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the-witches-you-couldnt-burn · 3 years ago

Text

It started with a whisper

I originally wrote ‘Like I did with you’ as a one-shot but people wanted a sequel. This turned out to be waaaaay longer than expected (4.7k word count). Inspired by Everybody Talks by Neon Trees. I hope you lot enjoy!

Ao3

(Also this is Mari’s new outfit, all credits go to the original artist)

————

Two teens stood upon the balcony of a large banquet hall, exposed to the midsummer night air. The sky was a lilac blanket that hung over the Parisian buildings, speckled with glowing stars. The moon, with it’s crescent smile, beamed down of the young couple.

Hey, baby, won't you look my way?

Marinette’s eyes were closed as she rested her head upon his shoulder, relaxing after the night’s rapid escalation. Tonight she had arrived at the ball with the intent to be there for her friends, but somehow she found herself within the arms of Gotham’s (and probably Paris’) Ice Prince. She had overheard his nickname from the Gotham students, one of which being Jon, who was in the middle of mocking the young Wayne. She had never considered that nickname as suitable; sure he was temperamental & had a tendency to snap, but icey to the core? No.

I can be your new addiction

Damian was calm. For the first time in his life he felt like he could take a breath. His exhale was carried off by a small gust of wind, the bush over hanging the stone railing rustled. With his inhale, the scent of Marinette’s perfume became present once more. Mixed with the crisp night’s air, her usual scent of pastries was mixed with what could only be described as ambrosia. His phone vibrated within his pocket, it was never on volume due to the potential risk it caused during his heroic activities.

“Shit.” Notifications covered his screen, multiple tweets, Instagrams and Tiktoks in which he had been tagged in. But the alert came from his family’s private messaging chat. The whole thread was a shit storm, Grayson and Todd’s messages were completely capitalised (he learnt years ago this meant ‘to yell’ in writing form) and both had multiple ‘keyboard spasms’. Drake, like the thorough detective he is, had combed through the images and videos, investigating their validity. His honorary sisters had replied with ‘awwwww’(s) and ‘Omg we MUST meet this girl! I need to know how she tamed the demon!’. He could practically hear Brown’s shrill voice from across the ocean.

Hey, baby, what you gotta say?

No reply from his father or Alfred. The two of them were the only semblance of ‘normal’ paternal figures he had within his life, after the sham of a relationship he had previously held with his grandfather. Their silence unnerved him.

Marinette had noticed his attention had shifted to his phone, her own mobile was buzzing away within her baby pink purse. Messages, notifications of account tagging and comments galore. A sigh left her lips when she saw her parents seemed to be none the wiser. Good, she didn’t need to deal with future adoration for ‘The boy who swept our daughter off of her feet’ (or something along those lines).

Her cheeks regained some of the warmth they held before as she thought of her parent’s reaction. Scrolling through her Twitter she saw her friends had posted multiple images of the night’s events, majority being her shared dance.

Chloé Bourgeois @TheBestBourgeois

what kind of Disney shit is this? (Insert video of two teens dancing around an mostly empty dance floor.)

Alix Kubdel @Sk8trGirl

Replying to @TheBestBourgeois

I KNOW RIGHT?! THEY WERE FUCKING FLOATING!!!

All you're giving me is fiction

She was thankful that they hadn’t tagged her but she hadn’t been spared by others in attendance. Her post thread had blown up, thousands had commented and even more had viewed the evidence. There was no way she would come out of this unscathed.

“Has anyone been on Twitter today?” The blonde of the family asked as she walked into the dining room. Her eyes focused on her scrolling screen, brows furrowed in confusion. “Actually has anyone seen what’s happening on any of our socials?”

It was early in the afternoon and the family had recently returned home after a straining stakeout. The Joker had broken out of Arkham and the Batfam had to deal with his minions. Dick’s arm was in a sling (sprained from a grapple gone wrong), Jason was icing his hand, Alfred was stitching Bruce’s chest wounds while Tim and the girls escaped without severe injuries. All were still recuperating and finally able to recharge.

Alfred always enforced a strict ‘no devices at the dinner table’ rule; no matter how urgent it was, it could wait until after sustenance was consumed. Tim strongly opposed this, but there was no arguing with Agent A. This all surmises that probably no one had seen the crap storm on social media.

I'm a sorry sucker and this happens all the time

Bruce sighed, bringing his free arm up to rub his eyes. Tilting his head back to look at Steph, “Who was it this time?” Barbara quickly took out her phone to see what Stephanie was talking about, all the while glancing accusingly at Dick and Jason. Both of whom held up their arms (or in Dick’s case arm), declaring their innocence.

“It wasn’t fucking me!”

“Jason! Language!” Dick shot a glare at Jason and was met with one in return. “It wasn’t me either.”

“Then who-“ Bruce started before being cut off by his most rambunctious daughter.

I found out that everybody talks

Stephanie with a squeal, exclaimed that it was Damian. Visions of what the Wayne brat could have done flashed through the heads of everyone in the room. He had been sent overseas before the quarantines and lockdowns hit. During Damian’s first month in France he had been forced into online schooling and then finally when he got to go to in-person classes he hated it. Described the class as a kindergarten with petty and vindictive toddlers.

Had he broken someone’s arm? Was that person of such importance that it had spread over multiple social media platforms? France’s government had announced on June 15th, that teens were now being inoculated so him having COVID-19 was doubtful. Had he insulted the wrong person? Had he taken over the government? He certainly had the potential.

Everybody talks, everybody talks

What they saw stunned them, even Steph as she watched it for the 7th time. Damian Wayne was dancing. But not only that, he was dancing with a girl.

It started with a whisper

“What is this shit?”

No one verbally objected to Jason’s outburst but he was sent a harsh glare from Alfred, Dick and Bruce. Their focus soon returned to the images and videos before them. Babs’ and Steph’s phones were returned to them as the others ran to grab their own devices. They all met back at the table, comparing the posts and comparing their notes.

I can hear the chitchat

“There’s no way this can be real.”

“Jesus Tim,” Barbara rolls her eyes, “have you seen the amount of posts there are? You’d be an idiot to think otherwise.”

Take me to your love shack

“I’m with Tim, how do we know this isn’t some skit. I mean, Demon Spawn almost looks normal. That’s a matter of concern.” He almost dry heaved when he agreed with Tim. Damian couldn’t be capable of naturally exuding that amount of humanity unless there was something in it for him.

Mamas always gotta backtrack

“I was just saying Babs, that we should check the credibility of these images. For all we know they could be gorilla glued together and trying to get unstuck.” Tim cringed at his own reasoning, he really needed to either sleep (probably not going to happen anytime soon) or find his favourite coffee brand (which had been one of the first to vanish after the covid hoarders appeared).

When everybody talks back

Dick was too busy freaking out and spam messaging the youngest Wayne, to defend Damian’s humanity. The family saw this and followed suit, wanting to get information from the source.

Chat name: Alfred supremacy

BigBird: AHHHHHH DAMIAN!

BigBird: YOU LOOK SO CUTE!!!

BigBird: HAIFJDNDNFI

LittleWing: WTF HAPPENED DEMON SPAWN YOU LOOK ALMOST HUMAN

Babs: who knew the city of love would influence the brat

Blondie: they are so cuteeeeeee!

Blondie: We HAVE to meet her!

Silent-but-deadly: agreed.

Timbo: YO DEMON

Timbo: Apparently the videos are legit

Timbo: are you being blackmailed?

And it just devolved into more chaos from there, fueled by the fact that they saw Damian’s ‘Blood Son’ account appear online before vanishing once more. Dick shrieked, “I FOUND HER ACCOUNT!”

The family gathered around the eldest son, peering over his shoulder to view his iPhone 12max screen. They saw a young girl’s Instagram account. It was locked but they could see her profile pic, the girl had black hair and looked to be if Asian decent. They compared it to the videos but it was hard to see due to the hall’s lighting and the minimised facial features of the pfp. Alfred suggested that they search up her username and see who has tagged her, some might have other photos of her.

After research for awhile, the family began to get frustrated with lack of results.

Hey honey you could be my drug

You could be my new prescription

“Come on!” Jason complained, “What kind of teenage girl doesn’t post her life online?” He ignored the girls glares and went back to researching. How had the account by the name of ‘mariiiiinette’ to managed to prevent the entire Wayne clan from accessing it? Damn Instagram privacy settings. He groaned, dragging a hand down his face, “We are fucking stupid. Why don’t we just use the Bat-computer? It would be so much fucking easier.”

“It shouldn’t be used for civilian issues-“

Too much could be an overdose

“The girl could be a meta for all we know! We aren’t safe until we know who she is.” Jason points a finger at Tim, his paranoia flared up and even though he would never admit it, Jason would do anything to protect each member of his family (although Bruce is still debatable).

All this trash talk make me itching

Barbara and Tim took their usual positions as Oracle and Red Robin (who had been banned from patrol due to lack of sleep). The rest of the Batfam stood behind them either with arms crossed or still failing at researching.

Oh my my shit

“The account is owned by a girl called Marinette Dupian-Cheng. She is French-Chinese and her parents own a popular bakery. Also if it wasn’t already obvious, she goes to Collège Françoise Dupont, aka Damian’s French school.” Tim begun informing his nosy family, “But this account has been inactive for the past 6 months, which is strange due to her frequent posting schedule before hand. It seems she probably has a second account and this is her old one.”

Everybody talks, everybody talks

“Not only that,” Barbara interrupted. “There are unopened messages from other accounts that accuse her of being a bully. There is a whole Facebook page about this girl and how she has been hurting her old friends, but neither side seems reliable. The so called victims seem to be twisting the truth but there is barely any information about Marinette so we can’t disprove it either.”

“Read out some of the messages.” Bruce took a cup of coffee from Alfred and sipped it.

The main screen of the bat computer displayed a Facebook group with the banner picture being a photo of Marinette. “They are mostly complaints expected of teen girls when there is a girl they don’t like; ‘Marinette is such a know-it-all’, ‘She is constantly insulting Lila’s intelligence’. They go on to talk about how Marinette was briefly expelled from the Collège before being reinstated by the principle for a reason unknown to them.”

Everybody talks too much

“Her school reports up until this year were good. The newest one states, ‘While Marinette is a wonderful and bright student, I encourage her to settle her disagreements outside of class. This seems to only be a recent occurrence and I implore her to go to the guidance council if she is in need of help.’” A beat of silence echoes through the cave, Tim sighed. “Jason’s meta theory could be correct. She could have just recently started exhibiting her abilities and using them to get what she wants.”

“Bruce what do you want to do?”

“We’re going to Paris.”

She opened her eyes to the blaring morning light that streamed through the blinds. Her lashes still painted with mascara that refused to leave. She felt a pang of sorrow when she was removing her makeup and dress last night, she never wanted the night to end. She shuffled down the stairs to the kitchen, covering her mouth when she yawned. She greeted her mother as she entered the kitchen to get breakfast.

She glanced at her phone and there was the chaos that was started hours ago and it was still occurring. It was the weekend, she wouldn’t need to deal with her classmates until Monday. But she would still have to survive her parent’s interrogation. Out of the corner of her eye she caught her mother smirking at her.

Everybody talks

“Nadja told me some interesting news about last night.” Marinette held her breath, glaring at the toaster, willing it to hurry up so she could escape. “Well,” Sabine patted her shoulder before rubbing Mari’s back. “I know you didn’t want to go but I hope you had fun.”

With that she exited the kitchen, probably going to help her father in the bakery. The ravenette stared after her, eye widened in shock, jumping when the toaster went off. Buttering her toast she went over the conversation, her brows furrowed in confusion. She had expected a ‘When do I get to meet the oh so famous prince?�� or ‘Should I be expecting a new guest sometime in the near future?’ or at least a ‘Who was that young man, Bǎozàng (宝藏 it means treasure)?’ But she said nothing.

A small smile was plastered upon her face as she changed and went down to help her parents in the bakery. Her father didn’t say anything either, he gave her a knowing smile before continuing to kneed the dough. She sat at the the store front as the cashier whilst her parents were busy making ‘Paris’s Finest Pastries’.

Her musings slowly faded as she was brought back to reality by badly hushed whispers. Two young preteens were by the bread roll casing near the door. She had seen them come in before with their parents, the girls went to the prestigious international school over in the 16th arrondissement. The one with purple hair kept whispering to the brunette, both ‘subtly’ glancing towards her. Using her enhanced hearing she listened in on their conversation.

“That’s her, I swear that’s her in the video.”

The blonde’s face soured likes she sucked on a lemon. “No, it wasn’t good lighting there is no way he would dance with someone like her.”

Everybody talks

Marinette had tough skin but their words had an impact, only a small one due to her defence mechanism of repressing emotions. She stopped listening and went back to drawing in her sketchpad, she was in desperate need of a new school outfit.

The two girls eventually came up to the counter, goods in hand. Marinette rung up and bagged their items (paper because save the turtles sksksk) in a tired daze. A phone was shoved into her face, her eyes barely adjusted to view the screen before the blonde spoke.

“Is this your instagram?” She asked in a tone so snobbish that it should be illegal from a person her age. Marinette finally was able to view the screen that was barely an inch from her face. Her old Instagram ‘mariiiiinette’ was displayed on screen, she hesitantly nodded, gaze flicking back to the two in front of her.

The blonde’s nose scrunched up and the purple goth girl squealed in delight. They soon after left the store, their conversation had devolved into ‘See! I told you’ and ‘Yeah, yeah. You were right.’

Walking to school on Monday, she had finally come down from cloud nine. She still rode the tail end of her high as she rushed along her path to her campus, she wasn’t going to be late but she sure wasn’t going to be early. She had spent the better part of the weekend designing and sewing a brand new outfit. Her new look was composed of a black cropped singlet (L'amour gagne hemmed into it and it’s straps), paired matching peach plaid cropped overshirt and a-line miniskirt. Her hair was down, ballet flats were worn and her makeup was the usual with the added edition of a rose gold eyeshadow.

