#(then i got 2 so one can go on my car with the tectonics one and the other can go on my water bottle lol)

[despite-everything]

just found the funniest stickers to put on my car

#idk why but 'stop plate tectonics' literally made me laugh out loud #so obvs i had to get it #then i saw 'reunite pangea' and thought it'd coordinate wonderfully #(then i got 2 so one can go on my car with the tectonics one and the other can go on my water bottle lol) #tree talks #geology

[poopunderstander]

i am probably the 5000th person to write Dean teaching Cas to drive but i did it anyway and i'm here to make it your problem

"Cas, who is living after death in the body of a man so devout he offered his whole self to the possession of God’s soldier, knows that the machine he’s sitting in is a part of the strange, ardent little faith Dean practices, a religion with three apostles, a virgin, and no god. Sitting here with Dean’s hand on his own, sweating and shaking at the helm of this unholy ark, he feels blasphemous."

2.4k words, destiel, PG/teen&up, no warnings except for a lot of geology talk at the start

link on ao3

Approximately 550 million years before what Castiel currently knows as the present day, two enormous sheets of earth collided in a dying ocean. The continent of Laurentia met with an arc of volcanic islands, and, finding itself unequal to their fury, folded downward beneath the sapping crust of the Iapetus Ocean. Over millennia, as Heaven watched, the earth and water consumed each other, leaving a thick scar of mountains, to be worn away in turn by new millennia of wind and ice and fire.

That was the Age of Fishes. Later, much later, humans climbed into the valleys in between the hills, to fish and hunt and build, and when they buried their dead they painted the graves with red earth, infinitesimal new scars over the old tectonic suture.

Castiel remembers all this—can feel it in the ground under his vessel’s feet, here in what Dean Winchester calls central Maine. They’re standing on glacial till deposited in the last ice age, and below them are the grains of sand from the Iapetus Ocean that became mudstone and siltstone, then pelite and shale and Silurodevonian granite. Twenty-five miles beneath Castiel lies a layer of Precambrian gneiss, a sheet of ancient dust pressed into solid stone nearly four billion years ago, when the ocean was wide and God himself wasn’t that old. That stone, Castiel knows, is Earth’s oldest shield: the last solid barrier between humanity and the planet’s molten core. He thinks about this as he watches Dean load guns into the trunk of his car, his boots planted in soft red earth carried here 10,000 years ago by a river of ice.

“Ready?” Dean says, turning back to face Cas.

Castiel thinks about the God who watched the continents form, who watched the planet eat itself a thousand times and heal a thousand more, the God who Castiel knows once wasn’t dead. He looks at Dean, who knows none of this and came with him anyway to trap an archangel on earth, and thinks: How could I be?

“Yes,” he says.

<>

“Wait,” Dean says. “Let me get this right. You can fly, right—you can teleport—but you can’t drive a car?”

They’re sitting in the empty parking lot of an ice cream shop, across the road from St. Peter’s Hospital. Dean drove them here after they left the house of prostitution, to wait for the sun to rise and the meeting with Raphael to “go down.” Castiel, still caught up in the pangs of regret and panic he brought away from the bar, has spent his last hours on earth contemplating the profound and mundane limits of his earthly knowledge.

“I thought she would appreciate the information,” he told Dean, trying to create in words a world in which he didn’t ruin Dean’s terrifying act of kindness, and Dean laughed and said, “Oh, dude, big mistake.”

“I don’t think I understand women,” Castiel said then, and Dean threw back his head and laughed, and Castiel felt a portion of the darkness inside him evaporate.

Dean started quizzing him after that, asking about things he’s done, talking about something he calls a “bucket list.” Castiel doesn’t know what the bucket is for, but Dean’s apparently contains people and places and food: a musician named Springsteen in Concert, the Chevrolet Hall of Fame in Decatur, the 1,800 pound burger at Mallie’s Sports. He asks Castiel if he’s ever been to the Grand Canyon, and Castiel tells him he witnessed its creation. Dean says okay, but did you ever hike it, and Castiel has to shake his head.

It’s in this way that Dean learns that Castiel has never driven a car—a fact which Cas thinks shouldn’t surprise him, but it does. They’re sitting on the hood of the car together, gazing out across Highwood Avenue at the glowing windows of the hospital, and Dean twists his whole body around to face Cas, telegraphing his shock.

“Why would I,” Cas points out. “I’ve never had the need.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “but—dude, what if somebody, like, zaps your wings? What’re you gonna do, huh, take a bus?”

Cas shrugs. “Probably. I think it’s far more likely that Raphael will kill me outright.”

He sees a flicker of pain cross Dean’s face; this conversation made him uncomfortable before. Castiel wonders about that. “I’m not talking about that,” he says. “I just meant—hypothetically. In a hypothetical world where you get your angel mojo un-mojoed, or whatever, you’d just—buy a bus ticket?”

Castiel isn’t sure what he’s admitting to, here. He thought bus travel was common. “I suppose.”

“Jesus,” Dean says, turning back to face the hospital. “That’s just wrong.”

They’re silent for a moment, spinning in their own private worlds. The lights are off inside the ice cream shop—it’s nearly dawn, and nobody buys ice cream at dawn—but the lamps above the Dairy Queen sign are blazing, and Castiel is watching the yellow light flow over Dean’s head and shoulders as he leans back on the hood of his car, still warm from the engine’s labor. Even now, looking at Dean’s body is like looking at a miracle. Castiel wonders if he’s aware that he’s the only thing in Waterville, Maine born entirely of God’s will.

“Listen,” Dean says suddenly, breaking the silence. “I don’t know what it’s gonna be like in there. I know you said—well, I know what you said. But I think,” he says, puffing up with that bizarre confidence he always seems to pull from nowhere, “I think we’re gonna make it. And if I’m right, if we do—” He turns to look at Cas again, a grin dawning across his face. “If we do, I’m gonna teach an angel of the lord to drive stick.”

Castiel has no idea why—he’s not quite sure what those words in that order mean—but this thought seems to give Dean hope. Castiel doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t have a human soul, that thing that seems to trap hope so unfailingly it feels like a flaw in the design.

The sun is feet from the eastern horizon.

“Okay,” he tells Dean.

<>

Twenty-five miles north of Waterville is a town called Canaan. When colonists first settled on the banks of the Kennebec, they used the native word for the place they built: Wesserunsett. Not long after, though, deciding that that long name was not worth the labor of speaking or writing it, they looked at the bright green fields laid all around their stolen home, imagined a similarly verdant place of rest waiting for them at life’s end, and named the new town after the Promised Land.

Canaan, of course, looks nothing like Heaven, really. Heaven is vast and multidimensional; Canaan is a ten-room motel, two grocery stores, and two churches along the length of US Highway 2. But outside Canaan, between the highway and the lake, is a wide field of grass and purple violets, which Dean pronounces “perfect.” He pulls off the road into the field, and Castiel feels the solid, assuring weight of asphalt give way to the uncertainty of earth.

“Okay,” Dean says. He gets out of the car, and motions for Castiel to do the same. Cas does, turning cautiously to scan the field around them.

“There’s no road here,” he points out. He’s never tried it before, but he always assumed that a road was essential to driving.

“That’s the point,” Dean says. “You can’t start on the road, you’re gonna get yourself killed. Gotta start where there’s nothing to run into.” He gestures at the expanse around them. “Like so. That’s how my dad taught me.”

Dean doesn’t talk about his father. Castiel has noticed. He’s never seen John Winchester; tries to imagine Dean as a child, standing in a field like this with the man who withstood one hundred years of Hell. He can’t picture it. But then, imagination has never come easily to him.

“Come on,” Dean says, waving a hand for Cas to come around the car. Castiel obeys, walking around to the open driver’s seat as Dean circles to where Cas just was. They both sit down inside, pulling the doors shut, and Dean says, “Okay. So. Let’s start at the beginning.”

He talks Cas through the controls of the car, laying his hand on the dashboard as he talks, identifying the levers and pedals and dials with gentle, nearly reverent touches, watching Castiel’s face to make sure that he’s taking it all in. Castiel tries to concentrate, thinks he understands what he’s being told, but he has no place to anchor this information. That’s the clutch, Dean says, and Castiel nods and thinks, clutch, and thinks about gripping Dean tight. The clutch.

“You got it?” Dean asks. Castiel doesn’t feel he has anything.

“Of course.”

Dean beams. Cas can’t find it in himself to regret the lie.

“Go ahead and put your hands on the wheel,” Dean says. This turns out to be more complicated than Castiel anticipated. He does it wrong, apparently, the first time, because Dean frowns and says, “No, you gotta—ten o’clock and two o’clock, Cas,” and when Cas asks what that means Dean says to picture a clock, and Castiel doesn’t see what relevance that has to driving a car. In the end, Dean takes Castiel’s hands in both of his, and puts them onto the steering wheel in the right position. He sits back in satisfaction, nodding.

“Okay. Okay.” Castiel’s heart is pounding like a hummingbird’s. It’s not the same fear he felt last night. He doesn’t know what it is. Dean tells him where to put his feet, says okay, clutch first, keep it in neutral, and Cas pushes down with what was once Jimmy Novak’s left foot and then his right, feels the engine rumble to life, and lets go when Dean says okay, now.

He breaks the car. Or, that’s what it feels like at first: a heavy, surely cataclysmic crash of machinery that throws both of them back against the seat. He sees Dean grimace and gets ready to apologize, but Dean just says, “Okay, kind of rough start, but that’s fine—try it again.”

“I’m not sure I should,” Cas says. It sounded like the engine cracked. He thinks Dean may have underestimated his ignorance here. But Dean says no, try again, so Cas puts his feet back on the pedals and focuses every particle of his celestial consciousness on easing the pressure on and off in perfect unison the way Dean tells him, hands rigid at ten and two on the clock-wheel, and the four thousand pounds of steel beneath them roll approximately ten inches over the grass before Castiel’s focus falters, and the engine grinds to another explosive, neck-wrenching halt.

“You suck at this,” Dean says. His patience as an instructor, apparently, has been exhausted.

“Of course I suck at this,” Cas says, hearing the panic in his own voice. “I’m an angel.”

He expects the lesson to be over then—clearly, he isn’t going to learn this—but Dean just chuckles instead, caught up in another burst of unearned optimism, and says, “Try it again, little slower this time.”

For half an hour, Cas jolts the car in short, violent circles around the field, struggling to follow Dean’s directions and feeling sweat build up on his palms and the back of his shirt. The longest he’s able to drive in one smooth line lasts about one minute and forty-five seconds, long enough for Dean to lose his look of consternation and break out in a grin, raising his hands in celebration just as Cas accidentally pushes down on the wrong pedal and sends them screeching to a halt.

“Hey,” Dean says, once he’s recovered from the physical shock, “at least you’re getting better.”

“I’m not,” Cas tells him. He can feel an odd, nauseous constriction at the back of his throat; he wonders if it’s possible for a being that doesn’t eat or digest to vomit. “I’m not good at this, Dean. I won’t be good at this.”

“Listen,” Dean says, “if Sam could learn, so can you.”

“Sam’s very intelligent.”

“And you’re not?”

“Sam’s human.”

“Since when does that matter?” Dean asks.

Cas stares at him. Of course it matters. It’s always mattered. “I don’t know how,” he says. His hands are shaking.

“Hey,” Dean says, “hey.” He reaches over and lays his hand over Castiel’s, still on the steering wheel. His skin is warm and callused. Castiel feels the blood vessels in his cheeks and neck dilating.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Dean. He knows, without quite understanding, that what they’re doing is important to Dean, somehow, and he’s fucked it up. He did the same last night, with the woman whose name wasn’t Chastity, whose father loved her in the same unknowable way that Dean’s father loved him. He didn’t want to do it again. Cas, who is living after death in the body of a man so devout he offered his whole self to the possession of God’s soldier, knows that the machine he’s sitting in is a part of the strange, ardent little faith Dean practices, a religion with three apostles, a virgin, and no god. Sitting here with Dean’s hand on his own, sweating and shaking at the helm of this unholy ark, he feels blasphemous.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“You can do this, Cas,” Dean says. “Look, I get you’re, like, superpowered, or whatever, I know you don’t need to. But did you ever think—maybe it’s just been a really long time since you learned something new?” He pauses, frowning, searching for the right words. “I don’t care if you can’t drive, man,” he says finally. “But I know you can learn. Right? I believe in you, Cas.”

Twelve hours ago, Dean stood side by side with Cas in the light of Raphael’s wings and heard him say that God died centuries ago. Dean heard it, and told Cas to go looking anyway.

Cas looks at him, at the freckles scattered over his nose, the serious little pinch between his brows, the soft ghost of a smile on his face even though Cas has surely damaged his car by now, even though God is dead and his neck must hurt and Sam’s taking a vacation from being Dean’s brother, the other half of his world. Dean looks back at him, raises his eyebrows, and grins.

“One more time?”

#destiel #deancas #destiel fic #deancas fic #castiel

[calzona-ga]

She might change her mind; she certainly has before. But midway through an interview, Ellen Pompeo casually drops the bomb that after more than 360 episodes, the upcoming 17th season of “Grey’s Anatomy” may be its last.

“We don’t know when the show is really ending yet,” Pompeo says, answering a question that was not at all about when the show might end. “But the truth is, this year could be it.”

Pompeo has played Meredith Grey — the superstar surgeon around whom “Grey’s Anatomy” revolves — since its start. The show, created by Shonda Rhimes, premiered on ABC on March 27, 2005, and became an immediate, noisy hit. Since then, for a remarkably long time in Hollywood years, the drama has been among the most popular series on TV, even as the landscape of television has changed seismically. At its Season 2 ratings height, the program drew an average audience of 20 million viewers. And all these years later — in a TV universe now divided by more than 500 scripted shows —“Grey’s” ranks as the No. 1 drama among 18- to 34- year-olds and No. 2 among adults 18 to 49. In delayed, multiplatform viewing, Season 16 averaged 15 million viewers.

Strikingly, technology is such that teenagers who were born when the show premiered, and later binged “Grey’s” on Netflix, watch new episodes live with their parents. The series has spawned two successful spinoffs for ABC, “Private Practice” (which ran from 2007 to 2013) and “Station 19” (which enters its fourth season this fall). “Grey’s Anatomy” has been licensed in more than 200 territories across the world, translated into more than 60 languages, and catapulted the careers of music artists — from Ingrid Michaelson and Snow Patrol to Tegan and Sara and the Fray — whose songs have played during key emotional sequences.

In its explosive initial success, “Grey’s Anatomy” was an insurgent force in popular culture. The Season 1 cast featured three Black actors — Chandra Wilson, James Pickens Jr. and Isaiah Washington — as doctors in positions of power at the Seattle hospital where the show is set, and Sandra Oh played the ambitious intern Cristina Yang, who would become Meredith’s best friend. For the women characters, the “Grey’s” approach to sex was defiant and joyful, starting in the pilot with Meredith’s one-night stand with Derek (Patrick Dempsey), who turned out to be one of her bosses at the hospital.

Rhimes presented these images to the world like they were no big deal, when in fact, nothing like “Grey’s” had ever been seen on network television. Krista Vernoff has been the “Grey’s Anatomy” showrunner since Season 14, as anointed by Rhimes, and was the head writer for the first seven seasons. She remembers the moment she realized how radical “Grey’s” was — a medical show driven entirely by its characters instead of their surgeries — as she watched an episode early in Season 1. “My whole body was covered in chills,” Vernoff recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, we thought we were making a sweet little medical show — and we’re making a revolution.’”

Still, no one expected “Grey’s Anatomy” to become the longest-running primetime medical drama in TV history, outlasting “MASH” and “ER,” the previous record-holder. Since 2005, “Grey’s” has inspired countless women to become doctors, and along the way, its depiction of illness has even saved a few lives. The show has remained popular through three presidential administrations, the Great Recession, tectonic shifts in how people watch TV and two cultural reckonings — one feminist, one anti-racist — that demonstrate how ahead of its time “Grey’s Anatomy” has always been.

And they’re not done yet. When Season 17 premieres on Nov. 12, “Grey’s Anatomy” will tackle the subject of the coronavirus as experienced by the doctors at Grey Sloan Memorial, all while filming under strict COVID-19 protocols. The season is dedicated to frontline workers. And Pompeo, a producer on “Grey’s” — whose Meredith has removed a live bomb from a patient’s body, was in a plane crash, was widowed after Derek died in a car accident, was beaten nearly to death by a patient and, in a separate incident, actually did die briefly after a ferry accident — is intent on making the show top itself once again.

“I’m constantly fighting for the show as a whole to be as good as it can be. As a producer, I feel like I have permission to be able to do that,” Pompeo says. “I mean, this is the last year of my contract right now. I don’t know that this is the last year? But it could very well could be.”

Pompeo has been refreshingly transparent about her fight to become the highest-paid female actor on television, having detailed a few years ago how she negotiated a paycheck for more than $20 million a year. She clearly knows what she’s doing with these frank pronouncements as well.

As Pompeo laughs over the phone from her car, she says in a near shout: “There’s your sound bite! There’s your clickbait! ABC’s on the phone!”

The “Grey’s Anatomy” team — led by Rhimes and executive producer Betsy Beers — created the first season in a vacuum, because the show did not have an airdate. The 2004-05 season was a comeback year for ABC because “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost,” both of which debuted that fall, became phenomena — not only ratings successes but also watercooler events.

But at “Grey’s,” Rhimes was getting noted to death by network president Steve McPherson. According to Vernoff, McPherson — who resigned in 2010 under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations — stonewalled with “pushback every step of the way,” as ABC’s then- head of drama, Suzanne Patmore Gibbs, fought for the show. Vernoff was close with Patmore Gibbs, who died in 2018, and recalls her talking about her clashes with McPherson.

“He just didn’t get it; he didn’t like it,” Vernoff continues. “Honestly, I’m going to say, I don’t think he liked the ambitious women having sex unapologetically.”

Wilson, when she was cast as Miranda Bailey on “Grey’s,” was a New York theater actor (“Caroline, or Change”) relatively new to series television. But she was well aware of the network’s issues. “We took a creative break around the Christmas holiday, which to me meant ‘Oh, we’re out of a job.’”

Pompeo was frustrated: “Once we finally got an airdate, two weeks before that airdate they wanted to change the title of the show to ‘Complications.’”

In an email to Variety, McPherson disputed these assertions, saying, “I made the original deal with Shonda. I developed ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ at the studio. I picked it up at ABC.” He praised Patmore Gibbs, and added, “As for defaming me again and again, I don’t know what to say other than it’s sad that anyone feels the need to spread lies about me.”

Yet there was so little faith in the show that the writers were asked to clear out their offices when they finished the season. But to Vernoff, who had clicked right away with Rhimes, the early episodes had “felt like a labor of love.”

And it was worth the battle. “We fought for the right for Meredith and Bailey to be whole human beings, with whole sex lives, and not a network TV idea of likable,” Vernoff says. “You might not have been likable, but now you’re iconic.”

As far as the medicine went, the cases were often ostentatious. “Every kind of crazy accident that had ever caused terrible harm to any human ever, that was our homework at night,” Vernoff says. It was up to Zoanne Clack, an emergency room doctor-turned-writer, to be a sounding board in the writers’ room. She began as the only doctor on staff during the first season, and is now an executive producer. “What was interesting was that the writers don’t have those boundaries because they don’t know the rules, so they would come up with all of these scenarios, and my immediate thought was like, ‘No way!’” Clack says. “Then I’d have to think about it and go, ‘But could it?’”

