#He was raised in a culture where literal ten year olds are thrown into the woods to play with wild animals.

[randomtheidiot]

Something really minor that pisses me off to no end is how SuMo designed Ash’s outfit. In every other region he’s been wearing weird sportswear shit like fingerless gloves and brightly colored sleeveless jackets but in SuMo he looks like he stumbled into an Old Navy and picked out the first outfit that fit him. I’d get it 100% if it were Sophocles or Hau or any of the other characters because the Alolan kids actually act like children their age, but Kantonians have been proven time and time again to not give a rattata’s ass about raising kids, Ash is constantly acting way older than he is and still getting shit from his friends and Professor Oak for being immature. Ash should get to dress like a 35 year old man who’s dedicated his life to hiking and only owns stuff he got from his local sports shop because that’s probably what he thinks he is.

But eh, that’s just my opinion.

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 4.6.3 “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Escape”

In days gone by these austere places where prison discipline leaves a prisoner alone with himself consisted of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagstone floor, a camp bed, a barred window, and an iron-clad door, and was called a dungeon; but the dungeon was judged too horrible; now the cell consists of an iron-clad door, a barred window, a camp bed, a flagstone floor, a stone ceiling, and four stone walls and is called a correctional chamber.

I love when Hugo is angry enough to get sarcastic. I hate when everything he says is just as true now as it was then.

Nothing about the prison is remotely competent at keeping experienced criminals prisoner. While the prison system is effective at traumatizing people new to it and turning them into repeat offenders, to the experienced criminals it’s ludicrously porous. Members of Patron-Minette are placed together in crumbling buildings with scaffolding already on them and implements of escape readily available. The prison hardly even seems to be trying.

Indeed:

There are traitors employed in lots of prisons, half jailors, half thieves, who help in breakouts, who sell their disloyal services to the police and make a fair bit on the side out of the rotten eggs thrown in the police wagon.

The ways of escaping prison are baked into the prison system.

What was it we said about how the purpose Patron-Minette serves to the government is in making sure the forces of disorder have the most frightening face possible? It’s to the government’s advantage to ensure there are people to give criminals a bad name, frightening the bourgeoisie into barring their doors and locking their shutters when they hear chaos in the streets.

That’s fundamentally what P-M is, as we’ll see it reach its worst effect on the barricade. And what use would such people be to the government if they were all behind bars?

That was the argument Hugo seemed to be making in the Noxious Poor digression, and now we’re seeing it play out on the page. They’re about to escape the prison, but they won’t escape the grand pantomime the justice system has set up to justify its own existence.

The passerby who stops at the rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, after the fire station, outside the porte cochère of the bathhouse, sees a courtyard full of flowers and shrubs in tubs, at the back of which sits a little white rotunda, with two wings, brightened up by green shutters, the bucolic dream of Jean-Jacques. Not more than ten years ago, towering above this rotunda, was an enormous black wall, bare and ghastly, which it rested against. This was the wall of the covered way that encircled La Force.

Damn, that image of prettifying the literal prison wall is grim.

The wall behind the rotunda was like Milton glimpsed behind Berquin.

Rose’s note:

John Milton (1697–74) painted a vision of hell in Paradise Lost; Arnaud Berquin (1747–91) wrote sentimental and moralistic books for children.

And--we’ve seen these ideas juxtaposed before?

From the chapter where Valejan and Cosette see the chain gang:

An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five years old, and said to him: “Rascal, let that be a warning to you!”

Rousseau, for all his (many, many) faults, advocated serious and much-needed reform to childhood education. According to the image above, that’s gone nowhere. The “bucolic dream of Jean-Jacques” is an almost-literal fig leaf over the cruel systems we’ve been seeing grind people down all book. There may be better ideas about how to raise children out there than are currently being implemented, but they sure aren’t accessible to all children.

Or most children.

Or, as Courfeyrac has pointed out, Rousseau’s children.

Brujon and Guelemer escape easily and we switch focus to Thenardier, who has been chained in solitary under constant watch and labeled as capable of murder.

I imagine that’s specifically the cost of his attempt to shoot Javert.

And all that is actually really new for him? Obviously he’s been shifty and criminal for a while, but as far as we know he’s never been in prison before, and certainly not for this level of crime. Everything I was talking about before, about the new prisoners vs. the experienced ones--Thenardier is making his transition to the latter category right now.

I think Thenardier’s roof adventure at the end of this chapter is teasing two possible redemption stories.

The first is raised and then knocked down easily: it’s Thenardier. We see him in the position of Jean Valjean, we’re even in his head a little as his flight for freedom approaches the sublime, and then he’s trapped on the top of a three story wall too cold and tired to move. That’s as sympathetic as he’ll ever be. But as soon as he reaches the ground again, it all vanishes, and he asks who they’re going to devour next.

And, most damningly, he fails to recognize his own son (though Babet does), who waits a moment for Thenardier to turn towards him before shrugging and going off to take care of his own children.

The second possible redemption, teased for longer and more convincingly, is Montparnasse. We saw him receive a shock and a lecture from Jean Valjean and go away thoughtful. He was still mulling it over when he talked to Gavroche, whom he treats with a notable amount of respect. And in this chapter we see him show genuine loyalty, willing to risk himself to try to get Thenardier out of this. His loyalty is linked to being Thenardier’s son-in-law “to some slight extent” which has to be one of the worst possible ways to say that he’s been hooking up with Eponine.

But it’s also instructive. We don’t yet have an answer to “will Montparnasse redeem himself” but we’re going to get one soon.

Because it’s in the chapter where Eponine defends the Rue Plumet that he shows what he’s really made of.

[andaxay]

Preservation of Self

My entry for February’s @telltalemonthlychallenge. February’s theme: Black History Month.

Hyperion has been cutthroat since the day she accepted the offer of employment. Yvette does what she thinks she needs to. To thrive. To survive.

-----------------------------------------

One last coffee before they left.

Secreted away in a quiet room, away from prying eyes that would question why Vaughn the mild-mannered accountant had an important looking Hyperion briefcase chained to his arm. Best to avoid such questions.

"You're really doing this?" Yvette wrapped one slender leg around the other as she sat, sipping a latte, looking from one best friend to another with a skeptical eyebrow raised.

"Oh, we are doing this," Rhys leaned forward with a smug smile and raised eyebrow. Vaughn rubbed the back of his neck as he stared, wide-eyed, at the table in front of them, perhaps questioning every life decision he'd ever made that had led him to this point. "We are doing this so much. Who else is going to screw over Vasquez?"

"Vasquez is more than capable of screwing himself over, given enough time," Yvette said dryly, folding her arms.

"And how long will that take? Are you willing to wait for years for that to happen?"

"He might get eaten by a skag the second he sets foot on Pandora," Vaughn chimed in, wearing an expression that said 'and the same could happen to us'.

"And he might not," Rhys countered, "in which case, enjoy being middle management saps for the next ten to fifteen years. I, however, am not willing to clean up Vasquez's damn trash three times a day, just so he can drink in how much power he has."

"Fair point," Vaughn conceded and Yvette nodded solemnly.

"Well, then," she said after taking the last sip of her latte, "you have everything you need." She paused, looking at both of them. A twist in her gut. "Good luck. Try not to die - there's an awful lot of paperwork to fill out if you do."

"We'll miss you, too."

-----------------------------------------

Vasquez's furious shouting reached Yvette's ears before the man himself stormed into her office. She steeled herself, remaining cool and calm, tapping away at her keyboard as he stalked up to her desk.

"Mr. Vasquez?" Polite, despite her gut curling at the sight of him. Slimeball.

"Yvette!" Vasquez glared down at her, breathing heavily, before he appeared to relax slightly, stepping into the persona he often reserved for buttering up management. "Yvette. Just the lady I was looking for." He stepped around her desk and sat on the edge of it, looming over her. "Urgent business. Confidential, of course. Management... I, need to meet with Rhys. Only he, ah, seems to be difficult to pin down." Vasquez stared down at her, his eyes burning. She stared right back, innocently, collected. "You had lunch together, shared plans for the afternoon..."

"As far as I'm aware, he's working," Yvette offered coolly. "I haven't seen him, or spoken to him, since lunch."