Even though her face was covered in a black and gold mask, she looked hot.

She reached the campus and the whispers started again, people were still buzzing from Friday night. Her classmates, the majority of her grade and the younger years seemed to gossiping before class about the formal’s events. She couldn’t spot any of her friends or the two Gotham transfers, so she was stuck listening the the chitchat. Why couldn’t she have been late like usual?

Damian had a fowl disposition and it showed in multiple icey glares (and that was before he even reached the collège). His family had made their appearance known in Paris at 1am Sunday morning. He could have used his dorm to escape but his family didn’t have the word ‘privacy’ within their vocabulary. He didn’t want to have to pay for a lock replacement due to his brothers’ (most likely Todd with Drake & Grayson laughing at him) lock picking habit.

The Ice Prince was back with full force. He had just been... influenced by all the other couples. Yes he did respect Dupain-Cheng and he appreciated her company & pleasant conversations. He would struggle to hide a small smile at the memory of the dance, even if he denied himself the happiness of normality, he felt content when reminiscing.

“Ooo the Ice Prince is here, did he have a fight with his princess or something?” The voice seemed to mock him.

“The Disney Magic is gone. The demon is back.”

Everybody talks

At the second jeer he shot a glare at the perpetrator. Jon held his hands up in an ‘I surrender manner’, laughing as he joined Damian at his side. The two entered the school’s large foyer and looked to see if any of the classes were open yet. Sadly they weren’t, before he was wrong and the his class was plain torture but this was truely hell.

He saw Dupain-Cheng sitting alone on the stairs, drawing within her sketchpad. He wondered how a girl like her, who always seemed to be involved in other’s lives (for the better) was ignoring all of the comments about her. She felt his focus centre on her, eyes flicking up to meet his, she provided him with a small wave before continuing to draw.

Jon nudged him with an elbow to his ribs and dragged him off to the side, into the boy’s locker rooms. Jon scowled at the door, “It’s a mad house out there. You’ve heard what some people are saying right?”

“Why would I care about these imbeciles?”

Jon jabbed Damian in the chest, causing the demon to stumble. Green eyes darted from blue eyes to the tan finger. “You care when lies hurt people you care about.”

The day began to rapidly decline once the two dance partners took their seats, next to each other. They had both been placed up the back of the class and them sitting together hadn’t been a problem until now apparently. She wasn’t even safe when the teacher started their lecture, whispers and glances were cast towards them. Once the two got to biology it was better, Ms Mendeleiev was a strict teacher and was able to control the class.

Everybody talks

But the recess came. When the bell rang she slowly started packing up her equipment, Alix and Max (who she shared biology with) waited for her; she watched as the Ice Prince left through the door. She knew she didn’t need to be concerned about her friends joining in with the gossiping, if anything they would dispel people and tell them to ‘Mind their own fucking business’ because this whole situations is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.

She did receive some slight teasing from Alix about being a Disney princess, but Marinette quipped back about the skater’s fairytale story being ‘Pinknette, the Geek and the Beast’. The three met up with the other two of their group, they had just come from geography. Kim was complaining that Argentina was a state in America.

“That’s Arkansas you idiot!” Chloe shrieked, lightly hitting his arm with her white handbag. Max held his head in his hand as he approached, how had his tutoring sessions failed so badly?

Chloe turned to Marinette, a smile forming from her glare. The blonde examined the designer’s clothing, nodding. “You look like you are about to have a hot girl summer.”

Marinette’s face burned, the tips of her ears coated in red. Alix chuckled and nudged her shoulder.

Everybody talks

“Look at her, she is so desperate for his attention that she probably copied those designs.”

“Why do you think he danced with her anyways? Maybe she has something on him? I mean, she forces him to sit next to her in class, who knows what else she has done.”

What. The. Fuck.

Chloe glowered towards Lila’s posy. “We have a fucking seating plan, those cretins-“ She made a motion to storm over but was caught by the ravenette, looking back to Mari, her rage decreased from a boil to a simmer.

“No Chlo. It’s fine, it’s not worth it.”

Everybody talks... back

The group walked out to the school’s front steps, it was a mad house... a mad courtyard? Students sitting on the stairs, on the grass and standing around mingling, all of them now were staring at her. She held her backpack close to her chest (she had swapped her signature coin-bag purse for the pastel pink bag), pretending its a shield. Her friends circled around her becoming an obstacle to prevent their stares. If people were afraid of a scowling Kim then they don’t know the scorn of Chloe or Alix’s bite. And Max, sweet quiet Max.... you better hope he doesn’t have blackmail on you (he probably does), he can dismantle your life with a single anonymous post.

Rushed footsteps approached them. The group was broken apart by a rude Wayne boy, he swept Mari away from the school and the gossip crowds within. Her four friends shouted at him and he kept walking, shooting a glare at them in response. He kept pushing Marinette forward with a hand placed on the small of her back, her backpack was now swung over his other shoulder.

They ended up in her favourite alcove. She had brought him here with the other Gotham transfers for a native’s tour of Paris. It had always been her safe place to be creative.

It started with a whisper (everybody talks, everybody talks)

“My apologises for our rushed departure but you seemed to want to get out of their anyhow.” His gruff tone danced through the silence, his head still peaking around the corner; watching for any unwelcome guests.

“Thank you.” She whispered, her voice almost being carried off by the gentle wind. A genuine smile illustrated upon her face.

“We weren’t able to converse after the events of the other night. I would like to formally apologise once more for my actions causing this adverse reaction. If I had kn-“

“You don’t need to apologise!” She squeaked, hiding her eyes behind her fisted hand. Her shoulders curled inwards as she tried to make herself seem as small as possible, a side effect of her common use of her secondary miraculous form: Multimouse.

“I chose to dance with you, you don’t need to apologise for my own actions.” He stared at her with confusion. He had taken the blame so she wouldn’t need to do so herself; but she had taken it anyways. He had given her an out. Why does she always take the blame, even for things out of her control?

“But if I hadn’t danced with you then you wouldn’t have been the focus of the entire school.”

Marinette stepped forward, her eyes hardened and blazing. “Damian Friday night I went there out of obligation to my friends, I didn’t want to be there. But dancing with you? That was the highlight of my week, probably my month too. I enjoyed our time together.” Her face softened, lips twitched downwards ever so slightly. “I don’t regret anything about that night, but do you?”

He was bad at comfort. Everyone in his family avoided him when they were in need, he plainly didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t visibly upset but he sensed that she is disappointed that he apparently didn’t share the same opinion of the night. The only thing he regretted about that night was letting Jon call him a coward, but then again if he didn’t he never would have danced with Dupa- Marinette.

He picked up her clenched hand, the tension in her body alleviated at his embrace. He remembered how Grayson would apologise to Kor’i or how his father interacted with Ms Kyle. He brought their hands up and placed a kiss upon her knuckles.

And that was when I kissed her (everybody talks, everybody talks)

“I do not regret anything either—“ he cleared his throat, “In fact, I’d appreciate if we would be able to interact more, especially outside of that cesspit.”

Was he...?

It didn’t matter.

She smiled the same dazzling smile she gave him at the dance. She nodded while laughing, “I’d love that.”

Everybody talks

The two stay talking, hidden within their secret alcove for the rest of the day. She texted her parents to say she was with a friend and would be back later that night. Damian didn’t bother texting his family, Marinette knew he had to be back soon due to his dorm’s curfew.

The sun was setting at they walked back together, he did the gentlemanly thing and dropped her off at her bakery door. She could see her mother behind the register inconspicuously looking over at the two of them. Damian’s lips quirked upwards, she was satisfied with his kinda-smile.

He walked back, hands in pockets and a neutral expression upon his face instead of a scowl. He reached his door and took his keys, he found that it was already open. Damn.

His family was splayed out within his two roomed dorm. Todd and Drake were fighting over a place to sit on his bed, whilst his father sat at his desk, watching the commotion. The three of them turned to him as he enter the room, they were the only family members able to attend on short notice; Cain had a ballet audition, Gordon & Brown had concert tickets for tomorrow, Grayson had to take care of Mar’i while Kor’i was on Tamaran and Alfred stayed to ensure no one died during their night time activities.

“We need to talk Damian.” His father stood, leaning onto the desk chair. “The school called and said you had an unexcused absence for half the day. Where were you Damian?”

Damian stared into his father’s eyes. He was fifteen, almost an adult, but was treated like he was ten again.

“I was with a friend.”

“Probably the girl from the dance. Marinette, right?” Todd mocked him. Damian snapped his head in the direction of his bed, glaring at both his brothers.

“That’s what I want to talk about with you Damian. Now I don’t know her personally but from what we’ve discovered through our investigation we have some concerns. What’s happened Damian?”

The youngest Wayne’s glare shifted off of his brothers to the floor, and then finally to his father; his family sitting in wait for his answer. Straightening his posture, his shoulders clicked as he rolled then back. His statement’s tone was sure and steady, “Everybody talks father.”

Everybody talks... back

#maribat #marinette x damian #mlb x dc #batfam salt #batfam is concerned #Daminette #the aftermath of ‘Like I did with you’#everybody talks by neon trees #max kante has blackmail and will use it #Alix will bite if provoked #dc x mlb #damian wayne x marinette dupain cheng #Marinette Dupain-Cheng is a meta?#supportive Dupain-Cheng parents ❤️

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storiesforallfandoms · 4 years ago

Text

private ~ eminem

word count: 1445

request?: yes!

“hellooo🥺i was wondering if i could request an imagine for eminem. Maybe where the reader (female) is also a singer and she posts a cute picture of them together by accident and fans go crazy since she’s very private and tells Em and so they reveal they‘ve been dating for like two years. feel free to change it if you need to. Love your writing, i hope you have a nice day 🤍🤍”

description: in which they’re both very private about their personal lives, until she accidentally posts a picture of the two of them

pairing: eminem x female!reader

warnings: swearing

masterlist

Before my career took off, I had a personal Instagram account that was private. It was for my friends and family and that was it. When I started to really become famous, and people started looking up my social media, I decided to make a public account just for fans to follow.

I wasn’t a very public person. I liked my privacy, but I also liked to share some of my personal life with friends and family. One of these things that I liked to share was my relationship with Marshall.

We had met through mutual friends and hit it off immediately. He met my family, I met his daughters, and within a few months, we were basically living with one another. I loved Marshall, and I loved to show him off. However, we were both very private people, meaning any showing off I did was always on my personal social media accounts, not my public ones.

On a rare night that we both had off, Marshall decided to make dinner for the two of us as a stay at home date. I was trying to take a picture of the meal with Marshall in the background, but of course he refused to take a good picture.

“Why do you have to be on your phone right now?” he asked. “We’re trying to have a nice date, no phones.”

“I want to take a picture of what you did for us,” I argued with him. “I want to show my family, is that okay?”

He playfully rolled his eyes at me, but didn’t say another word. I held my phone up again to take another picture, to which Marshall held up his middle finger just as I took the picture.

“Charming,” I said and rolled my eyes.

I figured it was the best I was getting, so I decided to quickly type a caption and post the picture before turning my phone off.

“It’s off,” I told him before showing him my phone. “Look, off. I’ll put it on the counter, you have me all night.”

“Thank you, that’s all I ask.”

We finished dinner and ended the night in the bedroom, as to be expected. When I woke up the next morning, I was still cuddled in Marshall’s arms. I couldn’t help but smile as I placed a gentle kiss on his cheek before slowly wiggling out of his arms.

I pulled on his discarded shirt and made my way to the kitchen to make breakfast for the two of us. As I began to cook, I realized I had left my phone off in the kitchen all night. I turned it back on, hoping that I didn’t miss anything too important the night before.

The moment my phone turned back on and connected to the wifi, I was bombarded with messages. Numerous mentions in tweets and Instagram comments, people trying to DM me on both social media platforms, multiple text messages from friends of mine all saying the same thing, “Did you mean to do this?”

I was confused. I couldn’t understand what was happening. For a moment, I started to worry that some tabloid had decided to write an article about me, or someone was trying to spread some sort of rumors about me. It wouldn’t be the first time. It wasn’t until I read the name Paul Rosenberg, Marshall’s manager, on my screen and the text message he had sent me.

“I don’t think this was on purpose, but it’s been up too long for deleting it to do anything. You and Em are about to have a field day. I’ll let you break the news to him”

Attached to the text was a screenshot of the picture I had taken of Marshall the night before, along with the caption I had written, “Date night in with my love”. It wasn’t until I read the username, “(Y/F/N)official”, that I realized I had posted it on my public Instagram, not my private one.

My eyes widened as I fumbled to try and unlock my phone. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, no!”

And there it was, the picture of my loving boyfriend with a caption that confirmed our relationship. I scrolled through the comments to read everyone’s reaction. Most people were shocked, very few of my fans were aware that I even knew Marshall. Many were very happy for me, and for Marshall. And then, of course, there was a small fraction of both of our fan bases that were unhappy with our relationship.

My DMs were filled with people reacting to the picture, and my Twitter notifications were bombarded with tabloid accounts posting stories about the “surprise confirmation”, and people’s reactions to it on there.

I felt myself becoming angry and frustrated. I locked my phone and threw it onto the counter, burying my face in my hands and starting to cry. I couldn’t believe I had managed to fuck up the one private thing I had in my life. When Marshall woke up he was going to be pissed. He wasn’t one to share his personal life, and now I had outed the both of us. We’d never get privacy ever again, not from fans and definitely not from paparazzi.

I heard footsteps approaching the kitchen and quickly wiped my eyes with the sleeves of Marshall’s shirt. He appeared in the doorway of the kitchen moments later, stretching his arms out as he did so.

“Good morning,” he said. “Are you burning something?”

I remembered then that I had forgotten all about the omelette I was making. I raced over to the pan and tried to flip the, only to find it stuck to the pan, and anything that wasn’t stuck was nearly black. I turned off the stove and threw the spatula I was using in frustration, exclaiming, “God fucking dammit!”

