#connor somerville

[andromeddog]

a few things

#my art #oc stuff #anselm lustig #connor somerville #ww1 #ww1 art #historical oc #i never know how to tag this shit #chose these two specifically bc they blow each other up in the end teehee #at least i got to draw a haversack <3

[hallmark-movie-fanatics]

New to Hallmark Movies Now - November

November 

Redemption in Cherry Springs (2021)  Starring Rochelle Aytes, Keith D. Robinson, and Frankie Faison.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries 

Murder, She Baked: A Deadly Recipe (2016)   Starring Alison Sweeney, Cameron Mathison, Barbara Niven, Lisa Durupt, Gabriel Hogan, Juliana Wimbles, Toby Levins, Kristen Robek, and Viv Leacock.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / Movie 4 of 5 

Garage Sale Mysteries: Murder in D Minor (2018)  Starring Lori Loughlin, Sarah Strane, Steve Bacio, Eva Bourne, Connor Stanhope, Kevin O’Grady, and Matthew Harrison.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / movie 15 of 16 

Garage Sale Mysteries: Search & Seized (2019)  Starring Lori Loughlin, Sarah Strane, Steve Bacio, Eva Bourne, Connor Stanhope, Kevin O’Grady, Matthew Harrison, Johannah Newmarch, and April Telek.  Movie 16 of 16 

Baby, It’s Cold Outside (2021)  Starring Jocelyn Hudon and Steve Lund.  Hallmark Channel 

Mystery 101: An Education in Murder (2020)  Starring Jill Wagner, Kristoffer Polaha, Robin Thomas, Preston Vanderslice, Caitlin Stryker, David Jame Lewis, and Steve Bacic.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / Movie 5 of 7 

Just in Time for Christmas (2015)  Starring Eloise Mumford, Michael Stahl-David, Christopher Llyod, and William Shatner.  Hallmark Channel / Hallmark Hall of Fame / Countdown to Christmas 

The Christmas Secret (2014)  Starring Bethany Joy Lenz, John Reardon, and Susan Hogan.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / The Most Wonderful Movies of Christmas 

Paper Angels (2014)  Starring Josie Gresiuk and Matthew Settle.  UPtv 

A Holiday in Harlem (2021)  Starring Olivia Washington, Tina Lifford, and Will Adams.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

November 2 

Roux the Day: A Gourmet Detective Mystery (2020)  Starring Dylan Neal, Brooke V+Burns, Matthew Kevin Anderson, and Bruce Boxleitner.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / Movie 5 of 5 

Our Christmas Love Song (2019)  Starring Alicia Witt and Brendan Hines.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / Miracles of Christmas 

The Perfect Catch (2017)  Starring Nikki DeLoach and Andrew Walker.  Hallmark Channel / Spring Fling 

Christmas Encore (2017)  Starring Maggie Lawson and Brennan Elliott.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / The Most Wonderful Movies of Christmas 

Trans-Siberian Orchestra Presents: the Ghosts of Christmas Eve The Best of Two and More 

A Cookie Cutter Christmas (2014)  Starring Erin Krakow, Miranda Frigon, David Haydn-Jones, Jill Morrison, and Lara Soltis.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

November 3 

Sister Swap: A Hometown Holiday (2021)  Starring Kimberly Williams-Paisly, Ashley Williams, Mark Deklin, Keith D. Robinson, and Kevin Nealon.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas / Movie 1 of 2 

Christmas in Dollywood (2019)  Starring Danica McKellar, Niall Matter, Krystal Lowe, and Dolly Parton.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: A Very Foul Play (2019)  Starring Candace Cameron Bure, Niall Matter, Lexa Doig, Marilu Henner, Peter Benson, Miranda Frigon, Dylan Sloane, Ellie Harvie, Catherine Lough Haggquist, Kristen Robek, and Matthew James Dowden.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / Movie 12 of 18 

Once Upon a Christmas Miracle (2018)  Starring Aimee Teegarden, Brett Dalton, Lolita Davidovich, and Steve Basic.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries / Miracles of Christmas 

A Gingerbread Romance (2018)  Starring Tia Mowry-Housley-Hardrict, Duane Henry, and Giles Panton.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

Three Weeks, Three Kids (2011)  Starring Anna Chlumsky and Warren Christie.  Hallmark Channel 

Holiday Engagement (2011)  Starring Bonnie Somerville, Jordan Bridges, Shelley Long, Sam McMurray, and Haylie Duff.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

Love, Of Course (2018)  Starring Kelly Rutherford and Cameron Mathison.  Hallmark Channel / Fall Harvest 

November 10 

Christmas in Harmony (2021)  Starring Ashleigh Muray, Luke James, and Loretta Devine.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

November 17 

Under the Autumn Moon (2018)  Starring Lindy B both and We Brown.  Hallmark Channel / Fall Harvest 

A Christmas Melody (2015)  Starring Lacey Chabert, Brennan Elliott, Kathy Najimy, and Mariah Carey.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

The Christmas House 2: Deck Those Halls (2021)  Starring Robert Buckley, Ana Ayora, Jonathan Bennett, Brad Harder, Treat Williams, Sharon Lawrence, Michelle Harrison, Matthew James Dowden, and Teryl Rothery.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

#new on hmn #hallmark movies #hallmark movies now #hallmark channel #hallmark movies & mysteries #uptv #movies & mistletoe

[sunaleisocial]

NASA Announces Semifinalists of Power to Explore Challenge - NASA

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/nasa-announces-semifinalists-of-power-to-explore-challenge-nasa/

NASA Announces Semifinalists of Power to Explore Challenge - NASA

NASA selected 45 student essays as semifinalists of its 2024 Power to Explore Challenge, a national competition for K-12 students featuring the enabling power of radioisotopes.

NASA selected 45 student essays as semifinalists of its 2024 Power to Explore Challenge, a national competition for K-12 students featuring the enabling power of radioisotopes. Contestants were challenged to explore how NASA has powered some of its most famous science missions and to dream up how their personal “superpower” would energize their success on their own radioisotope-powered science mission. The competition asked students to learn about Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS), “nuclear batteries” that NASA uses to explore the harshest, darkest, and dustiest parts of our solar system. RPS have enabled many spacecraft to conduct otherwise impossible missions in total darkness.

In 250 words or less, students wrote about a mission of their own that would use these space power systems and described their own power to achieve their mission goals. The challenges of space exploration without solar power are especially relevant ahead of the United States’ upcoming April 8 total solar eclipse, which will offer a momentary glimpse into what life would be like without sunlight.

Carl Sandifer

Program Manager, Radioisotope Power Systems Program.

The Power to Explore Challenge offered students the opportunity to learn more about these reliable power systems, celebrate their own strengths, and interact with NASA’s diverse workforce. This year’s contest received 1,787 submitted entries from 48 states and Puerto Rico.

“It has been so exciting to see how many students across the nation have submitted essays to NASA’s Power to Explore Challenge,” said Carl Sandifer, program manager of the Radioisotope Power Systems Program at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “We have been thrilled to read their creative RPS-powered mission concepts and have been inspired learning about their many ‘superpowers’ that make them the bright future of NASA – the Artemis Generation.”

Entries were split into three categories: grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. Every student who submitted an entry received a digital certificate, and over 4,094 participants who signed up received an invitation to the Power Up virtual event. With NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate Nicola Fox, NASA’s Radioisotope Power Systems Program Manager Carl Sandifer, and Kim Rink of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in

Southern California, students learned about what powers the NASA workforce to dream big and work together to explore.

Fifteen national semifinalists in each grade category (45 semifinalists total) have been selected. These participants also will receive a NASA RPS prize pack. Finalists for this challenge will be announced on April 8 in celebration of the total solar eclipse.

Maryam Asif, Sarasota, FL

Thashvi Balaji, Riverview, FL

Yavuz Bastug, Peckville, PA

Claire Bennett, La Grange, NC

Ada Brolan, Somerville, MA

Joseph Brown, Huntsville, AL

Ashwin Cohen, Washington, D.C.

Adara George, Lithia, FL

Katerine Leon, Long Beach, CA

Rainie Lin, Lexington, KY

Connor Personette, Lakeland, FL

Yash Rajan, Issaquah, WA

Camila Rymzo, Belmont, MA

Arslan Soner, Columbia, SC

Zachary Tolchin, Guilford, CT

Nithilam Arivuchelvan, Short Hills, NJ

Nandini Bandyopadhyay, Short Hills, NJ

Cooper Basi, Rocklin, CA

Joshua Cheng, Rockville, MD

Kaitlyn Chu, Mercer Island, WA

Mayson Howell, Troy, MO

Dhiraj Javvadi, Louisville, KY

Aadya Karthik, Redmond, WA

Subham Maiti, Bloomington, MN

Meadow McCarthy, Corvallis, OR

Elianna Muthersbaugh, Bluffton, SC

Archer Prentice, Koloa, HI

Andrew Tavares, Bridgewater, MA

Sara Wang, Henderson, NV

Anna Yang, Austin, TX

Sabrina Affany, Fresno, CA

Alejandro Aguirre, Mission Viejo, CA

Sai Meghana Chakka, Charlotte, NC

Khushi Jain, San Jose, CA

Aiden Johnson, Virginia Beach, VA

Robert Kreidler, Cincinnati, OH

Zoie Lawson, Tigard, OR

Thomas Liu, Ridgewood, NJ

Madeline Male, Fairway, KS

Dang Khoi Pham, Westminster, CA

Sofia Anna Reed-Gomes, Coral Gables, FL

Ava Schmidt, Leavenworth, WA

Madden Smith, Loveland, OH

Kailey Thomas, Las Vegas, NV

Warren Volles, Lyme, CT

The challenge is funded by the Radioisotope Power Systems Program Office in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and administered by Future Engineers under the NASA Open Innovation Services 2 contract. This contract is managed by the NASA Tournament Lab, a part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

Kristin Jansen NASA’s Glenn Research Center

[qqueenofhades]

Starlight & Strange Magic, Chapter 18: In Which Everyone Would Like To Know How This Happened

Rating: M Summary:  Lucy Preston, a young American woman, arrives in England in 1887 to teach history at Somerville College, Oxford. London is the capital of the steam and aether and automatonic world, and new innovations are appearing every day. When she meets a mysterious, dangerous mercenary and underworld kingpin, Garcia Flynn, her life takes a turn for the decidedly too interesting. But Lucy has plenty of secrets of her own – not least that she’s from nowhere or nowhen nearby – and she is more than up for the challenge. Available: AO3 Previous: In Which It Snows In St. Petersburg

To say the least, there is not a lot that can prepare you for the sight of your best friend literally falling out of the blue, a hundred and thirty years and a parallel dimension away from where you left him, and his landing spot being a back alley in Steampunk St. Petersburg just yards from you and your – well, Lucy has given up on any easily definable term for Flynn, so never mind that. She remains kneeling next to Rufus, her mouth still open but no sound coming out, as he likewise tries to regather enough wind to speak. He lifts his head an inch, then gives up, falling back into the snow, and she briefly fears that he’s dead. “Rufus?” she says again. “Rufus?”

“Nnnrgh.” Rufus seems to be signaling that he in fact still operational, but it’s going to take a long time to get everything back online, and she shouldn’t panic in the interim. At least he can apparently tell that he ended up in the right place, so he takes several well-deserved moments to remain exactly where he goddamn is. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Lucy repeats. It’s not really worth asking him the obvious question at this point, but she slides a hand under his head. “Can you stand up?”

Rufus tries, legs twitching, but to no result. For his part, Flynn – after an understandable moment of total shock – has realized that Lucy knows the magical flying moron, and strides down the alley, boots crunching, to tower over him. “Who the hell is this? What just happened?”

“This is my – this is Rufus.” Lucy waves at him to back off with the looming, as Rufus has clearly had the hell of a day already and she doesn’t want his first impression of Westworld to be an upside-down, bad-tempered Flynn. “I have no idea what happened, but he – he may be hurt.”

