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#like it’s always ‘he’s so much better than turin’ like I don’t care
applejuicefruit · 1 year
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i love your fics, you’re the only one who writes for my man dušan so i was wondering if you could write something angst today fluff where they were high school sweethearts like they’ve been in love since they were kids but eventually they broke up because he moves out to be a football player but one reader is at his match and he sees her in the crowd? you can chose the ending
this is a completely sad one, don’t hate me :))
dusan vlahovic x reader
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See you later
You and Dusan knew each other since you were kids. Not only he was your classmate during elementary and middle school but he was also your best friend, your comfort person, your safe place and your boyfriend. A lot of people said you were too young to know what love was but you knew exactly what love was when you met him. You found peace with him, it didn’t matter if you were only seven when you met him and it didn’t matter when he asked you to be his girlfriend when you were thirteen. You knew he was the man you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. Unfortunately things change. You always supported his dream to be a football player and you never missed one of his games when he was a kid, you were always front row cheering for him. But when he told you he was moving to Italy to play in Florence you saw something change in him. He was more focused on his career that your relationship and you couldn’t really blame him, you knew how much effort he put in his career but you weren’t ready for what was to come.
You still remember his words.
“I’m so sorry y/n…I don’t think I can keep up with a long distance relationship…it’s better for us if we break up” that’s what he said to you. You felt your heart go in millions of pieces. You know you couldn’t go with him but you didn’t expect the situation to go so down.
You were only sixteen, too young to be in love, so why did you feel completely empty the moment he left?
You remember going into a spiral of sadness and emptiness, where your days consisted of waking up, going to school, eat if you remembered, doing homework, going to sleep and doing all of that again. That became your loop. Dusan didn’t even try to contact you once he was in Italy. You thought he didn’t care but reality was he couldn’t forgive himself for hurting you, for breaking your heart, thinking you deserved more than that. He hated himself, your face still present in his head when he broke up with you, your eyes filled with sadness and anger, hate, knowing that you would never want to see him again.
It took a lot for you to forgive him. You wanted to hate him, to be mad at him but more than you tried the less you could bring yourself to hate him. You had nothing but love for him.
You always watched his games and it didn’t matter if you were in a different country, you always found a way to watch them. Some things changed when he moved to Turin to play for Juventus. You were already twenty and there was only one thing in your mind : go to Turin and watch a Juventus match.
And so you did. You packed your things and bought a ticket for the new upcoming match. You were lucky you worked for a while so you were able to save yourself some money.
Of course when you got in Turin the first thing you did was buying Vlahovic signature Juventus t-shirt. You were so proud of him for making in it so far.
You were currently sat down watching the lights of the stadium turning black to present all the players and you shouted so loud when the speaker announced Dusan that you feared someone might me annoyed by you. You knew he wouldn’t be able to see you but you still wanted him to feel your presence.
Only ten minutes on the game and Juventus was already winning, and of course Dusan scored the first goal. He celebrated right under the seats where you were seated and it took him only two seconds to see your face in the crowd. He froze. Definitely not expecting to see you there. He was speechless.
His teammates shook him out of his trance and they continued playing. The game ended and juventus won 4-0. Dusan scored twice and you couldn’t help but let a few tears of joy fall.
You were slowly getting out of the stadium when you saw a security guard coming towards you, signing you that you had to follow him. You already knew that Dusan did all of that.
The guard took you into a small room and told you to wait there.
A few seconds later Dusan came into the room with a face you would never forget.
“Y/n…” he whispered. He maintained his distances with you, not knowing if you wanted him closer or not.
“Hey Duci” you called him by his nickname and he melted right away, missing the comfort of your voice.
“What-what are you doing here?” he asked, a bit shocked to see you.
“I wanted to see the match” you simply said and he nodded.
“I didn’t know you were a Juventus fan” he teased you and you smiled.
“I’m your fan. I follow every team you play for” you confessed and he was shocked.
“Wow…” he simply said.
You two spent a few minutes in complete silence.
“Listen y/n…if you’re here to say that you hate me don’t even try to say it, I hate me too, for everything I did to you, for the way I treated you, for the way we broke up…I have no excuses but I’m so sorry it took me all of these years so say it…I still love you and I never stopped loving you. Not for a second. You still mean too much for me…I’m so sorry for letting you go, I don’t deserve you” Dusan said, fighting back his tears because he had no intention of crying in front of you.
“Hey…shhh Duci, it’s okay…I promise you I don’t hate you, I can’t hate you, you mean so much to me you have no idea, I love you and I will always love you…I just needed to see you one last time” you said holding his hands.
“What you mean one last time?” he asked you.
“I’m moving to New York…I was accepted into the photography school I applied one year ago. They accepted me last week so I wanted to see you one more time before moving to the other side of the world…” you confessed him.
“But that won’t be the last time I’m seeing you, right? You’ll still come back home? To see mama? Your family?” he asked you hoping you would say yes.
“I will come back home but it will probably be once or twice a year, not much more…I just…I wanted to say goodbye Duci…I missed you and the last time I saw you I was so mad I didn’t even want to talk to you…this time I wanna do it right” you let a few tears fall but Dusan was quick to dry them away. How you missed his touch on your skin. You leaned into his hand, finding the comfort you once missed. He took a few steps closer and gently grabbed your neck and pulled you into him. Your lips barely touching in what was a very soft kiss. You missed feeling him on you. You missed him. Dusan couldn’t hold it back and kissed you with more passion, a very needy kiss, more like a sorry for hurting you so much and leaving you alone all of these years.
You knew you had to step back, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to leave him.
“Duci…” you whispered, his hands on your waist while his head was on the crook of your neck.
“Don’t go please…please stay here” he knew it was selfish asking you to stay with him, not when he left you for following his dreams. Now you were leaving home to follow yours, but he couldn’t help feeling that something could have been different.
“Don’t think this as a goodbye…more like a see you later” you said cracking a smile even if you were hiding all the pain.
“I should have never let you go…that was my biggest mistake, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life” he said and you smiled.
“You won’t…” you whispered “I have to go now…but it was nice seeing you again” you said and he nodded, kissing your hands and showing you the way out.
Once you were out of the stadium you let yourself go, crying and hoping no one could see you.
But you thought about your words. One day, sooner or later you would see him again.
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borisbubbles · 1 year
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Eurovision 2022: #10 - #6
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10. UNITED KINGDOM Sam Ryder - “SPACE MAN 2nd place
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Decade rank: 18/79 [above Last dance, below Je me casse]
UP IN SPACE MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN
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There are moments I forget Sam Ryder and Space Man are real things that happened. A good song representing Union Jack colours, by an influencer who looks like a labrador superimposed onto the face of Janice the muppet through deepfake software. Are we sure this was not a fever dream? 😳 Are we sure this is the BBC ? 
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So uh yeah, the UK had a pretty good entry last year. 🙂 At last, a British hopeful who isn’t embarrassing right out of the gate and could unironically be described as enjoyable. If The UK were winning a jury vote any year, then 2022 was that golden opportunity.
The crazy part is that they did AND it felt earned? “Space Man” is so unequivocally British-sounding. The score effortlessly conjures up that unique Brit-rock vibe that we know from Queen, David Bowie, the Beatles, and turns it into something that sounds like a clarion of triumph thundering gloriously over the Turin 2022′s remaining proceedings.
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I feel like Space Man’s inherent sense of achievement and of victory - despite the lyrics dealing with the dark side of success and the return to the simple life - (you know i love a clever lyrical contradition) made so many people flock to it. There WAS some lameness to be found (”searched around the universe / been down some black holes” did the songwriters look at grindr bio’s for their material?) but overall Space Man stood up as the rare Good UK entry.
So if you have all that empowerment jazz in your song, you need a good act to bring it out? Fortunately, the BBC for once did well there too. As soon as I saw they had built a spacecraft out of scaffholding (clever lateral staging btw), had stuffed in Ryder into a swarovski-studded leotard and forced him to perform a cheesy guitar solo I knew. I knew they had managed to summon the spirit of Ziggy Stardust to bless Ryder with winnerness and that he would steer his rebar rocket into a top finish. And so he did. 
Now, as for my reservations because I have a few
One, Ryder. Yes, Ryder had the best vocal out of anyone this year, period. I have no doubts he’s a genial young man too. Cool if you care about these things. I however do not, because I don’t find him charismatic. 🙂 First of all, he does fucking look like a deepfake what the hell is up with that? Secondly, the adlibs. Normally I like it when contestants go full ham but here I find it irritating. Space man is good and doesn’t fucking need embellishment. Therefore the adlibs must be some kneejerk instinct Ryder inherited from his influencer days, which ew. The BBC have taken Ryder out of the TikTok but they have not managed to take TikTok out of the Ryder. 
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Two, The Social Media Craze. You already know I feel about that stuff and how it interacts with Eurovision, although I mind it not so much here - Space Man came fifth in the televote and not first (and thankfully, also not seventeenth), and was also adopted by the radio stations ahead of its viralness. Also Space Man went less viral than Snap. Its popularity was a natural evolution.  All of these things are preferable when you’re solidly into “Good Not Great” territory. 🙂 Still, any mileage derived from braindead spyware apps is a sin on principle, so ::ding:: 
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Three, Irrespective of anything else I’ve written above, I’ve always solidly liked, but never fully loved Space Man. This applies to both the song and its staging. I don’t mind that it got second, but it did beat better entries while doing so. Eleven months later I still feel that way, and as we go forward in this ranking, it has to leave within this update. If I have to choose who to rank higher between an annoying influencer with a good song and a bunch of lovable randoms with clown fiesta music, the randoms always win! 
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09. IRELAND Brooke - “That’s rich” 34th place
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Decade Rank: 16/79 [Above Destiny, below Natalia Gordienko]
NO TITLE SCREEN?! ROBBED!!!! RIGGED!!!
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God I wanted it for Brooke, I really, REALLY wanted it! In the same vein as Ryder, finally an entrant for Ireland that isn’t a walking cringe, or a dead on arrival lamus or an offensive sap. Finally an Irish entry that isn’t fucking HOPELESS. (um ignore that I believed in Maps until it crashlanded into last place lol)
But of course, less hopeless than the average Irish entry only meant "another solid NQ, just not in last place this time”. lol. 😥 
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I greatly enjoyed Brooke though. Here’s yet another flawlessly flawed combination of song and singer, united in holy floptrimony. “That’s rich” is a trash baby of the finest camp qualité, and at least half of its sassy vernacular belongs in an Almanac for All Time Eurovision lyrics. LOSER LOSE YOUR ATTITUDE I’M DOING GOOD YEAH THAT’S ON ME and BYE BYE FOOL are and will forever be a part of my brain-to-post jargon from this Brooke onwards. Me and the friends even conjured up a French version called “C’est Riche” which is the ultimate high honour you can get, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
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The way Brooke and That’s Rich synergize together spoke to me. The song is very sassy and feisty and playful, whereas the singer is kind of... a dorky shrew (<3). Reminder that Brooke is a friend to all Spanish Customs Officers and dedicated enough towards maintaining that friendship to greet her Italian audiences with  “OLÉ OLÉ OLÉ” . She went ALL IN on channelling ALL the emotions during her live performance. Unlike Ryder’s, Brooke’s adlibs felt genuine enough to adore. Let the GIF reel commence: ´
É, CRETIN
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C’EST RICHE, J’EN AI EU ASSEZ DE VOUS
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C’EST RICHE, T’AS UNE AIRE DE CLOUN
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C’EST RICHE; TU N'AS QU’AUCUN CLOU
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DONC C’EEEEEEEST RIIIIICHE
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VA T’EN, CON 🙂
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Ryder dead in a ditch. Brooke broke from her betadom to live the ALPHA LYFE on that stage and based on merit, I thought she had it. Yet almost nobody (of relevance) cared?! How? Well ok I know why (it’s eurotrash <3) but honestly how difficult was it to just penalize all the cheaters on the spot? I guess garbage like Fade to Black and River absolutely DESERVED those algoritm points!!! In the end, I can accept this outcome because WRS also served edible fun and I sorta nibbled, but Europe denied us a feisty feast here! Another year were Ireland deserved better! WILL IT EVER END?!
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08. AUSTRIA Lum!x ft. Pia Maria - “Halo” 36th place
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Decade rank: 14/79 [Above Natalia Gordienko, below Senhit]
LEMME BE YOUR HAY-LA HOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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There you have it. This year’s best non-qualifier. And its journey was through Eurovisionland was WILD. 😍
Where to start? Like always and more pressingly than usual, at the selection.  Imagine waking up to Austria declaring that a 20 year old Gabry Ponte protégé with no solo experience will be their rep, accompanied by something or someone called “Pia Maria”, a name that gave you zero hits if you put it through google or spotify. So of course me and the gang instantly started spec’ing whether “Pya Mariyah”  was a huge untapped talent discovered through chance by Lum!x (not implausable! Janet Grogan is, after all, a better vocalist than Adele), a highly advanced neural net or Philipp Kirkorov in disguise.
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Then “Halo” was released, and it doled out BpM at a faster pace than most nightcores and had an absolute word casserole for lyrics. 😍 “Philosophers like Socrates go find something to get on your feet. Go sharpen your teeth” lmfao what?! 
 And like that, the journey dove head-first into hilarious absurdity. WHAT IS THIS ENTRY?! This was chosen by the SAME people that bored us with Cesár Sampson and Vincent KinderBueno? HOW did ORF land on Pia Maria? Where did they find her? Did they select her via a raffle, or was she in the room when Lumix realized he needed a vocalist? Was she a random they snagged off the streets? Is she someone’s secret nepobaby? It honestly fries my brain that this was deemed a serious attempt at a qualifying entry by the fandom.
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So yeah the second they had set a foot in PalaOlimpico,  Pia and Luca immediately immolated themselves to death in a blaze of chaotic neutral. I hope everyone saw this coming because I sure did and relished every nanosecond of it. Pia became winded approximately 40 seconds into the performance and spent the rest of the performance running a losing race against her vital capacity.
Luca meanwhile, oh man. Pia gets a bad wrap for her vocals, and she was Not Very Good, but like what do you expect from a newbie cajoled into performing a litany of jibberish. What really took “Hayla Ho” on a ride down Hysteria Lane for me were Luca’s jubilant adlibs juxtaposed to Pia’s visible failure. Every time Pia missed a note she at least looked a bit disappointed with herself. Luca went on a fucking runner’s high with every passing beat, blissfully unaware to the hellscape forming itself around him and Pia.