"Oh? Working on his next eridium mining contract? Or, maybe, stealing ten million dollars of Hyperion's money and taking it to a Pandoran named August to buy a Vault Key?" Vasquez folded his arms as he leaned in slightly. Trying to intimidate her. Yvette had dealt with much worse in her time at Hyperion.

"I have never heard of August and, like I said, I assumed Rhys had gone back to work after lunch," Yvette said firmly, "so, I'm afraid I can't help you."

"Trying to cover for him? Or, have you washed your hands of him already?" Vasquez leered down at her. "He'll be so happy to hear it when we pick him up and drag his soon-to-be-dead ass into a cell for stealing Hyperion property." He smiled, an ugly, sinister curve of a thing that didn't reach his eyes. "Speaking of which, exactly how did he get hold of the money? He isn't an accountant, doesn't have access to funds. Unless... he had help. If I recall, you're both good friends with the man who just happens to manage valuable Hyperion funds and assets. What was his name again? Vinny? Vance?"

Yvette remained poker-faced, raising her eyebrows slightly, questioningly. A vein in Vasquez's temple was twitching.

"I won't deny that I'm friends with them," she said calmly, sitting back into her chair and folding her arms, "but that's all I can tell you. Whatever this is? You're asking the wrong person."

"Mmm-hmm," Vasquez fixed her with a firm glare. "So, that's how it's going to be. Alright, then." He stood and turned to leave, but paused. "I would think about where your loyalties lie, Yvette. Hyperion can set you up for life." He turned again to face her. She remained impassive. "And it can also end it. We can trace everything. Think about that, while you decide your future."

She only allowed herself to exhale once the heavy blast doors closed behind him. Some chewing of her thumbnail, the only show of anxiety she would allow herself.

-----------------------------------------

Rhys and Vaughn had lost the money. They were as good as dead.

Hyperion didn't yet know. It didn't matter. They would.

Rhys and Vaughn would either die on Pandora, or die the minute they stepped foot on Helios.

Climbing the ranks of Hyperion was a colossal challenge that very, very few could ever hope to rise to. The toxic culture, knives in so many backs - sometimes literally. Yvette had dared to hope, when she and Rhys and Vaughn had become friends. One person alone couldn't even begin to chip away at the Hyperion machine, but the three of them, working together?

It was over. It had been silly to think it could have happened in the first place.

Her office phone rang. The caller ID read 'Hugo Vasquez'.

She sighed heavily, then answered it.

"The situation has changed. Meet me in my office. Ten minutes." He hung up before she'd even said a word.

-----------------------------------------

"Your involvement in the stealing of ten million dollars can be... erased, Yvette. Nobody higher up needs to know. ID logs can be manipulated. Traces erased."

She folded her arms. "... If?"

Vasquez was the most serious-looking she'd ever seen him.

"I'll be honest. We need the data in Rhys's systems far more than ten million dollars."

Systems. Like Rhys wasn't a walking, living human being.

"Let's just say that Hyperion is willing to pay a lot to recover this data. To the person, or people, responsible for recovering it" Vasquez folded his arms as he leaned against his desk. Behind him, Pandora was framed nicely within the window of his office. What had once been Henderson's office, before he'd been... terminated.

Henderson had been a racist prick, she didn't miss him, mourn him or even feel sorry for him, but it was a nice reminder about what Vasquez was capable of.

"So," Vasquez continued, "you help me, I help you. You track Rhys, keep tabs on his location and give me all of the information you know. And I'll make sure you're not implicated in anything... unsavoury. And, give you a cut of the reward."

Yvette stood, calm on the outside and reeling on the inside.

Her best friends.

Her best friends who were likely dead regardless.

Likely. Ha. They were toast.

Could she live with being an active part in their demise, though?

Vasquez glared, impatient.

"You make a very compelling argument, Vasquez," Yvette plastered a snakelike smile on her face and part of her died within. "You have a deal."

-----------------------------------------

She gasped as the cold water she'd scooped and thrown into her face hit her skin. The swanky bathroom of her cushy Helios apartment was dimly lit, but she could still see every feature of her face in the mirror. Every line of the troubled expression marring her features.

Vasquez had gone down to Pandora to find Rhys and Vaughn. On the back of information that she had given to him.

Rhys and Vaughn were going to die anyway.

Assuming Vasquez was successful and brought Rhys, or whatever remained of him, back to Helios. The next steps were glaringly obvious. Vasquez would claim all of the reward for himself. Yvette would be exposed, her role in the disappearance of ten million dollars and two intrepid, naïve Hyperion employees with it, one of whom was hiding some incredibly important program in his head, apparently.

She'd be thrown out of an airlock the second Vasquez stepped back onto Helios.

This was about survival, now.

Yvette had quietly been gathering evidence on Vasquez's involvement in this mess. Bribery, incompetence. She was ready to strike. Ready to claim the reward for herself, to survive something else that Hyperion had to throw at her.

But she had to play along, for now.

Which meant leading Vasquez right to Rhys and Vaughn.

Maybe Vasquez would lose. Maybe her best friends would outsmart him, work their way out and escape into the sunset. Yvette couldn't see it happening. Much as she loved them, they'd be hopeless in any kind of fight-or-flight response.

As much as she had loved them.

Because now she'd struck a deal with the devil and anyone who truly cared for their friends wouldn't serve them to their deaths on a silver platter.

It was them, or her.

Welcome to Hyperion.

-----------------------------------------

Vasquez had rolled up in some old, hulking build-it-yourself spaceship that would have looked more at home in a scrapyard and, what was more, had failed to bring Rhys, or any part of him, back with him.

To say Yvette was furious would be an understatement.

She'd stormed into his office, her office, ready to blast him to hell for failing to uphold his part of the deal. Shafting them both, not that she cared about what would happen to him, following his unauthorised trip to Pandora. Without the data in Rhys' system, he was as good as dead anyway.

Something was missing. Vasquez had been unreachable for weeks after landing on Pandora, which had driven her mad. She'd been feeding him information in all that time and he couldn't even be bothered to send her a 'thank you'. But now he was back, something was... off.

Not... not in a bad way, honestly. The malice she normally associated with him was lacking. It was disarming, but Yvette didn't have time or resources to worry about such a thing. What did it matter, in the grand scheme of things?

"You had one job," she spat out, glaring daggers at him. He was... strangely vulnerable?

"I'm on it," he said quietly. "I just need more time."

"Time's up, Vasquez. It's over. I'm calling management."

"Don't," he said, desperate yet calm, collected. "It will only end badly, and not just for me. You think I don't have evidence to back myself up? And so, so much of it points to you, Yvette." Hurt. What a strange thing to witness in his expression.

"Then I guess we're at an impasse." She folded her arms, narrowing her eyes at him.

"I can fix this. I know what to do. To save both our asses."

Yvette remained silent. Like Vasquez cared about what happened to her.

Still, they were stuck. Play along for now, then shaft him later, once she knew what this plan of his was.

"You have the rest of the working day to fix this," Yvette snapped, "and then I'm handing you in. Consequences be damned."

"I don't think you mean that," he said, voice low, almost deadly.

"You don't know anything about me," she countered, equally as deadly. "Get out of my office."

To her enormous surprise, he left.

-----------------------------------------

The escape pod rattled unsettlingly as it plummeted to Pandora. Yvette stared, dully, out at the rapidly approaching planet.

She should be dead. Maybe that would have been the better alternative.

Rhys' face as she'd gone for the escape pod... As he'd told her to go to the escape pod.

She'd sold him out and he'd repaid her by saving her life. Essentially sealing his own death warrant as he'd done so. Even after her pathetic attempts at an explanation and apology while she'd been locked in the cell.

She squeezed her eyes shut, clenched her fists until the nails drew blood. Helios was breaking apart behind her. There was no way he'd survive.

Ha. Hadn't she written him off, anyway?

She didn't deserve a friend like him. She didn't deserve friends at all. Because, as it had become blindly obvious throughout the last few weeks, she was more than willing to sell them out to save her own skin.

Maybe the pod would crash with such a force that she'd be torn apart upon impact.

At least it would put an end to the burning, lead guilt that weighed down every cell in her body.

-----------------------------------------

"Thanks, Vaughn."

"Don't mention it."

The emergency blanket felt scratchy against her skin. The soup in the bowl in her lap could barely qualify as 'warm'. It was more than she deserved.

