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drifting-pieces-blog-blog · 8 months

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Breaking down the comics: The Desert has memory (Issue 22 short)

Alright guys... Back in issue 22, we got another bonus short.

Another TALES OF KHONSHU. Moon Over Alamein. by Alan Zelenetz.

The date is October 1942

The place is Alamein, Egypt.

History lesson time!

This is on the Mediterranean coast and was a the location of a huge decisive battle in 1942 WWII.

This was the beginning of the end of the Axis control in North Africa.

(It is also where the Desert Fox Rommel and Spartan General Montgomery duked it out if you're a buff when it comes to amazing stories of generals and the complicated respect and relationships of generals.)

History lesson aside, we open on a letter:

"Dear Meg,

Well, I'm seeing the front now for sure, I am. Nothing here but the dreary sands of North Africa for hundreds of miles. Rommel can't outflank us because the sea's to the north and there's a salt marsh and cliffs down south of here. So if he wants the canal at suez, he'll have to push straight through our lines. We're not about to let him do that now, are we? Kiss Mum, won't you?

-Ezzie"

Narration: "At night the desert terrain seems to mirror the moonscape above. It is ominous, empty, pocked with craters and hillocks. It is timeless, a mystery."

We see two soldiers out on patrol near a base camp. They are English soldiers.

While on patrol, they come across a cave and decide to investigate.

Following it down, they find a broken down wall that leads them into an old tomb.

Another letter:

"Dear Meg,

...I don't know how to describe it. Thousands of years old. It had clearly been broken into before us, but, still, here we stood after centuries! It runs underground for miles, long tunnels and tomb upon tumb.."

The two soldiers explore the tomb a bit and come across a Khonshu statue.

We have another Khonshu statue everyone! This one absolutely looks different from the one in the previous issue and the one that Marc keeps in Grant's house. (It's also ripped as hell.)

This one is clearly designed to look buff and ready for battle. Possibly to mirror the war that’s been happening in the world above.

Ezzie and his bunkmate Davey are now travelers of the night, out on patrol. With a simple introduction, he now falls under Khonshu’s watch.

"Under the flashlight beam the forbidding figure glistens, silvery white, for the first time in millenia. Who are these men? What do they want of Khonshu, God of the moon? Ancient Guardian of Egypt and preserver of the nile?"

Ah yes, these are tales of Khonshu. Perhaps Khonshu himself is the narrator? He would blowhard himself, wouldn't he?

Davey dismisses the statue and focuses in on the other valuables that would probably fetch them a lot of money.

Ezzie is upset by this idea.

"Hey, come off O'that Davey. Have a pity--We're here to save this land, not spoil it. We aren't the bloomin' Nazis!"

Speaking of the Nazis. We head to East Prussia where Adolf Hidler is scheming his plans.

This is a complete old comic throwback to a caricature of Hidler. He's ugly, malformed, and yelling and going on about astrology and the placement of the full moon.

It reminds me a bit of early Captain America war propaganda style comics.

Hitler is talking about his destiny to rule the world and how he refuses to withdrawal from Africa.

Another letter:

"Dear Meg,

Two years ago the germans were beating the hell out of us, now it's up for grabs. Tonight's the night..."

We see two armies prepping for battle. The English preparing to drive out the Nazi and the Nazi planting mines across the desert.

"Dear Meg,

A thousand guns strong we opened fire on the German positions. The sound of shells was like the rumble of ten thousand drums. Muzzles flashed, mortars sparked, machine guns shattered. Flares exploded in the darkness lit up the battleground bright as day..."

Ezzie suddenly sees the face of Khonshu in the sky, gazing down on the battlefield.

The English prepare to charge but know there are mines waiting for them.

Then, just before the charge, the earth suddenly splits open, setting off all the mines.

The tomb ran below the sands where the mines were buried and, weakened by the bombardment of shells, has collapsed. The mines destroyed, there is now a clear path for the English to tred.

Ezzie pauses for a moment before heading forward as he notices the Statue of Khonshu laying in sand now, tossed up by the broken tomb.

"I guess he WAS on our side after all, Davey!"

A letter in response:

"Dear Ezzie,

Churchill says the Battle of El Alamein is the turning point. We are winning. I am so proud of you,

-Meg"

This short is interesting because of the historical significance of the battle and how much the North African push really affected the outcome of WWII (and how much its' often forgotten about and overlooked).

Also you do have to consider the Nazi occupancy of North Africa and wonder how much damage was done to historical sites and things of the like. How much did the battles damage? How much was lost in the shelled sands?

Then we look at it from the comic side and it's interesting how Khonshu has always chosen sides. How he will pick one person who looks at his statue in interest or with a plea for help and he will go, "Yeah okay." and help them.

How many people before Moon Knight did he consider? And why did he wait to pick Marc? Was it the death and sacrifice that gave him the power to chose him? Or was it the way he could see Jake and Steven and the potential there?

Even now, his favor of Moon Knight over all the other chosen avatars is interesting.

#Moon Knight #Moon Knight comics #Analyzing the comics #Khonshu #This bitch be everywhere #He wasn't always bad

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 4 months

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Long-ish personal story about my job and about music and it sort of slightly connects back to comedy at the end, but only a bit (and unlike most of my personal posts lately, this one isn't even about how difficult it is to not drink alcohol, though it is a story that I'm writing on a Saturday night to distract myself from wanting to drink alcohol, so not entirely unrelated). Regular comedy posting will resume shortly.

There’s this SMBC comic that I really love:

(Source)

I’ve been thinking about this comic lately in a weird way, as I’m nearly six months into this job as a therapist for autistic kids. I don’t write much about my job, partly because it doesn’t have anything to do with the general topic of the blog, partly because I try not to talk about my job much in general due to confidentiality. But we are technically allowed to talk about it in ways that don’t give identifying details, and I have a story I really want to tell, and I don’t think anyone is going to be able to work out which of the hundreds of thousands of kids in Canada I’m talking about from this post on an anonymous blog.

There’s one kid I work with for three hours, three nights a week. He’s ten years old and he’s quite severely impaired in a number of ways; he’s not completely non-verbal but he can only say a few words and doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to express himself well, he understands more words than he can say but he still doesn’t understand anything beyond simple sentences, we’re trying to teach him to read but it’s at extremely early stages, he mostly doesn’t understand what’s happening. He semi-regularly has meltdowns during which he mostly just cries and tries to hurt himself, but can be aggressive against other people too.

He’s someone that people mean when they talk about “low-functioning autistic people” (I know the language is loaded an complicated, but there’s no term for it that isn’t loaded and complicated so I’m going with the clearest one). Most of the clients I work with are. They’re in the “low-functioning autistic” category that I usually hear referenced as a way to invalidate the neurodiversity movement. You know, when higher-functioning autistic people try to claim that autistic people should be treated as fully human and able to self-advocate, and then people will reply that this only applies to high-functioning autistics, but actually there are lots of low-functioning autistics and they’re not fully human, they can’t even talk or understand speech or read or write or dress themselves.

Sometimes I see people reply that of course autistic people can do all those things, and I’m not sure that’s always a helpful reply, because there lots of them who can’t do those things. Who can’t join the neurodiversity movement and self-advocate because they don’t have the cognitive capacity, who do actually need to be taken care of full-time for their own safety and well-being. But I think what we should be arguing is those people are still fully human, it matters how they think and feel, we can still make an effort to not just keep them alive and in line, but to understand them and meet them where they are and see that they have preferences and personalities like anyone else.

When I started this job in August and was trained to take over from this kid’s previous therapist, I was told that music can sometimes keep him in a good mood, so I should bring the centre’s laptop in the room during my sessions with him and play kids’ songs on YouTube sometimes. I asked if they had to be kids songs and was told no, I can experiment and see what he enjoys, the only rule is the lyrics should be clean.

I started this with fairly selfish intentions: I don’t enjoy listening to children’s songs all the time, so I thought I’d see if he liked anything else. I’m not completely selfish; if he’d hated the other stuff, I’d have played the kids’ songs that he likes. But on my first day with him, I put on a couple of the more upbeat and accessible Lennie Gallant songs, and had the absolute pleasure of watching his eyes light up with delight. I could see every tiny moment of the music hitting him, of him processing this thing he’d never heard before, this huge smile spread across his face and he got up and danced. When the song ended, he used one of the very few phrases that he’s able to consistently say with full understanding of what it means: “Put the music back on.”

Lennie Gallant is a folk singer from Rustico, Prince Edward Island, who now lives in Nova Scotia, and those are all places on the East Coast of Canada. Canada’s East Coast has a huge folk music tradition, including a lot of Celtic music that comes from the Celtic immigrants there (by and large, Scottish immigrants to Nova Scotia, particularly the island of Cape Breton off the Nova Scotian coast, and Irish immigrants to Newfoundland), but also a lot of stuff that’s developed in its own way in Canada. From when I was very young, my dad raised me on Canadian folk music in general, but particularly a lot of East Coast music, I’ve gone to folk festivals with him every summer since I was too young to talk. Lennie Gallant has been one of my favourite singers for nearly 25 years. To give an idea of how true this is, my parents currently have a cat named Rustico, because they let me name it, and I went with Lennie Gallant’s hometown as my inspiration.

I remember the first time I heard Lennie Gallant. I was nine years old, we were sitting in the living room, my dad put on the new Lennie Gallant Live album and Pull of the Fundy Tide started playing. And I remember how it felt. It felt like I’d never heard anything like it. There was so much going on. I closed my eyes and couldn’t process how much I liked it, and I made him play it again. If I try really hard when I put the song on now, I can still feel that.

It was so fucking cool to watch the same thing happen to this kid on that night, but this time I was on the other side of it. I watched him struggle to take it in, to have a whole new concept of what music can be opened up to him. He wanted to hear it over and over. I kept playing different Lennie Gallant songs, he kept playing and smiling and dancing.

In folk music there's a basic dichotomy between the stuff that's more trad or less trad (I mean, I guess that's true in any genre), more trad meaning less production and either no lyrics or very traditional lyrics and less of a beat and lots of other factors. So I figured as long as I stick to the less trad side of my collection, I can play this kid anything, I don't need to make it children's music. Over the next few weeks, I kept playing him my more accessible stuff. This, for example, was his favourite:

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Another great Nova Scotia singer, Dave Gunning, has a couple of Christmas albums, which I figured are good crossover between folk music and music that's for kids. So I started playing him some of Dave Gunning's Christmas songs, which he also loved. Then one day, while trying to navigate back to the Christmas album, I accidentally touched this song, and put it on:

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It's a medley of fiddle tunes off this great album that Dave Gunning did called A Tribute to John Allan Cameron, John Allan Cameron being a legendary Cape Breton singer who popularized traditional Celtic music in Canada, so a lot of that album is further to the trad side than most other stuff Dave Gunning does. When I accidentally put on the medley of fiddle tunes for a ten-year-old I was trying to entertain, I quickly realized my mistake and went to pause it until I could find the Christmas stuff.

