”Just as Lucas borrowed plot points and characters from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies, the costumes were clearly taking cues from Japanese traditional dress.
“It is distinctively different from the whole Western fashion tradition, and that’s an important thing to try and get a sort of ‘alien’ look,” Steele explains of the Japanese influence. “So the fact that it’s flowing, it’s sort of long, T-shaped garments, and sort of stylized armor, as opposed to clothing that is sort of tailored and fitted to the body.”
Not coincidentally, it was at that very moment that an emerging class of Japanese avant-garde designers were beginning to toy with their country’s folk costume in a movement that would soon reverberate in the Western world’s fashion capitals. Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Kansai Yamamoto, and Issey Miyakewere experimenting with surreal and cerebral shapes and bulbous gatherings of fabric that resemble the fresh, outer-world look of Star Wars, with perhaps less threatening results. (Yohji Yamamoto debuted his first collection in Tokyo the year of Star Wars’ premiere, and the others began showing in Paris in the early 80s. The group would be immortalized in a 1983 New Yorker article by Kennedy Fraser prophetically titled “The Great Moment.”)
“It’s hard for me to believe it was entirely accidental because if you think about that particular period right when Star Wars came out, that was right when Japan ruled the world,” Steele says. “The Japanese economy was on top of the world, they were taking over all kinds of companies, and I think there is definitely a hint of an idea that Japan was kind of like this evil empire. So whether consciously or unconsciously, [Mollo] is picking up on Japanese themes in dress for the costuming.””
German people, how does the ‘I am Lord Voldemort’ thing works in the German version? Google says Tom Vorlost Riddle makes 'ist Lord Voldemort’ but I don’t get it… The whole sentence… What is it
A couple of months ago I put out a question about Vikings Valhalla fans and what they want to read. @vikingstrash ran me up a little Google poll and I am circling back to share some results!
I feel like I should start this by saying that I’m not a statistician or a data scientist - I’m just someone who likes graphs. The last time I did this I got strongly chastised for shoddy methodology, so, in the interest of full disclosure - there wasn’t any methodology. We asked some questions. We got some answers. I did some math.
I got 37 responses to the survey - so, not a huge sample size, but enough to start seeing a couple of patterns.
I started this project with a question - what do you want to read? And I got what I think are some interesting answers.
, - an Alternative Universe(AU)-based Otome Content Creation Challenge
Brought to you by me and the amazing @queengiuliettafirstlady, this content creation challenge is a week-long exploration of the trope Alternative Universe!
→GENERAL RULES
Works of all forms are welcome! Fanarts, fanfics, headcanons,…whatever your heart desires.
Limited to otome fandoms-IkeSeries(Ikemen Vampire, Ikemen Prince, Ikemen Sengoku, Ikemen Revolution, etc.); Tears of Themis; Obey me!; Mr Love: Queen’s Choice; Light and Night; Voltage games; Mystic Messenger and others, as well as Visual Novel otomes.
This challenge takes place between June 13th and June 19th, 2022. The deadline for posting your works is June 25th (up until midnight, UTC+2).
On June 26th @queengiuliettafirstlady will publish a masterlist enlisting all works linked along with their creators. Don’t hesitate to contact us if your work was done within the deadline but wasn’t featured in the masterlist. Or, if you prefer not to be featured on the masterlist at all!
When posting your works, use the tag #different universe same love ccc - you can as well tag @xxsycamoreand@queengiuliettafirstladyin your posts! It will help us find your work easier!
Posting to other sites is allowed - as long as you mention the challenge and its creators.
Reblogs are appreciated!
→CONTENT RULES
This challenge uses a total of 14 prompts, two for each day. You’re free to create a work based on whichever one you like more for that day. You can also create works for both prompts, and you can also mix the two prompts into one work! Whateversuits you :) You can create more than one work for the same prompt, too!
You can find the list of prompts on the banner above, as well at the bottom of this post.
Under the cut you will also find a short explanation of each prompt, just in case there is anything unclear about them.
Any additional rules are up to the content creators. You are free to choose the rating(make sure to mark your NSFT works accordingly, and if you’re minor, make sure not to engage/interact with such!),you’re just as free to choose the genre (the challenge’s main focus is romance, but it is not obligatory for your work to be of such genre),all characters and ships are up to you (OCs, character x MC, character x character, etc.)
You’re free to take requests from your audience using this list, again please make sure to mention the challenge and its creators.
This blog is not taking requests for this challenge, unless I state otherwise later on!
You’re absolutely free to post your works for this challenge after its deadline, June 25th - but please know that they won’t be featured in the masterlist!
The final and most important rule is to have fun and not pressure yourself about full completion of the challenge. Do only as many works as you wish and you can! :)
Here is a free-to-use banner/header for the challenge!:
If you have any additional questions, we’ll be happy to help. There is no such thing as a stupid question, so don’t hesitate to get in contact with us! We wish you happy creating!
