View allAll Photos Tagged brainwaves
Page 1. To be honest, this is my favorite page. Yes. That is all I can say, actually.
No, wait, not true: I'd also like to say that this is one of those rooms I built
because I would love to live in it.
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I made a JALKOW collection, last year, in sort of homage to John's photostream and his JOHN Collection: the concurrent of the JOHN Collection. 'Not expensive, yet not cheap!'
So, big credits go to John and his trust.
This year, I had another brainwave, with lots of chairs and tables, so here it is: the JALKOW collection 2.
Fade away and radiate
From Parallel Lines, Blondie
watchful lines
Vibrate soft in brainwave time
Silver pictures move so slow….
The beams become my dream
My dream is on the screen
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©2009 Jason Swain, All Rights Reserved
This image is not available for use on websites, blogs or other media without the explicit written permission of the photographer.
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The snow has been melting away and now the top layer is just ice.
In the garden earlier we noticed Roo's (Our Cat) paw prints and my fiancee had another brainwave, this time it was putting tea lights in the paw prints.
So we got that sorted and then I wen't about taking some pics, firstly with no flash which didn't turn out well, but with the flash in the distance shining on them it gave more of the end result I was looking for.
Not sure why they become more orange when the flash is used but a great effect I think.
Only PP was cropping and an added bit of definition.
Strobist:
430ex II fired in the distance in slave mode @ 1/16 power.
I knew I wanted Cassie's maternity photos to be different, but I was stuck. I had zero clue what I wanted them to look like.
I knew what I didn't want them to look like; neither of us were interested in the classic black and whites on a bed with white sheets and soft focus. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to leave us a whole lot to work with.
For the longest time I had nothing. I couldn't wrap my head around what I wanted to do.
My breakthrough moment came, strangely enough, while watching Nine. I swear, never has a movie left me so creatively inspired. My massive musical-inspired brainwave was this:
Maternity photos are simply portraiture with a pregnant subject.
Once I got that embarrassingly obvious concept in my head, I started to extrapolate. How would I shoot Cassie if she wasn't pregnant? And could we make a simply allusion to her being pregnant, without that being the sole focus of the shot?
I feel like I got it.
Definitely best viewed large and decluttred.
Déja Vu vs DoYa View: Do You Experience Such Coincidental Alignments Of Random Things? - IMRAN®
Have you ever had one of those oddly timed coincidences that feels too precise to ignore? I experience a lot of those. Not the type of déjà vu brainwave—of having experienced that exact moment before and knowing exactly what would unfold in the next few seconds—but actual verifiable alignment of various unrelated things, despite total randomness.
This weekend, on October 10, 2025, I grabbed another handful of unread magazines from my piles of thousands that I’m working to browse and send to recycling at my Long Island home. Among them was a July 2018 issue of GQ, which I placed on my dining table in New York to browse during dinner and dispose of.
I’d owned it for over seven years but never flipped through it—mostly because I’d been spending so much time in Florida. An artist named Zayn Malik was on the cover.
The name Zain is of personal significance to me in another not-so-secret, precious part of my life. But I didn’t recognize Zayn. I’ve never followed One Direction and had no prior awareness of him in the band or as a solo artist. Still, something about his Pakistani heritage caught my attention, so I looked him up.
Here’s the weirdness: that same day—October 10, 2025—he released a new single. So the moment I finally engaged with a seven-year-old magazine cover featuring someone I’d never heard of, he happened to drop new music. It was so random that if it were in a movie, the audience would laugh at it as one of those “yeah, sure, like that type of coincidence happens in real life.”
No algorithm prompted me. No playlist suggested him. Just a perfectly timed sync between a forgotten magazine and a new release from someone I had literally just learned existed.
This Zayn “moment” wasn’t serendipity. I have no direct connection to him or even his music. But it was one more entry in a long list of strange, well-timed coincidences that seem to follow me. Do you have similar experiences and stories to share?
© 2025 IMRAN®
It's magic! Look! A floating briefcase! Hope you like the effect as much as I do.
The 'every-room-has-it's-own-colour' is not really working here. I hoped that brown would be eyecatching, but instead it looks a bit dull. Ah, who cares, that floating briefcase makes up for it, right?
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I made a JALKOW collection, last year, in sort of homage to John's photostream and his JOHN Collection: the concurrent of the JOHN Collection. 'Not expensive, yet not cheap!'
So, big credits go to John and his trust.
This year, I had another brainwave, with lots of chairs and tables, so here it is: the JALKOW collection 2.
Left to Right: Nuklon, Northwind, Fury, Brainwave and Obsidian.
Follow me for more LEGO DC and Marvel creations!
©2007 kelly angard
The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
- Carl Gustav Jung
original pen & ink illustration here
Funny story: a man and wife were behind me and she wanted to take a picture. he wouldn't let her and she referred to me and said - "she's doing it"!! and he said, "yeah - and she's probably not getting anything very good through that glass..." as the tiger moved and we all started to walk away, he turned to me and somewhat jerkingly said "did you get anything good?" ... i just showed him my pictures and kept my mouth shut. I thought she was going to shoot him right there on the spot!! ...as I smiled and walked on... HAA!! What a brainwave... =D
...I also have several more shots from around this park to process and edit... just haven't gotten to them yet. College projects to do... while keeping a job too... HA!! Crazy life I live.
The seasoned wanderluster who bristled past me on Glasgow’s Glasssford Street was obviously heading due south - but any sight of a hitchhiker’s handmade cardboard sign will always and forever bring a smile to my face, as it’s a magical reminder to Bill Forsyth’s unforgettable 1981 coming-of-age movie Gregory’s Girl (culture.fandom.com/wiki/Gregory%27s_Girl).
This little gem was Forsyth’s paean to growing up in the West of Scotland with a young ensemble cast portraying school days’ and first-love angst. Of the many magical moments, there was definitely something in the air - to coin one of the movie’s recurring gawky teen phrases - in the scene with Andy (Rab Buchanan) and his equally hapless and inept sidekick Charlie (Graham Thompson) trying to realise their dreams of hitchhiking from Cumbernauld to Caracas, in the belief that women outnumber men there three-to-one.
When the scene came, and the teenaged boys held up the handmade sign, Forsyth said, “Cut! Cut!” and turned to his set designer to tell her that she’d spelt ‘Caracas’ wrong. She was just about to correct the sign, only for Forsyth to suddenly have an improv brainwave and the happy accident scene of Charlie pointing out to Andy that it’s not spelt “C-A-R-A-C-U-S”, and no wonder they’d been standing there for hours with no cars stopping to pick them up!
Fujifilm X100V & Tiffen Black Pro-mist Filter
Acros Film Simulation
I have so many aurora photos from Iceland! Well, a lot from that one night the lights came out to play and the cloud cover didn't ruin everything, that is. This evening for some reason I had the sudden brainwave that just as I've collected nice cloud photos over the years that I can use in a pinch to replace a boring sky, I could do the same thing with the aurora shots. Pushing the white balance to simulate a moonlit night isn't that hard. It can be done!
So, I challenged myself to take an outtake from my favorite (daytime) equestrian cloaked photoshoot last year and blend it with an aurora. Better yet, I thought to use a third image as a background and tie the whole thing together, since it doesn't make a lot of sense to have an aurora floating above a flat field of sagebrush. While I considered using shots of the Tetons or Sawtooth Mountains, they all seemed too recognizable, so I opted for the lower mountains surrounding Jackson Hole viewed from Signal Mountain. A big plus: the valley blended so perfectly with the original sage that I could barely distinguish the two.
Then came the challenge of replacing the original afternoon storms with an aurora, and blending the whole thing together (which gave me another excuse to mess with onOne's Perfect Effects - sorry, I promise they're not paying me to advertise, it's just a lot of fun!). And lots of tweaking. And being pretty psyched about the final results.
Photoshop Phriday continues!
Character Creation
The Atom is a name shared by five superheroes appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics.
The original Golden Age Atom, Al Pratt, was created by writer Bill O'Connor and artist Ben Flinton and first appeared in All-American Publications' All-American Comics #19 (October 1940).
The second Atom was the Silver Age Atom, Ray Palmer, who first appeared in 1961. The third Atom, Adam Cray, was a minor character present in Suicide Squad stories. The fourth Atom, Ryan Choi, debuted in a new Atom series in August 2006. Another Atom from the 853rd Century first appeared as part of Justice Legion Alpha in August 1999.
The Atom has been the star of multiple solo series, and four of the five have appeared as members of various superhero teams, such as the Justice Society of America, the Justice League, the Suicide Squad, and the Justice Legion Alpha.
Publication history
The Atom introduced during the Silver Age of comic books in Showcase #34 (1961) is physicist and university professor Raymond Palmer, Ph.D.
After stumbling onto a mass of white dwarf star matter that had fallen to Earth, he fashioned a lens which allowed him to shrink down to subatomic size.
Originally, his size and molecular density abilities derived from the white dwarf star material of his costume, controlled by mechanisms in his belt, and later by controls in the palms of his gloves. Much later, he gained the innate equivalent powers within his own body.
After the events of Identity Crisis, Ray shrank himself to microscopic size and disappeared. Finding him became a major theme of the Countdown year-long series and crossover event.
Fictional Character History
Silver Age
Raymond Carson "Ray" Palmer, is a physicist and professor at Ivy University in the fictional city of Ivy Town, somewhere in New England, specializing in matter compression as a means to fight overpopulation, famine and other world problems. Using a mass of white dwarf star matter he finds after it lands on Earth, Palmer fashions a lens that enables him to shrink any object to any degree he wishes. Compression destabilizes an object's molecular structure, however, causing it to explode.
During a spelunking expedition, Palmer and his students, along with his girlfriend, lawyer Jean Loring, find themselves trapped in a cave. In desperation, Palmer secretly uses the lens he has carried with him to shrink himself to be able to climb through a small opening in the fallen rocks sealing the cave, knowing he will likely explode. Using a diamond engagement ring, Palmer enlarges the hole sufficiently and descends to the floor to try to alert the others of the escape route before dying. However, upon entering the lens' beam, he finds himself returned to normal size and without danger of exploding. As the lens is covered with cave moisture, Palmer believes this has altered the beam to allow this strange effect.
When subsequent experiments still result in objects exploding, Palmer concludes some unknown force in his own body allows him to safely size-shift. He decides to use this effect to become a superhero. A retcon in Brightest Day: The Atom Special (July 2010) removes the influence of his exotic physical makeup, tying his survival instead to the discovery of a compression matrix, a fabric able to spread the effects of the ray on the entire body, stabilizing it. The prototype matrix later became his costume.
