So listen, why take any country's side? Isn't it obvious that the same abuses of power exist worldwide, that as humans the issue is how these genocide-starting politicians manage to manipulate the people? How can we blindly go around talking about the actions of a country when "country" and "government" is a deceitful cover for the true power structure?

Economically speaking it makes perfect sense why these countries are at war, and why it needs to be at a fundamental level, at the level of religion. There is no other way that these regions can survive. The economy depends on mass genocides, on war, on massive means of population decrease. Realpolitik does not stop and weep for the fallen.

I still don't understand why they won't use Sunn O))) tracks in insurance ads. Just ukelele.

You know that it's actually been proven that UV reactive ink is carcinogenic and usually causes skin irritations, right? I mean, it's not just hearsay, that shit is bad.

Like your friends might be fine, but there are actually studies showing it's a bad idea. Quite a few years ago I remember everybody deciding not to be into them anymore when they found out what the ink contains.

Call off your hounds! I used to live in Toronto, lady! I was born there! I'm going back damnit! I know for a fact there are a load of shitty deals on rooms, and slumlords up the yazoo! Good for you, you've had some luck. I used to have to pay $600 for one room in a place on Queen St., and before that it was the same shared accomodation deal with a bunch of other people, shared kitchen and living room, garage and backyard, but ultimately only one room that is privately your own thing. That's still common so please don't start arguing over it. I wouldn't say it if I wasn't looking at places right now.

Don't know guys, seems like the same old dudes with dreads spinning the same old music about drugs and aliens while shitfaced on the same old drugs that they usually can't really handle, smelling the same, all acting the same. I've never even met most of the psy-hippies in this city but I don't really need to, I already mostly know their personalities already because they follow strict, psychotropically-assigned archetypes. I've been to tons of psy parties since 1999, that's why I stopped going actually. You are in fact talking to someone who used to book psy acts. I grew disillusioned with it because I noticed it was mostly just live PAs straight off of one big Cubase track prepared in advance or off of CDs. It's trance after all, you improvise too much and it doesn't keep people doing the hosen-scheisser dance all night.

Really nothing has changed. I went to a psy party once while I lived at William St. Same old shit. All that's changed is that you guys have even more nutjobs at your parties and that you charge even more at the door for shitty international acts nobody's ever heard of. Even the heads going to the parties. They really have no idea who anyone really is, they just act like they do.

I think I saw an oriole in my mother's backyard the other day. It might have been a cardinal though. Or a padre.

Have you ever tried bringing any sort of non-fluorescent deco into a psy rave? Anything different than the whole alien-themed thing that is nonetheless, in a very original way, psychedelic? Have you considered dressing uniquely when you go to psy-raves, rather than wearing dayglo? In fact, has anything new in terms of aesthetic been introduced to the psy-trance scene since its inception back around 1999?

No. Nothing at all.

Shitjustgotreal.

In Toronto most of the rental ads are for rooms because the rent is too high most of the time for a whole apartment, plus they usually ask for first and last month's rent when you move in. Nonetheless there are quite a few affordable places out there, depending like in Montreal on location. Thing is you can actually afford some places downtown because smarter tenants figure out how to pass the place off to friends before the landlord can raise the rent by too much. But rather than say 5 1/2 which can be misleading they tell you in the ads that it has two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and bathroom, or mention how many floors it is or on what level. Honestly a toilet should be big enough to count as a room, though, the half thing is sort of strange honestly.

On that note I'm renting out my bachelor apartment up at St. Joseph and St. Hubert which is costing me $525 a month with utilities and a fridge, stove, washer and dryer included in the lease. If anyone wants to come have a look at the place and perhaps take over the lease it's in a really nice looking building, and it seems noise is not really an issue because it's a basement.

