#and he still has his moon and star design shirt it's just altered into a t shirt now

[majoraop]

It partially overlapped with the Corazon Week so I didn’t have much time to make something for the Heart Pirates Week, but I managed to write a short story inspired by several prompts at once ("strength", "longing", "soft", and "caged"). The prompts are mostly used in the song pictured above (written by Law’s reincarnation in my “A Tale of Two Dragons” soulmate AU), which I included in the fanfic. The story features the CoraLaw pairing, the core Heart Pirates crew (Shachi/Penguin/Bepo), and a one-sided LuLaw.

A Tale of Two Dragons – Moon Chapter “You could smile for once, you know?” Penguin told Law while elbowing a chuckling Shachi.   “Is he always like this?” Rocinante sat next to Law, smiling at the camera Luffy was holding.   “Yeah. He has always been like this.” Law sighed, already exhausted even if they had just departed for their Moon Tour—as Luffy had dubbed it.   “My…brother”—just a moment of hesitation, but Rocinante couldn’t avoid forever bringing Doffy up—“told me that all people inhabiting our world came from the moon. I wonder what we’ll find there!”   “I told you already,” Law said with a grin. “There are people with wings on the moon—like angels.”   “Really?” Bepo, the younger component of their band, was staring at Law with a gaping mouth.   “Really,” Law echoed him with a serious face. Penguin and Shachi tried to say something, but Law sent a glare in their direction and they closed their mouths. “They have fluffy wings and celestial voices,” he continued.   “Oh…” Bepo blushed. He was a timid boy with a soft spot for pretty singers—but a skilled drummer for his age.   “Law…you should stop now,” Rocinante reproached him playfully.   “But it’s real!” Luffy exclaimed. “I remember people with wings living in the old world!”   Everyone looked at him, wondering if he was joking. However, there was no trace of doubts or lies in Luffy’s eyes. Law actually believed in those stories too, but he still had fun teasing Bepo.   “I can’t wait to meet them!” the boy whispered, blushing even more, and everyone laughed. --- “Look, Law, we’re almost there!”   Luffy’s enthusiasm rubbed off on Law, too, when he looked out of the porthole of the flying ship they rented for their journey. The moon was so near now that he could distinguish a large city quite clearly. Sentient beings were living up there, and he wouldn’t be able to refuse Luffy his craved moon concert. Law groaned. His life had changed so fast he hadn’t been able to adapt yet. He hadn't even finished writing his new song!   “It looks beautiful,” Rocinante whispered, putting an arm around his shoulders. “I can’t believe we’re travelling together as we promised to do.”   “If only those troublemakers weren't around…”   “Oh no, it’s better like this!” Rocinante smiled. “Your friends are a nice, funny bunch, and I can help with your band. You know, I’ve learned some useful skills.”   Law stared at his confident grin. “What skills?” he asked, mildly worried. He hoped it didn’t involve setting things on fire—the speciality of Rocinante’s old self.   “I’m a dresser,” Rocinante said proudly. “Well, not really—not yet at least, but I studied costume design. I have a great fashion sense, you know?”   Law didn’t remember the old Roci and his Corazon alter ego having a great fashion sense at all—if anything else, it was the contrary.   “Leave it to me,” Rocinante said, puffing up his chest.   Law felt a shiver running down his spine as he hesitantly nodded at him. --- You always gave me strength Once, I was a child who lost his heart Once, I was a child who got your heart On the second night after they arrived at their destination, Law was finally able to sit down and work on his song.   Penguin was playing his guitar in another room together with Shachi, the bassist of their band. Bepo and Luffy were keeping them company, and Law heard the latter singing. His cheerful voice put him in a good mood, which helped him resolve a difficult verse. He would have loved to spend some time alone with Rocinante, but he needed to finish writing his composition first. Besides, Roci was busy designing their stage costumes.   Law looked down at his laptop and deleted a sentence. He remained pensive for a moment. Then, he typed a new line. He hummed the refrain one last time and nodded, satisfied. He would sing this song alone, Luffy only joining him for the chorus. He needed to sing this song alone.   Law saved the file and closed the lid of his laptop. --- They still needed an agent so, after finishing working on his song, Law started searching for one.   Bepo, Shachi, and Penguin accompanied him while Roci kept working on their costumes. Luffy, too, decided to stay back: he hadn't had much time to learn Law's new song, and even if he would only sing the chorus he wanted to practise some more. Law wondered if Luffy understood how much that song was important for him and thus wanted to make a perfect performance. Sorry, he thought, knowing how Luffy felt about him.   “This place is huge!”   Penguin’s comment pulled Law out of his thoughts, and he surveyed his surroundings. That city was the main hub of the moon. The skyscrapers that soared against the starry night looked like buildings out of an ancient civilization, but they were made from glass and not blocks of stone. A giant bubble covered the city under a protective dome and shielded it from cosmic radiations, and at its outskirts, smaller bubbles encircled fields and farms. Factories were situated on the dark side of the moon and connected to the central hub by underground bullet train. During their stay there, Law had learned that water was scarce on the moon: there weren’t rivers, lakes, or seas, but people had been able to survive thanks to their advanced technology. Tiny humanoid robots took care of manual labour, so the citizens of the moon had plenty of free time. Unsurprisingly, upon learning that Law and his group were a rock band, they had immediately asked them to hold a concert.   “People of the moon do have wings, but they are small,” Bepo interrupted Law’s thoughts, sounding a bit disappointed. “They can't fly like that.”   “They don’t need wings to fly,” Shachi told him. “Can’t you see the floating vehicles above our heads?”   “It’s not the same.” Bepo pouted.   “But their wings are still fluffy at least,” Shachi insisted, clearly amused.   “Aye-Aye, they are fluffy.” Bepo nodded, smiling.   Law barely registered their silly conversation as he wondered how many marvellous things were waiting for him and Roci to discover. The thought of being able to experience all of that with him filled him with a happiness he had never felt before in his current of previous lives. --- Finding an agent turned out to be surprisingly easy. After talking with some local people, they met an extravagant man with sparkly, ambitious eyes—a foreigner probably, since he didn't have wings. Nevertheless, he had the right contacts, so they hired him.   The day of the concert arrived in no time, and now Law was staring, appalled, at the clothes and accessories displayed before him. “What. Are. These.” He managed to say after the first moment of shock.   “These? Your stage costume and accessories, of course!” Rocinante said with a big grin on his face.   Law glared at the black leather pants, the belt with a ridiculous-looking, heart-shaped buckle, the earrings, the rings, and the “shoes”. The shoes were the worst part: how was he supposed to sing and dance on those stilts?! Law put his hand to his face, sighing, and flung himself upon the armchair behind him.   “You’ll look great in them, Law!” Luffy exclaimed, looking at him like he usually looked at delicious meat—his favourite food.   Law felt a bit bad for him since he couldn’t reciprocate his feelings, but Luffy was a good person and had accepted Law's relationship with Roci without hesitation. Law sighed again and closed his eyes, massaging his temples with his thumbs.   “I love it!” Bepo cried next to him when Roci showed him his costume. Law glanced at it and was only able to distinguish a white fur-something.   “And these are for you,” Rocinante told Penguin and Shachi with a smiling face. Law straightened his back, ready to savour the horror on his friends’ faces, but they didn't react as he expected but just let out their breath in relief.   Law stood up to see their costumes closer and then frowned. “Why do their clothes look normal and they also have a shirt? Why can’t I wear a shirt too?!”   “It’s because you’re the star, my dear!” Rocinante beamed.   “But Luffy is the co-star, and yet he'll wear a shirt!” Law felt he was losing his sanity.   “It fits his look better,” Rocinante replied with a serious expression.   “…I give up.” Law threw his hands on the air and returned to his armchair. Besides, it wouldn't be the first time he appeared in public shirtless...Oh. He had just remembered about that. So, there were still parts of his past pirate life that he had not recalled yet. Ok, let’s go all out then. “Roci, I need you to paint my chest,” he said, trying not to blush.   At that, even Rocinante looked surprised. “What do you mean?”   “I mean a fake tattoo—nothing too complex, just some black ink.”   “Oh, I remember that!” Luffy chimed in.   Just perfect. Law wanted to disappear, but it wasn’t like his heart-shaped tattoo had been a mystery in his past life. He had walked around showing it on his bare chest like war painting when—no, he needed to stop thinking about that. Doflamingo wasn’t an enemy anymore. Now, we’re all free from our past.   “I…can draw it if you show me the design you’ve in mind,” Roci told him.   “Follow me.” Law stood up. “Just you,” he added when he saw the others moving too. That symbol on his chest had been his source of strength during his turbulent, painful past. More importantly, it had been a memento of his Cora-san. Only Rocinante could hear about it. --- When Law stepped out of his dressing room, he was welcomed by Penguin and Shachi’s barely held laughter and Luffy’s loud cheering. Bepo, instead, just looked at him with a worried expression.   Law sighed and tried a few slow steps on his heels. Thankfully, he was able to walk normally.   “You look fantastic,” Rocinante whispered, his eyes lingering on Law’s painted chest.   Law blushed. There were no secrets left between them: he literally wore his heart on his skin—his feelings for that man for all to see.   Now, he was ready to step on stage and scream his love for him. The white sea of clouds below me is spotless, I recall colourless roofs and skin now spotted, I recall cries and tears, smoke and flames, I recall being saved and then encaged. I remember falling on a pile of trash, I remember silence—and when it crashed. You always gave me strength Once, I was a child who lost his heart Once, I was a child who got your heart The waves are rolling and splashing before me, I recall blue oceans and endless adventures, I recall allies, friends, and their laughter, I recall legends, myths, and old treasures. I remember searching for the truth of my name, I remember crowning the very King of Pirates. You always gave me strength Once, I was a child who lost his heart Once, I was a child who got your heart The boundless sea of stars is sparkling above me, I recall worlds below and above the mountains, I recall the promise I exchanged with you, I recall black feathers, comfy and soft. I remember longing for you in the night, I remember you smiling for the last time. You always gave me strength Once, I was a child who lost his heart Once, I was a child who got your heart You always gave me strength Once, I was a child who lost his heart Once, I was a child who got your heart… A child no more, I give your heart back. [SOULMATE]

#onepiece #one piece #opfanfic #opfanfiction #coralaw #law #trafalgar law #trafalgar d water law #corazon #rocinante #rosinante #donquixote rocinante #penguin #shachi #bepo #luffy #monkey d luffy #one piece au #majoraop #long post #(I try to avoid putting links in post since posts with links often don't appear in the tags/searches... ^^' ) #queued

[lunarimpact]

do your master(s) have favourite mystic codes?? if so which ones?

Everyone does end up having a favorite, but they also have ones that they rely on pretty constantly. To make things easy, I will say they all make heavy use of the Combat Uniform, though some of them still jokingly refer to it as a plugsuit, even going so far as to alter the colors and add decals that make them feel more comfortable or retain some semblance of personality. They are noticeably more skintight than what we see on the Ritsuka avatars, and this is to more closely match in design with actual EVA Plugsuits, working as a more compressive uniform to allow for better circulation, assist with muscle soreness, and allow the uniform to handle the varying strength of the owner's circuits and magical prowess.

Let's start with Sayo, the main antihero, she has a preference for the Mage's Association, which fits her aesthetic most. She’s always been one for shorts and simple tops, and there’s some comfort to be found here. The usable additional skills gained by the mystic code are ones she often abuses in combat. As for her Combat Uniform, she wears a more traditional orange and black, with red instead of white patches. The only decals she's added is the word क्षत्रिय, read kshatriya, between her shoulder blades and along her right thigh as a bit of a tongue in cheek joke. 

Sachiko would be next, as she was the tritagonist between Sayo and Rem, though depending on Sayo’s role or existence at any given moment, Sachiko is sometimes elevated to deuteragonist. Sachiko is very fond of the look of the Tropical Summer mystic code, whilst finding it’s additional skills to be cheeky, but only so useful. However, she can’t just run around in Brilliant Summer all the time, though it’s ideal for her preferred quick servants. Her Combat Uniform is black and white, with some homage to crane feathers. A red circle rests within a mesh cover over her chest. One would surely wonder why.

Merari, the royal brat, has a preference for both the Royal Brand and Artic Uniform, as they both fit her more mature and stylish approach to things. However, one must note that for the new Artic mystic code, she does wear shorts with black compression tights. A skirt is non-negotiable in this matter. Her combat uniform is blue, black and white, but the black and white patches have switched places. There is a mesh peek-a-boo window found over her chest and on her hips with a crisscross of black bands.

Su-Yeong, like Merari, has a preference for the Artic uniform, though he wears a dark hoodie overtop his due to body dysphoria. Very rarely does he go without some sort of baggy jacket when wearing any form of mystic code, with the exception of the Mage’s Association. His Combat Uniform is black and purple in color with patches of azure blue, half hidden by an ordinary black cotton hoodie. A double zero rests on his chest, a display of some part of his emotional state. He also carries a knife strapped to either thigh.

Faye was never meant to be a Master of Chaldea or even a candidate, but on the rare occasion that she does manifest so in some half-dreamed storyline, she adores the Memoria of the Far Side of the Moon and Tropical Summer. Both of them remind her of some distant memory of happier times. Tropical Summer is especially a favorite of hers, as it happens to be closest in appearance to her downtime wear, which is usually a t-shirt and some yoga pants or leggings. Her tropical top has the same pattern as Male!Ritsuka’s, because she thinks the orange clashes with her pink peek-a-boo hair. Her Combat Uniform is a dusky pink, black and white, with a few star decals along the spine. 

On a final note, Merari, Su-Yeong and Faye do not wear the Ceremonial New Year kimono style mystic code as it conflicts with their nationalities. Merari is white English-Chinese mixed, and so she wears a hanfu. Su-Yeong and Faye are both Korean, and wear their respective hanbok. Sayo would much more prefer to wear a sari, but she doesn’t mind donning the kimono.

#Anonymous #asks #fgo #writing ; meta #Sayo ( master ) #Sachiko ( master ) #Merari Perrill ( Master ) #Su-Yeong ( master ) #Faye ( master )

[embersofstardust]

For the OC ask, if you don't mind, all of them? I like all the names and am curious about snake boi! 😊

:D absolutely!!!! But it’s gonna get long, so i’m throwing it under the “read more” (also sorry it took so long! I tried to do it before work, but didn’t have enough time so i had to wait until i got home)

ok, so i’ll do snake boi first then!

