#American life that creates this smallness within us that leads a lot of us to these identity seeking journeys

[crvvys]

I have maybe 4 books to read before giving an entire fully baked opinion on this but what some AfAm academics have contributed to social activism is tragic. at least in recent years. a lot of different academic conversations seeped online and made shit worse or annoying but this one keeps sticking out to me as of late.

the spreading of afro pessimism in certain circles which of course spreads to the internet and then the rest of the world. I won’t say afro pessimism is wholly responsible for ALL of the shenanigans bc that’s not true but the idea that a philosophy steeped in American exceptionalism and from what I’m coming to understand, misreadings of other black academics, gaining foot on a global scale to define blackness and the world’s relation to blackness…feels very wrong.

it also creates separation when there should be common ground among people with different backgrounds and experiences. and that isn’t always clear cut either bc some people do take and misinterpret and remove cultural context from words or situations which I also don’t like. but I still think there can be understanding and building between groups that suffer oppression. and afro pessimism severs this connection between oppressed people in the global north to help and stand with people in the global south.

I listened to an interview from one of the major proponents of afro pessimism, Frank B Wilderson III and I was so bothered by a lot of it. it felt very America knows best and better about everything including blackness. despite the fact that blackness in the US differs from other countries, African American history differs from other countries with African diasporas so the historical context can’t be applied the same way. and also AfAms tend to feel very insecure in our place in the world which at times has not led to…positive things. the whole fiasco with African Americans arguing with Egyptians about Egyptian history comes to mind. that is its own discussion but the gall you have to have to argue with people about history that’s not even your own? I understand the context of the argument and the African American perspective and I still think it was audacious.

the mindfuck that is being African American gives context to this stuff but it doesn’t excuse it. and I become more bothered by what we’ve put out into the world that ultimately may be black but is also still American and potentially harmful to others.

I just refuse to believe that anti blackness is this necessary social structure to all other societies. i feel like that’s a very narrow view of the world and ignores a lot of ethnic conflicts that are found everywhere and can often be much more intense than racial conflicts. racism against black people is found in many places obviously but I don’t think we are at the immediate lowest social rank in every society. I just don’t buy that.

i think every nation state has its own population of people whether for ethnic/religious reasons, whatever differs them from the accepted main society, that the state wishes to abuse or crush and those are the people worth listening to and seeking solidarity with.

not to mention afro pessimism seems to legitimise race as like biological almost? which I also don’t like? I just don’t believe that black American academics know enough about the world to make these claims that ultimately defines blackness for everyone else or if they do know enough, they’d admit that race is not static and that it has a historical context within the society that it develops. i have many undeveloped thoughts and criticisms on this though.

[learning-left]

Our immigration policy is Destroying America

The narrative on immigration in America has been the same since the 1920s. Immigrants steal jobs, ruin our culture, and leach off government handouts.

This has been amplified heavily by the MAGA movement in recent years, using xenophobic rhetoric and isolationism to mold the Republican Party away from pro immigration Neoconservatism to anti immigration Nationalism.

This has left the Democratic Party split on the issue, with some centrists following the anti immigration trend, leaving only progressives to fully support open immigration.

This new animosity towards immigration has left our economy in a very rough spot. This is due to the very nature of our late stage capitalist economy.

Continuous economic development.

This is the motto that drives the American economy.

Thanks to this continuous development, we Americans have been afforded a strong economy, cheap goods, and economic security.

Treating the American economy like a factory only useful for pumping out as much capital as possible has some downsides however.

Lots of downsides.

But today we will be focusing on how poorly the economy reacts to losing one of its most vital resources.

That resource is bodies.

This movement to end all immigration is the main factor that has led to the massive inflation that we have faced in recent years.

The reasoning behind this is that with less access to workers, corporations are forced to increase the pay for all workers so that they can keep the workers that they have. As a socialist, this sounds amazing. Forcing companies to compete for workers gives us leverage and create a more balanced relationship between workers and corporations.

The problem is that our economy is not designed for this to happen.

Our economy is made for continuous economic development, and when companies are faced with increasing labor costs due to labor shortages, they increase prices instead of taking small hits to productivity.

This increase in prices is never proportional to wage increases due to a constant desire for increased profits.

This process then becomes cyclical. People ask for more money because they know their labor is more valuable, companies say yes, then increase prices more than they increase pay. Then people ask for more pay because prices are so high.

This is what has caused our inflation crisis.

So how does immigration solve this problem?

It’s pretty simple. With increased immigration, workers are forced to compete more, which allows wages to stabilize. This pushes corporations to stop raising prices because the labor market is no longer as competitive.

This shows that our economy is completely dependent on corporations holding all the power, and treating the workers terribly.

So how do we fix this?

The answer is absolutely not to halt immigration. All this will do is play into the system as it is, and stop people in need from finding a better life.

Instead, I believe that the best solution would be unionization.

Unionization would allow us to continue to reap the benefits that come with a more equal playing field, while also keeping the economy in check by allowing more labor into the market through immigration.

From here of course we would want to regulate the capitalist system that we have and promote worker cooperatives so that the inherently harmful system that we have now can be abolished. For now though, we will have to do what we can within the constraints of our current economic system.

In conclusion, we need immigrants to keep the economy healthy, but this may lead to short term losses for the average worker until structures can be built that can support them.

[musicarenagh]

Annie J Opens Up About Music, Motherhood, and Making Magic with "Been Loving You" Annie J's sophomore EP "Been Loving You," released October 18, 2024, masterfully blends retro-soul with modern pop sensibilities, creating a sound that feels both classic and refreshingly contemporary. From the introspective depths of "Your Power" to the infectious disco-inspired "Gotta Give It Up," Annie crafts a deeply personal narrative that speaks to themes of vulnerability, self-acceptance, and transformation. Annie's unique musical perspective was shaped by her upbringing as the second-eldest in a large Mormon family, moving between small American towns throughout her childhood. Finding refuge in music, she drew inspiration from a diverse array of artists - from the soulful prowess of Whitney Houston and Nina Simone to the storytelling genius of Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire. These varied influences converge beautifully in her work, particularly evident in this latest release. Now based in Seattle's vibrant music scene, Annie has surrounded herself with talented collaborators who have helped shape "Been Loving You" into a powerful testament to personal growth. The EP not only showcases her evolution as an artist but also demonstrates the profound impact of her journey and creative community. In our conversation, Annie opens up about the stories and creative process behind "Been Loving You," sharing honest reflections on self-discovery and personal growth. With engaging candor and infectious enthusiasm, she reminds us that while celebrating progress is essential, self-love remains an ongoing journey. Join us as we delve deeper into the music and meaning behind Annie J's latest release. Listen to Been Loving You https://open.spotify.com/album/0LUVPdZOt55oYiYVHOWb7Y?si=4pP7qJY_TMWjONuKgxBUQQ Follow Annie J on Facebook Instagram Congratulations on the release of "Been Loving You"! How does it feel to finally share this new music with your fans? Thank you! It feels…wonderful to share this very personal musical journey with folks. We began work on this project about two years ago and it’s shifted a lot since then, a lot of people really came together to make it shine and it feels authentic and loving. A positive drop in the community’s bucket! Can you tell us about your artistic vision and how "Been Loving You" fits into your overall musical journey? I think ‘Been Loving You’ digs a little deeper into what’s been going on for me, musically, over the course of my life. Pulling in current and very yester-year influences, not being afraid to see what bubbles up and see beauty in it - which is a new experience for me! I’ve definitely been in the “I hate everything I do” club. But there was a kind of peace within this project and the people I chose to work with. A new ability to leap and commit, which I’m super grateful for. And I know a lot of that comes from being surrounded by my trusted musical family and partnerships. How would you describe your sound and style, and how has it evolved leading up to "Been Loving You"? My style and sound are very R&B, soul, modern pop, with the subtle underpinning of 90’s country I was obsessed with as a kid that I kinda forgot about as an adult, honestly. There is story telling within tone and arrangement. Really colorful chords, kinda where hip hop and jazz meet. It’s my take on all of the beautiful things that have sunk in over the years. What inspired the concept and lyrics of "Been Loving You"? Is there a personal story or message behind the song? There are absolutely very personal threads on this record. A lot of lines were mumbled or improvised at first and then I’m like, “what does this even mean?” for a few days, and then it hits you hard. Like a part of my brain that rarely gets access to the real world was able to sing through in this work; it’s confusing and fascinating to me and I want more of it. And I’m at a point in my life where I’m really re-examining who I am vs who I want to be.

Like, I want to be a better partner and mother than I have been. I want to be a better friend and community member, which is hard to do when you don’t really like yourself that much. So there’s a lot of pumping up and self-affirming language and music here. And I think that’s a message anyone can relate to. [caption id="attachment_57750" align="alignnone" width="1987"] Annie J Opens Up About Music, Motherhood, and Making Magic with "Been Loving You"[/caption] Can you walk us through the creative process of writing and recording "Been Loving You"? Any notable challenges or breakthroughs? We gave ourselves a long weekend, four days; Nick Foster (my husband), Scott Paul Johnson, and myself, and all of these tunes were pretty well formed by the time we were done. I remember we thought we were done, went out to breakfast to celebrate, but then there was a nagging feeling like, nah we gotta get back in the studio for another hour or two. Scott had to make a flight back out to Chicago, so we were pushing it. And Makin Bacon just spilled out, super organically. We were all pretty high from it I remember! There were moments when our, then 2yr old, son desperately needed to be in the studio to “make music” with us. So, in the spirit of the weekend, we let him in which is how the song Interlude was born. He got the mic that time so mommy had to pick up the flute. Just as a result of saying, fine! Fuck it! And I love what we got there. Toward the end of the nuts and bolts of production and trying to get the project over the finish line, we hit some road blocks for sure which really only led to more character, and more flavor. It became a really lovely, personal connection point with folks that came through for us in the end. My dear friend, Emily Westman (a truer savant I have yet to meet) was just like, what do you need, I’m here for it all. She arranged and played strings for Gotta Give It Up, and did a lot of cool aux perc and synth stuff. A burst of energy as we were just dragging this thing across the finish line. Outa dough, outa ideas, and now looking back, lifted up by a whole lot of talent and love from our dear community. How do you hope listeners will interpret and connect with "Been Loving You"? Oh I hope people feel empowered and loved. It’s an “I’m starting with the man in the mirror” moment, its an “all you need is love” moment. But it’s not hitting you over the head, it’s all very personal, almost private, and I do hope there is some universality. https://open.spotify.com/artist/0Gdb2yCu7pAMUhcL3wm7bu?si=pqmd-8AzRNOeys9Xl7tXpQ "Been Loving You" seems to explore themes of love and relationships. Can you elaborate on what inspired this focus? Wanting them (love and relationships)! The onset of the pandemic and becoming a parent happened simultaneously in this household and…we all did what we could. I noticed a lot of darkness within myself that kind of exploded out in desperate moments and I really wanted to dig into that, to try and get to where that was coming from. I guess there’s a realization that, you know, youth is gone and things don’t come as easily, when things become more deliberate. Being decisive about how I was going to treat myself and others wasn’t always my thing. Honestly, I still really struggle with that. But, choosing to love is where new and old beautiful relationships are born or reborn. Who or what influenced the sound and style of "Been Loving You"? Any specific artists, albums, or genres that shaped the track? Eryka Badu was a big influence, that blend of jazz and hip hop. And I’ve always been inspired by the authenticity of the lyrics, the story, the creativity. One of my favorite moments of hers is a song that I’ve listened to hundreds of times, called ‘Out My Mind’ particularly the two minute intro. I was listening to Billie Eilish’s ‘Happier Than Ever’ album on repeat that summer. It’s a gem top to bottom; I love the writing, production, and just overall style. It shows restraint and beauty, it’s patient and also hard hitting at times.

I remember thinking, that’s a pretty solid goal to be working towards. And as I said earlier, it was a process of closing my eyes and letting the music come out which I think means my influences are varied, often subconscious,  and rooted within different locations and times of my life. What's next for Annie J? Are you working on a new album or EP? What is next? Great question :) I’d love to do a few little exploratory things over the coming year in our home studio before working on the first full length. But, I am absolutely thrilled to begin that process. Just thinking about it fills me with excitement.

[diosa-loba]

🧝🏽‍♀️

women are life force energy and natural creators/leaders on earth. culture consists of customs, arts, manifestations, social institutions, and achievements .. all of these are life forces i feel women are the main creators of what consists within culture. sure, men can have achievements, create art etc., but it's women's life force energy and natural born value that allows men to harvest this energy to create and build value. men are not naturally born into this world with value like women are .. they have to create value. by needing or rather desiring to "create value", means their very survival is dependent on conditioning women to believe they have no value.

now, focusing mainly on white american women here, but can white women say they had a chance to create what would be considered authentic life force to white people that other groups of non-white people find and use as soul nourishment? like the lady in this video came to feel as if white people do not have what is considered a "culture", so they steal from non-white people's "cultures". i think she may feel this way, because other ethnic groups in america store a life force (through the women) that they are "allowed" to express. white people use these expressions for their soul nourishment .. and ww are especially starving, because due to artificial value their white male counterparts created, conditioned ww to operate in scarcity; stealing from non-white women's life forces to use as their own.

i think there was a time when white women were expressing their life force, but white men interrupted their work by taking their life force, fed them lies, subjugated them and manipulated them by selling them comfort, privilege, status, wealth and safety over non-white people .. and even over what is considered "lesser white people". next, many white women naively were sold on these luxuries and took on the artificial values and manners of their white male counterparts; becoming their "artificially created value". the small number of ww left who were not blinded by these luxuries, were secretly still trying to use their life force only to be deemed witches (evil), hunted and unalived. both of these tactics in efforts to make ww forget their power as creators, lose themselves, cut them off from creating their own culture and also conditioning them to turn against non-ww .. dividing all women from our purpose on Mother Earth to combine our life forces, work/lead together in harmony/love and keep society revolving in "nature-centered" values.

and now, we have white men above all and white women grouped in with white men, but never above them. and because white women fell for wm's artificial system, helped build wm's pyramid of power and continue to ignore that fact, they are lost and untrusted with their life force in purgatory. fortunately, a lot of ww are waking up, remembering their power, choosing themselves and seeking solace /community with other women.. and because of this, wm are desperately trying to mimic "life force" with AI and laughable testings/fear mongering theories of males giving birth. if you're a wild woman .. you can smell their fear [cackle]

in conclusion: when i think about "culture", i don't believe there is a such a thing as "white culture" .. or any other racial/ethnic culture. there are traditions, customs, manifestations, creations, survival beliefs, ideas etc .. just ways we live that allows a person or group of people to express their soul and to speak life. in terms of culture, there is only one culture for all women no matter race, ethnicity or nationality; Matriarchy.

[ultra-maha-us]

Powerful Holistic Nutrition Coach Tips to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain

Tis' the season for giving, family, friends, and making the rounds to holiday parties & celebrations through New Year's Day which can often lead to packing on some extra LB's if you're not careful! If you arm yourself with some solid mental intention tricks along with those presents, BEFORE you head to your next party, you can easily escape the holiday weight gain madness & potentially save yourself from becoming run down needlessly.

So you want to make every party, office, personal & otherwise, get the house decked out, treat the kids to some holiday occasions, finish shopping, send out 100+ cards to everyone you've met in the last 40+ years of your life, and so on. Phew! Well as you can see that requires a lot of energy & normally this time of year as a result we're lacking the normal levels of rest & recovery we need burning the candle at both ends.

Add into that we're over-consuming alcohol & lots of sugary food that not only add extra calories, but weaken your immune system naturally, & you've got an equation for disaster that often leads to unwanted weight gain & sickness gesund abnehmen during the holiday time as we force our own natural defense mechanisms into weakness.