Palmer creates a belt tool to control his miniaturization to subatomic size with an emergency backup mechanism in his gloves, and develops a costume that he can wear at most times that only becomes visible when he shrinks significantly. In addition, he develops equipment that allows him to decrease his weight in addition to his size, allowing him to glide on air currents on a low setting, while a high setting allows him to handle or strike objects with the equivalent strength of his normal size and build. A favorite travel method is to call some location on the telephone and when the phone is answered, Palmer can shrink enough to travel through the phone lines in seconds to emerge out the answering phone.
He carries out the bulk of his early superheroic adventures in Ivy Town, where he often helps his girlfriend, Jean Loring, win her cases. Much later, he gains the innate equivalent powers within his own body.
Palmer has fought against several alien and supernatural threats, as well as having his own rogues gallery, including Chronos, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, the Floronic Man, and the Bat-Knights of Elvaran. He also had several time travel adventures by means of Professor Alpheus V. Hyatt's Time Pool. The Atom is a member of several incarnations of the Justice League, and the team is gracious enough to supply a special chair scaled to his default size which can elevate to whatever height needed so he can easily partake in team meetings without having to go out of costume.
There, he meets Hawkman (Katar Hol pre-Hawkworld, Carter Hall post-Hawkworld), one of his closest friends in the superhero community. Neither character achieved major popularity, and even in their heyday were mostly supporting characters, often with Palmer as a specialist in size alteration who was needed to access extremely confined areas only he could access. Hawkman would manufacture prosthetic wings for a myna Ray saved, taking on the name Major Mynah and became the Atom's partner and steed.
Sword of the Atom, Power of the Atom, and Teen Titans
The Atom had one short-lived miniseries and three subsequent specials, all titled Sword of the Atom, in which Palmer abandons civilization after divorcing his wife Jean, who had an affair with fellow lawyer Paul Hoben, and becomes the hero of a tribe of six-inch (152 mm) -tall yellow-skinned humanoid aliens called Morlaidhans in the jungles of South America. He also becomes consort to their princess, Laethwyn. Palmer bequeathes his size-changing belt and role as Ivy Town's protector to Jean's new husband, Hoben. During this time, Palmer's friend Norman Brawler pens the book The Atom's Farewell, in which he reveals Palmer's identity as the Atom.
Eventually the colony is destroyed, despite Palmer's attempt to save it, by a group associated with the US Government acting as loggers. Palmer is forced to escape via the telephone to North America. In the attempt, he fails to anticipate that the connection will involve satellite relay and the unexpectedly arduous trip causes him to remain at approximately three feet high and without his costume's size changing equipment.
With the help of a friend, Ray creates a new costume from the material of the white dwarf star. This time, instead of a belt, Palmer uses an encephalotronic grid in the costume's headpiece to control the costume. The grid is keyed to his unique brainwaves. This enables him to transfer his mass into an unknown dimension which allows him to alter his size and weight just by thinking about it. He can even make the new costume appear or disappear with a thought by shifting most of its atoms to or from the other dimension. This allows him to be in costume while at full height or to shrink without having to have his costume appear.
He can even increase his weight while remaining six inches (152 mm) tall or reduce his weight while remaining at full size. Ray often does this and is then light enough to ride wind currents, where he actually appears to be flying to a limited degree. Palmer also develops a mental link with the white dwarf matter to which he has been regularly exposed. Most of the mass lies within another dimension. Ray can draw upon that mass and hit with a super-concussive force. He has been shown to punch through concrete walls, crush an exam table and break the axle of a car that is moving at high speed.
Palmer would learn of those behind the genocide of the Morlaidhans, namely five CIA operatives, part of a group called the Cabal. In a mission called Operation: Fireball, the tiny aliens were murdered in hopes Ray would return as the Atom and become a tool for the Cabal (as Ray worked for the CIA in his earlier years). Instead, Palmer shrank the five agents to six-inch height and the CIA would employ them as a group called Micro/Squad.
The Atom would take on new enemies during this period, such as Humbug, a sentient robot in control of an army of duplicates of itself, and Strobe, a technological armor-clad crook. Micro/Squad would also return, attempting to murder Palmer for what he did to them. Instead, teammate Ginsburg dies in the explosion they set and Ray approaches Adam Cray about becoming the new Atom to bring the remaining Micro/Squad into the open. Cray agrees, steals Paul Hoben's size-changing belt, and joins the Suicide Squad.
The plan works as the villains emerge and Palmer takes the place of operative Sting; but their leader, Blacksnake, kills Cray and takes the belt for himself, returning to normal height. Blacksnake murders the remaining members of his crew as Ray arrives, revealing himself, posing as Sting, and battles him. After Blacksnake is defeated, the Cabal employs Task Force X II to murder him to protect their secrets.
Later, during the events of Zero Hour, Palmer is rejuvenated to a teenage state and develops the ability to grow in height in addition to his previous abilities, all of which he was capable of controlling innately without using his white dwarf star-based equipment. He becomes field leader of a new group of Teen Titans, composed of hybrids of human beings and the H'San Natall, after a chance meeting with Isaiah Crockett on his first day attending Ivy University.
As a former member of the Justice League, Palmer viewed his affiliation with the Teen Titans as a step backward. The group primarily battled the Veil, an anti-alien organization that employed Deathstroke and Dark Nemesis, but it's revealed that their leader Pylon was actually a H'San Natall. They would also face Jugular (hired by the H'San Natall) and Loren Jupiter's son Jarrod, aka Haze.
The Atom's new growth powers were instrumental in the battle against Sekhmet of the Millennium Giants. Ray subsequently regains his original age and memories and loses his new powers after he begins to rapidly age and Waverider has to use DNA taken prior to his rejuvenation to restore him to his original state. Palmer returns to his teaching job at Ivy University, but also becomes an associate and alternate member of the JLA. With his exit from the Teen Titans, the group disbands. One notable student under Palmer was Ronnie Raymond, who, without the assistance of Martin Stein, found difficulty in fully employing his abilities as Firestorm.
Identity Crisis and Countdown
In the 2004-05 limited series Identity Crisis, Jean Loring kills Sue Dibny, the wife of the Elongated Man. After stealing some of the Atom's shrinking technology and his costume, she kills Sue in a misguided attempt to win Palmer back. She also arranges a hit on Tim Drake's father Jack Drake, which is carried out by Captain Boomerang (Digger Harkness). The intent is for Jack to kill some random attacker, but both manage to kill each other. After committing her to Arkham Asylum, Palmer shrinks himself to microscopic size and disappears.
Palmer eventually meets up with his old friend Carter Hall after microscopically traveling through phone lines. He warns Hall of the consequences of mindwiping Batman and of harassing criminals over a crime that is perpetrated by Jean, one of their own. Palmer explains he needs time away, and shrinks himself again after Hall agrees to keep the meeting secret.
His legacy lived on, however. Ryan Choi, a student of physics in Hong Kong who corresponded with Ray Palmer via mail in the past, found a copy of his costume and shrinking device to become the current Atom. Around this same time, an unnamed teenager with powers similar to Palmer joins the Teen Titans under the name Molecule. After a brief tenure with the team, he is later killed during a confrontation with the Terror Titans.
During the missing year, Palmer's technology is employed by Supernova to shrink and grow in size to enter and exit the bottle city of Kandor.
DC Comics would not reveal Palmer's whereabouts since his disappearance at the end of Identity Crisis. However, Palmer returned to play a very important role in the Countdown limited series. A Monitor asks the Source Wall what is the solution to "the great disaster," it answers "Ray Palmer". Subsequently, Kyle Rayner, Donna Troy and Jason Todd scour the Multiverse for the former Atom, who just might hold the key to saving reality from a crisis of unparalleled proportions.
In their travels, the quartet has found people marked with the Atom's familiar symbol. The group tracks Palmer to Earth-51, where he assumes the life of its native Palmer after his life is cut short during his studies of the Multiverse and discovery of the looming Crisis. Meeting the Jean of Earth-51 and the Justice League again for the first time, Palmer is found on a world where the heroes have been able to eradicate supercrime and create a utopian Earth (later revealed to have been the result of this reality's Batman murdering all of this world's super-criminals after the Joker killed Jason Todd).
However, once Kyle, Donna, Jason and Bob the Monitor are able to track him down, Bob attempts to kill Palmer; with the Challengers' help, Palmer escapes and reveals to the Challengers that it was the Ray Palmer of Earth-51 who was meant to stop the Great Disaster and that he had been trying to carry on his work, to no avail.
When the Challengers return to their own Earth, Jimmy Olsen is kidnapped by Mary Marvel, who has been corrupted by Darkseid. Palmer hitches a ride from within Jimmy. When Darkseid takes control of Jimmy's powers, Palmer locates and shuts down the control sphere inside Jimmy's brain, but is then swarmed by Apokoliptian antibodies. While escaping this onslaught, Palmer discovers the "battery" containing the New God spirit energies. Palmer removes it from Jimmy's head and shatters it, releasing the energy.
Palmer later (after much cajoling) joins Donna, Kyle, and Forager in their new mission as border guards to the Multiverse, realizing that there is nothing left for him on Earth. However, Palmer returns home to New Earth one more time, upon realizing that his old nemesis Chronos had taken his identity to mislead a young pretender to his identity, Ryan Choi. After helping his successor to once again save Ivy Town, he returns to the Multiverse with a new sense of fulfillment, leaving his town in the hands of a new, capable hero.
During the Final Crisis, Palmer returns to New Earth and works with Choi again to aid in the efforts to evacuate the last free humans.
In the Justice League: Cry for Justice mini-series, Palmer joins Hal Jordan's Justice League.
Blackest Night
On the night of the superhero's memorial day, Palmer asks Hawkman to visit Jean's grave to be honored as a fallen member of the community, but Hawkman refuses because of what she did in Identity Crisis. Palmer is later shown speaking to Hawkman again, over the phone (unaware that his friend has been killed and reanimated as a Black Lantern). Atom is then invited to visit undead Hawkman to discuss his heartache over his wife.
Palmer is later revealed to have shrunk into Hawkman's ring, escaping certain death. Joining the battle between Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, and the Black Lanterns, Palmer is set upon by Black Lanterns Ralph and Sue Dibny, who use his guilt over Jean's actions to try to feed on his compassion-filled heart. Palmer is saved from death by the Indigo Tribe, who combine their light with Hal's to destroy the Dibnys and their rings. During the crisis, Palmer was able to deduce with the heroes that the black rings are simulations taking the identities of the deceased and needing to feed. The Indigo Tribe take the heroes to the Hall of Justice, unceremoniously taking Hal Jordan and abandoning the rest when the Black Lanterns renew their attack.
