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winchestersingerautorepair · 4 years

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A Rift Between

A Brief(-ish) History of Dean, Cas, & Rifts

Let’s talk about rifts for a moment. And when I say rifts, I don’t mean their personal disagreements -- if I were to be discussing that, this post would be less of a brief history and more of a thesis paper.

No, I’m talking about rift rifts. As in, actual, literal tears in the spacetime continuum. They are littered across the whole run of this show, and we’ve recently had two whole seasons devoted to them. So, the sudden reappearance of rift-adjacent plotlines carries with it a weighty load of textual relevance.

Dean and Castiel’s relationship arc, a fan favorite, began when Leviathans, the notorious fan-unfavorite, came into the picture.

No, Maeve! Dean and Castiel’s relationship arc began in season 4, not 7! Cas was barely even in season 7!

Well, let me explain. Season 7, the age of Sera Gamble, was a total show reset. Was it uncomfortable? Yes. Did we all hate it? Yes. But like with muscle, you’ve got to tear through the old before you can develop something new, and Season 7 did this job quite effectively. An identity crisis at that scale means either a massive change of pace or a creative death, and as the show is still on, number one it is.

So, while we can most reliably chart the beginning of an intentional, substantive romantic undercurrent to Season 8, it is the waiting that allowed it to come to fruition-- Season 7 was a void, an unsustainable period of creative drought, a long cold winter in which seeds fell and laid dormant. And like the winter, it was necessary for rebirth.

This brings me to the first DeanCas rift:

The Purgatory Spell

Episode: 7x01

This tear in spacetime was the culmination of Castiel’s Season 6 character arc. It was the final, greatest betrayal, the irredeemable course of action which struck his relationship with the Winchesters a fatal blow-- and though his last act was to attempt to right his wrongs, the emergence of this rift meant estrangement and death for the relationship (and for Castiel.)

This incident is established as far more significant for Dean than it is for Sam, so I won’t spend much time justifying my classification of this rift as primarily DeanCas. It’s made pretty damn clear through Dean’s behavior throughout Season 7.

Castiel’s departure catalyzed the emergence of Leviathans. As the lore promised, they brought death and destruction to the whole ecosystem, purging the show and readying it for reincarnation; but I’ve already made this point.

As Destiel 1.0 dies, Destiel 2.0 is born.

~~~

The Purgatory Portal

Episode: 8x07

Let us journey back to "A Little Slice of Kevin"-- the gayest thing to happen to Supernatural up to that point. Suddenly, Dean and Cas’s ambiguity is no longer a joke. It’s no longer flippantly referenced, but Built Into The Narrative In A Noticeable Way. After Season 7, Season 8 shocked the system, earning Purgatory celebrity status as the Destiel fandom exploded back to life.

But, more important things. The events surrounding this portal not only codified romantic subtext, but reshaped their relationship by putting it in grave peril. Lovers trapped in separate worlds. There’s only like ten thousand examples of this in other fictional, romantic(-ally coded) relationships. Sigh.

As Destiel 2.0 dies, Destiel 3.0 is born.

~~~

Seasons 9, 10, and 11 are filled with near misses. Divisions between worlds/fates test and change their bond -- Heaven and Hell exert tremendous force on both, and the gates of Heaven and the Darkness’s breach of barriers flirt pretty openly with the rift theme -- but there isn’t anything that fits the profile cut and dry, so let us leap to Season 12. Five long years of glacial shifts, five long years of a slow, steady amping up of queer subtext. An argument can be made that it had graduated from subtext in some places, but both fandom and GA were frog-boiled enough in their interpretations for this argument to be an aside.

Destiel 3.0 reaches a transitional stage, and becomes Destiel 3.0+.

Now, It’s season 12. And like goddamned CLOCKWORK, six years after Season 6, another unstable tear in spacetime appears, and terminates Castiel’s character arc.

Rift? Check. Cas dead? Check. We’ve seen this pattern. Time for shit to CHANGE. And boy, did it.

~~~

The Rift

Episode: 12x23

Oh, boy. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Castiel’s death in the Season 12 finale was a magnum opus of SPN’s romantically coded imagery. I could elaborate, but if you’ve read this far into this post you likely already know what I’m talking about. My point is, a hall of mirrors is the chosen space in which Destiel 3.0+ is killed.

The relationship death lasts only a short while; their estrangement in separate realms is a five episode-long period of detachment and review. Our characters, as well as the viewers, stride through a hall of mirrors. In solitude, this DeanCas winter becomes a chance to reflect, because there is no better way to get a feel for the importance of something than to eliminate it. The crucial elements of Dean and Cas’s relationship, what they mean to each other, becomes clearer than ever before because, look! This is Dean without Cas! This is the show without Cas! Don’t you hate it?

I mean, guys. Mirrors. Cas spoke to a reflection of himself in the Empty. Literally. He addressed his greatest fears about relationships with himself. He was forced to rewatch his greatest mistakes, and what gets featured? Our first two DeanCas rifts. F*ck this show.

DreamHunter parallel! 13x10 reenacted this scene for us with Claire and Kaia.

Then, 13x05 changes the whole game once more. You know, the episode titled Thanatology. The study of Death. Fuck this show.

As Destiel 3.0+ dies, Destiel 4.0 is born.

~~~

The intensity of the queer narrative amps up continually. Things are getting harder to write off.

Rifts between worlds, crossover and confinement, and estrangement, and the blurring of lines, and the breaking of old taboos/breach of old barriers dominates the remainder of Season 13 and Season 14. We hold this broad focus for a long time, and Dean and Castiel become the emotional equivalent of the plot arc, always there, brewing, but taking a backseat to the Big Stuff. A wall rises, and solidifies. Silver Pole of Communication Barriers, anyone?

Then? Season 15 kicks us in the Destiel balls.

Full disclosure: I didn’t see this next part coming. I dared not ask season 15 for anything this significant, so the last scene of 15x08 just about took my life.

~~~

The Purgatory Rift

Episode(s): 15x08, 15x09

Dun dun DUN!!

This twist was my favorite Christmas present, because it communicated to me that the writers have an understanding of Dean and Cas’s history to match our own. Not only are they actively writing them utilizing the Destiel playbook, they obviously care immensely about the destiny of their relationship. I am speaking too soon to say this definitively, but this mission has all the hallmarks of a plot device designed to serve many purposes in respect to Dean and Castiel. They’ve got ALL the ingredients. There are so many things tied in here that it gets pretty damn near fanfiction territory.

Please read my reaction to the purgatory twist if you need context, as I don’t feel much like regurgitating it. This post is long enough, lol. (A bloom that grows only in one place? Fuck you, writers. You’re going to KILL me.)

~~~

So, to recap: In a universe defined by barriers and guidelines, a relationship that refuses to be defined will be under constant siege. Dean and Castiel suffer from the sheer reality of walking lines between two designated states of being-- friends and lovers, angel and human, take your pick. The current order isn’t friendly to beings who don’t fit a category. Until the barriers are stripped away, they cannot exist as they are, and rifts will continue to rip them apart.

The Purgatory Rift of 15x08 is such a big deal because it fuses themes. The rifts of the Dabb era have merged with the gateways of the Carver era. Not only are our long-standing almost-lovers returning to their relationship’s place of origin, they are doing so by breaching physical barriers designed to keep them apart; and all the while, the most dangerous, important rift is not the one in the fabric of reality, but the one in their relationship.

I expect this major rift to end no differently than it has in the past. Dean and Cas will be separated, and Cas will be out of reach. And then, they’ll be reunited. But, where will that take us? What will the next reincarnation look like?

As Destiel 4.0 dies, something will be born.

#who sucks at tags? me #spn meta #spotting patterns #symbolism #destiel #purgatory #spn s7 #spn s8 #spn s12 #spn s15 #theme: rebirth #endgame speculation #15x09 #15x09 speculation #rifts #mine

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zathuraroy5 · 3 years

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Supernatural rewatch 2x17

(queued 2021/02/20)

Werewolf episode!!!! God like, I know how this one ends, obviously, but like in my secret good supernatural, once Sam is leader of the new and improved Hunter network, there's systems in place to help people that happen to be monsters cope. Like I can't wait to meet Garth

Hey, bucky barnes? XD

@adhdeancas Budget Sebastian Stan

Oh shit she's already a Werewolf? I guess they skipped a few scenes to keep the suspense and the plot twist. (Saying this, because her boss is ripped to shreds. And if I remember she's the one that did it? I might be wrong) (ya she was already werewolf for a month)

Lolol Dean is so excited by the Werewolf. "Werewolves are badass" XD

@adhdeancas: Werewolves ARE badass. (Also shhh inherently queer coded)

Lolol you know something. If you do, I'm good, I'll find out. (Also valid, almost every monster is queer coded in this show lol)

Right. They make you think it's the creepy stalker ex-boyfriend. But if I remember correctly it's the neighbor, right?

Lolol they do rock paper scissors to choose who stays to protect the girl XD

All serious like. "Dean always with the scissors" OMG ITS THE QUOTE

Lolol girl folding her panties in front of Sam

@adhdeancas: Oho it’s a good ep. And YES the rock papers scissors, only fair way to do things. (Also, true. Monsters are queer). https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeL6Fgo6/

Omg. Valid thesis and explanation, but I'm deaded by "alsonakeddudesfucking".

@adhdeancas: lmao yep. accurate y'know

I felt the same way during the vampire episode. Den of iniquity. Having to share bodily fluids to change.

@adhdeancas: Yeahhhh yeah yeah. so much queer coding dear god

The shape shifter. That whole speech about never fitting in, just wanting to be touched, and loved, and accepted

@adhdeancas: i'll go insane if i think about all the ways monsters have been written to mean queer people and therefore queer people have been made into monsters.

Changelings

You could even argue that ghosts are the people that are like, "dead to me", but they are still very much there and haunt the existence of "normal" people

I know there's more but I'm blanking

And like in just this episode. The werewolves take the heart of their victims???

Oh yes. Let's not talk about the genderless angels

@adhdeancas: oh I Love talking about it

(back to the episode after the queer studies talk)

Lolol Sam got super into the story of the telenovela

@adhdeancas: both dean and sam are so into telenovelas

They're adorable

@adhdeancas: they are. i could make it sad about their life on the road with only access to the things on the motel tvs but i won't

Too late 😭😭

Lolol Dean at the strip club. Being very typical male. Which is making me want to write another essay. On the performance of the masculine and the attraction towards women vs men. How when it's women, it's full of leers and voyeurism and sexual in nature. When it's men it's violence and camaraderie, brothers in arms and rough and tumble. No vulnerability in neither. Intimacy is stolen touches. Because a man doesn't cuddle. Grumbly acceptance of small touches when it's women, strong pats on the back when it's men. Always on guard to never show too much emotions, or neediness.

@adhdeancas: oh my god. yes say that. in order to make a man seem like a man to other men he must treat women like objects because relating to women is gay. gendernatural

Good lord. Thank you for putting it into words

@adhdeancas: i live for gender studies

Even when it's two men attracted to each other, can't be seen as "womanly"

I'm slowly getting better at it. (gender studies)

Also pertaining to the episode. Sam being attracted to the "monster". Being "tricked", even if the monster was unaware. Ahhhhh (so he didn’t have sex with her before they found out, but there was still heavy flirtation and come hither, so my theory still fits lol)

@adhdeancas: it's so confusing and interesting to unwrap those fucking layers, it's alllll wrapped up together. agh yes the Sam being violated constantly thing. just agh

Wait wait. He didn't have sex with her yet... Wait let me keep going. This might change my theory

Oh. My. God. Wait. So they just found out it's her. Am I remembering the episode wrong?

Wow they really go 180 when they think someone's a monster

Oh God Dean's face when he realizes the person actually doesn't remember. (when he killed the guy werewolf) It's a human dying. The CONFLICT

Right. She never fell asleep (the night they waiting for her to transform)

So she didn't turn. Oh hug! Lol

Dean is too funny in this one omg. Not smooth

Ayy, Sammy getting some.

Those close ups good god

Fireplace

Wait they just stayed all day in bed? (literally, it was sunrise, sex, then night fall)

Andddd she's still a werewolf

Dean "can't help it Sammy, a part of her is .." Sam "evil? That's what they say about me! So what, you won't kill me but you're just gonna blow her away?" Dean looking conflicted.

@adhdeancas: yeahhhh. and they never fucking revisit that

Also I've noticed a lot of tv shows don't know how to end phone conversations. There's often no exchange of goodbyes, which are often long and awkward. Fics do it better, and it's in written form.

Ok fuck this, like I get this is a parallel to how Sam is asking Dean to kill him, now it's her asking Sam to kill her. But 1) she's way too calm and 2) they tried ONE thing, they "scoured every source" (which, I'm sorry, as good as Bobby is, he's not "every source") and now it's all over, not trying anything else. The Monster must be put down.

How to write stories Homophobically racist

"I'm asking you to save me" like FUCK

Dean saying he can do it. Parent trying to save grief.

JENSEN

Dean actually shedding a tear. Grief over a person that they couldn't save. Fear of having to do the same thing in the future. The micRO exPRESsionS

(Thank you for coming to this tedtalk on monster queer studies)

#rant #spn #spn rewatch #2x17 #queer studies

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emachinescat · 3 years

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The Casket of the Armadillos (by Edgar Allan Nope)

A Psych Fan-Fiction

by @emachinescat

@febuwhump day 9 - buried alive

Summary: When Shawn confronts a grad student turned murderer, he learns a very important lesson a very hard way: Don’t piss off English nerds - especially the homicidal ones.

Characters: Shawn, Gus, Juliet, Lassiter, Henry

Words: 5,924

TW: panic attacks, buried alive, claustrophobia

Note: If you liked this classic lit-inspired Psych fic, you can always check out this one I wrote, inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird: The Finch and the Mockingbird

Keep reading here, or on AO3!

If you enjoy, please consider liking, commenting, or re-blogging, and you can follow me for more content like this! :)

I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!

- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

Her name was Olivia Hale, she was a twenty-three-year-old grad student at UCSB, and she was working on her doctorate in American lit. She was attractive in a cute librarian sort of way - short and petite, with long, curly auburn hair she kept in a bun and oversized glasses with thick lenses, and a smattering of freckles across her slightly upturned nose. She knew a little bit about everything when it came to literature as a whole, a rather impressive amount about American literature, and absolutely everything there was to know about the life and works of one Edgar Allan Poe.

She was also batshit crazy and currently pointing a .22 pistol directly at Shawn’s head.

“Don’t move,” she growled, disengaging the safety.

Shawn did a cursory glance around the empty classroom, looking for anything at all he could use to his advantage, to distract her or attack her with or - worst case scenario - to use as a shield. But Olivia had found him snooping around on the tiny fourth floor study room that she’d been given to use by the department chair as her thesis headquarters. She’d really made herself at home here, piling books and journals and what seemed like hundreds of loose sheets of paper on every available surface.

But he was stranded in the middle of the room, with nothing close enough to use as a weapon, and so Shawn used the most powerful tool he had, one that had saved his life and many others, wooed women all over the country, and ordered more chili cheese dogs than he could count.

He started talking.

“Look, Olivia, I get it,” he said soothingly. Slowly, in the most non-threatening manner possible, he lowered his hands. Olivia gripped the pistol tighter but didn’t shoot. “I know what happened. You didn’t mean to kill him.”

Her eyes were wide and fierce, her lips pursed into a thin line. “No,” she admitted. “It was an accident. But he was going to--”

“Yeees,” drawled Shawn, slowly raising his left hand and putting it to his temple, very well aware that he was probably pushing the limit with all of this movement after she had expressly ordered, at gunpoint, for him to stay still. “I see it. Dr. Graves was feeling guilty, wasn’t he? A fifty-five-year-old professor with a fancy PhD and tenure, and a devoted wife and three kids and two grandkids, to boot. The perfect life. But oooh, it wasn’t enough for him, was it?”

Shawn immediately answered his own question, something that he had become exceptionally good at over the years since he was usually the only one who could keep up with himself. “Of course not! What’s the perfect job and family when you’ve got a smokin’ hot, super smart student in her mid-twenties who thinks you’re the most impressive man on the planet?”

She sneered, and Shawn noticed with some trepidation that the hand holding the gun trembled just the tiniest bit. When she spoke, her voice warbled with rage. “My age and appearance had nothing to do with it - and even if it did, there was nothing wrong with our relationship! We were perfect for each other, intellectual equals. We were on each other’s levels - he was my soulmate! So don’t you dare belittle what we had like that!”

Ah. So he had hit a nerve. This could now go either one of two ways, in Shawn’s extensive experience in being held hostage: Either she would get fed up and send a bullet screaming through his body, Garth Longmore style, or she would let her emotions distract her, and cause her to make a stupid mistake. Obviously, Shawn hoped for the latter.

Now Shawn had to make a choice, because he could proceed in one of two ways: Either he could back off and try from another angle, or he could further antagonize her into (hopefully) making a mistake. Naturally, Shawn went with the latter.

“Sure, sure,” he agreed airily. “Older men and younger women do it all the time. But to say there was nothing wrong with your relationship? The man was married, and you were his student. I’m not the headmaster here -”

“Dean,” she corrected sharply, and this further proved that Shawn had pegged her correctly as a know-it-all literature wunderkind who had to be right one thousand percent of the time. “This isn’t Hogwarts.”

Shawn gave a tiny shrug. “To be honest, all big schools look like Hogwarts to me.”

“Because you have the mind of a child.” The words were accusatory and patronizing, but Shawn flashed a dazzling smile.

“Thank you,” he said. Before she could respond, he continued his earlier thoughts, “Even though you were the ‘perfect couple,’ you were furious with him for even suggesting that you stop seeing one another. The affair was too risky, and he missed his wife. He wanted to tell her the truth, fix things.”

“It would have ruined everything!” Olivia hissed, and the sound of her voice sent shivers down Shawn’s spine. There was an unhinged quality to it, something raw and dangerous that he hadn’t sensed before. He fought the sudden urge to backpedal as far away from her as possible. “We were perfect together! And if he told his wife and she let it slip, I would be kicked out! All my research, all my time and work here, everything would be gone! He had no right to make that decision for me, to take away my future!”

“Maybe,” said Shawn, and it was like he was watching from outside his body, because he knew that what he was about to say was a big mistake, but he was helpless to stop the words from tumbling from his lips, “you should have thought more about your future before you pursued your married Shakespeare teacher.”

Fury etched itself into every feature of her face, turning her from a beautiful librarian to a feral monster, but her voice was slow and measured as if it was taking every ounce of self-control she possessed not to shoot him where he stood. “He taught Southern. Gothic. Masterpieces.”

Shawn tried to backtrack, to undo whatever damage had been done by his unpredictably big mouth. “But,” he pressed. “Killing him was an accident. You didn’t mean to push him down four flights of stairs.”

She considered this. “No, I didn’t mean to kill him,” she reaffirmed, and then an odd calm smoothed out the angry crevices between her eyebrows - the peace, perhaps, of having come to an important decision that she knew was absolutely right. Shawn recognized the look because he’d seen it on others’ faces before (very rarely, if ever, had he seen it upon his own). “And I don’t think I will kill you, either.”

Whatever Shawn had been expecting, this wasn’t it. Everything about this woman screamed insane and vengeful. If Shawn lived, he would turn her into the police, and she would go to jail for a very long time. She was incredibly intelligent - surely she knew this!

And then she clarified, and the world started to make sense again - though Shawn would have honestly been perfectly content in this alternate reality where the bad guy suddenly has a miraculous change of heart. “Well,” she amended, “I won’t kill you directly. I’ve never shot anyone before - I only have this little guy here because I’m a young, pretty girl on a big college campus, and I have two night classes. Besides, your death shouldn’t be so easy.”

Shawn swallowed. “Olivia, you don’t have to do this. You haven’t intentionally killed anyone yet. If you turn yourself in now and cooperate, your sentence will be a lot shorter than if you kill me - directly or not. Because make no mistake, even if you kill me, you will still get caught. The SBPD has some damn good detectives, and they’ll bring you down even if I don’t.”

She didn’t respond to him directly. Instead, her expression was flat save for the dark gleam in her eyes, and she intoned words that in and of themselves had no meaning to Shawn, but that still managed to strike a chord of fear deep inside of his soul. “‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.’” Shawn was utterly unnerved by this point; it was like she had been taken over by something both sinister and incredibly well-spoken.

And indeed, in many ways she had, as Shawn soon found out, she was quoting the beginning of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Presently, however, Shawn had no context for her strange words or sudden shift of demeanor. His skin crawled and his heart pumped with more get-up-and-go than he’d ever been able to muster in his whole body before. “Uh, Olivia…”

“Move,” she ordered.

This time, though it was contrary to his nature, Shawn did what she said without arguing. This side of the student, with stolen words sliding evilly from her mouth, was a million times scarier than the enraged Olivia who had very nearly shot him between the eyes.

She marched him out of the room and down the three flights of stairs to the main lobby of the English building. It was dark outside, nearing midnight, and Shawn kicked himself for thinking he was clever for coming to investigate this late. He’d thought she’d be at home sleeping. He should have realized that as a grad student, sleeping was the one thing she wouldn’t have time for! And now he was in very deep trouble, alone, and no one knew where he was. He should have waited until morning, until the building wasn’t deserted, should have at least called Gus and told him what he was doing. But it was a college campus, and she was a tiny little literature nerd - it should have been safe!

As she forced him down one flight of stairs, then two, then three, and finally, into a stairwell off the beaten path that had to be unlocked with a key card - which she had - she continued to encant, her voice slowly losing its flatness and growing into something twisted and sing-songy with every word.

“‘You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point, definitely, settled - but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk.’”

“Olivia--”

It was as if she hadn’t heard him as she shoved him into the basement, and now her voice stilled from a chant to a slow, measured whisper.. “‘I must not only punish but punish with impunity.’”

Shawn wasn’t sure what impunity was, but it sure as hell didn’t sound good.

Their final destination ended up being a small, partially finished storage room near the back of the basement. Dusty boxes and rusted cabinets and archaic old computer monitors lined the walls and cluttered most of the walking space. Shawn was reminded grimly of a school supply graveyard.

Olivia stopped him when they came to a brick wall that had been busted through to fix some issue with the pipes - Shawn saw the water stains on the concrete floor near the break in the wall, and there was a brand new water pipe joined to an old, yellowed one at about eye-level in the small open space between the bricks and the drywall beyond. Shawn also noticed that the new bricks had been neatly piled up near a sealed bucket that almost certainly contained mortar, right outside of the hole. Someone was in the process of walling this section back up.

“Nice wall,” Shawn joked, relieved that Olivia had finally stopped her creepy recitation and desperately trying to lighten the mood and bring things back to some sort of normal - honestly, he’d take being threatened with the gun again to the horror movie stuff he’d just witnessed. “I bet all the other walls are jealous of it.”

It was a lame joke, but her eerie dramatics had him all kinds of messed up. He expected her to tell him to shut up, or to threaten to shoot him again, or to actually shoot him, but instead she asked him a question in that same cold, calm voice as before. “Have you ever read ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Shawn?”

Shawn blinked. “I make it a point not to read anything that’s not a magazine from the 80s or WikiHow articles on ‘How to Escape from Dangerous Forest Animals.’”

The corner of her lips lifted in a mockery of a satisfied smile. “Good. Then you’ll get to experience it for yourself, first hand. Just wait until you get to the ending! You’re going to love it.”

Somehow, Shawn doubted that very much.

Still holding the gun on him with one hand, she reached her free hand into the cross-body bag she wore and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. Shawn groaned.

“Come on! What college student just carries handcuffs in their school bag?” Then he remembered that this particular student had until recently been having a passionate affair with her teacher. “Wait - never mind. It makes perfect sense.”

She laughed, even though what he said wasn’t even remotely funny. The sound of it was strange and discordant - light and tinkly with a threatening undertone that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Then she gestured at the hole in the wall and ordered, “In.”

Shawn had known it was coming, but had tried to shove that knowledge into the corner of his mind - something that was quite difficult to do for someone with a photographic and eidetic memory - in an effort to convince himself that even she wasn’t that cruel. He tried to appeal to her one last time: “Olivia, it’s not too late to stop this. I mean, are you really going to do this to another human being - seriously, look at this place - it’s dusty and moldy and I’m almost certain there’s no room service! If you’re going to chain me to a pipe, why not do it in a five star hotel?” When she nudged him with the gun, eyes gleaming with something dark and triumphant, he reluctantly stepped into the small space and implored, “I’ll even settle for a seedy motel off a poorly lit backroad. I’m not too picky.”

She didn’t answer him as she stood on her tiptoes and handcuffed Shawn’s wrists around the pipe, cinching them so tight that the metal dug into his skin and he doubted that even his dad’s lessons on escaping handcuffs wouldn’t be much help here. Already he could feel his fingers going numb, and his shoulders and back had started to ache from the hunched position he was forced to take due to the height of the pipe and the awkward angle of his arms.

Well, Shawn thought glumly as she smiled at her handiwork and carefully backed out of the small space, maybe all wasn’t lost. Surely someone would come down here and find him. This place was dusty, but it couldn’t be abandoned - work still needed to be done down here, after all. And he could always yell for help once he was sure Olivia was gone. She was booksmart, but maybe she wasn’t criminally minded. He might be in for an uncomfortable night, but in the morning someone would find him and he could have his vision and the cute little psychopath would go to jail for a very long time.

He waited for her to leave, but instead, she used a crowbar to pry the lid off the bucket of mortar, and the pit in Shawn’s stomach became a whole-ass trench. He should have seen this coming - his heart pounded madly against his rib cage as if trying to free itself, with or without him. He couldn’t blame it. “Olivia, please,” he said, and this time, there was no joke, his voice imploring and terrified. “You don’t have -”

Again, she cut him off. “How would you like to hear a story before you die, Shawn?” she asked in a tone so casual that she could have been asking him if he wanted to grab a taco.

“How about you tell me a story and then I don’t die?” Shawn bargained weakly.

“Mmmm… If you stay alive, my whole life will be ruined,” Olivia reasoned. “And I have worked far too hard to allow that to happen. So. You just stand there - quietly - and I’ll tell you the story of Poe’s most beloved tale of revenge. I won’t tell you word for word, of course - we don’t have time for that - but for posterity, I do have it memorized.” She sounded grotesquely proud of that fact. “It’s my favorite of his stories, after all.”

And so, as she slowly began to brick up the hole in the wall, with Shawn trapped, helpless and in a dissociative state of panic, she told him the story of two men with really stupid names that Shawn somehow managed, despite his raging fear, to file away for later as possible nicknames for Gus.

“Our story starts in Italy, during the carnival, and our narrator is a man named Montresor, who has a grudge against his once-friend, now-foe, Fortunato…”

The story was an interesting one, even to Shawn, who preferred watching over reading and especially over listening any day. And as it turned out, Olivia was a really good storyteller. If he had been in any other position, Shawn might have actually enjoyed the suspenseful tale of revenge.

But as he stooped there and was forced to listen, all he could think about was about how terrified this Fortunato guy must have been, and then he started wondering how long it had been before the man hadn’t been able to hold his bladder or… other things… anymore, and then about what had happened when he was too tired and dizzy to stand up, if the manacles on his wrists had pulled so hard against his flesh that they cut into him, and if lack of water or oxygen killed him first, all the while he knew that he wasn’t asking these questions for the sake of the fictional character. He was asking them for himself. Olivia had made it exceedingly clear - for a literature scholar, she was surprisingly un-subtle about any underlying meanings or motives - that Fortunato’s story was now to be his story.

It wasn’t until she had begun discussing with rapture the brilliance of Poe’s use of the Italian carnival as the setting of a story about murder (because of its abandonment of social order, whatever that meant) and had built up all but the last two bricks, leaving a hole around Shawn’s eye level, that came to the most horrifying realization yet. He’d been so focused on his own thoughts and fears with Olivia’s words washing over him like an acid bath that he’d barely registered that the dim light in the hole had been darkening incrementally with each new brick placed. Now he came to the bone-chilling understanding that once she placed those last two bricks, he would be completely in the dark.

