#this is quite possibly the longest quote I’ve ever posted | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

scripttorture · 3 years

Note

Hello! I have a few questions related to your most recent post and the definition of torture. You said:

"A trained person who was never tortured will always out perform someone whose training involved torture."

According to everything else I have seen on your blog, this makes sense - the mental and physical trauma from being tortured have lasting effects which make certain tasks more difficult.

However, this seems to juxtapose certain tropes I've seen in US military training advertisements. For example, "Hell Week" in the Navy SEAL training seems like it would be torture if it was forced upon someone (like if the soldiers didn't sign up for it and didn't have the option to quit.). *Hell Week is when soldiers are training continuously for 5 days in freezing, wet conditions, with little more than 4 hours of sleep for the entire week, under insane amounts of physical and mental stress.

- If someone chose to be tested both mentally and physically, I feel like it wouldn't be torture. However, if the same exact conditions were forced upon someone else (testing their mental and physical limits without their consent or understanding), does your quote above mean that the person who did not have a choice would not reap the benefits of the training/testing? Or would the Navy SEALs be better soldiers if they didn't have to go through 'torturous conditions' during Hell Week, regardless of their choice to do so?

(I used Hell Week as an example, but I meant this question generally. I'm trying to figure out how to best train an elite soldier and avoid any harmful torture apologia tropes, while also making sure that they are able to handle insanely challenging situations)

- My other question has more to do with the definition of torture that you quoted from the UN in one of your master posts. If someone is being seriously injured (pulled fingernails, whipping, starvation etc), but not for the purposes of interrogation, punishment, or intimidation, is that still torture, or is that just abuse? And, regardless of what we call it, would the effects be the same as if it were torture for any of the three motives above?

Sorry if this is long and hard to understand, I can clarify if needed!

It’s not the longest I’ve gotten and it’s perfectly clear, duck*. :) Honestly this is a difficult topic with a lot of nuance, it’s better to take a longer and more thoughtful approach.

From the stand point of the legal definition and what we study/understand as torture any consensual activity, however extreme, is not torture.

But here’s where it gets interesting: consent and our attitude to an activity actually changes our response to pain. It may even change how much pain we feel.

I’m going to take a slightly different example to yours. There are a lot of cultures globally that have practiced scarification, ritual cutting to deliberately form scars. And this can be done for a lot of reasons: membership of a family or clan, coming of age, traditional medicine, religion, you get the idea.

A lot of people in these cultures describe their scars as incredibly important and the process of getting them as a moving, deep and positive process.

This does not mean they wouldn’t be traumatised if they were attacked by someone with a knife.

Being able to approach something painful and see it as positive really changes our perspective. It makes trauma and mental illness a lot less likely. And being able to back out, even if it’s just for a little while to take a breather, seems to make us able to withstand more pain then we would have otherwise.

The simplest and most famous experiment that dealt with this relationship between our mindset and pain asked people to keep their hands in ice cold water. They timed how long people could do it when they were told to stay silent and how long they could do it when they were allowed to swear. If they swore they could hold their hands under for longer. An average of forty seconds longer.

Looking back over O’Mara (Why Torture Doesn’t Work, a very good intro to how pain works and what it does to the brain) the way he describes it as by thinking of the experience of pain as a collection of three things. There’s the physical sensation itself, the nerves firing. But there’s also an affective component, how we feel emotionally about the experience and a cognitive component, how we think about it.

Did you ever play that game as a kid where you stuff as many chilis as possible in your mouth to see who would spit them out first? I… might have done. And from what I remember it hurts an awful lot. But those memories to me are mostly about messing about with my friends, I remember trying to be stubborn about it and I remember us laughing at each other.

This is a completely different experience to someone being held down and having chili stuff up their nose. But the difference isn’t necessarily in the physical damage done or the physical sensation of pain. It’s in the other components, the emotional response and the rationalisation.

I also had a filling drilled in my tooth without painkillers as a kid. I don’t know how common this is in the West? It happened in Saudi. Honestly my biggest memory of it is the language barrier between myself and the dentist.

These are anecdotes obviously but I’m trying to show that you probably also have experiences in your own life that back up the experiments too. The way we think about a painful experience really does make a huge amount of difference. And that means consent matters enormously.

These soldiers are going into this experience knowing what to expect, how long it will last and that they can stop at any time. That makes a huge amount of difference. Those same factors have drastically increased the time volunteers will spend in solitary confinement for research. I’m pretty sure if I dug even a little I’d find pain studies with similar findings.

Here’s the flip side: the physical factors are still in play.

Sleep is an important physiological process that’s essential to normal functioning. Studies on consensual sleep deprivation have shown massive negative impacts on memory along with a host of other things that you can read about here.

Let’s take a non torture example. A student who stays up all night cramming for an exam is not going to develop the symptoms of trauma that a torture survivors who was sleep deprived would. But the effect sleep deprivation has on memory is due to sleep playing an essential role in preserving memory (and learning more generally.) So they’re both likely to have difficulty remembering things in days just before and just after sleep deprivation. They’re also both more likely to have false memories and catch a bad cold.

As a result of this memory impairment I question the educational value of anything involving sleep deprivation: you can’t learn while messing up the processes that let your brain remember things.

There have been cases in the UK of people dying during training for the armed forces. Because while consent makes a huge difference, mindset makes a huge difference- our bodies still have limits. We can choose to push ourselves past those limits and, whatever our motivation or feelings, it can do real harm.

Personally? I’m unsure of the benefit of these kinds of exercises. As in I’m unsure there is a benefit. Learning is going to be shot, chances of injury are going to be a lot higher- I don’t see anything that could be improved by these sorts of exercises.

Anecdotally people do report feeling like a closer unit after going through these sorts of routines. That might be the benefit: moral and unit cohesion, possibly self-esteem too.

If you’re making up something for your story I think it’d be helpful for me to mention a little statistical effect that gets used to justify punishment pretty regularly. Get some dice out if you’ve got them and roll one. Let’s say the number represents performance in some kind of test (because effort and learning matter but our performance also varies because of things we can’t control.) A roll of 1 gets punished, a roll of 6 gets praised.

Now after you roll that first 1 statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be better. And if you roll a 6 then statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be worse. People observe this effect in real life and they often conclude that there’s no point in praising someone but that punishment leads to improvement. Really it’s just a statistical effect, after a particularly, noticeably bad day the chances are things will be better next and vice versa.

This effect can make it difficult for people to recognise overall, long term progress. Which is the kind of progress you should be paying attention to when designing a training program.

If you want good performance from people, whatever the metric, the most efficient thing to do is ensure that those people are; well fed, have access to clean water, get plenty of sleep, have breaks and have access to medical treatment when they need it.

I’d say the main things to keep in mind when designing this fictional training regime are:

Being honest about the effects you describe, ie if they’re spending long periods without shelter are they at risk from exposure? If they’re standing in cold water are they going to get hypothermia?

Remember that even if something is damaging or causes lasting trauma it would not necessarily prevent someone from doing their job. Torture survivors have serious, lasting symptoms but many of them still work.

I think I’m going to leave that there because I’m not an expert in militaries or training people. And keep in mind that I am a pacifist, read this with my biases in mind.

Getting to the second question, there is a little more to the UN definition then that. The primary factor is still who the abuser is. For it to be torture (legally speaking) the abuser has to be (or be ordered by) an on-duty government employee, part of a group that controls territory (ie an occupying force). Some countries also count international organised criminal gangs in this definition.

It’s also important to note that torture can be targetted at someone other then the victim. So if the police arrest the brother of a political opponent and beat him in order to intimidate the politician, that is still torture.

Basically there are a lot of factors in the legal definition of torture and it’s that way by design. The hope is that you end up with a framework that captures as much government abuse as possible.

But it also means that there’s a pretty high barrier when it comes to proving torture. Which means that things which are legally torture can be prosecuted as assault, bodily harm or equivalents to these, because it’s easier to get a conviction for those charges.

Technically you are correct: if abuse done by a government official doesn’t have one of the four motivations in the legal definition (attempts to obtain information, forcing a confession, intimidation or punishment) then it doesn’t meet the definition.

However in practice I’ve not heard of a case failing because of the motive.

I’m not a lawyer and I’m not an expert in international law. I won’t say it’s never happened. But it’s much more common for cases to fail for other reasons. Off the top of my head I’d say the most common reason is difficulty proving the abuse took place.

The most common types of torture today are ‘clean’, a term we use to indicate that they don’t leave obvious marks. If someone turns up with fingernails torn out or the skin of their back lacerated by a whip that is clear physical evidence of abuse. Nothing else causes similar injuries. But if someone turns up at a doctor’s with swollen feet or reddened skin, if they’ve lost a lot of weight or they’re so tired they’re struggling to stand… Well all of those things can be caused by common tortures. But they can also be caused by common illnesses.

A lot of the deaths from torture today are similarly hard to prove. Beatings and stress positions ultimately cause death by kidney failure. Which can mean that prosecutors are asked to prove a victim didn’t have an underlying health condition. Or take drugs.

Honestly my instinct is that the motive is the easiest thing to prove. It’s often harder to bring charges against people in positions of authority, regardless of the country we’re talking about. Bringing those charges, proving abuse took place and proving it was done by the person in question, those are usually the tricky parts.

The difference between torture and abuse is scale. Torture is industrial scale abuse.

The law doesn’t define that scale but that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about abuse from organised authority. Abusers might have dozens of victims. Torturers have thousands, tens of thousands.

If you want to explore a different motivation in your story, something outside the legal framework, consider the scale at which this abuse is taking place. Consider how organised it is. If it’s organised and large scale, with multiple abusers, with no prior relationship between the abuser and victims then torture will probably be a better model then abuse. If it’s smaller scale with a more personal relationship and if it isn’t supported by a legal framework/organisation then abuse might be a better model.

For victims and survivors the difference isn’t so much about the symptoms they personally experience as the… side effect of that scale. Abuse victims are often very isolated and may not know anyone who has had a similar experience. Torture implies a community of survivors and possibly generational trauma. There are also effects to do with access to support, access to medical care and how likely it is that someone will be believed.

Torture survivors are often systematically disenfranchised in a way that abuse victims are not. Torture survivors are often forced to leave their home country. Anecdotally, based on what I’ve seen globally over the last few years, I think that struggling to get citizenship is increasingly an issue for torture survivors. And without citizenship there’s difficulty finding legal work, getting accommodation, accessing medical care, accessing the legal system etc.

I do not know whether torture survivors are more or less likely to be believed by their community compared to survivors of abuse. I do not think any one has attempted a comparative study. I do know that the prevalence of clean torture means that many torture survivors are not believed and this puts up a further barrier, making it harder to access medical treatment and bring charges.

Rejali’s book was published in 2009, so things may have changed a tad. At the time he was writing the average wait for a torture survivor to see a specialist doctor was about 10 years.

Abuse is to torture what murder is to genocide. And there are difference on a wider social scale as a result.

I mention all that because I feel it’s relevant but the impression I get is you’re mostly interested in the long term symptoms? In which case, yes the legal definition makes very little difference. The physical injuries caused by particular kinds of abuse don’t change depending on whether it’s a private individual or a police officer holding the Taser.

The lasting psychological symptoms are not particular to torture; they’re what the human brain does when traumatised. The same symptoms can manifest in people who witness traumatic events but weren’t actually hurt themselves. They can manifest in people who were injured in accidents and they manifest in people who were neglected or abused. Hell, I have a couple of them, though no where near the severity a torture survivors would experience. A sufficient amount of stress is enough for these symptoms to start developing in anybody.

You can find the general list of symptoms here. There’s also a post specifically about memory problems over here.

The pattern I describe; that these symptoms are a list of possibilities not ‘every torture victim will get all of these’ holds true for trauma survivors generally. Anecdotally there is some variability with chronic pain being reported more often with some kinds of abuse. That might be because it can have physical causes, psychological causes or a mix of the two.

Whether it’s torture or abuse there isn’t any way to predict a survivor’s symptoms in advance. Much of the advice I have about writing torture survivors and their symptoms holds true for trauma survivors generally. Which is why I’ll still take a crack at some questions that aren’t about torture.

Pick the symptoms that you feel fit the character and serve the story. We can’t predict symptoms and that means that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick the things that appeal to you.

And I think I’m going to leave it there. I hope that helps :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*This is a weird English endearment. I had someone ask if this was me trying not to swear.

#orphicphosphenes #writing advice #tw torture #torture as training #legal definition of torture #clean torture #military abuse #trauma #trauma and consent #pain #pain and memory #sleep deprivation #attitudes towards clean tortures #writing survivors #abuse within the military

82 notes · View notes

calliopecalling · 3 years

Text

Queen of the South 5x09 Debrief

Just like with episode 8, I'm having a hard time convincing myself to have opinions about this last one--because so much of what I think of the final third of the season will ride on what ends up getting resolved in the finale. Does that mean I have high hopes for the finale? Yes, unfortunately yes 😂 Does that mean I actually think those hopes will be met? I mean. No? 🤡

In any case, more thoughts, (obviously) spoilers if you haven't seen the episode, and speculation below the cut...

What's riding on the finale for me is whether the end ends up justifying the means. Like ok: you can tell by my 5x09 live reaction that I've sort of hit the point of just being phenomenally irritated by the extended Pote/Kelly Anne scenes. I think most of us on here are at that place (though apparently fans in other places love Kote? Idk?). Is it even possible at this point for the writers to wrap up that storyline in a way that won't make me feel upset about how much screentime they got? Maybe not. But if they just get a basic happy ending, I will probably remain eternally phenomenally annoyed by that part of this season.

You can also tell by my 5x09 live reaction post that I'm at the point of being phenomenally irritated by how few conversations we've gotten between Teresa and James (I mean honestly, between Teresa and ANY MAIN CHARACTER) that last longer than 30 seconds. Her longest conversations this season have been with side characters! I probably wouldn't be quite as irritated about Pote if he hadn't become so one-dimensional to me this season, and he wouldn't be as one-dimensional if he'd actually shared moments with Teresa. But back to the (lack of) Teresa and James conversations: I can imagine the finale revealing additional season 5 story that we haven't been seeing because it's being saved for a big plot twist.

Obviously a popular theory right now is that T and J have been planning their big escape via him fake-assassinating her all along. If this is true, we obviously will learn a lot more about conversations they've been having that we just haven't been privy to. And I can also see how, if this theory is true, it makes giving them meaningful conversations at least over the last few episodes a bit more complicated. Like we as viewers almost NEED to be in the dark about what the heck is going on between them in order for a fake death twist to be satisfyingly surprising. Earlier today I was trying to write "if they hadn't been interrupted by a phone call" extended conversation scenes for the two of them going back to earlier in the season and I found I was having trouble BECAUSE what if they were already starting to plan something as early as, say, episode 5? It seems unlikely there was any plotting of that nature that early because she was still invested in expanding her empire at that point; but definitely by episode 7? ANYWAY, there's still a lot of definition lacking in their relationship in the first half of the season, and honestly in her character overall. But it seems possible to me that with a secret-fake-death move, we could get more insight into some of their build-up and decision-making together at least in the back half of the season that COULD somewhat redeem SOME of that missing screentime.

I also wonder whether there's something more to Kelly Anne and Pote than meets the eye. I saw that flash of Kelly Anne in the finale promo wearing a baseball cap and carrying a duffel bag; could she be a double agent? That's James's CIA uniform... Hard to imagine that making sense but I probably wouldn't altogether mind that? Not sure how the pregnancy works with that story, though, so more likely to me is that Pote dies. That would at least help explain (if not exactly redeem) the drawn-out Kote scenes this season as the writers tried to get us all invested in their happy ending. I think that largely fell flat (at least with the part of the fandom I interact with!) and I would've rather they'd spent the time on Teresa and Pote's relationship than Kelly Anne and Pote's. But to me, the only ending that in any way justifies the amount of lovey-dovey Kote time this season is an ending that isn't happy for the two of them.

So I guess what I'm saying is, it's possible the finale will play out in such a way that some of the super annoying things about this season will end up feeling less annoying in hindsight. Making it hard for me to issue Opinions with a capital O. BUT I also can't count on that, and can't go into the finale full clown, so. My Opinions you shall get.

The other thing that will majorly piss me off is if James actually killed Teresa. Like that ending might just totally ruin the series for me. ***SPOILER***: I watched a panel on Saturday with Alice and Dailyn and Dailyn said she promised the ending is "super satisfying" (direct quote) and Alice qualified that with "it's sad and happy and satisfying and all of it" (that's a paraphrase because I didn't capture the full exact quote), so I cannot IMAGINE that they are that out of touch with fans that an ending in which James actually assassinates Teresa like two days after they finally confessed their love to each other and had super intimate presumably mind-blowing long-awaited tension-bursting sex would count as "super satisfying" to them. But, well, WHO THE FUCK KNOWS.

Speaking of that sex. Ummmm. If I were a decent smut writer I'd write a full-blown smut fic based around all of that, including all the bits between them passionately making out on the balcony and ending up banging in bed which were conveniently omitted from the episode. But I'm not a decent smut writer and I IMPLORE someone else to please do that because the world needs that desperately. Where are all the people who used to write on AO3? Can we bribe them to come back? I'll keep doling out my useless opinions and writing my rambly drawn-out Jeresa meta-analyses if we can get some more fanfics 😁😁😁😁😁

A few other random thoughts about the episode:

Did anyone else notice that we didn't actually get Teresa and James saying good-bye to each other before she takes off for Belize without him? Yeah, she's not dead.

I'm super confused at this point about Boaz's role in any of what's gone down. So he was basically being orchestrated by Castel and Devon to make a hit on Teresa? Try to squeeze her? But to what end, if Devon actually just wanted Teresa to take out Kostya? Couldn't he have just gone to her directly? I need to re-watch some episodes I guess to try to track it all but I'm confused right now about what Boaz is still doing and how much Devon has to do with what he's doing. And what Devon's end game is with him.

I'm really psyched to have seen that flash of Marcel in the finale promo and hope it's not going to just be some super disappointing "let's make sure to give a final bird's-eye view of all our faves before the final credits roll" moment. Like I hope we get some closure to him and Teresa!

If I were Devon, I would just want to send someone else to take out Teresa. Devon knows James is in love with her. Why would he think James would take her out? Maybe there's some subtext when Devon says "but I'm nice, and the next guy won't be as nice." The subtext being, "the next guy will just send someone who isn't you to take out your wife, so it might as well be me sending you to fake-take out your wife." Will we ever know? Or will this be one of those holes in the writing that never really gets resolved?

Guess we'll find out in a few days!

27 notes · View notes

alexbraindump · 3 years

Text

Night in the Woods & Optimistic Nihilism, Pt. 1: Constellations

“So I believe in a universe that doesn’t care and people who do.”

Night in the Woods manages to create one of the most realistic narratives I’ve ever seen crafted in a video game. And that’s a bold statement, one that shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. Yet I feel entirely concrete in saying it. It’s quite the diverse game, dealing with a range of topics so wide that it’d be hard to cover all of them in one single post. I hope to cover more of them someday, but today I’ll be narrowing in on one specific point that resonated especially well with me personally: finding purpose in an existence that is inherently devoid of it.