When the program finally premiered — on a Sunday night after “Desperate Housewives” — to massive ratings, it was a shock to the cast and crew, given that they had shot the first season under a cloud, Pompeo says, adding, “So the fact that the numbers were that huge the first time we aired was a big f–k-you to McPherson!”

With Season 2 now a given, everything changed, Vernoff says: “It was like a hurricane-force gale, and everyone was just trying to hold on.” They had made 13 episodes for Season 1, airing nine of them and holding the final four for Season 2 — Meredith finding out that Derek was actually married (to Addison, played by Kate Walsh) had felt like the perfect finale. But upon the writers’ return, Vernoff says, the feeling was “Holy s—. We have to make 22.”

The entire cast — mostly unknown actors like Katherine Heigl as the sunny Izzie Stevens, T.R. Knight as the chummy neurotic George O’Malley, and Justin Chambers as the troubled, secretly vulnerable Alex Karev — had become famous overnight. For Wilson, whose Bailey was the stern teacher the interns called “the Nazi,” it was a new experience. “Folks were scared to talk to me, like in the store or in the Target — people would just kind of leave me alone,” she says. “It was like, ‘What’s going on?’”

According to Vernoff, “Paparazzi were following the cast to work — it was wild.”

The mid- to late-2000s were the height of glossy gossip magazines such as Us Weekly (and its copycats), as well as the inception of TMZ and Perez Hilton as celebrity-hounding, news-breaking forces that fueled (and soiled) the fame-industrial complex. The cast of “Grey’s Anatomy” was firmly in the sights of these new, often toxic forces in media.

Pompeo says the cast was so talented that it “was all worth it” — but yes, the transition to stardom was hard for the group: “At the time, it was just a real combination of exhaustion and stress and drama. Actors competing with each other — and envious.”

Heigl, Knight and Isaiah Washington all went through press cycles that made the show seem scandal-prone. To rehash it all now seems pointless; you can look it up. Washington was fired in June 2007. Knight and Heigl asked to be written out of the show preemptively, in Seasons 5 and 6, respectively.

Vernoff and the other writers were watching the internal messes unfold. They had to deal with how the fallout affected the show’s plot, as when Washington was fired just as Burke, his character, was about to marry Cristina. “When word comes down that an actor is leaving the show, and what you’ve got scripted is a wedding …” Vernoff trails off, laughing.

“There was a lot of drama on-screen and drama off-screen, and young people navigating intense stardom for the first time in their lives,” she continues. “I think that a lot of those actors, if they could go back in time and talk to their younger selves, it would be a different thing. Everybody’s grown and changed and evolved — but it was an intense time.”

Pompeo doesn’t want to talk about what happened with individual actors from the show, because when she has in the past, “it doesn’t get received in the way in which I intend it to be.” But she does make a point about the way television is produced. “Nobody should be working 16 hours a day, 10 months a year — nobody,” she says. “And it’s just causing people to be exhausted, pissed, sad, depressed. It’s a really, really unhealthy model. And I hope post-COVID nobody ever goes back to 24 or 22 episodes a season.

“It’s why people get sick. It’s why people have breakdowns. It’s why actors fight! You want to get rid of a lot of bad behavior? Let people go home and sleep.”

Debbie Allen would eventually be Pompeo’s savior in that regard, but that was years away. Allen — an actor and a dancer — began her directing career when she was on the 1980s TV series “Fame” as a “natural progression” because, she says, “I was in charge of the musical numbers, and so many directors didn’t really know how to shoot them.” She went on to be a prolific director and producer, most notably overhauling NBC’s “A Different World” after a tumultuous first season. As a fan of “Grey’s Anatomy,” Allen wanted to work on the show, and in Season 6, she was hired to direct. To prepare for it, Allen shadowed Wilson, who had been tapped to direct by executive producer-director Rob Corn. (“He came to me and said, ‘You should direct,’” says Wilson, who has now helmed 21 episodes. “And I said, ‘OK.’ Because I didn’t know what else to say.”)

Directing that sixth-season episode led to Allen’s fruitful relationship with “Grey’s.” In Season 8, Rhimes wrote Allen into the show to play Catherine, a star surgeon, a love interest for Richard Webber (Pickens) and the mother of Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams). Ahead of Season 12 in 2015, Allen became the show’s EP/director. Her duties included hiring all of the directors, weighing in on scripts and casting, and, as Allen puts it, “minding that people feel good about themselves.” Several years before the revived #MeToo movement would lead to calls for systemic changes behind the camera in Hollywood, Allen set a goal of hiring 50% women directors. She also increased the number of Black men who directed “Grey’s” during her first season as executive producer, among them Denzel Washington. (When she sold him on it, she recounts, he said to her, “I’m going to say yes, Debbie Allen.”)

Pompeo and Allen are close. Allen began her new role the year after Dempsey left, “at a time when we were really broken,” Pompeo says. “And so much of our problems were perpetuated by bad male management. Debbie came in at a time when we really, really needed a breath of fresh air, and some new positive energy.”

Pompeo continues with a laugh: “Debbie really brought in a spirit to the show that we had never seen — we had never seen optimism! We had never seen celebration. We had never seen joy!”

According to Pompeo, Allen began advocating for her to have more humane hours — Fridays off (Pompeo: “And I was like, ‘What? What? Fridays off?’”) — and for the show to shoot 12-hour days maximum, and ideally no more than 10 hours (Pompeo: “And I was like, I love this woman.”).

Allen speaks affectionately about her bond with Pompeo. “Coming out of Boston, she’s so earthy and real in a way that you might not know,” Allen says. “There’s a sisterhood between us — I guess you would say it’s almost a Blackness that exists between us. And she’s part of our tribe.”

Allen has been a key member of the “Grey’s Anatomy” brain trust since Season 12, and two seasons later, Vernoff returned to run the show. She’d left at the end of Season 7, consulted on “Private Practice” for a few years, and then went to Showtime’s “Shameless” for five seasons. As her contract was set to expire, Rhimes asked Vernoff to lunch, and told her she wanted her to take over. “It felt like she was saying, ‘Hey, our kid needs you,’” Vernoff says.

Before accepting the offer, Vernoff had to catch up on the show. She had always written “Grey’s” as a romantic comedy, and what she saw on-screen during her binge was dark as hell — especially after Derek’s death. “If this show that you are currently making is the show that you want ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ to be,” she recalls telling Rhimes, “I am, in fact, not the right writer for it.” But Rhimes was insistent, saying it was time for a change after the mourning period for Derek.

Vanessa Delgado, who started as a production intern during the seventh season and has worked her way up to being lead editor and co-producer, says the show’s trajectory shifted when Vernoff came back — it was a return to the original, saucier tone of “Grey’s.” “We changed the music completely,” Delgado says. “The dialogue felt lighter and more fun, and wewere having fun again.”

That lightness will be difficult to maintain this year, of course, when, as Allen puts it, “COVID is No. 1 on the call sheet right now.”

Vernoff at first wondered whether “Grey’s” should ignore the coronavirus, thinking the audience comes to the show “for relief.” But the doctors in the writers’ room convinced her this wasn’t the time for escapism, saying to her, “This is the biggest medical story of our lifetime, and it is changing medicine permanently.”

When they’ve had doctors and nurses come speak with them this season, Vernoff says, “they were different human beings than the people we’ve been talking to every year. And I want to honor that, tonally. I just want to inspire people to take care of each other.”

Pompeo, who is not shy about offering criticism, sounds positively enthusiastic: “I’ll say the pilot episode to this season — girl, hold on.

“What nobody thinks we can continue to do, we have done. Hold on. That’s all we’re going to say about that!”

Pompeo has a few more months before she decides whether she wants to continue — and as Rhimes and ABC have made clear in recent years, the show will likely end when she leaves. “I don’t take the decision lightly,” Pompeo says. “We employ a lot of people, and we have a huge platform. And I’m very grateful for it.”

“You know, I’m just weighing out creatively what can we do,” she says. “I’m really, really, really excited about this season. It’s probably going to be one of our best seasons ever. And I know that sounds nuts to say, but it’s really true.”

Vernoff doesn’t worry about the creative well drying up. “We’ve blown past so many potential endings to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ that I always assume it can go on forever,” she says.

And Wilson knows how important “Grey’s” is to its audience, in that the characters have essentially become people who “live in their house.” As one of only three actors who’ve been on “Grey’s” since the beginning — the other is James Pickens Jr. — Wilson is in it until the end: “In my mind, Bailey is there until the doors close, until the hospital burns down, until the last thing happens on ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ That is her entire arc.”

Whenever the show does conclude, part of its legacy will be about the talent it launched into the world, beginning with Rhimes, who will soon release her first shows for Netflix, after her company, Shondaland, made a lucrative deal with the streamer in 2017.

But it will also be about the characters of “Grey’s Anatomy”— mostly women and people of color — who are trying to make the world a better place as they find friendship, love and community.

“The show, at its core, brings people together,” Pompeo says. “And the fact that people can come together and watch the show, and think about things they may not have ordinarily thought about, or see things normalized and humanized in a way that a lot of people really need to see — it helps you become a better human being. If this show has helped anybody become a better human being, then that’s the legacy I’d love to sit with.”

#grey's anatomy #Ellen Pompeo #chandra wilson #Debbie Allen #krista vernoff #season 17 #variety #news

[flannelpunkcalum]

The Devil Wears Kevlar - Part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

biiiiiiiiiiig picture of Cal there huh? anyway hi welcome to part 4! it’s moving along slowly but surely i promise you. as always if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to direct them my way! word count for this chapter is about 4k 

Aspen is shaky for the rest of that morning. Why shouldn’t she be? She’s had to face a number of terrible things about her city today, and now Mr. Hood - it’s not a good situation to be in.

She hates the idea of having to suck up to mobsters or her boss to keep herself safe. It’s not that she can’t, she knows she can be sweet and subservient if she has to, it’s just she wishes she had a choice. She knew she’d have to sacrifice for this position when she moved to Gotham and all, but- not like this.

She hasn’t had much time, but she’s been thinking about it all morning and she thinks that her best course of action is to lay low as best she can. Play nice. She can’t afford to get any more attention from mobsters, or… even if Calum wasn’t involved with this, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t do something like that, or worse.

She shouldn’t be playing with that shit anyway. Flirting with her boss- even a little… it was so dangerous. Even trying to get a little more of a casual relationship could be too much. She supposed that was why he insisted on formalities all the time. Aspen had hated it at first, but maybe he knew what he was doing.

No more jokes, then. No more tagging along. No more working for his smile.

This was all awfully heavy for 8 am.

Nervous or not, Aspen has a job to do. It’s simple, but it’s hers. So she gets coffee and makes sure Mr. Hood’s schedule is written down, just in case he’s not so angry and he thinks they’re useful. She’s waiting in the lobby at 8:30, like she has for every new morning since she started the job.

It seems like every day now she’s waking up different, coming to work different, leaving work different. The ground under her feet is shifting, now, like a panic of tectonic plates, and she can’t get used to it. Every hour on the hour she’s having an epiphany about herself, or the city, and it’s getting fucking old. She wouldn’t have called her position as a research scientist in one of the world’s most advanced companies somewhere she could enjoy ignorance, but now… two weeks ago she had been half-blind, and she’s still not sure if that was a bad thing. It makes her feel hollow, this chaos. It’s not right.

Her reverie is interrupted by Mr. Hood’s car arriving, and she checks her watch. 8:35. Hmm. He’s late.

Yesterday, Aspen would for sure have teased him about it. Today, she just says “Good morning, sir,” and hands him his drink.

He nods, and they move into the elevator. There’s still so much unsaid between them, but Aspen buries the buzzing in her head as they rocket up to the top floor. She had thought about handing him a blank page and telling him it was invisible ink, because that would be fucking hilarious, but she doesn’t, of course, because she’s acting like a professional now. She tells him about his day like usual, and if he notices that anything’s changed his face doesn’t show it.

“Miss McMichael,” he says, instead, “could you send Liam in to see me as soon as he arrives? Thank you.” And he looks to his computer monitor. Aspen can tell when she’s dismissed.

While she waits for the phones to ring, she checks out Paige’s article. She always sends Aspen links to shit she’s published, because they both know it’s the only way Aspen’s gonna stay informed, but this time Aspen’s feeling desperate for news as she scans the story. Falcone was in the hospital, she learns, and the police say it was similar to the Sionis CEO thing a few weeks back. She’s so wrapped up in it that she almost doesn’t notice when Liam comes in.

Liam. Fuck.

Liam’s obviously in trouble. Aspen would have realized it earlier if she hadn’t been so freaked out by this kidnapping. And there’s a stupid part of her that still thinks they can be friends again, maybe, even though she knows now that’s got a price she doesn’t know if she can pay.

God, she’s gonna go crazy in this job.

Aspen can’t believe she stood up to a gangster and not to Liam Payne (well, Liam is bigger, but that’s not the point). So she makes herself stand up and move towards his office, tapping a knuckle on the glass walls. “Mr. Payne?”

Liam looks up from where he’s taking his coat off. It’s barely 9 am and he looks pissed at her. “What do you want?”

Aspen has to steady herself with a deep breath. There’s no going back after this, she thinks. “Mr. Hood wants to speak with you.”

Liam’s annoyance disappears into something unreadable. He barely hesitates before he’s brushing past Aspen, on his way to see the CEO.

Somehow it still feels a little like she’s betraying him.

Aspen sits back down at her desk and tries to amuse herself (she’s a simple woman, she’s not built for this type of corporate stress and office politics). It wasn’t something she said, was it? Cal- um, Mr. Hood, he wouldn’t do this for her. He doesn’t even know about the bruising. Things might be scary and confusing right now, but one thing she knows is that she doesn’t want Liam to get in shit for something she said. She already feels guilty. She can’t shake the feeling out of her lungs.

She waves to Janice as soon as she comes in, but she can’t get Liam out of her head and as soon as he comes out of Mr. Hood’s office she knows her worry wasn’t misplaced. For two weeks he’s been catching her eye and glaring at her but all of a sudden he won’t look at her at all. Aspen locks her eyes on her monitor, but she can see him starting to gather up his things and her stomach plummets. He’s fired, then, and… it’s her fault, probably. She doesn’t think that’s her being crazy paranoid this time, what else could it be? Why else would Liam have started to shun her?

The phone rings. She’s almost grateful until she sees it’s Calum. “Yes, sir?”

“Can you send Janice in to see me as soon as Liam clears his office?”

Fuck. Does he expect her to just be fine with being told someone’s being fired right in front of her like that, especially when it’s so blatant? Not to ask any questions? It’s clearly about the Falcone thing yesterday; what, is she next? Aspen isn’t the kind of person who’s just gonna watch this happen and wait for it to hit her.

Except now she has to be.

“Absolutely, sir.” She says.

“Thank you.”

She hangs up and hates being professional a little bit more.

Liam hauls his stuff out in due time, and Aspen has to gather her courage to look at him on his way out. He’s still ignoring her, as if the walls between them aren’t fucking glass. She wishes he was acting angry, because this time she knows she deserves it, but somehow she thinks this is worse.

She lets herself mourn for a few seconds before she stands up and heads to Janice’s desk. “Um, Mr. Hood asked to see you after Liam left.” She says, trying not to colour her words with fear. Janice can’t be getting fired, right? She wasn’t involved. This has got to be something else.

Janice looks just as unsure as Aspen feels as she stands up, heads into their boss’ office.

It’s stupid, but after everything… it feels like things are crumbling.

Aspen knows it’s silly to feel this way. Nothing has really changed; in fact, she should be thankful that Liam’s not going to be glaring at her across the lobby. Shit, though, she can’t get out of her goddamn head about this. If he kept her from getting herself into trouble… she hates the way he went about it, but she thinks she might owe him. She has to do something.

Janice gets promoted to Liam’s old job, though, so at least the whole world isn't falling to shit.

Aspen’s busy answering emails and also she's nervous, so she gives it a little time before she makes her move. She reaches out for the phone, but she can't bring herself to pick it up. After a long moment, she stands and walks over to the office.

She knocks, of course she does, but she's pretty sure he knows it's her before he says “It's open!” Who else would it be, knocking without calling for an appointment or anything? Her position is unique; she's just trying to remember to be thankful for it.

It occurs to her that maybe he's tired of having her stand up to him like this. She's headstrong, she knows, she's been told it's a fault of hers. Still, this isn't actually, like, her career, right?

“How can I help you?” Mr. Hood asks, and she realizes she's gone too long without speaking.

“I was just wondering about Liam.”

He glances up and gives her a steady look. “I'm sure there's nothing I can tell you that you haven't already figured out for yourself.”

Oh. So does that mean it is her fault? And wait, why won't he tell her? What is she supposed to think from that? “I don't want rumour. I want to hear it from you, sir.” She says, finally.

Mr. Hood signs, like he was expecting that. “I moved Liam to manage the sales team because- let me see your arm.”

Aspen jerked back half an inch. “What?”

“I want to see where Liam grabbed you yesterday.”

Aspen panics, just a little. “He didn’t. I never said he grabbed me.” She says, as Calum stands up and moves out from behind his desk.

“I know, because you didn't want me to know. Janice told me.” He stops a few feet away from her, far enough so she doesn't feel attacked. She thinks the distance is carefully calculated. “I'm not gonna make you show me.” He sighs. “But I'd like it if you did.”

Aspen- what the fuck is she supposed to do with that? He's close, all of a sudden, at least for an office, and he's giving her this look with his baby browns that makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Fuck. Liam’s already been demoted, though, it's not like this would hurt him more… she knows when she’s lost. She rolls her eyes and yanks her sleeve up, sticking out her elbow all petulant. She knows there are small blue dots in the hollows around her bones, she took care to wear something long-sleeves today because of ‘em. Guess that didn’t work out.

“It's not as bad as it looks, sir, I bruise real easy.” She lies as Calum reaches out and cups her elbow, turning it gently to look at the bruising. She can feel her heartbeat in her ears.

“Mmm.”

“Like a peach.”

“That so?” He meets her eyes for a long moment before letting go of her. All of a sudden, Aspen has to catch her breath. The places he touched feel warm, even as she rolls the sleeve of her sweater down. He doesn't look flustered, not like she feels. She knows she just decided to repress all her feelings for him, but god, he is very good looking and he's being very soft and she thinks she might fall over. She knows her eyes are wide open right now.

“I can't have someone hurting you, or any of my employees.” He explains, taking a step back. Aspen knows they were a little close for a big professional office, but she feels kind of bummed anyway.

“You think Don Falcone wasn't prepared to hurt me?” She counters, eyebrows raised. Her voice is soft. “Liam did keep me from making my worst enemy so far. Which is saying something. Sir.”

It's meant to be funny, and it works; Mr. Hood smiles a little. “I know he did. That's the only reason I didn't fire him outright.”

Aspen wants to think of herself as kind of a cool customer, but when Mr. Hood says “fire” like that her stomach flips. “Okay, but- he was in kind of a tough situation there, and I- I mean, I'm pretty stubborn, I'm hard to move, and-” Mr. Hood mostly looks amused at this point, and Aspen gets it. She's not making good human sense, she's a mess, she barely remembers what she came here to do. “I'm sorry, I know you already did what you had to do. I just-” She sighs. “I’ll head. Sorry to waste your time. Sir.”

He looks amused, that asshole. Aspen can't quite find it in her to hate him this time, though. “You're really having a rough time with that today, aren't you?”

“I really am.” Aspen agrees. She shrugs. “Oh, also Trident Incorporated sent the contract for you to look over. I already forwarded it to the legal department but I'm gonna print a copy for you in just a sec.”

