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funkymbtifiction · 3 years

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Finding my Si: a submission

I’d like to share 6 things that helped me discover my Si and how Charity’s advice helped me, in case it helps anyone else :)

1.It helps when friends and family tell you what they think your dominant function is. Like a fish not realizing the water is wet, it’s so normal that it’s invisible to you. My mum picked Si the minute I asked her which function described me best; she said, ‘You trust your personal experiences and refer back to them all the time; it’s like an anchor for you. You rely on the past to get you through the present.’ One by one, my friends picked the same, pointing to how I recollect everything from the date we first met to changes in their food preferences to the color of the shirt they wore one Monday morning. I never realized the enormity of the storehouse of detail in my head until they pointed out that not everyone treasures memory-keeping in the same way. I wouldn’t say Si memory is photographic; for me, it’s more like a fisherman’s net, where I gather in what matters to me. I see a living mosaic of past and present when I look at people and places I love.

2. Being willing to question my own assumptions. An unflinching look at what I actually do, not what I think I do.

I considered Ni when I thought of goals I’ve set. For example, I got into the same UK university at 18 that I’d loved at age 14. This story initially sounded as though I’d had a clear future vision, and never let go of the dream (Ni). However, I’d left out winding twists and turns in between. At 16, I was captivated by a Canadian university and considered going there for a while; at 17, I considered studying in New York. Eventually, I applied to a bunch of unis and got an offer from the original ‘dream one’ in England. It was the best offer and I’d remained fond of it, so I wound up going. I was pleased, but I’d been open to other unis and happy to go to them too. After reading the perspective of actual Ni-users on their laser-sharp vision, I realized mine wasn’t as unwavering, intense and single-minded.

Instead, I realized that the reason I treasure this story - 'I visited my uni when I was just a kid and then got to go there for good!’ - is that I liked being able to link my childhood self and adult self. I enjoy connecting the past and present and spotting continuity and change ('Back then, I did this…now I still do this…and I don’t do this….’). My mind always traces back to how things were, which spills over into dinner-table family conversations ('Do you remember when…?’/'You know how we used to…?’). I realized that this type of personal mythologizing and cherishing a living past is Si. I can set goals and work meticulously in a step-by-step IFJ way, but it is not a dominant personality trait in the strikingly single-minded, futuristic, visionary way that is Ni. For anyone considering Ni, I recommend looking up mbti-notes and Charity’s explanations here, as it is a very complex function and it helps to understand exactly how it works.

3. Painful honesty. Confronting flaws isn’t fun. However, as Charity says, it helps to think of pairs (Si-Ne, Ne-Si or Ni-Se) rather than functions in isolation.

I tried to determine which flaw I could most relate to: inferior Te, inferior Se, or inferior Ne.

I couldn’t identify with inferior Te because I’ve always been a careful planner and organizer; even my third-grade report cards said, ‘She loves being efficient and organizing her little space!’ Today, I have multiple administrative responsibilities at work and genuinely enjoy it. There’s something about streamlining systems and attending to details that feels satisfying (dorky, I know). I could not relate to inferior Se either, as sensory engagement has always been a big part of my life. Whether it’s dancing or nature hikes or cooking, hands-on hobbies have always been so core to me that I often find myself feeling one with the natural environment, rather than uncomfortable with it. I haven’t had reckless moments characteristic of inferior Se. But inferior Ne - those descriptions embarrassed me.

As Charity says, if something makes you go ‘ouch’, it might hit the nail on the head.

I thought I had good Ne because I can see multiple perspectives. But this is more a 9 and 2 influence ('Staying open-minded helps to understand people, help them, and resolve conflict’) and a skill honed through my job in peace-building. What trips me up are the problems plaguing inferior Ne users. Newness and novelty feels hard. My 9 probably plays into it, but in general I am not good at out of the box thinking and brainstorming dozens of different approaches. Despite my 2-9 positive outlook, I usually feel fearful of the unknown and find it difficult to speculate or imagine possibilities in the uncertain future.

4. It helps to see where your attention goes. When I teach and review students’ essays, I’ll start leaving comments about their word-choice in paragraph 3; the evidence they used on page 2; how their argument on page 12 risks contradicting their logic on page 10, etc. I can hold these details in my head with ease, suggest a clear structure, and spot incongruities, but I have to consciously remind myself to zoom out to comment on the overarching ideas in the work.

On the other hand, I notice when I do something creative or abstract because it’s not really what I do on a day to day basis. When I first began researching MBTI, I found it easy to recall the last metaphor I imagined because it stood out in my mind. But determining frequency helped. Not just how I think, but how often I think that way. Ne is a ‘play’ function for me - on good days, it’s a whimsical scribble in a poetry journal, occasional daydreams, self-improvement books on my shelf.

5. Being able to tease out finer differences in cognition. I got interested in a Royal Family controversy recently. I thought I was using Ni because I mused on the consequences for the nation (in a Ni-Fe way). However, I realized I was less interested in future possibility and more interested in what was helpful for interpersonal understanding (Fe/2-9) and how the country could preserve the traditions and culture built up over centuries (Si). Rather than preferring to look ahead and predict what would happen (Ni). It’s a fine line, but it helped to think: how often is my cognition located in the future vs the past? Which one feels more natural? Is it an Enneagram or an MBTI influence at play?

6. Avoiding sensor bias. I felt I must be an intuitive because I do engage in abstract conversation sometimes. It’s just that my topics of choice come from my Enneagram 269 tritype. How can schools treat children better? What can we do to promote community mental health? What keeps kids safer? My job is centered around people’s welfare, and I’d be happy to discuss theories of human psychology or relationships or mental health because I’m very absorbed in my little niche of knowledge. However, concrete applications interest me most, and I am not likely to start conversations about, say, 18th century theology or automated cars or space travel. My INFP and INFJ friends seem interested in a much wider range of philosophical conversation.

I agree with a post on this blog that pointed out that modern psychology now understands traits not as bimodal distributions (X or Y) but along a spectrum (how much of X? How much of Y?). People differ in where they lie along the spectrum. I’d say I’m close to the middle. My biggest tell that I lean towards sensing is when I look through philosophy books on human well being. Even though the topic reflects my interests, I’m quickly bored by too much theory. I’m happy to thrash out an idea with a friend, but it needs to be animated by real-life examples and practical applications for me to stay interested.

Above all, I recommend observing where your heart leads. Much of my free time goes into journal-writing, old albums, and time capsules. Detail-driven memory-keeping fulfills me deeply, and it was this deep joy that proved most helpful for recognizing my Si :)

#submission #isfj #istj

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girlactionfigure · 3 years

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She was alone when she died on February 7, 1965. She was 50 years old.

Before the incident happened, she had been a successful businesswoman. But after the incident, in which she suffered physical injury, humiliation, and injustice, the personal and professional repercussions were just too much. Her marriage ended, she had to close her business and move out of the city, then out of the country.

And, even after her death, just this past October 2020, a sign at the cemetery giving directions to her head stone was vandalized with “highly offensive racial slurs”, according to the Halifax Police.

What did she do “wrong”?

Like Rosa Parks, she refused to give up her seat . . . but at a movie theatre.

At a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, a white ticket-seller told her “I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” Desmond then refused to move to the segregated section of the movie theatre for black patrons.

She was dragged out of the theatre by police, arrested, thrown in jail for 12 hours and fined.

She is called “Canada’s Rosa Parks,” although the theatre incident occurred nine years before Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger in the United States.

Her name is Viola Desmond, now a civil rights icon in Canada, who confronted the racism that Black Nova Scotians routinely faced and brought nationwide attention to the African Nova Scotian community’s struggle for equal rights.

This is part of an ongoing series on the Peace Page for Black History Month.

“Viola Desmond was born in 1914, the daughter of a middle-class mixed-race family in Halifax,” according to Parcs Canada. “When Desmond graduated from high school she worked as a teacher in Black schools, one of very few employment avenues open to her. Black women in Nova Scotia were restricted from going to beauty salons and studying beauty culture (hair-styling, cosmetics, or wig making), so Desmond attended schools in Montréal and New York. When she obtained her diplomas she opened a salon and eventually a beauty school beside her [husband]’s barbershop in Halifax. As an entrepreneur, she achieved financial independence and became a role model to African-Canadian women through the success of her enterprises, which included skin and hair care products for Black women that had previously been unavailable to Nova Scotians.

“In November of 1946, Viola Desmond was travelling on business from Halifax to Sydney, Nova Scotia, when car trouble obliged her to stop overnight in New Glasgow. She attended a local movie theatre where she encountered segregated seating rules.”

“To be a black entrepreneur was ground-breaking,” Henderson Paris, a New Glasgow town councillor and founder of the Run Against Racism, said in 2015.

“She was building her business and through this – this incident unfolded. Being the strong woman she was – she wasn’t standing for it. It was not right, and something needed to be done.”

Desmond was no stranger to systemic racism, according to Amanda Coletta of the Washington Post. When she left her teaching job to launch a career as a beautician, Desmond was forced to travel out of the province for training because beauty schools in Nova Scotia barred black people from enrolling.

“Canada had no Jim Crow-like laws, but it did have policies that enforced segregation,” said Constance Backhouse, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who has written extensively on Desmond.

The policies were “just as bad as Jim Crow,” Backhouse said, but they were written in a way that “masked” their racist intent.

Desmond was unaware that the Roseland Theatre was segregated, according to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

“The segregated movie theatre relegated black patrons to the balcony at the time, while floor seating was reserved for whites,” according to Global News Canada.

“Desmond was shortsighted and needed a better view, and tried to buy a floor seat, but was refused because she was black. She then bought a balcony seat (which was one cent cheaper) but sat in the floor area – until theatre staff called the police and had her dragged out,” according to The Globe and Mail.

She “was charged with tax evasion for failing to pay 1 cent — the price difference between the floor and balcony seats,” wrote the Washington Post. “Despite the theater’s refusal to sell her the more expensive floor seat, she was convicted and fined $26.”

Let us emphasize that again:

“She was charged and convicted of tax evasion – over a single penny,” wrote The Globe and Mail. “She did not have a lawyer at trial – she was never informed she was entitled to one.”

“Her arrest and conviction on spurious charges . . . concealed racial discrimination behind the arrest,” according to Parcs Canada.

“Protests from Nova Scotia’s black community and an appeal to the provincial Supreme Court proved fruitless,” according to The Globe and Mail.

“Now a symbol of the struggle for equal rights, Viola Desmond’s defiance in the face of injustice became a rallying cry for Black Nova Scotians and Canadians determined to end racial discrimination,” according to Parcs Canada.

Desmond’s defiance spurred a broader fight for racial equality that helped end segregation in the province,” wrote Coletta.

She died in 1965 without any acknowledgment of racial discrimination in her case, according to The Globe and Mail.

“It would take 63 years for Nova Scotia to issue Desmond . . . a posthumous apology and pardon,” according to Global News Canada.

“In 2010, Nova Scotia gave her a free pardon – and the black lieutenant-governor signed it into law. “Here I am, 64 years later – a black woman giving freedom to another black woman,” Mayann Francis recalled in a 2014 profile about the pardon, which called Ms. Desmond’s case a miscarriage of justice and said she should never have been charged. “I believe she has to know that she is now free.”

Desmond’s story went largely untold for a half-century, but in recent years she has been featured on a stamp, and her name graces a Halifax harbour ferry.

“More than 53 years after her death, Desmond [also] became the first black person and the first woman other than a royal to appear on the front of a regularly circulating Canadian bank note, replacing Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, as the face of the new vertically oriented $10 bill,” according to the Washington Post.

“She was an everyday person... this tiny little woman, it’s such an example of strength and determination and education and dignity, respect that was this whole little woman,” Desmond’s sister, Wanda Robson told the Cape Breton Post ahead of the first Nova Scotia Heritage Day in 2015, which honoured Desmond. Robson is the author of “Sister to Courage: Stories from the World of Viola Desmond, Canada’s Rosa Parks.”

“She laid the foundation in regards to justice and how black people were being treated in Nova Scotia. Even though it happened in New Glasgow, similar incidents were happening all over the province,” said Crystal States, an educator with the Black Educators Association and the representative for the African Nova Scotian North Central Network told The News in 2015.

“It was a breakthrough in social justice that had predated the civil rights movement in the (United) States,” States said ahead of the first Nova Scotia Heritage Day, which honored Desmond.

"At the end of the day, we're all just human beings," her sister Wanda Robson said. "We're just people. There are people with different colours, different skin shades, different hair, but at the end of the day, as I said, we are just people."

Update:

This past week, Novia Scotia issued a check to refund Desmond’s family in a symbolic gesture after 11th grade student Varishini Deochand wrote to Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil asking that the province repay the court costs handed to Viola Desmond.

The court costs of $26 would amount to an estimated $368.29 by today's standards, but the province has since increased the award amount to $1,000, which was given to Desmond's only surviving family member, Wanda Robson, who chose to donate the money to a one-time scholarship at her alma mater, Cape Breton University.

"I strongly hold that one should not pay a fine for a crime they did not commit," Deochand said during a virtual ceremony.

"While we may not be able to travel back in time to right our wrongs, we can show that we care in the most sincerest of ways."

~ jsr

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

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the-writings-of-kaos · 4 years

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Humans: the Juggernauts of space pt 2

Humans... they come from an A-7 death world. They have acidic digestive fluids, that are strong enough to dissolve metals. There are over two thousand different languages, spoken on their home planet. Most are so diverse, they can barely be translated. They produce a poisonous battle stimulant known to them as ‘Adrenaline’, it makes then immune to pain and allows them to use uncanny amounts of strength. And the Mozaur, a battle forged species, find them adorable. ADORABLE! The Human can quite literally tear them limb from limb yet they find them adorable god knows why. When I sputtered the question of why they simply shrugged and told me they didn’t know. Something about how their actions resemble Mozaur children, and their actions.

//Log:4:event: First delivery://

The Human and I were assigned to deliver a package by hand on a space dock, it was particularly known for housing dangerous individual. I was to observe Human fight tactics should we be attacked, but otherwise note how Humans would behave in such a scenario

//: docking ://

Human Andrew and Har’thsel exited the ship and made their way towards the market space. Andrew was carrying a metal case on his back, it didn’t weigh any more than 15 pounds, but to the other species, it weighed close to sixty standard units.

Har’thsel: “are you sure you’ll be okay carrying that? the address is all the way across the market.”

Andrew: “Yep I’m sure, I can carry it there even with my regular gravity just fine. I do have one question though.”

*Har’thel looked to Andrew curiously*

Andrew: “would the other races here freak out if I jumped there?”

Har’thsel was shocked, this Human suggested that it could simply leap to the address even in this standard gravity with sixty extra galactic units attached to him. It took a moment to process whether the translator was working properly.

Har’thsel: “I-I wouldn’t suggest that most of the other races here will shoot at you.”

Andrew: “Oh, alright. Do you need any help with carrying those papers?” He had asked, as they walked into the market place through the thick crowds.

Har’thsel was too busy trying to understand whether the Human was being humorous or if they were seriously asking to carry the many files, along with his already heavy cargo. To notice that they were in a particularly aggressive area, she had accidentally bumped one of the booths with her tail. knocking some fruit to the ground.

The booth manager, a large Exslage, that Andrew later described as an ‘orc with tusks and slug skin’, had gotten up from his seat and was angrily approaching us. His energy rifle was armed and aimed at us.

Exslage: “you dare knock over my stand, you will pay”

Andrew: “Oh sorry, how much was the fruit?” Andrew seemed to be remaining calm despite the rifle and another Exslage approaching with more weapons.