He was going to die, alone, terrified, and in utter darkness with fear as his only friend. He thought in that moment that he might die of a heart attack before he could even think about dehydrating or suffocating. Honestly, it sounded like an easier way to go.

“Well,” said Olivia finally. “I can’t say that it’s been a pleasure to meet you in any way, Shawn, but I suppose I should thank you. Ever since I found out about this unfinished wall down here, I’ve had this unscratchable itch to recreate the titular scene from my favorite Poe story. You gave me the means and justification to do it!”

Shawn was so overcome by the surging sea of fear and early-onset claustrophobia that he couldn’t even muster up the gumption to make a joke about the word titular. Instead, as Olivia knelt down next to her bag, rooting around for something, he jerked madly against the handcuffs, desperately searching for any give in the metal or the pipe he was handcuffed to (or even his wrists, at this point he wasn’t picky). But the pipe was new, and it was sturdy, and so was the fitting that connected it to the old one, which itself didn’t seem too keen on budging, either.

A sick grin teased at Olivia’s parted lips. “Oh, Fortunato tried that too. But then he stopped crying and struggling and chose to die with a shred of dignity. But I highly doubt dignity is something you’re capable of.”

And then, with the finality of fitting a lid to a coffin, she slapped a piece of fluorescent pink duct tape over his mouth and a fresh wave of panic ravaged Shawn’s everything. He didn’t remember this happening in her retelling of the story! Then again, the Fortunato guy had been sealed into catacombs deep underground. Shawn was in the basement of a heavily trafficked university building. Someone would actually hear him if he called for help, so she took his voice away from him too. He couldn’t even sing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to pass his time or distract him from the inevitable. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he would die in the dark, he would die in the quiet too - and silence was, as his incessant need for chatter plainly proved, Shawn’s worst enemy.

“Goodbye, Shawn,” Olivia said, and she added one brick, layered on the mortar, and then gave her captive one last satisfied glance before adding the last brick and leaving Shawn in total, impenetrable darkness. He would never forget that last, terrible look in her eyes before his world went black - she was no longer human; she had elevated herself to the level of the storytelling gods and she relished in the twisted power she held over the life of another human.

As her footsteps clipped away, her voice, obscenely gleeful, called out, “In pace requiescat!”

***

The next ten hours were the worst of Shawn’s life, and they consisted of five main elements all bundled together into a nightmare that would stalk him for the rest of his life.

Cold. It was the middle of January, and though it couldn’t have been less than forty-five degrees outside, the basement - especially behind the walls - was chilly, and with the musty smell and the dust and the pitch black, Shawn was reminded far too much of a grave and knew that he might as well be in one, because this was going to be his. It was the kind of cold that bit deeper than the skin and wormed its way into the very core and dug its icy fangs in and refused to let go - the chill of death, an open invitation from the dead to join them in their home beneath the ground. He shivered a lot, but he couldn’t be sure if it was the cold, or the panic. It was probably a little of both.

Dark. The darkness that surrounded him had an unreal nature that could easily trick the eyes into thinking that they were already closed. It was oppressive and thick, pressing in from all sides, inky black water dredged from the depths of the sea.

Shawn had never been a fan of the dark, but neither did he exactly fear it. That changed the second that the last brick was put into place and he found himself in a darkness so severe that were in not for the feeling of floor beneath his feet he could have been suspended in the depths of space so remote that not even stars could reach. The darkness swarmed his senses - it had a physical presence, and it didn’t lessen, never permitted Shawn’s eyes to adjust to it in the slightest. It just hung there, surrounded him, assaulted his mind with its infinite arsenal of nightmares.

After experiencing true darkness, Shawn would never sleep without a nightlight again (which unfortunately meant he couldn’t judge Gus anymore for using one, either).

Pain. At first it was just the pull of his shoulders, the ache in his back. Then, about five minutes after he’d been sealed up, he realized his wrists were screaming with agony - he must have torn them badly when he fought to get away, but the adrenaline staved off the pain until now. He vaguely wondered how deeply the cuffs had cut - it felt like the skin on his wrists had been flayed - but quickly remembered that it didn’t matter where he was going.

Then there were the hunger pangs, and they mingled with the cramps from holding his bladder longer than he ever had before, and at some point muscle spasms in his arms and chest and legs joined the choir of suffering. At one point, he shed a few tears, but they could have just as easily been from anxiety or exhaustion, which itself produced its own kind of pain - he longed to sleep, but his body refused to allow him even that comfort until the very end, right before he was rescued, as if he were being forced on pain of death to endure the pain of death right up until the very moment of his painful death.

At least he didn’t have too much trouble breathing. There must have been a crack somewhere in the wall in front of or behind him, because fresh air was entering somehow. He did, several hours into his imprisonment, begin finding it difficult to pull in a full breath, and by the time he was rescued he was giddy with light-headedness, but he didn’t know if it was from the air quality or exhaustion or panic or from being forced to breathe only through his nose for hours, but he really didn’t care.

Quiet. Even worse than the cold and the dark and the pain was the quiet. The tape over his mouth prevented him from doing the one thing that could bring him comfort in even the most difficult of situations. Talking was what Shawn did - he utilized mindless prattle to distract bad guys, to make people underestimate him, to quell fear and panic in himself and those around him, to annoy and wheedle those whose opinions meant the most to him (and who he was most afraid to be real with), and most importantly, to distract himself from all the pain and baggage that his exceptional memory had filed away for him throughout the years. Talking nonsense meant that he wasn’t thinking about or acknowledging the parts of himself that arguably needed the most attention, those bits that were scared and unsure and hurt and vulnerable.

Shawn had always detested silence, and now it had invaded so intimately that even he could not drive it out.

And all of these culminated in a constant, agonizing state of absolute, unrelenting fear.

Panic attacks are horrific things that take your natural instincts in potentially dangerous situations and turn them against you in the cruelest of ways. They suck the air out of your lungs and make your heart pound so fast and so hard that you are convinced it’s going to give out in pure fatigue and never make it to that next beat. It makes your skin crawl like there are thousands of spiders nesting there, and your chest hurts and your breath is short and stunted and you know you are dying, that the next breath will be your last, but it isn’t, and the fear just continues and sometimes you curl into a ball or rock back and forth or scratch at your skin.

Panic attacks generally last anywhere from five to twenty minutes. Shawn was stuck in a state of raw, unfiltered panic for ten hours. When the EMTs at the scene took his heart rate, it was 160, had been the entire time he’d been buried in a collegiate tomb, knowing that he was going to die.

Put simply, Shawn Spencer spent ten hours in his own personal hell.

***

It was nearly three in the afternoon when Detectives Juliet O’Hara and Carlton Lassiter, with the help of a frantic Gus and a worried Henry that tried his damndest not to show how worried he was, made the final connections in the case and tracked down the woman who had slept with and then killed her lover like a hyper-intelligent, book-loving black widow. Juliet and Gus remained on the college campus to continue investigating while Lassiter and Henry went on to the station to question Olivia. She had refused to say where the missing psychic detective was, however, and only offered one bitter phrase, spoken in another language that sounded to the questioning party like a curse being placed on their heads:

“Nemo me impune lacessit.”

It was Gus who figured it out after Lassiter related the cryptic saying over the phone.

“I know that phrase!” he exclaimed to a swell of raised eyebrows. “It’s Latin! It means no one wounds me with impunity!”

“You speak Latin?” Juliet seemed impressed.

“Not much. But I recognize that particular saying, because it’s from a story that gave me nightmares my entire sophomore year of college.” He shuddered. “It’s from the second-most terrifying Poe story.” He didn’t elaborate on what the first-most terrifying one was, largely because he didn’t want to give the others fodder to use “The Tell-Tale Heart” against him like Shawn already did. Then the full implications of the words sunk in and he gasped, “We have to find Shawn, now.” The horror in his expression sent a chill down Juliet’s spine.

“Gus - what the hell are you talking about?” Henry was no longer trying to hide the panic in his voice.

“It’s from ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Gus clarified, his own panic making it difficult to express himself clearly.

“Guster, this is hardly the time for you to have a glass of wine,” Lassiter barked. “Now stop talking in riddles and just spit it out!”

But Juliet had now made the connection as well and answered for Gus. “Oh my gosh - isn’t that the one where the guy is sealed into a wall and left to die?”

The dread in Gus’s eyes said it all.

“He’s got to be somewhere on campus,” Henry reasoned, and his voice shook the tiniest bit. “Lassiter and I are on our way back to you now. In the meantime, check with the school and see if there are any places that are easily accessed and under construction.”

No one said it aloud, but the possibility that her words hadn’t been a hint at all and that Shawn was somewhere else entirely hung in the air amongst them. It was funny, Juliet thought - though it wasn’t funny at all - she urgently needed Gus’s theory to be right, because otherwise they would have no leads, but at the same time, she was terrified of the implications if it were true.

Her heart felt as sick as Montresor’s when he placed the last brick as she and Gus raced to the administration building and prayed they weren’t too late.

***

When they broke through the wall, the sight that greeted them was one that would never leave them - any of them. Even Lassiter, who made it his sacred duty to remain unfazed by anything his job threw at him was visibly disturbed.

A moment of silence, a beat where time stood still and everyone was afraid to move, and then -

“Shawn!” The four rescuers surged forward as one, but Henry got there first, his trembling fingers groping for a pulse - thank God, but it was racing, dangerously fast, and in the background he heard Lassiter radioing for an ambulance.

Shawn woke up as Henry gently peeled the hideous pink duct tape (an affront to all duct tape everywhere) off of his mouth. It wasn’t a gentle waking, a flutter of eyelashes or the murmuring of a name - it was violent and erratic, fueled by terror.

Henry had had to deal with panic attacks before - mostly Gus’s when he took the boys camping together, but once or twice when Shawn was really young and he’d had a bad dream. This one was the worst that he’d ever seen - Shawn woke with a muffled yell, panting through his nose, writhing, tears streaming down his face, eyes squeezed shut against the trauma he’d been subjected to, and he threw himself against the handcuffs so fiercely that Henry feared he’d break his wrists.

Soon his wrists were freed, though, and Henry, with the help of Lassiter, helped a weakened Shawn out of the wall and into the basement and lowered him to the floor. Henry sat with him and rubbed his back and spoke quietly to him, Juliet took his hand, and Gus reassured him while Lassiter ran up the stairs to check on the ETA of the ambulance.

Twenty minutes later, Shawn had been placed onto a stretcher and carried up the stairs and out into the sunlight - sensing the warm rays, he opened his eyes only to pinch them shut again as the brightness after so many hours in the dark nearly blinded him. He had been given something to calm him down, and he would be going to the hospital to be checked over and observed overnight, and a psychiatrist would be sent in to evaluate him in the morning, and everything was moving so fast that Shawn leaned over the side of the stretcher and deposited the remnants of the last thing he’d eaten, nearly twelve hours before.

“There’s one thing I still don’t get,” he gasped as he was eased back onto the stretcher. “Where do the armadillos come into her plan?”

The EMTs exchanged a concerned look at the stretcher, probably wondering if there had been some carbon monoxide poisoning after all. Gus, however, just rolled his eyes.

“Amontillado, Shawn. It’s a kind of wine.”

“The story is called ‘The Casket of the Armadillos,’” Shawn argued stubbornly, going so far as to cross his arms over his chest, pulling at the IV in his right hand.

Gus was going to argue, to insist that he’d actually read the story (and why the heck would someone fill a casket with armadillos?), but then Gus saw the plea in Shawn’s hazel eyes, that need for jokes and silliness, and understood that his best friend was clinging onto his last shreds of control.

“You know what - I forgot,” Gus corrected, shaking his head and giving himself a light smack on the forehead for good measure. “It is ‘The Casket of Armadillos.’” He glared out at Henry, at Lassiter and Juliet and the EMTs, defying them to challenge his claim. No one did, but they all shared a similar baffled expression.

Well, they could deal with their confusion, Gus thought protectively as he watched Shawn and Henry disappear into the ambulance. Shawn had been through a night of unspeakable horror, so if it was armadillos he wanted, then it was armadillos he was going to get.

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mostweakhamlets · 4 years

Note

That small coffee shop you know the one,where time seems to stand still and the coffee seems to be laced with stardust

i’ve never been to a small coffee shop that isn’t too loud from grinders or blenders or has obnoxious hipsters working in it but i can do my best

Aziraphale is a student just trying to get some decent cash. He’s not a great barista, but he does know little tricks to make tea just a bit sweater and coffee a bit stronger. People seem to enjoy their coffee--or at least, they don’t complain. Other students will come in and rave about their drinks and what their friends should get.

Aziraphale often doesn’t remember faces or names of regulars. His hours are so odd, and he’s always too busy to make an actual effort to get to know many people.

There is an older woman who comes in every Saturday morning for a small, black coffee. He remembers her order and gives her a free shortbread biscuit on the side.

There’s a single father that comes in a few times a week in the evenings, ordering hot chocolate for his little kids and coffee for himself before settling down and working on his laptop while his children do their homework. Aziraphale always adds extra mini marshmallows to their hot chocolate.

And then there’s Anthony. Anthony is a theology student at his university who comes by fairly often for the most sugary, blended drink they have with his bag slung over one shoulder and sunglasses still on. He’s usually on his phone when Aziraphale calls his name and places his drink on the counter. He barely mumbles a “thank you.”

At first, Aziraphale thought he was just rude. But he quickly realizes that “shy” was a better word for him. He always tidies his space and leaves at least 30 minutes before closing--possibly, Azirpahale supposes, to get out of their hair. Whenever he asks for the wifi password, he’s quiet and nods and quickly walks away.

Two days before finals start, Aziraphale is waiting for his manager to give him the okay to fully close. Five minutes before they’re due to lock up, she comes into the back, huffy and says that there’s still one guy left.

“Bastard will probably stay until the minute we close.”

And Aziraphale is upset because he has two 15-page papers due in a few days that he’s only just started as well as other studying to do. After a few minutes, he volunteers to ask the man to leave. He looks polite and innocent. Customers usually listen to him.