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He absolutely CANNOT contain himself. 😍 So much so that his voice cracks THREE SECONDS INTO HALO. 😍 The true insane asylum heights of fusedmarc were never reached, but they came sorta close.
So yeah, like That’s Rich, Halo was instantly ironic eurotrash. Unlike That’s Rich, I not once thought Halo would do well lmfao. How could anyone think that?! Its entire purpose at Eurovision was to be a great and memorable trainwreck. They passed with flying colours <3
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Oh and as all great morality tales go, this one ends with Pia deleting Luca off her social media mere hours after the live performance, having accomplished her goal of getting a three-week free holiday 😍  If that doesn’t cement her as the most relatable neural net of this decade, then idk what will. 
K and now for a MASSIVE leap in quality: 
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07. THE NETHERLANDS S10 - “De diepte” 11th place
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Decade rank: 11/79 [above Manizha, below TBA]
🦉😂 -- S10, me.
Yep, above Manizha who was top five for me in 2021. 2022 is strangely top-heavy, where the good entries are all GREAT and the rest of the contest simply doesn’t exist. 
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So yeah, time to discuss a few Real Songs before the final countdown. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Eurovision is a music contest. This selectful forgetfulness is achieved when great music fails to reach the top 10! 🙄 And people wonder why juries are important. Forget the Die Togethers and Fade to Blacks of this world - THIS is sort of interpretation juries ought to reward. 
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Anyway, “De diepte” is kind of my jam and you may think this would make the write-up easier and you’re so so so wrong. Stien dwells deeply (ahem) in that Victoria zone where the quality is so obvious it renders further words redundant. WHICH IS PERSONAL RANKER HELL!!! 
 “De diepte” is not some dreck-wreck featuring several layers of mass hysteria (some of which only exist in my head <3) that I get to describe in various degrees of colourful language. "De diepte” is a song. A real song. It’s emotionally layered, intelligent, well structured and easy to listen to on repeat, and I have for several hours total. The moment RIGHT after the big note, when S10 looks almost overwhelmed with emotion and is about to cry man, I Felt That. I Felt it in my core, in my bones, in my soul. I’m not made of concrete. The contrast with Botmanda couldn’t be greater:
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Now as far as my random things I specifically loved about S10 go, they include: her nom-de-plume which caused several people (including Matt 🥴) to pronounce her name as “Season Ten”, the fact that AVROTROS wanted to push a song in Dutch and then came up with a chorus that can mostly be summarized by two emojis, and of course this:
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It’s not quite the Tinkara sorcery, but the intent is there, and I appreciate it. 
Other than that, “De diepte” is a very good showcase of Dutch indiepop, which -living 30 km from the NL border- is a genre I know very well and fucking love. It’s what I would call A Real Song, a song that actually speaks to people and has legs outside of the contest. It’s defo something I would listen to during the off-season when i’m detoxing from ESC if it had not been ESC itself.
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However, I have to also put my Big Ranker’s Pants on and make my Big Ranker decisions: When picking who I rank ahead of other entries I like roughly the same, I need to assess the contest. 2022 was light on europulp spectacle and heavy on the”“Good Musical Quality” type of entry. So in a sense, I feel like i need to prioritize spectacle over song to a certain degree. Or at least those I am able to praise with more profound terms than “this is very good, not a top 10, REALLY, Europe?”.
And on that note~
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06. PORTUGAL MARO - “Saudade, saudade” 9th Place
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Decade rank: 10/79 [Above S10, below TBA]
Ok so, S10, Maro and the 5th placer are basically three acts I like equally much, and they’re ranked based on how much I can talk about :-) 
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THOSE ARE THE RANKER’S RULES, SORRY! Speaking of things that rule, I present Maro: a woman who forgot to stage her song in the semi of FdC because she assumed nobody would like her and then won the final in an overwhelming landslide <3 
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and for good reason because “Saudade Saudade” is berry gud. Like “De diepte” i feel like its appeal is just very obvious? It’s clever, it’s emotional, it’s very well performed. It is one of those songs that would find their way to an audience even without the exposure of the Eurovision Song Contest.
That said, Maro *very* narrowly edges out S10 for me for a handful of reasons. First off, while beam sorcery is a nice staging trick, I do find the circle of wymyn powah a slightly stronger visual representation. It creates some interaction on the stage,which translates to spectacle, which translates to good television. 
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Secondly, the vocals: Systur’s harmonies were already outstanding. Maro and her backings are even better. Maro’s own hoarse vocals holy heck. t’s difficult to fully engage into praise because Cornelia exists and we’ll get there in the next post, but talk about a song whose rawness came alive through sheer vocal timbre. Anyone who can sing is able pull off a “De diepte”. The list of people that are capable of doing a “Saudade Saudade” is very short.
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Thirdly, both songs deal with break-ups and letting go, but I find Maro’s methods more wholesome.  “Saudade, Saudade” is literally an attempt at unspooling raw thoughts being put into little word blankets, and coming to the realization that the best memories and strongest emotions cannot be turned into lyrics. They exist in the heart. And that I can feel.
Ok some other little details here include Maro recruiting her former rivals Ginger Ale Lady and Woman’s Corpse Lady into her backing cabal, the fact that her fucking insta handle is or was @ItsAMeMARO and her growing disbelief that people really *truly* liked her as much as they did, and you know you have a pretty awesome contestant on your hands. Maro feels humble in a genuine and endearing way that you rarely see in Eurovision where most contestants are inexperienced, ambitious or huge fans. 
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Overall though, Maro runs into the same ranker curse as S10. There just isn’t much to discuss beyond the music, and the music is really darn good. Still, it’s a very positive sign that the juries recognized that by giving her 5th place (without a single 12? lol?) and countered her bad position in the R/O. In the full picture she falls a bit short for me though. 🤷‍♀️
CONGRATULATIONS TOP FIVE!!!
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WHO. WILL. WIN?!
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shirleysatterfield · 9 months
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Three Arguments For The Existence of God
Anne Mandel
Poetry and Essays
11 articles
June 24, 2023
1.
A Rational Dialogue with an Atheist
Mr. Hedley says:
Atheism provides one with freedom of thought, and hence freedom of actions. It also allows one to think rationally (which gives religionists great trouble). Empty your head of religious doctrine and beliefs and THINK for yourself. Go on; try it; you might enjoy the freedom. If you don’t like it, you can always revert.
I reply:
I already have the freedoms of thought and religion afforded to me by the constitution of the United States. And better than that “Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.” So, I have freedom in my spirit too and freedom from all sins and addictions. I once had constant suicidal thoughts but they have been gone for thirty years now, even in the difficult times. Freedom from a lifetime of food addiction, I once weighed 250 pounds now I weigh 170 and have been at this weight for eight years with little effort from me outside of intentionally getting regular excise. It’s even a miracle I survived because I was a victim of horrible childhood abuse, raised in a house of horrors. Perhaps you didn’t need Jesus, but I sure did.
But I tell you this much, if China goes to war with the United States over Taiwan. We are all going to need Him sure enough.
Enjoy your day, but stay vigilant. These are no ordinary times.
I do appreciate your mutual respect
Take care
2.
I had another conversation with an atheist who wanted proof. So I gave him my testimony.
Dear Sir,
Testimony time then. I was an Army veteran living in Hawaii with my Army husband. My Navy brother had been killed in an auto accident. After the funeral I took of long distance running in order to cope with the bone crushing grief. One day I jogged up a beautiful side road lined with palm trees to find a small charming white chapel at the dead end end of the road. Inside I found some literature about the evidence on the Shroud of Turin. Curiosity peaked I just prayed to the Lord that I would find a book on this subject thinking that a trip to the book store was in order. But days later I found myself waiting at the main bus hub in Honolulu where there were hundreds of colorful people going to and fro, when out of nowhere out of the crowd stepped a man who I did not know who handed me a book entitled The Shroud of Turin and he handed to me saying, “Here God told me to give you this book.” Then he disappeared back into the crowd and I have never seen him again.
Fast forward many decades. I had been sick and broken and had gained 100 pounds following a sexual assault at work that was not believed which also had me estranged from God Himself. Well at this time in my life I had found my way back to Him again with many weak, faltering steps and now on disability for my many illnesses I had enrolled into Averett University as a journalism student in order to get my life back together. And I was living in a cheap tenement apartment on a street so bad that there had been eleven arson fires in that neighborhood that years, including the house next door my large apartment building when I could hear the people the people screaming as they ran out. No one hurt.
Somewhere along the line I found myself wanting a snack after dark in the PM side of the night. I was standing right by my front door just thinking about how I would like a bowl of cereal with some milk, but it was to late to go to the store on foot as I had no car, and the neighborhood was dangerous. Then immediately there was a little knock at the door and there stood the little old lady who was my upstairs neighbor, someone whom I had helped with food before. She was standing there holding a whole box of cereal and a jug of milk which she handed to me saying, Shirley these are for you.
Need I go on? Just last Sunday my husband and I had a fight, and being old we each have our own little bedrooms. Well, he stormed to his respective room yelled, “I don’t want to talk to you for the rest of the day.” And he slammed the door and locked it from the inside with one of those little hook and eye locks like on screen doors. After a few hours of excruciating pain over the silly fight I decided it was time to make our respective apologies and get ready for some makeup kissing. So I softly tapped on the door but there was no response. I gently tried the door and sure enough it was locked. I knocked on the door again and heard him command me to go away because he was tired. So I tried the door again and it immediately opened. He exclaimed, “How did that door get unlocked, I didn’t unlock it.” And neither did I nor did I even try to force it and on examination the lock was in no way damaged. It had just somehow had separated itself hook from eye.
Now if the devil is in the little details well so is God. He was small enough to make an atom and large enough to make the sun. So God is in the tiny details if you know where to look.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11: 1
And we know that God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Hebrews 11:2
I rest my case. My testimony is my evidence and the last testimony had a witness of two. That’s all the proofs I have except more amazing testimonies of what God has done for me practically in this physical earth realm.
3.
A Last Word of Wisdom for the Atheist Community
I just have one question for the atheist community. What are the tangible benefits of being an atheist? Does it make you feel good, does it give you fulfillment, purpose, pleasure, the knowledge that brings awe? Does it enrich you in anyway? Just what is in it for you.? You sound so miserable. You sound like you don’t even have a song in your heart.
Remember Madilyn Murray O’Hare and what a gruesome end she came to after years of mocking God and His people. And the very son that she strove so hard to shield from prayers didn’t even know she was missing for a year because he became a Christian pastor and she had disowned him. I sometimes wonder if she prayed for herself as she was driven to her death? So sad.
I hope you find some joy and awe and purpose in something because at least for us Christians life has some meaning for us beyond sex and getting food. The atheist crowd is making a big mistake insulting me because I am a new writer in town that has had decades of education, experience, trials in the school of hard knocks, and am from Baltimore too with a similar personality style to Madilyn. Well you have taken on God’s answer to this irreverent woman from Baltimore when you mock God and His people instead of having an intelligent courteous conversation with us because I am more than capable of answering tit for tat without the name calling that you resort to. And these little writings of mine are trending worldwide right now which is an absolute miracle since I am unknown and my page is anonymous. Worldwide revival as the age comes to a close is not coming, it’s here.
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hildorien · 3 years
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Calling Tuor an Edain is always so funny to me, because he has no connection to that part of himself. He was raised by green elves for most of his life, and lived more of his life among elves than his own people.
He has no connection to the edain.
He’s more of an Green Elf who happens to be mortal.
That being said, it’s still pretty powerful Earendil wanted to be mortal. Even though by all realms of Logic he should have no connection to that history. It’s sad all he wanted was a ending and became a living prop for the rest of his life. Let this guy join his ancestors in the afterlife. Free him.
