#an entire emotional nuclear disaster

[its-your-mind]

what the fuck. what the fuck what the fu k.

rick riordan I am a whole ass adult now how tf are you taking a wrecking ball to my emotions AT THIS POINT. SHOULDN’T WE BE PAST THIS.

what the fuck Meg took in all of her foster siblings to help them live a life after Nero. she’s showing them a world that can be kind, where people will say what they mean, and where mistakes don’t deserve punishment.

BUT THEN ALSO. Apollo. Went back.

And for Meg and her siblings, everything about their lives has changed and improved. But Apollo just… goes back to Olympus. Where Zeus continues to rule with an iron fist, where no one was even able to stick up for him, where every other Olympian lives in fear of Zeus’s anger. And he’s still there, he’s still in charge, but Apollo knows BETTER now. He knows that things can be different. He knows that he can be different, and he’s making the decision to be better now than he was before.

But now he doesn’t fit. He doesn’t fit with the Olympians, who weren’t a healthy family even before this, and he doesn’t fit with his new friends, either, because he’s a god again. He can go see them and talk with them and help them, but he’ll always have to leave again. He can never stay.

The last few chapters of The Tower of Nero were so beautiful and amazing - getting to see everyone else living their happy endings (as much as any demigod can), but they were always tinged with… loneliness. Apollo is separate from them all again. He can teleport at will, he can change his appearance to anything, he can separate his consciousness… and that’s all great, he wanted all of that back…

But by the end? He kind of wanted to stay human. And there’s no resolution for him. He’s gone through this incredible, difficult, terrifying, life-changing adventure… and he came back, and everything’s the same. Kinda makes me think of Luke, going off on his quest, coming back different, harder, sharper… and finding Camp exactly like how he left it, with everyone expecting him to just slot himself back into the place he had before, when that space doesn’t fit him anymore.

And Apollo has what Luke didn’t - friends who knew him as he was changing, who love this new person he’s become, and even a sister whose affection won’t change no matter what happens. He’s going to be okay, I know that.

But there’s just… something so quietly tragic in the end of Apollo’s story. He doesn’t get his own personal happy ending. His “triumph” is a return to a divine status that he’s not necessarily sure he even wants anymore. He has to forge his own path forward towards his own happiness, and we don’t get to join him on it. We got to be with him through his Trials - his future is up to him, now.

#toa #trials of apollo #toa spoilers #trials of apollo spoilers #apollo pjo #lester papadopoulos #rick riordan #FUCK. #LIKE LISTEN UNCLE RICK #IM IN MY TWENTIES TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THE FUCK TO DO WITH MY LIFE #THE FUCKING AUDACITY YOU HAVE TO BUST INTO MY QUARTER LIFE CRISIS LIKE THIS #smfh #this book is for middle schoolers and it’s caused me #a middle school TEACHER #an entire emotional nuclear disaster #ugh.

[dweemeister]

Suzume (2022, Japan)

How dramatic Makoto Shinkai’s rise has been. The Japanese animator and filmmaker, with his background in video game animation, is far away from the narrative and editing incoherence that plagued his early works, such as The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004) and 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007). At first, neither film made viewers outside Japan take much notice. A decade later, Your Name (2016) commercially rocketed past all Shinkai films before it and, before one knew it, would go on to surpass Spirited Away (2001) as the highest-grossing anime of all time. The body-switching romantic comedy remains Shinkai’s best film, although Suzume comes much closer than I expected.

In my write-up to Your Name after its North American release, I speculated that the film’s success in Japan might be due to its allusions to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of northern Honshu, the Tôhoku region – potentially some sort of cinematic catharsis. Though the imagery that Shinkai employed in Your Name would be unmistakable to any Japanese person who witnessed the destruction of that day, he invoked those images seemingly for the sake of aesthetic appeal. So too was this the case for Weathering with You (2019) – a film that drowned Tokyo in constant rain in service of an epochally selfish decision in pursuit of teenage romance. As such, Shinkai’s insistence to this day that Weathering with You is a film about climate change collapses entirely in the film’s finale. Suzume doubles down on Shinkai’s shtick for teen romance and obsession for how light reflects off water, but now he has made a film where the repercussions of the Tôhoku earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are front and center. This is his most honest film.

17-year-old Suzume Iwato (Nanoka Hara; Akari Miura as a young girl) lives with her aunt (Eri Fukatsu) on Kyūshū, the southernmost of the major Japanese islands. On the way to school one day, she passes by an attractive, long-haired fellow named Sôta Munataka (Hokuto Matsumura) who asks about local ruins. She points the way to an abandoned onsen, and – following her romantic longings rather than common sense – follows him. At the onsen, she finds a door, standing alone without supports. After she removes a totem that transforms into a cat (Ann Yamane) that scurries away, the door leads to a grassy field, with picturesque blues and reds streaking across a starlit sky. Arriving at school later, she later notices that something resembling a gigantic red worm is emanating from the door’s location. She rushes back, noticing Sôta struggling to close the door, and lends a hand to shut and lock the door – but not without the worm (which no one except these two can see) crashing to the ground and causing a sizable earthquake. Sôta explains he is a “closer” – part of a line of individuals who search for these doors and ensures that they remain shut. Failure to do so results in cataclysmic earthquakes. Against her aunt’s wishes, Suzume will follow Sôta northwards, towards Honshu. The cat, Daijin, must revert to a keystone in order to prevent further disaster.

A few decades into his film career, Shinkai’s undisciplined writing of his character’s emotions remains. Complicating everything is the fact that Daijin turns Sôta into something that should be inanimate. In interviews, Shinkai has defended this decision as the only way to have any sort of comic relief amid the film’s themes – a curious statement to make, as half of Suzume’s comedy has little to do with Sôta’s transformation, instead centering on our characters’ habits and flaws. The original plan was for Suzume to fall for another young woman, but producers nixed the idea, believing such a development too controversial for Japanese audiences*. Shinkai’s decision to make Sôta non-human puts Suzume on the brink of slapstick absurdity. Even though it remarkably allows some of the best character animation from a filmmaker not regarded for that (yes, character animation for an otherwise inanimate object), this absurdity can occasionally deprive Suzume of some much-needed pathos. Only in the Suzume’s final third does that pathos become apparent, and it arrives less powerfully than it should because of Shinkai’s decision to transform Sôta.

Combined with Suzume’s tendency to make hormone-influenced decisions during both the quieter and most perilous moments of her journey with Sôta – I am all for female characters having romantic agency, but there are times and places for when expressing or acting upon romantic feelings is appropriate – Shinkai’s teenage romantic writing can feel tactless at worst, tacky at best. Yet, because Shinkai is upfront about Suzume’s desires from the beginning (unlike the does-he-love-her-or-doesn’t-he-love-her waffling in Your Name and Weathering with You), it makes Suzume’s finale less baffling than his previous two works. Concerningly, in Your Name and Weathering with You, a natural disaster is an inconvenience to two teenagers barely realizing their love for each other. Not this time, thankfully, because of Suzume’s forwardness.

Suzume’s success comes from the tradition of live-action Japanese cinema to reflect – whether directly or otherwise – on national tragedy. When the United States ended its postwar occupation of Japan in April 1952, it also halted the censorship of topics such as the occupation itself, World War II, and other topics that the censors might object to. One could read the previous sentence and draw rash conclusions: namely, that American censorship shackled Japanese artistry. Perhaps it did, but plenty of exceptions exist, such as Yasujirô Ozu’s entire post-War filmography (even during the occupation). In Ozu’s post-War films, the families in those works quietly observe or accept the gradual Westernization of their culture, most evident in changes in nuptial and familial norms, and articulated with subtle, but great artistry. Censors have a way in sometimes making art’s politics less didactic – no less powerful, much more palatable. Now without American censors, films like Gojira (or Godzilla; 1954), Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and The Burmese Harp (1956) wrestled with the morality of WWII, the apocalyptic consequences of nuclear weapons, and Japan’s war crimes inflicted upon its Asian neighbors (over the last few decades, Japanese filmmakers have become increasingly hesitant to engage in the last topic).

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 or 9.1 earthquake struck off the east coast of Tôhoku. The resulting tsunami killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands, as well as triggering a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. On 3/11 and the days after, images of the ocean swallowing buildings whole, boats now perched atop half-ruined rooftops, and clocks frozen at 3:25 PM made their way around a now-interconnected world. No sense can ever be made of nature’s randomness, and the loss of life in its wake. Suzume is a film that understands this, long before Shinkai truly shows what his film is about (accepting past tragedy and trauma) and what it champions (living life completely). Before we fully learn about Suzume’s loss on 3/11, Shinkai is content to introduce us to partake in some narrative detours. Those detours introduce the audience to side characters living their lives humbly, with little fanfare, and a joie de vivre. Notice the joy of the motorcycle-riding produce seller, content with the verdant beauty of her home and the rural simple living. The laid-back and unfussy Tomoya Serizawa (Ryūnosuke Kamiki; whose character is Sôta’s best friend) takes each day as is as he attempts to earn a teaching credential. Until then (and I suspect even after he becomes a teacher), he enjoys cruising along in his convertible, blasting a Spotify playlist with playful oldies such as Yumi Arai’s “Rūju no Dengon” (a familiar tune to fans of 1989’s Kiki’s Delivery Service), Yuki Saito’s “Sotsugyô”, among others.

These detours contrast with a device (that Shinkai also uses) more characteristic of Japanese cinema, or at least most Japanese cinema that has been exported to the West. That device is mono no aware (“the impermanence of things”) – with practitioners including some of the greatest Japanese filmmakers of all time such as Ozu and Isao Takahata (1988’s Grave of the Fireflies, 2014’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya). This refers to character behaviors or individual shots that emphasize how life is fleeting and precious. In that contrast of Suzume’s loss and the joyfulness of her companions, there is an implicit understanding that Japanese culture, as our characters know it, is disappearing (one might say “transforming”). It is there in the beautifully-drawn abandoned buildings – the onsens, the schoolhouses – alluding to Japan’s demographic changes, as well as the implication that there are fewer “closers” in Japan than there used to be. For an economy once pegged to lead the future in Asia, Japan’s stagnant financial reality is reflected in the supporting cast, all of whom are hardscrabble folks neither struggling nor prospering. Sometimes that change happens suddenly, as what happened to Suzume on 3/11, leaving behind a towering sea wall and imprints of former homes as nature reclaims these once-devastated places.

The trick, Shinkai says, is to acknowledge the tragedies of the past, for all its effects on the present. At the same time, one must press forward, to live as completely as possible in the days we have afforded to us. As simple as that may be to articulate verbally or cinematically, it is a much different proposition in practice, on both counts. If Suzume presented this message inelegantly, the film would be a maudlin exercise. Touch too lightly on these themes, and the film drowns in its heavily expository dialogue. Shinkai may too fervently focus on the romantic and the comedic in spurts, but Suzume eventually upholds the film’s ultimate thesis, so that Suzume can find true happiness today and in the future while in full acceptance of her past.

With any Makoto Shinkai film post-Your Name, one expects the band RADWIMPS to score the film and provide a wealth of original songs. This time, the lone notable song is the title number, “Suzume”, and it only appears in full during the end credits, rather than the characteristic Shinkai-esque montage. Performed by RADWIMPS and featuring the TikTok singer Toaka on vocals, the sixteen-note motif in “Suzume” (even when Toaka is on vocals and not vocalizing the motif, the motif is played as the harmonic line) is a hypnotically memorable idea that serves as Suzume’s motif for the film’s entirety. Together, RADWIMPS and co-composer Kazuma Jinnouchi (Halo 5: Guardians and “The Ninth Jedi” from Star Wars: Visions; like Shinkai, Jinnouchi got his start in the video game industry) craft a gorgeous score unafraid to mix styles and instrumentations.

