• Ayreon
• Peter Hammill
• Return to Forever
• Big Big Train
• The Mars Volta
• David Bowie
• Premiata Forneria Marconi
• Coheed and Cambria
• Leprous
• Procol Harum

Thanks!
View Poll

Feminist Frequency

Today was the #XboxGameShowcase and from it, this is what we observed - Breakdown of games: MALE: 5
FEMALE: 3
MULTIPLE OPTIONS: 11
N/A: 1
Breakdown of presenters:
MALE: 6
FEMALE: 3

Kim Belair - Writer, narrative designer, co-foundeCEO @SweetBabyinc Making games. Collecting skulls. (she/her)

"More people played as the male version of X character, so that means people prefer to play as a man" is a flawed statement and represents a huge misunderstanding of markets and marketing psychology. (1/?)
Presenting a male/female binary to a largely binary-ID'd market creates a psychological bias that you "should" choose your own gender. Consider how many products are needlessly gendered and must create alternate gendered options in order to sell the same stuff to different ppl.
The same applies in games. Our biases mean that men are more likely to choose the male character and women the female character because the action of presenting the choice actually creates an subconscious assumption that that is the "right" thing to do.
This is easily misinterpreted as "preference" when it's actually the result of social conditioning. I don't "prefer" to go to the women's room, nor do I truly "prefer" the pink razor. I have been conditioned to assume that this is "for me" and so I take it.
Let's also add systemic biases around gender to that, and understand that for a male player, society says "It is undesirable to be a woman, you do not want to be this", whereas non-male gamers playing as men are faced with no such barrier.
So, take Horizon: Zero Dawn, which I see used a lot as an example of "See? Female protagonists sell". And it is! But chances are, if a binary gender option was offered, a majority male market would skew to a male character and we'd be having the same discussion.
Now, sticking with the Horizon example, if the people making the flawed argument were right, then the player base of Horizon should skew majority female, right? Spoiler: it doesn't.
What DOES happen, though, is that non-male players become more likely to take interest-- including those who would ordinarily dismiss the genre of the game as "not for them". So now they join the market, and as newcomers are actually more likely to evangelize the game.
We can actually see this with Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Yes, Alexios (male) was played more than Kassandra (female) IN THE GAME, but even a quick Google reveals that Kassandra is significantly more popular in terms of the discussion surrounding the game.
That cultural, critical and conversational value is HUGE, and is what a lot of folks ignore in the development process- mostly out of fear and old ideas. They look at game data and hugely biased market data, draw the wrong conclusions, and then spend millions on a flimsy premise.
When the game then sells and a majority male audience chooses the male character, they take that as proof of the NEED for a male lead to sell the game. And that cultural/critical/conversational stuff is dismissed as having no monetary value, when it's actually hugely influential.
The amount of male gamers who get loud about how they "hate playing as a female!!" and then actually follow through for those reasons is surprisingly small. Often, a lack of perceived interest just reflects the fact we classically spend less marketing female-led products.
Ultimately, the discussion we SHOULD be having is about who is being allowed to make these decisions, and how many stories and characters are written authentically by people who share those identities and perspectives. Enough armchair market analysis. Go deeper.
(Also, I have a degree in this.)

Anita on the above thread

Over the years we’ve collected data proving that AAA game studios aren’t creating more solo female characters they are creating more player choice for the protagonist’s gender. This very good thread explains one reason why this isn’t the solution to our industry’s sexism problem.
We’re still compiling and finalizing the numbers from the pressers we’ve seen this summer and so far there is a statistical increase in the number of games with solo female protagonists but the trend continues to be a focus on binary choice or multi choice games.
This isn’t the exciting improvement that some folks claim because it isn’t actually an increase in sincere, genuine stories about people who have been rendered invisible or worse, degraded and dehumanized in games for decades.
We have to tell specific stories of women, women of colour, non binary folks, people of colour, disabled folks, trans folks. Having these stories centered, static, and not simply a choice or a side quest is paramount if we want to see sincere steps towards inclusion.

​
Another tweet reacting to Kim

Ubi's HR director once asked the diversity committee to imagine ways to "interest girls in video games". "I know a great medium!", I replied, "Video Games!" "NO!", he said, "We will NEVER restrain or guide the creativity of the teams!" The dissonance still shrieks in my brain
Narrator: Ubi was constraining all AAA production teams to male protagonists.
By the way the HR guy was the same person quoted below: (sorry, I will never tire of retweeting you, because, hahahahaha!)