Can we all stop arguing about this in this defensive manner finally and say that ISRAEL IS NO LONGER A VICTIM OF PERSECUTION, BUT RATHER A COUNTRY PLAYING OFF OF A VICTIM COMPLEX SHARED BY ALL JEWS OF THE BABY BOOMER GENERATION IN ORDER TO EXCUSE ITS EXPANSIONISTIC ECONOMIC GOALS? And then shut up if you support the stupid country or think I'm an anti-semite for it please? How much farther do they have to push this idea that Israel is acting in self-defense against a world of anti-semites? We're not that stupid. Stop apologizing to your Israel-supporting friends, stop feeling guilty for being against apartheid, stop excusing yourself because you're a gentile and you think maybe you're being insensitive.

The holocaust did not only victimize the jewish population of the world, it victimized EVERYONE. Ask any German (ie my grandparents) how it felt trying to live through WWII in Nazi-occupied Germany. The horror of having to be conscripted for a cause that disgusts and sickens you, and having no choice if you want your family to make it through that time in history. Ask anybody who's Turkish, Black, Gay, Lesbian, or Polish and had relatives in Germany at the time if only jews suffered during WWII. Ask the Japanese too, over here in Canada, who probably didn't think Hirohito joining up with Hitler was too cool. Everyone in that generation had to live through the holocaust, no matter where they were in the world, and it was not just the Jewish people who were victims. And it most especially was not Israel. So after all this time, the fact that Israel waves the victim card while committing atrocities almost daily against the people of Palestine and anyone who dares support them, and that they've gotten Carte Blanche from the United States over it entirely on the premise of defending their poor victim of a country, the most armed force in all of the middle east, is ridiculous. The whole world can see that Israel cares little where people are from, as long as they tow the line with their politics, which can always be excused by referring to the Holocaust as if the Jewish people were the only victims just because they were the most overtly targeted during that time. It may be true that the majority of the victims were Jewish, but by no means all. And as long as the lie goes on that nobody but the Jews suffered, and that all of Germany supported Nazi occupation, Israel will always get favor while any German who dares say that they felt victimized under that regime (take for instance my grandmother) will be treated as if they responsible for the holocaust. I've even been in arguments with hypnotized pro-Zionists who said after that point that Germany was because they elected Hitler.

Yeah right "Germany" did. Because of course it was totally possible to vote for Hitler's political opponents, who were killed off methodically, and after all everyone had the internet back then to find out what was really going on when the Reichstagsgeburg burnt down. Because of course there was never any strange cult from Austria trying to poison culture with an appropriation of occult symbolism and a twisting of the truth that everyone fell for: the idea that Aryans were blond, blue-eyed, "ideal Germans".

And after all this a country like Israel resorts to neo-fascist principles to "defend" its interests and we don't see it as the same beast. If it's too transparent to say they work along the same lines as the SS, perhaps it'd be better to compare the Shin Bet with Mussolini's MVSN. Because like any powerful country that needs to control dissent, they have been silencing their opponents any way they can. With the threat of violence or the act of it, with sanctions or with censorship. And it's at an international level. And to think, the older generations actually lived through WWII and they can't discern whether or not we risk once again supporting a global fascist political agenda.

It's pretty dumb to actually openly sell weed at a compassion club to just about anyone. I think the stupidest thing is fucking up the fact that you have such a centre by not working within the window of legality that does exist.

In Toronto there's the Hotbox café, which is totally legal as long as you buy food or drink when you sit on the back patio, and they don't sell you weed or anything that contains it. You bring your own, so it's basically a nice patio behind a head shop that's more hemp and sustainability oriented. The other pothead hangout is the Vapour Lounge which charges $5 "admission" or cover and is basically a place where you can smoke all you want indoors, no need to purchase anything except that admission fee, and although they don't sell there's always someone offering you "oil rips" or hits off of their volcano, and they provide these convenient glass trays to break up and roll weed off of. You're still not even supposed to enter unless you brought your own, but if you have a friend there with an ounce in front of you and he can see you on your way in, then they're cool. The bartender was wacked out of his head though.