Full Name: he doesn’t have one yet lolGender and Sexuality: Male (currently debating nonbinary), and asexualPronouns: He/HimEthnicity/Species: He is a snake hybrid sort of deal. Not a naga, but has reptilian eyes/toungue and is coldblooded and prefers his food extremely rare even though it might stain his nice dress clothesBirthplace and Birthdate: No birthplace, but birthday is April 19thGuilty Pleasures: His favourite band is ABBA but he thinks it’s embarrassingPhobias: Crickets. they terrify himWhat They Would Be Famous For: writing the book he’s been working on for the past 10 yearsWhat They Would Get Arrested For: god um, maaayyyybe being involved in a fight? but only like, if one of his friends was getting the shit kicked out of them. he hates confrontationOC You Ship Them With: none atm!OC Most Likely To Murder Them: i honestly don’t knowFavorite Movie/Book Genre: movie is suspenseful thrillers, but book is romcom novels! another guilty pleasure tbh. even tho he’s asexual he likes the romance side of it and the cheesy lines always make  him laughLeast Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: the fact that EVERYONE has to end up with somebody, and it’s usually a straight coupleTalents and/or Powers: no powers, but he can touch the bridge of his nose with his tongue! also he loves gardening and has a green thumbWhy Someone Might Love Them: he’s really just a mellow sweetheart with questionable fashion sense. he has green hair/stubble but likes to wear warm coloured dress clothesWhy Someone Might Hate Them: he really is almost unbearable mellow. he doesn’t get riled up very often and can talk for HOURS on book analysisHow They Change: he really hasn’t too much besides going from a more closed off type of character to just laid-back and sweet!Why You Love Them: he is literally the ONLY one of my characters with a decent amount of chill and i love his design so much

up next: Callalily! (also i’m  just realising i forgot two whole ocs, but i’m not gonna throw them in bc i don’t have anything other than their design and that they’re dating)

Full Name: Callalily MortrinskaGender and Sexuality: Female, lesbian (she dated a few guys, but eventually decided not for her)Pronouns: she/herEthnicity/Species: black and cyborg! and not shy about it either, she makes sure her cyborg parts are made of shiny gold. it was the only thing they could do for her after a nasty accidentBirthplace and Birthdate: i don’t think i have a birthplace for any of them tbh but her birthday is November 3rdGuilty Pleasures: nothing is really a “guilty” pleasure for her? She is pretty open about everythingPhobias: one of her parts malfunctioning, someone she cares about getting hurt, miceWhat They Would Be Famous For: shooting someone who deserved it (she’s a sniper)What They Would Get Arrested For: shooting someone who only SHE thought deserved itOC You Ship Them With: none atm!OC Most Likely To Murder Them: none atm!Favorite Movie/Book Genre: probably the political fiction stuff!Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: how pink = girly girl and that they’re always airbrainedTalents and/or Powers: an incredible sniper! Also a really smooth flirt when she wants to beWhy Someone Might Love Them: she has a huge heart for people she cares about and is willing to go to the ends of the earth for themWhy Someone Might Hate Them: if you’ve pissed her off there is no mercy or second chances unless your apology is REALLY goodHow They Change: hasn’t really! i like it too much :)Why You Love Them: i love the thought of a badass, sniper cyborg woman who loves pink, skirts, and girls and has both aesthetics at the same time

Xinae!

Full Name: XinaeGender and Sexuality: agender/omnisexualPronouns: they/them she/her he/him (technically her race doesn’t deal with gender/pronouns/sexuality? they’re heavenly bodies soooo)Ethnicity/Species: a living starBirthplace and Birthdate: noneGuilty Pleasures: her moonPhobias: being locked away and forced to forget her moon (which has since happened)What They Would Be Famous For: defying a sunWhat They Would Get Arrested For: defying a sunOC You Ship Them With: her moon, who doesn’t have much of a design yetOC Most Likely To Murder Them: the jealous sunFavorite Movie/Book Genre: soft romance and fantasy fictionLeast Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: forced romances that don’t develop/make senseTalents and/or Powers: she has intense light and heat, and can maneuver her way across the night sky to light the way for lost wanderersWhy Someone Might Love Them: she is gentle and kind, motherly almostWhy Someone Might Hate Them: she can sometimes not keep her mouth shut and if the reward outweighs the risk she’s not afraid of  consequencesHow They Change: no changes, shes new!!Why You Love Them: i love her story and design

Alrighty! Onto the twins Aven and Neva!

Full Name: Neva CarmondyGender and Sexuality: female, bisexualPronouns: she/herEthnicity/Species: human, idk ethnicity just yet but she’s pretty tan naturallyBirthplace and Birthdate: birthday is March 7Guilty Pleasures: Cheap beerPhobias: she’s actually really afraid of needles and blood in general for some reason?What They Would Be Famous For: whatever she got arrested for tbhWhat They Would Get Arrested For: public disturbance or climbing something she shouldn’t. maybe getting in a fightOC You Ship Them With: none atm!OC Most Likely To Murder Them: her brother tbh lolFavorite Movie/Book Genre: she doesn’t really read books, but she likes audio ones! and actually really loves historical fictionLeast Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: I hate you! oh i love you now!Talents and/or Powers: well i actually have them in BNHA, so they do have powers! She can alter/add something to people’s memories! she also took gymnastics for 8 years as a kid so shes pretty flexibleWhy Someone Might Love Them: shes fun! and totally willing to throw down for someoneWhy Someone Might Hate Them: a bit airheaded and doesn’t like to focus on serious things, she’d rather focus on having funHow They Change: honestly not too much? maybe a little less thot and a little more party but nothing major lolWhy You Love Them: it’s just a fun character!! and her dynamic with her brother is great

Full Name: Aven Carmondy (their 1st names are just reversed of each other lol)Gender and Sexuality: male, questioningPronouns: he/himEthnicity/Species: again, idk ethnicity yetBirthplace and Birthdate: March 7Guilty Pleasures: dumb looking t-shirtsPhobias: worms (his sister thinks its hilarious)What They Would Be Famous For: being a philanthropist idk he hates being the center of attentionWhat They Would Get Arrested For: beating somebody for hurting his sisterOC You Ship Them With: none!OC Most Likely To Murder Them: none atm!Favorite Movie/Book Genre: sci-fiLeast Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: inaccurate fake science lolTalents and/or Powers: again, has powers so! He can erase parts/whole memories!Why Someone Might Love Them: is the Mom Friend and very caring and protectiveWhy Someone Might Hate Them: painfully shy at first and a buzzkill at times worrying too muchHow They Change: he’s actually gotten a little more reserved! sorry buddy lolWhy You Love Them: i just do! also looking back at it we are pretty similar 

And now onto the big two!!!! :D

Full Name: Kronixus (Krow) Lioneheart (lion-heart)Gender and Sexuality: male, GAAAAYYYY AFFFFFFPronouns: he/himEthnicity/Species: changes depending on my mood bc i use him in a bunch of stuff? but always a mixBirthplace and Birthdate: October 31stGuilty Pleasures: pop musicPhobias: snakes, has a legit phobia of a certain shade of pink its weird as hellWhat They Would Be Famous For: being a mad scientist/famous inventorWhat They Would Get Arrested For: beating somebody for hurting his sister/just getting in a fight in general OC You Ship Them With: none atm! (it’s usually with canon characters lol)OC Most Likely To Murder Them: ravenna tbhFavorite Movie/Book Genre: sci-fi and gritty romanceLeast Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: ALSO inaccurate fake science. if its not plausible he throws a fitTalents and/or Powers: very smart!!!! has a great knack with machines, but shit at math it’s weird. also pretty musically giftedWhy Someone Might Love Them: he looks like a hard ass but is pretty sweet when you get to know him and v sensitive but still ready to fight someone for you w/ no questions askedWhy Someone Might Hate Them: ready to fight someone w/ no questions asked. also everyone thinks he’s straight so a lot of people get mad that their girlfriend thinks he’s hotHow They Change: was actually originally just a genderbend version of my main oc, but now is his own character completely with a different (more chaotic) personality! also was pan, but slowly evolved into just gay lolWhy You Love Them: he’s great! he’s such a chaotic gay energy but hides it under a hard-ass facade and i love him. i’ve also had him a while so yeah lol i put him in a lot of different aus/fandoms

The main one!!! My babey!!!!!

Full Name: Ravenna (Raven) Lioneheart (lol get it, raven and crow?)Gender and Sexuality: female, pansexual!!!!Pronouns: she/herEthnicity/Species: again, idk ethnicityBirthplace and Birthdate: October 31stGuilty Pleasures: ummm? partying i guess? sometimes she loves it alittle TOO much lolPhobias: snakes, the dark, swimming (shes says drowning buttttt)What They Would Be Famous For: her music getting bigWhat They Would Get Arrested For: getting in a fight, public disturbancesOC You Ship Them With: none! just canon characters ^^’OC Most Likely To Murder Them: none?Favorite Movie/Book Genre: high fantasy and sci-fi!Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: dumb romance/heavy political stuffTalents and/or Powers: she has powers depending on the universe, and they change on my mood so not listing that. But she’s pretty good with machines (Krow is better) and really good at the arts! Much better than Kronixus! also very smartWhy Someone Might Love Them: will go to the ends of the earth for the ones she cares about, and it takes a lot to break her trust once she has it. can be very lovingWhy Someone Might Hate Them: is loud and not afraid to voice her opinions. thinks she’s bigger than she is and sometimes gets her ass kicked for itHow They Change: she was actually originally a self-insert a LONG time ago, but has grown with me and developed into her own person! obviously we still share similarities, mostly in what we like, but i’ve had her for so long it’s really hard to remember what it was like without herWhy You Love Them: again, i’ve had her FOREVER! and i just love tweaking her to fit whatever au i’m doing atm!

#ahhhh this was so much fun!!!! #guilty pleasures was the hardest one to answer tbh #but yeah! #my main ocs! #sand-rose

[duskbeforeyou]

A Scratch on Our Lunar

Beyond Orange Dusk Part VI

It is beautiful how our brains designed to walk hand in hand with time. We can feel the pain and bliss of the past, of the memories that left footmarks on the continent we had walked. We can feel the sudden occurrences and thrills that stimulate our blood and heart passing through the present and have a life full of hopes, fears, and expectations of the uncompromising future. Perhaps, I am on the same page as the other typical millions of human living in this planet hoping that certain numbers of negativity just fade away fusing with wind and cold. But it is unlikely at those moments, when everything seemed easy. When everything was about you.

Our very first cup of coffee moment was about five months ago and we had been through another lot of cups together since then. Hundred of conversations were such clarifications of our each other fondness of sharing each other’s personal life, deep thoughts, and another classical jokes. I knew much enough about him. Keanu; a new boy who moved from another part of the continent to a neighborhood I had been living since I was a kid. He finished his high school and stayed with his parents for a while before he was ready to get into college life. He really was a cute boy next door. A boy who made people around love him unconditionally on the first sight by only looking at his smiling eyes and a lovable giggles. His voice was every beautiful note in this vociferous world could possibly offer. We were friends. Good friends. Then myself realized that I could not keep on denying this hidden feeling any longer.

 *ring ring*

 “Halo?” I picked my ringing phone.

“Hey! New episode of Star Wars movie is already on theatre!” sounded Keanu, excited.

“So?” was me, with a plain tone.

“What do you mean by ‘so’?! You’re going with me tonight!”

“What? Again? Last week you hit me with an alien and a weirdo movie, and now this?! No, no.”

“Ugh, come on. Just this time, please. I can’t enjoy a movie without a companion. And you’re the only person in this world who passed my requirement.”

“It’s enough for giving you my favor for free. I need a payment.” I teased.

“Oh God. I am robbed.” whined him.

“Geez, I don’t even ask for a cent.”

“Oh you don’t accept cash. Then what should I do for you, milady?”

 I was thinking for a while in silent. My mind went far and “stay here forever with me” came across my mind in for few seconds. But no, that sounded too obsessive. So I decided to say a request only.

 “A dusk.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“You know I love dusk right?”

“Ehem?”

“I want to see sunset when dusk falls behind the hills near our neighborhood.”

“On sudden? We often passed through it but this is the very first time you ask for such weird request.”

“That isn’t weird. I always want to see it with a cup of coffee. Oh, I almost forgot. You never get aesthetics, right, cause you’re only addicted to unidentified objects.”

“Hey, that is so rude!”

“You were too!”

“Alright alright. When you wanna see your dusk?”

“Hmm.. next week. November 10th.”

“Okay. I’ll pick you up by then.”

“Affirmative.”

 So I went. I mean for a Star Wars movie. He was really a boy next door; pleased even for a very simple thing. Call it a compatibility, when I was just a mellow-hearted woman who loved silent and solitude. If I were a house, finding Keanu in my life was such a sweet robbery ever happened to my tight-closed doors. Before him, I used to have rather spent all seasons facing thousand pages of my books and locked myself in my room than made tiring conversation with people. I preferred to be quiet most of the time cause I had not found yet people that could get my words, whether my deep conversation nor my humor. Pessimist not, but trust me, I had tried to talk to few people before and it ended up to a disappointment. With him, my fear to desperation just like faded away.

 10 November

16:00

 *knock knock*

 It was a sound heard from front a made of old teak door of my house. Then the sound of my little and hurrying steps followed after. With a smile on my face, I opened the door.

 “Well, just in time.”

“Of course. I want to make you see the most breathtaking version of sunset this evening.”

“Okay okay. Thanks.”

“So, you’re ready?”

“I very am.”

“Let’s take a walk.”

 So I closed the door behind us. November was all about falls. The wind felt colder day by day. I was wearing my navy vintage dress covered with a dark grey oversized cardigan. I was not a fan of high heels so I was having a pair of black ballerina flat shoes. My small sized feet were walking on cheerio following your feet from behind wearing 70’s Converse sneakers at the moment. You were on a stripe short sleeves T-shirt covered a dark blue parka, with a crème colored cotton long pants. My eyes were enjoying pleasantly looking at your footsteps walking in rhyme with mine. The path in that evening seemed indeed lovely, and so were you. Indeed.

15 minutes passed and we had arrived standing almost to the top of the hills. There was a small coffee shop standing solo near to them and we decided to go there. You had your favorite Americano as usual, and I only had a cup of hot chocolate. We were sitting at the porch relishing a mild evening wind while facing to the sun that was ready to bleed towards the dusk.

 “Look! The clouds are shifting.” said Keanu.

“Yeah, so does the sun. Beautiful, isn’t it?” was I, amazed.

“It is. The mixed of soft violet and orange colors are amazing. So, you’re happy now?”

“I love this moment, Keanu. When crowds are altered into silent, when the sky pulls out the night, when the moon cries existence to the sun. I love the way how universe conspires to captivate beings who own souls, like us.”

“Do we literally have a soul?”

“Of course. Don’t you think so?”

“Sometimes, I just feel like a person who has been losing my own soul for a long time.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean by why?”

“Why you feel so? All this time, what I know about you is merely a joyful excitement.”

“Haha. No, Rae. I am a normal human too. Grief is also part of myself, deep inside.”

“So, you feel the grief a lot?”

“Sometimes. Just in case I am thinking about certain people and circumstances.”

“Tell me about it, Key. Share everything. Talk to me.”

“Hm. Can it bring my soul back with that way?”

“Maybe.”

“Then can I ask you one thing?”

“Anything.”

“Please, stay there. Stay, whatever happens between us. Be my companion as we have been through these months.”

Oh God, what is this. My heart was beating faster than before. I was unsure whether it was an amusement or an anxiety. My throat was hoarse. My tongue lost its energy. I could not think straight at the moment. One thing that struck my mind was a query “Could he feel the same?”

 “I am staying.” I genuinely answered.

“Thanks, Rae.”

 A smile and a sincere gaze were my answer. We spent the rest of the evening by looking at the sunset and sipping our cups of coffee and chocolate. When the nightfall completely swallowed the sun, we decided to walk back home.

…

I finally entered my room. It felt earnestly warmer than the last time I locked it. I took off my cardigan then sitting at my little reading desk beside my bed for a while. Closing my eyes, trying to rewind all the delightful moments passed this evening. I even still remembered the smell of the wind that slowly stroking my hair. Afterwards, I opened my close eyes and grabbing a small calendar on my desk. It’s November 10. I marked the date with a pink colored pen and put a small memo on it.