The action scoring as heard in “Abandoned Resort” makes full use of Japanese instruments and an ominous choir on top of orchestra – lending the scene that it accompanies an immediate tension that bolsters the sense of danger in closing the door. Similar orchestrations in the other door-closing scenes are likewise as effective as this. In other moments, a wildly jazzy “Cat Chase” sets the pace for a chaotic pursuit early in the film, all while adding to the scene’s hilarity. A simple conversation between piano and strings such as in “Time for Two” introduces secondary romantic motifs for those moments when the action slows down and Suzume has Sôta on her mind. But perhaps the most effective musical moment occurs while our two leads are in Tokyo, and Suzume makes the decision to return home in “Suzume’s Departure”. It might not be the most musically interesting cue, but RADWIMPS and Jinnouchi’s restraint to delay Suzume’s motif until absolutely necessary pays off in emotional dividends that only film music can accomplish. By some distance, this is the most beautifully scored and fascinatingly orchestrated film in Shinkai’s filmography, and a stunning achievement for RADWIMPS and Jinnouchi.

There is no doubting that Makoto Shinkai is one of the most important filmmakers in Japan at this moment. He is the figurehead for a generation of directors for whom anime has always been their foremost cultural influence – with all the strengths and substantial limitations that entails. And like those he succeeds but does not quite emulate (Ozu and his contemporaries, but more closely the likes of Hayao Miyazaki and the late Takahata), Shinkai has made a film grounded upon the aftermath of a national disaster. For the first time, those intentions and allusions are clear. The directness of feeling in Suzume is a refreshing change for him, granting the film an emotive sincerity that none of his previous works can match. Indeed, some of his expository, romantic, and comedic writing threatens to render his work as tasteless. Yet with utter conviction in his writing and filmmaking, Shinkai presents that the goodwill and kindness of others is essential following tragedy. I might take issue with Shinkai’s approach, but I have no arguments there. Following the footsteps of great directors and their films in the years after another national calamity, Suzume, though imperfect, is Shinkai at his most humanistic.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL). Half-points are always rounded down.

* Broadly, Japanese society is not hostile towards LGBTQ+ persons. However, the nation’s politics – which have long been defined by remarkably low participation rates for an industrialized democracy, especially from younger generations – is conservative on queer rights. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been in power almost continuously since its founding in 1955, and the party has always been against same-sex marriage.

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#Suzume #Suzume no Tojimari #Makoto Shinkai #Koichiro Ito #Genki Kawamura #Nanoka Hara #Akari Miura #Hokuto Matsumara #Eri Fukatsu #Shota Sometani #Sairi Ito #Kotone Hanase #Kana Hanazawa #Matsumoto Hakuo II #Ann Yamane #RADWIMPS #Kazuma Jinnouchi #Toaka #My Movie Odyssey

[lesser-mook]

Dune: Part Two - Some of the best pieces of Anti-Christ Propaganda I've ever seen. And by itself? A well produced, well made film. Though it is heavy-handed aka long as shit (Movie Recommendation )

Holy Wars, Chosen One rising from the Desert, Third Eye's and shit, Free people/"Fremen" fighting for their desert land, Fall of The House of Atreidas/Collapse of Empires *cough America cough cough*, seeing timelines, Nukes n shit.

The powers that be really, REALLY want nuclear war. If it ain’t a Civil War, us killing each other, they want nukes flying. 

The Eternal's had good cinematography, so did The Ritual but those can't even touch this.

This movie, in IMAX? Was/IS a must see experience, religious experience even. If you haven't seen it in IMAX, Do it. Please. Don’t miss out.

But outside the realm of conspiracy, they're just well made movies on their own. The sequel had way better pacing, Part 1 was just 2 hour setup and it was worth it. So so worth it.

This movie is 2 films in one package, if you paid to see this? You're not wasting your money if you went to see this experience.

My biggest complaint besides the hefty runtime, expansive lore being somewhat crammed & rapid fired at the audience (hence a LOT of exposition), would be the fact that we never get to see exactly how the worm riders dismount or how a caravan riding the worms back- then get OFF the worm in the first place.

Jessica was pregnant, how did she get on the worm?! And how did they get her off the worm? 

See we’re shown how dangerous it is to get on a worm, every step involves mounting it while it’s in motion, it doesn’t stop to let you onboard. So how they transport crowds looks cool, but it in the movie specifically (fuck the books) the movie didn’t show that detail. 

Now, let’s put credit where it’s due: These two movies by themselves are a serious feat, especially in this nauseating cinematic universe era of film-making.

This isn’t Star Wars, this isn’t Marvel or DC. 

This is custom lore from a lesser known title, and a sequel with the magnitude of Avengers Infinity War in just 2 movies, coming off of one film with 2 hours of setup (which is basically what Part One was). All in just 4 years, not enough people are addressing how impressive that these two movies exist & executed in the way they were.

This isn’t DUNE II, but “Part Two”. The same narrative, same story, effortless momentum. Way better filmmaking than Endgame, better story, and better music (Hans Zimmer annihilated this OST, as usual).

This easily could’ve been a storytelling disaster, a contrived, over-ambitious mess with yet another messy Messiah overtone that falls on it's face, but it did well.

And while Paul isn't the most engaging main character (he has some gary stu-ish traits, which was ironically written to be part of the narrative) but he is no boyscout.

He cries, he will train, he is taught, he outbursts, he gets emotional, and when he's serious, it's serious. Not perfect, and is a man of vengeance, not Talk no Jutsu, not punching away the darkness of someone's heart to free their inner child or some bullshit:

Paul is here to handle business. Period. And you slowly see him developing emotional calluses to the point where you see him becoming something else entirely.

And that's ALL imma say, for now. Go watch the movie.

It could've been mess, but it works.

It ain’t no masterpiece, don’t mistake my compliments for hype, the movies are not perfect- but I didn’t expect this to impress, at all.

The music is just the movie's voice. The DNA.

Hans Zimmer's vision for music, coding the DNA for all the films he composes for is: Otherwordly.

Especially post- 2010, it’s like composing Interstellar was a period of transcendence for him.

Ever since that movie, his style entered a whole new realm, it’s almost intimidating how good he is.

Woke culture be damned, Films like this (while propaganda) still demonstrates in a good way, exactly what Hollywood's true potential is capable of.

#lisan al gaib #dune #dune part two #coming of the prince #keep your eyes on israel #propaganda #good filmmaking #movie recommendation #anti christ #Youtube #lessermook #the one

[adapembroke]

Ask Ada: Can You Have a Yod Involving Chiron?

Question: Can you have a yod with Chiron? Is this about a career in the sign/planet it points to?

Note: The yod in this chart is formed by the moon in Aquarius sextile the MC in Aries. Both are quincunx Chiron in Virgo.

Yes, you can have a yod that includes Chiron. A yod is an aspect pattern, and aspect patterns can involve anything from planets and asteroids to more abstract mathematical points like the nodes of the moon.

Yes, your career is one of the areas this yod is speaking to. Your chart has a yod that involves the moon, the midheaven, and Chiron. Whenever the midheaven is involved in something, questions about life purpose (which generally translate into questions about career in a capitalist society) come along for the ride.

Taking your question at face value, that’s the information you asked for. If you’ll humor me, though, I have a longer response to your question. I have a yod in my chart, and my yod also involves Chiron.

I like to joke that I play the game of life on hard mode. My chart is riddled with “difficult aspects.” The yod in my chart is, by far, the most difficult one.

My yod is made of a sextile between Venus in Aries and Mars/Chiron in Gemini, both of which are quincunx Pluto in Scorpio.

It is a little bit like living with an inner Chernobyl. The Chernobyl disaster happened because energy was allowed to run amok. The engineers believed they had an emergency system, but it was faulty. Pressing the emergency stop button just added fuel to the fire, accelerating the reaction instead of stopping it.

In my chart, Mars in Gemini and Venus in Aries are closely sextile. Sextiles are exciting, and planets that are sextile each other feed off of the other’s energy.

Venus in Aries is the spark of inspiration. The flash of knowing. An entire project appears from nowhere, fully formed in my mind. The beauty of the vision fills me with energy, and I immediately go into Gemini mode. I flail to record everything I can. But the act of recording fails to do justice to the original inspiration. And it triggers a torrent of new ideas. I flail to record these new ideas, too, but fail to do anything but trigger more ideas I flail to record. The intensity builds until I reach the limit of my physical and emotional endurance.

This is not how a sextile is supposed to work. A sextile is supposed to be an easy, supportive aspect. While the initial spark of energy from Aries should inspire Gemini, the exchange between them should be more gentle. An intense tennis match, not Chernobyl.

In my chart, that energetic sextile between Venus and Mars is fueled by the intensity of quincunxes with Pluto in Scorpio. When inspiration strikes, Pluto feeds energy to the sextile, and Pluto’s supply of energy is bottomless.

With Pluto’s assistance, the energy of the sextile builds and builds until Venus and Mars/Chiron are no longer able to handle the intensity. When this happens, Chiron kicks in.

Chiron’s involvement in the sextile feels like slipping on a banana peel at a million miles an hour. This disruption gives my Venus and Mars enough time to realize how tired they are. They collapse, and all of that energy runs down the quincunxes back to to Pluto, triggering a meltdown.

Even though we both have Chiron involved in our yods, your yod is different than mine. While our experiences will likely have similarities, Chiron’s position in the yod would bring with it some fundamental differences.

In your case, Chiron is at the point of the yod, not one of the planets involved in the sextile, which means that Chiron receives the energy of your yod the way Pluto receives the energy of mine.

Chiron doesn’t, however, have Pluto’s ability to feed energy into a system. Chiron is the wounded healer. Not a nuclear bomb. I would imagine that an exhausted Chiron feels more like a deep hole of loneliness and rejection.

I believe that there is no such thing as a “bad chart.” Everyone has the chart they need, even if it isn’t easy to see. Every difficult placement is actually a superpower in disguise. The more difficult the placement, the more powerful the superpower.

If I’m honest, though, finding the superpower in my yod is a work in progress. There have been times when the energy of that yod has allowed me to push far past the limits of my physical and emotional endurance in order to do something extraordinary.

But, this is almost never necessary. As my therapist used to tell me: “Your job isn’t diffusing nuclear bombs. You don’t need to live as if it is.”

It worries me that I have this placement because I wonder what will happen to make me need it.

In your case, I have an inkling that the energy generated by your yod will give you the ability to perform extraordinary acts of healing. Like a neurosurgeon who can spend 18 hours carefully working on a brain.

But that’s only a guess. You’re the only one who knows what you’re capable of.

If you enjoy Ask Ada, please subscribe and share it with your friends.

Have a question? Ask anonymously on my website.