Flynn raises an eyebrow, as if to say that if anyone wasn’t hurt after that swan dive from the sky, he would be very surprised. He considers Rufus balefully, as if to make sure he isn’t a cleverly disguised cruise missile (or whatever this world’s equivalent would be) and then realizes, as Lucy does, that this has put a crimp in the plan of packing her aboard the nearest airship back to England. She isn’t sure if that’s a good thing or not, but Rufus is here, needs help, and obviously has a whale of a tale as to how he is. And with Jiya supposedly held captive by Rittenhouse, that means all three of the team may be here, and while Lucy would of course gratefully welcome the presence of her friends again at long last, there is a fairly obvious logistical snafu. The Lifeboat, hidden back in New York, is only configured to take one of them home. And while further individual rocket-ship rides might not be totally out of the question, it is a stretch to expect to be normal after one of those, let alone survive two.

One problem at a time. Lucy pushes that out of her head, and turns to Flynn. “Can you – can you help me with him? We’ll have to go back to the hideout.”

Flynn considers, then shrugs. He leans down, hauls Rufus upright none too gently, and slings him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, as Rufus groans feebly but can’t really object to being tossed like a sack of beans. Lucy gives Flynn a be careful look, and goes to ensure that they can get out ahead of what must be a horde of incoming spectators. People must have seen that across St. Petersburg, and if the story spreads, that could also cause difficulties. It would be better to be away from here post-haste.

With Flynn lugging Rufus, Lucy wends her way back through the narrow alleys and stone quays that line the canal; the Neva is frozen solid, and won’t break up until March or April of next year, so the wintertime commerce is starting to set up camp on the river. At the moment, most of them are heading toward the site of the impact, speculating worriedly on what it could be, so Lucy and Flynn have to be careful about staying out of sight. They finally clamber over a low wall and hurry toward the warehouse, check once more that they haven’t been followed, and push through the door, as Lucy shuts and bars it behind them.

Flynn’s gang, who were expecting the boss back but not Lucy, jump to their feet in confusion, which is doubled at the sight of a semi-conscious man slung over his shoulder. The Sokolovs hurry to get some sacks to set Rufus down on, and as he recovers more of his battered higher faculties, Lucy can see him wondering just what kind of crowd she is running with these days. It’s finally Shitmouth who says, “Who’s the Negro, then?”

“Friend of hers.” Flynn glances at Lucy, with a hard-to-read expression. “At least, I take it from how she greeted him. If you recently heard a very large bang and saw a flash, that was him.”

“We thought an airship might have blown up,” says one of the Taylors. “Or someone had bombed the docks. How’s one man have that effect instead?”

“I sense it’s a fascinating story. But one not for you lot’s ears.” Flynn speaks brusquely, his manner once more that of the take-no-prisoners crime boss, as he turns his head at a sound from outside. “We’re still close to the scene. We should move again.”

“And what, that means I’m off to scout another hideout for us?” Karl has been standing with arms folded and chin outthrust. “We stay low and quiet, they’re not likely to come nosing around here again so soon. They just made an inspection yesterday, a few proper bribes should keep them out for months.”

Flynn looks at him as if to ask if Karl knew the correct St. Petersburg middle bureaucrats to pay off and did so, Karl looks back as if to say that of course he does and did, and interesting though this ongoing power struggle is, Lucy thinks they need to pay more attention to Rufus. She gets a cup of tea from the chipped porcelain samovar, warms it up, and hands it to Rufus, who is able to sip it with only minor assistance. Flynn waves away the gang to give her space, and once they have all withdrawn to the other side of the warehouse, Lucy and Rufus are left with a semblance of privacy. They look at each other, then blurt out at the same time, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Yeah.” Rufus grimaces. “It was not easy. I’ll see if I can explain it briefly. Basically, Jiya went missing thanks to some kind of artifact that took her and Wyatt Logan’s wife out of a room at Bethlem Royal Hospital. Mrs. Logan is there, it’s a long story, I don’t know it. I went to confront Connor about it, and – I can’t be sure, but I think he’s still actually on our side, has been tricking Rittenhouse and trying to delay them while pretending to be their fancy CEO. He gave me the equations for the Mothership’s modifications, and the schematics for whatever device he used to talk to Emma here, the Refractory-Glass. I put one together, which was how I communicated with you the other day. When is it, anyway? Date-wise?”

“November 1887,” Lucy says. “I’ve been here for just over a year. So what, you managed to build a working Refractory-Glass receptor from scratch?”

“Well, I had the plans,” Rufus points out. “And as I thought about it, and how Jiya vanished, I realized that I could possibly apply the principle to transmit myself along the same channels. After all, the human body is also essentially highly coded information packets, so if I could find the right frequency, I could basically email myself here. I took the Mothership modifications and meddled around with them so they applied to one person rather than a time machine, kind of like what I did to the Lifeboat the first time, but without the infrastructure. I realized that I already had a connection to wherever you were physically with the Refractory-Glass, so I set up the destination point to track with you.”

“So you were magnetically guided to wherever I was, and I’m supposed to be in Oxford, but instead, I’m in Russia – it’s a long story,” Lucy adds, seeing Rufus’s face. “That’s amazing, Rufus, that’s dazzling genius, but how did you know it was going to work?”

“I didn’t,” Rufus admits. “If I’d made a mistake in the math or the coding protocols, I would be disconnected wifi, times a thousand, and not exist in any of the branches of the multiverse ever again. But I couldn’t get here any other way, and I – ” He stops, then shrugs, glancing down. “For you and Jiya, I thought it was worth the risk.”

Lucy looks at him, realizes that in the haste and shock and disbelieving explanations, she has had no time to simply take in the fact that he’s here, he’s here, and reaches out to hug him desperately hard, fighting tears. Rufus does the same, they shake silently in each other’s arms, and then sniffle and try to pull themselves together. “Anyway,” he says. “I turned on my receptor to get a signal connected to Westworld, punched in all the information, crossed my fingers and toes and everything else, and stepped into the projector circle. The next thing I know, I’m dive-bombing out of the clear blue yonder, it’s really cold, I can’t breathe, and I see you and some cranky Russian giant staring at me. So I guess I didn’t screw it up.”

“That’s – that’s Flynn,” Lucy says. “He’s not actually Russian. He’s – as I said. Long story.”

“That’s Flynn?” Rufus looks startled. “Wait, the same one that Connor said was causing all the headaches for Rittenhouse here? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you two managed to meet up, but what’s with all the Newsies sidekicks?”

“He’s a crime boss in London. He runs a gang, that’s them, they’re here in Russia because Rittenhouse has an interest in the Trans-Siberian Railway. They’re having it built to provide themselves with a proprietary aether pipeline. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what they’re doing and how they want to harvest magic from this reality. I was actually on my way back to Oxford – I have a teaching post there – right before you made your dramatic entrance.”

“Have you heard anything about Jiya?” Rufus asks urgently. “Anything at all?”

Lucy hesitates. “Emma came to see me in Oxford last week,” she says at last. “She hinted that Rittenhouse had Jiya prisoner, and unless I cooperated, they’d – well. You know.”

“Rittenhouse has Jiya prisoner?” Rufus looks set to jump to his feet and swim to England himself. “I mean, I realize we can’t exactly work with them, but – what the hell did Emma even want? Just to be horrible and ruin more people’s lives?”

“She wanted help finding a lost magical library,” Lucy says. “The Bibliotheca Corviniana. It belonged to the Raven King, a famous fifteenth-century magician. She thinks it’ll tell her everything she needs to know to complete her world domination.”

“Yay. Emma.” Rufus rolls his eyes heavenward. “Still the worst in every universe, good to know. I feel like I’m probably missing half the story, but we can’t sit around shooting the shit all day. Are you and Flynn friends?”

“We…” Lucy doesn’t know how to answer that. “We’re colleagues, sort of. It’s been a very back-and-forth process. I think we’re working together now, but it could change again.”

Rufus eyes her shrewdly, as he knows her well enough to tell that she’s being purposefully evasive on this front. Still, this is not the opportune moment to press for details, so he doesn’t. “So, Jiya – did Emma say where she was supposed to be? Anything?”

“No. I was going to try to find her, but then I got – ” Lucy considers that. “Inadvertently brought over here, by Karl. He’s Flynn’s right-hand man. I think.”

“Which one’s Karl? The sandy weasel with the pornstache?” Rufus glances at the far side of the warehouse, where the gang appears to be a little too intently absorbed in conversation. “Or one of the other Scorsese rejects? Lucy, obviously, I’m the newcomer here, I don’t know what’s going on or what you’ve been up to, but do you really trust these guys?”

“I trust Flynn,” Lucy says. “And the Sokolovs – those two, the large blond Russian brothers. I think the others like me, or are at least certainly aren’t going to do anything to me. They’re the closest thing I’ve got to allies.”

Rufus continues to look extremely skeptical, but at last, he blows out a breath and nods. “Okay, if you say so. So what’s the plan? Can we get out of here and go save Jiya?”

“I want to,” Lucy promises him. “But after your entrance, we have to see if the airships are even still running. The Russian authorities may have closed down the port, and Rittenhouse definitely has people here as well. Can you even walk yet?”

Rufus makes a valiant attempt to get up, then reels, and Lucy has to catch his arm before he falls. Rufus breathes hard as the world apparently somersaults, and sits down again heavily. “Jiya’s hella resourceful,” he says, as if in an attempt to convince himself that any delay whatsoever in the rescue mission is acceptable. “She’s pulled the wool over Rittenhouse’s eyes and gotten away from them before, she could have done it again.”

“Yes, but we can’t count on that, and we can’t kill you too trying to get to her.” Lucy notices that Rufus’ color is still off, and drains the dregs of the samovar for another cup of tea. Violent interdimensional self-translocation is definitely not flying in business class, which her trip in the Lifeboat was by comparison. “Actually, I’m going to send a telegram to Ada Lovelace. Tell her to tell Oxford that I’ll be back soon, and see if she can get her butler on the case. Woolsey found Flynn’s hideout in like one morning, he could possibly find Jiya too.”

“Ada Lovelace?” Rufus goggles. “You know Ada Lovelace? Didn’t she die in like, the 1850s?”

“Not in this universe, apparently. She’s a grand old dame and very gleefully eccentric.” Lucy smiles at the thought. “We met when I came to London, and we hit it off.”

Rufus looks suitably impressed at the idea, and after a few more minutes, Lucy leaves him to continue his recuperation, heading over to the gang and explaining what she needs to do. It is agreed that Anton and Gennady will escort her to the telegraph office and take stock of the airship situation, and she can feel Flynn’s eyes on their backs as they leave. She’s tempted to glance over her shoulder and see what expression it is, but she isn’t going to be caught mooning after him. She screwed up her courage and asked for what she wanted, and he said no. She doesn’t know why, she’s going to respect his refusal because that’s what decent people do, take her lumps and get on with things, but it still hurts in an entirely different way than before. See. This is exactly why she didn’t want to make a move and muddy the waters with unrequited heartbreak. Should have contented herself that they finally seemed to be on the same page and actually ready to work together, and nothing else.

Sensing her melancholy, Gennady clears his throat awkwardly. “Are sad, Lucy?” he asks. “Later, I JUGGLE for you? Is VERY FUNNY when I juggle. I often DROP BALLS.”

“That – what, oh, no, that’s very sweet of you, but no.” Lucy glances at the Sokolovs, striding to each side of her like twin towers of six-foot-three Bolshevik brawler with perfect manners, and wonders if she could convince them to come back to England with her. After all, they technically aren’t part of Flynn’s gang; they work on the docks in London, and they don’t seem terribly impressed by his shortcomings in the etiquette department. Rescuing Jiya, if necessary, would take a lot more muscle than she and Rufus have alone, and they clearly like her. Maybe she can start up her own gang. There’s not a whole lot more scandalized that Somerville can be, right?