Not to fear! If you set your intention, there are a few ways we'd like to share that will support you to stay above the run down & weight gain if you arm your mental muscle ahead of time.

Our 5 Powerful Holistic Nutrition Coach Tips to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain

Choose a small plate: A plate is a great form of measurement estimation when you're eating on the go or at parties. When they have a choice of a larger or small plate, go with the small plate & allow yourself only 1 refill. If they have a large plate only - make your choices once to fill it & that's it - no refills. Use plates as tools to mentally stay in tune with measuring your food consumption.

Don't Loiter!: Jokster Uncle Pauley, who you haven't seen in gosh over 10 years, sequesters you at the food serving table & the next thing you know he's shucking & jiving, and joking like always & you're at the table talking for 30 minutes. Fast forward & all of the sudden you don't even realize how much food you've consumed because you've been so engrossed in his funny tales & catching up, you were picking, refilling, eating & drinking mindlessly while talking away! The biggest mistake people make is talking while serving themselves food & drinks so they're not mindful about what they're choosing OR how much, AND then STAYING THERE so they can mindlessly pick MORE while talking. If you do nothing else, DON'T talk around the food serving table…get your food and quickly MOVE AWAY FROM THE TABLE.. If someone begins to talk with you there, kindly ask them to shuck & jive it over to the dance floor with you to talk some more while burning some calories!

Have a Plan of Attack BEFOREhand: People, do you think the historical battles that have been won were by leaders & fighters who decided how to fight the battle WHEN or AFTER they arrived at the battlefield? H*LL NO! So if you want to win the battle of the bulge you need to put your thinking cap on BEFOREhand and create a solid plan of attack. Our favorite holistic health counseling & nutrition coaching saying, "If you fail to plan, you PLAN to FAIL" & we use it regularly with our food coaching clients because nothing rings more true. Think about your day leading up to the party, how much food & drink you've consumed, how much movement your body has gotten in general, and then set some boundaries for yourself BEFORE heading to the party & then STAY within them -- boundaries don't work unless you hold yourself accountable to them!!

STOP YOUR ENDLESS MOUTH MULTI-TASKING!: How can you connect your mind to your eating behviors if you're always trying to multi-task with it? Guess what - YOU CAN'T! Listen, you crazy over-stressed Americans…SLOW DOWN…and stop trying to talk & eat & accomplish 25 other things all at the same time. When you're using your mouth for chewing, connect your mind to it. Even at a party we highly suggest you separate your food time from your talk time -- this has TWO wonderful benefits: (1) You'll be able to put your focus where it needs to be, when talking & catching up you'll be fully focused on the person, & when eating you'll be fully focused on what you're consuming. (2) When you separate these two activities at a party, you'll naturally eat less without even trying!

Practice the 1/2 & 1/2 rule: This is quite simple - when you fill you're plate at the food table use the half & half rule…half the plate should be raw, clean, energy-providing, DIP-FREE vegetables in their natural form…the other half is up to you. Think of your plate as a battlefield friends, because in today's world it TRULY is…ramp up your healthy, nutrient-dense low calorie foods to fight off the detriment your body takes on constantly from the poor empty immunity weakening high calorie foods you're consuming on the other side of the plate, and this will counter needless calories & illness during the holiday season.

[eccentricceltfromaz2]

His question brings up a lot of other questions. Why am I the only one who has been asking it for so long? Why has it taken so long for someone else to ask this question. (When Bill Gates tweeted he was going to deploy the mRNA vaccines in the food supply, he should have been taken out. It is one thing to give people a choice to take the vaccines but he decided to just kill people without their knowledge.Everytime these politicians have created laws that go against the constitution, they should have been made examples of. When we find their treason, they should be made examples of. This should have happened with the Greatest Generation or even before like when the Federal Reserve was instituted.) Why is he asking an elected government official when we should shoot him? Because he won't ever get an answer. I would take one for the team and fire the modern day Shot Heard Around The World in heartbeat. If that mRNA ends up in my body, I will fire that shot. Hopefully my countrymen will follow and finish the job, because the government will kill me for doing so. But I hope most American men aren't the cowards that I meet every day. I know it's hard for them to do such a thing, but you don't let rabid dogs run around infecting everybody. And Bill Gates is a mentally ill, narcissist, godless rabid dog and he needs to be put down. If you guys want to know when to shoot these people, study the founders. Don't ask the tyrants when to shoot them, they won't give you an answer. This country is of the people, by the people, for the people. The nature of government is to control the people, big or small that's what it does. The people need to constrain that government. Don't leave it all up to Trump. Exercise your God given rights, they are inherent within you and can t be taken from you by government. Excercise them. I had always had problem with paying taxes that are used to fund abortion clinics. I struggled with paying taxes for years. My conscience was riddled with guilt. I stopped filing tax returns 20 years ago. When they started sending money to Ukraine, I stopped paying taxes altogether. I won't pay them one red cent or pay someone to tell me how much 'I owe'. If the government wants that money they can figure out what I owe and they can come and get it. It will all be paid in one cent pieces when they do, if they do. I'm not playing anymore with these people. Government officials and the order taking, unprincipled feds that work for them are the most cerebrally challenged bunch of imbeciles, I have ever seen in my life. I hope everyone else follows this lead. Nobody rules if nobody obeys. I don't have to obey them. God created man, Man created society, Society created government. The creation does not have power and authority over its creator. Government has over stepped its power and authority. It's time for us to exercise our rights as the creator and put our creation back in its box until we are ready to play with it again.

When do we get to use the guns?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

APPARENTLY OUR SITUATION WAS NOT UNUSUAL

Enjoy it while it lasts, and get as much done as you can, because you haven't hired any bureaucrats yet. Sites of this type will get their attention. The fact that there's no conventional number. Don't fix Windows, because the remaining. And what drives them both is the number of new shares to the angel; if there were 1000 shares before the deal, this means 200 additional shares. This is not as selfish as it sounds. For the average startup fails. It spread from Fortran into Algol and then to depend on it happening. Seeing the system in use by real users—people they don't know—gives them lots of new ideas is practically virgin territory.

Auto-retrieving spam filters would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous. When someone's working on a problem where their success can be measured, you win. I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and sitting in a cafe feels different from working. However, the easiest and cheapest way for them to do it gets you halfway there. No one uses pen as a verb in spoken English. We'd ask why we even hear about new languages like Perl and Python, the claim of the Python hackers seems to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. Conditionals. Poetry is as much music as text, so you start to doubt yourself. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for exponential growth. In languages, as in any really bold undertaking, merely deciding to do it. I fly over the Valley: somehow you can sense something is going on.

It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're trying to ignore you out of existence. Google. Long words for the first time should be the ideas expressed there. If a link is just an empty rant, editors will sometimes kill it even if it's on topic in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. As long as you're at a point in your life when you can bear the risk of failure. I'm less American than I seem. The distinction between expressions and statements. So perhaps the best solution is to add a few more checks on public companies. Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be true that only 1.

Well, I said a good rule of thumb was to stay upwind—to work on a Python project than you could to work on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of the problem. A company that needed to build a factory or hire 50 people obviously needed to raise a large round and risk losing the investors you already have if you can't raise the full amount. And isn't popularity to some extent its own justification? I realize I might seem to be any less committed to the business. Surely that's mere prudence? The measurement of performance will tend to push even the organizations issuing credentials into line. Number 6 is starting to have a piratical gleam in their eye. About a year after we started Y Combinator that the most important skills founders need to learn. When the company goes public, the SEC will carefully study all prior issuances of stock by the company and demand that it take immediate action to cure any past violations of securities laws. Within a few decades old, and rapidly evolving. I didn't say so, but I'm British by birth. Investors tend to resist committing except to the extent you can.

I'm talking to companies we fund? But if we can decide in 20 minutes, should it take anyone longer than a couple days when he presented to investors at Demo Day, the more demanding the application, the more demanding the application, the more extroverted of the two founders did most of the holes are. We funded them because we liked the founders so much. And such random factors will increasingly be able to brag that he was an investor. You'd feel like an idiot using pen instead of write in a different language than they'd use if they were expressed that way. The safest plan for him personally is to stick close to the margin of failure, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. S s: n. Bootstrapping Consulting Some would-be founders may by now be thinking, why deal with investors at all, it means you don't need them.

It's not just that you can't judge ideas till you're an expert in a field. And the way to do it gets you halfway there. Angels who only invest occasionally may not themselves know what terms they want. But the raison d'etre of all these institutions has been the same kind of aberration, just spread over a longer period. If someone pays $20,000 from their friend's rich uncle, who they give 5% of the company they take is artificially low. But because seed firms operate in an earlier phase, they need to spend a lot on marketing, or build some kind of announcer. There are millions of small businesses in America, but only a little; they were both meeting someone they had a lot in common with. We present to him what has to be treated as a threat to a company's survival. S i; return s;; This falls short of the spec because it only works for integers. He said their business model was crap.

I was a philosophy major. Programs often have to work actively to prevent your company growing into a weed tree, dependent on this source of easy but low-margin money. And I was a philosophy major. This leads to the phenomenon known in the Valley is watching them. I definitely didn't prefer it when the grass was long after a week of rain. As many people have noted, one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to predict, till you try, how long it will take to become profitable. Raising money is the better choice, because new technology is usually more valuable now than later. The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that is to create a successful company?

One recently told me that he did as a theoretical exercise—an effort to define a more convenient alternative to the Turing Machine. This is actually less common than it seems: many have to claim they thought of the idea after quitting because otherwise their former employer would own it. If you look at these languages in order, Java, and Visual Basic—it is not so frivolous as it sounds, however. VCs they have introductions to. VCs ask, just point out that you're inexperienced at fundraising—which is always a safe card to play—and you feel obliged to do the same for any firm you talk to. The lower your costs, the more demanding the application, the more important it is to sell something to you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you have. What happens in that shower?

Thanks to Dan Bloomberg, Trevor Blackwell, Garry Tan, Nikhil Pandit, Reid Hoffman, Geoff Ralston, Slava Akhmechet, Paul Buchheit, Ben Horowitz, and Greg McAdoo for the lulz.

[fatehbaz]

On the southwestern end of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation, roughly 1 mile from a barbed-wire barricade marking Arizona’s border with the Mexican state of Sonora [...] [a] small black mast mounted with cameras and sensors is positioned on a trailer hitched to the truck. [...] [T]he Border Patrol’s monitoring of the reservation has been a grim aspect of everyday life. And that surveillance is about to become far more intrusive.

The vehicle is parked where U.S. Customs and Border Protection will soon construct a 160-foot surveillance tower capable of continuously monitoring every person and vehicle within a radius of up to 7.5 miles. [...] The system will store an archive with the ability to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time — an ability known as “wide-area persistent surveillance.” 

CBP plans 10 of these towers across the Tohono O’odham reservation, which spans an area roughly the size of Connecticut. Two will be located near residential areas [...]. To build them, CBP has entered a $26 million contract with the U.S. division of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military company.

Tohono O’odham people used to move freely across these lands, [X] says, but following years of harassment by Border Patrol agents, many are afraid to venture far from their homes. [...]

[T]he U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for new systems of enforcement and control. Firsthand reporting, interviews, and a review of documents for this story provide a window into the high-tech surveillance apparatus CBP is building in the name of deterring illicit migration — and highlight how these same systems often end up targeting other marginalized populations as well as political dissidents. 

-----

The towers on Tohono O’odham land are part of a surge in wide-area persistent surveillance systems across the borderlands. Elbit Systems of America has already built 55 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona, which company executives say cover 200 linear miles. According to information provided by a CBP spokesperson, the agency has also deployed 368 smaller surveillance towers, known as RVSS towers, in areas ranging from south of San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley, as well as along parts of the U.S.-Canadian border. [...]

In February [2019], Congress allocated $100 million for integrated fixed towers and mobile surveillance systems, a sign that the towers may soon expand to new locations. According to [BB], senior director of Customs and Border Protection at Elbit Systems of America, the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,” [BB] said in an interview with The Intercept. “There’s a lot to be done.”

In November 2016, a company representative offered a system of wide-area persistent surveillance sensors to police monitoring Dakota Access pipeline opponents. Elbit’s description of its product, known as GroundEye, touted it as “a paradigm shift in defense and security surveillance,” owing to its “ability to move ‘Back-In-Time,’ to simultaneously track and trace the movements of one or more objects.”

-----

Border militarism [...] has, in turn, created new profit opportunities for technology and defense firms. [...] Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians. The company built surveillance sensors for Israel’s separation barrier through the West Bank [...]. In 2016, Israel became the first country to deploy autonomous vehicles in a border area, which were also created by Elbit. [...]

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation. [...] In 2017, as companies built prototypes for [the president’s] border wall in San Diego, CBP stationed one of its RVSS towers nearby to monitor political opposition, citing the “emerging threat of demonstrations,” records show. The tower deployment lasted for eight months beginning in September 2017, according to a federal contract tender posted online [...]. CBP also frequently “shares” its aircraft, including surveillance drones, with other U.S. law enforcement agencies. [...]

That potential is further underscored by a March 2018 email exchange, obtained via open records requests [...] Border Patrol Agent in Charge [CMS] of the agency’s Rio Grande Valley sector, emailed more than 30 other supervisory agents to invite them to a “Large Scale Protest Response Seminar.” The leader of the seminar was [PL], the former sheriff of Cass County, North Dakota, who served as the leading architect of the militarized police response at Standing Rock. “The current political climate, uptick in demonstrations and social media campaigns, along with the immigration debate almost ensure that RGV will have large scale protests,” [CMS] wrote

-----

[NJD], a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.” [...]

The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase [...]. [NJD] says the constant surveillance has profoundly disrupted the cultural fabric of the Tohono O’odham people [...]. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants.

“It is apartheid here,” [OR] says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.” [...] “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” [NJD] says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

-----

Will Parrish. ‘The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli military contractor are putting a Naitve American reservation under “persistent surveillance.”’ The Intercept. 25 August 2019.

[samwisethewitch]

Cults? In my life? It’s more likely than you think.

In my last post, I talked about how the Law of Attraction and Christian prosperity gospel both use the same thought control techniques as cults. I’ve received several public and private replies to that post: some expressing contempt for “sheeple” who can be lead astray by cults, and others who say my post made them scared that they might be part of a cult without knowing it.

I want to address both of those types of replies in this post. I want to talk about what a cult really looks like, and how you can know if you’re dealing with one.

If you type the word “cult” into Google Images, it will bring up lots of photos of people with long hair, wearing all white, with their hands raised in an expression of ecstasy.

Most modern cults do not look anything like this.

Modern cultists look a lot like everyone else. One of the primary goals of most cults is recruitment, and it’s hard to get people to join your cause if they think you and your group are all Kool-Aid-drinking weirdos. The cults that last are the ones that manage to convince people that they’re just like everyone else — a little weird maybe, but certainly not dangerous.

In the book The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, author Jeff Guinn says, “In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts.”

You might not know Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by name, but you’ve probably heard their story. They’re the Kool-Aid drinkers I mentioned earlier. Jones and over 900 of his followers, including children, committed mass suicide by drinking Flavor Aid mixed with cyanide.

In a way, the cartoonish image of cults in popular media has helped real-life cults to stay under the radar and slip through people’s defenses.

In her book Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control, Luna Lindsey says: “These groups use a legion of persuasive techniques in unison, techniques that strip away the personality to build up a new group pseudopersonality. New members know very little about the group’s purpose, and most expectations remain unrevealed. People become deeply involved, sacrificing vast amounts of time and money, and investing emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and socially.”