He walks to the front of the house and hears someone typing on a laptop, hidden by one of the many bookshelves they have. He pops his head around the shelf, smiling, and then freezes.

Anthony looks exhausted and doesn’t even notice Aziraphale there with his headphones on. He’s frantically typing, occasionally glancing at a book or pausing before picking up again.

“Excuse me.”

Anthony looks up, startled. It’s the first time Aziraphale has seen his eyes, he realizes. They’re a very pale green, and the pupils look as if they have burst at some point, spilling out into the iris. They’re beautiful, Aziraphale thinks.

“We’re closing in a minute, and we wouldn’t want to lock you in here.”

Anthony glances at his laptop screen. He blinks and raises his eyebrows.

“I’m sorry,” he says, grabbing his bag. “I lost track of time.”

“It’s alright! It happens. Are you writing for a final?”

Anthony nods. “Due tomorrow.”

“Oh! Well, good luck with it!”

Aziraphale turns to leave, but Anthony stops him.

“You’re an English student, right? I think I’ve seen you around the humanities center.”

“I am!”

“Umm...” Anthony shoves his laptop into his bag, grabbing a book next. “Do you know Dr. Gabriel’s office hours? Or his email? I’m supposed to have him sign a paper to get my thesis approved for next semester, but I don’t know anyone in that department, and no one told me how to contact him.”

Gabriel is the professor Aziraphale hates the most. He’s self-righteous, pompous, and thinks highly of himself for being given the position of the dean of the humanities the year before. Thankfully, that also means he has fewer classes, and Aziraphale didn’t have to take Modern British Literature with him that semester.

“I do, but not off the top of my head. I could send it all to you tonight if you’d like.”

“Yeah! That’d be fine. Uh...” Anthony tears the corner of a piece of paper out of his notebook. He scribbles his email on it. “Here. Thanks.”

Aziraphale tucks it into his back pocket. He grabs Anthony’s empty cup and scurries to the back.

An hour later, he sends an email:

Anthony,

Dr. Gabriel is in his office MFW from 8 am to 2 pm. TR he’s there from 10 am to 4 pm. Thought, he does sometimes drift around the department if he doesn’t make appointments. I would email him to let him know when you want to see him: egabriel.

Good luck with your paper and your thesis (I’m completing mine next semester as well).

Aziraphale

#good omens #stardust au #smolbeansnas

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imaginetonyandbucky · 5 years

Text

Tony Stark’s Guide to Being a Functional Adult

Step 5: Get Married (??) (AO3)

A few weeks later, Tony was sitting at the table working on his computer while Bucky read a book on the couch, low music playing on the radio. Then Bucky heard a sharp inhale. “Oh shit,” Tony blurted with a strangled sound. Bucky’s eyes flew up and Tony looked at him nervously. “I got an email from the school.”

“Okay,” Bucky said slowly, and when Tony just stared at him, he laughed in disbelief. “What, are you afraid you didn’t get in?”

“It’s a competitive school,” Tony said defensively, hunching his shoulders.

Bucky put his book down to throw a pillow at him. “Just open it, you nutcase, you know you got in.”

Tony clicked the button on his touchpad like it was pulling the trigger in Russian roulette. Bucky watched his eyes move over the screen, and then the fear turned into confusion. “What is it?” Bucky asked. “You’re making a funny face.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Listen to this: ‘This isn’t a proposal, this is a finished thesis,’” Tony read aloud. “’The idea of a proposal is that you aren’t sure if it’s going to work or not. This is a fully completed schematic. I would suggest submitting it to the patent office pronto and think of something else to study.’ That’s from the dean of the engineering school I applied to.” He lowered the lid of his laptop and met Bucky’s disbelieving gaze. “Whoops. Now what do I do?”

Bucky bookmarked his page and sat up. “Well, what were you going to use it for?”

“I don’t know. Anything that needs energy, really. I mean, it will be about the size of a coaster but thicker, so not like a cell phone but a car, or a house, something like that.” Tony scratched his chin. “I guess it could be fun to design a car around the arc reactor.” His eyes got wide as another thought occurred to him. “I bet I could make it fly,” he whispered to himself with awe.

“There you go,” Bucky said, smothering a laugh. “Just try not to design the whole thing until after you start. You know, to make it look like you actually need this school,” he added, voice so heavy with irony it probably made the air magnetic.

(More after the break!)

Tony stuck his tongue out and went back to the email. “Do you know what FAFSA is?”

“Yeah, it’s the application for financial aid. I think the website is like fafsa.org or fafsa.gov or something like that, it’s pretty easy to do.”

“Did you have to do this? When you went to college?”

“No, the military paid my way, one of the perks.” When Tony just nodded distractedly, Bucky went back to his book. There were long minutes of Tony typing and muttering to himself, frowning at his computer, then Tony made a sound of frustration.

“Goddammit,” Tony cursed and stood to pace around the kitchen. “That just fucking figures.” When Bucky looked up at him curiously Tony said, “I can’t get financial aid because of my father. He makes too much money.” Tony jerked open the refrigerator and stared moodily into the contents, then slammed the door closed and started pacing again.

“I’m sorry, Tony, that’s one of the big drawbacks to the system,” Bucky said sympathetically. “Unfortunately there are only a few ways to get around that. You can go through a long legal process to emancipate yourself, which would be kind of weird because you’re over 18. Or you can join the military – not the best idea, but they would eventually pay for you to go to school, no loans required – or you get married. They don’t ask for your parent’s income if you’re married.”

“Great.” Tony sat back down at the table and rubbed his eyes. “So I’m screwed.”

“You might be able to get a personal loan from the bank,” Bucky suggested. “I don’t know how much they would give you, but it’s worth a shot, right?”

“Sure,” Tony said, blowing out a breath. Maybe the Stark name would be enough collateral for a bank loan, then it would actually be good for something.

It wasn’t.

“Thank you for your time,” Tony said with as much of a smile as he could manage when he was screaming internally out of frustration. He stood and shook hands with the apologetic banker and left the bank, seething.

No luck, he texted Bucky as he walked back to his car.

Oh no that fucking sucks I’m sorry. Y?

No credit history, not enough income, wanted my dad to cosign. Then Tony put a series of angry emoticons and got back in his car. He rested his head on the steering wheel for a long time, pressing his palms to his eyes and concentrating on breathing. As he’d figured, the banker had looked puzzled at the very idea of Tony Stark asking for a personal loan, and Tony’d had to grit his teeth and swallow his pride when reporting his income and assets. All for nothing, in the end. He knew there were others that he could ask for help – Aunt Peggy would be more than happy to cosign for him, if only to piss off Howard – but he could just imagine Howard’s reaction to that. It didn’t count as making it on his own if he just went begging to someone else for the money.

“Scholarships,” Tony said to himself as he turned the engine on. Maybe it’s not too late to apply for scholarships.

When he got home, Bucky already had a beer opened for him and a pot of spaghetti on the stove. Tony smiled tiredly but gratefully and let Bucky pull him into a hug and then gently push him into a seat at the table. Tony didn’t try to make conversation while Bucky puttered around in the kitchen, he just sat in a companionable silence and sipped at the cheap beer as Bucky put their plates on the table.

He had barely picked up his fork when Bucky took a deep breath and said, “Look, I know you are really disappointed about today, so maybe this isn’t the best time to bring this up again, but...” Tony cocked his head in confusion while Bucky fiddled with his fork. “Remember what I said about the FAFSA, and ways to get around that income thing? This might sound crazy, but what if…we got married?”

“Got married?” Tony echoed, staring at him blankly.

Bucky shrugged with unconvincing casualness. “Yeah. I mean, it occurred to me today that I would actually get more money from the VA if I were married because they would consider you a dependent, so…Win-win, right?”

He stared at Bucky and thought about the fact that if he would just go and apologize to his dad, agree to work at SI and forget about this degree, he could pay off Bucky’s entire mortgage and make sure that Bucky never needed to worry about money again, wouldn’t have to work again. Instead, Bucky was sitting here suggesting more ways that he could help Tony and making it sound like Tony would be doing him a favor. Tony buried his head in his hands, fisting his fingers in his hair. “Bucky, that’s…” Insane. Way too much. “It just seems like a – a big step.”

“But it’s not, really,” Bucky said earnestly. “We just sign the paperwork, you can fill out your financial aid application, and in like a year or so we file for a no-fault divorce.”

Sure, he made it sound so easy, but that’s just because he didn’t know the truth. Shit, Tony thought, tugging on his hair until his scalp stung, and cleared his throat. “Look, Bucky, um…I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

“Okay?”

“My name isn’t Tony Edwards. My real last name is Stark. Tony Edward, um, Stark.” There was a long silence and when Tony looked up he saw a look of polite confusion on Bucky’s face. “Stark as in Stark Industries,” he explained, and then he saw a cascading series of realizations move across Bucky’s expressive face.

“Oh,” he said as he put two and two together and got a net worth of billions of dollars. “Oh,” he said with a frown when he remembered Tony’s story about being kicked out of his home. Then there was a third and final soft “oh…” when he realized what that meant for himself.

“Yeah,” Tony said and then it was quiet for a while.

“Well,” Bucky said slowly. “I can’t say that I’m not…feeling…surprised. And…maybe, a little, uh, upset. But, given what I know about you and your, um, situation, I can understand why you would hide…that.”

“Yeah.”

“So does that mean you want, like, a prenup or something?” Bucky said after another long moment of charged silence. “Because, unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t really change your situation right now, does it? I mean, your asshole rich dad is, uh, a lot richer than expected, but…still an asshole.”

“No, I didn’t say that because I wanted a prenup,” Tony protested. “I trust you. But I, um, wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into with this whole marriage idea.”

“I get it, it just doesn’t change my mind.” When Tony didn’t say anything to that, Bucky started digging into his spaghetti. “So just think about it and let me know, ok?”

Tony blinked and stared down at his plate. He could do this, he thought. They would get married, he’d get his degree, and when he made his fortune with the arc reactor he would pay Bucky back for everything he’d done for him. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, we’ll give it a shot.”

*****

After everything, filing the paperwork was pretty anticlimactic; Tony felt like he’d had more drama getting his driver’s license. There was some signing, a stamp, and a polite “congratulations” and then they were walking out of the courthouse technically a married couple.

“So,” Tony said as they stood out on the sidewalk. Bucky kept looking at the paper in his hand as if he felt a little let down. “Pizza?”

*****

“So I guess this is technically our wedding night, huh?” Tony looked around at the half-eaten pizza and empty bottle of wine as Bucky scrolled through Netflix trying to find something to watch. “Is it everything you imagined?”

Bucky snorted a laugh. “I have two sisters, so I always figured I’d be the crazy bachelor uncle,” he said. “The one that brings the cool presents and lets everyone stay up late. You?”

“Never really thought about it," Tony said lightly, which was a lie. He'd watched Jarvis and Ana together and dream about having the same for himself one day, and then he'd have dinner with his own parents and wonder if it was really possible. "My parents didn’t really give me a good opinion of marriage, so I kinda figured it wasn’t for me.”

Bucky made a face at that. “My parents always said that a marriage is what you make of it, so just because your parents’ marriage sucked or whatever doesn’t mean that yours would be the same.”

“Clearly,” Tony said dryly, gesturing around him. “For one, I think my parents would rather die than drink wine out of plastic wine glasses.”

"They don’t know what they are missing,” Bucky said as he gathered their empty cups and dropped them into the trash. “See? Dishes are already done.”

“A man after my own heart,” Tony said with a smile as he stood to help Bucky clean. “You know, it’s kind of funny,” Tony commented as he wiped down the counters and Bucky filled up the dishwasher. “Now that I think about it, what we have is already better than my parents’ marriage, and we’re just roommates.”

Bucky’s smile at that was rueful and a little sad. He closed up the dishwasher and turned it on, then leaned against the counter. “Come here,” he said with a gesture, and then when Tony was close enough he pulled him into a hug. Tony was stiff for a second, surprised, but he hurriedly brought up his hands to return the hug before Bucky pulled back. “You deserve better than this,” Bucky said softly. “Better than a sham marriage and shitty parents and a shitty childhood – “

“It wasn’t that bad,” Tony started to protest, drawing back, but Bucky shook his head.

“Hey, you can grow up with money and privilege and have a shitty childhood, Tony. Didn’t you tell me that you got sent to boarding school when you were young, and that most of the time your parents just paid for you to stay there over the holidays instead of coming home? Would you say that your dad yelled at you more than he hugged you?” Tony’s eyes cut away from Bucky’s and he shrugged, uncomfortable with how true all of that was. “I know this has been hard for you, but really, you are doing great. One day you’ll be back on your feet without your dad’s money and you can find someone to marry that you love and then you can have a marriage you can be proud of.”

"I'm not - you know, not proud of this," Tony said, and swallowed thickly. “Everything I have is because of you,” Tony managed around the tightness in his throat, staring at Bucky's collarbone intently and trying not to cry. “You’ve helped me so much-“

“Hey now,” Bucky said, clucking his tongue and cradling Tony’s chin in his hand as the tears spilled over his cheeks. “Everything you have, you've worked hard for. and we’ve been helping each other, yeah? I teach you how to boil eggs and you fix up my car so I don't crash trying to use the windshield wipers. I know we started out as roommates but I think we make a good team.”

Tony nodded and swiped at the wetness on his cheeks, embarrassed. “Thank you,” he said. “I promise, one day I’ll pay you back for everything, I swear, I owe you so much-”

“Don’t you dare,” Bucky said. "That's not how this works."

"Right." Tony nodded again, smiling wetly. Because we're a team."

"Exactly." As Tony turned away to find a tissue for his nose, Bucky said, "But if you're really feeling like you're not pulling your weight around here, you could take my turn cleaning the bathroom."