Mr. Hood - Mr. Calum Hood, CEO - sticks his tongue out. Aspen may be having a stroke. She's never seen- what the fuck-

Her surprise must show, because Mr. Hood shrugs at her. He looks bashful. “The last time we tried doing business with them, they wound up sharing some schematics with a competitor and a loophole let them get away with it. It was not… it wasn't honourable practice, but- anyway. Please tell the legal department to be careful going through the contract. It should take at least a few days. I mean that.”

“I will tell them so specifically, sir.” Aspen says, heading out of the office.

So, staying away from Calum… that kind of failed miserably. But he is her boss, that was mission impossible in the first place. Aspen knows she hasn't touched him like that before, though, and worse- she hadn't minded. Fuck her traitor heart, honestly, and him, for being so good-looking all the damn time in those goddamn suits- she's not even in to suits, and yet… here they are.

She doesn't let herself think too hard about how it felt for him to hold even one small part of her; she'll get no work done if she does.

Plus she also doesn't think about him sticking out his tongue because it's possible she wants to sit on it.

Fuck.

She takes a deep breath and makes herself focus on what it is she's doing. Writing an email, that was it. You know, to lawyers. God, she hates the ditzy secretary stereotype, but she's feeling it now. Maybe it comes from the boredom.

That might be why it surprises her so much when the phone rings a few hours later. Not the office phone, her phone, it starts buzzing in her pocket. Aspen knows that she's a professional and she shouldn't, but when she looks at her phone and sees Beth’s name at the top of the screen, she caves and answers in half a second. “Hey!”

“Yeah, hi, I'm looking for Aspen McMichael? Um, she's new up there, she got a promotion and didn't give her friends her extension, um, she probably has unbrushed hair and a wardrobe from-”

“Okay! God, I'm sorry.” Aspen laughs. “I missed you. I haven't taken a lunch break in years.”

“I know! I've been stuck with the boys- come visit. Please. Let's go out for lunch.”

“I dunno if I can… I'll let Mr. Hood know, I'll call you back.”

“Hurry, if you can, I want to go to Coco’s.” Beth’s voice sounds light, happy- Aspen had missed her, goddamn it, Beth was more than just a work friend. This executive office is like a weird little bubble, and Beth has always been the reality check she needed.

And Aspen does love Coco’s.

“I will. I'll call you back in two minutes, okay?” They say their goodbyes for the moment, and Aspen hangs up.

This is gonna be tricky, because (like an idiot) she hasn't taken a proper lunch break in ages. She's just been busy, and working through lunch keeps things easy, okay? Now she thinks maybe her boss has gotten used to it. He doesn't take a lunch break unless he's meeting a client, usually, but he also gets to go home to a butler and a mansion, so she figures she deserves this.

To be honest she doesn't think Mr. Hood will keep her from going out, but she'd just gotten in trouble yesterday, she doesn't want to piss him off. She calls into his office before she can lose her nerve. “I just wanted to remind you about your reservation with Falcone’s group in half an hour, if that’s still on. I haven’t heard from them. I'm about to head out for lunch, is there anything I can get you before I go?”

Mr. Hood is surprised, but he hides it well, and by the time she hangs up she feels almost thrilled, like she had gotten away with something big rather than going to eat.

Jesus, she has got to get out more. The fact that her boss is visiting some monster who was recently kidnapped and probably out for revenge barely even phases her, and lunch does, and that can't be normal.

Aspen texts Beth to meet her in the lobby and she almost throws herself into the elevator. She hadn't realized how cooped up she had been up there until she's stepped out into the sunshine at noon with her friend, feeling like she’s playing hooky. It's so good for her.

They get tacos at Coco’s and talk about the projects, about their friends, about the crazy things that have happened in the city. It feels good. It feels normal. Aspen teases Beth about her crush on Michael, Beth makes fun of Aspen for not knowing about Mr. Hood’s latest flavour of the week (a pretty, pretty nurse named Amina). Aspen was stupid, to let her job keep her from this time.

The talk turns to Liam eventually, though, because Aspen needs to know… well, anything. “He was acting really, really weird while we were working up there. Does he still seem mad at me?”

Beth, the sweet thing, shakes her head emphatically. “No, he didn't seem mad. When he came down today he told me all about how overworked ‘n lonely you were, he seemed really sorry for you. He stopped talking to you?”

“He barely made eye contact.” Aspen says, and then it sinks in.

Everyone knows how sweet Beth is. She's considerate as fuck, and worse, she doesn't always notice when people are using that. Maybe everyone knows that, too. Liam has no reason to help her out; if he cared about her, he would have gone out to lunch with her while they were still working together.

Liam wanted Aspen out of the office. Why else would he be kind to her?

Aspen knows she gets goofy and paranoid, but the bruises on her arm are enough to get her out of her seat. “I should head back now, actually, I got yelled at yesterday and I'm trying to avoid that, so-”

“Yeah, of course.” Says Beth, standing up as well. “Hey. We need to do this again. You can't live your life up there.”

“I know.”

Aspen parts ways with Beth in the elevator, and travels up to her floor alone. Even if Liam’s not up there, she's probably got a lot of messages waiting for her, so she doesn't feel too stupid about it. Really, she's just doing her job, and if-

The doors open and through the glass walls she can see Liam leaning over her desk, flipped through Calum’s planner. Fuck, she knew it! He looks up when the elevator doors open, and when their eyes met she thinks she can see genuine fear in his eyes. Good. He should be afraid.

“What are you-” She stomps over, blocking the doorway before he can try to avoid her. Janice isn't in, so she thinks she’s good to say “What the fuck are you doing?”

Liam is trying to hide it, but guilt is all over his puppy dog face. “I was just looking for-”

“Yeah, and it looks like you fuckin’ found it.” Aspen snaps. Liam has the good grace to close the planner and step away from the desk, but she doesn't budge. “What are you- why- you tricked Beth into taking me out! Liam! That's a dick fucking move, and you're-” She gestures to the desk, incoherent in her anger.

“I can explain.” Liam says, holding his hands out like he's scared that she'll lunge at him. Aspen wouldn't rule it out.

“Good! Because you're trying to sabotage me or something and frankly, I'm a little fed up!”

“...I'm sorry, Aspen, listen, you can't call security about this.” Liam says, quietly.

Aspen hadn't thought of that but it sounded like a fuckin’ great idea to her. “Oh, that's exactly what I'm gonna do, you're going through my stuff, you're going through Calum’s stuff-”

“What, you call him Calum?” Liam asks, forceful enough that Aspen falters.

“No, I- you're looking through my desk, shut up. I swear we were friends like two weeks ago, what the hell.” She says, still angry angry angry, but now that he’s got that sad little look on his face the likelihood of her tackling Liam has gone down significantly.

He knows it, too, because he moves towards her - not within range, exactly, and she doesn't budge, but he's not halfway to hiding behind the desk. “Aspen, I'm sorry. I was just… I was mad about losing my job and getting transferred, and I thought maybe if I messed up the book it would get you in trouble. It’s stupid. I’m sorry. Look, I know you appreciate what I did for you when Don Falcone was here, please just don't get me fired and we'll call it even.”

“That’s- disgusting. I can’t believe you.” Aspen feels cold all over. That kind of thing takes malice she didn't know Liam had, and it scares her, for a second, that someone she had considered a friend was so ready, willing, and able to hurt her. That's dishonourable. That's petty. It might not seem like much, but he went to all this effort just to- but he did save her from being mugged or whatever, at least.

Fuck.

She sighs. “Next time you come up here you're not gonna make it out of the elevator. I'm not kidding. I don't want to see you.” She says, and then, like an idiot, she moves aside and lets him pass.

He smiles faintly as he slips by. “I guess it's good for you that your handwriting’s so bad, huh?”

“Get out.”

There's something about her voice that makes him turn on his heel and speed for the elevator. Aspen watches their doors for a full minute after he leaves before she lets her guard down enough to sit down at her desk, head in her hands. She’s too flooded with anger and hurt to look through the book yet, make sure everything’s in order.

She hates this fucking office.

The doors ding again and she whips around, ready to yell at whoever is coming out, but it’s just Mr. Hood. He smiles tightly at her - they’re both worn thin from something, but like everything else they pretend to ignore it. “Any messages?” He asks.

“I just got back, I haven’t had time to listen yet.” Aspen says. She at least has the presence of mind to look apologetic as he checks his watch and then frowns at her.

“Hmm.” He says, and Aspen doesn’t snap and scream at him. It’s actually pretty remarkable. “Just let me know. I’ll need you to come take notes at my two-thirty, alright?”

“My pleasure.” She says, too sweetly, and maybe she’s laying it on a little thick but there’s no way he’d be able to tell that because his back is already to her.

Was this actually the same man she’d seen that morning, who demanded to see her bruises and touched her softly? Aspen could handle it if her boss was a bit of a dick. She could deal with it if her boss was too sweet to her and touched her just like that. But the two of them at once - it was a lot to bear. She wanted- she couldn't let herself finish that thought. It was dangerous. But this was a lot, was all.

She takes another deep breath and reminds herself to stay away. It's for her own good.

#the devil wears kevlar #tdwk #tdwk4 #my writing #calum hood fic #ch blurb #5sos fic #calum hood series #5sos series #ceo!cal #there's so long until we get to the ********** part #i promise it'll be worth it if you stick it out #also liams in this one

[idontlikesummer]

Japan Trip 2018 (Kansai)

Back from Japan again!

This time I went with my family went to Kansai!!

There were so many things we did in the span of 10 days that everything had passed by in almost a blur. The entire vacation was quite thrilling because we landed in Japan right when the flooding was taking place in Osaka. We stayed at my hometown in Nagano for about three days, and by the time we reached Kansai, most of the flooding had disappeared!

As with the previous travel post, I took pictures of almost EVERYTHING I saw. Some of my brother’s and dad’s photos will be in this log, and I will highlight them accordingly!

Please enjoy!! :’D

(Warnings: Lots of photos of pretty things, my sparse commentary and my occasional photobombing totoro)

Day 1: Travel to Nagano

ACK. I ate salted salmon with rice on the plane but everything was shaking and I forgot to take a picture. 

We arrived in Japan but I could only take a photo from the middle seat! The ride was crazy – the pilot said there would be clear skies but the rain was near torrential so the landing had a lot of drops. The woman behind me screamed, so naturally I, being terrible with turbulence, screamed as well. 

The floor was wet so the plane skidded a little when we landed!

NARITA EXPRESS to Tokyo station. Unlike the previous two trips, we managed to be on time for the train, so we didn’t have time to stop by the Starbucks ;w;

I napped throughout the flight since I didn’t manage to sleep a wink during the plane ride, therefore missing most of the awesome view. Totoro’s enjoying it in my stead but he’s separated from his natural habitat by a glass panel.

We reached Tokyo Station and went past GranSta!

There was an AI robot called Pepper greeting us there! This is my first time seeing an AI, but I didn’t have much time to find out what he was used for

Eventually, we stopped by Beer Hall to eat (this restaurant was located right next to Character Street!) I tried their mentaiko spaghetti and I was blown away by how light and delicious it was! This is something I can eat two helpings of before I become full!

Time to go to Daimaru, the place I can’t afford unless I’m with my parents. We bought Tops cake from there before heading off to my grandparents’ house!

I’M LEAVING TOKYO STATION AND I DIDN’T EVEN EXPLORE HALF OF IT. (Spoiler alert: I’ll be back here a few days later)

My brother ate some Shumais we bought from Tokyo station along the ride! I dozed off because the seats in the bullet train are better than my bed

Dropped off at Sakudaira! Since we were surrounded by mountains the weather was freezing despite it being mid-summer. Even though it’s only been a year I missed this place so much

COUNTRY ROAAAD TAKE ME HOOOME to the PLAACE I BELOOONG 

(the car ride back to my grandparents’ home  was super enjoyable since my brother kept blasting 70s music that my parents love)

On the way we stopped by a Seven Eleven! I got carried away with buying the cup noodles (Santouka and Ippudou) since they only cost 4USD while they would have caused 18 USD if you ate them in a restaurant in Singapore!

[First photo by my brother] Home away from home I missed you so. Most of what we had to do for the next few days were family stuff that I won’t go into detail about. But basically we had a whole lot of relatives to greet and a ceremony to prepare for! So there was a lot to do

View from my grandmother’s garden!! I love the mountains and I wish I could plant one where I live. I hope the tectonic plates in Singapore converge in five years

[Last photo by my brother] Like a good girl, I slacked off from cleaning duty to walk around the neighbourhood. This place always calms me somehow. If I lived here permanently I would probably want to walk at least twice a week! Here are some of the stuff that I photographed. I’ve always associated this place with good things and I feel like I go through some sort of emotional and spiritual cleansing each time I come here.

Here’s what we ate for dinner [photo by my brother]! Loads of protein and no carbohydrates. The chicken in particular was really nice and it was from this restaurant called Big Ben!

[First photo by my brother] Since my grandparents’ house was pretty much completely occupied, we stayed at our uncles’ place instead! It was so huge, almost like a Ryokan, and could afford at least 3 guest rooms. I can’t believe they live in something so grand it’s like a hotel

Day 2: Nagano

Honestly I live in an apartment so for this entire section to be the guest room just blows me away. IT’S HUGE.

We went back to my grandparents’ house for breakfast and ate matsutake  gohan with fish! I’ve always loved eating cheap and healthy food. The fried eggplant was probably the best eggplant dish I ever ate! Countryside food is so different from Tokyo food

Ate this for lunch during the ceremony! It was really filling!!

We had more time in the afternoon so I went to scale one of the mountains to a satisfying height!

Our grandmother came to join us in the afternoon, and before we knew it, it was dinner time and many of our relatives joined us with their food! [photo by my brother] It felt a lot like the Summer Wars sort of dinner gatherings, where everyone just sat along a long table and drank alcohol while chatting

We went back to my uncle’s place and our aunt made us mango pudding! She’s a really good cook.

Day 3: Nagano

The next morning she gave us cherries and grapefruit! Today we would have to leave her house for good, and it makes me a little sad. But I hope to return one day!

The next day was a day of loafing around at my grandparents’ place, but we did find some goodies! Namely my dad’s baby photos and we teased him relentlessly about it. We also tried the Ippudou and Santouka noodles and it was really good! The soup tasted just like the way it did in the restaurant!

Later in the afternoon, we went to a friend’s house! I haven’t been here for five years so it was really nostalgic to come back here! It always had a really western-decorated interior which I was fond of.

We had really delicious cake! The cream was super fresh and sweet *p*

It was blueberry season so we went to pick some blueberries from the garden! The one I picked was pretty but sour lmao. I have no green thumb

Mini eggplant! Too young to eat!

These were leeks!

Some of the flowers I really liked in the garden!

Good old chimney I always know where I stand with you

After that, we came by this area to buy our train tickets for Ise! [First photo by my brother]. I used to eat at a ramen shop here nearly ten years ago. I’m amazed how it’s been so long and everything still looks the same!

EON MALL I MISSED YOU SO [Photo by my brother]

Even the stores are the same as five years ago!! I’m on a nostalgia trip

They ACTUALLY sell uniform sweaters here! I really wanted to buy the red one but they were so expensive!! I will reserve my gakuen dreams for another day

Each time I step foot into a supermarket I realize how fortunate I am that I don’t live here, because I’d probably be bankrupt within the first week or so from attempting to buy half the stuff in the market. I mean, LOOK AT THAT BEEF.

Obon festival lanterns!

I’ve been eating at this Yakiniku house all the time since I was a kid. Until recently, I haven’t been able to return to the village, so I did miss this place a lot. Up until today it has the best yakiniku I’ve ever eaten ;w; For the curious it’s called Chikumaya (千曲屋)!

I’d probably make it a point to come by here every now and then! My favourite beef was the Karubi beef!

Cozy Corner cake for supper!! I was so full that when I lay down on my back, I felt like a turtle

That night I saw a starry sky for the first time in my life!!

[photo taken by my brother]. The phone camera quality does the scene no justice. But it was REALLY amazing, since all around, the silhouettes of the houses and mountains were actually blacker than the night sky. There were so many stars that the sky seemed more GREY than anything. The clouds also parted in a way that almost made it seem like there was a galaxy in the sky.

We counted loads of constellations, including Virgo, the Summer triangle, and we also probably saw Mars, Jupiter and Mercury or Venus. My brother studied astrology as a module in university, so he was telling me which constellations were which. And we sat there for hours by the roadside, just talking about how to read stars, which constellations were which etc. It was a really refreshing experience!

[Photo by my brother] This gave me a lot of Totoro vibes (the part where the Catbus appeared for the first time while Satsuki and Mei were waiting for their dad)

Day 4: Travel to Ise

The next day, we had to leave early, but my dad brought us to a place we frequented in our childhood since we had a bit of time. There was this mega-large slide which took approximately one minute for us to slide all the way down. We had to climb a large hill just to hitch one ride on it!

We left for Sakudaira station after this to go to Tokyo for a transit to Kansai soon after, but I’m sure I’ll be back here before long!

There was a really long queue for this ramen shop in Tokyo station, so we decided to try it! Apparently, it’s quite famous! It’s called 六厘舎 (Rokurinsha), to those interested! The broth was really good! The egg tasted like it had alcohol in it, but my absolute favourite was the CHASHU.

HARRY POTTER POP-UP STORE (anime style). I COULDN’T BELIEVE MY EYES. I wanted to take the entire stand home!!!! They had many of the popular characters, like Draco, the Marauders, and I think even Regulus Black! I was hoping to get Luna, but they didn’t sell her, so I settled for Hermione and Ron! I think the store owner was amused because I kept running back to the shop to buy new things

CHARACTER STREET! I have come back for you. Since we only had about two hours before the next train ride, we couldn’t really explore anything in detail. So I decided to loiter in the Ghibli shop!

This medal reacts to “Barus!” (words of destruction). The product makers have an interesting sense of humor

The match boxes were AESTHETIC

I WANT EVERYTHING

There were some OSomatsu-san stuff in one of the shops, but I didn’t have time to stay and look! ;w;

Self control….. self control…..

[First photo by my brother]. I ate at Italian Tomato Cafe Jr.  a really long time ago at EON Mall (but that outlet has since disappeared), so I was happy to see it in Tokyo Station! Their shortcake was just as good as I remembered!

Hoho. Komeda Coffee. I’ll be back for you one day…

Some of the things that fascinated me in Tokyo Station. Yes. That is a chandelier made up of kitkats, and that is PORK JERKY

TIME TO GO TO  KANSAI! We hitched a ride on the Hikari bullet train! This one was slightly bumpier than the one we took to Sakudaira because of  the terrain. It was interesting because our ride took place along the Toukaidou, which connected Kyoto to old-time Edo (Tokyo). Apparently, Tokugawa created this system that made the feudal lords move from Kyoto (the emperor’s place) to Edo (Tokugawa’s residence), so the economy of Japan boomed along this area. Stuff like Woodblock art and Kabuki became famous along the road.

We passed by Shizuoka, and we suspect the mountain blocked by clouds is Mt Fuji!

Well, if I can’t see Mt Fuji today I’ll just have to settle for the picture on this bottle

We’ve hit Nagoya!

We took another train to Ise! It seems like we’ll be travelling the entire day today! So I got a Café Latte to stay awake!

On the way we passed by Tsu: a station with only one syllable

The sky has become a lot prettier!

By the time we’ve reached Ise it was evening! This place feels really mystical—all the street lamps had windchimes in them, so each time there was a breeze you get this really lovely chime in the air.  To the curious, Ise is where the shrine of Amaterasu (The God of the Sun) is located.