#Chiron

[gallalctyka]

oooo wait i like ur ocs story even in shitpost small summary form tell me more :)))))))))

UAUAUAAAAAA..... alright then :3

okay so. like i said the whole premise is that, instead of the cold war ending by the fall of the eastern bloc and dissolution of the ussr, it ends with a world scale nuclear war that devastated mankind as we know it. not COMPLETELY wiped it out but. you know it was still pretty bad all things considered

the story focuses entirely on the eastern europe and the aftermath, as the action takes place a LONG time after the conflict. mankind is basically trying to rebuild itself from the ashes. think fallout or s.t.a.l.k.e.r. like (albeit i know the second one isn't technically post apocalyptic jdhgskh but i digress). ANYWAY the gimmick is that the long forgotten demons and spirits from slavic folklore have made themselves known after centuries (if not millennia) of hiding ^_^ they're fucking shit up!! well not all of them. many demons are cool actually. still dangerous as shit though

anyway with their "reawakening" so did the old faith. the slavic pantheon and old traditions are INTEGRAL to the lives and culture of the survivors. christianity who? (well it still kind of lingers i won't lie. considering the impact it had on our history but that's for another time). still, religion is a... tricky subject for some. as some people are understandably upset that the divine never came to stop the cataclysm from happening, ESPECIALLY since there are old tales of them actually showing up to aid after the fallout. but who knowsssss those are old sayings... wink wink

basically the whole thing is a mix of fantasy PURELY inspired by slavic mythology and sci-fi (there are ROBOTS HERE!!! soviet robots... and other weird soviet experiments that nobody knows what were for because nobody has any knowledge about technology anymore lol. oh also RADIOACTIVE MUTANTS) set in a post-apocalyptic setting

casimir is the main character!! a teenage disaster i tell you. they're basically a vagabond travelling between different settlements, their goal is to actually find a way to reach the Iron Curtain and to escape to the outside world (the whole eastern bloc is COMPLETELY unaware of what's going on outside). something something a metaphor of young eastern europeans running off to the west for better opportunities ANYWAY. the road to get there is basically unbeatable lol good luck trying to survive the ghouls lingering there. and if that won't stop you then good luck trying to pass through the Never Ending Storms. they're also a bounty hunter and Can Kill Demons. epic. something very useful. the story "starts" with them reaching lviv and kind of. getting stranded there?? but not really??? the details aren't important. what is important is that they're THERE

that's where they meet the brothers i mentioned! elias and nikolai :) they're old gruff men with an aura of mystery to them. elias is LOUD and very short tempered, emotional as all hell too. every emotion he has is explosive. he's definitely intimidating to a lot of people but once you start talking to him it's like to an old friend you've known all your life. he values camaraderie a lot. also he's a beast at parties. nikolai is more reclusive, always saying some ominous shit. you'd think he's the cool mysterious brother at first glance but really he's a chaotic freak that likes to fuck with people sometimes. mostly elias. but he is definitely more laidback of the two. one thing though is that their relationship is... VERY strained. to say the least. it's so bad to the point that basically EVERYONE IN THE CITY has no idea they are related. for all they know elias could chop off nikolai's head and nikolai could hex elias if given the right opportunity

oh right did i mention they are gods. perun and veles in fact, the two leading deities in the slavic mythology. that's fun. yeah they're basically undercover lol. you could even say retired. at least in elias's (perun's) case who feels unworthy of carrying the title of the "supreme god" after everything. nikolai (veles) is however more busy than ever being the god of death and afterlife. he feels like he's never going to rest - doesn't consider that a burden though, as he loves humanity. anyway they are DEPRESSED!

so when casimir comes into their lives they don't think much about it. elias doesn't even TRY to get attached because he never learned to cope with mortals passing. nikolai however decides to indulge in them... for one reason or another (:3) and it's like oh god. oh fuck i got attached. elias help. elias voice you're so pathetic watch me- oh no

honestly the one MOST against getting attached was casimir lol. all they wanted is some intel then they'd skeddadle outta there as fast as possible. people in this settlement were supposed to be nothing more than means to an end and now they ended up with TWO ADOPTIVE UNCLES and a CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. i love found family

#ask #i actually have no name for the project. yet lol #I NEED TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING COOL AND MEANINGFUL... DIES #hope you like it.... disappears into shadows #oc: casimir #oc: elias #oc: nikolai

[64bitgamer]

[mariacallous]

Since it was seized by Russian military forces a year ago, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Ukraine has lost external power six times. Following the latest outage, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Mariano Grossi, issued an emotional call to action, warning that it is only a matter of time before a disaster occurs. Given the fact that Zaporizhzhia sits on the frontline of a war zone, what can be done to prevent catastrophe?

On September 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Moscow had annexed the Zaporizhzhia region. So far, power outages have been handled by sourcing electricity from a coal-fired thermal power station and diesel generators. But if the final remaining power line from the national grid is damaged, on-site diesel generators cannot cool fuel in each of the plant’s six reactors in the long term. Should these backup generators fail, the subsequent loss of coolant could trigger a fuel meltdown. And as power outages, shelling, and even kidnappings of Ukrainian plant operators continue, that risk is escalating.

Zaporizhzhia is different from prior nuclear power plant crises for two main reasons. First, Russia’s weaponization of Zaporizhzhia is entirely novel. Never has a nuclear power plant been used as a nuclear shield (manipulated to protect Russian troops and military hardware), and never has a country threatened to co-opt a plant by siphoning power back into its own grid. Second, this new situation is occurring against the backdrop of an ongoing dispute over the plant’s ownership, bringing up issues over which country is responsible for its safety. Grossi likely knows a coordinated international response isn’t imminent. Prior power plant crises reveal that solutions are slow to arrive — even during peacetime. As such, he is appealing directly to Ukraine and Russia, calling on the two countries to agree to a demarcated demilitarized zone around all power plants, including Zaporizhzhia, with limited success.

Previous Power Plant Crises

Though the current crisis is unique, nuclear power plant crises are only rare — not unprecedented. In 1979, a power surge caused radioactive material to leak at Three Mile Island in the United States. Following this crisis, the U.S. nuclear industry created the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, tasked with fostering safety and reliability in nuclear power plant operations.

In 1986, another sudden power surge caused a severe radiation leak at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union). Although the first four years post-crisis were confined to responses at the national level, Chernobyl ultimately resulted in the creation of multiple international safety conventions, two Codes of Conduct, and the IAEA’s Safety Standards.

In 2011, an earthquake-triggered tsunami interrupted the power supply to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. Three reactors melted down, leading to a series of explosions and yet another radiation leak. Immediately following the crisis, the IAEA’s Incident and Emergency Care Centre sent experts and launched radiation protection and data collection efforts. Three months later, the IAEA hosted a Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety, leading to the IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety.

In the aftermath of Fukushima, the European Union brought Ukraine into a program to assess and improve reactor safety. Ensuing efforts directly affected Zaporizhzhia: Western governments and industry accelerated upgrades to the plant’s reactors, attempting to prevent similar natural disasters from destabilizing the infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, the nuclear reactor crisis-response pattern and recent IAEA action plan for Zaporizhzhia offer no guidance for how to deal with nuclear facilities that are located in or near a battlefield, even though nuclear reactors have been caught up in conflicts before. In 1991, the Slovenian nuclear power plant, Krsko, was threatened by the Yugoslav Air Force. Operators determined that putting the plant into cold shutdown mode was the best way to minimize risk to the public. In this mode, experts surmised Krsko could sustain the loss of all off-site power and cooling long enough to implement other emergency responses.

In 1981, Israel conducted an airstrike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear research reactor, which was linked to a research facility Israel suspected of developing nuclear weapons. Ten years later during the first Gulf War, allied bombers attacked two Iraqi nuclear research reactors, one of which was fully operational and had built up a radioactive inventory. Although there were no significant radiological consequences from either attack, in both cases, the facilities were safeguarded by the IAEA — demonstrating that compliance with the IAEA’s rules offers no protection against hostile actions during combat operations.

While global governance initiatives have improved the safety of nuclear power plants, these solutions are first and foremost a response to genuine accidents. And in cases where nuclear power plants were wrapped up in conflict, little was done by multilateral institutions to protect the facilities during wartime or prevent their use to shield troops and military equipment. Any other efforts at international regulations for nuclear power plants concerned the prospect of their use for nuclear terrorism. The current crisis is none of these.

Whose Responsibility?

Zaporizhzhia remains in danger in part because of its disputed ownership — a byproduct of the war. According to the United Nations, “nuclear safety is the responsibility of every nation that utilizes nuclear technology.” Since its occupation of the plant on March 5, 2022, Moscow has designated it as Russia’s “federal property,” created a state-run enterprise to oversee operations, and funded the plant’s management with a meager 500,000 rubles (about $6,500). But while Russian forces control the plant on territory that Moscow allegedly has annexed, Kyiv maintains that the plant and territory are Ukrainian, a position supported by virtually the entire world. This power struggle has raised questions about who is responsible for maintaining the plant’s safety and security.

The IAEA has been able to conduct intermittent inspections of Zaporizhzhia, but inspections — which are intended to collect information upon which safety recommendations can be made — and precautionary measures can only do so much against an unpredictable accident.

In previous crises like Fukushima, disaster was ultimately mitigated not necessarily through preventative policies, but through an emergency response system refined by historical examples like Chernobyl. Zaporizhzhia benefits from this history, having received structural and system-based reinforcements as a result of prior crises. As the threat of shelling continues, these reinforcements are providing added durability. Although the Zaporizhzhia crisis might be the first of its kind, it draws on a legacy of equally frightening instances that make a path forward possible, if not immediate.

Mark Hibbs has suggested that the safest option for the plant is to shut down all reactors, depressurize circuits, and remove fuel until the war is over. Zaporizhzhia could also be placed into cold shutdown mode indefinitely, as was done for Krsko.

Yet neither solution speaks to the motivations that Russia and Ukraine have for keeping the plant operational. Both have a reason to engage in shelling, just as both have an incentive to regain control and use the plant’s power for themselves. This, combined with the ongoing conflict for control over the plant, means that the Ukrainian-Russian cooperation required for managing risks is elusive.

As it stands, Zaporizhzhia was placed in a cold shutdown in September 2022. Operators have since restarted two reactors in hot shutdown mode, producing low levels of power to keep the plant operational. Perhaps this is why the IAEA has proposed a “protection zone” for Zaporizhzhia, in which both Ukraine and Russia would agree to refrain from firing at the plant, and heavy weapons would be removed from the area. Grossi correctly recognizes that an agreement of this nature must come from both countries and that their cooperation is essential to move toward any measure of stability.

Yet the Zaporizhzhia crisis cannot be categorized into a binary in which one side seeks to threaten or destroy another state’s power plant during wartime. Nor can previous examples of nuclear accidents fully apply to a situation in which the potential for an accident is entirely human-made. Instead, Zaporizhzhia currently sits between two warring parties who disagree on who should control it. Moreover, the global governance system, which requires a baseline level of cooperation if it has any hope of devising a new system to protect the security and safe operation of a nuclear power plant, is ill-suited to resolving the situation. As long as the war persists and Ukraine and Russia continue to jockey for control, disaster unfortunately looms large on the horizon.

The Zaporizhzhia crisis has highlighted the lack of international regulations governing nuclear power plants in wartime. Typically, international regulatory responses to nuclear power plant crises have taken time — time we don’t currently have. Future regulations must address not only the reality that nuclear power plants can be targeted in war, but that this targeting might involve hostage-style exploitation. They must also simultaneously offer parameters through which to establish ownership, or at least prescribe an understanding of responsibilities in contested nuclear spaces. The best way to support Grossi and avoid a nuclear disaster is to foster cooperation that lays the groundwork for the kind of regulation the current and potential future crises require — and now.

[spherii]

DeviantART digging

So years and year and years ago I used to write a lot more. No kink, but more like, sappy emotional things and sci-fi cause, well that's who I am.

Anyway, enjoy a small dump.

If you had been alive at the time of the war, you wouldn't have realized that it was part of the plan. A bunch of men in suits, controlling the world, and coming to the realization that humanity had not evolved to the point of their satisfaction. 

In secret, they decided to stimulate human evolution. Devices were constructed in secret, modifications to the human body and brain were tested. A new age of humanity was right around the corner. The only problem, was power. 

Conventional power systems were either not portable enough or long lived enough to assist with this singularity. Something had to be done. It was discovered that radiation from nuclear explosions could sustain the technology that they needed, and give humanity the freedom from power needs indefinitely. 

The only issue it would seem, would be the cost of these detonations. Human lives, and the society they had come to know. 

As men of power, they decided that if a nuclear war was on the horizon, that they could speed up the process. Over the course of a year, they fought pseudo wars and made factious alliances, all in the planing of a nuclear disaster. 

That is exactly what they got. 

There is a lot of discussion around whether or not the revolution was a good thing for humanity. Sure, the majority of humanity was now augmented by some form of tech, and the benefits were incredible. Most people could now live indefinitely between both physical and digital realms, our consciousness was now so massive that the physical limitations of the human brain had to be accounted for. Most people didn’t live their entire lives inside their head, but only partially. Most of their intelligence, consciousness, lived inside of a mainframe computer and the face that you saw was just the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more going on that we were not really aware of.