Palmer helps the heroes escape via a phone line, and then brings them to the JSA, who were also being attacked by Black Lanterns. During the crisis, Palmer meets Damage, son of Al Pratt, the first Atom. The two heroes briefly acquainted during the battle, and begin to develop a friendship. Palmer stopped the Black Lantern Pratt from killing Damage, but was unable to keep the reanimated Jean from finishing the job.
Palmer made a futile attempt to stop one of the black rings from turning Damage's corpse into an undead before Jean used his own technology to shrink him, Mera, and herself into Damage's ring. As Palmer and Mera battle Jean inside the black ring, Jean reveals Nekron's plan along showing what is happening at Coast City, as deceased residents and revived heroes arise as Black Lanterns under the demon lord's commands. Deadman witnesses their battle and plans to rescue Palmer and Mera from Jean.
Deadman saves Palmer and Mera by briefly possessing Jean, allowing them to escape and join the heroes against Nekron and his army. During the battle, Palmer is chosen as a deputy officer of the Indigo Tribe to be more effective against Nekron's forces. Although the Indigo Tribe eschews formal uniforms for tribal patterns over simple garments, Ray Palmer's costume is turned into a close approximation of the tattered Sword of the Atom clothing he had used in the past.
Palmer's past is rehashed, showing that he never quite got over Jean, even during the days of Sword of the Atom. Indigo-1 claims that she can teleport the armies of each Lantern Corps onto Earth, if given time to meditate. The responsibility falls to Palmer to protect her while she does so. Before she enters her trance, she reveals to Palmer that the indigo staff and his overwhelming compassion allows him to mimic the other powers of the Lantern Corps; she demonstrates this by temporarily becoming a Red Lantern and vomiting corrosive blood all over an attacking company of Black Lanterns. She then enters her trance, while Palmer fights off Black Lanterns Hawkman and Hawkgirl by temporarily becoming an Orange Lantern, loudly proclaiming "I want my friends back!"
He then summons energy duplicates of Khufu and Chay-Ara to help him fight off his and Indigo-1's attackers. He is briefly successful. But then Jean shows up to torment him, and she leaps into Indigo-1's ring. Palmer follows her. He ends up reliving Sue Dibny's death, and is then attacked by various Black Lantern Morlaidhans, the minuscule race he befriended during Sword of the Atom. He fights them off and, summoning the powers of a Green Lantern, destroys Jean. Indigo-1 manages to summon the various armies and thanks Palmer for his help. He tells her to keep his involvement in the deployment of the troops a secret, and asks that she help him find a way to legitimately resurrect Hawkman and Hawkgirl. In the final battle, Palmer gets his wish when Hawkman and Hawkgirl are resurrected by the Life Entity.
Brightest Day and Adventure Comics co-feature
In July 2010 Ray Palmer had a Brightest Day one-shot that led to a co-feature in Adventure Comics. Written by Jeff Lemire with art by Mahmud Asrar, the co-feature focused on Ray Palmer's early life. For a brief three-issue tenure, Palmer was part of writer James Robinson's new Justice League line-up, but resigned to help his friend Martin Stein with some sort of project. At the start of the Brightest Day event, Ray and Stein are seen at the funeral of Gehenna. When Jason Rusch gets into a confrontation with Ronnie Raymond over Gehenna's death, Ray steps in and tries to stop it. Ray manages to separate Jason and Ronnie from Black Lantern constructs.
Afterward, Ray discovered his father was attacked and the suspect was his own uncle David. With Ray's father in the hospital, Ray discovers his father had a stroke and his investigation of technology had been stolen. He seeks out Oracle to find the Calculator, Oracle manages to trace a data line, and Ray enters through the internet where he then encounters the Calculator and interrogates him to find out the dealers are. However, Calculator creates a room with no oxygen to make Atom's heartrate slower and he attempts to kill the Atom.
Ray manages to grab Calculator and shrinks to return to Oracle's base. While Ray is in remission, he threatens Calculator who tells him that something called the Colony has manipulated Ray. Later, Prof. Hyatt was attacked by the Colony while looking for white dwarf matter. When Ray arrives, he goes to rescue Prof. Hyatt. During the fight, the Colony dies by incineration from the white dwarf matter. Ray calls Oracle to trace the phone line, and while he arrives at the Colony's base he is confronted by the Colony squad.
After failing to avoid detection, he is confronted by Uncle David and with his help, pulls him away from the Colony heading towards the teleporter. Once safe, David tells Ray about the Colony. David also tells Ray that he could not leave and could not work on the projects on his own, he shows Ray how to travel using the astrology orb called the ant farm to see a mini-planet of microscopic nature. But, the Colony followed them to David's hideout and travels to the ant farm Ray then engages them in an epic battle.
After the battle the Colony died from incineration as it did before but, Ray managed to save him using his stable white dwarf matter. Ray demanded to know what they desired and the Colony tells him the same thing, and they transport the ant farm to the Colony's base. He destroys Ray's belt buckle's white dwarf matter and kills himself. Since they cannot return, Ray follows David with a backup plan when suddenly Ray is approached by robotic insects.
David explains that the robotic insects are caretakers. They manage to fix the belt buckle and he returns to normal size when in Colony's base. Failing to escape, Ray is forced by the scientist to bring the white dwarf matter. He shows the monitor renderings where Colony is standing in front of the hospital where is father his and he is going to kill him.
When Ray refused, Hawkman prevents Colony from attacking Ray's father. Ray receives a call from Oracle to trace the monitor renderings, but Hawkman is being attacked by the Colony squad that miniaturize into Hawkman's body. Ray chooses to save Hawkman to leave the Colony's base while the other Colony escapes and kidnaps Ray's father. Ray rescues Hawkman by leaping into a body of the Colony attackers. When Hawkman is recovering, the Colony leaves their message to bring the white dwarf meteor and warned him no tricks, and to bring the meteor to save his family.
While Ray traded the meteor to Colony before the Colony leaves, they exchange it for Ray's family that is in the ant farm. Ray travels into the ant farm and discovers that they planted a nuclear bomb on a vest strapped to David. Ray then manages to save his father and David and shrinks the bomb before it had a chance to detonate. While Ray's father is recovering, Ray reveals to David that he planted the white dwarf meteor into a nano-liquid to make the Colony's headquarters shrink. Ray, David, and Hawkman arrive at the location of the Colony's headquarters to attack their base. After the Colony was defeated however, David tells him there are more Colonies in the area. Later, Ray returns his father home. Ray forgives his father and apologizes for giving him a rough life before he overhears a firefighter rescue service, as he is a capable hero once more.
During this same period, Ray begins an investigation into the disappearance of Ryan, whom unbeknownst to the superhero community, had been murdered by Deathstroke. Ray comforts Ryan's girlfriend Amanda, and muses Ryan may be hiding out like Ray did after the events of Identity Crisis. While he shrinks himself to investigate he discovers microbiology blood. He arrives at the Hall of Justice to tell the League members that Ryan is missing. The League starts to help Ray's investigation to find Ryan's whereabouts. He discovers Ryan's DNA cell is not a match. The DNA cell came to someone else.
Later, Ray discovers evidence that Dwarfstar had a hand in Ryan's death, and vows to find him and make him pay. Ray eventually finds Dwarfstar in a hospital, where he is recovering from the severe injuries he sustained from his torture at the hands of Giganta (Ryan's ex-girlfriend). Believing it may lead to a lighter sentence, Dwarfstar confesses to hiring Deathstroke to kill Ryan. Armed with this knowledge, Ray leaves to inform the Justice League.
Later, he asked Batman (Dick Grayson) to get revenge on Deathstroke for murdering Ryan. Ray and the Justice League arrive to attempt to arrest Deathstroke and the Titans. The Justice League battle against the Titans in Khandaq, where Ray seriously injures Deathstroke for killing his friend. The battle is stopped by Isis, who forces the Justice League to flee to avoid restarting World War III. After failing, Ray begins writing the eulogy for Ryan's funeral, and is comforted by Superman.[54] In the final issue, Ray meets Ryan's friends and family, and gives the speech at his protégé's funeral.
Powers & Abilities
Size Manipulation
Can alter size at will and can alter body mass to deliver sizable blows at a diminutive size. Since he retains his full strength, by rapidly mass-shifting he can leap like a flea. He can also become weightless to glide on breezes. By shrinking to the size of a subatomic particle he can travel through conductive landline wires at the speed of electricity. As previously stated above, he can travel across dimensional barriers.
⚡ Happy 🎯 Heroclix 💫 Friday! 👽
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A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.
Secret Identity: Ray Palmer
Publisher: DC
First appearance: Showcase #34 (Oct. 1961)
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/48111267857
Created by: Julius Schwartz (editor and co-plotter)
Gardner Fox (writer)
Gil Kane (artist)
santa_sangre seems to have a bunch of brainwaves in common with me. I did ask if there was a smoke machine to use, which I used to bloom the light a bit more. But I didn't ask for her to bring metallic mylar sheeting or a metallic outfit, but that led us in some very interesting direction.
Lightpainting details: I painted with my gen3baby board connected to a 1 meter strip of APA102 LEDs over a 30 second exposure. With smoke from a smoke machine.
Shooting Del was my idea. Shooting Del in a bathtub full of bubbles, booze and a toy boat? That was all him. It was one of the first things he mentioned when Laura and I showed up at his place Saturday.
Even the shirt & tie, it was all part of this shot he'd always wanted to do, and was going to send off to his parents as a gift.
And it was an idea I would've, without hesitation, vetoed a few months ago.
Not enough light in the bathroom, too artificial a shot, no way to really test out how to make it work.
But now I've got a digital camera, ho ho ho.
Took me more than a few minutes figure out the flash, apparently it's got all these different settings?
But I did, got what I was looking for, and we worked it out.
Then, middle of this part of the shoot, Del got thirsty, had his BFF Dave hand him a beer.
BRAINWAVE.
This is a totally posed re-creation of that utterly absurd moment.
If only all shoots could be this patently ridiculous. An unabashedly fun.
A Polaroid of Del, all serious, up on the blog: blog.louobedlam.com/post/82809192/del-is-usually-all-smil...