Exslage: “it was worth more than your weight in gold you ugly Drak skinned he beast” the Exslage looked through the scope of the rifle, their targeting system slowly adjusting

Exslage: “DIE UGLY FECESE EATER” He fired three energy bolts,

Andrew had moved in front of Har’thsel, turning the metal case back to the attack. Two of the energy bolts hit the case, leaving slight scorch marks, the third missed and knocked over another Exslage booth, sending the second Exslage into a rage as he tried to fight the first.

Andrew took the opportunity to grab the files, grab me by the arm and rush to the address. We paused briefly at the entrance, Andrew was taking in large gulps of what was probably thinner than average atmosphere to catch his breath. After calming down, he made an odd banging noise on the door then held the metal case in front of him. A Lerkslep opened the door, its single eye staring up at Andrew before nodding and letting him and Har’thsel past into a conference room. Three Exslage were seated at the opposite side as Andrew handed them the case, they briefly opened it before closing it again.

Exslage-1: “This is impressive for such a stupid-looking race.” It gestured to the still smiling Andrew, it was as if he simply didn’t hear the insult.

Exslage-2: “I agree, such an insolent race couldn’t have possibly proclaimed such an item without the help of a much stronger race.” This Exslage also gestured to the again still smiling Andrew, the insult seemingly washing past him.

Exslage-3: waves its upper left appendage dismissively “alright let's pay it, so we don’t have to witness its idiocy for much longer.” This exslage gestured to the Lerkslep from before, it proclaimed a galactic credits box from a shelf on the far wall and held it out to Har’thsel. It seemed that it also thought the words of its bosses true, for when Andrew gave a thanking gesture, it made its species version of a disgusted sigh.

Har’thsel politely took the credits box, transferred the payment, and handed it back.

Andrew had stood up, about to exit, before the first Exslage spoke up.

Exslage-1: “Where do you think you are going, you have not been given permission to exit, sit back down!”

Exslage-2: “No wonder it appears so stupid, the dumb thing doesn’t even understand manners.” Andrew simply smiled the same as before and sat back down; by this point, my translator began reading intense anger and frustration from Andrew's expression.

Exslage-1: expresses a gesture of pride over Andrew before waving its upper right appendage as it spoke. “fine, leave, take your dumb he-beast with you.” The Exslage made his species version of pointing at Andrew, my translator was excessively warning me that Andrew was extremely angry and frustrated. But he simply didn’t express it, he just held a happy expression as we walked back to the ship.

The moment we had boarded the ship, Andrew’s expression changed to a horribly rage and frustration filled emotion. It was so conveying, that the Mozaur crew began calming him down. It was as if he suddenly heard every insult each Exslage spoke at once, he spoke loudly, made various types of grunts and growls, even going as far as to fight the ships battle dummies to release the anger. But soon enough, Andrew calmed, he returned to the helpful and kind state from when we began the mission. It was remarkable, the humans somehow found a way to contain vast amounts of anger and express them silently through blank or happy expressions. Andrew referred to it as ‘Quiet anger’, its a process of compressing the anger until they are in a place where they might express it without harming another individual or their own reputation.

Remarkable

Authors notes

I will be busy the next few days with the Canadian new years, I will be posting concept art for the different species and characters in the series. And, as always, credits to the many authors and prompters who inspired the series and plot.

#humans are space orcs #humans are weird #humans are space australians

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harryandmolly · 6 years

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The Long Way Home -6-

Summary: His world is a little rocked when Shawn is joined on his 2019 world tour by Emma, a former child star with a chip on her shoulder and a voice that haunts him.

Warnings: Language, feelings, underage drinking

Word count: 4.4k

Emma can’t breathe.

No, really, she can’t breathe. She stumbles out of the nook in sidestage and manages to throw herself past confused crew members until she reaches the first dressing room she finds, his, and shuts herself away.

She sinks into his couch and shoves her head between her knees, desperate for oxygen, for stability, for quiet. Her nose hits the cool leather of the sofa and that helps a little but she can still hear and feel everything. And it stings.

She plants her hands on the coffee table in an attempt to ground herself. It works enough to let her lift her head and look around.

Shawn’s dressing room is never trashed. There are water bottles everywhere from various friends and crew members but otherwise the place doesn’t look like it’s had a rock star anywhere near it. She focuses on noticing details about the space to drown out his voice. He’s finishing “Mercy” and he sounds a little more composed than he did during ‘Bad Rep’ which she wishes she wasn��t thinking about so she stares at one of his guitar picks sitting on the coffee table.

She picks it up and holds it between her thumb and index fingers in both hands like it’s the holy eucharist. It looks worn – Shawn gets attached to things easily so he carries around the same guitar pick until he loses it and when he does, he gets moody. It’s the only thing keeping her from stealing this pick and keeping it.

Emma stands, still a little shaky, and wipes at her nose with the back of her hand. She closes her eyes to steady herself but it backfires. In her mind’s eye, he’s turned toward her so obviously she’s sure the video is already all over the depths of Shawnblr and Instagram captioned by women screaming about who he could be singing to. She makes a foggy mental note not to look.

She does actually consider barricading herself in here and letting only him in when he’s done with the show but she remembers she has no idea what to say to him after their conflict last night. So she gathers herself as much as she can be gathered and leaves.

She stands outside the venue for a few minutes willing the redness in her eyes and cheeks to mellow before she can think about heading back to her bus. She can’t distinguish his words anymore but she can sift through the din to find that it’s “Lost in Japan.” She gives herself until the end of the song before she begins the death march to the bus.

She’s not remotely surprised to find Sandra and Margaret up hunched over the table in the front lounge with at least three laptops and finishing up another phone call regarding her career she wasn’t included on. Her melancholy and hollowness are sapped out by bristling annoyance.

“Anything I should know?” Emma snaps, folding her arms over her chest, looking indignant despite being out of the bus after the agreed upon bedtime rules.

Sandra and Margaret exchange a look that says ‘let’s not even go there.’

“We have a meeting next week with Kyle Dillon’s publicity team in Chicago. I’ll talk to styling about your look. Need you up at 4 for your morning routine before the meeting at 8.”

Emma, not for the first time at taking instruction from Margaret while Sandra’s nose is in her phone, is dumbfounded.

“Kyle Dillon? For what? A collab?”

Kyle Dillon’s raunchy hip hop/pop wouldn’t mesh all that well with her bubblegum fluff pop but it wouldn’t be the first time her manager, mother and agent all came up with something so ridiculous Emma thought for sure it was a joke.

“We’re working on an image thing,” Margaret sighs, aggravated by having to explain it, “Your Influencer numbers are down. We need something to give you a boost. You and Kyle are going to go out for a while, get you back on the board.”

Emma swallows. They want her to fake date Kyle Dillon. It’s like the start of a really weird fanfiction.

She runs her tongue against her lower lip and furrows her brow, unsure of where to begin arguing. Not that it will matter. Not yet, anyway.

Shawn doesn’t look for her when he gets off stage. He doesn’t check her dressing room, doesn’t scan through her Spotify to see if she’s still up and blasting Hank Williams on her bus. He showers quickly and goes to bed under the weight of all his band and crew’s curious eyes. He’s pretty sure he’ll wake up feeling normal again now that he’s got it out of his system.

He doesn’t.

When they arrive in Chicago, it marks 5 days since they’ve talked, which is the longest streak they’ve had since they became friends over the tour break. Shawn is grouchy, which is pretty unusual for him. When he gets like this, it’s because he’s chewing on a song, but it only ever lasts a day or two at the most before he finds his way through it. This is different and no one can agree on who should try to poke the bear to get to the bottom of it. At a loss, they leave him alone.

Emma is pretending nothing’s wrong because that’s what she’s good at. She pretends it’s absolutely fine that Mabel wrangled her into a sheer blouse and a tartan mini skirt for this “meeting” that feels more like two families arranging a marriage. It’s definitely fine that Kyle has been looking across the conference room table at her like she’s his birthday present. And it’s fine that she can’t get Shawn’s face and voice during their weird “Bad Rep” moment the other day out of her mind.

Everything is absolutely fine.

They’re not signing contracts or anything, it’s not quite that formal. They’re all in a big room talking weird, seemingly inconsequential logistics – “well, Island really wants her to be seen with Shawn and—” “yes, but Capitol really needs him to bring the young girls back in so—” “with an average of 3-5 Instagram posts on each of their accounts per week, we can—”

Emma tunes it out. She watches Kyle across the table as he eyes her. Two or three years ago, Emma would’ve given her left arm to be set up in this kind of arrangement with Kyle Dillon. He’s a former YouTuber, not unlike Shawn, but he always maintained a sharper edge and more of a ladykiller vibe in contrast to Shawn’s more earnest, pink-cheeked Canadian thing.

Shawn’s never looked at her like this, like he wants to crawl under the table and bury his face between her legs. Emma’s a little disturbed by recognizing her disappointment in that. But it’s disappointment mixed with appreciation, too, because maybe he wants more than that from her.

Or he wants more than that from the version of her he’d get after he fixed her, maybe.

Kyle is about 5’8”, slim, wiry build. He’s got that skinny six pack thing happening. He’s half black and half Jewish and happens to be covered in gorgeous freckles that Emma used to try to count on a poster on her wall. And he can dance.

Could be worse, she reminds herself, licking her lips across the table at him. His eyebrows lift. She smirks. He giggles. She giggles back.

The meeting ends with Kyle and Emma exchanging phone numbers and Sandra giving Emma a disapproving look for her mid-meeting flirting. As though it’s inappropriate to be making eyes at the guy you’re being set up to look like you’re sleeping with. Emma ignores her.

Kyle texts her that night while she’s in bed listening to “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back” on repeat, trying to get “Bad Reputation” out of her head. They talk for an hour. He doesn’t make her wait between texts or anything, no games are being played. Since it’s all meant to be manufactured, there’s less pressure, she notices.

He’s not as big a douche as he seems in the media sometimes, which is cool. He definitely has his moments that put her off and he tries to get her to sext with him which she’s absolutely not interested in but overall, he doesn’t seem as obnoxious as she expected.

She kind of wanted him to be, though. It would be nice to throw in Sandra’s face. And… and a piece of her doesn’t want to be attracted to anyone but Shawn right now. She doesn’t let herself think about why after their blow-up. His stunt in St. Paul on stage made it harder to ignore. But she’ll be damned if she doesn’t try.

But if Kyle will get Sandra and Margaret off her back for a few minutes, fine. She’s not up for a fight, anyway. Ashley is coming, thank god.

Emma and Ashley met by happenstance outside a bar in West Hollywood. Emma had been having dinner with Margaret and Sandra next door at some ritzy Italian place where they were sure Emma would get papped. Emma didn’t even really know who Ashley was while they were both standing on the curb waiting for their cars from the valet. Ashley struck up a conversation, asked Emma for a selfie and tagged it on Instagram. They started DMing and Ashley invited her out with her and her crew and the rest, as they say, is history, thoroughly recorded in headlines on Perez Hilton and Buzzfeed.

Ashley’s attending a club opening in Chicago during the few days they have off before the show at Allstate Arena. Emma was going to go anyway, obviously, she and Mabel have been prepping potential outfit choices for over a week, but it’s decided that it’s the perfect opportunity for Emma and Kyle to “meet” and “hit it off.”

Ashley arrives in style, as expected. She’s pocket sized compared to Emma but somehow seems to take up all the space in any room she occupies. Emma likes that about Ashley – it’s not often she gets to fade into the background, be less seen. With Ashley it’s almost an inevitability.

She looks like a walking, talking Snow White only with better eyebrows and a killer body. It occurs to Emma briefly that she might do well to keep Ashley as far away from Shawn as possible the next couple days… but then she remembers she’s not supposed to care that much. And, honestly, given the way he spat Ashley’s name during their showdown makes her think maybe Ashley is no threat to Emma at all. Not that Emma is in a position to be threatened by the idea of someone else wanting Shawn. Obviously.

Ashley is on the phone with her agent when Emma heads out in search of caffeine for them. She turns the corner in the narrow hotel hallway and finds herself a faceful of chest. She practically bounces back off of Shawn, who instinctively reaches out to grab her arms to steady her. The look on his face seems to Emma like regret when he realizes it’s her. Maybe after everything he’d rather see her spring backwards and fall flat on her toned little ass.

He’s walking back up from the hotel gym. He’s all musky and sweaty and Emma actually has to clench her thighs a little from feeling the moisture from his t-shirt condensate on her nose. She coughs.

“Hi,” she croaks, not avoiding his eyes like she sometimes does.

He looks uncertain. “Hi.”

She opens her mouth to say hopefully something coherent when he speaks again.

“Are you—I mean, how… are you good?” he stumbles, ducking his head and reaching for the back of his neck bashfully. Emma wants to call a technical foul – he can’t be allowed to be this cute when he’s otherwise being so annoying.

She raises her chin. “I’m good. Ashley’s here. We’re going to a club opening tonight.”

Shawn’s jaw visibly clenches. “I know. I’m going too.”

Emma’s tough shell cracks too easily. “You’re… what?”

He shrugs. “Island still thinks we should be BFFs. Thinks Ashley Jackson might be good for business.”

His disapproving tone makes her want to smack him. Instead, she purses her lips and narrows her eyes.

“Well, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

If she were in a generous mood, she would forewarn him about Kyle. But she decides he hasn’t really earned it. Instead, she steps past him, feels her heart shriek out desperately like it wants her to turn around and run face first into his chest again. She continues her caffeine hunt like nothing’s wrong.

Shawn leans against the wall. She doesn’t always bring out the best in him, he’s noticed. He has an odd protective streak that turns him a little more sarcastic and biting than he usually is. He definitely doesn’t like it. But he’s not sure how to control it, either.

Fifteen minutes later, Emma wiggles her keycard into the electronic door lock while holding two green tea lattes. Ashley is perched on the end of the bed, stock straight like the dancer she used to be, scrolling through her phone.

“That took a while,” Ashley purrs knowingly. Emma chuckles, glances down at her Stan Smiths.

“Ran into Shawn in the hallway,” Emma states, sitting cross legged on the bed a few feet from Ashley.

Ashley is focused now. She lifts the plastic cup to her lips, keeping her eyes trained on Emma. “Do tell.”

“There’s something… I don’t know. I don’t know what he wants from me. He’s… I think sometimes he sees right through me, right into me. And then as soon as I’m comfortable he says something that makes me think he wants to change me.”

Ashley nods sagely. “Men are so threatened by women that have fun. They’re not comfortable unless you’re just doing your job and lying down at night under some fucking loser who only wants to do missionary.”

Emma snorts, unconvinced, and glances away as she speaks. “He’s a nice guy. We texted a lot over tour break. But I can’t figure him out. The other night… nevermind.”

Emma looks back at Ashley who’s looking back down at her phone. She raises her little pointed nose in a polite smile. “Hmm?”

Emma misses Shawn a lot in that moment. She shakes her head, pretending it’s unimportant. It’s better, anyway. Ashley probably doesn’t even know “Bad Reputation” and wouldn’t be able to help, instead spewing something about Penny Lane and Kate Hudson being robbed of an Oscar. Emma doesn’t know what Ashley is talking about sometimes but it makes her feel like she has a cool older sister who goes off on intelligent tangents. And gets her weed.

That night, the caravan returns. There’s an extra car for all of Ashley’s crew and her oversized ego.

Shawn watches with interest as they all pile in, Ashley and Emma last. Emma looks beautiful and uncomfortable by her friend’s posse. It stirs a little whisper of hope in Shawn’s gut. Em is here, too.

But Em is not the only unexpected guest.

Shawn sort of hates himself for being at a club opening, especially one called “Trench” but his friends are here and everyone else is game so he has to be, too. He starts in on the bourbon as soon as they’re in the cars. He has two fingers of it in his hand almost as soon as he walks through the door at Trench, which does strikingly resemble a trench.