The drawback of course, was the nuclear annihilation that preceded the singularity. Countless billions died so that humanity could progress. Our planet was more or less an irradiated hunk of rock, and the majority of it was uninhabitable by a non-augmented human. The same radiation that powered the billions of devices we now relied on, also was slowly killing off the remainder of our former civilization.

These old civilizations clung to the idea of non-augmentation. They prided themselves as the last bastions of true humanity and took great honor in their survival skills in the wasteland that this world had become. 

For the majority of society, this was of little concern. The augmented were stronger, more conscious, and more prevalent than their human counterparts. Most of them had even built huge city spires, and orbital habitats, so they very rarely came in contact with any non-augmented. This lead to a huge disparity between the two fledgeling civilizations, and over the course of many years, this tension continued to build.

There were many devices that the augmented could rely upon. Brain capacity was supplemented by processors, and a constant network connection allowed their consciousness to expand beyond their bodies. Although the physical world was quite a disaster, most of these people lived most of their lives only partially noticing it. The sublime worlds they created for themselves inside of mainframes far surpassed anything physical. There was even a large subset of the population who decided to forgo physical bodies entirely and live exclusively through a virtual reality.

#cyberpunk #sci fi writing #scifi #singularity #fiction #Julie Darkheart

[fullofmultitudesfullofshit]

Clint being happily married makes you cringe?

Hi anon! Lol I was being more dramatic than I probably could’ve been, but yes, it does make me cringe a *little* bit. 

It’s nothing against MCU Clint Barton because I know it wasn’t his fault he ended up the way he did -- between Joss Whedon and a little bit on Jeremy Renner’s end -- he really just isn’t the Clint Barton that so many of us fell in love with. A lot of the time, when you hear comic book stans criticizing why Clint just isn’t “comic book accurate” (to use kind of a patronizing phrase, so please excuse me on that end because I don’t always think that comic book accuracy is entirely needed), it’s because most of us have read Matt Fraction and David Aja’s 2012 character defining, Eisner Award winning, New York Times best selling comic book, once-in-a-generation run on Hawkeye. Fraction’s inspiration for the character, making Clint delve into issues of depression, his disability with impaired hearing, the familial entanglements between him and his older brother, Barney, while simultaneously balancing the fact he’s 100% human compared to all of his superhero counterparts, is an incredible look into a very complex, kinda sorta sad, peak chaotic Avenger. Not to mention that Aja’s work in this comic book, with its simple line art, as well as Matt Hollingsworth’s colors, brings a sort of melancholic, cartoonish quality to the characters and the world they live in. Under Aja’s direction, it gives the viewer the effect that the characters Fraction is weaving into the story are all a little sad, or at least deal with something heavy, despite their basic inking. If nothing else, it makes the characters inherently human. All that to say, out of all the adapted Marvel characters in the “OG 6 Avengers,″ comic book Clint is the least likely person to get his life together and do the “family and kids” thing. 

As someone who studies adaptation as a grad student, I love depictions of characters who are different and I love it when directions go off book and shove it in the fandom’s face. That’s my favorite! However, and I’ll admit this is my own bias, Clint’s story is...not what I wanted. He’s a complex character for as simple as he seems in Fraction’s run. It’s what makes people love Clint -- he’s the guy with a million bandaids on his face, but despite his emotional disaster energy, he still gets up to be the hero, the Avenger, the Hawkeye. There are, of course, glimpses of this in the MCU (like when he has a funny rapport with Quicksilver in Age of Ultron), but nothing that’s entirely “Clint” as many of us know and love. 

This is mostly due to the fact that Clint has never been given a chance to be a “character,” so to speak. In the first Avengers movie, he’s brainwashed; you can’t exactly do character development when the guy has a space rock taking over his brainwaves. :) Age of Ultron, however, is the real heartbreaker for a lot of comic book fans because Clint was given his “family-man” plot point. Where, apparently, he has children and a wife and the whole 1950s suburban nuclear family thing goin’ on. That’s cool, but especially for that movie, it becomes more of a reference point for the other characters. You find out Natasha can’t have children and refers to her femininity as a “monstrous” (another shitty directorial decision on Whedon’s part), Bruce can’t have children because of his “Hulk-ness,” Steve doesn’t think he wants a family anymore, and Tony comes to believe that this is what he wants at the end of the day. So, even if it is a plot that works for the sake of the movie, it’s really only so the other characters can have a moment of self-reflection. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with Clint himself! 

Because of Whedon’s decision (as well as Jeremy Renner’s refusal to read any comics about the character), a lot of his further development in the MCU was hindered by Clint’s family plot point. We don’t ever get to see “disaster” Clint or the “human” Clint or the “almost got it, but not quite” Clint. We only see Clint as this white guy farmer who is married and has kids, which is more or less the diluted, heteronormative “1950s American dream.” The guy literally has a picket fence. To me, that’s not complicated enough. Whedon didn’t ask harder questions of this character, he didn’t care enough to, or maybe he did, but he just didn’t know how to. Either way, that’s not doing the character justice and that’s not giving Clint what he deserves. I’m all for doing something different with a character -- Clint can be married! Give em’ those kids! -- but make sure when you do it, that you’re not sacrificing the heart of the character for a one-off storyline that will hinder this cinematic depiction forever. After all, there’s a difference between preserving the “substance” of the character in the process of adapting comic book to film, and erasing their soul entirely in the process of trying to be different. 

So, in case you didn’t want to read ALL of that, which understandable because I wrote a lot, yes, Clint being happily married makes me cringe. :) 

Thanks for your question! :) 

#clint barton #hawkeye #matt fraction #long post #david aja #hawkeye 2012 #mcu clint barton #anti jeremy renner #general marvel #MCU #age of ultron #marvel #also #clint barton fans please add more of your mcu criticisms! so we can all be sad together! #marvel comics

[diet-comet-soda]

I need people to understand that the point of Hollow Mind was not to convey to us that Belos is just pure evil for evil's sake. A villain not being sympathetic doesn't mean that they're evil "just because".

Belos is a person who has been conditioned by his upbringing and the ideology of his society/community to see certain people as less than human, to separate them out from himself and his community and perceive them as an "other". Belos is, in most respects, a "normal" person. He can be kind and empathetic and want to do right by others. He is human, he has emotions and passions and if you had a conversation with him on the street about a mundane subject, you wouldn't think anything unusual of him. And yet at the same time he can wish genocide upon an entire population, without any cognitive dissonance.

Whether it be the people of the 1600s who labeled people who transgressed social norms as witches to burn them at the stake without remorse, or racists who labeled other peoples as "primitive" or even saw them as a completely different species in order to justify slavery without having to have a conscience, or modern day homophobes/transphobes who label our communities as sinners or groomers or ped*philes so they can kick down at us while feeling like they're being righteous. All of these people live normal lives within the bounds of their own communities. They can care about other people and donate to charity and volunteer to help others, they can do good and believe they're good people.

But to maintain their worldview and the status quo (such as slavery or the nuclear family or the authority of organized christianity), harm is a necessity, so they label those who they harm as subhuman to avoid feeling any more guilty than they would killing a fly. Yet the harm they inflict is very real and horrific. And almost more horrific is how most of the time the people doing it will never be able to see it as horrific; even after seeing someone beg for their life in agony, some might see their humanity and start to change (which is why the most useful ways to unravel bigotry is through proximity with marginalized people), but some will still remain unfazed. Because the people it's happening to aren't like them, because they "deserve" it. It's the same mechanism that allows every day people to see a serial killer get jailed for life and not feel any sympathy or horror, because we identify serial killers as a separate breed from us, as deserving of punishment. And in cases like that, this mechanism can be useful because it allows us to place aside our human empathy and carry out punishment that keeps our communities safer. But for bigots applying this mechanism to marginalized people in order to maintain/bolster current power dynamics, this can cause atrocities. Heck, even non-bigotted people can take this mechanism too far.

That is the horror of Belos to me. The Puritan Christian Witch Hunter, so blinded by his own bigotry, so cold and unfeeling to those he's shared a world with for hundreds of years, so caught up in religious essentialisms. Belos is unforgivable, cruel, and malicious, but he is also not unique nor especially inhumanly evil. All you need to be Belos is to fall deeper and deeper into a twisted worldview, and that's unfortunately not so uncommon. And when those people get access to power like Belos has, like so many fascists and religious authoritarians have in our own world, it can spell disaster.

#the owl house #Toh #toh spoilers #the owl house spoilers #hollow mind

[anniekoh]

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post Human Landscape

by Cal Flyn (2021)

In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. Exploring extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – Islands of Abandonment give us a glimpse of what nature gets up to when we’re not there to see it. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?

Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss & Grief                     

Edited by Ashlee Cunsolo & Karen Landman

We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges, including global climate change, large-scale industrial development, rapidly increasing species extinction, ocean acidification, and deforestation – challenges that require new vocabularies and new ways to express grief and sorrow over the disappearance, degradation, and loss of nature.

Seeking to redress the silence around ecologically based anxiety in academic and public domains, and to extend the concepts of sadness, anger, and loss, Mourning Nature creates a lexicon for the recognition and expression of emotions related to environmental degradation. Exploring the ways in which grief is experienced in numerous contexts, this groundbreaking collection draws on classical, philosophical, artistic, and poetic elements to explain environmental melancholia. Understanding that it is not just how we mourn but what we mourn that defines us, the authors introduce new perspectives on conservation, sustainability, and our relationships with nature.

An ecological elegy for a time of climatic and environmental upheaval, Mourning Nature challenges readers to turn devastating events into an opportunity for positive change.

#to read #plants #ecology #post-wild #grief #climate change #ecological anxiety

[astro-rain]

delicate; b.barnes

chapter seven - “the king is dead”

delicate masterlist

word count: 1.7k

synopsis: shuri has awful news. the reader is terrified but bucky is strangely calm. the world is turned upside down, and not in a good way.

pairings: bucky barnes x fem!reader

[A/N]: this was so fun to write omg get ready it’s finally getting interesting!!! (as always, OC on my wattpad @ / typicaldaze)

Months had gone by since that day at the lake. Countless therapy sessions had been endured, several hard questions asked, many many issues worked through. Bucky suffered through a few more anxiety attacks along the way, but they never hindered his resolve, thanks to (Y/N). They had made progress, good, solid progress. Bucky was pleased; (Y/N) was thrilled. It's hard to see change when you're the one going through it. However, to the person guiding that change, every step forward is recognized. She was proud. She was genuinely proud of him. He wasn’t “fixed,” he still had struggles, but he was a lot better off then before.

There was something peculiar, though. Their relationship was strictly professional, (Y/N) knew that. However, she couldn't help but feel as though along the sidelines of their progress, they had grown to become friends. She knew that, clinically, this was not appropriate, but there were no corporate guidelines she was working under. She was helping him. So, what would it matter if after all this was over, they were friends? What would it matter if his therapist also operated as his friend? Hell, she didn't even have an official therapist position here! Sharon just sent her to help. (Y/N) had decided she didn't care about the boundaries being crossed. Nothing ever went wrong with someone gaining a friend. It's fine.

Regardless, the two of them had thoroughly addressed the anxiety and the PTSD, and he now officially had both diagnoses. He understood himself and his brain so much better, and with (Y/N)'s help, he not only acknowledged his disorders, but accepted them. She taught him to not see them as the enemy, not something that was wrong with him. They were just a part of him, same as his brown hair or blue eyes.

Bucky was so much more open now. He was less on edge and more comfortable, especially around her. In all honesty, he was usually his most comfortable with her. He had coping skills and everything!

This was all grand and good, but (Y/N) hoped with everything in her that it wouldn't be ruined by the present disaster.

-

"I thought he was automatically supposed to be king?" (Y/N) asked, confused.

She was at her weekly meeting with Shuri for Bucky's treatment plan, and the young genius had just told her she couldn't make it next week due to T'Challa's coronation.