:::SOLE::: SA - Brainwave Stabilizer
♦Color♦
Steel Gray / Black
♦3Pack bonus♦
White
Permissions
Modifi / copy / no trans
Rig: Unrigged
Location
Needs no introduction,although it wasn't until I'd been shooting for half an hour I had a brainwave to check my aperture and as I thought I had left it at f8 since the last time I had used the camera.......but still not bad considering.
184x30 secs
800 ISO
f8 should have been f4 to 5.6 adjusting the shutter speed to set the exposure
I don't like swans. Yes, I know that they are very elegant etc but I have had a couple of bad experiences. The last occurred a few months back on one of my photographic forays.
I was walking along a narrow path, river one side, high brick wall other side. In the middle of the path sat the biggest swan I'd ever seen. Six feet tall, eight feet wide. (This may be a slight exaggeration but you get the picture).
No problem I thought. I'll walk up boldly, it'll get scared, slide into the river and I'll be on my way.
WRONG!
As I approached it stood up, spread its wings and snarled at me. (Well hissed actually, but I'm sure that's swan equivalent for snarling). I got the message..... No Way Hose.
About this time, I remembered that a swan was capable of inflicting severe bodily harm with it's wings. What we had was a stand-off. He was not going to let me pass.
So I had a choice. Climb the wall (but my climbing days are over) or jump in the river.
Now water is not my natural environment, particularly when it is cold and muddy. It is, however, a swan's. So how could I persuade this giant that it would be a nice idea if he went for a swim.
Brainwave! I was carrying a tripod. Extending one leg and the central column, effectively, I had a pole about eitght feet long. So using the tripod I could persuade (poke) the swan until he got into the river. Fortunately this worked and I was able to return home safe and sound.
Now you won't read of this use for a tripod in any photographic book or magazine. It's amazing what you can learn on Flickr. You might like to file this away for future reference.
”Okay after countless hours of hard work and countless cups of coffee I think I finally made something that may work!” Amadeus says.
“Great! How does it work?” I ask.
“After studying Bruce’s brainwaves compared to the Hulks I managed to find a way to use Bruce’s brainwaves to track down the Hulks. Just focus on the emotion and the device should show you where the Hulk is.”
“Sounds good, let’s try it out.” Fixit says.
Amadeus reaches behind him and pulls out a big metal helmet and puts it on my head.
“I call it…The Leader!”
“Wow a name that isn’t stupid!”
“Hey, you try making names for inventions!”
“Calm down, I’m kidding! Anyways, let’s try it out.”
I close my eyes and focus on intelligence, I see a green glow in my mind and the device says into my ear Walk two feet forwards.. I then open my eyes and walk forwards two feet to where Fixit is.
“Looks like it works, did you put a GPS in the helmet?”
“Yeah of course! What did you think was gonna tell you where to go?”
“I don’t know, I just didn’t think of a GPS.”
“Well if we got what we need let’s go find us a Hulk.” She-Hulk says.
“Well I have been feeling something strong since I’ve had this helmet on. It’s almost an olive green, it almost feels savage. I don’t know how we haven’t heard anything about it.”
“The remaining Hulks must be smart, if they’ve been able to hide for this long.” Fixit says.
“Well what are we waiting for? Let’s find him!” Despair yells.
“Alright you guys go, there’s an earpiece in the helmet so we can communicate well you guys are looking.” Cho says.
“Okay, let’s go.” I say.
=================================================================================================
Mr. Fixit, She-Hulk, Despair and I all walk out from the sewer and into my car, I then close my eyes and think of the savage Hulk, The GPS then speaks into my ear and tells me to go out to the countryside.
We drive for maybe about 20 minutes until we arrive at an old farm with a classic red barn and a yellow two story house. We all get out of the car and look around the barn, no animals or people. We then walk up to the house, but the door is wide open. I walk inside, to my right is an old, but oddly clean kitchen, the lights are on the water is still running into the sink. The kitchen then leads into the living room, the TV is on and there’s a half drunken beer on the coffee table. I signal the others to come in, we all look around and then we here a crash come from the upstairs. Fixit and I run to the stairs and start to walk up them. But then a huge olive green monster comes crashing through the roof, in his massive hand is an old man who looks as though he was literally sucked dry.
“It’s the Savage Hulk! He must have been feeding off the nasty, mean people.” She-Hulk says.
“SMART GIRL. THE CITY FEEDS ME, PEOPLE THERE HAVE BECOME SO…SAVAGE, SO VAIN, ALWAYS ONLY THINKING OF THEMSELVES. THEY’VE MADE GOOD SNACKS, BUT I’M STILL HUNGRY. BANNER IS THE MAIN COURSE.” Savage Hulk says.
“Bruce, run!” Fixit says. As he points towards the back door.
“YOU PROTECT PUNY BANNER? WE MAY HAVE CAME FROM HIM BUT WE DON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO HIM. MY POOR SISTER AND BROTHERS, HAVE YOU REALLY BECAME PUNY SHEEP LIKE HIM?”
“I’ll show you who’s puny!” She-Hulk says as she runs at the giant Hulk.
She grabs him by the foot and swings him into the kitchen, but it doesn’t seem to hurt him in the least. He just gets back up and runs at her.
“Don’t hurt MY FRIENDS!” Despair cries.
He jumps in and grabs Savage Hulk, smashing him through the wall. She-Hulk then runs in after them, while Fixit forces me outside. Just as we get through the door Despair and She-Hulk are sent flying back, they’re covered in blood.
“NOOOOO!” I yell as I try to run back in.
Fixit grabs my shoulder and pulls me back, and we just watch as the Hulks fight, destroying the house as they go. After a couple minuets I realize that they don’t stand a chance, I try to run to help but Fixit just pulls me back again and I fall into the mud.
“There’s nothing we can do, we have to let them fight so we can escape.”
“How can you be so heartless?! They’re gonna die! And you want to just let it happen!?”
I shove Fixit aside and run towards the Hulks and yell at them to stop. Savage Hulk looks at me and then picks up the other two, throwing them into me. We’re sent flying and we land in the crops. Savage Hulk then jumps in after us and picks me up from the rubble.
“BRUCE BANNER, YOU WERE SO FOOLISH THAT YOU CAME RIGHT TO ME. DID THIS LITTLE METAL CAP TELL YOU I WAS THE STRONGEST THERE IS? I REPRESENT YOUR STRENGTH AND THE MEAN SIDE OF YOU. AND ONCE I ABSORB WHAT’S LEFT OF YOU NO ONE WILL BE ABLE TO STOP THE HULK!”
Just as Savage Hulk is about to absorb me we hear a huge crash, dirt, soil and wood go flying everywhere. The from behind me a booming voice speaks.
”YOU MAY BE STRONG, BUT YOU ARE NOT THE STRONGEST. I AM PURE RAGE AND FURY. AND I WILL BE THE ONE TO HAVE BANNER.”
“It’s the Red Hulk…the Mindless Hulk…” Mr. Fixit says.
What started out as a "Sunrise morning", quickly turned into an "is it even worth being here" morning, with extremely dense fog and constant rain... And then we had a brainwave... WATERFALLS!!
Did a lot of hiking today, causing tired legs and an ouchy little toe, but totally worth it.
Advantage of working with another photographer: you end up getting pushed into taking better photos.
Laura and I had both been shooting Katie for a good few minutes, when Laura had herself a brainwave, positioned Katie just right and started shooting away. We both knew these were gonna be some awesome shots, you can just tell, knowing how good Laura is, knowing how the poses are gonna look because we know how she shoots, how Katie looks under certain circumstances.
Sometimes you can just see the pictures ahead of time.
And they were gonna be oh so nice.
Damn her!
I was well into a calm groove that day, nothing special, just enjoying the park, all the various places we could shoot there, the great grey weather.
But after that, I started looking around, just a wee bit frantically, looking for inspiration.
Because now I had to come away with something special.
And that is a great place to be, with my mind actually working on the "problem".
This shot...oh man, it's early, so forgive me, this shot was my Solution.
I crack myself up.
Another advantage of working with another photographer (as well as Laura At Work) up on the blog: blog.louobedlam.com/post/75870987/another-advantage-of-sh...
The Afence chair was one of the first pieces I built.
If limegreen doesn't make you feel summery, nothing does.
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I made a JALKOW collection, last year, in sort of homage to John's photostream and his JOHN Collection: the concurrent of the JOHN Collection. 'Not expensive, yet not cheap!'
So, big credits go to John and his trust.
This year, I had another brainwave, with lots of chairs and tables, so here it is: the JALKOW collection 2.
via KrakyLand.net BrainWave Tuner Brainwave sessions Free Download IPA Full Version www.krakyland.net/2015/12/brainwave-tuner-brainwave-sessi...
The Cloud-table is my favorite, altough it's not really table-touch-proof.
As in: it falls apart when you look at it.
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I made a JALKOW collection, last year, in sort of homage to John's photostream and his JOHN Collection: the concurrent of the JOHN Collection. 'Not expensive, yet not cheap!'
So, big credits go to John and his trust.
This year, I had another brainwave, with lots of chairs and tables, so here it is: the JALKOW collection 2.
Amsterdam Metro train and some trees, reflected in a puddle.
The title must have been subconsciously implanted into my brainwaves by the very loud Bob Marley music that I am listening to while posting this...he's still the Big Cahuna when it comes to real roots rock reggae music :)
Here it is finally - my Terror Drome. I've wanted to build one of these for years now, and once I finally got started, it took about half a year to complete, working on and off, and taking breaks to build small MOCs here and there.
The original error Drome is considered by many Joe aficionados to be one of the all-time greatest large toys in the line.
www.yojoe.com/vehicles/86/terrordrome/
I never had a Terror Drome myself, but became well acquainted with them through the G.I.Joe comic, in which Terror Dromes were used for air defense, as a covert source for spreading "paranoia waves" and to house the terrifying Brainwave Scanner.
In the comic and cartoon, the Terror Drome was represented in several different versions, generally larger and more elaborate than the one exemplified by the toy, which should be considered to be a scaled-down and simplified representation of a larger and more sophisticated Cobra base.
An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is an experience in which a person seems to perceive the world from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy (literally "seeing self"), although the term autoscopy more commonly refers to the pathological condition of seeing a second self, or doppelgänger.Do you want to float around the astral plane without dying first? Are you longing to leave your body at home for a few hours to explore the cosmos? People report out-of-body experiences (OBEs) while dreaming, during near-death experiences, or through relaxation techniques such as meditation. For some people, having an OBE can be like being Alice in your very own Wonderland. Read on to learn how to experience this on purpose.Ready your mind and body. Choose a quiet place you find relaxing. You can be indoors or outdoors, as long as you are comfortable. Make sure you won't be interrupted. OBEs are most common in the morning at 4:00am-6:00am, however trying this at night or when you are tired will probably just make you fall asleep.