But in that moment I saw his face, and a whole new sense of recognition was spreading across it again. Just like that first day when I put on music for him, like he couldn't believe what he was hearing, but loved it. Breaking slowly into a huge smile, snapping his fingers along to it. When I pressed pause, he said "Put the music back on," so I did.

After that, I set out to find just how trad I can go with this kid. I found out, pretty fucking far. Butterfingers Medley is actually pretty accessible as far as medleys of fiddle tunes go, but I tried playing him slower and more complicated and/or traditional fiddle tunes, and he enjoyed all of them. Then I tried playing Gaelic-language stuff, and this induced a whole new wave of shock and amazement at how beautiful it was, he could not get enough. One day he was "scripting" - which is the word for when autistic kids will repeat phrases they've previously heard (usually from a TV show or more likely a YouTube show these days, sometimes they repeat phrases that their parents or teachers have said, it can be anything they've heard before) under his breath around another therapist, and she asked me if I knew what he was saying because she couldn't figure it out, so I got closer to him to listen, and then had to tell her that the reason she couldn't understand him is he was speaking Gaelic. Specifically, scripting the lyrics to this beautiful song by Cape Breton band The Rankin Family:

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I tried as hard as I could to go too trad for this kid, just because I was curious to see what the boundaries were. I played him the most out-there thing in my music collection, which was the Barra MacNeils' (another great Cape Breton band) Mouth Music, and he fucking loved it:

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This kid is the best. At some point I did abandon my quest to find the boundaries of what music he'll like, and just started trying to put together a playlist of his favourite stuff. Because he doesn't indiscriminately love everything. Sometimes I'll put stuff on and he won't be that into it, and there is a pattern to what he likes and what he doesn't, but the pattern isn't, as I'd initially expected, that he likes the most accessible stuff and dislikes the most traditional stuff. Or that he likes the faster stuff and dislikes the slower stuff (if anything, it tends to be the opposite of that). The pattern is that he likes some things in music more than others, just like any other person does, and even if he can't have conversations about that more complex than just saying "Put the music back on" after songs he likes and not saying that after songs he dislikes, that is still enough for him to communicate those preferences. Which is where I come back to the idea that even the "low-functioning" people still have fully formed personalities, which obviously I knew full well before I played some music for a kid at work, but this sort of thing seems like a good example for people who don't know it already.

He's got a fairly broad palette, though, and it does include some of the faster songs that sound like the sort of thing a kid would be into. I wish I could have legally taken a picture of his face (I can't because confidentiality) the day I first played him this one:

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My job is stressful and scary, both due to the nature of the job and due to the nature of me, specifically the part of my nature that gets easily overwhelmed and I am constantly terrified that the next day will be too much and I'll have a panic attack at work from the social overload and then I'll get fired. It's not easy, and I haven't managed to find a lot of the "rewarding" parts of an allegedly rewarding job like this, because I'm so focused on just getting through the day. But this is one part of the job that I have really, really loved. I love getting to play music for this kid and watch him be amazed at the existence of something he never knew about before.

And that's what makes me think of the SMBC comic. I've actually been thinking a lot lately about my own dad, how he raised me on this music. How he took me to a folk festival every year since before my first birthday, and he played me his favourite music in the living room when I was too young to know the words to have a conversation with him about it, but I'm sure my body language let him know what I liked, just like this kid does with me. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad singing me to sleep with folk songs when I was three and four years old, because I refused to sleep due to "the world going upside down and almost explode" every time I closed my eyes (I was first diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at age 8, which seems young until you consider that it was four years after I started telling my parents that I can't sleep at night because it makes me feel like the world is going upside down and is about to explode). My dad's singing got me to sleep, it got into every aspect of my head.

I've always been really grateful to my dad for the way he introduced me to music so early, gave me a love of it. I feel lucky that I get to trace my favourite music back through my whole life. My favourite songs and artists and albums from when I was five years old, and eight years old, and ten years old, and twelve years old, and fifteen years old, are still among my favourites today.

When I play music for this kid, I bring back my early memories, of the first time I heard my favourite songs, when I was young and everything still felt new to me. I remember the amazement that music could sound like this, that something this good could exist, that the range of potential human feelings included all these new things that I was experiencing for the first time because of this song. I remember that, and I know from the look on his face that that's what this kid is feeling right now, as I play him a new song for the first time.

But I also bring back my early memories of my dad. I remember the look on his face as I ran around the living room dancing to The Rankins and The Barra MacNeils and The Irish Descendants when I was a kid. I remember his smile, how proud he looked when I liked stuff, how he'd dance with me, he'd excitedly tell me to listen closely before putting on the next song, because he couldn't wait to see my reaction. I don't think I understood until this year how special that was for him too, to get to share this with me. Because it's the way I feel when the smile of amazement passes across this kid's face during a new song.

And of course it was amazing for my dad to get to share that with me! We all love that! This is everyone is desperate to give music recommendations to anyone who will listen, because it feels really, really good to take something that induced a good feeling in you and watch it induce that same feeling in someone else, especially if you can know you're the reason why that's happened. I am currently writing an entire post just as an excuse to give people a bunch of recs for my favourite music (and to avoid thinking about wanting a drink). Of course that feeling is special. Of course it made my dad happy to do that for me. Zach Weinersmith of SMBC comics wrote that nice comic strip about how that's one of the best parts of being a parent.

That's all been happening for months now, and the kid has heard most of my best stuff. I've developed a couple of playlists for him - one for when I want to get his energy up and put on something upbeat, and one for when I want him calmer. It has a range of stuff, and I try to mix it up. I know his preferences now, I know what his favourite songs are and what they have in common so how to guess if he'll like a new one or not. And he doesn't look amazed when they play anymore, because he now knows that music like this exists. But he still smiles, and dances, and says "Put the music back on", and loves them.

One day last week, he was struggling hard. Crying off and on, and I was doing all the things that normally help: turning down the lights in the room, stepping back to give him space, soft and soothing music. But he kept getting upset.

I was alone in the gym with him when he had a meltdown that was worse than any I'd dealt with before. He started banging his head against the wall, and it scared the hell out of me, because of course I don't want him to hurt himself. I blocked it with a mat and he came after me, scratching my arms and hitting me. He pushed away and screamed.

I turned the lights down and grabbed my phone to try some music. Music had gotten us out of bad situations before. During the worst meltdown I'd seen him have before last week, I finally got him to calm down by putting on The Mingulay Boat Song off Dave Gunning's John Allan Cameron album, I just played it on a loop until he sat down on his knees and closed his eyes to take in the music and slowly stopped crying:

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But since then I've played that song for him lots, it doesn't have the same impact as it did when it was a novelty. It worked the first time because I was able to induce that "Wow, I didn't know music could sound like this" feeling in him, and that'll distract a person from anything. But he knows music can sound like that now. He knows all my music, or at least, all my music that could be at all appropriate for this situation.

Well, he knows almost all my music. Because as I was starting to panic and look to my phone to decide what to play for this kid who was scratching at me and posed a threat to his own safety (because "head banging" sounds like one of the less severe behaviours, at least compared to behaviours that involve committing violence against others, until you actually see a kid do it and realize how badly they can hurt themselves if you don't block it), I realized I did have a new folder in there.

And this is where the post comes back around to my usual topic. Did you think I'd finally taken a break from the constant posts about John Robins to write a heartfelt story about my history with music and connecting with a child at my job? Nope! This was secretly a John Robins post all along.

So, in one of the radio episodes, John Robins listed his top five favourite albums of all time. Van Morrisson's Astral Weeks at number one (Elis specifically checked with him that he really means number one of all time, better than all Queen albums, and he said yes), and 2-5 were: In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, I See a Darkness by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Ghosts of the Great Highway by Sun Kil Moon, and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Obviously I wrote all those down and downloaded them, because I am a normal person who is not too far down a fandom rabbit hole.

Van Morrisson, weirdly, was actually my first ever favourite singer. In that when I was three years old, the first time I was old enough to have any kind of preference, my favourite thing to do was run around the living room dancing to this album called Irish Heartbeat by Van Morrisson & The Chieftains. My favourite song on the album was Step Be Gaily, a song that is actually called Marie's Wedding, but when I was three I called it Step Be Gaily because that's how the first line of the chorus sounded to me (it's actually "Step we gaily"), so my whole family still calls the song Step Be Gaily. The song is still in my music collection and it's still great.

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I spent years listing Van Morrisson as a singer I very much liked. Until I was about ten, and my parents told me that since I like Van Morrisson so much, they'll play me some of his other stuff. And I quickly learned that actually, I do not like Van Morrisson. What I like is a Celtic folk band called The Chieftains, and the one album they made in collaboration with Van Morrisson, who is otherwise quite a blues-y and R&B-type singer and I'm not into that. I did try the Astral Weeks album on John Robins' recommendation, and I did not like it, because that's not my kind of music, but I'm glad the people who like it are having a good time.

The other four albums were different, though. I already knew some of the songs off the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy one, but listening to the whole album turned out to be a great idea, I've added it into my common rotation. Neutral Milk Hotel was exactly what I'd always assumed Neutral Milk Hotel would be, from years of vaguely hearing about them but not actually hearing them, which was ranging from all right to pretty good. The Sun Kil Moon album I quite like, and I'm still in the process of listening to some of its songs again because I feel like it's the sort of thing that rewards repeat listens.

The Godspeed You! Black Emperor album was exactly as weird as you'd expect from a band with a punctuation mark in the middle of their name, that made an album with four tracks that are 20-ish minutes each. Experimental music isn't normally my sort of thing, but I gave it a shot because John Robins told me to, and I was glad I did.

I tried listening to the first track while on a break at work, lying in the hammock that they have in their gym, closed the doors and closed my eyes and played my noise canceling headphones and tried to feel like I was at home so that I could recharge my social battery a bit and lessen the risk of overloading to the point where I have a panic attack at work and get fired. This song started and it was all weird and experimental and I didn't know what to make of it, but as it went a bit further in (like I said, each track is around twenty minutes so there are lots of changes throughout each one), it got to a part that was really lovely and relaxing. I closed my eyes and let it wash over me and it did, actually, help me to stop feeling all the stress of the job and transport me to some state of mind where this wasn't happening and it was okay.

I probably don't really have to write the rest of this story, because now that I've written the various parts of the backstory, I'm sure you can guess the ending. I needed a song that a kid who loves music would find beautiful and relaxing enough to calm him down, but the regular ones weren't working because he was too upset, and I thought the only way to solve it might be to induce that feeling of "Oh my God I had no idea music could sound like this", to distract him with the shock of novelty. I also had a song that I'd never played for him before because even I had only recently discovered it, and I barely knew what to make of it, but I did know it was amazingly relaxing.

So I put it on, and he stopped in his tracks, and I watched him tilt his head while he considered what he was hearing, and in that moment of quiet I managed to get him to sit down on the hammock, and I turned the lights all the way down and closed the doors to the gym, and I sat in front of him and rocked him very slowly and gently, and then of his own accord he went from sitting in the hammock to lying in it, and I played the music softly. After a few minutes he stopped crying altogether, and I hit pause on my phone, and he said "Put the music back on," so I did, playing that section of the song over for half an hour, just me and him sitting the gym listening to this weird band I got from a comedian on the radio, blood drying on my hands and my arms from where he'd scratched me, until his dad came to pick him up.