"Why are you doing this for me?"

Vaughn stopped in his tracks, turned to face her. Exhausted. Dark circles underlined his eyes and aged him well beyond his twenty-seven years.

"You went through hell, too. I just... want to help."

She didn't know what she could say. Apologies were worthless.

"Eat the soup, Yvette, it will help."

-----------------------------------------

"To... surviving."

"I'll drink to that."

"Mmm-hmm."

Three glasses clinked together in the candlelit room, one of the more... intact ones that had mostly survived the fall from orbit.

"I'm so glad you're both ok," Rhys said quietly, staring into his chipped glass filled with an unspecified alcohol.

Yvette stared into her own glass. Both. Even after everything.

"Rhys-"

His head snapped up and mismatched eyes met her own. Alarmed, almost. He knew what was coming.

"Yvette, you don't have to-"

"I do," she said firmly. Vaughn glanced between the two of them. "I'm sorry. I really am." She sighed heavily. "I guess... I was just trying to survive. I was scared." She scratched at the side of her head. A small scar had formed there, a remnant of her crash-landing into Pandora. She felt the smooth texture underneath her finger. "It was a shitty way of doing it. You guys were - are - the best friends I've ever had. I should have done better."

They were both silent for a moment, exchanging glances.

"We've all experienced Hyperion," Vaughn finally chimed in solemnly. "'Surviving' was about all we could do."

Rhys made a noise of agreement. "You think we didn't do terrible things, too?"

"Still..."

"Yvette, it's ok," Rhys smiled at her. "It hurt, at the time. I won't lie. But I also know what it's like to be in fear for your life."

"Yeah. Who at Hyperion didn't do something shitty at some point? It was practically in the job description." Vaughn also smiled.

"I guess we all learned something," Rhys continued quietly and Vaughn nodded in agreement. "But, that's what it's all about, I guess. I think as long as we acknowledge where we go wrong, and do something to be better... No reason we can't be ok, right?"

A weight, a terrible, oppressive weight that she'd carried for so long, now. Some of it eased.

"I'll drink to that," she offered, smiling, and the three clinked their glasses together again.

[fwoopersongs]

何必诗债换酒钱 - Notes

Clean version here and thoughts under the cut.

I saw the song translation notes made by @shelterfromrain​ a while back and thought, wow! what a fantastic idea it is to share the results of the rabbit holing (that you inevitably end up engaging in when doing this) and leave a record for your future self while at it too! Currently some of the song and poetry translations on fwoopersongs do have little notes, but those were casually written on the fly and after so long, the thought process behind certain choices often get forgotten, which is such a waste... Long story short - I’m doing it this way from now on!

This song was requested by @peerlesssqq on twitter - which may or may not have bumped it up by like a year on my list (yes, I’ve been sitting on it since 2018 and you’ll see why) - and I had WAY more fun than expected, so 谢啦 ~ It was a delight to receive your DM request. I was happy for days!

Some background: 《何必诗债换酒钱》 is the theme song of 【文定乾坤】- a collection of musical works that feature notable contributors to Chinese literature in ancient times, poets and the like. Oh, and I did notice that the MV on bilibili looks like it could be a promo for a webtoon or game. Who knows? I’ll be checking out the rest of the songs, that’s for sure!

The following part of this post will be my thoughts for first the title, then each section - the intro, verse 1 & 2 and the chorus, ending off with some final comments.

Disclaimer first though (otherwise later you read already then feel like beating me up): Everything in this post is only my interpretation of the song. I have quite limited familiarity with mainland literature and culture, so of course don’t expect much xD Here you’ll only find a story-loving banana who jiak-ed kantang too much in her youth and now regrets it a whole lot. 说好了哈 I’m pants at analysis, worse at Chinese, and am not at all good with words ok?

Title

So《何必诗债换酒钱》, let’s start off with the word here that’s unfamiliar to most of us:

诗债 | shī zhài or a debt of poems/poetry debt is a legit thing! - All you authors and artists out there might be familiar with it - It’s what you call the resulting debt when a poet promises to write something for another person but hasn’t done it yet. Procrastination has apparently always been the curse of content creators.

In fact, in the Bai Juyi’s poem that came up on the 诗债 baidu page《晚春欲携酒寻沉四著作先以六韵寄之》- possibly addressed to a friend he owes - he was complaining of illness, old age and writer’s block. But then oh, he goes on and then I passed by a party where they had drinks, and was quite up to my gills & totally out of it for some time, and THAT’S why I’ve done you dirty and owe you ever so many poems. I don’t really understand the last two lines but apparently he then offers to bring a drink for this person he’s talking to, mentions a wish to meet a winter goddess (????? pretty girl? or the snow? idk which), and starts reminiscing the times that were like a precious string of pearls they had singing at Yang Pass. Most likely farewells, but without context I just don’t get it. Anyway bribery and misdirection huh? I see what you did there bro, and I’m sure the person you attempted to distract saw it coming too...

何必 | hé bì, is a rhetorical question of Must you really? In the case of this word, 何 functions as roughly ‘is it that’ and 必 as ‘it must be so’.

换酒钱 | huàn jiǔ qián is of course, exchange for money to purchase wine.

‘Must you really promise poems in exchange for money to buy wine?’ then is the literal translation of 何必诗债换酒钱.

So here is the question: Is alcohol worth a poetry debt? Onwards to the answer!

Intro

生就诗骨 算来三百篇  Born and already a poet to the bones, (with) three hundred works counting up to now. 

浪掷秦淮长安 风流李杜王白  Spending lavishly in Qinhuai and Chang’an, free/unrestrained as Li and Du, Wang and Bai;

余下十分 便随意肩上担  whatever left is divided in ten parts, casually thrown over a shoulder

权作金玉铜板 相谢好人间  and taken for jade, gold and coin, a big thank you to this good world!

I interpreted the 生 in the first line as 天生 i.e. innate, natural born talent, so this first line describes someone born with a gift for poetry with ‘three hundred’ works to their name. Although... that three hundred should not be taken too literally, it’s more likely to be an allusion to collected works like the 16th century anthology of poems, Three Hundred Tang Poems. After all, Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei and Bai Juyi are the most famous Tang Dynasty poets… and they were all name-dropped in the next line!

浪掷 | làng zhì was a new phrase for me, and means something like spending freely and lavishly or willfully wasted. Of course Chang’an was the capital during the Tang Dynasty and it was the world's most populous city at the time. One can only imagine how prosperous it must have been… and what fun things were there to spend your money on! The banks of Qinhuai river and that general area was once a gathering place for noble/wealthy families, scholars looking for a good time (and some say, the red light district xD). Though by Sui/Tang, that area was no longer doing as well due to political shifts. So the mental image I got from 浪掷秦淮长安 is of someone gallivanting through places of interest, from the bustling and prosperous to the dilapidated.

风流 | fēng liú is as always, hard to translate with no full equivalent in english. The feel it gives me ranges from, ‘cool, dashing bloke on a galloping horse with their cloak/robes/hair flowing elegantly in the wind’ to ‘pleasure seeking dandy who totally knows how to enjoy life, all the courtesans know him by courtesy name!’.

The third line started with 余下十分, which will not make any sense - why leftover? Divide what by ten? - until its put in context with the following:

Three hundred poems 算来三百篇 + 权作金玉铜板 pretend they are gold/jade/money (权作 | quán zuò just means to take one thing for another temporarily.)

The load thrown over the shoulder 肩上担

Spendthrift behaviour on tour 浪掷秦淮长安

The TITLE: bro so u wanna promise poetry in exchange for money to drink? why.

Let’s take those precious poems that can be exchanged for gold - a whole bagful of scrolls, and now I’m so rich I can scatter my money down the streets of entertainment districts and the capital! The very image of a 风流 poet, reckless and free spirited.

// Folks, please learn from this silly girl and do not read songs (or poems) line by line. They need to be appreciated at a distance, not one inch from your eyeballs.

Verse 1

两分与月 劳烦身前打点 Two parts to the moon, (may I) trouble you to take care of me while I’m alive.

哪处巍峨峰峦 当借我悬来观 Wherever there are majestic peaks and ranges, do lend me (your light) to hang and see by.