I have yet to see anything similar spring up in Quebec - people either blatantly push it or the government pulls this puritan bullshit where they can't be at all lenient about weed while speed and coke are all over the place (ie Scott's point). For all the square-headedness of Toronto (higher rent, no beer at the convenience store, alcohol tax, and no picnic laws for parks regarding booze), at least they allow compassion clubs to run, albeit by stricter guidelines, probably because they also have a few safe-shooting centres and a history of advocacy for harm reduction over abstention policies. I think the main issue in Montreal is that there's a lot of protesting but not enough sitting down and discussing a compromise that allows for medical marijuana. From what I've seen the slackness of the laws about public consumption make it so people don't care too much if there's a designated pot-shop enough to make sure it follows the letter of the law and requires proper medical proof of need.

You know, after all this time I still don't get one thing.

Magnets... how do they work?

Toot be or not too be? That is toot question. Whether tis' nobler in the toot's eye to toot the toots and toots of outrageous toot, or to toot toots against a toot of toots, and by tooting them, end all toots.

That's the way to approach it basically, but for years I couldn't sort out how to set that up on a whim. With more preparation I've found I can do more of a mashup approach to sets which is where using Ableton rocks. But I have to say it's easier with standards... easier to make it flow at least - and by standards I mean sticking to 140 bpm dubstep or techno, having a common rhythm between tracks. I haven't had an easy time doing this with breakcore because you have to change tracks faster to make it interesting, plus in some cases I've been stuck with tracks I just don't have the original files for anymore, just a wav... what I do most of the time is play with some of the incomplete tracks in between the complete ones, try to do variations for the most part. But we can all agree it's something you have to sit down and work out, you can't just practice it and leave it at that. Takes way longer to get right too, as it's a matter of making good use of your MIDI controllers and planning out scenes in the mix. But it's definitely fun... just wish I didn't have a shit-heap of a computer.

Since when is this "missed connections"?

You better step off man that's my sister you're talking about.

That, sir, is UHF. I'm sort of obsessed with this movie despite it being mostly corny, it's the Weird Al movie from the late 80s.

Oh well, thanks for drowning my attempt at promoting A/V Jawa whatever you call it video madness.

You're going to be in a room later that night with a bunch of twinkies with small wieners, so you might as well eat this:

I personally find that because I've spent so much time producing I find it really easy to DJ, and in fact sort of boring. I don't always need to beatmatch but I'll admit that it's not always simple, especially when the track is a minute long and at blitz-speed... but generally speaking that's why a producer who wants to play live without running into computer crashes, hardware errors, or a missing cable for MIDI, RCA, you name it will opt for something like Serato or Final Scratch to cut corners on what they need to lug around, how much they need to prepare the montage or what-have-you they would use for a live mix, etc.

I use Ableton, and I have to say, to bring up an old topic here, it's kind of like having that infamous auto-mix feature some Tiesto fan was raging over... it's pretty easy to beatmatch tracks if you have the time to stretch them or set up the set in advance, but it's boring, because you essentially are taking a program that can do live mixing of stem tracks (the individual parts of one track) and reducing it to a program to crossfade between two tracks, sometimes more, although you can't always layer more than 4 tracks without it sounding like soup (unless it's minimal, where you need to do that to stay awake). So what does that leave you with? Relying on a couple of effects routed to a knob controller... which is sometimes great and sometimes the quickest way to overload your CPU.

It's not all that easy to do a live PA, it's not exactly the same as producing a track, and it's really hard to practice it in the same way you would a DJ set, because it's highly unlikely that you can change the flow on a whim, without resorting to mixing.

I tried once to take all of my tracks and open them all in the same Ableton file, so that they went from the top left corner down to the bottom right corner, nearly 96 audio tracks, tried freezing the tracks that were more CPU intensive, and well... any fool could guess that the computer crashed several times, eventually making it so that opening the unsaved crash of the file was impossible. It's not workable.