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skgway · 3 years
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1832 Nov., Mon. 12
9 1/4
12 1/2
Pickles came at 9 1/4 which roused me up – To see him after breakfast at Lower place or he to call here again in the evening – Letter 3 pages and ends from M– [Mariana] (Lawton) vide line 27 page 285. Inquiries about Miss W[alker]. Smokes what is going on. Writes with implied affection, true and great as that of former days. Is unhappy and carless off living long, and has made her will and …… the tears started to my eyes and all my own affection burst upon me again –
Breakfast at 10 40/.. with my aunt – George Robinson came almost immediately for near an hour – Settled with him for stone leading for James Smith’s road etc. – He proposed some means of getting rid of Lower Brea lane footpath – To see about another day –
Breakfast at 11 40/.. – Told my aunt of M– [Mariana]’s letter – Came to my room at 12 20/.. – Fire in my room and from 12 25/.. to note 2 pages of 1/2 sheet from Miss Walker at 1 10/.. in consequence of which off in 1/4 hour to Lidgate and there in 25 minutes –
Home again in 1/2 hour at 5 20/.. – At my desk in about 10 minutes – Wrote the last 1/4 of page 3, and the ends and under the seal and finished my letter to Breadalbane MacLean – Began yesterday – Thanks for her letter and the willows (sent off Monday 29th instant from Coll house) 
"which I am very anxiously expecting, not only for their own sake, but because they are associated with many remembrances that I value most highly" –
Should have written some days ago, but waited in the hope of announcing the arrival of the cuttings – Shall write by tonight’s post to Glasgow to inquire about them – Bavardage amical – Wonder how her people did without her so long (5 weeks away) 
"Your life is one continued benefit to them; and a five week’s arrear of such services is hardly to be made up" –
Sorry her father is so dead to the world and that Sir Hector’s health is so failing – Mention the death of old Lochiel on the 19th September – Only known to Lady S– [Stuart] on the 6th ultimo and not known to Vere on the 24th ultimo the date of her last letter to me (from Turin) – Hope 
"if Lochiel is obliged to come over immediately surely V– [Vere] will remain with her friends till he can return for her – I should quite dread her being hurried across the alps at this season of the year …. You would all be pleased at dear Vere’s having got her rank – Surely, it has some value in a world of vanities like this" –
Civil congratulations on  Mrs. Maclean’s being again about to increase her family and sorrow at Mrs. Hunter’s having lost her youngest daughter – The loss of my steward and my aunt’s suffering health have kept me so long here or I should have been on the continent again before this – But my aunt so very much recovered, no longer uneasy about her – She herself spirits me up to get off, and I hope to leave here about the end of January but all things here so uncertain never think much of plans very long beforehand – Kind regards to all I know "and believe me always very truly yours A Lister" –
Had written the following 2 1/4 pages to M– [Mariana] just before being off to Lidgate –
"Shibden Hall – Monday 12 November 1832 
Mary! I have been late this morning, and have done nothing but see and speak to Marian, and breakfast, since reading your letter – It would be difficult to describe the effect it has upon me – It is many months since I have basked beneath the beam of happiness, and without courage to think of the past, or hope to calculate the future, I am attempting to answer your letter –
Your account of yourself unnerves me – I grieve over your leaving Lawton, and tho’ I could, and would, see good in your going to Leamington, if you would let me, I am now uneasy at the thought, and little out of sorts than you can be – The only thing I rest upon, is the manner in which you mention coming here for a few days –
It makes me fancy, nay almost hope, my scheme is not quite impossible – You would have been agreeably surprised, and satisfied to hear what Marian said about it – Say I am not well (God knows I am sick enough at heart) or, which is true, that I am in great perplexity, or that my aunt is poorly (tho’ she is very much better, and probably in no danger) or say what you please, but lose no time in coming to me for at least a few days –
I really do want to see you – I will take the carriage and meet you at Manchester – Do pray make an exertion and get off – At any rate, answer my letter by the second post after you receive it, and tell me if you cannot come off immediately – Nothing like the spur of the moment –
You will get my letter tomorrow afternoon – and, if your answer is off on Wednesday morning, at night on that day I may hear whether I may be off for you on Thursday or Friday morning at seven, or not – Bring merely a few things and yourself – I will take care of you from and to Manchester –
You will see from my manner of writing, that I am not likely to relax my interest while it is yet necessary to your happiness – Your pages of Saturday make me fancy, I may have been mistaken, and that, in the bitterness of disappointment and regret, I may have miscalculated what it was my interest and desire to estimate most correctly 
This here written after dinner –
It is needless to write more – I shall anxiously and impatiently wait your answer – I would give worlds to hear of your being in better health and spirits – I had a letter from Eugénie last night – I consider her engaged; and she is to wait my orders till January –
I cannot enter upon the subject of my friend, as my aunt and sister laugh and call her – I am too much thinking of the interests of other days – Come if you can – You might be almost ride over to Manchester –
But cheer up, my dearest Mary – Time was when I had power to charm you into pleasure-stirring thought, and almost into happiness – I am what I was – And yet this power is gone, – Parted like Aynt never to return? 
God bless you! The heart knoweth its own bitterness – ’Tis harder than you think to break the spell of twenty years – Entirely and very especially yours AL –
Sent off at 8 by John my letter to Miss Maclean of Coll, Coll house Aros North Britain and my letter to Mrs. Lawton Lawton Hall, Lawton, Cheshire and my letter to the “Reverend T. Ainsowrth, at Miss Bentley’s, 1 crescent, Salford, Manchester”
George Robinson then came and staid till 9 – Said Ramsden, now the constable of H–x [Halifax], bought the last ground sold adjoining my Northgate land at 11/6 [shillings/pence] a yard – and Stancliffe bought his ground fronting into Broad street the street given at 12 /. [shillings] or 12/6 [shillings/pence] a yard but then it was cleared, or sunk down ready for building –
Had seen Bates of Washer Lane who said that I might build a good corn mill at Mytholm with saw and goit and wheel and machinery for £1500 and might have 7 to 7 1/2 percent for my money tho’ people in general did not look for much for their money now – 
Some man (Brook?) of Brighouse is letting a mill had 10 percent on his money for the 1st ten years, and then 5 percent rent afterwards – The Embargo on Dutch vessels has already made a great difference – Has stopt the German trade –
Went into the other room for 1/2 hour till 9 1/2 – π [Mariana] thought I might have gone from York to Langton 
"Is it Miss Walker of Crow Nest with whom you seem so suddenly to have formed an alliance? You mention her twice as "my friend" and as you were not wont to bestow this title lightly I am puzzled to unders[t]and, not having ever heard you mention her name,  how Miss W[alker] has so quickly succeeded in adding herself to the list so designated.
You say, "I shall be glad to hear your friend was etc. etc." I am glad to hear anything that gives you pleasure, and so far shall be pleased to hear all possible good of Miss Walker, but as I don't remember ever having seen her. 
She must be satisfied with secondhand interest for I cannot fancy her at all one of those who could herself awaken it. So far as her better health can contribute to your comfort, I rejoice that it is likely to improve and hope by this time she has somewhat recovered the loss of her particular friend" –
You say ‘I always tell you how much better Mr. Lawton is,’ because you always ask me. In bodily health he is certainly better than I have known him for years, but in mind and temper he is infinitely worse. As he improves I fall off, and I have been weak enough to fret and discomfort myself about this Leamington plan until I have almost made myself ill –
M– [Mariana] in very bad spirits about going to Leamington – "and if I could get to you, I should come for consolation" – Should be glad to spend a few days with me but does not know how it can be managed –
Watson more philosophical than π [Mariana], thinks she shall get all her mistresses things off to a place of safety   
"Made my will the other day, and told Watson where to find it – I do not fancy, my dearest Fred, that my health or happiness will claim your attention 20 years longer, so dont relax your interest while it is yet necessary to my happiness. I live in so much discomfort that it cannot be expected that I should covet living forever”
Concludes with 
God bless you Fred. Whatever I have said or may say, trust me, there is not much warmer affection bestowed upon you than that which flows from the heart of yours, very entirely, Mariana –
Poor π [Mariana].
Vide line 4 of today –  The following is Miss W[alker]s note
I have received a letter, which you shall see, but we must meet on different terms. Oh that I had taken you at your word last Monday, and as you said finished the matter on that day.  I should then have spared you this additional bitterness. 
I did hope when my word was once given to you that I should have felt at rest and satisfied, but in reflecting on all you have said and trying to turn it to my own advantage   I cannot satisfy my conscience, and with such sufferings as I have endured since Wednesday, I feel I could not make you happy. That I should only bring misery upon you,   for misery I am sure it would be to you to see me in the state I have been in for several days.
It was this sort of wretchedness that was expressed in my note on Friday. It was these miserable feelings that prompted my request
(that is I suppose for me not to send to York for the ring)
For your own sake, fly whilst it is yet in your power, 
(I smile as I copy this sentence)  
and believe that I will never intrude myself in any way upon you (unless it is your wish) whenever you revisit the neighbourhood. 
Nov[embe]r 12 eighteen hundred and 32 writton [written] on the outside of this half sheet but under cover,
Read this alone
Off I set. Found her twenty minutes ago returned from Cliff hill and lying on the bed in tears. Kissed and soothed her till in a few minutes she went down to dinner. I remained in her room a little while read overMr. Ainsworth’s letter pathetic appeal to her feelings, making sure that she must be engaged and hoping that her choice would do all he, Mr. A[insworth], had hoped to have done.
Begging her to take the scrapbook as a friend and to condescend  to write in answer to say if he might send the book and a narrative of himself. And if this business should be the death of him, he would only pray for blessings on her. But much bad tact and the whole ill done, tho better than I expected. 
I went down before dinner was over. Agreeablized and amused both Miss Parkhill and Miss W[alker]. Then pretending business letters for Miss W[alker] to answer, Miss P[arkhill] left us, and I talked the poor girl into admiration of my conduct and into thorough approbation of my writing and sending (I wrote there and shewed it to her) the following to Mr. Ainsworth,
Lightcliffe Mon[day] 12 November eighteen hundred and 32. 
Sir, I am commissioned by Miss Walker to acknowledge immediately the receipt of your letter of Saturday and to inform you that she has given me for the future, at least for some time to come, the surveillance of all her letters and parcels.
I am Sir your obedient servant, Anne Lister
Before writing I had asked if it was her heart that had changed towards Mr. A[insworth]. No, it was all her conscience. She owned she was not in a fit state to judge fairly and tho she had felt great affection for him, yet she did not know how it was, now all seemed dead. And if she felt at liberty, she did not know or think he was quite the man she should choose, in spite of the two great things, his being a clergyman and liking to live at Cliff hill. 
‘Well, but what would you have done had I not been here?’ She said she would certainly have exone[ra]ted herself now. Would have gone to her aunt Ploughs in London and then brought down the Chapmans with her. She would not have been alone and would have kept out of the way and done the best she could.
This, said I, is enough. In answer to her note said I did not think her at liberty to marry anyone without my consent, in which she agreed, and that Wednesday had given me a power over her which I was determined to use in her service. She would be better by and by and more able to judge for herself, and then she might try again, but now I should not let her.
She might safely trust to my honour, but I pledged myself to nothing. She brightened up and owned how much better she was. I even brought away, with her full consent, and A[insworth]’s letter, and the book of prayers he gave her with a long rigmarole written on one of the flyleaves promising to get her another of the same from London, and on asking for my dirty night things to bring back she said no till I promised to send clean ones, and we parted very good friends. 
She agreeing with me that she had reason to be thankful for the great event of Wednesday – Who could have anticipated such a result as the consequence of her note?  She likes me. But my affections are not so fearfully and I irretrievably hers as she thinks, and I shall manage well enough, tho I really will do her all the good I can –
Writing the above till 11 – Came to my room at 11 20/.. and then wrote note to Mrs. Holroyde
“Mr. T. Holroyde Esquire Solicitor Halifax” in answer respecting the land at Northgate – Not in any way anxious to sell, but would sell lot A as marked in the plan if his client would give my price – But before naming any terms I wished to know what sort of buildings it was proposed to erect –
Wrote to desire Booth to get me Gilpins practical hints on Landscape gardening and theform of family prayers published by Hatchard and Son Piccadilly London 8 edition 1828. 12mo. [duodecimo] pages 159 and 2 bottles of Albin and Chapman’s chemical writing ink – 
Did my clothes for the wash. Very fine November day – Fahrenheit 49º now at 11 40/.. – Sent off my note written last night to Mr. Holroyde –
[in margin] vide line 12 page 286
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nothing like the spur of the moment
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very fine November day
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nyarisu · 4 years
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Rammstein Family Game: Get to know me! (created by @vapor-stein)
Many many thanks to @ofmemesandbands @theelliottsmiths @notafraidofredyellowandblue @endlich-allein​ and @ghostlovesc0re​ for tagging me!! (I was gonna do this anyway but now I can actually blame someone for my word salad XD )
Also of course I read what other people wrote on his tag as well and let me tell you I lived for the unpopular opinions and there was a certain one that shocked me (but in a good-natured way?). And Stirb nicht for mir being roasted because it’s so funny how strong people feel about this song in particular XD
1. I’m curious: when did you discover Rammstein? Fuck if I know. For the most time they have existed in this wierd atemporal bubble where they were always somewhere out there (which is kind of right because I’m only 1 year older than the band itself) but at one point during my childhood I must have heard Du hast. So... late 90’s / early 00’s?
2. Tell me your story. How did you discover them? Ok so this question has 2 parts because fucking none asks how I started actually LISTENING to them. The first part of the question is answered above, probably heard Du hast because I don’t really have any early memory of another song but then again I forget very easily so there’s that.
And the second part is how I became a fan. Obv over time I heared a few other popular songs and the only one that stood out was Mein Herz brennt (ok, Mutter too but MHB has like 465694831 instruments which is <3). During the tour last year, someone I follow on instagram posted the „Mein Herz brennt” part from the chorus in her story and that made me think hmmmm I’ve already been listening to it a few times lately and I love it and I’ve been saying for a few years I’ll give them a chance might as well do that now.
And it went like this: on Wendsday I listened to the recording of the live in Berlin (2019). Sometime that evening I must have discovered Deutschland because the next day I was fucking obsessed with it and listened to it on repeat the whole day. And lastly, Friday I listened to the untitled album on repeat because it fucking slapped. So there you have it, my descend to maddness (and Saturday I was fighting against my growing Till attraction until I just gave up and Sunday afternoon I admited I find a grandpa hot). So yes, the last 3 days of August 2019 were life changing :))
 3. Favorite song? Mein Herz brennt and Deutschland, they are on equal foot, no way to choose between them. MHB because it has the amazing instrumentals and Duestchland because it has the amazing voice (and also they both are favourite song of the pre- and post-knowing R+)
 4. Least favorite song? Come on. I know you have one. *pulls up the songs rating list* according to the list, that would be Jeder Lacht but I don’t really care about the last let’s say 10 songs on there so yeah. Oh yes, and also Stripped and the English versions are not on the list so they don’t even exist for me.
 5. Favorite album? I have no idea which one that would be. I mean, I could say it’s the untitled one but there are also many songs I love very much from other albums. So I can’t really choose.
 6. Least favorite album? *shrugs* don’t make me rate albums (yet)
 7. Something that speaks to you in the deepest sense of the word: a lyric? A specific song? I... kind of started relating to Keine Lust because I can’t really motivate myself to do anything anymore (but lately I’ve been better, I like to think). But yeah, if I think a little to much about the song, I’ll probably start tearing up or something.
Wilder Wein and Schwarzes Glas hit me in a very emotional way because they just make me nostalgic for a thing I never lived/experienced and it’s wierd because they are such different songs.
 8. Unpopular opinion: about a member? A scandal? Anything? *starts rubbing hands* yes! I’m seeking discord and ruin withing the fandom with my unpopular opinions I was dying to be asked this question XD Ok so I have 2. The first one I keep seeing people all the time stating the opposite, and that is: I like Stirb nich for mir (and Te Quiero Puta). It’s an ok song, I enjoy it and I have nothing against it. More than that, I really can’t say whether I prefer the album or the demo version more. They are so similar and different at the same time that my brain doesn’t really comprehend comparing the 2. And the second unpopular opinion, which I’ve never seen stated, is: I hate Schneider’s curls. Obv I hate the hedgehog style even more but... the curls! I don’t trust them! (and I’m low key glad he cut his hair again)
 9. Have you ever seen them live? Tell me what you felt. ... let’s not talk about this (I still feel like the universe is against me because I first bought Trondheim feuerzone and then find out I can’t go to because it’s too expensive and have none to go to, but now I can’t go to Turin either. Also my copy of In Quiet Nights still doesn’t want to reach me for the second time so there’s that)
 10. Do you play any instruments? If you do, can you play any song by them? The only instrument I’m playing is the voice (as one does XD) but other than that, no, I don’t and I can’t (but if I would, I’d totally learn some piano versions :D)
I’m tagging @crina-s-blog?? If she wants to do the tag?