#winteriron #tony stark #bucky barnes #tony x bucky #no powers au #prompts #dracusfyre

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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In the early summer of 2017, a little less than a year after his Presidential campaign had ended, Bernie Sanders spent a few days on a speaking tour in England, to promote the European version of his book “Our Revolution.” The Brexit resolution had passed twelve months earlier, a general election looked likely to consolidate the conservative hold on the country, and Sanders’s audiences—in the hundreds, though not the thousands—were anxious and alert. I was at those events, talking with the people who had come—skinny, older leftists and louche, cynical younger ones—and they were anticipating not just the old campaign hits but a broader explanation of why the world had suddenly gone so crazy and what could be done. Sanders had scarcely talked about foreign affairs in his 2016 campaign, but his framework had a natural extensibility. Under way in the world was a simple fight, Sanders said. On one side were oligarchs and the right-wing parties they had managed to corrupt. On the other were the people.

In the thirty months since Sanders’s 2016 campaign ended, in the petulance and ideological strife of the Democratic National Convention, he has become a more reliable partisan, just as progressivism has moved his way. He begins the 2020 Presidential campaign not as a gadfly but as a favorite, which requires a comprehensive vision among voters of how he would lead the free world. In 2017, Sanders hired his first Senate foreign-policy adviser, a progressive think-tank veteran named Matt Duss. Sanders gave major speeches—at Westminster College, in the United Kingdom, and at Johns Hopkins—warning that “what we are seeing is the rise of a new authoritarian axis” and urging liberals not just to defend the post-Cold War status quo but also to “reconceptualize a global order based on human solidarity.” In 2016, he had asked voters to imagine how the principles of democratic socialism could transform the Democratic Party. Now he was suggesting that they could also transform how America aligns itself in the world.

In early April, I met with Sanders at his Senate offices, in Washington. Spring was already in effect—the cherry blossoms along the tidal basin were still in bloom but had begun to crinkle and fade—and talk among the young staffers milling around his offices was of the intensity of Sanders’s early campaign, of who would be travelling how many days over the next month and who would have to miss Easter. It was my first encounter with Sanders during this campaign. Basic impression: same guy. He shook my hand with a grimace, and interrupted my first question when he recognized the possibility for a riff, on the significance of a Senate vote on Yemen. His essential view of foreign policy seemed to be that the American people did not really understand how dark and cynical it has been—“how many governments we have overthrown,” as Sanders told me. “How many people in the United States understand that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran to put in the Shah? Which then led to the Revolution. How many people in this country do you think know that? So we’re going to have to do a little bit of educating on that.”

One condition that Americans had not digested was the bottomlessness of inequality. “I got the latest numbers here,” Sanders said. He motioned, and Duss, who was sitting beside him, slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Twenty-six (Continue Reading)of the wealthiest people on earth own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. Did you know that? So you look at it, you say”—here he motioned as if each of his hands were one side of a scale—“twenty-six people, 3.6 billion people. How grotesque is that?”

He went on, “When I talk about income inequality and talk about right-wing authoritarianism, you can’t separate the two.” No one knew how rich Putin was, Sanders said, but some people said he was the wealthiest man in the world. The repressive Saudi monarchs were also billionaire Silicon Valley investors, and “their brothers in the Emirates” have “enormous influence not only in that region but in the world, with their control over oil. A billionaire President here in the United States. You’re talking about the power of Wall Street and multinational corporations.” Simple, really: his thesis had always been that money corrupted politics, and now he was tracing the money back overseas. His phlegmy baritone acquired a sarcastic lilt. “It’s a global economy, Ben, in case you didn’t know that!”

When Sanders’s aides sent me a list of a half-dozen foreign-policy experts, assembled by Duss, who talk regularly with the senator about foreign policy, I was surprised by how mainstream they seemed. Joe Cirincione, the antinuclear advocate, might have featured in a Sanders Presidential campaign ten or twenty years ago. But Sanders is also being advised by Robert Malley, who coördinated Middle East policy in Obama’s National Security Council and is now the president of the International Crisis Group; Suzanne DiMaggio, a specialist in negotiations with adversaries at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Vali Nasr, the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in the Shia-Sunni divide.

Few of these advisers were part of Sanders’s notionally isolationist 2016 campaign. But, as emergencies in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have deepened, the reputation of Obama’s foreign policy, and of the foreign-policy establishment more broadly, has diminished. Malley told me, “Out of frustration with some aspects of Obama’s foreign policy and anger with most aspects of Trump’s, many leaders in the Party have concluded that the challenge was not to build bridges between centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans but, rather, between centrist and progressive Democrats. That means breaking away from the so-called Blob”—a term for the foreign-policy establishment, from the Obama adviser Ben Rhodes. DiMaggio said, “The case for restraint seems to be gaining ground, particularly in its rejection of preventive wars and efforts to change the regimes of countries that do not directly threaten the United States.” She and others now see in Sanders something that they didn’t in 2016: a clear progressive theory of what the U.S. is after in the world. “I think he’s bringing those views on the importance of tackling economic inequality into foreign policy,” DiMaggio said.

Since the 2016 campaign, Sanders’s major foreign-policy initiative has been a Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act of 1973 in order to suspend the Trump Administration’s support of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen. Mike Lee, a libertarian Republican from Utah, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, co-sponsored the resolution; on April 4th, it passed in the House and the Senate. It was the first time that Congress invoked the War Powers Act since the law’s creation, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. When we met, Sanders said that he thought the Republican support for the resolution was significant, in part because it reflected the strain of conservatism that is skeptical of military interventions. It also demonstrated, he believed, “a significant mind-set change in the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—with regard to Saudi Arabia.” He added, “I don’t see why we’d be following the lead or seen as a very, very close ally of a despotic, un-democratic regime.”

Sanders was warming to a broader theme. Our position in the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran should be rebalanced, he said. There has been, he went on, “a bipartisan assumption that we’re supposed to love Saudi Arabia and hate Iran. And yet, if you look at young people in Iran, they are probably a lot more pro-American than Saudis. Iran is a very flawed society, no debate about it. Involved in terrorism, doing a lot of bad things. But they also have more democracy, as a matter of fact, more women’s rights, than does Saudi Arabia.” As President, Sanders said, he imagined the U.S. taking a more neutral role in the countries’ rivalry. “To say, you know what? We’re not going to be spending trillions of dollars and losing American lives because of your long-standing hostilities.”

Sanders turned to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which he described in similar terms; he wanted to orient American policy toward the decent people on both sides, and not to their two awful governments. “While I am very critical of Netanyahu’s right-wing government, I am not impressed by what I am seeing from Palestinian leadership, as well,” he said. “It’s corrupt in many cases, and certainly not effective.” He mentioned the United States’s leverage in Israeli politics, because of its alliance and economic support. (“$3.8 billion is a lot of money!”) I asked if he would make that aid contingent, as some Palestinian advocates have suggested, on fuller political rights for Palestinians. Sanders grew more cautious here. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” he said. He was worried about the situation in Gaza, where youth unemployment is greater than sixty per cent, and yet the borders are closed. (“If you have sixty per cent of the kids who don’t have jobs, and they can’t leave the country, what do you think is going to happen next year and the year after that?”) But he also said that he wanted to “pick up from where Jimmy Carter was, what Clinton tried to do, and, with the financial resources that we have of helping or withdrawing support, say, ‘You know what? Let’s sit down and do our best to figure it out.’ ” He seemed to want to strike an earnest, non-revolutionary note. “I’m not proposing anything particularly radical,” he said. “And that is that the United States should have an even-handed approach both to Israel and the Palestinians.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #bernie sanders #foreign policy #New Yorker #2020 election

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emotionalsupportaudino · 5 years

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literally me just complaining

I am very genuinely hurt by the treatment my school gave me in the three years I was there. This is my gentle full on vent. This is me getting out my incredible pain in a timeline.

When I went to NCC, my mental health was literally improving in strides. Two years and I walked out confident, happy, assured of my own worth. It was such a great school. I had such great friends! I was losing weight, I was running 5ks every day in the summertime, I was learning to love myself.

And then I started at Moore. My first year, my first day, my first class, I walk in at 8:30AM ready to fucking learn. I have my notebook, my flash drive, and my confident spirit. Here I was. I was at this fantastic school. All my professors at NCC were so proud of me for getting there. I was in a class studying my absolute favorite topic of my major: Character Design.

My professor walks in, six months younger than me and with a chip on her shoulder. She tells us that if we’re not pulling all nighters every project, we’re failures. She tells us we have an assignment worth 20% of our grade due the next Friday. A 4-person set of silhouettes from a fairy tale that make each character clearly defined as their characters. She gives us a rubric and only explains 80% of it. I ask about the other 20% and she responds “Oh I’m not grading on that, don’t worry.”

Anxious about this huge chunk of my grade, I skip out on a free music festival with my NCC friends and spend every night until midnight working on this project. I go through dozens of iterations of silhouettes for my characters. And then, I turn it in, and I barely pass. Because she gave me a 1/5 in the section of the rubric I asked her about. I ask her why? “These are too identifiable. They’re too obviously what they are.”

She continues this to the point where the rest of my semester is a fucking blur. I was miserable, having mental breakdowns once a week, and this lasted for about two months before I dropped the class because I was literally on the verge of killing myself.

She puts down every aspect of my personality, my very being. I worked in cut paper when I was at NCC and I did really well at it. I tell her I like working with shapes and it was my specialty at my previous school, she tells me “It doesn’t look like it.” I tell her my favorite games are Persona 3 (this is before 5 comes out) and We Know the Devil. She says the artist behind WKTD is a bad person and no one should play it, and that Persona is bad because why would any adult want to play as a teenager. She catches me listening to Love Live music and makes fun of my taste. When I had thought too hard about my project (a chimera where she literally threw an entire in-depth illustration at us the night before it was due and required us to pay fare to the zoo or she’d take 50% off our grade, WHEN I HAD LITERALLY JUST RECEIVED MY FIRST PAYCHECK and had almost nothing), and had everything about this animal planned, she asks me: “What’s the Latin name?” It was not mentioned anywhere on the sheet, it wasn’t involved at all. She docked me 5% for not knowing Latin

I seek out help, first, from my head faculty. I tell him the things she tells us. He says “oh I’ll talk to her, but that’s just how she teaches.” She comes in the next class talking about how much he praised her and how great she’s doing. She’s even worse to me. I cry in the bathroom for half the class and the head of first year classes catches me and literally lets me cry on her despite the fact I am not in any of her classes and tells me to drop. So I do.

My classmates for the rest of the semester are miserable. Everyone except for me and 3 others in my program are literally miserable for the rest of the semester. She cost kids their scholarships. One of my friends is so bad that literally the mention of this professor’s name causes her to have a panic attack. I accidentally caused one and felt awful.

This professor is the start of my Xanax dependence. And she’s never disciplined.

In the same semester they start teaching 2D animation. Except by start I mean start and finish. We are expected to know everything about 2D animation in one semester. We are never offered another class.

My second semester, two of my classes are taught by a man who DOESN’T KNOW THE PROGRAM and is teaching it to himself as we go along. He smells of alcohol, and at the end of the semester he disappears during critiques. We have to teach ourselves everything, except, SURPRISE. One of the classes is 3D modeling, teaching us the foundations of Maya.

We never learn the foundations of Maya.

Third semester, first of junior year, we find out the school has lied to us from the getgo. After saying every student got 1k for their internships, we find out students get $500. And the other $500 goes right to the school if you paid by month like I did.

We also find out that everything we didn’t learn in our modeling class was super important. Our professor--THE HEAD OF OUR PROGRAM--gives up teaching us and kinda says to do whatever for our 3D Animation class. I ask him how to do several things specifically (2D animation on a 3D model being one of them). He does not know how. He does not bother to learn.

During that semester, my grandfather dies. I am told by my Admissions department job that if I miss more than one day of work for the funeral, I will be fired. I never got time to mourn. I still miss my grandfather. I cried about his death literally every day from October to May.

Second semester of Junior year is a blur because I am having so many panic attacks. I find an internship, but it’s outside of my typical field. That internship saves my life. And that’s barely exaggerating. I hadn’t felt happiness in a year when I started it and suddenly every day was... exciting again. I made friends, I had fun, I felt human.

First semester of Senior year is... rough. But not overly rough, mostly because I’m only taking two classes. And one of them is with one of the three (3) competent teachers I had teach me my studio classes. It’s great. I genuinely enjoy working despite thesis.

I had won a grant in the spring of my Junior year to travel abroad for two weeks at the beginning of September. My head of program swears he will present my game and get feedback. I return and he says there was no feedback. I ask my classmates--he never presented. I never got critique on my concept until three months into it because I thought everyone knew what I was doing.

Second semester of senior year was the worst four months of my life. I had never been so hurt, so ignored, and so honestly lost.

-My senior thesis class is taught by a woman who has no experience in any of the programs we are using. She has never animated in 2D or 3D. She has never programmed or designed a game before. She keeps asking for more work because she doesn’t understand that the 12 hours a week I’m putting in in coding is seriously beginning to harm my health.

-The same professor teaches the modern culture of Animation/Game Arts class. She refuses to touch on queer subjects. Repeatedly. She drops the hbomberguy stream but knows nothing about it. I wind up being the one who had to explain what it was about.

-She requires us to take a trip to New York and doesn’t get funding for us. This includes transportation there and back, subway fare, tickets to events, and meals. Had she mentioned it to ANYONE in administration, we would’ve gotten free meals. She did not. She left most of my class alone in New York City with literally no idea where to go and no instructions on how to get back. That trip cost me nearly $100 in the end. (I did get to see the original Taminella puppet at the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of Moving Image, and the costumes from Labyrinth, which was totally worth it and I broke down crying at it because like, Jim Henson means the world to me? I want to be like him. I just want to make the world a little brighter.)

-Oh did I mention we were never fully taught C#, and yet I was expected to code an entire game in it because for my thesis I wanted to combine 2D art and gameplay? Yup. She didn’t know that either.

-They refused to let us know anything about setup for Senior show until less than 2 weeks before hand. We had to pay for anything installed for the show and any decor. Every other major knew at least a month in advance. We had less than 14 days.

-I walked in on my one friend about to harm themself more than once. I found others saying they were on the verge of suicide. I comforted more people than I think I ever should have had to in those last 4 months. Whenever I asked for help, I was met with a door in my face.