The streets are crowded, the alley where Rufus crashed in is cordoned off, and police inspectors in high-collared overcoats and fur hats are blowing whistles and barking at the gawking onlookers to back off. It definitely looks like all incoming and outgoing airships and steamships have been halted while they search for the source of the incident, which doesn’t help. The crush slows almost to a standstill at points, so Anton picks Lucy up under his arm like a football and sends Gennady in front of them to bowl open a path. This is very effective, and they finally fight clear of the throng and make it to the port telegraph office. It occurs to Lucy just before they go in that Rittenhouse might be monitoring communications in and out of St. Petersburg, and she stalls. “Wait, what if they’re reporting to someone?”

“Eh?” Anton frowns at her, and Lucy explains that she’s worried they’ll pass her telegram on to some sort of secret listening service. The Sokolovs look at her, then at each other, crack their knuckles, and inform her to wait where she is and to maybe turn her back. They then proceed menacingly inside the telegraph office. Five minutes of muffled banging, thumps, shouts, and crashes later, Anton re-emerges, only slightly out of breath. “All right,” he announces. “Telegraph operator is ready to talk now.”

Lucy raises both eyebrows at him as he offers a hand to help her over the threshold, then over the numerous items of furniture that seem to have become unaccountably dislodged. A very cowed-looking clerk in a cockeyed green visor is sitting by the machine, with Gennady standing guard, and after some fits and starts, since Lucy doesn’t speak Russian and the clerk doesn’t speak English, Anton serves as translator and she composes a brief message to Ada. There’s also the possibility of it being read on the other end, so Lucy can’t go into much detail. She manages to convey that she has accidentally wound up in Russia, she would appreciate Ada informing Oxford that she’s not dead, and apologizing profusely for the inconvenience. As well, if Mr. Woolsey can possibly make a few enquiries about a young female friend of hers? Jiya?

When this is finished and dispatched, Gennady asks if he should take the telegraph operator by his heels and shake him several times to ensure he does not retain any copies for anyone else. It as he is prepared to do this that something falls out of the operator’s pocket, some kind of special cancellation stamp. When Lucy picks it up and turns it over, she can see the name SIBLEY in the grilling. Flynn said that Hiram Sibley Junior is running the railway project for Rittenhouse, and his father, Hiram Sibley Senior, was one of the main pioneers of the telegraph in America. Sibley senior worked with Samuel Morse, inventor of Morse code, and was the first president of Western Union, as well as being very interested in Russian-American telegraphic links. Lucy thought of him back when Flynn mentioned Rittenhouse’s Siberian interests at tea with Ada, and this appears to be proof positive that Sibley junior has in fact seeded St. Petersburg telegraph offices with his spies.

“What?” Anton asks, seeing her face. “What is?”

Lucy shows him the stamp – she doesn’t know exactly what it’s for, but most likely to highlight messages that might warrant Sibley’s personal inspection. Once she has conveyed this to the Sokolovs, they assume thunderous frowns and turn back to the clerk. They interrogate him in rapid-fire Russian, which Lucy of course can’t follow, and when the clerk seems to shirk on offering answers, Anton plucks him out of his chair and holds him up like a punching bag in front of Gennady. This sufficiently alarms the clerk into squawking something, which they make him write down. Anton holds it out to Lucy. “Is address. He says for office of Sibley.”

Lucy’s stomach lurches. This, obviously, would be a major breakthrough, and after a moment of consideration, she decides that they have accomplished enough for now. She jerks her head at the Sokolovs, they smartly step after her, and the clerk has a look of both terror and awe on his face at seeing a tiny woman command this pair of behemoths. They take a back route to the Ditch to avoid the police and the crowds, and hurry into the warehouse, where Flynn jumps away from the door as if to prove that he wasn’t standing there and waiting for them to return. “There you are,” he says. “Took long enough.”

“Is obviously some problems.” Anton eyes Flynn up and down. “You have not let Lucy’s friend die, we hope?”

“No, he’s over there.” Flynn jerks his head at Rufus, who does not look to be particularly enjoying his hospital bed of burlap sacks in a drafty Russian warehouse, surrounded by heavily armed criminals wanted in at least two countries. Shocking, that. “Did you get the message off?”

“Yes. And there’s this.” Lucy hands him the slip of paper. “The Sokolovs got it out of the telegraph clerk that that’s Hiram Sibley’s office. The family is in the business, he’s probably been helping Rittenhouse tap all the wires in and out of St. Petersburg.”

Flynn scans it quickly, scowling. “Sibley’s been at the Winter Palace most days to meet with the tsar and his engineering advisors. I did think he had to have a base somewhere nearby, but… are you sure about this?”

“I was about to punch clerk VERY HARD,” Gennady puts in. “In UNPLEASANT region for gentleman. Not sure if that make him more truthful, but I HOPE SO.”

Flynn raises an eyebrow at the younger Sokolov, but obviously does not dispute this bare-knuckled method of problem-solving. Finally he says, “Very well, we should check it out. If Sibley’s not there, we might also be able to steal his files or information. I’ll take the Taylors, Gennady, and Karl. The rest of you go and keep out of trouble, except for Anton. You stay here.”

Anton blinks. “I stay here? Why?”

“Because,” Flynn says, “you’re the only one I trust to keep a proper eye on Lucy and her vagabond friend. As soon as he can stand up straight and the heat’s died down, you can take care of getting them aboard an airship back to England.”

“Wait,” Lucy says. “I did send a telegram, I – Rufus just – ” She isn’t sure how much to say in front of Flynn’s gang, since he clearly has not widely shared the truth of her origins, and thus does not need to go blurting out that she and Rufus are from the next universe over. “He just fell out of the sky, I don’t think he’s going to be able to immediately travel – ”

“Airship to England,” Flynn says to Anton, ignoring her. “Yes?”

Anton pauses, then nods. “Yes.”

“Good.” Flynn strides away, opens a crate, and begins strapping on several extra guns, evidently in case Hiram Sibley is indeed there and objects to having his office robbed. Lucy stands there furiously, then runs after him, grabbing his arm. He looks up at her with his customary sardonic-dick expression. “Yes, Lucy?”

“You can’t just banish me,” Lucy says angrily. “You can’t just return to treating me like a piece of cargo, throwing me on board an airship again, like I have no thoughts or volition of my – ”

“Banish you?” Flynn arches the other eyebrow to its utmost potential. “You remember how you got here in the first place? I’m trying to help you out. I thought you wanted to go back to England.”

“I do.” Lucy’s voice sounds weak, and she tries again. “I do, but with Rufus – ”

“Nobody asked him to crash the party. Literally.” Flynn shrugs, thumbing open the chamber of a revolver, checking that it’s loaded, and slinging it into the holster. “Is that the only thing you want, Lucy? Because if not, you should say so.”

Lucy almost screams at him that she said so, she said so as clearly she could stand to do last night, and he already told her what his answer was. How dare he act as if it is her responsibility to fess up and bare her soul to him, when he stopped it, when he said no, and she has been chasing her head in circles and viciously second-guessing herself for risking it at all? The need is still present, it hasn’t gone away. If anything, infuriatingly, it’s gotten even stronger, the realization that while she is presently very angry at him and would happily slap that idiot look off his handsome asshole face, she would just as happily snap and kiss him, and possibly something else, if his entire gang was not standing right here and not even pretending they aren’t hanging onto this for dear life. Lucy’s fists clench. To stop herself from which of the options, she has no idea. Probably both.

After a pause, Flynn gets to his feet, straightening to his full height above her, which puts her nose somewhere in the region of his solar plexus. “You’ll stay here,” he says, in a tone that brooks no argument, “until it’s safe. Then you’re going to leave.”

Somewhere in the confused jumble of lust, wrath, and other deadly sins currently fighting for mastery of Lucy’s brain, it occurs to her to wonder if Flynn has been low-key panicking since she got here. If she’s likewise dropped out of the clear blue sky, not quite as spectacularly as Rufus but to basically the same effect, and he’s been scrambling ever since to accommodate her presence in the middle of his gritty, very-low-class, dangerous, anonymous existence as a spy and saboteur in the streets of St. Petersburg, running from his criminal record and Rittenhouse in one country and trying to blow up their operations in another. He’s had to devote time and effort to keeping her safe, fed, away from the police inspectors, un-frozen during the snowstorm, and otherwise in a functional state long enough to package her back to England in the first place, which by every respect, should be what she wants to do. What more does she want from him, his expression seems to say? When he’s gone to this much damn trouble to get her out of the frying pan, and she obstinately insists on sitting right in the middle of the fire?

They continue to eye each other for another extremely fraught few moments, Flynn staring down his nose at her as Lucy glares at him right back. Then he steps back. “I won’t hear anything more about this,” he says, “or I will have Anton throw you in the cargo hold.”

“Excuse me?” Anton looks mortally affronted. “You throw her in cargo hold yourself! Though if you try, I break your nose. Ignore him, Lucy. You know I never do such thing.”

“I know,” Lucy assures him. She’s tempted to tell him to break Flynn’s nose anyway, because it appears to be the only satisfaction she is going to get out of this, but she also just doesn’t want to have to look at him anymore. “Go on,” she snaps at Flynn. “Run out of here and leave your mess behind. Just like you always do, remember?”

He takes that in, and nods. Then he has the audacity, the sheer, ridiculous, unmitigated gall to grasp her shoulders in both hands, lean down, and kiss her patronizingly on the forehead. “Don’t worry,” he snarks. “We’ll be careful.”

“Right now, I honestly could not care less if you got yourself killed.” Lucy shoves him away from her with both hands. “So don’t strain yourself on my account.”

With a final evil look exchanged between them, Flynn stomps off, slings one last gun into his jacket, and jerks his head at his strike team. The Taylors, Gennady (with an apologetic glance at Lucy), and Karl form up behind him, Karl’s face also something that deserves to be in a museum, and they depart at speed. Once they’re gone, and the other gang members have scuttled out on their orders to make themselves discreet, Lucy’s strength abruptly runs out of her, and she sits down on one of the crates. She leans forward and puts her face in her hands.

“Lucy?” Anton hovers awkwardly at her shoulder. “I make you some tea?”

“No. I just…” Lucy remains where she is. “I’m done. I give up. Just take me back to England whenever the port reopens. I don’t know why I keep deluding myself, over and over, into thinking this has any chance of actually working.”

Anton pauses. Then he pulls up a crate next to her and pats her on the arm with a hand the size of a ham hock, in a clumsy but comforting gesture. “Flynn is horrible garbage goblin,” he says. “As I call him before. When he get back, I take him out and shake him very hard. You are very good lady, Lucy. Very strong. You give people chances when they not deserve. I am sorry how it is.”

“Thanks.” Lucy glances up at him. “I was thinking. Do you and Gennady want to come back to England with me? We’ll probably need to rescue our other friend, her name is Jiya. Rufus and I can’t pull it off by ourselves.”

“Lady needs rescue?” All of Anton’s Prince Charming sensibilities appear to have been activated on the instant. “Yes, of course we go. Flynn can think about poor life choices alone.”

Lucy snorts, feeling a little better. For his part, Anton does not juggle, but he offers to sing her a long Russian folk song, which Lucy graciously allows to hear a few stanzas of. He can’t really sing, but it’s sweet, and when he admits that he can’t remember any more of it, she thanks him and goes over to see how Rufus is doing. He has been watching the entire thing with the expression of an audience member at a blockbuster film, and glances up at Lucy with a look wondering if she’ll explain or he has to ask. Finally he says, “So, that whole married-for-ten-years argument, that was interesting.”

“That’s not what happened there.” Lucy feels her cheeks starting to heat. “And it seems to be how most of our meetings end up. With the arguing, that is.”

“Yeah, I see what you were saying about it going back and forth. Flynn seems like a real winner. I mean, it’s not like you got to pick who else in this world was going to be fighting Rittenhouse, but are you sure he’s worth the hassle?”

Lucy doesn’t answer, fussing unnecessarily with the burlap sacks that are serving Rufus in poor stead as blankets. Then she says, “Whenever the St. Petersburg port opens, we’ll get out of here. I’ll take you to London, I’m pretty sure Ada would be happy to put you up in her house. I’m not sure what I’ll do about Oxford. Maybe finish the rest of the semester, then leave.”

Rufus glances up at the tone in her voice. “Doesn’t sound like you really want to.”