Long time HR guy did a presentation on diversity to a room full of women... told us they knew women leave the studio/games early but they aren't sure why. His theory: women naturally lose interest in video games at 35

​
That tweet was in response to these tweets

"game dev is so competitive! so hard to get in!" they said "such a high churn in this industry! most ppl only last 5 years!" they said
HUH. I wonder who those apply to, since we have so many predators kept around for DECADES after complaints are made about them! [Thinking face] so mysterious

The "diversity committee" at Ubi was initially 9 people. Within 2 years of it's founding, 8 of us left.
"Maybe they just found better opportunities elsewhere?"

​
Unrelated to anything quoted above here is a tweet on sexism in Ubisoft.

Ubi QC managing director quits, saying her departure is unrelated to current events. But it's related in my heart as this woman told me "We expect women to work harder than men." In response to a complaint I had when she was in charge of HR.
"I work hard. I'm teaching my daughter to work hard. Don't YOU want to work hard?"
Specifically, she wanted me to work harder than that guy who said "I agreed with you but didn't want to say anything in front of the guys." When we say it's systemic, we mean like a Rube Goldberg machine.

THIS IS HUGE:
Half-Life: Alyx has been updated to include Steam Workshop support. This includes a beta release of our community development tools, as well as support for Linux and the Vulkan rendering API, and a few small quality of life updates.
Workshop and Editor Tools Beta ReleaseHalf-Life Alyx's level editing tools are now open to the community! You can create new levels, models, textures, and animations for Half-Life: Alyx, and using Steam Workshop you can browse and play everything the community has uploaded.
Want to make your own VR physics sandbox or a giant Rube Goldberg machine? Design a new combat encounter featuring a dozen Combine soldiers at once? What about creating the world's longest Multitool puzzle, or imagining a whole new district of City 17? Crack open the tools yourself and make it happen! If you just want to play what the community's been making, browse the Half-Life Alyx Steam Workshop page to try out the latest and most popular addons.
This is the first Beta release of the Alyx Workshop tools suite, and we intend to add to and improve them in the coming weeks. Included in this release are new or updated versions of:

• Hammer, the latest version of the Source 2 level editor.
• Material Editor, the tool for creating and tuning materials in Source 2.
• ModelDoc, a tool for viewing, editing, and compiling models with animation, collision, and other gameplay attributes.
• AnimGraph, our animation tool used to create complicated animation setups with blends and transitions.
• Particle Editor, for making new particle effects.
• Subrect Editor, for creating smart texture sheets known as "hotspots."
• Source Filmmaker, the Source 2 cinematic renderer and animation tool.

In addition to these tools, the update includes several sample maps. We've included these to demonstrate and explain how we authored enemy encounters in the game, as well as showcase some new features of the Half-Life: Alyx level art pipeline including tile meshes, static and dynamic cables, and texture hotspotting. The entire set of Half-Life: Alyx maps is also included as editable source for reference - this includes a large collection of interactive objects and prefabs. We'll have news on more features and some smaller additional tools and examples in an future update.
We've also started writing Half-Life: Alyx Workshop Tools documentation. If you're looking to start your first addon, this is a good place to start. This is a beta release of the development suite and we are still writing documentation for many of these tools, but we hope in the meantime you will dive in and learn by exploring for yourself. We can't wait to see what you make!
Linux and VulkanThe Half Life: Alyx Workshop update adds a native Linux version of the game using the Vulkan rendering API, as well as optional support for using Vulkan on Windows.
Depending on your system, you may experience better performance using Vulkan, especially if your system is closer to minimum spec. To try Vulkan on Windows, open the Half-Life: Alyx main menu and choose Options > Performance > Advanced (Gear icon) > Rendering API. (You must restart the game for the Rendering API choice to take effect.)
On Linux, AMD graphics and the Mesa RADV driver are recommended for best results.
On Linux, if you had installed the game through Proton previously, please follow these steps to correctly download the update:

• Go in the Properties for Half-Life Alyx by right-clicking the game in your Steam Library
• Check the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" box
• Uncheck the box, and the download will properly complete.

Spectator ViewThe spectator view (the view other people see when watching someone play) has received a few small updates as well. The spectator view now supports two zoom levels, and can be run in full screen mode by adding -fullscreen to your Launch Options in Steam. There is also now an option to draw the Spectator HUD directly in the SteamVR "VR View" window, so your spectators can see the HUD along with any other SteamVR overlays you use.
Additional fixesFixed some occurrences of the player's in-game hands shaking, GPU optimizations for rendering fog, and CPU optimizations for NPCs.
Version 1.3, Content Build ID: 5035510