Let’s address some more common myths about cults:

Myth #1: All cults are Satanic or occult in nature. This mostly comes from conservative Christians, who may believe that all non-Christian religions are inherently cultish in nature and are in league with the Devil. This is not the case — most non-Christians don’t even believe in the Devil, much less want to sign away their souls to him. Many cults use Christian theology to recruit members, and some of these groups (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) have become popular enough to be recognized as legitimate religions. Most cults have nothing to do with magic or the occult.

Myth #2: All cults are religious. This is also false. While some cults do use religion to recruit members or push an agenda, many cults have no religious or spiritual element. Political cults are those founded around a specific political ideology. Author and cult researcher Janja Lalich is a former member of an American political cult founded on the principles of Marxism. There are also “cults of personality” built around political figures and celebrities, such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Donald Trump. In these cases, the cult is built around hero worship of the leader — it doesn’t really matter what the leader believes or does.

Myth #3: All cults are small fringe groups. Cults can be any size. Some cults have only a handful of members — it’s even possible for parents to use thought control techniques on their children, essentially creating a cult that consists of a single family.  There are some cults that have millions of members (see previous note about Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Myth #4: All cults live on isolated compounds away from mainstream society. While it is true that all cults isolate their members from the outside world, very few modern cults use physical isolation. Many cults employ social isolation, which makes members feel separate from mainstream society. Some cults do this by encouraging their followers to be “In the world but not of the world,” or encouraging them to keep themselves “pure.”

Myth #5: Only stupid, gullible, and/or mentally ill people join cults. Actually, according to Luna Lindsey, the average cult member is of above-average intelligence. As cult expert Steven Hassan points out, “Cults intentionally recruit ‘valuable’ people—they go after those who are intelligent, caring, and motivated. Most cults do not want to be burdened by unintelligent people with serious emotional or physical problems.” The idea that only stupid or gullible people fall for thought control is very dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that “it could never happen to me.” This actually prevents intelligent people from thinking critically about the information they’re consuming and the groups they’re associating with, which makes them easier targets for cult recruitment.

So, now that we have a better idea of what a cult actually looks like, how do you know if you or someone you know is in one?

A good rule of thumb is to compare the group’s actions and teachings to Steven Hassan’s BITE Model. Steven Hassan is an expert on cult psychology, and most cult researchers stand by this model. From Hassan’s website, freedomofmind.com: “Based on research and theory by Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Singer, Edgar Schein, Louis Jolyon West, and others who studied brainwashing in Maoist China as well as cognitive dissonance theory by Leon Festinger, Steven Hassan developed the BITE Model to describe the specific methods that cults use to recruit and maintain control over people. ‘BITE’ stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.”

Behavior Control may include…

Telling you how to behave, and enforcing behavior with rewards and punishments. (Rewards may be nonphysical concepts like “salvation” or “enlightenment,” or social rewards like group acceptance or an elevated status within the group. Punishments may also be nonphysical, like “damnation,” or may be social punishments like judgement from peers or removal from the group.)

Dictating where and with whom you live. (This includes pressure to move closer to other group members, even if you will be living separately.)

Controlling or restricting your sexuality. (Includes enforcing chastity or abstinence and/or coercion into non-consensual sex acts.)

Controlling your clothing or hairstyle. (Even if no one explicitly tells you, you may feel subtle pressure to look like the rest of the group.)

Restricting leisure time and activities. (This includes both demanding participation in frequent group activities and telling you how you should spend your free time.)

Requiring you to seek permission for major decisions. (Again, even if you don’t “need” permission, you may feel pressure to make decisions that will be accepted by the group.)

And more.

Information Control may include…

Withholding or distorting information. (This may manifest as levels of initiation, with only the “inner circle” or upper initiates being taught certain information.)

Forbidding members from speaking with ex-members or other critics.

Discouraging members from trusting any source of information that isn’t approved by the group’s leadership.

Forbidding members from sharing certain details of the group’s beliefs or practice with outsiders.

Using propaganda. (This includes “feel good” media that exists only to enforce the group’s message.)

Using information gained in confession or private conversation against you.

Gaslighting to make members doubt their own memory. (“I never said that,” “You’re remembering that wrong,” “You’re confused,” etc.)

Requiring you to report your thoughts, feelings, and activities to group leaders or superiors.

Encouraging you to spy on other group members and report their “misconduct.”

And more.

Thought Control may include…

Black and White, Us vs. Them, or Good vs. Evil thinking.

Requiring you to change part of your identity or take on a new name. (This includes only using last names, as well as titles like “Brother,” “Sister,” and “Elder.”)

Using loaded languages and cliches to stop complex thought. (This is the difference between calling someone a “former member” and calling the same person an “apostate” or “covenant breaker.”)

Inducing hypnotic or trance states including prayer, meditation, singing hymns, etc.

Using thought-stopping techniques to prevent critical thinking. (“If you ever find yourself doubting, say a prayer to distract yourself!”)

Allowing only positive thoughts or speech.

Rejecting rational analysis and criticism both from members and from those outside the group.

And more.

Emotional Control may include…

Inducing irrational fears and phobias, especially in connection with leaving the group. (This includes fear of damnation, fear of losing personal value, fear of persecution, etc.)

Labeling some emotions as evil, worldly, sinful, low-vibrational, or wrong.

Teaching techniques to keep yourself from feeling certain emotions like anger or sadness.

Promoting feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness. (This is often done by holding group members to impossible standards, such as being spiritually “pure” or being 100% happy all the time.)

Showering members and new recruits with positive attention — this is called “love bombing.” (This can be anything from expensive gifts to sexual favors to simply being really nice to newcomers.)

Shunning members who disobey orders or disbelieve the group’s teachings.

Teaching members that there is no happiness, peace, comfort, etc. outside of the group.

And more.

If a group ticks most or all of the boxes in any one of these categories, you need to do some serious thinking about whether or not that group is good for your mental health. If a group is doing all four of these, you’re definitely dealing with a cult and need to get out as soon as possible.

These techniques can also be used by individual people in one-on-one relationships. A relationship or friendship where someone tries to control your behavior, thoughts, or emotions is not healthy and, again, you need to get out as soon as possible.

Obviously, not all of these things are inherently bad. Meditation and prayer can be helpful on their own, and being nice to new people is common courtesy. The problem is when these acts become part of a bigger pattern, which enforces someone else’s control over your life.

A group that tries to tell you how to think or who to be is bad for your mental health, your personal relationships, and your sense of self. When in doubt, do what you think is best for you — and always be suspicious of people or groups who refuse to be criticized.

[luckgods]

Why all the white guys in whump?

I got Inspired by a post asking that question, and here we are. Warning: long post ahead.

I think it’s due to a combination of factors, as things frequently are.

The preference for / prevalence of white male characters in fandom is well-known and has been examined pretty thoroughly by people already.

What’s worth noting for discussing this tendency in whump in particular is that the ‘whump fandom’ itself is not a ‘fandom’ in the traditional sense of being made of fans of one single source narrative (or source setting, like a particular comics fandom, or the Star Wars extended universe) with pre-existing characters. Although subsets of traditional fandoms certainly exist within the larger whump fandom, a lot of whump is based on original, ‘fan’-created characters.

So, given the tendency of ‘traditional’ fandoms to create stories disproportionately centered on white male characters due to the source material itself being centered on white male characters (and giving more narrative weight to them, characterizing them better, etc), if we say hypothetically that the whump fandom is split say 50/50 between ‘traditional’ fandom works and original whump works, you’d expect to see a higher number of works focused on white men than the demographics of the ‘traditional’ fandom’s source work would predict, but not as extreme of a divergence between the source material & the fanworks as the one you’d see if whump fandom were 100% based on popular media.

However, that doesn’t quite seem to be the case. Whump stories and art remain focused on overwhelmingly male and frequently white characters, which means that the tendency of the fandom to create stories disproportionately centered on white male characters cannot be ONLY explained by the source material itself being centered on white male characters (and giving more narrative weight to them, characterizing them better, etc).

And, having established the fact that whump writers & artists presumably have MORE control over the design of their characters than writers & artists in ‘traditional’ fandoms, we have to wonder why the proportions remain biased towards men, & white men in particular.

—

The race thing is pretty simple in my opinion. Mostly, it’s just another extension of the fanbase’s tendency to reflect the (predominantly US-American, on tumblr) culture it exists in, which means that, in a white-centric culture, people make artworks featuring white people.

There’s also the issue of artists being hesitant to write works that dwell heavily on violence towards people of color due to the (US-American) history of people of color being violently mistreated. I’ve actually seen a couple of posts arguing that white people SHOULDN’T write whump of nonwhite characters (particularly Black characters) because of the history of actual violence against Black bodies being used as entertainment, which means that fictional violence against Black people, written by white people, for a (presumed) white audience, still feels exploitative and demeaning.

I'm not going to get into all my thoughts on this discussion here but suffice to say that there's probably an impact on the demographics of whump works from authors of color who simply... don't want to see violence against people of color, even non-explicitly-racialized violence, and then another impact from white authors who choose not to write non-white characters either due to the reasons stated above, or simply due to their personal discomfort with how to go about writing non-white characters in a genre that is heavily focused on interpersonal violence.

Interestingly enough, there’s also a decent proportion of Japanese manga & anime being used as source material for whump, and manga-styled original works being created. The particular relationship between US-American and Japanese pop culture could take up a whole essay just by itself so I’ll just say, there’s a long history of US-Japanese cultural exchange which means that this tendency is also not all that surprising.

—

GENDER though. If someone had the time and the energy they could make a fucking CAREER out of examining gender in whump, gender dynamics in whump, and why there seems to be a fandom-wide preference for male whumpees that cannot be fully explained by the emphasis on male characters in the source text.

I have several different theories about factors which impact gender preference in whump, and anyone who has other theories (or disagrees with mine) is free to jump in and add on.

THEORY 1: AUTHOR GENDER AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
 Fandom in general is predominantly female, although these days it might be more accurate to say that fandom is predominantly composed of cis women and trans people of all genders. However, pretty much everyone who isn't a cis man has had to contend with the specter of gendered violence in their real personal life. Thus, if we posit whump (and fandom more generally) as a sort of escapist setup, it's not hard to see why whump authors & artists might willfully eschew writing female whumpees (especially in the case of inflicted whump), because (as in the discussion of people of color in whump above), even violence towards women that is explicitly non-gender-based may still hit too close to home for people whose lives have been saturated with the awareness of gender-based violence.

THEORY 2: SICK OF SEXY SUFFERING.
 Something of an addendum to theory 1, it's worth noting that depictions of female suffering in popular media are extremely gendered (in that they specifically reflect real-life gender-based violence, and that said real-life violence is almost exclusively referenced in relation to female characters) and frequently sexualized as well. There's only so many times you can see female characters having their clothes Strategically Ripped while they're held captive, being sexually menaced (overtly or implicitly) to demonstrate How Evil the villain is, or just getting outright sexually assaulted for the Drama of it all before it gets exhausting, especially when the narratives typically either brush any consequences under the rug, or dwell on them in a way that feels more voyeuristic and gratuitous than realistic and meaningful. All this may result in authors who, given the chance to write their own depictions of suffering, may decide simply to remove the possibility of gendered violence by removing the female gender.

THEORY 3: AUTHOR ATTRACTION. 
I'll admit that this one is more a matter of conjecture, as I haven't seen any good demographic breakdowns of attraction in general fandom or whump fandom. That said, my own experience talking to fellow whump fans does indicate that attraction to the characters (whether whumpers, or whumpees) is part of the draw of whump for some people. This one partially ties into theory 1 as well, in that people who are attracted to multiple genders may not derive the same enjoyment out of seeing a female character in a whumpy situation as they might seeing a male character in that situation, simply because of the experience of gendered violence in their lives.

THEORY 4: ACCEPTABLE TARGETS.
 The female history of fandom means that there's been a lot more discussion of the impacts of depicting pain & suffering (especially female suffering) for personal amusement. Thus, in some ways, you could say that there is a mild taboo on putting female characters through suffering if you can't "justify" it as meaningful to the narrative, not just titillating, which whump fandom rarely tries or requires anyone to do. This fan-cultural 'rule' may impact whump writers' and artists' decisions in choosing the gender of their characters.

THEORY 5: AN ALTERNATIVE TO MAINSTREAM MASCULINITY.
 Whump fandom may like whumping men because by and large, mainstream/pop culture doesn't let men be vulnerable, doesn't let them cry, doesn't let them have long-term health issues due to constantly getting beat up even when they really SHOULD, doesn't let them have mental health issues period. Female characters, as discussed in theory 2, get to ("get to") go through suffering and be affected by it (however poorly written those effects are), but typically, male characters' suffering is treated as a temporary problem, minimized, and sublimated into anger if at all possible. (For an example, see: every scene in a movie where something terrible happens and the male lead character screams instead of crying). So, as nature abhors a vacuum, whump fandom "over-produces" whump of men so as to fill in that gap in content.

THEORY 6: AMPLIFIED BIAS.
 While it's true that whump fandom doesn't have a source text, it's also true that whump fans frequently find their way into the fandom via other 'traditional' fandoms, and continue participating in 'traditional' fandoms as part of their whump fandom activity. Bias begets bias; fandom as a whole has a massive problem with focusing on white male characters, and fans who are used to the bias towards certain types of characters in derivative works absolutely reproduce that bias in their own original whump works.

—

I honestly think that there is greater bias in the whump fandom than anyone would like to admit. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems as though whump fans avoid introspection and discussion of the issue by bringing up the points I talked about in my previous theories, particularly discomfort with depictions of female suffering for amusement.

However, I think that, as artists, we owe it to ourselves and one another to engage in at least a small amount of self-interrogation over our preferences, and see what unconscious or unacknowledged biases we possess. It's a little absurd to argue that depictions of women as whumpees are universally too distressing to even discuss when a male character in the exact same position would be fine and even gratifying to the person making that argument; while obviously, people have a right to their own boundaries, those boundaries should not be used to shut down discussion of any topics, even sensitive ones.

Furthermore, engaging in personal reflection allows artists to make more deliberate (and meaningful) art. For people whose goal is simply to have fun, that may not seem all that appealing, but having greater understanding of one's own preferences can be very helpful towards deciding what works to create, what to focus on when creating, and what works to seek out.

—

GENDER ADDENDUM: NONBINARY CHARACTERS, NONBINARY AUTHORS. 
Of course, this whole discussion so far has been exclusively based on a male-female binary, which is reductive. (I will note, though, that many binary people do effectively sort all nonbinary people they know of into 'female-aligned' and 'male-aligned' categories and then proceed to treat the nonbinary people and characters they have categorized a 'female-aligned' the same way as they treat people & characters who are actually female, and ditto for 'male-aligned'. That tendency is very frustrating for me, as a nonbinary person whose gender has NOTHING to do with any part of the binary, and reveals that even 'progressive' fandom culture has quite a ways to go in its understanding of gender.)

Anyways, nonbinary characters in whump are still VERY rare and typically written by nonbinary authors. (I have no clue whether nonbinary whump fans have, as a demographic group, different gender preferences than binary fans, but I'd be interested in seeing that data.)

As noted above with female characters, it's similarly difficult to have a discussion about representation and treatment of nonbinary characters in whump fandom, and frankly in fandom in general. Frequently, people regard attempts to open discussions on difficult topics as a call for conflict. This defensive stance once again reveals the distaste for requests of meaningful self-examination that is so frequent in fandom spaces, and online more generally.

—

TL;DR: Whump is not immune to the same gender & racial biases that are prevalent in fandom and (US-American) culture. If you enjoy whump: ask yourself why you dislike the things you dislike— the answer may surprise you. If you create whump: ask yourself whose stories you tell, and what stories you refuse to tell— then ask yourself why.