My brother took a really nice photo of the lamps and the sunset, so I’m showing it off

[last photo by my brother]. This is the first time I’ve ever eaten in an Izayakaya and I ordered…. ORANGE JUICE. But the food was super good! My personal favourite was the omelette! Everything tasted home-cooked and the bill was really cheap! For those interested, the restaurant is called とばっこ (Tobakko).

We stayed at a really neat AirBnB! The furniture was sparse (if you ignore our laundry), and it was at a very good location. Our hostess was really helpful in helping us to find places to visit as well! 

Found this in the nearby Family Mart! I would buy you if I lived here, Hijikata… At this moment I’m eating five meals almost every day..

Day 5: Ise Jingu

We set off at 5am the next day I was near Death. From hereon we would repeat the cycle of waking up at 5-6am and arriving home at 11pm for the rest of the vacation. The good thing about it is that the streets are completely empty

It was a nice walk to the shrine! One nice elderly man on a bicycle said “Good morning!” to us and that brightened my mood for the rest of the day!

[last photo by my brother] Here we are at 外宮Geku shrine! This one is dedicated to Toyoukeno Oomikami, who takes charge of Amaterasu Ookami’s food, clothing and shelter! The place was really quiet and serene. It felt a lot different from Meiji Jingu, which was always filled with people. There were multiple offering spots in the shrine, and the main gate bans us from taking photos. The vibe here is really mystical and it feels powerful

We waited for a taxi to get to naiku! That’s Amaterasu Ookami’s shrine. The taxi on the sign looked like it was smiling. Our driver spoke in Kansai dialect – I was a little surprised to know that it’s not just the words, but the intonation had also changed!

This was a lot bigger than Geku! Like Geku, we were forbidden from taking photos of the interior shrine. One of the offering places was to the Wind God, Fujin, who apparently helped to expel the Mongols from the Japan seas in the 13th century! There were more people here than at Geku, but it still had that really mystical aura. I might come here again when the weather is cooler!

Well, since we left the house at 5.30am we were finished with Naiku by 11am HAH. We had lots of time to explore Oharai Machi, which is located right outside Naiku. But because of the hot weather, the fact that we didn’t eat breakfast,  and the little rest we had, I was about to drop dead at this point

So Oharai Machi used to be a purification and dance/singing centre dedicated to the Gods of Ise Shrine, but today you can find loads of food shops and goodies. The vibe of the place feels super retro and I love it! I caught one or two Halal shops that sell Japanese oden and kushi sticks!

[last photo by my brother] We ate some sweetened ice to cool down after the Naiku trip! They were really generous with the portions and their red bean snacks were DELICIOUS. I don’t usually like this sort of traditional sweets but I couldn’t stop myself from wolfing this down. The restaurant is called Akafuku (赤福) - at least, that’s what the signboard seems to say!

Yeah, I really like the aesthetic of this place. I live for street Udon tbh

We chose to eat at Ise Udon Soba Okadaya (岡田屋)! A sparrow flew into the shop the moment it opened so I guess we were the second customers for the day lmao. THE UDON WAS REALLY REALLY GOOD. It had a really chewy and soft texture and it became more and more delicious the more you ate it; it was surreal. It didn’t taste like all the types of Udon I’ve eaten before. I’m so sad that I can only eat it in Ise and not where I live. I will definitely be back for more argh. 110% WILL RECOMMEND. It’s pretty cheap too and in my opinion, it’s best to eat it without too many toppings. Maybe just an egg with garnishes will do

(The store had a retro telephone booth)

[Photo by my brother] We ate Matsusaka beef and ONE STICK COST 9USD. INSANE. But it was really good and chewy and I’ve never had better beef in my LIFE

Okage Yokocho is an area in Oharai Machi! It looked a little bit like a festival! They had a rifling booth which I wanted to try, but I was trying to save money so I decided against it. Lots of fancy buildings here!

We went to Kaminogo Station because our host recommended another shrine! The weather made me feel like I was swimming in a volcano, but the clear skies make it worth it! I could take photos with my eyes closed and it’d still turn out pretty

Here’s a bit of what was inside of the shrine! It was significantly cooler in temperature than Naiku and Geku. There were bees buzzing around here and there. The walk was less intense than Naiku and Geku but I was starting to get tired around this time

So we returned back to the apartment to pig out.

Only for us to leave about two hours later so we can eat… AGAIN. The sky was really pretty. I guess one good thing about summer is that you get really pretty skies

Guess what we’re having: Matsusaka BEEF! Apparently it’s one of the THREE BIG BEEF along with Oumi Beef and Kobe beef. Which means it’s expensive as hell but you only live once I guess. The restaurant was called Ishikawa 石かわ and it’s famous for Matsusaka Beef!

The restaurant had a really quaint feeling you would get from a sleepy little town. The chef pan fried the beef on a sizzling stove. I WISH I HAD A BIGGER PIECE. The beef was so chewy and the sauce was so good I made it a point to keep the meat in my mouth longer than necessary. The vegetables were also really fresh so it added to the taste! EVERYTHING WAS PERFECT. This was probably one of my favourite things I ate along the entire trip. Top 3 for sure

Ise is just as mystical at night time!

Aaaaaand we went to eat ramen for supper. This is the same restaurant as Tobakko, except it was a Ramen booth instead of an Izakaya. It had the roadside street stall feeling to it, and the ramen tasted really nostalgic! There was only one man running the shop so he must have been very busy

Day 6: Nara and travel to Osaka

The next day we woke up early to go to our host’s café! It was located deeper in the alley where the apartment was situated. I REALLY liked her decorations!

She cooked for us Ise Udon and many other side dishes like salad, omelette, and tofu pudding! It was REALLY cool because we were the only people in the café at that hour, so we could spend a lot of time chatting with her. I’ll miss this place and our hostess when we’re gone! ;w;

We traveled to Nara on a one carriage train called Yamashiro Reccha! [photo by my brother] All the blinds were drawn so the carriage was dark and my dad kept making murder mystery jokes

WELCOME TO NARA. You can almost tell from the staircase what this place is famous for; I’ve never seen wild deers before in my life so I’m really excited!! Unlike Ise, Nara seems to be a town instead of a countryside, so the vibes are pretty different

Here sells nothing but melon bread. I want to live in this stall

[Last photo by my brother] The tourist center recommended that we try 天丼まきの (Tendon Makino) for Tendon since it was a popular tourist destination. I swear to God, this is the BEST TENDON I’ve EVER eaten in MY LIFE. I’m not fond of octopus but I ate everything up in one go. There was a fried egg in the bowl you could crack open and spill all the yolk everywhere. Literally this is something I’d never get sick of. I could probably eat it everyday for the rest of my life.

MISTER DONUT. I will have you one day….

One of the stalls had a sparrow’s nest near its opening gate! While the sparrow chicks were cute as sin, I sort of pity the poor sparrow for making its nest in the middle of a tourist district

We stopped by Kofuku-Ji Nan-en-dou 興福寺 on the way to Nara deer park! The architecture of the tower seemed really old! It seems there are lots of old buildings (dating to before 16th century) in Kansai

A really nice looking hotel called 菊水楼Kiku-sui-rou. It seems they have a very high rating for their hospitality and their food!

We arrived at the gates of 春日大社(Kasuga Taishi)! And I SAW MY FIRST DEERS. I didn’t dare to approach them since I thought they would run off, but silly me, they were probably already accustomed to having people around.

More deer and shrine stuff! The deers are literally everywhere. And there are lots of tourists too! The awkward part was that there were tonnes of deer droppings everywhere, so you could step on them if you’re not careful.

There was a rest stop at the shrine, so we sat here to cool off a bit. Then this deer appeared out of nowhere and started sniffing my dad’s bag. He was sniffing every single human he came into contact with. Then he came up to me and began to sniff my plastic bag.

THEN HE RIPPED IT APART AND ATE OUR MAP.

I hope it was at least a little bit nutritious but now we hae no directions

We had ice-coffee and ice-cream at the rest stop after that!

So we walked down from the hill after that and played with some deers! This one kept following me. I’m sorry, I don’t have a biscuit for you but I can give you attention if you’d like!

Deers crossing the road! And the bus gave way to them

On the way to 東大寺Toudaiji!

Toudaiji houses the world's largest bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana. The statue was at least ten times taller than me without exaggeration!! I also really liked how old the building seemed to look! It seemed really ancient 

We headed out of the temple and this deer stuck his tongue out. What message are you trying to relay, friend?

We returned to Nara station soon after that and took the train to Osaka! We’ve been taking so many trains that the JR Pass is adequately used!

HELLOOOOO OSAKA

We arrived at our new AirBnB destination and I slept so soundly here!! Maybe it’s because I had my own room, but I love that we had the entire floor to ourselves! I also really liked the decorations she put all over the place! It’s really close to the station and Namba City so it was pretty convenient! Here’s the link if anyone is interested!

By the time we reached Namba it was already rather late! So we scoured the place in a rush. There was a Takashimaya somewhere in there which sold nice cakes!

The store Rope Picnic sold lots of cute clothes at 70% off because of summer sale! I felt like I held myself back from spending money just for this moment!! I would be coming here repeatedly over the course of the next few days!

Meanwhile my brother ate some Milk Ice-cream that’s so smooth it looks almost like a toy [photo by my brother]

We decided to eat at 百十Momojuu since it’s a crime to go to Osaka and not eat Okonomiyaki! That is, we ordered Monjayaki instead because we didn’t know there was a difference. THE BEST DISH WAS THE TONPEI (Omelette with meat inside)! The Okonomiyaki (second last picture) was not ours, but the cook accidentally placed it on our grill. Overall the meal was pretty affordable! If I were to go back to Osaka, I’d definitely come by here again.

(The air ventilators seemed to suck smoke up in the air, so people could smoke in the restaurant without bothering the other customers!)

Day 7: Kyoto

Some things I noticed and liked on my way to the station. Today we would be going to Kyoto. I haven’t been there since I was five but I remember bits and pieces of it!

THE ESCALATOR AT OSAKA STATION IS SO TRIPPY. Apparently people in Osaka seem to stand on the right hand side of the escalators rather than the left? That’s really interesting!

The escalators in Kyoto station have handles which are actually decorated!

We’ve reached the gates of the famous Fushimi Inari Shrine(伏見稲荷大社)! This one’s well known because of all the red gates and the impressive climb you need to take to the summit of the shrine. Inari is the God of rice, and you see lots of fox statues throughout the climb. Each of the gates have been donated by a Japanese businessman apparently.

It seems that at each of the gates, the fox on the left has a scroll in its mouth, while the fox on the right has a ball.

[Photos taken by my brother]. At the base, there were tons of people, but the numbers dwindled as we hit the summit. I had to stop at every rest stop because I was just that unfit! But the climb was good and hitting the summit made me feel healthy! One thing I was surprised about was how un-summit- like the summit seemed. We didn’t realize it was the summit until we had to climb down the  stairs on the opposite end of the hill!

Down we go!! My legs hurt. I probably won’t be able to stand tomorrow agh

We reached the base and ate some oden and shaved ice to cool down! The lady in charge of the shop told us that tourists only came by Fushimi Inari about four to five years ago. It appears that the shrine was a pretty recent tourist destination!

Eventually we headed back to Kyoto station and checked out the restaurants in Isetan! There was a restaurant which specialized ENTIRELY in omurice! Naturally, I was very excited!!

...Though we ended up eating at永寿案 “Washoku” Restaurant Eijuan since we were at Kyoto!

 They serve really fresh and delicious grilled fish dishes with tons of mini side dishes on the tray. The restaurant is also located on the top floor of the shopping center so you’re treated to a killer view of Kyoto! For Washoku, this restaurant is pretty affordable and the quality of the food is really good! It’s something to look for if you like light meals :’) The service staff were also really helpful in helping us to find places we can visit in Kyoto.

We took a bus from the station and headed to Kiyomizudera Temple! We have to walk up a hill again but thankfully it wasn’t as insane as Fushimi Inari. We did a lot of walking today and my legs are tired

SCENIC

We paid about 400 yen to see the rest of the temples, but I thought it was really worth it! Most of the trees in the mountain change colours really quickly when it hits autumn, but for now all the trees are green since it’s summer. The view is really breathtaking and worth the climb!

It was a long way down from the temple, but there was a shopping district with aesthetic houses nearby!!

I’m marrying this Ice cream melon soda shake you’re invited to our wedding

TOTORO SHOP KYOTO STYLE. I LIVE

This No-Face Piggy Bank will EAT YOUR MONEY so WATCH OUT

Some other things that caught my eye!

We took the bus to Gion-Shinbashi next! Gion’s the Geiko district with lots of Geiko and Maiko (geiko apprentice) running about!

The street is really pretty! I think you can’t enter any of these shophouses since they usually cost a bomb to go into. Lots of the second-storeys of the houses are covered with some sort of curtain. I wonder why

I MANAGED TO CATCH SOME MAIKOS

Before they boarded a taxi

I wonder if they’re used to tourists gawking at them each time we pass them by..

There’s a Lipton café at Kyoto station I don’t believe my eyes

I wanted to eat here but our train is departing soon!

We’ve arrived back at Namba!

Don Quijote is going to be my best friend for the rest of my days

There’s literally an alcohol called “Do your best, Daddy!” I can’t stop laughing

In the end, we decided to eat at a Yakiniku store since Osaka seems to specialized in grilled and pan-fried foods! We ate at牛角 Gyuu-Kaku, which is apparently expensive where I live, but pretty cheap here.

[second last photo by my brother]. The meat was really good! I swear everything we’ve eaten on this trip is good. The dish in the last picture was especially good—they put some sort of cotton candy and boiled the meat in sauce, and the cotton candy just melted into the sauce after that. I have no idea how it works. All I know is that it was GREAT

THEY HAVE GRILLED MELON BREAD WITH ICE CREAM. I went to town on this one. You grill the melon bread, cut it open and shove ice-cream into it. It’s SO GOOD I can die. This is the highlight of my trip

Then we ate takoyaki after that! We eventually headed back to Don Quijote for grocery shopping

ATTACK ON NOSE HAIR

We had dessert when we went home again! This one came from CRAMERCY New York!

Day 8: Osaka

My dad went to 高野山Koya-san while we rested at home for the day. Apparently, it was first built by monk 空海Kukai, who founded the Japanese calligraphic system! Here are some of the pictures he took!

Apparently, you would sit on a monorail that wasn’t shaped horizontally to get to the top of the mountain like you see in the last picture! It seemed really cool!

Guess what we had for breakfast the next day!!

1.       Cake

2.       Cake

3.       Cake

I can’t believe they made Takoyaki cream puffs and sold it in Takashimaya

We headed to Namba City and ate a buffet meal at GOOD SPOON! I really enjoyed the décor of this place. Apparently it specialized in Italian food, especially their cheeses! The huge bag on the bolognaise in the fourth picture is in fact a huge chunk of cheese! Honestly, everything we’ve eaten on the trip has been really worth it and delicious!

On our way to Osaka Tower!

There seems to be tons of Billiken motifs in the tower. He was dreamt up by an American artist, and is said to bring good luck!

A scene from Osaka tower! Apparently you can see Universal Studios here somewhere!

The history of this place seems a little interesting. Apparently it was built and opened in 1912 along with the amusement park, Luna Park, which included arcades and rides. Unfortunately the original Tsutenkaku and Luna Park burned down in the 1940s, but they rebuilt it under Hitachi in 1956, so the tower is still around today!

The Tower also hosts the Glico museum! Glico was the company which made Pocky!

I’m honestly scared of how much weight I’m going to put on

Eventually we headed back to Namba Area as a cut through to Dotonbori!

 [last photo by my brother] Doutonbori has so many lighted billboards I LOVE IT. The giant crab in the first picture actually MOVES. It reminds me of Tokyo a little, but has more of a night life feeling to it! Lots of shops that I love here, but I only had four hours to run through the place before everything closed!

There was a festival taking place along the river while we were there

We eventually went to eat Kushiyaki at だるまDaruma because that’s another thing Osaka is famous for! It was really good! My favourite dish was the Dotemiso and the quail eggs! So far, it seems like Tokyo has a larger variety of food, but Kansai’s food is more flavorful!

Gintama sale at Marui. I’ll patronize your store another time, Elizabeth….

Day 9: Kobe

We’ve arrived at Kobe! The weather was CRAZY HOT today! I really like the port towns in Japan since they seem to have a lot of delicious Western food, history and architecture! It reminds me a lot of Yokohama in a way! Plus it’s located on a hillside facing the ocean, just the sort of thing I like!

We went ahead and took the Kobe City Bus! It looked really fancy and there was an announcer giving us a rundown of the historical importance of the routes we were taking.

Our first stop was Ijinkan! AKA the street with all the old Western houses that rich foreigners used to live in or use for their recreational activities! The street here was REALLY pretty! Since Kobe was a hill, we would have to climb around to get to just anywhere. The England House apparently had a Sherlock Holmes exhibition on the second floor, and I could see Watson’s silhouette through the curtains!

We bought the tickets to go to the Trick House! Albert Einstein greeted us from the window it was surreal

Many art pieces would look REALLY TRIPPY if you took a photo with a person in it, but I’m camera shy. Here are just some of the exhibits which don’t require you a person to be in the picture. The third one was probably my favourite since it looks like a mirror but actually isn’t! They arranged two rooms to look perfectly symmetrical and you could only tell if a person is walking on the other side. It’s a lot like that one room in the Witch’s House…

You have paintings like these too. 

It was fun to walk on air :^)

Next we had to climb a steep hill to Uroko House!! It was a struggle in the hot weather but at this point I’m so used to sweating. I wonder how the staff come here to work everyday…

Kobe tiles!!

Uroko House! …..’s café

There’s a wild boar in front of it called Porcellino which brings good luck if you touch its nose! I kept getting distracted by its name because of Porco Rosso’s nickname…

The REAL Uroko house! Apparently they named the house as such because the tiles used to decorate the mansion look like scales (uroko). This house used to be luxury rental houses for wealthy foreigners. The exhibits include not only the rooms, but also antique utensils, tableware, and a small art museum!

If I were a doll and these houses are completely furnished I’d live in them.

Some of the stuff we ate in the café! I really liked the ice-cream. We accidentally spilled our drink and the waitress was nice to refill it for us for free

Here are some of my favourite rooms!! I’m glad I came here. It looks a lot like the dollhouse in The Secret World of Arrietty

The view and some of the nice artworks in the museum!

Now we’re off to Yamate 8Ban Kan

Yamate 8Ban Kan! It’s oriented to the sea with trapezoidal bay windows in a row. Inside the building, the “Saturn’s chair” which is believed to grant your wishes if women sit on the right and men on the left. I was having a stomachache so I might have wasted my wish by wishing it to be gone

FUJIKO MINE CLORETS! I love her she’s such a role model

Now we’re going to try Kobe Beef at Steak Land! While we were taking a lift to the restaurant, a man stumbled into the elevator with us. We suspected that it might have been someone important since the restaurant continued to serve him after its closing hours

I’M SO EXCITED!

THE BEEF WAS REALLY GOOD! They cooked the vegetables first and saved the beef and beansprouts for last!! I can’t help but think that everything that we’ve eaten on this trip was really delicious! As far as Kobe beef goes, this was one of the more affordable options!

SCORCHING SUMMER SUN. You can see how hot it is. I could write a song about how much the weather makes one suffer

We continued to take a bus trip around and passed by the maritime museum! I didn’t manage to go in this time, but there will always be future trips that I can plan for :P

Kobe is so scenic!!