“No,” Lucy says quietly. “No, I don’t want to. I’ve loved it more than anything. The city is magical and beautiful, my students are such interesting and passionate young women and I’ve been able to teach them things that nobody else has even thought about. I’ve gotten to have something like a normal life again, not just endlessly fighting and jumping through time. I’ve gotten to have roots again. A place to stay. Yes, well, I’ve inadvertently scandalized most of the faculty and students, but they got used even to that. But it would be beyond selfish for me to keep doing that, and leave you and Jiya and Ada and Wyatt and Flynn and everyone else to fight Rittenhouse, when what they’re doing here could change all of reality. I can’t sit out.”

Rufus looks at her with hesitant, uncertain sympathy, before he reaches out to take her hand, and they hold tightly. Lucy wonders if she should tell him about the revenant and the possibility of it being Amy, but decides that can come later. They have enough to deal with at present, and she doesn’t feel like Rufus would be all that enthused at the news of a murderous shadow monster stalking her heels. Instead they wait. And wait.

As the rest of the morning drains by and the afternoon goes equally slowly, Lucy – despite her resolve to stay mad at Flynn at least until he gets back – starts to worry. She paces and stares at the door, listening hard every time there are footsteps passing outside, fighting a swoop in her stomach every time they continue on without stopping. The distant sound of wailing klaxons aren’t helping her nerves either, and she isn’t sure if that’s related to the Rufus investigation or some entirely new calamity. Finally she says to Anton, “How long do you think it would take? Just to raid Sibley’s office, and leave?”

“If it was only that, not so long. But if they are caught, have to run for it, shoot way out, maybe longer.” Anton looks anxious as well, though he is clearly trying to keep his chin up for her sake. “Maybe clerk hurry and tell someone that he had to give up address, they have people waiting in case of attack.”

Lucy feels suddenly and unforgivably naïve that she didn’t think of that possibility. After all, she is the one who sent Flynn there, the one who gave him the information and told him that she didn’t give a rat’s ass if he got killed or not. A thick, sludgy feeling of horrible guilt crawls through her gut, making her swallow hard and stop in her tracks. “Oh God, is he – is he going to think I set him up or something? Led him purposefully into a trap?”

“Don’t know that is what happened,” Anton points out. “They could just have to take very long way back. Or hide out. Or – ”

At that moment, he is interrupted by the sound of footsteps that are very definitely coming this way, and he snaps into action. He shoves Lucy down on the sacks next to Rufus, heaves several fully loaded crates in front of them as a makeshift barricade, and draws his gun, pointing it warily at the door. Trying to peer out around the crates, Lucy waits, heart in her mouth, as the bar rattles and it swings open. If it’s the police, if it’s Rittenhouse – if it’s somehow worse, if it’s the gang with Flynn or without him and he’s not –

“Down!” a familiar voice says, sounding alarmed. “Bloody hell!”

“Karl?” Anton (and Lucy) stares at the bedraggled remnants of the strike team: Karl himself, the younger Taylor, and Gennady, all of them looking extremely bloody and dirty and grim. The older Taylor and Flynn aren’t there. “What in fucking hellfire – excuse my very bad language, Lucy, please excuse – just happened?”

“I’ll tell you what happened.” Karl wipes his filthy face on his arm, throwing down his spent revolver. “It was a trap from the start, that’s what it was. Guess the telegraph clerk ran off pronto to tell his Rittenhouse bosses to expect company, so that’s what they did. We got to Sibley’s office, went inside, and five minutes later, full house assault. John Taylor’s dead, they had to shoot him six times before they finished him off. We managed to hold our position inside the office for hours, but they called in more reinforcements. They got the boss, they dragged him away. Still alive the last time we saw him, they’ll want to grill him for information. The three of us barely made it out of there with our skins.”

A ghastly, stomach-churning silence falls in the wake of those words. It’s about as bad as it possibly can be – in fact, it’s worse. Rittenhouse has Flynn, they took Flynn prisoner, they’re definitely going to torture him in hopes of making him talk. Even if (as seems likely) he won’t, there is no scenario whatsoever in which they let him go alive. He has caused them too much trouble, and they have been hunting him for too long. If they chose to sell him back to the British government, they could ask for whatever political concessions or special powers they wanted in exchange, when he is the most wanted criminal in the entire United Kingdom and the egg has progressively accrued on the face of Gladstone’s government and the Metropolitan Police as they failed to catch him. Rittenhouse can do anything they want with Flynn, and get everything they want in return. Catastrophe barely does this justice. And Lucy – inadvertently, but still – sent him straight into the jaws of the trap.

“Oh my God,” Lucy says at last, which is impossibly inadequate, but is the only thing she can think of. There’s no choice, there’s no alternate option. “We have to save him.”

As far as predicaments go, Garcia Flynn has been in – he is sure – worse ones than this. But admittedly, just at present, they are not coming to mind.

He has taken a serious pounding, he’s fairly sure he’s been shot at least once by the stabbing pain in his leg, and he is well aware that he is, to put it gently, fucked. He was dragged off by the police and whatever local rented thugs Rittenhouse has acquired, hit a few more times when he kept fighting, and his ear is ringing in a way that means it might have taken considerable damage. Now he is crammed into some tiny, bleak holding cell, and his odds of getting out are very bad. He has a confused impression of seeing at least one member of the gang down – he thinks it was a Taylor – and the rest scattered. He doesn’t know if they got away. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, if they made it back to Lucy or not, if she –

Lucy. That thought hurts the most of all, and given his present dismal state of repairs, both mental and physical, that is saying a lot. He tries to roll onto his back, grunts as his back registers its extreme objections, and remains where he is, half-sprawled on his side in the darkness, like a dangerous animal thrown in a cage. His cheek is sticky with blood where it presses to the metal, and there’s a rattling sound in his chest where he breathes. Rittenhouse isn’t going to get much sport out of hurting him, at this rate. Well, he’s sure they will anyway, because they’re the worst and they’ve been waiting long enough that they’ll take full advantage. But –

Did Lucy know? Did she send him there on purpose? I honestly could not care less if you got yourself killed. Was that the warning, and he missed it? Flynn is well aware that his behavior, over the general span of their acquaintance and then again today, has been far from exemplary, and perhaps she finally axed the entire ill-fated experiment of their collaboration for good. But why after it was almost working, and why especially after last night? Was it a vindictively cold-blooded move to get revenge on him for turning her down? That would be callous beyond belief, something that Lucy, for all her fierceness, doesn’t seem to intrinsically possess. And it wasn’t – that wasn’t what he – he knows and he doesn’t, it is tangled and twisted and raw, wrapping around him like a strangler snake, and he can’t breathe as it tightens.

Last night, lying next to her in bed, with her soft and warm and nuzzled into his side, looking at him with those big dark eyes as he told her about the Raven King… even now, Flynn’s stomach turns over at the memory. It took every inch of his self-control not to grab her, to roll her over beneath him and bear her down into the mattress, take her until there was no space or separation left, but he has never in his life touched a woman like that and there is no way he is going to start now. Not with her, not in the least. She deserves someone who would come to her with gentleness and care, someone younger and less shop-worn, who could devote himself to nothing but making her happy. Self-evidently, a widowed forty-three-year-old ex-monster hunter crime boss, international fugitive, and ruthless anarchist is not that man. Not with the ghost of a murdered daughter that shrieks in his nightmares, and a quest for vengeance that – well. Was probably always fated to end up like this. So he sabotaged himself, he pushed her away, he set out to viciously prove to himself that she would never want him. In that, at least, he has spectacularly succeeded. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? Burning it all down?

Flynn works his tongue gingerly around his mouth, testing for broken or missing teeth. They seem to be still in place, though they ache like pieces of red-hot iron in his jaw, and this is not an unqualified blessing. He doesn’t see much point in struggling to get out of here. He can’t, clearly, and there will just be more of them on the other side. He has never cared about the odds or the number of enemies before, but now, he is finally too tired to keep fighting. He’s old enough to know that he can’t take an unlimited pummeling, and he needs to save what strength he does have. For what, he doesn’t know. Dying with dignity?

Some indeterminate time passes. Flynn wanders in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he thinks he sees shadows bending over him, once he swears he feels the brush of Lorena’s hand on his face, the distant echo of Iris’ laugh, and wonders if this is some new torment the revenant has cooked up, if it’s drawing closer in the dark, come to feed on him by insidiously making him forget, in fits and starts, that they were ever gone. To believe, to hope, to want, and then wake up, and relive the loss all over again.

(Lucy. He feels horribly guilty, and he doesn’t think he should want it, given as there is still the possibility that she deliberately betrayed him, but he keeps looking for her among the phantoms, and she isn’t even there.)

After some while, Flynn is aware of the cage being lifted, moved, loaded onto something and wheeled along with bumping jolts. His captors appear to be taking him somewhere. He can hear them talking in an indistinct blend of Russian and English, but his bruised, feverish brain is not up to the task of interpreting both at once. The walls of his prison are solid steel, so he can’t see out, and they are clearly taking no chances with his escape. He has to remain curled up in more or less a ball, since he is a big man and it is a small box. There is a large barred slit overhead for ventilation, and also presumably for them to toss food in from time to time. He wonders if they’re going to do that, or make him beg. They are in for an unhappy surprise if so. If this is the end, he’d rather just get it over with.

Flynn can smell coal smoke, and what sounds like the hiss and click of iron wheels on track. At that, he blurrily realizes where they must in fact be taking him. Whether if it’s a more convenient interrogation point away from prying eyes in the city, or they have something more spectacular planned for him, or want to demonstrate their success in building his railway to the tsar – why not? Out in the winter wilds, out in the depths of nowhere, no one will ever see him again.

“Matija.” The word is a hushed croak, all Flynn can get through his aching throat. He has a sudden memory of when he was a boy – he doesn’t remember exactly how old, seven or eight – passing a fence post with a raven painted on it, GK scratched beneath. The way he had a sense that as long as he stood on that exact spot, the boundaries between the worlds were thin as silk, clear as glass, and he might take another step on the path he had walked a thousand times and find himself lost in Faerie. The way a cloud passed over the sun, and he looked up and saw a flock of ravens winging on the wind. A meaningless coincidence, his father would have insisted. Asher Flynn, born Aleksandr Kovačić, a young idealist who changed his name and moved to the West in hope of making a fortune, then returned home to Šibenik as an angry, disillusioned atheist with a young American wife, a drinking problem, and eyes that always burned like dark coals. Flynn doesn’t remember being so scared of anything in his life as he was of his father’s eyes when they were angry. Not even the grimmest monsters (small wonder he ran away to join the hunters at age fifteen) of the darkest woods could compare.

“Matija,” Flynn whispers again. “Matija Korvin. The woods are yours. The sky is yours. The night is yours, and so too the morning. The hedges are your gateways, the stones your servants. In the earth you plant your staff, in the green you spread your roots. You are the branches upon which your children rest, and the wings on which they fly. I am only a servant, kneeling before the King. I call you from the dark, and I offer you my fealty.”

It’s a very old prayer, and he’s said most of it in Croatian because that’s how he learned it from his grandmother Katja, a formidable and bitter old crone who scared the children away from her house in the village and was constantly suspected (not without reason, Flynn thinks, Iris had to get it from somewhere) of being a witch. She was never impressed with Aleksandr for moving to the West, nor for bringing home Maria Thompkins, and spent most of her time making her daughter-in-law’s life miserable for not knowing how to cook and speak the language and otherwise instantly absorb the habits of their ancient town on the Adriatic coast. Flynn has complicated memories of her, to say the least. But Katja Kovačić was not about to let her grandson grow up without knowing his culture and his heritage, and the proper prayers to the King, the one he was never supposed to tell the priest about. She gave him that, at least.