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And that's my story. I wrote this instead of drinking alcohol. Sometimes my job is fulfilling. Autistic people are people, even the ones with a significantly lower cognitive capacity than neurotypical people. John Robins' taste in music is a mixed bag. I hope everyone is having a good night.

#Youtube

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padawanlost · 3 years

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Hey there! First of all I wanna say that I love your blog 😊

If I may, I wanted to ask you something regarding the Jedi Code. What did it say exactly about love and family? From my understanding, they were forbidden to form attachments, yet one Jedi (can't remember the name) married and had several kids. So, as long as there was no love or risk of attachment, they could marry and/or have kids?

I'm so confused

Before anything else is said, we need some context. The Jedi Order is over 25000 years old, which means a lot of things changed over the years. what’s really important to keep in mind is that theirs rules were no set in stone. There’re multiple variations of the “Jedi Code”. Also, not every rule the Jedi had to live by were part of the Jedi Code. Some rules were more about tradition than the code itself. Because of that every generation of the Order has its own particularities. That’s why the Prequels Order was different from the Old Republic’s Order and that was different from New Republic’s Order.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the prequel era Jedi.

1 – Jedi were NOT allowed to marry or reproduce (without the Council’s authorization):

“If anyone finds out that I’m expecting a child, I’ll be thrown out of the Jedi Order and I won’t be able to serve. I have to carry on. I can’t let the men down.” Skirata was furious. She felt it. She could see it, too. And if she thought that was bad, it would be nothing compared with how the Jedi Council would react. She’d be kicked out of the Order. She’d no longer be a general, no longer able to play her part in the war. [Karen Traviss’s Triple Zero]

2 – Jedi were allowed to have sex, but they were not allowed to have romantic relationships or to have any kind of emotional attachments to their sexual partners.

“Jedi Knights aren’t celibate. The thing that is forbidden is attachments and possessive relationships.” George Lucas.

“But ol’ Pellaeon’s just having a spot of romance, if you know what I mean. It’s not like he gets attached to any of them, is it? Is romance allowed? Can you have a spot of romance if you don’t get attached?” Ahsoka’s stripes became more vividly colored, embarrassed. Yes, she obviously did know what Coric meant by romance. It wasn’t the word he usually used for it, but Ahsoka was only a kid, and Rex had decided from the start that talking about that sort of thing was something best left to her Jedi Masters. Yes, General Skywalker, I think that’s a job for you, sir. It wasn’t a clone’s duty at all. “Romance,” Ahsoka said stiffly, “is acceptable. Jedi are not … celibate. Just … no attachment.” [No prisoners. Karen Traviss]

He felt his fingers fist. Don’t you lie. Not about this. Don’t you dare. “You love her.” Monotonous blasterfire filled the silence between them. Then Obi-Wan nodded. “Yes, Anakin, I love her. But I was never in love. For a short while Taria and I needed each other. And when we no longer needed each other, we parted—and remained friends.” So that was how it worked, was it? Stay aloof, stay detached, never let yourself feel too much, too deeply, and the Order didn’t care? So if Padmé and I pretended we weren’t in love … [Karen Miller’s Star Wars: Clone Wars Gambit: Siege]

3 – Jedi were not allowed to have contact with their biological families;

“After the Jedi Masters decided that it was too dangerous to train anyone familiar with fear, anger, and any other emotion that might lead to the dark side, it was agreed that Force-sensitive juveniles, adolescents, and adults would no longer be eligible for enlistment or conscription. Instead, they sought out and adopted Force-sensitive infants who would be raised and trained at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant; to prevent any emotional attachments that might cloud judgment, most recruits would never have any subsequent contact with their families.” [ Ryder’s Windham’s Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force]

The entire baby Ludi case

Still no word from the Jedi Council about what happened at the Battle of Naboo. Watto is beside himself with fury, complaining that if I can spend a hundred credits to send a message, then the Jedi can spend a hundred credits to answer. It worries me that it’s taking them so long. Three days should be long enough to figure out whether you were at Naboo, and whether you’re still alive. […] Shmi seemed to believe that Watto genuinely missed the boy. Leia had trouble accepting this, but was forced to at least allow for the possibility when Shmi reported that Watto had actually made a gift to her of the ten credits she had borrowed to help pay for her message to the Jedi Council. […] An administrator on Coruscant had finally replied to Shmi’s ’Net message: Anakin was well, but the Jedi did not discuss the activities of their Padawans even with parents. Even that was enough to elate Shmi. [ Tatooine Ghost by Troy Denning]

4 - The love they were allowed to experience was nothing like how we experience love in real life:

Who wept their tears on the inside, where they would not be seen. To weep for a fallen comrade was to display unseemly attachment. A Jedi did not become attached to people, to things, to places, to any world or its inhabitants. A Jedi’s strength was fed by serenity. By distance. By loving impersonally. [Karen Miller. Wild Space]

It was impersonal. It wasn’t like loving your family or your friends. It was more compassion, than love (the kind of love that connects you to someone on a emotional level).

Instead, they sought out and adopted Force-sensitive infants who would be raised and trained at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant; to prevent any emotional attachments that might cloud judgment, most recruits would never have any subsequent contact with their families. [Ryder’s Windham’s Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force]

“Not that Luminara is indifferent, but that Luminara is detached. It’s not that she doesn’t care, but she’s not attached to her emotionally. And at the end of the day, one of the questions that I guess I pose is, is that really a good thing? Is Anakin’s way of being so compassionate wrong? Because on a certain level, you have to accept that the Jedi lose the Clone War. So there is something that they’re doing that’s wrong.” Dave Filoni

Nobody asked the obvious—whether clone troopers were everyone else or not. Joc looked from Ahsoka to Rex and back again. “What’s wrong with attachment?” he asked. “Why can’t you have attachments? You mean love, right?” Ahsoka looked at the clones wide-eyed but in slight defocus, as if she was trying to recall something. “Love is acceptable,” she said at last. “But not attachment.” “What’s love if it isn’t attachment?” “Attachment is … putting personal relationships first, caring about the people you love so that it influences how you act.” Ahsoka seemed to be picking her words carefully. Coric stared back at her. “You know, it affects your judgment.” [ No prisoners by Karen Traviss]

5 - The exceptions:

There were some exception to these rules, most of them happening during a different time (Old and New Republic Eras). However, there’s one notable exception all the rules above during the prequels: Ki-Adi-Mundi. Unlike most Jedi he was allowed to marry multiple wives and have multiple children and still remain a jedi. They allowed it because he belonged to an endangered species, so him being in a polygamous relationship was part of the greater good. Fun fact, he was emotionally attachment to some members of his biological family.

#ask #anon #jedi order #jedi culture #txt

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moon-in-daylight · 4 years

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heyy! love your fics! i've seen you take requests so i'm testing my luck here. can we please get a dhawan!master x reader fic where reader is forced to pilot the tardis (like reason w her or link with her telepathically idk) to get the master to a hospital as he's passed out and kinda dying? like some angsty action that turns out fine in the end, please? thank you

Dispensable / Dhawan!Master x reader

Summary: You’ve always felt safe by The Master’s side, but when he endangers himself to save your life, you start wondering if his efforts to protect you are really worth it. Especially now that his life depends on you learning how to pilot a TARDIS.

Words: 4.6k

Warnings: Blood, weapons, injuries, insecure!reader, a little angst maybe.

A/N: Anon, I’m sorry this took me so long. I’ve just been out of inspiration lately and this is what came out after a month of writing. I hope you still like it though 💖

It wasn’t unusual for The Master’s plans to go terribly wrong sometimes, as it wasn’t unusual that you regularly got hurt in the middle of your adventures as a consequence.

Luckily, it was nothing too serious most of the times. Maybe you would get some scratches while running on the quiet days, some scars on the most serious days when you had to face some extremely angry alien civilization… And, in the worst scenarios, you had almost encountered your reaper face to face.

It was inevitable to suffer some unfortunate accidents while travelling inside the TARDIS. You knew that from the very start, that your least developed anatomy would barely be able to follow a Time Lord’s way of living, especially one’s with so much love for chaos and destruction. You were well aware that while you travelled with The Master death would always be keeping an eye on you. Yet, you gladly took the risks that staying in his ship entailed.

From the first moment you had stepped a foot inside that console room, you had known there would never be a way of turning back to your old life. Not after seeing the things, places and eras he could show you with the simple pull of a lever. At first, the main reason you stayed with him was the time travelling.

Though it was extremely dangerous and you feared The Master could abandon anytime and anywhere when he got bored of you, you decided to endure his rage filled words about your species and his several rules on how you should behave to try and get him to show you the stars. He wasn’t an easy person to deal with, but you had grown to both love and deal with him, and you liked to think he had done the same with you too.

After more than a year aboard of his ship, you trusted him almost blindly, confident that he would do anything he could possibly do to try and get you uninjured of the deadly situations you faced daily.

He was way more gentle and caring now than he was when you first met him, though that was something he would never admit out loud to you. But his change of behavior was evident. You noticed it by the little thing. By the way he always kept an eye on you when you were outside of the TARDIS, on how he threatened anyone that seemed barely interested in hurting you… He almost seemed a different person now. He even took care of your wounds when he couldn’t prevent you from getting hurt, and making sure you got the fastest recovery possible instead of leaving you to deal with them on your own.

You supposed he had gotten used to having a ‘human pet’, and that he took the trouble of taking care of you mainly because he didn’t want to have to take another human in his TARDIS to replace you if you were ever missing. Too much inconvenience to have to take another pet now that he had finally grown somewhat comfortable with your presence… Either way, and despite the many risks you faced time and time again, you always felt save by his side knowing that he wouldn’t let you die that easily.

While being by his side, you barely could remember what fear felt like.

That was, of course, until you found yourself in the worst situation you could have pictured.

The day had started as any other, with The Master taking you to New Earth in the middle of the First New World War, following your request of wanting to know more about the future of your species. The Master had told you repeatedly that humanity’s history was not worth seeing, that they were little more than amoebas. But your curious self had insisted him so many times about wanting to see your future that he had eventually given in.

You didn’t exactly liked what you saw there. The cruelty, the hatred that your own race processed against their own… The senseless death and unnecessary barbarism between those of their own blood… The Master had warned you that it wouldn’t be pretty, but considering the fact you were already used to face every possible form of chaos by his side, you had been sure that nothing he could show you could be worse than the damage you had already seen him cause to distant planets and civilizations.

Now that you ran for your life in the middle of an open battlefield, hand in hand with The Master as he tried to guide you to the safety of his TARDIS under a never-ending rain of bullets, you realized your mistake. You had never imagined a war could be so bloodthirsty, so atrocious… The Master hadn’t said it, but you were sure he was jealous of the destruction and despair caused by your species.