The cups of coffee and chocolate will always warm the orange dusk.

#short story #duskbeforeyou #beyondorangedusk

[bigyack-com]

Notable Deaths in 2019: A World of Women Who Shattered Ceilings

Almost all were born between the world wars, one even before women had the right to vote. They came from white-collar homes and blue-, from black households and white. But when they died this year, they had something in common besides the final leveling that death brings. They had all found a place in a world that rarely, if ever, had been open to women.Whether one or the other was the absolute first to break a glass ceiling could be open to debate. But let’s say, at the least, that each planted a foot inside a door that had long been closed to women and then shouldered her way in — to a roomful of men.Ruth Abrams was one. In 1977 she became the first woman to take a seat on the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court. It had taken 285 years (that is not a typo) — since the court’s founding in 1692. (Another notable juridical event that year was the start of the Salem witch trials.)Ellen Bree Burns overcame similar obstacles in Connecticut, also in the 1970s — a signal decade in which feminism’s second wave was just beginning to build strength. She became the first woman to rise to the bench of her state’s major trial court and the first woman to be named to a federal court there.Patricia M. Wald, too, was not to be denied a black robe, even after taking a decade-long detour to raise five children at home. In 1979, she became the first woman to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by most reckonings the second most influential court in the country. A kindred progressive spirit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, soon joined her on that bench.In a quite different arena but one no less fueled by testosterone, Bonnie Guitar, born Bonnie Buckingham, had one of the earliest records (“Dark Moon”) by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart. Even more significant was her work away from the mic. Crashing another men’s club, she became a force in the studio, engineering records, scouting talent and starting her own label.Barbara Gardner Proctor had to force open two doors before finding a place in the “Mad Men” advertising world of the 1960s: one blocking women, the other African-Americans. But she pushed anyway, becoming, according to the industry, the first black woman in America to establish her own agency, Proctor & Gardner, in Chicago. (There actually was no Gardner; she added the name to reassure wary prospective clients that “her partner” was a man.)Before 1972, an educational institution could discriminate against women and still receive federal funding, no questions asked. That changed with the passage of Title IX that year, encoding equity in law. And if there was one person to thank for that sea change, it was Bernice Sandler, who had once been told, in being denied a full-time university teaching job, “You come on too strong for a woman.”She did come on strong. Through scholarly writings, tireless lobbying and persuasive advocacy in the courts, she was, more than anyone, the catalyst behind Title IX.There were others: Barbara Low, one of the few women in scientific research in the 1940s, advanced our understanding of penicillin, leading to a cornucopia of antibiotics that continue to save lives. Rosemary Mariner, a baby boomer pilot, became the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron and then led a successful fight to get Congress to lift a ban on women serving in combat. And Florence Knoll Bassett, a designer and businesswoman, gave the modern office its streamlined shape and feel. Ms. Knoll ran a thriving company with her husband, but one look at a grainy black and white photo that ran with her obituary in these pages last January will tell you everything you’d need to know about the world she had to navigate: There she was, in 1953, the lone woman seated at a large conference table ringed by white men in white shirts and ties.For every glass ceiling broken, however, there was an untold number of women who in reaching higher came up empty-handed. By all accounts, Geraldyn M. Cobb had the right stuff to become an astronaut in the early years of the American space program. A veteran pilot, she held records in speed, altitude and distance before sailing through a battery of demanding physical and psychological tests that put her in the top 2 percent of all the program’s aspirants, including men. She was nevertheless left behind as a group of NASA pioneers, all men, paraded off into history. Though she lived a rewarding life — notably as a humanitarian flying medicine, food and clothing to indigenous people in the Amazon — she died, in her eyes, forever earthbound.

Athletic Firsts, Too

Not all the barrier breakers who died in 2019 were women, of course. The N.B.A. lost one in Wat Misaka, a son of Japanese immigrants who became the league’s first nonwhite player, and Major League Baseball lost three. Elijah “Pumpsie” Green is not much remembered for his career on the diamond, mediocre as it was, but he made a bit of history just by striding onto the field for the Boston Red Sox in July 1959, becoming the first black player on a team that was the last in the major leagues to breach the color line, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had made the Brooklyn Dodgers the first.Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field was also home to Don Newcombe, widely regarded as the major leagues’ first outstanding black pitcher, a Cy Young winner and a National League M.V.P. As fate would have it, his death, in February, came just 12 days after that of an even grander man of the game, Frank Robinson, who stayed in baseball after a Hall of Fame career in Baltimore to become the major leagues’ first black manager.They are on a long roster of sports stars who died this year. The N.B.A. mourned the loss of John Havlicek, a basketball dynamo who tasted championship glory in two distinct eras with the Boston Celtics. The N.F.L bade farewell to Bart Starr, the Green Bay Packers’ champion quarterback, whose sterling execution on the field was a visible manifestation of Coach Vince Lombardi’s genius.Athletes give us drama about human struggle, determination and excellence, but they also entertain us, and in that they share something with all those who mount stages and appear in front of cameras. Broadway typically (and wonderfully) dims its lights when one of its own has gone. But when it did so for Carol Channing last January, the gesture was never more apt. It may be falling back on press-agentry boilerplate to say that the star of “Hello, Dolly!” and “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” lit up stages with her irrepressibly high-spirited performances over an impossibly long career. But, really, more than almost anyone, didn’t she?Equally incandescent was the ballerina Alicia Alonso, who overcame near-blindness to become a globe-trotting star and ambassador of Cuban ballet; Norma Miller, the “Queen of Swing,” who cut rugs, stages and even Harlem sidewalks with her spectacularly acrobatic Lindy Hopping; and Jessye Norman, the magnificent American soprano who seemingly collected as many laurels — Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center honors — as curtain call bouquets.Like Ms. Channing, Doris Day, too, bridged singing and acting. But she did it in Hollywood, becoming its biggest box-office star in diverting romantic comedies opposite leading men like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, all while earning a reputation, deserved or not, for sugary wholesomeness to rival that of apple pie.And Albert Finney found a kind of trans-Atlantic crossover appeal by bouncing between Hollywood and the stage in his native England, where he had gotten his start as one of the fabled “angry young men” of British postwar theater.The year saw a host of familiar faces from television’s past become instantly recognizable once more — only now in photos accompanying their obituaries: Diahann Carroll (“Julia”), Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”) and Luke Perry (“Beverly Hills, 90210”), to name just three. (By contrast, Caroll Spinney, under all those feathers, was faceless to his viewers, but his alter ego, Big Bird, as bright as sunshine, needed no introduction.)Popular music lost the likes of the drummer Ginger Baker, one of the rock gods of the ’60s; João Gilberto, the Brazilian guitarist and singer and a founding father of bossa nova; Dr. John, the rollicking, gravelly voice of New Orleans; and Ric Ocasek, the singing engine of the Cars, the hit-making band that arrived with rock’s new wave in the late ’70s. And practically every genre of music could claim the death of the restlessly versatile André Previn as its own particular loss; a composer, conductor and pianist, he had crisscrossed boundaries in a peripatetic career that brought him a clutch of Oscars and a shelf of Grammys — half of them in classical music, half of them not. Behind every performer, of course, is someone who provides the stage, and few impresarios had as much boffo success as Hal Prince, the king of Broadway; Franco Zeffirelli, whose opera stagings were as extravagant as he was colorful; and Robert Evans, the Hollywood executive who essentially greenlighted a new film era while leading so cinematic a life, of downfalls and comebacks, that it will doubtless one day resurface in a biopic script.The world at large offered a different stage, with all too real dramas, to the likes of Robert Mugabe, the liberator-turned-tyrant of Zimbabwe; Jacques Chirac, the French president who embraced European unity when that was still a bold idea; Yasuhiro Nakasone, who could still recall the embers of war in championing Japan’s return to international influence; Moshe Arens, the politician and statesman and one of the last of Israel’s founding Zionists; and Mohamed Morsi, who, speaking of barrier breakers, became Egypt’s first democratically elected president after all those millenniums, only to be ousted within a year in favor of more autocracy.In Washington, Elijah Cummings’s lawmaking was cut short. As the powerful, principled and full-throated chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, charged with protecting the integrity of government, he was in the thick of investigating actions by President Trump when he died at 68 in his beloved Baltimore, a little more than two months before his fellow Democratic House members voted for impeachment.His death was followed 10 days later by that of his colleague John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in congressional history (52 years).

IX, 18 and 25 = Impact

The Senate, too, lost pillars. Birch Bayh, the liberal Democrat from Indiana, had as impactful a career as any in that chamber, attaching his name to landmark legislation identifiable by numbers: enforcing fairness through Title IX, lowering the voting age to 18, and providing for the removal of a president through a constitutional mechanism other than impeachment, the 25th Amendment.Within about six weeks of his death, in March, two former colleagues, Senate lions both, were gone: Ernest Hollings (Fritz to almost everyone), a South Carolinian and Democratic civil rights champion who had his eye on the White House at one point; and the courtly Republican Richard Lugar, another Hoosier, who had as much clout in foreign affairs as any modern-era senator ever had.In July, the 99-year-old body of Justice John Paul Stevens lay in state across the street from the Capitol in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he arrived in 1975 as a former Republican antitrust lawyer and left 35 years later a changed man — a stalwart of the court’s liberal wing.And in early December it was Paul Volcker who was remembered — for shaping his country’s economic policy and taming inflation from the corridors of another marble-clad Washington institution, the Federal Reserve, where he was chairman under Presidents Carter and Reagan.If Mr. Volcker was at heart a public-spirited man of business, a well-paid product of Wall Street who took a cut in salary to work for his country, Ross Perot was a politically minded one who would have gladly given up his executive suite in Texas for the Oval Office. A billionaire force in the computer services industry, he became an unlikely and surprisingly strong independent populist candidate for president in the ’90s, a folk hero to some and a folksy odd duck to others.For all the publicity Mr. Perot received, however, his influence on American politics paled before that of the industrialist David H. Koch, who went about his work far less noisily. He and his brother Charles tapped their vast energy and chemicals fortune to finance a right-wing libertarian movement that by all indications will far outlive both.The most powerful of business leaders inevitably acquire a public face, and none did so more successfully than Lee Iacocca. More than running two of the nation’s biggest automakers, he “came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile,” as his obituary said. A son of a hot-dog vendor, he was a gregarious self-made man who became a household name as an industry titan, television pitchman and best-selling author.Felix Rohatyn, too, became a public man after scaling the heights of Wall Street, summoned to rescue New York City in the gritty, scuffling ’70s as it teetered on the edge of a fiscal abyss. And while we’re thinking about New York (command central for eruptions of “Auld Lang Syne”), let’s not forget Robert Morgenthau, a patrician son of the city who chased every known sort of criminal as Manhattan D.A. for so long that one might be forgiven for mistaking his age at his death, 99, for the number of years he served.Other giants fell. The world of letters lost Toni Morrison, still another groundbreaker as the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for her powerfully moving novels that sang of an often brutal, racially torn America in the resilient cadences of the black oral tradition.And Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who, in championing the Western canon in an ever more multicultural world, endured ample criticism himself, earning a characterization seldom attached to a scholar: America’s most notorious.And Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets who earned the added distinction of being widely read.And Herman Wouk, the prolific, best-selling, movie-inspiring author who practically died writing, mid-book, leaving a sheaf of blank pages.

The Last Survivors

Journalism — and the Washington that reared her — lost Cokie Roberts, who brought a tough, knowing take on American politics to television audiences for decades, and Russell Baker, the New York Times humorist (and “Masterpiece Theater” host) who, with his wry observations on politics and other arenas of national life, didn’t so much bash his targets as poke them.Elsewhere, three of the most renowned architects of the last half of the 20th century died in 2019: I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli. And Karl Lagerfeld, that indefatigable definer of high fashion, and Gloria Vanderbilt, who poured a generation of women into designer jeans, left their most stylish of scenes.The art world lost, among others, Robert Frank, who changed the course of documentary photography with his 35-millimeter Leica and a penetrating eye that saw an increasingly disjointed world in a new, strikingly off-kilter way, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, a towering figure of postwar Latin American art whose deep immersions in brilliant color seemed to evoke the dazzling sunlight of his native Venezuela.The sciences, too, were drained of immense brainpower — for one, that of the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate who glimpsed the structure of the universe through its tiniest particles of matter the way a geologist might comprehend the Earth in a grain of sand.Which, in a free-associating sort of way, brings to mind an hourglass — one that might measure the passing of an era’s few remaining survivors: grains of sand, pulled by gravity, trickling away until all are gone.The scholar Charles van Doren was one, his death evoking the distant quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Edward Nixon was another, carrying the unwelcome burden — familiar to overshadowed siblings everywhere — of forever reminding us, by his very facial features, of Richard. Edda Goering and Rudolf von Ribbentrop carried pedigrees that harked back to the evil of Hitler, while Dick Churchill (no relation to Hitler’s nemesis) recalled a bracing moment for the Allies in World War II, the “Great Escape” from a prisoner-of-war camp. He was the last survivor of the 76 who had made the attempt. But he had been a survivor before: After only three men had made it to freedom, and after the Germans had executed 50 of those who had failed, Churchill was somehow spared. He lived another 75 years.And then there was Julia Ruth Stevens. It’s been 71 years since her “Daddy,” Babe Ruth, died, but over those many decades she remained a living link to him, showing up at old-timers’ games to accept the cheers of baseball fans to whom the Sultan of Swat was more legend than flesh and blood. Ms. Stevens reminded us that, yes, he put his pinstripes on the same way the ball boys did.“I miss him even to this day,” she said not too many years ago.Who among his intimates is left to say that as 2020 is about to dawn? To hazard a guess, no one. The last grain of sand has fallen.William McDonald is the obituaries editor of The Times Read the full article

#1augustnews #247news #5g570newspaper #660closings #702news #8paradesouth #911fox #abc90seconds #adamuzialkodaily #atoactivitystatement #atobenchmarks #atocodes #atocontact #atoportal #atoportaltaxreturn #attnews #bbnews #bbcnews #bbcpresenters #bigcrossword #bigmoney #bigwxiaomi #bloomberg8001zürich #bmbargainsnews #business #business0balancetransfer #business0062 #business0062conestoga #business02 #business0450pastpapers

[kattimariias]

Sonic Multiverse infodump

There’s like...a lot of redesigns. To start, Sonic’s proportions are a mix between his Classic and Modern design, the tips of his quills are slightly lighter (they also look like Boom!Sonic’s quills), and he wears a red neckerchief because that’s obligatory in Sonic redesigns at this point I guess

Tails is smaller and wears the same goggles as his Boom design, he also may or may not have similar markings to red foxes (idk whether to go for this or not)

Knuckles is more stocky but not as muscular as his Boom design. He also has white tribal markings and a muzzle that’s similar to real life echidnas (but very stylized), and wears his OVA hat.

Amy wears a shirt with ruffled sleeves, purple skirt and stockings, and a purple (or dark pink) sash. Her quills are longer and are more like her Classic design, and she also has back quills.

Shadow’s eyes are slit, his hands look like claws, and he has a slithery tongue and a longer tail.

Silver has blue glowing lines on his arms and quills, the latter’s more curled and they open up whenever he uses his telekinesis (aka i just took something from his original design).

The Babylon Rogues have feathers on their arms. Originally, they did have wings, but they were clipped off.