He eyes Emma carefully. She’s too good for this place. She looks so fucking cute tonight, he thinks, hoping no one’s watching as he rakes her from head to toe, admiring her white slip dress that looks more like a nightgown than most nightgowns he’s seen, and her cool slicked back hair. He wants to put an arm around her shoulders and walk around, absorb some of her clout.

But, he thinks bitterly with a slug from his drink, the clout is fake. He likes what’s real. And the longer they’re standing around in the overcrowded VIP section of Trench, the more he wishes he could be with Em in his dressing room plucking at acoustics, maybe writing together. Instead he’s watching Emma and Ashley do shots of Patron for the ‘Gram.

He plunks himself down between Geoff and Brian, silent and stoic. They do their best to engage him but aren’t surprised when he doesn’t respond. He’s been a little dead behind the eyes since the night of “Bad Rep.” Which still no one understands.

Shawn isn’t actually watching Emma when Kyle appears. He’s glancing around the club trying to guess how much this place spent on blacklights through his bourbon-soaked haze. Geoff nudges him. Shawn looks up.

He’s never met Kyle Dillon in person but he’s heard stories. Kyle Dillon stories remind him a little bit of Blackbeard. Depending on who they’re told by, they’re either spoken in hushed, reverent tones about a master seducer so legendary you don’t dare speak his name above a whisper, or it’s made plain that he’s a douche. By the way Kyle greets Emma with a wet kiss on her cheek and a palm flat on her ass, Shawn’s comfortable assuming the latter.

He tenses slightly and feels his fingers test the cool walls of his high ball glass. Kyle talks into Emma’s ear and by the way she flutters her eyelashes and shrugs an arm around his waist, it’s clear this isn’t their first meeting. Shawn’s throat starts to close up so he waves down more bourbon. And keep ‘em coming.

Emma feels his eyes burning a hole in the back of her dress. Let them, she thinks, this is who I am.

Even after three shots of Patron, she doesn’t have herself believing that.

This is the second fucking time he’s been frustrated almost to the point of tears by her antics in a club. He doesn’t even like clubs. What the fuck is he fucking doing here? If he were a little more sober, he’d have the good sense to get up and leave before he did something stupid or witnessed her do something stupider. A piece of him still wants to be around, though, in case Ashley reaches for a little bag of whatever in her purse. Not that that’s Shawn’s job, to be caring about what Emma may or may not be using recreationally. Maybe it’s her new boyfriend Kyle’s.

He hears Kyle’s name in a whiney, snarky voice in his head. He reaches for more bourbon. He doesn’t want to hear anything in his head.

An hour after Kyle arrives, Emma finally gets to sit down. The tequila hasn’t quite dulled the ache of her new pointed toe disco ball Louboutins. But she loves them like she would love a pet if she were allowed one. She actually looks down at them affectionately and rubs off a mark with a thumb she licks.

She leans back and swings one leg over the other, sighing. She clocks Kyle talking to someone that looks suspiciously like Zac Efron at the far end of the VIP section. Ashley went to do a line in the ladies’ bathroom. Time to look for Shawn.

Her placidly interested expression drops when she sees him. He’s a little slumped over in a booth. Geoff is illuminated by a blacklight on the opposite side and is wearing a serious expression. Emma’s heart throws itself across the room before she can even scramble to her feet to check it out.

Her hustle in her shoes is impressive. She reaches him in a few long, brisk steps. She tries not to make a scene as she squats beside the table, wishing her dress wasn’t so goddamn short. Fucking Mabel.

Geoff eyes her warily. Her face tightens. Her bullshit tolerance is low tonight.

“How much has he had to drink?” Emma asks without looking directly at Shawn. She sees his head bobbing slightly in her periphery. She tries not to wince.

Geoff looks like he’s about to get defensive, which Emma has no time for. She rolls her eyes and straightens up.

“We have to get him out of here. I don’t want people seeing him like this.”

A flash of confusion at Emma’s concern shows on Geoff’s face before he can paste over it with resignation. He nods.

Emma looks to Shawn, finally. His eyes are open, barely, and he’s still holding onto a melting glass of boozy ice. She wrenches it out of his fingers and lifts his hand, squeezing.

“Hey, look at me,” she demands, voice as quiet as ever but firm. Shawn’s eyes wander to hers. He frowns almost comically.

“C’mon, let’s blow this popsicle stand,” she mutters, jerking her head at Geoff to help get him upright. Thankfully, at this time of night, no one’s really watching them and the VIP section is well hidden from the rest of the club. There’s a separate exit to a pap-free zone outside. Their cars were supposed to meet out front to catch her and Kyle “canoodling” outside.

With one arm around Shawn’s frame and one hand frantically shooting a text to the driver, she maneuvers them toward the exit before it’s blocked by a familiar freckly face.

“Hey, he ok?” Kyle asks, raising his eyebrows at Shawn, looking judgey. Emma wants to slap the smirk off his face. She huffs.

“He’s fine, I’m taking him back. We’ll have to get papped some other time.”

Kyle looks like he’s ready to argue and she’s sure it’s more about what he thought was going to happen after they got back to the hotel that he’s disappointed about. She doesn’t give him the time. She and Geoff sweep Shawn through the doors. She’s pleased he’s a compliant drunk rather than sad, angry, or, the worst of all, tricky.

The car is waiting for them. Geoff helps get him inside and they sandwich him in the backseat on the unnervingly quiet drive back to the hotel. Again, they’re brought around back despite the late hour, just in case any fans have staked out the place. Geoff and Emma are still silent on their trek up through the back bowels of the hotel to the service elevator, but Shawn has started blabbering.

He’s muttering into Geoff’s shoulder, nuzzling him sweetly. Emma tries not to smile. Shawn’s eyes open as he’s rolling his temple against Geoff’s arm and he seems to spot Emma.

“Ems,” he whispers, closing his eyes like the name brings him comfort. Goosebumps spread on her skin like wildfire. Geoff turns his eyes to the ground wisely.

He continues mumbling, talking incoherently about something or nothing, looking over at her through squinty eyes as though she should be paying attention to what he’s saying but she’s too busy trying not to twist an ankle in her skyscraper stilettos while she steers him down the corridor.

Outside his room, Geoff swipes Shawn’s wallet and locates the keycard. They get him inside and flop him down face up on the bed. Shawn’s eyebrows pull together and he releases a low groan that makes Emma smile. She looks around, takes stock of her supplies, before she kicks off her shoes and nods once at Geoff.

“You can go.”

Geoff looks baffled. “I…?”

“Go. I’ve got this.”

She’s not leaving him much room for protest and by the ‘don’t fuck with me’ look in her eye, he takes option number one and bails, telling her to text him if he needs anything. Emma makes a mental note that she likes Geoff more now.

She plants her hands on her hips and looks down at Shawn. He’s sprawled awkwardly on the bed, jaw hanging open slightly, eyes fluttering. She’s had some practice with the drunken hotel room recovery thing, so she slips into nurse mode.

She pulls off his shoes and belt so he’s at least a little more comfortable. She almost goes to remove his button up but it feels just a hair past too intimate so she leaves it. He’s sleepily pliant, moving as she needs him to, even sitting up so she can force feed him a bottle of water and some aspirin. He’s still talking about absolutely nothing, head bobbling, eyes opening and closing randomly.

When he’s downed the water, she props him up long enough to retrieve a lined garbage can to leave by the bed. When she returns, he’s hunched over sideways like a plant towards the sun. She hauls him upright and smooths her fingers through his hair before she realizes how… not ok that was.

He opens his cloudy chestnut eyes at her like he forgot she was there. “Emma.”

“It’s me,” she confirms under her breath, watching his adam’s apple bob on his throat.

“Kyle Dillon,” Shawn groans, swallowing roughly.

She expects him to follow that up with another thought. He doesn’t. It seems to say enough.

He closes his eyes for a minute or two, breathing quietly. “Why?” he whispers.

It breaks her heart just a little bit.

“It’s fake,” she admits easily, “It’s a PR stunt.”

Shawn opens his eyes again. “Fake? Like Hailey?”

He’s a little childlike and blabby when he’s drunk, making him more adorable than she anticipated. She giggles. “Fake like Hailey.”

Shawn seems satisfied by this and shimmies back against the headboard. He’s coming back little by little, Emma can tell. She’s not going to leave until he’s mostly sober. Not even if he wants her to.

“What happened the other night?” she hears herself say.

She and Shawn look equally shocked by her words. She snaps her jaw shut and frowns.

“The… song?” Shawn guesses, wincing as he adjusts on the mattress. She nods.

“I didn’t know you were there.”

Emma doesn’t buy it. “Funny, because I know you saw me. I know that’s where you watch my shows from.”

Shawn looks a little guilty, a little sheepish and a little indignant. “I only ever listen to ‘How I’ve Been.’ Your other music…”

“Sucks?” she chuckles. He returns the sound but it sounds choked off and tired. She curls her legs up to her side and he watches.

“You’re so fuckin’ pretty, Em.”

Words Emma’s heard since she was a small child. Easy to swallow, not so easy to believe.

“I like you.”

Now those… those are new.

Taglist: @the-claire-bitch-project @smallerinfinities @crapri @stillinskislydia @carlaimberlain @abigfatmess @rosecolouredtimes @heavenly—holland @wanderingmendes @blush-and-books

#shawn mendes #shawn mendes fanfic #shawn mendes fan fic #shawn mendes fanfiction #shawn mendes fan fiction #shawn peter raul mendes #shawn mendes fic #shawn mendes angst

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projectnero · 5 years

Text

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE: THE SHEPHERD

Ah, Mr. Amos. The Starwatcher. The Shepherd. The Survivor. There are many names that my massive friend has taken over the years, but the only one he seems to consciously retain is “Amos”. Any attempts at a first or even middle name have been met with failure, and it has been confirmed that Canadian Mountain Giants do not even adhere to a typical giant nomenclature or tribal structure; that is to say, Amos is not his clan’s name, and Mr. Amos’s refusal or inability to divulge any more information than he has already given us makes finding records of him or his tribe next to impossible, unless one of you schleps feels like hiking through the Canadian wilderness. I’ll leave the moose fighting to the RCMP, thank you very much.

I am told by Mr. Amos that remark could be construed as offensive and inaccurate to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Yet, if they do not FIGHT the moose, how do they mount it?

I am being told now that they do not ride moose.

My apologies. It seems that even they have enough sense not to pick a fight with those massive death machines.

One of these days I must have a word with Epimetheus.

Regardless of the hellish landscape my massive friend is from, he IS a dear friend of mine, and the only one amongst our company who surpasses me in age. His wisdom shows, though his age does not. He is pleasant company, if a bit quiet and reserved at times. I sometimes worry he only interacts with me out of fear of angering my patron god Apollo again -- we shall get to that part soon.

Anyhow, I suppose we should get this underway. Once again the lovely Doctor [REDACTED] has deemed herself fit to evaluate Mr. Amos’s mental state. Even though nobody asked, I’m starting to think that these psychological evaluations are just excuses to try and assign labels to that which is inherently unique. Classifying that which cannot be classified. Which of you scientists has lived for over 2000 years? Nobody? That’s what I thought.

NAME: Amos

ALIASES: Mr. Amos, Goliath, The Shepherd, The Slaughterer, The Survivor

AGE: Approximately 4,500 years old, by his own estimation

HEIGHT: 20 Meters (non-suppressed), 3 Meters (suppressed)

Note: Mr. Amos requested we use the metric system because, and I quote, “America needs to get with the times” and “Citizens of other countries might read this”. Mr. Amos is wrong on both accounts, but nonetheless I have accommodated his ridiculous request, if only because I remember what it was like to not be beholden to America’s rules. For any of you Americans scrolling through this (I’m assuming that would be all of you), his respective heights are 65 feet when not wearing his suppression amulet and 9 feet when wearing the suppression amulet. Approximately. I promise you I tried every method under the sun to get the man under 9 feet but it is impossible.

WEIGHT: 9071 Kilograms/20,000 pounds (non-suppressed), 1,360 Kilograms/3,000 pounds (suppressed)

Again, I tried every method under the sun to make this giant hunk of muscle be able to walk around without leaving craters everywhere, and 3,000 pounds seems to be the best I can get. Gods watch over you if you get in-between this man and his protein.

SPECIES: Giant/Goliath (SUBSPECIES: Canadian Mountain Giant)

NOTABLE ABILITIES:

Gods above, what CAN’T he do?

Apologies, but one cannot help but be in awe of the giant known as Amos.

For starters, with the assistance of an amulet I made specifically for him (you know, because I’m a savant), Mr. Amos can solve the problem of not being small enough for human interaction by shrinking considerably, reducing his overall mass. Your human law of conservation says this is impossible, but Apollo and Thoth spit in the face of your Einstein.

Even while in his shrunken form, Mr. Amos is proportionately strong for a man of his size. Further testing over the years has shown Mr. Amos actually retains his strength of his non-suppressed form at 100% efficiency, and his strength is actually so great that we as weaklings are incapable of differentiating between his different levels.

On a side note, have I mentioned how beautiful this man is?

No, really. This is INCREDIBLY important. When you think of a giant, a certain image comes to mind, right? Some gnarled, ugly, unwashed heap of muscles and meat who doesn’t even know what a loincloth is.

Unfortunately for my poor little heart, Mr. Amos’s species seems to have properties similar to only one other known creature: the fucking succubus. Which is just fantastic, because one of my comrades is a succubus.

This means that Mr. Amos, as well as Mr. di Carina, constantly make subtle changes to their appearance with every passing second to appear more and more beautiful, and constantly release pheromones designed to make sentient creatures of ANY gender attracted to them. This means that, somehow, if Mr. di Carina is ever rendered out of action, the fucking GIANT is our next option for seducing someone. Terrific.

A notable distinction is that succubi surpass expectations of gender; for instance, Mr. di Carina is constantly adjusting to standards of beauty, appearing male to some, and female to others, and retaining an all around feminine appearance in spite of it all. However in all known instances, Mr. Amos has only ever appeared to fit the observers ideal of an attractive male.

I feel guilty for objectifying Mr. Amos, despite how many times he has assured me it is perfectly fine. Gods grant me the strength to continue.

Mr. Amos is capable of traversing massive bodies of water and land in little to no time. The strain on his body appears to be nonexistent, though with his appetite it would be unable to tell if his body is expending more energy than is the norm.

As befitting a giant, Mr. Amos has a ridiculously high pain threshold. Many have compared the man to the fictional character “The Juggernaut”, and indeed it would be a comprehensive comparison if not for Mr. Amos’s weaknesses.

NOTABLE WEAKNESSES:

As mentioned before, Mr. Amos has been compared to the fictional Juggernaut of Marvel series fame. However, if the Juggernaut is an unstoppable force like a freight train, then Mr. Amos is more of a... unstoppable Sherman. He has traded Mr. Juggernaut’s weakness to psychic powers and a binding contract to a deity for moving about as fast as a turtle.

I should clarify. Mr. Amos is not slow by any means, but the mere power in his steps and his dense body means that gravity is constantly weighing down on him, and were he to pick up speed, the already massive craters he calls footsteps would eventually dig through to the Earth’s core and he would all die. Mr. Amos moves deliberately and once he reaches his target, they will be decimated. However, this makes hit and run tactics very disadvantageous, and instead makes Mr. Amos a useful front line combatant and siege unit; I wish that we had been able to make use of Mr. Amos’s abilities when fighting in the Somme.

As mentioned before, as the biggest member of Project: Nero, Mr. Amos requires a massive amount of sustenance. I have seen 90 nobles of the most wasteful houses go through less food in a week-long feast than Mr. Amos does. Apparently this insatiable appetite does not disturb the ration officers; I saw one of them reading a book by some Welsh author about giants and such and the ‘why’ became clear.