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crazyrandomfucker · 5 years
Text
Adrien Augreste: Abandoned
He didn't understand it at all. What is the point of having pets if you won't take care of their children? When he found the cardboard box with six kittens in it, he simply sweared that if he ever had a pet, he would keep their childs and raise them. He couldn't and didn't want to believe there was people who would abandon six precious kittens in the streets, and certainly not while it was raining.
The kittens meow desesperatedly, crying for help. There were two calico kittens, a snow white one, two stripped kittens and a pitch black one. Without an ounce of doubt, Chat took the box and carried the kittens somewhere sheltered from the rain, ending in the Trocadero. Once he was there, he began to think what could he possibly do with the kittens. He thought of giving them to an animal shelter, but he didn't know where was one in Paris and wasn't exactly sure if he could go there as a hero.
As he stared to the horizon, the image of a young kind-hearted designer drawing came to his mind and he knew what to do. He closed the cardboard box and made some holes with his feline nails so the kittens would be able to breath normally, then he picked up the box and headed to the best bakery in Paris. He carefully landed on Marinette's balcony and tapped on her trapdoor, waiting for her to open it.
She took her time to open ther trap door, but when she did, she made Chat enter to her bedroom and gave him a couple of towels. He gladly accpted the towels and dried his hair and suit before one of them could even talk. Once he was done, he took the cardbox near him and opened in front of Mari so she could see the kittens.
"Princess, look what I've found in themiddle of this rain" said the hero without his usual punny tone. "Whoever abandoned them did it today despite the rain, because they weren't there yesterday".
"Oh no, who could be so heartless? They are newborns and completely adorable" said Marinette with a hint of heartbreak in her voice.
"I know. They were crying for help when I found them in the street. I can understand how could someone abandon them in such state" agreed Chat. "I came to ask you if you could take care of them, even if it was only one of them. I'm not allowed to keep them in my house".
"I'll try to convince my parents, leave me a minute" said the designer with determination on her eyes.
She went downstairs for a bit, also calling to her brother to come, and talked with their parents. Later, the four of them went upstairs and greeted Chat, which startled him a bit.
"Marinette has told us why are you here young man, there's no problem" said Tom smiling, calming a bit Chat.
"Sorry for the intrusion thought" apologised Chat.
"Don't worry about it, we know it was for a good cause. We also know you're friends with our children and that's why you came here. Furthermore, you're a regular client and you that gives us quite the publicity we need." said calmly Sabine. "So we've talked about the kittens and decided that we'll take care of two of them for a while, just make sure to came to the bakery more often, you always look so thin".
"Thanks a lot miss and mister Dupain-Cheng. I'll make sure to come more and give you a publicity boost" said Chat sincerely
"Well then, now we just have to choose which will be the lucky kittens" said Tom.
They let the twins choose a cat each. Marinette picked up the black one, because she liked those olive green eyes. Marin choosed the white one because when he kneeled down to take a better look at the kittens, the white one walked towards him and meowed. Happy with their good action, the family waved Chat as he runned over the rooftops with the kittens' box.
This time, Chat knew who to visit precisely. He still remembered the embarrasement and humiliation he suffered when he recovered from the catnip effects, clearly remembering what he did while he was high and how Ladybug reacted. Yes, he was going to pay a visit to some certain gingers and their four identical younger sisters.
He gently landed on a balcony and knocked at the window, waiting for someone to open it and let him in. With a confussion look on her face, Alya opened the window and let him inside, hurrying to also get him some towels before he got all the floor wet. Once she returned with towels and Alen and Chat dried himself with the towels, Chat brought the box in front of the twins and showed them the kittens, explaining why he was there with some random kitties.
After reminding the twins how closed they had been to cause an akuma to win, as well as stating how embarrassed he felt and how much they had played with him, the twins accepted to take two of the kittens in. Chat pointed that now they could use all those toys on a not superhero cat, to whichthe twins could only agree.
Then, the reporter duo chosed the two stripped kitties and wrap them up in a warm towel. Chat asked them curiously why didn't they talked to their parents first, to which the twonse responded that their father was a zoo keeper and their mother loved animals, so they wouldn't exactly oppose to the idea of having cats at home, more so because they were adorable kittens who were cruelly abandoned.
Before Chat left, he turned and ssked where could he go to give this kittens and after descarding the designers because they already had beenvisited, they told him to go to the Lahiffe house, telling him where to go and where to knock, because their parents were pretty chill and they were normally quite busy.
After a short race under the rain, which was now turining into a storm, the cat-themed hero arrived to the Lahiffe household. As Adrien, he could probably just enter through the main door, talk with his best buddy and give him the kittens, but now he was Chat and they hadn't had much interaction aside from the Bubbler incident or all the times he had rescued Alya and brought her to Nino, which didn't give him enough reasons to randomly appear by his window.
After some minutes of self debate, he knocked on the window and Nino immediately opened, as if he had been waiting for Chat to come. When the hero mentioned it, Nino just told him that he shouldn't have an inner debate on his window, laughing a bit about it. Nina came into the room, holding a couple of towels and offered them to the hero, making a remark that people would end up thinking that their cat hero was a stalker or something worse. Once the cat was dry again, he opened the box and told once more the story of the abandoned kittens.
"Okay dude, I get your point" said Nino. "Just tell me one thing, why did you come to me? Or us, I'm not sure who were you looking for. I mean, we've barely interacted except for when we were akumatized and all those times when you brought us Alya and Alen to ground them during an akuma attack".
"And that's precisely what my inner debate was of. The reason is simple thought. Alen said, and I quote: 'They would be the best option to take care of the kitties, well more Nina than Nino'. The Alya added: 'Also, I'm sure they will love their calico eyes and specially their orange almost ginger fur'. And here we are now" explained Chat.
"I have to agree, I'd make an splendid caretaker of the kittens. Mainly because Nino is generally focused on his DJ hobby or his obsession to become a film director. I'm rather relaxed" said the girl and Chat couldn't help to think about all the times she hadn't been relaxed when he was Adrien.
The siblings took the kittens out of the box, made a quick call and confirmed that they could keep for a while the kittens, lifting a weight from Chat's soul. When he turned to leave, Nina grabbed him by his tail and scolded him about how dangerous it was to run over the parisian rooftops in the middle of a storm and convinced him to stay and play some games until the dtorm cleared s bit. It goes without saying, but Chat's afternoon was completely made better by having fun with Nino and Nina.
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lenezdansleruisseau · 5 years
Text
Why Feuilly cares about Italy or “a lot of words to explain Hugo’s crush on Garibaldi”
Part one: The rebellions of ’20- ‘21
In this club of young Utopians, occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Italy. He uttered these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him.
Hugo’s description of Feuilly in the brick underlines how important it was, for our favorite fan-maker, the concept of self-determination of peoples or, more probably seeing that the concept of self-determination was better developed after the First World War, the concept of independence from an alien power.  
I, unfortunately, don’t know much about the history of Hungary, Romania and Poland and my knowledge of Greece’s history is not at all perfect, but I know enough of Italian history to explain to you why Feuilly (and consequently, I’d dare say, Hugo himself) would care about this boot-shaped country and its independence. 
1807-1815: the Napoleonic period and the origin of the Carboneria
I think the best way to start this is with the Napoleonic wars (and isn’t this ironic?): after the Napoleonic campaigns in Italy and the conquest of both the north and the south of the peninsula (not the Church’s State which was situated roughly in the center), hopes of independence and diffusion of liberal laws and Constitution started blooming all over the country. Especially the intellectual élites were very favorable to a liberal shift of the Italian politics and between 1807 and 1808 in the South of Italy, particularly in Naples, under the reign of Gioacchino Murat, brother-in-law of Napoleon, a secret society was created whose intents were the introduction of more liberal laws, the creation of a Constitution and the independence from the French Empire; this secret society was called Carboneria.
Still, the idea of a united and independent country didn’t exist yet. Italy had never been united since the Roman Empire shattered and it didn’t exist a real “Italian sentiment” or the idea of an Italian People (the existence of an Italian identity could be the subject of a whole other post so just let me tell you that even to these days we have some problem with the concept of unity).
1815-1820: the Restauration and some Italian geopolitics
The new order designed by the Austrian Chancellor Metternich had excluded any concession to liberals and separatists. In accordance with the principle of legitimacy, the absolute rulers of the entire peninsula had returned to their thrones, determined to repress any attempt at insurrection or simple innovation.
So, how looked Italy after the Congress of Vienna? 
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Like this.
There were four major states: the Reign of Sardinia (the light orange one) which contained also the County of Nizza and the Principality of Monaco, ruled by the Savoia family, the Church’s State (weird yellow one) ruled, yes you guessed it, by the Pope, the Reign of Lombardo-Veneto (green one) which was part of the Austrian Empire, and the Reign of the Two Sicilies (beige one) ruled by the Bourbon family, a branch of the Bourbon family that also reigned in France and Spain.
Beside these major states there was also the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (purple one) ruled by the Habsburg-Lorena, a branch of the Habsburg-Lorena ruling in the Austrian Empire, and four Duchy: the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, also ruled by a branch of the Asburgo-Lorena family, the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, ruled by the Habsburg-Este, a branch of both the Habsburg family and Este family, the Duchy of Massa and Carrara ruled by the Este family, and the Duchy of Lucca ruled by a branch of the Bourbon family (all of the Duchies are between the Reign of Sardinia and the Reign of Lombardo-Veneto and above the Grand Duchy of Tuscany).
Why is it important? Because it shows pretty clearly under which sphere of influence Italy was: the Congress of Vienna had given the Austrian Empire a lot of power and influence over Italy with an anti-France (represented by the Bourbon family) intent.
The Pope was a highly regarded and recognized power in Italy, but the Church’s State wasn’t considered a threat by the European powers.
And the Savoia family? No one cared about them at the time, but keep them in mind because they are going to become a LOT more important.
The modalities of the Restoration had disappointed both the liberal élites and the popular classes, but the Carboneria was incapable to expand its ranks and was subject to continuous surveillance by the various police forces. In the South of Italy and in the Church’s States, even existed reactionary secret societies born with the aim of fighting the Carboneria by killing its members or delivering them to the authorities. For these reasons, in the first years that followed the Restoration, the Carboneria was almost completely incapable of organizing revolutionary actions and the impulse for the riots of 1820 did not come from national societies but from the Spanish revolution and the restoration of the Constitution of Cadiz.
1820-1821: the birth and death of the first rebellions
The first state where the constitutional revolt spread was the Reign of the Two Sicilies. For dynastic reasons, Ferdinand I was both the king of the Two Sicilies and the heir to the throne of Spain and in that capacity, he was called to swear loyalty to the constitution brought into force by his nephew Ferdinand VII. The signature by the king of Naples (Naples was the capital of the Reign of the Two Sicilies) awakened the southern liberal world and in particular the Carboneria which, however, was divided into two opposing factions:  the first was formed by radical and egalitarian elements; the second, which gathered senior officers who had previously fought with Murat and rich bourgeois, gathered around General Guglielmo Pepe. A third minority current, headed by the Jacobin noble Orazio de Attellis, was even more radical as it wanted the proclamation of the republic and an agrarian reform that divided the estates among the poor farmers (and don’t let me start on how important an agrarian reform was for the South of Italy, but believe me it would have been a game changer).
On June 15, 1820 the independence movement of Sicily rose up in Palermo (the capital of the island) led by Giuseppe Alliata of Villafranca. A government was established in Palermo (18-23 June), presided by Giovanni Luigi Moncada, prince of Paternò. On 16 July the Sicilian Parliament was convened and the Sicilian Constitution of 1812 was restored.
On July 2, 1820 the radical wing started and lead the uprising of Nola and managed to force Ferdinand I to grant the Spanish constitution, but was soon overtook by the moderate wing. General Pepe became the main figure of the constitutional government and the nobles who supported him begun to show impatience towards the Carboneria and in the new-born Parliament, the representants of the secret society were only a small minority.
On July 23 a delegation was sent to the revolutionary government of Naples to demand the restoration of the Kingdom of Sicily, albeit always under a Bourbon guide, of the constitution, and of its own parliament. The Neapolitan government refused and sent an army under the orders of General Pepe who on September 22 reached an agreement with the Sicilian government: the decision to establish a Parliament was given to the representatives of the municipalities that were about to be elected. This agreement though was rejected by the newly elected parliament in Naples. Pepe was recalled and, in his place, was sent General Pietro Colletta who reconquered Sicily and re-established the monarchy, putting the island under the control of the Neapolitan constitutional government.
The internal struggles were not the greatest problem for the new constitutional state: Ferdinando I had granted the constitution, but only because he was forced and didn’t intend to favor the constitutional regime, plus Austria and the powers that had defeated Napoleon were more than ever determined not to allow a new revolutionary wave.
A congress of the Holy Alliance was convened in Ljubljana and Ferdinando I invoked an armed intervention to restore order in Naples. An Austrian expeditionary force led by General Frimont crossed the peninsula and, in the Battle of the Gole di Antrodoco (March 7, 1821), overwhelmed the defenses of the constitutional government. Ferdinando I returned in his capital as absolute sovereign and, while a wave of escapes and exiles pushed the Neapolitan liberals in the various European capitals, two officers responsible for the uprising of Nola in July 1820, Michele Morelli and Giuseppe Silvati, were rudely captured, summarily judged and executed on September 12, 1822.
The second revolutionary episode in Italy concerned the Reign of Sardinia where, at the beginning of 1821, some students’ demonstrations of an anti-Habsburg sentiment received the unofficial solidarity of Prince Carlo Alberto of Savoia. Following the southern rebellion, also the Carbonari and the Piemonte’s liberals decided to move, counting on the fact that the Austrian troops in Italy, engaged on the Neapolitan front, could not march directly on Turin (capital of the Reign of Sardinia) and would have later found themselves between two fires.
Santorre di Santarosa, a military member of the Carboneria, repeatedly contacted Carlo Alberto himself and several Sardinian army generals and, despite the ambiguous attitude of the prince, a military pronouncement was set for March 10, 1821.