Sally’s back stripe is the same color as her hair and it also goes to the bridge of her nose. Like real life chipmunks, she also has a white backstripe. (i was so tempted to change her hair to brown but i just couldn’t :U)

Nicole has a larger black stripe and Infinite’s glitchy effect.

there’s more that’s going to be redesigned, but i haven’t finalized them yet

The Freedom Fighters are still around, they’re just side characters and don’t have as much history with Sonic

Freedom Fighters from the British comics are apart of the Knothole team

The Sonic Schoolhouse students are Freedom Fighters trainees

The custom heroes we’ve seen in Forces’ gameplay and screenshots are apart of their own team

Amy has fortune telling abilities. She utilizes this with tarot cards.

Amy’s also 14 in this AU

Any interpretations of Sonic, Tails, or any other character’s parents are changed to being other relatives. With that in mind...

Sonia and Manic are Sonic’s cousins

Nikki exists, but Sonic isn’t his alter ego. He’s also his cousin

Eimi is Amy’s sister

Uncle Chuck remains as Sonic’s uncle

Jules is still robotized

The original parents have different kids. Specifically, Jules and Bernette have a daughter who’s based off of Sonic’s Sister from a cancelled Sonic game

Elias is Sally’s older brother still, but idk whether if I should go with him being her fraternal twin or identical. They look very similar, but then there’s also Elias’ drastically different tail

Sally’s family also includes a few foxes, hence why Elias has a fox like tail. Mobian genetics are weird like that

Cream has a lot of siblings, she’s the middle child

The red and yellow hedgehogs from another cancelled Sonic game are Sonic’s adopted younger brothers

Wisps and Zeti linger around on Earth

Echidnas are still around. Instead, Tasmanian devils are more rare

Seedrians are also still around...for now

Chao Garden is an actual location where people can take care of the local Chao there

Chao based off of canon characters are a myth

Cheese, at some point, evolves into a Hero type

The world in this AU is Earth, but with anthropomorphic animals

Most of the anthros/mobians live in woodland areas, although there are a lot that live with humans

Elise is a mobian (idk which animal she would be though) with sun powers. She’s more emotionally repressed here compared to canon.

Shadow doesn’t seal Mephiles into the Scepter of Darkness. Elise also isn’t given the blue emerald, because time travel is bullshit

Silver is from a really fucked up alternate universe

The Sol Dimension is filled with counterparts from the main universe, such as an Amy counterpart, a Freedom Fighters counterpart, etc

Blaze has parents that are like River and Moon from Star Vs

Mighty and Ray’s whereabouts are unknown, they just kinda disappeared after hanging with Sonic and the Chaotix. They’re looking for Matilda, who also mysteriously disappeared

Knuckles has a super form. His quills become bigger and they flow around everywhere, and he turns green

Super transformations are not limited to male hedgehogs obviously

Moebius is still a thing, but Scourge doesn’t start off as Anti-Sonic (and Moebius as a whole probably has a different name)

Sleet and Dingo are apart of the Egg Army

...and so is Lyric. he’s just heavily downgraded compared to Boom

Grimer is a reptilian

Fiona isn’t with Scourge, nor is she evil

Gadget the Wolf is a huge dork who idolizes the heroes of Earth a lot and tries to be cool whenever he’s with them, the cat is highly energetic and ready to kick ass, the bunny is more serious and goal orientated (though still cares for the world and others), the yellow wolf is the peacemaker and cinnamon roll (tm), and the other cat is protective and willing to make sacrifices

Mina is a singer, rivaling Madonna in popularity

and by Madonna, I mean Sonic’s cut girlfriend, who’s also a Mobian in this (like Elise, I don’t know what her species will be)

Alicia is still...ded

Super Emeralds may or may not be a thing

Sonnette and Mark have a secret Sonic fanclub

The game’s South Island and the OVA’s South Island are two different places

Sara is an actual cat, her dad adopted her

Sticks was found and taken in by Big

Bygone Island is a village many avoid, because it’s basically the place where assholes live. It’s protected by a small Freedom Fighters team which is lead by Tiara

Eggman has an abnormally long ass name

Most Mobians get name changes after their abilities get discovered

Mobians don’t have an educational system. Like real life animals, their parents teach them everything, but they can enroll in schools

Sally and Nicole are a couple

#sonic multiverse au #i don't know what i'm doing with this au lmao it's such a mess

[xseedgames]

Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star - Choose Your Servant Blog

With contributions from Alyssa, Billy, Brittany, Danielle, Jason, John, Liz, Nate, Nick, Ryan, and Tom

Part of what makes Fate such a compelling setting is that its specific premise doesn't just stand on its own, but fuels the viewer/player's imagination, inviting them to envision new additions to the world and the cast of characters. If you're new to the series, it's about a ritual conflict between a variety of heroes and villains from history, mythology, and fiction, all coming together to battle it out as Servants for the Masters who summoned them. The winning Master (theoretically) receives the world-altering power of the Holy Grail.

The Servants' battles are based on rules, and each Servant has strengths and weaknesses. Part of the reason the Servants typically refer to themselves by their class (such as Saber or Archer), rather than by their names, is because their true identities can give their opponents clues as to what those strengths and weaknesses are. For that reason, Servants often disguise themselves, appearing as other ethnicities, genders, or even species than their original namesake. Each Servant can only be summoned through the use of a particular artifact, unique to that Servant's history and personality.

All that got us thinking about what kind of Servants we'd pick for ourselves. We asked around the office, "If you could pick anyone, real, mythological, or fictional, from anywhere in time, to fight for you, who would it be, what would they look like, and what kind of powers would they have?" Here are everyone's answers:

 Ryan:

Servant: Don Quixote

Class: Lancer

Origin: Literary knight/madman, 1605

Artifact: The Golden Helmet of Mambrino (aka any brass shaving basin)

Appearance: Don Quixote appears as his author did in his youth, clean-shaven and a bit gangly, with the spark of adventure and a young man's drive to save the world.

Strengths: Can create Reality Marbles at will, and often does so without even realizing it. These Reality Marbles, which depict Quixote's imagined fantasy world, have the effect of hypnotizing anyone in them with a Mana rating of C or below, including Quixote himself, into temporarily believing that the fantasy is real. He is also proficient with his sword and lance, and while not a Rider, he can execute a (slow, awkward) charge from horseback.

Weaknesses: Quixote cannot always control when or how his Reality Marbles appear, and miniature Reality Marbles are constantly appearing and disappearing inside his head. As a result, he frequently mistakes inanimate objects for evil creatures, and has trouble distinguishing friend from foe.

Noble Phantasm: "Wild Winds of Fortune" — Quixote summons a row of giant windmills, which spin fast enough to create a tornado.

Alignment: Chaotic Good

 Brittany:

Servant: Steve Irwin

Class: Rider

Origin: Naturalist, born in 1962

Artifact: His shirt

Appearance: A rugged Outback-dwelling wildman, riding a wild boar. ("Irwin" being derived from the Old English words for "wild boar" and "friend")

Weapon: A Crocodile Dundee knife

Strengths: High endurance, can summon a variety of dangerous animals

Weaknesses: (Don't say stingrays, don't say stingrays...)

Noble Phantasm: "Irwinado" — Picture Gilgamesh's NP, but with crocodiles and snakes.

Alignment: Neutral Good

 Tom:

Servant: Bartleby, the Scrivener

Class: Would prefer not to say

Origin: Fictional clerk from a Herman Melville story, 1853

Artifact: An empty quill stuck in a shallow square foot of wet cement

Appearance: A woman in her 30s or 40s with hair graying before her time, and a perpetual look of absolute doneness upon her face.

Weapon: Reluctance

Strengths: Can efficiently calculate and execute strategy in short bursts

Weaknesses: Inevitably starts backing away from combat situations after a short while, just standing there and looking sad…sad enough that the enemies feel sympathy for her plight, as she stands and stares wistfully at the moon, proclaiming “I would prefer not to fight” whenever anyone comes at her with weapons drawn.

This is actually a strength, however, as no one would have the heart to hurt her, but they’d think about it for a second…and in that moment, they’d be distracted and vulnerable, which is when Tom would come in and smash them over the head with a vase or something.

Her other weakness is that her battles would all have to be fought in the same exact area, since Bartleby would eventually refuse to move from her spot for any reason whatsoever, even if compelled via Command Seal.

Noble Phantasm: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, moe-ness!" — Bartleby stands rooted there, eternally staring upward, the glow of the moon burning itself into her corneas until her corneas simply burn away altogether. And yet, she still stares, endlessly, deeply, even through the pallid, useless orbs now adorning her face.

Alignment: True Neutral

 John:

Servant: Cao Cao

Class: Caster (Some believed him to be a sorcerer in life; turns out they were right)

Origin: Imperial Chancellor of the Han Dynasty, born in 155 AD

Artifact: The noose he used to hang Lu Bu

Appearance: He disguises himself as a bent old man with a cane and a long, wispy white beard

Weapon: Chinese-style sword

Strengths: Particularly adept in magic that is useful for statecraft, such as sowing discord among people or spying on others. One of his mysterious abilities derives from the real Chinese expression, "speak of Cao Cao, and Cao Cao arrives" (an equivalent to "speak of the Devil"). Cao Cao has the ability to be anywhere that his name is spoken, even in more than one place at once. (In Fate, this also applies to anyone who speaks the word "Caster.")

Weaknesses: His weakness is his hubris. Zhuge Liang, who humiliated him at the Battle of the Red Cliffs, still inflames his temper easily. Lu Bu, whom he executed in life, wants to return the favor.

Noble Phantasm: Calls forth a cavalry charge, with his men driven forward both by rage against the enemy and fear of him.

Alignment: Lawful Evil

 Nick (who went all-out with his description):

Servant: Nebuchadnezzar II

Class: Caster

Origin: King of Babylon (and, by extension, the known world), born in 634 BC. The construction of the famous Ishtar Gate and the Hanging Gardens, noted as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, are commonly attributed to him, and he’s also known for his appearance in the Bible, particularly in the book of Daniel.

Artifact: One of the lapis-glazed bricks of the Ishtar Gate, which exists today restored in a museum in Berlin

Appearance: I can see him dressed in a fine robe dyed the color of lapis (prized for its rich, blue hue by the royalty of the ancient world), embroidered with extravagant designs on the hems in golden thread. He’d have the look of a mystic – a sort of “sorcerer-king,” in my imagination. Still not sure about whether my ideal Neb appearance would keep the famous beard you see show up in a lot of statues from that time period, but I like the idea of a wavy, windswept head of black hair. Civil enough for the chambers of government, but with a touch of unkempt-ness befitting a battlefield.

Strengths: An adept Caster, Nebuchadnezzar can exert great influence on the astral plane, spinning his dreams into prophecies and divinations. He’s also capable of using his sovereignty to prod at weaknesses and loopholes in the power of Command Seals.

Weaknesses: Nebuchadnezzar, while wise and shrewd, is also a superstitious man who seeks the approval of the gods. He may hesitate to press an advantage if he doesn’t have a solid grasp of the risks involved.

Noble Phantasm: "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" — Either a floating palace with an orbital laser cannon, or an untouchable sanctuary in which Nebuchadnezzar and his Master rest and bide their time.

Notes: The kingdom of Uruk that once belonged to series-staple Gilgamesh would after many centuries go on to become the Babylon ruled over by Nebuchadnezzar, and during his reign, he presided over both great destruction and great creation. His armies subdued foreign kingdoms, bringing them into the Babylonian empire, but he also oversaw a massive slew of public works projects – everything from walls to bridges to temples. His was a gilded age for the kingdom. Within Fate lore, Nebuchadnezzar is already acknowledged to exist as a Heroic Spirit, though we’ve never seen him summoned before and so don’t know much about what Type-Moon’s take on him would be, or what class he’s most likely to be summoned into. I can see him being a strategic type of caster – the type to factor in the placement of ley lines, fortify structures with wards, and favor spells that turned the environmental conditions of a fight to his favor. As a lover of great architecture, I think it fits him. But that said, his status as a conqueror means he wouldn’t shrink from direct battle, especially when he has aligned circumstances in his favor via his various enchantments.

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

 Billy:

Servant: Guan Yu

Class: Rider

Origin: A mighty warrior from ancient China who could cleave a large army with ease. He was also known for having a well-kept beard. He was nicknamed “Beautiful Beard”. Born in the latter half of the second century AD.

Artifact: Green Dragon Crescent Blade

Appearance: Guan Yu’s appearance would be of a large, red-skinned centaur. His mane and beard are made of fire.

Strengths: Superior strength, endurance, and mobility

Weaknesses: Easily identified by his hooves and red hide

Noble Phantasm: "Red Hare" — Guan Yu charges forward, swinging his spear and dragging a wall of fire with him.

Alignment: Lawful Good

 Nathan:

Servant: Björn Ironside

Class: Saber

Origin: Legendary 9th century Viking commander

Artifact: The runic stone from his barrow

Appearance: Disguises himself as a sickly, dying man

Strengths: Ferocity, advantage of surprise

Weaknesses: Vulnerable to fire, particularly Greek fire

Noble Phantasm: "Jarn" — Björn discards his sickly disguise and turns his body to iron. Since Fate enjoys its share of pseudoscience, this Noble Phantasm would not only make him relatively invulnerable to any attack that isn't ridiculously powerful, it would also increase his total weight, and therefore mass, substantially. If we assume that he'd still be able to move as quickly as he did before its use, then his overall combat abilities would increase as his hits now carry a greater force behind them. 

Notes: The picture shown comes from his most famous moment, in which, while besieging a city, he pretended to be dying, convinced the clergy to take his coffin into the city to perform his last rites, and then jumped out of the coffin, rampaged his way to the city gates, and opened them for his army.

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

 Alyssa (who also went all-out with her description):

Servant: Locusta

Class: The most obvious classes that she would fall into would be Caster and Assassin, but one of the nifty things about Fate is that it isn’t always about the obvious, so perhaps Locusta would actually be in the Archer class.

Origin: Locusta was a prolific serial murderer in Ancient Rome, with poison being her weapon of choice. She was so well known that Agrippina the Younger, sister of Caligula and mother of Nero, supposedly hired her to poison her husband, Emperor Claudius, in AD 54. Locusta was convicted of poisoning another victim, but Emperor Nero swept in and rescued her from being executed…in exchange for poisoning someone else for him. In short, Locusta was kept in Nero’s back pocket for all of his poisoning needs, given some very nice land, and even began teaching others the illustrious ways of poison making. Of course, being part of Nero’s entourage did pose its dangers, and after his suicide, Locusta was sentenced to death and (most likely) publicly executed.

Artifact: One of her old glass vials, filled with one of her signature poisons.

Appearance: Well, she was quite famous, so I don’t think it would be anything subtle, that’s for sure. Since Emperor Claudius’ murder was committed via a poisoned dish of mushrooms, maybe a mushroom design would be incorporated in some way.

Strengths: Unpredictable, backstabby, all her attacks inflict poison status

Weaknesses: Vulnerable when caught alone in the open

Noble Phantasm: "Venenum in Nube" — A toxic cloud spreads out from Locusta's hands and covers the area.

Notes: There are so many interesting characters in history and mythology that I think would be great additions to the already fantastic lineup of Fate Servants, so it was a really difficult decision to make (I’m sure almost all of my coworkers would say something similar!). I went through a lot of different options, but I kept drifting back to Locusta.