“Hey, hey, it’s fine,” Marshall said, wrapping his arms around me. “It’s just one omelette, we can make another. We have plenty of pans.”

“It’s not just that,” I sighed, turning to face him. "Remember that picture I took of you and the dinner you made us last night?” He nodded. “I thought I posted it on my private Instagram, but I was posting so quickly that I didn’t double check before I posted it and turned off my phone and I...I posted it to my public Instagram account.”

Marshall looked at me for a moment, his face confused. The longer it took him to realize what this meant, the more I found myself bracing for the moment he realized.

“Okay?” he said. “What does that mean?”

“It means I accidentally outed our relationship, Marshall,” I said. “Everyone knows. Nearly half the tabloid news sites have written fucking articles about it at this point, my social media has been bombarded with messages, I’m sure yours has too - ”

“I don’t give a fuck about being all those messages,” he said with a shrug. “I have my notifications off, and you should, too, if it’s going to bother you that much.”

“The messages aren’t bothering me!” I snapped, my frustration with myself erupting once again. “What’s bothering me is the fact that I outed our relationship by accident. Marshall, I fucked us over here! Because of me, we can never have any privacy ever again. We can’t go out on the down low, fuck, we probably can’t even leave the house right now cause there’s probably people outside! And it really fucking sucks cause...I felt so normal in our relationship. For a while, I forgot I was under everyone’s watchful eye and all I cared about was you.”

Marshall took me in his arms and held me tightly as I began to cry. He ran his fingers through my hair, kissing the top of my head as I let out my frustration.

“You haven’t fucked us over,” he told me. “Yeah, I wanted to keep this private, too, but I don’t care if the world knows about us. We don’t have to share every detail of our relationship, but I don’t mind if we get caught holding hands, or even just spending time together. At least everyone will know that you’re mine.”

I pushed away from his embrace to look up at him. “You’re not mad at me?”

He wiped away my tears with his thumbs and cupped my face. “Of course not. You didn’t do it on purpose, it’s fine baby. We’ll get through this, it’s not the end of the world.”

I smiled and leaned forward to kiss him. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too. Let’s go get some breakfast, I’m starving.”

#eminem #eminem imagine #eminem x reader #marshall mathers #marshall mathers imagine #marshall mathers x reader #imagine #one shot #request

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ofieugogyshz · 5 years ago

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I showed my bff this post

GODS HE WOULD DO THAT INTENTIONALLY SOMETIMES JUST TO SEE MY REACTION this is how he teases me ;~;

Actually jokes on him I don't know anything that came out after 2010

[I really couldn't recall if that was a real thing or not or if my friend was making shit up fndhdhd]

[[His response probably would have been to be like "oh wait you actually don't know that one..." Or something like that if it was a game]]

Whenever my husband and I are texting/using IM service, I talk like I normally do [keyspam, CAPS LOCK, acronyms, etc, typical internet dialect], and he usually still writes out messages in full excepting a few things [he does a lot of work, so it stuck to his personal messaging; i do a lot of chatting, ergo...]

But also some fun ideas just came to mind;;;

Me: "DKDNDKDJDHSVDHS OH MY GOD--" *goes off in caps lock about whatever*

Lance: "okay, sweetie. You don't need to capslock. I can hear you from over here" [he's like, a whole region or two away]

See also:

Me: >:(

Lance: :-)

Me: oh my god please don't.

Lance: What? D-:

Me: LANCE I SWEAR TO ARCEUS

Lance: :-(

Me: STOP USING THE NOSE EMOJI FJDNZBSJS YOU KNOW HOW MUCH IT MAKES ME UNCOMFORTABLE, I KNOW YOU'RE DOING IT INTENTIONALLY

Lance: I have no idea what you're talking about. :-/

Me: i want a divorce

Lance: Please don't joke about things like that. You know I don't like those jokes. :-(

Me: LANCE. I WILL END YOU WHEN YOU COME BACK.

#so we've got carbon dating jokes #we've got senior citizen jokes #now we've got this...#he's only a few years older than me what gives ;;#[probably lack of usage/time to use stuff]#[he makes an instagram only bc i did and only remembers to post if i tell him to]#[he doesn't have a tumblr (that i'm aware of) and his twitter gets used more than insta]#[he has a private/locked twitter which he uses to follow our family and friends] [and a public one bc. champion]#[his latest post on his official/public one is the pictures of him shaking hands with leon and holding up his hand #to announce him as the world champion]#[that happened a few months ago so that's how often he gets to post on his public]#[his priv is just. cute shit and like what his insta is/should be. he doesn't post anything personal on there bc. again. private person]#[but sometimes he'll post stuff about whatever's going on. also we look cute bc i'll randomly be like #'i miss @wyvernjustice :('#and he'll tweet back 'i miss you too'#ncnxhdhdj OH NOOO I JUST MADE MY HEART BLOW UP WITH BALLOONS OR SOMETHING AT THAT #tag talk #i rly don't wanna lose that last thing so also #prompts #i just...f hdhdhdhd anyways we're that cute twitter couple #and sometimes we'll bicker about inconsequential things on there in a way that's obvs we're joking #but our family and friends know us and it's adorable #the other cute stuff is he'll post pictures of his pokemon and training and matches he's having #sometimes we'll post selfies but it's only to his acct even tho i'll post the same pic to my unlocked insta #[but the viewership is different...]#anyways that's about it for my tag babbling! if you made it this far congrats #have a gold star

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dustedmagazine · 4 years ago

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Ian Mathers’ 2020: We’re stuck inside our own machines

I’ve had a song I loved in high school and haven’t thought much about since stuck in my head. The song “Apparitions” by the Matthew Good Band is a fine example of the alt rock of the late 90s; if you grew up then but somewhere down in the states (or elsewhere) instead of my southern Ontario you may well have your regional equivalents, and like this one they may not resonate terribly strongly outside of their time and place. It popped back into my head after a long time recently and of course 2020 has changed it a little. A song that as a teen I felt keenly as about loneliness (albeit also about how technology can feed into that) of course now plays on my nerves as another small piece of art about the way that most of us (those scared and/or responsible anyway) have only that relatively narrow, technologically mediated connection to the people we love. All of us, artists and listeners alike, are trying to fit our feelings and art and selves down these little connections, with some success.

On a personal level, 2020 wound up being stressful in ways we couldn’t have predicted even after the pandemic hit. In circumstances that could have seen governments on this continent support those unable to work (and those who shouldn’t have to), support those workers who are truly essential, support workers and renters and even landlords and small businesses, instead we got a near-total abeyance of those governments using the resources we provide them with to save any of us. On a personal level my wife and I were lucky enough to be able to work from home (not that it didn’t come with its own forms of stress, and now that I’m off until January I have several work/stress-related illnesses to recover from) but still saw friends and loved ones lose good, used-to-be-sustainable livings overnight, saw family businesses succumb to a near-total absence of effective government support after months of trying to keep above water, etc.

It is probably no surprise that this is not a situation conducive to listening to music, let alone writing about it; I have deliberately and happily kept busy on behind the scenes stuff at Dusted that I could still manage but looking, at the end of the year, at the amount I managed to actually create is demoralizing if not at all shocking. I’m not sure I think next year will be ‘better’ in many important ways, although at our job there is a growing feeling among coworkers that next year has to have some work/life balance because 2020 was, maybe more than anything else, unsustainable.

That’s not to say I didn’t spend a lot of time and emotion on music this year, and if nothing else constant sleep deprivation, stress, and panic meant I was probably open to being deeply moved by all sorts of art even more than normally (it’s gotten to the point where I can’t even read a sad or moving twitter thread out loud to my wife without getting teary, which is kind of… nice?). Funnily enough the band that did the most to keep me sane didn’t really put out anything in 2020. Personal favorite, Low, instead started, in early April, getting on Instagram with something they called on whim “It’s Friday I’m in Low.” With one brief break they have now done by my count at least 35 shows (catalogued here, by the way), every Friday at about 4 my time.

Admittedly it’s easier for Low to pull this off than some bands, since the 2/3 of the trio that sing are a married couple (they’ve had a couple of socially-distanced backyard shows with bassist Steve Garrington, but he’s mostly been isolating elsewhere). These shows have seen the band’s Alan Sparhawk take a mid-set break to do follow-up phone interviews with the acts featured in the COVID-curtailed touring bands series Vansplainingthat they started on YouTube, or just to give a tour round their vegetable garden and talk tips. It’s seen Alan and Mimi Parker draw on their impressive, 25+ year body of work (averaging 4-5 songs a set, I don’t think they’ve repeated themselves yet) and talk a bit between songs about pandemics, politics, song choices, and whether Alan should grab his bike helmet this time.

They’re not the only musicians out there speaking love and sanity (and playing music) into the strange digital interzone filled with hate and disinformation where we’ve all been forced to gather while locked down, but they were and the most consistent and steady signal being emitted each week. No matter how tired I was from work or what new symptoms I’d developed or what horrific thing I read into the news, even if I had to take an emergency nap while it was actually airing, every Friday the show was there. Once things do return to something more like normal, it’s one of the few things I’ll unambiguously miss about this weird-ass year.

So if that makes an argument for Low as my band of the year (admittedly again… it’s not like Double Negative has aged poorly, either), that does a disservice to those 2020 records I did connect with; even if there are still literally dozens I have to go through, many of which I expect to love, my top picks this year (if as unrankable by me as always) hit me as hard as any top pick in recent years did. So here I present a quick and informal top 5, which the rest of my top 20 following in alphabetical order. Here’s hoping for more time and space in 2021 for music, and even more than that, for more support for those who need it from those who could have been providing it all this time. (The Matthew Good Band, incidentally, always did best with their ballads. “Strange Days” is another I’ve had in my head these days; the image of moving “backwards, into a wall of fire” has stuck with me since the 90s and it’s never felt more grimly appropriate.)

Greet Death �� New Hell

New Hell by Greet Death

This one is, in some sense, cheating; it came out November 2019. But that just means it’s the latest winner of my personal Torres Prize for Ian Being Late to the Party (so named because becoming slightly obsessed with Torres’ Sprinter just after I sent in my 2015 list was the first time I noticed that one of my favorite records of each year tends to get picked up by me just after I call it quits on the year, no matter how long I try to wait). This very doom and gloom slowcore/metal/(whatever, just know it’s heavy) trio at first felt very much like my beloved Cloakroom (whose Time Well has also won a Torres Prize) but sure enough nuances revealed themselves. Back in February it felt almost a little too negative, but then the rest of 2020 happened. And the extended burns of “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and the title track remain searing.

Holy Fuck — Deleter

youtube

Probably the record I’ve been trying to write about the longest in 2020, and the one I’m most disappointed in myself that I just couldn’t get the requisite paragraphs together. It’s a wonderful effort from the consistently great Toronto resolutely human-created (and —mediated) dance music quartet, one that both feels like a summation of everything they do well, and with the addition of some outside voices (including strong turns from the singers of both Hot Chip and Liars) a step forward at the same time.

Spanish Love Songs — Brave Faces Everyone

Brave Faces Everyone by Spanish Love Songs

As the year got worse, this roar of defiance only got more crucial for me to hear every so often; I was a big enough fan of it, even after writing it up for Dusted, that when they solicited fan footage for a subsequent music video you may just be able to get a glimpse of me in it. (I’m the one in a “No Tories” t-shirt.) My punk rock-loving twin brother was the one who introduced me to Spanish Love Songs and we were supposed to spend an evening in June screaming along to them live in a packed, sweaty room. I need that in my life again.

Julianna Barwick — Healing Is a Miracle

Healing Is A Miracle by Julianna Barwick

It’s a sign of what 2020 has been like here that even just this album title leaves bruises, and while I privately worried Barwick would have a hard time following up 2016’s sublime Will (probably my favorite record that year), it seems that continuing to take whatever downtime she needs to keep focusing and refining her particular muse has once again yielded amazing results. Anyone who thinks they know what a Barwick track sounds like should really check out, say, “Flowers”, but much of this record absolutely sounds like Barwick, just even better than before. She also boasted my wife and I's favorite streaming concert of 2020, an absolutely gorgeous rendition of this album with Mary Lattimore showing up.

Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher

Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers

I joked on Twitter recently that I have far too nice a dad (and far too good a relationship with him) to be as obsessed as I am with Phoebe Bridgers’ “Kyoto”, but here we are. Like most of her generation, Bridgers’ social media presence ranges from shit-posting to inscrutable, but even though things are often just as hard to figure out in her beautiful songs (as they often are in life), there’s an emotional clarity to them that can just grab you deep down. Couple that with seriously impressive songcraft and the progress from her already astounding debut Stranger in the Alps and more than anyone else in 2020 I’m excited to see just where the hell Phoebe Bridgers is going to go, because it feels like she’s talented and hardworking enough to go just about anywhere and drag a lot of our hearts with her.

Other Favorites

Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis — Invisible Cities II

Anastasia Minster — Father

Deftones — Ohms

Hum — Inlet

Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song

Mesarthim — The Degenerate Era

Perfume Genius — Set My Heart On Fire Immediately

Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today

Rachel Kiel — Dream Logic

The Ridiculous Trio — The Ridiculous Trio Plays the Stooges

Sam Amidon — Sam Amidon

Shabason, Krgovich & Harris — Philadelphia

Stars Like Fleas — DWARS Session: Live on Radio VPRO

Well Yells — We Mirror the Dead

Yves Tumour — Heaven to a Tortured Mind

Five Reissues/Compilations/etc.

Aix Em Klemm — Aix Em Klemm

Bardo Pond — Adrop/Circuit VIII

Charles Curtis — Performances & Recordings 1998-2018

Coil — Musick to Play in the Dark

Hot Chip — LateNightTales

Ian Mathers

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ryadel · 3 years ago

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Should you be worried about your passwords getting hacked?