And it’s here that I’m going to say that, to anyone who hasn’t played NITW yet, stop reading this right now and go pick it up. It’s only $20 and with it comes an experience that remains consistently enjoyable and impactful throughout its entire runtime. I won’t be holding back from relevant spoilers for the rest of this post, so now’s your only chance. Go away. But come back once you’ve played the game. That’d be pretty cool I think.

~~~~~~~~~~~MILD SPOILER TERRITORY BELOW~~~~~~~~~~~

Now that the uninitiated are gone, it’s finally time to wrap back around to that quote at the beginning of this post. A universe that doesn’t care, and people who do. It perfectly aligns with the definition of optimistic nihilism, a term seemingly dubbed by a youtube channel in 2017. For those who are unaware, optimistic nihilism is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s the philosophy that the universe is inherently uncaring, that there’s no concrete meaning to life that we can grasp onto, yet we as human beings are uniquely capable of creating our own meaning without requiring some higher power or order to do it for us. We can choose to pursue what we wish for out of our lives, free to choose our own individualized path through the blank slate that is existence and draw whatever patterns we may choose from it.

As you read through that brief summary you may have already begun to understand exactly why I consider Night in the Woods to align particularly well with optimistic nihilism. The game is not exactly lacking in the theme of finding meaning within things that may be meaningless in the most literal sense. It’s been there since the very beginning, with NITW’s first supplemental game Longest Night. It’s a simple little game featuring Mae, Bea, Gregg and Angus identifying various constellations and making characteristically entertaining quips about each of them. Despite the game’s relative simplicity it acts as an early (over 3 years before NITW itself released!) establishment of NITW’s ever-present theme of establishing meaning in things that don’t have meaning by themselves by using one simple thing: constellations.

Constellations are a perfect medium to establish the philosophy of optimistic nihilism and it is evident that Infinite Fall were acutely aware of that from a very early point in the development of NITW. All constellations really are just patterns of stars we may see in the sky at night that people have assigned their own patterns and meanings to. Most stars sit so far away from the Earth that the human brain struggles to even comprehend how far away they truly are beyond a simple “Wow! That’s pretty far!” They’re balls of gas, unable to care about or even recognize whatever we humans see within them. Most of them have existed for longer than we have and will continue to persist long after we die. Yet the human race has taken it upon themselves to assign patterns to them and continue recognizing said patterns long after we’ve obtained knowledge about what the stars that form them truly are. In nature they hold no inherent meaning and have no rhyme nor reason to their locations relative to each other from our perspective, yet we have used our minds to instill meaning into them and draw patterns that can only be drawn from where we stand. The universe did not care about how it put them there nor how any living being may interpret them, but people cared enough to give them meaning.

Years after the release of Longest Night, Night in the Woods proper came out. And in it the usage of stars was far from ditched. Their function as being one of the elements perpetuating NITW’s optimistic nihilism was only expanded. Every two days in the game you are offered the opportunity to choose to hunt for dusk stars with a character named Mr. Chazokov. The interactions with him themselves don’t offer much in the ways of adding upon the pre-established theme of finding meaning within none, though their mere inclusion does help cement the theme as an important part of the game. The true point in which the theme is finally brought front and center is when the player can choose to go ghost hunting with Angus at Possum Jump. After some uneventful ghost hunting, Mae and Angus decide to rest at the top of a hill and do some stargazing. At this point the game essentially retraces (literally and figuratively) all the ground covered in Longest Night. Mae connects constellations together and Angus names them and gives a brief explanation for each of them. It’s a charming little moment that eventually evolves into Angus explaining the abuse he endured throughout his childhood to Mae. But what’s relevant to this specific analysis is Angus’s attitude throughout. He continually stays true to and loops back upon the fact that, while the stars themselves are very real and the stories given to them do very much exist, the stars really don’t mean anything by themselves. It all culminates with Angus explaining his tragic childhood to Mae. But what’s important to the overall narrative of this essay is Angus’s response when Mae asks him if he believes in anything.

It’s at this point that the game gives its most obvious addressal to its philosophy of optimistic nihilism. It’s like the pot finally boils over and it says “alright, time to finally talk about this.” As a response to being prompted about his beliefs, Angus explains his thoughts by using the constellations recently outlined as a convenient example. It’s here that the quote that spurred this whole essay on shows its head. “So I believe in a universe that doesn’t care and people who do,” is the final quote summarizing Angus’s philosophy on meaning in the universe. And if that isn’t the clearest possible representation of optimistic nihilism in NITW then I don’t know what is. It’s a simple little quote, yet it manages to single handedly encapsulate what optimistic nihilism is. Of course, it’s framed as the view of one character in the game, and a character thinking something doesn’t immediately mean that the entire work subscribes to that philosophy, but as you think about NITW and its various elements more and more it becomes increasingly apparent that it is indeed representative of the philosophy of optimistic nihilism.

And with that vague statement I’ll be leaving off the first part of this little mini-project for the time being. I do intend to come back to it at some point in the (hopefully near) future, as I feel that there’s a lot more that could be said about the themes of finding meaning in Night in the Woods. Currently I’m planning on writing about why I enjoy Mae Borowski as a character so much and see her as one of my favorite video game protagonists, so that’ll probably be done before any other parts to this essay come out. Keep an eye out if you enjoy what I’m posting and want to see more, and don’t be afraid to offer any feedback you may have. There’s a contact section on my profile if you’d like the most effective ways to get in touch.

#night in the woods #nitw #analysis #optimistic nihilism #writing #fiction #nitw angus #night in the wood angus #angus delaney #video games #games #indie game #longest night #nitw spoilers

87 notes · View notes

lwt28brave · 3 years

Note

Top ten AFHF documentary moments, go!

Hi Sea!

I wasn't home yesterday and when I arrived I was knackered so I had to pospone this for today when I was more awake and present. I'm rewatching the documentary right now so I will be doing both !!!!!

(Two hours later: i'm only 16 minutes in). (I started at 12 and its almost 5pm. I keep... pausing).

1. Helene. I love Louis to the moon and back and I feel like Helene is all of us. She represents us. She cares about him so much and is such a good mentor ♥ I adored both the before concert moments when she's here for him to help him battle his nerves and the post concert hug. She was crying, I was crying, we were all crying.

2. HIM PLAYING THE GUITAR. THIS IS EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WANTED (and I'm greedy, I want much more of it). Louis shut up I'm listening to the guitar. Long haired Louis playing guitar at the beach ;;_;;

3. His confidence. There were moments of doubt (him stress cleaning!), which I think are not only normal and realistic but also a testament to his perseverance both with his voice and his solo career in spite of everything. "I was fucking feeling like I was flying" this has to be one of my favorite quotes even if he said it when he was nervous. His facial expressions looking at the public.

4. Change. I loved how we got a glimpse of him practicing it too. Not my favorite song from him, but I like the general sound of it and I'm really excited for every new song we get. It has such a classic rock touch, his voice sounds amazing in it and the instruments are immaculate.

5. His grandparents. I love to see he has this support system in his family and how close he is to them. How they speak about this at the beginning and also the hugs afterwards and how he worried about how his grandpa was getting there (♥).

//This leaves me with only two points to talk about my favorite things about the performance...//

6. Him starting the concert with We Made It and the transition between the documentary and the concert are amazing choices. The filming and editing in general were top notch. TOU...The aerial shots. The torchs...The strings (The "hah"). Beautiful. Simply beautiful. Too Young already had a special place in my heart but I think I appreciate Perfect Now a little more every time. VOCALS. As for OTB... again... the shots. The flags. His face. It makes me feel so seen and loved.

7. This is already the longest post in the story of posts because I wanted to talk about how much I love everything related to Louis so a general shout out to COACOAC, Fearless, Defenceless, Walls, KMM and most importantly the covers! He owns these songs now, I don't make the rules. VOCALS. VOCALS. Yes that's all I will say. I'm so glad to have another audio for my collection of audios of 7.

8. Every time we see him interact with the band. The shots. The hugs. Both the individual ones and the group one. I'm so glad to see he picked people he feels so comfortable to be around AND they're all amazing musicians.

9. I just think it's so hot to read "Louis Tomlinson Presents", "in association with 78 Productions" by Producer Louis Tomlinson. This is truly Louis baby isn't it. In general I absolutely loved how involved with everything he seemed to be, he truly had every little detail under control. Him being bossy with Matt Vines and nagging him. Nothing else to add here. Just like, making sure it's when not if.

(Yes, this is just a compilation of Louis saying he loves us)

10. All of this is a mutual thing, all of us feeling that moment // So not quite touching distance? And we have gone as close as we can with that? // Putting on something big, and free and for the fans, you know, as a kind gift from us to them // This is only possible because of you lot // And then I get on stage and I fucking see you lot... what the fuck was I worried about // I fucking love you all // I feel you crystal palace // Throughout this whole gig all I felt is excited, about what's to come, the tour ahead of us. And that, that's thanks to all of you in here. I try in these moments to show you me thanks. But honestly, I can't- I can't even articulate. I just fucking love all of you. And everyone who's not here today, you know, anyone who's...fucking, I love you, I love you a lot // I fucked up your moment now, we will save it, we will save it // As per fucking usual got way beyond me expectations. And that's thank to you lot. And I want you to know... every single time I get up in stage... that's why I put today on....any opportunity that I can thank you lot, cause you're fucking unbelievable. Every fucking time I get up in stage you guys make me feel fucking invincible. I fucking love that feeling // If I've got this lot behind me, who the fuck is gonna stop us, you know what I mean?

(Also, very mememememe (diva?) moment but: when I saw me in the Barcelona footage. And the close-up of my friend's face).

Top 10 things I disliked:

1. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

2. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

3. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

4. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

5. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

6. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

7. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

8. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

9. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

10. Him saying "I haven't given it much a thought" about LT2.

(And his t-shirt. I disliked his t-shirt. Please don't kick me out of the fandom. Also him letting the fans to sing Defenceless bridge. Not allowed. Don't do that again).

#Louis Tomlinson #AFHF #top ten moments #enjoying this rewatch more than the first watch tbh #excessive use of the word fucking

14 notes · View notes

yasmijn · 3 years

Text

Day 14 – What challenge did you overcome and be grateful for?

Fulfilling my own expectation has been one of the greatest challenges I’ve faced and more of them will keep on coming.

After high school, the main challenge was to get into university and there was only one acceptable university I set for myself. I failed the non-test entrance scheme and there were only two weeks towards the written test. It was the longest three weeks in my life, but the day I read the announcement, the world suddenly turns brighter. I made it through the tiny needle hole.

During university, I didn’t set that many ambitious goals. I just want to experience a lot of different things and meet a lot of people. When I was in the first year and I got my first A, I thought getting a 4.00 for a GPA is possible (it is possible for certain people but not me), but then I got all ABs for calc, physics, and chemistry and I suppose it was already good enough for me. I survived the first year without having to retake anything. I wanted to graduate cumlaude but I am not the most diligent student. I studied last minute, slept at 3am the day before the exam, and prayed that whatever that is that I’ve learned would come out at the test. I managed to get my GPA past 3.5 on the 7th semester thanks to the guaranteed-A elective courses.

I guess one of the biggest challenges during university was juggling so many things at the same time. My third year was the craziest. I was a lab assistant for the most practicum-heavy laboratory, where we had to run each module almost every week during the night; a secretary general at the students association that would kept us at the uni up til midnight; and a journalist for the university news team on top of the craziest lab/course of PLO (Plant Lay Out) where a group of two students will be given sheets and sheets of Excel full of rows of data and we have to analyze everything and draw a full report on a weekly basis. I think everybody was sleep deprived.

After graduation, it got harder. Everybody went to find their own path and I wanted to stick with mine. The challenge was to keep going after so many rejections and doubts and feeling not good enough. I was grateful that I could raise from the failures, brush them off, kept on improving myself, and finally received the best email I’ve ever read in my life. It was the period where I felt the crappiest, and the scholarship was the external validation that made everything worth it. It also brought back my confidence and created a humbler version of me.

I learnt so much. Nothing I have planned has came true. Allah handed me better things in each stages of my life. I wanted to study Architecture, but I made it to my first option and studied Industrial Engineering - a program that screams me. I wanted to go to Sweden for grad school, but I ended up in the Netherlands, meeting so many good people and learned so much more about myself and what I want to do with my life. I thought I’d be able to secure the ultimate goal I had for my post-master’s life (uhm, settling down) but now I’m back to square one and my phone has been so goddamn silent. However, I am now starting my career in a company that holds up the values that I admire, with a day-to-day jobdesc that is unbelievably aligned with my master’s.

I am grateful that what I want has not been aligned with what I actually need, because I received better things. It took quite a great burden off my shoulder, knowing that I can do my best and nothing would happen because it is not meant to be. I know that God only has three answers to our prayers: ‘Yes’, ‘Yes, but not now’, and 'I have something better’. Things that are meant for me will find its way to me, and although I may not understand it fully at this moment, I eventually will. Here’s the quote that I look up from time to time to calm myself down:

#day14 #ramadan1442H #30days

11 notes · View notes

sanktagenyas · 3 years

Text

alrighty so i guess coherent thoughts about this book might be a very generous estimate of what i’m about to write here but i’ll write down my thoughts anyway ‘cause i wanna share and possibly hear yours like for real interactions with my posts are not just welcomed they’re encouraged.

ok so to start our protagonists are alina and mal and our antagonist is the darkling and i pretty much related to alina right away because i love a hero with insecurities and doubts, i love an underdog so of course i was always meant to fall in love with alina starkov on sight. now the darkling... should be that i and everyone else would be beyond tired of the dark, tall, handsome and mysterious/scary men in fiction especially when they whisk our hero away for even more mysterious and/or nefarious purposes that they leave them completely in the dark about BUT the charisma fucking jump off of the pages i don’t know what else to tell you. and i am deeply intrigued about him and his backstory and also him and how he feels about our protagonist because when you catch the attention of a centuries old immortal being that says something about you but it says more about said immortal imo.

we come to learn that the darkling is beyond ruthless and yet he still a capacity for love after all this time even if it’s quite out of use to say the least. and just the fact that out of the thousands of people who have crossed his path there’s this one girl he saw and he was like well look at that someone who’s not unremarkable for once. and i know that’s not exactly a romantic sentiment but that’s how it starts, folks.

but anyway to cap my little ramble here despite the fact that i’ve seen that kind of villain before i do still really love the darkling. i like that we don’t have all the facts yet about what led him to become who he is so there’s just the right amount of mystery around him to keep you wanting to discover more and he is just human enough that he is not this caricature monstrous villainous figure (alina would beg to differ but i don’t listen to what alina yells at people when she’s angry)

now onto mal. i’m trying to word this in a way that doesn’t make me come off as a raging anti because the truth is that would require me to be invested in mal enough to hate him and as of now i’m just not. with book one being told entirely in alina’s perspective it’s pretty in your face that we should care about mal. our hero loves him and we want her to be happy, right? plus we really shouldn’t ship her with the villain there are so many wrong aspects about that dynamic just to name one aspect the deceit and the lies. the foundation of darklina is so fucked we should not ship it, right? well see that’s where i would argue that my biggest issue with darklina as a ship is the darkling in the final act all but saying fuck alina’s agency i’m going to make her my puppet for eternity not because that is necessary to accomplish my plan but because i’m jealous and resentful that she left me behind and didn’t embrace my plans for ravka and therefore embrace me.

and you might think wait i’ve lost the plot we were talking about mal and now we’re talking about darklina and the darkling but rewind back a little i said my issue with darklina in the final act of the book is the darkling pissing all over alina’s agency. and he might do that in more extreme ways than mal but mal certainly does seem to view alina as property at times and that implies him not respecting her agency. i could point to the fact that saying “don’t tell me we don’t belong together” is only framed as romantic statement because it comes out of the mouth of one of our protagonists and not our antagonist but that’s a cheap shot, it’s easy. instead i’ll echo my thoughts i shared about that malina reunion in chapter fourteen. mal was not one bit concerned about alina there and even though he says later on that not one hour was spent not thinking about her and wondering about her wellbeing all that flies out of the window the second he sees her with the darkling during the fete and here’s the thing if he had caught them mid makeout session i could understand him letting jealousy completely overtake him to the point that he doesn’t ask if she’s ok or how she’s been treated here and just assumes based on appearances (let’s not forget before she unlocked her powers alina was well and truly miserable regardless of the luxury afforded to her by her new grisha status so appearances don’t mean shit malyen) that she must be hunky dory and then tiptoes the line around slutshaming her but definitely crosses the line over into making her feel like shit for circumstances beyond her control territory and all that over seeing her do magic trickery at a party with another guy.

alina is allowed to be attracted to another man, she’s allowed to have feelings for another man. they’re both guilty of miscommunication as they obviously both feel the same way about each other but alina has the decency to keep her jealousy to herself and not have outbursts about mal getting close to other girls like she owns his ass or something. that put me off and then i was hoping there would be a talk that would clarify things and he would apologize and that happened but it also came with the revelation that mal was upset to see her happy with the darkling. so he’d rather see the woman he loves miserable and alone rather than happy and belonging? and that’s the romantic lead i’m meant to be fawning over? i’m just not seeing it right now and that’s why even as he so generously offers her absolution (idk if you can read my sarcasm but just to be clear it’s sarcasm) for having loved the darkling and tells her he loves all of her even the part that loved the darkling i’m like..... i don’t believe you boy.

i guess in summary my thoughts about mal as a love interest is i need some consistency you cannot have him throw a jealous fit over seeing alina standing with another man (that’s literally all they were doing for real) and looking happy about it and then have him be like i don’t care i love you anyway. you cannot have him act as though he owns alina and in the same breath throw in her face that the darkling owns her (i hate this foreshadowing thank you very much) and you cannot have him get cold or angry at so much of a mention of a life she might have that doesn’t include him and then expect me to believe he’s made peace with her having feelings for more than just him. he’s not even able to accept a scenario where she goes off and does shit that doesn’t involve him as he shows no interest in her life in the little palace for the longest time. meanwhile you can literally read all about alina wondering what happened to him and what he went through trying to get to her. and for the love of saints i would love it if alina would stop acting like she needs to be forgiven for these feelings i absolutely get that she feels conned and ashamed about it but you do not need to ask anyone for absolution for falling someone who made you feel seen for the first time in your life. fuck that noise.

i just know trust issues are gonna arise and i know he doesn’t feel that way truly. if alina turned around and at some point decided to show mercy to the darkling mal wouldn’t understand or accept it and i’d fully expect a guilt trip to ensue.