You could, I guess, get all sorts of gear that costs an arm and a leg, you can do really fun live sets off of MPCs and grooveboxes, not necessarily for every style of electronic music, but yeah, I guess you could drop several thousands to have gear that you have to drag to a gig that maybe doesn't pay, set up properly, and then watch like a paranoid hawk for the rest of a night while spacecaked kids barf in the near vicinity, or maybe use Logic or Cubase to deconstruct a potential mix and turn it into a montage, running effects over everything, as a lot of people I know do for Live PAs. But if you lay it out too perfectly you have nothing to do for your whole set, and if you lose those thousands of dollars of gear you're in a heavy duty depression for quite a while, and if you drag everything out for one hour and then there's no table you look like a goof.

Use Serato or CDJs and all of the sudden because you have to listen to the damn CD trainwrecking in one ear until it's on, you look like you're more into it and people go crazy... records even more so. But once you can mix your tracks together it becomes a bit too easy and the only thing you can do to not go mad is to cut or tweak on the mix. That's what's always deterred me from DJing - having to accept that you're listening to the track off the beat in one ear and having to concentrate on all that, am I going to get hate for saying that it's an awful sound right until it's on? Plus if you try to apply effects it sounds pretty gay on the master.

All in all, as a musician, it's not really the same thrill that comes out of laying down a synth line in the studio or editing a complex amen rinseout. I'd love to do that live. But it's nearly impossible without Max or some sort of convoluted patch. So what I'm saying, Bliss, is that there's not much reward in preparing your tracks for three months each before completing them, then working for three months on the live montage, only to stand in front of a monitor for an hour trying to look busy, when everything basically already sounds as it should and is basically fit for DJing off of vinyl, if it doesn't cost too much to press it.

You can't just say that producers suck as DJs and that they should just play live. Try it sometime, live PA is a bitch to do right. And DJing for producers can feel like just running through your greatest hits catalog. You wouldn't play a set consisting of only Justice tracks would you?

Something like a phenounemenoune!

Yeah, I got it the first time. it's a BAD PUN.

This is a totally amazing thread. This is what [ rave.ca ] should be all about, talking about raves, like actual raves, not the little parties that happen today that somebody told you were raves.

First of all Syrous... they used to throw the hugest parties ever. They booked RUN/DMC once in 98, do you remember that?

To date the All Funked Up party that I went to in 1999 takes the cake for the most excessively huge one I went to. 20,000 people or something, I kid you not they packed the Ice Sports Arena in Brampton with more people than was sane, only problem is how little I can still remember... Congo Natty with Skibadee, it was packed but not as good as Dose's Connected parties, I couldn't even get into the one with Roni Size because they had overloaded the place. I remember running into some friends who had gone shortly afterwards and they were totally traumatized, not sure if it was in a good or bad way...



DUDE NO WAY... For your information Sabi Resonance was one of the most crucial events in my raving history. I ended up getting involved with those cats right after the Resonance party that took place at that warehouse off Adelaide. Those were some of the best parties ever! I was working with some people who used to be part of that crew, they had to make up for all the cash one of the promoters, Ariel or something, had stolen from Resonance III... and at the time that I worked with that crew we had brought in X-Dream (yeah, that's right, I used to be into psy) who borrowed my Juno-106 for their set, I ended up getting them too high on shrooms while watching the Marklar episode of South Park so I think they turned it on and then couldn't deal with it. I still have a sound on there that they were using, not too big on Psy anymore and I have to say their set sucked, but it makes the loudest farting bass ever.

Anyway I also remember Algorithm really well, he was the first person I ever met who used that much strange equipment in a live set, I think I saw him play a spot down on Richmond with a Gameboy and Joystick providing sounds and control respectively... the next time I saw him play I couldn't see him at all because the concept of that party (a Fukhouse jam) was to have nothing but two strobe lights going in a totally darkened room. I could see the lights on his sampler, an SU-700 I think, that was about it. I'm surprised I didn't run into anyone while wobbling around in a pitch black room, and it's a good thing nobody had any Pokemon style seizures.

Good times!

If you do a second installment I'd love to be in it. Fucking gold.

The fuck are you talking about? Veejays should be tight and wet? My thread was better.