Continuing
Time passed: winter changed into spring, spring changed into summer ... and winter gave spring and summer a miss and went straight on into autumn... until we decided that it was the proper time to host a housewarming party for all our new friends and colleagues here in Russia.
But first, I had to take several relatively short trips to Western and Eastern Siberia. To Kazakhstan, to Uzbekistan, to Kalmykia, to Dagestan, to Chechnya, to Ukraine, to Georgia, to Latvia, to Lithuania, to Tajikistan, to Estonia…didn’t get a lick of work done for my company, but sure met one hell of a lot of folks and got info on many, many different projects.
It was basically ‘pump-priming’, or ‘testing the waters’, or whatever the hell you want to call making initial contacts, spending huge amounts of company money on flights and ‘entertainment’ expenses. As well as meeting people from well over 1.6 million different countries.
I had a most burgeoning Rolodex, not Rolex, as if anyone here would remember those things. I carried a brick-like satellite phone which was monstrously expensive so I used it as much as possible. Had binders full of business cards and I had more visas for more different countries…strange thing, though. With my red Diplomatic Passport, I could sail right through the vast majority of border control points. I guess they were still jittery after the not-so-amicable breakup and were loath to cause any ‘Diplomat’ any grief.
I got away with such shit those days.
Smuggling? “Of course not! I’m a Diplomat!”
Are those rocks of any value? “Of course not! I’m an international geologist and those are but shiny, faceted, green, blue, and red crystalline hand samples!”
Are three cases of vodka really just for ‘personal use’? “Of course not! You’re right. Let me get another one to stuff into the Diplomatic Pouch.”
So, one bright spring day over bilberry-jammed blinis and freshly Samovared-coffee, Esme and I decided that since the kids had such good friends in the complex, we’d farm them out on one Friday night. Then we’d throw a house-warming party for all our new Muscovian friends.
The party was to include several of my Siberian friends and some actual real Muscovites; who we had to strangely invite via registered letter so they could be allowed entrance to our compound.
That was one of the things I didn’t care for in compound living. But, that’s the way it was; and nothing I could do, even grouse about the rules, would change anything.
Esme had invited her entire American Women’s Club, which was composed of North and South American women. They would be bringing their husbands.
We made it sort of clear that this was an adult’s night out. As much as we loved their little ankle-biters, carpet-crawlers, and curtain-climbers; they all needed to take this one as a time out.
It was parent time in the Motherland. I already had ordered up 3 half-barrels of beer and an equal number of cases of vodka. This was not a time for puberty, it was time for adultery.
No, wait. That’s didn’t come out right…it was parent time. A time for parents...
To socialize. To get to know each other. To eat, drink, and act like a bunch of goofy teenagers.
You get a general idea.
Anyways, there were going to be Russians, Siberians; and yes, there is a difference, Czechs, Brazilians, Scots, Americans, Canadians, Dutch, Brits, Australians, Moldovans, Chinese, Nepalese, several from various Stans, Botswanans, Danes, South Africans…ah, hell, there were going to be a lot of the globe represented.
All united by the common threads of bar-be-que, free beer, and ample smokeables.
Luckily, it was fairly equable outside, weather-wise, and we were in-between the seasons of the Spring *Rasputitsa *, or mud season, and the early summer thunderstorms. I had arranged for several large tarps on poles to be erected over the front dais of the house and even more in the back yard.
The back yard would hold all the troughs full of ice, beer, and soft drinks. There would be a separate one for the vodka, cognac, and sweet girly champagne that the local women seemed to really enjoy. These tarps also covered the bar-be-que grills I had made to order a few months previously.
One of the oilfield service companies took some 8 foot-long sections of 42” line pipe, sandblasted them and sawed them in half lengthwise. They were hinged together in back and handles were welded front and back for transport. Set on four stout pipe legs, interior racks were repurposed from some Russian appliances of one sort or another. The ends were welded shut with caps and suddenly, there were a couple of very Texas-sized bar-be-que grills in my backyard.
The company had stuffed the grills into their industrial autoclave and heated the things to 2 or 3 million degrees C. to burn off all the nasty oilfield schmoo. While they were still warm, they were powder coated with electronegative paint, and re-kilned. The result was the grills and racks were surgically clean and coated in a blast-furnace-heat resistant covering of melted porcelain-like glass.
One was red, of course, and one was blue. They were works of art and are still with the service company that created them as I willed them to the company when we left some years later.
Now, bar-be-que and outdoor grilling might be as dull as dishwater to us Norteamericanos, but it was absolutely thrilling for most of our new friends. Many knew of cooking over an open fire, but only during camping, hunting, fishing, or times of natural calamity.