now that’s my thoughts on mal as a romantic lead and that’s about the biggest aspect of him we’re focusing on but i do think he is a brave man who genuinely cared for his friends and genuinely cares for alina as that whole journey to hunt morozova’s herd definitely proved. he loves her i don’t doubt that but one grand gesture doesn’t excuse the way he treats her earlier in the books is my point and as been pointed out by others i don’t like how much alina relies on him even when he isn’t here. her refusal to let go of him was directly affecting her happiness and overall health as she couldn’t come into her powers before she thought he was lost to her. if i’m not liking who the hero becomes when she’s with the love interest it’s a big indicator i’m not gonna love said love interest as much as i’m clearly expected to by the author. i like mal just fine, he’s not without redeeming qualities, i just don’t love him yet and i may never do and that’s ok.

now i wanna take a moment and a couple sentences (it won’t be a novel i swear, pinky promise!) to talk about the twist that i should have seen coming miles away and i already know once my sister watches the show or reads the book whatever comes first i will be mercilessly teased about not seeing it coming. but when i found out the black heretic and the darkling are one of the same my jaw dropped. as memers might say i took that personally. and even though we have a lot of grounds to covers still and unanswered questions such as is the darkling still alive? if he is what is he up to now? is baghra dead in a ditch somewhere or worse? will alina and genya ever see each other again? why was zoya so standoffish and violent with alina, what’s her story? the question in my mind most prominent is what happened to the darkling? what happened for him to become who he is. i love the quote monsters are not born they’re made and i much prefer to see a villain who wasn’t always one than one who is just evil for the evulz. so i want a backstory and i also wanna learn about baghra while we’re at it.

it’s all fun and well for her to denounce her son’s actions but and i hate to break it to her but YOU RAISED HIM LADY. so yeah baghra’s whole speech to alina is missing parts for sure because she’s not just gonna admit her hands are covered in blood as much as the darkling’s are. not without some pressing at least.

sooo to cap off all this i guess i would have just two throwaway remarks and that is that i am getting a lot of gay vibes from alina and if i took a shot every time she remarks on genya’s beauty or just gushes about genya in general i’d be drunk by now and i hope we get an actual queer romance somewhere in these books even just between side characters. second remark would be ivan i’m waiting for you to find some redeeming qualities my dude, i was rooting for you! at first he is a raging dickhead about it but seemed to mellow some and then near the end it’s right back to square one and i am really sorry about his brothers dying but having lost family members is not actually a get out of jail free card that gives you free range to mistreat people just because you can.

#shadow and bone #shadow and bone book spoilers #i'm not putting anti malina tags on here because i'm not interested in engaging in disc-horse #that's why i'm also not tagging characters or ships but if it wasn't clear i am darklina trash yes hello #this is a) a mess and b) far too long but it's what it says on the tin aka my incoherent garbage thoughts

10 notes · View notes

radramblog · 3 years

Text

Radiohead Retrospective Part 6: I try to sing along but I get it all wrong (‘CAUSE I’M NOT)

I don’t have as much to say about the lead-in to Hail to the Thief, much like I didn’t have much to say about that for Amnesiac. There isn’t as earth-shattering a shift as Kid A, and there isn’t a big story like with The Bends or OK Computer.

Hail to the Thief was (probably) the first batch of music Radiohead recorded after the sessions that produced Kid A/Amnesiac, meaning they had the full breadth of that experience to work with. What we received as a result was somewhat of a fusion of the electronic/jazz-influences of those albums and the rockier stuff of the band’s past.

Now I’ve heard a fair few complaints that this album is too long. That’s probably fair, it’s their longest album, with a total of 14 tracks, meaning it does kinda drag on a bit. Thom Yorke apparently agrees, seeing as he put out an alternative tracklist in ’08 (link) missing four songs. At the same time, I’m going to pull Death of the Author on this one, because as much as I’ve seen people complain that there’s too many songs on this, nobody ever seems to get along with which ones they’d cut- let alone people wanting to pull B-sides in the mix.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves there, aren’t we? Suppose I should just talk about the fucking album.

We begin this record, like all Radiohead records, with studio chatter. Wait, what the fuck? Yeah, it’s quiet but it’s there. Why not, right?

2+2=5 is a lovely little banger to open on. Unquestionably a rock song, it features a very slow and quiet (and heavily panned) first half before just fucking exploding in the latter half. It genuinely might be the most aggressive track the band has put out, a manic cascade of energy and breathy falsetto that’s genuinely headbangable. It’s also a fun thing to try and read the lyrics for, since the booklet the album comes with gives up for this bit and just goes “eezeepeezee NOT” or something along that line.

Oh yeah, that’s actually something worth bringing up. Neither Kid A nor Amnesiac had lyric booklets, deliberately obscuring the actual words to the songs, to the point where people had pretty wide interpretations of what they actually were. Considering the incompleteness of 2+2=5’s entry in it’s booklet, perhaps similar occurred with that. I’m still unsure if the subtitle of this post is actually the real lyrics.

Most people, I think, read the name of this track and just kind of assume it’s about 1984, the book boomers bring up whenever their freedumbs are impinged upon. And it’s not not about 1984, but there are extremely specific political references as well- Hail to the Thief, title of the album and line in the track, is a quote regarding the U.S. President of the time, George W Bush, who lost the popular vote but won the electoral college- something that sounds awfully familiar to those of us living in 2021. “January has April Showers” similarly refers to the unseasonable weather of Bush’s inauguration.

The last thing I’d like to bring up before we finally move onto the second track is that every single song in this album has a subtitle- for 2+2=5, it’s (The Lukewarm). According to Yorke, it’s a reference to Dante’s Inferno- the Lukewarm being the people around the edge of hell, damned due to their passive indifference- the kind of people the song’s lyric, “you have not been paying attention”, is referring to. I’m literally learning these meanings now, so we’ll see how many are worth bringing up.

youtube

Perhaps fortunately for my word count, Sit Down. Stand Up (yes the full stop/period is part of the title) (that’s not the subtitle) doesn’t have quite as much going on. Though it does have a video, for some reason. It’s a sort of repetitive trance of lyrics set to an electronic percussion, distant piano, and….I don’t know what other instrument is making those light dings. A xylophone? Interestingly, much like 2+2=5, it’s one that builds slowly into a chaotic finish, the raving of that track reflected in the almost cold mania of the raindrops the raindrops the raindrops the raindrops the raindrops……. It’s a decent enough song, but I legitimately cannot imagine listening to it ever outside the context of this album. Which is weird, because I definitely remember doing so when I was younger.

Track 3 is Sail To The Moon, a lullaby or ballad or sorts, a calm after the storm that is the previous track. Quite literally, considering it’s repeated lyric. And also literally, in that it was actually written for Thom’s son at the time. The subtitle, (Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky) evokes a very literal interpretation of the song’s title, which doesn’t actually reflect the lyrics.

Sail To The Moon is, as any good lullaby should be, utterly soothing. It’s calm, with Thom’s vocals just drifting across the piano, loose guitar, and percussion like a low tide. This is one of those songs I’ve come around to much more with time, because I distinctly remember skipping this a lot. You’ll find I’ve listened to this album a fair few times, though the section between 2+2=5 and Go To Sleep is one I skipped a fair bit, I think.

Backdrifts is a heavily electronic song that apparently in part predates Kid A and Amnesiac, which is kind of interesting- we’ll see a bit more of that later. As a track, it’s kind of spacy- the synth instrumental feels like something out of an eerie sci-fi film, if you notched the tempo up a bit.

Backdrifts is also the first song where I can see the “too long” argument come in. Not for the album (though I believe it’s one of the ones the alternate tracklist leaves out), but the song itself- I’m not sure this is a song that needs to be the second longest on the album (and only by a second). It’s fine, but considering what it comes off and what follows it, it’s in a bit of an awkward spot.

youtube

Go To Sleep is another one that kinda took me a while to get. I always heard it as being one of the top tracks on the thing, but it never really clicked with me for a while. I suppose I’ve never been massive on purely acoustic-guitar-led affairs? With age, though, I’ve better appreciated the depth the song has. Possibly the folkiest song the band has, it might have taken me getting into R.E.M. to recognize what the song is.

And the song is good!

But unfortunately for Go To Sleep, Where I End and You Begin is my favourite Radiohead track.

Holy shit, this song sounds so fucking sick. That percussion, that bassline, those fucking Ondes Martenot babyyyy. The song is spacey and ethereal, but tied down by the more traditional elements of the instrumentation. The fantastical lyricism tying into very real themes of personal boundaries, how they define how people interact, and how when they fail, things tend to go badly- “There’ll be no more lies, I will eat you alive”. It’s just an absolute fucking track.

I don’t think I can possibly explain why I like this song so much. Opinions and favourites are kind of like that. But it just speaks to me. The hyper-fuzzed out guitar soloing in the bridge, the loneliness of the second verse, it’s just incredible.

Also it possibly references Optimistic with the lyrics which is cool! I also like that song a lot.

The subtitle, (The Sky Is Falling In), is something I’ve not been able to find a reference for regarding it’s meaning, but since I like the song so much, I’m going to do some interpreting. If we assume the song is about boundaries in a relationship, it’s clear that the final lyrics are the utter devastation after those boundaries are breached. But “The Sky Is Falling In” fits better with the third verse, what with the house falling into the sea- the tipping point has broken, the household (or, the house) is in freefall, the sky is falling with it. But that’s just my opinion, man.

Still with me? We’re not even halfway.

We Suck Young Blood can best be described as off-kilter, perhaps even deliberately out of tempo. A very pointed use of handclaps, typically a part of substantially more energetic tracks than the dirge this song presents. I’m sure this isn’t what the song is about, but at face value the lyrics read like some sort of social service run by vampires- give us your young blood, and we’ll make things better for you. In a way, it’s kind of fun, silly even. I suppose the claps help with that. The track is otherwise just, melancholic- slow, piano-y, even the sudden pickup barely lasts- though I always forget it’s there, making it kind of a surprise every time. Like, oh shit, we’re going somewhere for a bit, I need to put my seatbelt back on- ah never mind it’s over (and then the song keeps going for a while).

We come now to The Gloaming, the song that was originally going to be the title track for the album. They changed it, apparently, because it got rejected- too gloomy, apparently. According to Wikipedia, a fair few of the subtitles from the album’s tracks also came from proposed names for the album proper.

The song itself is also pretty gloomy, as it happens. Apparently, it’s literally about the rise of fascism, so fair enough. An electronic track, with many a repetition, feeling uneasy and cold the whole way through (making the subtitle, Softly Open our Mouths in the Cold, pretty apt). It feels almost minimalistic at times, without especially many lines running through it- and without a big crescendo like many to most of these songs have, it feels somewhat lifeless- a deliberate choice, no doubt.

youtube

Oh shit, are we up to There There? We are! God this song fucks. Those opening drums are iconic, not to mention the way it layers onto itself. And the video! Eerie horror at its finest.

Like, I know Where I End and You Begin is my favourite song on this album unquestionably. But there is no doubt in my mind that There There is the best song on the album.

Good enough that I don’t have anything really interesting to say about it? Like many songs on this album, it’s got a big old crescendo, but the build is just so smooth, and the climax is just such a swelling. “We are accidents waiting to happen” is such a powerful lyric, and it’s hardly the only one on the song. A comment I’ve seen about the song describes the guitar as akin to laughter, a mood I can definitely see in the track itself.

Anyway the song ended so I guess I gotta move on.

I Will is kind of an interesting case. It��s unquestionably one of the most emotional songs on the album, considering it was written about a U.S. bombing of a shelter that wiped out 408 innocent people, and that’s fucking horrifying (S.O.P. for the Army it seems). It’s short, and…well it’s not sweet, but it is tragic and haunting.

It’s also a song that went through variation on variation before finally appearing on this album. Early live performances date to 5 whole years before Hail to the Thief, and considering the bombing was in 1991, it was probably written well before then. Versions of this track are kind of everywhere as a result- one early version was eventually chopped up and reproduced into Like Spinning Plates on Amnesiac- reconstructions of the process are available on citizeninsane.eu- or they were, at least, because apparently that site’s embeds relied on Flash.

I do particularly want to highlight the Los Angeles version of the song, which was a b-side on 2+2=5 (and also was on the Com Lag EP), because it’s a fuller version of the track- not necessarily better, but the full band is involved, making it a much different experience.

Track 11, A Punchup At A Wedding, has become somewhat of a meme on the Radiohead subreddit. Mostly it’s a result of the opening lyric, literally “No” 42 times over. The subtitle, for reference, is also all “No”s. On a similarly lighter note, the track is apparently a result of the band stumbling upon just a needlessly scathing review of one of their live shows, making it one of the few Radiohead tracks I could confidently say is about one person in particular. With all the second person, the lyrics probably wouldn’t be out of place on an early Linkin Park track (whether that’s an insult or not, I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader).

The slow, almost marchlike rhythm of the song well suits the tone of the lyrics, and to be clear, the tone is pretty much “Man, what the fuck is wrong with you?” and the emotions that come with being torn down by someone who doesn’t know you or really recognise what they’re doing. I suppose it’s refreshing for the metaphor to be this obvious for once. It’s a pretty decent song, piano-driven like many a song on the album, which means theoretically if I ever relearn the instrument I could play it. Maybe.

Myxomatosis, while a pretty fucked up disease, is an absolutely excellent song. If 2+2=5 is the heaviest rock song on the album, Myxomatosis is the heaviest electronic song on it. The lyricism is incredibly dark, unsettling and violent, suiting the harsh buzzing synth line. They say fuck in this one! And the way the entire song save percussion drops for the key line (I don’t know why I feel so tongue-tied/skinned alive) is so excellent. Interestingly, said line also appears word-for-word in Cuttooth, a B-side from Amnesiac, though the mood is profoundly different.

I suspect the song being named Myxomatosis and being pretty clearly about public perception and fame should give you a hint as to how the band views the media and the world of the rich and famous- the subtitle, (Judge, Jury, & Executioner), certainly adds to that. Thom sounds a mix of hesitant, confused, disgusted, and frustrated on the track, and it works incredibly well.

We’re finally on to the penultimate track, Scatterbrain. And I’m going to be honest, I don’t know what this one’s about. I’m out of patience to figure out what Genius is going on about, though it’s fairly incomplete for this track anyway. It’s relatively simple, for a Radiohead track, and pretty enough, but I can see why people don’t tend to like this one as much. I distinctly remember it being bottom of the list or close to it on a subreddit poll at some point (might have been above We Suck Young Blood, which I don’t agree with).

Scatterbrain kind of just has the problem of being a pretty decent album track, right between two of my favourite songs on the album. Which is awkward as always.

Our final song is A Wolf at the Door, and talk about a closer. Thom has described it as like waking up from a nightmare and finding out reality is worse, which is both relatable and upsetting. The song is grim, with confusing imagery in the verses leading to a desperately emotional chorus about someone’s children being fucking ransomed. Also, a bridge with more Nos than A Punchup at a Wedding, where are your No (x105) memes Reddit, get it fucking together!

The lyrics of the verses in A Wolf at the Door have a swaying flow to them that’s almost rap-like, especially since the falsetto that Thom usually sings in around this time is completely absent from them. This makes it one of the few rap-ish songs I’ve actually tried to perform, and I’d probably be pretty okay if I didn’t keep forgetting bits.

The song is just, frustration (verse 1), desperation (chorus), anger/frustration (verse 2), and back to desperation (chorus) again, which doesn’t quite fit the stages of grief cleanly, but that’s probably fine. The final vocalisation of the song (and thereby the album) feels almost like a sorrowful howl, which makes less sense the more I think about the imagery and intent of the lyrics, so maybe just ignore that actually. There is just so much imagery packed into this track, especially in the second verse, that listing it out is pointless- but it all just clicks so well, into this deluge of frustration and madness carried along by that instrumental that just seems to get lower and lower forever.

Anyway that’s the whole album, isn’t it? I’m going to keep this outro brief, because we’re approaching 3000 words at this point, but I think that fact says it all. There’s a lot of Hail to the Thief, but it never really misses per se. It has less great songs, but no bad ones. I’d argue my own biases probably cloud my judgement, but even if some of the tracks are more forgettable, the highs are so high for me that it easily stands among the band’s best.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with me. But that’s fine, this is my opinion, the rest of the world is allowed to be wrong.

A lot of things would happen between Hail to the Thief’s release in 2003 and the followup, In Rainbows, in 2007. But that’s ultimately a story for another day. A week from today, to be precise.

See you then?

#ramble #music #radiohead #hail to the thief

3 notes · View notes

boltztheclown23 · 4 years

Text

Words Only Get In The Way

Cross posted on Ao3! This is for you @random-nerd-3 !!!!

Jim didn’t mean for Claire to find out this way, but he knew he was gonna have to tell her sooner or later. Claire was always talking about how something wasn’t quite right, Jim never chided her for it, he couldn’t. He felt the same.

They’d both figured it out a while ago, Jim caught Claire staring before they even knew Douxie was a wizard. At first what he thought he felt was jealousy, for the longest time he harbored what he assumed were terrible feelings.

Then they got stuck back in time, and Jim opened up a little bit. Therefore realizing, Douxie was very fricking attractive, and the only thing he was jealous of, would be the talking cat.

Claire’s voice broke through his thoughts, “So, you like me,” a pause, “And Douxie? You want to date both of us?”

“I- uhh, yeah. That’s- yep.”

“I like that idea, I really do Jim, but are you sure you want to?”

“Claire, I see you stare at him when you think I’m not looking. I know you love me, but you want him too. Besides, we’ve both said we’re missing something, this could be it!”

“How do you wanna do this?” Claire asked.

“Douxie works at the cafe today, right?”

“He does,” Claire confirmed, “This is really soon Jim, are you sure you don’t wanna wait a few days and plan something?”

“We could do a movie date at home! It’s perfect!”

“If you’re sure.” Claire relented.

“Don’t think, become,” Jim quoted, anxious, yet excited, thinking about the ways this could go wrong, and the things they could gain from it.

Claire smiled reassuringly, grabbing Jim’s hand. “Let’s go get our boy,”

The ride to the cafe was tense at best. Every time they stopped at a traffic light Jim second guessed his decision. Would Douxie be okay with dating the both of them? Would Archie be okay with it? The watch on Jim’s wrist taunted him, time seemed to move in slow motion, though they arrived downtown too soon for Jim’s liking.

Stepping inside the small cafe, Jim took a deep breath and turned to Claire, who bit her lip. Squeezing each other’s hands, they approached the blonde girl behind the counter.

“Are you looking for Douxie? He’s in the back, he’s got ten minutes left on his break, whatever you want you’d better make it quick.”

“How’d you know we were looking for Douxie?” Claire seemed skeptical, yet interested.

“He talks about you two a lot. Go through the door on the right, if they don’t let you through tell them I sent you.”

“Alright, thank you, uhh,” Jim glanced down at her name tag, “Courtney.”

“Sure, anytime. But you’re holding up the line.” Courtney said. Jim smiled sheepishly as Claire winced.

The door was relatively easy to find, and no gave them any grief as they passed through. “Hey Douxie, you back here?”

“Jim!? Fair Lady Claire? What’re you guys doing here?”

“We’re here to ask you-“ Jim cut off suddenly unsure.

Claire seeming to sense this, continued, “If you would like to go on a date with us, tonight if possible?”

Douxie looked shocked, but he recovered without to long a silence, “Okay, totally. What time?”

Jim smiled wide, “I can’t believe that was all it took! My house, seven!”

Claire sprung forward, pulling Jim with her, and planted a kiss on Douxie’s cheek, gesturing for Jim to do the same. Through his excitement he didn’t think twice. Pulling away he chirped, “See you tonight,” Tugging Claire along with him. Leaving a flustered and smiling Douxie in their wake.

—————————💜—————————

“Claire, do you have the snacks ready!?”

“Yep! Do you know what we’re watching?” She pressured as she organized the snacks to fit on the coffee table in the Lake’s living room.

“Sort of?” Jim questioned himself, “I narrowed it down to three in each genre, but what if Douxie hates all these movies!?”

Claire sighed, “Relax Jim, this isn’t a first impression, it may be a first date, but he already knows, and obviously likes us. We’ll be okay, promise!”

Jim exhaled, “You’re right. What do you think about, The Hustle?”

“I don’t think Douxie’s seen it, it’s a good pick.”

“So, do we have everything ready?”

“Actually, yeah! And with fifteen minutes to spare! Hang on, Jim, did you tell your mom?”

“I haven’t, but I should. I just don’t know what to say.”

I don’t think she’ll mind Jim, she’s one of the most open people I’ve ever met! Just give it a chance!” Claire gripped his shoulder supportively.

Jim nodded, heading down the stairs, “I’ll see you soon, Claire Bear!”

“Mom?” Jim called as he came upon her room.

“Come on in, Honey. What’s up?”