What's noune, pussycat?

See this is what I was waiting for. My man Recoil comes forward and tells it like it is, without sinking to needing to talk about himself or against others. Just the facts.

Wait a minute, do you guys mean the Toronto Blue Jays' mascot, BJ Birdy?



He's got that name for a reason. Never thought a beak could be so soft and moist.

I think the best idea is to wait until your neighbours throw a party that they've planned for months, cleared with all their direct neighbours, and legitimately set up with decent investment on promotion and talent, and just throw your own damn party with those aforementioned shitty speakers, connect a cheapass subwoofer that you throw into the redzone to try to drown out the folks downstairs, piss off your neighbours, and have the cops come in and bust the other dudes. Unless they have some kind of sketchy contract that says they have to do music down there 24/7, cuz then you're fucked.

All these points these days... can I use those to buy like, a computer that isn't broken, or trade in for food stamps, or like, a unicorn horn or something?

Is it just me or is that Hawaiian song actually the theme to World 1 of Super Mario 3?

Well essentially you should MURDER THEM VIA THE EYES MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA.






If the last one doesn't work, it's vimeo, I could use a pointer on posting those videos - [ vimeo.com ]

Can I just please say something very important about anti-virus software?

IT'S BULLSHIT.

Kaspersky and Norton especially. The majority of the time these programs are identifying viruses where there aren't any, and when you actually get one, oh, guess what? THE UPDATE CONTAINING THAT TROJAN OR VIRUS DOES NOT EXIST YET.

People who work in IT know this. That's why we stick with non-obtrusive software like AVG free. Because really, unless you have ultra top secret documents there's little chance that any malicious attacks directed at your computer will be so powerful that you need to have some CPU intensive false-positive crap like Kaspersky or Norton gumming up your works.

Not to say I'm really that much of an IT guy, but I'm well informed, worked as a tech support guy for hotels with 100+ APs configured through Cisco switches, and most of the problems people were encountering had to do with them downloading attachments from stupid mass emails or porn. And when I say porn I mean the sites that have you click on all sorts of "Enter" and "visit our sponsor to continue" links, etc.

As stated by Moloch, you don't get viruses in jpgs, unless you save them as .exe or .jar files. I doubt you did that Liam. Just run a thorough scan, scrap Kaspersky and switch to AVG free. Less false positives.

She has weird looking tits. And maybe that was just a DJ workshop.

It's very likely he's telling the truth though man, you make way more money playing gigs, as a DJ or live act, touring, or what have you then you ever will off of your productions. Especially if you have an agent, a label that fronts you cash (which you have to make back) or any sort of A&R taking your publishing profits... and if you don't, you usually have to work so hard to get your record to sell, only to get what you should have made in one month only after several. I'm not saying I have tons of experience with this, but I am writing pretty experimental and inaccessible music and I know friends even in this scene who make tons off of overseas gigs but have sold basically nothing in terms of albums. You can't deny that people make money off of gigs, especially people who have a good deal of presence in the scene on a regular basis.

I also don't like it when Bliss essentially brags about how successful he is but that's a personality thing, not a career thing. He's the least humble DJ I know of, and it's a detriment to his reputation as far as I'm concerned. Take someone like Recoil who's old school but who isn't a braggart, and you get an example of the nice guy + good DJ mix.

Also Bliss for the record anything said on here about you has to do with retorting your blatantly egotistical threads that go on about how you have the only formula for success. You do, of course, realize that many people have come across their success in many different ways, and that what works for you might not for the next guy. If you could be humble enough to accept that you are where you are as a result of a combination of luck and dare I say it skill, (and I've got my own ideas of how much knowing the right people and being at the right place at the right time was involved), you'd have people loving you up over here. Too late for that now, but it could have been. However as far as your sets go you play the crowd to a degree that some might consider opportunistic. You'll drop anything as long as it works, rather than saying "I am pushing this particular sound" as many of the trendsetters do... and well, a lot of people call that selling out.