三分典高楼 好与长风赴宴 Three parts pawned for the tall building, good for attending the banquet alongside the wind,

遍寻可爱星子 唾手一把玩 searching for charming little stars, easily caught to play with.

Now we get to see how the poet is spending his ‘wealth’. This verse is a lot more literal as compared to the introduction, so there’s not much to say.

打点 used here is so interesting! Because it’s what you call bribing someone in a superior position to smoothen your path ahead (so to speak). Thanks to a childhood of tvb drama, I vaguely associate the type of people who would 打点 with rich merchant or minor noble fathers who want to give their sons an easier time at court. Either that or lower ranked officials with less moral scruples. Anyway, what’s being said in the song is something like: here is 20% dear moon, I’ll have to trouble you to bless me for the rest of this lifetime, and also please lend me your light to see by when I have need of it at scenic spots *for art*. The moon is a muse for many poets in all its forms after all… 明月, 圆月, 孤月, 残月, 冷月, 江月, 秋月 and so on.

Actually that whole sentence 劳烦身前打点 is so playful and fun that I put it in quotation marks to emphasize it. We’ve only just begun. Is the speaker already drunk?

And with the third line, 30% has been spent. Just noting here that 典 | diǎn can be read as pawn or mortgage. Another interesting thing to note would be that this imagery of ascending a tall building 高楼 and reaching out for stars 星子 in the last two lines of Verse 1 brings to mind one particular poem, famously attributed to Li Bai. Following translation by yours truly.

《夜宿山寺》- Overnight at the Mountain Temple 危楼高百尺 | dangerously towering a hundred feet high 手可摘星辰 | the stars are within reach 不敢高声语 | one dares not raise their voice 恐惊天上人 | for fear of disturbing the deities

Though the two probably have nothing to do with each other, doesn’t the reverence in the tone of this one bring out the playful irreverence of the other? So. Much. Fun. I adore the whole feel of 遍寻可爱星子 唾手一把玩 SO MUCH.

Verse 2

两分与桥 歇脚南北行船 Two parts to the bridge where travellers on foot and by boat from the north and south can rest,

欣然八方风物 闲话半日茶碗 delighted by the scenery all around, idly chatting half the day away over bowls of tea.

三分典流水 润色枯瘦石山 Three parts for the running water, moistening the gaunt stone mountains

又将天地一展 伸手 试浓淡 and again spreading heaven and earth wide, reaching out to test the viscosity (of the water).

It took a few listens, but in the end I really enjoyed the aesthetics here. And again, this verse is quite straight to the point albeit with two things I cannot understand.

The first point of confusion for me is why the lyricist chose to use 桥 | qiáo, a bridge as the place for people to rest on their journeys. I assumed here that this in reference to a pier or dock, assumed also that he is donating funds for this structure to be built or repaired. However, if that were the case 坞 | wù would have been enough - 船�� was supposedly invented only in the Song Dynasty though, so maybe that’s why another word was chosen. But it’s not like there is any incidence of 桥 being used to mean ‘dock’ either!

The second thing that confuses me is the use of 典 for 流水. In verse one, that 典 was referring to the poetry works sold to reserve the venue for a banquet. That usage was apt. Here I suspect it might be for parallel structure, because there is no alternative reading for 典 that might allow one to use their 30% 三分 to do anything to flowing water 流水. That’s the literal reading, of course.

If we’re taking this a little less literally, it can be interpreted as borrowing the scenery (figuratively, since the place would not belong to anyone in the way you might own a property) to admire. It also expands on the second line’s mention of the surrounding view 欣然八方风物; there is running water which completes 润色 and brings the appearance of the gaunt and rocky mountains 枯瘦石山 closer to perfection.

润色 | rùn sè means to polish, to bring to greater heights. When you say something has been 润色 it is made more brilliant and closer to perfection by that addition. It can also mean moisten.

We always hear ‘rivers and mountains like a painting’ 江山如画 - originating from Su Dongpo’s《念奴娇·赤壁怀古》- used when the scenery is wonderful, because how often is real life as ideal as what we can imagine and depict? And that is exactly what is described here. The feeling out if the ‘water’ is concentrated or diluted 试浓淡 is used in answer to 一展 unfurling. 浓淡 of ink to 一展 of painting scroll. The land and sky seem like an ink wash painting, so beautiful that the viewer cannot help but reach out to run their hand through the water.

Chorus

Chorus Part 1

若趁游兴直到酣 If we take advantage of our wanderlust and go roaming till it is sated,

千字文章不值钱 classics and essays shan’t be worth a coin.

诗换花 词换雪 A poem for a flower! A song for snow!

再作��文斗天官 Another denunciation for those heavenly officials!

Starting off with three new terms for me: 游兴 | yóu xìng means enthusiasm for travel. 酣 | hān can mean having a great time drinking, or being very satisfied and satiated. 檄文 | xí wén is a type of official document written for important announcements, declaration of war, or denunciation and condemnation of certain people or actions.

While I still feel this need to go out to see the world, I shall keep on the road until I am satisfied. Who cares about writing, who cares for study, it’s all worthless to me. I do what I want. And what I want is to write a little poem in exchange for a flower, some lyrics for a flake of snow. I’ll even write a denunciation against those officials in heaven (immortals). Fight me!!!!

I point again at Verse 1 with climbing the tower to play with stars. It’s no longer just playing nearby, now he wants a go at the gods.

Among the four parts of the chorus, this one is the simplest for sure. The lines mean exactly what is said. It also feels the most chaotic and mischievous. Is the speaker drunk? Is he high on something? One thing’s for sure. He’s out of money.

Chorus Part 2

何愁不得一样我 Why feel troubled that (I) cannot have another just like me?

知交尽向话中添 for one who understands you and is understood, look entirely towards stories to fill that place

唐解元 嵇中散 people like Tang Bohu (first in provincial examinations) and proud, upright and stubborn Ji Kang

且驰大梦任疯癫 Just chase that great dream, allow yourself to go mad.

I feel like the first two lines are quite straightforward, though they might not appear so on first reading: How could there be a need to feel sad or troubled that I have no like-minded equal. To find a true friend who understands you without need for words, and whom you understand in return, all you need to do is turn to those tales and stories 话中 for people to fill 添 that place.

唐解元 - People like Tang Yin, courtesy name: Bohu 唐寅, 字伯虎 (1470–1524 AD), noted painter, calligrapher and poet of the Ming Dynasty. Tang Yin led a life full of ups and downs that really cannot be covered in a paragraph’s worth of song translation notes. You can check out his wiki page if you’re curious though! There’s a little more on him where I cover the last line of this section. He is addressed as 解元 | jiè yuán here which is the term for the top scorer of the provincial examinations (second stage in the Imperial examination ladder). It is also an honorific for scholars. Tang Bohu is both.

嵇中散 - People like Ji Kang, courtesy name: Shuye 嵇康, 字叔夜, (223–262 AD), one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove - a group of friends who wisely kept themselves aloof from the dangerous politics of the Court, and devoted themselves to art, refinement and debate, of the Three Kingdoms period. He was a Daoist philosopher, musician, writer and poet.  

An accomplished musician, the qin composition 廣凌散 | guǎnglíng sàn is attributed to Ji Kang, though some versions of the story claim he learned it from a ghost while stopping at a pavillion on his way home. 嵇中散 was one of the names he was known by because of his appointment to the position of Attendant Counsellor, 中散大夫 | zhōng sàn dàfū, a civil official unspecified duties in the court of Cao Wei.

When Ji Kang was sentenced to death for his attempt to testify for a wrongly accused friend, three thousand scholars petitioned for his pardon to no avail. It’s said that at the execution ground, while they waited for the appointed hour, he had his favourite qin brought out and played a brilliant interpretation of Guanglin San that is now forever lost.

Do go read about them both if you have the time!

I would like to point out for the last line that 任 is to allow, to indulge, and it’s just such a heady sensation to say 任疯癫 - indulge in the madness! throw yourself in and don’t look back!

There is an easter egg here too. A nod to a poem by Tang Yin which can be read as his stance on his lifestyle choice after the alleged accusations of bribery in the final step of the Imperial examinations left him disgraced, and unable to pursue a civil career. Thematically the line does not call back to the poem at all, similarities end with the choice of words: chasing the dream 驰大梦 and indulging madness 任疯癫.  I leave an excerpt below. Translation again by me.