“You know what, I’m just going to come right out and say it. Claire and I are having someone over for a date tonight.”

“Is it that Douxie boy you two are always staring at?”

“Mom!”

“So, I was right then!” Barbara laughed, “Have fun, Jim, and don’t stay up too late.”

“Thanks, mom.”

“You don’t need to thank me for loving you, for you.”

“I love you!” Jim said, pulling her into a hug.

“I love you, too, Sweetie!”

The doorbell interrupted their moment. Barbara smiled, releasing Jim, “Go get him,” Jim smiled brightly, bolting down the stairs two at a time.

Claire had already opened the door to reveal Douxie, wearing a yellow Def Leopard tee, with gray jeans.

“Hey.”

“We’ve got snacks and a movie all set up.” Claire informs him as they head to the living room.

When they arrive, Neither Jim, nor Claire hesitate to settle in on piles of pillows placed in the living room hours before. While Douxie waits, as if he needs to be positive he can sit, before tentatively sliding between them. “What’re we watching?”

“The Hustle.” Claire says with ease, a sly smirk adorning her features.

“I haven’t seen that one,” Douxie comments, “And you knew that, didn’t you.”

Instead of an answer, he got an honest remark from Claire, “Your accent is so hot.”

Jim snorted, “What the hell, Claire?”

“I’m sorry! It just slipped out!”

Douxie only continued to laugh, burying his red face in his hands. “You know Archie’s outside the window watching us, he’s going to have a fit!” As they started the movie, they all sobered up. Douxie leaned to the side and propped his feet in Jim’s lap. “Thank you guys for asking me out, you’re like, the town’s power couple, I wouldn’t‘ve had the guts.

“No thanks are in order,” Claire said, “Besides, two’s a couple, three’s a crowd.”

—————————————————

This is part of a series!! It’s posted on ao3 under the same handle!! The series is called, “if two’s a couple and three’s a crowd, what’re we?” part two is up, titled, “It’s All Fun and Games, Til Somebody Falls (In Love)!!

#jim lake jr #toa #tales of arcadia #tales of arcadia wizards #wizards tales of arcadia #toa wizards #toa wizards spoilers #douxie #hisirdoux casperan #claire nuñez #douxie x jim x claire

43 notes · View notes

syms-things-5 · 4 years

Text

Clear The Area - Chapter Fifteen (Part One)

Previous Chapter Here

Tags: @jennmurawski13 @kelbabyblue

Warnings: Some mild language

Notes: This is the first of a 3-part chapter. It moves the story along quite a bit (finally) and I am about 80% complete on the second and third parts, too. Shouldn’t be too long ‘til they get posted, fingers crossed. Thanks again for stopping by. Let me know if you have any comments or advice; all greatly appreciated, good and bad!

Chapter Fifteen: Part One

“So, what you’re saying is if I don’t put out a statement, they’re going to roll this all over me? And there is nothing we can do to stop this?” Chris yelled into his phone, his hand coming down hard on the white marble counter in front of him. “What do I even pay you for?!”

“Listen to me, will you?!” Matt was on the end of the line attempting to diffuse his client’s growing anger from 3,000 miles away. “There isn’t anything in this that harms you, OK? I’ve read the copy and honestly, you come across as a really sweet guy. She paints you out to be a lovely person, someone who was helping her come to terms with the end of her marriage.”

Matt was getting no response from the other end of the phone but could picture the look on Chris’ face as it he was standing in front of him. “I know it’s not ideal. It’s not great timing but it could be so much worse. You’re not being painted as a homewrecker. We can absolutely deal with this when it happens, put out a couple of cute pictures of you and your nephews or something and all will be forgotten.”

Chris sighed in exasperation. Or was it desperation? He didn’t even know. “...who the fuck ever writes this trash? None of it is remotely true.”

“I know, I know, we’ve pushed back on a lot of the smaller details, dates and things like that, but I honestly think if we put out this statement it’ll clear up a lot of the ambiguity they’ve left in theirs. They’re just trying to get some clicks, that’s all.”

“It’s not ambiguous, Matt, it’s downright bullshit. I mean, the whole thing about the hotel is not even close to being true. I booked it ‘cos I was feeling unwell and needed a break. She just turned up. I didn’t invite her.” He was losing his cool again and becoming more upset. “And what have they said about my mom?”

“Ummm...” Matt scanned the pages scattered over his desk. He quickly located the offending quotes and just as quickly sugar-coated it to avoid one of his biggest stars passing out from stress. “Just that they’d met and got along. I actually don’t think that’s a problem for us. If anything, it shows you are close to your family and they visit you on set from time to time.”

It had been a long morning and Chris was already feeling like he wad done for the day. No, the entire week. He needed a beer. He needed beers plural and he needed to get wasted for a night and forget everything arising around him again. Better yet, he needed Sarah. She’d know what to say and when she’d finished saying it, she’d help his mind feel quieter again.

Oh fuck. Sarah.

She’ll think he’s a dickhead when she reads this. It almost goes against everything he’d explained to her and his family so far.

“When is it coming out?” Chris asked after a few moments had passed.

“They’re pushing for late August and I actually think that is out best chance. September is a busy time for magazines across the board and everyone will be talking about the big ones, Vogue and Vanity Fair etcetera. There’s no competition.” Matt was talking in a calmer tone mirroring Chris’ own change of pace. “We can slip out a quiet rebuttal and end it before it’s even began.”

“Yeh, yeh, OK. I understand.” Chris took a deep breath wearily and leaned his whole body onto the counter. He ran his free hand down his face and rested it on the beard underneath his chin, tugging slightly on the hairs in a bid to feel something else that would hopefully bring him back into the room.

“You need to trust me, Chris. That’s what you pay me for.” Matt reassured him. They exchanged as polite a goodbye as possible before hanging up. Matt threw himself back onto his desk chair, swinging it around to take in the view of a bustling downtown Los Angeles outside his office window. stuff like this was child’s play for a pro like him but Chris wasn’t a typical client. He was normal for one thing, whatever “normal” meant these days. He’d been representing him for close to nine years, one of his longest relationships now he thought about it, and one that meant a great deal to him.

Professionally, the work helped pay for his mother’s retirement home and his own holiday apartment in Aspen, Colorado, but it ran deeper than that. Chris was also a very good friend. If Chris had stuck to low-budget Indie dramas like he originally planned, Matt wouldn’t have minded even though he had worked with and had experience of dealing with mega-studios like Marvel and stars who actively sought to cover themselves in PR glory any chance they got. That sort of thing was strangely easier to handle but Chris remained quiet and adamant about sticking to his guns when it came to his private life and Matt held a very high respect for that. So, when stuff like this came along, well, Matt knew exactly what to do and was all too happy to hold a light up to the hypocrisy of the Hollywood press machine.

Thousands of miles away in a small kitchen in Boston, Chris remained holding on to the edge of the countertop as he brought his breathing back under control. Lisa, had ventured in and out at times only to fall back when she felt Chris’ bristling, nervous energy. It was rare that he got angry at Matt so something was clearly going on to cause him to lose his cool but she knew now wasn’t the right time to ask him.

“Shall I make us some lunch, sweetheart?” she finally plucked up the courage to take a few steps into her kitchen. She ran her hand lightly across his broad shoulders causing Chris to look up and take stock of his surroundings again.

“Yeh, that’d be nice, thanks.” He pulled a stool out and sat down. “Sorry if you could hear me shouting. It’s just some stuff with work but it’s fine now.” it was sweet that he was trying to make her feel better as though he himself had done something wrong.

“I didn’t hear you so don’t worry. Glad it’s fine now, though. Ham and cheese OK?” she asked, a broad smile now painted across her face that only grew wider when he nodded back at her. “Also, Scott and Shanna were going to cook some dinner later on tonight so we could pop over if you like? Save us cooking here again.”

He would very much like to head over to his sister’s apartment. That way lied harmony and he could relax in calmer surroundings and spend time with the people he loved the most. This press nonsense could wait another day. If it was going to happen regardless of his intervention, why even bother stressing about it in the first place?

It wasn’t much of a surprise to find Shanna’s kitchen a total mess when they arrived later that afternoon. Despite the comforting smell of fried onions and garlic that greeted them from the hallway, the physical view of her kitchen provided an altogether different experience. A stack of unwashed pans and remnants of chopped tomatoes and leeks spread out across the counter surface and what Scott had actually meant when he said he was also going to be helping with the cooking was that he would stir the bolognese for half an hour and check the garlic bread hadn’t burned. Other than that, Shanna appeared to have built some kind of living art installation.

The four were seated around the table, a second bottle of wine down, and gabbing about sport and nothing in particular. Chris’ quietness had not gone completely unnoticed with Scott and his mother sharing a few glances as the evening wore on.

“Is Sarah staying at work for a while, then?” asked Lisa, picking at the final slice of garlic bread after her children had decimated the rest of it.

“Yeh, I think so. It’s been a bit up and down lately after the crash and I know she’s keen to muck in as much as she can now before she goes away.” offered Shanna.

Chris’s ears perked up. “Away? What do you mean?”

“Oh crap.” Shanna banged her hand on her forehead. “Um, OK, this isn’t common knowledge and I didn’t tell you guys this but she’s possibly heading back to college to train to become a doctor.”

“Really?” Scott dropped his fork on his plate causing a loud clang that reverberated around the kitchen. “Well, good for her. She’d be an ace doctor. She looks great in scrubs and I know for a fact she handles drunk people exceptionally well.”

Shanna rolled her eyes at Scott. “She actually has the exam in New York next week and if she passes that, who knows? I can’t really tell if she’s excited or not but her parents don’t know so please don’t mention anything to them...” Shanna looked across the table at her mother whose eyes widened in response to the insinuation.

“If she gets back into college, will she stay here to train or move or what?” asked Chris trying his hardest to keep a rising level of confusion at this new information to a minimum.

Shanna merely shrugged non-committedly and he felt his frustration with his sister boil close to the surface. “I can’t see her moving or if she does then it’d be more of a commute. Like, a couple of days there and here or whatever.”

“She likes living in Boston, doesn’t she? And I imagine it would be harder for her folks to visit if she lived in New York full time.” Scott offered, some logic that Chris was grateful for. “Jocelyn hates busy cities. She would hate New York for sure.”

“Lincoln is a teach hospital, right?” Chris asked, his tone more urgent than he’d intended. “I mean, she could train here? There’d be no problem with that. I’m sure they wouldn’t wanna lose her.”

“Well, selfishly I hope she doesn’t move ‘cos who’s gonna look after your sorry ass?” Scott needled his sister with his elbow and was rewarded with a slap on his shoulder. “Or if she does move full time it means we have a party base in the city again!”

“Oh yeh I’m sure she would love you rocking up at her home at all hours of the goddamn morning.” Lisa remarked. “When is her exam, honey?”

“Thursday. She’s staying at a hotel in town a few days before to swot up on some notes Greg lent her. He rocked up with a frickin’ suitcase the other night. Just books and books of the stuff.”

“What’s he getting out of this?” Chris asked. It was not the first time talk of Greg had ruined his day and now on top of that he was starting to feel distrusting of the interest he appeared to show in her future. He especially didn’t like the knowing look he caught his family give to each other either. “Oh c’mon. He’s not her type, really. She’s said as much herself.”

“Yehhh but he’s super cute and have you seen his car?” Scott asked, pouring another glass of wine for himself. “He reminds me of, fuck, what’s that actor’s name again? The guy from Sons of Anarchy but with darker hair...”

Chris threw him a puzzled look before dismissing his comments with a wave of his hand. “Sarah’s not like that. She’s not into trivial stuff.”

“No, I know, but he’s also stable. I mean, he’s ambitious to a fault, sure, but he knows exactly what he wants and where he’s going.” Scott reasoned. “That could be good for her. I think we can all agree that this stuff with Charlotte left its mark and maybe she’s wanting to try something different? Find a bit of stability? Y’know, settle down a bit or whatever.”

“Since when did you become an expert?” Shanna spoke up. Chris was glad somebody else said it but was less glad when she laughed a second later. She nodded, evidently in agreement with his rationale.

The room fell quiet again as they finished what was left of their dinner. Chris was feeling the dread borne from this morning’s conversations now manifesting itself in the very bottom of his stomach. He regretted coming now. He should have stayed at home and gotten drunk by himself. It would have felt a whole lot nicer than what he was experiencing now.

He swirled what was left of his wine around his glass before downing it and reaching for the bottle. Just as he poured, the front door went and in and walked Sarah surprisingly fresh-faced and smiling upon catching the clan sat peacefully around the kitchen table.

“Hey!” she exclaimed, happy to see them all. She walked over to the hob to smell what was left in the pan before catching sight of them staring at her. “Why are you all looking at me like that?”

“Nothing honey. Ignore them. How was your day?” Lisa started, breaking the silence.

“The usual. I did, however, manage to separate a grown man from a Tonka truck he had glued to his hand.”

“The fuck?” Scott quizzed almost choking on his food and turning around in his chair to face her. “I swear, you have the best job I have ever heard of.”

“Hmm true story. He was making some kind of art display and held on to it for too long. Took us an hour and a tonne of olive oil from the cafeteria to free him.”

Sarah glanced between Scott and his mother laughing before clocking Chris, stony-faced and not quite making eye-contact. She left her eyes on him a little longer than she was usually comfortable with in these settings but he didn’t budge. Shanna eventually grabbed her attention by handing her a bowl of pasta that she gratefully accepted with a “yummy” and grabbed a seat at the table.

Lisa left a little over an hour later but Chris and Scott remained loitering around the kitchen and the lounge. Scott was helping to wash up alongside Sarah when she excused herself to go to the bathroom. When she emerged, she nearly ran full-on into Chris.

“Sorry.” he said, shifting to the side so she could move by him.

“It’s OK.” she moved further out of the way so he could walk in behind her. “Are you OK? You’ve barely said a word all evening.”

He glanced back to her, trying to play down his obvious discomfort. “Yeh, fine. I’ll be out in a minute.”

He closed the door behind him leaving her in the hallway at a loss as to the reason for his agitation. She could hear Shanna and Scott making a mess of what was left of the washing up, the TV volume a little louder now in anticipation for Drag Race, and she retreated into her bedroom to fold away some of her clothes that Shanna had left on her bed from their washing that day.

Chris lingered in the hallway wanting to avoid the loud shrieking now coming from the kitchen before heading towards Sarah’s bedroom. She hadn’t noticed he was there so he allowed himself to watch her, smiling to himself when he heard her hum a tune under her breath. It sounded like ‘Beat It’ only slower. He never figured her as a Michael Jackson fan. Truth be told, he didn’t know all that much about her musical tastes other than making fun of the fact that she cried at a Pixies concert some years earlier.

He viewed the couple of photographs adorning the wall, one of a family gathering, one of her Shanna graduating, before resting on the Steve McCurry print she’d bought at the exhibition. That felt like a lifetime ago now. So much had happened since but he still clearly remembered the shit he had given her at the time. All she was trying to do, he now realised, was get some answers for herself. She wanted to put to bed all of the questions she had had since she was young, questions that might offer answers for who she was as a person. Isn’t that what everyone wants?

He liked Jocelyn and Noah, they all did, they were great people. but she wasn’t a part of them physically. There was something growing somewhere in the back of her mind and as she grew older and wiser, as time moved on, she increasingly felt the differences between them. She had once tried explaining it to him, that it was like a tree and an acorn; no matter what beautiful and wonderful branches and leaves grow from it, it always comes from something small at the very beginning. The acorn directs everything that follows. He couldn’t properly understand it at the time - why would he, he had had an easy life thus far - but as he watched her shuffled around in the closet, humming to herself quietly and in her own little world, he understood that what she longed for, that all anyone ever longer for, was to feel like she belonged somewhere.

He could hear Scott and Shanna joking around in the kitchen, no cares in the world, and knew he had it lucky. Despite the crap this morning still ruminating in the back of his mind, a slight unease at what might find its way into the press over the next few weeks, it was small-fry compared to the real, honest problems normal people experience in their lives. You never know what goes on behind closed doors. Maybe Scott was right. Maybe she just wanted some stability after all, and that realisation was stirring something uncomfortable that he couldn’t name inside him.

“Hey, you OK?” she asked and he realised she had been staring at him for god knows how long. All sorts of thoughts flew through his mind in quick succession but he didn’t immediately know how to respond to such an apparently straight-forward question.

“Yeh,” he responded, clocking how unsure he sounded. “I mean, I’m good. You?”

“Yeh, I’m OK.” She smiled at him and he instantly felt better, waves of stress just ebbing away. He wanted to reach out to her and give her a hug but he knew she wouldn’t feel comfortable with his family so close by and liable to walk in at any moment so he settled instead for smiling warmly back at her and handing over some folded towels from off her bed.

A couple of moments dragged by before she decided to break the awkward silence. “I know I said I would make it up to you but work’s been busier than usual and I’ve had to cover shifts for a couple of guys as well. Michael’s ill so Audrey’s been playing nurse at home.”

He leaned back on the side of her chest of drawers and nodded slowly. He was biting the inside of his cheek and she recognised his face from when he’d shown irritation towards Shanna. He was clearly contemplating something.

“Well, you can make it up to me now if you want?” He offered, arms folded, posing an interesting predicament. He noticed the confusion cross her face and chuckled to himself. “No, not that, not with... I just meant you could do me a favour now. If you wanted to.”

Sarah looked perplexed but Chris didn’t move. He didn’t immediately offer any answer to his question so she didn’t know what he was aiming for. She left the closet and re-entered her bedroom, taking up a stance a couple of feet in front of him. Even leaning back against her cabinet, he remained a good couple of inches taller than her.

“Shanna said something earlier and we promised not to bring it up with you ‘cos apparently it’s supposed to be some big secret,” he started, noting the hint of verbal aggression and thinking better of it, “but are you leaving Boston?”

“What?” She asked, stunned. She never anticipated that this was where he was going.

“She said you’re heading back to the college and that you might consider starting up your doctoral training again, and...I don’t know.” He was losing confidence with every passing word. “It just sounded like it was a done deal is all.”

She oscillated between feeling annoyed that Shanna had revealed her plan to re-take her MD exam, and concern that they all assumed she was suddenly wanting to leave town. As if it would be that easy to do so.

“No, I’m not leaving Boston. My God.” she rubbed her hand across her forehead in frustration. “I am taking the exam, yes, but I haven’t figured anything else out beyond that. Honest.”

He didn’t seem altogether convinced of her response but time was passing by and the noise had died down from the kitchen so it looked like it he would just have to accept whatever she was giving him. He had hundreds of questions, many far away from being appropriate, but the sincere look on her face did some of the work for him.

“It was only an idea. I tried it before and maybe, if it works out again, it could be something different for me to focus on.” she continued. Scott has been right about one thing at least.

“If you pass, you could always train at Lincoln, though, right?” he asked quietly. He sounded like a child asking his parents if they were still going to be friends once they divorced and he hated himself for it.

She shrugged, not having immediate answers that might make him relax a little more. He was clearly struggled with something. “I guess. I mean, I honestly have not thought about it beyond the exam. I have a lot of studying to do as well so I might not even pass it.”

“Yeh, she said Greg gave you some magazines or something.”

“Oh, good, so you’ve got the whole story, then.” Her tone validated the sarcasm behind her words. “Look, this is all so far into the future now and really, who the fuck knows what’s going to happen? But I promise that I will tell you guys everything once I know whatever the fuck it is I am thinking about.”

Selfishly, he wasn’t thinking of his family, or her family, or even her colleagues for that matter. He just wanted to know where she was going to be one month from now. Or, hell, even a year, and whether or not she would be open to him visiting her. Visiting her new apartment in Brooklyn. Or Greenwich. He could imagine her in Greenwich. It was greener and she could go for a run in the park every morning and they could grab a coffee on their way back home. He could walk her to work and wave her off and then spend all day lounging around her apartment reading the newspapers, waiting for her to come home again. One thing he had gotten used to was enjoying his quiet time a lot more when she was around. He wasn’t quite ready to give that up.

“Guys?” shouted Scott from the lounge. “It’s starting!”

“What’s starting?” he asked Sarah.

“Drag Race, I think.” she responded biting her lower lip and knowing exactly how he was going to feel about that.

“Oh fucking hell.” He threw his head back and laughed before resting his eyes back on her. “Alright. Let’s get this over with.”

#chris evans #chris evans fic #evans fic #chris fic #fan fiction #Clear The Area #Sarah Bernette #chris evans x original female character

19 notes · View notes

eldritch-elrics · 3 years

Text

tagged by @malvoliowithin for a writing meme! more talking about fanfic wooo

name

voidknight on ao3! and most other places actually

fandoms