I doubt I'll get a civilized response for this but I have to say it's weird that you haven't yet talked about a single artist or track that I haven't heard of in the mainstream press, even if they were underground at some point. You haven't really enlightened anyone to anything new either which throws your statement that you research 5-6 hours per day into question. There are styles of music that you are outright ignorant about (esp. rap and hip-hop), and others that you won't even inform yourself about enough to be able to critique them in any useful way (basically anything your internet foes like, incl. hardcore, hardtek, breakcore, and some styles of drum and bass). But somehow you've created this online persona of the know-it-all old-schooler and you seem to agonize any time that persona is threatened. Get over it, it's just a forum, and people are inevitably going to argue with you. Especially if you're pompous.

Am I right?

It gives the hypochondriacs ideas, then gets them to buy medication.

Drama has the tendency to dissolve into the ether if left alone for even a few hours. I'm glad to see that I didn't start a flame war and that nobody is doing the back and forth at this point. Excellent. Man would I love it if everyone just got along, agreed to disagree, and came up with productive things to discuss like "how can we all get mutually famous and rich and live in a sunny paradise hopefully far away from the oil slick". But hey, it's Raveca.

That dream clearly means you're gay, Hamish.

If you want epic threads, you have to start by being as strange and interesting as possible. Give the people what they want, a crazy ass topic that doesn't involve just hating on other members of the [ rave.ca ] community (did I just say community? I meant mess).

Or you can submit short stories. Everyone loves short stories.

The wind howled over the plain as a hooded rider, clad from head to toe in white robes, stormed towards the fortress. Unrelenting in his pursuit of something, an elusive enemy waiting to exist. It had been a long night, and the stains on his otherwise pristine garb bore testament to the events that had transpired. Trolls. Four of them. The stink of their blood clung to him still, turning his stomach which growled hungrily, barely tamed by the crusts of bread that served as an ersatz breakfast. He had only wounded them, and they were sure to alert their master to his passing - he could not say that he had left the fight unscathed. The harpies would catch up with him soon, and it was essential that he found shelter and a protected vantage point from which to take them out. His crossbow had been like a best friend to him these past days, but without any sort of bolt to fire he was as good as dead.

He was a white knight of the old school of bardic magic, and for these past weeks he had tried valiantly to rid the realm of these menacing spirits, these horrid creatures that mocked him and berated him, ignoring his accomplishments, out to get him. The Engineer, "the cutter of heads" bespeckled and paranoid, had infected his steed, who was stalwart despite the disease that racked away at him. Only his steward knew the full extent of the infection, the inevitable fate that awaited this brave horse, yet the foreboding sense of doom was apparent even to an animal unschooled in the arts of sorcery.

The trolls were products of the Engineer, once honorable men who had drifted far from the four values, warped by randomness and chaos, deprived of sunlight for too long, poisoned with the same affliction that had struck the town of Raveca, a town that no longer had room for white knights. Who was to save them now? They had been strangely accepting of the mutated creatures that now ruled the land. True, the land had seen untold prosperity, the people were happy, and the sarcasm and frivolity of the Engineer's craft had not gone unnoticed. "But what had happened to peace? To love? Where was the unity? Most importantly, why didn't they respect my works?" the rider thought, as the wind continued to whip his cloak into a frenzy behind him.

At last he arrived at the moat surrounding the keep, sounded his horn, and waited for a reply.

"Hamish? What business hath thee with the citizens of Pola?" called a familiar voice from one of the towers. The drawbridge began to lower, and soon enough the rider was across the moat and safely within the forecastle of the keep.

"The Engineer... he hath sullied by reputation! No matter how many times I try to persuade the citizens of Raveca that they have strayed from the truth, no matter how many times I try to enlist disciples with my bardic magic, I am still at the mercy of those mocking... Trolls! They aren't even human, why are they so well-received?" Hamish said, addressing the small militia that waited inside the keep's walls, smoking from cracked pipes, toying with crystals and powders capable of strong, yet surely dark magic.