The two sides of the conflict were ready to do anything to get even the slightest advantage over their enemies, and of course, The Master had decided he should turn such horrible situation in his favor. He had manipulated both, the leader of the resistance and the supreme general of the new Earth’s forces, to make them believe the other would throw an offensive in the middle of the night. That way, while everyone fought to death in the middle of the battlefield, you and him could sneak into each side’s bases and steal whatever could be useful or valuable.

The Master’s plan was executing itself perfectly, to the point where it was all being too good to be true. Everyone had seemed to believe him and, though you were suspicious that things were never that easy with him, he appealed to your specie’s stupidity to justify the fact that no major complications had met your little scam. If everything went as he had planned, you would be in and out of each fortress in barely ten minutes, with your pockets full and the armory of the TARDIS completely renewed with new nuclear weapons. But just when the both of you were emptying the armory of the rebel band, two guards caught you red-handed.

Apparently, before indulging their soldiers into a bloodshed battle that would likely finish all live on the planet, the leaders of each side had decided to make things the diplomatic way. And for the first time in a very long time, they had decided to unite forces against a common enemy, you and The Master. You would’ve been proud of them, had your life not been in such danger.

Now, getting yours and The Master’s head was top priority to every living being in that planet, and you almost doubted you would be able to make it to his ship alive.

You had ran alongside The Master from angry crowds hundreds, maybe thousands of times now, but never before had you felt so trapped. The TARDIS was somewhere nearby, and every step you took closer to her was a sigh of relief that left your already tired lungs. Bullets and all kinds of projectile weapons were thrown in your direction, and The Master had to keep you even closer than usual to his body to prevent you from getting hurt.

When the disguised aspect of the TARDIS finally met your eye, you thought you had never felt happier in your life, but your legs were beginning to get tired and you felt yourself losing all the strength in your body, struggling to stabilize the rhythm of your breathing.

One last push, you repeated yourself internally as you forced your body to not give up, to resist until you could collapse on the safety of the TARDIS’ ground.

With every passing second, you could see your destination getting closer, but that little time felt eternal as you did your best not to lose focus and sprint those last meters for the sake of your life.

You only let go of The Master’s hand so you could extend your arms to push the TARDIS’ doors open, get inside and quickly close them after you. But the only thing your hands laid on was the ground as you tripped and fell only a few steps away from the ship.

Your heart sunk in your chest as your bad luck struck in, realizing that you didn’t have enough time to stand up from the ground before the hordes of soldiers reached you, probably killing you instantly. This time there was no way out, and you closed your eyes while you met your unavoidable fate.

This wasn’t a bad way to die, you supposed. You hadn’t lived too long, but you had lived your life to the fullest, running away through the stars with a psychopath alien and visiting places most of your kind couldn’t even dream about. You were at peace with yourself, suspecting that The Master wouldn’t be too affected by your loss and knowing that you had already lived longer than what could be expected of such a fragile being living such a dangerous life.

You were ready to let the rest of your body hit the floor and say goodbye forever, but then The Master’s hands gripped you tight from each side of your body and pushed you up and forwards, giving you the last boost you needed to reach the TARDIS’ doors.

“What are you doing?!” His angry tone reprimanded you as he positioned himself behind you to shield you from your persecutors. “Run!”

Taking The Master’s hand in yours again, you finally made it to the insides of the TARDIS, the comfort of the familiar console room greeting you as she hummed happily at your arrival. As soon as the doors closed, you threw yourself onto the Time Lord, surrounding him with your arms to pull him into a victory hug, or more a thankfulness hug for having saved your life seconds earlier.

You squeezed him tight as you let fear crawl out of your body, starting to feel safe again by his side. For a moment you had truly believed he wouldn’t turn back for you, that he would simply get inside his ship and forget about the fact you had ever existed. But now, after watching him risking his own life to save yours, you realized there wasn’t a single place in the universe where you could really be endangered if you were with him.

As your breathing calmed and you stopped hearing the throbbing of your heart buzzing in your ears, you heard him hiss slightly at the same time you felt the lower part of your torso dampening. Getting away from him, you discovered your shirt was covered in blood, and immediately, you lifted it up to find there was no wound underneath.

Looking again in The Master’s direction and finding that his belly was also covered in the thick liquid, you didn’t let him time to say anything before undoing the lower buttons of his shirt and discovering a bullet wound on the right side of his torso.

Blood was quickly coming out of it, and you were quick to tear the lower side of your shirt so you could use the fabric to press against the bullet hole and stop the bleeding. You had always seen that work in movies, but the material was soon soaked and you realized you couldn’t stop him from bleeding out when you found a second wound a few centimeters above the first one.

“You’re going to bleed to death…” Fear was starting to form in the pit of your stomach as your mind rushed trying to find a solution to the mess developing right in front of you.

“Don’t exaggerate.” He said, as if he had just gotten an insignificant scratch. “I will be fine.”

“No.” You shook your head, taking some piece of clothing you had left in the room earlier and placing it over his belly in hopes it would do something more than the piece of fabric you had used earlier. That didn’t seem to stop the bleeding either and you started to become more and more desperate. “You need to regenerate.”

The Master frowned at you, and then you realized the weak state in which he was. In normal situations, he would have look way more threatening and powerful with the simple act of just lying his eyes on you. Now, looking at the titanic effort he put in simply trying to stay awake was enough for you to pity him.

When you thought of The Master, many adjectives came to your mind, but pity had never before been a word you would’ve use him to describe him.

“I’m not going to regenerate for something so stupid.” He immediately refused, and you cursed him internally as you guided him to the nearest couch, hand still pressing on the side of his body as you helped him sit down as comfortably as possible.

“You’re dying.” You tried to reason with him, but his stubbornness was too much to handle at the moment. He didn’t say a thing as he let the weight of his body collapse on the piece of furniture, and you watched him in desperation. “Please, just do the goddamn thing!”

You pressed the fabric in your hands harder against his wounds, wishing that he would listen to you for once in his life. When you got no answer from him, you lifted your stare to his face again, realizing he had lost consciousness.

“No, no, no, no...” You muttered as you shook his body slightly, trying to get him to wake up. “Wake up, come on. Just wake up and regenerate!”

Seeing that he wouldn’t respond, you immediately decided to check for his heartbeat. Or more correctly, heartbeats. Placing two fingers on the side of his neck, you found that the rhythm of his two hearts was starting to get very similar to the one your single heart made, and then you realized just in how much danger he was.

You were no doctor, but he had already lost a lot of blood. If you did nothing, you feared he could be dead in less than a few hours.

You had been under The Master’s care and protection for so long that now that you were the one that had to look after him, you felt completely helpless. How were you supposed to help him? All you knew about Time Lord’s biology was that they could regenerate when in life or death situations, and he had refused to do it, so you were out of ideas.

“Please, help me…” You felt your eyes watering as you cupped his face in between your hands, shaking it from side to side slightly in yet another attempt to bring him back in himself and get him to help you save him.

You didn’t get any response from him, but you heard the TARDIS humming intensely at you. And you felt relieved to at least have received a single answer to your plea, even if it was by some piece of seemingly inanimate, alien technology. Turning your head to the center of the room, you watched the console lights flicker as she indicated you to get closer to the controls of the ship. Understanding what she wanted you to do, you looked at The Master one last time.

“I’ll never forgive you if you dare to die on me.”

He looked as calmed as you had ever seen him, eyes closed and facial expressions completely relaxed. Your last thought while looking at him before rushing to the controls, was that you wished you could see that serenity in him more often, in better situations that the one taking place now of course.

Placing yourself before the buttons and levers of the console, you found yourself completely lost. You had seen The Master piloting the TARDIS billions of times, but looking down at the controls you couldn’t recall any of the movements he made while doing so… Was it really that hard to show you how to pilot the TARDIS? Hadn’t he thought it could be useful in a situation like this one? And why couldn’t you have a better memory? How could you have seen him doing so many times and not have the slightest idea of what to do?

You searched around the console in hopes of finding a piloting manual, some instructions, or at least some note handwritten by the dying Time Lord that could give you some clue on how to put the time travelling ship in motion. But when you found nothing and realized you wouldn’t even know when or where to take the ship to if you knew how to pilot it, you started to feel impotence taking over you.

The Master was dying because of you, because he had stopped to help you, a simple, useless human. And you weren’t able to do anything to help him, to make things right. You were the one dying, not him.

Feeling the lump forming in the back of your throat you wished you could turn back time and stop him from helping you get to the ship.

How ironic was that? You were inside a time travelling machine, desperate to go back in time, and you simply couldn’t. You had never felt so small and worthless in your whole life as the tears started to fall down your cheeks.

“I don’t know what to do…” You looked back towards The Master, his unconscious body laid on the other side of the room. Your eyes examined him with an apologetic look for a few seconds before the TARDIS’ hum called you again.

Following the sound she made, you realized she was trying to draw you attention to one specific lever of the console, one she had pointed out by illuminating it with a characteristic purple light. Assuming she was trying to guide you, you got closer to the lever and pulled it without thinking it twice, desperate to at least try something to fix the situation.

When you heard the approving hum of the TARDIS and noticed the way she illuminated a close button in the same purple light, you proceeded to push that button too, and then the next one she pointed you to. You honestly didn’t know what any of those controls were doing or if you would be able to follow her instructions well enough to get The Master somewhere safe, but you had no time to waste with doubt and second-guessing.

You rushed through the console’s controls, pulling and pressing as soon as the TARDIS indicated you what it was that you had to do next. After pulling one final lever, you noticed the ground beneath your feet tremble as the ship entered the time vortex. You looked back at The Master one last time as the ship landed in an unknown location and time.

“Is it done?” You asked her, quickly wiping away the tears that had fallen from your eyes seconds earlier.

She gave you yet another hum, and you supposed you would need to go outside and figure out if you had succeeded in piloting the TARDIS to the right place. When you ran outside and found yourself inside a building that seemed like what you knew as a hospital, you finally let out the breath that you had been holding.

By the time The Master woke up again, he was lying inside a hospital bed, a sharp pain on his side and a little dizziness caused by whatever substance they were putting into his IV, which he quickly took off without even acknowledging what it was. He attempted to get off the bed to try and find out in which planet he was, or how he had gotten there, but he found himself too weak to move, the stabbing pain on his side making him desist from it.

Giving up and lying his head back on the pillow again, he caught a glimpse of something that look like a bracelet on his right wrist. When he looked at it, he realized his data was printed on that bracelet:

SPECIES: Time Lord

AGE: ?

NAME: Doctor

He immediately frowned at the name of his older enemy on his own hand, and for a second he theorized about being dead and having been sent to the profundities of hell as a punishment for his numerous crimes during his extremely long existence. For a second he feared he would have to live as The Doctor for the rest of eternity.

If there was in fact something similar to hell, he was sure this was it.

Your entrance in the room interrupted his thoughts as he sighed in relief by seeing you. He let out the air too fast out of his lungs, and he couldn’t help but hiss in pain.

“How are you feeling?” You asked him after you realized he had gained consciousness back again, closing the door behind you.