oh man i’ve written for SO many different fandoms but in the last year i’ve been most prolific with works for the magnus archives, fullmetal alchemist, and mo dao zu shi. as one might expect haha

in the past i’ve also written a ton of fic for kirby, homestuck, and various shakespeare plays. it’s quite the combination of things!

where you post

just ao3!

most popular multichap

spacetime, sexuality, and other complex conundrums, which is a homestuck canon divergence au centered around a poly ship, featuring time travel shenanigans and lots of relationship building. this is also still the longest single thing i’ve ever written? which is pretty cool i think

favorite story you’ve written so far

i cannot POSSIBLY answer this. however one fic i always think back on fondly is he may even dream again, which is a very long character study of gooey, a minor character from kirby. i’m just really proud of being able to construct an entire backstory and personality for a character with very little canon content, and i really liked creating the dreamlike atmosphere of that fic (plus writing an unreliable narrator!)

fic you were nervous to post

haha definitely this one because it has a bit of Steamy Content which is not the sorta thing i usually post

how do you choose your titles

oh man titles are the worst! oftentimes i use either a song lyric or a line from a poem (or shakespeare play). sometimes i take a quote from the fic itself, or from somewhere in the source material. one formula i use a lot is to pick a couple representative words and call it [x, y, and z]. one time i went “fuck it” and titled a fic like a clickbait article

also if i can find a way to make a fic title have a double meaning i will jump on it so quickly

do you outline

i usually write notes. for longer fics i do try to outline unless i have a super clear picture in my head of where it’s going. if i’m writing something multichaptered i run out of motivation/ideas very quickly if i don’t have an outline

complete

i have 73 works posted to ao3...

in progress

2 wips right now! one is nothing beside remains, my angsty songxuexiao fic, and one is a sequel to my wwx/nhs fic except more romcom-y

...i also have a bunch of wips for other fandoms that i haven’t worked on in months or even years.....

coming soon / not yet started

i really want to write another ningxian fic. probably something fluffy. and also requited for once?

i’ve also been playing around with a couple aus in my head where wen ning and song lan outlive all their friends and kind of struggle to deal with the passage of time and being essentially immortal and all that wonderful stuff

prompts?

i haven’t written for prompts in forever but i think that could be fun to do sometime? i dunno! if anyone comes into my inbox with a fic idea i’d be very excited, though of course i can’t promise i’d write it

upcoming work you’re most excited about

i just want to finish my xiao xingchen fic is that too much to ask

tagging

can’t actually think of many mutuals who write but @goth-blaze and @lady-in-the-lair if you’re interested!!

#tag meme #fanfiction #writing #my post #thanks!!

3 notes · View notes

languagebraindump · 4 years

Photo

Different cultural backgrounds result in different writing styles that usually conform with the prevailing norms of the culture a given text has been composed in. Moreover, distinct ideological views, genders, religion, and socio-economic backgrounds create disparities as well (Sawaki, 2016). Our view of the world is reflected subjectively by the language even in the case of such a universal discourse characterized by dry facts, where there is no room for long musing and use of metaphors.

In this post I have already introduced some features of Polish academic writing. However, the features such as sophisticated vocabulary or long sentences are visible elsewhere too.

Here are more characteristic features of Polish:

Polish academic discourse according to Aleksander Wilkoń:

1. increase in the subordinate relationship among the semantic fields of signs (complex hypotaxis)

# it basically means that sentences are long. A lexical set of words grouped by meaning that refers to a specific subject (semantic field) are separated by commas that introduce another lexical set of words. “Signs” is a fancy linguistic term for words/phrases/morphemes used to designate/determine objects or phenomena of reality.

2. relatively regular hierarchy of concepts (reduction of the identity to a minimum, avoidance of synonyms);

# we start from the most general idea and then we go into detail. We avoid any personal language.

3. a tendency to assimilate unambiguous foreign scientific vocabulary;

4. a low frequency of expressive structures;

5. the absence of ellipses, nominal sentences, exclamations, apostrophes, etc.;

# we like to clarify everything hence the lack of ellipses, we prefer verbal phrases/structures.

6. use of passive voice;

7. impersonal constructions; the monologue nature of the text;

# we never refer to our readers directly.

8. devoid of subjective, expressive and aesthetic elements (Wilkoń, 2000);

9. according to Wytrębowicz, there is also a preference for sophisticated words even when a simpler synonym is available (Wytrębowicz, 2009).

10. the author of the text is more important than the recipient;

Scientific language as a typically written language can have many stylistic variations; for example, written dissertations in either clear and factual style or an intricate and abstract style. This depends on the personality of the author and his writing skills. It also depends on the subject and genre of the text, and finally on the conventions prevailing in a given research center (Wilkoń, 2000).

Now, let’s look at English and compare it with Polish.

English academic discourse according to Andrew Kemp:

Andrew Kemp, in his doctoral dissertation, refers to Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association which provides a list of particulars (these may be considered as tips rather than writing specifications):

1. Use the past tense or the present perfect tense;

Ø As there are only 3 tenses in Polish, we usually use the past tense. What’s also important to consider are perfective and imperfective verbs.

2. Vary sentence length; however, avoid long noun strings;

Ø The longer, the better; the more complex, the better.

3. Try to use short words and short sentences when possible;

Ø Nope!

4. Avoid jargon, redundancy, wordiness instead use specific language;

Ø That’s also true for Polish, but if your paper is a bit wordy and there are some redundant phrases which make sentences longer, you’re good, no worries.

5. Avoid colloquial expressions and “this, that, these and those” pronouns;

Ø We love “this, that, these and those” in Polish and in English.

6. Avoid illogical or ambiguous comparisons;

Ø True for Polish as well.

7. Avoid third person references when referring to yourself and the editorial “we;”

Ø We use a lot of impersonal constructions.

Andrew Kemp has conducted his research as well. He has analyzed scientific texts and the results are as follows:

1. No use of bias and figurative language;

Ø Kind of true for Polish as well.

2. Lack of “this” as a subject of sentences;

Ø We use “this” as a subject a lot.

3. Little use of direct quotes in the introductory material;

Ø It depends on the writer, the paper, the research center, and many more.

4. No use of imperative and exclamatory sentences;

Ø Imperative sentences are quite common.

5. Use a form of the verb “to be” as the main and solitary verb in the main clause;

Ø No. Use whatever you want. You can even start the main clause with an adjective if you want.

6. The placement of the subject of the sentence is either loose (beginning of the sentence) or periodic (end of the sentence). Frequent use of loose structure, immediately introducing the subject of the sentence, suggests the direct nature of academic writing;

Ø Again, start with whatever part of speech you want.

7. Minimum use of passive sentences, acronyms, contractions, second person sentences, interrogative sentences, compound/complex sentences;

Ø Use them in Polish as much as you want. They will make you sound smart.

8. Use of single-syllable words is more frequent than words of three or more syllables (single-syllable words suggests readability for the most part);

Ø We prefer longer, complicated, sophisticated words.

9. Sentences contain one leading idea only. The rest of the sentence supports that idea or there are subordinate materials that clarify the main point;

Ø With the right punctuation you can intrude several ideas in one sentence.

10. The average sentence length for the articles studied was twenty-five words (Kemp, 2007).

Ø The longest sentence I’ve ever read was around 100 words. There was lots of commas and dashes to clarify the meaning.

References

Kemp, A. (2007, May). University of Central Florida. Retrieved January 22, 2020, from Electronic Theses and Dissertations: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/3223

Wytrębowicz, J. (2009). O poprawności językowej publikacji naukowo-technicznych. Zagadnienia Naukozanwstwa.

Wilkoń, A. (2000). Typologia odmian językowych współczesnej polszczyzny. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.

Sawaki, T. (2016). Analyzing Structure in Academic Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

#polish #comparison #comparing languages #polish language #langblr #contrastive grammar #my teaching

4 notes · View notes

howlermemes · 4 years

Text

THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY ( S01E02 ) RUN BOY RUN S E N T E N C E S T A R T E R S

☂ long post ahead ! ☂ change pronouns / punctuation as needed . ☂ some quotes were altered for better context . ☂ E01. follow for more episodes to come !

☂ ❝ I have a question. ❞ ☂ ❝ Knowledge is an admirable goal. ❞ ☂ ❝ You know the rules. ❞ ☂ ❝ No talking during mealtime. ❞ ☂ ❝ I want to time travel. ❞ ☂ ❝ But I'm ready! ❞ ☂ ❝ Hence the reason you're not ready. ❞ ☂ ❝ I'm not afraid. ❞ ☂ ❝ Fear isn't the issue. ❞ ☂ ❝ I forbid you to talk about this anymore. ❞ ☂ ❝ ' Not ready ' my ass. ❞ ☂ ❝ I survived on scraps. Canned food, cockroaches, anything I could find. ❞ ☂ ❝ You know that rumor that twinkies have an endless shelf life? Well, it's total bullshit. ❞ ☂ ❝ You do whatever it takes to survive... or you die. ❞ ☂ ❝ You think I'm crazy. ❞ ☂ ❝ It's a lot to take in. ❞ ☂ ❝ Gee, wish I'd thought of that. ❞ ☂ ❝ You think I didn't try to get back to my family? ❞ ☂ ❝ This was a mistake. ❞ ☂ ❝ You're too young and too naive to understand. ❞ ☂ ❝ I haven't seen you in a long time and I don't want to lose you again. ❞ ☂ ❝ You know what, it's getting late. ❞ ☂ ❝ We'll talk in the morning again, okay? I promise. ❞ ☂ ❝ Dammit. I'm sick of this cost-cutting bullshit. ❞ ☂ ❝ Go ahead. Just say it. ❞ ☂ ❝ There's no point in keeping it bottled up, or it'll just give you heartburn, and I gotta listen to you complain about that too. ❞ ☂ ❝ It smells like cat piss. ❞ ☂ ❝ At least we're not stuck in some cubicle. ❞ ☂ ❝ They can shove their protocol up their asses. ❞ ☂ ❝ You get what you pay for. ❞ ☂ ❝ I think these idiots all shot each other. ❞ ☂ ❝ Any witnesses? ❞ ☂ ❝ Did you see what happened here? ❞ ☂ ❝ By the time I got back in here, everyone was... you know... ❞ ☂ ❝ Do I have to go through all this again? ❞ ☂ ❝ Let me catch you up to speed. ❞ ☂ ❝ Don't call me that! ❞ ☂ ❝ What? Are we gonna keep things professional? ❞ ☂ ❝ I don't know if we ever agreed on much. ❞ ☂ ❝ We agreed on some things. ❞ ☂ ❝ I'm confiscating this. ❞ ☂ ❝ You used to like that. ❞ ☂ ❝ By the way, this whole thing might look like a botched robbery, but my gut's telling me something else is going on here. ❞ ☂ ❝ You know I can help you. ❞ ☂ ❝ I do not want your help. ❞ ☂ ❝ Lord, you test me. ❞ ☂ ❝ I've had the same routine for the last four years. ❞ ☂ ❝ I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. ❞ ☂ ❝ I didn't think it was possible to miss a person this much. ❞ ☂ ❝ Someday I'd really love for you to meet her. ❞ ☂ ❝ When you left, it seemed like all you wanted to do was forget this place existed. ❞ ☂ ❝ I can't just forget about that. ❞ ☂ ❝ Don't turn his death into a mission. ❞ ☂ ❝ I think there's a reason why you never left. ❞ ☂ ❝ You know you talk in your sleep? ❞ ☂ ❝ There's no point. You're out of drugs. ❞ ☂ ❝ Shut your piehole! ❞ ☂ ❝ I've got a crazy idea. ❞ ☂ ❝ Why not try starting your day with a glass of orange juice or some eggs? ❞ ☂ ❝ You can't smoke eggs. ❞ ☂ ❝ One of these has got to be gold-plated, right? ❞ ☂ ❝ Christ on a cracker! ❞ ☂ ❝ Drop dead. ❞ ☂ ❝ That was a low blow. ❞ ☂ ❝ Would you just shut up? ❞ ☂ ❝ I just — You know there's been a lot of stuff I've been dealing with. ❞ ☂ ❝ I need to know who this belongs to. ❞ ☂ ❝ Where did you get that? ❞ ☂ ❝ Why do you care? ❞ ☂ ❝ What a thoughtful young man. ❞ ☂ ❝ You listen to me, asshole! ❞ ☂ ❝ I've come a long way for this, through some shit your pea brain couldn't even comprehend. ❞ ☂ ❝ Give me the information I need and I'll be on my merry way. ❞ ☂ ❝ If you call me ' young man ' one more time, I'm gonna put your head through that damn wall. ❞ ☂ ❝ Call security. ❞ ☂ ❝ The next time you interfere with one of my investigations, if you so much as breathe on one of my witnesses or touch a piece of evidence, I'll charge you with obstruction of justice. ❞ ☂ ❝ You need to relax. ❞ ☂ ❝ Why don't you put that badge down for one night and come out on the streets with me? ❞ ☂ ❝ You're right. That sounds super fun. ❞ ☂ ❝ Recess is over. It's grown up time. ❞ ☂ ❝ Leave. Before I change my mind. ❞ ☂ ❝ I was worried sick about you. ❞ ☂ ❝ Sorry I left without saying goodbye. ❞ ☂ ❝ I was dismissive and I guess I didn't know how to process what you were saying. ❞ ☂ ❝ Maybe you were right to be dismissive. ❞ ☂ ❝ Maybe I'm not the right person you should be talking to. ❞ ☂ ❝ It's been a long time since I've had a good sleep. ❞ ☂ ❝ I thought I told you to put on something professional. ❞ ☂ ❝ Oh my god, the sex was amazing. ❞ ☂ ❝ What a disturbing glimpse into that thing you call a brain. ❞ ☂ ❝ Don't make me put you in time-out. ❞ ☂ ❝ The whole thing is a disaster. ❞ ☂ ❝ Are you thinking what I'm thinking? ❞ ☂ ❝ It's sort of hard to wrap your head around. ❞ ☂ ❝ You're probably better off here. ❞ ☂ ❝ You know, if I wanted advice — no offense — it wouldn't be from you. ❞ ☂ ❝ You've never even been in a relationship. ❞ ☂ ❝ You don't know what it's like to love someone like this. ❞ ☂ ❝ You separate yourself from everyone and everything. You always have. ❞ ☂ ❝ You don't get to blame your problems on anyone but yourself. ❞ ☂ ❝ You're gonna do great in prison. ❞ ☂ ❝ You are a real sick bastard. ❞ ☂ ❝ Can I get that 20 bucks, like, now or what? ❞ ☂ ❝ The apocalypse is coming and all you can think about is getting high? ❞ ☂ ❝ You're useless. ❞ ☂ ❝ You need to lighten up. ❞ ☂ ❝ I've just now realized why you're so uptight! ❞ ☂ ❝ You must be horny as hell! ❞ ☂ ❝ It's gotta screw with your head, being alone. ❞ ☂ ❝ I wasn't alone. ❞ ☂ ❝ The longest I've been with someone was 3 weeks. And that's only because I was tired of looking for a place to sleep. ❞ ☂ ❝ Hey! What about my money?! ❞ ☂ ❝ I should... stop talking. ❞ ☂ ❝ Please come in. ❞ ☂ ❝ You could have killed me! ❞ ☂ ❝ If I wanted you dead, you'd be dead. ❞ ☂ ❝ I should have to prove my innocence to you. ❞ ☂ ❝ I have never been a prodigy at anything. ❞ ☂ ❝ How did you know I was up here? ❞ ☂ ❝ This is always where you used to come when you were upset. ❞ ☂ ❝ I want to show you something that I think will cheer you up. ❞ ☂ ❝ Make sure you fully extinguish that cigarette. ❞ ☂ ❝ Things have been disappearing lately. ❞ ☂ ❝ It's good to see you. ❞ ☂ ❝ I've missed you... obviously. ❞ ☂ ❝ It's been a rough couple of days. ❞ ☂ ❝ I've been looking everywhere for you! ❞ ☂ ❝ What are you doing here? I thought you were gone. ❞ ☂ ❝ I should be the one who's trying to bring us back together, not tear us apart. ❞ ☂ ❝ Come on, I gotta show you something. ❞

#rp memes #sentence starters #rp meme #rp starters #ask memes #inbox memes

9 notes · View notes

shy-of-the-cool · 5 years

Text

Jaime is a good man!

So like everybody I think, these last few days have been spent in a blur wondering what the hell happened on GOT on Sunday. It's taken a few days of venting, thinking and researching and I have to say I'm still on Jaime's side. After rewatching all of season 7 and then season 8 ep2 and 4 multiple times I can completely understand his aim.

This is a man who for years has loved only one woman, somebody he came into the world with, somebody he bore children with and somebody who ultimately brought out the arrogant, obsessive dark side of him. His entire life from the moment he was deemed Kingslayer has been a war between him wanting to be the best and most honourable man he can be in a situation that expects the very worst from him. His goal has always been his family, namely Cersei, Tyrion and his children. Keeping them safe and protected no matter what the cost...The things I do for love. The last line he muttered at the end of episode 1 season 1 and still he lives by that quest. Every atrocious, evil act he has done has had Cersei at the basis of it, to either get back to her, protect her or impress her.

We have to remember that Jaime and Cersei have been in a romantic relationship since they were young and they are both in their 40's now. That's a hell of a long time to be devoted to somebody. Now I wanted to research season 7 because I wanted to see the foreshadowing of them breaking up and obviously Jaime could see that slowly the power was overtaking Cersei and she was beginning to show signs of madness, but still through it all he remained loyal and when she announced the pregnancy and said she wanted people to know he is the father you could tell that was all he had ever wanted, but still even that moment was ruined by Cersei's viciousness. Now looking at the last episode of season 7 when Jaime leaves I wanted to work out the exact point you could see he completely gave up on Cersei. Of course he was not happy with her decision to not let him and the Lannister army go north but I don't believe that is what decided it for him. The moment when Cersei tells Jaime that she and Euron had plotted behind his back to hire the Golden Company and she planned to be his queen, you can see Jaime's heart literally break in 2. This was the woman he had given everything to, had broken oaths for, murdered for, betrayed people for and she was treating him like he was despensable. Like he was nothing, a subject that was stepping out of line. And I think that was the moment he thought, I've lost her, she is no longer my reason to die. When he threatens to leave she doesn't beg him to stay or show him any loyalty, she actually threatens to kill him for treason. I thinks that when Jaime thinks I made a pledge to go north and fight for the living and that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I think Brienne is an important factor in this as he remembers her statements to him in the dragonpit, and he wants to make her proud by honouring his pledge he made to her and the others.

To go north was ultimately a very brave decision on Jaime's part as he knew the welcome he would receive would be unkind and he would not be wanted there but still he is willing to face death to honour the pledge he made. To be an honourable man! What i don't think Jaime was prepared for when he got north was how he would feel seeing Brienne, as I stated in a previous post, s8 ep2 is basically Jaime pining over Brienne and I believe this stems from their first meeting again in his trial. You think, he has literally just left a woman he had loved for years without her showing any kind of affection or loyalty back to him, always let him take any fall he needed to for her and now here is,in a room full of judgement and Brienne has no qualms about standing up in front of those people and vouching that he is a good man, an honourable man and she would without a doubt fight beside him! She defends him knowing it puts her in a position to be ridiculed and possibly turned against but she does it. And in that moment I think he lets these buried feelings begin to surface. He admires her, he adores her, he wants to be good enough for her. He knows she would never ask him to do anything unjustly or unknightly like Cersei did. She has never judged him since sharing that bath at Harrenhal. She has respected him, as a knight and as a noble man. Throughout that entire episode he wants to be near her cause in his mind he doesn't plan on making it through that battle. He wants his last few hours spent with a woman that for a long time he has harboured feelings but because of the toxic hold Cersei had on him he could never admit it or even contemplate and still even now he doesn't want to dive in because what if he dies or worse what if she does. So they stand together in battle and fight for eachother. Not leaving each other sides for fear of not being there to save the other. But then they do survive, they make it through a battle where death is probable.

Now i also want to mention that I think for years Jaime's path in life was being prepared to die for those he loves, he puts himself in harms way numerous times to keep Cersei safe, Tyrion, Tommen, Myrcella and Brienne. He has never been afraid of dying, in fact I think in some way he hoped for it. Hoped for the torture to end, the feeling of failure, to die for a worthy cause so the world finally knew he was an honourable knight. He pledged to fight for the living and I think that's important to remember going into s8 ep4.

Now like everybody I had issues with this episode, I was so angry to begin with, what have they done to Jaime, why are they changing him, but then i watched again and again and actually i realised, they haven't, he is the same way he has always been. With Brienne, he is nervous, he feels unworthy, because all his life he has loved one woman loyally and even she threw him aside, and brienne is 100x the woman Cersei is so how could he ever be good enough, yet after the battle they both realise I think that they both long to be loved by somebody that loves them back, somebody they trust, in that moment just before they make love, Jaime looks at brienne with such awe and admiration and love quoting "I've never slept with a knight" I took that as he has never slept with anybody he deemed noble or honourable or loyal as Cersei is none of those things, and obviously Brienne has never given herself to anyone as she has never trusted anybody enough to let her guard down with but in eachother they have found missing parts of themselves and it's actually a truly beautiful moment. Too short though! And then when Jaime wakes up the next morning for the longest time I could not understand the look he had on his face, he appeared scared, and I thought why, then i realised in that moment he has found something to live for, he can see a future with Brienne, he truly loves her and she makes him happy. And that bloody terrifies him because when do Lannisters ever get happy endings! Even Tyrion can see how happy he is and not once did Tyrion ever say that about him and Cersei. Jaime even tells Brienne he will stay in Winterfell with her instead of going back to KL to help defeat his sister, that's a huge deal for him, he wants a life with Brienne.