King Vittorio Emanuele I of Savoia, rather than granting the constitution of 1812 as requested by the military, preferred to abdicate in favor of his brother Carlo Felice who was a champion of absolutism and explicitly opposed to any constitution. Carlo Felice, though, was on a visit to Modena, so, the prince Carlo Alberto was called to assume the regency. He complied with the demands of the insurgents and appointed Santarosa as minister of war in the provisional government.
Even in Piemonte, the revolutionary movement is divided and, if Santarosa is comparable, for political positions, to the most moderate members of southern liberalism, elements such as Michele Gastone and Carlo Bianco, advocate more radical measures.
Just a week after the explosion of the rebellion, however, the sudden return of Carlo Felice to Turin radically changed the political scenario and put an end to the uprising: the new king revoked the constitution, erased the work of his nephew and relegated him to Novara.
Santarosa tried to continue the Revolution and, from his position as Minister of War, opened the hostilities with the Austrian Empire. The attempt was unsuccessful: a small contingent of Habsburg troops entered Piemonte’s territory and defeated and dispersed the few troops who had agreed to follow Santarosa. Expecting that Carlo Felice would have started a repression and to be among the designated victims, Santarosa decided to save himself by fleeing and repairing in France.
Even in the absence of a real rebellion, the repression of the Carboneria also affected the Lombardo-Veneto and, in particular, the Milanese group (Milan was the principal city of Lombardia one of the regions of the Lombardo-Veneto) gathered around the scientific-literary magazine “Il Conciliatore” (= The Conciliator), created by the musician Pietro Maroncelli, the writer Silvio Pellico and the Count Federico Confalonieri. Discovered because of the interception by the political police of some letters by Maroncelli, the Milanese Carbonari were arrested one after the other and sentenced to death. The sentence was then commuted into prison for life.
From the political point of view, the rebellions of 1820-1821 ended with a complete failure in Italy: all the absolute kings remained in power (if we don’t count the abdication of Carlo Alberto in Piemonte who was replaced by an even more absolutist king) and all the constitutions granted during the rebellions were dismissed and forgotten. The situation in Italy was identical to its situation after the Congress of Vienna. 
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petroglifs · 5 years
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Grayshaw
*Enjoy!
Science Fiction Book Club
Interview with Bruce Sterling October 2018
Bruce Sterling is a prominent science fiction writer and a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre. Novels like Heavy Weather (1994), Islands in the Net (1988), Schismatrix (1985), The Artificial Kid (1980) earned him the nickname “Chairman Bruce”. Apart from his writings, Bruce Sterling is also a professor of internet studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School. He has contributed to several projects within the scheme of futurist theory, founded an environmental aesthetic movement, edited anthologies and he still continues to write for several magazines including Wired, Discover, Architectural Record and The Atlantic.
David Stuckey: Have you considered a return to the world of "The Difference Engine" for stories or another novel?
*That won’t happen.
David Stuckey: If you were going to write "Involution Ocean" today, what would you change or do differently?
*Well, alien planet adventures are a really dated form of space opera.  On the other hand, they’re great when you’re 20 years old.  If I were doing a project like that today I might make it a comic book.  Or a webcomic.  It might make a nice anime cartoon.
Richard Whyte: In the 2018 'State of the World' conversation on the Well, you said you were in Ibiza working on a novel. Are you able to tell us anything about it yet?
*I dunno if I’m ever gonna finish this epic novel about the history of the city of Turin, but I seem to get a lot of work done on it when I’m in Ibiza.  It’s about Turin, but when I’m actually in Turin I tend to work on weird technology art projects and goofy design schemes.
*Also, look at this palace.  I’m supposed to work on my novel in the attic of this villa.  That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?  This villa was built in the same era as the book I’m working on, which has the working title “The Starry Messengers.”  Like this villa, it’s big and baroque and complicated.
https://fenicerinnovata.tumblr.com
Andrzej Wieckowski: We read 'Sacred Cow' for one of our short story reads a few months' ago. Were themes such as Bolton's historic connection to the Indian cotton industry and immigration to this country deliberate or unconscious? And as it's my home town - did you visit? :)
*There aren’t any towns in Britain without some historic connection to India.  As it happens I’m flying to India day after tomorrow to meet with some Indian science fiction writers.
*I used to hang out in Great Britain rather a lot.  Brexitania I don’t much care for.  It’s a hostile, troubled place.
Gary Denton: You were active in the Viridian sustainable design movement that many readers may not know about. Do you think that major corporations have taken that over and it is less fringe now?
*I tend to do activist stuff.  Also, you get more done if you don’t ask for any credit.  I’ve come to understand that a lot of my most influential writing was stuff that I never got paid for.  Some of it never got published.
*I was just at the Whole Earth 50th reunion about a week ago.  They’re a good example of a “movement” that was super-influential and somehow a dreadful failure at the same time.
*As far as major corporations, meaning large public enterprises with a lot of shareholders, I don’t worry about them any more.  It’s actually moguls and oligarchs who are the big problem nowadays.
Gary Denton: Do you also see a change in the major polluters now compared to 25 years ago?
*They’re a lot more violent.  Blood for oil, killing off opponents in sinister ways, not a problem for them any more.  They’re quite grim and red-handed.  They used to be engineers, but now they know that they are culprits.
Gary Denton: You once said that the cyberpunks were the most realistic science fiction writers in the 80's. Who do you think are the most realistic science fiction writers now?
*Could be the Chinese.
Richard Whyte: Whenever someone here asks about the angriest SF work ever, I always seem to end up recommending your fine short story 'Spook'. Do you think of it as an angry story?
*Well, not really.  It’s a rather severely disaffected story from the point of view of a person who’s not human and knows it.  “We See Things Differently” is rather an angry story; it’s about a terrorist assassin with a righteous grudge.
Eva Sable: What is the experience of collaborating with another author like for you? Especially when working with someone who, like yourself, is rather an individual. (Never met William Gibson, but he strikes me as someone who would be more comfortable working on his own)
*I tend to collaborate rather a lot.  It helps if the two of you are combining forces in order to learn something together.  Gibson and I agreed that we couldn’t possibly write a work like DIFFERENCE ENGINE alone.  We used to urge each other to do it, but eventually we just had to have a lot of long, abstruse discussions of what a book like that ought to do.
*If you read the stories I wrote with Rudy Rucker you can see that a lot of those texts are basically him and me discussing weird ideas.  We’ve got a reason to write those stories – a high-concept, and then there are pages of bizarre hugger-mugger where we push the concept as hard as we can.  Then we give up.
*Nowadays I spend a lot of time negotiating or collaborating with artists, designers, architects.  I don’t get jealous about the origins of good ideas.
Richard Whyte: Your 1980s SF criticism seemed very much in favour of 'Radical Hard SF'. To what extent do you think your own fiction 'takes its inspiration from science, and uses the language of science in a creative way'?
*I wrote a lot of that in the 1980s.  Nowadays I tend to write speculative work that’s more influenced by industrial design rather than by science.
Richard Whyte: In the early 1980s I believe you were associated with a group of like-minded SF writers known as 'The Movement', who were subsequently renamed as 'cyberpunks'. Overall, do you think this name change was a good or a bad thing?
*If people notice you, you’re gonna get a public slang name anyway, so it’s good if you can cheerfully put up with it.  As for forming like-minded groups, that’s a valuable life-skill.
John Grayshaw: Who are your favorite science fiction writers? And how have they influenced your work?
*Well, those favorites change with time.  In different decades of my own life I’ve had different ambitions for my own science fiction.  I tend to write pastiches.  Lately I’ve been writing a lot of “science fiction” that’s heavily influenced by Italian fantascienza, or, really, Italian fantasy generally.  
*I’m a long-time Juies Verne fan.  I wouldn’t describe Jules as a personal “favorite,” but I recognize him as a titan of my genre.  Knowing the personal details of the guy’s career as a working creative has been of a lot of help to me.
*I had a couple of professional SF writers who I regarded as my literary mentors.  They’re both dead now: Harlan Ellison and Brian Aldiss.
John Grayshaw: I heard that you are currently dividing your time between Belgrade and Turin, do you miss living in Texas? Or America in general?
*I’m back often enough that I don’t really “miss it.”  I find that if I stay in one place too long, I tend to miss travelling.  I  roam a lot.  If I get too old and tired to lift a suitcase and I settle somewhere, it probably won’t be Austin, Belgrade or Turin.
John Grayshaw: I recommend everyone read your essay "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" (http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/interzone.txt) to understand that Cyberpunk was a movement and can't be removed from its time and place...But a Cyberpunk aesthetic has emerged over the years and that is what writers like Neal Stephenson or Richard K. Morgan are emulating. Was this aesthetic conscious at the time?
*Well, we spent plenty of time fussing about it. A lot of that conceptual work doesn’t really show on the surface.  Aesthetics interest me a lot.  For instance, I’m the Art Director of the Share Festival in Turin, which is an Italian technology-art fair.  Italians are good at fussing about how stuff looks.
John Grayshaw: Did "Mirrorshades" have a theme? What directions or guidance did you give the writers?
*It didn’t have a set theme.  Mostly I was trying to pick work from colleagues I respected, that I thought put them in a good light.
John Grayshaw: Other than writing what are your interests/hobbies?
*I like design and technology art. Also I travel a lot.  I spend a lot of time in arcane online research.
John Grayshaw: Why do you think Steampunk has become a popular subgenre/aesthetic in the last 30 years?
*I think it’s about the craft aspects of steampunk.  Hobbyist people like the costumes and the gadgets.  It’s like traditional historical recreation groups, but with an alluring fantasy aspect.
John Grayshaw: Can you explain why you have said that Artificial Intelligence is a bad metaphor?
*I think the AI metaphor gets in the way of actual progress in the field, with actual hardware and software.  Rodney Brooks explains the problem a lot better than I can, and nobody can understand his explanations either.  That’s not exactly fair – actually I get what Rodney’s saying enough to more or less agree with him.  He’s an expert, so I’d refer you to him.
*”Deep Learner” and “neural net” are kinda better metaphors than “Artificial Intelligence,” but they’re still metaphors.  We haven’t created sharp, focused words for what these odd devices really do. “Intelligence” is not what they’re doing.
John Grayshaw: Cyberpunk was a dark look at the future. Do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
*People always ask that.  People in Russia never thought that cyberpunk was “dark.”  Also, whenever you get to “the future,” no matter how scared or happy you are about some particular historical episode, there’s always more future on the way.  Eventually people are dead, so if you ask  if I’m optimistic or pessimistic about the 20th century,  the whole idea sounds silly.  The future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet.
John Grayshaw: In cyberpunk technology often contributes to society’s ills. What lesson do we take from this? That we must learn how to live with tech or that we should reject it and live like the Amish?
*Kevin Kelly kinda likes the idea of living like the Amish.  Kevin’s an interesting guy.  If I myself wanted to “live like the Amish” I’d probably move to Christiania in Denmark, where at least they have reggae music.
John Grayshaw: Do you keep up with the latest technologies? Or do you stay "off the grid?"
*I do both, actually.  I’m generally so “off the grid” that I’m not even in its time-zone.  I don’t have a business card, there’s no  settled mailing address, I’m never on Facebook, and no one knows my phone number.  Like they say in the world of electronic privacy, “I have nothing to hide, but I have nothing I want to show you, either.”
John Grayshaw: Do you think people will have "immersive" VR type experiences on the internet in the next 20 years?
*They have it already.
John Grayshaw: What do you feel is your legacy?
*Hard to say.  It’s like asking a Beatnik writer what “his legacy” is.  The Beats wrote a lot of more-or-less memorable stuff, but there’s also the existence proof that somebody was able to live like that, and that is their legacy.  I lived in a different historical period than the Beat writiers, but a lot of the stuff that entertained and engaged me is also quite archaic nowadays.  I don’t thing people aspire to emulate Bruce Sterling, but they  do like the idea of operating in the same cultural spaces that I do.  That something lively can exist between “science” and “fiction,” or between “cyber” and “punk,” that’s a valuable thing to know.
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The Dark-Lord Family, A.K.A. My Top 5 Favourite Villains
Melkor/Morgoth + Mairon/Sauron -- The Lord of the Rings+The Silmarillion
I know that’s two, but don’t make me separate them. I will not separate them.
They’re actually going to be the odd one out in this list because the rest are from anime/manga, but that’s because back when I was in middle school, I found villains from fantasy stories boring af and the notion that something external is the source of evil is just lazy. (Also because my obnoxious middle-school brain just went ‘Argh, blaming other people for your problems is soooo immature’ and shut down.) Arguably, I wasn’t well-versed in those kinds of literature, and stuff I did choose to read from that side of the globe don’t have villains in them.
And that’s kind of why these two makes the list -- they are more properly constructed than other dark lords that I know of. Yes, they serve as the personification of evil, but Tolkien also treated them as characters. They have reasons for becoming what they’ve become. And even though they are depicted as the epicentre of evil and destruction, evil isn’t actually their domain. Tolkien was pretty clear about that in his writing because he also examined and, to some degree, deconstructed evil in his universe. The Feanorians are chief examples of that. Turin is not really off the hook with some of his bad life choices (and I don’t mean marrying his sister; when intent in factored in, that’s actually not the worst Turin had done). And don’t get me started on how much I loathe Denethor.
In a way, I found Tolkien depiction of dark lords rather subversive. Having a dark lord really plays into a primal psychology that wants to blame the ill of the world to someone: capitalism, communism, Hitler, Stalin, Baby boomers, Millenials, the Jews, the Muslims, the conservative Christians, the patriarchy, cis white (American) males. But in the deconstruction of the dark lords, he was also saying, really, that evil without comes from the evil within and it’s complicated because evil is a part of nature. It doesn’t come from a box, an apple, a fallen angel, or a rebellious servant of God. And to win against the evil without, you have to fight the evil within. And that’s why Frodo is still one of my greatest heroes. He really did take the hardest job in the book, and I’m not talking about walking into Mordor.
Hao Asakura-- Shaman King (manga, not the anime)
Also known to me and my best friend as “Melkor and Sauron’s lovechild” because his character has things that reminded us of Melkor and Sauron. Hao is a personification of evil and destruction. His main power is Fire, and I’m capitalizing here because the spirit that is his main source of power is called the Spirit of Fire and it’s huge, like balrog huge.