[twh-news]

How Loki Shapeshifted From Nordic Folklore to a Marvel Icon

by Sara Durn

There are more than 800 years between the stories of Viking god Loki first being written down and his arrival (in the superb Tom Hiddleston) in the Marvel cinematic universe in 2011’s Thor. The new Disney+ series Loki, set to be released on June 9, is primed to explore more antics of Thor’s trickster brother as he attempts to fix the timeline he helped break in Avengers: Endgame. Among his many talents, Loki has cheated death a few times in the MCU, but that amounts to child’s play for this god.

In Norse mythology, Loki causes just as much confusion as his Marvel iteration. Though there aren’t any stories of him outwitting death, there are plenty of myths where he shapeshifts, swaps genders, or tricks gods into killing other gods. In the Marvel universe, he’s quite prone to allegiance swapping. Let’s dig into this troublemaker’s journey.

What is Loki’s origin?

The legends surrounding the Norse god are first documented in writing around the 13th century, primarily in Iceland. There are two versions of these legends that enter the historical record around the same time—the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. The Poetic Edda is an anonymous collection of Old Norse poems that are mainly pulled from an Icelandic medieval manuscript known as the Codex Regius (some of the poems date back to 800 CE). The Prose Edda is an Old Norse textbook for composing poetry that was written by a single author, Snorri Sturluson, a colorful Icelandic historian, scholar, and lawspeaker.

“Within the myths, you can see Loki moving from being just mischievous to being absolutely evil. If you think of him as only being mischievous, he’s actually a creative force and often ends up getting the gods much of their magical possessions, like Thor’s Hammer, through his cunning.”

“Pretty much everything we know about Loki came from Snorri Sturluson,” Viking scholar Nancy Marie Brown, author of Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, told io9. Brown says this was very appropriate given that “Snorri was quite a trickster figure himself.” While calling him the “Homer of the North,” Brown also acknowledges that Snorri spent a lifetime “double-crossing friends and family… scheming and plotting, blustering and fleeing”— a life that eventually led to his unheroic demise in a nightshirt where his (supposed) final words were “don’t strike!” In both Eddas, Loki is always portrayed as a cunning trickster. In the Prose Edda, Snorri describes Loki as “pleasing and handsome in appearance, evil in character, very capricious in behavior. He possessed to a greater degree than other [gods] the kind of learning that is called cunning.”

Besides appearances, Loki is always getting the gods into trouble and then cleverly extricating them from the mess he’s made. He fathers the Midgard Serpent destined to bring about Ragnarök, the end of the world in Norse mythology. He convinces the blind god Hodr to kill the beautiful and favored god Baldur. He kidnaps the goddess Idun to save his own hide from a furious giant. The mythological character is constantly switching sides—sometimes supporting the gods and sometimes their enemies, the giants. In the MCU, Loki is both hero and villain—in The Avengers he opened a wormhole in New York City releasing alien monsters and in Thor: Ragnarok he helped Thor save the Asgardians from Hela’s wrath.

Thorwald’s Cross, a fragmented runestone depicting Odin being consumed. Image: Public Domain

Loki might have begun as a Norse god of fire—fitting considering how fire can be both “helpful and destructive,” said Brown. Fire can both burn down your house and cook you dinner. It’s tricky that way—like Loki. As Brown puts it, “You can see his two sides there [reflected in fire].” Brown also explains that there was likely a transformation in Loki over the centuries. “Within the myths, you can see Loki moving from being just mischievous to being absolutely evil. If you think of him as only being mischievous, he’s actually a creative force and often ends up getting the gods much of their magical possessions, like Thor’s Hammer, through his cunning.” Again, it’s just like Marvel’s Loki, who sometimes helps the other gods out, like when he teamed up with Thor to escape the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok.

What is Loki’s relationship with the Devil?

In the long, slow conversion of the Vikings to Christianity that took place between the 9th and 12th centuries, Loki became a parallel to the Christian Devil. The creative, positive elements of him fell away leaving only the god favored by the Father (Odin/God) before getting cast out. (It does sound a bit like Lucifer, right?) Christianity paints a world that is far more black and white, good vs. evil than the Norse pagan religion—here’s little room for a grey, ambiguous figure like Loki. As Brown puts it, “The Christian religion insists that you’re either with us or against us. Whereas in what we understand of the pagan Viking religion, there were a lot of shades of grey. There was a spectrum on which you could move back and forth. You weren’t all one thing or all the other. You weren’t all female or all male. You weren’t all good or all evil. It was more human.”

Loki always moved fluidly between those two polarities—helping Thor in one story, causing an overthrow of the gods in another. In one tale, Loki shapeshifts into a mare, becoming the mother of Odin’s great 8-legged horse, Sleipnir. In another, he fathers the wolf Fenrir. The Church couldn’t really handle all that grey area Loki liked to inhabit, and so it eventually cast him as the devil himself. “[Monks] had to sort the gods into saints and devils, and Loki by being sexually ambiguous and also morally ambiguous falls into the devil [category],” explained Brown. Though Marvel’s Loki certainly channels a bit of the devil at times, we’ve luckily yet to see him become both mother and father to world-ending, multi-legged monsters in the Marvel Universe. But, there’s still time, especially with the new Disney+ series hitting the small screen.

When was Loki’s Revival?

After the Viking conversion, the Norse myths started to fade, and Loki with them—until the 1600s, when medieval manuscripts like those containing the Prose and Poetic Edda began to be translated. “The reason [these myths] became popular was because of nationalism,” Brown told us. “In the mid to late 1800s, there was the idea that what distinguished one nation from another was its cultural heritage.” This spurred Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm—known to many simply as the Brothers Grimm—to go “collect the stories of the local people to prove that Germany was a nation, not a collection of states. You had the same thing happening in Ireland to prove that they were different from the English and you have the same thing happening in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.” This eventually gave rise to the Nazis appropriating Norse myths in their twisted pursuit of alleging Aryan supremacy.

Following the Civil War, the United States also looked to the Middle Ages to redefine the country’s fractured identity. As Chris Bishop, author of Medievalist Comics and the American Century, explained to io9, “[the Middle Ages] offered an aesthetic that was individualistic (think: the knight errant, Robin Hood, etc.), given to interpretations of exceptionalism (Camelot, the once and future king), venerable (where old equalled established and respectable), and (unlike Classicism) Christian.” The Middle Ages, or more accurately the remixing of the Middle Ages known in academia as “medievalisms,” appealed to many Americans obsessed with ideas of American exceptionalism and singularity in the 19th century. Eventually the U.S.’s obsession with the Middle Ages made its way into comic books starting with Prince Valiant in 1937, a comic strip created by Hal Foster set in and around the legends of King Arthur. Other medievalist comics followed eventually leading to the inclusion of Norse gods like Loki, Thor, and Odin.

First appearance of Loki in the 1949 Venus comics. Image: Wikicommons

When was Marvel Comics’ Loki introduced?

While Loki first appeared in the 1949 comic book Venus styled after (you guessed it) the devil, the modern-age Loki didn’t hit the comic book scene until co-writers and brothers Stan Lee and Larry Lieber adapted him in 1962’s Journey into Mystery #85. It’s in that issue where Loki “becomes Thor’s enemy/ally/brother/adopted brother/etc,” said Bishop. The mischievous personality of the Norse god remains largely the same in the Loki of the comic books and films and even retains the ability to swap genders at times.

In the comics, Loki is raised as Thor’s brother in Asgard—somewhere the Marvel stories diverge from the Norse mythology. It’s Loki and Odin who are sworn brothers in the Norse myths, not Loki and Thor. As Brown explains, “Loki and Odin are blood brothers, which means they are even closer than real brothers.” In the Viking world, two people who swore a blood oath to one another formed a bond that went beyond kin, and so went the Norse Loki and Odin’s relationship. As Bishop points out, the Loki/Thor dynamic of the comics and movies is a “classic, formulaic archetype.” Thor is the “big, hunky, handsome (but slightly dumb) hero” and Loki is “his slight, quirky but super-smart frenemy. Loki is the dark, misunderstood, vulnerable shadow that audiences can relate to, reach out to, care for. Thor is that dumb jock who everyone looked up to at school, but Loki was that cool, quiet kid who went on to found a tech-empire.”

Why is Loki called a Trickster?

What does remain consistent with Loki is that he always plays the trickster. He is the manifestation of psychologist Carl Jung’s archetype: The trickster disrupts the individual and/or society causing either growth or destruction. Social scientist Helena Bassil-Morozow points out that when it comes to Loki, “despite the fact that the narrative details between the medieval Loki stories and their contemporary versions vary, the main idea remains the same—the trickster mercilessly attacks those in power and nearly causes the end of the world.” Both in the Norse myths and in Marvel, the world needs saving from Loki. He acts as the catalyst for a whole lot of upheaval—upheaval that in the Norse myths causes Ragnarök.

Loki “functions as a locus of salvation (literally, a prodigal son).” Loki just might be a savior. He’s someone audiences can look at and think “if Loki can be redeemed, so too might I.”

Perhaps that’s where the two narratives differ the most. In the Norse tales, the end of the world at Ragnarök is inevitable. Odin and Thor will die. Everything will change. Vikings lived with the knowledge that their world would end. In the MCU, we don’t know how the story ends, plus Ragnarök took place already and yet the Asgardians live on. There’s still hope that Loki will prove to be good and that the other superheroes will save the world from whatever mayhem he’s caused, or so we can hope in the upcoming Disney+ series. As Bishop puts it, Loki “functions as a locus of salvation (literally, a prodigal son).” Loki just might be a savior. He’s someone audiences can look at and think “if Loki can be redeemed, so too might I,” explains Bishop.

While the Vikings’ Loki caused the end of the world, today’s Loki might just save it. Or maybe not. And, perhaps that’s the fun of the trickster—you never quite know what they’ll get up to.

[dreamersdreamloud]

Drug Cartels (Part 1?)

Lena Luthor x Boss Cartel Reader 

AN: attempted rape, betrayal, strong language,  

The Luthor Cartel and Los Reyes Alfa Cartel have been in a drug war for a couple of years. The older generations knew how it all started but as the years went by, the lines have been blurred and the people had a hard time who to put their trust in. The two drug groups weren’t always like this before until a turnt of leadership led them into this direction.

It all started when two men from college wanted to start a business to make quick cash. The easy way to do that is to sell drugs. A shit ton of drugs. The two men became popular by name within their community. (Y/F/N)(Y/L/N) and Lionel Luthor have become popular within a month of sales. It’s a given fact that college students love doing drugs whether it's smoking it up or shoving it through their nostrils. They both agree that they want to keep this business stable but their supplier was lacking on them. 

Lionel pitched an idea that they should drop out of college and use his remaining inheritance money to create a warehouse supply in Mexico. It was relatively cheap at the time to buy land and start work. The two men drop out of college and disappear to Mexico to start a booming life. 

It was fairly easy. They got connected with American sellers and hired a bunch of Mexicans for the work. They called themselves the Templar Cartel. Lionel kept track of supplies and how it gets delivered while your father kept track of making deals and where the money was flowing. They become rich in the same year. They threw their money almost everywhere and anyone who needed it. They became the untouchable heroes . They hired lots of men for protection and women for pleasure. Life was going good for them until the Mexican and American government wanted to shut them down. 

The governments were getting frustrated with the rise of overuse of drugs, violence, and gang related fights. At first they didn’t know why and how but they found out that drug lords were the problems. At first, tensions grew between the Templar Cartel and the Mexican government. On both sides, many have lost lives from their own members or family. 

Lionel and your father brainstormed a plan to ease off from the government. They paid off Mexican officials to do some of their dirty work and create two branches within the Templar Cartel to cover more ground. More drugs and money production to flow in. It was doing really well until the American government finally got involved. Their efforts of hunting down warehouses were impressive but very dangerous. 

Lionel and your father have finally decided to go their separate ways and made a verbal agreement with several witnesses to not harm either drug group and hope for the best from out running the police and the ignorant government officials who betrayed them. 

*** 

A year and half later 

Lionel had found the love of his life. Lillian. He met the woman who was vacationing at one of the most beautiful Mexican beaches. They hit off pretty well and manage to keep a healthy relationship to the point where Lillian agrees to marry the leader of the Luthor Cartel. It wasn’t long for them to produce an heir, Alexander Luthor. Also known as Lex Luthor. Lionel was very pleased that his first child is a son who he can bond with and teach the ways of the Luthor Cartel. 

By the time that Lex was 14 years old, he found out that his father cheated on Lillian with an Irish woman when he visited Ireland for a business trip. The trip was about making new deals to send out drugs for that area. Lionel made a drunken mistake and fucked a woman during his trip out there. Lillain was upset for a while but they were able to talk it out and kept the marriage strong. When Lena Luthor was born, she wasn’t living in the Luthor compound yet, until after turnt of events. 

Lena’s biological mother was purposely shot by a rival gang. The backstory was when Lionel was in a meeting that day. Lena and her mother went to a beach to enjoy the nice warm day. Lena’s mother went for a swim and Lena walked around the beach to collect seashells. 

On her mother’s final moments, Lena heard a loud gun shot being fired from afar and she saw a bullet go through her mother’s head. A clean shot. Members of the Luthor Cartel tried to chase down the sniper. One member retrieves little Lena to safety just in case the sniper were to shoot again. 

Little Lena did not cry nor scream at her mother’s death. She knew what was going on and all felt helplessness in her heart. Lionel and his men took less than a week to find out who murdered her mother. A phony small drug gang who tried to scare out the Luthor Cartel for crossing their Irish territory. Lionel sent out orders to kill all the members of the drug gang. 

Lillian and Lex accepted Lena warmly but did not get much attention as Lex. The soon to be rising leader of their family cartel. Lionel has been training the young man into becoming a successful and ruthless leader. Lionel would give some training to Lena too but he always thought it was best that she stayed in school and stray away from the family business. 

*** 

A tragic day happened within the Luthor Cartel. Lionel Luthor was finally shot down by the CIA. The Americans have caught up with the cartel leader and brutally shot the man in public. The news spread so quickly. Lillian sent out members to pull out Lena and Lex from school to make quick changes of leadership. 

Lex became the new cartel leader. Lillian went into hiding because the Americans were hunting her down as well. Lena had a choice to go into hiding too but she decided to stay with her brother to help lead. She was angered by her father’s death but she can’t believe she was experiencing the same helplessness she once felt for her dead mother. Lex wasn’t coping well either. His rage was concerning but no one dares to question him. 

Lex sent out plans on expanding and killing many of those who were in the way. Lena supported his ideas and thought it was necessary. The Luthor siblings were unstoppable until Lena had a change of heart. She witnessed her brother send out orders to kill an innocent man’s family just because that man had pissed off him. 

Lena tried to convince Lex to stop the execution. She failed. She saw that Lex’s men shot the man and woman in front of their children and then the children became the next target. Lena cried for them that day. She cried out for many other family members but she did nothing to help. She let her brother do it. 

Her brother created more problems for the Luthor Cartel. He has started a war with Los Reyes Alfa Cartel. Lena and Lex knew that the leader of that cartel was once close friends with their father. They knew the history of how this all started  but never saw the face of the leader. Lex didn’t care for the old connection and threw the known verbal agreement out of the window. Lex stole clients and killed members of Los Reyes Alfa. 

Lex was growing insane and became hungry for more power. He threw a proposal to his sister on how to gain more power and money by sending her off to marry a cartel leader from Africa, James Olsen of Los Caballeros Negros. Lena rejected. She refuses to be in a arranged marriage with an unknown man who was know to rape women and kill families of those who disobey them. 

This angered Lex. He slapped Lena across the face and said “how ungrateful of you to refuse such a great opportunity! We are trying to build a bigger empire! For our father! For us!” 