DESPITE ALL OF THAT I have a deep love for my underclassmen. I genuinely want the fucking best for them. They’re in that hellhole and they deserve better, and I want to be as much help to them as possible. Our major has no connections in the paid art world.

Last March, due to my work in the library (AGAIN THAT INTERNSHIP SAVED MY LIFE ), I was offered a job teaching game design to kids in an underserved area. It’s good pay and great work and great people. So when they said “We need more people,” I immediately said “Let me get in contact with my school.”

The head of the program and his full time faculty both REFUSED to either answer emails or meet with me and my job leads. It’s good fucking work. I love every second of it. I’m happy doing it. And I know I have classmates who would be happy too.

And they’re refusing to meet with me.

Everyone else I came in contact with at the school was happy to see me again. The deans were happy, my old bosses were happy, my career center was happy, my old classmates were happy!

But it stings to be rejected like that after busting my ass for three years to do my best.

I just... I feel like I’m never enough for anybody. And the damage they did to my mental (and physical) health is irreversible. I got addicted to anxiety medications, I’m struggling to be confident in myself, I literally get told almost daily at work to not do the things the program drove into me.

I’m getting better and learning to be okay again, but... I’m really fucked up by this school. And I don’t know what to do.

(Oh and the school counselor apparently didn’t actually have a license to practice and often told me my anxiety was in my own head and that it was my own fault bad things were happening to me. Like deaths in the family. And the way my teachers treated me.)

#cw: Suicidal ideation #i am okay #this is talking about years ago #if you're a student at my old school currently #heed my warning

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yinzhengs · 5 years

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timeline of zhai tianlin drama

—aka, why OS s2 is in peril: the tl;dr is that people are casting suspicion on zhai tianlin’s phd thesis’ validity + it’s blown up. this is taken from this weibo post here that tried to give a summary / timeline of events (note that as far as i can tell, OP is biased against ztl...)

note that a lot of (if not all) of these claims are unsubstantiated / based on questionable “evidence.” my heart goes out to ztl for having to deal with the massive influx of hate — tags abt this have been trending all week, and this drama’s even made the news. (link to english article, south china morning post)

avenuex also made a video about it here (which i haven’t watched yet bc frankly i don’t have the emotional energy, but i’ve heard it’s good)

throughout the post they refer to ztl as “翟博士” which is lit. doctor/phd zhai. whether or not it’s snarky... well... i’ll leave it to you to decide. all my additions in the form of links or supplementary info are in square brackets.

一个翟博士引发的惨案 / lit. a massacre that dr. zhai started

背景：翟博士微博晒出北大光华学院博士后站录取通知书，自勉“加油，小翟”。

background: dr. zhai shared on weibo his acceptance letter to the brilliant beijing university, encouraging himself with the caption “加油 [jiayou], xiao zhai” (approx. keep up the good work, little zhai) 第一波：翟博士不知知网。网友问他能否在知网看见他的博士论文，他一头雾水问“知网是什么” 翟博士：自我挽尊“我说不知道1+1=2都有人信”。 the first wave: dr. zhai didn’t know about 知网 [zhiwang] / China National Knowledge Infrastructure (wiki link provided, but it’s a research database similar to jstor in the west). netizens asked if they would be able to read his phd thesis on CNKI. completely confused, he asked: “what’s CNKI?”

dr zhai [later], trying to save his own dignity: “people would believe me even if i said i didn’t know 1+1=2.”

[ie. he commented this to note that he meant it sarcastically. ppl on the net didn’t believe him, sparking the next events...] 第二波：翟博士无c刊论文。网友通过知网查询，发现翟博士没有c刊论文，正规大学毕业一般都需要发论文。翟博士轧戏无时间上学。网友分析翟博士博士期间的工作量，基本都在拍戏和活动，完全不符合全日制学生的在校时间。翟博士工作室挽尊：“博士论文将由学校统一上传”，“通过函授、导师进组指导学习”。

the second wave: dr. zhai doesn’t have a paper in the CSSCI (a rather unhelpful wiki link provided, essentially the largest social science publication citation index in china + a measure by which a publication’s authenticity/accredibility is measured). netizens searched across CNKI and found that dr. zhai didn’t have any papers [cited] in the CSSCI, though according to usual university graduation standards, theses must be published [into the system].

dr. zhai had no time to attend class while filming. netizens analyzed dr. zhai’s workload during his phd program [2014-2018] and found that he was always either filming or doing promotional activities — there was no way he could have had time to attend full-time schooling during the semester.

his studio’s damage control: “[ztl’s] doctoral thesis will be organized and uploaded by his university,” “through correspondence [long-distance teaching], his advisor oversaw his studies”

第三波：网友继续质疑没有c刊论文如何答辩。粉丝拿翟博士唯一发表在《广电时评》文章挽尊，但被嘲笑不是c刊，又挽尊北电不一定用c刊。

the third wave: netizens continue to question — without a published thesis, how could he defend his dissertation?

fans tried to defend him with an essay he published in “广电时评” [a film-related magazine], but were mocked because that wasn’t a CSSCI publication. fans also tried to defend him saying that beijing film academy [where ztl got his phd] didn’t necessarily use CSSCI. 第四波：于妈下场。于妈发出对话截图，证明翟博士有十万字论文，且高达645k，赞他写的好。网友质疑十万字论文怎么只有600多k，引用文献和开头学校图标都没有吗。 the fourth wave: mama yu [nickname for director yu zheng, notable for shows like story of yanxi palace + yin zheng’s upcoming winter begonia] appears. yu posts a screenshot of their chat history [with picture of attachments sent], proving that dr. zhai had a thesis w/ over 100,000 words, and a file size of over 645 kilobytes, praising that he wrote it well.

netizens call into question why a 100,000 word thesis is only ~600 kilobytes — was there no bibliography, or even a icon [ie. picture file which would increase file size dramatically] of his school[’s logo]?

[unfortunately... this didn’t really help his case, considering yu zheng has also been involved in controversy regarding plagiarism allegations many times]

第五波：同学被拖下水扒皮。与翟博士一起毕业的其他学生名单被翻出，网友挨个知网查询，均有3-5篇论文，有人非c刊。电博士不用发c刊论文，含金量受质疑。

the fifth wave: classmates are pulled into the controversy + not spared. the list of the other classmates that graduated w/ dr. zhai was dug up. netizens searched each of them one by one on CNKI: they all had 3-5 papers, some didn’t have CSSCI publications.

beijing film academy’s phd students don’t need to publish CSSCI-level papers — beijing film academy’s academic standards are called into question. 第六波：翟博士抄袭。翟博士发表在《广电时评》的普通文章知网查重高达40%，抄袭十几年前的文章。文章被抄袭的黄教授朋友圈回应“春晚饰演打假警察的人要我来打假”。打脸工作室声明没有学术不端行为。

the sixth wave: dr. zhai’s plagiarism. the essay [mentioned earlier], published in 广电时评 was ran through CNKI and [supposedly] had a similarity rating of over 40%, with passages plagiarized from papers over ten years old.

professor huang li hua posted on his wechat: “the one who acted on 春晚 [lunar new year broadcast show] as someone exposing cops as fake has to be exposed by me as a fake.”

[ztl’s] studio officially announced that no academic dishonesty had taken place.

[huang later continued, translation from the south china morning post: “The celebrity’s management company claimed Zhai had no academic misconduct issues, but my essays a decade ago were copied paragraph by paragraph. The truth trumps his argument,” Huang wrote on the Chinese social media app WeChat.] 第七波：学术不端列撤。四川大学将翟博士事件列为学术不端案例，几日后又删除。

the seventh wave: removal from “academic dishonesty” list. sichuan university listed dr. zhai’s case as an example of academic dishonesty, but deleted it after a few days. [link to the world’s worst screenshot] 第八波：导师被拖下水扒皮。翟博士导师被扒出，身为博导却是本科毕业！导师另一位弟子也无c刊论文。

the eighth case: [ztl’s] academic advisor is dragged into the controversy. dr. zhai’s advisor was dug up — he was appointed phd advisor, but had only an undergraduate degree! another one of this advisor’s students also didn’t have a CSSCI-level publication. 第九波：官媒发声。人民日报、共青团微博、紫光阁等官媒发表对翟博士的质疑。北电回应：自查自纠小组成立。北大回应：看北电查的怎么样根据规则处理。

the ninth wave: official state media starts reporting: people’s daily [newspaper], the communist youth league’s weibo, tower of purple light [magazine], etc. publish articles regarding the suspicion surrounding dr. zhai

beijing film academy’s response: an internal investigation committee has been established.

beijing university’s response: we will wait on beijing film academy’s investigation results, and then follow standard regulations to deal with this matter.

[ according to smcp: around this time, essay is also reported to have been taken down from CKNI ] 第十波：院长被拖下水扒皮。翟博士毕业答辩导师、北电表演系张院长被网友扒出五十多岁娶了自己的九零后学生刘某，也是杨紫同学，北电下制片厂投资两人演男女主角，找杨紫张一山关晓彤当配角，只获得75万票房。 the tenth wave: a university dean is pulled into the controversy. [one of the] advisors dr. zhai had to defend his dissertation against to graduate, dean zhang of beijing film academy’s acting school, is revealed to have married a student (surname liu) of his born in the 90′s(?), despite being over fifty himself. she was also a classmate of yang zi [this is very irrelevant but she’s a very famous post-90′s actress who graduated from beijing film academy. you might know her for being in ashes of love.]

a movie production studio under beijing film academy invested in producing a movie where dean zhang + his wife liu were the male/female leads, getting yang zi, zhang yishan, and guan xiaotong [all v v v v famous] to play supporting roles, though it only made 750,000 at the box office.

[so i did some digging and it appears that this is the movie they’re talking about. again it’s mostly irrelevant if you ask me, but maybe you wanted to know. mostly the controversy is for like, taking a really young wife and then making beijing film academy pay for his romantic fantasy movie lol.

what does this have to do with zhai tianlin? pretty much nothing tbh] 第十一波：北电侯亮平、阿廖沙再次被提起……北电的水有多深? 豆瓣赐翟博士新绰号：靖北侯。

the eleventh wave: previous allegations of professors’ sexual assault cases / misconduct brought back into question ... how much is beijing film academy hiding?

[ the specific cases they reference are 阿廖沙 and 侯亮平, both web names that anonymous posters used on weibo to report/investigate sexual assault allegations at beijing film academy. (the second name is a reference to a character in a tv show who’s a anti-corruption prosecutor); i can talk about those cases but it’d take a whole separate post — tl;dr anonymous poster shares account of sexual assault and ensuing ostracization from faculty/classmates when they tried to bring it to light and ultimately turned to weibo. it was a rly big trending topic for a while back in 2017. ]

douban confers on dr. zhai a new nickname: 靖北侯

[the meaning, v. approx “peaceful north marquis” is a reference back to “平西王,” “peaceful west king/prince,” the nickname for 薄熙来 (bo xilai), a PRC politician sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption — obviously, the 北/bei also refers to beijing film/uni + 候 is a convenient callback to the previous anon investigator into beijing film sexual assault cases]

that was very very long. i hope this was somewhat helpful ;-; chinese social media has been blowing up about this, this is an attempt to capture some of the context. (this has been stressing me and my friends out as well — fingers crossed for ztl to get out of this unscathed.)

#zhai tianlin #translation #zhai tian lin #翟天临

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saywhatjessie · 6 years

Text

Fucking Hollywood

Aro!Dean 1.8k (Ao3)

“It’s just so frustrating!” Sam threw up his hands, the breath of his explosive sigh blowing his bangs around.

Dean just nodded non-committedly. Sam had been going on about this for the last twenty minutes.

“I mean, representation is important. Everyone knows that. Studies and stuff, right? So if we all know this, why is it still so hard to find content without sex in it?!”

Dean grunted. Sam waved a hand at him as if it had been a grunt of agreement.

This would be better if Dean had somewhere to go, but it was his own fault for offering to drive his brother back to school after his visit. He could have easily given the kid money for a bus but, no, Dean — being the amazing older brother he was — had offered to drive Sam back to Stanford.

And now he was trapped in his own car, listening to Sam bitch about sex in the media. Again.

“I’m not even talking, like, explicit HBO sex. But just this idea that sex is always the endgame and the thing that’s the most important of all things. When a character has sex for the first time it’s a Big Deal and like, why? Narratively? For what reason? Why does it matter in movies if someone’s a virgin?”

“Well, you know Hollywood, Sammy,” Dean reasoned, doing his best to diffuse the situation. “It’s like Hooters. Just there to do one thing.”

Sam snorted. “What? Titillate men?”

“Okay, A) You’re men. And two I meant make money. Sex sells, Sammy. I hate to say it but it’s true.”

Sam groaned. “Okay, maybe , but media also helps define culture. If we continue in this cycle where sex is the most valued commodity than how are we supposed to move past it?”

Dean sighed, unsure how to respond to that.

Sam had gone to college and come back gay. Or, rather, ‘queer’. Dean wasn’t totally sure what that meant except that, according to Sam, ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ didn’t necessarily mean he wanted to fuck dudes. Actually, in Sam’s case, he was gay in a way that meant he just didn’t want to fuck at all. Or he only wanted to fuck people he also wanted to marry. Something to do with Demi Moore? Dean still wasn’t clear on the details.

Whatever Sam’s sexual status, he had also come back from college with a vendetta against society’s obsession with sex. Which, objectively, Dean could get behind. But as a card-carrying, porn watching, one-night-stand having red blooded American, Dean couldn’t invest any personal devotion into it.

“It’s not even just Hollywood! Fan created content has historically been a refuge for marginalized people to create a space in the universes they love for people who are like them. Like Kirk and Spock in Star Trek.”

“Are you writing a thesis? What the fuck?”

“But even in fan-created spaces it’s like all they care about is whether or not the characters are boning,” Sam said, disgusted. “Like, that’s not what their relationship is about. Kirk and Spock aren’t compelling because they wanna bone. They’re compelling because they’re, like, accidentally the greatest love story ever told.”

Dean sighed again, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel.