Most IT security specialists define passwords as "the keys to our Digital Home": that's a pretty good metaphore, especially considering that our "digital home" is getting bigger as the time passes (and the technology advances). In the latest few decades we learned how to protect our precious devices (computers and, most recently, mobile devices) to prevent unauthorized access to them and their data... But, with the advent of the Internet and Internet of Things, the house became an infinite amount of different rooms: from online banking to food delivery services, from cloud-based repositories to remotely accessible Virtual Private Networks, we were literaly stormed by those "keys". At the same time, since technology runs faster than our ability to assimilate it, most internet users - as well as business companies - still use passwords in a totally insecure way today: to continue with our initial metaphore, nobody would leave the key on the door, or feel comfortable using the same key to open multiple doors, or use a weak lock & key combination, right? However, when using passwords, most of us often do just that. In the initial part of this post we'll try to summarize the most common mistakes that people do in choosing a password; then we'll briefly review the most common ways used by hackers to stole passwords; last but not least, we'll share some suggestions and best practices to secure our passwords and improve our account's security.

Common Password Mistakes

The typical password mistakes can be split into three main categories: choosing a weak password, using the same password among different web sites, and insecurely storing passwords. In the following sections we'll deal with each one of them. Choosing a weak Password A weak password, as the name implies, is a password too easy to guess or to discover using automated hacking techniques (brute-force, rainbow tables, and so on). Those who thinks that this is issue is a thing of the past because nowadays the majority of IT users have been educated enough to avoid choosing trivial passwords should check the SplashData's Most Used (and Worst) Password of 2017 infographics, which could easily change their mind. Here a list of the top 10: - 123456 (proudly keeping the first place since 2013) - password - 12345678 - qwerty - 12345 - 123456789 - letmein - 1234567 - football - iloveyou Luckily enough, such situation has been mitigated by enforcing a password security policy that is already adopted by most websites - and that is mandatory for all online services that deal with money or personal data, at least in most countries. Such policies not only require a minimum length and the presence of different character types (uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters) to make them harder to guess, but also force the users to periodically change them (often every 90 or 180 days). However, choosing a weak password is still critical for those devices where such policies are not enforced yet - such as most IoT devices. Using the same Password In addition to using passwords objectively too weak, users (and company officers) often also make the mistake of using the same password for different web sites or services. The so-called "password reuse" is probably the most serious mistake we can make nowadays: if a hacker manages to hack into a website's servers (this is happened for Yahoo, LinkedIn, Sony, and countless "minor" websites) and steal the users passwords, it will definitely try to use those retrieved passwords to gain access to other services. The only thing we can do to stop such common hacking practice is to ensure that each and every account that we have has its own password. A great example of such bad practice was given during the LinkedIn data breach (2012), through which Mark Zuckerberg's LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest accounts were all hacked because he used the same password for all of them. Such verification process can be automated using dedicated tools, such as Shard - a open-source command line tool that was developed to allow users to test whether a password they use for a site is used to access some of the more popular services, including Facebook. LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter or Instagram. Insecurely storing Passwords The need to use strong passwords and a different password for each website or service inevitably brings another big requirement: the need to have a "secure" mechanism for storing these passwords, since human memory won't definitely be able to keep up. And this is where the most serious security problems often occur, not only for home users yet also for most companies. Who among us has never seen those dreadful MS Excel files (or text files!) containing a huge list of passwords? And the worst thing is that those unsecure repositories are often shared among different users (family members, co-workers, and so on), meaning that they aren't protected even with the basic user authentication mechanism provided by the OS.

How passwords are hacked

The techniques used by hackers for discovering our passwords are more than one, sometimes really trivial: as we can easily see by looking at the list below, most of them leverage or exploit the bad practices that we've talked about early on. - Social Engineering: e.g. Phishing, Password Sniffing. In practice, it is we who allow ourselves to be deceived by social engineering techniques and give passwords to those who ask for them through for example messages, emails, fake sites that disguise a well-known site. - Guessing passwords: Using personal information such as name, date of birth or pet names. When this happens, sometimes the "hacker" happens to be kind of close to the "victim": a friend, neighbor, co-worker or someone that knows enough info to perform such guesses. However, thanks to the modern approach to social networks, everyone might easily know a lot of stuff about anyone else. - Brute Force Attack: Automatically testing a large number of passwords until the right one is found. There are special programs to do this (a widely used one, John the Ripper, is open source, meaning that anyone can use it). Brute-force attacks are quite expensive to pull off, which requires time and computing power, but can easily achieve the result if the password is weak enough. - Intercepting a password, for example while it is being transmitted over a network. The bad habit of communicating passwords via email is frequent: there are even sites that, as soon as we register, send us a polite welcome message containing username and password displayed "in clear". Too bad that email is not a safe tool. - Shoulder surfing: a social engineering variant. It basically means "observing someone from behind" (i.e. "shoulder") while typing the password. - Using a KeyLogger. Keyloggers are malware programs that record everything typed on the keyboard, then transmit this data to the hacker who installed the keylogger. There are also hardware-based keyloggers that require direct access to the victim's computer. - Passwords stored in an insecure way, like handwritten on a piece of paper, or saved on a word file (see above). - By compromising a database containing a large number of user passwords, then using this information to attack other systems where users have reused the same passwords ("credential stuffing"). How to secure our Password Securing our passwords in order to avoid most - if not all - of the hacking attemps listed above is not impossible and is a goal that can be achieved by anyone. In a nushell, all we need to do is to apply two best practices: - Write strong and unique Password - Securely store your Passwords Both of them are equally important and must be followed for each and every password, without exceptions. How to write a strong Password A strong password is characterized by the following elements: length and character types used. - Regarding the length, it is strongly recommended to use at least 12 characters. - As for the character types, just let the math guide you: we have 10 numeric types (0-9), 52 letter types (26 lowercase + 26 uppercase), and more or less 33 special character types easy to type because they're directly accessible from a typical keyboard (such as #, &, %, ?, ^, and so on). To summarize all that, in total we have 95 character types available: with that in mind, we can say that a good password should have at least one character coming from each one of these types, because by increasing the types of characters, the number of possible combinations grows exponentially, thus making harder (and time-consuming) to "brute-force" the resulting password. How to store your Passwords As we aready said early on, using a different password for each website or service means that we can't rely to our memory to remember them all: at the same time, using insecure data stores such as MS Excel files or text files is definitely not an option. The best way to tackle (and fix) this problem is to use a Password Manager tool: a dedicated software that acts as a vault where you can securely store all your passwords, as well as your usernames and/or credential info, with the big advantage of having them in a single place. This basically means that you'll only need to remember the password required to access it, which is often very strong and can be further protected by other authentication factors (fingerprint, SMS, OTP, mobile tokens, and so on). The most advanced Password Managers also provide a good level of integration with the Operating System and browsers, meaning that they can even “automatically” (yet securely) fill in your credentials whenever you log in to a site (or an app) using your desktop or mobile device. IMPORTANT: Password Manager apps shouldn't be confused in any way with the "password storage" features offered by most modern browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and MS Edge, that prompts you to store your credentials and fill out the forms for you, unless they are part of a bigger product that grants the fundamental features that a good Password Manager needs to have: centralized and distribuited repository, access from multiple devices, data encryption of the whole vault, 2-factor authentication support, and so on.

Conclusion

That's it, at least for now: we hope that this post will help most users and companies to increase their online security by securely choosing and storing their password. Read the full article

#BruteForce #InsecurePasswords #PasswordManager #Passwords #RainbowTable #StrongPasswords

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Friday, January 15, 2021

DC locks down a week before inauguration (AP) All through downtown Washington, the primary sound for several blocks was the beeping of forklifts unloading more fencing. There were no cars or scooters and seemingly no tourists Wednesday, just the occasional jogger and multiple construction crews at work. The U.S. Capitol that proved such a soft target last week was visible only through lines of tall, black fence. Two blocks from the White House, a group of uniformed National Guard troops emerged from a tour bus and headed into a hotel as a state of lockdown descended on Washington that will last through the Jan. 20 inauguration. More than 15,000 National Guardsmen from multiple states, some of them armed, will be in Washington. “Clearly we are in uncharted waters,” said Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser. The FBI has warned that armed protests by violent Trump supporters were being planned in all 50 state capitals as well as in Washington for the days leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Between the pandemic and the security threat, Bowser is flat-out asking people not to come to the District of Columbia for the inauguration.

Republican Party faces rage from both pro- and anti-Trump voters (Reuters) After riots at the U.S. Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters, the Republican Party is facing defections from two camps of voters it can’t afford to lose: those saying Trump and his allies went too far in contesting the election of Democrat Joe Biden—and those saying they didn’t go far enough, according to new polling and interviews with two dozen voters. And the choice confronting party leaders as they ponder a renewed impeachment effort—whether to continue backing Trump or make him a pariah—will almost certainly cost the party voters it needs to win future elections, Republican party officials and strategists say.

A tinderbox (The Media Today) Sam Lessin, an early Facebook staffer, wrote at The Information that “the move by social networks to deplatform President Trump last week was the right call.” But he added that the moment will be “remembered as a watershed moment for the history of free speech and the globally open internet. It has the potential to be a tinderbox that undoes the core of the internet as we know it.” Lessin says the moves will “create intense pressure to censor private messaging (starting with email) and that other countries will “now have a very legitimate argument they need their own control” of information platforms, and even the internet itself.

Defiance of virus dining bans grows as restaurants flounder BORING, Ore. (AP)—A line formed out the door during the lunch rush at the Carver Hangar, a family-owned restaurant and sports bar, and waitresses zipped in and out of the kitchen trying to keep up with orders as customers backed up in the lobby. Indoor dining has been banned in much of Oregon for nearly two months, but the eatery 20 miles southeast of Portland was doing a booming business—and an illegal one. The restaurant’s owners, Bryan and Liz Mitchell, fully reopened Jan. 1 in defiance of Democratic Gov. Kate Brown’s COVID-19 indoor dining ban in their county. “We’re not going to back down because our employees still need to eat, they still need that income,” said Bryan Mitchell, as customers ate at tables spaced 6 feet apart. “The statement that we’re making is, ‘Every life is essential. You have the right to survive. Nobody should tell you what you can and cannot do to provide for your family.’” Even as coronavirus deaths soar, a growing number of restaurants in states across the country are reopening in defiance of strict COVID-19 rules that have shut them down for indoor dining for weeks, or even months. Restaurants can serve people outside or offer carry-out, but winter weather has crippled revenues from patio dining.

Colombia struggles to keep social leaders safe (AP) Just taking a walk in the streets of Colombia’s capital can feel dangerous for Luz Nelly Santana. The Afro-Colombian community leader always wears a bulletproof vest. And she’s followed by a bodyguard assigned by the government. “I get death threats on the phone every month,” Santana said, “and once a man entered my office and said he was going to kill me.” Santana, who runs an organization that helps community leaders fleeing violence to settle in Bogota, is one of more than 3,700 activists given some sort of protection from Colombia’s government. The country is widely seen as one of the world’s most dangerous places to be a community leader or advocate for human rights or environmental issues. Last year 120 community leaders were murdered in Colombia according to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. Decades of bloody civil conflict involving government forces, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries linked to landowners and powerful drug trafficking groups have created an atmosphere in which many factions feel little hesitation at trying to kill or intimate those who oppose them.

‘At 6 p.m., life stops’: Europe uses curfews to fight virus (AP) As the wan winter sun sets over France’s Champagne region, the countdown clock kicks in. Laborers stop pruning the vines as the light fades at about 4:30 p.m., leaving them 90 minutes to come in from the cold, change out of their work clothes, hop in their cars and zoom home before a 6 p.m. coronavirus curfew. Forget about any after-work socializing with friends, after-school clubs for children or doing any evening shopping beyond quick trips for essentials. Police on patrol demand valid reasons from people seen out and about. “At 6 p.m., life stops,” says Champagne producer Alexandre Prat. Trying to fend off the need for a third nationwide lockdown that would further dent Europe’s second-largest economy and put more jobs in danger, France is instead opting for creeping curfews. Big chunks of eastern France, including most of its regions that border Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, face 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. restrictions on movement. Overnight curfews have become the norm in swaths of Europe but the 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew in 25 regions of eastern France is the most restrictive anywhere in the European Union’s 27 nations. Others countries’ curfews all start later and often finish earlier.

Facing New Outbreaks, China Places Over 22 Million on Lockdown (NYT) When a handful of new coronavirus cases materialized this month in a province surrounding Beijing, the Chinese authorities bolted into action. They locked down two cities with more than 17 million people, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. They ordered a crash testing regime of nearly every resident there, which was completed in a matter of days. They shut down transportation and canceled weddings, funerals and, most significantly, a provincial Communist Party conference. By this week the lockdowns expanded to include another city on the edge of Beijing, Langfang, as well as a county in Heilongjiang, a northeastern province. Districts in Beijing itself, the Chinese capital, also shut down. More than 22 million people in all have been ordered to remain inside their homes—double the number affected last January when China’s central government locked down Wuhan. The flare-ups remain small compared with the devastation facing other countries, but they threaten to undercut the success the country’s Communist Party has had in subduing the virus, allowing its economy to surge back after last year’s slump and its people to return to something close to normal lives.

The rise of Chinese financial technology (Foreign Affairs) China’s emerging dominance in financial technology, known as “fintech,” poses a fundamental problem for the United States. Washington cannot trust that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will harness its growing influence in financial markets for the benefit of all. More likely, Beijing will use fintech to occupy the high ground in global commerce, bolster its surveillance state, and lay the groundwork to challenge the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The rise of Chinese fintech companies threatens to strengthen the world’s most pervasive surveillance state. The so-called data exhaust from billions of digital transactions supplements existing data from facial recognition, search histories, and social network connections, furnishing the CCP with GPS time and location stamps, transaction histories, travel logs, bank account details, and more. Together, this information allows Chinese authorities to closely monitor and control specific individuals and communities by reducing or canceling access to bank accounts, freezing travel routes, and denying entry to specific locations. Ominously, financial authorities in Hong Kong have recently begun asking banks to report transactions to help authorities identify pro-democracy activists.