"He is," Shuri started, "but it's Wakandan tradition to open the position up to a dual. So, his rule isn't set in stone."

"Oh... What if someone... challenges him?"

"Then they will fight! However, I have no worries. T'Challa is a great warrior, and though I doubt anyone would challenge him, he would win if they did."

(Y/N) admired the faith Shuri had in her brother. She could tell their bond was strong.

"Couldn't you technically challenge him?"

Shuri revealed a kind of devilish smirk that only a sibling can muster. "Oh, I have thought about it. But I am much more useful in my lab, and T'Challa wouldn't know what to do with himself if he wasn't in charge."

(Y/N) looked back on the memory anxiously as she stared in horror at the look on Shuri's face. A wicked mix of fear, grief, and stress drained all the color from the princess' normally dark, beautiful skin. Shuri had always radiated confidence and composure; seeing this change worried (Y/N) deeply.

"The King is dead."

Her face became void of any expression and all she could process was fear. She thought she gasped but she couldn't remember breathing out again. Her brain was frozen. (Y/N) was in a foreign country that just lost its monarch. She was alone, and all the people she was relying on to protect her just had their kingdom invaded and taken over by someone with the word kill as part of their nickname. She was almost certain that this would be her end.

"Dr. (Y/L/N)?" Shuri said unsteadily. "Did you hear me?"

"Y-Yes I... What are we going to do?" her voice was weak and small. Pathetic and afraid.

Then, thoughts of Bucky crossed her mind. What would happen to him? He could fight, she supposed, but he doesn't have any weapons or gear and he'd be against an entire regime. What if they killed him? What if they tortured him? Different scenarios quickly flashed through her brain, but she could only one concrete thought.

I have to find him.

"My family and I have a plan, but we can't take you with us."

Any remaining semblance of hope dissipated from (Y/N)'s body, and she swore she could feel her veins quiver with apprehension.

"What?"

Her voice felt far away.

"It is not ideal, and I'd never leave you unless I had to. But Agent Everett Ross is here. It's a long story, but as you know, he can't find out about Sergeant Barnes. He can't know that either of you are here. If we take you with us, it could compromise everything we've been working for," the nervous princess explained.

"So... what of me and Bucky?"

"Again, it's a long story, but there's a... sort of fallout shelter - I guess you could call it - that was built years and years ago when the first tribes of Wakanda were constantly at war with one another. I will give you supplies and directions, and you two must go there and remain hidden until this is all over."

Fantastic. (Y/N) would get to play Cold War nuclear fallout in Wakanda.

"How will we know?"

Shuri gave her a somber look. A look of uncertainty and immense guilt.

"I wish I could apologize enough, my partner, but I do not know. I promise I will try to contact you as soon as I get any information, but for now we must hurry. We do not have much time."

With that, Shuri took (Y/N)'s arm and quickly led her her outside. It was late afternoon and the air was beginning to cool. They ran, locked together, until they met the Queen under a large tree among the outskirts of a nearby forest. The woman looked just as shaken up as Shuri.

(Y/N) could see bags of different shapes and sizes at the base of the tree. She could only hope whatever was in there was sufficient for survival.

Shuri immediately embraced her mother, but the moment was short lived as she then bent down to gather the bags.

The Queen placed her hands gently on the sides of the psychologist’s face. "I am so sorry, child. This does not involve you in the slightest yet you are swept up in the middle of it."

Shuri handed her mother the bags and they both geared (Y/N) up with all her supplies. It was heavy. Really heavy. She realized she was carrying supplies for two. Then, there was panic.

"What about Bucky?"

"Barnes doesn't know about any of this yet. I thought it best he heard it from you," Shuri expained, "and we cannot afford anymore delays. Us or you. You must go now, tell Barnes what is happening and go. I wish I could be more help, but we simply don't have the time."

(Y/N) nodded, trying to process all the chaos. She was internalizing every bit of it. As a result, she was once again, frozen.

"Dr. (Y/L/N)!" Shrui exclaimed.

Her head shot up, snapped out of it.

"Go! You must go!"

And with that, (Y/N) took off. She had been in Wakanda long enough to know her way around the castle's surrounding land. Her speed didn't last very long as she was carrying for two, but she tried all she could to keep going as quickly as possible.

Eventually she found herself outside of Bucky's living quarters. She didn't know what to do, so she knocked.

An array of different emotions went through Bucky's face. At first he looked pleased, but then he saw the horror etched into (Y/N)'s features, and the bags she was carrying. He could tell something was wrong.

"What happened?" he asked, surprisingly calm, while immediately taking some of the bags from (Y/N). He still only had one arm but that really didn't seem to matter to him.

She was out of breath, face flushed and eyes wide.

"The King is dead," she said breathlessly. "Someone... someone killed him a-and took over."

Bucky didn't look as scared as (Y/N) felt. In fact, he looked... totally fine?  She was so out of it she wanted to curl up in a hole and allow natural death. How was the anxious man she was accustomed to so at ease? The world was flipped upside down and (Y/N) had no control. She wished there was a word stronger than fear because she couldn't even describe what she was feeling.

"Okay," Bucky said, gently taking another bag, leaving her with only one to carry, "What did Shuri say? What do we have to do?"

She shook her head, trying to regain her breath and her composure. "There's um - there's a fallout shelter thing we have to go to. Here."

She handed  him a crumpled up piece of paper that Shuri gave her. A map with directions. (Y/N) knew he would've been better at locating it than she could at that moment.

"Alright," more of the calm voice filled her ears. "Anything else?"

"There are more details, but - we don't have time," she sighed, restlessly. Her voice began to shake ever so slightly. "Bucky, I'm so sorry. We have to go now. I promise I'll tell you everything."

"Okay," he said again. He bent down slightly, looking her directly in the eyes. " (Y/N), we're fine, okay? We're good, and we're gonna be fine. I will get us there. Are you ready?"

She nodded, steeling herself.

Bucky looked at the map, then glanced up in the direction of the shelter. He took (Y/N)’s forearm firmly. She gave him a look, confirming she was ready. And off they went.

#bucky barnes #bucky fanfic #bucky headcanon #marvel #steve rogers #bucky reader insert #bucky blurb #bucky drabble #bucky fic #marvel fanfiction #bucky x you #bucky x reader #bucky x female reader #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x female reader #james buchanan bucky barnes #james bucky barnes #winter solider edit

[theparanormalperiodical]

The Spirits Of The Tsunami: Charting The Surge In Reported Paranormal Phenomena Following The Great East Japan Earthquake

On the 11th March 2011, there was an earthquake in the Pacific Ocean.

It was the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded, successfully shifting the entire world off its axis by more than six inches. The epicentre was 72km off the coast of the most disaster-prepped country on the planet: Japan.

But we all know that she did not come away from this unscathed.

The Tōhoku region was first hit by the oncoming tsunami with its waves cresting at 133 feet high.

The Japanese government put forward a 10 year recovery plan to deal with the consequential crisis. I doubt they expected 2021 to look and feel like this.

But Japan was left with more than the physical scars of the intensive flooding and the emotional trauma of 20,000 people missing or confirmed dead. To this day, a rise in paranormal phenomena followed the ocean’s retreat back to the shore.

Sightings. Encounters. Even exorcisms.

The tales reported and shared by the locals do not make this a horror film, however. This is and always will be a tragedy.

We Need To Talk About March 11th

It’s easy in this field to take cheap shots. Documenting various urban legends or discussing campfire stories doesn’t often involve many people. Nor does it hurt them.

But this does.

This is not an article about ghost stories. This is an article about a documented, very much real cultural phenomenon put forward by journalists and sociologists, like Richard Parry. I’m not here to mock or make light of terrible circumstances. After all, the alleged spirits emerged in response to the circumstances which engaged Japan in a nuclear disaster, large-scale debris and infrastructure clearing, and widespread damage costing $360bn.

So, I wanted to start by reflecting on the earthquake and the tsunami that followed closely behind.

Known today as the Great East Japan Earthquake, it struck at 2.49pm and was soon followed by hundreds of aftershocks. Even a satellite orbiting the earth picked up sound waves from the quake.

But what made this earthquake quite so powerful was the lasting damage brought in by the surge of the sea.

One wave came as far as 6 miles, a feat not impossible to imagine given the unfathomable video clips captured by locals of water engulfing harbours, then roads, and then towns. 200 miles of this coastal land was flooded and forced 500,000 people - yes, half a million - to be evacuated.

Tsunami waves were even reported in the US, off the coast of Hawaii and California.

But today we’re going to start with the region first struck by the tsunami. An area in north east Japan that lay claim to one of the most tragic consequences of the natural disaster.

Tōhoku.

The Investigation Of Richard Lloyd Parry

Journalist, writer and expert in Asian politics and culture.

Parry put the invisible cultural effects of the tsunami on the map with his groundbreaking book Ghosts Of The Tsunami. And he focused his attention on the forgotten northeastern region of Japan.

Many other journalists showcased how well Tōhoku was coping and how well it survived the brunt of the disaster. Parry disagreed. The area had claimed 99% of the total death toll of the earthquake and tsunami. So, he went back to uncover how much the disaster had changed the area.

But what he found was rather more extraordinary. Or should that be supernatural?

He didn’t devote the entire book to the statistics or the costs. He dedicated it to the people and how they grieved their sudden, tragic losses.

“Since that day, everyone has something wrong with them.”

- A woman he interviewed for the book

He followed a simple line of thought that everyone’s experience of grief is different. That’s what made the tsunami ghosts so unique.

Post-disaster Tōhoku was reportedly crawling with them.

Strange women would enter people’s homes, sit down for a cuppa and vanish to leave behind a large damp patch of seawater. Familiar faces would be passed in the street and then disappear when they turned around.

It wasn’t long before local priests - Christian, Shinto And Buddhist - began to report being called upon to cleanse and remove unhappy spirits.

But this was rather odd for Japan, famously an atheistic country. It’s even considered one of the least religious nations on the planet - a statement that must’ve been difficult to judge.

In times of crisis, we turn to faith. And this faith was used to come to terms with not just the shocking amount of death during and following the crisis, but the number still missing. The inability to find their loved ones and bury them slashed any chances of closure.

This was emphasised by Shinto beliefs regarding spirits. They believed, as many would agree, that the dead were taken before their time. So, they were wandering this middle-ground between the realm of the living and their take on the afterlife. They were restless and they were lost.

Imagine trying to grieve and move on in those circumstances.

Another element of Japanese beliefs is that of ancestor worship. They emphasise commemorative rites with temples and gravesites that celebrate past ancestors. A prominent feature of this is elaborate funerals. Relatives that were physically and spiritually lost presented an insurmountable obstacle to this.

However, some believed that the spirits were trying to find their way back.

The Possessions

Unsolved Mysteries is a cult-classic TV show for paranormalists, true-crime fans and fledgling conspiracy theorists.

And one of its most striking and saddest episodes takes on the same spirits Richard Lloyd Parry devoted his attention to. They looked closely at the possession and exorcisms of the local population following the tsunami.

One of the most famous cases of this was the possession of Takeshi Ono (a pseudonym to anonymise the real person). He was a builder who was lucky enough to not live in an area ravaged by the disaster. But a few weeks after it happened, he drove down to the nearest beach to see what really happened.

Naturally, he was astounded. It was only later, when he sat down for dinner with his family, that he experienced his true grief in a bizarre, overwhelming manner.

He dropped to the ground, rolling around on the carpet and grunting various animal noises. He then rushed out of the house and dived into a pit of mud, continuing his strange behavior.

He remembered nothing the next day.

But then it began again. And didn’t stop for 3 more days.

He would speak in a strange, angry voice. He would threaten his family with violence, and he would talk about the dead.

They believed he was possessed with multiple spirits that had died during the tsunami and were now lost in a different realm. They took him to a local buddhist monk, Reverend Kaneda.

“I asked him about it once and he said it doesn't matter whether ghosts really exist or not. He said what matters is that people believe in them. These experiences are real.”

