#it was in surprisingly good condition for a book everyone could access

[mashkaroom]

Lengthy analysis of Holes, as promised!. This will include spoilers, which will be marked. Just gonna go through the book and the philosophy/themes/connections I caught onto this time around. Stuff discussed, in order: connections to Camus, on the question of children’s books, systems, cycles, and why Stanley is gay and jewish 😏

Camus:

The first and perhaps most obvious set of texts/theories it makes sense to put Holes in conversation with is the works of Albert Camus. Holes starts out with a description of the sun and the heat, which readers of the Stranger will remember are major themes there. The heat continues to be a prominent part of the story, though thematically, it functions very differently in the two books. In The Stranger it primarily represents the indifference of the universe (or at least so claim a ton of sources and I’m inclined to agree) and the lack of control we exert over our own lives while in Holes it’s basically the opposite of that. The heat and drought is implied to be a semi-divine punishment for a past injustice and, moreover, the elite adults of the camp have air conditioning and access to shade: the sun does not affect everyone equally in Holes as it does in The Stranger (though even that is debatable: I don’t think this was Camus’s intent, but it’s notable that it’s only the white englishman who’s driven to murder by the sun. This could certainly be read as critique of colonizers who cannot/refuse to coexist with the land and environment and how the indigenous population always suffers for it, but I digress). The other Camusian parallel one is immediately inclined to draw is that, of course, of Sysiphus: there’s the repetitive and seemingly meaningless act of digging holes not to mention that carrying stuff up a mountain is both thematically and plot-wise a very important part of Holes. But, once again, it is eventually revealed that both acts do carry an inherent meaning. Holes does not present the image of an uncaring universe: on the contrary, destiny and semi-divine influence plays a major role. The story may start out with a series of seemingly random and inherently meaningless events, but as the story progresses, people, actions, items, and events become increasingly imbued with meaning. In the Holes universe, one must imagine Sisyphus redeemed, not through the act of rolling the stone but by rebelling against it. I have difficulty imagining that Sachar was not thinking of Camus while writing Holes, or, at the very least, that if he encountered Camus afterwards, he must have been struck by the similarities. I don’t know if there was a specific intent in creating a story so embroiled in Camusian absurdism, especially since the target readership is (allegedly) children who almost certainly are not recognizing specific allusions to Camus, so perhaps the similarities are purely aesthetic — after all, everything that is nominally similar does play quite different thematic roles. However, I would never pass up the opportunity to talk about the myth of sisyphus and I think placing Holes in dialogue with Camus can raise some interesting questions about the nature of meaning.

Is Holes a children’s book?

Speaking, though, of the target audience, the audience for this book is in fact children. What about it makes it a children’s book makes it difficult to say: the protagonists are children (and, I would argue, it is not a coming of age story, despite the claims of one piece of lit crit about Holes in which i disagreed with almost every claim made, but i digress once more) and the writing style is fairly simple: you can read it with a second-grader’s vocabulary. Also, of course, being a children’s book doesn’t (and crucially shouldn’t!) mean that it’s lacking in depth and complexity. However, I think most thematically rich children’s books tend to be quite allegorical. The Little Prince is a good example. Holes is just way too specific for its sole market to be children. It’s either intended to be read by multiple generations at once or for child readers to return to it as an adult. It addresses themes of racism (and not just generic racism, anti-black racism in the reconstruction south), homelessness, intergenerational trauma. and the modern carceral system. These are social critiques that will probably go over most kids’ heads (certainly over mine). However, the themes of the text are not inaccessible for children. You don’t have to understand the particular history of the US criminal justice system or even that Sachar is making a comparison to anything specific to get that the system that he’s portraying is unjust. Knowing the real-world context just adds another layer to the text. Holes also has one of the hallmarks of children’s books that I really like, which is a particular type of absurdism that the child characters come up against. This always rang true to me as a kid and well into my teens, when you start understanding that your life is controlled by some set of systems, but you haven’t quite gotten what those systems are or why and how they came about. Like nowadays, I can say “we did this in elementary school because of a state law, that because of a federal law, that because of the history of puritanism, and this because we got a grant for it”, but as a kid nobody tells you these things or really even cares to explain why the rules are as they are, and the systems that govern your world, often with no small degree of violence and almost always with an inherent disregard for your agency, are ineffable and slippery, and good children’s books capture this really well (Series of Unfortunate Events is probably my favorite example of this, where a secret organization that everything is implicated in and more more tragicomic details about it get revealed until the Baudelaire children find themselves to some degree members with mixed feelings is honestly an excellent coming-of-age allegory. oh, not to mention the constant conflict with bureacracy. god that series is so good, everyone read it). Back to Holes, Sachar weaves the more fantastical ineffable elements in with real-world issues so neatly. Stanley’s family is allegedly cursed, which is why Stanley keeps having bad luck, but he also lives in systemic poverty, which is also why he keeps having bad luck. Sachar eschews neither the allegorical elements common in children’s literature nor the more direct systemic critiques more often found in YA and adult lit, and it creates a really unique vibe. I think the story really benefited from having a children’s author, and I would love to see more authors in both children’s and adult lit do this!

Systems

Speaking of the systems, this book is surprisingly radical. Like it’s full-on an abolitionist text. The law is pretty much only ever presented as adversarial, both in the story of Stanley’s present time, and in Kate and Sam’s story. It’s implied if not stated repeatedly that Stanley and the other boys are pretty much victims of circumstance and have been imprisoned pretty much for the crime of being poor. The hole-digging is shown to be cruel and bad for the boys. It’s noted that in digging the holes Stanley’s heart hardened along with his muscles. This is of course very evocative of the system of retributive justice we have in America. Additionally, Camp Greenlake’s existence can ultimately be traced back to an act of racist violence, also in close parallel with our prison system. Hole’s stance on justice is very restorative. Punishments are never shown to work: only through righting the wrongs can true justice be achieved. Moreover, Holes even gives the opportunity for redemption to a minor antagonist when [minor spoiler] Derrick Dunne, the kid who was bullying Stanley in the beginning ultimately plays a small role in helping Stanley regain his freedom [spoiler over].

Cycles

Cycles are a major theme in holes, and Sachar creates a unique temporality to support this theme. There are 3 interwoven stories: that of Stanley’s in the present date, that of Stanley’s ancestors, and that of the land that Stanley is on (though, as I will delve into later, it’s at least a little implied that Stanley is descended from the characters in that story also). The stories from the past reach in and touch the present. You can’t untangle the past from the future. Looking at this again through a social justice lens, it could be seen as fairly progressive commentary on what to do with regards to America’s past wrongs. The past cannot and will not be left in the past: it must be dealt with on an ongoing basis. Even the warden, the greatest villain of Stanley’s story has a sympathetic moment at the end where it’s revealed that she, too, is stuck in a cycle of intergenerational trauma she can’t break free from.

Stanley is gay and jewish

Ok, I will now talk about how Stanley is a queer Jew, but this entire section will be riddled with spoilers, so read the book first and then come back!

A queer Jew?? i hear you ask. You’re just projecting. Yes, 100%. However, I think that interpreting Stanley as both these things adds to the thematic richness of the text. Let’s start with the Jewish bit: it’s not explicitly stated that Stanley is Jewish, but his great-great grandfather is a nerd-boy Latvian immigrant with the last name Yelnats, and his great-grandfather was a stockbrocker, so, like, ya know. Louis Sachar is also himself Jewish, as was the director of the movie, who cast Jews in the roles of Stanley and his family (dyk Shia LaBeouf is Jewish?? i did not), so I know I’m not the only one interpreting it this way. And honestly, does it not resemble the book of exodus quite a bit? They escape what is pretty much a form of slavery and wander in the desert. Sploosh resembles the well of Miriam, and then they ascend up a mountain to the “thumb of god”, perhaps in a parallel to Moses receiving the commandments. Is this a useful way to look at the text? Who knows. But what I think we do get from reading Stanley as Jewish is a more nuanced discussion of privilege and solidarity. If Stanley and his ancestors are Jewish (or at least Jew-ish), then what placed the curse upon his family (and, we see, Madame Zeroni’s family isn’t doing so great either) is the breaking of solidarity between oppressed people. But also, the fact that you are also marginalized does not wash you of the responsibility to other marginalized groups. I don’t think Sachar intended it this way, because I think he probably would have talked about it more if he had, but I would say this book can be read as a call to the American Jewish community to take an active role in forging solidarity with other marginalized groups and actively righting the wrong you, your ancestors, and your community wrought upon them.

Now, why do I think Stanley and Zero are gay? Before I go into how it augments the text thematically, I bring to your attention this passage.

Two nights later, Stanley lay awake staring up at the star-filled sky. He was too happy to fall asleep. 

He knew he had no reason to be happy. He had heard or read somewhere that right before a person freezes to death, he suddenly feels nice and warm. He wondered if perhaps he was experiencing something like that. 

It occurred to him that he couldn't remember the last time he felt happiness. It wasn't just being sent to Camp Green Lake that had made his life miserable. Before that he'd been unhappy at school, where he had no friends, and bullies like Derrick Dunne picked on him. No one liked him, and the truth was, he didn't especially like himself. 

He liked himself now.

 He wondered if he was delirious. He looked over at Zero sleeping near him. Zero's face was lit in the starlight, and there was a flower petal in front of his nose that moved back and forth as he breathed. It reminded Stanley of something out of a cartoon. Zero breathed in, and the petal was drawn up, almost touching his nose. Zero breathed out, and the petal moved toward his chin. It stayed on Zero's face for an amazingly long time before fluttering off to the side. 

Stanley considered placing it back in front of Zero's nose, but it wouldn't be the same.

Girl, I’m sorry, that’s gay as shit! It’s such tremendous tenderness, not to mention the traditionally romantic imagery of moonlight and the flower petal. There’s also the non-romantic aspects. Stanley’s inexplicable happiness and suddenly liking himself evokes, for me, at least, the experience of coming out to yourself, of realizing who you are. Later in this chapter, Stanley contemplates running away with Zero despite the fact that it would make them lifelong outlaws. This book, remember, was written in 1998, and homosexuality was decriminalized in 2003, and the book takes place in Texas. It would have been, if anything, even more evocative of gayness when it was published. Now as to how this increases the thematic richness of the text: obviously, in carrying Hector up to the thumb, giving him water, and singing the lullaby, he redeems the wrong done by his ancestor, after which his family’s luck immediately changed. However, after Hector and Zero return to camp Greenlake, rain falls there for the first time. What was redeemed here? Remember that earlier on we learn that what caused the drought was the fact that Sam the onion man (who was black) was murdered for kissing Kate Barlow (who was white) — so what would a [post-factum wronging of that right look like? Zero, as we remember, is black while Stanley is white, so them being in a romantic relationship would be a successful interracial relationship to redeem the one Kate and Sam weren’t able to have. It’s also, as I said earlier, implied that Stanley is descended from Kate Barlow on his mother’s side: Stanley remembers seeing the other half of the lipstick tube with her initials on it in his mother’s bedroom. I’d also argue that Sam the Onion Man is implied to be descended from Madame Zeroni (chronology-wise, I think he’d be her grandson). First of all, there’s no follow-up with Madame Zeroni’s son who moved to America, and pretty much all other plot threads are followed up with in Holes. Secondly, Sam mentions water running uphill, just like Madame Zeroni does. Even without these speculations being true, Stanley and Hector being gay would redeem the land they’re on, but If they are, the parallel with the other ancestral redemption arc becomes to much to imagine it was unintentional.

So anyway, those are my thoughts on Holes, now everyone go read it!

#was trying to express my dad that shia labeouf is jewish but couldn't remember how to pronounce his name #so i was like. dyk sheeya labeeoof is jewish? indiana jone's son. shaya labyof. Pap. Indiana Jone's son. you know who he is. Pap come on #when he figured out who he was he asked if harrison ford was also jewish #as a joke #and turns out he fucking is! his maternal grandparents are jews from minsk! #quoth my father: 'they're everywhere. nothing is sacred' #lololol #anyway this fucking booooook you guys

[jenniferisacommonname]

Bonus Level Unlocked

This week marks the release of Jason Schreier’s Press Reset, an incredibly well-researched book on catastrophic business failure in the gaming industry. Jason’s a good dude, and there’s an excerpt here if you want to check it out. Sadly, game companies going belly-up is such a common occurrence that he couldn’t possibly include them all, and one of the stories left out due to space constraints is one that I happen to be personally familiar with. So, I figured I’d tell it here.

I began working at Acclaim Studios Austin as a sound designer in January of 2000. It was a tumultuous period for the company, including a recent rebranding from their former studio name, “Iguana Entertainment,” and a related, ongoing lawsuit from the ex-founder of Iguana. There were a fair number of ghosts hanging around—the creative director’s license plate read IGUANA, which he never changed, and one of the meeting rooms held a large, empty terrarium—but the studio had actually been owned on paper by Acclaim since 1995, and I didn’t notice any conflicting loyalties. Everyone acted as if we always had been, and always would be, Acclaim employees.

Over the next few years I worked on a respectable array of triple-A titles, including Quarterback Club 2002, Turok: Evolution, and All-Star Baseball 2002 through 2005. (Should it be “All-Stars Baseball,” like attorneys general? Or perhaps a term of venery, like “a zodiac of All-Star Baseball.”) At any rate, it was a fun place to work, and a platformer of hijinks ensued.

But let’s skip to the cutscene. The truth is that none of us in the trenches suspected the end was near until it was absolutely imminent. Yes, Turok: Evolution and Vexx had underperformed, especially when stacked against the cost of development, but games flop in the retail market all the time. And, yes, Showdown: Legends of Wrestling had been hustled out the door before it was ready for reasons no one would explain, and the New York studio’s release of a BMX game featuring unlockable live-action stripper footage had been an incredibly weird marketing ploy for what should have been a straightforward racing title. (Other desperate gimmicks around this time included a £6,000 prize for UK parents who would name their baby “Turok,” an offer to pay off speeding tickets to promote Burnout 2 that quickly proved illegal, and an attempt to buy advertising space on actual tombstones for a Shadow Man sequel.)

But the baseball franchise was an annual moneymaker, and our studio had teams well into development on two major new licenses, 100 Bullets and The Red Star. Enthusiasm was on the upswing. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention when voice actors started calling me to complain that they hadn’t been paid, but at the time it seemed more like a bureaucratic failure than an actual money shortage—and frankly, it was a little naïve of them to expect net-30 in the first place. Industry standard was, like, net-90 at best. So I was told.

Then one Friday afternoon, a few department managers got word that we’d kind of maybe been skipping out on the building lease for let’s-not-admit-how-many months. By Monday morning, everyone’s key cards had been deactivated.

It's a little odd to arrive at work and find a hundred-plus people milling around outside—even odder, I suppose, if your company is not the one being evicted. Acclaim folks mostly just rolled their eyes and debated whether to cut our losses and head to lunch now, while employees of other companies would look dumbfounded and fearful before being encouraged to push their way through the crowd and demonstrate their still-valid key card to the security guard. Finally, the General Manager (hired only a few months earlier, and with a hefty relocation bonus to accommodate his houseboat) announced that we should go home for the day and await news. Several of our coworkers were veterans of the layoff process—like I said, game companies go under a lot—and one of them had already created a Yahoo group to communicate with each other on the assumption that we’d lose access to our work email. A whisper of “get on the VPN and download while you can” rippled through the crowd.

But the real shift in tone came after someone asked about a quick trip inside for personal items, and the answer was a hard, universal “no.” We may have been too busy or ignorant to glance up at any wall-writing, but the building management had not been: they were anticipating a full bankruptcy of the entire company. In that situation, all creditors have equal standing to divide up a company's assets in lengthy court battles, and most get a fraction of what they’re owed. But if the landlords had seized our office contents in lieu of rent before the bankruptcy was declared, they reasoned, then a judge might rule that they had gotten to the treasure chest first, and could lay claim to everything inside as separate from the upcoming asset liquidation.

Ultimately, their gambit failed, but the ruling took a month to settle. In the meantime, knick knacks gathered dust, delivered packages piled up, food rotted on desks, and fish tanks became graveyards. Despite raucous protest from every angle—the office pets alone generated numerous threats of animal cruelty charges—only one employee managed to get in during this time, and only under police escort. He was a British citizen on a work visa, and his paperwork happened to be sitting on his desk, due to expire. Without it, he was facing literal deportation. Fortunately, a uniformed officer took his side (or perhaps just pre-responded to what was clearly a misdemeanor assault in ovo,) and after some tense discussion, the building manager relented, on the condition that the employee touch absolutely nothing beyond the paperwork in question. The forms could go, but the photos of his children would remain.

It’s also a little odd, by the way, to arrive at the unemployment office and find every plastic chair occupied by someone you know. Even odder, I suppose, if you’re actually a former employee of Acclaim Studios Salt Lake, which had shut down only a month or two earlier, and you just uprooted your wife and kids to a whole new city on the assurance that you were one of the lucky ones who got to stay employed. Some of them hadn’t even finished unpacking.

Eventually, we were allowed to enter the old office building one at a time and box up our things under the watchful eye of a court appointee, but by then our list of grievances made the landlords’ ploy seem almost quaint by comparison (except for the animals, which remains un-fucking-forgivable.) We had learned, for example, that in the weeks prior to the bankruptcy, our primary lender had made an offer of $15 million—enough to keep us solvent through our next batch of releases, two of which had already exited playtesting and were ready to be burned and shipped. The only catch was that the head of the board, company founder Greg Fischbach, would have to step down. This was apparently too much of an insult for him to stomach, and he decided that he'd rather see everything burn to the ground. The loan was refused.

Other “way worse than we thought” details included gratuitous self-dealing to vendors owned by board members, the disappearance of expensive art from the New York offices just before closure, and the theft of our last two paychecks. For UK employees, it was even more appalling: Acclaim had, for who knows how long, been withdrawing money from UK paychecks for their government-required pension funds, but never actually putting the money into the retirement accounts. They had stolen tens of thousands of dollars directly from each worker.