Nishimura’s Coffee looks really fancy and I really like the exterior décor despite not eating inside.

We headed to Mosaic Mall! Which seemed to be an outdoor shopping centre!

We meet again, Donguri Garden.

SMILING TOTORO BAG. How can something so perfect exist

My brother tried some chocolate ice-cream from Frantz! Though I didn’t manage to try it to tell if it was good or not

We took the bus back to Kobe station and headed to Namba again!

MY FIRST CREPE ON THE TRIP. I have found you at last

I seem to come across a lot more kittens than full grown cats while I’m in Namba, but this brave warrior didn’t seem afraid in the midst of all the people walking around.

Lmao R18 gacha-gachas

We headed back to Namba City for dinner! There’s this shop called C3 Baked Tiramisu which is ABSOLUTELY DELICIOUS. I’m not sure if you can find it in Tokyo but this is hands down the best Tiramisu I have ever eaten in my entire life. We bought a dozen back home to finish

MIX FRUIT JUICE SHAKE IS GREAT! I should make this on my own next time! It probably had mango and orange inside, maybe even pineapple, but I’m not too sure

Eventually we headed to Shabu Nabe Udon Noraya のらや, which specialized in Udon and Shabu-Shabu. I had the Udon and tempura set while my brother and mother shared the Pork Shabu Shabu. HOW CAN SUCH A PINK PORK EXIST. I guess the reason why the food here’s so great is because of the quality of the ingredients as well. I really like non-greasy food so this has to be one of my top 3 meals in the entire trip! Definitely would recommend this! And it’s pretty affordable as well. They are really generous with the portions!

  We had more cakes for supper

 Day 10: Leaving Japan

Tiramisu for breakfast! It’s over so soon and I don’t want to leave Osaka so soon ;w;

We stopped by Tully’s Coffee at Osaka station and my mother tried a pancake! It would take a few hours before we reach Tokyo…

We had lunch at 矢場とんYabaton  at Tokyo Station!! The Pork cutlet was really good since they cooked it with their own miso! The staff were really nice too! They helped to warm up my food since I took such a long time to eat because of my stomachache ;w;

We took a Monorail to Haneda Airport! I didn’t know that monorails would tilt to the side when they turned!

Might that be rainbow bridge?

Amuro Tooru seems to be really popular in Japan now! It’s probably because of the new Detective Conan movie in Japan but he’s always been intriguing! I hope they release more on his backstory soon.

Agghh I don’t want to leave but I will definitely be back

The sky was really pretty! Overall the ride was way better than the initial one, since much of the rainy season has cleared up. I actually managed to sleep so that was impressive!

It’s good to be back!!

I guess on the whole Kansai has a pretty different vibe from central Tokyo. Both had their fair share of cultural landmarks and city areas, but Kansai used to house the really old capital of Japan, so they had much older monuments compared to Tokyo. Osaka’s city also seems to be a lot more night life-ish compared to my experience with Tokyo! In terms of food, I’d say that Tokyo has more variety, but I really think Osaka’s food has more flavour. Literally everything I’ve eaten on this trip is delicious and worthy of a recommendation!

On the other hand, I’m really proud of myself since I managed to control myself from overspending this trip :^)

If you make it a point to visit the cultural landmarks instead of going to shop, you really can save a lot of money when travelling in Japan! There are also many more Halal food options compared to what I’ve seen last year, so it should be possible to find good Japanese food for those who have to adhere to a religious diet!

#japan #kyoto #osaka #food #ghibli #photography #travel #scenery #other stuffs #ise #kobe

[mommyg2013]

The not-so-Thanksgiving Update…

I always thought that if the virus were to come home it would’ve been through the kids. They have been going to school in person for 18 months now. Every Monday is a Hail Mary. But it was me! Two months ago. Thanks to the vaccine, it felt like no more than a passing cold.

I am grateful to the OTHER ADULT

Day 1 of basement-quarantining was great. Text Message ….

I am a firm believer that a plate of spicy biryani can cure almost anything. They were leaving food and other supplies by the backdoor.

  Day 2 was similar, Thank you UberEats·         

Day 3 was a Publix grocery bag.

 Canned Soup! They fed me canned soup!!!

I always wonder who’s buying canned soup, there’s enough sodium in that shit to kill you! At least the ‘Cream of Mushroom’ says “98% Fat Free” – I’ll be DEAD but SKINNY.

  I am grateful to SOHA.

 I was taking the girls for hair trims when she announced, in the car, that she doesn’t like her shoes.

Umm Okay, I can wave my wand and turn it into a glass slipper if you’d like!

I parked and she insisted that she wasn’t going to wear her shoes, she didn’t like them. She said she’d rather be barefoot.

 THROW ME A GAUNTLET AND IMMA GRAB WITH BOTH HANDS. My only regret is that the gravel wasn’t as poppin’ hot as I would have liked it to be.

   A few minutes after she sat down, GREAT CLIPS  - SUCH A FINE ESTABLISHMENT *heavy eyeroll* told me that they have a “shoes and shirt required” policy.

And so I seated her outside. Thank you, Soha, you who keeps me tethered to my last ounce of patience.

I am grateful to SAANYA. If there is a “path to mortification” she will make sure I tread on it.

 On a recent trip, most of the activity was strenuous and had a minimum age limit. On one particular excursion, we put her down as an EIGHT-year-old. SIX was not going to cut it. I have no shame. I increase and decrease their age per my convenience. I would pass them off as “infant in arms” if it means I can score a free plane ticket.

Twenty minutes into the hike it became obvious that she wouldn’t be able to go further, she simply did not have the body weight and dexterity. We made a hard call for her and I to turn back while the rest of the group went on.

Back at basecamp, they asked her directly “How old are you?”

And before I could interject, she said “I’M SIX”

OH SHIT. If them tectonic plates could have parted open and swallowed me up, that would have been just fine.

 More seriously…..

Going back to where I began - two months after I had the virus, my six-year-old got her first shot. For that I am truly grateful.

  For everything else, there’s CREAM OF MUSHROOM soup.

[dipulb3]

2021 Audi RS6 Avant review: Swiss Army Wagon

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/2021-audi-rs6-avant-review-swiss-army-wagon-2/

2021 Audi RS6 Avant review: Swiss Army Wagon

That’s one mean soccer-match machine.

Andrew Krok/Roadshow

Having a friend who owns a station wagon is like having a friend who’s a vegan or who owns a rescue dog: You’re never going to hear the end of it. The era of crossovers has given these low-slug longroofs new life among a small but vocal subset of automotive fans who want you to wake up and realize that not everybody needs a sun-blotting SUV. The 2021 Audi RS6 Avant is treated like a demigod in this circle, and for good reason: It combines ample storage and enough torque to affect plate tectonics in a package that makes for one of the most compelling daily drivers for sale today.

Like

Killer looks

Balls-out performance

Storage galore

Don’t Like

Big wheels = stiff-ish ride

Requires money to purchase

There’s no mistaking the RS6 Avant for anything else. The body is low and long, really hammering home that battleship metaphor thanks to the no-cost Nardo Grey paint color and the $6,350(!) Carbon Optic package that replaces all hints of exterior chrome trim with carbon fiber. This pack also adds 22-inch alloy wheels that fill the wheel wells amply. Combine that with some impressively fat rear fenders and you’ve got a wagon that out-sinisters even its closest rival, the Mercedes-AMG E63 S. I’m not a fan of the protruding rear diffuser, but that gripe extends beyond the wagon to its hatchback sibling, the RS7, as well.

Where there’s bark, there’s… more bark. Slipping down into the RS6 Avant’s standard sport seats, I push the start button on the center console and half the neighborhood is smacked in the face with a bass-heavy roar of a cold start, thanks in part to my tester’s $1,000 sport exhaust upgrade. Even though the body looks glued to terra firma, there’s just enough ride height here to escape a scrape from my steep driveway as the exhaust announces my departure with enthusiasm, despite the twin-turbocharged V8 never spinning over 2,500 rpm. Whether the pipes stay in their standard mode or are opened up a tad in more aggressive profiles, there’s never a lack of noise emanating from under the cargo area. It’s great.

The RS6 Avant’s standard multimode air suspension is impressive in its ability to change the car’s character. At its most compliant, the RS6 should keep the whole family comfortable, and I wager that the stock 21-inch wheels do an even better job here — the 22s and their 285/30-profile Pirelli P-Zero summer tires make for a ride that’s on the stiff side, although not punishingly so. Throw the car into Dynamic mode, though, and the solidity increases, all but eliminating body roll and giving the RS6 a surprising amount of agility for a car this size. 

Turbocharged V6s might get a lot of attention nowadays, but the V8 ain’t done yet. Packing 591 horsepower and 590 pound-feet of torque in the RS6 Avant, this eight-pot produces forward motion like an EDM concert in the forest provides good vibes. Let the eight-speed automatic transmission quickly kick its way down to the appropriate gear (best done on its own, even though shift paddles are standard) and the car will dart toward the horizon, bouncing its perennially thunderous exhaust note off every flat surface in earshot. There isn’t much in the way of overrun between shifts or while decelerating, but that’s fine, you can’t win ’em all.

It’s clear that the RS6 Avant would be best utilized on a German autobahn, pushing the speedometer needle into the region of silly numbers while returning a sufficiently smooth ride. On tight, curvy forest roads, this wagon almost feels like too much car. It’s almost as wide as a single lane. It wants to accelerate until it runs out of gas. It’s this kind of hard-to-wrangle attitude that gives this RS-badged vehicle some of the character that feels lacking in the automaker’s other performance models, which feel so thoroughly sanitized that you wonder if those cars weren’t built by robots, for robots.

Don’t act surprised when I say the RS6 Avant is one thirsty wagon, with the EPA estimating just 15 miles per gallon city and 22 mpg highway — the same as the less capacious RS7. While the V8 can deactivate half its cylinders under light loads, which can push instantaneous mileage to the 30-mpg mark, I find my highway economy only slightly higher than what the feds can muster, with my city economy falling closer to about 12 mpg.

Audi‘s interiors are pretty corporate, so if you’re familiar with one of the newer ones, odds are you’ve got a good lay of the land for the whole lineup. My tester sports $500 carbon fiber inlays with a matte finish and actual texture, which is a nice departure from the ultra-glossy SEMA crap. A $2,500 Executive Package puts soft Nappa leather just about everywhere, from the dashboard topper to the center console trim. The whole shebang coalesces nicely, feeling quite expensive while still maintaining a racy appearance. There’s ample lateral support in the front and rear seats, and the red deviated stitching adds some extra character.

Put that matte carbon fiber on everything, Audi, and never look back. High-gloss finishes are… not exactly en vogue.

Andrew Krok/Roadshow

Both rows offer up tons of space and visibility, and the cargo area’s 30 cubic feet of storage space trumps the RS7‘s 24.6 cubes while nearly tying the two-row Q8 SUV. See? You can have your cake and eat it while simultaneously transporting several other cakes with room to spare.

Audi loves itself some screens, and thankfully, those screens are easy to love. The company’s MMI infotainment system lives inside the 10.1-inch touchscreen on the dashboard, and while it might take some time to get used to the effort required to click each tile, the tech is responsive and easy on the eyes. A 4G LTE Wi-Fi hotspot is included, as are Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Two USB-C ports hang out under the center console armrest, in addition to a wireless device charger that uses the wagon’s own antenna to boost a phone’s signal. Just below the main screen is an 8.6-inch display that covers climate control and seat settings — again, finger presses require some weight, but the haptic feedback feels nice with every push.

The gauge cluster is a screen, too. Audi’s Virtual Cockpit puts just about every usable piece of information in front of my face, and I can change parts of the screen to display even more, whether it’s a Google Earth-style map or the current power and torque outputs from the engine, with some RS-specific designs for the tachometer. The Executive Package also includes a head-up display, in case I want to save my eyes from moving two extra inches to see what gear I’m in. Virtual Cockpit is adjusted using steering wheel switches, so distraction is kept to a minimum.

Once you get used to Audi’s interface, it’s pretty easy to change things with minimal distraction.

Andrew Krok/Roadshow

Some performance cars don’t even offer safety systems, but the RS6 Avant is rife with ’em. Standard save-your-butt tech includes automatic emergency braking and regular cruise control, but the $2,250 Driver Assistance Package beefs things up with adaptive cruise control, traffic sign recognition, lane-keeping assist and rear cross-traffic warnings. The driver assists are mighty smooth, but it’s hard to willingly give up control of such a fun car, even in the tedium of a daily highway commute.

Unsurprisingly, the 2021 Audi RS6 Avant is an expensive proposition, starting at $110,045 including destination, with my tester’s numerous options pushing the window sticker north to about $123,000. The only real bummer with its configurability is the inability to pair the smaller 21-inch wheels with any of the black-exterior-trim packages, which would remove some of the ride’s inherent stiffness while maintaining its more aggressive countenance. I’d probably spec an RS6 Avant exactly like it is here, though.

The RS6 Avant has a single competitor in the US: The Mercedes-AMG E63 S Wagon, which costs a little more and produces a little more power while returning quicker acceleration figures (3.0 seconds to 60 mph versus the Audi’s 3.5) and offering a few extra cubes of cargo capacity. That said, the Merc’s aesthetics are far more subdued inside and out, so it’s mostly a manner of personal taste, especially at this price stratum. If you really dislike wagons for some reason, there’s always the RS7, too.

Fast wagons are few and far between, and the RS6 Avant is usually relegated to forbidden fruit status in the US, so consider this one a special treat. With performance chops to spare and a properly luxurious interior that can hold more than you’d expect, there’s a good reason why people fawn over the RS6.  If you aren’t quite ready to embrace the crossover life, this middle-grounder presents a hard opportunity to pass up.

[mapsburgh]

In Defense of Tolkien’s Mountains

At tor.com, Alex Acks asserts that the mountain ranges of northwestern Middle-earth are geologically implausible. But I think a fair reconstruction of Middle-earth tectonic history can be made. This is a long post, so I’m putting it behind a read-more:

First, a few points to clear the ground:

1. As Acks notes, modern plate tectonic theory didn’t become widely accepted until after Tolkien had established the geography of Middle-earth, so neither success nor failure at imitating real-world tectonic principles can be laid at the feet of the author. This is all speculation on both sides.

2. Many of Middle-earth’s mountain ranges -- notably the Misty Mountains, the Iron Mountains (of which the Third Age’s Grey Mountains are a remnant), and the mountains surrounding Mordor -- are said in canon to be created through magical means. That’s true as a matter of literary criticism, but kind of a cop-out form a geography/geology nerd point of view. For the purposes of this post, I am going to assume that such explanations are myths, and that the actual geography arose through mundane tectonic processes.

3. Acks complains, echoing a variety of other fantasy map critics, that the mountains in Middle-earth are too straight and make too-neat right-angle corners. This complaint deserves two responses. First, the mountain ranges on the map aren’t actually that straight. Just look at the map Acks uses to point out this supposed fact:

On this map, Acks draws a neat line along the Misty Mountains -- but this line doesn’t match the mountains’ course at all. The Misty Mountains (including the northern spur of the White Mountains and the mountains of Angmar) is better described as a gentle S-curve. Likewise, the White Mountains are more of an arc than a straight line. We tend to conceptualize the Misty Mountains as a straight N-S line between Eriador and Rhovanion because that’s how they function in the story. But we can’t just read that simplified plot summary onto the actual map.

Second, these complaints assume that the familiar map of Middle-earth is spatially accurate in the modern sense. But there is no particular reason to assume that. It seems more reasonable to me to hold that the map, like the story and appendices, is an artifact from within Middle-earth. It is, after all, drawn to deliberately imitate medieval maps. And when we look at medieval maps of our world, we see plenty of implausibly straight mountain ranges. Medieval cartographers were interested in presenting a conceptual model of how their world fit together, not getting the lat/long coordinates of every peak correct.

(Nova Graecia by Sebastian Munster, 1550 -- showing that straight stylized mountain ranges persisted into the early modern era)

With those preliminaries out of the way, we can ask: how could the mountain ranges of northwestern Middle-earth in the Third Age have formed? Acks gives a good explanation of the basic ways mountain ranges can form:

The main creator of mountains are tectonic plate collisions. You either end up with the heavier oceanic plate grinding under the continental crust [subduction]—which is lighter because it’s got a lot more silicates in it—and wrinkling it up that way, as seen all around the Pacific Rim; or you have two [continental] plates of roughly equal density colliding and, since one isn’t going to sink under the other, building up and up like a cartoonish car pileup, which is why the Himalayas keep getting a little bit taller every year.

So, let's start in the middle with the Misty Mountains. We're far from any ocean, so they seem to be a clear example of the convergence of two continental plates, centered respectively on Eriador and Rhovanion/Rhun. I'm inclined to say that this plate boundary is either still active or was so relatively recently, since they present such a formidable barrier to travel. That is, they are more like the Himalayas than the Urals.

The Himalayan analogy suggests an interesting explanation for the other uplands in Rhovanion. We could be seeing here a broad-scale lava flow similar to what produced the Deccan Plateau in India, with subsequent folding pushing up the northern edge into the Grey Mountains (a la the Ghats of India). The Mountains of Mirkwood may be the older peaks formed by the mantle plume that eventually gave us Erebor before falling dormant. Mantle plumes give you a series of extinct volcanoes stretching away from the active one in the direction of plate movement, so it makes sense to have the Mountains of Mirkwood west of Erebor if the Rhovanion plate is moving westward.

All of this activity happened quite some time in the past, so the Forest River has had time to erode a broad valley, giving Erebor its "lonely" appearance. This past activity made northern Rhovanion rich in minerals (attracting Dwarvish settlement) but the region is now tectonically inactive.

The Indian analogy also resolves one other geographical worry cited by Acks -- the fact that the Anduin seems to implausibly run parallel to the Misty Mountains for most of their length. While it's true that such behavior is unusual in the real world, one notable example of it is the Ganges, which runs parallel to the feet of the Himalayas because a southward course is blocked by the Deccan. Likewise we can say that the Anduin follows the Misty Mountains because an eastward course is blocked by the volcanic plateau underlying Mirkwood.

To the west, we have the Blue Mountains. Acks suggests these could be the result of subduction of the seafloor of Belegaer under the edge of Eriador, similar to the formation of the Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada in the western US. I have doubts about this theory for several reasons. First, the Blue Mountains are short. If there was an active plate boundary, we would expect to find either a continuation of the Blue Mountains down through Minhiriath (if the plate boundary follows the coast) or the formation of an off-shore island arc (similar to the Aleutians) if the Eriador plate extended into the sea. Second, the Blue Mountains are small and broken up by the mouth of the Lhun, which to me suggests an older, eroded range (though yes, San Francisco Bay could be a counterexample).

But the main reason I don't want to call the Blue Mountains the result of subduction is because it means entirely discarding the Silmarillion (which Acks admits to not having read). A better theory to my mind, not least because it grants a historical reference point to the First Age legends, is to say that the Blue Mountains were formed by the collision of the Eriador plate with the Beleriand plate. After pushing up the Blue Mountains, the plate boundary changed direction and became divergent, breaking Beleriand away and opening up Belegaer. This is more or less the process that happened in our world between North America in the west and Europe and Africa in the east, leaving the Appalachian Mountains and -- of special interest to a "mythology for England" -- Britain's Pennines and other mountain ranges.