“Better than ever, love.” He said with that smug smile on his face, trying to ignore the intense ache on the side of his torso.

You looked at him for a few seconds, upset that he would act as if nothing had happened. Well, he was The Master. He was an expert in being annoying, you thought. What else could you expect from him?

“I hope it’s really hurting, you thick idiot.” You spitted out, not holding yourself back as you bitterly let him know just how angry you were with him. Had you been anyone else, you wouldn’t have probably lived to tell about it “Do you have any idea how worried I was about you?! I thought you were dying!”

“Dying is not something I’m very good at, as you can see.” The Master casually said with a pompous smirk on his face, one you wished you could slap off him. You simply decided to ignore his comment.

“Why didn’t you just regenerate? Do you have any idea how many trouble you would have spare me?”

“I thought you liked this face, pet.” He raised an eyebrow at you, arrogance showing all over his face as you couldn’t help but blush slightly. It was true you found him attractive, but he clearly didn’t need you to boost his already enormous ego.

“I would have rather have you alive with a different face than dead with this one.”

For barely a second you could see the façade in The Master’s eyes fall apart as you said those words. You knew he wasn’t very keen on talking about feelings, but you hoped he knew you were being serious.

“How did we arrive here?” He quickly changed the subject. “And why am I The Doctor now?”

“I brought us here. The TARDIS taught me to pilot her” You started to explain, watching the surprised look on his face as he tried to imagine you maneuvering his ship. “And well, when they asked me what your species was so they could give you the right medication, I thought I would tell them the truth, but when they asked me for your name I figured telling them they were treating one of the most dangerous criminals in all of time and space wasn’t such a great idea.”

“I would have rather you letting me die before letting anyone think I was her.” He rolled his eyes and ripped off the bracelet on his wrist, clearly annoyed by the idea of being mistaken for his former best friend.

“If you hadn’t stopped for me back then I wouldn’t have had to do it!” You pointed out in frustration, tired of him only complaining. You knew The Master would never thank you for saving his life, but those comments he made were starting to get you on your nerves. The Time Lord started at you in confusion for a few seconds, eyes glued to your face as he tried to decode what was going through your mind before forcing himself inside of it. After staying silent for several seconds, you decided to ask right away. “Why would you risk your life for me anyway?”

“You’re my pet, dear. I’m supposed to keep you safe.” He replied as if it was an obvious thing. When you had first met him, you had never thought you would hear him speak that way about a human.

“Not if it costs you your own life!”

“Did you really want me to abandon you?” He asked, tone deadly serious and eyes inspecting you carefully.

“No, but…” Sighing, you tried to find a proper way to express what was going on inside your head. “I would never want you to get hurt because of me. I’m only human, and my life is so ephemeral and fragile… Your life is way bigger and exciting than what mine could ever be, and you shouldn’t put it at risk because of me. I’m dispensable.”

While hearing your words, The Master regretted every time he had told you how inferior you were because of your ‘human condition’. He had seen you as dispensable at first, but he no longer considered you anything other than his equal, his partner in crime. The fact that you had grown to see yourself as something of less worth than him was almost as painful as the injury on his side.

“Don’t you ever say something like that again.” He warned you in what almost sound like a threatening tone. “You’re not dispensable. If you were I wouldn’t have you in my TARDIS. I did what I did, and I would do it again if I had to, love. I promised to take care of you and that’s exactly what I’m going to do, no matter the cost. Is that understood?”

A little taken aback but moved by his words, you simply nodded, trying to regain composure again.

“Good, now help me get out of here.” Without giving you a second to react, he immediately attempted to get out of the mattress. You quickly rushed to his side to try and get him to lay back again.

“What are you doing? You’re still not ready to go!” You tried to convince him to stay in the hospital for a little longer, to give himself some time to fully recover. Deep down you knew everything you’d try would be useless, knowing that he would run away from that room at the first chance he got. He would probably even want to go plan his next heist right after arriving the TARDIS, as if nothing had ever happened.

“It won’t take long for the staff to discover you lied about my identity, and they’ll want some explanations.” He began to explain to you. “We need to be gone by the time they arrive.”

Closing your eyes, you realized he was right. That was one of the few inconveniences of travelling around space and time causing chaos and destruction, you couldn’t stay anywhere for too long if you didn’t want to get caught, and The Master was a wanted man in practically every corner of the universe.

“Okay, we are leaving.” The Master’s face was adorned with a pleased smile as he heard your words. “But don’t even think about getting into trouble for the next few days. You’re going to get a full recovery first. You have to promise me.”

“I promise you, pet.” He stated as he leaned onto you to use your body as support when he got up.

“Oh, and I’m piloting the TARDIS, by the way.” You added, gaining a warning look from him. “What? You are going to need a lot of rest in the next few days and I have to practice in case I have to pilot her again.”

#Dhawan!Master #Dhawan Master #Dhawan!Master x reader #Sacha Dhawan #Dhawan Master x reader #Dhawan!Master x you #Dhawan Master x you #Doctor who fanfiction

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astrojmonaf1 · 5 years

Text

This isn't the F1 we love

History in the making, Unfair Rulings, and Big Disappointments

Formula One is a sport that many define as the closest thing to riding a rocket into outer space because of the downforce generated inside the 800 kg car which is more than the weight of the vehicle itself.

Every time the drivers get behind the wheel, they defy gravity which is very much compared to being inside a Space Shuttle and a modern F1 car can pull more G’s than a Space Shuttle launch. Think about that one for a minute.

This week, Falcon Heavy carried an extraordinary payload, a rocket full of satellites and between them a Solar Sail is known as LightSail 2 the size of a loaf of bread which is the second spacecraft of it's kind with nothing, not one engine but the energy of photons to propel it in orbit and promote space exploration.

Then, NASA on June 27th announced that we are going back to Saturn’s biggest Moon, Titan, to send a helicopter drone named “Dragonfly,” to uncover the fundamental blocks that gave way life to our planet.

That race is no easy feat.

The last time NASA accomplished this was during the Cassini-Huygens Mission, and until this day it remains the farthest aircraft to ever land in the outer Solar System.

Just like Cassini and Huygens, Formula One has a lot of things in common.

A lot of preparation and teams of two, but sometimes not both make it till the end.

This week we saw the youngest podium ever to win in Formula One history at the Austrian Grand Prix.

Amidst back grid positions, penalties for impending drivers and a theatrical ending, and why yes— even a fake document from a pesky fan, because you have to have it all in Formula One, FIA could not taken long to call on their investigation for this year’s winner.

Max Verstappen wheeled banged himself into Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc on lap 69 which cost the Monégasque his first win.

The Dutchman had earlier overtaken on Bottas from Mercedes right after saying his hybrid engine was losing power and as if a miracle, recovered.

The Finnish and teammate to Lewis Hamilton for Mercedes was having overheating issues, but kept the pace with the 21-year-old, said “made the most out of it. It was a bit more difficult than we expected, especially with the overheating of the engine, so couldn’t race properly – had to manage all.”

The FIA Regulations clearly state:

Article 27.4. : "At no time may a car be driven unnecessarily slowly, erratically, or in a manner which could be deemed potentially dangerous to another driver or any other person.”

It almost seems as if they were quick enough to deliver a penalty against Sebastian Vettel who had nowhere to go when Lewis Hamilton kicked him out of track in Canada, and it showed.

“I had nowhere to go,” Vettel said, to Lewis Hamilton when he was broadcasted through by Sky Sports after the race was over, “Seriously, I had nowhere to go.”

Sebastian Vettel, superpositioned the FINISH order of the signs once he caught up to the two drivers, Leclerc, and Hamilton in Canada.

Yes, stewards, you can fool yourselves but not a man behind the wheel!

The rules stand clear on this one.

And although this year's rules were changed to allow overtaking to increase by 50%, that oversight by the judges caused Vettel the race by 5 seconds which subsequently handed Hamilton first place.

That same discrepancy and too much power in the stewards allowed the Monégasque to lose the track not because he could not win it but because of incompetence from the governing body.

A dramatic end indeed which translates it to another week in Formula One, even if Verstappen was able to break the 1-2 Mercedes partnership, FIA, you had one job, just one, and you messed it up.

What does that mean for the greatest single seat racing sport in the world? The biggest stage in racing that is? It means that even if Honda Racing waited nearly 13 years, for their big break by Verstappen, and Congratulations— for it must feel excellent that you got something handed to you unfairly well, the real winners here are the Fédération.

It means there is a big problem going on with Formula One.

Their penalty process or lack thereof has become a substantiated mess.

FIA forwent their own rulebook when it comes to the violations but happily look away when it pleases their judges.

No wonder why fans have taken it upon themselves into forging fake documents.

They no longer have the ability to trust the governing body, there is no credibility left in the sport after they have blatantly showed to favor certain teams, especially after changing the rulebook to appease them.

Whatever credibility the fans used to have in this organization there is none left, and can you blame them?

The whole system is wrong. Do they know how it works? It is their system after all, but it is broken, and it needs a complete overhaul.

Two hundred and three thousand attendees turned up today in Spielberg, Austria, to celebrate the legend, Niki Lauda, where they saw a Turn named after him. Were he still with us today would he be proud?

This is a massive sport, with millions of fans visiting the circuits and audiences tuning in tandem online and through cable TV, cheering for their favorite teams, from Ferrari to McLaren, Red Bull, and Mercedes to name a few of the top favorites.

There are currently 20 male drivers in the series.

It isn't an easy feat to get licensed for Formula One; many think that the name helps, that it may be a ticket to get into Ferrari Driver Academy, but that is not true. You have to have talent.

And this year's alumni prove it; it isn't like any other group of drivers in the history of the Federation.

Without a shadow of a doubt, they are the youngest group Formula One has ever put behind the wheel and inside a helmet.

We saw Charles Leclerc, Max Verstappen, and Lando Norris set some impressive records in Austria this week.

The young British driver from McLaren was poking fun early about keeping the Aussie on check from DRS.

It was a beautiful thing when he was radio’d. ”Like, Forever?” he replied to his team.

Ferrari driver, Charles Leclerc, 21, winning pole position for the Austrian Grand Prix on Saturday, while Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton 5 time World Champion, was given a three-place grid penalty which forced start him in the fifth position on the grid for impending Alfa Romeo's Kimi Raikkonen.

He went as far as saying “We’ve been chipping away at it, but right from the get-go we noticed a bit of a deficit to the Ferraris,” Hamilton said.

“We definitely underestimated how fast they would be, I would say, and I think ultimately on the straights.”

“They really kill us on the straights.” because the Monégasque was leaving him in the dust by a margin.

Raikkonen gave a middle finger at the five-time world champion as Lewis overtook him. About the incident he said, "He blocked me, simple as that," Raikkonen said.

It is known that Hamilton can get tricky on those laps and get off the hook with penalties, FIA notwithstanding has looked the other way and handed them to other drivers like Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari's teammate to Charles Leclerc, who after the Canadian Grand Prix was given a five-second penalty, which ultimately cost him the race to Lewis Hamilton.