I think it would be interesting to see Locusta in Fate because of her ties to Nero and Caligula, two Servants already present in game. Would Locusta be angry at Nero, since her connection with him put a target on her back after he was dead? I mean, not that the poisoning people thing would have helped her out anyway… On the other hand, she would have been killed years prior, if he hadn’t interfered. So how would THAT play out in the Fate world? My mind spins.

Alignment: Neutral Evil

 Jason:

Servant: Harada Sanosuke

Class: Lancer

Origin: 10th Captain of the Shinsengumi

Artifact: The head of his spear

Appearance: A waifu version of himself

Strengths: Supernaturally long reach

Weaknesses: Quick to anger

Noble Phantasm: "Makoto no Tsuranuki" — Sanosuke uses his spear to pierce through dimensions and strike from all angles at once.

Alignment: Neutral Good

 Liz (who even drew her own illustration):

Servant: Ilana (Alan) Turing

Class: Caster

Origin: Computer scientist/mathematician, born in 1912

Artifact: A punch card from the Pilot ACE computer

Appearance: [See illustration]

Strengths: Mother of artificial intelligence, Turing controls legions of clockwork minions with algorithms ahead of her time. She can also crack open the secrets of the mind, and even occasionally take control.

Weaknesses: Delights in exposing others' secrets, but despairs if her own are ever revealed

Noble Phantasm: "Enigma" — Her Noble Phantasm will trap the mind in an artificial reality almost impossible to distinguish from our own world, leaving those affected catatonic and vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation.

Alignment: True Neutral (In the end, she really just wants more toys to play with)

 Rejected Servants:

 Servant: The Kool-Aid Man

Class: Berserker

Origin: Drink mascot, debuted in 1954

Artifact: A copy of the Kool-Aid Man 2600 game

Appearance: Cleverly disguised as a ketchup bottle

Weapon: Himself

Strengths: Can build up momentum for powerful charging attacks, can appear wherever kids are thirsty, can cause an excess of Vitamin C in large doses

Weaknesses: Low defense and agility

Noble Phantasm: "Oh Yeah!" — Summons an enormous wall, then breaks through it, scattering bricks for miles

Alignment: Chaotic Good (He causes property damage, but gives free drinks to kids)

 Servant: Ryan Seacrest

(Attribution : © Glenn Francis, www.PacificProDigital.com (Email: glennfrancispacificprodigital.com))

Class: Caster (because he helps CAST people, get it?)

Origin: TV host, born in 1974

Artifact: His microphone

Appearance: Nicki Minaj

Weapon: His microphone

Strengths: Can shout to stun enemies

Weaknesses: Must follow the will of crowds/armies

Noble Phantasm: "And the Winner Is..." — When first summoned, Seacrest hands his new Master an envelope, which contains the name of the winner of the Holy Grail War. This envelope cannot be opened, torn, cut, burned, made transparent, scryed, or otherwise accessed until the Holy Grail War is over, at which point Seacrest, if still alive, takes it back, opens it, and reads off the name. In the meantime, clever Masters may find ways to use the indestructible envelope as a tool or a weapon.

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

 Servant: ALF

Class: Rider (Spaceship)

Origin: TV alien, debuted in 1986

Artifact: A vinyl copy of "Melmac Rock"

Appearance: ALF, but in a wig, Hawaiian shirt, and shades

Weapon: A long salami

Strengths: Encyclopedic knowledge of engineering and Earth pop culture

Weaknesses: Uncontrollable appetite, vulnerable to Earth diseases and poisons

Noble Phantasm: "You're the One Who's Out of This World": Alf traps his opponent in an ‘80s music video, which bombards him or her with a sonic assault.

Alignment: Chaotic Good

 Servant: Santa Claus

Class: Rider

Origin: Amalgamation of pan-European folklore across the centuries

Artifact: Snow from the North Pole

Appearance: A Nordic female forest ranger in red

Weapon: A Red Rider BB Gun

Strengths: Youthful vigor combined with the experience of old age, ability to slow time to a crawl, can call on various old-timey unsafe toys to assist in combat

Weaknesses: Her powers only work if enough children believe in her

Noble Phantasm: "And to All a Good Night": Time stops while Santa scoops up his or her opponent, flies into the night sky, and drops him or her down a chimney into a blazing fire.

Alignment: Lawful Good

 Servant: The Big Lebowski

(Painting by Heather Buchanan https://www.etsy.com/listing/263598399/the-dude-acrylic-portrait-painting-print )

Class: Bowler

Origin: Film protagonist, debuted in 1998

Summoning Artifact: A threadbare rug (it really held the room together)

Appearance: Jeff Bridges in plaid shorts, flip-flops, a t-shirt, and a beat-up old sweatshirt. Basically, a Southern Californian hippie. He doesn't bother hiding who he is.

Weapon: Bowling ball. Like...a very shiny bowling ball, man.

Strengths: Ability to remain unfazed by all manner of chaotic happenings; extreme passivity means he can stay materialized by his Mage for a very small mana upkeep

Weaknesses: White Russians, work

Noble Phantasm: "The Dude Abides" — Shifts reality to create a zone in which aggression shall not stand, reducing the hostility of even an attacking Servant to zero. It might just be drugs, but we'll let you be the judge of that.

Alignment: True Neutral

 ...And okay, we should probably get back to work. Enjoy the game when it comes out next week, and if you think up any more Servants, leave them in the comments below!

Cheers,

~Everyone

#XSEED #XSEED Games #XSEED blog #Fate/EXTELLA #Saber #Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star #Fate series #Long Post

[couchcushings]

5, 13, 14, 29

5. since how long do you write?

Oh lord like idk since I was 12 really?? But long before that little Chelsea was dreaming stuff up and telling herself stories at bedtime.

13. hardest character to write

*sideeyes bram van helsing* Uh well someone has been causing me writerly trouble lately but overall I have more trouble with my OCs because they start to get wildly OOC from how I designed them. The little bastards.

14. easiest character to write

I have this weird thing where if I listen to someone/read them for long enough I can hear the words with their voice. Which is apparently A Thing. But at one point the answer was Dr. Miguelito Loveless because he had such a unique dialogue style that it was hella east to just hear things in his voice. Right now? Golly, right now it’s probably one of my OCs but most recently it was HM Murdock.

29. favorite story/poem of another author

Right now I’m hella into Lovecraft like I’m literally typing out one of his stories so I can get the feel of his heady-ass unnecessarily purple-as-fuck prose. It makes my head hurt if I don’t hydrate adequately before I read it. Favorite story by him is, currently, The Statement of Randolph Carter because it’s so short and perfect and it has a gr8 ending. My favorite poetry is by Stephen Vincent Benet and I’m just going to link you to some because otherwise I’ll talk about it all night. And I’m leaving my favorite piece of poetry by him under the cut because it’s hella long.

INVOCATIONAmerican muse, whose strong and diverse heartSo many men have tried to understandBut only made it smaller with their art,Because you are as various as your land,As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.Swift runner, never captured or subdued,Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,That half a hundred hunters have pursuedBut never matched their bullets with the dream,Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorryAnd mortal snare for your immortal quarry.You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghostWith dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,And you are the clipped velvet of the lawnsWhere Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,The grey Maine rocks--and the war-painted dawnsThat break above the Garden of the Gods.The prairie-schooners crawling toward the oreAnd the cheap car, parked by the station-door.Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumesOf stranded smoke out of a stony mouthYou are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,And you are ruined gardens in the SouthAnd bleak New England farms, so winter-whiteEven their roofs look lonely, and the deepThe middle grainland where the wind of nightIs like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.A friend, an enemy, a sacred hagWith two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.They tried to fit you with an English songAnd clip your speech into the English tale.But, even from the first, the words went wrong,The catbird pecked away the nightingale.The homesick men begot high-cheekboned thingsWhose wit was whittled with a different soundAnd Thames and all the rivers of the kingsRan into Mississippi and were drowned.They planted England with a stubborn trust.But the cleft dust was never English dust.Stepchild of every exile from contentAnd all the disavouched, hard-bitten packShipped overseas to steal a continentWith neither shirts nor honor to their back.Pimping grandee and rump-faced regicide,Apple-cheeked younkers from a windmill-square,Puritans stubborn as the nails of Pride,Rakes from Versailles and thieves from County Clare,The black-robed priests who broke their hearts in vainTo make you God and France or God and Spain.These were your lovers in your buckskin-youth.And each one married with a dream so proudHe never knew it could not be the truthAnd that he coupled with a girl of cloud.And now to see you is more difficult yetExcept as an immensity of wheelMade up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweatAnd glittering with the heat of ladled steel.All these you are, and each is partly you,And none is false, and none is wholly true.So how to see you as you really are,So how to suck the pure, distillate, storedEssence of essence from the hidden starAnd make it pierce like a riposting sword.For, as we hunt you down, you must escapeAnd we pursue a shadow of our ownThat can be caught in a magician's capeBut has the flatness of a painted stone.Never the running stag, the gull at wing,The pure elixir, the American thing.And yet, at moments when the mind was hotWith something fierier than joy or grief,When each known spot was an eternal spotAnd every leaf was an immortal leaf,I think that I have seen you, not as one,But clad in diverse semblances and powers,Always the same, as light falls from the sun,And always different, as the differing hours.Yet, through each altered garment that you wore,The naked body, shaking the heart's core.All day the snow fell on that Eastern townWith its soft, pelting, little, endless sighOf infinite flakes that brought the tall sky downTill I could put my hands in the white skyAnd taste cold scraps of heaven on my tongueAnd walk in such a changed and luminous lightAs gods inhabit when the gods are young.All day it fell.  And when the gathered nightWas a blue shadow cast by a pale glowI saw you then, snow-image, bird of the snow.And I have seen and heard you in the dryClose-huddled furnace of the city streetWhen the parched moon was planted in the skyAnd the limp air hung dead against the heat.I saw you rise, red as that rusty plant,Dizzied with lights, half-mad with senseless sound,Enormous metal, shaking to the chantOf a triphammer striking iron ground.Enormous power, ugly to the fool,And beautiful as a well-handled tool.These, and the memory of that windy dayOn the bare hills, beyond the last barbed wire,When all the orange poppies bloomed one wayAs if a breath would blow them into fire,I keep forever, like the sea-lion's tuskThe broken sailor brings away to land,But when he touches it, he smells the musk,And the whole sea lies hollow in his hand.So, from a hundred visions, I make one,And out of darkness build my mocking sun.And should that task seem fruitless in the eyesOf those a different magic sets apartTo see through the ice-crystal of the wiseNo nation but the nation that is Art,Their words are just.  But when the birchbark-callIs shaken with the sound that hunters makeThe moose comes plunging through the forest-wallAlthough the rifle waits beside the lake.Art has no nations--but the mortal skyLingers like gold in immortality.This flesh was seeded from no foreign grainBut Pennsylvania and Kentucky wheat,And it has soaked in California rainAnd five years tempered in New England sleetTo strive at last, against an alien proofAnd by the changes of an alien moon,To build again that blue, American roofOver a half-forgotten battle-tuneAnd call unsurely, from a haunted ground,Armies of shadows and the shadow-sound.In your Long House there is an attic-placeFull of dead epics and machines that rust,And there, occasionally, with casual face,You come awhile to stir the sleepy dust;Neither in pride not mercy, but in vastIndifference at so many gifts unsought,The yellowed satins, smelling of the past,And all the loot the lucky pirates brought.I only bring a cup of silver air,Yet, in your casualness, receive it there.Receive the dream too haughty for the breast,Receive the words that should have walked as boldAs the storm walks along the mountain-crestAnd are like beggars whining in the cold.The maimed presumption, the unskilful skill,The patchwork colors, fading from the first,And all the fire that fretted at the willWith such a barren ecstasy of thirst.Receive them all--and should you choose to touch themWith one slant ray of quick, American light,Even the dust will have no power to smutch them,Even the worst will glitter in the night.If not--the dry bones littered by the wayMay still point giants toward their golden prey.

#replies #liggytheauthoress #hi my name is chelsea and i only like one poem but its a novel length odyssey style telling of the civil war and its rad

[biofunmy]

In a Year of Notable Deaths, a World of Women Who Shattered Ceilings

Almost all were born between the world wars, one even before women had the right to vote. They came from white-collar homes and blue-, from black households and white. But when they died this year, they had something in common besides the final leveling that death brings.

They had all found a place in a world that rarely, if ever, had been open to women.

Whether one or the other was the absolute first to break a glass ceiling could be open to debate. But let’s say, at the least, that each planted a foot inside a door that had long been closed to women and then shouldered her way in — to a roomful of men.

Ruth Abrams was one. In 1977 she became the first woman to take a seat on the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court. It had taken 285 years (that is not a typo) — since the court’s founding in 1692. (Another notable juridical event that year was the start of the Salem witch trials.)

Ellen Bree Burns overcame similar obstacles in Connecticut, also in the 1970s — a signal decade in which feminism’s second wave was just beginning to build strength. She became the first woman to rise to the bench of her state’s major trial court and the first woman to be named to a federal court there.

Patricia M. Wald, too, was not to be denied a black robe, even after taking a decade-long detour to raise five children at home. In 1979, she became the first woman to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by most reckonings the second most influential court in the country. A kindred progressive spirit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, soon joined her on that bench.

In a quite different arena but one no less fueled by testosterone, Bonnie Guitar, born Bonnie Buckingham, had one of the earliest records (“Dark Moon”) by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart. Even more significant was her work away from the mic. Crashing another men’s club, she became a force in the studio, engineering records, scouting talent and starting her own label.

Barbara Gardner Proctor, who died just before the year began, had to force open two doors before finding a place in the “Mad Men” advertising world of the 1960s: one blocking women, the other African-Americans. But she pushed anyway, becoming, according to the industry, the first black woman in America to establish her own agency, Proctor & Gardner, in Chicago. (There actually was no Gardner; she added the name to reassure wary prospective clients that “her partner” was a man.)

Before 1972, an educational institution could discriminate against women and still receive federal funding, no questions asked. That changed with the passage of Title IX that year, encoding equity in law. And if there was one person to thank for that sea change, it was Bernice Sandler, who had once been told, in being denied a full-time university teaching job, “You come on too strong for a woman.”

She did come on strong. Through scholarly writings, tireless lobbying and persuasive advocacy in the courts, she was, more than anyone, the catalyst behind Title IX.

There were others: Barbara Low, one of the few women in scientific research in the 1940s, advanced our understanding of penicillin, leading to a cornucopia of antibiotics that continue to save lives. Rosemary Mariner, a baby boomer pilot, became the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron and then led a successful fight to get Congress to lift a ban on women serving in combat. And Florence Knoll Bassett, a designer and businesswoman, gave the modern office its streamlined shape and feel.

Ms. Knoll ran a thriving company with her husband, but one look at a grainy black and white photo that ran with her obituary in these pages last January will tell you everything you’d need to know about the world she had to navigate: There she was, in 1953, the lone woman seated at a large conference table ringed by white men in white shirts and ties.