Now let's turn our attention southward. Here we see the White Mountains as well as the Mountains of Ash and Shadow surrounding Mordor. These areas, I would posit, are the result of a complex convergence between the northern plate group (call it "Eriavanion") and the northward-moving Harad plate. The real-world analogy for this is the northward movement of Africa into Europe and southwest Asia. In the west, subduction of the oceanic crust beneath Belfalas has created the White Mountains. The landmass of Gondor is the accumulation of various terranes (micro-plates and old volcanic island arcs) that have been scooped up and carried along as Harad moves northward. Mordor itself is a micro-plate being sandwiched between Harad and Eriavanion, causing mountain-building on all sides, similar to Anatolia or the Arabian Peninsula. This complex tectonic activity would lend itself to volcanism, creating the distinctive landscape of Mordor (especially in the northwest) and making Orodruin possible without needing to posit a mantle hot spot.

So, in map form, here's what the geological history of northwestern Middle-earth might have looked like. Convergent plate boundaries are marked in red, and divergent ones in blue, with green arrows showing the direction of plate movement:

#middle-earth #plate tectonics #lotr meta #geography nerdery #fantasy maps

[stevedonnellyfaith-blog]

Gettysburg (Post 96) 7-8-15

I have four favorite colonels in life and only one of them makes chicken; the other three fought a desperate fight on a rocky hill in rural Pennsylvania more than a century and a half in our past.  In the town of Gettysburg, on July 2nd, 1863 the outcome of the Civil War hung in the balance, but the Union forces held the high ground and ideally had well-prepared defensive lines organized in a fish-hook shape from Culp’s Hill to Little Round Top.  Except they really didn’t. Dan Sickles, by all accounts an incompetent general, repositioned his forces away from the ordered line without authorization, leaving Little Round Top unmanned and the left flank of the Union line completely exposed. A Brigadier General was sent to investigate Sickle’s mayhem and discovered the empty position on Little Round Top in time to notice the Confederate troops streaming across the heavily wooded Big Round Top headed to the occupy a commanding position on the smaller hill, a leverage point from which they would have first slaughtered Sickle’s troops and then likely rolled up the entire Union line.

But the Brigadier acted quickly enough.  He happened across Col Strong Vincent, who rather than wait for confirming order, moved his brigade into position about five to ten minutes before the rebel yell announced the first onslaught.  Strong Vincent positioned Col Joshua Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment at the extreme left of the Union forces and then returned to overall brigade command where he was shot dead within the hour.  Col Paddy O’Rourke, likewise swiftly answered a call for reinforcements and brought his troops up across Little Round Top to push back the Confederate attack. O’Rourke too was mortally wounded while leading the charge of his soldiers from a frontal position.  Thus two of my favorite colonels died bravely leading their men in an extraordinary situation that required risk and heroism.

Among his brave men the third colonel, Chamberlain, defended his position until there was almost no ammunition left to return fire.  He and his officers knew that they would soon be swept away by their determined adversaries, and that their failure would seriously endanger the entire Army of the Potomac, which had massed for the pivotal standoff.  Rather than retreat, though, they made the decision to fix bayonets and charge, an act that was immortalized in the movie Gettysburg, a film that began my fascination with this particular Civil War campaign.

Anyway, this is not a story about my love of history; it is about my journey over last weekend.  Determined for the last several years that if I ever returned East, I would visit Little Round Top, this holiday I finally made the trip.  I guess you would have to characterize my Gettysburg journey as a line item on a pretty underwhelming bucket list.  I have no desire to scuba, sky dive or ride for even one second on a bull named Fu Manchu, but I am attracted to several places associated with a paradigm shift, a collision of the tectonic plates of American history.  

I find these times and places especially alluring because, to me, they represent our most clear vision of the continuing chess game between Satan and Jesus that spans the centuries.  When there occurs a virtual volcanic crescendo of positive providential happenstance, I feel like I can finally distill God’s will clearly in our most muddied and relativistic times.  I gravitate to those places where spiritual struggle is most concentrated. If I ever visit Europe again, I will certainly stop at Fatima, at Lourdes, and most certainly, at Auschwitz where Maximilian Kolbe’s selfless act rebuked the Nazi killing factory.   In cooperation with Jesus and his vicious captors, the great saint poured out the libation of his life singing hymns to encourage his companions.

So Stephen Jr. and I headed off on an Independence Day pilgrimage to Little Round Top.  I like military history; Stephen likes gift shops at historical sites; my parents like peace and quiet every once in a while.  What is not to like?

We started on Friday morning and I accidentally left a GPS preference enabled that routed me away from all toll roads.  I use this preference to avoid a daily $4.50 shakedown I would otherwise receive by using the Ohio Turnpike to get to Youngstown. I didn’t like bridge tolls in the Bay Area, but here I can avoid the extra cost fairly easily, so I choose to. Unfortunately, if you leave that particular preference in effect on a sojourn from Cleveland to Gettysburg, you will drive through the boondocks of Pennsylvania.  Apparently, you could, in fact, drive on Route 30 from Gettysburg to either Long Island or to the city of San Francisco, but my fascination is with history not with stoplights so I would never do that.

Anyway, I realized my mistake after it no longer made sense to correct the error.  If we were so inclined, Stephen and I could have enjoyed some beautiful scenery of Western Pennsylvania.  Instead we were mostly lost in our own thoughts and tuned out the splendor of God’s creation.  Now that Natalie often rides with me, I have begun to listen to some pop stations again as relentlessly repetitive and sappy pap can pass the time on a long drive.  I must have eventually gotten sick of the audio cotton candy, as I think I was praying a rosary when I noticed the road sign.

Route 30 happens to lead through Shanksville on its meandering circuit towards the location of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous public address. I, like many Americans, vowed long ago never to forget 9-11, but it is not in my nature to remain steadfast in vigilance.  I am easily distracted by the Women’s World Cup, whatever is on the Velocity Channel, and assorted mundanity.  For instance, I missed Nathan’s hot dog eating contest this year because I was traveling.  Still I had intended to visit the Flight 93 Memorial back when I remembered that there was such a thing.

Although 9-11 was a highly significant event, it is probably not as historically important as Gettysburg, after which everything was entirely different, and America continued its ascent to a position of global power, a Godly country that Our Creator put to good use on many occasions until these last couple decades.  As a memorial, Shanksville is a smaller and newer one, but it is and will always remain a place of quiet contemplation.  I took several pictures there and will remember the experience for quite a while, although I now understand that my memory of Todd Beamer’s name etched into a white wall with various mementos lain at wall’s base will eventually fade.

My many pictures of Gettysburg will not serve as fuel for my imagination down the road, as I took very few shots on my July 4th tour.  Because it was a short trip, I decided to not pack my phone charger and instead planned to charge my phone in the car as I drove.  Unfortunately, there is no drive to charge your phone when you stay the night before at the place where you are going in the morning.  Perhaps I should have forwent updating my Facebook page the night before, but the phone would have probably only been a distraction from the documentary, bus tour, museum, cyclorama painting and obligatory visit to gift shop, which Stephen deemed quite satisfactory.  I made it to Little Round Top, the Wheat Field, The Peach Orchard and the Devil’s Den where the strategically challenged Gen Sickles got his leg blown off, which eliminated the need for his superior officers to cashier him.

What I didn’t find in Gettysburg was quiet contemplation. It is hard to engage in meditation in such a popular historical site on such an appropriate day.  In the end, after a good tour, laden with assorted trinkets Stephen and I headed off to Antietam which is down the road a spell, but seemed likely to be less popular.  I don’t know as much about that battle, but I understand that it was pivotal on a smaller scale.  I hoped for a quieter experience there, but Stephen and I were greeted with a crowd overflowing the parking lot and what looked like pumpkin chuckers on the horizon. They were actually amplifiers.  To our great surprise we discovered that the Antietam had closed down as a historical exhibit about an hour before our arrival and was instead being set up for an outdoor night concert by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  We could have stayed for the fireworks but we arrived at 4 PM, without a blanket or picnic basket, so it seemingly was not the right time for our visit and we headed up the road.

Interestingly, we had spent an hour on the drive at another site we just stumbled across.  Mount Saint Mary’s University, America’s second oldest Catholic University, also a diocesan seminary, is evidently located upon the same Emmitsville Pike along which the Confederate forces traveled towards Gettysburg in search of quality footwear.  We stopped over because there were signs for a Lourdes Grotto on a hill above the campus. The grotto we found was an incredibly beautiful peaceful place.  There is another Lourdes Grotto in Cleveland, but although it is convenient, the Cleveland Lourdes site is largely a deserted and dilapidated relic from the area’s Catholic heritage, although beautiful and peaceful.  I spent time there after Pam’s passing.  While it is also beautiful and peaceful, the grotto at Emmistville, Maryland is wonderfully alive with serene and respectful layman, priests, brothers and sisters of all orders.  Had I not been hurrying towards my disappointment in Antietam, I probably could have sat their quietly all afternoon.  Unencumbered by my unnecessary and doomed holiday syllabus, Stephen enjoyed the stop at the grotto quite a bit.

Already, Stephen has asked me to revisit the grotto on our next trip south, this time a pilgrimage to my wife’s final resting place. Emmitsville was that very memorable stopover for him, although he did like the gift shop at Gettysburg as well. Ironically, the two unplanned stops were more powerful for the both of us, even though I have been planning the ascent of Little Round Top for many years.  I guess that oddity is consistent with all of our pilgrimages, through life. I often assemble and try to execute my own agenda with mixed results.  Sometimes I’ll leave a family member out of an activity if I think that they may be less enthusiastic about my plan than I am.  When instead of over planning, I hand the rudder over at least partially to Jesus, throughout my endeavors, the results are usually much better, more powerful and often more moving that my original idea.  The spiritual wellspring I experienced during the two providential stops on our little weekend trip is continued proof to me that Jesus delights in providing me with more happiness than I expect.

#God #Jesus #The Holy Spirit #The Virgin Mary #grace #hope #faith #love #Gettysburg #Fatima #Lourdes #grotto #Maximilian Kolbe #libation #sacrifice #independence day #pilgrimage #Rosary #Flight 93 #July 4th #cyclorama

[thetwelfthdr]

What are your apocalypse dreams like? Lmao I read your tag on the tsunami clouds video and got very curious 😂

oh GOD. THIS IS GOING TO BE LONG. So a lot of them use to be tornado related, so like, multiple tornados in a general area but no one seemed to be worried, and for some reason I was always in a car when these tornados would pop up. These dreams help me realize they are a dream and give me the ability to control the weather/the dream.

I think within the past 2-3 years, I’ve had more water related dreams, aka tsunamis and floods. I can’t remember the first one I had, but the earliest one I can remember is being in my hometown (which is nowhere close to the ocean) and seeing giant tsunami waves covering the skyline and me on the ground, getting engulfed by waves, and yet somehow surviving and floating to the top of skyscrapers to get saved (this also included me leading a group of “survivors” who were stupid enough to jump down off the roof of a house to save a dog when the waves were coming). 

OKAY BUCKLE UP BECAUSE THIS IS MY LATEST TSUNAMI DREAM

Basically, I was on the beach suntanning when the water started to recede and a giant wave developed. I somehow managed to dive into the wave, grab onto a dolphin, and sort of hang on until I got to safety, while everyone else presumably drowned. Safety meant a building somewhere in NYC, and getting scolded by Barack Obama ... but I digress. I think my dream jumped forward in time because I saw a “vision” of London, UK developing a giant laser that shot into the ocean, which would hit the tectonic plates and cause the waves to come towards NYC. So as that “vision” happened, the water started to recede again, but I managed to get to the nearest building’s roof after running past multiple guards, only to see that the water was basically waist high that I had to hold onto a pole in order to not get dragged away. 

MY DREAMS ARE WEIRD

#personal #Anonymous

[newflanagansonthebloch]

Day 3: Hanoi to Halong Bay/ Lan Ha Bay

I still can’t sleep to the alarm which is set for 7 but Kerran can. So instead I wake at 6 and make my first blog post you saw a few days ago. At 7:15 we tie up our running shoes and do 3 laps around the lake. We run slow at around 8:30 miles, but the air is thick with humidity and I’m just getting back to running shape. In fact, I may be getting slight shin splints. I’m impressed we’ve now run twice on vacation and it’s nice to go together.

After showering and packing up a bit we head to breakfast. No Vietnam English newspaper today. I was enjoying that as it’s interesting to see how people who love hear view the world. There is far more articles about small European countries and happenings. Obviously there’s more about Vietnam to, like an upcoming visit from the Dutch PM (I think?) and how they can learn more about climate change practices etc from them.

Kerran manages to have half the menu for breakfast—an egg muffin, an omelet, baguette toast, one of my hard boiled eggs, muesli, yogurt, fruit, donuts. I can run on an empty tummy so I’ve had a ONE bar already (the peanut butter ones are delicious) that I’ve brought from home. I have some tea, a hard boiled egg and a small dish of cornflakes to get me through lunch. I am loving the portion sizes (though they aren’t always small!!). Kerran clearly loves breakfast. Me, I’d prioritize dessert, but I’m sure that doesn’t surprise anyone!

At 9:15 we meet Tsoi for our two hour drive to halong bay. As always, Kerran dozes off while I stare at the green landscape and draft these posts. It reminds me of how my mom would doze off between animal sitings when we went on Safari. There is an unimaginable amount of construction on the outskirts of Hanoi. At one site alone there are probably thousands upon thousands of apartments being constructed for the ever expanding population and more cranes than either of us have ever seen in one place!

We arrive at the new port, it’s nothing like the serene photos you see in Pinterest. It’s a pretty gross site with makeshift offices, containers, and cranes. It’s industrial. Four couples sit in the waiting room for Heritage Cruise line’s Ginger boat. I play a game with myself guessing where they are from. (I got two of three correct—Quebec and Connecticut)

The 8 of us take a small boat equipped with big bright orange life vests for a short speed boat trip to the Ginger. We take the grand stair case to the third floor dining room where were briefed by Min, one of the staff, on safety and the jam-packed program ahead. We unpack in our Junior Suite which is quite large (and beautiful) for a boat. The boat itself is a new build, it’s been out for about a year or so and it’s stunning. At lunch we’re joined by a tour group from Canada. Lunch is absolutely beautifully presented, and it’s a multi course meal of sea food—soup, salad, spring rolls, a main and dessert. Luckily portions are small so I can taste it all.

As we make our way around Cat Ba archipelago, the scenery is more and more stunning with karst “mountains” reaching 50-100m on all sides. The limestone makes the water a beautiful green. We pass an old lighthouse which is more house line in actuality, while we eat. While the area is famous for Halong Bay, we are actually on the adjacent Lan Ha Bay which has the same scenery, fewer tourists, less garbage and some surviving house boats.

Our first stop is on Cat Ba island, the second largest island of Vietnam and the largest in this archipelago. There are 367 islands in the archipelago. Our guide tells us that Cat Ba means “women’s land.” We sail about 3/4 around it and take our smaller motorized shuttle boat to Viet Hai, a small village on the south east coast. In fact, Viet Hai means “Vietnamese who live in the sea.” Here we get on beach cruiser bikes for a short 3k ride to Tai Lai town. We pass goats, cows, farms, and of course limestone. When we arrive in town, our guide gives us a short lesson. She tells us that about 10,000 people live on Cat Ba, mostly in Cat Ba Town. There are about 1000 people in floating houses. In this town there are 300-400 residents but many are not there now—some are off fishing and those who are in secondary school are at a boarding school in Cat Ba Town, which is about 45 minutes away by boat. We learn that Cat Ba has one small hospital in town, staffed by nurses and no doctors. For this reason, the locals of this village tend to gravitate toward natural medicines.

Up until 10 years ago this village did not have electricity and relied on batteries and generators. Until 2-3 years ago there was no tourism. Tourism has provided more economic opportunity for this small village.

We walk around the village starting with the burial sites, where families are buried together. Here it’s custom that three years after a parents death the oldest son will dig up the body, clean the bones and then rebury the bones. (I’m really glad we don’t have this custom). Lychee trees are planted nearby the graves as they believe that ghosts are attracted to the fruit and that by planting these trees the ghosts stay away from the homes.

We walk through the garden where peanuts are growing, as well as Papaya trees, green beans etc. Mai, our guide also informed us about the native animals here—the Black Kite or small sea hawk that we see from the boat and the Langurs and Gibbons like we saw in the rescue center yesterday. The Cat Ba white headed langur is one of the top 25 most endangered primates in the world and lives only on Cat Ba—it has been here since the island separated from the mainland due to tectonic activity. There are about 60 left on the island. The island itself is a National Park that protects the langurs but prior to this they were hunted because many believed their brains and bone had medicinal properties. Unfortunately we don’t see any primates today.

We do meander our way to a local home where a man is chopping a tree endemic to Car Ba island. It’s believed to have medicinal properties like Keri g away cancer and is evidently good for your health. They use it to make tea. We also see how they ferment their own rice wine—a little jarring to see what we’d use for gasoline to make wine! We get to try some of the tea and the rice wine which is surprisingly not so bad. Kerran is the only one out of all 24 of us brave enough to taste the snake rice wine!

We bike back to the small port and board the Ginger again and have just enough time to freshen up before a cooking demonstration. This is probably the only time I’ll blow dry my hair the whole trip and it feels so luxurious. The ridiculous heat and humidity of Vietnam has otherwise confined my hair to a pony tail. This is the first time I’ve seen my hair frizz in ages!

Before dinner a small group of us attend the cooking demonstration where they are making green papaya and shrimp salad (Kerran has beef). They use so many herbs and spices which explains the delicious and complex flavorings. The salad itself has green mango, jicama, shredded carrot and cucumber, onion, mint, cilantro and more. The dressing has sweet chili sauce, chilis, fish sauce (always!), sugar, garlic, rice vinegar. We get hands on and learn to plate and sprinkle our creations with peanuts and sesame.

Dinner is more meat based and not quite as good as lunch was but still tasty. After dinner we try our hand at squid fishing (and fail) but see some cute butterfly looking fish (dragon fish?). There is a screening of Top Gear’s Vietnam episode which I manage to catch some (but not all) of as I’m getting so sleepy! Upon return to our room there are ginger (of course!) chocolates on our pillows. Within moments I’m asleep, managing to clock a full 8 hours for the first time this trip!

[brianjameson]

Saturday Day 4: Snorkeling in Silfra

It was the day of my snorkeling tour and thankfully I woke up not feeling sick. It was a good idea to just go home after my dinner I had the night before to avoid getting sick.

I was beyond excited for this tour because of the amount of history it had to it.

I was going to be snorkeling in Silfra in between the 2 tectonic plates where 2 major oceans are separated.

Silfra is a fissure created by the separation of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates cutting through Iceland. The Silfra fissure fills with glacial water that has been filtered underground for decades through hardened, porous lava rock. The filtering process of the glacial water makes Silfra one of the clearest bodies of water on earth with up to 120 meters of visibility.

Most people do this tour in the summer for obvious reasons but once I saw the images when I was booking my tours, this one just looked the most magical.

I walked down the street where my bus was going to be picking me up and there was a boy standing on the side of the road so I figured that was the bus stop. I swear some of these bus pick ups were literally just outside of hotels and hostels. There would be no bus signs, nothing, you just stand there on the side of the road and hope that your bus hasn’t passed by yet.

My bus arrived and my driver was hot. He was this bald tall buff dude wearing a tank and a jacket half zipped blasting Pantera on the bus. I was melting lol.

We drove out about 45 min to Silfra and when we got there we had clear instructions on where to go to start getting dressed for the tour. You had to go to a different bus that had the snorkeling suits with different sizes. You then have to go back to your bus and get suited up. Afterwards you then grab your flippers and the rest of the gear from crates that they had on the floor and just wait for everyone else.