During the Austrian Grand Prix, his luck had not changed.

The air pressure line to the engine was acting up, and the mechanics had to shield his car from view while Leclerc had to leave him behind to go on the circuit. Vettel had to stay on the vehicle for as long as he could.

“The car was obviously broken so we couldn’t fire it up and go,” he said.

“We fairly quickly made the decision to change, but it’s not so easy to take the bodywork off.”

“We done everything we could be we couldn't get it done in time." he continued.

“There's nothing you can do inside the car. It's nobodies fault, but we need to understand what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.”

“At that time it's nobodies fault, I knew most likely that if we fixed it, there would be one run, so I tried to focus solely on that.”

“As much of a pain it is, it's good to see that the other car came through and got pole.”

“I'm happy for the team, obviously not happy for my side. We'll have a good day and a good race tomorrow.”

Following Vettel’s comments Mattia Binotto, Ferrari F1 team boss said "It is an engine problem, "We had miscombustion on one cylinder, but it's yet to be understood.” which indicates they will be taking Vettel’s engine back to Maranello, Italy ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix.

This is Charles Leclerc's second career pole position after qualifying in Bahrain Grand Prix back in March, but missed out due to a cylinder malfunction where he allowed Mercedes AMG F1 Team took a 1-2 victory, Hamilton-Bottas from the overtook him in his last ten laps.

The Monégasque, who was repeatedly proving his driving credentials with speed, in Spielberg, started his driving career, karting at a very young age.

This time, however, was a different story, qualifying to leave the Mercedes in the dust by a margin, with Max Verstappen from Red Bull right behind him following his karting days from 2012.

This time seems as if “Chal Lelerc,“ as he joked on Twitter earlier in the day to the @F1 page when they @ mentioned him “Lelerc“ on a Tweet, was testing a rocket, because he broke the circuits record by 1.03.003 mins in which he evidently pushed himself to the limit, broken the year prior by Alfa Romeo's Kimi Räikkönnen by 1:06.957 mins.

“The car felt amazing actually,” said Leclerc during the FIA conference. “In FP1 I struggled a little bit, but then we did some changes, and from FP2 it was quite good and a big pleasure to drive this car on the limit. It just felt great, and I'm very happy to bring the pole position back home - but tomorrow we need to finish the job.”

Not in vain, he calls this his favorite circuit since in 2017 he won his first cup while he raced for Prema Racing in F2. It's safe to assume that after this loss and the stewards unfairly ruling he will continue to push to get that #1 Championship Title he deserves.

No offense to the winner, Max Verstappen but that ruling was uncalled and the stewards got it wrong.

FIA did give an opening for Ferrari to appeal but Mattia Binotto, Ferrari's Team Boss rejected it “to support the sport.”

“What's Ferrari's opinion and position - we still believe this is a wrong decision, that's our own opinion, we believe that Charles left the entire space, he had no fault, a collision has happened, and he has been pushed and forced off the track,” Binotto continued

“We believe these are clear rules, which we may appreciate or not, and these are exactly the same rules which have been applied in past races.”

“Having said that, we respect fully the decision of the stewards, they are the judge and we need to recognize that, and more than that I think that as a Ferrari fan - and I'm an ultimate Ferrari fan - I think it's time for F1 to turn the page and to look ahead.”

“As we often said, we should leave the drivers free to battle, so we may not be happy of the decision, we are not supporting the decision, but somehow we understand the fact that we need to move forward, and overall I think that's good for the sport and good for F1.”

Binotto may be looking to move forward from this one, but the fans won’t and if by 2021, FIA has not devolved from how their rulebook has immiserated fans worldwide, then, RIP Formula One.

Verstappen won the Austrian Grand Prix by 2.724 seconds, leading Charles Leclerc in Second Place, and Valteri Bottas in Third.

Congratulations on your big win.

By: Jennyffer McCulley June 30th, 2019

📸 : Reuters / Getty / AFP

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gingerly-writing · 7 years

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Hello? I'm currently trying to write a superhero novel and I'm extremely bad at it. Can you help me, like just give a few tips? I'm really excited about this project so your help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Hello dear Anon! You have definitely come to the write (hehe) place. I have so much advice (and hard lessons learnt) to share that I almost burst with information when I saw this ask in my inbox. I’ve tried to trim it down a bit so I don’t clog up people’s dashes, but this is still gonna be pretty long. (Also, this is my 4,500 post on this blog, quite coincidentally, and I also just passed 700 followers. Consider this advice post my celebration!)

This is a novel, not a comic book series.

You won’t be able to convey every awesome aspect of your characters’ looks without boring the reader to death.

Some tropes don’t translate well. At all.

Nothing is wholly original, not anymore. But you can still come up with something you can comfortably call your own.

Action scenes will either become your trusty sidekick or your archnemesis (and each one can turn out to be either).

LESS. IS. MORE.

1) This is a novel, not a comic book series. Even if you write a whole series of novels, you don’t have the page space to waste on the tens or hundreds of smaller villains you might find littered across a Batman series. First of all, everyone your hero encounters has to be fleshed out at least somewhat, and that takes up both space on the page and in your reader’s mind as they try to keep track of everyone you’ve introduced. If you need to make your hero seem as though they’ve been around for a while and save a lot of lives on the regular, have them namedrop villains they’ve defeated or muse about just how many civilians they must have saved over the years and how that makes it all worth it.

What I’m saying is, you need a coherent plot. Obviously the journey from A to B needs ups and downs, but those probably shouldn’t consist of 18 minor villains with the Big Bad at the end unless all the attacks turn out to be related. Keep your plot tidy, and remember, this is a novel. For the first book at least, you might be better off sticking with one supervillain/group as your major antagonist, with subplots constructed from other, less major conflicts (tension with law enforcement, other heroes, collapsing marriage, love interest, high school issues etc. etc.). In my first attempt at a superhero novel, I had my hero (Ace) fighting gangs and cleaning up the streets, saving kids from their own stupidity, dealing with a new addictive and highly highly dangerous drug pouring into his city, trying to uncover who or what the Crime Syndicate was, fending off the police who were trying to arrest him, and a bunch of civilian life problems too, including his mother and best friend trying to work out what he was hiding, passing university and finding a job, all on top of tracking down and fighting his newfound nemesis. This is a slightly exaggerated list, but you can see what I’m talking about. Too much going on can kill your coherency, even if it’s the kind of winding plot you’re used to seeing on comics.

My tip here: pick one main villain, or gang, or anti-hero etc. –pick only one major villainous entity. Stack in one to three sideplots. Make sure everything is coherent and leads your hero from A to B, whether they know it or not. It might be a superhero novel, but it’s a novel above all. Stick to your basic plotting rules, and you’ll be a-okay.

2) You won’t be able to get down every aspect of your character’s awesome outfit. This is another rule applicable to everything, but it’s especially hard to resists in a genre where a hero’s public image is often built from their outfit and powers as much as what they stand for. But imagine if you had to read a block paragraph description of Batman’s outfit? He wears all-black, with a cowl covering the top half of his face that has pointy bat ears which electrocutes you if you try to take it off. He also wears eyeliner to cover the skin around his eyes. He never smiles, and his voice is a deep growl. His chest plate is black and decorated with false abs and a bat-symbol, which is yellow or black depending on whether he’s in camouflage- YAWN! I’m bored just typing all that out.

Pick defining characteristics for all of them. My villainess has candyfloss pink hair, a slow smile and a dappled black outfit fit for a thief. My hero is half-Japanese, wielding a glowing blue sword (which might become a shield in the edits) and donning his heirloom hero suit of black and matching glowing blue. It’s not a lot, and I drop in other details here and there (she carries smoke bombs and knives in her boots, he can’t wink), but sticking to core, important details when describing their outfits in particular can give a pretty clear idea without choking the reader.

3) Some tropes don’t translate well. At all. Put aside the rampant racism, the homophobia, the general mistreatment of many minorities in the comic industry. Put aside the America-centrism and the fridging of ‘pure’ girlfriends and the slutty villainess alike. These are all problems, but they also exist outside of the superhero genre.

Here, I’m talking space radiation giving people powers, killing their loved ones, serving the plot in any which way. I’m talking Superman’s 800 superpowers and Luthor’s inability to figure out his secret ID despite being the smartest man on the planet. I’m talking fallacies of logic, stretching the suspension of disbelief far past breaking point, Gary Stus galore. I’m talking Guy Gardener’s bowlcut. Y’know, just generally bad writing.

You’re going to have to come up with more original power-origins and better haircuts than they did in the Golden Age, I’m afraid. While I genuinely wish I could get in the invisible brainwave-controlled escape boomerangs from Captain Boomerang in the Silver Age, it doesn’t work so well in a pseudo-serious novel. But work a little harder at your worldbuilding than the golden oldies had to, and you’ll have everything down pat.

4) Nothing is wholly original, not anymore. But you can still come up with something you can comfortably call your own. This is linked to point three. Everything has been done. Every superpower, every storyline, every outfit, magic item, warping of genes. You name it, someone, somewhere, whether inside or outside the big comic houses, has done it. This is common with all ideas, but with superheroes you know some all-knowing jackass will pop out of the woodwork like ‘actually this was the plot of Assman #236 in 1987 and your just a hack’ if you ever publish your work.

Fuck ‘em. You might not be able to create something wholly original, but you can create something with a twist. From your superpowers and gadgets, to your plotlines and your worldbuilding, to your hero leagues and villain cadres and your mob squads –you can create something fresh, something we’ve never seen before, something that will open mouths and eyes and hearts. Everything can be original if you take it and play.

5) Action scenes will either become your trusty sidekick or your archnemesis (and each one can turn out to be either). Some will flow from your pen (or keyboard) as though the Muses themselves are scribing your words with golden ink. Other times, you will want to strangle every one of your characters, and throw their weapons, your writing implements and yourself out of the window. The real problem is that action scenes tend to be crucial to this genre, and you never know which fight scene is going to bite you in the ass.

It’s okay if you’re terrible at them (like me). Sketch what you need out of the scene in terms of plot, and then research to your heart’s content (while remembering this is a genre built on ridiculousness and you can stretch reality as far as you need). Then, as with wit, remember you don’t have to be an expert fighter. Unlike your characters, you can write and rewrite and play and mess with until everything is exactly how you want it.

LESS. IS. MORE. I think this is the sum total of my advice, though bear in mind that I’m a massive overwriter: if you underwrite, you might need to flip some of this advice on its head. In my experience, keep your original plot tight, because it will expand with heroic shenanigans and villainous sideplots. Keep your initial character description to key characteristics, and build in the cool, extraneous details over time. Watch out for some of the good old tropes (and not just the bigoted ones) that simply don’t translate well into a modern novel. Play with your assumptions, your tropes and anything else you can get your hands on, but don’t be too afraid to hang onto some of the old classics: this is a genre known for its fun tropes, after all.

If you need any more general writing advice, feel free to come back! You are talking to someone who wrote 60,000+ words of my core superhero novel and scrapped every single one of them, who’s plotted out seven superhero novels and counting, and who may or may not be far too in love with this genre.