Though I generally reside somewhere between mellow and complete doormat on the emotional spectrum, I did get riled enough to send out one bitter email—not to anyone in corporate, but to the creators of a popular webcomic called Penny Arcade, who, in the wake of Acclaim’s bankruptcy announcement, published a milquetoast jibe about Midway’s upcoming Area 51. I told Jerry (a.k.a. “Tycho”) that I was frankly disappointed in their lack of cruelty, and aired as much dirty laundry as I was privy to at the time.

“Surely you can find a comedic gem hidden somewhere in all of this!” I wrote. “Our inevitable mocking on PA has been a small light at the end of a very dark, very long tunnel. Please at least allow us the dignity of having a smile on our faces while we wait in line for food stamps.”

Two days later, a suitably grim comic did appear, implying the existence of a new release from Acclaim whose objective was to run your game company into the ground. In the accompanying news post, Tycho wrote:

“We couldn’t let the Acclaim bankruptcy go without comment, though we initially let it slide thinking about the ordinary gamers who lost their jobs there. They don’t have anything to do with Acclaim’s malevolent Public Relations mongrels, and it wasn’t they who hatched the Titty Bike genre either. Then, we remembered that we have absolutely zero social conscience and love to say mean things.”

Another odd experience, by the way, is digging up a 16-year-old complaint to a webcomic creator for nostalgic reference when you offer that same creator a promotional copy of the gaming memoir you just co-wrote with Sid Meier. Even odder, I suppose, to realize that the original non-Acclaim comic had been about Area 51, which you actually were hired to work on yourself soon after the Acclaim debacle.*

As is often the case in complex bankruptcies, the asset liquidation took another six years to fully stagger its way through court—but in 2010, we did, surprisingly, get the ancient paychecks we were owed, plus an extra $1,700-ish for the company’s apparent violation of the WARN Act. By then, I had two kids and a very different life, for which the money was admittedly helpful. Sadly, Acclaim’s implosion probably isn’t even the most egregious one on record. Our sins were, to my knowledge, all money-related, and at least no one was ever sexually assaulted in our office building. Again, to my knowledge. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we remain the only historical incident of corporate pet murder. The iguana got out just in time.

*Area 51’s main character was voiced by David Duchovny, and he actually got paid—which was lucky for him, because three years later, Midway also declared bankruptcy.

#gamedev #gaming #pressreset #acclaim #acclaim studios #bankruptcy #midway #midway games #layoff #layoffs #turok #vexx #bmx xxx #game company #corporate shenanigans #all star baseball #quarterback club #penny arcade #sid meier #sid meier's memoir #memoir #area 51 #david duchovny #iguana #jason schreier

[mordoriscalling]

The Shrike and The Lark (pt.3)

Jaskier and Renfri are disaster twins ruling Creyden. When the Warlord of the North knocks at their door, Queen Renfri and King Julian are at an advantage - they know him. As in, they know him. (Inspired by the Warlord AU and “the heart is a winged beast”).

(Pt. 1) (Pt. 2)

Creyden, 1237

The morning following the feast, the monarchs of Creyden, their Royal Council and advisors meet with the White Wolf and his right and left hand.

“We come to you with a proposal of a non-aggression pact,” Lady Yennefer proclaims as soon as everyone sits down at a round table in the war room.

The King and the Queen have a wordless conversation with Lady Chancellor, a striking woman whose skin is nearly the colour of charcoal. After the three exchanges glances, Queen Renfri replies, “Creyden would find that treaty agreeable.”

The White Wolf inclines his head.

“We have prepared a draft,” the sorceress adds, presenting the scroll to the Solicitor-General.  

“I shall take a look at it now,” the Solicitor answers.

The man appears orderly in all manners, with his prim attire and neat white beard. He surveys each line of the pact thoroughly. As everyone waits for his verdict, the negotiations continue.

“We have another proposal, though,” Eskel states. “An alliance, if you’d be interested.”

The suggestion is met with bewilderment from Creyden’s representatives.

“What would the alliance involve?” King Julian asks.  

“Mutual profit, generally,” Eskel replies.  

“I’m afraid I can’t think of any ways in which our kingdom could bring profit to you,” the King admits. “The White Wolf’s empire seems to lack nothing.”

The Warlord of the North has so far conquered Caingorn, Kaedwen, half of Aedirn, and two-thirds of Redania. It’s an area exceedingly large and full of diverse resources; the White Wolf, ruling over such a territory, should not be in need of anything. With one exception, perhaps.

“Nothing but reliable access to ports,” Lady Yennefer answers.

The one-third of Redania that remains sovereign is the part of the country adjacent to the coast. The King of Redania was wise not to have surrendered it; sea grants some considerable advantages, after all. Creyden, especially after turning Kovir and Poviss into their vassals, has plenty of seashores to make use of.

“I see,” the King says slowly.

Again, the royals and their Council hold a silent debate by sharing telling gazes among themselves. When the matter is settled with nods, Queen Renfri speaks.

“What would the White Wolf offer in exchange?” she inquires.

“Many benefits come from the very fact of being the White Wolf’s ally,” Eskel answers.

“And just as many threats,” Lady Chancellor counters.

To this, the witcher retorts, “Yet I should think that the Warlord’s military support whenever the need arises, in the case of both internal and external conflicts, is a suitable compensation for that.”

Such a prospect is so tempting that King Julian does not consult anyone, giving an immediate response instead.

“It would be a profitable alliance indeed,” he agrees. “But how do we ensure that we keep our sides of the bargain?”

“There are ways,” Lady Yennefer replies. “Marriage, for instance. ”

Many people in the room still in unease. The royal advisors grow tense, while the White Wolf scowls formidably.

“Yen –” he gowls but then, wonder of all wonders, falls silent at the gesture of Lady Yennefer’s hand.

“Would this idea have Her Majesty’s consent?” the sorceress asks the Queen.

“Consent,” Queen Renfri scoffs. Her countenance transforms suddenly, shifting into a fury powerful enough to overthrow kingdoms. “Consent!” she repeats, measuring the sorceress with a deathly glare, “As if that ever mattered before –”

“My Queen,” King Julian interrupts, in a manner surprisingly stern. “While you have every right to your anger, don’t you think it’s unjust for Lady Yennefer to suffer it? I’m sure she had no malicious intentions.”

The Queen’s wrath seems to falter as her brother talks.

“My King is a voice of reason,” she admits. Addressing Lady Yennefer, she then states, “I said it only once to my advisors and I shall it only once to you: I will not marry any man. Ever.”

The sorceress accepts the answer with an inclination of her head. She eyes the Queen intently and Renfri watches her closely as well. Before it can turn into a staring match, however, Lady Chancellor speaks.

“What about the King?” she suggests. “Perhaps he could be to the Warlord’s preferences?”

“No,” the Warlord replies firmly, without missing a beat. “With all due respect to His Majesty,” he adds, in a tone not so respectful, “I have no interest in taking a consort.”

At that, King Julian gives a mirthless, mocking laugh. “You have no interest in it even though you need it?” he asks.

The White Wolf’s gaze seems as fierce as flames when it rests upon Julian. “My need to take a consort is small compared to my need to be certain that I can trust my consort with my life,” the white-haired witcher replies. “I want a partner who’ll hide nothing from me, or I don’t want a partner at all.”

A lot more seems to have passed between the Warlord and the King than the words that were said. There is hurt in both their expressions – hidden deep but still visible – and Julian appears mournful for some reason. The room is quiet and everyone regards the two rulers with curiosity. The silence is finally broken by the Solicitor-General.

“This draft is acceptable,” he declares, which is met with clear relief on both sides. “We could develop it into a binding pact, sign it, and then negotiate the terms and conditions of the alliance whenever the Warlord deems– ”

“Or,” King Julian interjects, “we could start working on the new treaty immediately.”

This time, it is the Warlord and his two advisors who are surprised.

“What is your urgency?” Eskel inquires.

“We expect a rebellion from Kovir and Poviss any day now,” Lady Chancellor reveals reluctantly. “When it happens, the Warlord’s support would truly be invaluable.”

The White Wolf, Lady Yennefer and Eskel look between each other.

“I’m aware that I’m asking a lot,” the King adds, “But I’m certain that we can compensate you for the haste somehow.”

“Let us consider it in private,” Lady Yennefer decides.

The White Wolf, his right and left hand then take their leave. After they do so, the Council debates the proposal of the alliance. It seems ideal almost, and the advisors are suspicious. They voice their concerns about the White Wolf’s motives, for it may as well be a ruse. With marriage out of the question, there is not an easy but reliable way to hold the Warlord to his word. If it were to be an alliance based solely on the belief in mutual profit, Credyen could have its ports taken over and be conquered in a matter of days.

Queen Renfri and King Julian, however, do not consider the threat possible, and their confidence in the White Wolf displeases the Council. In fact, many of them see it as yet another sign of how untrustworthy the twin monarchs are. Even in their own kingdom, they regarded as unstable, and uneducated in the matters of running a state. Having spent so many years in exile, Renfri and Julian are not believed to be fit to rule. Although the twins’ reign has been successful so far, their subjects do not feel secure under their leadership, and Lady Chancellor does not hesitate to remind them of it.

“I urge you to be more cautious, Your Majesties,” she tells them, “The trust you put in the Wolf will have a negative effect on your fragile popularity.”

“It will until it won’t,” the King retorts. “The Wolf is good to the common folk. It’s the nobles who spread the terrible tales of him, and they are just myths. Not a single grain of truth to them. With time, the Warlord will prove himself to be a valuable, faithful ally, and our nobles will have to stop wagging their tongues eventually.”

“But how can you know that, Your Majesty?” the Chancellor presses on, “How can you be so sure?”

“My brother reads into people’s nature with the ease he reads books,” Queen Renfri answers. “Has he not appointed all the positions at this court with each person perfectly fit for their role? Has he not predicted the decisions of the Kings of Kovir and Poviss with accuracy?”

These arguments are not refuted, for no one can deny the truth of them.

“I understand why you’re afraid of the Wolf plotting to conquer us,” King Julian says. “I believe it would soothe your fears to bind him to his promise in such a way that he wouldn’t dare attack us. There must be something, so please endeavour to find it.”

The advisors are still displeased but the King’s suggested solution has appeased them slightly.

Soon after, the monarchs dismiss the Council. King Julian and Queen Renfri stay in the room and break their fast together. Having no other engagements until later in the day, the twins then amuse themselves with a game of chess. As they play, Julian banters with Renfri, partly for entertainment but also in order to distract her. His sister knows his tricks, however, and beats him twice.

Shortly before the bell strikes noon, the Warlord and Lady Yennefer return to the war room.

“We have come to the decision,” the sorceress announces.

“What will it be, then?” Queen Renfri demands.  

The Warlord looks at no one but the King as he replies, “The new treaty.”

Read the rest on AO3

#myfic #geraskier #the witcher fanfiction #the accidental warlord and his pack #jaskier & renfri are disaster twins

[andyet-here-we-are]

I Would Get Into Millions of Accidents Just to See You, Chapter 2 (aka Nurse Geralt AU)

(ao3: x

Chapter 1 Tumblr Link: x )

Geralt is not someone who is an active social media user. He has never been.

Hell, he wouldn’t even use WhatsApp if he didn’t have to.

He thinks that apps like this make people so accessible, and leaves little privacy, and ironically, despite it’s called “social media” it makes people less social. He has lost count of how many times he has seen a group of friends sitting somewhere and scrolling through some apps on their phone or something instead of talking to each other.

Of course, it depends on one’s use, but from what he can tell, whenever you’re online, people tend to think that you have all the time in the world.

So no, thank you very much. He likes his privacy.

Whenever he says that “Social media is for people who don’t have nothing better and important to do,” Ciri just gives him The Look ™ and says: “Okay, boomer.”

He has no idea what the hell it’s supposed to mean, but he is sure it’s not something good.

Once Ciri had downloaded some dating app on his phone without his permission while he was sleeping his ass off after a very tiring night shift. That little match-maker of a girl.

And not only that, but also she had said: “I texted some of the users for you! The ones I thought you might like. One of them seemed nice, I like her energy. So, anyway, long story short, you have a date this weekend. You can thank me later.”

“Excuse me, you did what?!”

Needless to say, Ciri wasn’t allowed to use the internet for three days after that.

“I just want you to be happy,”  on the third day, Ciri had said out of the blue while they were reading I, Robot together —they were both into sci-fi, and reading was a great escape from thinking about all the things going on in life.

“You deserve love. Everyone does. Your whole life is nothing but me and your job, and… You deserve happiness, dad. You deserve love.”

“Come here,” Geralt had said, opening his arms wide for her to embrace him, which Ciri had applied.

“I am happy, pumpkin.”

“You could be happier… If there was someone you loved and dated—”

“Ciri, look. Love is… A beautiful thing.” he started ‘Even though it can be hurtful,’ was left unsaid.

“But love doesn’t necessarily mean the affection between a couple. It doesn’t just mean romantic love. Love can be in many forms, shapes, and different ways. Love of self, of animals, of nature, friends, family… We experience love every day when you think about it. You can find it in everything.  Even in a slice of homemade pie that Mrs. April brought us today.”

“I love pie! But dad, I doubt that if a slice of pie can tell you that you look lovely today. A cutie-pie on the other hand—”

“Ciri, have you been even listening to me?”

“…and a pie can’t run their fingers through your hair-”

Geralt sighs, “Why am I even trying?”

“Deep down you know I’m right. Dad… How about you just… give her a chance? For me? Just see how it goes?”

"Is it gonna make you happy if I do that?”

“So happy!”

“And you’re not gonna do something like that ever again.”

“Promise!”

“Not downloading stupid apps on my phone, and not trying to set me up.”

“You got it, Cap!”

Geralt had met with that woman, and they just didn’t click.

True to her word, Ciri never has done something like that again.

***

Geralt is not someone who likes social media.

But there he is, looking at the musician’s posts instead of sleeping—even though he has to get up early as always tomorrow—scrolling through the app, and feeling like a high school girl with a stupid crush.

He reads every little caption the musician had written.

Surprisingly- well, maybe not so surprisingly- his songs aren’t the only thing he posts about.

He posts about random things; sometimes it’s a pretty flower he came across this morning, sometimes it’s a kitten, a book he is currently reading, food recipes, his drawings, things like that.

His account seems like just his personality.

Filled with all the beautiful colors in the word. Filled with joy, and every little thing he shares feels so sincere. Personal.

[I tried that recipe @Brianricci has sent me and it still feels like there are fireworks in my stomach, so here’s a little drawing for you my life-saver pasta-mate.]

That one makes Geralt smile. Reminds him of that day.

***

“I have something for you, Mr. Should Have Been A Model But Became A Nurse For Some Reason. Not that I’m complaining, for the record. The only thing I have complaints about is your hospital’s awful food. So awful that it should be illegal. A sin, even. You’re sinning whenever you guys force people to eat that food. I can only imagine your staff’s weekly confessing: ‘Forgive me father for I’ve sinned.’

‘What’s wrong, immortal one? What did you do?’

‘Oh, father, even bathing myself in holy water can’t cleanse me from my sins! I made my patient eat that awful food, I had to, father! I had to! I had no choice! But I have faith that I can change that one day!’

‘Faith becomes you. Stay with it. Keep fighting the good fight with all thy might.’

God help him this man is so ridiculous.

“Why are you suddenly Anthony Hopkins from The Rite?”

“Eh, just felt like it,” Jaskier shrugs “Your jello is pretty good though, so, good deed point. And your nurses aren’t half bad either, so I heard.”

Jaskier winks at him.

The audacity of that man.

“Anyway! As I was saying, I have something for you—”

“I have something for you, too, Mr. Pankratz,” Geralt says. He has a good guess about what Jaskier has for him.

A drawing of a flower.

He had heard the staff talking about how the pretty patient in room 242 has been giving flower drawings to pretty much everyone while he was walking around.

“Why thank you, you shouldn’t have! You brought some wine for me or something? For the celebration for my third week here? You’re so kind, my good sir.”

“It’s your medicines.”

“…ever the heartbreaker. I take back everything I said. You’re the devil in disguise.”

After Geralt gives him his medicines, Jaskier pulls a scratch book under his pillow and carefully tears a page from it. He gives it to Geralt.

“I thought I was the devil in disguise?” The nurse says as he takes the drawing from him “Are you sure that you should give demons a flower draw—”

Geralt can’t finish his sentence.

Because what he is looking at certainly is not a flower drawing.

It’s a man who holds a syringe in his hand with a kind smile on his face, and the syringe is filled with cute little hearts.

It’s him.

There’s a giant cactus standing behind him for some reason Geralt finds it hard to understand why.

He has seen the other drawings, and they are nothing like this one. This one looks like Jaskier has tried his hardest to make it perfect. Put everything in it. It’s perfect and detailed as if he had drawn it while looking at Geralt. It also seems familiar for some reason.

“—in conclusion, devils are fallen angels, so…” Geralt hears Jaskier talking.

Yet he is too busy to say something as he keeps looking at the drawing in his hands.

“Ooops, did I go too far with the hearts?”

“Hm.”

���Geralt? Say something, please? Oh God, I broke my nurse. They’re sooo gonna sue me. And I don’t think I can afford a good lawyer, I’ll rot in jails, I’m too young to rot in jails, I can’t be someone’s bitch, I’m not even—”

“May I ask why is there a cactus standing behind me?”

“A comment! Phew! Finally! Well, that would be because you’re just like a cactus.”

Geralt raises an eyebrow.

“Better than being a weed, Dandelion.”

Jaskier holds his hand to his chest and gasps, feigning offense.

“Words hurt, Geralt. Words hurt.

I meant it as, like, let’s face it, you’re kinda prickly on the outside sometimes, but soft on the inside? A cactus in the desert.”

Geralt sighs.

“And now you imply that my hospital is a desert. How nice. What’s next?”

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s okay.”

It’s obviously more than okay, but teasing with the young man is fun, and everyone needs some fun in their lives once in a while.