To cook outdoors when it wasn’t really required? Such Western decadence. This was all something thrillingly new and potentially dangerous.
I had arranged for some charcoal to be flown in from Finland, as the stuff available locally just couldn’t cut the mustard, so to speak. It was more loamy and peaty than charcoal-y. The Finnish stuff was as hard as anthracitic coal.
We were going to grill up a half-side of cow, several small suckling pigs, a load of pike-type fish, and just because, a couple of locally sourced briskets, some ‘gamburgers’ and hot dogs.
Just because it was a barbeque. Of epic proportions. Of Rocknocker-esque proportions.
Esme tried several times to reign me in, but after the truck showed up with an entire side of beef, she realized it was a lost cause.
“Rock”, she cooed to me as I tried to stuff the side of beef into our tiny kitchen, “I knew that sooner or later, you’d twist off. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately and I guess it’s finally arrived. I just want to let you know, I love you greatly and if I should disappear, I wouldn’t have gone far. I just don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.”
“What’s that, m’dear?” I asked while I tore the kitchen apart looking for the Old Bay spice and Dave’s Insanity sauce we smuggled in on our last trip.
“Oh. Nothing, dear.” Es smiled, “Go nuts. But please, be careful.”
“Oh, sure. Yeah. No worries.”, I smiled as I found that ceremonial Gurkha knife, “This will work a treat in cutting up the beef once it’s done.” as I swung the massive thing around like Darth Vader confronting a Rebel contingent.
“Kids”, Es called, “Isn’t it time to go to your friend’s house?”
This all started on a Tuesday afternoon. Es and I had to prepare the menu and then I’d get after what needed getting after.
Besides a half-side of beef on the bar-be-que, as I mentioned, we’d have some stuffed and grilled pike, hot dogs, ‘gamburgers’, a few suckling pigs, a couple of big, meaty briskets, currently corning in the kitchen, and maybe some form of poultry or two.
It’s a meat-heavy menu for a meat-heavy diet round these parts.
I took care of the beer, vodka, champagne, cognac, and gin, well, there’s were going to be some Brits in attendance, soft-drink mixers, and ridiculously expensive citrus fruits. I had the country store on-site crank up their ice machine and had standing orders for all the excess ice they could produce over the next few days.
Roger, my Texan neighbor, confidant, and mechanical engineer buddy who kept to a work schedule which closely mimicked mine, decided he couldn’t let this hapless Baja Canadian handle these whole two grills on his own.
Truth be told, Roger was a major help in fabricating the necessary rotisseries and pipework to spin the pigs and side of beef above the fire. He was keen and adept at drawing things up on paper, but pretty worthless in translating them from two to three dimensions.
That’s where my adroitness and past experiences with a pipe cutter and welding torch, again, ‘borrowed’ from the oilfield service company, along with their pipe-rack truck, came into its own. He designed, we both cut the appropriate metal, and I metal-glued them in place.
Roger ‘located’ a couple of large electrical motors, one capable of turning the 300 pounds of cow on the one spit and one efficient in handling the ‘pig basket’ of about 250 pounds of young piglet that was going to be prepared. Each was several dozen horsepower in displacement and heavy as a motherfucker. They stood alone on the ground, while Roger fabricobbled up a drive-train system and electrical controls for each.
What began as a simple ‘C’mon over for a back yard bar-be-que’ had turned into something of which NASA would have been proud.
Picture this: 2 eight-foot-long, 42” diameter pipe grills, one gleaming red, one shining blue, with a Rube Goldberg set of pipe contraption A-frames making a pair of rotisseries; one driven by a 30HP 3-phase electric motor, the other by one only churning out 20 HP. There was a separate control tower Roger ginned up which contained the start-stop switches and rheostats which controlled the rotation of the beeve and baconators.
With all that, we still had room for four stuffed pike, each at least a meter in length, my briskets, a few butterflied chickens, hot dogs and ‘gamburgers’.
“Nothing succeeds like excess”, I said to Roger as I toasted him with the second or eighth beer of the morning.
He agreed with me and stole yet another cigar.
The beef was turning slowly over a low fire of finest Finnish hardwood. This was calculated to take at least 2.5 days to complete. The suckling pigs I’d start the next morning. If all went to plan, we’d have everything ready for dinner by 1700 that Friday.
Well, the meat’s taken care of, as were the drinks.
Esme and Linda, Roger’s wife, grabbed Valosh and made a trek into downtown to Stockman’s Pantry for some typically American repasts.
Cans of baked beans, fresh lettuce, rocket, radicchio, romaine, and other salad-y makings. Several varieties of fresh fruit, Emmenthal cheese and melting Dutch chocolate for the fondues that Es set up every single time we had a gathering.
It was a tradition.
We’d source much of the remainder of the party munchies locally. There was a bakery just around the corner of the compound and after buying our bread there for months, we got to know the proprietors quite well. We explained the concept of the “tortilla chip” and damn if they didn’t create a very passable Russian version.