For every glass ceiling broken, however, there was an untold number of women who in reaching higher came up empty-handed. By all accounts, Geraldyn M. Cobb had the right stuff to become an astronaut in the early years of the American space program. A veteran pilot, she held records in speed, altitude and distance before sailing through a battery of demanding physical and psychological tests that put her in the top 2 percent of all the program’s aspirants, including men. She was nevertheless left behind as a group of NASA pioneers, all men, paraded off into history. Though she lived a rewarding life — notably as a humanitarian flying medicine, food and clothing to indigenous people in the Amazon — she died, in her eyes, forever earthbound.

Athletic Firsts, Too

Not all the barrier breakers who died in 2019 were women, of course. The N.B.A. lost one in Wat Misaka, a son of Japanese immigrants who became the league’s first nonwhite player, and Major League Baseball lost three.

Elijah “Pumpsie” Green is not much remembered for his career on the diamond, mediocre as it was, but he made a bit of history just by striding onto the field for the Boston Red Sox in July 1959, becoming the first black player on a team that was the last in the major leagues to breach the color line, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had made the Brooklyn Dodgers the first.

Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field was also home to Don Newcombe, widely regarded as the major leagues’ first outstanding black pitcher, a Cy Young winner and a National League M.V.P. As fate would have it, his death, in February, came just 12 days after that of an even grander man of the game, Frank Robinson, who stayed in baseball after a Hall of Fame career in Baltimore to become the major leagues’ first black manager.

They are on a long roster of sports stars who died this year. The N.B.A. mourned the loss of John Havlicek, a basketball dynamo who tasted championship glory in two distinct eras with the Boston Celtics. The N.F.L bade farewell to Bart Starr, the Green Bay Packers’ champion quarterback, whose sterling execution on the field was a visible manifestation of Coach Vince Lombardi’s genius.

Athletes give us drama about human struggle, determination and excellence, but they also entertain us, and in that they share something with all those who mount stages and appear in front of cameras. Broadway typically (and wonderfully) dims its lights when one of its own has gone. But when it did so for Carol Channing last January, the gesture was never more apt. It may be falling back on press-agentry boilerplate to say that the star of “Hello, Dolly!” and “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” lit up stages with her irrepressibly high-spirited performances over an impossibly long career. But, really, more than almost anyone, didn’t she?

Equally incandescent was the ballerina Alicia Alonso, who overcame near-blindness to become a globe-trotting star and ambassador of Cuban ballet; Norma Miller, the “Queen of Swing,” who cut rugs, stages and even Harlem sidewalks with her spectacularly acrobatic Lindy Hopping; and Jessye Norman, the magnificent American soprano who seemingly collected as many laurels — Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center honors — as curtain call bouquets.

Like Ms. Channing, Doris Day, too, bridged singing and acting. But she did it in Hollywood, becoming its biggest box-office star in diverting romantic comedies opposite leading men like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, all while earning a reputation, deserved or not, for sugary wholesomeness to rival that of apple pie.

And Albert Finney found a kind of trans-Atlantic crossover appeal by bouncing between Hollywood and the stage in his native England, where he had gotten his start as one of the fabled “angry young men” of British postwar theater.

The year saw a host of familiar faces from television’s past become instantly recognizable once more — only now in photos accompanying their obituaries: Diahann Carroll (“Julia”), Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”) and Luke Perry (“Beverly Hills, 90210”), to name just three. (By contrast, Caroll Spinney, under all those feathers, was faceless to his viewers, but his alter ego, Big Bird, as bright as sunshine, needed no introduction.)

Popular music lost the likes of the drummer Ginger Baker, one of the rock gods of the ’60s; João Gilberto, the Brazilian guitarist and singer and a founding father of bossa nova; Dr. John, the rollicking, gravelly voice of New Orleans; and Ric Ocasek, the singing engine of the Cars, the hit-making band that arrived with rock’s new wave in the late ’70s.

And practically every genre of music could claim the death of the restlessly versatile André Previn as its own particular loss; a composer, conductor and pianist, he had crisscrossed boundaries in a peripatetic career that brought him a clutch of Oscars and a shelf of Grammys — half of them in classical music, half of them not.

Behind every performer, of course, is someone who provides the stage, and few impresarios had as much boffo success as Hal Prince, the king of Broadway; Franco Zeffirelli, whose opera stagings were as extravagant as he was colorful; and Robert Evans, the Hollywood executive who essentially greenlighted a new film era while leading so cinematic a life, of downfalls and comebacks, that it will doubtless one day resurface in a biopic script.

The world at large offered a different stage, with all too real dramas, to the likes of Robert Mugabe, the liberator-turned-tyrant of Zimbabwe; Jacques Chirac, the French president who embraced European unity when that was still a bold idea; Yasuhiro Nakasone, who could still recall the embers of war in championing Japan’s return to international influence; Moshe Arens, the politician and statesman and one of the last of Israel’s founding Zionists; and Mohamed Morsi, who, speaking of barrier breakers, became Egypt’s first democratically elected president after all those millenniums, only to be ousted within a year in favor of more autocracy.

In Washington, Elijah Cummings’s lawmaking was cut short. As the powerful, principled and full-throated chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, charged with protecting the integrity of government, he was in the thick of investigating President Trump’s conduct in office when he died at 68 in his beloved Baltimore, a little more than two months before his fellow Democratic House members voted for impeachment.

His death was followed 10 days later by that of his colleague John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in congressional history (52 years).

IX, 18 and 25 = Impact

The Senate, too, lost pillars. Birch Bayh, the liberal Democrat from Indiana, had as impactful a career as any in that chamber, attaching his name to landmark legislation identifiable by numbers: enforcing fairness through Title IX, lowering the voting age to 18, and providing for the removal of a president through a constitutional mechanism other than impeachment, the 25th Amendment.

Within about six weeks of his death, in March, two former colleagues, Senate lions both, were gone: Ernest Hollings (Fritz to almost everyone), a South Carolinian and Democratic civil rights champion who had his eye on the White House at one point; and the courtly Republican Richard Lugar, another Hoosier, who had as much clout in foreign affairs as any modern-era senator ever had.

In July, the 99-year-old body of Justice John Paul Stevens lay in state across the street from the Capitol in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he arrived in 1975 as a former Republican antitrust lawyer and left 35 years later a changed man — a stalwart of the court’s liberal wing.

And in early December it was Paul Volcker who was remembered — for shaping his country’s economic policy and taming inflation from the corridors of another marble-clad Washington institution, the Federal Reserve, where he was chairman under Presidents Carter and Reagan.

If Mr. Volcker was at heart a public-spirited man of business, a well-paid product of Wall Street who took a cut in salary to work for his country, Ross Perot was a politically minded one who would have gladly given up his executive suite in Texas for the Oval Office. A billionaire force in the computer services industry, he became an unlikely and surprisingly strong independent populist candidate for president in the ’90s, a folk hero to some and a folksy odd duck to others.

For all the publicity Mr. Perot received, however, his influence on American politics paled before that of the industrialist David H. Koch, who went about his work far less noisily. He and his brother Charles tapped their vast energy and chemicals fortune to finance a right-wing libertarian movement that by all indications will far outlive both.

The most powerful of business leaders inevitably acquire a public face, and none did so more successfully than Lee Iacocca. More than running two of the nation’s biggest automakers, he “came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile,” as his obituary said. A son of a hot-dog vendor, he was a gregarious self-made man who became a household name as an industry titan, television pitchman and best-selling author.

Felix Rohatyn, too, became a public man after scaling the heights of Wall Street, summoned to rescue New York City in the gritty, scuffling ’70s as it teetered on the edge of a fiscal abyss. And while we’re thinking about New York (command central for eruptions of “Auld Lang Syne”), let’s not forget Robert Morgenthau, a patrician son of the city who chased every known sort of criminal as Manhattan D.A. for so long that one might be forgiven for mistaking his age at his death, 99, for the number of years he served.

Other giants fell. The world of letters lost Toni Morrison, still another groundbreaker as the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for her powerfully moving novels that sang of an often brutal, racially torn America in the resilient cadences of the black oral tradition.

And Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who, in championing the Western canon in an ever more multicultural world, endured ample criticism himself, earning a characterization seldom attached to a scholar: America’s most notorious.

And Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets who earned the added distinction of being widely read.

And Herman Wouk, the prolific, best-selling, movie-inspiring author who practically died writing, mid-book, leaving a sheaf of blank pages.

The Last Survivors

Journalism — and the Washington that reared her — lost Cokie Roberts, who brought a tough, knowing take on American politics to television audiences for decades, and Russell Baker, the New York Times humorist (and “Masterpiece Theater” host) who, with his wry observations on politics and other arenas of national life, didn’t so much bash his targets as poke them.

Elsewhere, three of the most renowned architects of the last half of the 20th century died in 2019: I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli. And Karl Lagerfeld, that indefatigable definer of high fashion, and Gloria Vanderbilt, who poured a generation of women into designer jeans, left their most stylish of scenes.

The art world lost, among others, Robert Frank, who changed the course of documentary photography with his 35-millimeter Leica and a penetrating eye that saw an increasingly disjointed world in a new, strikingly off-kilter way, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, a towering figure of postwar Latin American art whose deep immersions in brilliant color seemed to evoke the dazzling sunlight of his native Venezuela.

The sciences, too, were drained of immense brainpower — for one, that of the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate who glimpsed the structure of the universe through its tiniest particles of matter the way a geologist might comprehend the Earth in a grain of sand.

Which, in a free-associating sort of way, brings to mind an hourglass — one that might measure the passing of an era’s few remaining survivors: grains of sand, pulled by gravity, trickling away until all are gone.

The scholar Charles van Doren was one, his death evoking the distant quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Edward Nixon was another, carrying the unwelcome burden — familiar to overshadowed siblings everywhere — of forever reminding us, by his very facial features, of Richard. Edda Goering and Rudolf von Ribbentrop carried pedigrees that harked back to the evil of Hitler, while Dick Churchill (no relation to Hitler’s nemesis) recalled a bracing moment for the Allies in World War II, the “Great Escape” from a prisoner-of-war camp. He was the last survivor of the 76 who had made the attempt. But he had been a survivor before: After only three men had made it to freedom, and after the Germans had executed 50 of those who had failed, Churchill was somehow spared. He lived another 75 years.

And then there was Julia Ruth Stevens. It’s been 71 years since her “Daddy,” Babe Ruth, died, but over those many decades she remained a living link to him, showing up at old-timers’ games to accept the cheers of baseball fans to whom the Sultan of Swat was more legend than flesh and blood. Ms. Stevens reminded us that, yes, he put his pinstripes on the same way the ball boys did.

“I miss him even to this day,” she said not too many years ago.

Who among his intimates is left to say that as 2020 is about to dawn? To hazard a guess, no one. The last grain of sand has fallen.

William McDonald is the obituaries editor of The Times

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Coin Style Blunders at the United States Mint

By Lianna Spurrier for CoinWeek ... We all make mistakes-- the U.S. Mint consisted of. For many years the Mint has released numerous coins with design flaws that triggered outrage, confusion, and flat-out rejection.

We've all heard how public upset led to the removal of "VDB" from the back of the wheat cent and the covering of Girl Liberty's breast on the Standing Liberty quarters. Did the masses really care that much about their coinage? Existed actually sufficient pushback that popular opinion demanded these changes?

Shield Nickel Rays

The guard nickel was released in 1866 with a circle of 13 stars on the reverse that had rays between them. In early 1867, these rays were eliminated.

It's commonly understood that the shield nickel series as a whole proved to be really difficult to strike. The Mint had not worked with nickel quite and it is a harder material than copper or silver, making the dies responsible to break and have a short life expectancy.

The rays on the reverse became part of

the issue. There was little space in between each ray and its nearby stars, making it an especially troublesome part of the coin. They were gotten rid of in part to assist the passes away last longer. However there were other factors. The design as a whole was commonly slammed; Joseph Wharton notoriously compared it to a tombstone, and an 1866 Letter to the Editor released in the American Journal of Numismatics asserted that" [t] he slogan 'In God We Trust,' is really suitable, for the innovator [sic] of this coin may feel confident that the devil will never forgive him for such an abortion."

The most controversial offense, however, was on the reverse. The rays advised a few of the Confederate flags from the Civil War, indicating Southern sympathies. While apparently not a very widespread grievance, this may have had something to do with the elimination of the rays as well.

VDB Wheat Pennies

The release of the Lincoln cent in 1909, developed by Victor David Brenner, was extremely prepared for. It was the very first flowing US coin to feature a picture of a historical figure, and there was such high demand that the Mint had to restrict the number of a person could buy. They were released on August 2, and the grievances began rolling in only a couple days later on.

On August 4, the Middletown Daily Argus of Middletown, New york city, published a short article entitled "Lincoln Coins Faulty":

"The new Lincoln cent has actually been just one day in circulation and currently it is declared that a severe oversight was made by the Mint authorities which a brand-new die may have to be made to get rid of the objectionable feature."

The initials"VDB", on the bottom reverse of the coin, were seen as too vibrant and made many consider Brenner

as pompous. In addition, according to the Des Moines News, some individuals mistook the initials for the hallmark of an underwear brand-- BVD. Franklin MacVeagh, Secretary of the Treasury, responded immediately. Over the next couple of days, multiple options were thought about: eliminating the initials completely, leaving them be, or changing them with just a"B". Eventually, they were eliminated completely, till finding a new home below Lincoln's shoulder in 1918.

Numismatists of the day anticipated that the VDB varieties would end up being limited and started conserving them as soon as the modification was revealed, resulting in lots of state-of-the-art specimens offered today.

Brenner was none too pleased about the removal of his initials. He initially included his complete last name on the design, however it was reduced before minting began. In a letter to The Numismatist on August 23, Brenner stated:

"It is mighty tough for me to express my beliefs with reference to the initials on the cent. The name of the artist on a coin is important for the student of history as it enables him to trace environments and conditions of the time stated coin was produced."

There was already precedent to position his initials on the coin. The just other distributing coins at the time without a designer's initials were the nickel and the $10 gold piece. Regardless, the controversy regarding his initials might effectively have made him one of the more widely known designers of a United States coin, specifically considering that the wheat cent is the only flowing coin he produced.

Type 1 & & 2 Standing Liberty Quarters

Another well-known design modification was the covering of Lady Liberty's breast on the Type 2 Standing Liberty quarter in 1917. The typical belief is that a public protest of conservatives drove this change, however there were no such grievances.

The modification was in fact an outcome of people inside the Mint. Hermon A. MacNeil designed the Standing Liberty quarter in 1916. In between the approval of his styles and the start of production in December, several adjustments were made without MacNeil's approval; the eagle on the reverse was lowered, a set of dolphins initially on the obverse was gotten rid of, and other small modifications were made. His style was modified in part since the original design remained in high relief, which the Mint was not capable of producing. Already having difficulty with the new Mercury dimes and Walking Liberty half dollars, they intended to prevent comparable issues with the quarter and address them prior to production began.

Initially, the new coins were available just to authorities and prominent numismatists (out of a fear of hoarding), and MacNeil needed to request a sample. Formerly unaware of the design changes, he was outraged by the adjustments and insisted that the brand-new coins not be launched to the general public. They were held till January 17, 1917, when the already minted pieces were put into circulation.

MacNeil got his dream. He was permitted to change the design so that he found it appropriate, and this was where the Type 2 style was available in. The original objective was to leave Liberty's breast bare and combine 2 formerly produced obverses, however minting innovation at the time was incapable of doing so. As an outcome, MacNeil had to totally reengrave the obverse. He finished this in mid-February and chose to provide Woman Liberty a chain mail shirt, thus covering the exposed breast.