But unlike with Melkor and Sauron, we got to hear directly from Hao why he thinks the destruction of humanity is a good idea. As it turns out, Hao actually has a shit-list on humanity collected over the last thousand years, and we look horrendous on it. It’s hard to argue that we are not cancerous, narrow-minded, selfish bunch of crap who frequently gives into the tendency to destroy each other and is going to destroy this one planet we have and take every other species who had not done any shit to deserve this with it. So, yes, Hao was saying, ‘I’m the necessary evil because you all are shitheads’. And he’s right. In some ways, he’s even more right now than he was back in the 90s.
But you might say that’s one particular lens of interpreting our complex and problematic (as in difficult) legacy. We’re not all bad! Well, true, but us doing good does not in anyway erase the fact that we’ve done some really shitty things as well. That’s why as extreme as Hao’s position might be, he’s about as logically wrong as saying we should keep humanity because we have done some nice things.
And the greatest thing in Shaman King to me is that Hiroyuki never went down that route of that oversimplified counter-argument. He actually had Yoh -- our hero, the personification of good, and Hao’s twin brother -- admitted to not liking human either. In fact, Yoh was the one most sympathetic to Hao’s position even though he disagreed that destroying humanity would solve any of Hao’s problems.
And Hao’s biggest problem was that he was isolated, dehumanized, and betrayed over such a long time that he lost the ability to trust and to love. And as time progressed and Hao becomes more powerful, you can even argue that he lost the ability to love himself. When Hao became God, he isolated himself from other souls, pushing even his most loyal followers away by displays worthy of an evil dark lord when they in fact contradicts how he had always treated them-- with kindness and understanding that they never received from others.
But that tactic wasn’t going to work on Yoh’s watch. The guy basically threw the biggest spirit party ever, invited everyone who ever crossed path with Hao, and gave the man the biggest metaphorical group hug. There were some stern talks about his past behaviour and ambitions, but all in all, everyone acknowledged that he was a person -- complicated and damaged but still a person worthy of friendship and love and loyalty. And after all the embarrassing reunion, including being enthusiastically called ‘nii-chan’ (that’s a cute way of calling someone ‘big-bro’) by his supposed mortal enemy and twin brother, Hao just kind of went ‘Fine! I warned you Earth sucks with humans on it, but if you want to make it better so much then go do it. I’ll watch you try!’
So, yep, that’s how you literally prevent apocalypse with the power of love. I wish more heroes adopt this strategy.
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^Hao as God Almighty from the sequel to Shaman King. Art by Takei Hiroyuki. This is to say that Hao is also a crazy cat-person.
Gabriel -- Daemon Hunters
Speaking of gods, here’s another god you should not mess with. I have to admit that this guy scares the living daylight out of me. And it’s not because he’s evil or cruel or twisted. Gabriel is... nothing. Really nothing. He was born out of an experiment to create a living god. And when knowledge and power are chosen over compassion, this is the destructive result.
Gabriel was born more powerful than anything under the sky. And he knew everything -- past, present, and future. He looked into a person’s eyes and he knew the life that was and the life that still to come. Except for one thing, one moment at the end of the world when he would meet a creature more powerful than himself, a creature that knew the answer to one last question Gabriel did  not: why was he alive?
And for that answer, Gabriel would do anything -- kill people, play with their minds, break their souls, wipe out an entire city or country. Literally, nothing was off-limits. And he was like a force of nature. You couldn’t negotiate or bargain with this guy because he didn’t care about puny little humans with puny little minds. He’s looking for an answer, and nothing was going to stop him.
So yeah, evil is not scary at all in my book. The insatiable thirst that knows no love? Yeah, totally.
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^The entire internet seriously just have this one picture of Gabriel. The sorrow of being in a non-existing fandom, I supposed.
Sebastian Michaelis -- Black Butler/Kuroshitsuji
Technically speaking, Sebastian is not a villain. He’s one of the two protagonists of Kuroshitsuji -- the other being my beloved anti-hero Ciel Phantomhive -- but considering that Sebastian (i) is a demon (ii) is after Ciel’s soul (iii) loves leading my dear boy astray, I count him as one.
Being treated in the narrative as one of the main characters is probably why he’s the most relatable on the list. Even though he’s a demon, he’s not treated as a personification of evil, just a corrupted creature serving as a vehicle for his master’s ambitions who likes to have fun along the way. That is not to say he’s not bad. He totally is. He would tear people to pieces as he kills them. He likes mind games and has no qualm manipulating people to get what he wants.
But the thing is, humans do that, too. Sebastian’s corruptness is not exceptional in anyway. We like to think we know what is right and wrong, but do we? We think we have made the best choices out of the goodness of our hearts, but were they, really? The matter of fact is a lot of our decisions are lazy, selfish, or just meanness dressed up as something else. There are moments when Sebastian demon’s ‘aesthetics’ seems more morally sound than the morality of a human being. And that’s kind of the theme of the series -- that the evil within clad in self-righteousness, desperation, and elitism can be more reprehensible than the evil without.
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^Art by Yana Toboso. I feel compelled to mention that Sebastian is also a crazy cat-person.
Johan Liebert -- Monster
To me, there is rarely a personification of evil more terrifying and a deconstruction more nuanced and heartbreaking than that in Naoki Urasawa’s Monster.
And it’s not even his best work! It was his first work in psychological thriller, so you can kind of see him working out how to do thriller and play with with characters’ psychology on the go. And the psyche that governs the entire story is that of Johan Liebert -- arch-villain, evil-incarnate, the new Napoleon of Crime. He rarely made any appearance in the story, but every time he did, I literally wanted to hyperventilate.
But really, setting Johan up that way was kind of a red-herring on Urasawa’s part, a good red-herring, too, because he was giving what Tolkien gave us in Middle-earth -- a personification of evil, someone we can point the finger to and blame for all the wrong in the world. And Johan played the dark lord to the tee.
Except then Urasawa slowly pulled the rug from under us. Little by little, as Dr. Kenzou Tenma, our personification of good, uncovered Johan’s past, we come to realize that there were other evil that made Johan. But then when Dr. Tenma approached those people, the big-bads dwindled into an old deluded man, a woman hunted, a mad scientist trying to repent his sin -- people after people who had made a decision based on their beliefs and made the wrong one.
I think what made Monster so powerful is how it uses Johan as the focal point to deconstruct evil down to its origin, to the fact that there is no other evil in the world than us. The evil without really is just a manifest of the evil within, and that little moments where we might have let it win could snowball into something monumentally terrifying.
But Urasawa’s view of human nature is not all doom and gloom. Yes, we’re at times wretched and wicked, but we can be better when we choose to be. And that idea is actually what Dr. Tenma represents. Tenma didn’t start out being good. He lied about his history. He was motivated by reputation and ego rather than the well-being of his patients. He had to be confronted by the consequence of his decisions and have his entire world crashing down to the ground to find the path to being good. And after that, it still wasn’t easy, as trying to be good in a world full of shitty people often is.
But things had changed for him, and I think that’s why he thought Johan could, too. That’s why he could never shoot even though Johan let him.
So, is Johan evil? My answer is yes. After all, he had done grave wrongs to people knowingly. But could he turn from the path of evil? Well, I think the more appropriate question is, have you?
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^Original design by Naoki Urasawa. I was once terrified of blue eyes because of this man.
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readfelice-blog · 6 years
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moominland chronicles elf . its not you, its me.
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and howlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good.
It's late today, well i mean there is no set time, but im slow, on this gorgeous early autumnal sunday, i dozed till 15h, getting up intermittently to empty my washing machine, tug at my hair (vinegar makes it sticky? I'm trying to find the perfect all natural solution to shampoo because I’m no poo now : https://www.nopoomethod.com , in fact i’m practising a very loose version of alchemy in my house, trying to find drinks that energise but don't make me anxious, cleaning solutions for my body and for my house that bewitch the nostrils and incinerate grease / kalk. Essentially I’m just concocting weird stuff, hunched over materials collected around the city, boiling my hell broths in ikea pans, surrounded by recycled jars).....
Lets press on…...
Yes, my morning, my intro to the day, I was up so late because I was up last night so late, till 4am, painting and listening to sweet feminine soundwaves in my kitchen, getting it done in my way, step by step. Because now I’m working a 5 day week again, my days are 3 hours long, 5 at a push, 6 in the most extreme cases, so now I’m back to burrowing out time where i can find it, because now i have my teeth dug in to a big project, a big project that will be realized, for the first time since may May last year.
May last year:
I killed myself, artistically, me artistically is the majority of me.
My whole life has been sewn into my practise, my method, my way of understanding and redistributing everything that comes into my life, and May last year I moved out of the house I shared with my ex husband , moon, and into a shared flat, to embark on a restorative journey. Me and moon were not doing well in our little cramped caravan, we were at each other's throats incessantly, already broken up, him with a new partner, me in full swing of frantic madness, fuelled by bottomless bottles of booze.
Day in day out in my studio, I slowly turned my 450sq ft basement into a mermaids cave, drunk on 8% cider, night after night, sticking black bin liners to the walls with double sided tape, hanging spirals of bubblewave to the ceiling, spray painting floor tiles, screaming at the camera on my iphone half naked, making terrifying life size dolls and cry singing to myself, emphatically paranoid and fractured, writing letters to a man I’d never met who I thought could save me. It was my last great project, I created a film I can never show my parents and documented myself throwing my life away, in my wedding dress, shadowed by the virgin: a wreckage, a car crash, a lot of footage I haven’t been able to edit because I haven’t got the equipment to do so.
It's all stored on a clunky hard drive bundled up with the moon, he saved it for me, without him I would of lost it because my laptop, his laptop, broke in the middle of me editing it and since then its been untouched. I’m afraid the hours of video that follow me dancing around everything i’d ever owned up until that point, rigorously chucking it all in more black bin liners. When I can find a place to edit everything and the capacity in my mind, then I can piece it back together and show it to the world.
Since May last year, I have totally uprooted my life, moved out of London, had a very strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes harrowing time with my family in Devon, rolled through Turin, Cork, Helsinki, chasing the man I’ve never met, blocking the man I’ve never met at the behest of my friend in Cork, defending and understanding my art more deeply in Helsinki, and finding Tove Jansson. Her bronze bust on the door of the studio she used to hold, her gorgeous expanding black and white prints in the mumin cafe that towered in the sky under artificial light, her room in the museum of Modern Art, her soul in the botanical gardens amongst the families having lunch together.
It's been a glorious invigorating illuminating intrepid journey (I’ve been writing a hip hop song recently, can you tell?) but its not been anything monumental in terms of creation and since May last year is the longest time I have gone without a major project in my life, for possibly my entire adult life, bar being at uni, where conversely I was more orientated towards squat parties than art making.
So here I sit now, with a great big juicy exciting idea inflated in a giant balloon, ready to be released into the atmosphere, the only snag is that it needs to be manifested into real material, which means a lot of work, and so, I find myself back in a place I’d forgotten about.
That's the very good thing about having such a long break, is now I can totally observe what happens to me when I’m in this phase: it’s quite extreme from a fledgling perspective.
Not fueled by booze this time, but instead concocting things to give me a buzz that I can buy in the supermarket (don’t drink to much valerian, it gives you a bad tummy, im not drowsy or euphoric I just feel sick from the after affects and rancid smell) and developing my cleaning routine to be the most streamlined and creative that it can be, to give my art sustenance.
But if I could I would lock myself away from the world in a cabin far up on a mountain and painfully draw out everything in a more concentrated form, the cleaning is fine for now but it's hard to concentrate when I have to go to peoples houses and deal with their kalk as well, it might be one of the factors in why the whole thing is so stressful, but I have the suspicion that it will always be stressful, even if I ever get the luxury to entirely dedicate my day to working on my art.
The big thing I’m noticing is incessant, almost intolerable paranoia, that someone will steal my idea and present it to the world before I’m done. I notice it now and then I turn and look at my past and see its infected traces throughout my history, it's a big driving force in getting the work finished and I’m starting to see that I cannot share or talk about what I’m doing when I’m in the midst of it, but all i want to do is share and talk about it, hence why that cabin would be a better place than a city I’m not fully established in.
I know it’s unreasonable, untrusting, maybe even unkind of me, to believe that someone would steal something like this from me. I know that sharing ideas is healthy and loving and makes the world go round, but this paranoia is totally immovable and so I just accept it and try to satiate it, hoping by feeding it homemade remedies that it won’t make my life worse.
But these big idea’s, they come upon me, I don’t choose them, all the strands of my life and experimentation ferment slowly and then one day I wake up and I know what I have to do, then as I start to do it it grows and morphs, develops, things come and go from my wall, until I have reduced and finelined the parameters of a project, that's where I am now, all the mental groundwork is laid, its just the creation that's left, I’m now half way through the musical aspect of it but not halfway through the visual and I need to amp up, because it must be done by November the second, so I can take it to Turin with me, so I can deposit it at the gates of hell, so I can complete a cycle, so I can be free to make blue music and who knows what, maybe try something formless, kind and organic - that's not for me to know yet though.
Once it rears its great dense head, I am in its power, I am in the throng of obeying my art and that's a lonely place to be. It's lonely being an artist, some of us are collaborative and collective and have communities, but I’m not among those right now, this project, lets just call it by its name for here in : восем acht ocho : is not something I can share and make with others, it is a process of me picking up the pieces of my life, of giving praise to the moon, who has saved me and supported me so many times. I must give praise to him finally so I can move on and give praise to myself.
So I sit in my house and dutifully work back and forth between paint and ableton, singing and faux performing in my hallway in between, performing to my very tolerant invisible neighbours that must think I’m some kind of banshee from a deep buried part of the world. I sit in my house alone, I reject all the invitations extended to me, I retract from the life I am building to some extent and just hope the friends I have been finding will be understanding, though it's hard to explain to someone that I can’t come because of something I am choosing to do myself. It's not work related in terms of my bread and butter, Its not health related, I’m not resting, I guess a lot of people won’t understand which is perhaps why I feel compelled to try and somehow explain myself in this blog today.