“If you don’t appreciate my drawing just give it back,” Jaskier makes grabby hands as he pouts like a little kid that just dropped his ice cream,  “I’m pretty sure it’ll look good on my fridge anyway. No trouble for me.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

“I’m not giving this back. Too late, you should’ve thought that before you gave it to me. Can’t take it back now.”

“If you don’t say something nice about my spectacular drawing you can be sure that I’m gonna take it back from your hands even if that means putting up a fight.”

“How bold of you to think that you’re in a condition to put up a fight.”

“You’d be surprised. And if I can’t, your other nurse friends and your fellow patients can do it for me. I haven’t been handing out flower drawings for nothing all day.”

“And you say I am the devil in disguise.”

“I never said I was an angel, have I? Seriously though, you have ten seconds to pay a compliment to my drawing. Ten—”

“ ‘Okay’ was a compliment.”

“I beg to differ, since when ‘okay’ is a compliment? Say that to the Italian chef in Mamma Mia when he asks how is the pasta and see if he takes ‘okay’ as a compliment and doesn’t pour half-full pasta plate over your head, and ruin your favorite bee shirt. Also, nine.”

“That was oddly specific. Did that happen to you?”

“Eight, I have no idea what you’re talking about, I was just being hypothetical. Seven, six—”

“I bet he wouldn’t threaten me with taking my meal back if I did at least.”

“Sev— wait a second I was counting backwards, weren’t I? Where were we? Five!”

“Man, you’re really no good at math.”

“Wanna know what I’m good at? Many things, and fighting happens to be one of them. Four, ” Jaskier attempts to get up from the bed, somehow forgetting about his broken leg for a split second and swears: “Ah, cock!”

Geralt barely holds back a laugh at that one.

“Careful.”

“I can still verbally fight you.”

“You’ve been already doing that for the last five minutes.”

“…three.”

“You never give up, do you?” Geralt rolls his eyes with a smile, “It’s a good drawing. I really like it.”

Another lie.

He doesn’t just like it, he loves it.

But even saying that he likes it is enough to make Jaskier beam at him.

“You gave everyone a flower drawing,” he points out  “but I get a cactus and a drawing of myself, why is that? It must have taken some time to draw this.”

“A special drawing for a special nurse.” Not making eye contact, Jaskier says so softly that Geralt nearly misses it. “Yeah, it sure took some time to draw it, and my schedule was so full because of all the crazy hospital parties you guys keep throwing that I could hardly find the time, but eh, I managed somehow.”

“Sucks that they never invite me to that parties,” the nurse jokes back. “Seriously though, thank you. I appreciate it.”            

“I’d like to draw something for Ciri, too. But I’m saving it for later when I can meet her. You didn’t tell her that I’m here, right?”

“She doesn’t know.”

“Good! Keep it that way.”

***

Smiling at the memory, Geralt rises from his bed to take the drawing from his bedside drawer. No, of course he doesn’t look at it every day, what are you talking about?

If he hadn’t promised Jaskier that he wouldn’t let Ciri know until these two can meet in person, this drawing would be on his wall already.

Maybe next to Ciri’s painting of a white wolf.

He had considered doing so but then decided that it would be wise if he didn’t. No doubt Ciri would figure out it was Jaskier’s drawing as soon as she would see it. It was signed by him, after all. Not that Ciri couldn’t figure it out without the signature.

“What the hell, Geralt” The nurse snorts to himself and runs a hand over his face as he imagines his room filled with the drawings of his daughter, and Jaskier’s. “What are you gonna dream about next? Ciri being a flower girl at your wedding?”

Fuck.

He is totally dreaming about it now.

God, it’s crazy how much he misses him, even though he doesn’t really know him.

Ciri already is crazy about Jaskier, and Geralt looks forward to them to meet, to see how Ciri is going to react when she sees him. He feels like the two would talk non-stop, and he would just listen to them talking about God knows what.

He would have no problem with that; in fact.

“I’ll give him a call tomorrow,” he thinks.

He wants to see Jaskier again.

(Thanks for reading! Sorry for the lack of Jaskier in this chapter, but it was like:

-So, it’s time for you to meet Ciri! 

-Hah, well, I love her, but I don’t think so. Not yet. 

-But Ciri- 

-You can have me as a Flashback Guest in this chapter, nothing more. 

-But my plan wasn’t like this. 

-Too bad, I’m my own character.

Let me know what you think please. Have a good day everyone ~ 💛)

#the witcher #jaskier #geraskier #nurse geralt au #my writing #I Would Get Into Millions Of Accidents Just To See You #geralt of rivia

[seymour-butz-stuff]

A real estate agent might call our apartment in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston cozy with a sun-drenched bedroom. The reality is that it’s a small, cheap, window-heavy garage conversion. But it’s ours. We’ve filled it with art, good food, books, craft supplies, so many plants, dog toys. It’s our home. Now it makes my skin crawl, a reminder of how fragile these comforts often are.

There are blankets and rugs on the floors to protect feet and paws from the cold wood. There’s a pile of extra coats and sweatshirts in one corner. My girlfriend and I draped a sheet over our headboard so we wouldn’t have to touch the freezing metal and hung a camping lantern from our out-of-commission ceiling fan. Most of the apartment outside the bedroom was made useless, lost to the cold. We each keep a pile on our nightstand—a hat, gloves, and headlamp—in case we need to get up in the middle of the night and venture outside the bubble of precious heat we’ve created. None of this was comfortable, but it wasn’t deadly. At least not for us.

In Harris County, which houses Houston, at least 4 people are dead from hypothermia as ice and snow covered the streets and temperatures plummeted dangerously low. Counting the surrounding counties, at least 30 people are dead from weather-related incidents, The Washington Post reported on Thursday night. That number is sure to grow as we get a fuller account of the destruction. With each new death, Texans were reminded that asking for the basics was out of bounds. We want our lights to turn on, we want our homes to be habitable, we want our faucets to give us safe water.

The state turned away from us; we turned toward each other. Mutual aid funds populated every major metro area in Texas, giving away money for hotel rooms, food, gas, and the massive energy bills that will follow the disaster—no questions asked. Volunteers with donated water and all-wheel drive helped our elderly, unhoused, and disabled neighbors move to safer places. These groups—Houston’s alone has distributed more than $22,000 to date—became a lifeline.

It’s a beautiful thing born of an ugly thing. We shouldn’t have to donate money to keep us alive because the government is incapable of or indifferent to helping us. But every once in a while, you can see the indifference reveal a deeper contempt. Then-Colorado City Mayor Tim Boyd, in a perfect marriage of content and medium, wrote on Facebook that, “No one owes you are [sic] your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! … The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!.”

Boyd started his tirade with, “Let me hurt some feelings while I have a minute!!” It’s a succinct enough expression of the modern Texas Republican Party’s beliefs as any I’ve seen. They see policies as a way of exacting pain on people they despise. When their cruelty is spelled out plainly, you’re the one who is too sensitive. They could never be the ones in the wrong. The ability to stand by that position is Trumpian, but predated Trump: Never apologize and never retreat.

The reality of a changing climate is that we will only become more reliant on each other, and we must decide what kind of world we’d like to live in as it burns—or freezes. In an interview with Texas Monthly, energy consultant and UT Austin research assistant in smart grid and bulk electricity systems Joshua Rhodes said while it’s theoretically possible that we might have avoided this week’s energy crisis, there’s also tangible reason why it happened: powerful people made choices.  

“Could we have built a grid that would have fared better during this time? Of course we could have. But we could also build a car that could survive every crash you could possibly throw at it, but it would be very expensive and not many people would probably be able to afford it,” he explained. “At some point we do a cost-benefit analysis of how much risk we are willing to take. We have never had weather like this thrown at us, so it’s not surprising to me that we don’t have infrastructure that can support it.”

Rhodes continued, “We may decide now as a society that we do, but that’s a conversation we’re going to have to have with our collective self, if you will.”

But until such a time comes—and with the knowledge that the state would not provide aid to those who desperately need it—we planned for the storm to the best of our ability. My girlfriend and I were lucky: We had a well-stocked hurricane kit, snow pants from some camping trips we’d taken, more than enough blankets and coats, non-perishable foods, cash, and every lidded pot filled with water while we had water pressure. We only lost power for 36-hours, and it was after Monday—which was when it got down to 14 degrees.

But your own good luck stops mattering after a while, as your anxiety about your loved ones takes over. My grandparents, both in their 80s, lost power on Monday morning and spent the night huddled in layers in one room of their house. They would continue to do so for the next two days. Those days felt frantic. My texts to my abuela would go through green instead of the usual blue because her phone was off. I had no idea when it would turn back on; I just had to pray.

The closest warming shelter to my grandparents didn’t have transport for the elderly and information felt hard to come by—I still couldn’t figure out if they were open overnight. Joel Osteen had opened his megachurch, but getting them there would require freeway travel, which was itself extremely dangerous.

My parents live just outside of Dallas, near the airport, about five hours north of Houston. North Texas was being hit with much of the same conditions as the south, but was closer to the cold eye of the storm. They’re older, both diabetic. My mother is recovering from surgery. They set themselves up in their living room, next to the fireplace. They live at the base of a valley—all hills, nothing flat. Leaving could be deadly. Maybe they could make it to the Hyatt connected to DFW, but again that required freeway travel. I felt paralyzed: Inaction was the safest course of action.

It was hard to know what to do. We only had access to social media flooded with unverified reporting; checking the homepages of The Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and the Texas Tribune grounded us. (It also taught me that I need a solar or hand-crank radio.) Instagram became surprisingly helpful; Austin Fox affiliate morning anchor Leslie Rangel had an incredible rundown of the terrible conditions in central Texas. Chronicle reporters filed an impressive liveblog, seemingly answering every question we had about our pipes and when the weather would let up. Despite trying our best to conserve energy on our phones, it was our only lifeline and our battery banks became precious.

By week’s end, everyone in my family had their power back. Things were thawing. We had been spared. Spared by the fact of enough disposable income to buy those hurricane supplies. By the timing of our power outage. By bodies that were able to carry us down stairs and easily move in the cold. By jobs that shut down for two days and let us focus on surviving.

Not everyone had luck on their side. Texans were already hurting because of the pandemic. At least 41,000 people filed unemployed due to Covid-19 this week. Houston only passed an eviction grace period this week. Plus, to state the obvious, homes in Houston and along the Gulf shores are not meant to protect from this type of winter weather. Even if you were only marginally affected by the pandemic, but lost power in Galveston, you were in real danger.

If I sit with this governmental abandonment too long, it makes me seethe with rage. I feel it radiate at Ted Cruz leaving us for Cancún and John Cornyn’s culture war bullshit when power was already out and Rick Perry saying people would want longer blackouts to stop regulation or Greg Abbott blaming wind power and the not-enacted Green New Deal for the blackouts. I feel this rage at the long line of Republican governors and legislators who value markets over human life.

People across my state are dead. They deserve the truth to be told about their deaths. Their government did not adequately prepare them for a climate-change disaster. Their government did not adequately prepare itself for this climate-change disaster. And there will be more storms. We’ve seen disasters that the state has turned away from, never learned anything like a lesson from the loss of life or the scale of suffering. What’s more upsetting is that Texans who have lived through climate disasters support solutions. In 2020, the University of Houston found that three years after Hurricane Harvey, people whose homes were devastated by the 50-plus inches of rain dumped on southeast Texas overwhelmingly support flood mitigation efforts, but only 52 percent are “somewhat” or “very confident” in local officials to prevent future flooding trauma. Rick Perry doesn’t know anything about his state.

The most frightening part of the experience was coming out from the fog only to realize that the machine to forget was well oiled and running. As the climate crisis worsens, we will continue to see these “500-year” weather events. What happened this week was extraordinary. It was a catastrophe. How we were treated this week was unacceptable. How Texans were treated during Hurricane Harvey was unacceptable— was also a catastrophe. How Puerto Ricans were treated during Maria was unacceptable—another catastrophe. But our political system is built around forgetting, of powerful people who would like us to turn away from the things we’ve lived through—trapped in our homes, shivering—and turn away from each other. I keep hearing that I’m living through extraordinary times, and I guess that’s true. But we know this won’t stay extraordinary for long.

#structural racism

[mysaldate]

(UM seduction methods anon here) Im in awe over how much you write for so many character, every day! Do you have any hc on how they live? (where they live? living conditions?) BUT please dont push yourself or anything either!

Thank you so much for worrying about me! I’m simply trying to do my very best for all of you! And thank you also for such wonderful and original requests!

The living conditions of the Upper Moons headcanons

Daki&Gyuutaro

This one will be short since we know quite a lot about them. They’ve lived in the red lights district for their whole lives. In the streets and usually with little more than just their clothes on but they had each other.

They stayed in even after they became a demons. No surprise, there’s plenty of food and nobody will really care if a couple girls disappears.

They don’t have separate rooms of course. These two are literally inseparable so of course they wouldn’t bother with something like that. There’s nobody to tease them about it either since people are not aware of there even being two of them and as for their fellow demons, those just don’t care. Except maybe for Douma but he wouldn’t tease them about it.

We got to see their room so there’s not much to be said about the decorations either. Daki is a stylish girl and she likes to show it off even in the way she sets up their room – even if nobody much gets to see it.

Kaigaku

He never really had much of a home per say. He became an orphan at a young age (if he wasn’t abandoned as a baby already) and then was chased out of Gyomei’s temple as well. Jigoro took him in but unfortunately enough, that relationship didn’t really work out either. Strangely enough, he felt most at home when he was outside, travelling from one mission to another.

After he became a demon, he stayed with Kokushibou for a short period of time but that was just before Muzan approved of his existence. After that, he had to find his own territory – which wasn’t really too hard anyway. He picked a run-down old house as his shelter from the sun for the day but he didn’t really care much how it looked, at least not at first.

It’s not that he wouldn’t like company but there’s not really anyone to share his place with. Humans wouldn’t hang out with him, other demons literally can’t. Other Upper Moons won’t.

He first didn’t care at all how the place looked but after some time, he decided that since he didn’t have anything to do during the day anyway, he could at least try to decorate the place a bit. So while the sun is up, he does little things inside, like sweeping the floors or painting the walls. He even learnt to sew to make curtains. And at night, when he’s not out hunting, he does other reparations. Even he is surprised by how much fun he can have, giving the place a personal touch.

Gyokko

Being an artist, it’s not unlikely that he lived in an open, arid room before he became a demon. Lots of sunlight too. And occassionally, a companion or two but those never really stuck around for long. His place was filled with various unfinished art pieces.

Now that he’s a demon, he can’t have the luxury of a sunny appartment. His pots, however, work as a little pocket dimension so that’s an upgrade? Of sorts? It doesn’t really have a set shape either, it’s a little bit like Nakime’s Infinity Fortress but shapeless, like the walls are made of water or another liquid and constantly change form.

He lives with plenty of goldfish. The entire place is nearly filled with aquariums of various shapes and forms. You know how people make mazes for hamsters, guinea pigs or even cats? Well, those are nothing when compared to the lengths Gyokko goes to for his fishies. It’s not just glass, coloured or plain, either. Sometimes he would use the nichirin blades or pretty hairpieces of his victims’ to decorate the elaborate fishtanks as well. If a human ever strays in, it’s the last thing they say.

Gyokko LOVES decoration. Aside from his fishtanks, he has numerous statues, paintings and just about everything else you can think of. Both handmade and stolen. For his handmade art, he usually uses bodies or bodyparts of his victims, possibly their blood too. It serves both as an artpiece and a food reserve just in case he ever gets to a position where he’s forced to starve. Surprisingly enough, his pots are great at preserving things. Oh, and let’s not forget about the amount of detail he puts to the exterior of his pots! 

Hantengu

Back when he was a human, he didn’t really have a home, naturally. He couldn’t afford it. And most people wouldn’t let him stay more than one night, chasing him out often with sticks and stones. He had to travel all the time and preferably somewhere far away where the rumors about him didn’t reach yet. Due to this, he becomes restless when he has to spend a long time in one place.

Now, as a demon, he also doesn’t stay in one place all the time. He usually sneaks in a house, kills the family and stays there for a few days before moving on to the next one. Some of his other personalities, namely Sekido and Karaku, find this a little useless and bothersome but they wouldn’t really fight him on it.

Speaking of whom, his other personalities split when they have time to be alone as well, taking care of him and the house. It’s a great way to keep him safe as well since at least one of them is always on guard for possible intruders. They get along... somewhat well. There are the usual conflicts between Sekido and the others. Karaku is careless about their cover, Yoroko likes to make pranks on them and Aizetsu tends to lock himself in his room for hours on end. Poor Sekido is left with the task of housework, making sure they don’t get discovered too soon, acting as the voice of reason... and he still has to go out hunting and stay on guard when it’s his turn.

Yoroko likes decorating stuff and Karaku loves to watch him but their taste is strange to everyone but them. Surprisingly enough, Hantengu as well as Aizetsu both can actually create rather beautiful tapestries and Zohakuten sometimes paints when Sekido is just too done with the three useless dorks.

Nakime

She used to be your typical hikikomori. Nakime spent all her time in her room, with nothing but a pile of books and her biwa. It wasn’t a big room either. While her room did have windows, she prefered them covered and read in the light of an oil lamp. As expected, it wasn’t too good for her eyes...

She lives in the Dimensional Infinity Fortress now. A place she can fully control and knows everything about, one that bends to her will and where she can transport anyone anywhere at any time, just as she wants. The only exception seems to be Muzan who comes and goes as he sees fit (at least until the current arc but y’all already know how I feel about that). It’s not that she minds it, she still knows where and when he enters and leaves and even if she didn’t, it’s not like he would ambush and kill her for no reason (right?).

Despite providing rooms specifically suited for the Upper Moons, she much enjoys her solitude. Even when they’re in and she has to keep an eye on them (I’m sorry, I’ll stop with the puns now), she keeps her distance. Try to annoy her, or even just seek her company, and you will mercilessly get thrown out. An exception, again, is Muzan. He doesn’t live there with  her though and only seeks her out when he has work for her to do.