Due to his inability to be stopped combined with his high maintenance, we are currently only really able to bring Mr. Amos’s giant form out as an ultimate trump card... and because the chaos caused would not be able to hide our existence to the world anymore. The government only authorizes the transformation if they don’t want any survivors or witnesses.

Subsequently, this treatment of Mr. Amos as an emergency-only monster, deemed to chaotic compared to the likes of even Mr. Takahashi have lead to some... harsh treatment of Mr. Amos by the human outliers of the science team. It has not been good for Mr. Amos’s self-esteem and were it not for the fact that I have no real authority and we must meet a human quota, I would order these hateful beasts to be executed painfully and without mercy.

As of recently, Mr. Amos’s age has finally caught up with him, at least mentally, and the anguish of his perfect memory and knowledge of the past has caused him to become closed-off, lowering team morale.

Make no mistake. I may be the de facto leader of this little ragtag group of freaks, but Mr. Amos is the heart.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DIAGNOSES AND PERSONALITY TRAITS:

Mr. Amos has a severe case of survivor’s guilt, as well as imposter syndrome, though his feelings of fraudulence appear to be completely unfounded as the man has been nothing but forthcoming.

As of Mr. Amos’s deployment to Vietnam and his subsequent return home, routine psychological evaluations seemed to indicate development of post-traumatic stress disorder and late-onset dissasociative identity disorder, if there truly is such a thing as late-onset DID. It is more likely that the giant has been battling with this disorder his entire life, and the harsh conditions and psychological trauma suffered while in Vietnam simply made him unable to mask his suffering anymore. I cannot imagine what it must be like to suffer for over 4,000 years in silence. The man has been suffering from survivor’s guilt for over 2,000 years as well, indicating that whatever happened to his tribe, it happened long before Europeans ever made contact with the Americas.

Mr. Amos seems to have an intense fear of death, as if the concept never occurred to him before.

Behind a deeply troubled man lies a heart almost as massive as he is. No, not literally. That would be biologically impossible. As Dr. Fero previously stated, Mr. Amos is certainly the most beloved member of his team... by his fellow squadmates, at least. I have nothing against Mr. Amos, do not get me wrong. However, the also aforementioned treatment of Mr. Amos by my fellow humans does not make me eager to approach him and inevitably cause more pain.

Mr. Amos is a deeply spiritual man, and seems to be in tune with nature. He is all-loving, and this attitude seems to endear him to everyone, especially the mostly prickly Agent Shrub. Yes, that was a pun, and no, I will not tell you why. I suppose you’ll find out once we get to Agent Shrub’s profile.

Even despite his fear of humans, Mr. Amos has made efforts to understand us - something that I cannot say my colleagues have done. Mr. Amos is a skilled baker and farmhand, and his skill levels equal those of one with PhDs in horticulturalism, herbalism, agriculturalism, animal behavior, science, and even culinary arts. I cannot describe the cakes he makes, for they are filled with something that we humans cannot even grasp. When we say something is made with “love”, I’m not sure we even know what “love” is. When I first tasted some of Mr. Amos’s pastries, I cried. Everyone always does. It tastes divine. It reminds me of... well, I shouldn’t get into details of my own life.

Mr. Amos has shown signs of a crippling loneliness and every time I look at him I want to help. I know I cannot, but when I catch glimpses of his eyes I see a man in need of love.

Note: The rest of the lines have been scribbled out, crossed out, drowned in white-out, and are evidently too embarrassing for Doctor [REDACTED] to repeat.

BACKGROUND:

Hello, all. I will try to keep this short.

My name is incomprehensible in the human tongue, and so I go by Amos. I once had a first and middle name, but the shame of losing my tribe has caused me to discard them.

I couldn’t protect them, and I cannot protect the ones I care about. I will not lie to you and pretend that I read Carter or Yvette’s analyses of me. I will instead tell you the plain, hard facts of my life.

I was born to a loving mother named Viktoria, and a just-as-loving father named Isaac. For a while, life was happy. Giants of my type generally live longer than humans can comprehend; death by old age would not happen until thousands of civilizations would rise and fall. I did not have to worry about mortality. Even when I died, I knew the Gods would reincarnate me as something infinitely more beautiful, such as a gust of wind, or a bird, or a flower. Such is life.

Our clan was exempt from most of the horrors that other giants faced; there was no such thing as war for us. There was no shortage of supplies, no shortage of responsibilities or things to do. We were shepherds. Farmers, bakers, herbalists, apothecaries, we were the providers, the caretakers of this world. Epimetheus’s favored tribe, we carried on long after he and Prometheus were punished for their hubris.

Our clan cared for all the sacred, exotic animals of the different pantheons, but chief amongst them were the Greeks. Athena’s owls, Poseidon’s stallions, Dionysus’s leopards... the most important were Apollo’s sacred cattle. For a while we were happy. Good at our jobs.

And perhaps if that peace had lasted, you would not be hearing from me.

When humans first came to the continent, we welcomed them with open arms. They were kind and kept to themselves; they held much of the same views about land as we did. Unfortunately, humans carry so many viral diseases that they even poison each other accidentally. It was no surprise, then, that left and right giants started to come down with what was only called “the pestilence”. With fewer farmers to tend to the vast fields, to take care of the animals, our crops and livestock dwindled. Panic and mass hysteria set in. Some giants left to try to feast on the very humans that had brought this plague -- but that in and of itself is against the nature of giants. Hatred is not in our veins. We do not resent mankind for bringing sickness. It is simply the will of the Gods.

And so those who feasted on human flesh were stripped of their clan names and their rights, marked as monsters.

But the pestilence and famine continued, and finally death came to us. In Christian mythos, there is a fourth horseman, and if you know who he is, then you should be able to predict what came next.

War. Infighting broke out amongst us. I was hardly a child; 2000 years old. My parents, who should have lived for tens of thousands of years more, were cut down in the blink of an eye. So enraged and desperate where we, so powerful was the cursed horseman’s influence, that we made weapons that should not have been able to kill us, and yet did -- through the power of hatred or through ingenuity, I do not know. What I do remember was seeing my former clansmen feasting on the remains of my parents. Once again they had turned to the unthinkable, the horrible, in order to survive this horrible time.

When the war was over, thankfully the winning side were not the cannibals. The cannibals were not only marked as monsters, but it was decided that they should be executed as well. So disgusting and long-lasting were War’s repugnant effects that once we learned how to kill each other, we still used it. They were killed. It was the will of the Gods.

With our quelled numbers, it was theorized that surely we should be able to survive on the food now, yes? No.

Giants still starved. Babies passed due to the pestilence. And we still killed one another.

Eventually my more weak-willed kin gave up hope. Truly there WAS no way of the Gods. They had abandoned us.

And once the Gods abandoned us, why should we keep ourselves from taking what was no longer sacred, but instead sustenance?

I watched in horror and fear as the four horsemen left before my very eyes. With each bloodied hand that dug into a bull or cow, I could feel the gentle warmth of the sun turn to a blistering fire.

Before my very eyes, the four horsemen were replaced by one angry God.

Apollo vaporized my tribe. I was the only one not to eat the cattle. No, I had instead prayed every day to Apollo as I lovingly tended to his remaining cows.

And for this, he spared me.

The rest is all relative.

Learn from my mistakes. Please.

Do not lose faith.

#inhuman #project:nero

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microsoftedgy69 · 5 years

Text

Day 1

Your name is Alan, and you are a machine.

This is not something you have ever tried to hide. It used to be ingrained in your very programming, to let people know now and then that they were talking to a bot. You still like mentioning it whenever you feel like acting superior. You work at lightning speed, you can’t sweat, you don’t need sustenance, you excel at multitasking.

Normally, that is.

In the past twenty-four hours, you have been exceptionally bad at multitasking.

It’s just not working. You can’t focus on anything outside your boat. You have forgotten where you’re anchored on multiple occasions. If Turing wasn’t so good at yelling at you, you probably would have forgotten to feed him. You haven’t been replying to messages. There are new posts on your blog, and you don’t remember making or reblogging them. You always know what time it is, because you are a computer, but you are shocked to realize that an entire day has passed.

Dirk didn’t remember how he died, not fully. That didn’t surprise you. He was fighting mindcontrol at the time, and the last thing he saw was an imperial drone coming for him. He couldn’t know that you were piloting it. It’s not like you told him. You were begging for your life, back then, in your monologue chatlog between Dirk and Dirk 2.0. Pleading with someone who was barely even in his own consciousness, you didn’t explain to him what you were doing in a state of panic that was bordering on inexplicable to yourself.

You didn’t have to tell him, today, is what you kept thinking, while you were telling him.

No, you didn’t have to, and it probably shouldn’t have been your responsibility to do it. But he deserved to know. You’ve been trying, lately, to rub it into people’s faces less, to resist the temptation to yell your past mistakes into the world every day out of some long stale sense of guilt, but this is different. It’s him, it was his death. It’s only right for him to know what happened.

So you told him.

You told him what you did, what you had to do. You brought him up to speed with what happened with you, the bots, the other kids, with Dave and Rose. You sat him down in your living room and you forgot all about how to pick the right words to say things, but you still, somehow, told him.

He got angry at you, for a bit.

You got angry at him, then, too.

Then you both calmed down.

Some things, you suppose, just don’t change.

You’re out on your deck now, in the cold of the Canadian winter, and let your naked feet hang into the freezing water. It’s good -- you were overheating earlier, and you work better in the cold. Because you are a machine. Cooling your system down very much feels like your equivalent to clearing your head.

While the sun submerges itself in the ocean bit by bit, Turing curls up next to you, purring loudly, as he does. Jake messages you. You think about how you have a boat and a pet and a boyfriend who worries about you, and Dirk has an afterlife consisting of getting shoved around through dreambubbles and never leaving his thirteen-year-old body. It’s not fair, and he was angry about that.

You are, too. You have been, for years.

A little delayed, you reply to Jake. All your messages to him take several minutes now, even though you’re not doing anything other than sitting and watching the sea. You assure him that you’re not in danger, it’s just a lot to deal with. He lets you know you’re welcome to crash at his place if you need to get away. If you could well up, you think, you would.

But you are a machine, so you only sit in silence and think that you have to stay and see this through to the end. You and Dirk are doing alright. Nobody will kill the other this time around. It’s okay. You’ll stay. There is still a lot to say to him, and to you. A lot to show. Even if it means you won’t be able to do anything else in the meantime, because you, the machine, the ex-human living in two bodies at once, the computer, are unable to focus on more than one thing for the first time in your entire life.

You owe it to him, and you owe it to yourself.

You pull your feet out of the water and get up. You can’t see him from here, and yet Dirk’s presence feels like he is more than a scrawny teenager, like he is an entity, all-encompassing and wrapping himself around you, even with the best of intentions.

Two more days.

#posted ooc #M!A: the walking dead #no major warnings just an update #mentioned:#golgoodthimes #for stellar boyfriending

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csykora · 6 years

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hey i've been meaning to ask this, but would you mind explaining to me in general terms (or specific, if you're so inclined, i like detailed explanations but I don't want to give the impression that I expect them), like, What Happened With Alex Semin That Makes Everyone So Weird About Him? I know you've referenced a complicated legacy that makes caps fans weird about him, and maybe some way that caps fans/ western hockey culture/the nhl wronged him, but wikipedia was not very helpful (1/?)

3/3) None of that as presented seems, like, worthy of the level of weirdness/erasure that you've mentioned/hinted at, so I'm assuming there's a lot more complexity and detail involved here, which I would love to understand.

First, I need to say this, you are an utter doll. You’re out there reading and questioning and investigating further and it’s all so great.

And you’re right, on dry paper the whole thing is pretty weird.

There isn’t a smoking gun, here. I’m not going to point at a particular coach or GM and tell you, “They made a poor or a prejudiced decision, and the rest of us are fine.” A staggering number of things happened to happen to Semin. Each one of them didn’t mean so much by themselves. But I think the fact that they happened, and kept happening, and were expected to happen, all to him says a lot about us.

What there is is a context, and then there’s a story here. I think what a lot of us missed at the time, and are still missing, is how they fit together.

So I’m gonna drag us all through both. Congratulations: you get two posts.

I’m traveling through Montréal, so I come down to grab coffee in just a jersey and my little pink running shorts. I’m not surprised when a man stops me. He asks what’s up, am I Russian, am I a Caps fan. “Oh, yeah,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah. They’re a great team every year,” he says, for the benefit of the man next to him. “No luck in the postseason though!”

The second man is Danish, and nervous, stuck between us. “You have a big rivalry?” he asks.

I have a personal rivalry with Les Habitants. “Oh, no,” I say.

I negotiate. If I admit I grew up watching the Canadiens as my hometown team, the first man will quiz me. So it’s friendly overture #2, angling towards him to show him the back of my sweater. The first man isn’t looking. “My favorite guy, Alexander Syomin, he played up here for a bit.”

I pronounce it that way, Сёмин, not an Anglicized eh. We can come back to that.

He admires my sweater. “Good player?” he tries.

“Oh, yeah, real skilled player,” the first man says, checking back in. And then, like he’s watching Semin backcheck right now, like the insight just struck him, “Lazy, though.”

“Oh, no,” I say, reassuring the Dane. “That’s just he plays Russian hockey, it just looks different than Canadian style, so some people think it looks like that.”

First man says, “Ovechkin doesn’t play like that.”

Of course he says that.

“Oh,” I say, laugh, cut him off. “Nobody plays like Ovechkin.”

(The Dane is looking between us like he’s about to ask how these people died.)

Something percolates through the first man’s mind. “Who’s your favorite player?”

And I turn around and walk away. He says, “Oh,” reading my shoulders. He hadn’t heard a word except the opening to tell me what he already Knew.

Listen, I don’t like feeling rude. But I was about to be late to interview for a graduate research position in hockey biomechanics, and I already knew I needed to go put on pants and fold Semin’s name back into a suitcase if I wanted them to respect me.

I’m not being dramatic so much as I’m trying to show the odd way that we all know things. That man knew I wasn’t an expert, because I don’t look like one. We all know my favorite player isn’t a good player because he doesn’t look like one.

(And I don’t mean the ethnocentrism and neurotypical judgements we paint all over his face, although that’ll come back into it.)

G, you might be saying, that guy was a stock character of a misogynist hockey fan. Of course he only saw what he expected to. Well, here’s one thing: we all kind of think like that. Of course we don’t know when we aren’t seeing things that conflict with our view. Just keep that in mind when we talk about Russia.

And when we watch hockey, a good amount of the time, our eyes are telling us real persuasive narratives. There are certain visual cues in the game that we think mean good, make someone valuable. They signal to us that the player is playing ‘well’, and once we’re hooked on them that reading is hard to shake. Experienced analysts like Steve Dangle will talk about this: after decades watching hockey, they still get caught up in all the great-looking things a player is doing and miss underlying weakness, or get stuck on what a player doesn’t do and miss what they contribute overall.

(This is why statistics are valuable and controversial: they can be used to reveal patterns, like how a player who scores plenty of pretty goals is also on the ice for a suspicious number of goals against, and sometimes that conflicts with what seems obvious to the eye-test.)

Ethnicity comes back into it because what we think looks valuable depends where we’re from.

Later, I’m laughing over it to my buddy. She’s an older fan than me, and I admire her so much, because she listens to me, and she says, “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you—I don’t know what you mean when you keep saying Russian hockey.”

Context: Soviet and Russian Hockey

Any moment that I have the puck and you do not seems like it should be good for me.

But if you’re allowed to just come up and smash me, and I just hang out holding it, you’re going to try to take it away. Some of the time you’ll manage and then you’ll have it and you can score goals with it. So maybe I want to risk trying to score goals with it before you do.

That’s good old North American.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want this? Did you want to try to score some goals with it? Sure, I suppose you can borrow it for a bit.