I must make this work, it is not a choice, I am in my house alone because this idea has bound me up and demands my care and attention, because for the first time in over a year I can make work again and make it with diligence, create something on a large scale. It means that Berlin is working, this is the change I was looking for, because I feel like I have a future again, whilst the 100’s of drawings, paintings, books, trinkets from my life decay in some junk yard close to London, I have the space to bring new art into the world. It’s really a glorious turning point in my life so far.
I am still terrified that it will all collapse in on me at any time, but there are ways of fighting this paranoia, careful planning, creative problem solving, and probably just not talking about the details of what I am doing anymore until it is finished.
Phew, nothing enlightening this week, more of an attempt to bridge the gap between myself and the life that flows around me. I’m now off to edit my most current track on ableton then do some line work and probably make up some mixes of citric acid / bicarbonate of soda cleaner for the week ahead.
We just have to do what we must, and be grateful when we know what it is we must do.
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@bisexual-turin​ tagged me!! (chelle!! I didn’t know you had a tolkien sideblog!!! AAAAAA)
rules: choose any three fandoms (in random order) and answer the questions, then tag 10 people you want to know better
I mean I know y’all pretty well but this is fun so..... IF Y’ALL WANT TO... I TAG @lesbiankiliel​, @chibistarlyte​, @lovelylilpup​, @bagginshieldisreal​, @fishfingersandscarves​, @gaaladrieel​, @sarkastically​, @strawberrylaugh​, @knightjeran​ and @thefaerie​!!
i choose:
tolkien (probably specifically the hobbit)
star wars
ATLA/LOK
the first character you loved:
honestly?? probably frodo?? OR SAM
I CAN’T REMEMBER I mean probably Leia?
AANG FOR SURE
the character you never expected to love so much:
lmao probably thorin i don’t remember having much of an opinion about him at first other than he was boring and now i would Die™ for him
ANAKIN my current love only sprang up again while rediscovering the fandom so uhhh
ZUKOOOO i mean i started at the beginning when it was airing so I was not feeling angry bald ponytail man and then we came out of the series finale and he is one of my absolute faves jfc
the character you relate to the most:
bilbo baggins.... wanting to go on adventures but also i just wanna stay home in my comfy armchair and eat 7 times a day tbh??
OH GOD uh I’m gonna say Hera bc i’m the Mom Friend™ half the time also I don’t know if I want to be w her or be her 
my gut says aang bc he’s so positive and i always try to stay positive!!! but again probably more like katara bc Mom Friend Who Cares Too Much About Everything™
the character you’d slap:
azog/bolg can meet me in the pIT
kyle ron (i’m leaving this answer bc same)
UH OZAI FOR SURE or vaatu if I’m thinking about LOK
three favorite characters (in order of preference):
bilbo, thorin, frodo...yknow... the fam......
HERA, ahsoka, kanan???
zuko, aang, sokka UGH CAN I JUST SAY THE WHOLE GANG katara, suki, toph, mai, ty lee.....
a character you liked at first but don’t anymore:
oh god uhhh... none really? everyone i loved at the start i still love?? maybe legolas only because my friend was obsessed with orlando bloom/legolas so much in middle school so i got roped into the obsession and it’s not there much any more but uhhh i still fuckin love him ghdfds
JEEZ lmao maybe jar jar bc i was a kid when i saw them and i thought he was funny and uhhh 
MAKO........ i still appreciate him.... but uh I thought he’d be another Zuko at first and I just got super irritated w him by the end of s2 but again I don’t hate him I still actually really like his character when he’s not in the middle of a love triangle :))
a character you did not like at first but now do:
PROBABLY BOROMIR?? i remembered not caring for him at all when i first saw the movie and since then everything makes me love him more and more 
this relates back up to the ‘never expected’ question.... Anakin again, only cause I thought he was whiny and irritating and now i’m just like.... my poor emo boy he just wants a family and happiness and feels 590324 emotions at once and he was manipulated ridiculously can we just give him a happy ending already
Asami?? I remember just being irritated with her being introduced just to be a love triangle for no reason and now she is THE BEST
three otps:
BAGGINSHIELD, kiliel, gimlas, sam/frodo
omg too many.... KANERA, BAZECHIRRUT, anidala, rosefinnreypoe...
KATAANG & KORRASAMI also maiko... sukka...
three nonromantic relationships
thorin & dis?? (i know she’s not in canon much but i love the fanon interpretation of their relationship) fili & kili (ALL THE DURIN FEELS), bilbo & frodo
sabine & ezra, anakin & obi wan & ahsoka & padme....
aang & zuko, katara & toph, mako & bolin!! 
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avnakin · 6 years
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For such an interesting ask I got tagged by @straightouttahimring. Thank you for tagging me! <3
*Stretches out the hands and prepares to type furiously all the ramblings*
How do you think the Oath worked practically?
I don’t think the Oath actually had the power over the ones who followed it. I think what mattered is your ‘connection’ with it. Feanorians have been following the Oath for their father until his death. Afterwards, what was driving them - not the will to do so, not the actual ambition to get the Silmarils. It became a ‘blind’ target for them, an obligation they have set in their mind over long years. Feanorians didn’t even think of the reasons of following it or not. They just did it.
Were the Valar in the right to bring the Elves to Valinor?
I have mixed feelings about Valar. At some extend I feel what they were doing was fair, but on the other side I doubt their actions. Valar weren’t forcefully bringing elves to Valinor - elves could choose whether they want to follow Orome or not. They had a freedom of choice. At this point, in my opinion, Valar were doing only good, as they were helping the Newborn to get established in this harsh world.
Which Silm character do you find the most relatable personally and why?
Turin is the character I can relate to the most in particular moments. What connects me with him the most, is his ambition to go against the Fate, to go his own path he builds. Turin believes it is up to us to make the life the way it is, not Fate. I agree with him.
If you could ask one character one question (to get clarification on their motives, to ask their opinion etc), who would you ask and what?
I would ask Melkor, as this is the most mysterious character for me. Did he want to destroy the world to fulfill his revenge in such way? Or did he want to create his own world where would be freedom from order and limitation? Did he ever think of stopping what he had begun? Did he really believe in his succession? What were his feelings before the War of Wrath? What were his last thoughts when he was defeated and was going to the Void?
Would you have gone with Fëanor, Fingolfin or Finarfin?
I would have gone with Fingolfin for multiple reasons: 1. I would be very unsure of whether it is right to leave such ‘paradise’ and go somewhere unknown, somewhere, where you don’t know what to expect; 2. I wouldn’t have certain opinions and thoughts about Valar;  3. I would be suspicious to Feanor’s speeches and ambitions, though, they would get to my heart; 4. I would want to follow someone who had neutral and sane thoughts, unlike Finarfin, who was against the idea of leaving Valinor and rebelling against Valar from the very beginning, and unlike Feanor, who, well, was a little bit insane. Fingolfin is the one of the Noldorian princes, who kept the clearest point of view, weighing the consequences, opportunities and possibilities in this situation.
What do you think was the determining factor/reasoning behind the Doom of the Noldor? Does it hold for scrutiny in your opinion?
When a person you care about is mad, what do you try to do to reason them? You try to calmly talk it out and explain to them. But they wont listen to you, plus, basically spit in your face. You try to warn them and tell them why it is better to do otherwise. Still, they won’t listen. What do you have left? You can’t just let them go because you care about them. So you have the last option left - to threat them in hope that it will eventually make them come back to senses. This is what Valar did. When they came to the last option, it is when Mandos came into action (though it didn’t work). However, if the Doom was actually related to unlucky events in Noldorin lives, rather than just simple coincidence, then Valar were unjust and very likely their pride was harmed to bring the actual damage with their threat.
Who is the scariest of Tolkiens characters?
Sauron must be the scariest. Not Melkor even, despite him being a smart dude with genius ideas, tricky and unexpected approaches during the war. Sauron would start from the very far end, even if it means more time and some damaged pride. As a great example we can see how he spreads his web in Numenor, which leads the whole civilization to fall (and even worshipping Morgoth), or his participation in the creation of the Rings, bringing the great men to fatal destruction. There is a good proverb to describe why Sauron’s approach is so effective: “Slow and steady wins the race”.
Any other versions of a story you prefer over the version published in the Silm?
I am the kind of person who will be super interested in Tolkien’s abandoned ideas, but I will always stick to the final result. It is where I have learned this world, where I have had my journey, where my heart belongs. I love the Silmarillion the way it is and I can’t picture it any other way.
Favourite story of the legendarium and why?
Probably the story about Turin Turambar. The story is so tragic, especially after reading the Children of Hurin, that it got firmly sealed in my heart.
The latest thing you learned that made you reconsider or change your view on something in Tolkiens world?
In Tolkien’s abandoned ideas about Dagor Dagorath, one of the ideas was about Eonwe being Morgoth’s bane. It surprised me a lot, since I have never thought of such an end. Why Eonwe exactly? It does make sense if it was Turin who finally defeated Melkor, as he and his family were under Morgoth’s curse. Yes, it is said that Fionwe was in rage because of Arien’s death, but still, why him? Could it be such a classic line from the Lord of the Rings “Even the smallest person can change the course if future” as an explanation, since Eonwe is not the most vital character in the Silmarillion (though not the smallest one either)? I just can’t think of a solid explanation for this.
Thoughts on Fëanor not wanting to share the Silmarils after the Darkening?
It does make sense that Feanor felt reluctant to not sharing his greatest work ever, since he had put so much of himself in this piece. And then in one moment it could be destroyed. Here, I understand and even support Feanor. Though, what he didn’t consider is the fact that by destroying your greatest creation you could really help the world. At this point I think Feanor was just purely selfish.
I am tagging: @forestphantom05 @fionwe @jane-ways @moriquendii @alia-andreth
Anyone who wants to do this ask, don’t hesitate! 
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noldorianprincess · 6 years
Note
Fin + Tu for the ship meme!
ULTIMATE SHIP MEME
General:
Rate the Ship -  Awful | Ew | No pics pls | I’m not comfortable | Alright | I like it! | Got Pics? | Let’s do it! | Why is this not getting more attention?! | The OTP to rule all other OTPs
How long will they last? - Forever, or, until one of them dies
How quickly did/will they fall in love? - Started out as friends? Then grew as they grew and now they’re like an old married couple.
How was their first kiss? - Probably horrendously atrocious, but got better with practice.
Wedding:
Who proposed? - Tuuuu did
Who is the best man/men? - Beleg I’m pretty sure?
Who is the braid’s maid(s)? - Wow I don’t know Findu doesn’t have a lot of friends, so maybe just Luthien and her cousin Celebrian 
Who did the most planning? - Fin. Everything had to be very minimalistic. Nothing too big or too fancy, else it might grab her father’s attention
Who stressed the most? - Fin. She’s too much of a perfectionist.
How fancy was the ceremony? - Back of a pickup truck | 2 | 3 | 4 | Normal Church Wedding | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Kate and William wish they were this big.
Who was specifically not invited to the wedding? - Orodreth, for specific reasons. She loves her dad, but not on this day specifically.
Sex:
Who is on top? - Mainly Tu, but if it’s a wild night, maybe fin.
Who is the one to instigate things? - They both keep it pretty interesting; couples who watch porn together, stay together.
How healthy is their sex life? - Pretty healthy.Barely touch themselves let alone each other | 2 | 3 | 4 | Once a couple weeks, nothing overboard | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | They are humping each other on the couch right now
How kinky are they? - Straight missionary with the lights off | 2 | 3 | 4 | Might try some butt stuff and toys | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Don’t go into the sex dungeon without a horse’s head
How long do they normally last? - A few hours? Depends on who is in the mood
Do they make sure each person gets an equal amount of orgasms? - Definitely. Tu takes care of his lady, and she takes care of him in return
How rough are they in bed? - Softer than a butterfly on the back of a bunny | 2 | 3 | 4 | The bed’s shaking and squeaking every time | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Their dirty talk is so vulgar it’d make Dwayne Johnson blush. Also, the wall’s so weak it could collapse the next time they do it.
How much cuddling/snuggling do they do? - No touching after sex | 2 | 3 | 4 | A little spooning at night, or on the couch, but not in public | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | They snuggle and kiss more often than a teen couple on their fifth date to a pillow factory.
Children:
How many children will they have naturally? - Maybe two.
How many children will they adopt? - One (if Fin can convince Tu to let her take Sasha)
Who gets stuck with the most diapers? - I think it’s pretty equal.
Who is the stricter parent? - Fin. Dammit Tu, stop giving the children candy!
Who stops the kid(s) from doing dangerous stunts after school? - Tu.
Who remembers to pack the lunch(es)? - Fin. She packs everyone’s lunches
Who is the more loved parent? - Turin.
Who is more likely to attend the PTA meetings? Both. They are very interested in their children’s education. 
Who cried the most at graduation? - Fin. Her children are leaving the nest!
Who is more likely to bail the child(ren) out of trouble with the law? - Tu. And they never ever are to speak a word of it to their mother.
Cooking:
Who does the most cooking? - Fin. Tu tried once and nearly burned the flat down.
Who is the most picky in their food choice? - Fin. Can’t mix textures.
Who does the grocery shopping? - Both. 
How often do they bake desserts? - Special occasions or if Fin has cravings
Are they more of a meat lover or a salad eater? - Tu is an obligate carnivore. Findu is an omnivore. 
Who is more likely to surprise the other(s) with an anniversary dinner? - Tu (but he just orders take out, plates it, and calls it his own, and that’s perfectly fine with her)
Who is more likely to suggest going out? - Fin. Cooking sucks. It’s always better when you’re not the one making it. 
Who is more likely to burn the house down accidently while cooking? - Turin...renter’s insurance is getting a bit pricey, love.
Chores:
Who cleans the room? - Fin
Who is really against chores? - Fin, but she does it anyways cause Tu works and is exhausted all the time.
Who cleans up after the pets? - Turin. Fin refuses to touch the vomit of that cat; who knows whats in there.
Who is more likely to sweep everything under the rug? - Turin
Who stresses the most when guests are coming over? - Fin. 
Who found a dollar between the couch cushions while cleaning? - Turin
Misc:
Who takes the longer showers/baths? - Fin. She has an extra complicated routine with all that hair.
Who takes the dog out for a walk? - Both. It’s good for fresh air.
How often do they decorate the room/house for the holidays? - It looks like the Jolly Fat-Man vomited all over the house.