Decoration of the rooms varies greatly, mostly based on what are they used for. Most of the Fortress is not decorated since Nakime sees no reason to waste time and effort on that. However, there are special parts that deserve special attention. Just as an example, there’s Muzan’s upside-down lab, Douma’s lotus pond, that traditional japanese area Kokushibou first appeared in... And of course, the execution platform that’s now decorated with the red of the Lower Moons’ blood.

Akaza

Again, we have a very good canon idea about his life as a human. First living with his father and then spending some time in the streets, he eventually ended up staying at Keizo’s house, taking care of Koyuki. He had his own room there too but it didn’t really matter because he spent most of his time by Koyuki’s side anyway. Rumor has it he dragged his futon to her once when she was having a nightmare and never moved out until she got all better.

He’s pretty much a street rat as of now, looking for challenges and new foes to fight for the most part. During the days, he usually stays still outside, in dense forests or deep caves. He’s not particularly picky. Sometimes he stays there during the night too, setting up a campfire and waiting for someone to wander close. For some reason, he doesn’t really like cities, especially during the festival season.

So yeah, he lives alone. At least usually he does. It’s not all that rare for Douma to find and bother visit him. He doesn’t want company. Getting attached would make him weak. The more people you care about, the easier it is to take advantage of you.

The only thing he cultivates in his surroundings is his own body. No, I’m not talking about the tattoos, though those certainly are a decoration as well. Rather, it’s his muscles and strength. However, he still prefers to have some manners over raw power, hence why he keeps refusing Douma’s more than generous offers to hunt down some girls together even if that could make him stronger.

Douma

Grew up in the temple in the forest. High up on a mountain overlooking a small town, it’s not a place with the most access to society. But cults are usually like that. When he was about three years old, his father planted two magnolia trees in the courtyard so that the place is a little more lively and the trees can grow tall to provide lots of shade in summer since the sun could be quite annoying. If only he knew...

Loyal as he is, Douma stays at the temple even now. He had it expanded a little and even had a lotus pond build right behind his room so he can calm his thoughts at least a bit after every session. He used to need it more than he does now, especially since he now also has the one made by Nakime that is way better and more spacious.

Canonically, there is at least one temple servant staying with Douma at the temple. But honestly, it wouldn’t be quite like him to satisfy himself with a single person. There’s probably a number of people taking care of the place, both temple servants and maidens. They also serve as a source of entertainment and possibly even as a last-resort snack just in case. There also used to be Kotoha and Inosuke for a short period of time but well...

While he is quite childish and it might sound just like him to go overboard with decorating stuff, that’s not entirely true. Really, the most he has is the skull closet with engraved golden door. That and the pot in which he planted Kotoha’s head but that one is a gift from Gyokko so it doesn’t really count.

Kokushibou

As with most of them, we were blessed with enough info on Kokushibou’s, or rather Michikatsu’s, homes. Growing up a samurai, he never had time to spare, little to no friends and a bride who was most likely found for him without him having any say in it, it’s really not that much of a surprise he would elect to leave it all behind and become a demon slayer since it gave him significantly more freedom.

Even as a demon, not much have changed. During the day, he stays at a mansion like the samurai lord he is, and at night, he goes out to hunt down the pests in the area, more often than not treating himself with a bountiful feast while he’s at it. He also has a room in the Infinity Fortress but like the majority of the Upper Moon demons (actually everyone but Douma), he enjoys his solitude way more.

He has a few servants at the mansion. Ones that get replaced every once in a while when they mysteriously disappear. But the salary is high enough to let any major rumors die out in a blink (I know, I promised, I’m sorry) so the most he has to deal with are whispers about him overworking his servants to the point where they rather abandon the money and run away under the cloak of the night.

You would probably find the house eerily plain but he’s used to it. The backyard is where he spends most of his time aside from his room and those two are the only actually decorated places in the house. And they’re still kept neat and practical for the most part. He rarely has anything that wouldn’t serve a purpose, both when it comes to items and people.

#kny #kimetsu no yaiba #kny imagines #kny headcanons #upper moons #upper demon moons #daki #kny daki #gyuutarou #kny gyuutarou #kaigaku #gyokko #hantengu #sekido #aizetsu #karaku #yoroko #zohakuten #nakime #akaza #kny akaza #douma #kny douma #kokushibou #michikatsu tsugikuni

[jennifercrowart]

D&D Diary - The Yawning Rodent, 4

Refresher: Our adventurers Lugs (grung barbarian), Lurk (grung rogue), Aelia (tiefling cleric), Valas (drow sorcerer), and tagalong Meepo (kobold) were able to unlock a series of rooms in the citadel that had been left untouched for ages, and defeated a starved troll that had once been entombed alive inside. Amazed by the party's strength, Meepo began leading them towards the Goblin Gang's territory to find the Kobold Gang's stolen dragon, but after a small splitting of the party to explore some adjacent rooms and dungeon cells, Lugs stumbled into the main nest of the giant spiders and their giant spider mother. Aelia was surrounded by the spiders, and Meepo chugged his potion of fire breath as her ran forward to help her...

Sunless Citadel spoilers!

Although the giant spider mother doesn't go down easily, the party regroups and are able to dispatch her spider children and not get caught in the sticky web attacks. While she bears down on Lugs, Meepo surprisingly deals the finishing blow, sending an arc of fire breath towards her from over the grung and ending the fight after Valas weakens her attacks with a Frostbite spell.

Aelia, not hurt too badly, immediately begins scouring through the large spider nest now that no one's home. She finds some gems and coins from the decaying corpses amongst the webs - mostly kobolds and goblins who had ended up as the spiders' dinners, but one of the bodies is that of a human. They're dressed in fancy, flashy boutique rogue armour that looks more for show than for use, but her backpack is full of adventuring gear, and she bears a gold ring on her finger. Aelia, concerned it's the Hucrele daughter the party were hired to find, inspects the ring but finds that it's engraved with a different name: Reignbow. More importantly, the ring isn't worth nearly as much as the Hucrele's signet rings should be.

As they'd found with the magic dragon-shaped fountain that flowed with the potion of fire breath earlier, the party notices another similar fountain in this area, too. Valas asks Meepo to translate and read out the Draconic inscription on it like he's done before, and he reads, "Let there be death." Suddenly, a dark red mist sprays out from the dragon statue's mouth, and while Valas is able to get out of the area just in time to not suffer any harmful effects, Meepo is left clutching at his burning and itching throat while his eyelids swell from the poison. Lugs is able to pull him out as he's immune to poison by virtue of being a grung, and offers Meepo the potion of healing the group had looted from Reignbow's bag. Meepo goes to gladly take it, but Valas stays Lugs' hand, assessing Meepo's condition to not be that bad and the little kobold just needing a rest to feel much better.

The adventurers are weary after the fight, and feel in need of a long rest soon anyway, as they've been exploring for about 8 hours now. It's hard to tell the time of day or night it is inside the Sunless Citadel beneath the earth, but it should be morning now, and - having begun their dungeon diving last night - they sorely need to sleep. Lugs is keen to return to the Rats' Nest and the Yawning Rodent for a hot meal and a  proper bed, but the rest of the group agrees to save the travel time and just camp out in the nearby dungeon cells instead, now that they're clear of spiders. While taking watches in shifts - Lugs and Lurk using their watch to sit in the barrel of water Lugs carries around on his back, to refresh their moist grung skin - the group is able to sleep peacefully through the daytime hours, with seemingly nothing left in this part of the citadel to disturb them. The party becomes level 2!

After waking, they go back the way Lurk had tried exploring before Lugs had stumbled about the giant spider mother's nest. Nothing had previously come of triggering the bell on the door, and the steel tooth traps he'd laid out were untouched. He's able to slowly open the door without ringing it this time and edge around it to disarm the trap, although not without being noticed by goblins that are on guard in this new hallway, ready with bows behind a short wall. Meepo cowers behind Valas as he sees some of the Goblin Gang members who have given the Kobold Gang so much trouble.

The bandits start shooting, and one of them lands a critical hit on Lurk, the arrow embedding itself in his shoulder! Lugs flies into a fury, recklessly charging after them and ignoring the five caltrops scattered pathetically along the hallway as the goblins turn tail and flee deeper into their territory. Lurk is next in line, chasing after them with his two short swords, while Lugs yells in Grung that the goblins have messed up big time by hurting his brother. Although they regroup with a second defensive wall with more goblins at the ready behind it, Lugs swats each one with his club like he's swatting flies, blind with rage. The chase runs through a training hall and into a new corridor, Lugs killing the last of the guards on watch just feet away from what turns out to be a guard room.

The reinforcements from the guard room get the drop on the party, but still don't prove to be much trouble, especially when Aelia, Valas, and Meepo are able to catch up and deal some ranged attacks. One last goblin guard is left cowering in the corner, badly hurt and pleading that he'll tell them anything they want in exchange for his life. Valas asks where the Goblin Gang is keeping the dragon they stole from the Kobold Gang, and he says it's just in a room down the end of the nearby corridor. With that information, Lugs knocks the goblin out cold, and they leave him there. With the fight over, Lugs asks if Lurk is ok. Although he's very badly hurt and about to pass out, bleeding from arrow and scimitar wounds, Lurk says he's ok. When no one else believes him, Aelia is at last reminded to use some of her cleric healing magic on him.

Suddenly, Meepo calls the adventurers over from the training hall, saying he can hear several people yelling for help in Common and Draconic from one of the adjacent rooms. Already having looted some of the bodies, Aelia produces the key needed to unlock it, and they find that it's been used as a dungeon cell; three starving kobolds are chained up with manacles to benches lining the dank room, and in the back is a small cage with an even smaller ratfolk inside it!

The other kobolds recognise Meepo, surprised that, out of everyone, he's the one who's managed to save them - although, he does have help! They're other members of the Kobold Gang who had been captured by the Goblin Gang to hold for ransom. Lugs, with a crowbar in each hand, bends open the cage bars so the small, frail ratfolk boy can hop out. He introduces himself as Deku, the missing brother the blacksmith asked the party to find. Aelia is thrilled, exclaiming that Big Oak was going to pay them in return for Deku's rescue. Despite this, Deku is cheerful, and grateful that they've helped him break free, though he needs to find his belongings that the goblins confiscated from him. He explains that, although he'd promised Boak that he wouldn't go further than the cavern at the top of the Sunless Citadel's gorge, he'd been too eager to explore and had poked around inside the citadel's entrance. He was captured by a group of goblin bandits lead by a hobgoblin who said they could ransom him back to the Rat's Nest for a good price, so he was stripped of his gear and locked up in this cell a few days ago. Being born chronically ill, he really needs his stuff back so he can access his regular medicines again, as well as needing his holy symbol so he can use his magic as a cleric of the Life Domain.

Fortunately, the party had come across a pile of confiscated equipment in the Goblin Gang guard room they'd been to already, remembering seeing a backpack on top of the pile. After Lugs smashes the manacles on the other prisoners so they can return to the Kobold Gang territory, the group backtracks so Deku can pick up his stuff. Rooting around in his backpack, he starts to panic when he realises that his library book - Cults Around The World, which he was using as a reference point to study the Sunless Citadel and the cult it previously housed - is missing from it. At least reassured that his rescuers are strong enough to help him find it, he takes his medicines, retrieves his quarterstaff which he also uses as a walking aid, and puts on a breastplate that looks much too large and heavy for his tiny frame. He shows the group that, yes, it may be a bit big and slow down his walking speed with its weight, but he can slip inside it like a turtle!

Resuming their search for the Kobold Gang's dragon next, with Meepo mentioning that her name is Calcryx, they approach the room the now-unconscious goblin guard told them about. Deku, reunited with his Rat King holy symbol, casts Detect Evil and Good, but doesn't sense anything such as undead, elementals, aberrations, fiends, or celestials behind the door, as well as no consecrated or desecrated objects. The wooden door is locked, and when Lugs tries to break it in, he's unable to because it's been reinforced with tacked-on steel to strengthen it.

Lurk is able to pick the lock, and when they step inside, they find that the dark room is in disarray, with furniture and tacky trophies knocked over and strewn about the floor. Out from behind a tipped-over table stalks the white dragon wyrmling, her eyes glinting with hostility as she's about to pounce on our adventurers...

#dnd #dungeons and dragons #d&d #dungeons & dragons #dm diary #dungeon master #the yawning rodent #the sunless citadel

[kayskasmoviereviews]

25 Best Films of the 2010s

Admittedly, it has been a very long time since I updated this blog. However, given that we have just come to the end of an exceptionally great decade of film, I wanted to reflect on which films from the 2010s have stuck with me the most. This is of course a very personal list, and I haven’t seen half the movies that I wanted to in the decade. But on the first day of 2020, here are the 25 films I consider the best of the 2010s. If you’re inclined to comment, let me know what your favorites were!

1. Swiss Army Man - This surreal, bizarre comedy has such an eclectic mix of gross-out humor, emotional depth, and spectacularly original visual imagination that I honestly couldn’t imagine putting anything else in the #1 spot.

2. First Reformed - Paul Schrader returns to the transcendental style of classical filmmaking he had studied early in his life, and the result is a film that considers the human condition more seriously than just about anything else in a long time. Ethan Hawke gives a career-best performance, which is saying a lot.

3. Moonrise Kingdom - I always use this film to introduce the film unit of my freshman writing class, meaning I’ve seen it about 8 times or so. It never gets old. It was the movie that really made Wes Anderson click for me, and enhanced my appreciation of his work (and indeed, of cinema in general) to a new level.

4. Calvary - A dark, funny, intensely moving study of a moral dilemma in the life of a priest in Ireland. Absolutely amazing writing and a masterful performance by Brendan Gleeson. Somehow, John Michael McDonagh, the film’s writer and director, then went on to make War on Everyone, one of the worst films of the decade.

5. Lady Bird - Greta Gerwig’s debut movie was an extremely funny, warm, and true-to-life film that artfully and economically created as believable an on-screen world as I’ve ever seen. The film has enormous empathy with every single one of its sizable cast of characters. Gerwig is a major talent.

6. Arrival - Denis Villenueve made a lot of great films this decade (Prisoners, Blade Runner 2049, Enemy, Sicario), but none were better than this intellectually and emotionally brilliant work. As a bonus, it got me into reading Ted Chiang, who is now one of my favorite writers.

7. A Ghost Story - David Lowery also had some exceptionally strong work this decade (The Old Man & the Gun, Pete’s Dragon, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), but the best and most distinctive was this film, which featured Casey Affleck as a ghost in a white sheet who can’t leave the house he shared with his wife (Rooney Mara). This film did more interesting things with cinematic time than any other this decade, and felt like an actually successful version of what Terence Malick tried (but in my opinion, failed) to achieve with The Tree of Life.

8. Her - One of the most profound romantic films ever made. Most romantic comedies play around with relationships as plot elements, but this one actually asked what a relationship even is in the first place. 

9. Phantom Thread - The only movie to ever actually make me say, “What the fuck?” out loud in the theater. In a good way.

10. Turbo Kid - A wonderfully entertaining low-budget indie movie that mixed irony, sincerity, nostalgia, pastiche, humor, and gory violence into something truly singular.

11. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - One of the most purely fun films ever made in terms of visual style. Edgar Wright’s meticulous attention to mise-en-scene, editing, and visual effects has never been put to better use than it was here.

12. 12 Years a Slave - The best historical film of the decade, one that used art-house style visuals, stern filmmaking discipline, and major Hollywood actors to create an extremely convincing and harrowing portrayal of slavery.

13. Room - One of the most moving films of the decade, and Brie Larson was a deserving Oscar winner for this one.

14. The Paddington films - The cutest, cuddliest, most sweetly entertaining kids’ movies in a very long time. Both films are essentially perfect in their charm and their surprisingly elaborate attention to visual craft. I can’t wait for Paddington 3.

15.The Hateful Eight - Everyone knows the over-the-top violence in Quentin Tarantino’s other films is largely played for fun and laughs, and I enjoy it as much as anyone. However, I think he was doing something distinctly different here, something much darker and more morally serious. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance was one of my absolute favorites of the decade.

16. The Lobster - Few films are this original, this dark, or this bitterly funny. I really gelled with Yorgos Lanthimos’s distinctive style in this movie, and thought Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and the other actors all landed on the perfect wavelength for their performances.

17. Logan - People talk constantly about the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and it is very true that those films as a group achieved something truly unprecedented and highly enjoyable in the 2010s. In terms of individual films, though, the best superhero movie this decade (and maybe ever) was Logan, which gave an extremely satisfying conclusion to Hugh Jackman’s 17 years with the character.

18. The John Wick series - The John Wick films are undoubtedly some of the most technically proficient and stylistically accomplished action films ever made. The plot is so simple as to be a joke, yes, but the action is executed with such an incredibly high level of skill and dedication that you simply have to respect the people who put this madness together.

19. Blade Runner 2049 - Some of the most visually stunning cinematography and visual effects I’ve seen, smartly put in service of a strong story that does actually live up to the legacy of the original.

20. Cloud Atlas - Sure, you could pretty fairly say that this movie was cheesy, messy, silly, and missed some of the elements of the book. But dammit, it was truly ambitious, and the Wachowskis (one of whom had transitioned before the making of the film, and the other of whom did later) really did put their hearts into it.

21. The Favourite - Lanthimos further develops the weird style I had liked so much in his earlier films, but this time puts it in the service of a slightly warmer and more accessible story than before. Olivia Colman gave a truly astonishing performance.

22. It Follows - My favorite horror movie of the decade, even more than Hereditary, Get Out, or Midsommar. I found the premise ingeniously frightening, and thought the direction, mise-en-scene, and performances really helped develop the film into a singular horror achievement.

23.��Dunkirk - I would actually argue this is one of the best war films ever made, maybe even the best one, precisely because it does away with most of the cliches and contrivances and narrative devices common to most war films in favor of simply creating two hours of an ever-escalating “We need to get out of here right now” feeling. By abandoning so many trappings, it managed to feel more real than almost any other war film.

24. It’s Such a Beautiful Day - This film got me into Don Hertzfeldt’s work, and now he’s someone I’m keeping an eye on forever. This is intense, weird, emotionally powerful stuff, all done with stick figures.