- Richard Lloyd Parry

Numerous people would come forward claiming to be possessed. This was a unique form of mourning.

The Psychics And The Primary School

I’ve already mentioned Tōhoku and how it was first hit by the devastating tsunami. But it's also become famous for claiming one of its most tragic tales.

The flooding of Okawa Elementary School.

Historically, Tōhoku has been considered the mythical realm of goblins and barbarians. It’s like a frontier for another realm. It would realise this destiny in a much more real way than expected.

The school was only 2 miles away from the coast and perched on the bank of the Kitakami River. It was effectively  in the direct path of the surging waves.

When the earthquake struck, the protocol was clear and closely followed. Japan has designed its infrastructure based on such an occurrence, and the public knows what to do and when to do it.

The staff and children gathered outside the school. Many considered running up a nearby hill, a basic instinctive response to a potential tsunami. But they were instead ordered to head to a nearby traffic island (I think this is an area containing lots of main roads that probably is accessible by emergency vehicles).

But the river bank was soon bursting with jet black water and frothing with white seaspray. It was aiming its water directly up the road towards the children.

Some of them froze in the face of the wall of water. Others turned back and pelted towards the hill. Many were quickly caught up in it and then swept away.

Out of the 78 children in school that day, 74 died. 10 out of the 11 staff members met the same fate.

The sudden death of nearly an entire school of young children was traumatic, to say the least. But the paranormal phenomena that supposedly followed made it rather more horrific.

The mother of one student lost in the tsunami asked a psychic to visit the site of the school.

“Some of them were stuck in the water, covered in mud, and swallowing the dirty water in terrible suffering. Some of them were trapped and trying to get out”

Another medium told a different, less harrowing story of the spirits.

“You might think that the kids want their parents to find them, that they are desperate to go back home. But they are already home. They are already in a very good place. And the more you bury yourselves in the search, the more desperate you will become.”

This conflicting view of the supernatural phenomena is important. As Parry and many others make clear, we aren’t talking about the existence of the paranormal. We are talking about grief and the many forms it can take.

Unfortunately, the tragic story did not end there. On another level, the loss of young children and teachers marked something else haunting local government. It was eventually revealed as the truth trickled in that these deaths were largely avoidable.

The school was inadequately prepared for such an occurrence.

A court case put the Ishinomaki City and Miyagi Prefecture to trial - but only in 2016 did witnesses finally give evidence. The prosecution claimed the city was guilty of negligence and that the children could’ve been saved.

On the 26th April, the verdict was delivered. It found the city guilty and ordered it to award the parents of the students of Okawa Elementary School over £11m. But this wasn’t a victory to celebrate.

I doubt it helped any of them grieve, gain closure or alleviate their suffering at all.

The Taxi Cabs And Other Tales

A variety of sightings of supernatural phenomena followed the tsunami. Some are very diverse, but often share distinct similarities, confirming that this was a cultural phenomenon as much as a paranormal one.

The most notable example was reported by taxi drivers.

In 2016, a sociology graduate travelled to Ishinomaki to study strange phenomena reported by locals. Specifically, the things experienced by the cab drivers that took the public around the most ravaged area of Japan.

One driver recounted a particularly haunting story:

In the summer of 2011, mere months after the tsunami retreated back to the ocean, he was hailed down by a young woman. She was wearing a winter coat and soaking wet, as if she’d been standing in a rainstorm. But it was a hot summer’s day.

She asked to be taken to the Minamihama district, a mostly-abandoned area.

The driver asked if she was sure she meant that district. She paused and then asked:

“Have I died?”

He turned around to see that she was no longer there.

Another cabbie experienced something very similar.

He picked up a confused-looking young man who said he wanted to go to Hiyoriyama, a mountain park nearby. By the time he reached the summit, he looked in the backseat and saw that it was empty.

The same sociology student was told of other terrifying sightings.

One man based in Kurihara even claims he can see the eyes of the tsunami victims in puddles when it rains.

A few specific ghosts are frequently sighted, making themselves at home at certain locations. In one refugee home in Onagawa, the ghost of an old woman is often reported to sit down on a sofa. But when she gets up, she leaves a cushion soaked in seawater.

In Tagajō, a fire station received frequent calls out to houses that had been destroyed in the tsunami. They went out to the ruined homes and prayed for the dead. The calls then stopped.

***

Reflecting on this natural disaster in a time of global crisis is not lost on me. Of course, COVID-19 did not last six minutes and then decide to stop. 

I wonder how we will reflect on this time of pain and powerlessness. Of loss and loneliness.  

If I have got any information incorrect or missed anything you think matters, let me know in a comment or a private message and I can edit the article.

#Japan #japanese earthquake #great east japan earthquake #tsunami #japan tsunami #paranormal #supernatural #cultural history #shinto mythology #shinto #horror #ghost stories #true ghost stories #real ghost stories

[travllingbunny]

I was thinking about something... Am I the only one who thought while watching 7x08 of The 100, the backdoor pilot Anaconda "Did Jason Rothenberg write Bill Cadogan as a more charismatic and more powerful self-insert?" Maybe subconsciously? Maybe that was one of the reasons why that episode was well-written, he was writing about something he knows a lot about. I noticed the similarities of the Cadogan family dynamics to the Lightbourne family dynamic from a season before (such as both men being called out for being megalomaniacs/narcissists).

It also strikes me that all the main villains of the last 2 seasons have been megalomaniac privileged white men - Bill Cadogan, Sheidheda, Russell Lightbourne. And even in the other season - we can add the two Wallaces (and the Wallace family dynasty was referenced in Anaconda, too, with the mention of President Wallace’s administration). In season 5 the most villainy villain was McCreary, as a sociopathic manchild who destroyed the Earth because he couldn't have it all for himself. In the entire show, the human Big Bads of all seasons have been entitled white guys. (The other Big Bads were a computer program and a nuclear disaster, and season 1 didn’t have an overall main villain but many minor ones.)

I normally wouldn’t find anything strange about that - it’s an obvious and safe choice for a villain - but the specific character traits of the megalomaniac, egotistical, power-obsessed and entitled white men of these last couple of seasons and especially season 7 and Cadogan, have really made me think that there may be something subconscious going on there on Rothenberg’s part (probably not intentionally, as that would entail way too much self-awareness).

And there’s also another pattern I’ve noticed this season in particular (though it did not start this season, but now it’s really been maximized). When I wrote my review of 7x12, I was still giving the show the benefit of the doubt and trying to find the positives as well as the negatives, but there was something that had been making me increasingly uncomfortable throughout the season, and I couldn’t help mention that the show finished the last season with the Brainwashed into a Cult Jordan storyline, which was then dropped and ignored in season 7, but only to be replaced by the Indoctrinated into a Cult storyline for another man of color, this time the show’s second protagonist/male lead. 

There is pattern of men of color constantly being portrayed as followers, manipulated and/or brainwashed, usually by white male villains. Even those MOC who still have a mind of their own and aren’t background characters (I think that’s only Gabriel at this point) are not leaders. (Gabriel may do his own thing, but he’s not in charge and agreed to be a Disciple.)

Jordan was brainwashed last season by an annoying Devout guy, a minor character called Trey . That didn’t end up having consequences  except for Jordan spouting pro-Prime propaganda and getting hated by the fandom, and was retconed/ignored/dropped in season 7, except for Jordan continuing to be manipulated by the Devout (Trey and Alyssa) and Sheidheda (as Russell).

But after dropping that storyline, the show had Bellamy - who was a leader and a damn good one - indoctrinated into a cult and a follower of Cadogan. Then murdered. I really don’t want to talk anymore about that horrible plot and death scene. I was deeply uncomfortable with the plot to begin with, but was hoping that the show would do something that makes sense and is respectful to Bellamy’s character. My ideal version was that his friends and particularly Clarke get through to him and he realizes that individual love is not bad, but that his visions and beliefs weren’t entirely wrong, and that he turns his back on Cadogan and his interpretations of it. We know how that worked out.

Nelson was a leader, but was manipulated and used by Sheidheda in a way that didn't even make sense, preying on Nelson’s emotions and impulsiveness. Later murdered. 

Sheidheda’s main follower was Knight of Sangedakru. There were some minor hints he may have been rethinking his loyalty and fans speculated he may turn, but nope.

Reese Cadogan was the child loyal and subservient to Bill, desperate for his father’s approval. And Bill thinks he may have been killed by his sister (because he can't imagine another reason he didn't bring him the Flame - in his mind, he couldn't have possibly broken away from his influence). 

Miller and Jackson are background characters, in spite of having been on the show since season 1. Miller's most important arc in the last few seasons was having been a loyal follower or Blodreina. Jackson spent most of his time in the previous 6 seasons as Abby’s sidekick.

Even if we go back to previous seasons... Not to go over the minor characters like Shumway (season 1 minor villain- a follower of Diana Sidney, manipulated and murdered by her). But even Jaha, who was a strong leader, love him or hate him, was a brainwashed follower of ALIE for a full season.

Monty and Lincoln were characters of integrity, but were never put in charge. Lincoln was also a brainwashed slave/monster for half a season - but at least he got to get a revenge on his brainwasher Cage Wallace. Then he got murdered the next season. 

I’d have thought Bellamy was an exception once the show seemed to have stopped trying to impose the idea he was a “follower” and let him be a really good leader in the later seasons.... And then season 7 happened.  (I used to argue the line about him being a “follower” rather than a leader was just something a villain used to taunt him and that was not meant to be gospel truth, but guess what, the latest season has decided to confirm that ALIE!Raven’s taunting was indeed the truth, including that about Clarke being poison to everyone close to her and bringing them all death...)

The only exception was Pike, and he was made to be more hated than any of the white villains who were much worse in terms of motivations, actions and having a sympathetic qualities/backstory to explain their actions.

#the 100 #racism #bellamy blake #jordan green #reese cadogan #thelonius jaha #lincoln kom trikru #charles pike #nate miller #bill cadogan #sheidheda #russell lightbourne #paxton mccreary #cage wallace #anti jason rothenberg

[mewtonian-physics]

my ranking of the alex rider original series (stormbreaker through scorpia rising) from ‘book i least enjoy rereading’ to ‘book i most enjoy rereading’ let’s goooo

spoilers for all 9 books under the cut

9. Ark Angel

...He went to space. He went to space. Also the entire plot could have been avoided if Drevin had actually bothered to provide a photograph of his son. I’m sure he had one. I still like this book but it’s literally so insane that I just don’t know what to do with it. 

It is however really funny that Webber just goes and gives a speech insulting this super high-profile ecoterrorist group and acts like it’s no big deal and then they kill him. Shock of shocks.

8. Skeleton Key

Okay, points to this book for terrifying the shit out of me. God damn it does that shark scene scare me. Also, points for making me feel a little bit bad for a man who wants to nuke his own country because he thinks it will fix the place up. I’m still not entirely sure how that’s supposed to work, but that’s probably a good thing. I feel like understanding his thought process would say bad things about me. Still, I actually did feel sorry for him, if only a little. Dude was clearly mentally unstable and I doubt his son’s death helped at all. I also got sad about what happened to Carver and Troy. (Yeah, yeah, I’m a cringe fail American who has the American release. So sue me.) What a nightmare that must’ve been to endure... Otherwise, though, I’m not super into this book. The opening is just kind of meh and the way it leads into the rest of the plot seems a little bit unbelievable. Also, this might be an unpopular opinion, but Sabina annoys me. I would not get along with her at all and I can’t imagine her as a girlfriend. Skeleton Key does, however, absolutely excel at the emotional scenes. 

Also, why are all the spy agencies so comfortable with sending in a 14-year-old? Especially when they outright admit that the other attempts have all died horribly? Bureaucracy’s a bitch.