Find a comfortable position, either sitting or lying down. Many people choose to lie down on their backs, but be forewarned that temporary sleep paralysis is more likely in this position if you do fall asleep. These may consist of dark figures, ghosts or whatever you fear entering your room. Though this may sound scary, the more you realise they cannot physically harm you for they are your mind's creation, the less scary it is to endure.
Affirm to yourself that you are going to have an out-of-body experience. Say to yourself "Mind awake-Body Asleep" or "I will have a lucid dream." Repeat this several times until it is the only thought left in your mind. Close your eyes and relax. Become less conscious of your external surroundings. Empty your mind of thoughts and ideas. Meditation techniques can be helpful here to maintain an empty mind while still remaining focused and aware. Allow yourself to almost fall asleep. Actually sleeping would defeat the purpose. Instead, let yourself drift close to sleep while concentrating on being conscious of your sensations and mental state. Feel a vibrating sensation in your body. As you relax further, you should become more aware of what's happening inside your mind and body than anything happening in the room around you. Try to feel the vibration of your body, coming from both the larger pulse of your blood and breath to the individual movements of your cells. You may think you hear sounds like a tornado/wind. The urge to move here will be tremendous, especially if it's your first time. Just relax deeper and deeper until the sounds passes, but avoid falling asleep.
Try to slow the vibration. Visualize the movements of your body slowing and the sounds and sensations of vibrations getting fainter. Soon everything will be completely silent and your body will be still. Let your body become paralyzed. Some say it feels like a lead blanket has been placed over you. You may notice all of a sudden that you can't move your arms or legs. Don't panic! If you try to force yourself to move you may wake up. You will, however, be able to move your eyes, mouth, nose, and face, so try moving those slightly instead. Feel your hands grasping an invisible rope. Don't move your actual hands or visualize the rope. The "rope method" relies on the imaginary feeling of the rope, not a mental image. Focus on the texture, thickness and heftiness of the rope. Feel the tension in your arms between the strength of the rope and the pull of your weight. If you have trouble using the rope technique, try imagining a ladder instead. Some people find this easier, especially if they are more accustomed to climbing ladders than ropes.
Use the rope to pull yourself up and start climbing. Feel your muscles contract and your body move upward when you pull. Don't visualize: imagine you are doing this in pure darkness. Keep going up. Soon you will find yourself out of your body, triggering the "projection reflex."
If you experience vibrations in your body as you climb, try to relax more, or else you will only lose more energy and it will become harder.
If you have trouble, try climbing up as you inhale and then resting as you exhale.
The rope method is a more practical variation on the more iconic technique of visualizing yourself floating up. Though floating out of one's body all at once makes for a better image in the movies, it's not as effective in real life.
Open your astral eyes. Once you know you are out of your body, open your eyes. You should be viewing your room from the side of your bed, with your body still lying there still with eyes closed.
If you want, try to open your third eye first, low on the center of your forehead.
Visualize every detail of the space around you. Make sure you get a good look at your surroundings before you lie down. Now try to recall and feel the location and shape of every object in the room, as it looks from where you are resting.
Visualize the space around you as seen from a different point in the room. Once you have the image of the room clear in your mind's eye, shift that perspective to try to see that image as though you were standing over or near your body. In some ways you should already feel like you have left your body.
Rise from your body to the spot you were visualizing from. Stay very relaxed, but be forceful in your will to gently bring yourself to that point. Feel yourself moving up and over to that space, and visualize your perspective changing. Then open your astral eyes.
www.wikihow.com/Have-an-Out-of-Body-Experience
The term out-of-body experience was introduced in 1943 by G. N. M. Tyrrell in his book Apparitions, and was adopted by researchers such as Celia Green and Robert Monroe[3] as an alternative to belief-centric labels such as "astral projection", "soul travel", or "spirit walking". OBEs can be induced by brain traumas, sensory deprivation, near-death experiences, dissociative and psychedelic drugs, dehydration, sleep, and electrical stimulation of the brain, among others. It can also be deliberately induced by some. One in ten people have an OBE once, or more commonly, several times in their life.
Neuroscientists and psychologists regard OBEs as dissociative experiences arising from different psychological and neurological factors.
Those experiencing OBEs sometimes report (among other types of immediate and spontaneous experience) a preceding and initiating lucid-dream state. In many cases, people who claim to have had an OBE report being on the verge of sleep, or being already asleep shortly before the experience. A large percentage of these cases refer to situations where the sleep was not particularly deep (due to illness, noises in other rooms, emotional stress, exhaustion from overworking, frequent re-awakening, etc.). In most of these cases subjects perceive themselves as being awake; about half of them note a feeling of sleep paralysis.
Near-death experiences
Main article: Near-death experience
Another form of spontaneous OBE is the near-death experience (NDE). Some subjects report having had an OBE at times of severe physical trauma such as near-drownings or major surgery. Near-death experiences may include subjective impressions of being outside the physical body, sometimes visions of deceased relatives and religious figures, and transcendence of ego and spatiotemporal boundaries.Typically the experience includes such factors as: a sense of being dead; a feeling of peace and painlessness; hearing of various non-physical sounds, an out-of-body experience; a tunnel experience (the sense of moving up or through a narrow passageway); encountering "beings of light" and a God-like figure or similar entities; being given a "life review", and a reluctance to return to life.
Resulting from extreme physical effort
Along the same lines as an NDE, extreme physical effort during activities such as high-altitude climbing and marathon running can induce OBEs. A sense of bilocation may be experienced, with both ground and air-based perspectives being experienced simultaneously.
Induced
Chemical
OBEs can be induced by hallucinogens (particularly dissociatives) such as psilocybin, ketamine, DMT, MDA, and LSD.
Mental induction
Falling asleep physically without losing awareness. The "Mind Awake, Body Asleep" state is widely suggested as a cause of OBEs, voluntary and otherwise. Thomas Edison used this state to tackle problems while working on his inventions. He would rest a silver dollar on his head while sitting with a metal bucket in a chair. As he drifted off, the coin would noisily fall into the bucket, restoring some of his alertness. OBE pioneer Sylvan Muldoon more simply used a forearm held perpendicular in bed as the falling object. Salvador Dalí was said to use a similar "paranoiac-critical" method to gain odd visions which inspired his paintings. Deliberately teetering between awake and asleep states is known to cause spontaneous trance episodes at the onset of sleep which are ultimately helpful when attempting to induce an OBE. By moving deeper and deeper into relaxation, one eventually encounters a "slipping" feeling if the mind is still alert. This slipping is reported to feel like leaving the physical body. Some consider progressive relaxation a passive form of sensory deprivation.
Deep trance, meditation and visualization. The types of visualizations vary; some common analogies include climbing a rope to "pull out" of one's body, floating out of one's body, getting shot out of a cannon, and other similar approaches. This technique is considered hard to use for people who cannot properly relax. One example of such a technique is the popular Golden Dawn "Body of Light" Technique.
Mechanical induction
Brainwave synchronization via audio/visual stimulation. Binaural beats can be used to induce specific brainwave frequencies,[30] notably those predominant in various mind awake/body asleep states. Binaural induction of a "body asleep" 4 Hertz brainwave frequency was observed as effective by the Monroe Institute, and some authors consider binaural beats to be significantly supportive of OBE initiation when used in conjunction with other techniques. Simultaneous introduction of "mind awake" beta frequencies (detectable in the brains of normal, relaxed awakened individuals) was also observed as constructive. Another popular technology uses sinusoidal wave pulses to achieve similar results, and the drumming accompanying Native American religious ceremonies is also believed to have heightened receptivity to "other worlds" through brainwave entrainment mechanisms.
Magnetic stimulation of the brain, as with the God helmet developed by Michael Persinger.
Direct stimulation of the vestibular cortex.
Electrical stimulation of the brain, particularly the temporoparietal junction (see Blanke study below).
Sensory deprivation. This approach aims to induce intense disorientation by removal of space and time references. Flotation tanks or pink noise played through headphones are often employed for this purpose.
Sensory overload, the opposite of sensory deprivation. The subject can for instance be rocked for a long time in a specially designed cradle, or submitted to light forms of torture, to cause the brain to shut itself off from all sensory input. Both conditions tend to cause confusion and this disorientation often permits the subject to experience vivid, ethereal out-of-body experiences.
Strong g-forces that causes blood to drain from parts of the brain, as experienced for example in high-performance aircraft or high-G training for pilots and astronauts.
An apparatus that uses a head-mounted display and a touch that confuses the sense of proprioception (and which can also create the sensation of additional limbs).
Theories of OBEs
Psychological
In the fields of cognitive science and psychology OBEs are considered dissociative experiences arising from different psychological and neurological factors.Scientists consider the OBE to be an experience from a mental state, like a dream or an altered state of consciousness without recourse to the paranormal.
Charles Richet (1887) held that OBEs are created by the subject's memory and imagination processes and are no different from dreams.James H. Hyslop (1912) wrote that OBEs occur when the activity of the subconscious mind dramatizes certain images to give the impression the subject is in a different physical location. Eugéne Osty (1930) considered OBEs to be nothing more than the product of imagination.Other early researchers (such as Schmeing, 1938) supported psychophysiological theories.[46] G. N. M. Tyrrell interpreted OBEs as hallucinatory constructs relating to subconscious levels of personality.
Donovan Rawcliffe (1959) connected the OBE experience with psychosis and hysteria. Other researchers have discussed the phenomena of the OBE in terms of a distortion of the body image (Horowitz, 1970) and depersonalization (Whitlock, 1978). The psychologists Nandor Fodor (1959) and Jan Ehrenwald (1974) proposed that an OBE is a defense mechanism designed to deal with the threat of death.[51][52] According to (Irin and Watt, 2007) Jan Ehrenwald had described the out-of-body experience (OBE) "as an imaginal confirmation of the question for immortality, a delusory attempt to assure ourselves that we possess a soul that exists independently of the physical body. The psychologists Donald Hebb (1960) and Cyril Burt (1968) wrote on the psychological interpretation of the OBE involving body image and visual imagery. Graham Reed (1974) suggested that the OBE is a stress reaction to a painful situation, such as the loss of love.John Palmer (1978) wrote that the OBE is a response to a body image change causing a threat to personal identity.