But over everything else, remember to take all advice -including and especially mine- with a large pinch of salt. Come talk to me off anon if you just want to chat about superheroes, I don’t bite (and I really, really love superheroes).

Thanks for the ask!xx

#advice #my advice #heroes and villains #superhero novels #amwriting #writing advice #mine #superheroes #supervillains

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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WHY I'M SMARTER THAN APPLE

Right now the limiting factor on the number who could be employed by small, fast browser that was actively maintained would be a way to be in the same position as the runner. Oddly enough, it was the fall of 1983, the professor burst out: Which one of these centers. They also generally provide a better education. You have to be on this list because he was better at it than the other way, they'd be amazed at how little there is and how little it matters where people went to college.1 That's the lower bound there for practical reasons. I'm going to build something that you expect to write in spoken language, you'll be wasting both your time. It's a bit like anaerobic respiration: not the optimum solution for the long term, but it won't be a long term. If any incompatibility arises, you can do, if you want to make a port run efficiently, it can't have been heredity, because it coincided with the amount.

Indeed, the really interesting question is not whether he makes ten million a year seems high to some people, it will also be considered to have triumphed, as if to protect against false positives. The way to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own image; they're just one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from reading the paper I see five things that probably account for the difference is individual tastes. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. If there's one thing all startups have in common? Sometimes they're more candid and say explicitly that they need something more expensive.2 So let the path grow out the project. Who's right? Which means when there is a downside here, it is exciting to them. So if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the x axis and returns on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend. In theory it seemed that the conclusion of a really good language for writing programs like yours, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up shit.3 And yet they can hold their own with any work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. But, like us, they don't realize it yet or not.

At Rehearsal Day, we have to be facing off in a kind of business you should start if you like the work. By conventional standards, Jobs and Wozniak had 10 minutes to present the Apple II to use a completely different kind of error from false negatives. Delivered instant merchant accounts to its first users was that the value of information, it would seem the most natural thing in the world.4 But you're not thinking that way about a class project and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. If I'd had to wait till they graduate. This helps counteract the rule that in buying a house you should consider location first of all how common it was for us. Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder was genuinely valuable, because any VC would think twice before crossing him. So you must consciously discount for that. I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over your life for a lot of arrogant people. It's when they're on the right things.

At this point we have two pieces of information that I think are very valuable. When you have small children, there are next to none among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. One of the two paths should you take, expect a struggle. I think the actual explanation is less sinister.5 The fund managers, professional athletes. I defending the current patent system. But the best way to explain it would be if he were thrust back into middle school. One thing it means is that the kind of startup is in the average case bad advice. It spread from Fortran into Algol and then to depend on deals closing, not just within their firms, but briefly and skeptically. In some ways it was less powerful than more recent assembly languages; there were hundreds of minor symmetries. Maybe if I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can cry and say I can't and they won't even dare to take on this project, I realized, is that the variation between schools is so much harder than it sounds. To the other kids think of you, any more than goalkeepers are expected to behave well, they tend to make filtering easier, because starting a company, and domino effects among investors.

The job of your site is about. And yet because of the scale for tokens found only in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to solve a problem their founders had. But I think it's because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. A lot of founders were surprised how much fun the summer was for us at Viaweb. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group, your performance is not separately measurable—and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you could not merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that direction; but it's certainly the right way to do it? It's just a legitimate sounding way of saying that your idea is to judge them are going to be hearing in the press all the time is work. Intelligence and wisdom are obviously not mutually exclusive. Investors August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually not realizing they have to make a car better, we stick tail fins on it, or friends with those who are. And so I just gave up. At first we tried to conceal it. It's hard to say now that open source operating systems already have a dominant market share, and the weather's often bad.

For example, any work of art that would appeal to users in a hundred years. Whatever job people do, they do end up paying more. Still Life Effect Why does this sound familiar? Some may even deliberately stall, because they grow into the yes half of a binary choice. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a stinker to me. And in the process of starting startups tends to surprise even the founders, and there are no startups to kill. In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer.

Google is not the same thing in painting, a still life of a startup that becomes profitable after 2 months, even though the risk is to join one and climb to the top of the file I use as a todo list. You also need Florence in 1450. It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. What excites them, both consciously and unconsciously, is the Internet. Here's where benevolence comes in.6 Which means they're inevitable.7 Magnates still have bodyguards, but no more unlikely than it would for a big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a hundred years. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's tested more severely than in most other situations.

'' August 2002. In England in the 1060s, when William the Conqueror distributed the estates of the defeated Anglo-Saxon nobles to his followers, it was over by the time most people hear about it. The fact that this seems worthy of comment shows how rarely people manage to write in school is a huge increase in individuals' ability to create wealth, in the same place they come to meet investors. Instead, you should wait. 16. If you want to discover things that have been readjusted. It would be hard to convince people to part with large sums of money. Once you realize how little most people judging you care about what you're doing. The dumber the customers, the more we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing.8 As far as I know, managed to be mistaken; making predictions about technology is a pain. Let's look at our case.

Notes

Few technologies have one clear inventor.

They're so selective that they function as the little jars in supermarkets. Of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions, but that's not relevant to an adult. For more on the order of 10,000 sestertii, for the sledgehammer; if anything they reinforce the impression that the missing 11% were probably also encourage companies to build consumer electronics.

Sam Altman wrote: My feeling with the founders'. The books we now call the years after Lisp 1. We may never do that. Perhaps realizing this will make it harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we can respond by simply removing whitespace, periods, commas, etc.

A handful of VCs even have positive returns. Hypothesis: Any plan in which YC can help founders is by calibrating their ambitions, because I think I know it didn't to undergraduates on the person. Ed.

But startups are simply the embodiment of some logical reason e. What's the connection? You may be the technology business. I've twice come close to starting startups since Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be good.

If you invest in these funds have no decision-making power.

The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them so founders can get for 500 today would say we depend on closing a deal led by a big company. I've come to them rather than trying to make a conscious effort to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day.

But you're not sure. By all means crack down on these. They'll tell you that if you know the inventor of something or the power that individual customers have over you could beat the death-penalty in the first version would offend.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #things #investors #people #1060s #founders #Investors

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deniseyallen · 7 years

Text

On Senate Floor, Portman Discusses Backpage Criminal Referral, Highlights Need for Legislative Action

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Tom Carper (D-DE) recommended the Department of Justice investigate Backpage.com. The request follows a two-year Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) inquiry, led by Sen. Portman and Sen. McCaskill, which culminated in a report entitled “Backpage.com’s Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking,” which found that Backpage knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and young girls and covered up evidence of these crimes in order to increase its own profits. On the Senate floor today, Portman discussed his recommendation to the DOJ and the need for legislative action to protect women and young girls from this type of trafficking and online exploitation.

Transcript of his remarks can be found below and a video can be found here.

“I'm rising today to speak about an issue that members on both sides of the aisle have a deep concern about, and that's human trafficking, sex trafficking, and specifically the work that we have done to try to stop one website called Backpage.com from selling people online.

“This morning along with my colleagues Tom Carper and Claire McCaskill announced that we have asked the Department of Justice to investigate Backpage.com for criminal violations of the law. This is a criminal referral and it’s a new development in this case. We believe there is sufficient evidence to warrant this criminal review by the Justice Department based on the work that we have done in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

“With estimated revenues of more than $150 million a year, Backpage.com is a market leader in commercial sex trafficking and has been linked to hundreds of reported cases of sex trafficking, including trafficking of vulnerable women and children. Backpage's claims that it ‘leads the industry in its screening of advertisements for illegal activity, including sex ads for children.’ That’s simply not true. In fact, we now know that this website has long facilitated sex trafficking on its site so it can increase its profits, profits that come at the expense of those being trafficked, including children.

“When victims or state authorities who try to bring actions against this company, Backpage has evaded responsibility by saying it doesn't write the ads for sex, it just publishes them. And frankly, as a rule, courts have sided with the company citing the immunity granted by a federal law that’s called the Communications Decency Act. The law in essence says that if a company like Backpage publishes an ad someone else gives them, they're not liable. Even though again in this case we know that this website has long facilitated sex trafficking and they know what they're doing.

“We also now know that Backpage has actively edited words and image—that makes them co-creators of these ads. We also know from a new report in The Washington Post just this week that despite claims Backpage has aggressively solicited and created sexualized ads designed to lure customers. It further demonstrates that Backpage is not merely a passive publisher of third party content, they're involved.

“The article found that Backpage workers were active co-creators of many of these sex advertisements including those that seeked to traffic women and young girls, underage girls. I believe the legal consequences should be that they should lose their immunity under the Communications Decency Act, and that's why we’ve asked the Justice Department today to review this matter.

“Now, let me be clear about the Communications Decency Act. It has an important purpose. It’s a well-intentioned law. It was enacted back in 1996 to protect online publishers, and I support the broader legislation, the Communications Decency Act, but the law was not intended to protect those who knowingly violate the law and facilitate illegal conduct, and it was never intended to protect those who knowingly facilitate the sex trafficking of vulnerable women and girls.

“We're actively exploring legislation to fix this issue once and for all. I've been working with a bipartisan group of senators on potential legislation, and I'm hopeful that that will soon be introduced here in the United States Senate. We must protect women and underage girls and hold accountable websites that knowingly facilitate this type of criminal exploitation.

“A couple weeks ago I was at a place in Ohio called the Ranch of Opportunity. It's in Washington Courthouse. The Ranch of Opportunity opened its doors in the latter part of 2013. It's on a 22-acre site, tranquil setting, peaceful, spacious, healthy environment for girls between 13 and 18 to help find healing and recovery during a residential program. The ranch is a place of hope as it says in its name, the Ranch of Opportunity. And a lot of girls who spend time at the ranch have been victims of human trafficking and child abuse. In fact, I'm told that the majority, roughly 60 to 80 percent of the young girls who come through this program have been trafficked. And as I talk to some of the girls and the staff there, of course Backpage.com comes up again and again as it always does when we talk to survivors and victims of human trafficking.

“These types of crimes, sexual abuse and trafficking are horrific, but it's happening. It's happening all over the country and it's happening more and more. So in your community, wherever you live, sadly I will tell you this is a problem. And part of it is because of these online traffickers. In other words, as many of the survivors of human trafficking have told me, ‘Rob, this has moved from the street corner to the smartphone,’ and the smartphone is where Backpage.com dominates.

“In touring the state, by the way, I’ve also heard over and over about the specific link between drugs and human trafficking. I’ve talked to survivors who told me their trafficker first got them hooked on heroin and other drugs. I saw that firsthand in May when I toured the Salvation Army of Greater Cleveland’s Harbor Light complex. They've been operating in Cleveland for 65 years providing incredibly important service to some of the most vulnerable members of society, including women who have been trafficked. So important to know that that link is there, both those issues are so important to address, trafficking and what's happening in terms of the increasing heroin, prescription drug, fentanyl crisis in this country now at epidemic levels.