We created our own flavorings for dusting over them, and I think we were the absolute first to come out with a caviar-flavored chip. Potato chips were easy enough to make, as were soft tortillas, but we were coming up shy on dips.
Substituting unflavored Greek yogurt for the more usual labneh back in the Middle East, I converted some of our imported biryani masala, lamb masala, curry mix, and other Middle Eastern spices into chip dips.
You haven’t lived until you’ve had Red Caviar flavored Russian tortilla chips with a healthy dollop of garam Masala and yogurt dip.
As Emmanuel from Argentina sniffingly said: “It’s a brilliant antihistamine.”
I contracted with a batch of local school-aged kids to pick fresh mushrooms for the party.
Russians are just crazy over mushrooms. However, as we were to find out, they will only eat them cooked; having them raw for dipping or in salads really gave them pause.
Ah, just another twist on the usual house warming party.
The cow continued cooking, the porks were happily spinning along in their private horizontal merry-go-round and the Finnish cooking wood was holding out well. The smells emanating from our corner of the compound had many, many people wandering over wondering who was opening the restaurant.
Thursday slid into Friday. I took the car and made a mad dash for the Mitino Ramstore to replenish our butter, paprika and vodka stocks. Seems all those Russian bottles had holes in them…
I was actually using a good supply of the stuff in cooking. Take a cup or so of good vodka, taste-test it, just in case, restore to proper measure and heat it gently as to not incinerate your eyebrows. Add a cup or so of berries, and a cup of sugar, and a smidge of molasses. Heat until just right. Repeat until you have enough drunken berries to fill a pie crust; graham cracker or otherwise.
You can freeze this and serve it with whipped cream frozen or bake it until the berries bubble; then you can serve it with ice cream.
I made homemade ice cream as well for the evening’s festivities. To a standard vanilla base of sugar, egg yolks, and hot heavy crème, you whip this stuff until it can’t take it any longer and it goes all custardy. Then you add your flavorings and churn the hell out of it over rock salt and ice.
Result?
Mint chocolate chip with Cornish crème de menthe.
Rum raisin with Jamaican dark RUM.
Watermelon ice and spirit. Spirt is homemade Siberian rocket fuel. Pretty close to 200 proof as one can get.
Rocky road with pecans, marshmallows, caramel, chocolate truffle, and Napoleon cognac.
Bourbon vanilla with fresh Madagascar vanilla-bean vanilla.
“You can’t get booze to freeze in ice cream!” I hear some wag yell.
“You can if you freeze the stuff with liquid nitrogen!” I yell back.
I have access to all sorts of fun, sciency stuff. Liquid nitrogen is as much a cooking staple as is liquid oxygen.
We’ll save the Great Grill Meltdown story of 2002 for a later date.
Friday morning, as I was out tending the grills, several of Esme’s friends from the compound showed up to help set up for the evening’s festivities.
“Great”, I thought, “They’re in there, I’m out here with the vodka and beer. All is right with the world.”
There was a flurry of activity as each of Esme’s friends busied themselves with a different portion of the party. One was handling the desserts, one was preparing the salads, one was setting out the plates, cups (first time for red Solo Cozy Cups in Russia), and silverware. It was going to be a very informal sort of party, but evidently, there was a certain protocol to follow.
Flowers appeared from the Babushka Mafia; where we had a standing order. A huge centerpiece filled what seemed half the dining room table. A fire was started in the fireplace.
Why?
Because.
Reasons.
OK.
Me? I just stayed out of their way.
Esme started up her fondue pots; ones we’ve had since day one of our marriage. Into one went a four-cheese mixture of Emmenthal, edam, cheddar, and brie cheese, along with some light white wine. Into the other pot went a kilo or so of melting chocolate, imported from the Netherlands or other European someplace. Some very expensive, 45-year-old cognac went into that pot to facilitate meltage. There was some nutmeg, cinnamon, saffron, and other spices as well.
Potato salads were made and brought out, covered under chilled cheesecloths as the fridge was hopelessly full at this point. Green salads were made, with and without locally-produced mushrooms. The whole table groaned after a fairly short time from it’s covering of fruits, breads, beans, salsas, salads, and other party fares.
The ice creams I had made were up at the country store near the entrance to the compound, We had no room and they graciously ‘rented’ out some of their freezer space. All it cost were a few rubles and a couple of quarts of ice cream.
The horse troughs out back were stocked with kegs of beer, tappers, and bottles of booze, all on ice. There was one smaller trough full of Russian soft drinks, juices, fizzy and still waters, and other things that would probably stave off if not prevent total alcohol poisoning.
Olga, our house girl, insisted on stuffing and preparing the pike for the grill. She was a wonder. She was teaching the girls, and truth be told, Es and I, Russian and Ukrainian. She insisted on making dinner anytime Es or I wandered into the kitchen looking for a sandwich and generally made us feel like some sort of privileged class. We didn’t want that at all and went out of our way to make certain we treated her like family.