Carl Sagan (1977) and Barbara Honegger (1983) wrote that the OBE experience may be based on a rebirth fantasy or reliving of the birth process based on reports of tunnel-like passageways and a cord-like connection by some OBErs which they compared to an umbilical cord.Susan Blackmore (1978) came to the conclusion that the OBE is a hallucinatory fantasy as it has the characteristics of imaginary perceptions, perceptual distortions and fantasy-like perceptions of the self (such as having no body).[60][61] Ronald Siegel (1980) also wrote that OBEs are hallucinatory fantasies.
Harvey Irwin (1985) presented a theory of the OBE involving attentional cognitive processes and somatic sensory activity. His theory involved a cognitive personality construct known as psychological absorption and gave instances of the classification of an OBE as examples of autoscopy, depersonalization and mental dissociation.[38] The psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge (1985) has written that the explanation for OBEs can be found in lucid dreaming. David Hufford (1989) linked the OBE experience with a phenomenon he described as a nightmare waking experience, a type of sleep paralysis.[64] Other scientists have also linked OBEs to cases of hypnagogia and sleep paralysis (cataplexy).
In case studies fantasy proneness has been shown to be higher among OBErs than those who have not had an OBE.[67] The data has shown a link between the OBE experience in some cases to fantasy prone personality (FPP).[68] In a case study involving 167 participants the findings revealed that those who claimed to have experienced the OBE were "more fantasy prone, higher in their belief in the paranormal and displayed greater somatoform dissociation."[69] Research from studies has also suggested that OBEs are related to cognitive-perceptual schizotypy.
Terence Hines (2003) has written that spontaneous out-of-body experiences can be generated by artificial stimulation of the brain and this strongly suggests that the OBE experience is caused from "temporary, minor brain malfunctions, not by the person's spirit (or whatever) actually leaving the body."In a study review of neurological and neurocognitive data (Bünning and Blanke, 2005) wrote that OBEs are due to "functional disintegration of lower-level multisensory processing and abnormal higher-level self-processing at the temporoparietal junction. Some scientists suspect that OBEs are the result of a mismatch between visual and tactile signals.
Richard Wiseman (2011) has noted that OBE research has focused on finding a psychological explanation and "out-of-body experiences are not paranormal and do not provide evidence for the soul. Instead, they reveal something far more remarkable about the everyday workings of your brain and body."[75] A study conducted by Jason Braithwaite and colleagues (2011) linked the OBE to "neural instabilities in the brain's temporal lobes and to errors in the body's sense of itself". Braithwaite et al. (2013) reported that the "current and dominant view is that the OBE occurs due to a temporary disruption in multi-sensory integration processes."
Paranormal
Writers within the fields of parapsychology and occultism have written that OBEs are not psychological and that a soul, spirit or subtle body can detach itself out of the body and visit distant locations. Out-of-the-body experiences were known during the Victorian period in spiritualist literature as "travelling clairvoyance". The psychical researcher Frederic Myers referred to the OBE as a "psychical excursion".[79] An early study which described alleged cases of OBEs was the two volume Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886 by the psychical researchers Edmund Gurney, Myers and Frank Podmore. The book was largely criticized by the scientific community as the anecdotal reports lacked evidential substantiation in nearly every case.
A 19th-century illustration of Robert Blair's poem The Grave, depicting the soul leaving the body
The Theosophist Arthur Powell (1927) was an early author to advocate the subtle body theory of OBEs. Sylvan Muldoon (1936) embraced the concept of an etheric body to explain the OBE experience. The psychical researcher Ernesto Bozzano (1938) had also supported a similar view describing the phenomena of the OBE experience in terms of bilocation in which an "etheric body" can release itself from the physical body in rare circumstances. The subtle body theory was also supported by occult writers such as Ralph Shirley (1938), Benjamin Walker (1977) and Douglas Baker (1979).[85] James Baker (1954) wrote that a mental body enters an "intercosmic region" during the OBE.[86] Marilynn Hughes states that the experiences are the projection of the spiritual body from the physical for the purpose of the soul's purification.[87] Robert Crookall in many publications supported the subtle body theory of OBEs.
The paranormal interpretation of OBEs has not been supported by all researchers within the study of parapsychology. Gardner Murphy (1961) wrote that OBEs are "not very far from the known terrain of general psychology, which we are beginning to understand more and more without recourse to the paranormal".
In the 1970s, Karlis Osis conducted many OBE experiments with the psychic Alex Tanous. For a series of these experiments he was asked whilst in an OBE state to try to identify coloured targets that were placed in remote locations. Osis reported that in 197 trials there were 114 hits. However, the controls to the experiments have been criticized and according to Susan Blackmore, the final result was not particularly significant as 108 hits would be expected by chance. Blackmore noted that the results provide "no evidence for accurate perception in the OBE".
In April 1977, a patient from Harborview Medical Center known as Maria claimed to have experienced an out-of-body experience. During her OBE she claimed to have floated outside her body and outside of the hospital. Maria would later tell her social worker Kimberly Clark that during the OBE she had observed a tennis shoe on the third floor window ledge to the north side of the building. Clark would go to the north wing of the building and by looking out of the window could see a tennis shoe on one of the ledges. Clark published the account in 1985. The story has since been used in many paranormal books as evidence a spirit can leave the body.
In 1996, Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan and Barry Beyerstein visited the Medical Center to investigate the story. They placed a tennis shoe on the same ledge and discovered that the shoe was visible from within the building and could have easily been observed by a patient lying in bed. They also discovered the shoe was easily observable from outside the building and suggested that Maria may have overheard a comment about it during her three days in the hospital and incorporated it into her OBE. They concluded "Maria's story merely reveals the naiveté and the power of wishful thinking" from OBE researchers seeking a paranormal explanation.[93] Clark did not publish the description of the case until seven years after it happened, casting doubt on the story. Richard Wiseman has said that although the story is not evidence for anything paranormal it has been "endlessly repeated by writers who either couldn't be bothered to check the facts, or were unwilling to present their readers with the more skeptical side of the story."
Oneness and One
In 2017, Prince Paul Mamakos summarized the three stages of out of body experience.[94] The first stage being achieving an out-of-body experience and experiencing movement within the environment near the physical body. The second stage being going out and exploring outside ones house, going off planet, going into the planet and meeting other beings. In the third stage of OBEs, a person begins to notice the energy within another being as the same as that which is coming out of their own being. The energy essence of another, is the same as your energy. In the culmination of the third stage, a person experiences a sense of connection with all beings. On a linear range of awareness, if we place personality at a proximal point on a line, a point on the distal end of the line will represent an experience of oneness. Personality and oneness representing opposite extremes of awareness. Further dropping oneness results in the 'it' experience. One.
Studies of OBEs
Early collections of OBE cases had been made by Ernesto Bozzano (Italy) and Robert Crookall (UK). Crookall approached the subject from a spiritualistic position, and collected his cases predominantly from spiritualist newspapers such as the Psychic News, which appears to have biased his results in various ways. For example, the majority of his subjects reported seeing a cord connecting the physical body and its observing counterpart; whereas Green found that less than 4% of her subjects noticed anything of this sort, and some 80% reported feeling they were a "disembodied consciousness", with no external body at all.
The first extensive scientific study of OBEs was made by Celia Green (1968).She collected written, first-hand accounts from a total of 400 subjects, recruited by means of appeals in the mainstream media, and followed up by questionnaires. Her purpose was to provide a taxonomy of the different types of OBE, viewed simply as an anomalous perceptual experience or hallucination, while leaving open the question of whether some of the cases might incorporate information derived by extrasensory perception.
International Academy of Consciousness - Global Survey
In 1999, at the 1st International Forum of Consciousness Research in Barcelona, International Academy of Consciousness research-practitioners Wagner Alegretti and Nanci Trivellato presented preliminary findings of an online survey on the out-of-body experience answered by internet users interested in the subject; therefore, not a sample representative of the general population.
1,007 (85%) of the first 1,185 respondents reported having had an OBE. 37% claimed to have had between two and ten OBEs. 5.5% claimed more than 100 such experiences. 45% of those who reported an OBE said they successfully induced at least one OBE by using a specific technique. 62% of participants claiming to have had an OBE also reported having enjoyed nonphysical flight; 40% reported experiencing the phenomenon of self-bilocation (i.e. seeing one's own physical body whilst outside the body); and 38% claimed having experienced self-permeability (passing through physical objects such as walls). The most commonly reported sensations experienced in connection with the OBE were falling, floating, repercussions e.g. myoclonia (the jerking of limbs, jerking awake), sinking, torpidity (numbness), intracranial sounds, tingling, clairvoyance, oscillation and serenity.
Another reported common sensation related to OBE was temporary or projective catalepsy, a more common feature of sleep paralysis. The sleep paralysis and OBE correlation was later corroborated by the Out-of-Body Experience and Arousal study published in Neurology by Kevin Nelson and his colleagues from the University of Kentucky in 2007. The study discovered that people who have out-of-body experiences are more likely to suffer from sleep paralysis.
Also noteworthy, is the Waterloo Unusual Sleep Experiences Questionnaire that further illustrates the correlation.
Miss Z study
In 1968, Charles Tart conducted an OBE experiment with a subject known as Miss Z for four nights in his sleep laboratory. The subject was attached to an EEG machine and a five-digit code was placed on a shelf above her bed. She did not claim to see the number on the first three nights but on fourth gave the number correctly.The psychologist James Alcock criticized the experiment for inadequate controls and questioned why the subject was not visually monitored by a video camera.Martin Gardner has written the experiment was not evidence for an OBE and suggested that whilst Tart was "snoring behind the window, Miss Z simply stood up in bed, without detaching the electrodes, and peeked." Susan Blackmore wrote "If Miss Z had tried to climb up, the brain-wave record would have showed a pattern of interference. And that was exactly what it did show."
Neurology and OBE-like experiences
There are several possible physiological explanations for parts of the OBE. OBE-like experiences have been induced by stimulation of the brain. OBE-like experience has also been induced through stimulation of the posterior part of the right superior temporal gyrus in a patient.[106] Positron-emission tomography was also used in this study to identify brain regions affected by this stimulation. The term OBE-like is used above because the experiences described in these experiments either lacked some of the clarity or details of normal OBEs, or were described by subjects who had never experienced an OBE before. Such subjects were therefore not qualified to make claims about the authenticity of the experimentally-induced OBE.