“But in America…” (Foreign Policy) Chinese state media is still focused on the dysfunction revealed by the assault on the U.S. Capitol last week. As with Soviet propaganda about U.S. racism, Chinese propaganda is most effective when it goes after genuine U.S. failings. But the media has bent the Capitol story significantly toward Beijing’s own needs. Emerging themes include the chaos of democracy, the righteousness of China’s own censorship, and that the United States is making a mistake by going after China instead of fixing its domestic problems. One theme has especially resonated, though: guns. Like most of the world, the Chinese public views the U.S. attitude toward firearms with horror. The sight of armed marchers baffles people. In China, the issue has tragic salience in the death of Yiran Fan, a talented Ph.D. student in Chicago who was killed on Jan. 9 during a gun rampage.

‘Rent-a-person who does nothing’ in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude (Mainichi/Japan) A 37-year-old Tokyo man who says he rents himself out to other people “to do nothing” has been inundated with gratitude from Twitter users. “I’m glad I was able to take a walk with someone while keeping a comfortable distance, where we didn’t have to talk but could if we wanted to,” one user wrote. Another reflected, “I had been slack about visiting the hospital, but I went because he came with me.” Shoji Morimoto has been advertising himself as a person who can “eat and drink, and give simple feedback, but do nothing more,” since June 2018, and has received over 3,000 requests. He has about 270,000 followers on Twitter. Initially he had offered his “rent-a-person who does nothing” services for free, but he now charges 10,000 yen (roughly $96) per request. People rent him for various reasons. At times he will participate in a gaming session to make up numbers, turn up to send off people who are moving away, accompany those filing for divorce, or listen to health care workers who have become mentally unwell due to their exhausting work. It may be the case that somewhere in their hearts, everyone is longing for someone who will cheer them on. It seems that this may be why the “rent-a-person who does nothing”—who doesn’t tell you to “do your best” or that they “support you,” but stays by your side in silence, has seen endless demand.

Fire destroys homes of thousands in Rohingya refugee camps—UNHCR (Reuters) A huge fire swept through the Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh in the early hours of Thursday, the United Nations said, destroying homes belonging to thousands of people. The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said more than 550 shelters home to around 3,500 people were either totally or partially destroyed in the blaze, as well as 150 shops and a facility belonging to a non-profit organization. More than a million Rohingya live in the mainland camps in southern Bangladesh, the vast majority having fled Myanmar in 2017 in a military-led crackdown the U.N said was executed with genocidal intent, charges Myanmar denies.

Lebanon begins all-day curfew as virus spins out of control (AP) Lebanese authorities began enforcing an 11-day nationwide shutdown and round the clock curfew Thursday, hoping to limit the spread of coronavirus infections spinning out of control after the holiday period. For the first time, residents were required to request a one-hour permit to be allowed to leave the house for “emergencies,” including going to the bakery, pharmacist, doctor, hospital or airport. Authorities came under pressure to take a tougher approach after the country’s hospitals ran out of beds with daily infections reaching an all-time high of 5,440 cases last week in the country of nearly 6 million people. Even before the coronavirus, Lebanon was going through an unprecedented economic and financial crisis that has seen its national currency and bank sector collapse and locked depositors out of the savings. Hospitals, long considered among the best in the Middle East, struggled to pay staff, keep equipment running and secure necessary medical supplies as dollars grew scarce. Furthermore, the country has been without a government since the old one resigned in the wake of the catastrophic Aug. 4 explosion at Beirut port, which put a further strain on hospitals, inundating them with injured. At least three hospitals were destroyed.

Central African Republic soldiers repel rebels at capital (AP) Security forces in Central African Republic repelled attacks by rebels trying to seize the capital early Wednesday after intense fighting on the city’s outskirts, officials said, in a major escalation of violence that has rocked the country since last month. At least one Rwandan peacekeeper has been killed, and another injured, according to the U.N. mission in the country. At least 30 rebels have been killed, according to Prime Minister Firmin Ngrebada. The rebels are protesting the re-election on Dec. 27 of President Faustin-Archange Touadera. Following the Jan. 4 announcement of Touadera’s victory, the rebel coalition threatened to take the capital. They had also taken towns in other parts of the country before the election. The army is supported in its battle against the rebels by forces from Rwanda, Russia, France and the United Nations.

Lack of Tiny Parts Disrupts Auto Factories Worldwide (NYT) Automakers braced for turmoil when the pandemic hit. They expected supply chain disruptions and plummeting sales. But they never figured that a year later one of their biggest problems would be PlayStations. Strong demand for gaming systems, personal computers and other electronics by a world stuck indoors has sucked up supplies of semiconductors, forcing carmakers around the world to scramble for the chips that have become as essential to mobility as gasoline or steel. Virtually no carmaker has been spared. Toyota Motor has shut down production lines in China. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles temporarily stopped production at plants in Ontario and Mexico. Volkswagen has warned of production problems at factories in China, Europe and the United States. Ford Motor said last week that it was idling a Louisville, Ky., factory for a week because of the shortage. When Covid-19 hit, automakers slashed orders for chips in anticipation of plunging sales. At the same time, semiconductor makers shifted their production lines to meet surging orders for chips used in products like laptop computers, webcams, tablets and 5G smartphones. “Consumer electronics exploded,” said Dan Hearsch, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners. “Everybody and their brother wanted to buy an Xbox and PlayStation and laptops, while automotive shut down. Then automotive came back faster than expected, and that’s where you get into this problem.”

#headlines #news

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thefaeriereview · 4 years ago

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Tour: A Perfect Storm

https://ift.tt/3nKciN7

A PERFECT STORM

Mike Martin Mystery

Sgt. Windflower is back, untangling another swirling mystery, this one bringing the meth crisis and biker gangs to the quiet Newfoundland town of Grand Bank, feeling the sting of their deadly tentacles reaching all the way from Las Vegas. He’s working with his familiar crew of RCMP characters – but wait, are some of the faces changing? New challenges for Jones, an unknown side of Smithson reveals itself, and what ever happened to Tizzard? In the midst of putting the pieces of the puzzle together, Windflower and his beloved Sheila also find themselves navigating sorrows and surprises on the family front.

Come back to Grand Bank for more fun, food and cool, clean, Canadian crime fiction with Sgt. Windflower Mysteries.

MY REVIEW

5 out of 5

A Perfect Storm is a great mystery. I really enjoyed this cozy mystery following various members of the RCMP stationed out of Newfoundland. Although this is a cozy mystery, it is far from fluffy. There's a wonderful balance between the hard and rough parts and the softer, sweeter side of life. At first I wasn't sure how much I would like the focus changing between characters, but Martin handled it seamlessly, and I was quickly lost in the story. This definitely made me want to read the other mysteries in the series!

Amazon → https://amzn.to/36sHEBz

Chapter One

Eddie Tizzard passed his card over the sensor and pushed the door open. He flicked on the light. “Holy jumpins,” he said when he saw what was on the bed in his hotel room— thousands of dollars strewn around like confetti. When he looked closer, he saw something else. There, right in the middle of the bed, was a very red, very large bloodstain.

His first instinct was to run. But his years as an RCMP officer got the best of him, and he had another look around. Soon the source of the blood became obvious. It was a man in a suit lying face down in the bathroom with a visible hole in the back of his head. Tizzard should have trusted his first instinct because when he did decide to leave the room, he walked directly into the path of who he would later find out was the head of hotel security.

He was remembering all of this as he sat in a holding cell with a dozen other men in the Las Vegas jail. Tizzard had gone to Vegas for private detective training, having decided on a new career path after leaving the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the Mounties. Technically, he was on leave for the rest of the year, but he doubted he’d ever return to his old job. He’d applied for and received his firearms license, but he wanted a certificate to put on the walls of his new office, that is when he got an office. That seemed very far away right now, about as far as he could get from his home in Newfoundland on the eastern tip of Canada.

He’d watched enough police shows on TV to know that he could make one phone call. But nobody had said when he could do that. The duty officer kind of smirked when he pushed him into the lock-up with his dozen new friends and told him, “Yeah, yeah, coming right up.”

Tizzard was confused but tried to look like he fit in with his fellow cell mates. They, in turn, looked like they were measuring his clothes to see if they might be a fit. As long as they don’t find out that I used to be a cop, I’ll be OK, thought Tizzard as he backed up as far as he could into a corner.

It seemed like he had waited forever, but as several of his new friends came in for a closer look, he heard his name called, “Tizzard, Tizzard.”

“That’s me,” he said and pushed by the two large men who had got the closest.

The duty cop opened the door, and Tizzard walked along the hallway to an interview room. He was pushed inside, and the door clicked shut behind him. It was a small, windowless room with a camera in the ceiling, a mirror on the wall, a single chair on one side of a table, and two on the other. Tizzard knew the drill and took a seat on the one-chair side. Then he waited, again. Feels like home, he thought. Just not my home.

On the other side of the continent Mayor Sheila Hillier was wrapping up her town council meeting and was on her way to meet Moira Stoodley who was babysitting her daughter, Amelia Louise. The meeting had been made unpleasant by a couple of contentious issues, including whether the older buildings in the downtown core of Grand Bank should be modernized or restored to maintain their historic character. But Sheila also realized that most of the tension was really about who would replace her as mayor in the election only a couple of weeks away.

Jacqueline Wilson was Sheila’s preference, but there was another candidate, Phil Bennett, who was leading the anti-tax faction of council. Every meeting, Bennett would try to disrupt things to show how influential he thought he could be, but Sheila would have none of it and would put him back in line. Bennett’s behaviour in itself was more than enough reason for her to want to leave, she thought.

Sheila had decided to go back to school part-time, eventually do an MBA once she had cleared up her scholastic records and completed the course load for an old degree program she had started several years earlier. Politics had never really been her thing, even though she was very good at it. She had only taken the mayor’s job to try to improve the town’s economy. And she had succeeded, mostly. The Town of Grand Bank’s fish plant was now operating on a regular basis with a quota for crab and the sea urchins considered a delicacy in Japan and China. The town also had a recycling factory and a solar panel fabrication plant.

Half of the town’s people wanted to not just preserve the past but to live in it. The other half wanted to blow it all up and start over. They had no use for the old and wanted everything to be modern, like the way it was in St. John’s or even nearby Marystown. It seemed there was no middle ground for the residents of Grand Bank, yet Sheila was sure you could have the best of both worlds. Getting others to agree with her, though, seemed impossible.

Sheila gathered up her things and drove to the Mug-Up, which was known through much of the province to be the best little café there was in Grand Bank. That it was the only café in Grand Bank was usually not mentioned. Sheila had owned the place years ago but gave it up after a horrific car accident left her with a slight limp and no desire to stand all day. Moira and her husband, Herb, had taken it over, and it was there that she found Amelia Louise sitting at a table with her Poppy Herb.

“Mama, mama,” she shrieked as Sheila’s heart melted. “Ook, ook.”

“I think she’s got talent,” said Herb Stoodley.

Sheila examined the crayon scrawls on the paper and murmured her approval. “It’s so nice,” she said. “Is it Lady, your doggie?” she asked, making a leap of faith based on the fact that there was one small circle on top of a large mass of scratches.

Amelia Louise smiled and nodded her head up and down emphatically. She had always been able to somehow say no, but now the 20-month-old toddler was happy to signify yes with a grand gesture.

“Well, thank you,” said Sheila. “And thank you, Herb. And here’s Moira, too. Thank you, Moira, for looking after her.”

“It’s our pleasure,” said Moira, wiping her hands on her apron. “I was just finishing off some baking.”

“Em,” said Amelia Louise. “Ook, ook,”

“I can see,” said Moira. “Has Poppy Herb been nice to you?”

“She’s like our baby, too,” said Herb. “It’s easy to be nice to her. ‘Those that do teach young babes, do it with gentle means and easy tasks.’”

“Okay, my soon-to-be-famous artist, let’s go,” said Sheila as she put on Amelia Louise’s jacket. Once outside again, Sheila noticed the November air had lost any tinge of summer warmth, and the wind was picking up, making it a bit of an adventure to walk the short distance to their house. Sheila tried to carry her daughter, but Amelia Louise was determined to walk on her own, while examining every leaf that blew their way.

When they got home, Molly the cat watched them carefully as they came up the walkway. The dog, Lady, was more directly affectionate and showed how much she had missed them both by almost knocking them over in the hall. The only one missing from the happy family was Sheila’s husband and the father of Amelia Louise, Sergeant Winston Windflower of the RCMP Grand Bank Detachment. He was at work, but Sheila expected to hear from him soon because his stomach would be rumbling any minute now, and he’d want to know what was on for dinner.

Mike Martin was born in St. John’s, NL on the east coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand. He is the author of Change the Things You Can: Dealing with Difficult People and has written a number of short stories that have been published in various publications across North America.

The Walker on the Cape was his first full fiction book and the premiere of the Sgt. Windflower Mystery Series. Other books in the series include The Body on the T, Beneath the Surface, A Twist of Fortune, and A Long Ways from Home, followed by A Tangled Web, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award as the best light mystery of the year, and Darkest Before the Dawn, which won the 2018 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award. Fire, Fog and Water was the eighth in the series. He has also published Christmas in Newfoundland: Memories and Mysteries, a Sgt. Windflower Book of Christmas past and present.

He is Past Chair of the Board of Crime Writers of Canada, a national organization promoting Canadian crime and mystery writers and a member of the Newfoundland Writing Guild and Ottawa Independent Writers.

A Perfect Storm is the latest book in the Sgt. Windflower Mystery series.

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mike54martin

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWalkerOnTheCapeReviewsAndMore

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3nKmRQb

#Blogger #pumpupyourbook #book review #Book Tour #cozy #Mystery #Mystery & Thrillers #review

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dwestfieldblog · 5 years ago

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DIFFERENT SCENES FOR DIFFERENT GENES

I scry with my third eye. Something beginning with...V...Police patrolling the parks for people in numbers of more than two. Partners in masks, holding hands in gloves and everyone suddenly vulnerable, unable to gather in packs and gain vicarious strength. Droplets on breath, float and melt into eyes and everybody keeping their distance now paranoia is no longer irrational but sensible. Hello, hope you are doing okay.