Getting ready was easily the most miserable part of this tour.

The floors were all ice because of the snow and the rubber boots in the suits were so thin that your feet immediately start to freeze. It got to the point where we were standing on our flippers to avoid the freezing cold floor. We couldn’t wear gloves or beanies or anything and we were standing outside for a good 45 minutes. They put this rope around your neck over the suit so that water doesn’t get inside your suit and it was pretty uncomfortable.

You get put in groups of 6 and wait for your wave to go which took foreeeever. I was talking to these 2 girls while waiting in the freezing cold. One of the girls was from Canada, her name was Julie and the other from Taiwan and her name was Lien. They were cracking me up taking photos of themselves looking miserable because of how cold they were lol. Lien had a Gopro so she was taking photos of everything in the water.

When we got down to the ramp they have you do something disgusting. YOU HAVE TO SPIT IN YOUR FACE MASK. Like, literally spit all in that shit… I guess the enzymes in saliva help from the mask fogging up which did work but it was FUCKING DISGUSTING to me. I know everyone is going to ask ‘WASN’T THE WATER COLD?’ no not at all because once in the water you do not feel how cold the water is because of the dry suit, plus, it was colder outside than in the water. Something shitty that does happen is water gets in your gloves regardless of how much you move your hands around to swim and your hands start to freeze so I had mine clenched most of the time.

There are no fish or anything living in the water it’s all just rocks and shells that reflect light.

While swimming I was just thinking to myself  ‘wow I’m really swimming in something that holds so much history’ even though I was struggling to swim because of how obnoxious the suit was. We swam for about 30 minutes and at that point I was ready to go. My gloves were filled with freezing cold water and I literally ran my ass back to the van while trying not to fall because of the ice on the ground. I was so uncomfortable because of the gloves that I could barely take them off and when I did my thumb was literally frozen to where I couldn’t even move it. Once it thawed out it hurt because of how cold my hands were lol.

Once we all got back to the vans and got undressed they gave us hot coco to warm us all up lol.

We hung out for maybe 20 minutes and then it was time to go which I was kind of glad about. I love the cold I really do but this tour REALLY TESTED ME. Needless to say, the tour was not as easy as it looked in photos but it was worth all the money.

    I got back to my place and showered to go out on the town with Janusz, a polish boy I had met. We were going to go to 101 Hotel to have a drink by the fire place. We both had espresso martinis which I totally needed after all that swimming I did. My friend Jacob had wrote to me while I was in Iceland and told me he used to live in Reykjavik and that he and his wife Debbie actually fell in love in Iceland and every Friday night they would go to 101 Hotel and have drinks by the fire. I thought it was the most romantic and endearing thing to do and so I definitely wanted to toast to them and their love. I met them at a wedding recently and we all just connected and they’ve instantly become such a big part of my life.

Janusz and I sat by the fire and talked and got to know each other and it was just fun to be able to do this with someone I just met and since he lived in Iceland it was great to have him guide me around the town. I don’t think I’ve ever met a random stranger who was as kind as he was to me.

Afterwards we went to a restaurant that was across the street that supposedly had good Icelandic food. Definitely did not disappoint!

We ordered puffin for appetizer which was very tender and kinda sweet but very good! I had whale for my main course and that was a shocker because it literally tasted like steak. I think the fact that it was grilled really helped but it literally tasted and looked like steak.

Once we left the restaurant, we instantly hit the bars. He took me to a gay bar called Kiki which is the main gay bar in Iceland. It was cool but definitely not Vegas and I kind of felt like anyone goes there not just gay people. We kind of pub crawled after but once we left Kiki it started to snow! It was the first time I was actually in the snow while being in Iceland and it truly was like a dream. I felt the need to dance in it through out our escapades lol. The saying is definitely true about the rain and snow in Iceland…. It all comes at you sideways! So while you’re trying to walk, you’re getting wacked in the face with snow to the point where you can almost not even see lol.

I don’t normally make it a point to get drunk but I told myself I was getting HAMMERED since it was my last weekend in Iceland and I sure did get hammered. Janusz was taking me all over the place and we kept ordering more and more drinks. One thing I noticed is that most of these bars and clubs don’t have a DJ they just play music on a track which was different. Most of the songs coming on were either early 90’s or the super gay pop songs you grew up listening to. It really depended which bar you were at because some other bars we went to were playing early 2000’s songs from when I was in high school which realllllly took me back in time. It really made me happy hearing all the variety of different music I hadn’t heard in years but it was also interesting to be hearing it all play in a foreign country lol.

Soon it was 2am and time to go home. Before we parted ways Janusz told me he wanted to take me to the waterfalls and to the Reynisfjara Black Sand beach where Game of Thrones season 7 ended. I was STOKED because the beaches were not a part of the Game of Thrones tour and I was super bummed about it since I really felt that the beach was calling my name. I wanted to go to the beach so so bad but didn’t want to go alone after seeing what the roads looked like in the country when I was on my tours. So he said he would go with me and I felt like I actually would really like that. It helps having someone who knows their way around the city just in case anything happens. I know I was being a wild child but driving in Iceland definitely requires a lot of caution and focus because of the weather conditions in the country. Driving in the city is fine because they pump hot water into the roads so that there’s no ice to slide on but once in the country, you don’t get that luxury.. I would be seeing these itty bitty ass cars driving through plows of snow. So yeah I was not about to do all of that alone because the responsible me was like ‘bitch don’t even try it without someone because if something happens YOU’RE IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY’ and so I listened to the voice talking to me in my head and took Janusz with me lol.

He walked me back to my place and we said goodnight.

Sunday was a very important part of my trip and easily the most spiritual..

Letters from the Arctic pt.4 Saturday Day 4: Snorkeling in Silfra It was the day of my snorkeling tour and thankfully I woke up not feeling sick.

#advice #arctic circle #best wordpress travel blogs #blog #blogging #brian jameson #coldest places on earth #good reads #iceland blogs #icelandic #ideas #inspiration #las vegas #las vegas bloggers #life #nevada #pieces of jameson #travel blogs #travel ideas #travel tips #traveling #traveling alone #wordpress

[heister]

Reykjavik, Rafting, & Golden Circle

well…I didn’t take an early night Sunday. I ended up making some friends at the hostel and we decided to go out; yes there is nightlife in Reykjavik on Sundays. We landed at Kiki, the only queer bar in Reykjavik (which I have affectionately started to call Reyk, even though probably no one says that), where we made some more friends and danced a little. It was pretty low key (there’s not THAT much nightlife on a Sunday!) and I made it back to the hostel in time to stream Game of Thrones. BUT – tragedy – the internet futzed up halfway through and when I tried to get back on, it told me there were too many people using my account. It’s finally happened, friends. I gave out my password too many times. It’s funny because I looked up HBOgo’s policies about number of uses of one login, and they are very vague. So I guess we hit the magic random number. If this happens again, I may have to change the password – I’ll let y’all know if that happens and apologize if that’s the way of it, but a girl’s gotta watch her GOT. I’ll probably just wait until Mondays to watch it anyway, because I’d rather stick it to capitalism and share my (mom’s) account with all my friends but…we’ll see. Oh! And no spoilers here, now or ever.

So I did not have a very good night’s sleep, maybe about 4ish hours, and then it was off to my big rafting adventure! Yes, I went rafting in an arctic river composed entirely of glacier melt. Whoo it was cold! They gave us all special wet suits and shoes which was really helpful. I rented a gopro for the journey and have a butt zillion photos and videos, but the memory chip they gave me doesn’t fit into my computer, so no pics from that for now. It was a lot of fun, but I am so sore now (the next day). It really is a good upper body workout! Oh! And I managed to fall in on the very first rapid. Oy. It was quite exciting…I don’t think I really had time to feel too scared, though I was definitely a little freaked out. But I did everything right and was pulled back into the boat after the rapids were done. I’m sure my butt is bruised but I held on to the boat and kept my feet up, so it could have been a lot scarier than it was. I guess I can say I swam a class 2 rapid! I am grateful to be okay – it was quite the surprise, I was in the boat then all of a sudden I wasn’t! After that it was pretty hard for the rest of the journey to compare, thrills-wise, but believe me, I was glad to have some tranquility. My arm hurt a bit after that, but it went away soon enough. We also stopped at a place where you could jump off a cliff at 5 or 8 m. I chickened out of the 8m and did the 5m one, and ooof, I did not jump right because my body was hurting after that. I think it was the impact of the life jacket moving on my upper torso, it hurt to breathe too deep for the rest of the journey. I was starting to get a little worried, but the pain went away as soon as I took my life jacket off, later. So everything’s okay! But I must say the jump was more scary and painful than fun…I think my phase of jumping off things (see: Central America 2015) may be over; it’s probable that bungee jumping (also CA 2015) actually increased my fear of heights haha.

After rafting, our group did a tour of the Golden Circle. I was so tired and wiped out I almost didn’t even care about everywhere we went. It was hard to pull myself out of the car, I was so tired. But I’m glad I did. We went to Geysir first, which is the geysir all other geysers are named after

It doesn’t gush anymore, just steams. Its neighbor, Strokkur, is much more active, but I didn’t get any good photos. It gushed 3 times in a row right after I walked away – poor timing! Whatever, though, I was there and I remember :)

Then we went to Gullfoss, which means golden waterfall, named for how it looks when the sun hits it a certain way.

It was really beautiful, and we saw a few rainbows! I didn’t have time to go close to the falls, but I was also a little worried about slipping and falling on the slippery rocks, so it’s probably for the better. After my excitement on the rafting trip I think I was a little hypochondriac. On the trail here I realized I didn’t have my drive with the rafting photos and assumed I’d lost it, that it had fallen out of my pocket in a bathroom somewhere. But then I found it back on the bus. Yay!

Our final stop was þingvellir national park, where I’d stopped with the GoT tour earlier. The rest of the group went to the waterfall I’d already seen, but I went to Alþingi (which sounds like how I try to pronounce most Icelandic: “Al-thingy”) which is where the first seat of Icelandic parliament in the 900s (yes, 900s, NOT 1900s) was.

It’s right where the tectonic plates of Europe and North America are coming apart, slowly (about an inch in Iceland every year). I realized that this is what that tunnel from the GoT tour was (the bloody gate one; also used when the wildlings meet the thenns) – it’s the “no man’s land” between continental plates. wild!

Then we went home and I went to sleep, whew!

Today is my last day in Reykjavik and I’m taking it pretty easy. I checked out of my hostel and am at one of my favorite Reyk cafes. Tonight I’m going to the Blue Lagoon – a total tourist trap hot springs but all I’ve heard is that it is a tourist trap AND still worth it. It will be nice to just relax with all my sore muscles from yesterday. After that I’m heading to an airport hostel to rest up before my flight to Berlin early tomorrow morning. I’ll be getting into Berlin around noon tomorrow, and while I’m sad to leave Iceland – I’m rather fond of it – I will NOT miss how freaking expensive it is here! Oy! My hostel in Berlin is 1/3 the price of my hostel here, and it’s so refreshing to return to semi-normal city prices. I’ll be saving a lot in Greece, I hope, but dang, this was an expensive trip. I wouldn’t take it back, but do wish I had planned more. I understand why I didn’t/couldn’t but my recommendation for others is to definitely plan, save, budget, etc. for Iceland. It’s not a great spur-of-the-moment trip, but it is a great trip! I think my favorite parts were the glacier lagoon and rafting. It’s a really beautiful country – even the “mundane” parts of it are gorgeous – and worth coming to see. Just be sure to budget and save in advance. My only regret is that I’ll be saving after the fact to cover some of the costs on this trip. But, yolo, you know?

Well, I think that’s all for now! Catch you in Berlin!

#iceland #reykjavik #gullfoss #geysir #golden circle #rafting #adventure #travel #þingvellir

[vulbyte]

story time!

hi, sorry but i haven’t posted anything good in a while so i thought i’d post something related to the animation i’m working on!... it’s only a small chunk and i’m kinda nervous about posting this but i’d love some feed back, so i hope you all enjoy!.. also this will related to the comic and animation so please keep that in mind... also, please don’t be too harsh...

prolouge

>insert and family is out on their yearly camping trip. The day is a normal clear day. The drive to the camping grounds is along a paved dirt road with trees to both sides. There are trees to both sides and the road is quite long, insert is waking up from his sleep and this is where the story starts…<

Chapter 1: back again for the dozenth time.

I wake from my sleep with a bang to my head and an instant headache. I quickly jolt up with the music from my phone still playing in my ears. It’s house music, with bleed from the car's stereo. I look out the window to my right seeing the bumpy gravel road and a wall of pine trees… as we pass the trees it all looks so similar like a pattern on loop… there’s very little fauna on the ground due to the lack of light caused by the canopy of the trees… any part of light that does shine threw looks like a small island in a sea of orange dead plant remains…

    I look forward seeing that my parents sitting in the front seat. Lightly bobbing and dipping their heads to the music that they're listening to. Dads tapping his fingers on the wheel while he’s snickering about something, while mom taps her hand on the wheel. i can't stand the “best of the 80’s” rock my dad likes so much. Not for the fact it’s rock, but for the idea of listening to the same song for the 200th time is just too much. I would love for him to be a little more open minded about his music choices but it’s just a never ending uphill battle with bad puns mocking the1 edm artist he knows i like and endless claiming that edm isn’t music. But i got my lovely headphones which have broke at least 10 times but i'm too cheap to replace them and i can deal with the slight noise they give off.

    I look to my right noticing my younger brother and sister some how sleeping threw that massive pot hole. My brothers against the left door. Drool running down his face and down the door dripping on the handle. My sister’s head is tilted right forward supported only by her neck and her chest. I move my left arm noticing how uncomfortable it is and i can quickly feel all the blood rushing back into my arm making me feel like i got dozens of pins suddenly stuck in my arm. I notice dad glance in the rear view mirror look back in the mirror and notice that i’m now awake. I can notice him talking but can’t hear a word he’s saying due to my music. Take an ear bud out to hear the middle of his “good morning world” speech…

“-lmost at the camp ground! Can’t wait for this weekend! How about you kid?”

“other than the recent blunt force trauma to my head i think alright…”

“Yeah, meant to hit that one. Was hoping you and the others would wake up!”

    “welp, your plan worked for one of us…”

“Meh, better one than none…”

        “thanks, my brain cells appreciate it…”

Mom quickly buts into the conversation sensing my bitter mood.

        “Hey hun, could you please take this piece of paper to the office once we park at the camp ground and tell them that we’ve arrived?”

    “sure, i can probably say hi so shawn while i’m there.”

        “Thanks, hun!”

I notice we’re right beside the office as she says this and i quickly jump out of the car ignoring the whole wait “till we park” so i don't have to wait 10 minutes for dad to back it.

I look upon the rotting shack thinking of how this place was when i was much younger. Now it just looks like an old house outta a bad horror movie. I look thru the window on the door trying to see shawn while i walk in. i quickly hear a chime followed by shawns voice coming from behind the counter,

“Just a second!”

    I look over the counter seeing the big guys ass move back and forth while trying to do something to the computer. I look around the office placing the paper on the counter, noticing a chair behind me. Kick the chair behind me and fall back into it. Making a screeching across the floor. I see a small spark and shawn's voice quickly follows

“FUCK! Shit shouldn't have said that with a customer in here. Fuck, shouldn’t have said that… i should just shut the fuck up… i’m just going to shut up…”

    “yea, ya should.”

“Hey! Is that you insert?!”

    “yup” (adding a popping sound after words.)

“Hey, i know i asked you this the other day but why did you literally change all your usernames to that?”

    “a bunch of annoying idiots in school where mocking me in school, they were pissed i was inserted into their group last year even though i did literally all of the work and got them a high b. buy anyways they started calling me insert along with rest of the school. It started to bug me but i decided to own it and it still bugs me but least i own it and other people can’t use it to bug me. a kinda win…”

“Well, ya should stop moving so much”

    “ya, i can totally control what my parents do”

“Oh hey, did you know the tides supposed to be really low tonight?

    “yay, another low tide. we can go pick dead seaweed and watch crabs eat dead starfish.”

“No, it’s supposed to be really low.”

    “okay, i see what you’re getting at. how low?”

“Low enough to see the what's at the bottom of sandy bay...”

    “what’s at the bottom?”

“No once can tell, the currents so strong they can’t send divers in there because they’ll get pinned against the bays seamounts.” and the sand causes whatever is down there to be distorted. They got a good idea what’s down there but they're not completely certain.”

    “okay. so there’s going to be a massively low tide on a super crowded beach, you know how i hate being in crowded areas…”

“Dude, thats the best part! Did you hear about that big earthquake yesterday up north?”

“no, i’ve been in a car for the last 2 days with the only access to internet being the hotel wi-fi for 30min before i passed out at 4am, and the 3 gigs of cell data, no wait. 1.5 gigs because i need the other half to get back and i’m not wasting it looking for news.”

“Okay okay i get ya, i know you’re a music whore”

    “bitch you know i am!”

“Anyways, there is going to be another one tonight that’s supposed to cause a huge rip! an-”

    “how big?”

“Huge! At least  250 km long and 50 km wide there expecting!”

    “woah, where is it happening?”

“That’s the best and probably only good part! From ahousat down to seattle!” there’s a huge evacuation going on because of it!”

    “ya realize we’re there right?”

“Ya, my parents already jumped ship. They were practically dragging me out the door but i convinced them to let me stay!”

    “how?!”

“Well i told them what i told you at the beginning.”

    “I know you better than that. What you actually say?”

“...i told them i’d watch over the visitors…”

    “was that so hard?”

“Yeah! If i skip work to go to this this thing you’ll tell my parents!”

    “dude, i said something that you did which i don’t even think is or was bad in front of old staff of this place. when we were 8! we’ve literally doubled our life since then. and other than that technicality i would never tell on you! You’ve covered me more than enough! now shut up and when’s this thing happening?”

“It’s supposed to fracture at around 1am tonight.”

    “what’s supposed to fracture?”

“Remember 8th grade scie-”

    “ohhhhhh, so a tectonic plate is going to break off tonight? or at least a chunk?”

“Before you interrupted me i was going to tell you that but yeah, it is…”

    “so you wanna meet up on the beach later tonight? just us?”

“No man! I gotta work!”

    “uhhh, we’re the only ones staying here tonight. literally the whole campground is empty except for us. and probably the town now that i think about it.”

“Fine! You promise not to tell!”

    “what are we? 8 again? of course i won’t tell on you if you come! but i might say ya did if ya don’t!”

“Fine! I’ll come but you better not tell!”

    “for the 3rd time i won’t, and this is your thing not mine. you should be pumped!”

“I am but i’m also scared about what my parents might say or do if they find out!”

I turn around walk towards the door and walk thru the door and say

“they won’t meet me at my campground tonight!

And i shut the door behind me.

_______________________________________________________________

if you read it i hope you enjoyed it and please leave some feed back! i’d love to hear what you have to say!

#story #early #development #related #to #some #of #the #art #ive #been #posting #recently #update #dailypost #inserthashteghere #thanks #for #reading #and #hope #you #enjoyed!

[aoi-midori]

Resolutions for 2K17

hey everyone! hope you guys’ve had a happy new year! i did, and i want to get this year started off with a bang. 

first of all, i want to thank all of my followers (both old and new) for following me. i haven’t been as active as i’d like to be lately, but thanks for keeping up with me! I really appreciate it.

that being said, now i’d like to ask for your help. i’ve advertised this a few times in the past few years, but i have an original story that i’ve been working on since 2011, and since then, it’s basically been stuck in development hell due to the constant rewrites and shit and me never actually finishing the thing. another problem i’ve been having is the damn writer’s block, but that’s mainly due to a lack of motivation to write.