British psychologist Susan Blackmore and others suggest that an OBE begins when a person loses contact with sensory input from the body while remaining conscious. The person retains the illusion of having a body, but that perception is no longer derived from the senses. The perceived world may resemble the world he or she generally inhabits while awake, but this perception does not come from the senses either. The vivid body and world is made by our brain's ability to create fully convincing realms, even in the absence of sensory information. This process is witnessed by each of us every night in our dreams, though OBEs are claimed to be far more vivid than even a lucid dream.
Irwin pointed out that OBEs appear to occur under conditions of either very high or very low arousal. For example, Green[109] found that three quarters of a group of 176 subjects reporting a single OBE were lying down at the time of the experience, and of these 12% considered they had been asleep when it started. By contrast, a substantial minority of her cases occurred under conditions of maximum arousal, such as a rock-climbing fall, a traffic accident, or childbirth. McCreery has suggested that this paradox may be explained by reference to the fact that sleep can supervene as a reaction to extreme stress or hyper-arousal. He proposes that OBEs under both conditions, relaxation and hyper-arousal, represent a form of "waking dream", or the intrusion of Stage 1 sleep processes into waking consciousness.
Olaf Blanke studies
Research by Olaf Blanke in Switzerland found that it is possible to reliably elicit experiences somewhat similar to the OBE by stimulating regions of the brain called the right temporal-parietal junction (TPJ; a region where the temporal lobe and parietal lobe of the brain come together). Blanke and his collaborators in Switzerland have explored the neural basis of OBEs by showing that they are reliably associated with lesions in the right TPJ region and that they can be reliably elicited with electrical stimulation of this region in a patient with epilepsy.[114] These elicited experiences may include perceptions of transformations of the patient's arms and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses).
In neurologically normal subjects, Blanke and colleagues then showed that the conscious experience of the self and body being in the same location depends on multisensory integration in the TPJ. Using event-related potentials, Blanke and colleagues showed the selective activation of the TPJ 330–400 ms after stimulus onset when healthy volunteers imagined themselves in the position and visual perspective that generally are reported by people experiencing spontaneous OBEs. Transcranial magnetic stimulation in the same subjects impaired mental transformation of the participant's own body. No such effects were found with stimulation of another site or for imagined spatial transformations of external objects, suggesting the selective implication of the TPJ in mental imagery of one's own body.
In a follow up study, Arzy et al. showed that the location and timing of brain activation depended on whether mental imagery is performed with mentally embodied or disembodied self location. When subjects performed mental imagery with an embodied location, there was increased activation of a region called the "extrastriate body area" (EBA), but when subjects performed mental imagery with a disembodied location, as reported in OBEs, there was increased activation in the region of the TPJ. This leads Arzy et al. to argue that "these data show that distributed brain activity at the EBA and TPJ as well as their timing are crucial for the coding of the self as embodied and as spatially situated within the human body."
Blanke and colleagues thus propose that the right temporal-parietal junction is important for the sense of spatial location of the self, and that when these normal processes go awry, an OBE arises.
In August 2007 Blanke's lab published research in Science demonstrating that conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality could disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. During multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. This indicates that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and is based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.
Ehrsson study
In August 2007, Henrik Ehrsson, then at the Institute of Neurology at University College of London (now at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden), published research in Science demonstrating the first experimental method that, according to the scientist's claims in the publication, induced an out-of-body experience in healthy participants. The experiment was conducted in the following way:
The study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant's head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one "stereoscopic" (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them.
The researcher then stands just beside the participant (in their view) and uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant's actual chest out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera's view.
The participants confirmed that they had experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location.
Both critics and the experimenter himself note that the study fell short of replicating "full-blown" OBEs. As with previous experiments which induced sensations of floating outside of the body, Ehrsson's work does not explain how a brain malfunction might cause an OBE. Essentially, Ehrsson created an illusion that fits a definition of an OBE in which "a person who is awake sees his or her body from a location outside the physical body."
Awareness during Resuscitation Study
In 2001, Sam Parnia and colleagues investigated out of body claims by placing figures on suspended boards facing the ceiling, not visible from the floor. Parnia wrote "anybody who claimed to have left their body and be near the ceiling during resuscitation attempts would be expected to identify those targets. If, however, such perceptions are psychological, then one would obviously not expect the targets to be identified." The philosopher Keith Augustine, who examined Parnia's study, has written that all target identification experiments have produced negative results. Psychologist Chris French wrote regarding the study "unfortunately, and somewhat atypically, none of the survivors in this sample experienced an OBE."
In the autumn of 2008, 25 UK and US hospitals began participation in a study, coordinated by Sam Parnia and Southampton University known as the AWARE study (AWAreness during REsuscitation). Following on from the work of Pim van Lommel in the Netherlands, the study aims to examine near-death experiences in 1,500 cardiac arrest survivors and so determine whether people without a heartbeat or brain activity can have documentable out-of-body experiences. As part of the study Parnia and colleagues have investigated out of body claims by using hidden targets placed on shelves that could only be seen from above.Parnia has written "if no one sees the pictures, it shows these experiences are illusions or false memories".
In 2014 Parnia issued a statement indicating that the first phase of the project has been completed and the results are undergoing peer review for publication in a medical journal. No subjects saw the images mounted out of sight according to Parnia's early report of the results of the study at an American Heart Association meeting in November 2013. Only two out of the 152 patients reported any visual experiences, and one of them described events that could be verified. The two NDEs occurred in an area were "no visual targets had been placed".
On October 6, 2014, the results of the study were published in the journal Resuscitation. Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDEs. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBEs with explicit recall of 'seeing' and 'hearing' events. One case was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest. According to Caroline Watt "The one 'verifiable period of conscious awareness' that Parnia was able to report did not relate to this objective test. Rather, it was a patient giving a supposedly accurate report of events during his resuscitation. He didn't identify the pictures, he described the defibrillator machine noise. But that's not very impressive since many people know what goes on in an emergency room setting from seeing recreations on television."
AWARE Study II
As of May 2016, a posting at the UK Clinical Trials Gateway website describes plans for AWARE II, a two-year multicenter observational study of 900-1500 patients experiencing cardiac arrest, with subjects being recruited as August 1, 2014 and a trial end date of May 31, 2017.
Smith & Messier
A recent functional imaging study reported the case of a woman who could experience out of body experience at will. She reported developing the ability as a child and associated it with difficulties in falling sleep. Her OBEs continued into adulthood but became less frequent. She was able to see herself rotating in the air above her body, lying flat, and rolling in the horizontal plane. She reported sometimes watching herself move from above but remained aware of her unmoving "real" body. The participant reported no particular emotions linked to the experience. "[T]he brain functional changes associated with the reported extra-corporeal experience (ECE) were different than those observed in motor imagery. Activations were mainly left-sided and involved the left supplementary motor area and supramarginal and posterior superior temporal gyri, the last two overlapping with the temporal parietal junction that has been associated with out-of-body experiences. The cerebellum also showed activation that is consistent with the participant's report of the impression of movement during the ECE. There was also left middle and superior orbital frontal gyri activity, regions often associated with action monitoring."
OBE training and research facilities[edit]
The International Academy of Consciousness (IAC) is a global organisation, with training centers in California, New York, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, several other cities around the world and a research campus in Portugal. The research campus features specialised laboratories, including a spherical lab dedicated exclusively for the practice and research of out-of-body experiences.The IAC offers courses online and in person, including their signature course the Consciousness Development Programme (a comprehensive 40-hour course covering OBE techniques, with practical classes, as well as many other para-psychic themes related to the practice).
The Monroe Institute's Nancy Penn Center is a facility specializing in or out-of-body experience induction. The Center for Higher Studies of the Consciousness in Brazil is another large OBE training facility. Olaf Blanke's Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience has become a well-known laboratory for OBE research.
Astral projection
Main article: Astral projection
Astral projection is a paranormal interpretation of out-of-body experiences that assumes the existence of one or more non-physical planes of existence and an associated body beyond the physical. Commonly such planes are called astral, etheric, or spiritual. Astral projection is often experienced as the spirit or astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the spirit world or astral plane.
So Santa Danbo found his sleigh-pulller (thank goodness!) and in the end , he didn't have to look very far at all, for it was his very best friend in the whole world Tiny Ted who helped save the day - and Christmas! He makes a very good Rein-bear indeed! ^_^ Merry Christmas everyone! I hope Santa is good to you all xoxo
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"Mama… I don't understand," Joar asks, wiping the tears from his eyes, shivering even with his two large winter jackets on. "Why? Why am I different from you and papa? Why am I not like everyone else?"
Lily, the boy's mother, places a box into the back of her truck, biting her inner cheek as she turns to her son. "Joar…" she says, thumbing away his tears, "I… do not know."
Sofus, the boy's father, takes a knee beside him, placing a hand atop his shoulder. "That does not matter, Joar," he says, smiling a wobbly smile. "We are going to go far from here, somewhere that doesn't make you feel so different."
"But… this is h-home!"
Lily pulls the boy into a hug, tears of her own falling. "Home is not a place, Joar."
"It is the people you care for," Sofus concludes, joining the hug."
"Go ahead," the overweight southerner chuckles, licking his lips as he places his cards onto the table, "play 'ya hand, Wiz."
Every Thursday at eight o'clock pm, Joar Mahkent finds himself at the same table, in the same bar, surrounded by the same faces. The ISA, The Injustice Society of America, though no longer an active force of villainy, continues its weekly meetings. While their base of operations had long been destroyed, the remaining members of the team chose the New Warriors, a hole in wall attempting to bank off the Warriors success, as their new gathering place.
Though, the meetings never go to plan.
Henry King, Brainwave; one of the most brilliant men in the world, now bound to a wheelchair, forced to wear glasses, and a hearing aid, all of which being side effects of his mental-based powers.
Steven Sharpe III, the Gambler; the ISA's snake who's luck had run out, forcing him to take up a walking cane, as well as developing diabetes.
Isaac Bowin, the Fiddler; a man who had gone deaf years back, now with severe carpal tunnel from decades of playing the violin.
William Zard, the Wizard; a once great and powerful sorcerer, now relegated to a sad, cowardly man plagued by delirium.
Finally, sitting at the head of the table, is Shiro Ito, the immortal known as the Dragon King. Ito, unlike the rest of Joar's colleagues, has been alive for centuries, dating back to the dark ages. Having grown fond of the team in their years spent together, Ito has taken upon himself to care for the ISA until their time comes.
Joar is also an oddity among the villains. Through all his years as a criminal, he never had powers to harm himself overtime and made sure to never rely entirely on a piece of technology. He took every precaution possible, staying in peak shape and developing protective gear to combat his technology, saving him from the fate of his friends.
"Will…" Bowin whispers, tapping Zard on the shoulder.