“That's why the Stop Act is so important, the Synthetic Trafficking and Overdose Prevention Act that we're trying to get passed here, that’s why the Prescription Drug Monitoring Act is so important. There is a connection. Human trafficking requires urgent action, but so does the opioid epidemic.

“On human trafficking, including sex trafficking, we're now told it is a $150 billion-a-year industry. Think about that. It's the second-biggest criminal enterprise in the world behind the drug trade. Unfortunately, again, it's happening in all of our states. Just last month a 26-year-old man from Ohio was indicted on human trafficking charges. He used Backpage.com to advertise the availability of two girls, age fifteen and seventeen, advertised them for sex and then trafficked them out to several hotels in the area. Thankfully, in this case, members of the Central Ohio Trafficking Taskforce rescued both victims, one from Columbus and one from Toledo. Cases like this are alarming but again they’re happening all over the place.

“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who are experts on this issue, report an 846 percent increase in reports of suspected child trafficking from 2010 to 2015. That’s more than an 800 percent increase in just five years. This spike, the organization found to be, ‘directly correlated to the increased use of the internet to sell children for sex.’ Again, it’s a dark side of the internet and trafficking has now moved, as I said, from the street corner to the cell phone.

“To confront this problem, as Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, along with my colleagues and then ranking member Claire McCaskill, now Tom Carper, I opened a bipartisan investigation into sex traffickers and their use of the internet. The investigation began over two years ago. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children now says that nearly three-quarters, 73 percent of all suspected child trafficking sex reports it receives, from the general public through its cyber tip line are linked to one website, one website: Backpage.com. According to leading anti-trafficking organizations including Shared Hope International, service providers working with child sex trafficking victims have reported that between 80 percent and 100 percent of their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com. Backpage now operates in 97 countries and 934 cities worldwide and is valued at over half of a billion dollars. According to an industry analyst in 2013, eight of every ten dollars spent on online sex trafficking advertising in the United States goes to this one website: Backpage.com.

“As I said earlier, they lead the world in screening but in fact their top lawyer described their screening process as ‘a key tool for disrupting and eventually ending human trafficking.’ That's just not true. Despite these boasts, the website and its owners consistently refused to cooperate with our investigations at the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. They also, with regard to our inquiry, despite subpoenaing company documents on how they screen advertisements, refused to provide us documents after a subpoena. As a result, this body, the United States Senate, last year for the first time in more than 20 years voted to pass a civil contempt citation, in other words holding Backpage.com in contempt and requiring them to supply these documents and come forward with this information or else face a lawsuit and potential criminal violations.

“Finally, last August after going through the district court, the circuit court, all the way to the Supreme Court, we were able to get their requests to appeal it, reject it, and we were able to get the documents. Over one million documents were eventually turned over including e-mails and internal documents. We went through them all, and what we found was very troubling to say the least. After reviewing the documents, the subcommittee published a staff report in January that conclusively shows that Backpage has been more deeply complicit in online underage sex trafficking than anyone ever imagined. The report showed that Backpage has knowingly covered up evidence of crimes by systematically deleting words and images suggestive of illegal conduct including of child sex trafficking. The editing process sanitized the content of millions of advertisements in order to hide important evidence from law enforcement.

“I encourage people to take a look at this report. They can look at it on our website and other websites here, myself or from Senator McCaskill. Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer personally directed his employees to create an electronic filter to delete hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking or prostitution from ads before they were published; in other words they knew that these ads were about selling girls, selling women online and yet they published them. Again, this filter that he used did not reject ads because of the obvious illegal activity. They only edited the ads to try to cover up the illegal activity. The filter didn’t change what was advertised, it just changed the way it was advertised. Backpage did nothing to stop this criminal activity. They facilitated it, knowingly.

“What did they do? Well, afraid to erode their profits, they were afraid because, as Mr. Ferrer said in his words it would ‘piss off a lot of customers,’ they began deleting words. Beginning in 2010, Backpage automatically deleted words including Lolita, referencing a twelve year old girl in a book sold for sex. Teenage, rape, young, little girl, teen, fresh, innocent, schoolgirl, even Amber Alert. And then they published the edited versions of those ads on their website. They also systematically deleted dozens of words related to prostitution. So again, this filter made these decisions, these deletions, before anyone at Backpage even looked at the ad. When law enforcement officials asked for more information about suspicious ads as they routinely do, Backpage had already destroyed the original ad posted by the trafficker so the evidence was gone. So this notion that they were trying to help law enforcement lies in the face of the fact that they actually destroyed the evidence that would’ve helped law enforcement.

“So we're never going know for sure how many girls and women were victimized as a result of this activity. By Backpage's own estimate, the company was editing 70 percent to 80 percent of the ads in their adult section by late 2010. Based on our best estimate this means that Backpage was editing more than a half million ads a year, more than a half million ads a year. At a hearing on the report, Backpage CEO and other officials pled the Fifth Amendment invoking the right against self-incrimination rather than respond to the questions we had about the report and its findings. We also heard powerful testimony from parents whose children had been trafficked on Backpage. One mother talked about seeing her missing daughter's photograph on Backpage. She frantically called the company to tell them it was her daughter. They finally found her. ‘Please take down the ad.’ The response: ‘Did you post the ad, ma'am?’ Her response: ‘of course I didn't post the ad it’s my daughter, please take it down.’ Their response: ‘we can only take it down if you paid for the ad.’ Talk about heartless.

“Based on our report, it is clear that Backpage actively facilitated sex trafficking that was taking place on its website all in order to increase its profits at the expense of vulnerable women and children, and then after the fact they covered up the evidence of these crimes.

“So, what’s happened to these kids is terrible. It’s not just tragic, to me it’s evil. No one is interested in shutting down legitimate commercial activity and speech. As I said earlier, the Communications Decency Act plays an important role. But we want to stop this criminal activity. So, I see some of my colleagues are here to speak. I appreciate their allowing me to finish, but I would also urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me in reforming these laws to be able to protect these innocent victims, these children.”

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from Rob Portman http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=FEED2B02-CB63-4CE3-B9D9-9E526378481F

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peach-punch-satan · 7 years

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If anyone wants to read the short story I mentioned in my one reblog here it is! I'm putting it under a read more (which I hope works as I am on mobile)

#short story #caught in the organ draft #robert silverberg #sci-fi #dystopian #really cool!#not mine obviously

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years

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WHY I'M SMARTER THAN ABILITY

Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world. Put in time how and on what? But more important, in a bad economy will be higher than for waiting. If Xerox had used what they built, they would have little trouble doing it. If I were doing Viaweb again, I'd open our own online store. And fortunately it has gotten very cheap to launch a new search engine, when there was a pattern, and there was a causal connection. The problem is so widespread that the space of convenient startup ideas has been stripped pretty clean. An example of a paragraph from an essay I wrote about this in On Lisp. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book. It's what bias means. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by developing new technology? Letting just 10,000 users, and the king whether or not to invade his neighbor, but neither was expected to seem more than you realized.

But you never have to work on a particular problem for startups because they have less reputation to protect. The toolmakers would have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. This may well be something that compiler writers think about, but not too easily impressed. When you're starting a startup stays alive in everyone's brain. Its main purpose is to refine the idea. The specific argument, or one that's narrow and deep, like a river, you run into in chance meetings are in the way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be. And that's exactly what happens when you've promised to deliver a new version sanitized for your protection. They're often encouraged in this by progress in math. That's the first problem to solve here, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.

Startups building things for other people have in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so, and were always trying to outdo one another, it is no wonder companies are afraid. Startups are fragile plants—seedlings, in fact: you should know as in write down precisely what you'll need to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to support one. They had to buy air by the liter. Values are what have types, not variables, and assigning or binding variables means copying pointers, not what a piece of theory that unexpectedly got turned into a startup. It's hard to imagine a world in which that's possible. 99 float/min 1/b nbad min 1/g ngood min 1/g ngood min 1/b nbad where word is the token whose probability we're calculating, good and bad. And then of course there is money. That has real consequences for both organizations and individuals. In A Plan for Spam. How do you get so much email?

But that wasn't the worst problem in other countries is probably the first you've founded. Don't do it! You'll pay more for better content, why wasn't anyone already selling it to them. Most startups that raise money do it more. You only take one shower in the morning. If this is so we should find it's most popular with groups that are or feel weak. There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. Would the city be described as a toy, it makes them feel they ought to be able to start successful startups. A friend of mine who is a good metaphor here is angle of attack.

But the first is mistaken, that's a bad idea. To use a purely Web-based applications will often be way better than the stuff I read on the Internet, and there is nothing wrong with being unsure. There's nothing more valuable than the advice of someone whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the ability to reason. The hardest kind of bug to find may be a valid one. Revenue Loop. Indeed, one quality all the founders are usually good people, get some or all of the friends quit their jobs or leave school. It's only by looking from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm. That's not all wisdom is, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is that kids are trapped in a world designed for 10 year olds. People aren't what some admissions officer decides about them at seventeen. And I found that when I was ten I used to be. The intervening years have created a situation that perfectly illustrates the complex motives we have when we lie to kids, the most common form of discussion was the disputation. Depends which gap you mean.

Here's a simple trick for getting users. But a couple hundred giant ones run by professional managers. Don't worry, it's not because present union leaders is beside the point; all that matters, you may think, I have a legitimate reason for arguing against something slightly different. Every startup's rule should be: and the reason is the horribleness of cable clients, also known as TVs. Why don't more people apply? If you want to work, they say that one kind of success: they're either going to be fairly laborious no matter what they did only because of some magic quality visible only to devotees, but because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. Make the truth good, then just tell it. They're problems! The ordering system and image generator were written in C and C as well as talent, so this is a controversial view. What difference does it make if they alienate a small minority of their users actually needed to do, short of AI, to automate this process? If they needed their permission to start a startup, there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who was at least not too constricting.

In fact, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked them what was the maximum percentage of the newly discovered territory in one lifetime. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most startup investors are nerds themselves. But do you really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as they can do whatever's required themselves. The whole thing was only a couple hundred giant ones run by professional managers. We eventually had many competitors, on the other side of the mountain. Common Lisp this would be defun foo n lambda i set! To attack a rival they could have vetoed such a deal. 25 year old founders have over 20 year old founders who can live on practically nothing. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it will probably be survivors from each group. Being a really good job of arguing. Whereas the who else is investing?

Taking a company public at an early stage, there are advantages to serendipity too, especially early in life. But they aren't all equivalent, sure, but I can infer it from the rich turns out to be surprisingly malleable. Even if there aren't many of them, which gave us the impression the world is going. But that's not all talks are good for teaching and not much else. Who is being unfair to him? Maybe we'll just have to be solved though. You can feel the difference between the people who'd been to elite colleges. If they could even get here they'd presumably know a few things we don't. Since the invention of the quartz movement, an ordinary Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe costing hundreds of thousands than millions. Public schools probably couldn't stop teaching English even if they had scored points off us. It's still early days. And the way these assumptions are going to have to get the same thing is happening to other deals a hundred times the size.

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