“Matija… Korvin.” You’re supposed to call him three times by his full name for the proper effect, Flynn remembers. There is another bump and jolt, and it feels as if his cage has been loaded onto the train. He hears a piercing whistle, feels a gust of frigid air, and knows it is only going to get colder. He is actively struggling to maintain consciousness, and feels the dark tugging at him with alluring, relentless hands. “Matija… Korvin…”

Not a damn thing, so far as he can tell, happens as a result. He feels ludicrous, trusting in old wives’ tales and children’s stories for his deliverance, when he might as well have asked the cage to spring open of its own accord, for all the locks to unbind and the train’s engine to spit bolts and shut down. Technology does not tend to work in the places where you find the marks of the raven. Flynn closes his blood-crusted eyes and lets his head drop onto the floor. He cannot remember a time, recently or perhaps ever, when he has felt so utterly, desolately empty.

Once more, the whistle sounds. The train starts to move. The wheels click on the track, he can sense St. Petersburg dwindling behind them like a dream lost on waking, and so, Garcia Flynn begins the long, last journey to Siberia.

#timeless #timeless ff #lucy x flynn #garcy #garcy ff #starlight & strange magic #steampunk au #garcia flynn human disaster #(who is surprised not me)

[destinationweddinganovel]

Followed Home

MARISSA

Christine has been stalking him again. I can tell. When I meet up with Alex inside the Riviera Cinema, he’s edgier than an abused pet. Throughout the first half of the movie he keeps turning his head toward the exit as if he’s expecting someone to burst in with machine gun fire. Finally he settles into his seat, takes my hand in his, and faces the screen. An hour later the end credits roll and I slouch in the red velvet seat, eyeing him nervously. “What did you think?”

“It was good,” he says, a dimple pressing into his cheek. He pockets his glasses, which he refuses to wear unless he has to, claiming he doesn’t want his eyes to get lazy or some such thing. Everyone has their quirks. I’ve told him he looks cute in them, but all he does is shrug and put them away.

I reel as I sidle along the cramped row toward the aisle. Picking the right movie is always tricky. Alex is into art house cinema so I have spent weeks scouring YouTube, catching up on everything David Lynch, Akira Kurosawa, and Wim Wenders ever produced. The last thing I want to admit is that I didn’t see a single indie flick the entire time I lived in NYC. I went to more launch parties than films.

Only now do I realize what I used to take for granted. If only I could go back and take Alex with me. “I liked that one you took me to the other night even if I didn’t understand what those scenes with the rabbits meant.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret.” He squeezes behind me as we press into a revolving wedge of glass and bronze. I can’t wait to be lying in bed next to him with his breath hot my neck like this, sending a shiver into me. “No one understands that movie, they just pretend.”

I can’t help but giggle, mostly at how I stress myself out over the dumbest things. Whenever I’m with Alex, I feel zero regrets about how my life has turned out. Every bad step led me to right here.

“What a beautiful evening,” he says as we come out onto the sidewalk. We linger in front of the Art Deco facade and he gazes up at the Marquee. According to a giant clock above, it’s just after eleven. He sighs, turns, and takes my hand. “Time to call it a night, I suppose.”

Disappointment stings. We amble in the direction of my apartment building and he keeps checking over his shoulder. It’s all I can do not to look myself, wondering if Christine is behind us, lurking in the shadows. Twice this past week, he’s caught her trailing us.

“One of these days when work dies down, we’ll go out for drinks afterwards.”

“Hm,” I say, trying not to sound too upset. Reggie’s warned me not to lay guilt trips.

Sensing my hurt, he takes me in his arms and presses his lips to my forehead. “It’ll get better when I’m living downtown again. I promise.”

“Why are you still staying way out in Somerville? I thought you gave her notice ages ago.”

He squeezes me and sighs. “While I thought I had to wait only one month, turns out she’s entitled to two. Which she … plans to take. My lawyer said not to fight it. All I can do for now is hide out at my parents, ignore her texts and phone calls, and there’ve been hundreds of them.”

And she doesn’t have family or friends she can stay with? Connor was helping Kayla move in while I was still packing. I had to rely on Airbnb until I found more stable digs. Meanwhile in Dorchester you can find a fantastic apartment in less than an hour. Try where two-hour commutes are the norm. “Ouch,” I say and the most regretful expression I’ve ever seen hangs on his face.

“I’ve done everything I can to avoid her. I’ve blocked her on my phone and all forms of social media, and security has been told not to let her into the area where I work.”

“I fully believe you,” I say, knowing it’s exactly what he needs to hear right now. That I trust him. Something Christine never could do, no matter how faithful he was to her. Nothing made her happy.

“Thanks for being so understanding.” He holds me close, his body so firm and warm.

“It’s only another week or so anyway.” I say, and we continue walking hand in hand. We reach my front step and Alex kisses me good night. A long, tender kiss. Hopefully once she’s fully out of the picture, he’ll spend the night with me. When we kiss, I sometimes feel a swelling bulge press against me, and it’s so cute the way he flushes and gets all embarrassed.

“She moves out not this Sunday, but the next. Whatever the thirtieth falls on.” He pulls away from our embrace and says, “We’re still on for that Friday, and I’ll email you tomorrow, okay?”

“Drive safe!” I say, waving at him as he gets into his car. I just have to be patient as we grow more cemented in our relationship. Reggie assures me that Alex is just hesitant to jump in too deep with anyone new until he’s cut every last cord binding him to Christine. Two Fridays from now, he’ll be meeting my friends. She’s due to move out that weekend, and both of us cannot wait.

I’ve just opened the outer door of my apartment building when I hear footsteps slapping on the sidewalk behind me. I duck inside, press myself against the wall of mailboxes, and wait. The headlights from Alex’s car flash through the window of the door as he turns around and drives off. Sucking in my breath, I peer outside. And there she is. Blonde and slim, wearing a long beige coat with a matching knit toque. Her eyes are quite large and her face has that elfin shape some guys seem to like. She takes a couple of steps up the footpath, narrows her eyes, and turns around again.

Relief sinks in as she crosses the road but it’s only temporary. After returning to the sidewalk she wheels around and strides toward my building at a breakneck speed, her arms folded across her chest and with a look of murder on her face. I keep close to the wall and press my foot against the base of the door. Reggie had said she’s insane; he wasn’t kidding.

My heart thuds in my chest as she gives the door a hard push. She can’t see me, I remind myself. It’s brighter on the front step than in this tiny, darkened space between the two sets of doors.

I jam my foot against the bottom of the door and grasp the handle. She tries turning it, first one way and then the other. I hold my grip while she tries moving the handle more forcefully. I’m so thankful she’s not that strong. She releases the handle and gives the lower half of the door a hard kick. A kick of frustration; I doubt she could break this door down.

I almost feel faint with relief when she gives up and heads back down the steps.

Exhaling a deep breath, I watch her hurry down the road. Good, she’s gone. I glance up at the list of apartment numbers and names above the mailboxes, thankful I never got around to changing it from Pierre’s when I took over his lease. I won’t be updating that anytime soon. 

#destination wedding #suspense novel #fiction #psycho exes #crazy ex gf #crazy ex #stalking #unreliable narrator #Multiple POV #revenge #dark secrets #dark past #love triangle #stalker #scheming #novel #women's fiction #marissa #books #writing

[sywtwfs]

2017 CS Nebelhorn Trophy & JGP Croatia: Info & Streaming

Nebelhorn Trophy, part of the ISU Challenger Series, will serve a dual purpose this year as the last Olympic Qualifying Competition for countries that did not earn any Olympic spots in a discipline at the 2017 World Championships. The top 6 men, top 6 ladies, top 5 pairs and top 6 ice dance teams from countries without Olympic spots will earn one spot each for their country. For more information on the Olympic qualification process, please see this post. Meanwhile, the fifth Junior Grand Prix event of the season will take place in Croatia.

NEBELHORN TROPHY

Live results | Detailed schedule | Website | Livestream

Designation: Challenger Series When: Sept. 27-30 Where: Oberstdorf, Germany Level & disciplines: senior men, ladies, ice dance, pairs How to watch: Free livestream on Dailymotion

Notable skaters competing for Olympic spots:

Men: (6 spots available) Jorik Hendrickx, Matteo Rizzo, Julian Yee, Michael Christian Martinez, June Hyoung Lee, Alexander Majorov, Yaroslav Paniot, Stephane Walker

Ladies: (6 spots available) Anastasia Galustyan, Kailani Craine, Amy Lin, Viveca Lindfors, Anne Line Gjersem, Matilda Algotsson, Alexia Paganini, Anna Khnychenkova

Pairs: (5 spots available) Ekaterina Alexandrovskaya/Harley Windsor, Miriam Ziegler/Severin Kiefer, Anna Duskova/Martin Bidar, Tae Ok Ryom/Ju Sik Kim, Sumire Suto/Francis Boudreau-Audet, Paige Connors/Evgeni Krasnopolski

Ice dance: (6 spots available) Viktoria Kavaliova/Yurii Bieliaiev, Kavita Lorenz/Joti Polizoakis, Penny Coomes/Nicholas Buckland, Kana Muramoto/Chris Reed, Yura Min/Alexander Gamelin, Olga Jakushina/Andrey Nevskiy, Cortney Mansour/Michal Ceska

Notable skaters not competing for Olympic spots: Alexander Johnson, Aliona Savchenko/Bruno Massot, Evgenia Tarasova/Vladimir Morozov, Ashley Cain/Timothy Leduc

JGP CROATIA CUP

Live results | Detailed schedule | Website | Livestream

Designation: Junior Grand Prix When: Sept. 27-30 Where: Zagreb, Croatia Level & disciplines: junior men, ladies, ice dance, pairs How to watch: Free livestreams on the JGP Youtube channel

Schedule (CEST, UTC+2) 9/28: Men's SP 10:00; Pairs' SP 13:30; Ladies' SP 16:00 9/29: Short Dance 11:30; Pairs' FS 14:10; Men's FS 17:00 9/30: Free Dance 12:00; Ladies' FS 14:45

Notable entries: Joseph Phan, Koshiro Shimada, Mitsuki Sumoto, Makar Ignatov, Alexei Krasnozhon, Akari Matsuoka, Mako Yamashita, Young You, Sofia Samodurova, Anastasia Tarakanova, Kaitlyn Nguyen, Evelyn Walsh/Trennt Michaud, Yumeng Gao/Zhong Xie, Aleksandra Boikova/Dmitrii Kozlovskii, Marjorie Lajoie/Zachary Lagha, Natacha Lagouge/Corentin Rahier, Ksenia Konkina/Grigory Yakushev, Sofia Shevchenko/Igor Eremenko, Eliana Gropman/Ian Somerville

#figure skating #challenger series #nebelhorn trophy #nebelhorn trophy 2017 #jr grand prix #jgp croatia 2017 #events #season: 2017 2018 #how to watch

[ledenews]

Sports Shorts - February 28, 2020

Nailers Face Crucial Weekend

The Wheeling Nailers host the Maine Mariners for the only meeting of the season tonight at WesBanco Arena. Face-off is slated for 7:05 p.m. The Nailers are currently 10th in the Western Conference standings, two places behind the Tulsa Oilers who currently own the eighth and final playoff spot. Wheeling has 53 points heading into tonight while Tulsa has 59 and the Indy Fuel nestled in between with 57.  The Good news? Wheeling has a prime opportunity to make up some ground in the playoff hunt. The Oilers will hook up with the Rapid City Rush for three straight games starting tonight? Why is that a good thing? In five previous head-to-head meetings this season, Rapid City owns a 4-1 record against Tulsa, outscoring the Oilers 17-14 during that span. Tulsa’s one win came at its own Bok Center. This weekend’s three games are all at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, where Rapid City is 3-0 vs. Tulsa this season. That’s the good news. The bad news is Wheeling is facing a three-game slate against some of the better teams in the ECHL.  First are the Mariners, owners the fifth spot in the Eastern Conference with 65 points. Maine is 5-4-1-0 in its last 10 games and is led by Alex Kile. Kile has 48 points this season, including 16 goals and is a plus-9. Netminder Connor Lacouvee is 19-2-1 with a 2.67 goals against average and a save percentage of .919. The following night the Cincinnati Cyclones come to Wheeling. The Cyclones are third in the West with 74 points but are on a two-game losing streak.  The Nailers are 4-3 against the Cyclones this season, including 2-1 at WesBanco.  The Nailers are 2-5, however, vs. the Toledo Walleye and haven’t beaten Toledo since a 3-0 shutout at home back on December 20. Sunday, the Nailers travel to Toledo to take on the Walleye. Toledo is fifth in the West with 69 points, has won three in a row and is 7-2-1-0 in its last 10. The Nailers are 2-5, however, vs. the Toledo Walleye and haven’t beaten Toledo since a 3-0 shutout at home back on December 20.