Zard jolts at the contact, head snapping forward. Sweat rolls down his face as he stares at his cards, currently upside down. "Ah… yes, my cards…" he shivers, slowly turning them over, before his eyes go wide and he throws them across the table. "I-I fold… just keep that woman away from me!"
Ito tilts his head, scooping up the cards. "William, have you been skipping your medication?" he asks, hiding a frown beg and his hood as he showcases the queen of hearts. "You should not be ignoring your prescription, or your condition will worsen, as will the severity of your symptoms.
"Ah, let him do what he wants," King mumbles, raising a finger to place down his cards. "Who cares if he-"
"Doctor King," Ito interrupts, his voice showing clear signs of dissatisfaction, "you are not to use your abilities for such trivial tasks. They are to be used for emergencies only."
"Yeah yeah, 'I'll get a migraine,' sure," King mocks, bringing his palm into the air, the table and everything on it following suit. "I am just fine, thank y-AGHG!"
In an instant, the table fell to the ground, knocking over chairs and sending all the cards and drinks flying. Ito rushes to King, pulling a needle from his belt pouch, one likely filled with painkillers. Sharpe is in the floor, having fallen over in the commotion and now struggling to stand. Zard is curled into a ball, chanting his old shielding spells as he rocks back and forth. Bowin holds his hands over his ears, shaking in his seat.
Joar sighs, staring at his former teammates, watching as each seethes in their own undoing. "I uh… I think I'm gonna call it a night," he musters, standing up from his chair.
"Joar," Ito grunts, having forcefully stuck a needle into the bulging vein of King's temple, "I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Would you like me to have any hoods escort you home? It can be dangerous at this hour."
"Thanks, Ito, but I'm fine," Joar waves, turning his back to the man and swinging open the bar's door. "I need a bit of alone time anyways."
Knowing Ito, the man surely wants to protest, but Joar knows he can't, not with the issues of his former team. So he takes the chance, slipping outside into the cool, February air. The street is empty, like it always is when he walks home after an ISA meeting, but it feels different now. The abundance of supervillains as well as lanterns has dropped to a record low following the apocalypse. It made for… more quiet nights. No rampaging villains, no heroes soaring through the sky… just calm.
Its quiet moments like these that Joar likes most, moments where he can reflect as the moon shines down on him.
Moments to look back on his mistakes.
He wonders if being Cameron's father caused the pain to hurt worse or less; if the feeling of heartbreaking betrayal made the pain linger… or if it faded away into forgiveness. He wonders if he did ever care about the boy before his goals and aspirations warped him. He wonders if he even deserves to care. Does he deserve the chance, not to be forgiven, but to apologize?
Before he knows it, Joar finds himself at his front door. Before stepping inside, he looks out at the shining moon above him, as if it was staring back.
"How do I atone?" he asks, praying in his mind the moon will answer back. "Can I?"
The moon never answers back.
-^-
"Inmate 1886?" the head guard of Belle Reve's Y-wing calls, unlocking the cell door and stepping inside, hand on his belt. "You got a letter."
The inmate inside doesn't look up to the man, instead keeping his head down. "1886" they call him. A number, never his name.
"Name…" he mumbles, refusing to respond to the man.
"Your name?" the guard chuckles, tossing the letter onto the ground. "I'm not calling you that dumbass name, Wyck."
The inmate grimaces, tugging on the apparatus around his neck. "Name… my name," he grumbles, his other hand scratching his cheek.
"Hey!" the guard shouts, pulling a small device from his belt and flipping the switch. A blast of cold air causes the inmate to cry out, falling off the bed and onto the ground beside the letter. He claws at the collar, nails digging into his skin.
"Inhumane!" the inmate shouts, tears building up behind the light blocking goggles strapped around his eyes. "I'm human!"
"I don't give a damn what you are," the guard says, slamming the door of the cell behind him. "While you're here, you're a number."
The inmate seethes on the ground as guard walls away, the cold air continuing to shoot from the collar. Like an animal, a monster.
Not a human.
-^-
"Dad, Dad!"
"Not now," Joar says, dismissing his son without taking his eyes off his work.
"B-but dad…" Cameron mumbles, strapping I side the lab, "it's mommy."
"Cameron, I said I'm busy, damnit," Joar scowls, clenching his fist as he continues working on the calculations.
"No, dad, her machine!" Cameron pleads, grabbing onto his father's arm. "It's making weird noises, I think it's broken!"
"Then she should've thought of that when she bought it!" Joar shouts, yanking his arm away and finally looking the seven year old in the eye. "Now, out."
Cameron stands still, head aimed towards the floor. "You're stupid work…"
"What!?"
"I said your stupid work!" Cameron shouts, tears running down his face. "Mommy is hurt, but this is all you care about! I hate it!"
Joar's expression darkens as he stares at the boy. Feeling anger build up, his hand raises towards his son.
"STOP!"
Joar jolts awake, screaming iwth his eyes blown wide. He pants, watching as his icy breath fills the room. He surveys the room as he trembles, the walls are frozen solid and shards of ice hang from the ceiling. He sits up, letting his feet hang off the side of the bed. He's still shaken, running his fingertips over the frozen droplets of sweat along his body. His eyes lock onto a blue man, his reflection on the ice.
Blue skin… the power of ice. The shared metagene passed down through generations of the Mahkent family… the metagene that had been lying dormant inside him. Through decades of trying, years of experimentation and failures, he'd done it. He accomplished his singular obsession that plagued his life, his family. He thought finally achieving his goal would thaw his frozen heart… but it merely made the ice that much colder.
"I… I just don't know anymore," Joar says, sitting at the counter of New Warriors. The bags under his eyes hang low, as does his head. "Everything I dreamed about, everything I ever wanted is mine… everything I thought I wanted, at least."
"I feel as if your struggle is… difficult to understand," Ito replies, sitting beside Joar, arms folded on the countertop. "I know when I finally accomplish a goal of mine, no matter the size, I tend to feel better about myself. Long term goals like your own even more so."
"Yeah… s'what I thought too, but even now," Joar pauses, swirling his glass of scotch around before freezing it solid. He stares at the frozen liquid, seeing shining blue eyes stare back. "I'm just… empty."
"Perhaps treatment is required?" Ito inquires, taking the frozen glass from Joar and inspecting it in the light. "I do have a doctorate in psychology," he places the glass back down and looks at Joar, "I believe you may be depressed."
"I don't think it's… Ito would you…" Joar pauses once more, biting the inside of his cheek as he thinks back the monster he was- is, "would you believe me if I… if I said I missed my son?"
""I would… find it a bit strange," Ito's cloth shifts, signifying a cocked brow. "I don't recall you ever being very fond of Cameron. At least not beyond-"
"Yeah…" Joar nods in agreement. "Even so…"
"You regret your past actions?"
"I was so… clouded," he grits his teeth, feeling a tingling sensation in his hands. Without realizing it, he freezes the entire countertop, eyes widening as his breath becomes a visible mist. He turns to Ito, who'd slid his stool back a few feet to avoid the ice. "I never saw the monster I was becoming. I didn't help my dying wife… and used my sick, dying son as a lab rat for my experiments…"
Ito stays silent.
"I wish I could tell him sorry, that I could make up for every ounce of hurt I caused," Joar mumbles, turning his head to stare at his reflection on the counter. "No… the monster I am doesn't deserve the possibility of forgiveness."
Ice crackles as Joar's feet touch the floor. He takes slow steps across the frozen ground, still unable to balance properly on the icy terrain. Slipping, he barely catches himself on his dresser, cursing under his breath. His hand finds the drawer's knob, which he pulls on roughly. The coat of ice over the wood shatters, giving him a view inside.
A small, silver picture frame sits inside. Joar reaches his hand inside, but pulls away harshly as his fingers begin to spread frost on the frame. "Damnit!" he shouts, slamming his fist into the wall, creating shards of ice on impact. He peers down at the picture, his lip quivering not due to the cold.
Children were huddled together, all laughing with large smiles on their faces. The photo was from Cameron's 7th birthday, a day that felt like a millennia ago. Joar had missed the party, "more important matters" he'd say. Every year, every birthday, holiday, or celebration… it was always the reason.
Joar doesn't even know why he has the picture, he remembers the way he lashed out at his wife when she presented the memory to him. Whatever the reason, he thanks god every single day that he kept it… it's the only time he's ever seen Cameron smile.
"What a nice photograph."
Joar feels a chill run down his spine. It's only now that he feels breathing against the back of his neck, cold breath that rivals his own. Whipping around, he blasts a barrage of ice towards the sound of the voice. The attack causes a thick mist to fill the room, blocking out Joar's vision.
"That is some power you have, Mr. Mahkent," the voice from before says in a thick, proper English accent. "I wonder what you had to endure to achieve it."
From the corner of his eye, Joar sees a silhouette in the mist, prompting him to fire another volley of ice. As it connects, the silhouette disappears, leaving Joar puzzled once more. Before it had vanished, Joar noticed the outline the shadow gave off; a top hat sat on the man's head with a cane in his hand.
"The last brit in a top hat double crossed me and my team!" Joar shouts, icy mist pooling around his feet. "That you?"
"'Brit in a top hat' doesn't narrow it down nearly as much as you think it would," the man says, tapping his cane against the ground, causing the mist to disperse. Now, standing in front of Joar, was a tall, lanky man with a large grin spread across his cheeks. His jet-black slacks contrast with the pale blue, furred trench coat he wears with confidence. His free hand slides his glasses down his nose, revealing silver eyes.
"My name, Mr. Mahkent, is Percival DeChaunce…" he says, his grin only growing wider. "However, as I can call you the Icicle, you may call me…
"The Fop."
This past winter I was digging into my archives and posting shots of mountain meadows and flowers when my Flickr Friend, janiecakes, requested an archival food shot. Around the same time, I had just discovered how to blend two images using Adobe Photoshop and I was going nuts blending everything in sight. I'd been experimenting, blending this pelican with all sorts of landscape shots when I got a brainwave: wouldn't it be fun to find an archival food shot for Janie (an awesome Photoshopper with a great sense of humour) and blend in this pelican coming in for a landing on it?
In the spirit of fun, here it is.
The French Toast shot is one of my first photos taken with my then new (and first ever) digital camera of a lovely breakfast my partner made for me (French Toast, made with homemade French Bread, topped with slices of fresh summer peaches and blueberries from the market, with a slight drizzle of maple syrup and a light dusting of icing sugar). The Pelican shot was taken from a boat near Long Beach Harbor, California.