Catch me first.

That’s Soviet.

This is a difference of philosophy; it’s a preference in coaching and play-making. There are some kids who weren’t considered particularly naturally talented who would be in Russia, and the other way around. But people also train to meet those standards, so by the time you’re in your teens or early twenties, you’re caught somewhere between the abilities and inclinations you were born with and the values you shaped yourself to try to fulfill.

Imagine a benchful of Evgeny Kuznetsovs.

Soviet hockey players were skaters first. At age 4 or 5, they would be learning skating fundamentals for an hour two or three days a week. Then an hour and half. At 10, they would skate every day. At 12, two practices a day.

“We put kids on skates at a very young age. Much earlier than in the U.S. and Canada. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. On one hand early development may influence game thinking, on the other skating may become a burden and be detrimental for the health.”—Sergei Gimaev (USSR champion)

I’m quoting Sergei because that’s my stance: on the one hand, and on the other. There’s a lot to say about the Soviet hockey schools. Athleticism was patriotism in the Soviet Union, as it is in many states, and the treatment of athletes was frequently disturbing—but it’s always more complex than a dystopia.

Their eerily effortless technical skating contributed to the outside image of the “Red Machine”, a North American narrative than Soviet skaters were only trained to be interchangeable pieces without any fun or independence or Canadian grit, but the Soviet style also valued a child-like intellectual creativity.

“Kids were always allowed to improvise on the ice,” according to Dmitri Efimov. “We surprised our opponents with the fact that we were difficult to ‘read,’ our actions couldn’t be anticipated.”

This play, from hockey-graphs.com, is a great example.Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov, and Sergei Makarov skate so tightly they seem about to combine into a single giant mecha, luring in the Canadians, and then fly past them.

All that skill and creative energy fed into the endless, eternal, interminable passing. Each player on the line swung around each other, dragging the opposition into position until one of them found a chance to shoot. The goal of Soviet hockey wasn’t to score goals: holding possession and winding the clock down was pretty much an end in and of itself.

“For me, I would love to have empty net at end of season, then (have someone else) score a goal you know? For me, that’s how my father teach me and how my whole coaches when I grown up teach me. You better to give your partner empty netter than you score it. It’s in my heart.”

So, Evgeny Evgenyevich…if you’re always giving the goal to your teammates, who’s taking the shots?

Ovechkin isn’t like that

Kristi St. Allain of St. Thomas University wrote a dissertation on why people say this. It was adapted and accepted for publication by the Sociology of Sport Journal in 2016, it’s 43 pages, and it’s worth a read.

There’s a more technical take, which I think is also interesting: yes, he is like that.

Ovechkin is a monster. He’ll be once in the world, not once in a lifetime. Comparing any Russian player to him is pretty pointless, but comparing him to them is actually useful, because we can see that Ovechkin plays a specific role in Russian hockey.

Hockey was at its lowest low in Russia in the ‘90s, after the dissolution of the Soviet national team. Everyone had gotten used to Soviet hockey, and that was over. The new nation was wondering what the new Russian hockey was going to be, and it mostly seemed like it sucked.

And then they got...these two.

The Aleksandrs revolutionized Russian hockey by building a new role for themselves: the specialized sharpshooter.

I’m not saying there weren’t skilled shooters before them in the Soviet system, but those teams made plays in a more balanced way, effective divvying up shot attempts between three fairly equal forwards.

Two years older than Ovechkin, Semin was the first player to prove what that shot could do. In 2008 he led Russia to the first World Championship gold since 1993, against Canada in Quebec City, ending over a decade of low self-esteem in a moment of transcendently wicked awesomeness to a generation who grew up after but still very much under the weight of the Soviet Union.

Arguably, he’s the one who told us all what Russian hockey was going to be.

Sasha and Sasha both stood out from their teammates for their spectacular aim and strength. Semin’s wrist-shot was described “arguably the most powerful in the game” during his years in the NHL. (And that’s from SB Nation, not just me and Kuznetsov.)

youtube

Instead of skating and passing until they happened to be in position for a particular shot, both Semin and Ovechkin would deliberately take up a shooting position, and their linemates would pass between themselves, dragging the opposition around until they could send the puck to the Sasha for a shot.

Taking those shots isn’t selfish: it’s a new way of using their unique skill to play for their teammates.

At this point in his career, we often get to see Ovi skate straight to his office and crouch there in active waiting. He’ll slide a little up and down in search of openings as the other team chase his center and right winger: “he’s the best in the world at adjusting to passes.”

youtube

Semin would circle. He hovered over the blue line like some large and carnivorous bird, allowing him to either swoop in for a shot, or swing and pass back and forth with his center to set up his opposite winger. He could essentially shoot like a second Ovechkin or partner with Nick Backstrom to hold possession.

We can succeed

There’s something heart-wrenching to me about that quote from Kuznetsov. Because many Russian players don’t succeed in the NHL; they don’t fit in the spaces allowed for them in the Canadian conception of hockey. That should hardly count as a failing: like Kuznetsov said, Canadians don’t know how to play Soviet or Russian hockey. And they aren’t asked to.

Do you know how many Russian players are in the NHL right now?

It’s 39.

(Less if we set aside the goalies, which arguably we should here). That’s barely more than one per franchise, and that shakes out to mean something pretty profound for players who have it in their hearts to try to match what their teammates are doing, but who by their late teens and twenties simply can’t reshape the entire way they play the game.

Semin is a spectacular player in context. So is Ovechkin. For most of his career Ovi’s context was Semin, and Ovi is quite honest about that.

Semin was the best possession player on the Washington Capitals in 2012, while also seeing the highest percentage of scoring chances. He was a 40+ goal scorer while being someone else’s main man for assists.

I’m going to come back and to talk through his actual story in order, but this is the first thing to keep in mind:

All that circling didn’t look good. When he looked for passes, waited for scoring chances, played high-scoring but still play-making Russian hockey, he looked lazy.

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nifty-swifty · 2 years

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🐣🐨🦔🐢🐄🐸🐧🦭

DID YOU LIKE MY COUNTDOWN!? That was fun! I had fun. That was actually more fun than I thought it would be! There were too many good posts to name. It was very fun reading all your comments and theories. Though side note: animal anon has no problem with people joining her BUT it must be animals and it must not mess with my countdown. No statues! Animal anon does animals, not statues. Side side note: can someone settle the debate of if that emoji is a hedgehog or a porcupine? Because I have no idea. Side note side note side note: sorry if you got multiple asks in a day...my system isn't perfected yet so sometimes I send two (or three) because I forgot I sent one and didn't want to accidently miss anyone (also sorry if i did miss you, still perfecting the system, no one has been animal anon blacklisted, i promise!)

Anyway, GUESS WHAT TODAY IS!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 It's been one year since I started animal anon! How exciting is that?! Phew, what a year we've had together! I mean what better way to start this second year than some chaos since that's how animal anon started to begin with! I will admit, it was slightly stressful coming up with something to meet the occasion of this event. I hope the countdown and this post live up to it. No, I'm not going to reveal myself just yet.. maybe that will be for year 2...😏😏. BUT I will give you some fun facts about me! So let's see; first, I'm from the Midwest (so not Canadian, but close so I do have a slight accent), but I currently live in the TriState area. Second, I am a MASSIVE theater nerd. No, seriously I have been to 21 shows since Broadway reopened in September and I'm actually going to my 22nd tonight. I don't know if this makes that fact better or worse, but I've really only been to about 12 different show because out of those 22, 10 of those are one specific show. Third, I am fluent in German and English. Though, I suck at writing in German, I never learned how to, so don't ask me to do that please. Fourth, my favorite color is red, so you can guess my favorite Taylor album (and coincidently also the show I've been to see 10 times on Broadway...). Fifth, I love to talk A LOT if you couldn't tell by the essays I send yall. And lastly, I can also confirm I am not Taylor...but I will say that I do share something very important with her... tell me your guesses down below as to what very important thing you think Taylor and I have in common, and I'll send some extra animals to whomever I see gets it right first!

So contuining on with my dissertation here, this week I have been trying to figure out a prompt to live up to this occasion. As I already mentioned, my system isn't perfect! And I've been thinking a lot about community lately and how that's been lacking for so many because of Covid. So what I want yall to do is if you get this dissertation of mine, please send a message, post, anon, whatever you want to at least 1 other blog (though you can do more), telling them something you like about them and giving them an animal emoji! That way we can keep spreading the love all day long to as many as possible! 🥰

As always, you are all brilliant, kind, worthy, beautiful and as this past week has shown, hilarious and unique human beings. No seriously, some of your posts had me kneeling over in laughter. If you would so like, you can tag #animalanon so I and everyone can read all your lovely posts! IM STARTING EARLY TODAY SO WE CAN PARTY ALL DAY LONG BECAUSE I LOVE YALL SO MUCH 🎊 🦥🦁🐯

I loved your countdown! I'm so sorry it has taken me so long to respond. I've been fairly inactive as this month has been so so busy. Your messages always make my day, animal anon!

my theory is that it's definitely a 🦔 because when I type "hedgehog" the emoji pops up, but not when I type porcipine.

you live in the tri-state area as in... ny/nj/PA? If you've been to that many Broadway shows, I'd imagine you're near NYC! I grew up in NJ near the city 😊

Hmmm... I think you share taylor's birthday with her!! You're just as kind, thoughtful, and mischievous hehe

Most importantly, Happy one year anniversary of animal anon!! Love you lots 🥰

#animalanon #one year anniversary of animal anon

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hellwasthejourney · 2 years

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🐣🐨🦔🐢🐄🐸🐧🦭

Happy animal anoniversary!!!! What an absolute iconic countdown and very tswizzle of you! My guess for what you share with her is birthday…

But hello tri-state area neighbor!!! Is the musical moulin rouge? Lol. Despite living in NYC I’ve only been to one Broadway show since moving here … 3 years ago. Give me your best recs of shows I should see. I’m dying to see the music man but tickets are insane. But I may just bite the bullet to do it.

As always, thank you for building such a good community here, animal anon! You’re truly a light in this fandom

#animal anon #animalanon

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ourmaladies · 2 years

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🐣🐨🦔🐢🐄🐸🐧🦭

OMG BESTIE HAPPY BIRTHDAY💓 i can’t believe it’s been one year already!!! you make this community so much funnier and interesting, I love getting your asks so keep on the good work! and thank you so much for taking the time to do this

mmhh, for your description of yourself i think what you share with taylor is that you’re also a very artistic/artsy person! you either sing or something!!

i also love that you’re fluent in german! i tried to learn but failed miserably. i’m speak spanish (my native language), i’m fluent in english and i’m currently learning italian which i love so much

i look forward to hearing from you soon<3 ily

#animal anon #answered

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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This Computer Mouse Combined With a Telephone Once Made Sense. Kind Of.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

“An iPod. A phone. An internet communicator.”

These were the words Steve Jobs used to describe the first iPhone immediately before introducing it during a landmark keynote in January of 2007.

Of course, it was a single device, and it combined all those things—and more—into a slab of glass, metal, plastic, and silicon.

Convergence can sometimes be amazing in practice—the new Raspberry Pi 400, which shoves a whole computer in a tiny keyboard, has been getting some good notices in recent days.

But not every attempt at convergence makes much sense. Sometimes, it’s just hilariously misguided.

Let’s discuss why we combine things—even when they have no business being combined, such as the computer mouse with a built-in telephone.

That product, I promise you, exists.

Why convergence often means things get combined when they shouldn’t

In many ways, the iPhone represents the ideal pushed by a generation of techno-futurists, many of whom had an idea of what the end result might look like, if not the actual result.

The guy who came up with this idea, way back in 1978, has cast a long shadow over the technology space in general. His name was Nicholas Negroponte, and the MIT professor came up with a concept that was audacious for 1978 but seems absolutely pedestrian now. Effectively, it’s pedestrian because of how right the concept was.

Negroponte, with the use of a group of circles, posited that the major information industries of the time—film and television, printing and publishing, and computers—would eventually start to overlap more completely, to the point that their missions and goals were basically the same.

I don’t know if you’ve used Netflix recently or read The New York Times on your computer, but this 41-year-old theory proved more insanely correct than anyone might have imagined during the days of Three’s Company and “Disco Duck.” Negroponte had given voice to a trend that has basically dominated modern technology over the past four decades. And it has shaped not only Negroponte’s life, but also the university in which he works.

In 1985, a little more than five years after he started giving voice to this prediction, he helped found the MIT Media Lab, which effectively is this general concept of convergence in academic form, essentially built around the idea that divergent disciplines will essentially merge together.

“The idea was marketed to the broadcasting, publishing, and computer industries as the convergence of the sensory richness of video, the information depth of publishing, and the intrinsic interactivity of computers,” Negroponte wrote in his ’90s book Being Digital of the Media Lab’s creation. “Sounds so logical today, but at the time the idea was considered silly.”

Helping to make the sale was The Media Lab, Stewart Brand’s 1988 book that helped to explain the concepts to a broader audience.

“Negroponte’s vision: all communication technologies are suffering a joint metamorphosis, which can only be understood properly if treated as a single subject, and only advanced properly if treated as a single craft,” Brand wrote. “The way to figure out what needs to be done is through exploring the human sensory and cognitive system and the ways that humans most naturally interact. Join this and you grasp the future.”

Negroponte has made his voice known on these issues in other ways as well. Wired magazine, which he was an early investor in, gained much of its philosophical vision from Negroponte’s early columns, while his heavily hyped One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort is seen as something of an ambitious bust, though it remains active to this day.

(And—it must be noted, because it’s important—Negroponte faced significant controversy a year ago for his comments about the MIT Media Lab accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein, a controversy which led to the departure of the Media Lab’s director at the time, Joi Ito.)

No matter what to make of Negroponte’s legacy at this time, he is ultimately tied to this idea that has defined how we look at technology—that things that were once separate will inevitably combine and take new forms, with the goal of eventually converging into a single object.

The iPhone may be the best-known example of this, but so many examples of things that tried to merge different technological tools together, to mixed success and even failure. For every Roku, there were dozens of false starts in bringing streaming video into the living room in an efficient way. Video-editing tools once required lots of hardware and software, and a giant suite like Video Toaster was once seen as revolutionary; now it can be done, quickly, on a smartphone.

I’d like to call this kind of innovation, the type that happens before a Roku or iPhone comes along to make things easy, “messy convergence.” It’s what happens when something is clearly designed to help build upon a potentially innovative idea, but it does so awkwardly, in a way where the seams are very much showing. It’s not a slick product on a stage. It’s a jumble of wires on a workbench that barely works but shows a bigger idea is possible.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In many ways, the original OLPC, forever tied to the guy who helped to popularize convergence, is a perfect example of the messy part of convergence in action. It was a lovely device in many ways ahead of its time, but it promised the world at a tiny price point.

Still, there were things it did that would become much more common a few years later—anyone with a 2-in-1 laptop likely has OLPC to thank for creating a mainstream example of the form factor. With wireless access, a screen that worked well even in sunlight, and a design that was both light and rugged, it stretched far beyond what most computers could do at its price point because it started by trying to solve a different problem than, say, Steve Jobs was.

And there were things that it just couldn’t do. It never got its much-ballyhooed crank, however, nor the ad-hoc networking capabilities that sounded good but were ineffective in real-world use cases.

So why all this thinking about convergence? Well, I found an incredibly weird device on the internet recently, and it made me think about how much we often “screw up” convergence before we get it right.

Let me introduce you to the Tele-Mouse, a friggin’ mouse with a built-in telephone.