So why the change? There are several theories, but no definitive records. It may have simply been an individual option of MacNeil's, like other works he produced throughout that time, such as the statue Intellectual Development, also feature more covered women. Ron Guth and Jeff Garrett assert in United States Coinage: A Research Study by Type that MacNeil didn't have a say in this design modification.

David Lange recommends the Treasury Department might have played a part in the addition of chain mail, and Ray Young, in a short article for Coins, thinks it might have been a symbolic change.

As stress with Germany grew and the lead-up to World War I began, the chain mail might have been contributed to show Woman Liberty as more ready to protect herself in war. Whatever the factor genuinely was, there's no proof of any public outrage at the exposed breast.

Susan B. Anthony Dollars

In one of the more current design flops, the Mint avidly marketed the Susan B. Anthony dollar prior to its release. They even dispersed folders of advertising products to banks and businesses, including sample ads and comics, tips for events, and diagrams of how to reorganize sales register drawers to enable space for the new coins.

These products promoted the coin's benefits, declaring it would be "easy to see it is a lady"; "easy to see the distinct 11-sided inner verge on both sides"; and "easy to distinguish by size".

The decision? Not so much. In 1988, the Colorado Springs Gazette quoted Michael Brown, Spokesman for the United States Mint, as saying, "I suppose there might have been other catastrophes like this in the history of our nation's currency, however never anything this bad. Never ever rejection by the public that is this total."

The Susan B. Anthony dollar just distributed for 2 years before production was halted due to public rejection. The most typical factor for such dislike was that it was so quickly puzzled with a quarter. Contrary to what the Mint's marketing products suggested, there was not a large sufficient distinction in size in between it and the quarter to make it easily appreciable.

There were likewise critiques of the design.

The majority of coins have some correlation between the obverse and reverse designs, but the Susan B. Anthony made no such attempt. Really couple of connections can be found in between Anthony, a females's rights activist, and the symbolic moon landing illustrated on the reverse. Disconnection aside, there has actually also been speculation that some viewed it as feminist propaganda.

It definitely can't have assisted anything that the designer, Frank Gasparro, had no concept what Anthony appeared like and might just find two photos on which to base his design. Still, according to a short article from the Chicago Tribune in 1988, the extensive rejection of the coin harmed his sensations.

There were concepts to try to revive the coin. Stella Sims, Director of the Mint, supposedly thought about making changes, such as putting a hole in the coin or altering the color to a brassy yellow to make it simpler to distinguish. Absolutely nothing came of these ideas up until the release of the gold-colored Sacagawea dollar in 2000.

While all of these styles are chronicled in any type book, the stories behind them are not. In contemporary society, it's difficult to imagine that there was truly an outcry about initials on a penny, however not an exposed breast.

It must also be noted that this is by no means an exhaustive list. Between the Type 1 and Type 2 buffalo nickels, the ground on the reverse needed to be submitted down so that the denomination wouldn't wear away of the coin so quickly. Of course, coinage of the early 1800s functions many mistakes, such as anywhere from 12 to 15 stars on assorted coins. The 1801 3 errors big cent is another gem of an error, however those early slip-ups are more frequently due to mistakes when making the passes away, not clearly bad decisions.

These four, however, seem to have actually been the worst mistakes. The styles were authorized as they were, no problems observed till the public reacted. They were mindful options made by the Mint, choices they probably wanted they might have reclaimed.

[bigyack-com]

In a Year of Notable Deaths, a World of Women Who Shattered Ceilings

Almost all were born between the world wars, one even before women had the right to vote. They came from white-collar homes and blue-, from black households and white. But when they died this year, they had something in common besides the final leveling that death brings. They had all found a place in a world that rarely, if ever, had been open to women.Whether one or the other was the absolute first to break a glass ceiling could be open to debate. But let’s say, at the least, that each planted a foot inside a door that had long been closed to women and then shouldered her way in — to a roomful of men.Ruth Abrams was one. In 1977 she became the first woman to take a seat on the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court. It had taken 285 years (that is not a typo) — since the court’s founding in 1692. (Another notable juridical event that year was the start of the Salem witch trials.)Ellen Bree Burns overcame similar obstacles in Connecticut, also in the 1970s — a signal decade in which feminism’s second wave was just beginning to build strength. She became the first woman to rise to the bench of her state’s major trial court and the first woman to be named to a federal court there.Patricia M. Wald, too, was not to be denied a black robe, even after taking a decade-long detour to raise five children at home. In 1979, she became the first woman to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by most reckonings the second most influential court in the country. A kindred progressive spirit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, soon joined her on that bench.In a quite different arena but one no less fueled by testosterone, Bonnie Guitar, born Bonnie Buckingham, had one of the earliest records (“Dark Moon”) by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart. Even more significant was her work away from the mic. Crashing another men’s club, she became a force in the studio, engineering records, scouting talent and starting her own label.Barbara Gardner Proctor, who died just before the year began, had to force open two doors before finding a place in the “Mad Men” advertising world of the 1960s: one blocking women, the other African-Americans. But she pushed anyway, becoming, according to the industry, the first black woman in America to establish her own agency, Proctor & Gardner, in Chicago. (There actually was no Gardner; she added the name to reassure wary prospective clients that “her partner” was a man.)Before 1972, an educational institution could discriminate against women and still receive federal funding, no questions asked. That changed with the passage of Title IX that year, encoding equity in law. And if there was one person to thank for that sea change, it was Bernice Sandler, who had once been told, in being denied a full-time university teaching job, “You come on too strong for a woman.”She did come on strong. Through scholarly writings, tireless lobbying and persuasive advocacy in the courts, she was, more than anyone, the catalyst behind Title IX.There were others: Barbara Low, one of the few women in scientific research in the 1940s, advanced our understanding of penicillin, leading to a cornucopia of antibiotics that continue to save lives. Rosemary Mariner, a baby boomer pilot, became the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron and then led a successful fight to get Congress to lift a ban on women serving in combat. And Florence Knoll Bassett, a designer and businesswoman, gave the modern office its streamlined shape and feel. Ms. Knoll ran a thriving company with her husband, but one look at a grainy black and white photo that ran with her obituary in these pages last January will tell you everything you’d need to know about the world she had to navigate: There she was, in 1953, the lone woman seated at a large conference table ringed by white men in white shirts and ties.For every glass ceiling broken, however, there was an untold number of women who in reaching higher came up empty-handed. By all accounts, Geraldyn M. Cobb had the right stuff to become an astronaut in the early years of the American space program. A veteran pilot, she held records in speed, altitude and distance before sailing through a battery of demanding physical and psychological tests that put her in the top 2 percent of all the program’s aspirants, including men. She was nevertheless left behind as a group of NASA pioneers, all men, paraded off into history. Though she lived a rewarding life — notably as a humanitarian flying medicine, food and clothing to indigenous people in the Amazon — she died, in her eyes, forever earthbound.

Athletic Firsts, Too

Not all the barrier breakers who died in 2019 were women, of course. The N.B.A. lost one in Wat Misaka, a son of Japanese immigrants who became the league’s first nonwhite player, and Major League Baseball lost three. Elijah “Pumpsie” Green is not much remembered for his career on the diamond, mediocre as it was, but he made a bit of history just by striding onto the field for the Boston Red Sox in July 1959, becoming the first black player on a team that was the last in the major leagues to breach the color line, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had made the Brooklyn Dodgers the first.Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field was also home to Don Newcombe, widely regarded as the major leagues’ first outstanding black pitcher, a Cy Young winner and a National League M.V.P. As fate would have it, his death, in February, came just 12 days after that of an even grander man of the game, Frank Robinson, who stayed in baseball after a Hall of Fame career in Baltimore to become the major leagues’ first black manager.They are on a long roster of sports stars who died this year. The N.B.A. mourned the loss of John Havlicek, a basketball dynamo who tasted championship glory in two distinct eras with the Boston Celtics. The N.F.L bade farewell to Bart Starr, the Green Bay Packers’ champion quarterback, whose sterling execution on the field was a visible manifestation of Coach Vince Lombardi’s genius.Athletes give us drama about human struggle, determination and excellence, but they also entertain us, and in that they share something with all those who mount stages and appear in front of cameras. Broadway typically (and wonderfully) dims its lights when one of its own has gone. But when it did so for Carol Channing last January, the gesture was never more apt. It may be falling back on press-agentry boilerplate to say that the star of “Hello, Dolly!” and “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” lit up stages with her irrepressibly high-spirited performances over an impossibly long career. But, really, more than almost anyone, didn’t she?Equally incandescent was the ballerina Alicia Alonso, who overcame near-blindness to become a globe-trotting star and ambassador of Cuban ballet; Norma Miller, the “Queen of Swing,” who cut rugs, stages and even Harlem sidewalks with her spectacularly acrobatic Lindy Hopping; and Jessye Norman, the magnificent American soprano who seemingly collected as many laurels — Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center honors — as curtain call bouquets.Like Ms. Channing, Doris Day, too, bridged singing and acting. But she did it in Hollywood, becoming its biggest box-office star in diverting romantic comedies opposite leading men like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, all while earning a reputation, deserved or not, for sugary wholesomeness to rival that of apple pie.And Albert Finney found a kind of trans-Atlantic crossover appeal by bouncing between Hollywood and the stage in his native England, where he had gotten his start as one of the fabled “angry young men” of British postwar theater.The year saw a host of familiar faces from television’s past become instantly recognizable once more — only now in photos accompanying their obituaries: Diahann Carroll (“Julia”), Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”) and Luke Perry (“Beverly Hills, 90210”), to name just three. (By contrast, Caroll Spinney, under all those feathers, was faceless to his viewers, but his alter ego, Big Bird, as bright as sunshine, needed no introduction.)Popular music lost the likes of the drummer Ginger Baker, one of the rock gods of the ’60s; João Gilberto, the Brazilian guitarist and singer and a founding father of bossa nova; Dr. John, the rollicking, gravelly voice of New Orleans; and Ric Ocasek, the singing engine of the Cars, the hit-making band that arrived with rock’s new wave in the late ’70s. And practically every genre of music could claim the death of the restlessly versatile André Previn as its own particular loss; a composer, conductor and pianist, he had crisscrossed boundaries in a peripatetic career that brought him a clutch of Oscars and a shelf of Grammys — half of them in classical music, half of them not. Behind every performer, of course, is someone who provides the stage, and few impresarios had as much boffo success as Hal Prince, the king of Broadway; Franco Zeffirelli, whose opera stagings were as extravagant as he was colorful; and Robert Evans, the Hollywood executive who essentially greenlighted a new film era while leading so cinematic a life, of downfalls and comebacks, that it will doubtless one day resurface in a biopic script.The world at large offered a different stage, with all too real dramas, to the likes of Robert Mugabe, the liberator-turned-tyrant of Zimbabwe; Jacques Chirac, the French president who embraced European unity when that was still a bold idea; Yasuhiro Nakasone, who could still recall the embers of war in championing Japan’s return to international influence; Moshe Arens, the politician and statesman and one of the last of Israel’s founding Zionists; and Mohamed Morsi, who, speaking of barrier breakers, became Egypt’s first democratically elected president after all those millenniums, only to be ousted within a year in favor of more autocracy.In Washington, Elijah Cummings’s lawmaking was cut short. As the powerful, principled and full-throated chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, charged with protecting the integrity of government, he was in the thick of investigating actions by President Trump when he died at 68 in his beloved Baltimore, a little more than two months before his fellow Democratic House members voted for impeachment.His death was followed 10 days later by that of his colleague John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in congressional history (52 years).

IX, 18 and 25 = Impact

The Senate, too, lost pillars. Birch Bayh, the liberal Democrat from Indiana, had as impactful a career as any in that chamber, attaching his name to landmark legislation identifiable by numbers: enforcing fairness through Title IX, lowering the voting age to 18, and providing for the removal of a president through a constitutional mechanism other than impeachment, the 25th Amendment.Within about six weeks of his death, in March, two former colleagues, Senate lions both, were gone: Ernest Hollings (Fritz to almost everyone), a South Carolinian and Democratic civil rights champion who had his eye on the White House at one point; and the courtly Republican Richard Lugar, another Hoosier, who had as much clout in foreign affairs as any modern-era senator ever had.In July, the 99-year-old body of Justice John Paul Stevens lay in state across the street from the Capitol in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he arrived in 1975 as a former Republican antitrust lawyer and left 35 years later a changed man — a stalwart of the court’s liberal wing.And in early December it was Paul Volcker who was remembered — for shaping his country’s economic policy and taming inflation from the corridors of another marble-clad Washington institution, the Federal Reserve, where he was chairman under Presidents Carter and Reagan.If Mr. Volcker was at heart a public-spirited man of business, a well-paid product of Wall Street who took a cut in salary to work for his country, Ross Perot was a politically minded one who would have gladly given up his executive suite in Texas for the Oval Office. A billionaire force in the computer services industry, he became an unlikely and surprisingly strong independent populist candidate for president in the ’90s, a folk hero to some and a folksy odd duck to others.For all the publicity Mr. Perot received, however, his influence on American politics paled before that of the industrialist David H. Koch, who went about his work far less noisily. He and his brother Charles tapped their vast energy and chemicals fortune to finance a right-wing libertarian movement that by all indications will far outlive both.The most powerful of business leaders inevitably acquire a public face, and none did so more successfully than Lee Iacocca. More than running two of the nation’s biggest automakers, he “came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile,” as his obituary said. A son of a hot-dog vendor, he was a gregarious self-made man who became a household name as an industry titan, television pitchman and best-selling author.Felix Rohatyn, too, became a public man after scaling the heights of Wall Street, summoned to rescue New York City in the gritty, scuffling ’70s as it teetered on the edge of a fiscal abyss. And while we’re thinking about New York (command central for eruptions of “Auld Lang Syne”), let’s not forget Robert Morgenthau, a patrician son of the city who chased every known sort of criminal as Manhattan D.A. for so long that one might be forgiven for mistaking his age at his death, 99, for the number of years he served.Other giants fell. The world of letters lost Toni Morrison, still another groundbreaker as the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for her powerfully moving novels that sang of an often brutal, racially torn America in the resilient cadences of the black oral tradition.And Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who, in championing the Western canon in an ever more multicultural world, endured ample criticism himself, earning a characterization seldom attached to a scholar: America’s most notorious.And Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets who earned the added distinction of being widely read.And Herman Wouk, the prolific, best-selling, movie-inspiring author who practically died writing, mid-book, leaving a sheaf of blank pages.