This crisis will bring out ALL the best and the worst in people, in both selfless and panic based behaviour. The imminence of a possible bad death or infecting one you love can focus the mind wonderfully on what truly matters to the individual. Adults and children are dying independent of age and previous health status or racial characteristics, remorseless and random. The chaos plague in action and it is mutating. So let's have some lively imature comedy before we get deadly serious.

There are many who will use this situation for political ends and many rabid Endtimers of apocalypse who will be rejoicing somehow that Christ will soon return and save his flock of sheep. Two recent quotes direct from Trump's twitter; 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord' (Matthew 21:1) Well...'Oh God!' is what millions cry in orgasm. 'But the Lord watches over those who fear Him, those who rely on His unfailing love'. (Psalm 33) Really? How many God fearing Christians have died so far and in all the previous plagues? As one American (or maybe hacked by Russia) site says; 'You can't hold hands with God when you are masturbating'. In other words Donald, if you are a wanker you will not get into Heaven. But I digress...

And other fundamentalists who have yet to notice that the virus is killing everyone from all groups, not just those who disagree with them. Kick them hard between the legs if they say this within earshot of you. Hard enough to stop them breeding. (Sidenote... nice to hear that many more pregnancies than normal have been logged over the last few weeks...folk staying at home with nothing better to do and subconsciously wanting to keep the population up. Arf. It is already up. 66.44 million people in the UK (of which England is 56 million)and the UK annual deathrate has been 9382 for the last five years.) Coming and going in the name of the Lord, hallelujah and pass the holy blood...

There were some people at the start of this, a doctor, a couple of journalists who started to warn about Covid 19 in December/January. They were quickly removed by the communists. The world could have had an extra five weeks to prepare and take measures. Hopefully many countries, if unable to actually sue the Chinese government for being totalitarian swine (and why not - Loss of earnings, cause of mass death, covering up facts and lying to health organisations) then the least we can all do is to stop buying ANYTHING from China. Check the labels first. The West has been outrageous in its kow-towing to a regime that machine gunned its own children from tanks, uses unwilling organ donors, transportse ethnicities of Tibetans and Muslim communities to ‘re-education’ camps. WE should have been ashamed. Now we should be angry. BOYCOTT CHINESE GOODS FOR ONE YEAR, GET THE COMMUNISTS OUT.

Speaking of which, the ‘British’ deal with Huawei...giving even the crack of a possibility that a nation with such serious issues with ‘freedom’ and murder of its own citizens should be in charge of Britain’s infrastructure for information and hospitals and surveillance and....Well...it seems...how to put this...f..ing stupid. Done only in order to ensure more investment by China in our shrinking economy. ‘When China sneezes, the world catches a cold’...the markets certainly are. But sellers of respiratory face masks made in guess where are doing well. Well you know everything is made in China...

Globally, right now, we seem to have the worst possible leaders in charge for this crisis. The weakest, craziest and the most despotic (very often all in one). China, with mass interests in Africa and South America has sold the media line that the virus is an American creation to protect their newest client base. And every single damn time Trump opens his mouth, he just makes everybody on the planet who did not vote for him, all the less likely to believe a word. Or even that he exists.

Horrible to see Michael Gove praising the medical staff in Britain for working their hearts out during this crises. He was one of the Tory MPs who voted against giving nurses a small pay rise in 2017. All but one did so, and when the vote was 'won' , the Conservatives let out a loud cheer. They cheered. Cheering now boys and girls? Many thousands of Labour supporters voted Tory in December simply because Corbyn is pointless as pointless can be and the Stalinist Momentum group trying to take over the party are bloody dangerous. I will never be a Socialist but I would truly like to hear why the posh rich boys thought it unnecessary to give a little bonus to nurses and why the bastards cheered. Unforgivable.

Boris taking cold revenge on the BBC for having had the temerity to ask him impertinent, salient questions in December...by decriminalising not paying the license fee. Succumbs to the virus after having taken three days to even organise a COBRA meeting of the highest and then shilly shallying for several weeks longer before acting to lock down the city. Enough time for the shops to be emptied in fear because Britain chose to be self isolating before Covid 19 was even known about. Anti bacterial soap stolen from hospitals. How many readers saw the photographs of the London underground the Friday after its Lord Mayor begged the public to stay home? Packed. Five percent in masks. Hoards of idiots at weekends getting drunk in London and the USA. ‘It’s only the old and weak who die’. No it isn’t. By no means are all those dying are old and previously ill.

This is what happens in various (if not most) countries, when the masses are not educated to cogitate for themselves. Governments neither need nor want the majority to be clever and ask questions at any point. They need basic workers, such as the ESSENTIAL WORKERS these days...easy to spot, they are the ones being paid the least amount of money) The masses are disallowed genuine opportunites to make money and keep it without being taxed at every turn. These two things result in vast populations who have been educated to be less than intelligent and millions who cannot afford to stop work and self isolate for a couple of months. They don’t have private health schemes, stocks and shares, a rich daddy or friends, family jewellery , a second car to sell or gold bullion in Switzerland. They have what they do daily, to make them money and pay bills and rent. Many of the poorest in numerous countries, live with their parents and grandparents. No real alternative but to work, mix and bring the virus home.

What would be wonderful would be if the landlords, big bosses and bankers (who, well...appear to have quite a lot of moolah) would say, ‘okay...you know what...no need to pay rent for two or three months and perhaps there is no work to be done but I won’t lay anyone off or count this as sick leave’. How f..ing likely is that to happen? There will be a few who will do the right thing. The rest will remain as the bastards as they always were. May the Devil take them.

And as for the hackers blackmailing hospitals...when they are caught, strip them, parade and flog them till bloody, and then put them away for Life without parole. At the very least. I would turn them loose in a crowd of those they had caused pain to. The same goes for any leader who had given them orders.

And ooh, ahh...the deadly serious internet conspiracy...apparently Bill Gates is acting like Thanos or a James Bond villain but without the charm and sense of humour. If this virus had been created by Man deliberately, there would already have been a vaccine somewhere. Perhaps there is. If you really are a nut, then watch where the cure seems to originate from and trace it backwards. And which of the ' Elite' refuse to have the jab. Interesting to think how long the Chinese (or anyone for that matter) have been eating bats and only now does this spring up. Yum yum. Yab Yab.

To quote from the master again..’Conspiracy is contagious and so is worrying about it. At such time, theories about totally imaginary conspiracies also escalate, because (a) times of transition make people nervous and uncertain, (b) nervous and uncertain people tend to become at least a little bit paranoid, (c) most people most of the time follow their own prejudices and anxieties much more than any technique for ascertaining objective facts, and (d) most people have no knowledge of the techniques or self –disciplines necessary to the search for objective facts.Robert Anton Wilson, Right Where you are Sitting Now. (Ronin Publishing)

Meanwhile...John von Neumann’s game theory continues to be used in global warfare scenarios...they are still attempting to overcome the odds against negative outcomes...More satellites fired upwards, planning to use EMP to disable the enemy’s networks before they do the same. Peace and goodwill to all, Amen...AI Terminators building the Matrix etc.

But I remember some time in 1997 after five years of various daily practices in England and Czech Republic, a sudden moment in the countryside walking down a small valley...having an absolute instinct that humans would never be strong enough to destroy this world. Simultaneously there was a sure and clear feeling that I no longer lived in the time stream of a world which would be annihilated by nuclear war. Through my baby steps towards tiny pulses of enlightenment, I had stepped across to a parallel world. Breaching a strange loop in a 'quantum-jump to a different order of coherence.' (Identical, but not one in which such insanity would happen...)

Twenty three years later after dropping many of the disciplines I had used in the Nineties and getting caught up in the horseshit of trump and such others - and my own failing mental health, I seem to have crossed back over into a world which is worse on many levels. There were flashes back then, revolutions without bloodshed, with dialogue, and agreements (even if based on trade and power sharing) but step by step, what I call the Conspiracy of Counter Evolution (Neophobes) struck back at the possibility that humans could do the right thing. Dragging the masses back into petty squabbles and bloodshed based on the three main (as they like to see themselves) religions and the eternal struggle for resources. Of which there are plenty for quite a few hundred generations yet, as long as we stop eating bats and don't allow the fundamentalists to wipe us out in the name of a merciful God. Nationalism and Religion are the perfect illusions with which to rule and dominate the gullible through fear, unprovable promises and selfish pride. And resources are mace to look limited and endangered in order to drive prices up. Fear, as was said, is big business.

‘Don’t associate with people who have a low view of humanity; it’ll give you a low view of yourself’ Mark Twain. And thus I remain cynically optimystic.

Did you know that 10 hours exposure to low doses of ketamine ‘enhances corticostriatal cross frequency coupling and hippocampal broad band gamma oscillation’...? Useful to know eh? Many things have the same effect without resorting to horse tranquiliser...like focusing on changing brain speed via breathing. He says on Codeine, whisky and Tramadol. And no doubt burning out all the couplings between the trains of thought but only last night. You will ‘be right there’? I will be wrong here.

I recently had a dream where I had set up a solo concert, all equipment ready, tuned strings, prepared gear etc, then on stage an hour before the start, realised I had forgotten to invite anyone...Hmm...Two more quotes...

‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable’. JFK.

‘The only reason a caterpillar ‘knows’ how to become a butterfly...is because genes contain a memory of the future. This is a metaphor, remember, it may be a very useful one, at that.' RAW.

SO, HOLD ON TO YOUR SANITY, RELEASE ALL TENSIONS AS YOU WILL, BUT HARM NO ONE. KEEP A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOUR AND LOVE LIFE, FORM AND FORMLESS. BE AWARE AND SEE YOU LATER...D.

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bangkokjacknews · 5 years ago

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Thailand sets itself up as DEMENTIA CARE destination

British families are sending elderly relatives with dementia overseas to #Thailand in a small but growing trend.

Researchers visiting private care homes in Chiang Mai have found eight homes where guests from the UK are living thousands of miles away from their families, because suitable care in their home country was impossible to find or afford. “Thailand already has a long history of medical tourism and it’s now setting itself up as an international hub for dementia care,” said Dr Caleb Johnston, a senior lecturer in human geography at Newcastle University. Some of the facilities are British-run; some are Thai-run but with substantial investment from British citizens; and some are Swiss-run. All have the backing and support of the Thai government. “The government and private investors are very active in cultivating this as part of their economic development,” Johnston added. There are an estimated 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK. Local authority residential care costs up to £700 a week, with private care around £1,000. There are no prescribed staff-to-guest ratios in the UK but, with annual staff turnover exceeding 30% and 122,000 job vacancies, levels in state and private facilities tend to be around 1:6. In Thailand, in contrast, 1:1 around-the-clock residential care with fully-qualified staff – in award-winning facilities that look like four-star hotels – costs around £750 a week. Johnston spent nine weeks in Thailand along with Prof Geraldine Pratt, head of geography at the University of British Columbia, interviewing families and staff in residential care homes. “There aren’t yet any official numbers as to how many people are moving out to Thailand to receive care,” said Johnston. “Relative to the total number of people living with dementia, it is a low number. But with the number of people with dementia set to increase, and the cost of looking after them also getting higher, it is likely to be an option that more and more people consider.” Paul Edwards, the director of clinical services at Dementia UK, said: “I can well understand people choosing this option, given the state of anxiety about care in the UK. “It’s an emerging market that I can see becoming more popular because our failing and ailing system – which no politician is even trying to find a solution for – causes fear for those whose loved ones have to use it.” Nonetheless, those who take their loved ones abroad talk of the distress in having to choose between the physical, emotional and financial hardships of caring for them in the UK and outsourcing their care to the other side of the world.

Swiss guests with Alzheimer’s disease in a care home in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photograph: Apichart Weerawong/AP Annie (not her real name) has moved her husband into Vivobene Village, a Swiss-run home near Chiang Mai. She initially tried finding care close to her home in the south of England, but was forced to move to Yorkshire. “There was care for him there but there was no one for me to turn to there,” she said. “So then we moved again to the north of England. But then I needed respite. The home we were recommended for my husband cost £900 a week and one afternoon, my son-in-law went to take out and he wasn’t dressed or shaved. He was just looking out of the window. We bought him home and a few months later, I put him into another care home and the same thing happened again.” Shortly afterwards, the couple flew out to see their daughter in Bangkok and heard about the care home. “He’s never left here since that day. We just said, ‘this is perfect’,” said Annie, in an interview with Johnston and Pratt. Annie now visits her husband three times a year, staying for two to three months at a time. “I think he’s very happy here,” she said. “The people around him are so nice and he reacts to that. For him, I think his life is as good as it could be. It’s worse for me than it is for him.” Peter Brown moved to Thailand from the UK and opened a four-star hotel resort in Chiang Mai 11 years ago. He founded the Care Resort Chiang Mai six years ago, after becoming unhappy with the quality of care his mother was receiving in her British care home. “I don’t believe there are any relatives in the world who want to export their mother and father to a different country,” he said. “What they want is care for their mother and father that they are entitled to and unfortunately, their local city is incapable of giving them. “They don’t want their mother and father locked away for 23 hours a day, sat in a corridor for one hour then put back into their room, so they start to look around for alternative options. There are plenty of options in a separate country, so how can you blame them for taking it? “You should find the solution at home. But the solutions aren’t good enough or affordable in the UK. Dementia sufferers need a lot of time and that doesn’t fit in with the western lifestyle any more. The advantage with somewhere like Thailand is that the staff are a lot cheaper and the strong family culture here. People respect the elderly as a norm. In the west, we don’t respect the elderly any more. “The British state does need to do more because the best place for people to be looked after is where they are now.” There have been recent reports of people with Alzheimer’s disease being forced from Thailand because of changes to immigration rules, but for Allan Sims, from the south of England, his experience is “as close to perfection as you can imagine”. Sims and his wife had been going on holiday to Thailand for years, and when she developed Alzheimer’s disease four years ago, the couple moved to Ko Samui and lived in a four-star hotel. When his wife’s condition worsened, their daughter found a Chiang Mai care home on the internet. “We have three to four carers for every dementia guest here and my wife’s caregivers are my close friends now,” Sims said. “I’m so impressed. My wife needs someone with her 24/7. When I get overwhelmed and my daughter takes me away for a break, a carer doesn’t just care for my wife but shares the bed with her . “If I was in the UK, we might get a carer for 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening, or some ridiculous thing,” he said. “I despair about the care in the UK.” – You can follow BangkokJack on Instagram, Twitter & Reddit. Or join the free mailing list (top right) Please help us continue to bring the REAL NEWS - PayPal Read the full article

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briefzombiepersona-blog · 6 years ago

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Image copyright PA

Image caption George Michael at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics

“Sex, beauty, sadness: All those things resonated with George.”