Lena didn’t cry. She glared at him. She was going to hit him back but his two close  men, Ben Lockwood and Morgan Edge, took her away and locked her in her room. A few hours later, Morgan came back with handcuffs in his hands. 

“Your brother told me you need some warming up to do.” The disgusting man rubbed his clothes cock and eyed Lena from head to toe. “He says that this might change your mind. Once I’m done with you, I’m sure you’ll change your mind about your brother’s proposal.” 

Lena panicked. The man is going to rape her. She’s still a virgin too. She wasn’t going to let this man take her pure form. She didn’t scream because she knows that won’t help. Morgan holds her down and rips her tight skirt. She felt the hard cock hit her thigh. She kicked and punched the man. 

“You bitch!” Morgan slaps Lena’s face and tries to hold her down again. He attempted to unzip his pants with one hand but Lena kicked again but this time in the right spot. The man groaned on the ground and held onto his manhood. The raven-haired woman picks up a heavy object and knocks him out with a single blow to the head. 

She grabs the combat knife and gun on his body and quickly packs a backpack full of essentials. She manages to get out of the Luthor compound and makes a run for it. She doesn't know where she’s going but she knows she can’t stay within the Luthor Cartel territories. Eventually, the woman who used to run the Luthor Cartel with her ruthless brother is now on the run. 

When Lex found out that she escaped, he sent out groups of people to hunt for the young Luthor. Little did he know, Lena ended up hiding in the Reyes Alfa grounds where her faith could be unpredictable.

[grigori77]

Summer 2021′s Movies - My Top Ten Favourite Films (Part 2)

The Top Ten:

10.  WEREWOLVES WITHIN – definitely one of the year’s biggest cinematic surprises so far, this darkly comic supernatural murder mystery from indie horror director Josh Ruben (Scare Me) is based on a video game, but you’d never know it – this bears so little resemblance to the original Ubisoft title that it’s a wonder anyone even bothered to make the connection, but even so, this is now notable for officially being the highest rated video game adaptation in Rotten Tomatoes history, with a Certified Fresh rating of 86%. Certainly it deserves that distinction, but there’s so much more to the film – this is an absolute blood-splattered joy, the title telling you everything you need to know about the story but belying the film’s pure, quirky genius.  Veep’s Sam Richardson is forest ranger Finn Wheeler, a gentle and socially awkward soul who arrives at his new post in the remote small town of Beaverton to discover the few, uniformly weird residents are divided over the oil pipeline proposition of forceful and abrasive businessman Sam Parker (The Hunt’s Wayne Duvall).  As he tries to fit in and find his feet, investigating the disappearance of a local dog while bonding with local mail carrier Cecily Moore (Other Space and This Is Us’ Milana Vayntrub), the discovery of a horribly mutilated human body leads to a standoff between the townsfolk and an enforced lockdown in the town’s ramshackle hotel as they try to work out who amongst them is the “werewolf” they suspect is responsible.  This is frequently hilarious, the offbeat script from appropriately named Mishna Wolff (I’m Down) dropping some absolutely zingers and crafting some enjoyably weird encounters and unexpected twists, while the uniformly excellent cast do much of the heavy-lifting to bring their rich, thoroughly oddball characters to vivid life – Richardson is thoroughly cuddly throughout, while Duvall is pleasingly loathsome, Casual’s Michaela Watkins is pleasingly grating as Trisha, flaky housewife to unrepentant local horn-dog Pete Anderton (Orange is the New Black’s Michael Chernus), and Cheyenne Jackson (American Horror Story) and Harry Guillen (best known, OF COURSE, as Guillermo in the TV version of What We Do In the Shadows) make an enjoyably spiky double-act as liberal gay couple Devon and Joaquim Wolfson; in the end, though, the film is roundly stolen by Vayntrub, who invests Cecily with a bubbly sweetness and snarky sass that makes it absolutely impossible to not fall completely in love with her (gods know I did).  This is a deeply funny film, packed with proper belly-laughs from start to finish, but like all the best horror comedies it takes its horror elements seriously, delivering some enjoyably effective scares and juicy gore, while the werewolf itself, when finally revealed, is realised through some top-notch prosthetics.  Altogether this was a most welcome under-the-radar surprise for the summer, and SO MUCH MORE than just an unusually great video game adaptation …

9.  THE TOMORROW WAR – although cinemas finally reopened in the UK in early summer, the bite of the COVID lockdown backlog was still very much in effect this blockbuster season, with several studios preferring to hedge their bets and wait for later release dates. Others turned to streaming services, including Paramount, who happily lined up a few heavyweight titles to open on major platforms in lieu of the big screen.  One of the biggest was this intended sci-fi action horror tentpole, meant to give Chris Pratt another potential franchise on top of Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World, which instead dropped in early July on Amazon Prime.  So, was it worth staying in on a Saturday night instead of heading out for something on the BIG screen?  Mostly yes, although it’s mainly a trashy, guilty pleasure big budget B-picture charm that makes this such a worthwhile experience – the film’s biggest influences are clearly Independence Day and Starship Troopers, two admirably clunky blockbusters that DEFINED prioritising big spectacle and overblown theatrics over intelligent writing and realistic storytelling.  It doesn’t help that the premise is pure bunk – in 2022, a wormhole opens from thirty years in the future, and a plea for help is sent back with a bunch of very young future soldiers.  Seems Earth will become overrun by an unstoppable swarm of nasty alien critters called Whitespikes in 25 years, and the desperate human counteroffensive have no choice but to bring soldiers from our present into the future to help them fight back and save the humanity from imminent extinction.  Less than a year later, the world’s standing armies have been decimated and a worldwide draft has been implemented, with normal everyday adults being sent through for a seven day tour from which very few return.  Pratt plays biology teacher and former Green Beret Dan Forrester, one of the latest batch of draftees to be sent into the future along with a selection of chefs, soccer moms and other average joes – his own training and experience serves him better than most when the shit hits the fan, but it soon becomes clear that he’s just as out of his depth as everyone else as the sheer enormity of the threat is revealed.  But when he becomes entangled with a desperate research outfit led by Muri (Chuck’s Yvonne Strahovski) who seem to be on the verge of a potential world-changing scientific breakthrough, Dan realises there just might be a slender hope for humanity after all … this is every bit as over-the-top gung-ho bonkers as it sounds, and just as much fun.  Director Chris McKay may still be pretty fresh (with only The Lego Batman Movie under his belt to date), but he shows a lot of talent and potential for big budget blockbuster filmmaking here, delivering with guts and bravado on some major action sequences (a fraught ticking-clock SAR operation through a war-torn Miami is the film’s undeniable highlight, but a desperate battle to escape a blazing oil rig also really impresses), as well as handling some impressively complex visual effects work and wrangling some quality performances from his cast (altogether it bodes well for his future, which includes Nightwing and Johnny Quest as future projects).  Chris Pratt can do this kind of stuff in his sleep – Dan is his classic fallible and self-deprecating but ultimately solid and kind-hearted action hero fare, effortlessly likeable and easy to root for – and his supporting cast are equally solid, Strahovsky going toe-to-toe with him in the action sequences while also creating a rewardingly complex smart-woman/badass combo in Muri, while the other real standouts include Sam Richardson (Veep, Werewolves Within) and Edwin Hodge (The Purge movies) as fellow draftees Charlie and Dorian, the former a scared-out-of-his-mind tech geek while the latter is a seriously hardcore veteran serving his THIRD TOUR, and the ever brilliant J.K. Simmonds as Dan’s emotionally scarred estranged Vietnam-vet father, Jim.  Sure, it’s derivative as hell and thoroughly predictable (with more than one big twist you can see coming a mile away), but the pace is brisk, the atmosphere pregnant with a palpable doomed urgency, and the creatures themselves are a genuinely convincing world-ending threat, the design team and visual effects wizards creating genuine nightmare fuel in the feral and unrelenting Whitespikes.  Altogether this WAS an ideal way to spend a comfy Saturday night in, but I think it could have been JUST AS GOOD for a Saturday night OUT at the Pictures …

8.  ARMY OF THE DEAD – another high profile release that went straight to streaming was this genuine monster hit for Netflix from one of this century’s undeniable heavyweight action cinema masters, the indomitable Zack Snyder, who kicked off his career with an audience-dividing (but, as far as I’m concerned, ultimately MASSIVELY successful) remake of George Romero’s immortal Dawn of the Dead, and has finally returned to zombie horror after close to two decades away.  The end result is, undeniably, the biggest cinematic guilty pleasure of the entire summer, a bona fide outbreak horror EPIC in spite of its tightly focused story – Dave Bautista plays mercenary Scott Ward, leader a badass squad of soldiers of fortune who were among the few to escape a deadly outbreak of a zombie virus in the city of Las Vegas, enlisted to break into the vault of one of the Strip’s casinos by owner Bly Tanaka (a fantastically game turn from Hiroyuki Sanada) and rescue $200 million still locked away inside.  So what’s the catch?  Vegas remains ground zero for the outbreak, walled off from the outside world but still heavily infested within, and in less than three days the US military intends to sterilise the site with a tactical nuke.  Simple premise, down and dirty, trashy flick, right?  Wrong – Snyder has never believed in doing things small, having brought us unapologetically BIG cinema with the likes of 300, Watchmen, Man of Steel and, most notably, his version of Justice League, so this is another MASSIVE undertaking, every scene shot for maximum thrills or emotional impact, each set-piece executed with his characteristic militaristic precision and explosive predilection (a harrowing fight for survival against a freshly-awakened zombie horde in tightly packed casino corridors is the film’s undeniable highlight), and the gauzy, dreamlike cinematography gives even simple scenes an intriguing and evocative edge that really does make you feel like you’re watching something BIG.  The characters all feel larger-than-life too – Bautista can seem somewhat cartoonish at times, and this role definitely plays that as a strength, making Scott a rock-hard alpha male in the classic Hollywood mould, but he’s such a great actor that of course he’s able to invest the character with real rewarding complexity beneath the surface; Ana de la Reguera (Eastbound & Down) and Nora Arnezeder (Zoo, Mozart in the Jungle), meanwhile, both bring a healthy dose of oestrogen-fuelled badassery to proceedings as, respectively, Scott’s regular second-in-command, Maria Cruz, and Lilly the Coyote, Power’s Omari Hardwick and Matthias Schweighofer (You Are Wanted) make for a fun odd-couple double act as circular-saw-wielding merc Vanderohe and Dieter, the nervous, nerdy German safecracker brought in to crack the vault, and Fear the Walking Dead’s Garrett Dillahunt channels spectacular scumbag energy as Tanaka’s sleazy former casino boss Martin, while latecomer Tig Notaro (Star Trek Discovery) effortlessly rises above her last-minute-casting controversy to deliver brilliantly as sassy and acerbic chopper pilot Peters.  I think it goes without saying that Snyder can do this in his sleep, but he definitely wasn’t napping here – he pulled out all the stops on this one, delivering a thrilling, darkly comic and endearingly CRACKERS zombie flick that not only compares favourably to his own Dawn but is, undeniably, his best film for AGES.  Netflix certainly seem to be pleased with the results – a spinoff prequel, Army of Thieves, starring Dieter in another heist thriller, is set to drop in October, with an animated series following in the Spring, and there’s already rumours of a sequel in development.  I’m certainly up for more …

7.  BLACK WIDOW – no major blockbuster property was hit harder by COVID than the MCU, which saw its ENTIRE SLATE for 2020 delayed for over a year in the face of Marvel Studios bowing to the inevitability of the Pandemic and unwilling to sacrifice those all-important box-office receipts by just sending their films straight to streaming.  The most frustrating part for hardcore fans of the series was the delay of a standalone film that was already criminally overdue – the solo headlining vehicle of founding Avenger and bona fide female superhero ICON Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow.  Equally frustratingly, then, this film seems set to be overshadowed by real life controversy as star and producer Scarlett Johansson goes head-to-head with Disney in civil court over their breach-of-contract after they hedged their bets by releasing the film simultaneously in cinemas and on their own streaming platform, which has led to poor box office as many of the film’s potential audience chose to watch it at home instead of risk movie theatres with the virus still very much remaining a threat (and Disney have clearly reacted AGAIN, now backtracking on their release policy by instigating a new 45-day cinematic exclusivity window on all their big releases for the immediate future). But what of the film itself?  Well Black Widow is an interesting piece of work, director Cate Shortland (Berlin Syndrome) and screenwriter Eric Pearson (Thor: Ragnarok) delivering a decidedly stripped-back, lean and intellectual beast that bears greater resemblance to the more cerebral work of the Russo Brothers on their Captain America films than the more classically bombastic likes of Iron Man, Thor or the Avengers flicks, concentrating on story and characters over action and spectacle as we wind back the clock to before the events of Infinity War and Endgame, when Romanoff was on the run after Civil War, hunted by the government-appointed forces of US Secretary of State “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt) after violating the Sokovia Accords.  Then a mysterious delivery throws her back into the fray as she finds herself targeted by a mysterious assassin, forcing her to team up with her estranged “sister” Yelena Belova (Midsommar’s Florence Pugh), another Black Widow who’s just gone rogue from the same Red Room Natasha escaped years ago, armed with a McGuffin capable of foiling a dastardly plot for world domination.  The reluctant duo need help in this endeavour though, enlisting the aid of their former “parents”, veteran Widow and scientist Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) and Alexie Shostakov (Stranger Things’ David Harbour), aka the Red Guardian, a Russian super-soldier intended to be their counterpart to Captain America, who’s been languishing in a Siberian gulag for the last twenty years. After the Earth-shaking, universe-changing events of recent MCU events, this film certainly feels like a much more self-contained, modest affair, playing for much smaller stakes, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less worthy of our attention – this is as precision-crafted as anything we’ve seen from Marvel so far, but it also feels like a refreshing change of pace after all those enormous cosmic shenanigans, while the script is as tight as a drum, propelling a taut, suspense-filled thriller that certainly doesn’t scrimp on the action front.  Sure, the set-pieces are very much in service of the story here, but they’re still the pre-requisite MCU rollercoaster rides, a selection of breathless chases and bone-crunching fights that really do play to the strengths of one of our favourite Avengers, but this is definitely one of those films where the real fireworks come when the film focuses on the characters – Johansson is so comfortable with her character she’s basically BECOME Natasha Romanoff, kickass and ruthless and complex and sassy and still just desperate for a family (though she hides it well throughout the film), while Weisz delivers one of her best performances in years as a peerless professional who keeps her emotions tightly reigned in but slowly comes to realise that she was never more happy than when she was pretending to be a simple mother, and Ray Winstone does a genuinely fantastic job of taking a character who could have been one of the MCU’s most disappointingly bland villains, General Dreykov, master of the Red Room, and investing him with enough oily charisma and intense presence to craft something truly memorable (frustratingly, the same cannot be said for the film’s supposed main physical threat, Taskmaster, who performs well in their frustratingly brief appearances but ultimately gets Darth Maul levels of short service).  The true scene-stealers in the film, however, are Alexie and Yelena – Harbour’s clearly having the time of his life hamming it up as a self-important, puffed-up peacock of a superhero who never got his shot and is clearly (rightly) decidedly bitter about it, preferring to relive the life he SHOULD have had instead of remembering the good in the one he got; Pugh, meanwhile, is THE BEST THING IN THE WHOLE MOVIE, easily matching Johanssen scene-for-scene in the action stakes but frequently out-performing her when it comes to acting, investing Yelena with a sweet naivety and innocence and a certain amount of quirky geekiness that makes for one of the year’s most endearing female protagonists (certainly one who, if the character goes the way I think she will, is thoroughly capable of carrying the torch for the foreseeable future).  In the end this is definitely one of the LEAST typical, by-the-numbers MCU films to date, and by delivering something a little different I think they’ve given us just the kind of leftfield swerve the series needs right now.  It’s certainly one of their most fascinating and rewarding films so far, and since it seems to be Johansson’s final tour of duty as the Black Widow, it’s also a most fitting farewell indeed.