Patriots in Excellent Shape After Day One

Wheeling Park trails favorite Parkersburg South by half a point in the Class AAA team standings at the W.V.S.S.A.C. Wrestling Championships after Day 1 action in Huntington. Cabell-Midland, Parkersburg and Riverside round out the top five. The Ohio County Patriots pushed 11 of 12 wrestlers through to the second round and are positioned to battle South for the team championship. Of those 11 wrestlers, six are either freshmen or sophomores as Park has only two seniors that won in the first round. A more telling stat is that two freshmen, Adam Angel at 170 and Erick Brothers Jr. at 182 were advanced in one of the heavier weight classes, far from the norm. Angel won via technical fall with a 17-2 score and Brothers pinned his opponent in 2:35. John Marshall had three wrestlers secure Day 1 victories and Brooke had one. The local teams didn’t fair quite as well in Class AA/A.  Oak Glen has five wrestlers advancing to the next round in the championship bracket, with Weir, Cameron, Magnolia and Weir each advancing one.  Point Pleasant is leading the pack with 52 points, followed by Braxton County, Fairmont Sr., Independence and Herbert Hoover. Oak Glen is the highest ranked local team in eighth place with 15 points. Team Scores and Local Winners AAA Top 5 South 41, Park 40.5, Cabell Midland 29.5, Parkersburg 29.0, Riverside 25 106: Quinton Velas, Wheeling Park (pin 1:04); Brandon Roberts, Parkersburg South (0:41); Ethan Cook, John Marshall (Maj. Dec. 9-1). 113: Cody Taggart, Wheeling Park (0:16); Nathan Ford, Parkersburg South (0:42); Carl Cochran (0:39). 120: Nate Shelek, Wheeling Park (tech fall 18-2). 126: Trent Jones, Parkersburg South (1:08); Jace Stockett, University (0:58); Bradyn Lucas, Wheeling Park (9-6). 132: Dom Parker, University (1:00); Gabe Carman, John Marshall (3:06); Brayden Johnson, Parkersburg South (MD 9-0); Trentin Thompson, Morgantown (1:01). 138: Andrew Shelek, Wheeling Park (0:23); Dakoyta Thatcher, John Marshall (MD 10-2). 145: Steven Mitchell, Wheeling Park (2:58); Gavin Quiocho, Parkersburg South (0:09); Joey Gidley, University (5:31). 152: Dakota Hagedorn, University (2:47); Billy Gooch, Wheeling Park (TF 15-0); Brayden Roberts, Parkersburg South (0:36). 160: Canon Welker, Wheeling Park (0:50); Elijah Wellings, University (8-6). 170: Casch Somerville, Parkersburg South (1:34); Max Camilletti, Brooke (2:23); Adam Angel, Wheeling Park (TF 17-2). 182: Erick Brothers Jr., Wheeling Park (2:35); Noah Buckalew, Parkersburg South (6-1). 195: Oscar Lemus, Parkersburg South (1:42). 220: Charlie Tamburin, Wheeling Park (2:38); Braxton Amos, Parkersburg South (pin); Josh Sanders, University (TF 18-3).  285: Corbin Turney, University (6-3). AA/A Top 5 Point Pleasant 52, Braxton Co. 32, Fairmont Sr. 20, Independence 20, Herbert Hoover 18; closest OVAC is Oak Glen at 8 with 15 106: Camden Barr, Oak Glen (3:53) 120: Clayton Lamb, Oak Glen (8-6) 132: Wyatt Conley, Weir (1:49) 145: Jonathan Creese, Oak Glen (MD 14-3) 152: Peyton Hall, Oak Glen (1:06) 170: Ian Bush, Cameron (0:35) 182: Kyler O’Conner, Oak Glen (10-4) 195: James Stillwagoner, Magnolia (MD 9-1) 285: Jordan Brueck, Weir

Bethany Sprinters Excel at PAC Indoor Championships

The Bethany men’s and women’s indoor track teams took fifth and sixth place, respectively, as Thursday’s Presidents’ Athletic Conference Indoor Track and Field Championships in Youngstown. Defending champions Westminster for the women and Geneva for the men both repeated. Shaylyn Gower won the 60-meter dash in 8.97 and followed that up with a 26.62 in the 200 for another first-place finish. Teammates Grace Chambers was second in the 200 and Riley Meyers fourth as the Bison took three of the top four sports. Chambers came back and won the 400 in 1:00.37 as the Bethany women swept the sprint events. Meyers added a third-place finish in the 60 hurdles and 60-meter dash. Danielle Williams finished in 7th in the 1-mile run and Shae Reinbeau of Bishop Donahue was fourth in the 5,000 meters, finishing in 19:21.30. Cameron’s Kelsie Meintel just missed placed in shot put. Her final throw of 10.31 meters was just behind the eighth-place winning throw of 10.4. On the men’s side, Chas Blango finished first in the weight throw with a toss of 15.82 meters. He was sixth in the shot put after scratching on his first and final throws.  Raekwon Wright captured the men’s long jump by leaping 6.96 meters. Hunter Klein won the 400 for Bethany in 50.53, Keyohn Thompson finished second in both the 60-meter dash and 60-meter hurdles.

Sports on TV

For men’s college basketball, Ohio U hosts Kent State at 6:30 p.m. on CBSSN. Davidson travels to Dayton at 7 p.m. on ESPN2, with Texas State at Texas Arlington at 9 p.m. on ESPN and Washington State and Washington squaring off at 9 p.m. on FS1. For the women, Villanova plays at Creighton at 7 p.m. on FS1 ESPN is featuring Oklahoma City at Milwaukee at 8 p.m. Cleveland travels to New Orleans to take on Zion Williamson and the Pelicans at 8 p.m. on FSN and Ohio, also at 8 pm. Later on ESPN, the Denver Nuggets take on the Los Angeles Clippers at 10:30 p.m. A replay of the Pittsburgh Pirates vs. Baltimore Orioles at 6 p.m. on ATTSN. MLB Network will have the Colorado Rockies at San Francisco Giants live at 9 p.m. Those with either FSN Cincinnati or Columbus will get to watch the Minnesota Wild take on Columbus at 7 p.m. while the NHL Network is airing the New York Rangers at Philadelphia, also at 7 p.m. College hockey featuring Michigan State and Notre Dame is available at 7 p.m., on NBCSN. Later, the Penguins travel to Anaheim for a 10 p.m. faceoff on ATTSN.  Auto racing fans can catch Auto Club 400 practice starting at 4 p.m. on FS1, with final practice taking place at 5:30 p.m. Read the full article

#BethanyCollege #ECHL #nailers #TV #WheelingNailers #wrestling

[kidaoocom]

[lookgoodformula]

5 Things I’ve Been Loving Lately

1. Coloring

With colored pencils, and using said pencils to draw false lashes, questionable eyeshadow and winged liner on cartoon horses. 😊

2. Retinol

I have a pimple on my chin.

It’s one of those *painful* ones with roots like an old oak tree, but instead of doing what I usually do with a pimple like this one — bombarding it with benzoyl peroxide — this time I showered it in Kate Somerville’s +Retinol Vita C Power Serum Firming + Brightening Treatment instead.

Soooo I may have overdone it a little, though, because the peeling around the area was intense for a minute, but dang, the retinol worked some serious magic. It pushed that pimple through the various annoying pimple phases quicker than benzoyl peroxide ever could, and a healing process that usually takes a month took about a week and a half.

OK, #teamretinol, I totally get it now.

3. “When Will My Life Begin”

Connor is going through a Disney princess phase at the moment, and this song from Tangled sung by the adorable Mandy Moore (LOVE HER) sticks in my head for a loooong time every time I hear it.

Continue reading "5 Things I’ve Been Loving Lately" on Makeup and Beauty Blog.

from Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup https://ift.tt/2P8yTWe via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews #Swatches and How-To Makeup

[andromeddog]

may i interest you in whatever this is

#my art #oc stuff #original characters #ww1 #historical oc #historical fiction #world war one #hanging my head in defeat #here is a big mess of scottish highlanders i made because i am infatuated with the kilts #they’re from the argyll and sutherland highlanders regiment just for fun bonus facts #the four dudes are mostly bros who play rugby together before the war and the officers are guys with a lot of issues #too much for tags so i’ll leave you with this and then go die #peter murray #johnny drummond #connor somerville #james logan #lt irvine #lt kincaide

[democratsunited-blog]

MA-07 Democratic primary a lived experience test.

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=9197

MA-07 Democratic primary a lived experience test.

Ayanna Pressley attends an EMILY’s List gala in 2015.

Kris Connor/Getty Images

At least one high-profile House primary remains on the Democrats’ 2018 calendar: Tuesday’s contest in Massachusetts between Rep. Mike Capuano and Boston city Councilwoman Ayanna Pressley. This intra-party fight, though, does not mimic the same narrative we’ve seen elsewhere.

Capuano and Pressley are both proud progressives with the track records to prove it. As a result, their primary is lacking the ideological fights over policy that have animated other closely watched Democratic primaries in places such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Nebraska. Meanwhile, the 7th District, is so liberal that Republicans haven’t bothered to contest it this century. And so with the nomination doubling as a free ticket to Washington, there’s been none of the usual messaging fights that tend to break out ahead of competitive general elections, where one candidate talks about turning out a disaffected base and the other plots a path to the middle.

Even the outsider-versus-insider trope is an imperfect fit in this one. As a 10-term incumbent, Capuano is the one carrying the insider baggage, but Pressley is an outsider only in comparison. She served on the city council for the past eight years and previously worked on Capitol Hill as a staffer for former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II and later Sen. John Kerry. She may be looking to shake up the status quo, but she has plenty of experience working within the current system, far more than political newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Kara Eastman.

With those traditional fault lines absent, this Boston-area primary has become the most explicit test yet of a question being asked increasingly on the left in the age of Trump: What counts more to Democratic voters, political experience or lived experience?

Capuano, a 66-year-old white man, has been coasting to re-election on the former for the better part of two decades, before which he was the mayor of Somerville, a residential suburb of Boston. He’s one of the most reliably liberal members of Congress, and his progressive policy bona fides are well established. He was an early backer of sanctuary cities, a vocal opponent of both the invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act, and a supporter of single-payer health care well before Bernie Sanders and co. turned it into a litmus test on the left. Capuano’s backers—like former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, the state’s first black chief executive, and Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis—cite that progressive track record to argue he deserves another term.

Pressley, a 44-year-old black woman, says it’s time for a change. “We will vote the same way,” she said during a debate earlier this month, “but I will lead differently.” She was the first black woman elected to the Boston City Council, and she’d be the first elected to Congress in Massachusetts if she can take down Capuano, who hasn’t faced a serious primary challenge since he was first elected in 1998. She’s put a premium on her personal experience—not only as a person of color, but also as a woman, as a survivor of sexual assault, and as a daughter of a single mother and of a father who battled drug addiction and spent time in prison—to argue she’s better suited to represent a district, the only one in the state, where most constituents are people of color. As she has put it: “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”

Such a pitch is not unique to Pressley. Ocasio-Cortez, who has endorsed Pressley and is the candidate to whom she is most often compared, also used her identities—as a Latina, as a middle-class American, as a former restaurant worker—to connect with voters in her diverse district on the way to shocking Rep. Joe Crowley in New York this summer. Likewise, gubernatorial candidates such as Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida spoke openly about their lived experiences on the way to winning their respective nominations.