A voice came . "Got any drugs?" it said. A wizened and decrepit looking youth dragged forward, bottom lip jutting out as her crazed eyes rolled in her head. Hamish felt wretched as he looked upon them. These were agents of the same forces it seemed. How could the corruption have spread so far. "N-n-no." He replied. "Don't you have enough?"

"We will help you defeat the trolls, if you help us make our theatre piece. It will show the citizens of Raveca our vision of the four sacred values, the PLUR." spoke another shadowy figure, clad in tinted spectacles, and grinning in an exaggerated manner beneath a slicked pate of black hair which shone in the light.

"You! I've seen so many paintings of you! It's as if everyone in Raveca has posed for portraits with thee!" Hamish exclaimed. "You hath posed even with my foes, those who would wish to sully my good name! The trolls!"

"Aye, it is I, Antonio the IVth, of Pola" the sharp looking (yet smelly) man responded. "You may join us if you wish, we believe we have the power to save the realm. But you must point out to the people of Raveca, every chance you get, that they are under rule by trolls, that their minds have been poisoned... but not like ours, which we've poisoned willfully and with every intention of having a really fun future with even more drugs and uh um. Well, they hate us too, that's what I'm saying essentially."

Just then someone spoke from high above. High on the parapet sat one of the harpies, laughing hysterically through his words of ridicule "LOL STFU NOOB YOU WISH 1111!!!11!1!1ONE!!1!111 YOU ARE A FAG".

"Host One! Nooooo!" Hamish cried, pulling out his crossbow. But he had no ammunition! He scrambled around and could only find his bardic weapon, the tablet of turning. Frantically he played several chords.

"IS THAT FROM LIKE 1998? WHAT A LAME TRACK!" it was another harpy, on the opposite parapet, "YOU'VE WALKED STRAIGHT INTO OUR TRAP" it was SourUltraFast, the black harpy. He was black. Like really black. Just in case you're wondering. Like his feathers and everything. Once they saw him everybody looked at him sort of funny and thought of stereotypes but they wouldn't stick.

Sure enough, he had walked into their trap. As he looked back at the plain through a slit in the wall he could see that the thread of his cloak had unravelled and trailed behind him for many miles. The thread had continued right up until here, where it had gotten tangled and confused amidst the brambles and started to fray.

The drawbridge shuddered and shook as a battering ram crushed through it, revealing several pink elephants with riders. The trolls had found him. "You're a has-been!" they cried. "A fool! Haha." Alas, it was the moderators, with the trolls in tow. And the engineer was with them, though he seemed so maddened by his disease that he was babbling incoherently... perhaps he hadn't been behind it at all!

The trolls approached Hamish, grabbed his arms, and held him still as the moderator showed him the mirror of truth saying. As he looked into it he saw a troll looking back. The reality dawned on him as he saw the reflections of those who held him, who were human in the mirror. "You mean... all this time..." he began.

And so it was that Hamish was cured of his delusion. The dreamworld slipped away and he saw that it was in fact he himself who had corrupted Raveca with his pride and arrogance, it was he who had poisoned the people with his proselytizing, and he was in fact no white knight at all, but just a smelly, putrid troll wearing a burlap sack. He saw that it would have been folly to appear in Pola at all, a definite end of career move. As he looked around him the scene changed. The spelling of the word scene also changed, into "since". And he realized that anyone could be perceived as a troll if one was sick enough with egomaniacal delusion and paranoia that he was the victim of persecution. He also realized it was time to get new plates for his tables of turning. Ones that weren't sort of shitty and uninteresting compared to everyone else's.

All this time the Peril lurked beneath the scene, in the sewers, coming up with bad short stories.

The End. For now.

I was actually going to make it much more complicated but started getting bored.

If anyone mentioned in the story takes offense other than Hamish or Steph then I'm very sorry. If either of those two get pissed off - GOOD.

Forget that man, there's no need for a liquid comeback. It's like wearing a sign that says "I am fucking high out of my skull".

Damn.