David Austin is casting his eye over George Michael’s art collection, which is on display at Christie’s in London before going under the hammer on Thursday.

Among the 200 exhibits are a colour-changing portrait of the star by Michael Craig-Martin, a dove preserved in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst, and a life-size bronze gorilla by Angus Fairhurst, which used to live in Michael’s garden.

Austin, who rarely gives interviews, was Michael’s childhood friend, songwriting partner and manager.

He worked closely with the star’s team to put the exhibition together, drawing on the times he’d accompany Michael to buy new works of art.

“I remember going down to the White Cube #gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

one evening,” he recalls. “It was closed when we got there and we saw Damien Hirst’s Saint Sebastian through the locked doors.

“I remember his disappointment at not being able to see it – but I also remember him buying it. It’s such an imposing piece.”

The seven-tonne work restages the death of Christian martyr Saint Sebastian – traditionally depicted as a handsome young man pierced with arrows – using a bull encased in formaldehyde.

Over time, the saint has become a gay icon (more through iconography than biography) and his quiet suffering resonated with Michael.

Image copyright Damien Hirst

Image caption Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain by Damien Hirst

The star was frequently drawn to mournful pieces, and the Christie’s sale includes a haunting cast iron human sculpture by Antony Gormley, a pink coffin by Sarah Lucas, and an unsettling collage of broken mirrors and eyeballs by Jim Lambie.

But Michael also had a love of life and a cheeky sense of humour, exemplified by the triptych Urinal and Sex and Handcuffs, a reference to the star’s 1998 arrest for engaging in a sexual act in a public toilet.

“There’s a humour about the art,” agrees Austin.

“In actual fact, there’s a quote of George’s that we use in the exhibition where he sums it all up: ‘I guess I’m just not afraid of being laughed at.'”

Generosity

Austin accompanied Michael throughout his career, playing in his first band The Executive and joining Wham! for their Top of the Pops debut in 1982.

After a brief attempt at his own pop career, he co-wrote songs including I Want Your Sex and You Have Been Loved, and latterly became the star’s manager, “although I hate that word because George really managed himself”.

The art sale is the first public project since the star died as a result of heart and liver disease on Christmas Day 2016, aged 53.

“It does feel very personal walking around it, because George was such a private person,” says Austin.

Image copyright Michael Craig-Martin/PA

Image caption The charity sale includes a specially-commissioned portrait of the star by Michael Craig-Martin

Image copyright Mary McCartney

Image caption Other pieces in the sale include these portraits of Kate Moss by Mary McCartney

All the money raised will go to charity, continuing the philanthropic work he started in his lifetime.

After his death, it emerged that Michael had worked anonymously at a homeless shelter and donated millions to Childline – including the royalties from Jesus to a Child.

“He was a wonderful person,” says Austin. “A caring, kind, giving man.

“It never stops amazing me how he touched people and how much love there is for him.”

He remembers Michael’s final months fondly. They would spend the days working on a documentary before retiring to Michael’s home in Goring-on-Thames to play records or going out for dinner.

“I remember sitting in a restaurant one evening and people were looking across thinking, ‘Ooh, it’s George Michael!‘” he recalls.

“I got up to go to the toilet, and when I came back he was having a cup of tea with two women at the next table. They were just talking about life and their problems, and I was like, ‘What is going on here?’

“That was a small moment, but it was important – because that’s exactly who he was. Everybody warmed to him, from Princess Diana to those two women in the restaurant.”

Image copyright PA

George Michael’s art collection unveiled

Obituary: George Michael

George Michael: Six songs that defined his life

After Michael died, Austin found himself unable to listen to his music until his phone accidentally started playing a live version of Praying For Time.

“I was in shock. I fumbled with it and I wanted to turn it off,” he says. “But then I stopped, and I listened to him and I thought, God, he really can sing can’t he?

“George and I worked our whole lives together – but when you’re in the eye of the storm, you don’t always see it.”

Today, Austin is a custodian of the star’s legacy and says fans have a lot to look forward to.

“I’m going to make sure all of George’s stuff is back out on vinyl,” he says, noting that the Older album, which the star called “his greatest moment”, is currently out of print.

This December will also see the release of a film, Last Christmas, featuring nine of the musician’s most famous songs.

Starring Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke and Crazy Rich Asians actor Henry Golding, the rom-com has been written by Emma Thompson and is directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters).

Image copyright Universal Pictures

Image caption Last Christmas is a rom-com set in London, featuring George Michael’s music

“I did the deal with Emma Thompson because I knew it would be a family film, I knew it would have absolutely massive reach, and we’d be rolling out year after year to a new demographic that would be listening to his music,” says Austin.

“It’s really taking a note out of George’s book. He hated going around selling his wares and this film will do that job.”

Austin denies rumours of an all-star tribute concert but says there are other, secret projects in the works.

“There will be lots more happening in the future. Beautiful and significant stuff, too,” he says.

“My job is just to make sure everybody hears that music and his legacy continues.”

Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected].

BBC Music homepage

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Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk

‘Everybody warmed to George Michael’ Image copyright Damien Hirst Image caption Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain by Damien Hirst The star was frequently drawn to mournful pieces, and the Christie's sale includes a haunting cast iron human sculpture by Antony Gormley, a pink coffin by Sarah Lucas, and an unsettling collage of broken mirrors and eyeballs by Jim Lambie.

#bbc #news

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meepface · 7 years ago

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i’ve had a weird day so far and doing this is purely for distraction purposes just ignore me

1) What images do you have set for your desktop/cell phone wallpapers?

home screen

and my lock screen is my gf

2) Have you ever had a crush on a teacher?

oooohhh yeah. one of my first super gay crushes was on my 7th grade english & composition teacher Ms. Lawrence. i just recently unadded her on facebook bc i thought it was weird that i had her added but i’m a lil sad i did it bc that was a big ol phase of my life and i liked her soooo much ya know. i also had a big crush on this dorky geography/tennis/psychology teacher Mr. Whittlesey. he was so cute and goofy i love that man

3) What was your last text message?

i was offering to drive over to visit a friend and bring her comfort food bc her and her fiance just broke up :(

4) What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?

uhh i don’t really think that far ahead but hopefully i am happy and have a stable job and hopefully i’m with the person who i’m planning on spending forever with and i have a nice lil place. maybe i’ve even finally moved out of texas by then

5) If you could be anywhere else right now, where would you be?

honestly the mountains would be really nice. i really miss em and they make me feel really happy n peaceful and idk if my family and i are going to get to go or not this summer

6) What was your coolest Halloween costume?

idk one year i wrote “life” on a shirt and went around handing people lemons all night which was Extra as hell but it was also sort of iconic

7) What was your favorite 90s show?

friends

8) Who was your last kiss?

my gf

9) Have you ever been stood up?

no i don’t believe so

10) Favorite ice cream flavor?

mint chocolate chip

11) Have you been to Las Vegas?

no but my parents have been WITHOUT my brother and i!! i would love to go at least one time though

12) Your favorite pair of shoes?

i like my vans they’re comfy

13) Honestly, have you ever cheated on your significant other?

no, that is one thing i would never do. esp since it was done to me and even though our relationship hadn’t been that serious, it still sucked

14) What is your favorite fruit?

watermelon and peaches and apricots

15) Have you talked to anyone on tumblr that you could see yourself dating/having sex with? If possible?

honestly? i maybe could’ve seen myself dating a few people here but only if they were here in person with me lol i'm not interested in online relationships at all so

16) Are you into hookups? Short or long term relationships?

long term relationships i ain’t tryna mess around rn

17) Do you smoke? If so, what?

i don’t but i would like to smoke weed at least once in my life just to experience it ya know

18) What do you do to get over your anger?

sing really loudly to music in my car until i am Tired or just vent on my private sideblog

19) Do you believe in God?

i’m sure there’s something out there but who knows what

20) Does the person you’re in love with know it?

yes

21) Favorite position?

laying the fuck down

22) What’s your horoscope sign?

aries

23) Your fears?

settling for less than i deserve or want just bc being happy requires work that seems scary or difficult or would hurt someone, scorpions, the ocean, walking sticks, horses, never being enough for anyone, not finding stability in my life

24) How many pets do you have? What kind?

i have four dogs named Sophie, Millie, Rusty Bob and Joey

25) What never fails to turn you on?

gettin soft kisses on my stomach n hips

26) Your idea of a perfect first date?

we do some sort of fun activity together, we have a nice dinner and maybe chill in our cars after and talk n maybe kiss a bunch depending on how the date went

27) What is something most people don’t know about you?

i can sing kinda well ?? maybe not anymore it’s been a while since i have but i used to be in musical theatre and they wanted me to be a lead role in the musical but i was too much of a pussy and i didn’t

28) What makes you feel the happiest?

having fun bein surrounded by people i love, also when dogs are so happy to see you that their tails wag their whole butt

29) What store do you shop at most often?

probably forever 21 or h&m bc i’m all about affordable clothing that’s semi-cute

30) How do you feel about oral? Giving and/or receiving?

i’m down for both

31) Do you believe in karma?

sure

32) Are you single?

nope

33) Do you think flowers or candy are a better way to apologize?

“i’m sorry, i understand that this hurt you and i understand why and i will work on not doing this again in the future” followed by actually working on not doing that again in the future is the better way to apologize, actually

34) Are you a good swimmer?

eh i’m okay

35) Coffee or Tea?

coffee

36) Online shopping or shopping in person?

in person

37) Would you rather be older or younger than your current age?

i kinda like being 20 i think it’s nice to be right in the middle

38) Cats or Dogs?

dogs

39) Are you a competitive person?

in mario kart maybe but generally no

40) Do you believe in aliens?

yes!!!!!!!!!!!!

41) Do you like dancing?

yes but i’m no good at it

42) What kind of music to you listen to?

i like upbeat alternative music generally

43) What is your favorite cartoon character?

eeyore

44) Where are you from?

texas unfortunately

45) Eat at home or eat out?

idk my dad’s home cooked meals have gotten pretttttty good but if i can’t have whatever he’s making then i wanna eat out

46) How much more social are you when you’re drunk?

i’m definitely more talkative and i laugh out loud a lot more

47) What was the last thing you bought for yourself?

i bought myself a meal last night but today i’m gonna go out and buy myself some shorts and a bikini so i’m hyped for that

48) Why do you think your followers follow you?

probably from when i blogged about youtubers back in the day, also i hosted these selfie party things and shared everyone’s selfies to boost their confidence and so many people followed me bc of those

49) How many hours do you sleep at night?

not enough

50) What worries you most about the future?

not finding stability in what i want to do and not doing what i want and what would make me happy just bc it would be challenging

51) If you had a friend that spoke to you the same way you speak to yourself, how long would you be friends?

i’m learnin a whoooole lot of self love so maybe we’d be friends a lil longer than i would’ve been if you’d asked me this in like, february

52) Are you happy with yourself?

i mean? i’m happy with where i’ve come. definitely could improve but ya know. baby steps

53) What do you wish you didn’t know?

there’s too many things i wish i didn’t know to be honest

54) What big lesson could people learn from your life?

puttin other people first too much only makes you know and love yourself less

55) If you could live in any home on a television series, what would it be?

the loft from New Girl

56) What’s your favorite Website?

runescape

57) What’s the habit you’re proudest of breaking?

getting rid of this fb account i had and then also this private twitter account i had that i sorta used to vent and also overshare too much lmao

58) What was your most recent trip of more than 50 miles?

i went to NYC before christmas last year!! my family and i are hoping we’ll be able to go to Washington this year

59) What’s the best bargain you’ve ever found at a garage sale or thrift store?

probably my mug that says “i’m too sexy to be 60″ that i bought for like $2

60) What do you order when you eat Chinese food?

i reaaaaally like kung pao chicken but sometimes i like to get sweet and sour or sesame chicken and then i’ll get wonton soup and eggrolls and white rice and sometimes edamame ooooo my god

61) If you had to be named after one of the 50 states, which would it be?

idaho just so i could call myself a ho all the time

62) If you had to teach a subject to a class, what would it be?

psychology or cinematography

63) Favorite kind of chips?

lays limón chips

64) Favorite kind of sandwich?

i really like the new york italian sandwich from Thundercloud

65) Which do you use more often, the dictionary or the thesaurus?

dictionary probably??