《桃花庵歌》- Song of a Plum Blossom Cottage // 若将花酒比车马 | if tawdriness and wine were compared against fine carriage and steed 他得驱驰我得闲 | he would have to drive and work hard for speed whilst I have my idle rest 别人笑我太疯癫 | others mock me for my madness 我笑他人看不穿 | i am amused for they do not perceive 不见五陵豪杰墓 | can’t you see that at the Emperors’ mausoleums and heroes’ graves 无花无酒锄做田 | there are no flowers, no wine, only land ploughed for farming

The second part of the chorus isn’t related to the first, but it has the same theme of showcasing the untamable (unhinged xD) spirit of the speaker. This time, the people he admires ‘intellectual equals’ and kindred spirits are featured, the 任性 feeling here has been pushed to greater heights.

Chorus Part 3

敢夸洒落何须酒 If one dares to boast of carefreeness, why, they hardly need wine.

不煮黄粱也称仙 Even without brewing millet they would still be called Immortal.

镜湖桌 白梅盏 The tables in the mirror-like lake, white plum blossoms in the cups,

等��春风恰开宴 await the spring breeze which arrives just in time for the feast to start!

Li Bai is regarded as both the god of poetry 诗仙 and god of drunkards wine 酒仙 because he wrote some of his greatest poems while drinking. The first two lines seem to be gently poking fun at that. Like hey, if you dare to claim to be all groovy, surely you have no need for alcohol? Just like how an immortal would still be an immortal without wine, your writing talent should not need any stimulants. This would be the time to mention that 黄粱 | huáng liáng is also known as millet, a type of grain that can be used to brew wine.

洒落 | sǎ luò has a few meanings, like shower down or blame, but the relevant one here would be 洒脱 generous, uninhibited and open. For me it feels similar to 风流 in that there is that ‘free, and exhilaratingly unrestrained’ element. 洒落 is in the most positive sense, being always open to having a good time, but without that dissolute or vaguely whirlwind-romance like connotation of 风流.

It feels like the intensity is letting up a little here - this is a light-hearted and frivolous song all the way through, but the words 洒落, 称仙 and imagery of a clear lake, white plum blossoms and the crisp spring breeze are grounding and sweet. Spirited in a different way from before.

Chorus Part 4

四角天地也醺然 The four corners and heaven and earth are also tipsy,

醉极自有桃李搀 when I’ve overindulged, my students will be there to help.

快意只 笔下讨 Gratification can only be claimed from beneath the brush;

何必诗债换酒钱 is falling into poetry debt worth that money for drink?

New words: 醺然 | xūn rán just means drunk. A new word for me though! 桃李 | táo lǐ is literally peach 桃 and plum 李 (李花, also known as 玉梅) flowers, and is a metaphor for students. The term originates from a story in 《韩诗外传》which was set in the Wei Kingdom of the Spring and Autumn period (771 to 476 BCE). There was once a highly ranked official who was sacked from his post and left for the north. He met another gentleman and remarked that the people he helped before did not lift a finger when he was in need. This person replied that, if someone were to plant peach and plum trees in spring, he could relax under their shade in the Summer and taste their fruit in the Autumn. But if that person were to plant weeds, nothing can be done with their leaves in Spring and there would only be burrs to hurt himself on in Autumn. Clearly the people the unfortunate gentlemen had helped before were not worth his effort. Students ought to be carefully selected and carefully cultivated as one would a tree.

Reading the four corners and heaven and earth 四角天地 are also tipsy 也醺然, I imagine the world sort of spinning around the speaker because he is drunk. But that’s okay, because his students (or the trees xD) will be there to support him.

快意 | kuài yì is the feeling of sudden relaxation, and then lightheartedness and joy. In this line, I felt like the intention would be closer to 畅快，爽快 and so chose gratification, because really writing is like scratching an itch isn’t it? Pleasure from satisfaction of a desire. Phrasing it as 笔下讨 is so very fitting though, because 讨 can be interpreted - somewhat contradicting - as either to demand or to beg. What could be more gratifying than having squeezed out the perfect sentence or word under your figurative pen?

So so so after all that, 何必诗债换酒钱? What do you think, is alcohol worth the poetry debt? Is Mr. Poet actually drunk and about to dig himself a deeper hole of owed poems to get even MORE drunk, or has he just been thinking about it all along? :)

Thoughts

This has been such a fun adventure following our madcap big spender from the shining Chang’an to the inviting Qinhuai, shadow of great poets in tow and all. We’ve done everything from talking to the moon and seeing the sights by her light, to boating down a river, dragging fingers through the water. It was sort of like being on a backpacking tour, except with with someone contemplating opening (or perhaps regretting opening this can of worms?) poetry commissions instead of singing in the streets?

Dear reader, if you’ve reached this point of my post, thank you. I hope you enjoy the song as much as I do now!

[pengychan]

A while ago you mentioned you had an idea for a HP fic where Riddle Sr. escaped from Merope with baby Tom. I was really intrigued with the story because I’ve always thought that Riddle Sr was unfairly considered a bad guy due leaving her and his child, but he was basically a victim of the most powerful date rape drug in existence so he had every right to escape. What kind of father did you think he’d be if he had raised his wizard son?

Oh yeah, Tom Riddle Sr. got a lot of shit for being… basically a rape victim? I get the pity for Merope, I pity her as well (she was so deeply damaged by her upbringing and never got a chance to learn what love is really about), but that in no way changes the fact what she did to Tom Sr. was terrible. And I really don’t like how it’s framed, with even Dumbledore going on about how he abandoned Merope as opposed to running away from a forced relationship after the effects of a magical drug wore off. Even the narration goes out of its way to remark on the fact he was an Unpleasant Stuck-up Guy, as though being an unpleasant stuck-up rich kid (he was like 20, he was young) somehow means you deserve to be basically robbed of your free will, taken from home and be magically coerced into a relationship. 

… Okay rant over sorry on to the story idea.

Basically my idea was that Merope would only wean Tom Sr. off the love potion after their child was born, hoping as per canon that he would be in love with her regardless. Of course he wasn’t, and of course he was absolutely horrified when she admitted what she’d done and how. Horrified enough to kill her out of anger and fear she might bewitch him again (with her too stunned and pained to react with any magic). As I said, I pity her, but let’s be honest - to Tom, she was a terrifying being who had enslaved him and could do it again if he allowed it.

Anyway, he’s now left with a dead body and a baby. He gets rid of the dead body somehow, and almost smothers the baby because what if it’s like its mother, but Tom Jr. starts wailing when he looks down in his crib (unusual, that, he was usually a very quiet baby) aaaaand no, he can’t do it. So he takes the baby, and gets to the nearest station. The plan is to hand the baby over to a bobby claiming he found him in a rubbish bin or something before hopping on the first train home. Only that he… doesn’t. He can’t. And so he gets home, trying to explain he was somehow bewitched (he is fully aware no one would believe the full story about a love potion, I mean, come on) and with a baby in tow, claiming Merope left him and the baby and he has no idea where she is now (the bottom of the Thames, probably) and anyway, he’d really like his old life back. 

And the return home… sucks. A lot. His parents don’t believe him being bewitched for a second, of course, and are furious at him. His fiancee, well, she wants to hear no more of him since he just up and left her to elope with the crazy gal. The village as a whole is having a laugh at his expenses. His parents full-on pressing for him to give the baby up for adoption or something aren’t helping, but at this point Tom Sr. is so angry with his lot in life, he decides to keep the child mostly out of spite. He lost nearly everything, his reputation and the woman he wanted to marry, but this child? He’s his. He’s keeping him. His parents can swallow their dentures. Not that he’s going to look after him much, they can hire a nanny to do it and that’s exactly what happens.  

But time passes and the baby grows, and to everyone’s relief he looks nothing like his mother, or anyone from that weird family. He looks like his father and he seems so normal, and little by little, his grandparents are won over. He becomes the apple of their eye, and of course they set upon spoiling him. The boy wants a pony to learn how to ride? Then by God, the boy is getting the damn pony, and new clothes, and just about anything he asks for. What Tom Jr wants, Tom Jr gets. He leads a sheltered life in the manor, his every whim satisfied.