But in those races, the representation argument—in short, that those long ignored or sidelined from the political process deserve to be given a voice—was a secondary storyline, one that ran parallel to fights over policy or politics. In Queens, for instance, the major fault line was ideological, between Ocasio-Cortez’s democratic socialism and Crowley’s relatively centrist worldview. In Georgia, it was political, between Abram’s belief she could turn out the Democratic base and her opponent’s plan to focus on moderates and independents in November. In Florida, where Gillum ran as an unapologetic progressive and bested both an establishment-favored moderate and a self-funding, self-proclaimed “radical centrist,” it was both.

Claiming that Tuesday’s primary is only about identity politics would be an oversimplification, of course. Pressley and Capuano overwhelmingly agree on matters of policy, but their rare points of disagreement are illustrative. Earlier this year, for example, Capuano voted for a “Blue Lives Matter” bill to make assaulting a police officer a federal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Capuano has defended that vote by downplaying the legislation as a “statement bill,” since similar laws were already in the books in all 50 states. But Pressley counters such statements are exactly the problem. As she said at a recent debate: “We are holding up the dignity and life of police officers, and, meanwhile, we are not getting justice for the black men in this country who are being murdered every day.”

Capuano has led by double-digits in limited polling this year and enters Tuesday as the clear favorite, though the outcome remains in doubt. An added wrinkle: The primary is the day after Labor Day, when many would-be voters will be busy returning to work and getting their kids back to school. Another factor is that while the district is majority-minority, the electorate is not. According to the most recent U.S. Census data, 41.5 percent of its residents are non-Hispanic white, but a local political data firm estimates about 55 percent of registered voters are white. Primary turnout in the district in the last midterms in 2014 skewed even whiter: 65 percent.

The demographic breakdown of Tuesday’s vote will be parsed by Democrats trying to gauge just how effective Pressley’s pitch worked across racial, ethnic, and gender lines. With so many of the usual policy or political variables either eliminated or muted, this primary may be the closest thing to a control group they’ll find. The results will come far too late to inform how the party thinks about what makes a good candidate for this November. What it means for 2020, though, is a different story.

If you think Slate’s work matters, become a Slate Plus member. You’ll get exclusive members-only content and a suite of great benefits—and you’ll help secure Slate’s future.

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Read full story here

#Democrats

[glitteryuongbi-blog]

Marissa Jaret Winokur Backstage at Hairspray Closing Night

Marissa Jaret Winokur Backstage at Hairspray Closing Night

Clsoing night of Hairspray, January 4th, 2009, backstage with Marissa Jaret Winokur

SUBSCRIBE!!

TheRyanOConnorShow.com

2009,4th,Closing,Feirstein,Hairspy,Harvey,January,Jaret,Judine,Marissa,Night,O’Connor,Ryan,Show,Somerville,Winokur,Zev

View On WordPress

#2009 #4th #closing #Feirstein #Hairspy #harvey #January #jaret #Judine #marissa #night #O&039;Connor #ryan #show #Somerville #winokur #Zev

[monalisaliveshere]

“Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.” – Aesop

Because if you do, surely you will have underestimated. Both the quantity and quality of the Make A Chicken project assignment far exceeded my expectations for my art students in grades 5 and 6 at Miscoe Hill School, in Mendon, MA. Three key events came together as I assigned this project on April 13:

My husband and I had added eight chicks to our little farm on April 8. They were precious and sweet and truly brought much needed joy to our lives as we quarantined due to COVID19

On Facebook, I had seen the work of Massachusetts College of Art and Design Professor Chuck Stigliano and his students as they responded to his Chicken Challenge assignment: https://www.facebook.com/MassArtBoston/posts/10157789254776201

My school district was set to enjoy a school vacation from April 20-24. As we entered our 5th week of remote learning on April 13, I wanted to assign something cheerful and engaging to be accomplished with found materials already at home.

Patrick C

As we approached the fifth week of remote learning, I still hadn’t seen or heard from about half of my 196 students. Families were adjusting to learning at home and the many challenges they were suddenly confronting. Students weren’t yet sure what their responsibilities were and it was a nebulous time for many. I had been pushing out simple drawing tasks along with a weekly wellness check-in, where I asked students to send a photo or short video of themselves or what they were doing to pass the time to share with the rest of the class. I would upload the photos and videos to Animoto and create a weekly video to share via Google Classroom and as an unlisted video on my Youtube channel. More students participated in this weekly check-in than with the weekly drawing assignments. After a few weeks, my district shifted from “practice” and “optional” assignments to “regular” assignments and participation grew immediately.

During the week of April 13, I pushed out the Make A Chicken assignment with an introductory video:

I fielded questions throughout the week and shared creations on social media as they came in. It was a daily delight to look at the fun submissions to Google Classroom. And curating chickens for publication became my morning focus.

Liam F

That week, students were also asked to complete a survey about the art materials they had at home. As it turns out, many did not have colored pencils, chalk, crayons, or paint. The only items 100% of my students had at home were pencils, paper, and scissors. The Make A Chicken project allowed for everyone to create and create they did! Here are just some of the chickens that were submitted (you can click on a photo and view the collection as a slideshow):

Jack O

Abby M, Tommy J

Adam D, Jack S

Alexa L, James A

Alyssa B

Ana T

Ben M

Brady G

Brody K

Carly W

Charles M

Connor M

DashC

Evan D

GavinM

Grady O

JackM

JacobH

Jason C

Jessica C

Kate M

Kaycie G

Kendall M

Kyle K

Liam F

Liam F

Liam F

Liam F

Lily T

Logan D

Finn L

Lyla H

Mackenna S

Riley C

Maggie R

Matthew B, Patrick G

Max G

Michael L

Nadia S

Nick L

Orianna M

Patrick C

Samantha C

Sydney D

Tyler N

Tyler V

Kaylyn T

Gabriella L

In all, about 160 hand-crafted chickens were submitted. Some are shared above, and I’m happy to add that you can see these chickens and more on Artsonia in our Make A Chicken gallery: https://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?project=1981037

My principal, Jennifer Mannion, was inspired to Make A Chicken and I was delighted to find this image in my email one day:

Jennifer Mannion, Principal, Miscoe Hill School

How creative is that?

And it just kept happening that people from all aspects of my life shared their chickens with me! This is the absolutely magical thing about the Make A Chicken project! For the first time in all my years of facilitating art making in school and sharing artwork via social media, this project is the first that knew no boundaries. Art teachers reached out to me for the lesson and family and friends across the United States shared chickens with me that they had made. Here is a special gallery of “affiliate” Make A Chicken submissions:

Sarah G of New Boston, NH – Granddaughter

  Nellie M of Denver, CO – Great niece

Julia G of New Boston, NH – Granddaughter

Jayne M of Somerville, MA – Sister in Law

Pam S of Bridgewater, MA – Second Cousin

Penny S of Raynham – First cousin once removed (my father’s cousin)

My father’s cousin, Penny Sawyer, not only shared the quilted chicken (above) with me, she shared the story of the original quilt maker, Barbara LaFlamme. Barbara was a friend of Penny’s who I had also spent time with visiting quilt shows with Penny and my mom. Barbara passed away after a long illness in June 2019. When Penny introduced us, she knew we would enjoy each other’s company because Barbara was a former teacher, retiring after 30 years of teaching art. In her spare time she enjoyed quilting and crafting. And indeed we did enjoy each other’s company, especially when Penny and Barbara would drive up to visit the Thimble Pleasure quilt show at Blackstone Valley Tech with my mother and me. The photo below is from a visit to my home after the quilt show, apparently around St. Patrick’s Day, 2018:

When Barbara’s family was going through her home after her passing, they found some unfinished quilts, including a collection of chicken squares. As Barbara and Penny often worked together (at least conspiratorially) on quilts, Barbara’s family gave Penny the unfinished quilts.  Penny took the chicken squares and sewed them together to make this beautiful quilt:

Barbara and Penny’s Chicken Quilt

I especially enjoy the stitched sayings around the edges(Penny) and the incredibly detailed stitchery and beadwork on the individual squares (Barbara):

I’m grateful to the Make A Chicken project for taking on a life of it’s own as I stumbled through the middle weeks of COVID19 enforced Remote Learning. I have enjoyed sharing the creations across social media where I believe they were enjoyed by all. As we go forward into the final six weeks of remote learning, I’m focused on maintaining the joy, creativity, and humor the Make A Chicken project fostered. I thank everyone for participating and once again thank Chuck Stigliano for the idea. Thanks for reading, “peeps”:

Make A Chicken Project/Wk 5 Remote Learning "Do not count your chickens before they are hatched." - Aesop Because if you do, surely you will have underestimated.

#ArtEducation #artsed #creativity #MakeAChicken #MiscoeHill #mursd #mursdvisualart

[deniscollins]

Amazon Faces Investor Pressure Over Facial Recognition

San Francisco police forces had been using facial recognition software to search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage until the city banned the technology due to civil liberty groups expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state. If you were an Amazon executive would you prohibit sales of its facial recognition system, called Amazon Rekognition, to government agencies, unless its board concludes that the technology does not facilitate human rights violations: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Facial recognition software is coming under increasing scrutiny from civil liberties groups and lawmakers. Now Amazon, one of the most visible purveyors of the technology, is facing pressure from another corner as well: its own shareholders.

As part of Amazon’s annual meeting in Seattle on Wednesday, investors are voting on whether the tech giant’s aggressive push to spread the surveillance software threatens civil rights — and, as a consequence, the company’s reputation and profits.

Shareholders have introduced two proposals on facial recognition for a vote. One asks the company to prohibit sales of its facial recognition system, called Amazon Rekognition, to government agencies, unless its board concludes that the technology does not facilitate human rights violations. The other asks the company to commission an independent report examining the extent to which Rekognition may threaten civil, human and privacy rights, and the company’s finances.

“This piece of equipment that Amazon has fostered and developed and is really propagating at this point doesn’t seem to us to be in the best interest of the common good,” said Sister Pat Mahoney, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a religious community in Brentwood, N.Y., that is an Amazon investor and introduced the proposed sales ban. “Facial recognition all over the place just makes everyone live in a police state.”

The proposals are nonbinding, meaning they do not require the company to take action, even if they receive a majority vote. But they add to the growing resistance to facial surveillance technology by elected officials, civil liberties groups and even some Amazon employees.

Last week, San Francisco banned the use of facial surveillance technology by the police and other city agencies. Oakland, Calif., and Somerville, Mass., near Boston, are considering similar bans. Earlier this year, state lawmakers in Massachusetts and California introduced bills that would restrict its use by government agencies. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform is holding a hearing on the civil rights implications of facial surveillance.

The Amazon shareholder proposals also highlight the rise of activism among investors in the country’s top tech companies.

Last year, investors successfully pressured Apple to create stronger parental controls for iPhones, warning that the device could be too compelling for young children. In the coming weeks, shareholders of Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet will vote on issues related to election interference, hate speech, disinformation and the creation of censored services for China.

“We’re not Luddites, we’re not anti-technology,” said Michael Connor, the executive director of Open MIC, a nonprofit group that works with activist investors in the tech sector and helped draft the facial surveillance proposals with Amazon shareholders. “But we do think all these technologies have to be handled and introduced in a responsible way.”

For Amazon’s annual meeting on Wednesday, employees who are stockholders have also introduced a proposal on climate change, pushing the company to make firm commitments to reduce its carbon footprint.

But Amazon fought particularly hard to prevent the votes on facial surveillance. In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission in January, the company said that it was not aware of any reported misuse of Rekognition by law enforcement customers. It also argued that the technology did not present a financial risk because it was just one of the more than 165 services Amazon offered.

“The proposals raise only conjecture and speculation about possible risks that might arise” from clients misusing the technology, lawyers for Amazon wrote in the letter. The agency disagreed, ultimately requiring Amazon to allow the facial surveillance resolutions to proceed.

In a statement in response to a reporter’s questions, Amazon said it offered clear guidelines on using Rekognition for public safety — including a recommendation that law enforcement agencies have humans review any possible facial matches suggested by its system. The company added that its customers had used Rekognition for beneficial purposes, including identifying more than 3,000 victims of human trafficking.

“We have not seen law enforcement agencies use Amazon Rekognition to infringe on citizens’ civil liberties,” the Amazon statement said.