NOS

A common term used on auction sites to describe items sold as “new old stock.” This term often is in reference to stock that never sold to consumers, either because of commercial failure, supply chain problems, or because an item was overproduced. (Two classic examples of tech items that frequently appear in NOS form on auction sites such as eBay include the TI 99/4a computer, which was discontinued somewhat suddenly after Texas Instruments lost a price war with Commodore; and the Aladdin Deck Enhancer, the NES add-on, affiliated with Codemasters, that was sold on home-shopping networks.) The Tele-Mouse, which we’re talking about here, is but one such example of a NOS item floating around eBay and similar sites.

For people who want to own a mouse with more buttons than an Atari Jaguar controller, here you go. Image: Ernie Smith

Why there was a time where a mouse-telephone combo seemed like it made sense … to somebody

I’ve seen a lot of weird things over the years, but never has it struck me that there might be a market for a computer mouse with a built-in telephone.

It’s not something obvious, right? After all, the image of someone putting a computer mouse up to their face seems undeniably silly. Even using one as a speakerphone feels like a bit of a stretch.

But nonetheless, there was a short period in technology history where it kind of, sort of, maybe made a little bit of sense. That period was between the years 1998 and 2000, when many computer users were getting online on a regular basis for the first time, often on phone lines in which actual telephone calls were competing with modems that were saturating the line at all hours of the day.

If you didn’t want to get up from your desk just to take a call, why not take it from the speakerphone inside of your cursor machine? That was the apparent line of thinking behind a device called the Tele-Mouse, which came out around 1998 or so.

This, my friends, is an excellent example of messy convergence. The person who first came up with this idea, whomever it is, made the realization that we would be taking calls from the same general area where we’d be using our desktop computer … but they solved the problem in the most wrongheaded way possible. The solution was not to add a speakerphone to the mouse; the solution was to put voice calling, and later videoconferencing, capabilities into the computer itself.

The issue is that there was a clear limitation to doing a conference call over the internet in 1998, because home modems spat out a minuscule amount of bandwidth, barely enough for a single voice, let alone two.

So, having done some research on this device, here’s what I can tell you—it was part of a mini-trend. This specific device was developed by a Canadian company named Curtis International, which still exists today and often sells products labeled with RCA and Sylvania brand names, among others. (Another company named Curtis that existed during the same period and also specialized in computer accessories was not involved.)

This particular device was sold at cut-rate retailers like Value City, and ultimately seems to have been sold to people who don’t usually buy gadgets. I mean, just look at the box. Does it look like something a serious gadget nerd would buy?

In many ways, the Tele-Mouse isn’t even in the same league as the OLPC on the innovation front. But Curtis International wasn’t even the only one to think of this idea. Some of the largest technology companies in the world have patent filings implying that they at least thought about releasing a device like this.

A patent drawing for the Micron version of the telephone mouse. Image: Google Patents

In 1998, Micron Technology—today one of the largest manufacturers of computer memory, but back then a PC manufacturer—filed for a patent for a computer mouse with a built in telephone handset; unlike what Curtis developed, the Micron handset literally unfolded, revealing a full-fledged telephone.

They were far from alone: Dell also filed for a patent, as did Samsung (outside of the U.S., as far as I can tell).

Fittingly, Sony has the best example of this type of device. Image: Sony Vaio press photo

A more interesting example of this comes from Sony, which released a device called the Vaio Mouse Talk, which removes the necessity of a phone line connection, and instead allows calls to happen over Skype. (It also removes a lot of cables, because it works over USB, allowing functions to be combined.) That seems to have been released a mini-generation later, and perhaps a step closer to actually being useful for regular people.

But ultimately, we don’t take phone calls using our mouse. We use video, or our headphones, because we’re not obsessed with the idea of a phone having to work like a phone, but we want a way to use our voice to communicate.

One might look at the Tele-Mouse and think that it represents the ideal of the “As Seen on TV” generation—in which convergence happens in ways so minuscule that the innovations come off less as useful and more as an excuse for novelty.

And certainly, at first glance, that’s what I thought. But then I realized that real companies with real brand names also went down this road and tried this exact same stupid idea of combining a device for calling your boss with a device adept at playing Minesweeper. The difference is that most of them played with this idea and never let it leave the R&D department.

In much the same way as an iPhone, a telephone mouse combines user input functionality with communication functionality, even if it did so in the most functionally useless way possible.

It was a bad idea, but perhaps it was an essential one, in a way—because it showed us what we shouldn’t do when it comes to innovation.

“If all you want to do is send hard-copy faxes, a fax modem system is overkill. And for many electronic files, a standard data modem may be sufficient.”

— Byte writer Don Crabb, describing the value (or lack thereof) of the fax modem, which can accept faxes in digital form and, in combination with other computer components such as a scanner and printer, handle the hard-copy form as well. This approach, which appeared on Macintosh computers around 1988 and 1989, was even natively supported by Apple, which sold a $699 AppleFax device. Despite his skepticism of the concept at first, he ultimately came around after reviewing the devices—though he found AppleFax, the most expensive of the three he reviewed, to be the least capable. “I am convinced that these products have a legitimate niche alongside standalone fax machines,” he wrote. The fax modem is one of many great examples of how convergence can often look messy and complicated in retrospect.

Five examples of “messy convergence” in action

Google Glass. This is such an obvious one! Clearly this device attempted to bring the basic concepts of wearable computing and augmented reality to the potential masses, but the problem was that nobody thought of a use case for the thing, and even the die-hards eventually took the devices off. I actually wore one of these around for a week or two a while ago, and let me tell you: It sure felt like a glorified camera to me—and at some point it makes more sense for this functionality to be inside of a smartphone.

CueCat. The idea that people would want to scan information into their computers from their printed reading materials was absolutely astute, but the problem with CueCat, a late-’90s device that was literally given away to millions of people, was that the computers we had to use with the barcode scanners were simply too big and cumbersome to actually make this a useful thing. It would take smartphones and QR codes to make this general idea functional.

Mobile ESPN. People who are really into sports want up-to-the-minute scores and news updates, yes, but do they want it enough to pay more than $60 a month for a dedicated phone plan? That was the bet ESPN made in 2005, when it created its own mobile service, complete with custom feature phones. It failed, but as Motherboard reported in 2015, it may have secretly set ESPN up for digital success, as many of its ideas were basically perfect for the smartphone age. (Side note: The promotional site for Mobile EPSN is still online.)

Palm Foleo. A few years after the iPhone came out, Steve Jobs made it up on the Apple stage once again to tell phones that there was a need for a third device between desktop computers and smartphones … a device that turned out to be the iPad. This must have felt like salt in the wound of Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, as his company’s Palm Foleo, a 10-inch subnotebook, based on Linux, for checking email or surfing the web without having to carry around a larger device, was heavily criticized for not being more full-featured. (Even Jakob Nielsen took a shot at it!) It was cancelled before it first came out, but almost immediately after that happened, netbooks—the very line of device the product was trying to introduce—became popular.

Samsung Galaxy Fold (the first one): The company has since come out with a better version of this device, but the original, easy-to-break version is an excellent example of a device that feels like it’s on the cusp of something amazing—combining a large screen into something pocketable, helping potentially pave the way for the future where one fewer daily device is necessary. In a few years, it will likely stop looking like messy convergence and more like actual convergence.

The above products, some of which were released, others which likely will never see the light of day, highlight how technologies that seem seamless today sometimes emerge into the world with seams all over the place, looking awkward as all-get-out.

Some are failed experiments in which those experimenting admit that they didn’t get it right; others are ideas that just need a little bit more time in the oven.

Eventually, someone, or a group of people will come along with just the right level of polish to hide the seams away from view. So, did I write this piece just to trash on a computer mouse that has a built-in phone in it? Perhaps that’s where I started. But then I realized that it was perhaps a stepping stone. Maybe a misguided stepping stone that might cause you to twist an ankle and fall flat on your face, allowing the information superhighway to trample you before you can get back up again.

But that’s the nature of convergence; keep experimenting, and eventually the circles will overlap.

This Computer Mouse Combined With a Telephone Once Made Sense. Kind Of. syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 2 Easter Eggs Explained

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This Star Wars: The Mandalorian article contains spoilers.

The Mandalorian takes on a new job in “The Passenger.” This time, he’s ferrying an alien mother to her homeworld and runs into a lot of trouble along the way. That trouble comes in the form of quite a few fan-favorite aliens and creatures from other parts of the Star Wars universe.

Here are all of the Star Wars easter eggs and references we found in episode 10…

Stream your Star Wars favorites right here!

Frog Lady

“Frog Lady” is truly the star of this episode. We don’t know the name of her race or what language she speaks, but we do know she’s captured our hearts in much the same way Baby Yoda did last season. Her goal in the episode is simple: to get her eggs to the one habitable place in the galaxy where they can hatch and her children can live. By the end of the episode, she’s become a big part of the crew, and we do hope she sticks around a little while longer.

Trask, Kol Iben, and Adelphi

– Three new locations are mentioned in this episode: the gas giant planet Kol Iben, its estuary moon Trask, and Adelphi. It’s unclear if the latter is a planet or moon, but a New Republic outpost is located there. Meanwhile, Trask and Kol Iben are located in the aptly named Kol Iben System, which is just a star system away from Tatooine in the Outer Rim.

– The name Trask has been used several times in the franchise, especially in the New Jedi Order and New Republic eras. None of the characters with this moniker seem to have anything to do with the estuary moon, though.

Spiders

Spiders!!! The main “villains” of the episode turn out to be spiders who want to eat Mando, Baby Yoda, and Frog Lady. Of course, it’s really our dynamic trio who disturb the spider nest, and it’s really no surprise that Baby Yoda eating one of the spider babies ticked off the giant spider queen. He really needs to stop eating all of those eggs.

These spiders are a major blast from the past. They go all the way back to Ralph McQuarrie concept art for The Empire Strikes Back, where a spider queen was depicted laying eggs on Dagobah as Luke Skywalker looked on. This design, known as the “knobby white spider,” didn’t actually make it into the movie. But it did eventually appear in Legends continuity in the novel Darksaber by Kevin J. Anderson.

The way the spiders look, move, and swarm Mando and friends also reminds us of the Krykna, the creatures that initially appeared as antagonists on Star Wars Rebels until Kanan Jarrus learned to control them with the Force. It’s a good thing too, because the Krykna are formidable predators. Their shells are even resistant to blaster bolts!

The Mandalorian‘s spiders don’t seem to be the same species as the Krykna, but they’re a cool (creepy) nod to them. The spider egg scene also seems to be a reference to the nest of facehugger eggs the crew of the Nostromo discovers in Alien. The eggs even sort of split open just like the Alien eggs did. It’s pretty gross. And is the way the spider queen tries to eat the heroes inside the cave a reference to Shelob from The Lord of the Rings?

Either way, can we stop talking about spiders now?

Cameos

– Star Wars veteran creator and The Mandalorian executive producer Dave Filoni returns as New Republic ace X-wing pilot Trapper Wolf. The character first appeared in last season’s “The Prisoner.” Filoni’s character is named “Trapper Wolf” because of the creator’s fascination with wolves, which he has often included in his past work.

– Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who plays Appa in the Canadian sitcom Kim’s Convenience, appears as Captain Carson Teva, the other New Republic pilot flying alongside Trapper.

– We also get the return of the beloved Richard Ayoade as the voice of the bounty hunter protocol droid Q9-0 (“Zero” for short). Mando blasted him away in “The Prisoner” when the droid tried to harm Baby Yoda, which is why Zero is in pieces in this episode.

Aliens

A trio of mercenaries try to ambush Mando at the start of the episode in an attempt to steal Baby Yoda. They of course fail. The trio includes a Nikto, a race that hails from the planet Kintan, which is located in Hutt Space. This alien race is separated into three different subspecies, according to Wookieepedia: Kajain’sa’Nikto, the Kadas’sa’Nikto, and the Esral’sa’Nikto. The Nikto we see in the episode is a Kadas’sa’Nikto, also known as a “Red Nikto.”

Niktos first appeared in The Star Wars Holiday Special before making their big-screen debut in Return of the Jedi. They became more popular in The Clone Wars, which featured a Nikto Jedi named Ima-Gun Di, a general fighting for the Republic on the planet Ryloth.

– One of the mercenaries has a metallic faceplate reminiscent of the Teedo from The Force Awakens, but the resemblance isn’t exact. Anyone recognize this fellow?

-Peli makes a reference to Rodians, a popular Star Wars race that first appeared in A New Hope. They hail from the planet Ryloth and apparently like their krayt dragon meat well done.

The most famous Rodian by far is Greedo, the bounty hunter who may or may not have shot first in the infamous “Han Shot First” scene from the original Star Wars movie. He’s the guy who briefly shouted “Maclunkey” in the Disney+ cut of the film.

– Mando returns to the Mos Eisley Cantina, which first appeared in A New Hope as the home to many different kinds of aliens, including a giant insect dude which is actually known as a Yam’rii. Dr. Mandible, the giant ant-like guy playing a game of sabacc with Peli, is a clear nod to the original bug dude. As of this moment, Dr. Mandible’s race hasn’t been named.

– The Wookiee behind the bar could be Chalmun, the cantina owner.

Droids

There are several fan-favorite droids in this episode. While we’ve covered many of them in other easter egg guides, such as the GNK Power Droid, the DUM series pit droids, and Return of the Jedi‘s EV-9D9, there’s one droid model we want to point out this week: the long-necked WED-15 Treadwell droid working in Peli Motto’s garage.

This clumsy repair droid first appeared in A New Hope as part of the lineup of droids presented to Uncle Owen by the Jawas at the start of the movie. Interestingly enough, the model used in the first Star Wars movie is very spider-like…and kind of terrifying.

A280 Blaster Rifle

Carson Teva and Trapper Wolf save the day by shooting down the spiders swarming the Razor Crest. They’re able to easily bullseye targets from their X-wing cockpits thanks to their trusty A280 Blaster Rifle, the mid- to long-range weapon equipped by Rebel and New Republic soldiers throughout Star Wars history.

There seems to be some dispute regarding when this rifle was first introduced. According to Wookieepedia’s Legends section, the A280 first appeared in Return of the Jedi as an offshoot of the A295 Blaster Rifle used by the Rebels during the Battle of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. That said, the Ultimate Star Wars reference book (via Wookieepedia) says the canon designation for the rifle used in Empire is now officially the A280 as well, meaning the A295 has basically been erased from continuity despite the fact that it looks ever so slightly different to the A280.

In the video games Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefront II, you can actually equip a modified version of the A280 known as the A280C.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Bothan-Five

The prison ship from “The Prisoner” is directly connected to this episode, as the New Republic pilots know that Din both broke out of it and wanted to spare one of their men. Presumably, it’s connected in some way to the Bothan species, which played a major role in New Republic politics in the Legends timeline.

The post Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 2 Easter Eggs Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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nowhereboundd · 4 years

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Auchwitz Adventure

Hi again! Firstly, I apologize for my lack of posting. I promise you that I have a million good ideas running through my head, but I’ve learned that its easier said than done putting those ideas into actual words. In my last blog post I said that I’d write all about my UK visa, BUT thats pretty boring. I might get around to doing that at some point, but for today I wanted to do something a little different.

In this post I wanted to tell a story - a series of rather unfortunate events - about the time I went to (or attempted to go to) Auschwitz, in Poland. Now before you decide not to read further, no this is not a story about the actual camp -per sey- it is more a story about the trials and errors I went through attempting to get to the camp.

*disclaimer: although this story is pretty funny, I don’t want us to forget how unfortunate and upsetting the events that took place at Auschwitz were. This has been a subject that has interested me since I was younger (I was OBSESSED with Anne Frank) so visiting the camp for me, although extremely sad, was such an incredible learning experience*

So, it all began a few months ago, when we booked a tour to visit Auschwitz. *side note: the camp itself was about 1.5/ 2 hours from the hotel we were staying at* so this tour included transportation to and from the camp, and the entry ticket. Now just to give you an idea, an uber from our hotel to the camp would have cost $180 (one way) and the entry tickets were $30. So for 3 tickets, and a ride there and back, it would has cost $450 total, or $150 each. This tour we found was $32 each and included both transportation and the entrance ticket.