7. Point Blank

Boo, Dr. Grief! Boo! We hate your white supremacy! I’m so glad you got a snowmobile to the face, you deserved it. (Perks of books written by Jewish people--we aren’t afraid to give the neo-Nazis an unpleasant death.) Anyway, this book definitely isn’t bad, but I wouldn’t really say it stands out in the series. It definitely does hammer home the point of just how trapped Alex is, since MI6 isn’t going to just let him go after one mission, and let’s face it, the plot with the clones is creepy as hell, if highly improbable. But I’m largely just here to see the neo-Nazi get snowmobiled. That’s right, I just completely changed the definition of a pre-established word. I’m a rebel.

Also, I hate Fiona Friend so much and overall think she just didn’t need to be in the book, but the line about ‘I’d rather kiss the horse’ made me laugh so hard. Alex, you sass.

6. Snakehead

Okay, let’s talk about how genius the plan in this book is. I love it! I love how Yu wants to kill the people involved in the peace conference without making them into martyrs, so he comes up with this whole elaborate plan to stage a natural disaster. It’s incredible. This dude was thinking so far ahead. And he would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for that meddling kid... But anyway, I don’t see a lot of books where the villain really acknowledges that killing their enemies could just cause more problems for them via turning them into martyrs for a cause. Also, the way he’s so polite and soft-spoken while also being a complete monster... This book genuinely gives me chills. Extra bonus points for the part in the hospital, the absolute nightmare of having all your organs slowly removed and sold off and everyone around you is being so nice about it? ‘Oh, don’t worry, Alex, it won’t be so bad. Here, take your medicine. Do you need anything?’ Literally just. What the fuck. 

Also Ash can fucking fight me. You put your own godson in horrible danger on purpose! You killed your best friend! Bastard. 

...And just in case the book wasn’t disturbing enough, Yu’s fate at the end lives in my mind rent-free and I think about it on a concerningly regular basis considering that the chances of that happening to me are so low they’re practically in the negatives. Damn you, Horowitz.

I would also be remiss if I did not mention just how much I love the tagline ‘once bitten, twice spy’.

5. Crocodile Tears

Ah yes, the book that kickstarted my drift away from the church... I kid, of course. I drifted away from the church for completely separate reasons. But Desmond McCain is always going to scare the shit out of me. The ability to kill countless innocent people while blissfully quoting Bible verses (that he takes wildly out of context and uses for his own self-serving means) is... well, I could actually say a lot about what that reminds me of, but I’m here to rate books, not religion. Moving on. This book has some really stellar antagonists, and the plot is chilling in a way that feels a lot more realistic than most of the other books. Even if some of it is a bit farfetched (sabotaging a nuclear power plant? Really?), the idea of using disasters for your own profit... well. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on why that is so believable. The Poison Dome is also a really cool and chilling scene--even Alex, who has the luck of the devil, can’t get out of that one unscathed. Further scares come in with the fate of Harold Bulman--imagine having your entire existence wiped and your identity changed while you were asleep! The breakdown he has over it is almost enough to make me feel sorry for him, even though he was ready to exploit a teenager and make his life a living hell just to turn a profit. Note the word almost.

Also. The opening makes me cry. Specifically the line talking about how Ravi’s kids would ‘never meet Mickey Mouse’. I lose my goddamn mind every single time I read it. That little personal touch turns the scene from a statistic to a tragedy. Once again: Damn you, Horowitz.

4. Stormbreaker

Yeah, this one gets the special cover shot. And why not? What we are looking at here is the birth of a legend. Move the fuck over, James Bond, Alex Rider is on the scene now. Anyway, yeah, this book is pretty damn spectacular. It has its stumbles, but as the first book in a series, that’s to be expected. Still, it pulls you in from quite literally the first line and keeps you going right up until the end. (If you came here from my post of memes, you know how much the line ‘Killing is for grownups, and you’re still a child’ destroys me.) It has the debut of much-beloved characters such as, of course, Alex--but also Jack Starbright, and of course, the best MI6 agent of them all, which is to say Smithers. Hell, even Yassen Gregorovich, especially once you get through Russian Roulette... Man, that was a rough one. 

Seriously, though. This is a really good book. The scene with the Portuguese man-o’-war still gives me the chills to think about. (Have you ever looked up pictures of those things? They’re beautiful, but holy shit will they make you regret being born. Nature is funny like that.) 

We also get the introduction of, of course, Alex’s patented sass (his response to Sayle saying he relates to the man-o’-war is HILARIOUS) and we get the inherent humor of Alex screwing up an alias one time and then just going by Alex for the rest of the series so he doesn’t do that again. Really, kid, I know you’re not a trained spy or anything but did you never play pretend growing up? Ever? You can’t pretend your name is Felix for a little while? That sounds like a you problem.

3. Scorpia Rising

I distinctly remember when this book came out, actually. I was on vacation at the time, and I remember my brother annoying the hell out of the poor workers at a bookstore we frequented there to see if/when they were going to get it in. They did, finally, and we bought it immediately, and I was of course absolutely desperate to read it. He got to read it first, though. -_-

This is a great book, an absolute emotional rollercoaster all the way through. The way Blunt tricks Alex back into service by staging a shooting was exactly the kind of cold, brutal behavior I’d expect from him. Seeing Julius come back was shocking, but very exciting, too. And Razim makes an incredibly chilling villain, with his absolute disregard for human life and his desire to measure pain. Also, seeing Smithers’s house was so much fun. Smithers in this book was just really fun in general, but he’s really fun in every book, so... nothing unusual there. But also, I want an unwelcome mat. Please?

2. Eagle Strike

‘But Penny,’ you might ask, ‘why is this book so high on your list? It has so much of Sabina in it, and you said she annoys you.’ That is true. What does not annoy me, however, is basically the entire rest of the book. I love the tense opening, and then reading through Alex’s real-life ‘playthrough’ of Feathered Serpent is still one of my favorite scenes. Cray is absolutely incredible as a villain, with the way that he truly believes in his cause--which is undoubtedly a good one! Yet the extremes to which he will go for that cause, and the fact that he very nearly succeeds, are what elevate him to one of the most dangerous villains in the series. That scene with Charlie Roper and the nickels is something I can never seem to stop thinking about. Actually, I think about it basically whenever I think about large amounts of money paid in small increments... 

Also, I really enjoy how he gets into the whole plot in the first place, and I really enjoy Smithers saying ‘ah, fuck it’ and helping him out anyway. Go, Smithers. You once again prove me right in saying that you’re the coolest adult in MI6.

The revelation that Yassen knew Alex’s father is one that absolutely blew my mind first time around. The way his life was threaded into the lives of the Rider family--he worked with John Rider, was saved by him, killed Ian Rider, and then died for refusing to kill Alex Rider--wow. Wow. It gets to me. It really gets to me. This book is a masterpiece. I heard that it’s going to be what the second season of the TV series is based off of, and I’m so hyped for that. We love to see it, we really do.

1. Scorpia

I don’t believe anyone who says this book didn’t get to them at all. I just think they are lying. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to not be affected by this book. God. Just thinking about it reminds me of why I don’t think it’s possible. I mean, come on. We get all this backstory about Alex’s parents, we get tricked along with him into thinking MI6 killed his father, then bam, that was a lie, and Alex may have just fucked himself over big time. Also, that plot is terrifying! (And I bet anti-vaxxers had a field day with it, huh.) Julia Rothman is a really great antagonist, one of the only ones who didn’t go and explain her plan in great detail to Alex--the fact that she didn’t actually being a plot point was something I personally found pretty clever. In general, this book is... I tend to hate when people say they ‘can’t put it down’ because it’s usually an obvious exaggeration, but that really is how I feel reading it.

And again. If that ending didn’t get to you... Well, I just think you are lying.

#alex rider #spoilers

[lifeofyellowpearl]

Yellow Pearl Goes Over Old Files: The Diversion Agreement

Of the hundreds of files present on my holo-screen, my eyes fixed upon yet another of personal significance. Its personal meaning, found not within its content but within my experience surrounding the controversy brought upon by its abrupt inception. It is suspected, though seldom acknowledged, that the current resource crisis, which has come to define Era 2, had long been foreseen by White Diamond. And that in its earliest beginnings, the eldest ruler had begun making turns for redistribution of resources as well as redelegation of personnel. It is doubtless to me, with that in mind, that it was her surreptitious need for redelegation which prompted White to do what she did. Though I had heard whispers of Pink Diamond’s violent tendencies, I had never seen first-hand the full extent of her rage. That is, never until that fateful day.

I still had the duty of serving Pink Diamond as her temporary pearl since White Diamond had yet to provide a suitable replacement for the one she seized from the neophyte ruler. We had just returned to the moon base from a particularly clamorous meeting over which Pink was still fuming. Much to Pink’s greatest annoyance, White had made the unilateral decision to divert 10,000 Lapis Lazuli away from the construction of Pink’s colony. To the end that they may be redelegated to other projects throughout White’s Jurisdiction.

To make such a call without even bothering to alert - let alone consult with - Pink Diamond was not only a measure yet unheard of but a gesture of great disrespect. That White Diamond had violated the very protocol she, herself, ratified in making such a discourteous move infuriated Pink all the more. When word of this reached the young diamond, an emergency meeting was convened at which even Blue and Yellow Diamond expressed marked shock and discontent at White’s thoughtless action. And so, to placate her peers, White Diamond agreed that the order for redelegation would be - hastily - rewritten into a “mutual agreement” between White and Pink, requiring the signatures of both parties. Pink was not happy with this arrangement - especially considering that the gesture was all but purely symbolic. But, at the very least, she would be allowed to retain the Lapis Lazuli of terraform company 16. A company comprised of some of the finest that Homeworld has to offer. Pink also managed, after throwing a tantrum presenting her arguments, to secure the promise that White would no longer make attempts to divert resources away from Pink’s colony. These admittedly meager concessions were enough to earn Pink Diamond’s signature - albeit after some gentle convincing from Blue Diamond. But alas, it was not enough to quell Pink’s fury over the entire affair.

And so, for the very first time, there at the Earth Colony moon base, I was able to bear witness to one of the emotional blowouts for which the Pink Diamond was infamous. “I can’t believe her! Why would she do that! Why would she think I’d be okay with this??” Pink angrily paced, following no strict path or predictable direction, as she continued her tirade over what White had tried to do, “Oh but of course when I break the rules, it’s this huge goodman deal, but when she does it, it’s perfectly fine?? What even is that?? How is that FAIR?? I just… I can’t even….GAAAAAA!!!!”

I watched on as Pink, lost in the whirlwinds of her own rage, marched over to one of the glass panes of the base’s dome; upon which she took out her frustrations with a steady cascade of thunderous strikes. With every punch that Pink brought against the glass, I swear the moon itself trembled as though its very surface were jolted by the force of one thousand nuclear blasts! Truly it was a terrifying sight! As the rhythmic assault continued on, cracks in the pane began to appear, spread, and multiply; stoking mental imagery of potential disaster in which we are depressurized from the base as a result of the pane’s shattering.

Even more frightening were recollections of the injury sustained by Pink Diamond’s erstwhile pearl. An injury the poor gem was loath to discuss, as talks of its causation were a source of nothing but great anxiety and anguish for Pink’s loyal servant. Nevertheless, I had my suspicions of what - that is to say ‘who’ - caused that unfortunate pearl’s trauma. And seeing Pink Diamond now, in this truly horrific state, served to confirm my suspicions were correct. With this in mind, I was certain to maintain my distance and allot Pink the time she needed to fully release her anger. I did my best to remain at attention, in spite of the full-body tremors brought upon by the terror I was feeling at that moment. 

As time went on, the frequency of her pulsating strikes began to decrease. Until, at last, her onslaught came to an end and the final echoes of her thunderous rapping gave way to the default silence of this desolate place. The silence, however, did little to ease my nerves. For Pink Diamond now stood rigid and sullen with balled fists down at her sides, mumbling expletives through gritted teeth. Pink’s titanic fury had not died. It had only moved inward; barely concealing itself just beneath the surface of her inner gem. To this very day, I can still safely declare that at that moment, I was more frightened than I had ever been before or since.