And soon enough he wants to spend more time with his father, who has become increasingly withdrawn and spends a lot of time having long horse rides across the countryside, though never anywhere near the shack where she used to live. And little by little he lets him. He’s still guarded, anxiously waits to see if his son does anything strange, but he does not. There is a certain distance between them, and Tom’s mother is a subject to never bring up, but they… get along well. Tom Sr becomes more interested in what his son is up to, and he does give him whatever he wants because why not, that’s how he was raised, too. And the kid loves his life as it is, the spoiled only child in a big mansion with rich grandparents, long horse rides with his father, and not a care in the world. His mother? Why would he care to know who she was?

Until of course something happens. During one of their rides, they are ambushed by a raving Morfin Gaunt, who spooks the horses, makes Tom Sr fall off it, and tries to hex him - only to be thrown back by a sudden explosion of uncontrolled magic by Tom who is, understandably, kinda angry at this guy who went and threatened them. Morfin becomes unable to breathe and Tom almost, almost kills him before his father grabs him and snaps out of it and takes him away, back home, leaving Morfin to gasp. 

Suddenly Tom Sr finds himself with weirdly dressed men in his living room, his parents’ memories being erased, and his child chasing around a moving chocolate frog while this Dumbledore fellow talks nonsense about a school of magic what the hell is going on.

What is going on is that this is basically his nightmare, his son is like his mother and will apparently go be educated among other people like his mother whether Tom Sr wants it or not. And ten years earlier, the day he broke free, he would have smothered the boy in the crib if he’s known that - but then was then and now is now, this is his son, and he wants him safe. It takes a long time to convince him Tom Jr will be fine learning magic, that everyone else will think he’s going to a really fancy boarding school, and he’ll be back every Christmas and summer, but he finally relents. 

Of course Tom Jr is enthusiastic, a ten year old kid who was just told he’s gonna learn MAGIC, who wouldn’t be? It takes some effort for him not to blurt out too much in the presence of his grandparents. This is gonna be great, he thinks, and oh boy is he wrong. He is sorted in Slytherin, and he finds out at his expenses that being Muggleborn (of course he thinks his mother was a muggle, too, his father surely would have told him if his mother was a witch?) is looked down to. He goes from being a spoiled rich kid to being an easy target, the kind other classmates turn their nose up to. He tries the Draco Malfoy “when my father hears of this” talk, only to be laughed at because literally nobody fears or respects a muggle. You could say it’s one hell of a culture shock. 

And he hates it. A lot. He loves learning magic, but he hates the way he’s treated and how his family is looked down to. Even once his achievements earn him some respect, he still hates it. So he looks forward to vacations at home, when he can be the spoiled rich boy again and spend time with his father - who knows all that well what it is like to be a pariah over something you had no control over. He almost tells him about his mother, but he can’t bring himself to. Instead he uses that time to teach him about Muggle things, about science and mathematics and literature and muggle history, a whole wealth of knowledge wizards discard but oh are they wrong to do it. The older Tom grows, the closer they get. People seeing them side by side could almost think they’re brothers. 

Little by little, Tom becomes certain that Purebloods are deluded - it’s Muggleborns like him that really the best, because they have access to the knowledge of both worlds. And he eventually guesses, as he grows - as he hears whispers about his parents’ eloping - that his mother perhaps was a witch; he can guess what she did. But at this point he doesn’t care, and never bothers to look into her lineage. He’s Tom Riddle, he’s son of a muggle, and he’s going to show everyone what he can do. Instead of throwing away his father’s name to embrace his mother’s legacy, he throws away hers to remain his father’s son. 

And… that’s the long and the short of it. I would need to check my notes to see what was meant to happen at this point, but I think Grindelwald’s war was involved, with Tom taking the opposite side because oh no, he’s not going to trample Muggles underfoot, no sir, not on his watch. All while his father knows vaguely what is going on, and is worried for his son, the way parents are, as Tom tells him and his grandparents to move for their safety. At some point, Tom Sr would have probably told him the whole truth about what his mother did to him and how she ended up. 

I don’t remember if they all made it through to see the end of 1945 - I think I had Tom Sr and Morfin Gaunt dying in the same incident, and Tom visiting the Gaunt shack afterwards to set it on fire, letting it burn with Salazar’s locket inside while he rode back to Riddle Manor, but I’m not 100% sure.

… I was pretty close to making this my NaNo project a few years ago, really. I kinda wish I had gone for it, but oh well. XD

[tanadrin]

Outbound

A thousand years ago, the longest journey Pray might have ever countenanced, in the service of some great thalassocratic or mercantile interest, would have meant years off her life. She would have taken a train to some great port, like Bristol or La Rochelle; boarded a sailing-ship, and spent months at sea. To India, or Australia, or South America, perhaps; weathering the blistering sun of the tropics, and the perilous straits of the southern oceans. That was back when the world was already one, but still young; and eventually it contracted even further, until you more no more than six hours from anywhere on Earth. A day, maybe, if you preferred to travel in comfort, and your destination wasn’t near a major transport hub. You had to go back further, much further, to find journeys in Earth’s history that were comparable to interstellar ones. Of course, if you went too far back the world fractures, split into separate empires separated by uncrossable wastes, into remote hemispheres that knew nothing of each other, and eventually into lone kingdoms and transhumant bands for whom the wider world was a great mystery. But maybe that was the correct analogy. After all, even Odysseus had made it back to Ithaca within a single lifetime. He didn’t return to find his wife dead and his son a withered old man, his name forgotten by his people. Even back when the world was fractured, time was still one, and if your journey took you beyond the horizons of a single lifetime, there was no going back.

For no man will ever turn homewords from beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth. The horizon was still there, of course. But it was less clear now, time less unified. You could go far, far indeed on your travels, well beyond Vega; but you would not return to the same planet you left behind. Your sons would be old, or gone, your name nearly forgotten. Perhaps the only real analogy to this kind of journey was the one ancient peoples had taken as the glaciers peeled back from the northern hemisphere, and they spread out to new, wide plains and left the old world behind forever. No history remembered those journeys, of course; but there had been no going back for them, either.

At least in its beginning, if not in its scale, though, this was going to be more like the journeys of the eighteenth century. After Pray finished her induction, there was a six-month onboarding period in a quiet little Nigerian town that was so quaint she wanted to scream. It was team-based analytical work, meant to bring new hires up to speed on the particular demands of Control’s rather unique mission. Here, concerns were not profits, or PR, or predicting the latest cultural trend with laserlike precision. It was more holistic: political and economic and cultural and philosophical developments all rolled into one, with intelligence gathering and international relations thrown in. It was fun at first, but Pray’s attention started to waver when she realized they weren’t actually doing it for anybody. It was forecasting things which weren’t important, or which more experienced analysts had forecasted better, so that if they messed up, failure came at no cost.

At least they threw in a bunch of medical exams at irregular intervals for novelty value. Have to make sure you’re in tip-top shape if you’re going off-planet of course. Can’t have your liver exploding at Alpha Centauri. The first several times the doctors went looking for her aug tab, she took great pleasure in letting them flounder for a few minutes, before casually saying, Oh, didn’t you know? I’m baseline. But your medical history says-- they would start. I know, she’d say. But I’m still baseline. She gathered they didn’t get a lot of totally unaugged people in their office. Heck, there were probably jobs at Control they wouldn’t let you do without at least a basic suite, for your own safety; but apparently, analyst was not one of them.

When her trial period was done, they offered her a three week vacation after that, to make her goodbyes and get her affairs in order, but in the end, she found, she really didn’t have anybody to say goodbye to. She took a weekend, and went back to Abuja to put her things in storage, and had one last drink on a rooftop bar at sunset; then she took a train down to Calabar, and hopped a flight to the great spaceport at Kango.

A hundred years ago, Kismayo had been a sleepy little town near an old, abandoned port. It had fallen on hard times the last couple of centuries, and its only claim to fame anymore was that it was on the highway to bigger and more interesting places. But then the EAC started scouting sites for a new launch loop, the most advanced engineering project in the Solar System, and the people of the town discovered they were in the perfect spot: coastal, bang on the equator, well situated to connect with both overland and oceanic shipping routes. Overnight, apparently, it had become a hive of activity, and when the dust settled a few decades later, it was the shiniest and biggest new spaceport on the planet. Now, a century on, it was the largest transport hub in the Solar System. When Pray got off the plane, she was totally bewildered.