25. Parasite - A perfect film from beginning to end. There’s not one frame out of place, and no way I can imagine Bong Joon Ho and his collaborators having made this film any better than they did. They should teach this one in film school forever.

[brightly-painted-canvas]

for the series ‘fic I think about all the time but I’ll never be able write’, I’m honoured to present you:

Band of Brothers’s High School Football (and I mean soccer!) Team AU

featuring:

- the team’s name is Currahee Easy of Toccoa High School (I don’t make the rules... I mean yes I do, but you know...) and they’re basically shit at playing football/soccer - it’s not that they don’t have good individual players or don’t train hard enough, it’s that their coach, PE teacher Sobel, doesn’t know shit about tactics and theory and he’s just too much of a dick to admit it - so the team trains hard everyday under every weather condition, but they still suck in championship games - (it’s by then a well known thing in Toccoa High School) - except this year is senior year for a big chunk of the team and most of them really really want to win at least one game before parting ways and going to college - so some of them basically mutiny against Sobel and go beg Principal Sink for a new coach - (he’s easily convinced after he sees the disgraceful row of defeats the team managed to string in the past three years) (it’s disgusting) - he calls in his office the other PE teacher, Richard Winters (who’s in fact already the coach of the baseball team) and gives Winters the responsibility of coaching the football team as well - thing is: right until that moment Dick Winters knows nothing about football, but he’s not a bitch about it so he buys a lot of books and watches a lot of youtube videos and drags his best-friend-and-maybe-also-more Lewis Nixon (history teacher at Toccoa) to a bunch of games to study - he’s a good student because when he meets the team for the first time and they try some of the tactics out, they seem to work - (he goes with basic 4-4-2 formation but his full backs are fast and both his side midfielders can shift to the attack on the occasion) - so the championship starts and the boys are for once both physically and tactically ready (mentally not so much, but hey can you blame a rowdy team of 20 teenagers?)

- so the team is composed like this: - D. Hoobler as the keeper (2nd keeper: D. Webster, although everyone is secretly glad he never plays because last time he did he was reading books during the game when the ball was on the other side of the field... at least on the bench he can read as much as he wants and pretend to be too precious and literate to play sports) - “Buck” Compton and “Bull” Randleman as center backs (reserves: “Tab” Talbert and “Pat” Christenson) - “Babe” Heffron and Frank Perconte as full backs (reserves: “Popeye” Wynn and A. Blithe) - center midfielders: Joe Liebgott and Johnny Martin (reserve: D. Malarkey) - side midfielders: “Shifty” Powers and “Skip” Muck (reserve: A. Penkala) - forwards: Bill Guarnere and Joe Toye (reserves: “Chuck” Grant and P. O’Keefe) - coach: R. Winters; coach’s alcoholic husband: L. Nixon; 2nd coach: C. Lipton; manager: H. Welsh; assistant and medic: “Doc” Roe; referee: R. Speirs - (everyone is scared of the local referee as there are numerous rumors circulating about him, like the one that says he once stabbed a protesting player in the eye with the red card) - Toccoa also has a student radio broadcast and the designated sportcaster is George Luz, so he also follows the team in away games (and having him around helps with the team’s morale) - the first match is a draw, which is neither a good or a bad thing, but Winters is still kinda proud of the guys and buys ice cream for all of them and says inspirational things like “the best is yet to come” - the second match is a whole struggle against the defending champions of the previous year, which makes the opposite team’s players a bit too arrogant and which causes yellow cards to fly around - to the surprise of absolutely nobody Liebgott is the first to get a red card and gets sent out. To the surprise of everybody except his teammates, he’s double booked because he picks a fight not with the opposite team but with his own (specifically: Guarnere asking for more forward passes and Webster, still on the bench, for seemingly no reason at all). Luz announces that it’s probably the first time in the history of football that this happens (yay for a new embarrassing record for Currahee Easy!) - Easy loses in the last minutes after a struggle to maintain the 0 - 0 and Lipton has to intervene before the whole team riots against the referee (not Speirs this time) who also gives a penalty to the opposite team in recovery time. It ends 2 - 0 for the defenders and in the brawl that follows the three final whistles Heffron loses a shoe, Toye gets a bloody nose and Liebgott sneaks out from the locker room just to throw a few punches - they win the third match. The opposite team never shows up at Toccoa High School so it’s a forfeit win - (rumors say the opponents didn’t want to attend not because they were scared of Easy, but because they were scared of Speirs, the designated referee for the game) - after the sixth match they start to win for their own merits and everyone is ecstatic. The whole school gets involved (all thanks to Luz’s enthusiastic commentaries and sport-related news) and there’s suddenly an high attendance of audience at their games - some of them even gets fans, like some guy starting to admire Guarnere’s technique and some girl suddenly making banners for Christenson or even Webster (though that must be less for athletic merits and more for aesthetic reasons, much to all the other player’s displeasure)(and Liebgott’s absolute rage, though no one gets exactly why)(c’mon guys...) - they manage to end the championship at an average position in the chart and with enough points to access a row of head to head games - the last match of the season is one of those direct clashes and becomes very important not only because it’s the last match ever for the senior students, but also because winning would mean getting an access to summer play-off - everyone is super nervous - coach Winters makes another one of his nice motivational speeches which leaves almost everyone near-tears (even the tough ones)(and especially Lew, who still gets free access to the locker room despite not being directly involved with the team) - things turn bad real soon real fast because during the first half within minutes both Guarnere and Toye get a leg injury and need to be substituted by Grant and, to the whole team’s horror and desperation, sweet innocent O’Keefe - Doc Roe gets helped by Lip and Welsh to get Bill and Joe out of the pitch and most of all to placate their rage and frustration (my poor boys...) - despite the injuries and early substitutions, Shifty manages to score an outside the box stunning volley for the 1 - 0 that makes everyone in the audience literally freaks out - the opponents equalize right at the end of first half with a goal following a contested free kick right outside Easy’s penalty area - the second half ends on a draw despite the team’s best efforts in maintaining their shape and positions as well as their nerves (and everyone is extremely proud of them, but most of all surprised by Liebgott)(considering he’s not even being supervised by Martin, who had been substituted by Malark at some point) - after the first extra time Dick is already thinking about the penalties: to the sudden shock of everyone present at the game (and the delight of his hardcore fangirls), Hoob gets substituted with Webster - (all of Easy, as one man, think they’re doomed) - the penalties are a matter of even more nerves and sweat and tears, but the five kickers get chosen (Grant, Buck, Skip, Heffron and Shifty) and after that, everything is in their preferred foot (and in Web’s hands) - Web saves the first penalty and the whole school gasps in disbelief - (while Dick and Lip share a knowing smile on the bench) - Grant scores, Buck scores, Skip’s shot unfortunately gets saved and they’re back to equality - no one speaks (Luz included!), no one even blinks - Babe manages to score a stunning lob penalty that has the whole field freaking out again - (Bill from the bench points at him and screams: ‘That’s my boy!’ jumping on his uninjured leg) - Shifty scores with cynical precision (and Winters almost sobs out loud) - as Webster takes his position between the posts, silence falls again all around the pitch and tension is so thick it feels like it could be cut with a knife - right before the opponents fifth kicker positions the ball on the penalty spot, everyone takes a deep breath and holds it for seemingly endless minutes - Webster saves - everyone screams - chaos is everywhere - Lieb kisses Web on the mouth - someone cries - (probably Web’s fangirls) - (and also mama!Lip since he’s so proud of his boys) - after that everything is a blur of celebrations and tears and hugs and also other less celebrated kisses (but Babe gets one from Doc and Dick gets several ones from Lew and, to be fair, no one is really that surprised) - Luz loses his voice at some point and completely forgets being on air on the school’s radio as he runs down to the field to celebrate with the team (which results in long minutes of radio silence he’d be scolded for the next day)(and, for what is worth, he does not give a single fuck) - Easy chases coach Winters across the field and lift him in the air to celebrate, then they do the same for Lip and Welsh and (surprisingly?) Nixon - (Doc Roe refuses and hides behind Babe and Bill and everyone loves him too much to force him anyway) - more chaos ensues and rumors say the celebrations went on for weeks - (also some rumors say referee Speirs took part to the celebrations as 2nd coach Lipton’s date, but no one present ever confirmed or denied that) ...and that’s basically it. Sorry for any mistake: I typed this all in one go and my football terminology is strictly Italian-based (just as much as my football enthusiasm lol) so I may have got something wrong. Thanks a bunch to my sister @gaiayukari85 for having helped with the plot (as often happens when we create silly stories)

#headcanon #fanfiction #band of brothers #easy company #high school football team AU #winnix #webgott #baberoe #spierton #richard winters #lewis nixon #ronald speirs #carwood lipton #david webster #joe toye #joe liebgott #bill guarnere #don malarkey #shifty powers #eugene roe #babe heffron #george luz #...basically the whole gang is here #fic I will never write #gaiayukari85 #soccer #it's called football

[calleo-bricriu]

Finally, FINALLY, the author uses detail. Sort of. In some parts. But mostly not.

Continuing on...

Right, so, chapter 7, surprisingly doesn't have a time skip.

It's just Mizpra on the train with some long author monologing about how evil and twisted she is but he never really explains how or why just that "to kill, destroy, cause misery, and produce unhappiness was her life."

For a change he's briefly nice to her by saying she's clever, talented, and almost a genius but then goes on about how not really because she's selfish and gross.

"She did not understand or realise that she herself was the product of the last feeble efforts of exhausted ancestors." Wow.

Paragraph about how Mizpra is basically evil because she doesn't want to get married or have kids or have a sex life or any of that and it goes right into Leigh knowing that all because Leigh, being a genius, enabled him to realise it.

Why are we even talking about Leigh? He's not on the train.

Long paragraph about how children born to women with "nervous exhaustion" (again, not really a real thing) or to older women were basically trash that nobody should want and also makes for...infertile children somehow. This author is a doctor. A medical degree holding doctor, just in case you'd forgotten.

Few more pages rambling on and on about why Mizpra is evil and that only serves to make me still feel a bit bad for her because, so far, she hasn't really done anything all that terrible; the worst she's done so far is humiliate a student for wearing a corset and marry a guy for his typing abilities.

He keeps bringing god into it but, in all honesty, after reading seven chapters of this book he's convinced me that if one does exist it sure as hell isn't merciful.

Psychic conditions mean you can't have reasonable children.

Oh! Finally we get a description of an Evil Thing she's been at! She took a course on bacteriology which, whatever that is, would probably make her better at being a doctor than Leigh, for the sole purpose of sending Leigh's entire family contaminated mail. Cool initial thought but germs spread so she could also inadvertently cause an actual plague.

Her lab has a bunch of mouse and rat cages but, for some reason, they're not in there; they're in the bread. Comically poking their little heads and tails out of the...bread that I sincerely hope she won't eat.

Some descriptions of a bunch of dying rabbits in other cages that had all been infected with whatever disease she was working on.

Cotton tipped tubes are not going to contain pneumonia, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, 'blood poisoning', or tetanus (sorry, lockjaw) and she really shouldn't be keeping them like that.

Oh, but this is common and "bacteriologists" just carry them around willy-nilly like that because they're--I mean, honestly, it's probably because constant low level exposure has given them immunity so, inadvertently discovering how vaccines work while not knowing that's what's happened.

We find out that, for some reason, she's particularly focused on killing Leigh's kid which is odd because there has never been much mention of her disliking that particular child, just all children. Also, it's 1901, just wait, he's got a pretty high chance of dying before the age of 10 anyway, especially living in a city.

She's a near genius level "bacteriologist" in the plot at this point and can't figure out how to spread diphtheria.

Air.

It spreads through the air.

Just powder it up and mail it along.

Or coat some baby toys with it, I guess that's the route we're going.

All right, so we've got the Baby Murder plan underway. It’s better than a few other Baby Murder plans I’ve heard over the years but, since we’re not even half way through the book I doubt Baby Murder Attempt #1 will fail.

A few scenes of her very nearly getting off to watching her lab animals die while also thinking, in a bizarre level of detail for this book, of a baby dying. Getting a little weird there, Mizpra.

How is it this author can detail that and detail all the ways the alb animals are suffering but couldn't be bothered to add any details to anything else?

Diphtheria doesn't need to enter through a slight wound, Mizpra, it just has to be present. It's very easily airborne and will also likely spread to anyone else that walks into that house until everyone is dead and they use fire as a way to clean the building.

So she goes out, gets a rattle and a whistle, goes back to her lab, files the whistle so it's likely to cut the kid's mouth then applies the "venomous bacilli" (Diphtheria is not venomous...) onto it all and wrapping it up in steralised cotton which would definitely have killed a lot of the diphtheria on there but, 1901 and nobody knows how infectious disease works.

Mizpra, we now find out when some professor addresses her as Dr. Newcomber, does, in fact, hold some sort of doctorate degree. Good for her.

He takes her back to his office and tells her, what amounts to, "Please stop leaving dead animals all over the lab, it's rude to the other students."

Long lecture about how she's coming off as kind of really fucking creepy by doing that and by being pointlessly cruel to the lab animals, she basically just rolls her eyes and asks him if he's done talking yet.

Which made him decide to fire her. She asked him again if he was done talking, and he went. off. on her for how careless she was in the lab and how thoughtless she was in regards to the other people that also had to use the lab which prompts her to start--reading--poetry out loud.

For whatever reason, despite being in Colorado, and despite Professor Ridge not being German she decides to start calling him "Herr Professor" then says goodbye in...French.

His farewell was, "There are no women of genius; the women of genius are men," so at this point, I'm kind of okay with him maybe getting diphtheria as well for that.

It hasn't been mentioned if she mailed the diseased baby toys yet but, they're all going to California now.

On to Chapter 8.

Back in New York with Obera.

There is no e in dachshund, a dachshund that is being mishandled by Obera's kid who still does not have a name, or, rather, his name hasn't been told to any of us reading.

Oh.

"Leigh, Jr." which is normal enough for about two seconds until you read on and the rest of the sentence says, "or, as he was called, Mops". The servant from the place in Hamburg gave him that nickname and that's just what we're going to call the kid now I guess.

Mops.

Obera has gone from the creepy child like girl in the "fascinating toque" to "proud and handsome in the full bloom of matronly womanhood" which is equally creepy sounding just in a different way.

Leigh is, of course, still a published author now and people love him for some inexplicable reason. I still sort of want to backhand him, he's so pretentious and doesn't even have the intellect to back it up.

"Leigh now counted his friends by the hundred". Sure.

They get into an argument about Leigh being a dick at work and Obera reminding him that he really needs to stop doing that shit before he ends up fired again and of course he lectures her on how her silly woman brain couldn't possibly comprehend his genius behaviour.

Can we just skip to the "infect the entire house and possibly city block with diphtheria" subplot here? Because I'm definitely more interested in that than I am in listening to this idiot wax philosophic and say nothing at all for dozens of pages on end.

Not yet? Okay.

Oh! No, few pages further and the diphtheria soaked toys have arrived!

Obera, having some good sense, was super suspicious at receiving a box addressed to a 3 year old, just sort of locked it in drawer to think about what the hell it might be. She assumes Mizpra sent it and that it’s probably poisoned or infected with something which I’d normally say is intuition but, she would have no way of even beginning to think Mizpra had the skills to do that (let alone the access to materials) so we’re going to go with metagaming here; Obera is clearly reading the story along with us.

Anyway, she sends the package to Dr. Bell so maybe someone else will be getting the diphtheria. Just doing a quick look up, in New York around 1900, the average fatality rate for diphtheria was--1,227 deaths in 1901, which is about a 15% rate, of the 7,726 cases reported in Manhattan and The Bronx, which is the area these people are living in.

So, her plan was kind of bad from the beginning; it had a 15% success chance IF it got to the point of infecting the kid.

Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and cholera would have been better, more likely to kill the kid choices. Cholera usually knocks over young children pretty fast.

Or just poison. You have a lab, you probably can easily get cyanide.

Not telling you how to go about your baby murdering plans here, Mizpra, just saying you're not exactly picking the ideas with high chances of success or doing it with any subtlety since they kind of immediately figured out it was from you and probably contaminated somehow.

And on to chapter 9!

Dr. Bell, probably being a real doctor, ran some tests and explained the results to Obera which, of course, made her faint immediately. She does that a lot.

So as she's sort of starting to wake up she starts screaming over and over that Leigh needs to kill her; her being Mizpra. Fair enough response to just finding out your sister in law tried to infect your entire family and specifically your child with diphtheria which had an--admittedly low death rate but still a 15% chance of it.

Leigh, in a surprising moment of clarity asks the other doctor if he knows what she's talking about, he says yes, then Leigh goes with, "NO TIME FOR EXPLANATIONS!" and tries to do medical care things on Obera.

Eventually  he goes with, "Okay yeah, I'll kill Mizpra for you."

Dr. Bell, the only sane person in the room, tries to talk him out of that and apparently a pulse of 120 is something we should know the meaning of.

So he's gonna lock himself in a room and not drink just to see what happens. What happened was he stayed awake for three solid days and that's it, only it took several pages to say that because we're supposed to feel sorry for this guy.

Several pages of a rambling story about a morphine addict not part of this story.

More pages of Leigh being mad at religion for no reason whatsoever.

Charlie listens to him ramble about how much he hates religion for the rest of the chapter then tells him he's such a well educated genius and leaves.

#Finally some DETAIL as to what some of this plot is #so #murder cw #violence cw #child death mention cw #animal torture cw #animal testing cw #hp rp #books

[irarelypostanything]

Slice of Life[6]

[Andy]

“There have been some increasingly controversial topics in the news,” began Andy, in the milionth meeting they were holding that week, “and I know that not everyone here is in agreement with regard to personal beliefs.  Though there is some merit to discussing these topics, I would encourage you to do so outside of work.

“So please,” he continued, “for the love of the old gods and the new, stop arguing about the last episode of Game of Thrones.”

“It was kind of bullshit though, right?” asked Jake, to murmurs of approval.  

“I haven’t watched it yet,” complained Kevin.

“Spoiler,” said Jake, “it sucked.”