→ THE LIST
Day 1 - June 13th- Modern AU | Historical AU
Day 2 - June 14th-Celebrity AU |Person of the arts AU
Day 3 - June 15th- Enemies AU | Soulmates AU
Day 4 - June 16th- Mythology AU | Fantasy AU
Day 5 - June 17th - Academia AU | Small shop AU
Day 6 - June 18th- Domestic/Family life AU | Role Reversal AU
Day 7 - June 19th- FREE DAY (an AU of your choice)
Under the cut you’ll find a short explanation of each prompt:
The Petrov line—Valeri Kharlamov, Vladimir Petrov, and Boris Mikhailov—played on the world stage throughout the 1970s, and pretty much crushed it.
In World Championships alone, their line scored the most points in the tournament in:
1969
1973
1974
1975
1977
and1979.
1973 was the year that they scored 86 points, which still stands as the record for a single line. If you want to know how close anyone is to passing it, the second most points by any line is only 56—them again, in 1977.
Their total works out to about 5 points per game on the national team in the World Championships. During the regular season, all three of them played for CSKA Moscow in the Soviet League, where each member of the line brought in about 1.2 points a game (the top scorer of the group was worth a bit under a goal per game). In recorded international play they scored 539 total goals (plus an incalculable number in exhibition games and discontinued tournaments). In the Soviet League, they scored 1086.
Now, the wildest statistic might be this: they did that over thirteen years together.
Most lines are lucky to last a year or three.
Their records are unbeatable now because World Championship goaltending has probably gotten better, but also because the way the game is not just played, but made, has changed. For better or for worse, I don’t think we’ll see three athletes who know each other so well again.
In the ‘80s the Soviet style would come to be exemplified by the mechanical precision of the Green Unit forwards, who besides being the same size were all equally skilled skaters and all shot in the same direction, so they could pull into tight formations and any player could pass or reposition seemingly interchangeably. Kharlamov, Petrov, and Mikhailov were not like that. Each was the very best version of a very different physical style.
(And, in Kharlamov’s case, fashion style).
As their teammate Tretiak put it, “It is very difficult to talk about [them] separately—and, perhaps, wrong.”
“It seemed,” he felt, “that they were born to meet.”
2. Hang in there, I talk a lot about getting good wood but Wayne Gretzky’s in a sauna at one point and Vladimir Petrov is what we could call the original Soviet Unit
The Soviet habit of holding the puck rather than shooting, and taking wristshots rather than one-timers and slapshots when they did, was both philosophical and practical. Their sticks were pretty terrible, and there weren’t enough.
In the ‘70s everyone used wooden sticks, which had to be made from a single piece of wood with an even grain. Any knot would make a weak spot. In North America the design of the ice hockey stick had been developed and refined by members of the Mi’kmaq nation in eastern Canada since the 1800s, initially using flexible willow, maple, and hornbeam lumber before forest reserves were depleted and quick-growing but heavy yellow birch and white ash got cheaper. In the 1930s production of Mic-Mac brand sticks shifted from individual carvers to a factory, but the design remained otherwise unchanged for decades.
The Sher-wood and Canadien brand sticks appeared in the 1950s. In the 1970s they introduced sticks made from aspen wood, which was lighter than ash, covered in a layer of laminate to strengthen it. The layered and laminated process also meant, in theory, more uniform products, because you didn’t need such a big piece of uniform would. That design would dominate North America until the 90s—the companies competed over who could promise the most consistent product, not through new designs.
In Europe, you had KOHO, Montreal, Toronto, and Titan. All four were Finnish brands.
The first, debuting in the 1950s, provided solid sticks but would really when it came to goalie gear later in the century. Montreal and Toronto were lighter laminate sticks introduced in the early ‘70s. In 1966 a member of the Finnish national apline skiing team called Antti-Jussi Tiitola invented a fiberglass stick he started selling as Titan, which people thought were…okay.
“My thinking was that I could sell hockey sticks by motivating hockey players with my engineering skills,” Antti-Jussi says. “It did not happen like that, because hockey players are not engineers.”
Then in the ‘80s Wayne Gretzky sauna’ed with the Finnish national team and liked the look of their sticks, so Titan became a thing.
But when Coach Tarasov had been given instructions to start a Soviet hockey program, he’d also been given a box of Finnish wooden sticks, probably KOHOs or ones a lot like them. Those were copied to carve new sticks, eventually leading to a company called ЗФСИ (“Efsi”) which made sticks under a contract with the Glavsportprom, which distributed sporting equipment in the Soviet Union.
The results weren’t great.
By the ‘70s the rest of the hockey world was moving on. No pro wanted to rely on Efsis. The Finnish companies reached out to Soviet League teams, who took up Torontos and Montreals, but supply was always short. When they traveled Soviet teams begged or borrowed skates, pads, and especially sticks from their opponents. One of the most important pre-game duties of the assistant coach was to go around to the other dressing rooms, and ask if they had extras.