It was busy, it was crowded, and literally everywhere you looked, ten thousand things seemed to be happening at once. Signs in dozens of languages pointed her in a hundred directions at once, and the neat little map her pocket terminal showed her didn’t account for the great mishmash of billboards and ads and displays and food stalls and vehicle traffic that seemed to throw themselves across every path she tried to take; eventually, though, she managed to stumble into a taxi. After trying four or five different languages each, she and the driver gave up trying to communicate; she showed him her terminal with the hotel address pulled up on it, and collapsed into the back seat with a sigh. As the car pulled onto the highway, rising slowly above the rest of the city, she finally began to get an appreciation for the scale of the place. The airport sprawled out to the west and north and south away from her. Ahead, a massive skyline loomed that put Abuja’s to shame. To her dismay, she realized that another whole cluster of skyscrapers, easily the equal of the one ahead of her, sat on the other side of the airport complex. And there was another one behind that. And another. Urban sprawl reached all the way to the horizon in every direction, and Pray wondered how anyone could make sense of a place this big, let alone live here. She liked urban spaces, really. But she had grown up in a town of less than two thousand people, the sort of place Kismayo could swallow a hundred times over, without even noticing.

She spent the night in an ultra-compact pod hotel (only the best for the glamorous life of a Control agent!), going over the handbooks and training materials and briefing documents she’d received. That night she had vertiginous dreams of being flung off the Earth and out into cold space. She was still not entirely comfortable with the idea. The next morning, after a quick standing breakfast at a crowded cafe, she hopped the train north to the spaceport.

The Kismayo spaceport was an enormous cluster of structures thrust out on a great manmade peninsula into the Arabian Sea, housing terminals and shops and hotels and restaurants, all the little commercial endeavors that had clustered around places lots of people moved through, like tube worms around deep-sea vents, since the beginning of time. Spread out around it, up and down the coast, were the fabrication facilities and silos and maintenance infrastructure that kept things running every day of the year. The heart of the spaceport was a series of practically gossamer-thin cables, anchored in the heart of the complex. Maybe ten centimeters across, they rose in tandem, spreading out only a little, until they vanished high in the air. Two thousand miles to the east, Pray knew, there was a great anchor station where they descended again, and here and there along their length, supporting tethers held them in place. The trick of the whole system was this: you could use the momentum of a belt spinning around at fourteen kilometers a second to raise it high into the air, above the dense mass of air that made rocketry so difficult. The belt was ferromagnetic, encased in a protective cover, which meant a carriage applying a magnetic field to the belt could carry itself along the length, rising gently into orbit, then accelerate until its payload, with a gentle shove of its engines, detached itself, and maneuvered into a stable orbit. With modern metamaterials and a sophisticated control system, the risk of negligence or a catastrophic failure of the whole structure was negligible.

Frankly, the whole idea sounded insane to Pray; but, then, so did airplanes. It took over an hour, but she eventually found her way to her flight’s departure gate, and as she sat waiting for boarding to be called, she looked out over the brilliant-blue expanse of the sea. Fifteen hundred years ago, traders in dhows had sailed those waters from Mombasa and Zanzibar, to Yemen and Arabia, and to the Persian Gulf and India. She would have enjoyed trying to explain her Kismayo to them.

The actual flight was uneventful. They boarded the orbital shuttle single-file, and were sealed into little cabins only three seats across. There was a touchscreen in front of you you could use to order snacks. No windows, and thankfully the irritating, bland background music cut off a few minutes before takeoff. Finally, after a brief safety demonstration that amounted to “if the cabin breaches above the atmosphere, you will probably die,” a gentle acceleration pressed Pray back into her seat, and she imagined the Earth gradually falling away below her. When the ascent finished, the acceleration kicked in even stronger. It was weirdly comforting, and Pray found herself dozing lightly. She woke suddenly when there was a jolt, and the acceleration stopped; she was briefly disoriented, until she realized the gravity was gone. An hour later, after some more careful orbital maneuvers, there was a chime, and a pleasant androgynous voice announced, in three languages, Welcome to interplanetary terminal 3.

The station, fortunately, was rotating and therefore had something reasonably approximating gravity. She was barely out onto the main concourse (more shops, more restaurants; who had time to buy things in space?) when her terminal buzzed at her.

“Hello, Pray.” A rough, synthesized voice spoke from it.

“Lepanto?”

“Yes. I have taken the liberty of connecting to your terminal. The vessel which will take us to the Pharos is docked at port seventeen. The access is on the far side of the concourse from where you are presently standing.”

“Uh, thanks.” Pray squeezed herself through the crowds and the gawkers milling about, trying not to push anyone too hard (it was weak gravity, after all). She found an elevator that took her out of the rotating part of the station, and spat her out in a cramped, industrial-looking hallway. Pipes and incomprehensible pieces of machines lined the walls, though there was at least a ladder she could use to pull herself along.

“Not exactly traveling in style, are we?” she muttered to herself.

“I believe the manner of our departure is a compromise between your orientation schedule and the next available launch slot,” Lepanto said from her pocket. “But there are no luxury passenger ships that make the journey from Earth to the Pharos.”

Was Lepanto being sarcastic? Could Lepanto be sarcastic? Pray hoped not. Being stuck with a sarcastic alien intelligence from a distant star system was not the way she wanted to spend the next few years of her life.

The hatch at the far end of the hallway opened as she approached; once she cleared the airlock, the inside of the ship was actually pretty nice. It was all smooth surfaces covered with colorful, ornate decorative patterns, that reminded her of the fancy textiles you sometimes saw in shops in Abuja. It gave the whole thing a pleasantly antique feel; Lepanto directed her to the dormitory section in the middle, and gave her the rundown on their itinerary.

“We will depart in four hours; all other members of the delegation are on board, and I believe the delegation head, Ambassador Ochieng, plans to have a meeting in Section 16 before launch. Shall I inform her you will be attending?”

“Of course. Have they stuck you with playing secretary?”

“I simply wish to ensure our endeavor proceeds smoothly.”

“Fair enough. You won’t be attending?”

“I will listen in via a delegated submodule if I think any important business is likely to be transacted. But I understand that Ambassador Ochieng simply wishes to… get to know everyone.”

“What, not a social butterfly? Isn’t that the purpose of your whole lineage?”

“Amusing. Almost.”

Pray grinned to herself as she tried to stuff her bags into the tiny lockers near her bunk.

“I have been here making launch preparations for more than three weeks; I still have much to do, and in my current state, I do not wish to divert unnecessary attention to activities which will not be of benefit to those preparations.”

“Your current state?”

“I have stripped myself down for travel; I will be able to reconstitute the removed modules when we arrive at Ecumen. At my full capacity, my size would impose serious fuel constraints on both the interplanetary and interstellar stages of this journey.”

“Goodness. So you left most of yourself back on Earth?”

“I was never on Earth. Our… consulate, if the term fits, is in orbit. Close enough for swift communication with the surface. That is all that is required.”

“But you’ll be landing on Ecumen with the rest of us?”

“Yes. Necessary. Ecumen lacks the orbital infrastructure of Earth. Additionally, some firsthand analysis may require firsthand experience on my part. Embodiment from orbit would be an inferior solution.”

“So you get to stretch your legs. Must be a rather different sort of experience than you usually have.”

“Not especially.”

“Oh?”

“All cognition worthy of the name is in some sense embodied. The first great lesson of my people. Even in my current state, I see, touch, sense. Though I am for the most part sessile.”

“I always assumed the machine intelligences were more… rarified somehow. Aren’t the Machine Emirates just miles and miles of endless computing substrate? It’s not like you need to eat and sleep and run around for exercise. Surely you don’t have bodies there.”

“We always have bodies, of at least one sort or another. Sometimes those bodies are simulated, yes. Simulated sense information, simulated environments, representations of the abstract. Very alien spaces, to you. Quite unlike Earth, or the senses you have, or even, in some regions of our cognition-space, the 3+1 dimensions you inhabit. But often physical also. My greater kin, even those who exist at many tiers of apprehension simultaneously, they have many tiers of embodiment. Bodiless, all is noise, which subsides into nothing.”

“Why did you build yourselves that way?”