The Last Survivors

Journalism — and the Washington that reared her — lost Cokie Roberts, who brought a tough, knowing take on American politics to television audiences for decades, and Russell Baker, the New York Times humorist (and “Masterpiece Theater” host) who, with his wry observations on politics and other arenas of national life, didn’t so much bash his targets as poke them.Elsewhere, three of the most renowned architects of the last half of the 20th century died in 2019: I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli. And Karl Lagerfeld, that indefatigable definer of high fashion, and Gloria Vanderbilt, who poured a generation of women into designer jeans, left their most stylish of scenes.The art world lost, among others, Robert Frank, who changed the course of documentary photography with his 35-millimeter Leica and a penetrating eye that saw an increasingly disjointed world in a new, strikingly off-kilter way, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, a towering figure of postwar Latin American art whose deep immersions in brilliant color seemed to evoke the dazzling sunlight of his native Venezuela.The sciences, too, were drained of immense brainpower — for one, that of the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate who glimpsed the structure of the universe through its tiniest particles of matter the way a geologist might comprehend the Earth in a grain of sand.Which, in a free-associating sort of way, brings to mind an hourglass — one that might measure the passing of an era’s few remaining survivors: grains of sand, pulled by gravity, trickling away until all are gone.The scholar Charles van Doren was one, his death evoking the distant quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Edward Nixon was another, carrying the unwelcome burden — familiar to overshadowed siblings everywhere — of forever reminding us, by his very facial features, of Richard. Edda Goering and Rudolf von Ribbentrop carried pedigrees that harked back to the evil of Hitler, while Dick Churchill (no relation to Hitler’s nemesis) recalled a bracing moment for the Allies in World War II, the “Great Escape” from a prisoner-of-war camp. He was the last survivor of the 76 who had made the attempt. But he had been a survivor before: After only three men had made it to freedom, and after the Germans had executed 50 of those who had failed, Churchill was somehow spared. He lived another 75 years.And then there was Julia Ruth Stevens. It’s been 71 years since her “Daddy,” Babe Ruth, died, but over those many decades she remained a living link to him, showing up at old-timers’ games to accept the cheers of baseball fans to whom the Sultan of Swat was more legend than flesh and blood. Ms. Stevens reminded us that, yes, he put his pinstripes on the same way the ball boys did.“I miss him even to this day,” she said not too many years ago.Who among his intimates is left to say that as 2020 is about to dawn? To hazard a guess, no one. The last grain of sand has fallen.William McDonald is the obituaries editor of The Times Read the full article

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Notable Deaths in 2019: A World of Women Who Shattered Ceilings

Almost all were born between the world wars, one even before women had the right to vote. They came from white-collar homes and blue-, from black households and white. But when they died this year, they had something in common besides the final leveling that death brings.

They had all found a place in a world that rarely, if ever, had been open to women.

Whether one or the other was the absolute first to break a glass ceiling could be open to debate. But let’s say, at the least, that each planted a foot inside a door that had long been closed to women and then shouldered her way in — to a roomful of men.

Ruth Abrams was one. In 1977 she became the first woman to take a seat on the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court. It had taken 285 years (that is not a typo) — since the court’s founding in 1692. (Another notable juridical event that year was the start of the Salem witch trials.)

Ellen Bree Burns overcame similar obstacles in Connecticut, also in the 1970s — a signal decade in which feminism’s second wave was just beginning to build strength. She became the first woman to rise to the bench of her state’s major trial court and the first woman to be named to a federal court there.

Patricia M. Wald, too, was not to be denied a black robe, even after taking a decade-long detour to raise five children at home. In 1979, she became the first woman to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by most reckonings the second most influential court in the country. A kindred progressive spirit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, soon joined her on that bench.

In a quite different arena but one no less fueled by testosterone, Bonnie Guitar, born Bonnie Buckingham, had one of the earliest records (“Dark Moon”) by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart. Even more significant was her work away from the mic. Crashing another men’s club, she became a force in the studio, engineering records, scouting talent and starting her own label.

Barbara Gardner Proctor had to force open two doors before finding a place in the “Mad Men” advertising world of the 1960s: one blocking women, the other African-Americans. But she pushed anyway, becoming, according to the industry, the first black woman in America to establish her own agency, Proctor & Gardner, in Chicago. (There actually was no Gardner; she added the name to reassure wary prospective clients that “her partner” was a man.)

Before 1972, an educational institution could discriminate against women and still receive federal funding, no questions asked. That changed with the passage of Title IX that year, encoding equity in law. And if there was one person to thank for that sea change, it was Bernice Sandler, who had once been told, in being denied a full-time university teaching job, “You come on too strong for a woman.”

She did come on strong. Through scholarly writings, tireless lobbying and persuasive advocacy in the courts, she was, more than anyone, the catalyst behind Title IX.

There were others: Barbara Low, one of the few women in scientific research in the 1940s, advanced our understanding of penicillin, leading to a cornucopia of antibiotics that continue to save lives. Rosemary Mariner, a baby boomer pilot, became the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron and then led a successful fight to get Congress to lift a ban on women serving in combat. And Florence Knoll Bassett, a designer and businesswoman, gave the modern office its streamlined shape and feel.

Ms. Knoll ran a thriving company with her husband, but one look at a grainy black and white photo that ran with her obituary in these pages last January will tell you everything you’d need to know about the world she had to navigate: There she was, in 1953, the lone woman seated at a large conference table ringed by white men in white shirts and ties.

For every glass ceiling broken, however, there was an untold number of women who in reaching higher came up empty-handed. By all accounts, Geraldyn M. Cobb had the right stuff to become an astronaut in the early years of the American space program. A veteran pilot, she held records in speed, altitude and distance before sailing through a battery of demanding physical and psychological tests that put her in the top 2 percent of all the program’s aspirants, including men. She was nevertheless left behind as a group of NASA pioneers, all men, paraded off into history. Though she lived a rewarding life — notably as a humanitarian flying medicine, food and clothing to indigenous people in the Amazon — she died, in her eyes, forever earthbound.

Athletic Firsts, Too

Not all the barrier breakers who died in 2019 were women, of course. The N.B.A. lost one in Wat Misaka, a son of Japanese immigrants who became the league’s first nonwhite player, and Major League Baseball lost three.

Elijah “Pumpsie” Green is not much remembered for his career on the diamond, mediocre as it was, but he made a bit of history just by striding onto the field for the Boston Red Sox in July 1959, becoming the first black player on a team that was the last in the major leagues to breach the color line, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had made the Brooklyn Dodgers the first.

Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field was also home to Don Newcombe, widely regarded as the major leagues’ first outstanding black pitcher, a Cy Young winner and a National League M.V.P. As fate would have it, his death, in February, came just 12 days after that of an even grander man of the game, Frank Robinson, who stayed in baseball after a Hall of Fame career in Baltimore to become the major leagues’ first black manager.

They are on a long roster of sports stars who died this year. The N.B.A. mourned the loss of John Havlicek, a basketball dynamo who tasted championship glory in two distinct eras with the Boston Celtics. The N.F.L bade farewell to Bart Starr, the Green Bay Packers’ champion quarterback, whose sterling execution on the field was a visible manifestation of Coach Vince Lombardi’s genius.

Athletes give us drama about human struggle, determination and excellence, but they also entertain us, and in that they share something with all those who mount stages and appear in front of cameras. Broadway typically (and wonderfully) dims its lights when one of its own has gone. But when it did so for Carol Channing last January, the gesture was never more apt. It may be falling back on press-agentry boilerplate to say that the star of “Hello, Dolly!” and “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” lit up stages with her irrepressibly high-spirited performances over an impossibly long career. But, really, more than almost anyone, didn’t she?

Equally incandescent was the ballerina Alicia Alonso, who overcame near-blindness to become a globe-trotting star and ambassador of Cuban ballet; Norma Miller, the “Queen of Swing,” who cut rugs, stages and even Harlem sidewalks with her spectacularly acrobatic Lindy Hopping; and Jessye Norman, the magnificent American soprano who seemingly collected as many laurels — Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center honors — as curtain call bouquets.

Like Ms. Channing, Doris Day, too, bridged singing and acting. But she did it in Hollywood, becoming its biggest box-office star in diverting romantic comedies opposite leading men like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, all while earning a reputation, deserved or not, for sugary wholesomeness to rival that of apple pie.

And Albert Finney found a kind of trans-Atlantic crossover appeal by bouncing between Hollywood and the stage in his native England, where he had gotten his start as one of the fabled “angry young men” of British postwar theater.

The year saw a host of familiar faces from television’s past become instantly recognizable once more — only now in photos accompanying their obituaries: Diahann Carroll (“Julia”), Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”) and Luke Perry (“Beverly Hills, 90210”), to name just three. (By contrast, Caroll Spinney, under all those feathers, was faceless to his viewers, but his alter ego, Big Bird, as bright as sunshine, needed no introduction.)

Popular music lost the likes of the drummer Ginger Baker, one of the rock gods of the ’60s; João Gilberto, the Brazilian guitarist and singer and a founding father of bossa nova; Dr. John, the rollicking, gravelly voice of New Orleans; and Ric Ocasek, the singing engine of the Cars, the hit-making band that arrived with rock’s new wave in the late ’70s.

And practically every genre of music could claim the death of the restlessly versatile André Previn as its own particular loss; a composer, conductor and pianist, he had crisscrossed boundaries in a peripatetic career that brought him a clutch of Oscars and a shelf of Grammys — half of them in classical music, half of them not.

Behind every performer, of course, is someone who provides the stage, and few impresarios had as much boffo success as Hal Prince, the king of Broadway; Franco Zeffirelli, whose opera stagings were as extravagant as he was colorful; and Robert Evans, the Hollywood executive who essentially greenlighted a new film era while leading so cinematic a life, of downfalls and comebacks, that it will doubtless one day resurface in a biopic script.

The world at large offered a different stage, with all too real dramas, to the likes of Robert Mugabe, the liberator-turned-tyrant of Zimbabwe; Jacques Chirac, the French president who embraced European unity when that was still a bold idea; Yasuhiro Nakasone, who could still recall the embers of war in championing Japan’s return to international influence; Moshe Arens, the politician and statesman and one of the last of Israel’s founding Zionists; and Mohamed Morsi, who, speaking of barrier breakers, became Egypt’s first democratically elected president after all those millenniums, only to be ousted within a year in favor of more autocracy.

In Washington, Elijah Cummings’s lawmaking was cut short. As the powerful, principled and full-throated chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, charged with protecting the integrity of government, he was in the thick of investigating actions by President Trump when he died at 68 in his beloved Baltimore, a little more than two months before his fellow Democratic House members voted for impeachment.

His death was followed 10 days later by that of his colleague John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in congressional history (52 years).

IX, 18 and 25 = Impact

The Senate, too, lost pillars. Birch Bayh, the liberal Democrat from Indiana, had as impactful a career as any in that chamber, attaching his name to landmark legislation identifiable by numbers: enforcing fairness through Title IX, lowering the voting age to 18, and providing for the removal of a president through a constitutional mechanism other than impeachment, the 25th Amendment.

Within about six weeks of his death, in March, two former colleagues, Senate lions both, were gone: Ernest Hollings (Fritz to almost everyone), a South Carolinian and Democratic civil rights champion who had his eye on the White House at one point; and the courtly Republican Richard Lugar, another Hoosier, who had as much clout in foreign affairs as any modern-era senator ever had.

In July, the 99-year-old body of Justice John Paul Stevens lay in state across the street from the Capitol in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he arrived in 1975 as a former Republican antitrust lawyer and left 35 years later a changed man — a stalwart of the court’s liberal wing.

And in early December it was Paul Volcker who was remembered — for shaping his country’s economic policy and taming inflation from the corridors of another marble-clad Washington institution, the Federal Reserve, where he was chairman under Presidents Carter and Reagan.

If Mr. Volcker was at heart a public-spirited man of business, a well-paid product of Wall Street who took a cut in salary to work for his country, Ross Perot was a politically minded one who would have gladly given up his executive suite in Texas for the Oval Office. A billionaire force in the computer services industry, he became an unlikely and surprisingly strong independent populist candidate for president in the ’90s, a folk hero to some and a folksy odd duck to others.

For all the publicity Mr. Perot received, however, his influence on American politics paled before that of the industrialist David H. Koch, who went about his work far less noisily. He and his brother Charles tapped their vast energy and chemicals fortune to finance a right-wing libertarian movement that by all indications will far outlive both.

The most powerful of business leaders inevitably acquire a public face, and none did so more successfully than Lee Iacocca. More than running two of the nation’s biggest automakers, he “came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile,” as his obituary said. A son of a hot-dog vendor, he was a gregarious self-made man who became a household name as an industry titan, television pitchman and best-selling author.

Felix Rohatyn, too, became a public man after scaling the heights of Wall Street, summoned to rescue New York City in the gritty, scuffling ’70s as it teetered on the edge of a fiscal abyss. And while we’re thinking about New York (command central for eruptions of “Auld Lang Syne”), let’s not forget Robert Morgenthau, a patrician son of the city who chased every known sort of criminal as Manhattan D.A. for so long that one might be forgiven for mistaking his age at his death, 99, for the number of years he served.

Other giants fell. The world of letters lost Toni Morrison, still another groundbreaker as the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for her powerfully moving novels that sang of an often brutal, racially torn America in the resilient cadences of the black oral tradition.

And Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who, in championing the Western canon in an ever more multicultural world, endured ample criticism himself, earning a characterization seldom attached to a scholar: America’s most notorious.

And Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets who earned the added distinction of being widely read.

And Herman Wouk, the prolific, best-selling, movie-inspiring author who practically died writing, mid-book, leaving a sheaf of blank pages.

The Last Survivors

Journalism — and the Washington that reared her — lost Cokie Roberts, who brought a tough, knowing take on American politics to television audiences for decades, and Russell Baker, the New York Times humorist (and “Masterpiece Theater” host) who, with his wry observations on politics and other arenas of national life, didn’t so much bash his targets as poke them.

Elsewhere, three of the most renowned architects of the last half of the 20th century died in 2019: I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli. And Karl Lagerfeld, that indefatigable definer of high fashion, and Gloria Vanderbilt, who poured a generation of women into designer jeans, left their most stylish of scenes.

The art world lost, among others, Robert Frank, who changed the course of documentary photography with his 35-millimeter Leica and a penetrating eye that saw an increasingly disjointed world in a new, strikingly off-kilter way, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, a towering figure of postwar Latin American art whose deep immersions in brilliant color seemed to evoke the dazzling sunlight of his native Venezuela.

The sciences, too, were drained of immense brainpower — for one, that of the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate who glimpsed the structure of the universe through its tiniest particles of matter the way a geologist might comprehend the Earth in a grain of sand.

Which, in a free-associating sort of way, brings to mind an hourglass — one that might measure the passing of an era’s few remaining survivors: grains of sand, pulled by gravity, trickling away until all are gone.

The scholar Charles van Doren was one, his death evoking the distant quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Edward Nixon was another, carrying the unwelcome burden — familiar to overshadowed siblings everywhere — of forever reminding us, by his very facial features, of Richard. Edda Goering and Rudolf von Ribbentrop carried pedigrees that harked back to the evil of Hitler, while Dick Churchill (no relation to Hitler’s nemesis) recalled a bracing moment for the Allies in World War II, the “Great Escape” from a prisoner-of-war camp. He was the last survivor of the 76 who had made the attempt. But he had been a survivor before: After only three men had made it to freedom, and after the Germans had executed 50 of those who had failed, Churchill was somehow spared. He lived another 75 years.

And then there was Julia Ruth Stevens. It’s been 71 years since her “Daddy,” Babe Ruth, died, but over those many decades she remained a living link to him, showing up at old-timers’ games to accept the cheers of baseball fans to whom the Sultan of Swat was more legend than flesh and blood. Ms. Stevens reminded us that, yes, he put his pinstripes on the same way the ball boys did.

“I miss him even to this day,” she said not too many years ago.

Who among his intimates is left to say that as 2020 is about to dawn? To hazard a guess, no one. The last grain of sand has fallen.

William McDonald is the obituaries editor of The Times

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