66) Have you ever been stung by a bee?

nope but one time i was carrying a balloon and a bee came up and stung my balloon and died and i was like oh

67) What’s your favorite form of exercise?

just goin for a walk is nice

68) Are you afraid of heights?

not heights but falling lmao

69) What’s the most memorable class you’ve ever taken?

probably my film class junior year of high school. i was part of the school’s daily announcement team and we made intros for it based off of popular TV shows and we did this whole project about drinking and driving and my teacher was so great and i had a crush on every single boy in that class

70) What’s your favorite breakfast?

i love breakfast tacos

71) Do you like guacamole?

yes

72) Have you ever been in a physical fight?

i punched a girl in kindergarten but she didn’t hit me back and i pushed a kid over in spy camp in like fourth grade but he didn’t fight me back and i shoved a really stoned guy in a pit at a concert two years ago bc he was being a dick but he was too stoned to fight me back so what i’m saying is i sort of have tried to start a fight but nobody has taken one for the team and kicked my ass yet

73) What/who are you thinking about right now?

i’m thinking about how today sorta sucks but i feel like, too sad to go out and hang out with someone and do something about it so i am just going to stay here. maybe i will eat soon if i can get myself out of bed lol

74) Do you like cuddling?

it’s my faaaaavorite

75) Are you holding onto something you need to let go of?

yeah

76) Have you ever experienced one of your biggest fears?

yeah lol

77) Favorite city you’ve been to?

hmm i really really liked Hood River, Oregon but probably mostly bc of the people i knew there and everything making it special. i loved Columbus, Ohio for that same reason too. i thought Ohio was gorgeous. i also loved Flagstaff, Arizona just because it was beautiful and quaint and i would love to go back

78) Would you break the law to save a family member?

depends on the family member

79) Talk about an embarrassing moment?

just a few weeks ago i was in my summer class and we had about 10 minutes until we got out and it’s like 1 so i was starving and ready for lunch so i was looking at my food options in the area and next thing i knew Siri screams into my quiet classroom “starting route to Raising Cane’s”, and everybody laughed and my teacher was Annoyed. and then when we finally got out i thought everybody had moved on and then the guy who sat next to me, WHO HAD NEVER SPOKEN TO ME ONCE, goes “have fun at Raising Cane’s!”

80) Are there any causes you strongly believe in?

anything to do with women/POC/LGBTQIA+ rights

81) What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had?

one time i was showin off on my razor scooter while zoomin down a steep hill and i fell off and got scars all over my body and a young girl witnessed it but didn’t say anything or do anything she just left me layin there and crying on the pavement

82) Favorite day of the week?

thursday is nice

83) Do you consider yourself sexually open minded?

uhh i mean yeah i guess

84) How do you feel about porn?

i feel like it gives you really false expectations about what sex is going to be like when people watch too much of it

85) Which living celebrity would you like to know?

i’d like to be good ol pals with Mamrie Hart still

86) Who was your hottest ex?

my exes were all ugly

87) Do you want/have kids?

i think i would like kids at some point. at least one

88) Has anyone ever told you that they wanted to marry you?

yes

89) Do you get easily distracted?

yes sometimes

90) Ass or titties?

titties

91) What is your favorite word?

serendipity

92) How do you feel about tattoos?

i have three and i love em. go for it pal

93) Do you have any pets?

i have four dogs

94) How tall are you?

5′7

95) How old are you?

96) 3 physical features you get complimented on a lot?

my hair, my eyes, my stomach

97) Is there anything you’re really passionate about?

yes i am v passionate about supporting other women!!!! and also about trying to be kind to everyone the most you can be bc i hear so many people spout rude things about people they don’t even know (esp when driving) and it’s like stop and listen to yourself lmao

98) Do you have trust issues?

a little bit but i’m trying to be more open and it hasn’t hurt me yet so

99) Do you believe in love at first sight?

absolutely not. that’s called infatuation

100) What are some words that you live by? Why?

two quotes: “anything that costs your peace is too expensive” and “let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier”.

i think the first one is important because i have a tendency of putting myself through a lot of shit to make other people happy and then i’m really unhappy and it’s just not a good way to live. i am really trying to learn this one. and the second one i think is important because being good to other people is a very important thing and i think you never know when somebody else needs that

#like if ya read #i started this yesterday and finished it today bc i didn't have the motivation to finish it yesterday! a new low!#nah today doesn't have to be so bad though #i am gonna go put on some nice music and have some coffee #long post #about me

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etoilesdephan · 8 years ago

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Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? (Chapter 7: Nolens volens)

Chapter masterpost

Chapter words: 2.2k

Total words: 17k

Read it on ao3!

Trigger warnings: Implied abuse, Anxiety/Panic attack

‘’Are you sure about this?’’ Martyn’s words were quiet, the two men leaned over the small device on the table for the numerous time in the span of three weeks. Though time was eating away at Dan and though having this planning with Martyn broke his heart and soul every time, he felt like it was also helping. There was a sense of purpose still, and though he knew that it could not last, he held onto those moments like his life depended on it.

‘’You know Phil, he would only share the most innocent details about his life, or something that surprises him, not world news,’’ Dan waved his hand at the mobile phone that displayed the achingly familiar hues of Twitter application. He longed so much for the access to his own phone again, to just read the shittiest little updates made, at least on one social media.

For now, he had to focus though.

‘’Who would think that updating your twitter accounts would involve such meticulous planning…’’ the older Lester sighed, picking up the phone and tapping away at the screen to save the tweet in drafts for later posting before switching to Dan’s account ‘’And I take it you don’t have anything to change in yours?’’

Dan shook his head and slumped backwards in the chair, tired and a little bit jealous of the other man and his freedom, but that feeling was heavily coated in the thoughts that every well-hidden bruise on his body reminded him of: he had no right to long for freedom now. He just had to try and do his best to mend the situation.

‘’Cornelia’s friend,’’ Dan suddenly remembered and he saw the slight crease that formed in Martyn’s forehead before the older man heaved a sigh ‘’They are still trying to figure a way around this. The law is quite strict in the case of comatose apparently, even if mum, dad and all of our extended family try to apply for reassessment, without Phil we can’t do much about it.’’

A small shiver ran through Dan’s body but he shifted to mask it and instead wrapped his arms around his body loosely ‘’So we can’t know how long...‘’ Dark brown eyes looked up to meet Martyn’s and it didn’t need any words for him to understand. They could do nothing to get him out of this forsaken place.

Silence fell between the two men and Dan longed for it to become eternal. It was easier to live in nothingness than to return back in that hell that was prison life. Though he hadn’t been punched that much, it was almost as if the time between the each attack and the dull repetitiveness of the prison routine was tearing away at him and he was losing the sense of who Dan Howell was. It felt so easy, to just think of it as being instantly cut away instead of the slow chipping of old paint that was now his life.

The mornings when he woke up with the realisation of something new that he was missing were the worst and if it weren’t for the fact that his bed always felt so cold and stiff, he was sure that more of his days would just be wasted away under the blanket, until a guard would force him to get out.

‘’Hiatus,’’ His lips formed the word before he really found his voice and he cleared his throat before answering the questioning gaze of the older Lester brother ‘’If I am stuck here for an unknown amount of time and if we don’t know about Phil either, wouldn’t it be best to announce Dan and Phil hiatus? Just use something from the past year; we’re too tired and taking a hiatus to recharge after the tour and getting our lives sorted out.’’

‘’I know it will sound unrealistic,’’ He interrupted Martyn who was about to protest already ‘’But this is for the best; how many faux tweets can we compose before someone will begin to suspect something? Especially if we aren’t uploading anymore either. Even if we tried to piece together something from the bloopers that I have on my laptop for the gaming channel, it won’t work.’’

He watched as Martyn rubbed his face, thoughtful. Dan could almost see how the cogs were turning in his head and the moment where the shoulders of the other man slouched, even if only by a little bit, where defeat set in and he looked up again.

‘’Alright.’’

Though his idea was accepted, it was no victory for Dan and he had to take a moment to steady his breath before he could speak again.

Leaning forward again, he began ‘’We have enough tweets to last us a few weeks but I think we should announce the hiatus soon…’’

=====

After the meeting with Martyn in which they finally had settled on the hiatus announcements, Dan found himself lying wide awake in his bed most of the nights when he wasn’t ready to succumb to the nightmares right away. The dark circles around his eyes were becoming more prominent by day, and he found himself absent-minded more often than not, only coming back to it when Rudy would again drop his tray next to Dan’s or when somebody would shove Dan against the hallway wall more harshly. It was moments when Larry and Spike would disagree on something again and raise their voices that he would realise that he had returned to the cell, locked away.

It was like he was existing but not living. He’d looked forward to those meetings, to that connection to the outside world with a lingering hope of being released soon.

Now it was only planning of how to subtly possibly end things for good.

They had always been so private about their lives, but now there was a part of Dan that wanted to yell it at the world, to tell them everything, to find a way to prove his innocence. And there was a part of him that wondered if there would be a chance of this never happening in the first place if they had been more open with their audience.

He hated the lies, the lack of communication, because it was what eventually got them to where they were now.

To where they may never return from.

======

‘’Stop sulking in bed and get up,’’ The raspy voice of Larry broke through Dan’s consciousness and he rolled over to his side, pressing his palms against his eyes, rubbing with more vigour than was probably healthy, but he welcomed the discoloration behind the closed lids that it caused. It made him reminisce the feeling of being too drunk to focus and there were days where he missed it a lot.

‘’You hear me?’’ He heard Larry again, but the hand on his arm was smaller than the other man’s, and soon enough he heard Spike speak up ‘’Relax, Larry. Oi, boy, get up before the guards think that you need to be forced out.’’

To that, Dan shook off the other man’s hand from him but obeyed, sat up, blinking repeatedly until he could make sense of the surroundings again.

The common room was the only place where he could try to sometimes attempt to imagine normalcy again. A single screen of an old TV was attached to the wall and it was a retreat where he could still see the fake liveliness of the outside world. It was nothing like picking up the remote to watch whatever series he wanted while curled up on the sofa, but it was still something that reminded him of home and the things he was used to doing.

This screen was usually controlled by the most intimidating one currently present in the room if they bothered to express their wishes for watching something. Most times it was some shitty reality show, a rerun of news or some old TV show that Dan couldn’t have guessed was still running on any of live channels.

His stomach poorly filled with the food aching uncomfortably, he found an empty corner to sit in, fingers picking at a loose thread of his clothing idly as he tried to melt in with the background and ignore the presence of the other inmates, especially the more familiar trio whose knuckles he’d become very intimately acquainted with. The presence of the guard near the door was enough to keep him relatively relaxed. If only for the selfish part of him that craved peace still.

A familiar flash of a screen appeared, announcing a rerun of some news and his eyes lazily followed the letters, his ears slow to pick up the words spoken by the news anchor through the low chatter in the room. It was something about the new election coming up and he couldn’t force himself to care enough to follow too closely.

It was, however, when the full combination of surprise, dread and shock flooded into him and his surroundings cleared instantly when the next segment came on and he suddenly was faced with a picture that had marked some of his best times, the peak of his career and now it just felt laced with accusations and poison. It was him and Phil, as they had been when they were the BBC presenters, before the picture cut to one of the tour advertising shots.

‘’Former BBC Radio 1 show hosts and Youtubers Dan Howell and Phil Lester, better known by their internet handles danisnotonfire and AmazingPhil, have recently hit the social medias with their hiatus, but is it just a mere time for relaxation or does it hide a lot more morbid truth?’’

An older picture of Dan appeared on the screen. ‘’Reliable sources confirmed earlier today that the Youtube star, Howell has been sentenced to several years in prison for what has been disclosed a disagreement with his business and allegedly romantic partner - Lester. The current whereabouts of Phil Lester are still unknown, but it has been rightfully rumoured that the notable absence of the man could indicate that he currently may not be in physical condition to be seen in the public. This has, of course, caused an uproar in the social media, many fans trying to justify the absence and contact the two social media stars, but currently there is no further insights of the situation. Stay tuned--’’

There were eyes on him, some of the inmates aware of Dan’s presence in the room, but he didn’t see them, paid no mind. There was a dull ringing in his ears and he stood, stumbling a little, from his seat and before anyone could even attempt to speak to him, he was down the hall.

This couldn’t be happening, it had to be a bad dream. He had so many nightmares and he was so delirious, it was possible that the reality had mixed with the plaguing thoughts and vibrant images of reality.

He kept telling himself that as he shoved past the people, not even thinking as he dropped his name to the guard near the phones. It was when his fingers, shaking more than he ever had experienced them to, were punching in the digits of the number, that he realised that he could barely breathe, the breaths short, gasped, his heartbeat jittery from the mixture of adrenaline and the lack of proper sleep and nutrition.

‘’Hello, Dan?’’ He heard Martyn on the other end, but though his lips were forming words, no sound was coming out and it increased the frantic until a strained sound finally broke from his throat. There was an attempted soothing hush from the other side but it dissipated into a sigh soon ‘’Dan, calm down, we’ve been working on it since we heard about the news, we’ll cover it as much as possible. They had no rights to announce this without an approval, we’ll figure it out. Just breathe, you hear me? Dan? Breathe.’’

The words were spoken reassuring, but all Dan heard was the news presenter talking, repeating every spoken word as it hit him harshly with every short breath. It was real, and this call had been the only saving grace that could have proven otherwise.

Yet, it hadn’t.

Everybody knew now. He knew how the internet worked. The damage was done and everybody knew about this, about them.

This was not how he wanted to eventually come out, if they ever would have decided to officially. He didn’t even care that they were out as much as the fact that it was side-by-side with the announcement of the assumptions of what had happened.

He didn’t realise at which point he’d released the phone and sunk to the ground, knees close and his hands in his hair, pulling tightly as he breathed shallow, quick breaths against his knees. He was dizzy, so dizzy, the black blotches present in his vision. He craved to just pass out right there and then because it felt like it would be easier to just turn to blackness now than to deal with the buzzing inside his skull and the cacophony of noises that the words were causing. His own thoughts and heart were against him and he could not handle it.

There was a touch of a hand and a voice speaking to him, but he just writhed weakly in response, the panic too strong in his being.

He was out of control.

#myfanfic #phanfic #phanfiction #phandom #phanfic au

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clothinglennyco · 6 years ago

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Image copyright PA

Image caption George Michael at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics

“Sex, beauty, sadness: All those things resonated with George.”

David Austin is casting his eye over George Michael’s art collection, which is on display at Christie’s in London before going under the hammer on Thursday.

Austin, who rarely gives interviews, was Michael’s childhood friend, songwriting partner and manager.

He not only put this exhibition together but often accompanied the star when he bought art.