Amazon is becoming a national magnet for mounting opposition to facial surveillance — a technology that may be used to identify and track people at a distance without their knowledge or consent.

Facial recognition uses artificial intelligence to scan a photo of an unknown person. The software then compares the facial template of the unknown person with a database of templates of known people and, if the templates are very similar, may suggest a name or match.

Proponents of the technology argue that such systems help law enforcement agencies more easily identify crime suspects and missing children. Civil liberties groups warn that the technology could easily be misused to disproportionately pursue immigrants, people of color and protesters, infringing on their rights to free speech and movement.

Other companies have long sold facial surveillance to law enforcement agencies, but Amazon has differentiated itself by, in part, playing down warnings about the technology.

Last year, Google said that it would refrain from offering facial recognition for general purposes until it had worked through the policy implications. This year, Bradford L. Smith, the president of Microsoft, said that his company had decided not to sell the surveillance technology to a police department seeking to freely use it on the general public.

Amazon, in contrast, recently pitched its facial recognition services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to company emailsobtained under open records law by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group based in Washington.

Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, two prominent firms that advise many large institutional investors, each recommended this month that shareholders vote in favor of the resolution calling for an outside report on Rekognition’s risks.

In its analysis, Institutional Shareholder Services wrote that Amazon “may be lagging its peers” because it has “not developed rules for bidding on government contracts, has not formed an artificial intelligence ethics committee and has not announced partnerships with civil liberties organizations.”

Industry analysts said there was little chance that the proposal to ban Rekognition would gain traction among shareholders.

But at least a few large institutional investors — including the New York City Pension Funds, which have about $1 billion in Amazon holdings — plan to vote in favor of the proposal for an independent report on facial surveillance.

“We want Amazon’s board to oversee and disclose how Amazon is addressing the significant risks posed by the sale of facial recognition technology,” said Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller and the investment adviser to the funds. He described the software as “a product that could lead to violations of human and civil rights around the world, especially if sold to authoritarian governments.”

Even so, that may not sway Amazon, whose largest investor prefers a wait-and-see approach to the risks of emerging technologies.

“Technologies always are two-sided. There are ways they can be misused,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said at a Wired tech conference last fall, adding: “That’s always been the case, and we will figure it out. The last thing I’d ever want to do is stop the progress of new technologies, even when they are dual use.”

#Amazon #Civil Rights

[what-is-sibling-test]

from 'RittenhouseTL' for all things Timeless https://ift.tt/2KtkAYL via Istudy world

Starlight & Strange Magic, Chapter 10: In Which We Briefly Return To Reality

Rating: M Summary:  Lucy Preston, a young American woman, arrives in England in 1887 to teach history at Somerville College, Oxford. London is the capital of the steam and aether and automatonic world, and new innovations are appearing every day. When she meets a mysterious, dangerous mercenary and underworld kingpin, Garcia Flynn, her life takes a turn for the decidedly too interesting. But Lucy has plenty of secrets of her own – not least that she’s from nowhere or nowhen nearby – and she is more than up for the challenge. Available: AO3 Previous: In Which Flynn Faces a Dilemma

All things considered, Rufus Carlin thinks he is enjoying London. Sure, you pay nine pounds for a beer, you will probably die if you look the wrong way crossing the street, everywhere is always crowded, the default weather is fifty-five degrees and cloudy, and his best friend disappeared down a wormhole to a parallel universe months ago and there’s no guarantee he’ll ever see her again, but on the whole, mostly, somewhat enjoying. He and Jiya have taken a workmanlike flat in Ealing, which still costs twenty percent more than the national average and doesn’t have a living room (they’re using the spare bedroom for this purpose) and set up a makeshift base of operations. Conscious of London’s reputation as one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world, they’re careful to wear hats, sunglasses (this being tricky with the aforementioned weather), hooded sweatshirts, or whatever when they go out. The names on their passports and other documents are not their real ones. It’s kind of James Bond, Rufus supposes. So long as you go with the “British” and “spy” parts, and forget everything else.

For that matter, he doesn’t know if “spy” is exactly what they’re doing, but close enough. They arrived here because this is where Connor Mason is, and Connor is now the de facto managing director of Rittenhouse after Emma went to Westworld. There used to be missions, plural; now there’s only the mission, and it no longer involves time travel, at least not for Rufus and Jiya. They worked as hard as they could, but they could only figure out how to send one person after her into an alternate dimension, and while the massive sci-fi nerd in Rufus was very disappointed at missing it, they agreed Lucy was the best choice. That was last October. They have no idea what, if anything, has happened since.

The only thing keeping them here is the fact that Emma and Company haven’t resurfaced either, so whatever’s going on over there, Rittenhouse hasn’t yet gotten what they wanted. Rufus has found it bizarre to live in the modern world again on a regular basis, more or less openly, after several years in the business of chasing an evil secret society through various pivotal events in American history (and some not so pivotal, but where they just felt like being dicks). He can have a phone again, though he has to be careful and never connect to public wifi hotspots and erase his data every night. Indoor plumbing, takeaway food, not coming face to face with the dark underbelly of racism and oppression in the land of the free every work day. Weird.

That is not to say that they have nothing to do here but kick back and find out what cheeky Nando’s are (chicken? Rufus is fairly confident that it’s chicken, though he doesn’t know why it’s cheeky). Connor works in a fancy office on Canary Wharf, he’s the one heading Rittenhouse’s apparent organizational transformation into a successful international philanthropy outfit (what are those board meetings like, Rufus wonders?) and they need to keep tabs on him. They’re fairly confident that Rittenhouse doesn’t have a second time machine either, but Connor has to keep the wheels greased until the boss gets home, and donating millions or billions of pounds/euros/dollars to various one-percent oligarchs is a way to control the world that doesn’t even require time travel. So most of Rufus and Jiya’s job these days is hacking, trying to figure out how Rittenhouse makes a big donation to Save the Whales or whatever, it gets re-routed through various shell companies and third-party offshore bank accounts, and ends up actually funding some genocidal lunatic in the Congo or ruthless Gazprom oil mogul in Russia. They’re not sure what to do even if they do get enough solid evidence for a case. Take it to the authorities? Like that wouldn’t end up with them disappearing permanently on the spot.

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#IFTTT #'RittenhouseTL' for all things Timeless

[londontheatre]

Today, 23rd October 2017, rehearsals begin for the new West End cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Olivier award-winning production of School of Rock – The Musical. Stephen Leask, having played the role of alternate Dewey since May this year, will now lead the cast as Dewey Finn from 15th November 2017, as the show enters its second year in the West End. Joining Leask at the New London Theatre will be Alan Pearson as Ned Schneebly, Michelle Francis as Patty Di Marco, currently a member of the ensemble, and Craig Gallivan as the alternate Dewey Finn. Florence Andrews will continue as Rosalie Mullins alongside the three teams of thirteen kids who make up Dewey’s band. The ‘grown-up’ cast is completed by ensemble members Nick Butcher, Cassandra McCowan, Jessica Louise Parkinson, Andy Rees, Cameron Sharp, Jake Sharp, James Smoker, Wendy Somerville, Andrew Spillett, Hannah Stratton and Alex Tomkins with swings, Paul Kemble, Laura Medforth, Billy Mitchell, Tasha Sheridan and Joshua St. Clair.

To vote for School of Rock – The Musical which has been nominated for the 2017 Evening Standard Radio 2 Audience Award for Best Musical visit bbc.co.uk/radio 2. Voting closes on 29 October 2017 at 11.59pm and the winner will be announced at the Evening Standard Awards on 3 December 2017.

On 6 November 2017 School of Rock – The Musical will host this year’s BBC Radio 2’s BBC Children in Need Gala. Hosted by Ken Bruce with the charity’s mascot Pudsey, at least 50% of the proceeds from the Gala will go to BBC Children in Need’s 2017 Appeal going on to make a difference to the lives of disadvantaged children and young people across the UK. 

Continuing the countrywide search for kids to ‘join the band’, further open auditions will take place in London on 8, 10, 20 and 22 November 2017. If you’re between 8 – 12 years old and play the drums, keys or the electric or bass guitar, registration and further details can be found at http://ift.tt/2lDsPG9 or by contacting Jessica Ronane Casting at [email protected]

Now booking to 13 January 2019, School of Rock – The Musical opened in November last year and is one of four Lloyd Webber shows – with Phantom of the Opera, Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar – which have played concurrently in the West End this year. The West End production of School of Rock – The Musical is the recipient of the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music, and in August this year, the production welcomed a new group of kids who play live music on stage at each performance.

[See image gallery at http://ift.tt/1FpwFUw]

  Before joining the School of Rock company Stephen Leask’s previous theatre credits include Robin Hood at The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath, One Man, Two Guvnors at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, A Little Hotel on the Side for Theatre Royal Bath, Potted Panto at the Vaudeville Theatre, The Secret Garden for Birmingham Rep and Troilus and Cressida for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Leask is a member of the Merely Players, a theatre company dedicated to producing accessible productions of Shakespeare. His television appearances include Nightmares, Doctors, Our World War, The Intern and EastEnders.

Florence Andrews’ West End theatre credits include the role of Glinda in the Really Useful Group’s production of The Wizard of Oz at The London Palladium, Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theatre and Once The Musical at the Phoenix Theatre. She played the leading role of Candy in Miss Atomic Bomb at the former St. James Theatre as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Mikado, both at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.

Alan Pearson has recently completed a run in Alice’s Adventures Underground at the Waterloo Vaults. His other theatre credits include One Man, Two Guvnors for the National Theatre, The Mitford Girls at Chichester Festival Theatre, Avenue Q at the Gielgud and Wyndham’s Theatres, Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse and Jack and the Beanstalk at the Palace Theatre, Watford.

Michelle Francis’ theatre credits include Mack & Mabel and Oklahoma! for Chichester Festival Theatre, Jersey Boys at the Piccadilly Theatre and Prince Edward Theatre, The Importance of Being Earnest at the former St James’ Theatre, Finding Neverland at Leicester Curve and Shrek The Musical at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Craig Gallivan is best known on television for playing Luke in the British comedy-drama Stella, a role he has played for over 50 episodes. His theatre credits include Billy Elliot The Musical at the Victoria Palace Theatre, Crime and Punishment for the National Theatre, Days of Significance for the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Long, The Short and the Tall for Sheffield Theatres and the UK Tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. His other television work includes Torchwood II, Footballers Wives and Footballers Wives: Extra Time.

Based on the iconic hit movie and with a rocking new score by Andrew Lloyd Webber, School of Rock – The Musical follows slacker and wannabe rock star Dewey Finn turn a class of straight-A 10-year-old students into an ear popping, riff scorching, all-conquering rock band! Dewey poses as a substitute teacher at a prestigious prep school to make ends meet, and when he discovers his fifth graders’ musical talents, he enlists his class to form a rock group and conquer the Battle of the Bands. As Dewey falls for the beautiful headmistress, can he and his students keep this special assignment secret as they learn to fully embrace the power of rock?

Based on the smash hit 2003 film of the same title, School of Rock features music from the movie, as well as new music written by Andrew Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Glenn Slater and a book by Julian Fellowes. School of Rock – The Musical is directed by Laurence Connor with choreography by JoAnn M. Hunter, set and costume designs by Anna Louizos, lighting design by Natasha Katz, sound design by Mick Potter, music supervision by John Rigby with Matt Smith as musical director.

Produced by Paramount Pictures, the 2003 hit film School of Rock was directed by Richard Linklater and starred Jack Black in a career-defining performance.

School of Rock — The Musical is produced in the West End by Andrew Lloyd Webber for The Really Useful Group and Warner Music Group & Access Industries with Madeleine Lloyd Webber as Executive Producer.

School of Rock at the New London Theatre 166 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5PW

SHOW SCHEDULE Monday – 7.30pm Tuesday – 7.30 pm Wednesday – 7.30 pm Thursday 2.30pm and 7.30 pm Friday – 7.30 pm Saturday – 2.30 pm and 7.30 pm Sunday – 3.30pm

http://ift.tt/2y0cuSc London Theatre 1

#IFTTT #London Theatre 1