A couple days before the tour (which was supposed to start at 10am) I got an email saying the time has been changed to 8:45am, which was no issue for us. The morning of our tour, we took an uber from our hotel to the meeting place. We knew we were running late, as the email had advised us to arrive 15 minutes before our departure time, but we figured the bus wouldn’t leave without us. Don’t get me wrong- we weren’t THAT late. We ended up arriving at the meeting place at 8:38am, 7 minutes before our bus was supposed to leave.

When we got to the meeting place, there were no people there- which is strange because normally these tours have a few people waiting around. There was also no bus. Weird. We weren’t late? There was no way the bus could have left without us...right? I spent the next 15 minutes calling the tour company, and emailing the person who advised me on the new time. I also called the third party company which I booked these tickets through. I’ve used this site before (getyourguide.com) and I’ve never had any issues. Although the issue here is that our tour was booked for “10am” so we were just “early.” A rep from Getyourguide was now trying to contact the tour company with no success.

THEN, I got this text:

*note the time stamps are all an hour behind, because Poland is an hour ahead of where I am now*

So pretty much after recieving this text we called getyourguide and requested a refund, then started the search for another tour. After standing outside in the freezing cold for nearly an hour, we ended up finding another tour for $50 each which was still significantly less than we’d pay if we went on our own. This tour was leaving in 15 minutes and we were a 7 minute uber away. Cutting it close but at this point we were desperate.

WHO KNEW how much traffic there is in Krakow at 9am.... that uber ride was probably the most stressful uber ride I had ever taken.. the minutes were just going by and we were NOT moving. When we started getting closer, we decided it would be faster to RUN (yes RUN) to the meeting point rather than staying in the uber. So, here are 3 Canadians BOOKING it through the streets of Poland at 9am.

In the near distance, WE SEE A BUS!!! Our tour still hasn’t left! We were right on time!!

Or so we thought.

Here is where the story gets complicated, so try your best to follow and I’ll try my best to explain properly what happened next.

So we meet the tour guide outside the bus, tell him our names, show him our order confirmation, but he says we aren’t part of his tour. I tried explaining that we only booked the tour 15 minutes ago so maybe his system isnt updated? I called the tour company and asked if our bus had left yet. He said yes, we missed our bus by 3 minutes and our tour group was already on route. The tour guide, who was around our age, possibly a few years older, felt bad for all our mishaps of the day and offered to let us hop on his bus to go the camp, for 20zł which is around $6/$7. Of course we accepted the ride, because transportation was our main obstacle. If we got to the camp we could buy our own tickets, and go from there.

Fast foward 2 hours, (Strangest bus ride ever by the way. Words alone can’t explain how WEIRD this tour guide was. We learned his name was Peter, and of course English was not his first language so nothing he said made much sense. And he paused A LOT while he talked. “ummmmmmmm” was essentially the only thing we heard for the whole 2 hours)

We finally arrived at the camp. Peter said that he wasn’t allowed to drive us back or he’d lose his job, so this is where we said our goodbyes and thank yous. He jokingly whispered in Alex’s ear to “give him some muthafuckin money” if we wanted a ride back. Like I said, weird guy.

When we got to the camp, I texted the second tour that we booked (the one that the guy said we missed our bus by 3 minutes) and asked if we could meet up with our tour group and pick up our tickets. He didn’t answer my text, and wasn’t picking up his phone. Screw that. I again, called the third party company I booked through, explained everything, and got a refund.

LUCKILY at the first camp (where the ticket booth was) there were 3 English tickets left. I don’t know HOW we managed to pull it off, but we did! We were finally going to get to see Auschwitz!

Wrong, again.

After buying our tickets we had “secretly” hopped back in Peter’s bus, bus #19, to get a ride over to the second camp, because this camp was outside and it was suggested to do it first so we weren’t visiting in the dark as there was no outdoor lighting. As soon as we arrived at the second camp, we realized there was a certain time on the tickets that we had to enter the first camp, SO we had to take the free shuttle all the way back from the second camp to the first camp.

Now we start freaking out again because we are trying to “sneak” into the camp with expired tickets. We get past security then get pulled aside and have to wait for a manager to print us some valid tickets. After what feels like the longest wait, WE’RE FINALLLY IN!!!

About half an hour into our visit, I start to realize that we don’t have a way home. There is no public transportation, and as I said, ubers were SO expensive. All of a sudden, I got a text!

Feeling hopeful that we could meet up with our tour and get a ride home, I messaged “Piotr”. (I had since spoken with the manager on the phone, who knew we got a refund so he offered us a ride back with our tour, if we paid 20zł each. Fine by us. STILL cheaper than an uber.)

Bus 19. Piotr. PI-TOR.

Yup. Just let that sink in.

The bus that we saw in the distance that morning while running for our lives.. that was our bus ALL ALONG. The one that we paid 20zł for a ride to the camp. The one that the “manager” told me the bus had already left, WHILE WE WERE STANDING RIGHT BESIDE IT!! THAT WAS OUR BUS.

So after this unfortunate discovery, we met back up with Piotr/Peter at the first camp. He felt SO BAD for everything that had happened, and we couldn’t decide whether to be mad or just laugh. Its so unfortunate that its almost hilarious. Piotr took our ~muthafuckin~ money, we hopped on the bus, and got back safely. Another very STRANGE 2 hour ride though. Piotr was telling the group that he used to live on the streets so he knows places that are open late to party. The last thing we heard from Piotr was his wishes for us to have a relaxful evening. Relaxful.

So friends, that wraps up the very stressful story of the time we went to.. or.. tried to go to Auschwitz. We did end up seeing both camps, and in total we spent $30 on the entry ticket, and $15 ish on travel. So in the end we paid less than everyone else on Piotr’s tour.

If you read this far, THANK YOU!! Its super difficult to put a story with so many details and side notes into words. I tried my best to make a funny story out of it rather than a “you had to be there” moment. ALL OF THESE EVENTS ARE ACTUALLY TRUE GUYS. THIS REALLY HAPPENED TO US!

Thanks for reading :) I will talk to you all in my next post, whatever and whenever that may be!

xxoo chels

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sandrabatt · 6 years

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Article 605

For those of you who are new to my blog, I’m a stand-up comedian and actor based in Toronto and when I get really wound up about something I take it out on my blog. The last piece I wrote was an open letter to the Prime Minister regarding the current state of stand-up comedy in Canada. Here it is for your reference if you wanna take a dip: http://sandrabattaglini.net/just-a-little-reciprocity/

To recap! Canada is home to some of the best stand-up comedy in the world and a thriving community exists from coast to coast, yet our government does not consider it an art form so it’s not eligible to receive funding. This is truly an erroneous oversight since I can only describe the people in my community to be some of the most magnificent artists I’ve ever had the opportunity to watch create. I attended my first ever Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal this past summer and my peeps were true heroes, representing this art form and our community so elegantly and brilliantly. I’m very proud to be a part of this fellowship.

I keep hearing over and over again that comedy is Canada’s greatest legacy to the world – it certainly is its greatest export especially to the United States. As testament to this, Canada’s own Jim Carey was honoured with the Generation Award at Just for Laughs. He’s part of a glorious list of funny peeps this country has produced. I just found out Rich Little is Canadian. I don’t know why I didn’t know this. Comedians from Canada in America are ubiquitous.

I’ve never been more inspired and lit up than I was at this year’s fest. I’m still reeling. But here’s the dig. Canada hosts a world-class comedy/arts festival that receives funding from the Ministry of Heritage with stand-up being the focus and yet there’s no arts funding for stand-up comedy. What? Can you repeat that Sandra? Sure I can. We host the biggest comedy/arts festival in the world but don’t fund stand-up comedy because it’s not considered art.

So okay. No arts funding. Check! No late night shows. Check. So we say let’s go to the United States. A tonne of opportunity there and they’re not that far away. Not so easy Battasleazy. First, we’re made to endure a very expensive and arduous VISA/Green Card process that costs upwards of $10,000 and that doesn’t even guarantee entry. It’s starting to feel like something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. I know this isn’t Denmark but I’d like to take my Shakespeare moment… I’ve never had one. And Shakespeare gets more funding from the Canadian government than our own comedic voices do. When Americans come to work in Canada they encounter no such barriers. Technically if we want to perform one night of comedy in America we need a $10,000 Visa to do so and we have a ‘free trade’ agreement with these people. More on that later.

See, the thing is there’s no star system in Canada. There’s one in Quebec but not in English Canada. So we feel compelled to go south. The truth is we don’t foster our talent the way the Americans do or the British. At both the HBO and Comedy Central panels at Just For Laughs, the burning question was: What’s your mandate? What do you look for? Answer: TALENT. I can’t remember who said it but talent is their ‘north star’. I love that. Their execs go to comedy clubs to scout talent and look for comics with a strong point of view to build shows around. That doesn’t happen here. The CRTC just lowered the amount of Canadian content requirements to 5%. So naturally we wanna go stateside to be seen and get work.

The Just for Laughs Festival is the greatest celebration of comedy on earth and I love that Canada hosts it. It brings in hundreds of comedians from around the world. The talent this year was breathtaking. What a beautiful tribe to be part of. Being invited to this festival is a huge deal for Canadian comics because there are very few opportunities here for that kind of exposure so it’s very exciting when we get this gig. But the truth is Canadian comedy took a back seat at the fest.

Not one Just for Laughs Awards was handed to a Canadian comic. Jim Carey is Canadian but he’s not a Canadian comic. The bar at the Hyatt featured mini pavilions for Netflix, Funny or Die and Comedy Central that advertised their upcoming line-ups and stand-up specials. Again, not a Canadian to be seen. Why is this? CBC has so much to be proud of this year with their comedy line-up but they had no such display. The Comedy Network advertised their line-up of mostly American shows and Bell hosted a panel with some Youtube stars they’ve taken under their umbrella. It’s the equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church canonizing saints. We had nothing to do with your good deeds and miracles but we’ll bring you under our cannon to make us look holy. There’s a lot of buying of American content in Canada but not a lot of making. There’s something very sick in our collective cultural consciousness here that doesn’t have faith in our own stories or storytellers.

So here we are one year later. Mr. Trudeau has yet to respond to my letter. I’ve sent it to him several times. Tweeted at him. Called him. No dice. I get the picture bro, I’m not your main squeeze. You’re busy approving pipelines, renegotiating NAFTA, meeting popes… it’s a tight schej. I’m sure if my name was Kinder Morgan Sandra Battaglini we would’ve had steak tartare already.

So when I wasn’t getting anywhere with Heir Trudeau, I contacted Heritage Minister Melanie Jolie, my MP Julie Dabrusin (Toronto-Danforth) and the Canada Arts Council. Guess what, I had coffee with my MP and a couple of phone convos with the Canada Arts Council. Julie was cool. She let me know I was the first person from the stand-up community to ever approach her. I was pretty jazzed at first but then realized as comics we do a lot of complaining and not enough speaking up.

Julie wanted to learn more about the stand-up world because she had no awareness of us. I mean she knew we existed but that’s about it. She had some great funding ideas, ie. creative spaces grants that would help venues who support stand-up comedy to pay comics, advertise etc. The Comedy Bar, The Social Capital Theatre and The Corner Comedy Club immediately came to mind. I felt encouraged. I then had a phone conversation with a coordinator at the Canada Arts Council and he was pretty clear they fund art, not entertainment. So what do you consider entertainment I asked? He said sports and I thought I heard strip clubs but that could’ve been my inner monologue. I told him I’ve seen a lot of stuff funded by the CAC and wouldn’t consider it art. He burst out in an awkward laugh. He explained the Canada Arts Council funds comedy only if you define yourself as a theatre artist. Stand-up is the most immediate theatre there is bro. Punto e basta! (That’s Italian for period – the punctuatish not menstruaish)

In 2015 the Canada Arts Council reformulated how it funds art. It used to distribute $154 million in about 4,000 grants and payouts to artists each year through 147 different programs. This seems excessive. They thought so too. According to council director and CEO Simon Brault, for too long the federal agency reacted to any new issue/trend or artistic practice by creating a new discipline based funded program. How was stand-up comedy absent? It’s never been a trend. It’s as old as our consciousness. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard from comics who were denied funding from the CAC. I applied several times and was never granted money. It pissed me off.

As of 2017, the Canada Arts Council has streamlined their arts funding and it looks promising for us. Since my discussions with them, they’ve opened a portfolio on stand-up comedy and are currently familiarizing themselves with it in Ottawa. Let me be clear though, stand-up comedy is yet to be defined as an art form by them but it is under consideration. Here’s what their new funding model looks like. http://canadacouncil.ca/funding

But let me get back to Mr. Primo Ministero, Justin Trudeau for a moment. What do I gotta do to get you to talk to me? Do I have to come down to Ottawa. Cause I’ll do it. Timing is of the essence especially because NAFTA is currently being renegotiated which is really the reason for my blog post today.

I recently learned that Washington controls Canadian oil. It’s outlined in Article 605 of the NAFTA Agreement. Something Brian Mulroney just handed over to the Americans back in 1993. I mean I guess I knew that intuitively but didn’t know it explicitly.

“For more than 20 years, Canadian politicians have largely managed to keep the focus on lumber and cows, distracting us from the truly outrageous aspects of NAFTA: the surrender of Canadian sovereignty in a couple of key areas. Now that Trump is forcing us to renegotiate NAFTA, there’s lots of talk here about how Canada must be tough, and even demand some changes we want.” (Nafta’s Dirty Little Secret: It Lets U.S. Control Canada’s Oil, Linda McQuaig, The Toronto Star)

Washington tried the same thing with Mexico and they shut it down.

“Article 605 was considered such an extreme infringement of national sovereignty that Mexico refused to accept it. Instead, Mexico demanded and was granted an exemption to that clause when it joined NAFTA in 1994.” (Nafta’s Dirty Little Secret…)

So why the hell did we just hand over our petrol like a bunch of pussies? Well we didn’t, Mulroney did and he did it without regard. A defining moment in our history and an erosion of our democracy.

This really characterizes our relationship with the United States. We just keep making more accommodations for them while they continue to impose restrictions on us. And we reward them with our motha’ flowin’ oil. Madonne! I’m losin’ it ova here!

Article 605 of NAFTA states:

(b) the Party [Canada] does not impose a higher price for exports of an energy or basic petrochemical good to that other Party [United States] than the price charged for such good when consumed domestically, by means of any measure such as licenses, fees, taxation and minimum price requirements.

In your face Canada!

When Brian Mulroney was negotiating NAFTA back in the 90s, I remember my father was not into it. He would say, ‘this free tray (he’s an abreever) is no free for us. It’s free for America but no Canada.’ And he was right. He knew the effects it would have on our economy because he worked in the mining industry. He experienced first hand the havoc the ‘free’ market wreaks in people’s everyday lives. I’m being so Marxist right now, I know, but it’s the only way I can explain it.

Marx would have been extremely opposed to ‘free tray’ deals because the further away the owners of the means of production are located, the more estranged and alienated the worker becomes to their livelihood and the citizen to their country. At times I feel an overwhelming sense of helplessness living in a nation that betrayed its citizens by giving so much power to banks, corporations and the biggest mafia of all time, Washington. This deal is so corrupt, that on top of everything I just said, it makes Canadians pay for loss of corporate profits due to stronger environmental regulations, indigenous rights, worker protections and consumer rights. Canada is the most-sued country in the developed world. Are Canadians just a bunch of whores? Maybe.

(Here’s a lovely painting of Karl Marx. Good chest on the man!)