She was scrupulously honest, and when we included 250 extra rubles for her first week since all the extra work she took upon herself; she actually chewed us out for being too “credulous”.
“People will take advantage.”, she scolded, “I agree to weekly pay, no more. I will not make you more naïve.”
I finally got her to take it for payment for the language lessons.
She was a real polymath. She helped the girls with homework, ran interference with any local entanglements, and could cook like there was no tomorrow. She was a peach, pure and simple.
Plus, she liked my cigars and loved cognac.
We got on like a house afire.
She also knew her way around a fish. She had those four-meter long critters gutted, scaled, stuffed and trussed as good as any Michelin starred chef in any international seafood house.
They went on the grill, just to the south of my briskets. The chickens would only take a couple of hours over this low and slow heat and the aromas of them comingled with the other proteins were intoxicating.
Or it might have been the potato juice and beer marinades I was using for the various bits of animal carcass.
Vodka, melted butter, smoked Himalayan salt, and smoked Hungarian paprika was brushed liberally over the butterflied chickens. Many times during their grilling tenure.
Beer, a tomato reduction sauce, molasses, maple syrup, and cognac graced our rapidly caramelizing roasted piglets.
Bourbon, coffee, treacle, and a few secret ingredients made up the sauce for the beef. It went on every 100 or so turns.
The brisket and pike were left alone, except for some fish masala for the pikes and Old Bay mixture for the briskets. The grill was closed on these and they were allowed to continue more or less unmolested.
The day drew along and it was soon noon. The house was decked out very festively. The girls were going directly over to the neighbor’s after school so it was now T-5 hours to party time. But with all our help, there’s wasn’t much to do. It was all pretty much done.
Roger assured me he’d stop over at the country store and pick up the pies, ice cream and extra ice in our amassed coolers when he returned from work, around 1500 hours. So that was taken care of.
Esme decided she wanted a shower and nap before the evening’s frivolities, and since everything had already been done I couldn’t agree more. We kissed and smiled at our good fortune and taste in friends and neighbors, as she headed upstairs for a bit of kip.
The cow was turning, the pigs were spinning, the pike and briskets were smoking and I decided to grab a lawn chair, fire up a cigar and sit out back enjoying the warmish afternoon in northwestern Moscow. Oh, sure; I nodded off a few times, but made certain my charges were well looked after. Be silly to get this far and have things go south.
Roger showed up around 1600 hours and I helped him move all the coolers into the garage, as there just wasn’t room in the house nor kitchen, it was that stuffed with party favors. The meat was approaching that point where it was done to if you’ll pardon the expression, a turn.
Roger sampled a piece of the spinny cow and declared it good enough for a Texas rodeo.
High praise indeed.
He left and would return with Linda in perhaps an hour.
I went to wake Es and got her in the shower with a cup of coffee. I decided to forego the shower and helped myself to another pre-party cocktail.
5:00 PM arrived and our guests…did not.
Roger and Linda, our only North American invitees showed up around 1730.
Es, myself, Roger and Linda sat around chatting and nibbling, wondering where the hell everyone else was. I even motored up to the gate to see if the officious guards were giving any of my local invitees any grief and thus holding them up.
No. They hadn’t shown up as of yet.
Back to the house, and now, I’ve dealt with the Arabic version of showing up for a meeting, party, or operation. These characters will be late for their own autopsy. I thought punctuality was more prized in the European community.
I fiddled around with the grills and turned everything to ‘warm’. I was, truth be told, a bit miffed at all this. I had spent a fair fortune on feeding these characters, you would think…
At that precise moment, the doors burst open. The crowds had arrived. All a bit ‘fashionably late’, but with their gird on and ready to party. There was no mention of their unpunctuality, but huge bear hugs, back slaps, and depositions of house warming gifts, all bottles of some form or another of alcohol, typically rare and reflecting the origin of the giver.
The party went from absolute silence to incredible raucousness in nothing flat. I still had to man the grills, so I dragooned Roger into being the ad hoc bartender. Esme and Linda were showing folks around the place, making the perfunctory tour before the inevitable feeding and drinking. Roger was busier than a one-handed paperhanger in a windstorm. I helped out best I could by tapping the kegs and passing around the Solo Cozy cups, which made a huge hit among the Western and Eastern Europeans.
Of course, the stereo was cranked up. Between Esme’s classical music and my 60s and 70s rock collections, the place began vibrating. Luckily, we had the forethought to invite the neighbors who lived immediately adjacent to us.
After the initial drinks were disbursed, it was time for the first rounds of nibbly bits. Being in Russia, one simply cannot have a drink without a nosh. Esme’s fondues were incredible hits. Since fondue is a Scandinavian invention, we figured it’d be more well known here. Evidently not as several folks had to be given instructions as to how to build a cheesy or chocolatey snack.