“Okay…” he started, aware that the only way out of this conversation was through. “So I admit, I don’t know a whole lot about,” he gestured vaguely at Sam. “That. But me, personally, I have a hard time telling the difference between romantic and platonic love.”

“So like aromanticism.”

“No, what?” Dean glanced at Sam who was looking at him weirdly. “I don’t know. But one of the only ways I know how to confirm the difference is with sex.”

Sam was shaking his head before Dean had even finished. “But that’s not how that works. You don’t need sex to prove it’s love. That’s what I’ve been talking about!” Sam slumped dramatically in his seat, throwing his head back, before sitting straight again. “The difference between romantic and platonic love is there without sex. They feel different. They just do. As an asexual person, I know this better than anyone.”

Sam was pretty sure ‘asexual’ wasn’t the word Sam had used before but he didn’t really understand it all anyway and didn’t want to ask.

“Okay…”

“You can’t tell the difference between romantic and platonic love?” Sam asked, his focus now entirely on Dean.

Shit . Dean squirmed. “No, not really.”

“So you’re aromantic?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“No, no, stop looking like that.” Dean made an attempt to stop grimacing. “No pressure or anything, it’s just that that is, definitionally, what aromanticism is. Not being able to distinguish a difference between romantic and platonic love. Because you don’t really feel the first one.”

Dean was definitely grimacing again.

He looked down at his arm when he felt Sam lay a hand on his bicep. “Thank you for trusting me with this moment.”

Dean shook him off, scoffing. “Shut up, man. Whatever. You know how I feel about labels.”

Sam took his hand back, biting back a smile. “Yeah, I know. But it’s good to have a word for it. Helps other people understand where you’re coming from. Helps you understand yourself.”

“I think I have a pretty good understanding of myself.”

Sam just snorted, not bothering to further respond to that, but then, blissfully, changed the subject.

Dean hated himself for bringing it up but it didn’t stop him from asking. “Hey, Cas, you ever hear of aromanticism?”

It was Thursday which meant it was Roadhouse night. There wasn’t any real reason they’d chosen Thursday for their weekly bar meetup, it had just been the only night they had free early on. Further down the road, they had begun cancelling plans to make it to the bar on Thursday, and now Thursday was firmly bar night. The bar of choice: The Roadhouse.

Cas blinked over at him over his large pint of whatever shitty IPA he’d chosen that day. “From my understanding of Greek prefixes I can presume it means to be without romance.”

Dean snorted, taking a sip of his own (proper, dark) beer before nodding. It figured Cas could guess what it meant without being told. He was smart as fuck.

“Eh, kinda,” he continued, tracing patterns in the water droplets on his glass. “I think it means to be without romantic love. Romantic attraction?” He shrugged, eyes in his beer. “Sam explained it better.”

Cas nodded back, smiling softly. “It was lovely to see him. He’s grown up so much.”

Dean grinned, ducking his head.

It was a little embarrassing how soft he let himself get around Cas. They’d been friends for four years, meeting in Cas’s Sophomore year of college when he needed to interview Dean for his college paper. Dean had been working as a mechanic at the time. He was still working as a mechanic, actually, but Cas, as an actual reporter person, interviewed people far more interesting than Dean.

Cas had been there for John’s death. For Sam’s high school graduation. Sam going off to school. Cas had seen Dean in way more emotionally compromised positions. Dean let himself be soft around Cas.

It didn’t mean he’d let it last longer than he had to, though.

“Yeah. That kid picked up all kinds of wild shit in college. You know he’s gay now, right?”

Cas rolled his eyes, a touch of annoyance furrowing his eyebrow. “You really shouldn’t casually out your brother, Dean.” Dean rolled his eyes back. “But yes, I saw it on Facebook. He posted about it.”

“Well then I didn’t out him!” Dean waved his hand as if to say ‘there you go’. “And, besides, I couldn’t get the words right if I wanted to. I still don’t remember what he actually said he was.”

“Demisexual, heteroromantic,” Cas responded automatically. He blinked and then corrected himself. “Or… aromantic? Is that why you brought it up?”

Dean shook his head, looking into his beer again. “Nah, Sam’s not that. That’s what he says I am.”

A horrible pause of horrible silence Dean stared into his beer.

“Are you?” Cas asked, gently.

Dean looked up. Cas appeared nothing but softly interested.

Dean shrugged, all shoulders, no eye-contact. “Nah. Maybe. I don’t know about labels, man.”

Cas nodded, consideringly. Dean watched him take a sip of his beer. He spent a lot of time staring at Cas’s neck this way.

Cas tipped his head as he put his glass back on the bar. “You don’t have to talk about it. But it may be worth looking up so you can potentially learn more about yourself.”

Again with the learning about yourself thing.

Dean shook his head. “I don’t think I need to do that. I think I’m fine.”

Cas seemed to deflate a little, the sag of his shoulders making Dean cautiously curious.

“Of course,” he said, taking another long pull from his glass. “Forgive me, I suppose I hoped — ”

He cut himself off, looking sternly into the dregs of his own beer.

Dean watched him. His blue eyes were washed out in the yellow light from the bar but the dark shadows defining his profile made him just as striking. The clench of his jaw. The furrow of his eyebrows. The tension in his shoulders.

Dean downed his beer.

He put the glass gently on the bar, pushing both his and Cas’s away from them before turning and putting his hand on Cas’s shoulder.

“You wanna go on a date with me, Cas?”

Cas looked up at him, sharply, eyes wide. “Dean?”

Dean suddenly wished he had beer to nervously swig. Well, no going back now .

“If I don’t feel romantic attraction or whatever – if I’m not just waiting for the right girl and I’m never gonna – then I wanna be with my best friend. And that’s you.”

Cas’s eyes were still wide and it looked like he was biting his lip.

“My best friend who I’m still very much attracted to!” Dean rushed to correct, realizing that Cas might be afraid that this was just him settling. “Jesus fuck , am I attracted to you. I never did anything about it because I was probably straight, ya know? But obviously I’m not so...” He shrugged.

Cas was still just staring at him.

Dean’s hand twitched. “You gonna just leave me hangin, man? I don’t really know wh–”

Cas surged forward, hands coming up to cup Dean’s jaw as he kissed him quiet.

Dean had never allowed himself space to imagine this kiss. But he’s sure he never would have been able to capture it anyway. So easy. So nice.

It was the kind of kiss where if Dean would ever have had butterflies, he’s sure they would have been hammering away in his stomach at that moment.

Guess it’s official, then. I’m aromantic .

Dean could feel Cas smile as he kissed him.

I’m fine with that .

#aro!Dean #aromantic Dean Winchester #DeanCas #Destiel #oops I wrote a thing #SJW Sam #lol #Sam is me in this fic this is an actual conversation I had with my brother #Jessie writes Destiel fic

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avanneman · 5 years

Text

The New York Times, more sinned against than sinning. Or not.

The New York Times has caught a lot of grief for its “1619 Project”, which claims to explain all of American history in terms of slavery. And much of it is justified. Damon Linker, writing in The Week, gives a reasonable overview: “The New York Times surrenders to the left on race”, Damon offers praise where praise is due:

Now, there is a lot to admire in the paper's presentation of the 1619 Project — searing photographs, illuminating quotations from archival material, samples of poetry and fiction giving powerful voice to the black experience, and gripping journalistic summaries of scholarly histories. Much of it is wrenching, moving, and infuriating. The country's treatment of the slaves and their descendants through the century following emancipation and, in some respects, on down to the present was and is appalling — and the story of how it happened, and keeps happening, is extremely important for understanding the United States. Bringing this story to a wide audience is a worthwhile public service.

But there is a whopping downside as well:

Throughout the issue of the NYTM, headlines make, with just slight variations, the same rhetorical move over and over again: "Here is something unpleasant, unjust, or even downright evil about life in the present-day United States. Bet you didn't realize that slavery is ultimately to blame." Lack of universal access to health care? High rates of sugar consumption? Callous treatment of incarcerated prisoners? White recording artists "stealing" black music? Harsh labor practices? That's right — all of it, and far more, follows from slavery.

In fact, I found the packaging so off-putting—so portentous, condescending, and cheesy—“Everything you learned about slavery in school is wrong!”—as if we were all a nation of Homer Simpsons stretched out in our lazee-boys before our beloved wide screens shoveling honey-glazed pork rinds into our gaping Caucasian maws with both hands for fourteen hours a day—all of us who don’t work for the New York Times, that is—that at first I skipped the whole goddamn thing, only to go back and discover the same mixed bag that Damon described.

Many of the articles were good, but, shockingly—so shocking, in fact, that Timesfolk may not even believe me—I knew a lot of it already. When I was a boy, which was waaayyy back in the fifties, I read Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, a book about slavery written by someone who’d actually been a slave, inspired to do so after first reading a “Classic Comic Book” version of Washington’s story. Later, in the tenth grade, I stumbled across Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, just sitting there on the library shelf, where any dumb ass could pick it up. (I thought it might be like H. G. Wells. As it turned out, it was even better!)

And what about James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”? How about The Autobiography of Malcolm X? Or Soul on Ice? These were all works that received immense publicity decades ago—before, I suspect, many Timesfolk were even born. And what about “today”? I remember several decades ago a black woman telling me she thought interracial couples were crazy to expose themselves to the sort of hatred they received from both blacks and whites. Today, interracial marriage is (almost) passé. Recently, the Times own Thomas Edsall published a long piece examining the impressive gains in both education and income levels for some (but not all) blacks. But the 1619 Project isn’t interested in “good news.” Over a century ago, House Speaker Thomas Reed congratulated Theodore Roosevelt on this “original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” One could offer similar praise to the New York Times.

I was intrigued in particular by the “Everything you learned about slavery in school is wrong!” pitch. Well, if so, New York Times, tell me, what are our kids learning, not 60 years ago, when I went to school, but today? Nikita Stewart fills us in: ‘We are committing educational malpractice’: Why slavery is mistaught — and worse — in American schools.

Nikita begins her piece by quoting a text book written in 1863 (not a misprint) in the South. Guess what? It’s totally racist! Totally! Who could have imagined? Also guess what? Things haven’t changed that much! How do we know? Nikita tells us so.

Stewart follows the pattern used in many of the pieces, taking an egregious example from the past and then “explaining” that things haven’t changed much. For the meat of her article, she relies almost entirely on a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has done good work in the past but now is largely a solution (and a very well funded one, at that) in search of a problem. Of course the SPLC is going to find that America’s school books don’t adequately teach the role of slavery in American history. How could they not?

Part of the problem, Stewart says, is this: “Unlike math and reading, states are not required to meet academic content standards for teaching social studies and United States history.” She’s presumably referring to the “Common Core” standards, but states are not “required” to meet them, and in fact the whole “standards” movement, pushed by the Obama administration back in the day, has since fallen into considerable confusion, in conjunction with the entire Trumpian revolt against “experts”.

Speaking of her own schooling, Stewart tells us, “I was lucky; my Advanced Placement United States history teacher regularly engaged my nearly all-white class in debate, and there was a clear focus on learning about slavery beyond [Harriet] Tubman, Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, the people I saw hanging on the bulletin board during Black History Month.” How does she know she was “lucky”? Doesn’t she “mean” “My own experience was contrary to my thesis and therefore it must be exceptional”?

Instead of selectively quoting a handful of “experts” she chose to tell her what she wanted to hear, why didn’t Stewart do some actual leg work, or chair work, by reviewing the textbooks used in, say, California, Texas, New York, and Florida, the four largest states, containing about one third of the entire U.S. population, and including two states from the Confederacy? Isn’t that what the “1619 Project” is supposed to be about?

Because we most definitely need to examine the way the history of slavery and the Civil War is taught and understood in today’s USA. Nothing is more obvious than that leading figures, or “would be” figures, in the Trump Administration, starting most obviously with Donald Trump himself, and including former chief of staff/four-star Marine General John Kelly and dumped (dumped and disgraced) putative Federal Reserve Board appointee Stephen Moore, all cling to the absurd and disgusting notion that the North was the “bad guy” in the Civil War. As Moore “explained”, “The Civil War was about the South having its own rights”—you know, the right to enslave and oppress millions of human beings.

But it isn’t only the Trumpians who still maintain a soft spot—and a grossly meretricious soft spot it is—for the “Lost Cause”. Poor David French, who gets it from both the left (for being a conservative and, worse, an evangelical Christian) and the right (for being insufficiently bad ass), is going to get a little for me. There’s good Dave, as in this excellent article in which he both describes his laudable efforts to prevent the muzzling of “wicked” Christian groups on campus and denounces proposals on the right to restrict the First Amendment rights of those on the left (largely “the media” and “Big Tech”):

Never in my life have I seen such victimhood on the right. Never in my life have I seen conservatives more eager to rationalize passivity and seek the aid of politicians to make their lives easier. They look to politicians — even incompetent, depraved politicians — and cry out, “Protect us!”

Admirable words. But here are some not so admirable, in an unfortunate piece with the unfortunate title “Don’t Tear Down the Confederate Battle Flag”.1 After launching into a scarcely objective account of the South’s motivation for succession—scarcely better than Moore’s—French falls into total small-boy, flag-waving, saber-waving mode:

Those men [the southern armies] fought against a larger, better-supplied force, yet — under some of history’s more brilliant military commanders — were arguably a few better-timed attacks away from prevailing in America’s deadliest conflict.

So yay Team Dixie, right? If only “we” had won. Then slavery forever! Is that what French dreams of? That southerners could continue to exercise their “right” to whip millions of black men, rape millions of black women, and sell their children for profit? If only those few attacks had been better timed! Damn it!

Couldn’t the Germans say the same thing about World War II? If only we had won. Then the Master Race forever!

These “brave men” at whose shrine French worships, wantonly murdered all black Union troops they captured, in utter violation of the most basic “laws” of war. When Robert E. Lee (French’s “gallant” hero, of course) marched into Maryland and Pennsylvania, he captured black American citizens and impressed them into slavery, sent them south to labor in defense of their own oppression. Mr. French fancies himself a Christian. But sometimes, it seems, Christians forget.