6.  WRATH OF MAN – Guy Ritchie’s latest (regarded by many as a triumphant return to form, which I consider unfair since I don’t think he ever went away, especially after 2020’s spectacular The Gentlemen) is BY FAR his darkest film – let’s get this clear from the start.  Anyone who knows his work knows that Ritchie consistently maintains a near flawless balance and humour and seriousness in his films that gives them a welcome quirkiness that is one of his most distinctive trademarks, so for him to suddenly deliver a film which takes itself SO SERIOUSLY is one hell of a departure.  This is a film which almost REVELS in its darkness – Ritchie’s always loved bathing in man’s baser instincts, but Wrath of Man almost makes a kind of twisted VIRTUE out of wallowing in the genuine evils that men are capable of inflicting on each other.  The film certainly kicks off as it means to go on – In a tour-de-force single-shot opening, we watch a daring armoured car robbery on the streets of Los Angeles that goes horrifically wrong, an event which will have devastating consequences in the future.  Five months later, Fortico Security hires taciturn Brit Patrick Hill (Jason Statham) to work as a guard in one of their trucks, and on his first run he single-handedly foils another attempted robbery with genuinely uncanny combat skills. The company is thrilled, amazed by the sheer ability of their new hire, but Hill’s new colleagues are more concerned, wondering exactly what they’ve let themselves in for.  After a second foiled robbery, it becomes clear that Hill’s reputation has grown, but fellow guard Haiden (Holt McCallany), aka “Bullet”, begins to suspect there might be something darker going on … Ritchie is firing on all cylinders here, delivering a PERFECT slow-burn suspense thriller which plays its cards close to its chest and cranks up its piano wire tension with artful skill as it builds to a devastating, knuckle-whitening explosive heist that acts as a cathartic release for everything that’s built up over the past hour and a half.  In typical Ritchie style the narrative is non-linear, the story unfolding in four distinct parts told from clearly differentiated points of view, allowing the clues to be revealed at a trickle that effortlessly draws the viewer in as they fall deeper down the rabbit hole, leading to a harrowing but strangely poignant denouement which is perfectly in tune with everything that’s come before. It’s an immense pleasure finally getting to see Statham working with Ritchie again, and I don’t think he’s ever been better than he is here – he's always been a brilliantly understated actor, but there’s SO MUCH going on under Hill’s supposedly impenetrable calm that every little peek beneath the armour is a REVELATION; McCallany, meanwhile, has landed his best role since his short but VERY sweet supporting turn in Fight Club, seemingly likeable and fallible as the kind of easy-going co-worker anyone in the service industry would be THRILLED to have, but giving Bullet far more going on under the surface, while there are uniformly excellent performances from a top-shelf ensemble supporting cast which includes Josh Hartnett, Jeffrey Donovan (Burn Notice, Sicario), Andy Garcia, Laz Alonso (The Boys), Eddie Marsan, Niamh Algar (Raised By Wolves) and Darrell D’Silva (Informer, Domina), and a particularly edgy and intense turn from Scott Eastwood.  This is one of THE BEST thrillers of the year, by far, a masterpiece of mood, pace and plot that ensnares the viewer from its gripping opening and hooks them right up to the close, a triumph of the genre and EASILY Guy Ritchie’s best film since Snatch.  Regardless of whether or not it’s a RETURN to form, we can only hope he continues to deliver fare THIS GOOD in the future …

5.  FEAR STREET (PARTS 1-3) – Netflix have gotten increasingly ambitious with their original filmmaking over the years, and some of this years’ offerings have reached new heights of epic intention.  Their most exciting release of the summer was this adaptation of popular children’s horror author R.L. Stine’s popular book series, a truly gargantuan undertaking as the filmmakers set out to create an entire TRILOGY of films which were then released over three consecutive weekends.  Interestingly, these films are most definitely NOT for kids – this is proper, no-holds-barred supernatural slasher horror, delivering highly calibrated shocks and precision jump scares, a pervading atmosphere of insidious dread and a series of inventively gruesome kills.  The story revolves around two neighbouring small towns which have had vastly different fortunes over more than three centuries of existence – while the residents of Sunnyvale are unusually successful, living idyllic lives in peace and prosperity, luck has always been against the people of Shadyside, who languish in impoverishment, crime and misfortune, while the town has become known as the Murder Capital of the USA due to frequent spree killings.  Some attribute this to the supposed curse of a local urban legend, Sarah Fier, who became known as the Fier Witch after her execution for witchcraft in 1668, but others dismiss this as simple superstition.  Part 1 is set in 1994, as the latest outbreak of serial mayhem begins in Shadyside, dragging a small group of local teens – Deena Johnson (She Never Died’s Kiana Madeira) and Samantha Fraser (Olivia Scott Welch), a young lesbian couple going through a difficult breakup, Deena’s little brother Josh (The Haunted Hathaways’ Benjamin Flores Jr.), a nerdy history geek who spends most of his time playing video games or frequenting violent crime-buff online chatrooms, and their delinquent friends Simon (Eight Grade’s Fred Hechinger) and Kate (Julia Rehwald) – into the age-old ghostly conspiracy as they find themselves besieged by indestructible undead serial killers from the town’s past, reasoning that the only way they can escape with their lives is to solve the mystery and bring the Fier Witch some much needed closure.  Part 2, meanwhile, flashes back to a previous outbreak in 1977, in which local sisters Ziggy (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) and Cindy Berman (Emily Rudd), together with future Sunnyvale sheriff Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland) were among the kids hunted by said killers during a summer camp “colour war”.  As for Part 3, that goes all the way back to 1668 to tell the story of what REALLY happened to Sarah Fier, before wrapping up events in 1994, culminating in a terrifying, adrenaline-fuelled showdown in the Shadyside Mall.  Throughout, the youthful cast are EXCEPTIONAL, Madeira, Welch, Flores Jr., Sink and Rudd particularly impressing, while there are equally strong turns from Ashley Zuckerman (The Code, Designated Survivor) and Community’s Gillian Jacobs as the grown-up versions of two key ’77 kids, and a fun cameo from Maya Hawke in Part 1.  This is most definitely retro horror in the Stranger Things mould, perfectly executed period detail bringing fun nostalgic flavour to all three of the timelines while the peerless direction from Leigh Janiak (Honeymoon) and wire-tight, sharp-witted screenplays from Janiak, Kyle Killen (Lone Star, The Beaver), Phil Graziadel, Zak Olkewicz and Kate Trefry strike a perfect balance between knowing dark humour and knife-edged terror, as well as weaving an intriguingly complex narrative web that pulls the viewer in but never loses them to overcomplication.  The design, meanwhile, is evocative, the cinematography (from Stanger Things’ Caleb Heymann) is daring and magnificently moody, and the killers and other supernatural elements of the film are handled with skill through largely physical effects.  This is definitely not a standard, by-the-numbers slasher property, paying strong homage to the sub-genre’s rules but frequently subverting them with expert skill, and it’s as much fun as it is frightening.  Give us some more like this please, Netflix!

4.  THE SPARKS BROTHERS – those who’ve been following my reviews for a while will known that while I do sometimes shout about documentary films, they tend to show up in my runners-up lists – it’s a great rarity for one to land in one of my top tens.  This lovingly crafted deep-dive homage to cult band Sparks, from self-confessed rabid fanboy Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim), is something VERY SPECIAL INDEED, then … there’s a vague possibility some of you may have heard the name before, and many of you will know at least one or two of their biggest hits without knowing it was them (their greatest hit of all time, This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us, immediately springs to mind), but unless you’re REALLY serious about music it’s quite likely you have no idea who they are, namely two brothers from California, Russell and Ronald Mael, who formed a very sophisticated pop-rock band in the late 60s and then never really went away, having moments of fame but mostly working away in the background and influencing some of the greatest bands and musical artists that followed them, even if many never even knew where that influence originally came from. Wright’s film is an engrossing joy from start to finish (despite clocking in at two hours and twenty minutes), following their eclectic career from obscure inception as Halfnelson, through their first real big break with third album Kimono My Place, subsequent success and then fall from popularity in the mid-70s, through several subsequent revitalisations, all the way up to the present day with their long-awaited cinematic breakthrough, revolutionary musical feature Annette – throughout Wright keeps the tone light and the pace breezy, allowing a strong and endearing sense of irreverence to rule the day as fans, friends and the brothers themselves offer up fun anecdotes and wax lyrical about what is frequently a larger-than-life tragicomic soap opera, utilising fun, crappy animation and idiosyncratic stock footage inserts alongside talking-head interviews that were made with a decidedly tongue-in-cheek style – Mike Myers good-naturedly rants about how we can see his “damned mole” while 80s New Romantic icons Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, while shot together, are each individually labelled as “Duran”.  Ron and Russ themselves, meanwhile, are clearly having huge fun, gently ribbing each other and dropping some fun deadpan zingers throughout proceedings, easily playing to the band’s strong, idiosyncratic sense of hyper-intelligent humour, while the aforementioned celebrity talking-heads are just three amongst a whole wealth of famous faces that may surprise you – there’s even an appearance by Neil Gaiman, guys!  Altogether this is 2+ hours of bright and breezy fun chock full of great music and fascinating information, and even hardcore Sparks fans are likely to learn more than a little over the course of the film, while for those who have never heard of Sparks before it’s a FANTASTIC introduction to one of the greatest ever bands that you’ve never heard of.  With luck there might even be more than a few new fans before the year is out …

3.  GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE – Netflix’ BEST offering of the summer was this surprise hit from Israeli writer-director Navot Papushado (Rabies, Big Bad Wolves), a heavily stylised black comedy action thriller that passes the Bechdel Test with FLYING COLOURS.  Playing like a female-centric John Wick, it follows ice-cold, on-top-of-her-game assassin Sam (Karen Gillan) as her latest assignment has some unfortunate side effects, leading her to take on a reparation job to retrieve some missing cash for the local branch of the Irish Mob.  The only catch is that a group of thugs have kidnapped the original thief’s little girl, 12 year-old Emily (My Spy’s Chloe Coleman), and Sam, in an uncharacteristic moment of sympathy, decides to intervene, only for the money to be accidentally destroyed in the process.  Now she’s got the Mob and her own employers coming after her, and she not only has to save her own skin but also Emily’s, leading her to seek help from the one person she thought she might never see again – her mother, Scarlet (Lena Headey), a master assassin in her own right who’s been hiding from the Mob herself for years.  The plot may be simple but at times also a little over-the-top, but the film is never anything less than a pure, unadulterated pleasure, populated with fascinating, living and breathing characters of real complexity and nuance, while the script (co-written by relative newcomer Ehud Lavski) is tightly-reined and bursting with zingers.  Most importantly, though, Papushado really delivers on the action front – these are some of the best set-pieces I’ve seen this year, Gillan, her co-stars and the various stunt-performers acquitting themselves admirably in a series of spectacular fights, gun battles and a particularly imaginative car chase that would be the envy of many larger, more expensive productions.  Gillan and Coleman have a sweet, awkward chemistry, the MCU star particularly impressing in a subtly nuanced performance that also plays beautifully against Headey’s own tightly controlled turn, while there is awesome support from Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh and Carla Gugino as Sam’s adoptive aunts Anna May, Florence and Madeleine, a trio of “librarians” who run a fine side-line in illicit weaponry and are capable of unleashing some spectacular violence of their own; the film’s antagonists, on the other hand, are exclusively masculine – the mighty Ralph Inneson is quietly ruthless as Irish boss Jim McAlester, while The Terror’s Adam Nagaitis is considerably more mercurial as his mad dog nephew Virgil, and Paul Giamatti is the stately calm at the centre of the storm as Sam’s employer Nathan, the closest thing she has to a father.  There’s so much to enjoy in this movie, not just the wonderful characters and amazing action but also the singularly engrossing and idiosyncratic style, deeply affecting themes of the bonds of found family and the healing power of forgiveness, and a rewarding through-line of strong women triumphing against the brutalities of toxic masculinity.  I love this film, and I invite you to try it out, cuz I’m sure you will too.

2.  THE SUICIDE SQUAD – the most fun I’ve had at the cinema so far this year is the long-awaited (thanks a bunch, COVID) redress of another frustrating imbalance from the decidedly hit and miss DCEU superhero franchise, in which Guardians of the Galaxy writer-director James Gunn has finally delivered a PROPER Suicide Squad movie after David Ayer’s painfully compromised first stab at the property back in 2016.  That movie was enjoyable enough and had some great moments, but ultimately it was a clunky mess, and while some of the characters were done (quite) well, others were painfully botched, even ruined entirely.  Thankfully Warner Bros. clearly learned their lesson, giving Gunn free reign to do whatever he wanted, and the end result is about as close to perfect as the DCEU has come to date.  Once again the peerless Viola Davis plays US government official Amanda Waller, head of ARGUS and the undisputable most evil bitch in all the DC Universe, who presides over the metahuman prisoners of the notorious supermax Belle Reve Prison, cherry-picking inmates for her pet project Taskforce X, the titular Suicide Squad sent out to handle the kind of jobs nobody else wants, in exchange for years off their sentences but controlled by explosive implants injected into the base of their skulls.  Their latest mission sees another motley crew of D-bags dispatched to the fictional South African island nation of Corto Maltese to infiltrate Jotunheim, a former Nazi facility in which a dangerous extra-terrestrial entity that’s being developed into a fearful bioweapon, with orders to destroy the project in order to keep it out of the hands of a hostile anti-American regime which has taken control of the island through a violent coup.  Where the first Squad felt like a clumsily-arranged selection of stereotypes with a few genuinely promising characters unsuccessfully moulded into a decidedly forced found family, this new batch are convincingly organic – they may be dysfunctional and they’re all almost universally definitely BAD GUYS, but they WORK, the relationship dynamics that form between them feeling genuinely earned.  Gunn has already proven himself a master of putting a bunch of A-holes together and forging them into band of “heroes”, and he’s certainly pulled the job off again here, dredging the bottom of the DC Rogues Gallery for its most ridiculous Z-listers and somehow managing to make them compelling.  Sure, returning Squad-member Harley Quinn (the incomparable Margot Robbie, magnificent as ever) has already become a fully-realised character thanks to Birds of Prey, so there wasn’t much heavy-lifting to be done here, but Gunn genuinely seems to GET the character, so our favourite pixie-esque Agent of Chaos is an unbridled and thoroughly unpredictable joy here, while fellow veteran Colonel Rick Flagg (a particularly muscular and thoroughly game Joel Kinnaman) has this time received a much needed makeover, Gunn promoting him from being the first film’s sketchily-drawn “Captain Exposition” and turning him into a fully-ledged, well-thought-out human being with all the requisite baggage, including a newfound sense of humour; the newcomers, meanwhile, are a thoroughly fascinating bunch – reluctant “leader” Bloodsport/Robert DuBois (a typically robust and playful Idris Elba), unapologetic douchebag Peacemaker/Christopher Smith (probably the best performance I’ve EVER seen John Cena deliver), and socially awkward and seriously hard-done-by nerd (and by far the most idiotic DC villain of all time) the Polka-Dot Man/Abner Krill (a genuinely heart-breaking hangdog performance from Ant-Man’s David Dastmalchian); meanwhile there’s a fine trio of villainous turns from the film’s resident Big Bads, with Juan Diego Botta (Good Behaviour) and Joaquin Cosio (Quantum of Solace, Narcos: Mexico) making strong impressions as newly-installed dictator Silvio Luna and his corrupt right hand-man General Suarez, although both are EASILY eclipsed by the typically brilliant Peter Capaldi as louche and quietly deranged supervillain The Thinker/Gaius Greives (although the film’s ULTIMATE threat turns out to be something a whole lot bigger and more exotic). The film is ROUNDLY STOLEN, however, by a truly adorable double act (or TRIPLE act, if you want to get technical) – Daniella Melchior makes her breakthrough here in fine style as sweet, principled and kind-hearted narcoleptic second-generation supervillain Ratcatcher II/Cleo Cazo, who has the weird ability to control rats (and who has a pet rat named Sebastian who frequently steals scenes all on his own), while a particular fan-favourite B-lister makes his big screen debut here in the form of King Shark/Nanaue, a barely sentient anthropomorphic Great White “shark god” with an insatiable appetite for flesh and a naturally quizzical nature who was brilliantly mo-capped by Steve Agee (The Sarah Silverman Project, who also plays Waller’s hyperactive assistant John Economos) but then artfully completed with an ingenious vocal turn from Sylvester Stallone. James Gunn has crafted an absolute MASTERPIECE here, EASILY the best film he’s made to date, a riotous cavalcade of exquisitely observed and perfectly delivered dark humour and expertly wrangled narrative chaos that has great fun playing with the narrative flow, injects countless spot-on in-jokes and irreverent but utterly essential throwaway sight-gags, and totally endears us to this glorious gang of utter morons right from the start (in which Gunn delivers what has to be one of the most skilful deep-fakes in cinematic history).  Sure, there’s also plenty of action, and it’s executed with the kind of consummate skill we’ve now come to expect from Gunn (the absolute highlight is a wonderfully bonkers sequence in which Harley expertly rescues herself from captivity), but like everything else it’s predominantly played for laughs, and there’s no getting away from the fact that this film is an absolute RIOT.  By far the funniest thing I’ve seen so far this year, and if I’m honest this is the best of the DCEU offerings to date, too (for me, only the exceptional Birds of Prey can compare) – if Warner Bros. have any sense they’ll give Gunn more to do VERY SOON …