What are their goals for the relationship? - To barely ever argue and never keep secrets
Who is most likely to sleep till noon? - Tu on his days off
Who plays the most pranks? - Findu; i think that’s what keeps him on his toes the most. He’s probably had welts on his posterior from nerf-bullets.
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gurguliare · 7 years
Note
the part with gwindor and finduilas's private conversation about turin and beren and etc
[ @crocordile asked for Turin and Finduilas’s “But you are queenly” convo and I kind of folded it into this. WRITING ABOUT WRITING IS REALLY HARD. ]
It was a tradition in Nargothrond that matters of war were debated before an assembly, in the great cavern where the river Ringwil raised all speech to a bellow on its back, and so—though Orodreth and all his councillors were slain, and Gwindor died first of those princes—Dirhaval had only to ask a cook who had taken a shift off to go hearken—and who later had run like a deer through the smoke in the forest, all the way west—to learn what words passed between Gwindor and Túrin before Túrin led Gwindor’s people to war; and, further, what words passed between Gwindor and the king, when Gwindor came unburdened out of Angband to his door.
The cook had short brown hair and a slumbering beauty, a long face with a short nose on a long neck, rounded shoulders not a fault when setting off her face, although she never straightened; she laughed like an old woman when she remembered how Turin had found the dwarf-helm. “Ha! oh, ha! Ha, ha, how daring we thought him, out to out-glower the orcs—none of our lords would have made themselves so ugly. And he said: ‘Valiant defense of the borders and hard blows ere the enemy gathers; in that course lies the best hope of your long abiding together. And do those that you speak of love such skulkers in the woods, hunting strays like a wolf, better than one who puts on his helm and figured shield, and drives away the foe, be they far greater than all his host?’ But I forget what else,” she added, going blank, using a Sindarin term humans had coined. I unremembered. She did not mean ‘I forget’; she meant, ‘I did not hear,’ or ‘I understood it poorly,’ or ‘I am not interested in the wretched end of a memory that began in merriment.’ And he could not press her, who would, in her politeness—determined to match his words to the words that she had learned—would say only and firmly, “I forget.”
But never mind. He guessed the drift of Túrin’s thought. Túrin (he was sure) thought always of his mother and his sister, who were to him the whole of Dor-lómin, who feasted on his feats of arms and withered when he cowered. He knew Túrin. Gwindor was another matter; do those that you speak of love such skulkers, had Gwindor had an answer?
What did Gwindor think of women?
Finduilas, unlucky lady, won passage for her lover and the stranger whom he led. When first Dirhaval heard the tale, she was a second Nienor; high-hearted and sorrowing, golden as dragon-mail—perhaps seven feet tall. She leaped barefoot from the dais, the throng parted for her, and she took Gwindor’s hand between her hands.
Perhaps she had. He found another watcher, a chemist-turned-fletcher who came to Nargothrond in Curufin’s train, and left in Celebrimbor’s ragtag, rallied flock—though now Celebrimbor dwelled with Gil-Galad on the Isle and this chemist, somehow, sat whetting arrow-points in Sirion, warning bystanders from his little pot of poison. This was an elf with weak blue eyes that shivered in their high seat, and vanished when he yawned, which was often; he said that Finduilas, before her father’s throne, pleaded amid a hundred voices, and although her voice was high and pure none other hushed, knowing it too well. First her voice, then her quick feet, and then at last her words were heard through that low hall, before her fair head plunged out of gloom, hands held before her like a diver’s hands. In this description Dirhaval heard the chemist’s blindness and the fletcher’s venomed aim, but nonetheless it lodged in him with barbs, and he dreamed of a lady who in girlhood harbored the gleam of new-hardened wheat, and now was white-haired, clad in white, alone.
But maybe she was brave and not high-hearted. If she came to her father’s other councils, none now living could confirm it: I forget, said the cook. I was away, said the purblind fletcher.
Túrin himself had spoken of Finduilas to the people of Brethil. He called her queenly, and a golden tree, though he said it—said the woodsman—seated by the mound, and meant perhaps to plant one there. Túrin had a straightforward enough imagination.
He took to reading Gwindor’s lines in his father’s louring tone; alone by the creek, he sat perched on driftwood and croaked to himself, “A woman is not easily deceived.” Nay, a woman is not easily deceived. Nor will you find many—nor will you find many who deny that they are loved, if that is true—and he felt a warm glow rise in him, as though he had announced to the forking stream that he was loved. Which he was, he thought; how else to explain the willows touching fingers to the green shapes in the current? Like a wicker bridge, woven for men to climb and meet themselves. Sunlit evening, tall overhead, sewed for the river a shirt of bright rings. To hear there was the spill of the water, going on its belly over stones. Yes: all of that and more. How was it that Gwindor, dead, could make him laugh and look with kindness on his father, who would shortly—in a little while—drive his poor pledged sister mad? Linnor had threatened twice already to turn him out, to make his way—she said—as Dirhaval, in a hut of reeds.
I have a house, Dirhaval argued. Not only that, I will never starve, for every hall accepts me. I have a place in the king’s own lodge when I hunt with his riders. She had his pen out of his fist and held the point very near to his eye. She said, You live in the hollow.
This was Sirion. The reeds grew to man-height, so thickly that they seemed to stand by leaning on stacked neighbors. It was hard enough to find a slender reed to cut a nib from. In wind-tossed thickets on the shore he did hear the whisper of pens dulling on the page, but preferred not to listen, as already he sometimes feared he would go mad.
“Hello,” said the cook.
He jumped to his feet, bowed, smiled; cursing himself indifferently, he relaxed when she smiled as well. She had a basket of baked fish and offered him a trout still on its skewer, and, when he took it, sat beside his place on the log, calling him to sit also. Wind lifted her short hair and showed her reddened cold ears, small and round for an elf’s, but pricked as though attentive to far sounds, and yellow at the center from the light.
“I have remembered something,” she added, inconsequentially. “My aunt’s husband was Guilin’s steward. Everyone in my family hated him because he  because he always making up to us with stories about the great princes. He said that Gwindor and Finduilas fought much over the Adanedhel’s love for her.”
Dirhaval considered the fish with great interest. He had been told triumph lent him a fierce expression. He had no wish to scare his friend off now.
“Raised voices—he overheard—Gwindor said, ‘Why does he seek you out, and sit long with you, and come ever more glad away?’ And that was true, I remember; they sat together in all kinds of places, on the terraces, in the treasury, and even by the earthworks for the bridge. No doubt he told her much you would be glad to know. But as for me, I think Gwindor a fool; few men would have loved her for listening. It reminds them what they hold dear in themselves.”
“That’s true,” he said. The first time he had interviewed her, she had spoken for an hour about the cavern of assembly, like an egg on its side—but so vast!—and with stalactites Finrod himself had sung down into pillars, or was it that he had worn holes in the walls parting small caves, she couldn’t decide; and the window on the river, whence a grey light came, like a shadow thrown on the gliding light of a thousand lamps and torches. And now when she spoke it was matter-of-fact and with hardly a jibe at her uncle. She was Túrin to him in that moment with her straight-sloping neck, the flushed skin of her neck and jaw with her face as fair as fair could be near sunset, the cupful of shadow under her chin. He had burned the roof of his mouth. The fish was tender, almost flavorless, flaking between his teeth like a cake of river-flesh; a little muddy, even, as all water here was. He ate the crisped-black skin for a whiff of charcoal, which coated his mouth. “Don’t you love me, your loyal hearer?”
She gave him a startled wink; and smiled, and smiled.
“I do not think Finduilas loved the Mormegil either. Or, that is, I believe they loved one another as sister and brother.”
Trying to lick his fingers clean just spread around the soot. Among the things she had told Dirhaval was that she was an only child. But he was inclined to believe her, almost. To Finduilas Túrin should have been a child. She must have wanted to love him like a brother—it would have been best, by far clearer and finer, to love him as a brother, even when her death walked near. The death he handed her down to; but if they were kin, it would have been her right to love him, blaming him.
“Do you not agree?”
“I can’t say.” Up again to pace. She followed him, basket on her arm, and settled onto her haunches when she saw he had no journey in mind. He stood when he performed, which was not hard, but it made him more restless when alone. “I think—by the time—no, Túrin did not love her, and as for Finduilas, well, surely she cared for Gwindor? If they argued. Let’s see. And Túrin pursued her at last and fell in a swoon on her grave, we know that. And he loved Gwindor; how not, when Gwindor was with him at Ivrin? But Gwindor—I suppose—Gwindor must have hated him. No. He must have hoped Túrin loved Finduilas, and that was why he couldn’t be persuaded of the truth. For he would have wanted her to be happy, in the end.”
“Oh, no!”
His mood tipped down at once. “Oh no,” he agreed, and took his sandals off and stepped into the stream. His mother had said once that both he and his father were happier than other men, but that they had no ballast, to keep steady the craft. If he took on an ounce of grief he’d sink, and yet he felt the flood almost as freedom. It made him more the master than had his dry, feckless race, his high-riding. As long as he struggled he had yet to succumb; that was the rule for a wasted evening. From here he could trace all the way on to a night of stars. He ought to go and beg a cup of sour milk from Linnor, or go and sing a service for the king. 
But it was day, it was red evening. It was his companion’s grief, filling his mind from above. She crouched and watched the far bank huge-eyed, not a tear in evidence, eyes opened but sealed, as it seemed, against sadness that strove for entry, not escape; she sat with wide mouth cracked, nostrils flared, sucking in great absent sniffs of sea-wind. She was besieged as an afterthought, safe and calm except besieged.
(Gwindor surely wished Finduilas joy. Finduilas, dying, remembered Túrin, and told him where his quest should end. The feathered tops of the reeds glowed on dark stems, like a fire in a field of reeds—there before nightfall he planted for ever the standards of the Noldor and their unsheathed swords, kindling in the dawn.)
He washed his hands and greasy beard in the river. “Your fish will be cold,” he advised. He had abandoned hope of dinner until she brought it, but that was no reason to encourage bad habits in her. Then he had to pick some scales out of his teeth, and couldn’t elaborate, but he heard her uncover the basket, anyway.
He had met her before with a handful of salt, pressing a few grains to her mouth to check their purity. “Dirhaval,” she said wisely, mouth full. “Dirhaval, I have forgotten how to cook.” Meaning she had no spices, witched ovens, and trained assistants—maybe, to her, it was really as though she had forgotten; it was at least something else she had lost.
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remindingpersephone · 7 years
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Killjoys Season 3 Review
I apologize for the hit-or-miss nature of my TV show posts.  It’s all about time for me, and these days I barely have enough to watch TV, let alone post about it.  But I’m carving out a little time right now because Season 3 of Syfy’s Killjoys was exceptional.  I’ll put in a jump for those who don’t want my endless babbling to take up their whole dash.  (Oh, and SPOILERS!)
From the pilot, Killjoys has been required viewing for me.  It felt like old-school sci-fi from the 80′s/90′s, which was my first love.  Someone said it had a Bladerunner feel to it, and I cannot disagree with that.  It’s absurd, but so much fun.  The actors are all gorgeous and it’s got enough fun one-liners to not take itself too seriously.
Season 3 started off a little slow for me.  I wanted Johnny back on Lucy, I wanted the RAC Army to get it’s shit together and quite infighting.  I wanted Dutch to spend some more quality time with Alvis because those two have insane chemistry.  (Although I still believe D’avin and Dutch is endgame.)  And Aneela bugged me.  They took their sweet time filling in the blanks on why Aneela is so batshit.  But episode 7 “The Wolf You Feed” finally paid off.  Not only is the story of the two wolves one of my favorite parables, but it works beautifully against the story of Dutch and Aneela.  
And then the last 4 episodes were damn near perfection.  
The writers did a wonderful job of using the foreshadowing in seasons 1 and 2 to give depth to the season-long “Hullen destroy humanity” story arc.  There was really good character development, and they even did pretty good with continuity, which is often the first thing sacrificed when linking seasons together to tell a cohesive story.
Johnny continues to be adorable and so fucking loyal it makes me want to cry.  I know in the early days they wanted us to think D’avin was the dark brother, but it’s really Johnny.  He’s the one who will cross the line and damn himself for those he loves.
D’avin is the hero, always and forever.  The way he stepped up to lead the Army when Turin got stupid and Dutch got caught up in family baggage was as inevitable as it was heroic.  Once a soldier, always a soldier.  But he never once wavered from what he knew was right, even when others did.  That’s a true leader right there.
Pree was wonderful and totally deserved the increased role this season.  He and Gared are adorable.  And can Thom Allison sing!  His version of “Wayfaring Stranger” was gorgeous.  And especially haunting when Aneela killed Alvis.
Alvis!  You deserved better, Uncle.  I am going to miss they way he looked at Dutch.
Zeph is getting better.  At first I didn’t care for her at all.  But I think that Jaqobis sandwich hug finally got me to warm up to her.  Now how can I get one of those hugs?
Kendry is a fucking hoot.  Seriously, Mayko Nguyen is fantastic at bored, haughty, condescending and conceited.  And I love that she’s the one who’s carrying the savior-demon baby, because back in season 1 she was all snotty about not carrying or delivering Qreshie heirs.  I hope she goes into labor on that stranded elevator with the boys, because that would be some gold right there.
The star of this show is always going to be Dutch.  She manages to be equally convincing as a bad-ass, a loyal friend, a crook, and a hero.  She’s a little bit broken (ok, maybe more than a little bit) but that only makes you like her more.  “But I was here.  I was real.  And I mattered.  I will not be forgotten!”  Three seasons lead up to that scene, and it was worth the wait.
Hannah John-Kamen did a brilliant job all season differentiating Aneela from Dutch.  It wasn’t just makeup and accent.  She used posture, gesturing, speech patterns, and movement to really bring it home.  I figured out once they mentioned “The Lady” that Dutch and Aneela were going to wind up fighting on the same side.  Question is, do they keep Aneela alive after they kill “The Lady”?  I think Aneela will survive, but she’ll have to go somewhere else.  Too many bad deeds for her to stay in the Quad.
So Killjoys has been given two more seasons with the fifth being the definite end.  I appreciate that because it gives the writers enough time to really go big, and then give it a proper ending.
I can’t wait to see how they top this season.
It’s a long wait until next summer, but I think we can do it.  Just keep dreaming about that Jaqobis sandwich hug.
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