My thoughts wandered back to Pink’s former pearl as many of her idiosyncrasies began to make sense to me. The ease with which she startled, the frequent hand tremors, and, most telling of all, her occasional hesitation in returning to her diamond’s side when summoned back from the pearl chamber. “I do hope her elders didn’t upset her too much.” I once heard her say. What I initially thought to be a statement of selfless concern, I now recognize to have been an expression of self-preserving fear. Indeed, that pearl had seen, known, and personally experienced, the truest extent of Pink Diamonds capabilities.

All of this, I was contemplating when my thoughts were interrupted by the tone of an incoming message. Still on edge, I fumbled with my holo-screen until I was finally able to answer the call. A Lapis Lazuli appeared on my screen. It was then commander of Terraform company 16, 528’s predecessor. I don’t remember her facet or her cabochon, and due to the circumstances leading to her unfortunate stranding on that doleful planet, such identifying information was blacked out on any and all files in which she is mentioned. I struggled to gather myself, “This is the Yellow -Er - White…” I had to pause and take a breath, “Sorry. This is the Pink Diamond control room.”

“Yeah, hey...” The Commander replied with an air of mild vexation, “I’m calling about the proposal my company sent to Pink Diamond?”

“Proposal? Which one?”

The commander nearly rolled her eyes. But she knew better than to let slip such an expression of disrespect when speaking of a diamond - unlike her loathsome colleague, 528. She did, however, sharply inhale before pursing her lips, I assume to prevent the quiet utterance of an expletive eager to escape her breath. “Uh, yeah. It was the proposal about a stretch of land that was originally reserved for the construction of a city. Peridots in my company have found that this land would be better suited for a kindergarten and that the city could be moved further north.” The Commander awkwardly rubbed the back of her neck “I eh...heh...I forwarded that proposal to Pink Diamond several weeks ago, and the city planner is really getting on my case.” Her nervous laughter did little to mask her exasperation.

I had to ponder for a moment before I remembered, “Oh yes, of course” I replied, “how could I forget such...wait, has Pink Diamond still not gotten back to you on that?”

“Nope.” The Commander’s frustration was still actively tempered but no less apparent, “Nope. Nope. Not at all. I mean, I get it. Pink Diamond’s busy but...I kinda need an answer so if you could just...”

“I’m sorry, but now’s not really a good time.” Of course now wasn’t a good time! Now was quite literally the worst possible time! I had no intention of disturbing Pink Diamond now. Not while she was in this horrible state. I’ll admit it, I was frustrated with Pink. I didn’t want to be, but I couldn’t help it. I had forwarded that proposal to her the moment I received it because I understood it’s importance. I marked it to be saved under her “high priority” tab and even let her know that the proposal was there, waiting for her reply. She acknowledged it but was so distracted by the images of “Earth’s beauty” - her words, certainly not mine - that it likely slipped her notoriously absent mind.

The Commander took another deep breath. I could already see that her forced politeness was dissipating, “Well, here’s the thing. The city planner is threatening to move forward and break ground, so I need an answer. Like...right now.”

“I understand, commander but with all due respect…”

“Please...don’t ‘with all due respect’ me. I have waited patiently for weeks, and I am running out of time. I need to know what to tell the city planner, and I need to know immediately.”

“Commander please, listen-”

“No, you listen…” I watched, over the course of our interaction, as The Commander’s demeanor change from a forced civility, to an abject annoyance, to a calm sternness, “When word gets back to the Diamond Authority that a city was built on top of a potential kindergarten without Pink Diamond’s knowledge, they’re going to be asking why she wasn’t made aware of that land’s viability before we went ahead with construction. They’re going to wonder why Pink Diamond wasn’t given a chance to make a final call. Do you understand what I’m saying?” 

I sighed. I did understand. Someone would be held responsible for ultimately allowing tons of raw material to go to waste. That someone couldn’t be a diamond, and The Commander was making it clear that that someone wouldn’t be her. I could see it, now - stained on my record in bright red lettering, ‘Failure to forward vital information to her superior.’ Such an error would not be easily forgiven. The Commander wasn’t giving me a choice, “I understand.” I said, resigned, “I will remind Pink Diamond of your proposal, immediately.”

There was a sigh of relief followed by a brief moment of silence. The sternness with which The Commander addressed me had gone. Replaced by what appeared to be a twinge of remorseful understanding, “Look...I heard about what’s been going on, and I understand that Pink Diamond isn’t exactly in the best mood right now. But this shouldn’t cause too much of a fuss, right? All I need is ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ That’s it.”

“Yes...of course.”

“Thank you...good luck.” We both signed off with an unspoken understanding that this would not, in fact, be easy. But it was necessary. I turned to Pink, who was still facing the damaged pane, her back turned to me. Still seething. Still grumbling. Still ruminating. I began my approach slowly and methodically, so as not to startle the irate diamond. I could almost feel the ire radiating from her person as I got closer. Once directly behind her, I cleared my throat in an, albeit immature, attempt to grab Pink’s attention. It seemed to have worked as her head raised slightly. Yet, she did not turn to face me. I took a deep breath, mustering every ounce of courage that I had at my disposal, “Sorry to disturb you My Di-”

“Now now…” She growled those words with a quiet intensity that would send a chill down the back of even the most hardened quartz.

I truly wanted nothing more than to leave Pink Diamond be. Unfortunately, the situation obligated me to press further, “My Diamond, please. This is very impor-”

“I said, ‘not now’” again, I was shaken by her simmering inflection. But time was of the essence. I couldn’t let up.

And so, pushing aside the remainder of my apprehension, I made one final, more forceful, attempt, “My Diamond, I beg of you. We really need your…”

“SHUT UP!!!” In a single, rapid, fluid motion, Pink whipped around! For a fleeting second, I looked into the eyes of the frightful, raging diamond! Words could never describe that hateful look in her eyes! Much less the true extent of the fear it struck. But it was only for a second that I was able to catch a glimpse of that hideous gaze. For the very next second, I was off the ground! In the air! Ascending! Flying! Then falling!

I have no recollection of the moment I hit the floor. I can only recall the moment immediately thereafter. I was lying on my back, staring up into the heavens through the glass dome above. Only half-aware of what had just transpired. My ears were ringing. My mind was abuzz. I was all but deafened by the cacophony of voices of my now panicked inner-pearls. As the moment went by, the voices began to fade as my cruelest inner pearl regained her dominance over the rabble. Once I recovered the full extent of my faculties, I was able to hear her voice, loud and clear; just as biting and scornful as always. You stupid clod! You stupid idiot clod! You stupid worthless idiot piece of filth clod!! You just had to push her, didn’t you? This is what happens when you forget your place!! You’ve killed us! Do you understand? You’ve killed us!! You’ve killed us!!

‘You’ve killed us.’ Over and over that statement rang through my head until I was finally able to surmise it’s very grim, very literal meaning. Without looking, I placed my hand over my gem and shuttered internally when I felt the rapidly spreading cracks. In that moment, I thought of what I could have done differently. Of what I could have done better. I knew how Pink Diamond was. I knew how forgetful she was. I should have anticipated that the proposal would slip her mind. Why didn’t I remind her? Why didn’t I at least ask about its status? Why didn’t I try harder? Why didn’t I do more? I should have been more proactive! I should have been more tactful! I should have been more careful! There was little room for doubt. I was dying, and it was my fault. Stupid clod. I thought to myself, look what you made her do. Stupid...stupid clod. Though I knew that I was static, it felt as though my body were sinking, and it appeared as though the stars above were receding away, further into the ether. I felt that the heavens themselves were judging me, mocking me. And, of course, they were right to do so.

It wasn’t too much longer before I heard the rapid, approaching footsteps of a now panicked diamond. “Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!” Before long, Pink Diamond came into view. She knelt down over me, clasping her head in both of her hands with a look of frenzied concern. “OhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygod!!!” In a gesture far outside the realms of social acceptability, Pink bent down and embraced me, cradling my head in her hands as she rocked back and forth, all the while hyperventilating. With my cheek now pressed against hers, I could feel the tears streaming down her face, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” No. This wasn’t right. A diamond should never find reason to apologize to a pearl. I wanted ever so badly to remind her that the fault was mine and mine alone! That it should be me apologizing to her! That I was the one to provoke her. And now, thanks to my worthless stupidity, I have caused even further distress! I wanted so much to tell her all of this, but I found myself, for reasons unspecified, yet unable to speak. 

Pink Diamond then pressed her face against my chest, sobbing into my gem, releasing my head to hang limp and allowing me another view of the stars above. There was no room for doubt. The heavens were indeed judging me. 

“I’m sorry!” Pink cried, “I’m so sorry!” as her tears made contact with my gem, I could feel the cracks disappearing and my body regaining its vigor. It was as though Pink’s tears had healed me of the very injuries she inflicted. I was then able to raise my head and see Pink, yet unaware of my rejuvenation, still crying into my gem. Making for a somewhat awkward situation.

“My...Diamond?” Pink pulled away, seeing that she had healed me. She embraced me again, now overjoyed. “Oh, thank the stars!” she exclaimed. She got up and helped me to my feet, “I am so sorry. I-I don’t know what came over me! I was angry at the other diamonds and I just.” There she goes, again. I hated that she felt the need to apologize. Or, to be more accurate, I hated that I made her feel like she had to apologize. As if I didn’t feel terrible enough, what Pink said next still makes me cringe to this day, “Can you ever forgive me?” 

I bowed my head in absolute shame. That I had driven a diamond to the point of asking me, a pearl, for forgiveness was a misdeed that I could hardly bear. “There’s...nothing to forgive, My Diamond.” I whispered, “It was my fault. I’m the one who should be sorry...”

Silence. I didn’t dare look up at Pink, though I suspect she still felt guilty for what had transpired. Perhaps she wanted to say something to ease my distress. But there was nothing that she could have said. I am her pearl. The responsibility was, and always will be mine. 

I suspect it was her realization that nothing could be said to ease my feelings of shame and self-loathing, which prompted her to change the subject, “Um...right. So what was it that you needed?” 

In the frenzie, I had nearly forgotten. I, too, wanted nothing more than to put this conflict behind us. And so, I gathered myself and stood at attention to properly address Pink Diamond, “Oh...yes. Um, The Commander of Terraform Company 16 requested your response to a proposal. She had sent you. It was the…”

“Oh god! The proposal!” Pink exclaimed with a gasp. Pink brought up her holo-screen and anxiously scrolled through her inbox. “Gah! I can’t believe I forgot about that! Where was it? Where was it?”

“It should be at the top of your ‘high-priority’ tab, My Diamond” I said.

Following my suggestion, Pink found the proposal. “Oh! There it is! Now what was it…?” Pink tapered off as she went to sit on her throne, now fully engrossed in her current task. It seemed she had almost immediately forgotten about the preceding events. I went to take my place next to Pink Diamond. Standing at attention as she carried out her tasks. The rest of that day was largely uneventful, but that conflict would remain fresh in my mind. Amazingly, the same couldn’t have been said for Pink. For her, it really was though the whole thing never happened. 

As I observed this, I remembered something else Pink Diamond’s former pearl once said of her, “What I really admire about Pink Diamond is how quickly she’s able to forgive herself. She almost never dwells on her actions for long. Why, she hardly dwells on them at all! I sure wish I were like that!” ------

Author’s Note: Hey guys. Finally got around to posting another entry. Sorry about the delay but the truth is, I haven’t been doing well. Like...at all. Don’t wanna get into specifics but everything is kinda been falling apart, lol 😅. This may seem weird but if you don’t mind, I could use some words of encouragement if you get ‘em Anyway, here’s the Diversion Agreement. Making these documents has been surprisingly fun. They certainly make for a nice distraction, lol

#Yellow Pearl #yellow diamond #pink diamond #pink pearl #volleyball #steven universe #fanfic #abuse