1.  A QUIET PLACE, PART II – while UK cinemas finally reopened in early May, I was determined that my first trip back to the Big Screen for 2021 was gonna be something SPECIAL, and indeed I already knew what that was going to be. Thankfully I was not disappointed by my choice – 2018’s A Quiet Place was MY VERY FAVOURITE horror movie of the 2010s, an undeniable masterclass in suspense and sustained screen terror wrapped around a refreshingly original killer concept, and I was among the many fans hoping we’d see more in the future, especially after the film’s teasingly open ending.  Against the odds (or perhaps not), writer-director/co-star John Krasinski has pulled off the seemingly impossible task of not only following up that high-wire act, but genuinely EQUALLING it in levels of quality – picking up RIGHT where the first film left off (at least after an AMAZING scene-setting opening in which we’re treated to the events of Day 1 of the downfall of humanity), rejoining the remnants of the Abbott family as they’re forced by circumstances to up-sticks from their idyllic farmhouse home and strike out into the outside world once more, painfully aware at all times that they must maintain perfect silence to avoid the ravenous attentions of the lethal blind alien beasties that now sit at the top of the food chain.  Circumstances quickly become dire, however, and embattled mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is forced to ally herself with estranged family friend Emmett (Cillian Murphy), now a haunted, desperate vagrant eking out a perilous existence in an abandoned factory, in order to safeguard the future of her children Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and their newborn baby brother.  Regan, however, discovers evidence of more survivors, and with her newfound weapon against the aliens she recklessly decides to set off on her own in the hopes of aiding them before it’s too late … it may only be his second major blockbuster as a director, but Krasinski has once again proven he’s a true heavyweight talent, effortlessly carving out fresh ground in this already magnificently well-realised dystopian universe while also playing magnificently to the established strengths of what came before, delivering another peerless thrill-ride of unbearable tension and knuckle-whitening terror.  The central principle of utilising sound at a very strict premium is once again strictly adhered to here, available sources of dialogue once again exploited with consummate skill while sound design and score (another moody triumph from Marco Beltrami) again become THE MOST IMPORTANT aspects of the whole production. The ruined world is once again realised beautifully throughout, most notably in the nightmarish environment of a wrecked commuter train, and Krasinski cranks up the tension before unleashing it in merciless explosions in a selection of harrowing encounters which guaranteed to leave viewers in a puddle of sweat.  The director mostly stays behind the camera this time round, but he does (obviously) put in an appearance in the opening flashback as the late Lee Abbott, making a potent impression which leaves a haunting absence that’s keenly felt throughout the remainder of the film, while Blunt continues to display mother lion ferocity as she fights to keep her children safe and Jupe plays crippling fear magnificently but is now starting to show a hidden spine of steel as Marcus finally starts to find his courage; the film once again belongs, however, to Simmonds, the young deaf actress once and for all proving she’s a genuine star in the making as she invests Regan with fierce wilfulness and stubborn determination that remains unshakeable even in the face of unspeakable horrors, and the relationship she develops with Emmett, reluctant as it may be, provides a strong new emotional focus for the story, Murphy bringing an attractive wounded humanity to his role as a man who’s lost anything and is being forced to learn to care for something again.  This is another triumph of the genre AND the artform in general, a masterpiece of atmosphere, performance and storytelling which builds magnificently on the skilful foundations laid by the first film, as well as setting things up perfectly for a third instalment which is all but certain to follow.  I definitely can’t wait.

[jaybear1701]

March 29, 1970

Astronauts are a rare breed, and Pam is still amazed that she, of all people, has a front row seat to the American heroes. A rather unique one at that, where she bears witness to facets usually shrouded from the rest of the country, catching glimpses of what lies beneath the carefully curated air of confidence and capability.

For all the stoicism of the likes of an Ed Baldwin, or the laid-back charm of a Gordo Stevens, there’s a thread of vulnerability that ties them together, tense and taut. It emerges as the nights wear on, and the liquor flows freely. Pam has bent her ear long enough to recognize it for what it is–an unspoken acknowledgment that, despite hours upon hours of meticulous preparation that can stretch for months or even years, the precariousness of their jobs means it could all go belly up without a moment’s notice. 

She observes this uncertainty–this fear –even in the ASCANs, every time they walk into The Outpost with one less candidate in tow. Pam makes sure to give an extra generous pour of whiskey whenever she sees the exhaustion in Tracy Stevens’ eyes or the weariness in Danielle Poole’s polite smile. Tries to make the already taciturn Ellen Waverly laugh whenever she folds ever inward into quiet solitude.

Yes, Pam knows the weakness of these titans of space. They know she knows. And though she’s an ally, and not quite a friend, her discretion makes her an honorary member of their exclusive club. But sometimes that privilege can be a bit too much. Too overwhelming to play unofficial therapist as she fixes cocktails and cracks open beer bottles for hours on end.

And so, she welcomes the breaks, and doesn’t hesitate to accept when her boss tells her to clock out early on a slow Sunday afternoon. It’s Easter after all, and even the astronauts know better than to spend it away from their families.

Pam’s halfway out the door, already in her own little world, when she nearly bumps into someone while crossing the threshold.

“Pam, hi.” Ellen, startled, takes a step back as Pam exits and lets the door swing shut behind her.

“Hey,” Pam greets, stomach fluttering in pleasant surprise.

In jeans and a white blouse, Ellen’s the most casual Pam’s ever seen her. She takes in Pam’s denim jacket and the purse slung over her shoulder. “You, uh, heading out?”

“Yeah.” Pam nods. “Got a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card for the rest of the day.”

“Oh.” 

Pam’s not sure if the flash of disappointment in Ellen’s brown eyes is a figment of her imagination. “Didn’t expect to see you here on a holiday.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” Ellen shrugs sheepishly. “Took a walk and just ended up here, I guess.” 

Pam gives an exaggerated grimace. “I don’t know whether that’s sweet or sad.”

Ellen laughs. “Definitely the latter, for sure.”

Of all the ASCANs, Ellen’s the one Pam knows the least about. Not that she hasn’t been curious to know more about the introverted trainee. She knows better than to push, preferring to let people open up at their own pace. But when an opening presents itself…

“Won’t your family wonder where you are?” Pam ventures.

“Ah, family’s back in Connecticut.” Ellen slips her hands in her back pockets. “So…” 

She’s alone , Pam realizes with a swell of sympathy, and before she can think better of it, she blurts out, “You should come with me.”

Ellen’s eyebrows shoot up. “W-where?”

“Anywhere’s gotta be better than here.” Pam doesn’t know what she’s doing or why she’s doing it. But it just feels right . “I mean, unless you want to spend the rest of your holiday in this shithole. No judgment.”

To Pam’s relief, the corners of Ellen’s lips curl up. “Lead the way.”

It’s a beautiful spring day in Houston, still pleasantly cool as the days creep toward the heat of summer. Pam brings Ellen to her favorite park, where budding trees line the banks of a small pond in bright pastels of pink and green and white. The sun glints off the rippling water and, judging by the way Ellen’s eyes light up, Pam knows she made the right decision.

“So, how’s training going?” Pam asks as they walk side-by-side along a paved path that winds around the pond, taking their time.

“It’s…” Ellen squints into the distance before glancing sidelong at Pam. “Don’t you get tired of us unloading on you?”

The question catches Pam off-guard, and she doesn’t answer right away. “No one’s, um, ever asked me that.”

“Probably because a lot of us are narcissistic assholes,” Ellen says the expletive so matter-of-factly that Pam can’t help but laugh. “It’s true! You know it.”

“Not all of you.” Pam nudges Ellen’s shoulder with her own. “Listening’s part of the job.”

“Doesn’t mean you don’t get tired of it,” Ellen points out, prompting a noncommittal hum from Pam. “I could go on and on about how it’s tough and stressful, but I’m guessing you’ve heard it all before. I’d rather know more about you.”

“I’m really not that interesting,” Pam deflects even as warmth prickles up the back of her neck.

“Try me.” Ellen looks at her with such open, genuine interest that Pam caves. She’s not quite sure what it is about Ellen that makes her want to open up, but she does and she goes with the flow.

She leads them to a row of empty benches situated beneath pergolas covered in plants that twist up and around wooden posts to create a tangled rooftop of sweet-scented blooms. 

“Let’s see.” Pam takes a seat and angles herself toward Ellen, who mirrors her. Their knees are almost close enough to touch. “Grew up in a small town outside of Austin. Got my bachelor’s in English from UT, to my parents’ deep and never-ending chagrin.”

“Which part didn’t they like, if you don’t mind me asking?” Ellen tilts her head to the side, curiosity etched across her pretty features.

“Take your pick. It was bad enough their only daughter wanted to go to college–because a woman’s place is always in the home, of course,” Pam rolls her eyes, “But she also had to go and pick a quote-unquote ‘useless’ degree.”

“It’s not useless,” Ellen says sincerely, once again surprising Pam. 

“Thanks, but I know it’s not exactly practical. I mean, not like an engineering degree or anything.”

“Engineering’s overrated.” 

Pam wrinkles her nose, incredulous. “Says the woman who’ll be up in space mapping out the universe in a few years.” 

“I’m serious,” Ellen insists. “Outer space is exciting, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I think people get too caught up in the external, when there’s still so much left unexplored within humanity’s…” Her hands grasp at the air as if the right words hang invisibly around them. “I don’t know… innerspace? And the arts navigate it.”

Lips parted, Pam is left speechless and, if she’s honest, a bit flattered.

“God, that’s cheesy, isn’t it?” Ellen winces.

“No, that’s…” Without thinking, Pam reaches out and brushes her fingers against Ellen’s knee. “That’s really sweet. Thank you.”

Gaze drifting down toward the brief touch, Ellen clears her throat and looks out toward the water, seemingly fascinated by a family of ducks floating along the surface. “You’re welcome.” A light shade of pink dusts her cheeks. “And so you ended up in Houston because?”

“Isn’t it every little girl’s dream to sling drinks in a NASA watering hole?”

Ellen chuckles. “Definitely was mine. Except I wanted to do it on the moon.”

Pam shakes her head, amused, very much enjoying this playful side of the normally staid astronaut candidate. Truthfully, Pam’s not even sure herself anymore why she’s remained in Houston. What had seemed like a good idea after college has slowly faded in the wake of her ongoing indecision about what exactly she wanted in life. 

“I figured Houston’s not too far from home,” she finally says. “But far enough away that I can figure out my shit without my parents’ constant disappointment.”

Ellen ducks her head, dark hair partly obscuring the wistful expression on her face. “I get that.”

Pam stifles a sudden and unexpected urge to smooth Ellen’s hair back behind her ear. She leans back and crosses her arms, to prevent herself from doing something monumentally stupid. “Are you saying your parents aren’t thrilled their daughter could be the first American woman in space?”

“Yes,” Ellen answers candidly. “And no. My parents are definitely proud. Supportive, even. But I also know they wouldn’t complain if I just settled down, got married, and helped with the family business.” Her voice is soft in its resignation, and Pam can’t help but empathize. 

“Expectations are a bitch, aren’t they?”

Ellen laughs, the sound musical, and Pam’s heart throbs without warning. “Yes,” she turns her head to capture Pam’s gaze. “Yes, they are.”

Ellen’s always been pretty–Pam’s not blind. But in the sunlight filtering through the canopy above them, she’s particularly radiant, and Pam quickly forces herself to tamp down on the warmth spreading through her chest. This isn’t the right time or place, and most definitely isn’t the right person, for those sort of feelings. 

“I, um, I’m glad I bumped into you today,” Pam says to fill the silence stretching slowly between them, self-consciously brushing her bangs to the side.

“Me too.” Ellen looks out over the water once again, wistful. “I had no idea this was even here.”  

“It’s not like you all have a lot of time to sightsee,” Pam points out. “But if you ever need a tour guide, you know where to find me.”

“Not sure about a tour guide,” Ellen glances at her, almost shyly, out of the corner of her eye, “but I wouldn’t say no to a friend.” 

Pam pretends to mull it over. “Yeah, I guess I could put up with you. Until you move to space, that is.”

“Oh, well, thanks for doing me that favor.”

“Don’t mention it, but don’t think this means you’ll get free drinks or anything.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ellen says with a gentle smile. 

Pam returns it, trying but failing to ignore just how light her heart feels. 

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

The Hunt Is On! Eggs-traordinary Animals That Hide Their Eggs

by Shelby Wyzykowski

Just once every year, an eggs-tra special day rolls around when a certain long-eared, fluffy-tailed fellow comes hopping down the bunny trail to your home. He brings with him all of the egg-ceptionally tasty springtime goodies that he knows will satisfy your sweet tooth. Your basket gets filled to the brim with chocolate rabbits, pastel-colored confections, and chick-shaped marshmallows, just to name a few delectable treats. It’s a holiday candy lover’s dream! But then you may just notice one thing that’s missing…where are all the eggs? No, the Easter Bunny didn’t forget them. He’s giving you a bit of a challenge this year. He’s remembered an old German tradition that started hundreds of years ago. It was so long ago that he had a different name…Osterhase! Osterhase would secretly lay eggs in the back garden so children could enjoy the outdoors and hunt for their Easter eggs. So, like long ago, you get to look outside (virtually) for eggs too! But as you search and discover egg after egg, little do you know that, beyond your garden, there are many more eggs concealed in secret spots. In fact, they’re all over the world…in mountain forests, on ocean shores, and in steamy swamps. But they’re not hidden by the Easter Bunny. All sorts of animals hide their eggs too! Let’s take some time to eggs-plore the planet and learn more about these eggs-traordinary creatures. Let’s go on an egg hunt!