“Jake, please.”

“There was a shocking twist about Tyrion being the Night King.”

“Kevin, Jake may or may not be messing with you.”

“I did think the part where Eddard rose from the dead was a little out of left field, though.”

“Amy, please proceed with your presentation.”

Amy was standing in front of their conference room’s projector.  Her long, dark brown hair was tied into a bun, and her usual Davis badminton jacket was replaced by a white button-up.

“Thanks Andy,” she said, relieved that the meeting was back under control, “as I was saying, this project is worth roughly 25.6 million dollars, collectively.  As is the usual case, the largest defense contractors are going to take the majority of business.

“But this is where things get interesting.  I’m going to have to be intentionally vague about the next portion of this, since we’re in a nonclassified setting, but we have certain...capabilities...that even some of the largest corporations don’t.  Thanks to some wise decisions we made early last year with regard to our research allocations, we are actually the first team we know of that can use...”

Her voice trailed.  “Well, that’s also classified.  But the figures aren’t.  Look at this.”  The slide changed.  “We are poised to become the government’s preferred vendor for the entire sensor, and all we have to do is give them a taste.  They expect delivery within three weeks.  For this to work, all teams have to collaborate perfectly.”

“It’s really important that we execute this now,” agreed Andy, “that means it’s really, vitally important that we not let our meetings diverge into arguments about petty bullshit.

“Kevin, we’d like a status report from you.  What’s the important software issue you said you wanted everyone to know about?”

“I know we were told not to compile on the hardware,” began Kevin, “but unfortunately, with our system, it’s unavoidable.  The time stamps are messed up, so doing basic things like compilation is surprisingly difficult.”

“Why not code it in Python?” suggested Jake.  “that way you won’t need to compile it.”

“Wow,” said Dan, with mock amazement, “switch programming languages.  Brilliant.  This is the kind of empty-headed bullshit that only a hardware engineer would come up with.”

“Right,” Jake retorted, “because messed up time stamps is a hardware issue.  Do you guys also give your system administrators mops, then give your janitors root access?”

“Switching to python actually isn’t a bad idea,” said Ryan, “but there’s a much more obvious solution to this problem.  You can-”

“Hang on,” interrupted Dan, “care to repeat that comment about root access?”

“You guys don’t understand separation of duty,” said Jake.

“You guys don’t understand fuck about fuck,” said Dan.

The next half hour went about as productively as that conversation.

[Nora]

Saturday.  It was a surprisingly clear morning, for San Francisco, and the sun was just starting to rise.  Because it was San Francisco, though, the morning was ice cold.

Nora made her way up the steep trail of Mt. Davidson.  Kevin said he knew every trail and angle at this place, and she believed him.  The park was tiny.  She reached the peak with ease.  She glanced in the direction of the sun, then turned away to look at downtown in the distance.  She could see the bay, and Castro, and a bunch of major downtown buildings until her view reached Sutro Mountain.

She pulled out her cell phone.  “This is boring,” she told Kevin through the speaker.

“Did you know it’s the tallest hill in all of San Francisco?”

“Highest of the seven hills?”

“Sure.”

“What, because of the giant cross?”

“I admit that the giant cross is cheating, but the point still stands.”

“Not sure what the big deal is, to be honest.  I’ve had a more fun time at Bernal Heights, and that place has some pretty good coffee.”

“Giant blue building.”

“What?”

“Find the spot where Balboa is, look a bit to the left, and you’ll see that giant blue building.  It’s a water tower.  We used to sneak up there, forever ago, when we were young.”

“Okay...”

“I used to love this city.  It’s not the same now.  Whenever I came back it was never the same, always a little different.  So I started to come home every month, then every other month.  The last time we spoke, it was my first time back in almost a year.”

“Well, what’s changed?”

“It’s just different.”

Nora looked at the tower, then at Kevin’s high school, then at the water again.  From a distance, it was all tiny.  Like none of it mattered.

“You used to love this city,” asked Nora, “and now you don’t because it’s changed?”

“Exactly.  You took the words right out of my mouth.”

“So you believe that the city you once loved is gone.  I believe that the city you loved never existed.”

“That’s morbid.”

“Seriously, how much of it had you really seen?”

Nora looked again at the view.  “Oh wait, technically you’ve seen quite a bit of it.”

“Technically.”

[Kevin]

Sunday.  Kevin was at a church.  Again.

After another sermon, a middle-aged person named Leo (whom he had met a couple of weeks ago) sought him out.

“Hey Kevin,” he said, “do you know a lot about social media?”

The question hit him with surprise.  Kevin had once been obsessed with social media.

“I know a little bit,” said Kevin, “why do you ask?”

“I’d like to give our church more of an online presence, but it’s all new to me.  What do you know about Facebook groups?”

“Well,” said Kevin, “not too much.  I know that you can pay to have the algorithm favor you, so you get more traffic.  I also know that you can integrate it with Google Analytics, and I believe the algorithm will favor you if you can rack likes or comments in a five-minute window.

“The whole thing is very calculated.  The emojis you use, whether you use GIFs, whether you use tags...all of these are taken into consideration when considering your post placement.”

“That’s all fine and good,” said Leo, “but you don’t sound super enthusiastic right now about Facebook.”

“Have you heard of Life Church?”

“No.”

“It’s a nice resource, it’s an online church, but it’s just a little bit too good.  It’s hard to describe.  It’s ridiculously high quality video, full Facebook integration, professional band.  You can view the likes and comments in real time.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s weird.  All of this is weird to me for some reason.  Doing that kind of thing for a church?  I prefer sites like Medium.  I can harvest so much sweet, sweet data.”

“Are you okay?  You just turned red.”

“You know, I get crazy about this a lot.  I used to be a normal guy.  A couple likes here, a couple likes there.  I started to find forums where I could get 100 likes a post, consistently, and I started to get a presence.  Click, like, share.  Click, like, share.  It’s no way to live, man.  Every second a feeling of wanting judgment, every act of communication a desperate plea to please the algorithm.

“But this one time, this one night I’ll never forget, I put up an article that went #trending.  It got 36,000 Facebook shares.  Pretty okay, sure, but then I found the real analytics.  3 million hits.  3 million people read it, all around the world.”

For a little while, Leo just stood there.  Finally, he spoke again.

“Kevin, I just want to share some videos.”

“Oh, okay.  Have you considered YouTube?”

“What’s that?”

Kevin walked back to his apartment after lunch.  Part of him wished he could be as enthusiastic about church as he was about technology, but there was still something he couldn’t get over.  It was a belief that was fundamental to him for as long as he remembered.  It was a belief that went against everything he had read in every book of the bible.

Kevin didn’t think it mattered what people believed.  All that mattered to him was what people did.

Some Christians donated to the poor, built schools, saved lives.  Some atheists donated to the poor, built schools, saved lives.  Both Christians and non-Christian people had done great things, and horrible things, but so had Muslims.  And Hindu people.  And scientologists, and probably a million other religions.  But no one thought it was okay to believe that your beliefs didn’t matter.  

Kevin wasn’t sure if he believed in everything or nothing.  He figured it was impossible to believe in nothing, because that would mean that he still believed in something.

[Dan]

Monday.  8PM.  Dan was one of the only people in.

It was a long meeting, followed by a crucial lunch meeting, followed by coding, followed by another meeting.  These past few days had been tough on everyone, but Dan sometimes wished he could just hole up, not talk to anyone, and code.

He finally had a few hours to himself.  This was when he felt most productive.

2, he thought.  2, 4, 8, 16…

Dan’s weapon of choice had always been C++.  He knew bitwidths, 56-megabyte proprietary structs, obscure abbreviations that only meant anything to him, Andy, and the Department of Defense.  He knew 18 different ways to bind to a socket.  He knew 19 different ways to accidentally bind to the socket incorrectly, which is why he was careful who he hired.

He looked at his code.  100 lines.  18 minutes.  It compiled, implemented a client/server, verified that both sides were properly using the data.  Not bad.  He added error handling, comments, varied conditions.  He updated his code like a skilled writer polishing his prose, and like a skilled writer he knew how important every individual unit was.  He knew how significant the difference was between --i and i--.  He knew the implications of using [] on a vector instead of .at()

Having accomplished his main goal, he decided to spend a few minutes making fun of other people on Github issues.

He saw one branch of code where someone failed, failed again, then tried changing all the include statements from using “” to using <>.  Dan laughed.

He saw one branch of code where someone tried to log everything as fatal.  This was surprisingly common, especially for people too dumb to figure out how to set log level.  Dan laughed.

Then Dan saw a branch made by one of his best friends.

Ex-friends.  No one ever figured it out.  Things were mysterious, but for reasons he never understood this friend’s family chose not to mention their company (or Dan) once.  But how did it happen?  This was also mysterious.  Dan compiled a list of all the things he had learned after college, and it was long, but one item stood out:

When an obituary omits cause of death, that usually means it’s suicide.

What appalled Dan wasn’t the act itself, but the sheer indifference that their company displayed.  They just didn’t care.  His cubicle was replaced by an intern’s, then another intern’s.  That’s more or less how he felt the company regarded this death.  It was a name tag change, a commented out line in payroll.  It frustrated Dan to no end, the sheer meaningless and triviality of the ordeal.  

Silently, when he was sure no one was there to hear, Dan wept.

He cried to a timer.  When five minutes passed, he got back on track with coding.

#short story #fiction

[crystalelemental]

FE Fates Replay - Part 5

I was having such a good time.  And then...

Chapter 9 starts out with Corrin returning successful from her mission to suppress the Ice Tribe’s rebellion.  Even Garon is impressed, and makes some hesitant comments about being proud of her.  Honestly, this is the Garon I want.  The one that’s slightly unhinged, but generally does care about the well-being of his children.  You know.  The one with any level of complexity at all.  For a moment all is well, until Iago decides to be the way that he is and announces that Corrin didn’t do it alone as commanded.  Xander’s response here is kinda funny.  “That’s really shitty, Iago, even for your slimy ass.”  Or something to that effect.  Anyway, Garon’s slightly miffed, but let’s it go because damn, she did a real good job on suppressing the rebellion without taking lives.  Again, the Garon with some level of complexity.  Instead of just murder man, he commends her specifically for not taking life in the suppression, which would be cool if that mentality of “not taking life in the conflict is a good thing.”  Shame about the way this game handles villains.

You’re immediately given another assignment: go to...uh...shit.  I can’t remember how to spell the place.  Basically, he wants you to go capture a territory.  Chapter 9 involves going through a fortress that’s the remains of a dragon, which is held by the Hoshidans.  This is a fairly fun chapter.  Not too difficult.  Mostly Effie and Silas carry the day.  You also recruit Azura and Nyx, making this the best recruitment chapter so far!  I really like both of them.  It’s a shame that Nyx is at level 9 when you get her.  Her stats are, uh...pretty terrible.  Okay, really terrible.  Skill, Luck, and Defense are all abysmal, with Magic and Speed being her only worthwhile stats.  They wouldn’t be as bad if she showed up a few levels lower, but at level 9, a lot of her stat spread is unsalvageable without stat boosting items.  Which means if you’re gonna use her, you have to invest.  And I absolutely intend to use her.

The map is your standard Seize map, after clearing everyone out, so not much to report on in terms of combat.  After the fight, Azura explains that she’s stuck here because the Hoshidans, wary after Corrin’s decision, turned on her too and had her locked up here.  So I guess that proves I made the right call.  So much for family, am I right?  Fuck Hoshido.  Azura instantly joins up with you, since she’s got nowhere else to go.  As for Nyx, just to give a bit of info on her, she’s apparently a really old magic user who, for reasons unknown, is in the body of a child.  Honestly, if it weren’t for her outfit, she’d be perfect.  She’s sassy and fun, and admittedly I like her hair.

Chapter 10 has the group arrive in some port town looking for passage to this territory they’re to take.  At first, it’s assumed this port will be safe, but unfortunately for them, it’s now crawling with Hoshidans.  Fortunately for me, Takumi is leading the charge, meaning it’s finally time to kick his ass.  He goes on about Corrin being a traitor and all that, but what’s interesting is he mentions that some Hoshidans took Azura away, and that Ryoma was worried about her.  He wasn’t, obviously, but what’s neat to me is that the eneimes from last chapter were apparently in active defiance of Ryoma, who is essentially their king now that the old queen is dead.  At the very least, the Hoshidans are very disorganized.  So that’s funny.  Good job, idiots.

Honestly?  This is my favorite chapter so far.  I mentioned last time, I think, but while the developers of this game were insistent that Awakening’s weak point was its story (don’t ask how one can be so out of touch, I don’t know either), its actual weak point is mostly its maps.  It’s been a while since I’ve fully played Awakening, but I remember about 90% of it being “route the enemy,” with very little else aside from standard Seize and Defeat the Boss.  There aren’t too many weird conditions or gimmicks.  Fates, at least on the Conquest route, has given some more interesting stuff.  This one in particular is really fun.  You’re defending the territory, so you have four squares at the far north of the map, where your units start, that the enemy can’t reach.  If they do, you lose.  To help out, you get a bunch of ranged weapons near your position to help weaken, but not KO, foes.  There are also a lot of homes around the area that you can access to get some items.  Naturally, as with any defending map, there are tons of reinforcements.  What really makes the map interesting to me is that, so far, we’ve been using a lot of Dragon Veins.  Allegedly.  I don’t use them that often.  They’re not always as helpful as they think.  But in this map, Takumi activates one, and dries up all the water, allowing the enemies to traverse around the paths you’ve been defending.  It’s incredibly frustrating, but a neat surprise that the map pulls to make your attempts at defense even harder.  I know for me, I had spread out my units by this point.  We’d managed to put a dent in their forces and were alerting the houses and trying to push south.  But as soon as that happened, a bunch of reinforcements came in.  The only one who could continue to move forward was Dragon Corrin.  Everyone else had to start back-tracking to defend.

Chapter 10 also introduces three new units to our party.  In order of least to greatest importance, we first have Beruka, one of Camilla’s retainers.  She’s quiet and doesn’t talk much, but honestly was pretty funny in her debut.  Selena, or Severa for those of us who played Awakening, is the same as she ever was, so you kind of expect her to tease Corrin about being heartless for not remembering them, but Beruka joining in was pretty good.  Speaking of, Selena’s the other character who joins, and just like as Severa, she’s a lot of fun.  She’s a bit more mellow here, if only slightly.  A little more in tune with herself, perhaps?  Then we have Camilla.  She arrives, and is surprisingly intense about murdering dudes.  Almost a bit Faye-like, only instead of the love of Alm, it’s for the love of her sister.  It’s a bit disconcerting, frankly.  I go back and forth on really liking Camilla and really disliking her.  They just go a bit too heavy on some of her more intense traits, you know?

The map is pretty tough, but Corrin and Azura wound up kicking Takumi’s ass no sweat.  In fact, I first had Corrin do it, and then with save states thanks to Casual, went back and had Azura finish him instead.  Both of their dialogue reveals about what you’d expect.  Takumi’s just a butthurt baby.  After you win, he whines about Corrin’s betrayal again, and then gets a migraine or something and fucks off.  This is one of those “Camilla is great” moments, because as Takumi is throwing insults as Corrin, Camilla just goes “What a rude boy.  Perhaps I should beat some manners into him...”  Corrin stops her and says no violence, but we really should’ve allowed it.  Takumi mentions the Rainbow Sage, which is apparently our objective that I don’t think anyone has mentioned until now.  He says Ryoma got the blessing so it’s all over for you fuckers now.  Camilla lets us know that it’s fine, Xander also got the blessing ages ago, so the Hoshidans are really just one step behind.  Though depending on time frame of Xander getting this blessing, this would mean that Ryoma could potentially be considered stronger, based on them being “even” in Chapter 6.  Though in fairness, my run involved Xander immediately getting a crit and taking Ryoma out in one shot.  So that was fucking hilarious.

Chapter 11, we finally arrive in this territory.  We meet a nice lady who tells us about the dangers of the mountain the sage lives on, and that he’s been taken captive by the Hoshidans.  Corrin naturally hurries to his rescue, and the fight is on!  This time, it’s against Hinoka.  The map itself is alright?  It kinda forces you to take two separate paths and gets a little cluttered, but not too bad.  Azama is, without question the worst part of this map.  Staves don’t count as a weapon, so his special ability means you continuously take counter damage equal to what you deal to him, and he has some bullshit Hexlock Staff that cuts the HP of anyone hit by it to half for the remainder of the map.  It’s such garbage.  Thankfully, Jakob is very fast, so haha, idiot.  I did get special dialogue with Hinoka, though.  Camilla is just...so incredibly petty here.  “She’s my sister now, you lose, bitch.”  The amount of pettiness on display is unreal.  Corrin, by comparison, actually has a pretty touching conversation.  Hinoka seems to understand Corrin’s resolve, and doesn’t really pressure her the way the others did.  She’s not happy with Corrin’s decision at all, but ultimately accepts Corrin’s decision and lives with it.  This automatically makes Hinoka the best Hoshidan sibling in my book.  I don’t regret siding against the others, but I do regret siding against her.

After the battle, Hinoka recognizes they need to retreat, and makes a comment about gathering their dead later.  She is then informed that there are no dead, only wounded.  Corrin gave the command to not kill anyone in this fight, and announces that she wants to end the war peacefully, without bloodshed if possible.  Hinoka is taken aback, but flees quickly after.  Kaze, however, remains behind to speak with Corrin.  He’s impressed by her devotion to peace, and pledges loyalty to her.  Another new ally!  And a ninja at that!

We meet the Rainbow Sage, who activates something with Yato.  He tells us to seek out the Nohrians who will activate the blade’s true power and awaken it as Grim Yato, the ultimate blade of darkness or whatever!  Given that we already have two Nohrian siblings, I wonder who the two we need could be.  Honestly, I’ve been holding on to this complaint, but now’s a good time: it’s bullshit that the female siblings don’t get unique weapons.  Xander and Leo get unique, powerful weapons, as do Ryoma and Takumi.  But the sisters?  They have to make do with generic weapons.  That’s such utter horseshit, and frankly, kinda sexist.