The dips, crudités, amuse bouche, and chips went over very well. We had people from Africa, Asia, Europe, both Americas, Australia and other ports of call not yet mapped. Everyone had their story of foods back home that mimicked our offerings. It was most entertaining to hear stories of the braai, pit roast, chuanr, yakitori, satay, khorkhog, tandoor, and the like.
But it was the whole, well, a half grilled cow that boinged everyone’s eyes. The whole suckling pigs, smoked stuffed pike, briskets, and chickens also got their share of gapes. I had some hamburgers and hot dogs in case anyone was about to go hungry.
Over more rounds of drinks, I announced that I’d be carving up the meat and setting it out, for everyone to help themselves.
Olga shouldered her way through the crowd with my Gurkha knife and a couple of large platters. First off were two of the whole smoked and stuffed pike. These were attacked with abandon, much to Esme’s alarm as people missed the salads and zeroed in straight on the protein.
Olga sorted them all out by pointing out proper party protocol and for people to take notice of the assortment of bread, salads, Jellos, and fresh fruits provided to accompany the meals.
Properly chastised, some sense of party decorum returned as the beer continued to flow, the empty vodka bottles stacked up and my cigar humidors went, for the time being, unnoticed.
I carved off great, bleeding hunks of cow. It was so tender I could have butchered the thing with a pleasant remark. Some were blue, some were medium and some, down the way along the beast, we well done. I carved up huge hunks of each for all to take that which they would please.
The chickens came off the grill next, and after a few deft knife swipes, were deboned and ready for consumption. The briskets were resting on a sideboard in the kitchen and Olga assured me she’d take care of them as long as I handled the disassembly of the suckling pigs.
Taking a quick restroom break, I was amazed to see one of our living room tables completely covered by bottles of wine, champagne, spirits, and who-knows-what. These were our inevitable house warming gifts from our assembled friends.
There was much greeting and handshaking as I tried to make my way to the facilities. I could hear Valosh and his wife somewhere in the madding crowd, but this was simply going to have to wait. Internal pressure was approaching critical limits.
I decided to keep station out by the grills as I still needed to handle the roast suckling pigs. I figured that if people were wondering where I was, follow their nose out to the bars and grill; I’d be around somewhere close.
Roger dragged a table over from his backyard to give me some room to disassemble the little porkers. He kept up with his bartending duties and I reduced those crispy little pork packets into more eatable size pieces. People had gotten the idea that enough with me bringing in the grilled food, they’d just come outside and get it fresh off the cooker.
The party was going into high gear. People were showing up who I didn’t know, and after quizzing Esme, she had no idea as well. Didn’t make a bit of difference; there was no way we’d run out of food or drink, and as long as we’re here, we international ambassadors of general amity. As long as these interlopers behaved themselves, no one had any objections.
There was one small incident where some local younger hooligans tried to swipe a couple of bottles of booze off the living room table. Some older Russian gentlemen, Heroes of the Soviet Union all, relieved the hooligans of their ill-gotten gains. Somewhat forcefully. They gifted them instead cuffed ears, kicks up the backside and swats on the back of the head as they admonished them off the property.
We learned later these older Russian gentlemen were both maintenance and security for the compound. We were most pleased to make their acquaintance and happy they could join us.
The house was packed, the front yard was packed, the back was really packed. Everyone was eating and drinking like there was no tomorrow. And as tomorrow was Saturday, the international day of rest and hangover nursing, and since we’re so far north, we’re starting to get into White Nights territory, this was going to be a long, long night.
The pike were gone. All four, consumed.
The briskets were as well. I was told they were ‘very good’. I’ll have to take their word for it, I never as much as got a slice.
Chickens? Disappeared. Gone without a trace.
Piglets? We had about one small half left.
The side of beef? Well, there were still a few steaks left, as I carved myself a healthy hunk, but I was amazed at the feeding frenzy we had just witnessed. It was mostly gone as well. Maybe enough for a few sandwiches come the morning.
The salads were most appreciated and devoured. Even Esme’s grandmothers bit-o-a-joke lime Jell-O with carrots and peas disappeared. Bread? Mostly gone. Chips and dips? Still holding out, but would never survive the night.
Esme and I were glad everyone was getting their fill.
Everyone was finishing up on the main courses and all helped pitch in to clean up any trash and do what few dishes Olga hadn’t yet gotten to. There was an actual lull in the gathering as now it was time for a post-dinner smoke and a bit of rest before dessert.