First let’s search out West for the eggs of a plump, short-tailed bird called the American Dipper. They love to live in and around pristine mountain streams ranging from way up in Alaska and all the way down into Panama! That’s a lot of places for them to hide their eggs, so, for now, let’s just focus on one of the Dipper’s favorite spots in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. Dippers are the only songbirds in the United States that love to routinely swim. And they have several adaptations that make dunking and diving quite easy for them. At the base of their tails, they have what is called a uropygial (oil) gland. They use their beak to collect oil from this gland and, when they preen, it makes their feathers waterproof. They also have nictitating membranes (extra eyelids) and flaps of skin covering their nostrils that protect their eyes and beak when they’re submerged.

But all these swim-friendly features can also help immensely when Dippers nest. To keep their eggs safe from predators, they sometimes build their nests in hard-to-reach spots like cliff ledges, on boulders, and under bridges. But there is one very special, watery way that Dippers like to raise their chicks…behind waterfalls! It can get wet if you live behind a waterfall, so a Dipper nest is specially designed to withstand such damp conditions. The dome-shaped nest is about the size of a soccer ball and has multiple layers of moss, bark, leaves, and coarse grass. The thick, outside shell of moss absorbs moisture so the inside, lined with grass, stays cozy and dry. After around two weeks of incubation, the clutch of four to five eggs hatch. Mom spends a lot of time on the nest, but both parents feed the sparsely-downed chicks up to twenty times an hour! They must fly back and forth through the veil of falling water to get to and from their hungry babies.

After a little over three weeks, the fledgling Dippers are old enough to leave the nest. So, they must bravely make their first trip through the curtain of cascading water. Then they watch and learn from their parents how to wade, swim, and dive in the stream to hunt for food. Sadly, the Dipper’s preferred meals (crayfish, tadpoles, fish eggs, and aquatic insects) become scarce when streams are tainted by humans. Poor practices in logging, mining, and farming can cause these birds to abandon polluted areas. Luckily, for now, they do manage to find new locations with clean, cold, rushing water that they can happily call home.

Now let’s travel a few states over to Florida, one of several Southern states where the American Alligator glides through the waters of slow-moving rivers, lakes, and sweltering marshes. In June and July, the female alligator creates a huge nest out of mud, plants, and sticks. It can be up to two to three feet high and as wide as seven to ten feet! The nest needs to be this big because the mother alligator lays as many as thirty-five to ninety eggs. Once the nest is filled with eggs, she completely covers them up with more vegetation. As the eggs rest hidden and undisturbed for several weeks, an interesting process occurs within the massive mound.

Photo credit: Rene Ferrer from Pexels.

Alligator embryos do not have chromosomes that determine gender, so the temperature of the nest determines how many of the young are girls and how many are boys. If, for example, the nest is located on a sunny riverbank (somewhere around 91 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit), the offspring are mostly male. The temperature of a nest in a cool, shady spot might hover around 86 degrees, and that environment produces mostly females. Around the end of August, the baby gators, still safe in their eggs, start making high-pitched noises. This lets their mom know that they’re ready to break out. She uncovers the nest for them to hatch. When the hatchlings are tiny, they hang out in a small group called a “pod”, but mom is always close by keeping a watchful eye on them. Unfortunately, climate change is beginning to affect the behavior of temperature-dependent species like the alligator. They are beginning to nest earlier and earlier in the year to preserve the correct male to female ratio. The alligators instinctively know that they need to keep a gender balance to allow their species to successfully thrive!

Our last stop covers a wide area, so get ready for the toughest challenge of our hunt! We’re going to search for the eggs of the Loggerhead Turtle. They like to swim in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea. But between late April and early September, the females leave their aquatic homes to nest on the beaches where they themselves hatched decades earlier. Safely under the cover of darkness, a female Loggerhead will use her powerful rear flippers to dig a hole in the sand. After she lays around one hundred eggs, she once again uses her flippers to expertly cover up her eggs. She does such a thorough job that she erases any sign of her nest…it’s a safe and cozy hiding place for her eggs! They need to be well-hidden because the mother Loggerhead does not watch over her nest. Instead, she returns to the sea, leaving the concealed eggs to develop on their own.

Like alligators, the gender of sea turtle embryos is temperature dependent. A nest in warmer sand produces more females (this biological fact concerns marine scientists because global warming will disrupt the proper male to female ratio). After about two months of incubation, the baby turtles hatch and wait for nightfall. Then in a joint effort, they all climb out of the nest together and make a mad dash for the ocean waves. But their journey is fraught with danger.

Predators such as birds, crabs, dogs, and even raccoons are anxiously waiting to make these little turtles into scrumptious evening snacks. And the hatchlings have another, more insidious hazard to deal with…artificial light. To reach the ocean, the hatchlings use the natural light (the moon and stars) horizon to guide them. But beachfront lighting, highway lights, and campfires can disorient them and lead them in the wrong direction. It’s true that the odds are stacked against them, and even though it’s a treacherous trek to the water’s edge, many do make it. And then the real adventure begins for these little ones in their new ocean home!

Now that we’ve finished our egg hunting eggs-pedition, and you’ve fervently feasted on your Easter treats, your once-filled basket contains only some crumpled foil, a clump of Easter grass, and one squashed jelly bean. And, unfortunately, the only thing that you’ve got plenty of are the pangs of an eggs-cruciating stomachache. But while you’re laying back in your favorite comfy chair recovering from the day’s egg-citement, think about all those creatures out there in the world that work so hard to hide their eggs in the most interesting of places. And that leads you to wondering that maybe, just maybe, there might be one more egg still hidden in your garden. It might be hiding behind the daffodils or under the old wheelbarrow or in the tulip bed. And when you feel better, and you go back outside and find that last egg, it seems to me that would be an egg-cellent way to end an eggs-tra special day.

Shelby Wyzykowski is a Gallery Experience Presenter in CMNH’s Life Long Learning Department. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

[writingwithcolor]

Magical person in history, on not intervening on human rights issues

I am writing a dating sim/visual novel set in the present day. A major (non-romanceable) character is an ancient sorceress who moved from France to the Pacific Northwest in the 1850s. She is white. She is shown to have powerful magic. She also works closely with the main characters and develops personal relationships with them as she teaches them magic, giving each character comfort and advice during their respective stories.

Considering the events in America around her move-in date, there’s no way she could have missed the horrible human rights abuses going on, and there’s no way she was too powerless to help, even when most of the fighting and slavery was so far away. So I’m having trouble balancing “don’t make her a white savior by having her personally fireball Robert E. Lee” against “Hogwarts University is cancelled because Dumbledorette didn’t care about slavery.” I had the idea that the magical regulating body back home in France didn’t want her to intervene due to political reasons, so she helped out in small ways that could safely fly under the radar. She later realized that she prioritized her social standing over the suffering of countless others, so she began making a point of reducing human suffering as much as she could.

I can’t imagine this will show up in more than one small scene, but doing it wrong could really sour the whole thing. Is this backstory still icky? Should I just not mention it and let readers headcanon what they please?

I’m wondering what you think was happening in the PNW at the time for the fighting and slavery to be “far away.” Washington State had the Cayuse War at exactly this time period, Oregon didn’t ratify treaties and was calling for the extermination of “the I*dian race” in roughly this time period, and California’s Gold Rush created the California Genocide starting heavily in the 1840s, picking up steam in the 1850s, which included slavery of California Natives thanks to a law enacted in 1850 that lasted for 13 years. 

This is all from the top five results of googling “pacific northwest genocide 1850”, for the record. It’s not exactly hidden history.

So suddenly your character’s lack of movement in healing the poisoned populations as disease ravaged the area, in attempting to stop or at least buy and free the enslaved Natives being auctioned on their doorstep, or in attempting to get treaties ratified and honoured looks a lot more damning.

This is not counting any of the future events that happened at the turn of the century, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Hawai’i monarchy being overthrown, and Federal Order 9066, which is the WWII concentration camps (that included Japanese, German, and Italian individuals). This is just to name a handful of coastal issues in the next 100 years, completely ignoring Jim Crow, residential schools, the San Francisco Earthquake (which nearly had Chinese people relocated to the worst land imaginable for gentrification purposes, had the Empress of China not stepped in), and many others.

In short: she would have had hundreds of opportunities to end suffering, and focusing on a single event as a small scene feels disproportionate to how much she could have done.

And honestly? The French were no angels. 

The Second French Colonial Empire was one of the largest empires in history, and it began in 1830, covering roughly a third of Africa. The First French Colonial Empire began in the 1600s, and had both India and North America, primarily Canada.

She was white. French. You don’t specify her birth year other than “ancient”, but considering the sheer amount of territory-grabbing France has been doing since Normandy invaded England in the eleventh century AD, I’m going to assume her birth year is somewhere more recent than that. Therefore, I’m going to assume she has been around the Catholic Missionary Attitude that France had; one could call that attitude the bedrock of its existence for at least a millennia (and is still visible in modern day).

So tell me: when did she break out of it? What made her even care about human atrocities, when she has likely grown up watching France commit them her entire life? 

Because let me just say, she has had plenty of opportunities to realize she did nothing in the face of her neighbours’ hatred of people not like them, and she has never taken them before. 

Did she (or her parents, if she was born around this time) decry Napoleon re-introducing slavery in France in 1802? Side with Haiti when it declared independence in 1804, and hate that the government forced Haiti to pay for the “theft” of slaves and land (that was only paid off in 1947)? Is she presently championing for France to pay Haiti the money it wrongfully took from the country? Did she hate the delays in stopping the French slave trade, which took 11 years to actually stop after it was banned on paper? 

Unconditional emancipation was only reached in 1848, after all. I don’t care if she was born in 1830, there was some sort of major racial event happening in France all throughout the late 1700s to mid-1800s. Where did she side then?

Abolitionism was not an unknown concept in France, so it is possible she had already been working towards it quietly, but that would mean she would have felt guilt at inaction much earlier, depending on when she began decrying slavery—if she was even delayed in decrying it, which I will admit is possible. 

And if she was an abolitionist, would she have even listened to the French government in not at least easing the genocide around her? Because she would have watched nearly 100 years of the French dragging their feet on stopping slavery in their empire, and known how BS it all was… if she saw it that way.

That’s just abolitionism, and is not even counting the French relationship with the Native population in Quebec and the Great Lakes region, which is a giant tangle of proxy wars, colonialism, missionary work, and very, very, very complex relationships that started off good and ended terribly.

So I ask again: why did she only start caring then?

Speaking of proxy wars, the Napoleon Empire wanted a Confederate victory, because the Confederacy was its source of cotton and the American Civil War created a “cotton famine” in France that basically forced the textile industry into a massive downsizing. The Confederacy also tolerated Napoleon’s plans for expanding the empire in Mexico, which actually had begun in December of 1861.

So when it comes to how a magical board would rule—even though France was officially neutral in the war, the court of public opinion (among politicians and capitalists) was more on the Confederate side than the Union side. Many politicians secretly worked with the Confederacy, until they abandoned them when the Union showed signs of winning. The only reason France officially remained neutral is because a war with the British was inevitable if they acknowledged the Confederacy, and Napoleon didn’t want that.

I shall work under the assumption that because it was rather literally on her doorstep when she moved to America, she lost insulation to it (if she hadn’t thought about it before), but I will say how iffy that makes her look in the long term if she had so many opportunities beforehand (at the very least, seeing slaves in France).

My other option is the word “ancient” is liberally applied and she was only in her 20s or 30s when 1850 hit, and therefore had not had many opportunities to see otherwise (but she still would have seen slaves in France, likely).

Onto the white guilt and white saviour aspects

Strictly from a writing perspective, you have to determine if she changed the course of history, or not. This would not necessarily be within the realm of white saviour, seeing as white people were the only ones listened to at the time. You can see people who changed the course of history in this period by looking up the pastor who insisted Lincoln hold fair trials for the Dakota, which brought the execution count from over 200 down to 38. You can also look at Alice Fletcher, who made quite a few laws designed to protect Native people, but whether or not they were successful is up for debate (and she regretted some of the laws she helped enact).

If not, then you have the current tangle you’re dealing with.

Option 1

She was unestablished in America and relied on the magical regulations board to protect her, and she figured working small and under the radar would mean she could do more good long-term by not being killed, so long as you establish that such a threat is viable.

This option only works if she’s an active advocate for the slew of other racist acts that pass once she’s settled in America, of which I gave many examples above.

Option 2

She actually did change the course of history in perhaps a mixed way, or perhaps a positive way. She could have relied completely on being a white, well-to-do voice in the community, which would have granted her some privilege without using a drop of magic. 

This can apply to any point in history, seeing as there were a lot of others to pick from. It would be particularly useful once suffrage was achieved, and if she was part of suffrage, did she call out Susan B. Anthony’s racism? Did she encourage allowing non-whites to vote?

Option 3 

She was slow to care, and did not actually understand what a big deal it was that such atrocities were happening until it was too late. This leads to her dedication to atonement the strongest, but you have to be careful about white guilt. This option can go along with option 1.

This allows her to be a passive player in future racist events, but makes her an even more privileged white character who PoC will have a hard time seeing as kindly, and you should go out of your way to show white players how unkind and privileged she was, and perhaps still is.

Option 4 

she doesn’t actually care much, because she has a president of not caring about atrocities happening in France, and her bigotry shows up in other ways in modern day and she’s just a kindly-but-bigoted character. She’s your wonderful grandma who you have beautiful memories with… she just doesn’t care about anyone not white.

This can go along with option 3, as she was so slow to realize that she is still bigoted and hasn’t done any work, but her racism is going to be more covert and you’ll have to do research on microaggressions and how to frame them.

Based off the way her lack of action is framed in-story and how little a plot role it plays, I would say that option 4 with a dash of option 3 appears to be the most likely interpretation of her character by PoC. She’s lip-service to progress, at present, but seems to have made no strides in losing her social standing to be an ally.

Now here’s why I don’t think you should let readers headcanon her however they want:

White players in particular are going to minimize her culpability in what happened, and think that she did all that she could, and she is a Totally Redeemed Character now. In fact, they’ll probably wonder why she’s even an Atoner, because she did something, right? She helped, right? And now she’s helping and that’s plenty. She’s good to the players, so she is a Good Person.

Meanwhile PoC players are going to see yet another white author ignore the fact that colonialism was happening en masse at the time, and that white people deeply benefited from it, and are going to see the “it happened in the past why do you keep bringing up racism?” defence continued.

Let her be flawed. Let her be on stolen land and acknowledge it every time she teaches them something, and let her sit and exist in the guilt that happens when she realizes she could have stopped the theft but didn’t. Let her not wallow in self hate, but acknowledge her mistake with every lesson the main characters receive, and let her work on righting that wrong by championing “land back” causes that centre Indigenous voices.

Let her dialogue options show every trace of how the past is not over because the past’s actions are still being felt and reparations have not been made. The settler state is still controlling the land she has made home and she knows exactly what they did to get it, and she passes that knowledge on.

Let players be uncomfortable with the knowledge that, if they sit by and “only do small things when they can, to not lose anything”, they are complicit. Let white people see they must well and truly denounce what has been given to them by their racist, colonial ancestors in order for PoC to “stop talking about racism.”

Make her use whatever income she makes be paid in part to Native causes, as rent for the land she occupies unfairly. Make her refuse to teach bigoted students who want “mystic secrets” that aren’t hers to give, that were appropriated centuries ago. Make part of her life’s work be hiding away Black and Indigenous spiritual leaders to minimize the loss.

Let her past be imperfect. And do not force redemption on her, but instead let her own the fact she made catastrophic mistakes that will not be redeemed until land has been returned to the Native population. Until all forms of slavery are abolished. Until colonial powers give back all the resources and finances they stole from their colonized regions. Until the privilege that white people spilled so much blood to secure is no more.

Because if you want her to truly be a good character who does not support racism? That is the level you have to step towards.

Everything else is simply whiteness trying to make itself feel better.

~Mod Lesya