But then of course he plummets back to earth with a bang when he finds out what Cersei has done to Dany’s Dragon and Missandei being captured and he realises, he can't just run away from this problem. I think Olenna Tyrell said it best in Season 7 when she was with Jaime during her last moments. “If she has driven you this far, it’s gone beyond your control....she’s a disease, I regret my role in spreading it...you will too” I think finally, Jaime is seeing Cersei as the disease and how he finally needs to put a stop to the spreading of it. This woman controlled him for years, manipulated him, and yet that has helped him know Cersei, know her mind, know what lengths she would go to and the people she would hurt to get what she wants. The north wouldn't be safe, KL wouldn't be safe, Brienne wouldn't be safe not while Cersei still rules. So he makes one of the hardest decisions he ever will, he pledged to fight for the living so that's what he's gonna do, when he leaves without waking Brienne that night I think it's because he literally can't bear the thought of having to saying goodbye probably for the last time. But then she comes to find him and he wasn't prepared for her reaction. Now remember Cersei never begged him to stay when he said he was leaving, nobody has ever ever begged him to stay, to ask him not to put himself in harms way to save somebody else. But Brienne does, she loves him so much the thought of him going to KL and probably sacrificing himself pains her and Jaime can see that in her eyes as she begs him to stay. Jaime didn’t see this coming, he doesn’t anticipate it and you can see in those long moments when he’s clutching her hand, he doesn’t want to go of course he wants to stay, but he knows if he tells her why he has to go to KL, she will follow, she will pledge to stay by his side no matter what, and Jaime can’t bear that, to let Cersei even have the chance of destroying Brienne is not an option. So he breaks her heart, he reminds her of he is, who Cersei has made him become, what hateful things he did to love that hateful woman. Even though this isn’t who he is now, he’s actually hoping for the fact that Brienne will think the worst of him and let him go. It’s awful because you can tell it absolutely breaks Jaime to do this, but he loves Brienne more than the idea of living happily ever after with her, her safety is all he cares about. And what I actually found quite poetic about this moment is that Tyrion had to do the exact same thing with Shae when Cersei found out about her, he had to lie and say she was nothing but a whore to break her heart in hopes she would run and get safe. I find it ironic that the two great loves in these Lannister’s lives have been destroyed because of Cersei. This is why Jaime will not return to save Cersei, or because he loves her. They came into the world together, of course he has to be there when she leaves it, they have unfinished business. But this is not the end of Jaime and Brienne. Their love story is probably one of the most important in GOT. It’s lasted over 7 seasons and I can’t see it culminating in Jaime dying, I think that would be too obvious. They have finally after all this time given him something to live for and I can’t see him not doing everything in his power to get back to the one he loves.

#jaime x brienne #braime #jaime lannister #brienne of tarth #nikolaj coster waldau #gwendoline christie #game of thrones #got8 #got8 spoilers #got #just let the man be happy #jaime/brienne

241 notes · View notes

thinkingisadangerouspastime · 4 years

Note

17, 18, and 20 for the behind the scenes asks!! -ambivalentmarvel

thank you @ambivalentmarvel!! 🥰 how did you know these were some of the exact ones i wanted hm? 🤔 you're just brilliant like that i guess 💛

17. What fic are you most proud of?

Tbh this is kind of hard to answer because I'm proud of different things within different fics! (It'd be easier to pick which fic I'm least proud of lmao.) I'm really proud of "No Ordinary Exchange" (my rayllum fic) because it's the longest fic I've ever written and completed (it's gonna clock out at over 160k, possibly 170k when it's all posted). I'm proud of "all i know is gone (but i am not alone)" (my Aang-centric atla fic) because I felt like I really explored the dynamics of the Gaang's (+Bumi) relationships with Aang, specifically in terms of his grief regarding the Air Nomad Genocide, in an emotional, raw way that I've never really done with my other fics. That said, and you, my lovely friend, probably knew this was coming...

I think as of right now I'm most proud of "There's a Fine, Fine Line" (my Flash Thompson-centric mcu fic) simply because of the incredible responses I got from it. I had people telling me I inspired them to view his character in a completely different light, people telling me they saw themselves within him through my portrayal of his struggles in school and his having to deal with neglectful parents, people telling me that they want my interpretation of his character (e.g. giving him dyslexia and an interest in art history) to be canon (like,, what?!). It blows my mind that people were so touched by the story I wrote, and as a result that fic will always hold a very special place in my heart. Writing that fic was very important and very personal to me, and I couldn't be prouder of how much it has resonated with people.

(lmao hopefully I don't sound too big-headed with that. I just really love all of my readers and the positive responses y'all give me! you have no idea how much each of you means to me 💕)

18. What is a line/scene you’re really proud of? Give us the DVD commentary for that scene.

Lmao I must refrain from choosing a line/scene that I haven't uploaded yet! I have some gems I'm quite fond of in my rayllum fic, but alas - they're yet to be posted. ;)

Since I've already talked about "There's a Fine, Fine Line" in relatively extensive detail, I'll choose a scene from a recent atla fic I mentioned previously instead; this is an excerpt from the eighth and final section of "all i know is gone (but i am not alone)":

There was a long pause after she spoke. Aang seemed almost hesitant to continue. “And… there’s one other thing I want to do.” Something about the weight of his tone, the way his voice seemed to waver slightly - it completely changed the atmosphere around them. The air itself was heavier… as if the pull of gravity had increased by a tenfold.

“Okay,” Katara managed to say. “What is it?”

Aang took a deep breath in what seemed like an attempt to calm himself, his grip on her hands tightening. “After each temple is restored, I want to… to have proper burials for the Air Nomads. Sending their spirits off into the Spirit World the way - the way we traditionally would, because there was no one to hold those ceremonies or perform the burial rites a hundred years ago. It’s -” His voice cracked, and he flinched. “It’s the only thing I can do for them, because I’m responsible for -”

Katara instinctively yanked Aang into a tight hug, his face pressing into her shoulder. “Don’t say it,” she murmured, blinking back tears. “Don’t you dare say it was your fault, Aang. It wasn’t. It never has been.”

She felt Aang wrap his arms around her, squeezing her just as tight in response. A few months ago, he might have turned away to hide his tears. A few months ago, he might have tried to bury his pain as deep as possible in the hopes it would never resurface. A few months ago, he might have forced himself to take on the world alone.

But now, Aang cried freely into her shoulder, body shaking with sobs. “I miss them, Katara,” he whispered, clutching her even tighter. “I miss them so much it hurts.”

“I know,” was all she could say in response, her own voice breaking. “I know.”

This is the culminating moment of the fic, where Aang, who has been putting aside his own grief because he feels he has no choice but to do so in order to save the world, and because he still struggles with his guilt over the genocide of his people, finally finds a moment to allow himself to grieve, to let himself cry and release the burden of thousands of lives that he's been forcing himself to carry for most of the series. To me this is different from when he opens his fourth chakra, because while Aang did face his grief head-on then, this is simply a moment of learning to live with his loss, which I don't think is exactly the same as accepting it. It's like the step after coming to terms with his loss - grief has several stages, after all. And who else would be there with him except Katara, the person who has loved him and supported him the most throughout the entire show? The quote I used at the beginning of this final section of the fic is fitting: grief, she's learned, is really just love. grief is all the love he wants to give, but cannot - his grief is just love with no place to go. Aang releases his grief, and he has thus fully reconciled his position as the Avatar with his being the last airbender.

(Or so I wanted to portray when I wrote it, lol!)

20. What’s your favorite minor character you’ve written?

Gonna break the rules and name TWO characters: Flash (mcu) and Mai (atla). Easily. They're lowkey kind of similar, both with rich, neglectful parents who'd rather they be seen and not heard, so... idk what that says about me 😂 take that as you will. That said, Mai is a much more emotionally-closed, almost standoffish type of person, while Flash has a tendency to lash out and be vocal when he's angry, so their upbringings may be where the similarities end lmao.

(Crossover potential? 🤔)

#thank you so much for sending these i know i got super long-winded lmao but i really enjoyed answering them!! 💕#ambivalentmarvel #amy answers #flash thompson #aang #katara #mai #mcu #atla #tdp #fanfic asks

1 note · View note

opinuun · 5 years

Text

Do you guys remember when this was a studio Ghibli blog and I’d post gifs? 2017 was a good year lol. Anyway. As a child, I never knew I’d thirst for a 2-D otome man, but sadly I’ve stopped. Yes, after two years of obsession, it’s time I retire from the fandom. I’m keeping the blog though. Ran this shit for years, ain’t gonna give up now that my horny-meter has plummeted to an all time record low. Did you guys know blogs don’t have a character limit??

Oh god. I didn’t know this blog would suddenly receive so much attention. Please, I am begging you to not scroll down. It’s endless MysticMessenger posts from two years ago.

Hey, I'm once again: back, you can't possibly have more time than I do. I mean, after all, I made this blog. You're only browsing it. And most people don't even come here. Not even my friends...*sniffle* The just ignore this poor, pathetic little page. All they do is fill out the TAB form and leave. I think. Maybe they're here right now! HI! HOW ARE YOU DOING? I'M FINE! THANKS FOR COMING! YES, I'M YELLING! Who am I kidding. This page won't get a single hit, unless I bribe people...now that has possibilities. Okay, fill out the TAB form, so I have proof that you bothered to come here and...uh...I'll...uh...send you a sandwich? Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. I'm bored. I'm gonna go hug a moose. MOOSE! I love-d you moose! Hey, I'm back again! Yea...*waits for applause* okay! Now I want all you loyal fans...*cricket chirps* to go to the link to see what I'm like. I took a whole bunch of personality quizzes and posted them there. I'm an evil villain, kitty and a freakazoid so far. And I only took the quiz once, too. Spooky how accurate they are...anyway, I command you to go! I'm going. I'm back. I'm gonna start counting how many times I say back. Let's see: 1...2...3...4...5! Wow. I must really be desperate for something to do. I now officially have proof that someone has been here! It was one of my friends. Apparently this page really is getting long, because my friend said something to that effect. Maybe. Anyway, moving on! I'm just basically typing nothing. Just like all those reports people have to do. You know? With a specific number of words. They start out with half that number, and then just fill in words until they have the right amount. I salute those people. You're great tradition is being carried out here, on the second most pointless site ever! Well. Maybe eventually some weird, bored person will wander onto my site on accident and be mildly entertained be my site until they wander onto a live video feed of a coffee maker. Or maybe not. I only know that I'm entertaining me, which was my original goal. So. I've done what I've set out to accomplish. Yea, me! I'm so special. You see, most people, they don't like reading or writing. So if you're not most people, you've made it down this far without skipping, skimming or getting the spark notes version. (Which I think does not exist) My point is, if you've bothered to read this, then, (like me) you probley have also read the ketchup bottle so many times that you have it down verbatim. Look verbatim up. It's a word. But, you should know that, since you like reading. Or maybe you're just skimming. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with reading food labels. You might be asked a question about them on a quiz show. And now, for the million-dollar question: How many calories are there in a single serving of Mustard? I can just see it now...It could be called Know-Your-Food. Or You are What you Eat. It'd probley be as popular as those game shows that no one's ever heard of. Speaking of food, what's up with pie? There's strawberry pie, apple, pumpkin and so many others, but there is no grape pie! I know. I'm just as upset about this unfortunate lack of development in the pie division. Think about it. Grapes are used to make jelly, jam, juice and raisins. What makes them undesirable for pie? Would they dry into raisins? Couldn't you just stick some jelly in a piecrust and bake it? It just doesn't make any sense. Another thing that bothers me is organ grinders. You know, the foreign guys with the bellhop hats and the little music thingy and the cute little monkey with the bellhop hat who collects the money? Okay. They're basically begging on the street. How did they ever afford an organ-thingy? Wouldn't it make more sense to get a kazoo, if you're broke? And if they're so poor, what possessed them to buy a monkey? I mean, I don't think I could afford a monkey, and I'm not exactly on the streets. Obviously I at least have a computer...so, back to the organ grinders. I would have sold the monkey and the organ and been able to eat for at least a year. Or, if I was weirder than I am, I could at least kill the monkey with the organ and eat it. Why on earth did they keep the monkey? It must have cost a fortune to feed...not to mention the mess. That's just one of those many facts of life that are better left mysteries. Especially since no one but me would ask the question. I better go. I think I hear a monkey...Okay...now I'm back. That's the sixth time I've said back! I realize that this longest text ever must be very boring and not worth anyone's time. But I'd like to take this time to thank the 2 and 1/2 people in the entire universe who have bothered to read this entire thing. I'm not exactly sure who they are, but: thanks! Right now, my spacebar is malfunctioning...that's not good...I have to press it two or three times just to insert a freaking space. Maybe the evil little faeries with the sharp little teeth have put their evil faerie dust on my computer. Or maybe not. This is too frustrating. Goodbye for now...Now I'm back. And still frustrated. But for a different reason. Today I had the misfortune of playing a Treasure Planet game on neopets.com It was terrible. Apparently the point of the game was to get your character to shout "Whoo-Hoo!" as many times as possible before you splattered your brains on the rocks, all the while listening to a soundtrack that is similar to a dying ceiling fan. Of course, when I started out I accidentally hit the rocks approximately three million times. Halfway though I used my four remaining brain-cells to decide that the game was dumb. So my goal changed from surviving to laughing evilly while my character died. So the game naturally did everything it could to preserve my life. The stupid game is still going on and I refuse to quit because I want my points. My character is actually dodging the stupid rocks better now then when I controlled him. I hate irony. Seeya. Okay. Now I'm back again. Today I added an update page, which is basically a less chaotic, outlined version of this without all the ranting. It's more like techno talk about arrays and how much I suck and whether or not the Braves will win this year. Okay, the whole braves thing is made up. But everything else I've said so far is true. I think. Maybe I should start on a boring disclaimer...Eh-hem. All contents of this site were designed for entertainment purposes only. Any use thereof that is not stated in the above mentioned statement would make the author, hereby referred to as Patron Saint of Paper Clips, very angry. Should you violate the purpose of this site: i.e. become not entertained, the Patron Saint of Paper Clips will be forced to take drastic measures. This is specified in Code: 343 of the Flaming Chicken Handbook. Ooooo…that’s a great idea! I’m gonna start quoting from the Flaming Chicken Handbook! Code: 343 of the Flaming Chicken Handbook states that the Patron Saint of Paper Clips (that’s me) is allowed to cause vague, pain like sensations while the offending person (or alien life form, dog, etc.) isn’t paying attention. Now I have a purpose in life! To make up quotes from the non-existent Flaming Chicken Handbook, which I’m sure you have a copy of. No? Too bad. It’s in the mail, I promise! Now I must take my leave…and remember. Cheese is watching. Okay...I'm back...I think that eventually half of this thing will consist of the word back over and over again...that's just weird. Which fits the motif of the rest of the site. There's even a money back guarantee. Isn’t' that nice? See? Now no one can ever say that I don't take care of my viewers. Especially since I don't have viewers. I have readers. Wait...I really don't even know if anyone bothers to read this. Even if I put it in a less chaotic, more user-friendly format people would still ignore this because it involves: reading. Yes. Sad to admit, but the majority of people would rather read the summary at the back of a book rather than the whole book itself. What has the world come to? It's pathetic. Especially since I'm bothering to write all this. It's not fair! Why can't I have more readers?! All the other internet writers have nothing on me, except they're better at advertising, having a central theme/plot and basically more talented. Whereas I'm more into the whole ranting and raving stage right now. Plus, I am horrible at spelling. Which is bad. Thank the powers that be for spell-check. The single greatest invention of the computer gods. I'm getting bored, so I think I'm done for the day. May your day be shiney! I'm back again! And I feel weird! I found at that yet another one of my friends is reading this. Creepy. Just how much time do they have on their hands. Perhaps their just trying to be nice. I can just see it now...an organization devoted not to feeding the hungry, or peace, or love or whatever, but to giving recognition to all those poor, pathetic, unpopular websites. I wonder what it's name would be. Don't Ignore Sites? Would it be called DIS? Isn't that like a slang term for an insult? Would that be considered poetic justice, or just a nice coincidence? And why do I even care? I'll tell you why. Because I have nothing else to do right now. I could be playing neopets, but ever since my bad experience with Treasure Planet, I don't feel like it. Oh, by the way, I noticed that whenever I use spell-check, my stupid computer turns the word probley into to word problem. To prevent this, I did nothing. So, it is now up to you, the imaginary reader, to decide whether I mean probley or problem...it's almost like a game! But without the bad sound track. And I promise not to force you to live when you would rather die. Moving on, I have nothing else to say, but don't feel like quitting just yet. I'm like the little engine that could. Or maybe the Energizer Bunny. I just keep going, and going and going. Or I could be like that annoying guy on T.V. who keeps asking if you can hear him. If my site manages to last a decade, my readers *snicker* will probley wonder what I'm talking about. My answer is simple. It doesn't matter. I'm just rambling. Which means that it doesn't matter if you understand anything I say. Doesn't that make you feel better? I bet it does. Wow. Look how long this has gotten. I even impress myself. Who would have thought I have this much free time? And I congratulate any reader who has gotten this far. Ooooooo! You must check out the fortunes section of the random stuff page! I've just gotten an idea for some more, original, fortunes...I gotta go!(may the moose be with you) And now I am back. I swear. If iI fill out the fake tab form I'm gonna have to put back as my favorite word...I already have filled it out, though. Would it be cheating to fill it out again? Only if I had multiple personalities. Or would it be cheating if I didn't have multiple personalities? The world may never know. Just like how many licks it takes to get to the bottom of a tootsie pop. Would it vary? The number of licks, I mean. Someone could have super-disolving spit, or watery-spit. Or what if you took big ol' slobbery licks? Does the commercial take that into account? No. It doesn't. And let me tell you, it's an outrage. It deludes all of American's sweet, innocent, candy-loving children into thinking that a cartoon owl is smarter than they are! "Mr. Owl, can you tell us how many licks does it take to get to the bottom of a tootsie pop?" Or whatever. And "Mr. Owl" replies "One...Twoo...Three! Chomp" And he bites it. That teaches our youth that it's okay to agree to help someone, and then ruin their experiment. Well...it's not. I am going to start a protest group. Teens Against Cartoon Owls. We could call ourselves TACO! I love the little tacos, I love them good! That is a direct quote from GIR, co-star and comic-relief on INVADER ZIM. Hmmmm...intersting. I put hyphens in both of his titles...it must be a conspiracy! I gotta go. Those TACO buttons don't make themselves, you know. I'm back again. And not so cheesed off about the whole tootsie roll pop thing. Right now, I have another twenty minutes on the Internet before I'm gonna watch T.V. And I can't think of anything else to do. So, predictably, here I am. It's not like I have anything better to do. Obviously, you know this. After all, look how long this text is. I wonder if I've made the world record? If I did, would I stop this? Why bother asking? I'll will most likely still be adding to this on my death bed. Hmmmmm...has any old, senile person ever written anything? Was it coherent? Did it make more sense that this text? Is it possible to make less sense? Am I enjoying asking retorical questions? Yes. Yes, I am. But I seriously wonder what something written by a senile person would be like. I've heard of poems and stuff written by people who were high, insane or paranoid. But never senile. Can a senile person write? Aren't they regressed to a child-like state? Does it even matter? Is anyone even reading this? Did I resume asking retorical questions? Do you care? Is this eating up time? I feel like I'm playing questions only on whose line is it anway. I probley should have capitalized something, or underlined but I'm feeling lazy...hey, you try to keep your two and a half readers happy! It's really stressfull. Someday, I'm gonna snap and just delete this entire thing. Gee, I hope not! I worked sorta hard on this. It's great for making random topics weave together to form an overall infrastructure of chaos. That made little sense. That's why it's here, and not some critically acclaimed site. Ooooooooooooo! I'm gonna quote from the FLAMING CHICKENS HANDBOOK again! Yep! I bet you were just breathless in anticipation. Okay. Here goes. Code: 472 of the Flaming Chickens Handbook states that this site in no way aknowledges the existance of other, better sites (hereon reffered to as the Losers) The Losers are a myth. The Patron Saint of Paper Clips (me again!) claims no knowledge as to where that particullary nasty rumor started, but confirms that this is the best site ever. It would be a sin against humanity for a better site to exist. Should you refuse to aknowledge the Patron Saint of Paper Clips as the ruler of the Internet, you will be subjected to punishment as stated in Code 343 of the Flaming Chicken Handbook (i.e. Experience vague, pain-like sensations when you're not paying attention) This has been a public service announcement. This is a test, I repeat only a test. Had this been an actual emergency, we would have bought up all the can openers and charged 3 cows and a pig for each one. I repeat, lock all you doors and windows, this is it. I repeat, there is nothing to worry about. Everything is fine. The end is not here. I'm going, you're on you're own! Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm back!