Immediately after this, Iago shows up and again, decides to be the way he is.  Garon gave a command to kill the sage.  Corrin outright refuses, stating the obvious: Ryoma already got the power, we’re not preventing anyone important from getting it because everyone already has said blessing, you’re doing this for nothing.  The Rainbow Sage thanks Corrin for wanting to spare his life, but proclaims it was time for him to die anyway and just dies out on the spot.  So I guess Mission Successful?  Weird.

I was gonna cut here, as the natural end to a particular thread of the game, but I’m kinda having fun, so let’s keep going.  Chapter 12!  Elise takes ill from a weird virus thing in that territory, and we need to find help!  Garon gives another command, specifically, to go to this one place for rest and relaxation.  Oddly kind.  It also turns out this place is the medical hub of the world, so suspiciously fortuitous.  They group hurries there and fucking surprise, there are Hoshidans everywhere.  Led by Ryoma.  Amazing.  Corrin begs him to let her pass, telling him about Elise’s condition.  He offers the trade: Corrin comes with him, and they’ll let her pass without a fight.  Corrin, of course, refuses.  As she should.  Listen, I get that it’s war, but by now they know what Corrin’s about.  She’s aimed to prevent the death of their soldiers in every battle.  They know she’s shown mercy where protecting life is concerned.  So what does Ryoma do?  Insist on fighting, potentially allowing Elise to die.  Bastard.

Thankfully we get reinforcements in the nick of time, in the form of-oh fuck me.  Laslow, listen.  You’re cool.  I’m glad you’re here.  I liked Inigo too.  But Peri.  Motherfucking Peri.  She is the worst character in the entire series for me.  There’s no question.  Not even a close second.  Even Tharja doesn’t come close, because some of Tharja’s supports were at least endearing in some way.  Peri is just a little sociopath who can’t shut the fuck up about murder.  Xander, where the fuck did you find her, and why is she not in jail?  I honestly feel it’s hypocritical to complain about Hans when you hired Peri on purpose, you asshat.  Honestly, for your belief in doing right by people and wanting to protect others, I cannot believe you thought putting Peri in charge of anything was a good call.  This is actively a blemish on your record.

Fuck, I can’t do this now.  I can’t deal with Peri.  We were having such a good day, then this little freak-ass gremlin shows up and prattles on about stabface of whatever the fuck, and now I’m just angry.  I’ll deal with her later.

#fire emblem fates replay #fire emblem fates

[thewanderingamalgamate]

Return of the Goopman!

[[Hey there everyone! I’m still alive and decided to give this another go. Missed the goopman and getting them into trouble. Of course I missed all of you blessed nerds as well. 

I know I burnt some bridges in a bad way prior to my departure, though I’m unaware of the complete extent of it. Regardless, if you’re uncomfortable seeing me again then please feel free to unfollow or block, I’ll understand.

So, theres been a few changes over here. *The obvious one being the name/url. I lost wanderandward to a squatter, didn’t want to make a fight out of it. Check it out if you like flowers though heh. All the links here should direct you to the proper pages under the new url, but if you find one that doesn’t please let me know. *Again, I fell out with some people, their characters and interactions with them were pretty important too. I’m not going to erase all that history, specifics will just be glossed over if they ever come up. *I made an aesthetics/personal blog over at @shareourwanderings. It should help reduce the clutter and minimize the chance of losing replies in my drafts. I’ll still reblog friends’ art, fanart, and commission posts here. *Made a few small tweaks and additions to the rules/about too and that’s about it.

I’ll leave what I’ve been up to in the past year under a readmore. 

Hope to reconnect with you folks (and make some new connections of course), without any unpleasantness.]]

The TL;DR version: Instead of wallowing in misery, self-pity, self-loathing etc. with this being my only escape, I’ve started the grueling process of unfucking myself and my life. 

There’s been a metric crapton of thinking, reevaluating, reading, realizing, and understanding happening on my end. Turns out fucking up horribly and getting called out on it can be a great impetus for personal growth if you let it. I haven’t miraculously changed and eliminated all that is wrong with me of course, from what I understand such a thing is pretty much impossible. Its an endless process of figuring out how and why you’re wrong, accepting it, and taking steps to be a little less wrong. And I’ve at least started that process.

I’ve confronted the reality of my mental illnesses. The anxiety and depression. How they’ve affected me, how they’ve manifested, the causes, how my behavior has been affected by it. And how I’m still responsible for my actions despite them. I haven’t been to a therapist yet, but its on the agenda and progress has been made towards it. I have been taking medication for them though, learning how to more actively recognize when I’m being affected and how. I’m getting a better grip on my mental faculties. You might not help how you feel, but how you react to it is always up to you. Sounds simple, but ‘simple’ has never excluded something from being hard to do. Been worth trying though.

I finally have prescription glasses. If anyone ever took a close look at my munday pics, my eyes never lined up properly in them. Untreated astigmatism+nearsighted that led to amblyopia. Corrective lenses, eye exercises tailored to the condition, drawing (mostly tracing from a book). Unfortunately I’m long past the age where the condition can be completely fixed, but progress can still be made. Keeping my fingers crossed for advancements in that field though.

I’ve been taking better care of my frail mortal form. Mostly by cramming a handful of supplements down my gullet and putting it through immense stress and pain. The human body is just weird like that. I can understand why others tell the depressed to get some exercise, its actually good advice just poorly worded/explained. But yeah, been exercising, watching my intake, trying that ‘healthy living’ myth people propagate. Those long infrequent walks I took roughly once a week? Twice a day now. I’ve gone swimming for the first time in about 5 or 6 years. Got access to a proper weight room too. I’ve concluded that bodybuilders are masochists. 

I have a new laptop. Fanfuckingtastic considering the old one could barely run discord, its screen is dead, fans dead, deskbound connected to a monitor, and liked to disconnect from the wifi when I most needed it. The new one might not be some $2k alienware powerhouse sure, but it opened a lot of damned doors. Like being able to write here without constant frustrating interruptions. 

I reconnected with my brother somewhat. Always considered him the more successful one and felt like a disappointment to him. We got past that. Just about every saturday since around january, I’ve been hanging out with him, until well past midnight, playing D&D with him and his friends. They’re all a bunch of shameless walking memes and its great. My brother is the DM, and so far my dragonborn sorc is the only group member that hasn’t be downed. Not for lack of trying. My anxious arse has been palling around, in person, with complete strangers, and I’m pretty happy about it heh. Probably going to put up summaries of our crimes adventure on shareourwanderings.

Between all that, I’ve been reading, poking at my backlog of games and shows. I’ve spent some time on Quora, picking up tips from published writers (Mercedes Lackey is surprisingly active over there), and of course checking out the mental health topics over there. The new laptop has made it easier to catch up on shows I’ve been wanting to watch. As in, I binge watched One Punch Man in a few nights, OVAs included. Mob Psycho is next on my list. Add in some new music, Sanderson stories, and the creative juices are flowing again.

I’m making progress. Life feels like its worth living, despite and even because of the fuckups. Its very likely I’m going to fuck up again eventually, hopefully in a less horrible manner. Just something I have to live with and continue to learn from.

#I Live! #Hello Hello Hello you wonderful people! #Out of Sight #the mun #Damn that was a lot longer than I thought it would be

[the-desolated-quill]

Extremis - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I seriously can’t make up my mind as to whether or not I actually liked this episode. Extremis is certainly very different from previous Who stories and there are some interesting concepts and ideas buried within. I could imagine a talented writer creating something really special with these ideas.

...

Take a random guess who wrote this one.

Okay. Credit where it’s due. This is not the worst thing Moffat has ever written. Hell, in terms of quality, Extremis is several leagues above shit like The Husbands Of River Song or Hell Bent. I suppose the fact that I’m not instantly dismissing this episode like I’ve done with previous Moffat stories shows that things are improving somewhat, right?

Let’s start with the obvious. Guess who’s in the Vault:

Oh yeah! Fucking called it!

Obviously this didn’t come as much of a shock. Like with all of Moffat’s series arcs, the list of suspects was pathetically small. Really, who else could it have been? I was more shocked by how blasé the reveal was. There was none of the usual melodramatic theatricality that comes with these sorts of reveals. It was basically just a ‘oh by the way, the Master is in the Vault. Just so you know.’ Makes me wonder why Moffat even bothered making it a mystery in the first place? Why not just be upfront about it from the get go if it’s not that big of a deal?

So yeah. The execution stuff. It had all the usual Moffat bollocks. The Doctor using the power of plot convenience to get out of a situation, using his reputation to scare off the opposition and thus completely removing any and all tension or excitement from the proceedings, Nardole being an unfunny killjoy, and River Song chastising the Doctor (this time from beyond the grave) for being a very bad man because he wants to kill the Master even though the chances of the Doctor actually going through with it are extremely slim and even though River Song has more blood on her hands than he does. Hypocritical much, sweetie? On the whole, I wasn’t particularly fond of any of that. But what saved it for me, surprisingly, was the Master. The annoying crazy schtick has been stripped away completely here as we see the Master at her most vulnerable, pleading for her life. Michelle Gomez knocks it out of the park completely and I did actually find myself feeling sorry for her.

Oh, not that I’m convinced any of this will stick. I know Moffat’s bullshit all too well. All this crap about the Master wanting to turn over a new leaf I’m sure will be conveniently reversed at some point. Same goes for the Doctor’s blindness. It’s a bit hard to feel any sort of emotional investment towards the Doctor’s current condition when you can practically see Moffat’s hand hovering over the reset button at all times (and why is the Doctor trying to keep it a secret from Bill? How bloody stupid is that?).

Now let’s get into the story good and proper. There’s this book called the Veritas, which contains a terrible secret and anyone who learns this secret commits suicide immediately afterwards. Okay. As premises go, that’s a bloody good one. Already I’m intrigued. We’ve also got some genuinely creepy monsters. The Monks. They certainly look cool and the voices are chilling. It seems like they’re going to be the main recurring villains this series, and yeah I wouldn’t mind seeing them again. I’d certainly like to learn more about them. Hopefully they won’t outstay their welcome like the Silence and Weeping Angels did.

So yeah. it’s a good setup that draws you in. However it’s when the action shifts to the Vatican’s secret library where everything starts to wobble and fall apart. So the Veritas reveals the truth. That this isn’t the real world and that this is a computer simulation. Quick question. How long has this simulation been running for? If it’s in real time, how did the ancient scholars figure out they were in a computer simulation? If it’s not, why did the Monks put the Veritas into the simulation in the first place?

This then leads to further questions. Why would finding out you’re in a simulation make you want to kill yourself? Why did that priest wait four hours to kill himself after he sent the email to CERN? Why do the CERN guys think they’re saving the world by blowing themselves up? How does that work? And the most important question of all, why would the Monks create simulants smart enough and self aware enough to work out their true nature? Why put the Veritas in the simulation? Why give them access to all those portals? It doesn’t make sense. The purpose of these simulations is for the Monks to test run how they’re going to take over the Earth. How does creating a simulation where the simulants realise they’re simulants do that? How does that benefit the Monks’ plans? It doesn’t make sense.

I can see how this could have worked. Have a story where the Doctor fails to save the Earth from alien invaders and possibly even die, only to then reveal that it was all a simulation and have the real invasion take place in a future episode, where the tension would come from wondering how the real Doctor will succeed where his computer generated self failed. That could have been very gripping and genuinely original. But unfortunately Moffat trips up thanks to one of his many flaws as a writer, His desperate desire to appear clever when in reality he’s a colossal idiot.

So the Veritas contains a shadow test, where any random number you think of is the same number everyone else is thinking of. The Doctor explains that if all computer generated people are part of the same programme, then they’ll all generate the exact same string of random numbers.

Now I’m not an expert on computers by any stretch of the imagination (I did all my A Level coursework on a typewriter), but from what little I remember from my IT GCSE, I can tell that’s prime bullshit. It’s true that computers aren't perfect random number generators, but they can do a hell of a lot better than that!

Then it just gets even weirder when Moffat starts bringing video games into the equation. Why video games? This simulation has nothing in common with a video game as far as I can see. And what’s all this crap about video game characters thinking they’re real? Moffat does know video game characters aren’t actually sentient, right? And finally, how is the fake Doctor able to email the simulation to the real Doctor at the end? He claims it’s something any computer or subroutine can do. Again, I’m not an expert on computers, but even I know that’s bollocks.

So is Extremis good or bad in the end? Well... I suppose I didn’t dislike it, but there are far too many plot holes and loose ends that I simply can’t overlook. On the whole it’s conceptually interesting, but poorly thought out. Points for trying though.

#extremis #steven moffat #doctor who #twelfth doctor #peter capaldi #bill potts #pearl mackie #nardole #matt lucas #the master #michelle gomez #bbc #review #spoilers

[hellofastestnewsfan]

On March 15, 2019, legions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by dropping to the ground and grinding out the Super Diva’s signature push-ups on the steps of courthouses around the country.

This unusual tribute to a Supreme Court justice was one of the many ways a new generation has shown the love to the five-foot tall legal giant who made the lives they live possible. But by Sept. 18, her iron will and gritty determination was no longer enough to propel her to court. Ginsburg died on Friday at the age of 87 of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to a statement released by the Supreme Court, per the Associated Press.

In the early ’70s—when Gloria Steinem was working underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism, and Betty Friedan was writing a feminist manifesto about “the problem with no name”—Ginsburg named the problem, briefed it, and argued it before the Supreme Court of the United States.

She was 37 then, on the receiving end of so much of the discrimination she would work to end, and she was just undertaking her first job as a litigator—as co-director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. In her “very precise” way, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, she studied title, chapter, clause, and footnote of the legal canon that kept women down and overturned those that discriminated on the basis of sex in five landmark cases that extended the 14th Amendment’s equal rights clause to women. In that long, hard slog, she employed some novel devices, using “gender” (so as not to distract male jurists with the word “sex”) and representing harmed male plaintiffs when she could find one (to show that discrimination hurts everyone). And she never raised her voice.

When she was done, a widower could get the same Social Security benefits as a woman and a woman could claim the same military housing allowance as a man. A woman could cut a man’s hair, buy a drink at the same age, administer an estate, and serve on a jury.

By the time she left the ACLU, and before she donned her first black robe, Ginsburg had brought about a small revolution in how women were treated, wiping close to 200 laws that discriminated off the books. Over the next decades, first as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and then as the second woman on the Supreme Court, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she would become to women what Thurgood Marshall was to African Americans. She employed the same clause in the 14th Amendment he used to free former slaves to extend protection to the mentally ill who wanted to live outside institutions, gays who wanted to marry, immigrants who lived in fear, and, of course, females: those who wanted to be cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, have access to abortion, and, when pregnant, not be fired if they couldn’t perform duties their condition made, temporarily, impossible.

Her fans’ courthouse celebration was also a plea for the bionic Ginsburg to carry on, at least until the 2020 election. There was high anxiety when she fell asleep at the State of the Union in 2015 (a case of enjoying a fine California wine brought by Justice Anthony Kennedy to the justices pre-speech dinner) and even more when she missed the court’s 2019 opening session in January, her first such absence in 26 years. She hadn’t fully recovered from surgery to remove three cancerous nodules from her lungs. But she took her seat as the senior justice next to Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-February, picking up her full caseload. That following summer, she went through radiation to treat a cancerous tumor on her pancreas, her fourth brush with cancer. In July 2020, she announced that cancer had returned yet again. Despite receiving chemotherapy for lesions on her liver, the 87-year-old reasserted that she was still “fully able” to continue serving on the Supreme Court.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesAugust 2, 1935 Childhood photograph of Ruth Bader taken when she was two years old.

Baton-twirling bookworm

Joan Ruth Bader was born in 1933 in Brooklyn and came of age during the Holocaust, “a first-generation American on my father’s side, barely second-generation on my mother’s … What has become of me could happen only in America,” she said at her confirmation hearing.

True enough, but what would become of her was a long time coming. In an enthralling biography, Jane Sherron De Hart describes schoolgirl Ruth, who twirled a baton but was such a bookworm she tripped and broke her nose reading while walking. Her mother, who convinced her she could do anything, died just before Ruth, the class valedictorian, graduated and headed off to Cornell. There she met the tall, handsome Martin Ginsburg, and married him the minute she graduated Phi Beta Kappa—the first person, she said, who “loved me for my brain.” She’d been accepted to Harvard Law, where Marty was already enrolled. She calls “meeting Marty by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me.”

What happened next is proof of her maxim that “a woman can have it all, just not all at once.” Marty was called up to active duty, so instead of studying torts in Cambridge, Ginsburg found herself working as a claims examiner at the Social Security Administration in Fort Sill, Oklahoma—that is, until she was demoted with a pay cut for working while pregnant.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesSummer 1958 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg play with their three-year old daughter, Jane, in her bedroom at Martin’s parents’ home in Rockville Centre, N.Y

Life threw another wrench into the works when both were back at Harvard with a baby girl, and Marty was stricken with a rare testicular cancer. Ruth went to class for both of them, typing up his notes and papers as well as her own, getting along on even less sleep than your usual new mother, all while being scolded for taking up a man’s seat by Dean Erwin Grisold. When her husband graduated and was offered a prestigious job at a white shoe law firm in New York, she gave up her last year at Harvard to finish at Columbia.

Once again, she felt the sting of the discrimination. Despite being the first student ever to serve on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews and graduating at the top of her class, she couldn’t get a job at a premier law firm or one of the Supreme Court clerkships that went so easily to male classmates who ranked below her. According to DeHart, Judge Felix Frankfurter fretted a woman clerk might wear pants to chambers. Without bitterness, she calls anger a useless emotion; she noted that in the ’50s, “to be a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot—that combination was a bit too much.”

Librado Romero—The New York Times/Redux 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New York, when she was named a professor at Columbia Law School.