But since Soviet kids grew up playing with the domestic sticks or homemades, most of the players had never practiced hard shots, because their stick might break, and then they’d be left without.
All of this left a massive, Vladimir Vladimirovich-shaped hole in the ecosystem of Soviet hockey.
Vladimir Petrov was built like one of those really homoerotic Soviet propaganda posters, and he acted like it.
He played bandy, basketball, tennis, and soccer as well as hockey, picking up new sports whenever he got bored or ran out of people who were willing to play chess with him. He’s best know for challenging Soviet chess masters, but when that didn’t work out he took up boxing.
As a boy growing up outside of Moscow, he would wake up at 4AM to get to a neighboring town where there was a rink and hockey school—buses didn’t run that early, so he would either try to catch a freight train or walk an hour and a half, apparently unbothered.
One of his two best friends once said, “Volodya has a difficult character: he is quick-tempered, stubborn, and there is no person in the world who could argue with him. But in serious matters, he is principled and will express his point of view to any…and will defend it to the end.” The other called him “a cheerful man of great energy who loves life.”
He appears to have been ambidextrous: he shot from the right side (most people naturally put their dominant hand on top of the stick and shoot from the opposite side), but used both, so either he was left-handed and had to learn to use his right like many kids in that era, or he was right-handed and decided to put his dominant hand on the shaft of his stick, which some people argue lets you shoot harder.
(Petrov and his linemate Kharlamov admiring another team’s stick. I like that two other people are holding onto it, as if trying to psychically project, “Don’t do it. I know you want to. Don’t you dare break it.”)
He was the only member of the Red Army who carried himself like a soldier, posture perfectly controlled. I assume this was either ironic or pointed.
No one had ever seen anyone knock him down. He didn’t have the fine footwork of other Soviet skaters, but he could get up to significant speed on the straightaways—getting out of the way was everyone else’s problem—and as soon as he had a semi-steady diet of sticks he started working on a one-timer shot “like lightning”.
He was a power forward, but when he was pressured by the Canadians, he studied and and made himself more defensively responsible. As such a physical center, probably what distinguished him was just being able to mentally track and anticipate his different wingers—one who was always vanishing and circling back, and the other driving ahead. When it came to questions of hockey strategy, Vladimir was willing to fight God or Coach Tarasov, whoever came first.
There’s a story that one time Coach T was trying to talk in a meeting with superiors from the hockey federation. Lower-ranked players were supposed to be quiet, but Vladimir coughed in the back. Tarasov told him to fix that cough and be quiet: Vladimir told him something to the gist of “why don’t you fix your face first?” The federation representatives, horrified, asked Tarasov whether he was going to do anything about Petrov, and Tarasov sighed and said, “If you don’t want us win, sure!”
The tragic irony of Lucy writing earnestly about how married people should tell each other everything while Jonathan is being forced to write fraudulent letters to Mina is really heartbreaking.
He longs to be honest with her, but he’s not in a place where he can.
It’s also interesting because the two are not juxtaposed in the original book. The change to emails created something rather tragic.
She (Aunt Mimi) is naturally sad about the break-up of the group. “I find it difficult to believe that John and Paul have fallen out,” she says. “I remember them so clearly as schoolboy friends, coming home on their bikes. They had a very close relationship. What this dispute is all about I just don’t know – and, of course, I have never asked John about it. It is his business. I remember once he asked me what I thought about Paul’s first solo album and I said I thought it was all right, and asked him what did he think. He said, in a rather offhand way, ‘O.K.’ . But he didn’t elaborate.”
“I rang Paul and asked him what was wrong because it seemed strange that they had fallen out. But he said, “It’s O.K. Mimi, don’t worry.” Clearly, however she does worry because it is hard to see the happiness of those earlier years clouded by dissent and misunderstanding.
“I really hope they’ll become friends again because I’m sure they have more to agree about than to argue over,” she says.
Record Mirror - 13 March 1971
And I was always saying, “Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off. He can’t hit you. You can kill him [laughs], he’s an old man.” I used to say, “Don’t take that shit off him.” Because I was always brought up by a woman, so maybe it was different. But I wouldn’t let the old man treat me like that. He treated Paul like a child all the time, cut his hair and telling him what to wear, at seventeen, eighteen. But Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job, he fucking dropped the group and started working on the fucking lorries, saying, “I need a steady career.” We couldn’t believe it - my Aunt Mimi reminded me of this the other night - he rang up and said he’d got this job and couldn’t come to the group. So I told him on the phone, “Either come or you’re out.” So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me. But it was a long trip.
John Lennon: St Regis Hotel Room Interview - 5th September 1971
“power corrupts” ok or maybe we just live in a society that rewards corruption, wherein power is naturally allocated to the people most likely to abuse it.
This genuinely made me stop for a moment and think. And it kinda seems obvious in retrospect? But…I had never actually thought about this.