NOT THIS YEAR DAMMIT.

i’m actually going to be productive this year and WRITE WRITE WRITE. and so i’m taking a huge risk here by doing something that i should have done a long time ago: starting with this post, i’m going to post my story chapters right here to on this blog. so all i’m asking from you guys is to please read them and GIVE ME FEEDBACK. if any of you did that, i would be SO grateful, you have no idea! 

okay, so about my story, working title of “brotherhood” (definitely changing it to something better eventually). to give you all a quick run-down of it, it’s set in 2019 in a world pretty similar to ours, but with a few big differences, the main one being EVERYONE HAS POWERS. what’s not to love about powers, right? anyway, here’s a brief summary of it: 

“ In 2019, activity in the magi-underworld has grown exponentially. ETMA, one of the largest magi-organizations in the world, brings in 20 elite mages - people gifted with special abilities - to counter these criminals. But this is merely only the beginning. As these elites grow with their powers and become increasingly well-known in the magi-community, a new threat lurks in the shadows, waiting to strike... “

so as for the story mechanics, it’s written in rotating first person with six main characters. if you don’t know what that means, basically i’ve got six narrators for this thing, each with their own sub-plots that link up to the main storyline, and some characters’ stories are interconnected with each other. so that makes things really interesting! 

so anyway, i’ll post the prologue under the cut! enjoy!

Chapter 0: ETMA [Al Smith]

Today went off to a pretty slow start. But what I didn’t expect was for my dad to drag my sister and me all the way down to Florida along with our two best friends. Not that we were really complaining though; all four of us were either out of school or taking random classes at the local community college, so we didn’t have much of a reason to argue our way out of our current situation.

“Augh, are we there yet?” My sister, Lex, groaned from the seat next to me. We had left the Miami Airport about 30 minutes before and after only a 2 hour flight, so I didn’t see what the big deal was to be honest.

“Yeah, almost,” Dad reassured her from the driver’s seat. “But we really haven’t been driving for that long. Are you that bored already?”

“No, that’s not it at all. I just want to get this over with so that I can go back to sleep. And what bugs me is that you woke us up at the crack of dawn just so we could catch a plane at the last minute!”

“Heh heh, sorry about that. Though, I only got my orders this morning, so this was the best that I could do.”

She let out a great big sigh and folded her arms across her chest. “Yeah, well they should at least give us a few days warning next time. It’s so inconvenient, and I didn’t get much sleep last night because of it!”

“Well, if you’re that tired, then you could’ve-”

“Don’t even go there!” Lex turned right on the spot and glared in my direction. “There was no way I could’ve slept on the plane, it was too bumpy! And those kids kicking my seat sure didn’t help either! So zip it!”

Things pretty much always ended up like this. Whenever Lex and I talk with each other, it usually turns into an argument, just like the snap of a finger. “Hey, relax. I’m just trying to give you advice! Is that a problem?”

“When you’re being sarcastic about it, yes!”

“Okay guys, let’s calm down, alright?!” Enter the first of our two mediators, Will Parker. Whenever Lex and I started arguing, he would be the one to try to settle things verbally. As to how effective that was, I’d say it was about 50% of the time, maybe even less than that. But he still tried regardless.

Anyway, Will had turned around to face us from the front seat to try to talk us down once again. “Come on, let’s just try to be civil about things, okay? After all, we are almost there!”

“Yeah, thank god. I don’t think I could stand sitting next to him any longer.”

I copied her posture and slid down in my seat. “Well, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I haven’t done a single thing to you all day, so what’s your problem?”

“See, see? There’s the sarcasm again! I swear, that is all that ever comes out of your mouth these days, and it drives me off the edge!”

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

“What did I just say?!”

“Guys, please!” Will did his best to try to get us to stop, but Lex and I had found ourselves in a full-blown argument at this point, so no dice. “Just a few more minutes, and we’ll be there! That’s good, right?”

Still nothing. “Augh… Emma! A little help here please?!”

Both of us shut up really quick and turned our heads left as our second mediator pulled out her earbuds and gave us the death glare - Will’s younger sister and my best friend, Emma Parker. During those times when Will couldn’t stop us from arguing, that’s when Em would step in. She was the one to literally break up our fights, either by scolding us or by resorting to force and violence. And unlike Will, her methods were 100% effective every time.

She glared at the two of us for a few seconds before conjuring up a fireball with the snap of her fingers. “Do I need to switch seats with one of you?” The way she delivered it was downright terrifying.

“Nope, we’re good!” I didn’t need to be told twice. I wouldn’t dare cross her.

“Uh huh. And no more arguing, right?”

Lex let out a nervous laugh. “No no, of course not! We’ve got everything under control, don’t worry!” Then she leaned to the side and hugged me. “Isn’t that right Bro?”

“Yeah, sure thing! We’ll be good, Em!”

She eyed us suspiciously for a bit longer, and we stared right back, albeit very anxiously. Then her demeanor changed altogether as the fireball vanished, and her face broke out into a wide grin. “Now that’s more like it!”

Will sighed with relief as Em clapped me on the back. “Now let’s lighten up the mood here, guys! I mean, we’ve got ourselves a new job! I’m excited!”

Dad laughed from up front. “Well, at least one of you is lively back there. And…. We’re here!”

It was about time! I leaned over against Em as we both looked out the window at our new home.

The Elemental Tectonic Mage Alliance, or “ETMA” for short: it was a massive organization affiliated with the United Nations tasked with handling affairs involving rogue mages- people gifted with special abilities- and the like. My dad, Joe Smith, had been working for ETMA for a long time, and he had trained the four of us over the past several years so that we’d have better control over our powers, as we were all mages. And now it seemed that ETMA was in some kind of trouble, so Dad finally brought us in.

Anyway,  Dad drove onto the base and parked the car a little ways in. Leaving our luggage inside to pick up later, the five of us headed inside what I thought looked to be the main building on base. Eventually, we made it to the assigned room where everyone was supposed to be meeting. And when we stepped inside…

“Well… This is shocking.” I looked around the room to find it completely empty. “We’re actually the first ones here, I don’t believe it.”

Even Lex was surprised. “Yeah seriously, Dad. What happened to being fashionably late?”

Dad ushered us in and propped the door open. “Yeah, well I’m best friends with ETMA’s leader, so I kind of have to make a good first impression here.”

“Well, you don’t necessarily have to, but it sure does help in the long run.” We hadn’t even been there ten seconds when someone else entered the room. After taking one good look, I could tell in an instant that this guy was important. There were a few things that could easily be pointed out, such as the long red hair worn back in a ponytail, but what made him stand out the most was the blindfold covering his eyes.

Dad was smiling. “Speak of the devil.” He bounded over to the guy with the blindfold and gave him a sideways hug. “Nice to see you again, Shuuhei!” Then he waved at the rest of us and beckoned us over. “Hey kids, come on over and say hi to your new boss!”

I figured as much, but it was still a little bit surprising to me all the same. “Wait, so he’s the leader then?”

“In the flesh,” the blindfold guy replied as he broke away from Dad. He held out his hand for each of us to shake once we reached the two of them. “Imada Shuuhei, it’s good to have you all on board!”

Will was the last of us to shake hands with him. “We’re just glad that we’ll be of good use to you. Anything we can do to help out!”

Meanwhile, Em had put her knuckles against her mouth and was gazing curiously at Shuuhei. “Erm, I don’t want to be acting out-of-line here or anything, but could I ask you something? I don’t know if it’s too personal to ask about though, but…”

“I don’t see why not. Ask away.”

“Right, okay. What’s up with the blindfold? Like, can you even see under that thing?”

I was actually glad she asked that, because I was positive I wasn’t the only one thinking it. Who wouldn’t wonder about that anyway?

Shuuhei smiled and shifted his footing a bit before answering. “Oh yeah, I get that a lot actually. Let’s see… To answer your first question, I have my reasons for wearing this thing.” He gestured to the blindfold as he mentioned it. “As for the second one… Yes and no. I guess you could say that I can’t see in the traditional sense, but my powers actually allow me to- oh, never mind…”

He drifted off as several people began filing into the room. “Looks like we’ll have to pick this one up later, sorry!” And with that, Shuuhei left our group and approached the front.

We couldn’t argue with that. The rest of us all sat down in a group together, but Lex made it a point to sit as far away from me as possible. I didn’t mind though, as I was sitting by Em anyway.

“Morning everyone!” Shuuhei announced once it seemed that everyone had finally gotten there. “I’m sorry you all had to come here on short notice, but what with everything going on lately, it had to be done.” Then he looked around at the small crowd, which consisted of what I’d say to be about 20 people. “Now, maybe some brief introductions are in order? That way, we can get to know each other more?”

Right off the bat, a Japanese-looking girl with a long black ponytail sitting not too far away from me spoke up. “Let’s skip the formalities, Shuuhei. We can introduce ourselves later.” She then sat up straight and stared him right in the eye. “So, what happened?”

“Right… Very well, Cho.” Shuuhei let out an audible sigh and nodded. “Okay. As most of you should be aware of by now, ETMA primarily deals in magi-affairs, but our main enemy is the Chang-Los. They are an anti-mage crime syndicate originating out of Hong Kong, China, and have spread their influence into several other countries. We’ve been fighting these guys for almost 20 years now, but we still haven’t come close to catching their leader since then.”

“Another thing I’d like to mention is that over the past several years, the number of mages within our ranks has diminished greatly, but hasn’t been that much of a problem since everyone within the Chang-Los are all non-mages. Also…”

“Oh boy,” Cho spoke again, this time sounding a bit irritated. “Shuuhei, I love ya, but you’ve gotta get to the point here! What changed? Why bring us in now of all times against a whole bunch of asshole non-mages?”

“Because now they have mages of their own, that’s why.”

The whole room had gone silent. Shuuhei cleared his throat and then continued. “Let me explain. About a week ago, we found out about an alliance between the Chang-Los and what looks to be another mage organization, like ours. Not much is known about them at this point, but we do know that they go by the name of Melisma.”

This time, it was a brown-haired girl sitting next to Cho who spoke up. “So… are you sure we haven’t dealt with them before? I mean, if they’re another mage group…”

“Well, I’d like to say that they’re relatively new, but from the looks of things, it seems like they’ve been around for a while actually. Judging by the reports of several of our agents, these mages at the latest Chang-Lo operations were skilled enough with their powers to be able to give our agents a bit too much to handle. My guess is that these guys have been laying low for a while underground and have only now surfaced.”

“But anyway, the point here is that our regular agents are excellent when dealing with Chang-Los, but they aren’t fit to handle Melisma. It’s just too much for them. And that’s where you all will come in. While I have our non-mages scout out and do reconnaissance, it’s you who will actually be doing the fighting.”

He then looked over by the door, where I saw a woman leaning against the doorframe waiting for him. It must have been his secretary or something, but she had long red hair like Shuuhei’s, so she probably could’ve passed as his sister. “And that’s the gist of it, really! I think I’ll stop here for now and let you have a look around and everything. But before I head out, I just want to leave you with a few words of encouragement.”

Suddenly, Shuuhei’s stance changed in the blink of an eye. With both hands in his pockets, he stamped his foot down hard on the floor and looked straight at us. “Anything is possible if we set our minds to it! And no matter what’s in our way, we won’t stop! If there’s a wall in our way, we’ll just smash it down! If there isn’t a path set out in front of us, then we’ll carve one out ourselves! Live for today, but look forward to tomorrow! That’s how Team ETMA rolls!”

And then, the secretary-looking lady came in, grabbed Shuuhei by the arm, and nearly dragged him out of the room. “Okay, well I’ll check back in with everyone later on! Welcome to ETMA!”

… Now that was one hell of a way to inspire a crowd. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t there to see it, but the entire room, myself included, broke into a round of applause. I’d have to remind myself to thank Dad later for bringing me here, because this guy was so great. It was like he had come out of one of my favorite Japanese anime, so naturally, I was pretty damn pleased.

“Well, there you have it,” Dad said with a wave of finality. “So what do you guys think?”

Lex and Will were both nodding with satisfied looks, while Em smiled enthusiastically. “It sounds great! I think it’ll be fun!”

“Yeah, I’m game.” The minute I first saw Shuuhei, I could tell that I was definitely in the right place. “So, when do we start?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

if you’ve read this far (i really appreciate it btw), then PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GIVE ME FEEDBACK! i want to improve my writing, and the more people i have reading this, the more inclined i’ll be to actually finish this thing! thank you!

#my story #my ocs #my al smith #i know prologues aren't usually exciting but i hope this was at least a little bit interesting #if you at least like the characters then i'll be really really happy #i'm posting chapter 1 tomorrow and that one's MUCH more exciting! #my bhood prologue

[robertkstone]

2020 Porsche 911 S/4S Cabriolet First Drive: Vitamins and Exercise

During an intense day spent driving the all-new 992-generation 2020 Porsche 911 S and 4S around the Attica peninsula below and around Athens, Greece, I sensed that my heart was spending a great deal of time at an elevated rate. My pasty winter-in-Detroit skin was equally conscious of and grateful for the overdue dose of vitamin D it was receiving in the nearly draft-free cockpit. This drive felt like the healthiest activity I’d engaged in since the warm weather departed the Michigan peninsula.

Sure, most Porsche press drives are fun, but this one was extra fun thanks to a mechanical problem with an airplane in L.A. See, that plane’s snafu prevented my driving partner from attending, so I got to do the whole thing solo (missed ya, @nireson—mean it!). Whether dancing or driving, my natural tendency is to let it all hang out a bit farther when nobody’s watching (or hanging on for dear life). This is especially true when I’m leading a superior dance partner who’s forever sending the message “C’mon, don’t be shy!”

Let’s recap some of the highlights of the 911 Cabriolet that we laid out when the Cabrio was first teased in January. The new top—designed in house at Porsche like every convertible top that’s preceded it—employs a clever magnesium structure with three large panels that stow in a stack above the glass rear window and ensure that the fabric never balloons or flaps at top speed (188 mph on the 4S and 190 on the rear-drive S if you’re planning to take factory delivery for an autobahn vacation, which we highly recommend). The top goes up or down 2 seconds quicker than its predecessor (in 12 flat) at speeds of up to 31 mph. It’s controlled by buttons clearly marked with open- and closed-roof icons, set above a button that controls the clever mesh windscreen.

More good news: Somehow the engineers managed to improve the car’s dynamic torsional rigidity by about 10 percent—that margin sounds small, but when coupled with two other key suspension upgrades, it satisfied the team in Weissach that the Cabrio can now handle the optional PASM sport suspension (part of a $5,460 Sport package) that used to be reserved for coupes only. For 2020 it stiffens the springs and anti-roll bars, and it lowers the car by 0.4 inch. Those other key upgrades: Next-gen Bilstein adaptive dampers can now be fine-tuned midstroke on the millisecond level; the old ones could only change their damping rate at the top or bottom of a stroke event. New staggered 20-/21-inch wheels wearing 245/35 and 305/30 tires and wider front and rear track widths (1.8 inches in front and 1.4 inches in the back) allow the springs to be located slightly farther outboard, increasing their “leverage” on the car to inherently reduce roll. The shock upgrade does wonders for improving both handling responsiveness and ride comfort.

Back to my twisty-road drive/fitness routine. Not far from our coastal hotel, I headed up into the volcanic and tectonically upheaved rocky hills, starting out in the 4S. Early on I encountered some peculiar pavement that seemed to approximate the grip level of a polished garage floor even when dry. I was amply informed about it—in advance by the event organizers and at the time by the car’s controls. The steering wheel effort dropped commensurate with the friction coefficient; the brake pedal and my ears sensed the slight anti-lock braking and stability control intervention entering and leaving the turn. (I nominate this as the reference car for brake and electric power steering feel, by the way.) Such honest, forthright communication ensures that the driver’s heart rate is consistently elevated by exhilaration, not fear—a much healthier cardio stimulus.

On the slightly broken stretches of pavement I start doubting that 10 percent rigidity improvement statistic—there’s just no cowl shake or floorpan juddering at all. “Mr. 911,” August Achleitner, explains that the sense of rigidity is further enhanced by supporting the back of the powertrain via mounts on the cylinder head rather than via a plate mounted across the back of the engine, which could flex a bit. Cycling through the Normal, Sport, and Sport Plus drive modes, I’m pleased by the lack of an obvious difference in ride quality in a straight line and by the absence of harshness in bumpy corners.

Another clearly communicated message when the Sport modes are engaged: “Woo-hoo, the Feds aren’t sniffing our exhaust now!” Auto stop/start gets switched off and precious dino-juice gets injected for no other reason than to provide those lovely audible pops and burbles on overrun. And the almost overeager automatic downshifts in these modes remind me of Chester the cartoon terrier forever asking Spike the bulldog, “Wanna beat up that next turn even harder, huh, wanna?!?!” The PDK’s gear selection was so spot on that I only touched the shift paddles once, to limit speed on a downhill stretch.

The best fitness routines involve periods of rest, and coastal towns in between the hills revealed the new Cabrio to be better than its predecessor in this respect, too, thanks to improved driver assist systems, including a lane keeping assist that manages not to pinball off the side-marker lines without strictly lane centering, either, as that might foul the natural on-center steering feel. Adaptive cruise provides stop-and-go functionality, and when the car notices you’re squeezing through a tight space, it automatically calls up the surround-camera view. So solicitous. The optional 855-watt, 13-speaker Burmester sound system has soothing powers and offers impressive dynamic range, though the spatial imaging doesn’t seem as obvious as in other systems, and enough of the system’s brilliance gets lost with the top and windows down that if that’s to be your usual driving mode, you might as well save the $5,560. It still sounds pretty great with the windows and wind-blocker up.

After lunch I strapped into a rear-drive S and was instantly aware of a much greater inclination to gently drift when launching from a stop into a right or left turn. The stability control gets a pretty good workout much of the way through first gear, but at higher speeds wheelspin was much less evident (possibly thanks to unnoticeable electronic machinations of the $3,170 Porsche Dynamic Chassis Control and/or the $2,090 Rear Axle Steering).

There are nits to be picked. As noted on our First Drive of the coupe, the two outermost gauges may as well be devoted to diet tips and Oprah’s book club recommendations because nobody’s going to see them. Sadly, the right one includes the pretty important fuel gauge, so try to remember to move your head occasionally and check that one. I also wish Apple CarPlay would share my Spotify artist and song info with the car’s home screen. And finally, I’m not in love with the turbo engine’s exhaust note, and Herr Achleitner says these Euro versions actually sound a bit better thanks to their particulate filters.

Watch for a GoFundMe page I’m planning to launch to finance a study proving that 911 Cabriolets qualify as health supplements so that I can defray the hefty monthly note with funds from my Health Savings Account.

2020 Porsche 911 S/4S Cabriolet BASE PRICE $127,350-$134,650 VEHICLE LAYOUT Rear-engine, RWD/AWD, 4-pass, 2-door convertible ENGINE 3.0L/443-hp/390-lb-ft twin-turbo DOHC 24-valve flat-6 TRANSMISSIONS 7-speed manual, 8-speed twin-clutch auto CURB WEIGHT 3,550-3,650 lb (mfr) WHEELBASE 96.5 in LENGTH X WIDTH X HEIGHT 177.9-178.4 x 72.9 x 50.7-51.2 in 0-60 MPH 3.5-3.7 sec (mfr est) EPA CITY/HWY/COMB FUEL ECON Not yet rated ON SALE IN U.S. Late summer 2019

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