*smiles brightly* And apparantly delusional! Anyway, I just finished rereading my longest text ever. And I became inspired to talk about nothing. You see, I periodically read the longest text ever to check the constant downward spiral of my sanity. Hmmm...I seem to be entertaining myself though, even while reading what I wrote. Which is why I still go to the Really Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything website. Because I am easily amused and have lots and lots of time on my hands. Maybe, some day far in the future (like next Thursday) I'll print a copy of this insane text. And then go door to door distributing it. Eventually, this would become a monthly tradition. Whole families would gather around their front door, in breathless anticipation while they attempted to barracade me out. I can just see the whole community rising to thwart my attempts to spread love, joy and insane chaos. I probley wouldn't actually print this out (think how much paper it would take!) but if I do, only friends and enemies will receive copies. Hmmmm...maybe my condition is worsening. Or not. I'm still peeved about the cartoon owl from the Tootsie Roll Pop commercials. He is pure evil. TACO will eventually destroy him. Unless he has already been destroyed by an even more radical Anti-Cartoon-Owl group. I hope not. Or, would that be good? I suppose I could let someone else have the glory. After all, I'm not in this line of buisness for the fame, fortune and power. What line of buisness, do you ask? Why, the assasinating annoying cartoon characters buisness. (Actually I just question them untill they spontaneously combust, I ask lots of questions) So, in conclusion, ladies and gentleman of the jury(that's you) I could not have possibly tortured "Mr. Owl" to death. I love owls. Hmm...I seem to be jumping from one subject to another more frequently. Either I am growing more comfortable with my on-line writing, or I am progressivly getting more insane and chaotic. I also am psyco-analyzing myself a lot today...hmmmm...I'm even saying "hmmmmm..." a lot. Just like a real psychologist. Hmmmmmmm. Time for another boring disclaimer!!!!!!! Code: 742 of the Flaming Chickens Handbook states that in no part does the Patron Saint of Paper Clips (That's still me!) actually claim to be mentally ill. That's either a) a publicity stunt b) An attempt at humor c) a cry for help or d) none of the above You can e-mail your responses by conducting a scavenger hunt of this site. Some of the pages of this site contain a link encouging the two and a half people to e-mail the Patron Saint of Paper Clips. There may also be evil little links that are designed to confuse you. These links send stuff to someone named [email protected] Saint of Paper Clips does not know who this individual is, but sincerly wishes that you send all your hate mail to him. Not that the aformentioned individual claims to have received hate mail (or mail of any kind) via a website link. Thank-you for your time. Remember to send your answers to my sanity quiz to the e-mail account, [email protected] Oh, and once I refer to myself in the first person again, the handbook quote is over. I just thought that I might like to mention that. Oh. You're still here. I figured you rush right on over to e-mail me. Perhaps you don't have time to waste e-mailing me. HA! HA! HA! That's funny!!!! If you you don't have time to waste, what are you doing here?!!! Oh, who am I kidding. I figure that even the people I manage to lure onto my site from neopets don't even bother to come to this particular page. Maybe I should make the link come here directly...Hey! What a good idea! That way I can spread my love, joy and insane chaos to more people! I'm a genius. Gotta go, must lure innocent victems to the second most pointless site ever!!!! I'm back. And really angry, and confused. I've always known that I was weird, that's always been a given. But now I realize that I am considerably more normal than the rest of my family. Today we had a "family outing." Now, most families will go bowling, or putt-putt golfing. They may go to a resteraunt with an arcarde, or the movies or to a theme park. Not my family! No, we got the greatest family outing of all. We got to go to a bar and play pool!!!!!*waits for readers to become insanely jealous* Yep, that's right, a bar with a pool table! Not only did we get world class cuisine (under-cooked hotdogs and over-cooked hamburgers), my little sister (age 10) got taught pool by someone I strongly supect is an ex-convict! Naturally when it was announced that we'd be eating dinner in this place, I could hardly contain my excitment(I glared at my mother and asked why we couldn't go to Pizza Hut) When we arrived, we were promptly served (after thirty minutes) In the meantime, we played a family game of pool(my parents played while my brother and sister and I watched) After two rousing rounds, our food came. The food was superb, (our food came the exact opposite of how we ordered it, and half of the onion rings were missing) Then we joyfully returned to our game(my sister and the ex-con played my mom) We spent hours there (from 5p.m.-7:15p.m.) There were many people that were the same age as me and my siblings (no one in the room but us were under 30) Us kids had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the bar ( I almost fell asleep during the last game I watched) As we left, there was a feeling of goodwill and fellowship between all(my sister locked me out of the car and wouldn't let me in untill I started yelling profanity in her general direction) The high point of the entire night was when my mother gave me $21 for my report card. She promptly borrowed $1 to help with the waitresses tip(This part I'm not being sarcastic about) All in all it was a night I'll remember forever (as the lowest point in "family outing"history, except for that time my mom dragged me to a church thing on the concept of truth.) My brother(age 13) even decided upon a new job he wants when he's old enough to work, a busboy at the bar. We had to tell him that he would probley have to wait untill he was 21.(Absolutly nothing about that statement was sarcastic) As you can see, I love my families outings(Not unless you're blind...or stupid) &#!#%&&!!!(*%$ WHAT THE %$#@ WAS MY MOTHER $#$#%$# THINKING!!!!!!!???? BRINGING $#$$# KIDS IN A BAR!? I know it was her idea, 'cause my dad hates it, too. My mom and my stupid little 10-year old sister loves it, though. *sighs* Why does my life have to be so weird? I'm leaving...now I'm back! And not so pissed at my weird family. Now is the time to mourn the loss of one of my most loyal readers (I think she's read the entire thing one time, which is more than anyone else has done so far) She has been banned from accesing any portion of the Internet, do to reasons that must remain confidental due to security reasons. If I told you, I'd have to kill you and all that stuff. So...now I am down to one and a half readers. Untill such time that I have more. I wonder why anyone would read this? You would have to have several characteristics that I possess. First of all, you'd have to have an extrodinary amount of free time. Second of all, you would have to have the patience to read through all of this. And lastly, you'd have to know where the heck this site is. I admit it. I haven't exactly advertised this site. Nor can I find it on any search engines. Some of my pages have stuff written in to make search engines recognize me, but it doesn't seem to be working. What must I do to rise above obscurity? I tell people I know about this site, but they either ignore this page, or don't even bother coming to the site in the first place. I suppose that is the bane of all authors. To pour your heart and soul into a passage, and have everyone ignore it. *sniffle* Why must this be? Maybe I should just give up. After all, no one would really care if I quit updating this site. But I can't help but think of stuff like the evil over lord list and REALLY REALLY BIG BUTTON THAT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING. They are not great neccesarily because of the content, (although that helps some) they are great because of their sheer length. You can read a little each day. And almost never finish. Also, I guess I still am trying to get the world record. I have heard some feedback suggesting that I make someway for people to remember where they stopped reading. It can be very confusing, especially if you weren't paying attention in the first place. Well, I dont want to organize this page, in any manner. This is chaos. And insanity. Not neat little text in classifiable rows, in alphabetical order. If you want neat, go to some other site(though, as mentioned in Flaming Chickens Code:472 there is no such thing as a site better than this one). Otherwise, I guess you're stuck with me. Awwwww...I'm touched! You didn't run screaming to another site, thankfull for the chance to escape this insanity. You're still here, which must mean that you'd rather be here than anywhere else! Hey, where are you going?! I thought you were gonna stay here and keep me company?! *drags reader back* See, I knew you'd stay! *gagged reader glares* What's that? I know this is the best site ever, thanks for the compliment! *reader starts inching towards freedom* I better go...I think that I may have a problem brewing. I'm back. And very concerned about this new, younger generation (all 10 year olds who were born in 1992) They are supposed to be the future. Instead they appear to be a nuclear armagedon in the form of a fifth grader. I chanced to have an interview with an informant from this evil generation (my little sister) who will be called Mrs. X for security reasons (no, she's not married, the "Mrs" makes it good as a disguise) I was quizing Mrs. X on Civil War History for an upcoming test in her classroom (whose location can not be devulged) Mrs. X seemed fluent in the subject. Using prior knowledge, I deduced that Mrs. X was full of crap. Out of sheer curiosity, I asked Mrs. X who participated in the Civil War. She immediatly replied "Clara Barton". I clarified, which countries fought in the Civil War. She answered: England, Russia, and (out of sheer desperation) Iraq. I believe that she was just listing countries she knows America has fought against. Now, correct me if I'm wrong...but Iraq? I don't know if Iraq even existed in the Civil War Era! Why on earth would we go have way across the world to fight them when we didn't even really need oil?!! Moving on, I finaly managed to coax my sister (I'm tired of writing Mrs. X) to tentativly guess that America fought in the Civil War. I mean, who'd a thought? America? Fighting in the American Civil War? In a moment of inspiration, I asked her who America fought. Her first guess was enslaved africans. Well, at least she knows that slaves were involved in the war. Before she could start listing all of America's enemies, I gave her a hint. I said "The Union fought..." With a crack, snaple and pop, some random synapses in her brain connected in the right order and she said "CONFEDERACY!!!" I was very proud of her, just as you would be proud of a two-year-old who has just announced: "I WENT POO-POO ON THE POTTY!!!!!" What I mean is, you wouldn't be very proud if the average person said that they just took a dookey on the toilet, and you wouldn't be very proud if they knew who fought against the Union in the Civil War. I confirmed that the Union was Northern and Free, and that the Confederacy was Southern and Slave. We resumed quizzing and she got every question on the worksheet correct. This is because she memorizes the questions. That way, she can pass the test without actually learning anything. You see, if you memorize stuff, you only have to remember that the answer to number 6 is Clara Barton for a week, rather than having to remember that Clara Barton started the Red Cross for the rest of you life. I sincerely appologize if anyone is offended by my view of memorization. I also would like such persons to immediatly leave my site. You don't belong here. You see...knowledge is good. If my sister...uh...Mrs. X were ever asked a question on the Civil War on a quiz show, she'd come up with nothing. With knowledge you can win money and the opportunity to look like a dork on national television. My sister is a big believer in the memorization system. I previous time when I was studying with her (American Revolution, this time) I was trying to help her remember the difference between the Patriots(Patriotic to America) and the Loyalists (Loyal to Britain) She didn't know what the word patriotic meant. I tried to explain. I asked her how you dress on the forth of july (she said nice) I asked what the colors red, white and blue were (pretty). I gave up in exasperation. More recently, I was trying to instill a sense of empathy and niceness in her. I asked her what the golden rule of christianity was. She didn't know. When I pressed her, she confessed she didn't know what chrisianity was. Completly defeated, I told her that it was the religion she practiced every Sunday when she went with her friends to church. This confirmed my suspicion that she only went so that she could have the use of the church's playground equipment. My family also strongly suspects that she stole $20 from the donation thingy. Anyway, that's my rant on the new generation that contains my little sister. When someone of her generation runs for president, I'm gonna do a complete background check. If they're anything like my sister, I'm movin' to Canada. Gotta go...the Russian-Brittish-Iraqi-enslaved-Africans are coming to defeat the Mexicans. I'm back! *there's that darn cricket again* And I have a genuine question to ask all of my loyal readers *cough-cough* Okay, here it is: Is it normal for a non-gender specific sibling to carry around various dead reptiles (snakes, turtles, lizards etc.) Furthormore, is it considered accepted behavior to talk to these dead reptiles, in a cooey, baby talky kind of voice? Finnaly, is it expected for said sibling's non-gender specific parent to encourage such behavior, citing "I was just like that as a child" as an excuse? It's an honest question as I fear that my non-gender specific sibling is weird. Who am I kidding? My entire family is weird. It's just a matter of degree. Hey, by the way. I'm sorry that my last few entries have been only about my various family antics. Although I can't see why you care, because there is a large probability that you do not exist, because I don't think anyone is reading this anymore. How discouraging. People need to make the time to waste time. It's a time honored tradition. Who'd thought that I could use time that many times in only a few sentences? It's been pretty quiet here lately, which is why I haven't added anything to this text in awhile. I know, you were just crushed that nothing new was happening. It's a sad, cold, cruel world out there and you had nothing to relieve the monotony of it. *sniffle* I feel so sorry for you! Next thing you know, you're internet connection will die. Well, too bad! Do you know I never even had a computer untill just a few months ago (that's why I'm obsessivly writing here) So I won't pity you if you're computer dies for unexpected reasons. Time for another quote from the FLAMING CHICKEN HANDBOOK!!! Code: 843 of the Flaming Chicken Handbook states that in no way is the Patron Saint of Paper Clips (guess who?) responsible for any faulty wiring or lack thereof in your computer. The Patron Saint of Paper Clips in no way wishes harm on your computer. Any derogatory statement is simply an opinion of an individual, not of the flaming order of the flaming chickens. Said order will in no way be held responsible for any damages, injuries, loss of life, limb, head, or organs. Okay, quote is done. Maybe I should put quotation marks around them...nah, too much work. But I probably will eventually get around to having a seperate page just for the FLAMING CHICKEN HANDBOOK. That way all the members (what members) can print out a copy of it for themselves (if they didn't get that copy in the mail) I guess I'm done for the day...I know. You want me to stay. It's okay. Because eventually, I'll be back! Seeya! I'm back. And once again suprised. When I was at a TAB poetry thingy (TAB is good TAB is great We love TAB) I met some new people. One of these people (who shall remain nameless untill such time that I have explicit permission to use her name) turned out to be almost as weird as me. As in...she read the ENTIRE Longest Text Ever. The whole thing. So far two whole people (to my knowledge) have read the entire thing, and a few people have skimmed it. That means I really can justify claiming to have two and a half readers! I'm so happy! That means my pointless obsession has actually entertained someone besides me! Perhaps, one day, far in the future, this will actually be a world record and random people will acutally voluntarily read this text every day. Or maybe not. The point is that it is nice to have readers. Or maybe it's not...I mean...won't the quality *snicker* of my work deteriorate if I am no longer writing for the target audience of me? If that happens, then no one will read this. And then I'll be writing for me again. And then the quality will rise. And then people will start reading. And then the quality will go down and the vicious spiral of good and bad will continue untill I either give up this text, or go crazy...er. In any case...I should probably find a topic. Yeah...a topic would be good. Or...I could just continue to write about finding a topic. Ooooo! I know a topic! Ice cream trucks! This has been bothering me for a while. You see...when it's hot, you want something cold to eat. Conviently, ice cream trucks come around during the hottest part of the year (it must be a conspiracy). As you may or may not know, small children swarm the ice cream trucks. The vendors even play whimsical music which I strongly suspect contains subliminal messages to make you hungry for ice cream. The vendors get oodles of cash, and the kids get ice cream. Now, in today's society of buying groceries on-line and getting them delivered, why hasn't any other food industry marketed this ingenius idea to bring the product to the consumer. I can just see Hot Dog, and Pizza trucks roaming the neighbor hoods, selling treats to hungry children...and adults. Of course, said adults would have to peel their butt-cheeks off the couch...but they'd have to do that for the delivary man anyway. The food trucks could even play music that made you hungry for their food. Then the problem with obesity in America would be blamed on evil food truck drivers as opposed to the harmless, benificient television and computer. We could all breath a sigh of relief as parents kept their children inside, away from the evil truck drivers and near the T.V. Gone would be the days when parents told children to play outside, it's a nice day. Parents would buy their children computers, video games and other television neccesities. This, of course would expand the market for such products. This would lead to a better, more stable economy. Food industires would be buying cars, gas and music. Parents would increase the purchase of entertainment items. In return companies would make a profit, pay their workers better. The workers would then be able to afford more entertainment items and the upward spiral would continue, as opposed to the evil downward spiral of my writing. In conclusion, Ladies and Gentlemen...if you implement my idea, there will be peace and prosperity for all. As long as you don't mind a few more couch potatoes. Gotta go...I think I hear a catchy jingle. I'm back...it's been awhile since I've written here. A lot has happened. Like my EVIL school computer deleting my updates page. But it's all good. Especially since I just saw The Matrix: Reloaded. The following text may spoil the movie for you, so WARNING: do no read this unless you have already seen the movie. Okay. What I liked best was the philosophy on choices. (the mindless fight scenes were really cool, too). It's like this. In the beginning of the movie, Neo is having dreams about Trinity's death. Later, The Oracle tells him that he has already decided her fate. Towards the end of the movie, Neo chooses to tell Trinity to stay out of the Matrix, since he saw her die in it. She agrees, but only after seeing how important it is to him. After a horrific chain of events (is it coincidence, or fate) the people who will deactivate the secondary power source of the building Neo is infiltrating, die. So...the plan is going to fail. Unless someone does something, Neo, Morpheus and many others will die. Trinity, who is of course outside of the Matrix, knows this and chooses to enter the Matrix to save the day. The events of Neo's dream unfold. So...when the oracle said that the choice had already been made, she was completely correct. The moment Neo woke from dreams of Trinity's death, he made a choice. He would do everything in his power to keep his dream from becoming reality. So he kept her out of the Matrix, and she saw the problem, and entered the Matrix to fix it. If she had been in the Matrix, she would have likely been with Morpheus, never would have known about the plan's failure, would therefore not have been in the situation that resulted in her death. And the plan would have failed and Neo might have died, along with a large portion of the city (the building was set to blow if there was any intruders) So...Neo's choice to attempt to save Trinity triggered the sequence of events that led to her death. As Neo realizes all of this, through a nearly omniscient Architect of the Matrix, he makes another choice. This choice is simply an extension of his original choice: he will save Trinity at all costs. Neo is told that he has two choices. He can save mankind, and doom Trinity. Or he can try to save Trinity and doom mankind. No guarantee that he'll succeed in saving Trinity. He goes for Trinity, makes it just in time to catch her body, and starts her heart back up. In return for not taking the easy route, he gains a power in the more or less real world. He can deactivate the machines, (squidies) but at great personal cost. The movie ends with him in a coma. Now, you must realize that I have described only one aspect of this movie of all movies. There are not enough words in the English language to describe the sheer coolness of the fight choreography, special effects and the plot. I highly recommend you see the movie yourself. I'm sorry that today's rant isn't random, insane or completely chaotic, but I must right my experience with The Matrix before I forget. I am so buying this movie when it comes out on DVD. I love it! You have to admit its sheer coolness. I mean, come on! It's the sequel to the movie that revolutionized the standard by which we judge special effects. I better stop typing before I have a heart attack...just remember...The Matrix has you...I'm back. And throughly pissed off at my school system in general. You see...they feel that the only way to reward academic achievement...yada-yada-yada...is to force the smart kids to be ushers for Senior Honor Nite, and Graduation. Where is the logic in this? I for one, didn't know about such dire consequences for not deliberatly failing classes. It was bad enough that I was forced to "volunteer" my precious time (i could have worked on this site)...no...I was forced to wear formal attire. My school system is stuck in the past...and formal attire means...a dress...a white dress...