Afterwords It’s “interesting” that both Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist and Supreme Court Justice Antonine Scalia felt somehow compelled to parade their opposition to Brown v. Board of Education, Scalia “explaining” that liking the sort of judicial thinking that produced Brown because it produced Brown was like liking Hitler because he developed the Volkswagen—which by the way is entirely untrue,2 but whatever, Brown equals Hitler, got it?

French says “battle flag” because as a true southerner he knows that the familiar “stars and bars” was not the flag of the Confederacy. ↩︎

The Volkswagen was largely designed by an Austro-Hungarian designer named Béla Barényi in the mid-twenties and then “modified”, sans credit to Barényi, by Ferdinand Porsche a few years later. Hitler planned to put the car into production as a "people's car" but, unsurprisingly, the cars that were built were all for military use. After the war, an enterprising British major thought the bombed out VW factory could be repaired and used to create jobs for workers in a shattered Germany. ↩︎

#new york times #1619 Project #David French #Nikita Stewart

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bluewatsons · 7 years

Text

Jessica Bennett, On Campus, Failure Is on the Syllabus, New York Times (June 24, 2017)

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — Last year, during fall orientation at Smith College, and then again recently at final-exam time, students who wandered into the campus hub were faced with an unfamiliar situation: the worst failures of their peers projected onto a large screen.

“I failed my first college writing exam,” one student revealed.

“I came out to my mom, and she asked, ‘Is this until graduation?’” another said.

The faculty, too, contributed stories of screwing up.

“I failed out of college,” a popular English professor wrote. “Sophomore year. Flat-out, whole semester of F’s on the transcript, bombed out, washed out, flunked out.”

“I drafted a poem entitled ‘Chocolate Caramels,’ ” said a literature and American studies scholar, who noted that it “has been rejected by 21 journals … so far.”

This was not a hazing ritual, but part of a formalized program at the women’s college in which participants more accustomed to high test scores and perhaps a varsity letter consent to having their worst setbacks put on wide display.

“It was almost jarring,” said Carrie Lee Lancaster, 20, a rising junior. “On our campus, everything can feel like such a competition, I think we get caught up in this idea of presenting an image of perfection. So to see these failures being talked about openly, for me I sort of felt like, ‘O.K., this is O.K., everyone struggles.’”

The presentation is part of a new initiative at Smith, “Failing Well,” that aims to “destigmatize failure.” With workshops on impostor syndrome, discussions on perfectionism, as well as a campaign to remind students that 64 percent of their peers will get (gasp) a B-minus or lower, the program is part of a campuswide effort to foster student “resilience,” to use a buzzword of the moment.

“What we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning, it’s the feature,” said Rachel Simmons, a leadership development specialist in Smith’s Wurtele Center for Work and Life and a kind of unofficial “failure czar” on campus. “It’s not something that should be locked out of the learning experience. For many of our students — those who have had to be almost perfect to get accepted into a school like Smith — failure can be an unfamiliar experience. So when it happens, it can be crippling.”

Ms. Simmons would know. She hid her own failure (dropping out of a prestigious scholarship program in her early 20s; told by her college president that she had embarrassed her school) for close to a decade. “For years, I thought it would ruin me,” she said.

Which is why, when students enroll in her program, they receive a certificate of failure upon entry, a kind of permission slip to fail. It reads: “You are hereby authorized to screw up, bomb or fail at one or more relationships, hookups, friendships, texts, exams, extracurriculars or any other choices associated with college … and still be a totally worthy, utterly excellent human.”

A number of students proudly hang it from their dormitory walls.

Preoccupied in the 1980s with success at any cost (think Gordon Gekko), the American business world now fetishizes failure, thanks to technology experimentalist heroes like Steve Jobs. But while the idea of “failing upward” has become a badge of honor in the start-up world — with blog posts, TED talks, even industry conferences — students are still focused on conventional metrics of achievement, campus administrators say.

Nearly perfect on paper, with résumés packed full of extracurricular activities, they seemed increasingly unable to cope with basic setbacks that come with college life: not getting a room assignment they wanted, getting wait-listed for a class or being rejected by clubs.

“We’re not talking about flunking out of pre-med or getting kicked out of college,” Ms. Simmons said. “We’re talking about students showing up in residential life offices distraught and inconsolable when they score less than an A-minus. Ending up in the counseling center after being rejected from a club. Students who are unable to ask for help when they need it, or so fearful of failing that they will avoid taking risks at all.”

Almost a decade ago, faculty at Stanford and Harvard coined the term “failure deprived” to describe what they were observing: the idea that, even as they were ever more outstanding on paper, students seemed unable to cope with simple struggles. “Many of our students just seemed stuck,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshmen at Stanford and the author of “How to Raise an Adult.”

They soon began connecting the dots: between what they were seeing anecdotally — the lack of coping skills — and what mental health data had shown for some time, including, according to the American College Health Association, an increase in depression and anxiety, overwhelming rates of stress and more demand for counseling services than campuses can keep up with.

It was Cornell that, in 2010 after a wave of student suicides, declared that it would be an “obligation of the university” to help students learn life skills. Not long after, Stanford started an initiative called the Resilience Project, in which prominent alumni recounted academic setbacks, recording them on video. “It was an attempt to normalize struggle,” Ms. Lythcott-Haims said.

A consortium of academics soon formed to share resources, and programs have quietly proliferated since then: the Success-Failure Project at Harvard, which features stories of rejection; the Princeton Perspective Project, encouraging conversation about setbacks and struggles; Penn Faces at the University of Pennsylvania, a play on the term used by students to describe those who have mastered the art of appearing happy even when struggling.

“There is this kind of expectation on students at a lot of these schools to be succeeding on every level: academically, socially, romantically, in our family lives, in our friendships,” said Emily Hoeven, a recent graduate who helped start the project in her junior year. “And also sleep eight hours a night, look great, work out and post about it all on social media. We wanted to show that life is not that perfect.”

At the University of Texas, Austin, there is now a free iPhone app, Thrive, that helps students “manage the ups and downs of campus life” through short videos and inspirational quotes. The University of California, Los Angeles has what it calls a head of student resilience on staff. While at Davidson College, a liberal arts school in North Carolina, there is a so-called failure fund, a series of $150 to $1,000 grants for students who want to pursue a creative endeavor, with no requirements that the idea be viable or work. “We encourage students to learn from their mistakes and lean into their failure,” the program’s news release states.

“For a long time, I think we assumed that this was the stuff that was automatically learned in childhood: that everyone struck out at the baseball diamond or lost the student council race,” said Donna Lisker, Smith’s dean of the college and vice president for student life. “The idea that an 18-year-old doesn’t know how to fail on the one hand sounds preposterous. But I think in many ways we’ve pulled kids away from those natural learning experiences.”

And so, universities are engaging in a kind of remedial education that involves talking, a lot, about what it means to fail.

“I think colleges are revamping what they believe it means to be well educated — that it’s not about your ability to write a thesis statement, but to bounce back when you’re told it doesn’t measure up,” said Ms. Simmons, the author of two books on girls’ self-esteem who is publishing a third, “Enough as She Is,” next year. “Especially now, with the current economy, students need tools to pivot between jobs, between careers, to work on short-term projects, to be self-employed. These are crucial life skills.”

If it all feels a bit like a “Portlandia” sketch, that’s because it actually was one: in which Fred and Carrie decide to hire a bully to teach grit to students, one who uses padded gym mats to make sure the children don’t actually get hurt.

Add “teaching failure” to nap pods (yes, those exist) and campus petting zoos (also common), and you’ve got to wonder, as a cover story in Psychology Today questioned last year: At what point do colleges end up more like mental health wards than institutions of higher learning?

“Look, I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with trying to create experiences that are calming,” said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Penn. “But I’d like to spend a bit more time figuring out what’s causing those stresses.”

Researchers say it’s a complicated interplay of child-rearing and culture: years of helicopter-parenting and micromanaging by anxious parents. “This is the generation that everyone gets a trophy,” said Rebecca Shaw, Smith’s director of residence life. College admissions mania, in which many middle- and upper-class students must navigate what Ms. Simmons calls a “‘Hunger Games’-like mentality” where the preparation starts early, the treadmill never stops and the stakes can feel impossibly high.

It is fear about the economy — Is the American dream still a possibility? Will I be able to get a job after graduation? — and added pressure to succeed felt by first-generation and low-income students: of being the first in their families to go to college; of having to send money home; or simply overcoming the worry that, as one engineering student put it, “maybe I was a quota.”

“I’m coming from a low-income, predominantly African-American community where there just aren’t resources,” said Arabia Simeon, 19, a junior at Smith. “So there is this added pressure of needing to do well.”

And there’s the adjustment, for many high-achieving students, of no longer being “the best and brightest” on campus, said Amy Jordan, the associate dean for undergraduate studies at Penn. Or what Smithies call “special snowflake syndrome.”

“We all came from high schools where we were all the exception to the rule — we were kind of special in some way, or people told us that,” said Cai Sherley, 20, seated in the campus cafe. Around her, Zoleka Mosiah, Ms. Simeon and Ms. Lancaster nodded in agreement. “So you get here and of course you want to recreate that,” Ms. Sherley said. “But here, everybody’s special. So nobody is special.”

Social media doesn’t help, because while students may know logically that no one goes through college or, let’s be honest, life without screw-ups, it can be pretty easy to convince yourself, by way of somebody else’s feed, “that everyone but you is a star,” said Jaycee Greeley, 19, a sophomore.

It is also a culture that has glorified being busy — or at the very least conflates those things with status. “There’s this idea that I’m not worthy if I’m not stressed and overwhelmed,” said Stacey Steinbach, a residential life coordinator at Smith. “And in some sense to not be stressed is a failing.”

It’s what Ms. Simmons calls “competitive stress”: the subject of her afternoon workshop on the campus lawn, to which she was luring students with ice cream and bingo.

When students arrived, the sundaes were there. But the bingo cards were a little different — filled with things like “I have 20 pages to write tonight,” “I’m too busy to eat” and “I’m so dead.” It was called “Stress Olympics.”

“It’s basically a play on competitive suffering,” said Casey Hecox, a 20-year-old junior. “It’s when we’re like, ‘I have three tests tomorrow.’ And then someone’s like, ‘I have five tests tomorrow, and all I’ve eaten is 5-hour Energy, and my dog is sick.’”

With only a few weeks before school was to let out, the stress pinwheel over summer internships and jobs — applications, recommendations, networking — was already at a steady buzz. What if they didn’t get one? Or the right one? “I’m not used to the whole ‘summer job’ concept, and I found the process quite intimidating,” said Ms. Mosiah, 21, a sophomore. “I had to ask for help from my friends and the on-campus resources to work through this. I’m not used to asking for help or being rejected this often, so I was really taken aback.”

Ms. Lancaster said, “Sometimes it’s hard not to take each and every rejection letter as a failure, but I’m trying to stay positive.”

Whatever happens, there will be plenty of time to talk about it when students return to campus in the fall.

#high education #society #academia #failure #the way we live now #young adulthood

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newstfionline · 7 years

Text

On Campus, Failure Is on the Syllabus

By Jessica Bennett, NY Times, June 24, 2017

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.--Last year, during fall orientation at Smith College, and then again recently at final-exam time, students who wandered into the campus hub were faced with an unfamiliar situation: the worst failures of their peers projected onto a large screen.

“I failed my first college writing exam,” one student revealed.

The faculty, too, contributed stories of screwing up.

“I failed out of college,” a popular English professor wrote. “Sophomore year. Flat-out, whole semester of F’s on the transcript, bombed out, washed out, flunked out.”

“I drafted a poem entitled ‘Chocolate Caramels,’ “ said a literature and American studies scholar, who noted that it “has been rejected by 21 journals … so far.”

“What we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning, it’s the feature,” said Rachel Simmons, a leadership development specialist in Smith’s Wurtele Center for Work and Life and a kind of unofficial “failure czar” on campus. “It’s not something that should be locked out of the learning experience. For many of our students--those who have had to be almost perfect to get accepted into a school like Smith--failure can be an unfamiliar experience. So when it happens, it can be crippling.”

A number of students proudly hang it from their dormitory walls.

Preoccupied in the 1980s with success at any cost (think Gordon Gekko), the American business world now fetishizes failure, thanks to technology experimentalist heroes like Steve Jobs. But while the idea of “failing upward” has become a badge of honor in the start-up world--with blog posts, TED talks, even industry conferences--students are still focused on conventional metrics of achievement, campus administrators say.

They soon began connecting the dots: between what they were seeing anecdotally--the lack of coping skills--and what mental health data had shown for some time, including, according to the American College Health Association, an increase in depression and anxiety, overwhelming rates of stress and more demand for counseling services than campuses can keep up with.

And so, universities are engaging in a kind of remedial education that involves talking, a lot, about what it means to fail.

“I think colleges are revamping what they believe it means to be well educated--that it’s not about your ability to write a thesis statement, but to bounce back when you’re told it doesn’t measure up,” said Ms. Simmons, the author of two books on girls’ self-esteem who is publishing a third, “Enough as She Is,” next year. “Especially now, with the current economy, students need tools to pivot between jobs, between careers, to work on short-term projects, to be self-employed. These are crucial life skills.”

“We all came from high schools where we were all the exception to the rule--we were kind of special in some way, or people told us that,” said Cai Sherley, 20, seated in the campus cafe. Around her, Zoleka Mosiah, Ms. Simeon and Ms. Lancaster nodded in agreement. “So you get here and of course you want to recreate that,” Ms. Sherley said. “But here, everybody’s special. So nobody is special.”

It is also a culture that has glorified being busy--or at the very least conflates those things with status. “There’s this idea that I’m not worthy if I’m not stressed and overwhelmed,” said Stacey Steinbach, a residential life coordinator at Smith. “And in some sense to not be stressed is a failing.”

It’s what Ms. Simmons calls “competitive stress”: the subject of her afternoon workshop on the campus lawn, to which she was luring students with ice cream and bingo.

When students arrived, the sundaes were there. But the bingo cards were a little different--filled with things like “I have 20 pages to write tonight,” “I’m too busy to eat” and “I’m so dead.” It was called “Stress Olympics.”

#failure #teaching failure #Smith College #competitive stress

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