Roger and his teenage son went out in the garage and brought back the 4 coolers full of bespoke ice cream. One would think ice cream wouldn’t be terribly relished by denizens of the far north. Au contraire. The locals love the stuff. In fact, I haven’t found a single person who has actually refused a bowl of my homemade nitrogenized ice cream.
Esme broke out the plastic bowls and announced that there were homemade pie and ice cream available out back.
“Name your poison”, I chuckled.
That idiom took some time to explain across 20 or so different languages.
There was a problem though. People may be familiar with chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream; but Rum Raisin, Vodkamelon ice, and Crème de menthe chocolate chip? This was ‘terra incognita’ for most everyone.
What better way to sort it all out by providing samplers of each of the flavors in one bowl?
I froze the plastic bowls in liquid nitrogen then placed smallish scoops of each flavor ice cream in each.
“Just a sample”, I said, “So you can figure out which you like best.”
It took a bit of translating, but soon everyone got the idea.
Once I dished out the mixed-berry pie, there was no clear winner on which ice cream flavor was the favorite. They were all consumed 100%. Some actually came back for thirds.
And the pie was good, or so I was told.
Once more, after the dessert course, the whole area was policed clean. Food, drink and various fun activities started to take their toll. Things were beginning to quiet down.
Then I forgot and went to my humidor and grabbed a smoke.
Over a couple of boxes of cigars, impromptu Bocce ball, lawn darts, and corn hole games broke out. I mean, it’s 2200 hours, you have a huge cigar, it’s still light. What better than tossing around heavy metal balls, pointed oversized darts, or bean bags at holes sawn in plywood?
Then Laurens-Jan and his wife, Fientje broke out the Absinthe Fountain.
An absinthe fountain is not for dispensing absinthe, but rather for dispensing water.
A typical absinthe fountain is an ornate vessel with several taps around its central water container, which permits a number of drinkers to louche their absinthe at the same time. On contact with water, absinthe will louche -- or develop a certain subtle clouding that will slowly transform the drink's color from deep emerald into a delightful shade of opalescent light green.
They had brought a couple of bottles of King of Spirits Absinth from Denmark with them.
Just for a side note, the stuff is 70% alcohol or 140 proof.
As if the evening needed another shot in the arm.
The Absinthe Fountain louched four drinks at a time. It did so in a mesmerizing and nearly hypnotizing manner so that when the drink was ready for consumption, one could scarcely decline.
OK, there was still a half-barrel or so of beer out in the backyard, probably a case or so of spirits of various denominations swimming around back there as well. There was an active absinthe loacher going on in the dining room, cigars were being had by most everyone and games of very little skill were being attempted out in the yard.
The party had found its high watermark.
People had achieved what we Baja Canadians would call ‘blissed’. It’s that feeling you get, sitting out under a basic roof, at a rained-out ballgame or after trekking all over a country or state fair, sitting with several pitchers of probably somewhat flat and lukewarm beer, feet up and just enjoying the hell out of the universe.
It’s a rare condition, but I think we attained it here.
Spontaneous card games erupted: cribbage, Schafskopf, Canasta, poker, and spit.
The music toned down and was more instrumental than the early electronica synth-pop of dinner. Conversations broke out. Friendships were made and cemented.
Bliss had been achieved.
One of those friendships came back the very next day to haunt us.
Dr. Dumitru Hurgoi and his wife, Dr. Anamaria Stelymes, veterinarians both, showed up at our door early the next afternoon; planned strategically after the girls had returned from school.
Seems Dr. Dumitru heard me lamenting the loss of our Lady McBeast a few years prior and how our daughters were missing having a pet or two around the house.
Drs. Dumitru and Anamaria ran the local chapter of the Russian version of the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They had just taken possession of a litter of little, pure-snow-white Samoyed pups that had been abandoned at their clinic.
They made their entrance carefully, making certain the girls saw all 6 puppies as they spilled, oops, out of the box and into our villa. They were about 5 weeks old, very inquisitive and were immediately all over the house. It took us over an hour to round them all up.
Of course, at that time, we had a great deal of exposure to each of the pups.
Of course, we couldn’t be cads and refuse to take at least one for our very own. It was Khris, already starting her studies to be a large animal veterinarian, that ran each of the pups through her testing scales to see which would be the most appropriate for our family.
That all didn’t matter, as Tash glommed onto one little female and refused to give her up.
We took the smaller female puppy of the litter. It proved to be the best idea of the time because once she was removed from the bump and tussle of the litter, she really came into her own.
So, that afternoon, I signed the papers on the ownership of “Zima”, Russian for “Winter” due to her snow-white countenance.
Smart? Like a whip. Clever. Inquisitive? Oh, yes. A footwear thief?
Until we left Russia, I never had a matching pair of socks again.
To be continued