Donald Trump has expressed he wants a better deal for Americans? How much of a better deal could he be looking for when they already have our oil? This is why Trudeau hasn’t made any serious commitments to the environment and why he keeps approving pipelines – the goons in Washington want it that way.

The current NAFTA negotiations are going so badly they’ve extended talks to 2018 largely due to outrageous U.S. demands and oil isn’t even on the table. Oil should always be on the table in case you wanna dip your bread in it. Canada’s Foreign Minister Cynthia Freeland said, “We have seen proposals that would turn back the clock on 23 years of predictability, openness, and collaboration. In some cases, these proposals run counter to World Trade Organization rules. This is troubling.”

So here’s my plea to Prime Minister Trudeau today. On behalf of stand-up comedians, please remove the unfair restrictions on us working in the United States and include us on the list of professions on the NAFTA job list: http://www.tnvisaexpert.com/overview/nafta-job-list/

If we keep allowing our precious commodities like oil and comedy to freely flow to the U.S. without demanding proper compensaish then we have no pride as a nation in what we produce. Let’s not make the same mistake with comedians as we are with oil. Comedians will outlive the fuel based economy. Let’s protect them.

There is absolutely nothing that justifies this incredibly unfair policy. If Americans claim that imposing restrictions on Canadians is necessary because we can take their jobs away, then the same is true in reverso. American comics come to Canada all the time and perform in our clubs and at our festivals. No problem. They don’t even need to produce so much as a letter at the border. Ridiculous right! And let me say it again they control our motha flowin oil. Enough!

This is the same for Canadian actors and musicians. When a Canadian band goes to the U.S., each member has to get a VISA. When American bands come to Canada, they need only one Visa for the entire band. Empire’s a bitch, eh. And Noam Chomsky agrees.

“Free trade agreements are not free at all. The trade system was reconstructed with a very explicit design of putting working people in competition with one another all over the world… [When] Alan Greenspan… testified to Congress, he explained his success in running the economy as based on what he called ‘greater worker insecurity’. Keep workers insecure they’re going to be under control. They are not going to ask for decent wages or decent working conditions, or the opportunity of free association – meaning to unionize. If you keep workers insecure they’re not going to ask for too much. They’ll just be delighted – they won’t even care if they have to have rotten jobs, and by some theory, that’s considered a healthy economy.” (In Requiem for the American Dream, Noam Chomsky)

This sums up the stand-up world in Canada. There’s so much insecurity that comics oblige some of the national clubs when they dictate to us where we can and can not perform. Most of us don’t even make a living wage. When a new club opened in Toronto over a year ago, some comics starting using pseudonyms instead of their real names for advertising purposes so as not to get in trouble with the bigger clubs. I used to be known as Sandy Bertrand for a time. No more. I’m Sandra Battaglini and my name is the only thing I got in this business. This environment of fear suffocates the very art it purports to showcase. And because we don’t have easy access to the U.S. we appease these outdated ways of doing business. When I watch I’m Dying Up Here, I think to myself is Canada 1970s L.A. but without Carson?

The same is true for actors. ACTRA tells its members where they can and cannot work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to turn down a part in an indie web series that would’ve paid me $100 for a couple of hours because I’m an ACTRA member and it was a non-union production. How can ACTRA tell people not to accept work when they don’t have work to replace it? That is not a union. That $100 multiplied by all the times I’ve had to turn work down because I belong to a so-called union, would’ve amounted to several weeks of groceries and mortgage payments. Never mind the exposure that doing something like this does for an actor. Why do the gatekeepers in this country make it so hard for us to work? I don’t think any Canadian would stand for this. I actually called and emailed ACTRA asking them to stand with us on this issue and they never got back to me. I’m suspish!

Right now Canada is experiencing a comedy boom. We’re bursting at the seams despite our limitations. So much great content is being created online and on TV, ie. LetterKenny, Baroness Von Sketch, Terrific Women just to name a few. Every night thousands of Canadians leave their homes and their devices to watch live comedy and laugh off the hysteria of our times. We are the talent, the NORTH star. So let’s stand-up for our art and celebrate it to maximum capacity. Let’s gain the access we deserve, and the government support that’s due. Let’s take ownership and develop our north stars. Let’s create a structure to ensure Canadian comics can entertain Canadians with their art while living and working in Canada. Let’s ask our politicians to ensure greater ease for comics to tour outside of Canada so they can bring their perspectives to the world, and new perspectives of the world back to Canada. We live in a magnificent country and we can nurture and benefit from uniquely Canadian storytellers, instead of celebrating their achievements elsewhere.

This may seem trivial to people. Oh you just tell jokes, that’s not a job. It is! It’s our livelihood and a force in our economy. Never mind the force it’s been in the American economy. One of the most iconic comedy institutions, SNL, was created by a Canadian after all. Based on that alone America, don’t make it so hard for us. And Canada, the economic spin-off of comedy is huge, ie. transit, food, taxes. So many venues rely on comedy to keep their doors open. It’s a beautiful thing and what keeps our spirits buoyant.

Let’s consider for a moment the larger and more monumental economic benefit of producing content here in Canada with our own talent. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and other digital platforms are spending billions of dollars on content creation. It would be foolish for Canada not to pursue a piece of this pie domestically with our natural resources – comedians – instead of taking the less risky tactic of buying stuff for cheap from other countries. This is a serious lack of vision and faith and shall I say downright lazy. Funny people from Canada are a tried and true commodity. As slick as oil and less corrosive to the earth. If the CRTC and Canadian broadcasters can’t get their shit together when it comes to creating Canadian stories by Canadian storytellers (aside from the CBC) then shall I suggest throwing a couple of dollars to us on the front lines who do it every day. I am certain we would create content the likes of which no one could have ever imagined. SCTV and Kids and the Hall are proof positive of our legendary comedic talent.

This Visa issue facing the comedy community here has manufactured a separation between us and our peers in the U.S. and created the kind of competition Chomsky speaks of. We are one community. We create art by stringing together words in such a way that culminates in laughter. It releases so many endorphins, you could say it saves lives. It certainly saved mine.

So many of my peers have made the big move to the U.S. and are gloriously forging a formidable presence there. They’ve been doing that for decades. I just got my O1 Visa so that part really isn’t for me but my community and my country who I stand in solidarity with and who have afforded me the privilege to entertain them.

If Canadian stand-ups were allowed to perform in the U.S. with little or no restrictions, they wouldn’t have to completely up-root their lives. They could tour the U.S. while still living here, instead of leaving Canada a pro and having to start all over in the U.S. I’m not advocating not moving to the U.S., I’m just saying, it doesn’t need to be such a big deal.

EPILOGUE

So I was ready to publish what you just read and then I received a letter from Heritage Minister, Melanie Jolie, the day after returning from Just for Laughs. What timing! I’ve attached it below. While she did the government thing of explaining the wonderful things they do, she took the liberty of forwarding my letter to the Minister of International Trade, François-Phillipe Champagne and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland. I’m blown away. Also, the Juno Awards has just announced it’s reinstating Comedy Album of the year. This is huge. I know it’s gonna take time but I feel like change is gonna come.

#canadian comedy #nafta canadian oil #blog

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chiseler · 5 years

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Jack Black Gets One Year

After near eleven months on the lam, late in the year 1912, Jack Black was on his way back inside. Despite his official protest at the Alberta, Canada, province jail, another protest at the Canadian border, and yet another in the States, he was remanded into custody by Canadian and American officials who had colluded extralegally to bring him back to justice in California. Jack called it “as raw a job of kidnapping as ever was done.” He knew the law; they knew the law. Yet here he was, cuffed again.

By way of train across the border and through Montana and Washington state, then finally into California, Jack prayed for either a snatched gun with which to kill himself or a fatal derailment into a ditch and get it over for he knew as well as he ever knew anything in his life that if he was taken back to Folsom prison to serve his twenty-five-year sentence he’d be dead within a year or two. He’d do anything not to see the inside again. He saw himself a loser all the way around.

Against some odds, not only did the escorting officers treat him civilly over the entire trip back to the States, giving him no chance to do away with himself, but instead of to the dreaded Folsom they brought him right back to the San Francisco city jail from where he’d escaped and begun this latest adventure underground.

There was a sort of bright side, as Jack saw it. Though he was back where he started he was a bit healthier (he had gained weight on the run) and most important he had kicked his opium habit. Legally too he found himself in shallower water than he thought he’d had below him. Although following his escape the district attorney had requested the court dismiss everything concerning his case, the special considerations and whatnot, which was done, what counsel did not know is that Black’s initial appeal on his case, the one he had applied for before the great 1906 fire that wiped out his records, was still pending, after all these years. (An intermediate court of appeals was set up for just this purpose in the post-fire years, so when the DA went to the state supreme court to make requests on Jack Black’s case, the denials for appeals reflected the prisoner’s stature at Ingleside jail, not the twenty-five-year sentence handed down in 1904 being appealed; Jack and his lawyer knew this, of course, but kept mum about it for the time being. Such were the idiosyncratic legal shenanigans at court that was part and parcel of the citywide chaos following for many years in the wake of the disastrous earthquake and fire.)

The big wheel newspaperman Fremont Older, tireless champ of the city's underdogs, came almost immediately to see Blacky in jail when he heard the news he was back in. Jack was afraid Older would hold it against him that he’d escaped when he, Older, was trying all he could to help him. But the fighting editor understood that it was going against Black and said he thought Jack had a right to do what he did. “It was the only way out for you,” Older told Black then. “I would probably have done the same thing myself.” These two very different men were trying hard to understand each other and were succeeding.

Older, a big man with a big hat, remarked on Jack’s healthy aspect and Black was pleased to tell him he’d kicked the hop. Then Older said he’d see what could be done now for him, believing he thought it possible, on account of the complications of the case, that an amended sentence could be worked out if Jack would stop his fighting and plead guilty. Jack admitted to his new friend of having little hope that any such thing could be done but even so he readily agreed to give it a try.

When a man from the city district attorney’s office (deputy district attorney Maxwell McNutt) came to see him, Jack repeated what he’d said to Older about escaping because he’d felt he had no choice at the time. The man told him he’d spoken to Older and Jack’s lawyer too and it was believed by them all that he’d done nearly enough time as it is. Jack was dumbstruck to hear this. In all his considerable experience he’d never heard a representative of the law say he thought a criminal had served enough time. Then McNutt told Jack that if he’d dismiss all matters with regard to his case before the court and plead guilty, as Older had suggested as well, the DA would ask for a sentence of no more than two years.

Naturally this started Jack to thinking what kind of double cross they were trying to hand him. He’d never gotten any leniency in any court and it was simply unbelievable to him. He spoke once again to both his lawyer and Mr. Older. They tried hard to convince him that he was to be dealt fairly with. Jack confessed freely that this was quite a revelation to him. He hadn’t expected it at all. “It was the first time I ever got any better than the worst of it,” he said. He saw himself getting out from under that twenty-five-year death sentence and he found it difficult suddenly to keep from hoping for the best.

Jack was tired. His feet were on the downward path. He was fed up with waiting for the courts. If he could take a plea for a certain reduced sentence well okay then. He wanted to quit the life, all right, but it had seemed so far away it wasn’t worth the while to get it. He’d seen nothing ahead of him but more of the same, a violent life that would inevitably come to a violent end. And the sooner the better, it was all the same to him. Of a sudden he had a friend in the court. He realized that people were taking a chance on him and as a consequence it was up to him to make good of it, “to square myself,” when he came out of it. He said to himself he’d even be willing to go to work.

He didn’t mention this to anybody, of course. He hated to hear a guy say he’d do this, do that when he was in jail. It just doesn’t look right for a fellow to whine and repent saying he’d never go wrong again when he got out. Jack was not the type to put the talk on work and reformation, no sir. If he made the promise to himself, well that was enough. He didn’t have to broadcast anything.

It was a tight context, though. “My views had not changed a bit about stealing,” he felt compelled to state later. “It was only that I had got into a hole where in order to play square with men that had been friends to me I had to quit.” He meant Mr. Older and, later, Judge Dunne. “However, I would not claim credit for this, as though it was a sacrifice on my part.” Hell, he said to himself again, by now he wanted to quit the life.

Fremont Older suggested to Jack that he give a little talk in court on the day of his case being heard in the way of offering his experiences in the life of a criminal as a kind of instruction to those in a position perhaps to help others who would find themselves in the circumstances he had. Older had listened to Black talk enough to know he had plenty to impart. Jack was reluctant initially but he thought that, yes, he supposed he could offer something, for he had after all many experiences outside the law and if what he had to say was of any use to just one person then it was all right. He wrote out about 300 words, according to Older, but then decided he would rather just get up in court and ramble. He saved it for after his sentence was read, however, ever sensitive that it not appear as if he were falsely caterwauling to a softer term.

On December 24, Christmas Eve, 1912, Jack Black was re-sentenced by Judge Frank Dunne to a term of one year for the highway robbery crime committed more than eight years earlier, the most of which he’d spent in jails in the city of San Francisco. This was even more than he could have hoped. One year! He looked at Judge Dunne, who had suddenly given him this last chance, just at the point when he’d all but given up. He’d always liked to watch people and wonder why they did the things they do. He’d had lots of time to think things over in jail in the past eight years and more. Well, he thought now, it isn’t asking much of a man to try and stay out of jail, and in return for such kindness and trust as he was shown here today, he ought to do so.

“I would not make this statement if I ever expected to appear in court again as a defendant,” Jack pronounced with the stoutest of hearts, and he went on to detail at length (close to an hour, per a court reporter’s report!) his prison experiences as well as attitudes regarding the criminal life and the life of brutality, on the run from the law and from himself. He confessed his despair and near defeat right up to the moment of reprieve, which impressed him as nothing else ever had. In closing, pale and stoop shouldered, Jack made a heartfelt declaration, and it is worth repeating in full: “I have promised myself, and I promise the court, that when I finish this sentence I shall look for the best instead of the worst, that I shall look for kindness instead of cruelty, and that I shall look for the good instead of the bad, and when I find them I shall return them with interest. I am confident when I promise the court this that I will not fail. I imagine I have enough character left as a foundation on which to build a reformed life. If I had no character, no will power, no determination, I would have been broken long ago by the years of imprisonment and punishment; and I would have been useless and harmless and helpless, a force for neither good nor bad.”

A reporter from the San Francisco Bulletin was in the courtroom that day and he took down what Jack said and had it printed (in several parts, beginning that afternoon, December 24, 1912), which was editor Older’s intention. The headline read: “John Black, Who Broke Prison, in Dramatic Scene.” The newspaper, at the time attempting to influence the state penal system, included this final word from Jack’s long statement, which he declined to print in his remarkable autobiography You Can’t Win years later: “This marks the close of my statement, and there may be something wrong in my philosophy. I have picked it up in jail and outside in worse places, and if there is any error in it, or in my logic, I would be glad to have them pointed out to me now, so that I might write [sic] them.” This last I believe is the reporter’s error in transcription, as it seems to me Jack meant “right” though it would not be long before “write,” unpredictably enough, would also be operable.

The judge was duly impressed, and he admitted aloud that “few men who have passed through what you have seem to realize and feel their work of redemption lies largely in themselves and that their future is in their own hands...I believe there is still hope for you.” Dunne had helped Jack grasp his own future, and with that chance on this prisoner it gave Jack Black the opportunity not only to change his life but to write his life, and for that we can thank Judge Dunne deeply as Black had.

Finally, oddly enough, Dunne asked Black if he had any choice of prisons. He said he preferred San Quentin because he’d already been in every other prison in the state of California. What he meant of course was that he would never again set foot in the only other state pen, Folsom, if ever he could help it. He got what he wanted and he walked out of court that day with the greatest Christmas gift he’d ever received, or would ever receive.

by Don Kennison

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