Battling discrimination

She didn’t get outwardly angry and only, after many years, got even. She took a lower court clerkship, researched civil procedure (and equality of the sexes in practice) in Sweden and wrote a book on the subject—in Swedish! She returned home to teach at the Newark campus of Rutgers Law, where she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter. Despite being a progressive school, discrimination struck again. She learned she didn’t earn the same as a male colleague because, the dean explained, “he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good paying job in New York.” No wonder then, when she found herself surprisingly (given her husband’s medical history) but happily pregnant again, she took no chances and hid it.

After the birth of her son, James, she became a tenured professor at Columbia, co-authored the first case book on discrimination law, a work in progress as she changed much of it while litigating for the ACLU, until in 1980 she joined the Court of Appeals.

Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton was elected and he wanted a Cabinet, and by extension a Supreme Court, that looked like America. Ginsburg was on the list, but so were a dozen others and she wasn’t at the top.

Even Clinton’s deliberations weren’t without a peculiar form of discrimination as he worried, “the women are against her.” He was right. To the feminists of the ’90s—who might be ignored by the White House if it weren’t for Ginsburg’s decades of opening doors—she was yesterday. The judge methodically chipping away at bias, without burning a bra or tossing a high heel, looked plodding and uninspiring; her friendship with her colleague on the district court, Scalia, looked suspect.

Enter Marty. “I wasn’t very good at promotion, but Marty was,” she told the late Gwen Ifill, a PBS anchor. “He was tireless”—and beloved among lawyers, professors, and politicians. Women came around, reminded that she was a pioneer in their fight to overcome the patriarchy and a steadfast supporter of abortion rights, despite acknowledging in an interview that the country might be politically better off if the states had continued to legalize abortion rather than have Roe v. Wade as a singular target of its foes. Ginsburg was confirmed 96 to 3.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States August 10, 1993 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. From left to right stand President Bill Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Ginsburg, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

David Hume Kennerly—Getty Images March 2001 The only two female Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pose for a portrait in Statuary Hall, surrounded by statues of men at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The two Justices were preparing to address a meeting of the Congressional Women’s Caucus.

The Great Dissenter

She didn’t disappoint. In one case after another, she asked the right questions (and usually the first one), cobbled together majorities and wrote elegantly reasoned opinions: striking down stricter requirements for abortion clinics designed to make the procedure extinct (Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt), and approving gay marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), making the point during oral argument that if you can’t refuse a 70-year-old couple marriage because they can’t procreate, how could you use that excuse to deprive a gay one.

But it was her minority — not her majority — opinions that made her beloved to a new generation of women. As the court tilted right in 2006 after the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg started to read, not just file, her dissents to explain to the majority why they were wrong in hopes that “if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

Here was a shy, understated incrementalist suddenly becoming the Great Dissenter. In Shelby County v. Holder, she said that relieving errant states of the close scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” In Hobby Lobby, she was aghast that the court would deny costly contraception coverage to working women “because of someone else’s religious beliefs.” In the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber equal pay case, she asked how her brethren could penalize the plaintiff, who only got evidence of the disparity from an anonymous note, for missing a 180-day filing deadline given that salaries are kept secret. One person whose eyes were opened was Barack Obama. His first piece of legislation in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Karsten Moran—ReduxA woman attending the New York City Women’s March wears a t-shirt ​featuring Supreme Court Justic​e Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Jan. 20, 2018.

Becoming the Notorious RBG

Ginsburg’s womansplaining caught the attention of New York University law student Shana Knizhnik, who uploaded Ginsburg’s dissents to Tumblr. Overnight, a younger generation of women, and their mothers and grandmothers, were reminded of what Ginsburg had done for them. Knizhnik joined with reporter Irin Carmon to write Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The justice was soon a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, with a hyperkinetic Kate McKinnon issuing blistering “Ginsburns.” The justice’s 2016 memoir, My Own Words, was a New York Times bestseller. There were more books — adult, children’s and coloring. In 2018, Hollywood released a major motion picture, On the Basis of Sex, and the documentary RBG, which won an Emmy. Store shelves groan with merch: mugs (you Bader believe it), onesies (The Ruth will set you free), tote bags, bobblehead dolls, and action figures, one of the latest from her cameo in Lego Movie 2, produced by none other than Trump Administration Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

All this late-arriving fame rested uneasily on the shoulders of Ginsburg, who accepted it with dignity and took some pleasure at grandchildren’s shock that “so many people want to take my picture.” She kept a large supply of Notorious RBG T-shirts as a party favor for visitors.

At the heart of Hollywood’s treatment of Ginsburg wasn’t only the case Marty and his wife worked on together—an appeal of an IRS ruling—but a marriage of extraordinary compatibility and mutual support. After he recovered from cancer and had become a sought-after lawyer, he eagerly took on his share of domestic duties, which included feeding the children since, according to former Solicitor General Ted Olson, “Ruth wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the kitchen.” Marty was the fun parent (Ginsburg joked at her confirmation hearing that the children kept a log called “Mommy Laughed”) and a big-hearted host who happily roasted “Bambi,” Ruth’s name for whatever Scalia, her opera buddy, bagged on his last hunting trip. The pair were the subject of an actual comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, in which one scene depicts the over-emoting Scalia, locked in a dark room for excessive dissenting, and Ginsburg descending through a glass ceiling to rescue him.

A fellow justice said that neither Ginsburg would be who they were without the other. Marty once joked about being second banana: “As a general rule, my wife does not give me any advice about cooking and I do not give her any advice about the law. This seems to work quite well on both sides.” De Hart reprints the letter Marty put in a drawer in the bedside table as he was dying from a recurrence of his cancer. He was the “most fortunate” part of her life.

Marty lived to see his wife recognized beyond what the two imagined when they agreed to marry and be lawyers together, but died just before a slight she suffered for following him to New York was righted. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard Law that Dean Griswold had denied her for taking her last credits at Columbia.

The longer she lived, the wider her reach and the deeper the appreciation for her years on the bench. At the opening concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Sept. 2019, Kennedy Center chair David Rubinstein introduced the dignitaries in the audience. When he got to the justice, women rose to applaud her. Then, the men quickly joined in until everyone in the hall was standing, looking up at the balcony, cheering and whistling, as if they’d come to tell her that they knew what she had done for them, not to hear Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2.

This wasn’t an audience of liberals, but a cross-section of the capital touched by a once-young lawyer who saw unfairness and quietly tried to end it during her 60 years of public service.

Throughout the decades, Ginsburg quietly persisted—through discrimination she would seek to end, through the death of Marty, through more illness and debilitating treatments than any one person should have to endure—without complaint, holding on and out, until sheer will was no longer enough.

from TIME https://ift.tt/2RHBzbQ

#Blogger

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Died. She Leaves Behind a Vital Legacy for Women — and Men

On March 15, 2019, legions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by dropping to the ground and grinding out the Super Diva’s signature push-ups on the steps of courthouses around the country.

This unusual tribute to a Supreme Court justice was one of the many ways a new generation has shown the love to the five-foot tall legal giant who made the lives they live possible. But by Sept. 18, her iron will and gritty determination was no longer enough to propel her to court. Ginsburg died on Friday at the age of 87 of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to a statement released by the Supreme Court, per the Associated Press.

In the early ’70s—when Gloria Steinem was working underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism, and Betty Friedan was writing a feminist manifesto about “the problem with no name”—Ginsburg named the problem, briefed it, and argued it before the Supreme Court of the United States.

She was 37 then, on the receiving end of so much of the discrimination she would work to end, and she was just undertaking her first job as a litigator—as co-director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. In her “very precise” way, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, she studied title, chapter, clause, and footnote of the legal canon that kept women down and overturned those that discriminated on the basis of sex in five landmark cases that extended the 14th Amendment’s equal rights clause to women. In that long, hard slog, she employed some novel devices, using “gender” (so as not to distract male jurists with the word “sex”) and representing harmed male plaintiffs when she could find one (to show that discrimination hurts everyone). And she never raised her voice.

When she was done, a widower could get the same Social Security benefits as a woman and a woman could claim the same military housing allowance as a man. A woman could cut a man’s hair, buy a drink at the same age, administer an estate, and serve on a jury.

By the time she left the ACLU, and before she donned her first black robe, Ginsburg had brought about a small revolution in how women were treated, wiping close to 200 laws that discriminated off the books. Over the next decades, first as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and then as the second woman on the Supreme Court, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she would become to women what Thurgood Marshall was to African Americans. She employed the same clause in the 14th Amendment he used to free former slaves to extend protection to the mentally ill who wanted to live outside institutions, gays who wanted to marry, immigrants who lived in fear, and, of course, females: those who wanted to be cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, have access to abortion, and, when pregnant, not be fired if they couldn’t perform duties their condition made, temporarily, impossible.

Her fans’ courthouse celebration was also a plea for the bionic Ginsburg to carry on, at least until the 2020 election. There was high anxiety when she fell asleep at the State of the Union in 2015 (a case of enjoying a fine California wine brought by Justice Anthony Kennedy to the justices pre-speech dinner) and even more when she missed the court’s 2019 opening session in January, her first such absence in 26 years. She hadn’t fully recovered from surgery to remove three cancerous nodules from her lungs. But she took her seat as the senior justice next to Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-February, picking up her full caseload. That following summer, she went through radiation to treat a cancerous tumor on her pancreas, her fourth brush with cancer. In July 2020, she announced that cancer had returned yet again. Despite receiving chemotherapy for lesions on her liver, the 87-year-old reasserted that she was still “fully able” to continue serving on the Supreme Court.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesAugust 2, 1935 Childhood photograph of Ruth Bader taken when she was two years old.

Baton-twirling bookworm

Joan Ruth Bader was born in 1933 in Brooklyn and came of age during the Holocaust, “a first-generation American on my father’s side, barely second-generation on my mother’s … What has become of me could happen only in America,” she said at her confirmation hearing.

True enough, but what would become of her was a long time coming. In an enthralling biography, Jane Sherron De Hart describes schoolgirl Ruth, who twirled a baton but was such a bookworm she tripped and broke her nose reading while walking. Her mother, who convinced her she could do anything, died just before Ruth, the class valedictorian, graduated and headed off to Cornell. There she met the tall, handsome Martin Ginsburg, and married him the minute she graduated Phi Beta Kappa—the first person, she said, who “loved me for my brain.” She’d been accepted to Harvard Law, where Marty was already enrolled. She calls “meeting Marty by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me.”

What happened next is proof of her maxim that “a woman can have it all, just not all at once.” Marty was called up to active duty, so instead of studying torts in Cambridge, Ginsburg found herself working as a claims examiner at the Social Security Administration in Fort Sill, Oklahoma—that is, until she was demoted with a pay cut for working while pregnant.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesSummer 1958 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg play with their three-year old daughter, Jane, in her bedroom at Martin’s parents’ home in Rockville Centre, N.Y

Life threw another wrench into the works when both were back at Harvard with a baby girl, and Marty was stricken with a rare testicular cancer. Ruth went to class for both of them, typing up his notes and papers as well as her own, getting along on even less sleep than your usual new mother, all while being scolded for taking up a man’s seat by Dean Erwin Grisold. When her husband graduated and was offered a prestigious job at a white shoe law firm in New York, she gave up her last year at Harvard to finish at Columbia.

Once again, she felt the sting of the discrimination. Despite being the first student ever to serve on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews and graduating at the top of her class, she couldn’t get a job at a premier law firm or one of the Supreme Court clerkships that went so easily to male classmates who ranked below her. According to DeHart, Judge Felix Frankfurter fretted a woman clerk might wear pants to chambers. Without bitterness, she calls anger a useless emotion; she noted that in the ’50s, “to be a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot—that combination was a bit too much.”

Librado Romero—The New York Times/Redux 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New York, when she was named a professor at Columbia Law School.

Battling discrimination

She didn’t get outwardly angry and only, after many years, got even. She took a lower court clerkship, researched civil procedure (and equality of the sexes in practice) in Sweden and wrote a book on the subject—in Swedish! She returned home to teach at the Newark campus of Rutgers Law, where she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter. Despite being a progressive school, discrimination struck again. She learned she didn’t earn the same as a male colleague because, the dean explained, “he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good paying job in New York.” No wonder then, when she found herself surprisingly (given her husband’s medical history) but happily pregnant again, she took no chances and hid it.

After the birth of her son, James, she became a tenured professor at Columbia, co-authored the first case book on discrimination law, a work in progress as she changed much of it while litigating for the ACLU, until in 1980 she joined the Court of Appeals.

Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton was elected and he wanted a Cabinet, and by extension a Supreme Court, that looked like America. Ginsburg was on the list, but so were a dozen others and she wasn’t at the top.

Even Clinton’s deliberations weren’t without a peculiar form of discrimination as he worried, “the women are against her.” He was right. To the feminists of the ’90s—who might be ignored by the White House if it weren’t for Ginsburg’s decades of opening doors—she was yesterday. The judge methodically chipping away at bias, without burning a bra or tossing a high heel, looked plodding and uninspiring; her friendship with her colleague on the district court, Scalia, looked suspect.

Enter Marty. “I wasn’t very good at promotion, but Marty was,” she told the late Gwen Ifill, a PBS anchor. “He was tireless”—and beloved among lawyers, professors, and politicians. Women came around, reminded that she was a pioneer in their fight to overcome the patriarchy and a steadfast supporter of abortion rights, despite acknowledging in an interview that the country might be politically better off if the states had continued to legalize abortion rather than have Roe v. Wade as a singular target of its foes. Ginsburg was confirmed 96 to 3.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States August 10, 1993 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. From left to right stand President Bill Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Ginsburg, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

David Hume Kennerly—Getty Images March 2001 The only two female Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pose for a portrait in Statuary Hall, surrounded by statues of men at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The two Justices were preparing to address a meeting of the Congressional Women’s Caucus.

The Great Dissenter

She didn’t disappoint. In one case after another, she asked the right questions (and usually the first one), cobbled together majorities and wrote elegantly reasoned opinions: striking down stricter requirements for abortion clinics designed to make the procedure extinct (Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt), and approving gay marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), making the point during oral argument that if you can’t refuse a 70-year-old couple marriage because they can’t procreate, how could you use that excuse to deprive a gay one.

But it was her minority — not her majority — opinions that made her beloved to a new generation of women. As the court tilted right in 2006 after the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg started to read, not just file, her dissents to explain to the majority why they were wrong in hopes that “if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

Here was a shy, understated incrementalist suddenly becoming the Great Dissenter. In Shelby County v. Holder, she said that relieving errant states of the close scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” In Hobby Lobby, she was aghast that the court would deny costly contraception coverage to working women “because of someone else’s religious beliefs.” In the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber equal pay case, she asked how her brethren could penalize the plaintiff, who only got evidence of the disparity from an anonymous note, for missing a 180-day filing deadline given that salaries are kept secret. One person whose eyes were opened was Barack Obama. His first piece of legislation in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Karsten Moran—ReduxA woman attending the New York City Women’s March wears a t-shirt ​featuring Supreme Court Justic​e Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Jan. 20, 2018.

Becoming the Notorious RBG

Ginsburg’s womansplaining caught the attention of New York University law student Shana Knizhnik, who uploaded Ginsburg’s dissents to Tumblr. Overnight, a younger generation of women, and their mothers and grandmothers, were reminded of what Ginsburg had done for them. Knizhnik joined with reporter Irin Carmon to write Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The justice was soon a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, with a hyperkinetic Kate McKinnon issuing blistering “Ginsburns.” The justice’s 2016 memoir, My Own Words, was a New York Times bestseller. There were more books — adult, children’s and coloring. In 2018, Hollywood released a major motion picture, On the Basis of Sex, and the documentary RBG, which won an Emmy. Store shelves groan with merch: mugs (you Bader believe it), onesies (The Ruth will set you free), tote bags, bobblehead dolls, and action figures, one of the latest from her cameo in Lego Movie 2, produced by none other than Trump Administration Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

All this late-arriving fame rested uneasily on the shoulders of Ginsburg, who accepted it with dignity and took some pleasure at grandchildren’s shock that “so many people want to take my picture.” She kept a large supply of Notorious RBG T-shirts as a party favor for visitors.

At the heart of Hollywood’s treatment of Ginsburg wasn’t only the case Marty and his wife worked on together—an appeal of an IRS ruling—but a marriage of extraordinary compatibility and mutual support. After he recovered from cancer and had become a sought-after lawyer, he eagerly took on his share of domestic duties, which included feeding the children since, according to former Solicitor General Ted Olson, “Ruth wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the kitchen.” Marty was the fun parent (Ginsburg joked at her confirmation hearing that the children kept a log called “Mommy Laughed”) and a big-hearted host who happily roasted “Bambi,” Ruth’s name for whatever Scalia, her opera buddy, bagged on his last hunting trip. The pair were the subject of an actual comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, in which one scene depicts the over-emoting Scalia, locked in a dark room for excessive dissenting, and Ginsburg descending through a glass ceiling to rescue him.

A fellow justice said that neither Ginsburg would be who they were without the other. Marty once joked about being second banana: “As a general rule, my wife does not give me any advice about cooking and I do not give her any advice about the law. This seems to work quite well on both sides.” De Hart reprints the letter Marty put in a drawer in the bedside table as he was dying from a recurrence of his cancer. He was the “most fortunate” part of her life.

Marty lived to see his wife recognized beyond what the two imagined when they agreed to marry and be lawyers together, but died just before a slight she suffered for following him to New York was righted. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard Law that Dean Griswold had denied her for taking her last credits at Columbia.

The longer she lived, the wider her reach and the deeper the appreciation for her years on the bench. At the opening concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Sept. 2019, Kennedy Center chair David Rubinstein introduced the dignitaries in the audience. When he got to the justice, women rose to applaud her. Then, the men quickly joined in until everyone in the hall was standing, looking up at the balcony, cheering and whistling, as if they’d come to tell her that they knew what she had done for them, not to hear Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2.

This wasn’t an audience of liberals, but a cross-section of the capital touched by a once-young lawyer who saw unfairness and quietly tried to end it during her 60 years of public service.

Throughout the decades, Ginsburg quietly persisted—through discrimination she would seek to end, through the death of Marty, through more illness and debilitating treatments than any one person should have to endure—without complaint, holding on and out, until sheer will was no longer enough.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news