(for those you who never bothered to find out...I am indeed female). So...for the first time in about 5 years...I wore a dress...and something that was complelty white. What cruel fate is this? To compound the EVIL situation...I was forced to wear feminine shoes. In other words...they hurt. And they pushed my toes together. Since I have a rather weird phobia of touching my own skin...this made my evening my own personall torture session. I think that such gender-specific torture should be deemed inhumane and abolished from our great society...of flaming chickens. Henceforth...Code: 666 of the Flaming Chickens Handbook states that under no circumstance will the Patron Saint of Paper Clips (guess who) be forced to wear anything other than a t-shirt and preferably black jeans. Should you violate this right, you will become destroyed or possibly dizzy. I'm leaving now...I have some destruction to do. i'm back. from graduation. we had to get there one hour and fifteen minutes early because there was traffic. After standing around a lot...the ceremony started. Lots of people spoke. by the time I had to do my part (tell people where to stand before getting their diploma) it was dark. there were bugs. they liked landing on me. then...i got to go stand while people said a lot of stuff. i couldn't hear it because someone had put the speakers facing the audience. we clapped. the whole time, even during the name-calling, seniors were playing with silly string and beachballs. afterwards...they turned off the lights. there were lots of fireworks. i wandered around for 20 minutes looking for a cell phone. i called home, and waited another hour for my ride...traffic to the school was one way. i felt sorry for my dad. i am tired...but cannot go to sleep. i'll copy and paste this to my site. maybe the longest text ever. you will all suffer as i have suffered when and if you graduate. i cannot feel my feet. i hate dress shoes. I'm back. Today, I'm here to salute the Pointless Signs Of America! The PSOA have been whole-heartedly working for you, and what have you done for them? NOTHING! These so-called "pointless" signs are doing just what they were meant to do: entertain you! You cannot judge them simply because they have no apparant function. They expand your mind, making you think about all the things they could do. They could do anything they wanted to, if they just put their minds to it. If you judged everything by what it doesn't acomplish, then the entire world is populated by pointless beings. Noone can do everything, so how can you expect a SIGN, with the I.Q. of toilet paper, to do everything. You people sicken me. You expect far to much of the inanimate world. The inanimate world, on the otherhand, expects nothing of you. Which is exactly what it gets. If you expect nothing, and get nothing, you feel nothing. If you expect nothing and get something, you're happy. But, if you expect something and get something you feel nothing. And if you expect something and get nothing, you feel cheated. If you're following along, and not completly confused, you'll realize that it is better to be a pessimist than an optomist. Yep that's right. This entry went from saluting the PSOA to making a statement about my ideals. This has been a weird day. You can thank my associate "Meg" she came up with the PSOA acronym. Everyone, clap for "Meg".I gotta go...seeya later! I'm finnaly back! Today, I took a long look at this site, which is the acomplishment of almost a year of work. And I asked myself "How could I have better spent my time?" And so, in the interest of wasting even more time, I made a list. Here we go! Number One: I could have cured cancer. Not that I know anything about medicine...or cancer for that matter. But I'm sure that if I just would have put my mind to it, I could have done it. Number Two: I could helped the earth to find eternal and lasting peace. Which would be boring. So I at least have an excuse for not doing that. Number Three: I could have studied and stuff. Uh...don't think so...Number Four: I could have learned to drive. This would have resulted in the deaths of numerous pedistrians...and I would still probably be wondering around in search of a McDonalds. Number Five: I could have read more books, played more video games and watched more mindless television. Gee...I wish I'd thought of that sooner. Number Six: I could have implemented one of several plans for world domination. Or, as an alternative, I could have ruined several plans for world domination that other people made. Number Seven: I could drive people crazy. Wait...aren't I already doing that? Scratch number seven. And on to: Number Eight: I could have...uhhhh...ummmmm...actually thought up these things before hand. Number Nine: Now it's just getting redundant, isn't it? Number Ten: This is the list that never ends. Yes, it goes on and on my friend. One person, started typing it not knowing what it was, and they'll continue typing it forever just because this is the list that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friends, some person started typing it not...etc, etc. Okay...I admit it. I have officialy run out of ways I could have better spent my time. I don't think there actually are any. Except for maybe five and six. Now, those have possibilities. However, I am currently content to just sit here and type. For the benefit of you, the reader...who may or may not exist. Either way, I'm continuing to sort of entertain myself. I feel like I should be outraged about some topic or another. I just can't work up the energy to be outraged. Perhaps a nice, soothing mistrust. Yeah. I can work with mistrust. I definitly mistrust lots of stuff. Like organ grinders, and the evil conspiracies. Did you know, that Kodak was part of the conspiracy to assasinate John F. Kennedy. Now, some of you are probably thinking "Gee, Really?", or "Wow, I never knew that!" while others are thinking "Who's John F. Kennedy?" or possibly "Who or What is Kodak". I fervently hope that you're not thinking the last two...especially about Kodak. Kodak, as you may know, is a film developing company. And John F. Kennedy (JFK) was an alien bent on global domination. Or possibly a really good president who wanted to fly to the moon. Either way, he got assasinated. And ever loony in America decided that it was a conspiracy. Some even go so far as to claim that Kodak "changed" the pictures of the assasination to make an assasination in the bushes become a tree's shadow. I didn't know that they had such good technology back then. I have to wonder...why would Kodak do such a thing. Perhaps Kodak is actually a front organization for a shadowy governmental system that controls the entire world and didn't want mankind to obtain the freedom of the stars and so tried to sabotauge the space program even though it didn't work as well as they planned. Or perhaps not. Either way, Kodak is undeniably evil. How can any company that takes so many "wholesome" pictures not be? You can just bet that they look at every one that get's turned in to them, judging blackmail value, and whether or not you could get arrested. It's just sickening, you can't even take a simple photo nowadays. Unless you have a digital camera, which are a symbol of freedom from the old ways and willing enslavement to the new ways. We can only hope that the digital camera manufacturers are kinder masters than the evil Kodak Lords. I better go...I think Kodak is tracing my site....I'm back now! And, once again, I have proof that someone actually took the time (two hours) to read this entire Longest Text Ever! It's amazing, it's incredible, it's unbelievable. But true. Even more incredible, this time it's someone I don't even know! Wooooooo! I feel inspired and happy and other really good emotions and stuff. And so, I'll take a trip down memory lane, to the dark depths of the past, to when I decided to make this page. It was inspired, in part, by my sheer and utter boredom. In school, back before I even owned a computer, I'd type random words for long periods of time, 'cause I had nothing better to do. Once I got this computer, I decided to do something similar on my beloved site. But, it ended up making more sense than I anticipated (scary thought, huh). Oh, well...I tired of nostalgia. Back to the present. Right now, I'm just typing so that no one can say that I've been slacking off. I don't think I have any conspiracy theories...except pop-ups/pop-unders. Have you ever had the evil pop-up that says that if you click here, it'll get rid off all the annoying pop-ups? Isn't that sort of ironic? Could the pop-up blocker people have chosen a better means to advertise their product? It's like grand-theft auto 3's talk show, you know, the one where there are Citizens Raging Against Phones? Or CRAP, for short. And the lady representing them, calls the radio station...on a phone. It's stupid and ironic and just shouldn't exist in a better world. Pop-Up ad's help you get rid of pop-up ads? Insane, chaotic...hmmmmm...I wonder who thought of it? Was it on purpose, or was it just some mistake? It is now my civic duty to discover this ancient mystery, and reveal it to the uncaring world. Or maybe I'll go make a frozen pizza. Yeah. That sounds good, too. Since I'm not particualarly inspired at the moment, I should leave and let you gather what is left of your sanity. I just can't seem to stop, though. Okay...I can do it. I'm leaving. I'm back...and it's several hours later. I've decided to imortalize the stupidity of my dog, Moose. She is a heavy-set Yorkshire Terrior (12 lbs.) In otherwords, she's a small yappy dog who is big for her breed. Today, I met her arch-enemy. An enemy so terrifying that Moose cannot stop shaking. An enemy so hideous that Moose must destroy it at all costs. An enemy so dangerous that Moose fears it above all others. Now you may be wondering what horrible beast is Moose's arch-enemy. And you probably suspect that it is something pathetic. You would be correct in your suspiciousness...for Mooses arch-enemy is...*dramatic drumroll*...a small, white, feather. Now, Moose has seen many feathers, birds even. But none have struck terror in her little moose heart like this particular feather. So...naturally I put her arch-enemy in my pocket and brought it home with me. This action has made her very suspicious of where my loyalties lie. She tracks the feather smell all over the house, and goes crazy whenever I take it out of my pocket. She even got her sister and mother in the spirt of things. Now her sister sounds an alarm whenever she sees the evil feather. Now, you may be wondering what is so terrifying about a small, white, feather. So am I. It doesn't smell funny, (I asked my brother, since I don't have a sense of smell), it seems perfectly ordinary. So, I've decided that Moose works for some secret government organization, and that the feather is the key to the destruction of the world, and I am just blithely letting it enter our home, so that it may furthur its evil plans to destroy the universe. That is the only possible explanation as to why it upsets her so much. Or...maybe it's the feather off of the cartoon owl from the tootsie-roll pop comercials (one...two...three..*crunch*). Whatever the case, I decided that the whole world, (or three of four random people) deserve to know that if the world and or universe are destroyed, it's the evil, little, white, feather's fault. Now I'd better go and torture my Moose with it...:) I am officially back. And you, the potentially non-existant reader gets a once in a lifetime chance to hear me rant and rave about my Horrible, Horrible Family Vacation. I know. You feel very, very honored. It's like this. My mother is a control freak, and she decided on the spur of the moment that we were going north to visit relatives. Later that day, she decided we were NOT going north, we were going south to a beach resort. Still later that day, she got offended at some trivial thing and decided that we weren't going anywhere at all. The very next day, she decided that we were going north, after all. So, we packed everthing up. Before we knew it, we were on the road. The first part of the trip was fairly easy. As in, I was half-asleep, hoping that we'd arrive while I slept. Then, in an inspired move, my brother talked my mother into letting him sit up front. That meant that my mother would be in the back, with me and my younger, eviler sister. Immediatly, my mother started complaining. It was uncomfortable in the back, it was too hot, it was too cold. Then, she accidently woke our three yappy dogs up, and they relized that they were in a car. That meant only one corse of action for them. They started shaking and barked their little heads off. This annoyed my mother further, untill she asked, no, demanded that my father turn the car around so that we could go home. Unfortuantly, we had already driven 337 miles toward our destination. After much argument, my father was going to turn around, untill he realized that my mother was going to drop the dogs and me off, and then turn around and continue north. This seemed slightly unpracticle, so we ended up not taking that 337 mile detour. We eventually reached our destination after 16 hours of virtually non-stop driving. We got there, we ate. We slept. My mother visited relatives. And so the week went by. I got to go to a huge library, and see Terminator 3 at the local theater. That was the high point of the entire trip. The last day, we were deciding where to eat. My mom said that she didn't care. So my dad picked a steak place. My mother tried to order a mushroom-swiss burger...only to discover that the place had no swiss-cheese. So she decided on a salad, only to discover that they didn't have her favorite salad dressing. After much deliberation, she decided that she wouldn't eat. After complaining how hungry she was, and about the poor quality of the resteraunt, she walked out of the resteraunt, instructing the rest of us to "enjoy our meals". And I wonder where my little sister gets her annoyingness. Not that my mother is annoying...just set in her ways. The whole meal thing was about the only interesting thing to happen during the week. On the way home, we had gotten approximatly 4 hours into the trip when my mother predicatably decided that we had to go back and eat at the 50th aniversary of her favorite ice cream place. Needless to say, we ignored her. Oh, and when my sister had to go to the bathroom very badly during a traffic jam, my mother had the good taste to making hissing/water noises to make my sister's problem worse. She claimed that my little sister always did it to her, and she was getting pay-back. Between her bickering with my sister, and obsessivly playing neopets games, I don't know what to do with her. Anyway...that was my family vacation rant. It sucked. No suprise. At least it's over. Sorry if I complained a lot. If you don't like it, start your own longest text ever. Anyway, I promise to go back to my usual routine the next time I rant here. I thought of a topic on the way home, but forgot it. Seeya. I'm back! I know, I took you completly by suprise. You thought you'd gotten rid of me. *cheesy super-hero voice* Well, fear not, random citizen, for I, PSOPC am here! *normal voice* Today I have a very important to discuss with you in this: PERFECTLY NORMAL PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCMENT. Yes, that's right. It's time to warn you, the viewer...er...reader...about the evils of various stuff. Today's lesson is: subliminal messages . That's right, folks, mass hypnosis via commercials. Now, I'm sure you've at least heard of subliminal messages , right? No? Well...prepare to be enlightened. Subliminal messages are an advertising technique that puts hidden pictures and words into a main image. You don't see them, but your subconsious (dreaming) mind does. Your subconsious mind acts on whatever it is told. What does this mean to you? It means that WAL-MART TV IS EVIL! EVIIIIIIIIIIIIL!!!!!! Why else would they invest all that money to show commercials in their own store? Because they put subliminal messages in them, of course! Subliminal messanging also explains the successes of certain fast-food resteraunts, and brand name items. BEWARE YOUR TOASTER OVEN! Okay. That had nothing to do whatsoever with subliminal messages...it's just cool to say. Anyway, only watch wal-mart if you WANT to be subliminaly entertained into purchasing a new set of TUPERWARE, even though your old set is PERFECTLY fine. This has been a public service announcment. Pretty cool, huh? Uh...you don't have to take the subliminal stuff seriously. It's true, and all, but I have no proof about wal-mart, or certain fast food resteraunts. It makes sense, though. Wal-mart TV is evil. You cannot deny it. Seeya...hmmm..I wonder if there's subliminal stuff in my computer...I'm back. And I feel that it's time for a FAKE commercial break, for the highly informed, obviously brain-dead consumer. And now, a word from our non-existant sponsor. Ketchup: The only food that you'll want to eat after traveling to the 5th Dimension. It's been practically proven that Ketchup transforms into a highly intoxicating (non-addictive) delicious substance upon returning from the 5th Dimension. Stock up now with our Valu-Pak to recieve 3-metric tons of Ketchup, all for the low, low price of your brain, since you're obviously not using it anyway. Then, just wait for technology to "catch-up" (get it, catch-up, Ketchup?)so you can travel to the 5th Dimension like our scientists almost did. (Next Commercial) Get ready fo: Faux's new "reality" TV show, "How Low Can We Go?" It's about six contestants who compete to create the worst, least likely "reality" TV show. The winner not only gets the million-dollar prize, they get the chance to produce the show they created. Remember: if the show sucks, it's their fault, not ours!(Next exciting commercial!)And for all the idiots out there: Try new and improved Dum-B-Gon! Dum-B-Gon stimulates brain activity, making you up to 10 times smarter! Not only that, Dum-B-Gon: stimulates weight loss, cures "any" illness, does simple houshold chores, never leaves the toilet seat up and is the perfect gentle companion for your kids. How can you pass up this revolutionary new product? It's yours for only 3 bi-monthly payments of $3.95 ($3,95,000 on days ending in "y")Don't forget, Dum-B-Gon is practically guaranteed!* (*Not a guarantee) (Next commercial)Have you ever wondered why food sometimes goes bad in your fridge, even if you've only had it a few years? It's because of the "evil little faeries with sharp little teeth." These "faeries" sprinkle your food with highly toxic "age dust" and ruin a perfectly good four-year-old meatloaf. How do you stop them? With our patented "spray". Our "spray" kills over 99.9% of "faeries" (which are much to small to see) Our "spray" also kills most disease causing agents, like rats, or pigeons. WARNING: Leave food sit in an open, well-venilated spot for a week before eating. And now, back to our featured presentation. Wasn't that semi-entertaining? I bet you wanna go eat some Ketchup covered Dum-B Gon right now, while watching "reality" TV. Just make sure you "spray" your food first. Pathetic, wasn't it? Oh, well. I was bored, and a dilligent reader suggested I make fake commercials, so...therer they are. Happy? Good. I'm leavin', for now. I'm back. And I'm willing to enlighten you, the potentially you-know-what reader. Today, I was checking out some weird news. At one point, I read an article that stated that it had been proven, conclusivly, that Kansas was flatter than the standard pancake. The researches even used highly advanced technololgy to map the surface of a pancake and compare it to documented geology of Kansas. Some people disagree, the director of the Kansas Geological Survey said "I think this is part of a vast breakfast food conspiracy to denigrate Kansas. It's a cheap shot." So...doesn't that make you want to take Kansas' side (I sincerly appologize if you are from Kansas). It just seems extremly weird (and worthy of mentioning) that this semi-important guy from Kansas believes in a "vast breakfast food conspiracy". Makes you think that the long held belief that Kodak conspired with the JFK assasin(s) is normal. Another article claims that an anitseptic turned a polar bear purple, drawing large crowds of people. I sure hope other zoos won't copy them. Before you know it, we'll have orange alligators, pink tigers and blue lions. School children won't be able to correctly identify the color of a zebra. Random people will think they've gone crazy, after a seemingly innocent visit to the zoo. It's wrong, I tell you. A complete and total degregation of our societies values. What values, you say? The basic moral belief that Polar bears should be WHITE. Unless we spray-painted the snow purple, too. Then it would be okay. As long as the bear blends in, you know? Speaking of animals, there's a cat in California who is a kleptomaniac (likes to steal stuff). He sneaks into neighboring homes, and takes clothing, wrapped christmas presents, and anything he can find. He then leaves them under his owners car. Okay, better leave. I'm back. And I don't really have a topic today. I'm just bored. Sometimes I just do this, you know? Start typing without any idea about what it is I intend to say. Maybe I subconsiously DO know what I'm doing here, but refuse to admit it to myself. Or maybe I am monumentally bored and don't have anything else to do at the moment. Either way, I'm here. You must be pretty bored, too. Otherwise, why on earth (beta, krpto, zkdjf, Planet X, whatever) would you be here? It would make no sense. If you have something better to do, why wouldn't you be doing it right now? I would be. But, maybe that's just the difference between you and me. Yeah. That must be it. Unless you're bored. Then I completly understand. I need to find a topic. Here, topic, topic, topic! Come on, I won't hurt you, I promise! *hides large ax behind back* Come here, topic! Why are you afraid of little ol' me? *sigh* There are no topics anywhere near me. Kinda like me and "Meg" webcomic we are trying to do. It's called Hit-Or-Miss, any topics, plot, etc. are completly accidental and are not the fault/responsibility of the creators. That was sort of a topic, even though it was sort of random. Which is what I do best. Okay, I'm done with that litte commercial. What now...hmmmmm...should I share with you more of my paranoid/delusional conspiracy theories? Or have I been doing that too much lately? Oooooo! I know, I'll start of list of why it's fun/good to be insane/weird! #1You can say or do anything and normal people will agree with you in the hopes that you'll be satisfied, shut up, and go away. Far away. I will show you an example with this completly true stuff that I experienced several years ago. ME: My vicious, psychotic, flesh-eating bunny-rabbit wants to rule the world. RANDOM PERSON: Uh-huh, that's nice. ME: Yeah, but I told her that she'd be a terible ruler. I mean, she traded Asia for a carrot! And she doesn't even LIKE carrots! RANDOM PERSON: You don't say? ME: Yep. She also is the goddess of red jello. RANDOM PERSON: *head explouding from sheer insanity* As you can see, I was a very weird child (this happened in elementary school...uh...except for that head-explouding part). Okay...on to: #2 You can get out of practically anything by saying: a)It's against my religion b)I'm allergic to that. c)I have an extremly irrational fear of that. d)I already did that in a past life and it sucked. e)My psychotic bunny predicted I'd die doing it. Unfortunalty, several of those reasons LEGITAMITLY apply to a certain activity I do every Tuesday, which WILL NOT BE NAMED HERE LEST I GIVE IT POWER OVER ME! I'm allergic to parts of it, have irrational fears about others and I'm pretty sure it's against my Jenny religion...along with eating mashed potatoes, or potatoes of any kind. I'll add that to the FLAMING CHICKENS HANDBOOK. Thou shalt not eat spuds. Hmmmm...time for #3You can obsessive over ANYTHING, and people will think nothing of it. I, personally, am obsessed with, kitties, bunnies, bats, this website, drawing, making intriate little patterns with strings, doing mildly repetitive activities, being weird, apparantly making lists and cheese...and chickens...and flame. Fire is good. Fire is free. Fire is my friend...until it burns me. Then it must die...painfully. And on to:#4You make your friends look normal in comparison. And #5: You can give each of your pets several weird names such as: Ringling-Raison-Bailey-Suzana-Midnight-Schultz, Squirell, Moose, Moose-Moose, Moosey-Moose, Linzey-Moose, Muffin, Squirell-Muffin, Yabby-Doodle, Abby Normal, Wiggle-Baby, Wiggle-Muffin, Witle-Baby, Cheese-Monkey, Muffin-With-Squirell-Juice, Squirell-With-Muffin Juice, Moosey-Juice, Squirell-Monkey, etc. Now, wasn't that a fun list!? Doesn't that just make you proud to be weird? I should make bumber stickers saying that. Proud to be weird. It'd be cool. Anyway, gotta go! *yawn* I'm back. Last night I was super-charged with lots of sugar and not a lot of sleep. I ended up writing things during the time of night when EVERYTHING is hilarious, including the word sheep. To compound things, I wasn't alone, and things just escalated. The following is everything I wrote during that sugar-coated time period. Some are answers to e-mails, the rest are just stuff I wrote.

Definitly. THen we go to library. Guess what? Me and Josh ate lots and lots of sugar, and it's late at nite and everything is funny but we can't laugh 'cause everybody is sleepin' so it's even funnier but ever since we drank the water we sobered up even though we weren't drunk but we ate sugar...lots and lots of sugar. MOstly donut cake. Okay. JOsh says it was only one piece of cake. WE got it at Wal-mart. Or his mom did. OR something. Goodbye..

#long post

20 notes · View notes