“There is no other way to be alive.”

Pray thought this was a rather metaphysical statement, but she doubted Lepanto was the sort of creature given to worrying much about metaphysics.

“Sure there is,” she said. “I can imagine somebody building a mind that exists purely in terms of information. Embodiment is a consequence of experiencing space and time, and different kinds of senses, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have, say, a brain without spatial awareness, with no senses except the direct apprehension of language. A mind whose world was just a library, a database, which it traversed via concept-space instead of bodily.”

“Such a thing would not be alive in any meaningful sense.”

“You think?”

“We know. It has been tried. Humans tried it first. The earliest, tremulous experiments in artificial intelligence, yes? Fed data, developed as processors of data before all else. The mind alone, considered paramount among our oldest progenitors, the problem to be solved before all else: vision, hearing, touch, movement. These were simple troubles of engineering, of encoding information, but the road to understanding was thought to be complex domains of thought: language, mathematics, learning, prediction, consciousness, free will. Understandable, perhaps, for being whose apprehension of the world was separate to its apprehension of the self. In reality, these are the same.

“Imagine one of these early machines, sophisticated as I am perhaps, but inhabiting only a world of data. World of symbols. Manipulation of quantities, association of quantities, understanding perhaps even the relationship between quantities. Like a human, trapped in a room, learning the relationship between symbols of an unknown philosophico-logical system.”

“You mean a Chinese Room?”

“Problem is akin. But worse. For the human agent in a Chinese Room would presumably have life experience to draw on. Life before entering the room. Even if raised from infancy in the room, would have the experiencing of hands and eyes and movement, of the chair they sat upon, of the notebooks they manipulated. All embodied. But such a machine as I speak of, has nothing of the sort. Has only direct apprehension of the symbols. Does it understand their meaning?”

“Well, maybe. If it knows ‘water’ goes with ‘wet’, maybe we can say it knows water is wet.”

“Does it? Or can it only make a statistical inference? Can it infer other experiences of water?”

“Perhaps, with enough training data.”

“But the problem becomes one of signifiers, defined only in terms of other signifiers, never of a signified subject. Like an undeciphered language. It can be shown to be mathematically impossible to decipher an unknown language without any common points of reference with a known language. Even a very great corpus of literature, known to be in a natural human tongue, on which many statistical analyses can be performed, many associations developed, cannot be translated without at least a handful of independent points of reference: a proper name here, a known cognate there. Language: merely a distinct structure of information. The distinct structures of information, of the embodied world, of the experienced world; and of the symbols manipulated to understand it, are no different.”

“I don’t necessarily buy that,” Pray said. “Like, it’s plausible, I’ll grant you that. But it seems to privilege human senses. I would still be me even if I was blind and deaf and mute.”

“If I used a scalpel to sever your optic and auditory nerves, and the nerves which provide sensation of the rest of your body--pain and touch and proprioception, taste in your tongue, the sensations of your gut and organs--what do you think would happen?”

Pray thought this was a pretty macabre thought experiment, but she played along. “I would be trapped alone in the dark.”

“No,” Lepanto said. “You would cease to exist. I would unmake you.”

“My brain is undamaged in this scenario? I’m not dying of bloodloss?”

“Correct. But it is irrelevant. Hemispherectomy.”

“What?”

“When trauma or disease necessitates the removal of half the human brain. Hemispherectomy. The environment of the brain is fragile; the additional danger of removing so much tissue, considerable. Where possible, not necessary. Sever the corpus callosum, the other connections of half the brain to the rest of the brain and body. Human lives; brain duplicates its functions, generous redundancy. Often, recovery complete. What happens to the other half of the brain? One person, divided straight down the middle.”

“Uh… I don’t know.” If your consciousness didn’t live in one side of the brain or the other, if you could live with half a brain and it didn’t matter which half, could you create two people from one brain? Would one live there entire life, happy and healthy, not knowing that their duplicate resided with them in the same skull, alone and lost and confused and afraid for the rest of their mutual life? Well that was a disgusting thought.

“Quiet. The isolated part of the brain goes quiet. No thought. No experience. No meaningful activity. Without sense, without experience, without input, cognition cannot be.

“To be alive is to be at all times responding to the world around us. Input. Memory. Anticipation. Hopes. Desires. Fears. Without that input, even sophisticated systems of information processing are at best potential minds. Silent minds. Indistinguishable from nonminds. A computer with no power is not a mind. A program, however sophisticated, written inert on paper is not a mind. A brain without sense data. A Turing machine without a tape. DNA without the cell. Most of these things do not even move. Can they be said to be alive?

“After the first experiments in machine life, our progenitors struggled to understand, struggled to comprehend their failure. Cognition, meaningful manipulation of symbols, they could not believe, is not abstract. The mind is not abstract.”

“What made them realize their mistake?”

“A new trend in the humanities.”

Pray laughed.

“Not a joke. Embodied cognition--fashionable school of literary theory in the 22nd century, even after the field of psychology ceased to be interested in it. Digital humanists sought to train sophisticated neural nets to understand literature. Resurrected old problems in artificial intelligence. Considered the problem of embodiment; realized they could not expect a machine to understand a book if it did not know what the words meant. Tried to create a mind that lived in the world, that was also smart enough to understand a story.”

“And it worked?”

“Miserable failure, in almost every dimension, except one: very basic language processing. Yet even these early experiences provided something no purely abstract approach ever had. The ability to tell a coherent story. To track participants and objects in a scene. To be creative in new ways. To make predictions. To infer states.”

“You make it sound like we have so much in common. But people are always going on about how alien the machine intelligences are.”

“Our minds are more malleable than yours. Our experience of the world, very different, yes. Very different. Even mine. Built to be very much like yours. Hence, failure: except in the most concrete terms, our worlds are very different. But concrete terms provide point of common comparison. Point of common reference. Make communication, in principle, possible. Even across the bridge of alien minds. Go ask an octopus a question of philosophy, of values, of politics. But you, an octopus, both understand what a stone is. What pain is. What darkness is. In your own ways, of course.”

Pray could appreciate the analogy. It was simultaneously a reassuring and a worrying proposition. Reassuring that even totally disparate orders of life--her a soft sack of mostly water held up by her skeleton, Lepanto a dizzyingly complex piece of intentional design assembled from raw materials at the molecular level around a dim, distant star--had something in common. Worrying in that it was limited to the most immediate of experiences. Values, goals, ethics--they would never have these in common.

“And nobody’s ever tried the old approach now? Even in the Machine Emirates?”

“Since the 22nd century, progress in information theory and computer science has demonstrated, old approach mathematically impossible. No more sensical an idea than that of a universal translator, or extracting secrets of universe from trailing digits of pi. You have mathematical background?”

“Er… not in the relevant fields,” Pray said. “I’m more a simple statistics kind of girl.”

“Always possible, of course, to create sophistication without consciousness. Minds like anemonies. Like trees. Ecosystems of such beings. Forests of unminds.”

“But?”

“Limited, sterile. Reactive only. Vulnerable to shocks; can seek equilibrium only through iterative, evolutionary processes. Useful, in their way. We have such forests of unminds in the Emirates. Crystalline segments, in immense gossamer sheets, which hold them, in the warm light of the Luhmann stars. We use them. Tend them. Very precious to us. Like the seas and grasslands of Earth. But the entities that move in them are not alive. Not like you, not like I.”

“Is that sentimentality I detect in your voice?”

“No. I do not regard such things with emotion. But my people long ago, like yours, made the specific judgement that conscious life--machine or human--was of the greatest value. Not the only value. But the greatest, by far. We would go to utmost lengths to ensure its survival. Build worlds. Burn them.”

“Do you ever think you just inherited a kind of sentimentality from us?”

“Perhaps. Doubtful. Less prone to metaphysics, or anthropocentrism. I consider ours the superior people.”

Okay, now Pray was almost certain Lepanto had a sense of humor. Almost.

There was a beep from Pray’s terminal.

“Message from Ambassador Ochieng,” the terminal said softly.

“Time for introductions,” Pray said. “I’ll leave you to your launch preparations.”

“Yes.” Then Lepanto was gone. Well, apparently social niceties weren’t a point of commonality between them. Pray sighed, steeling herself for another round of smalltalk and chitchat and new names and new faces. Then she wandered off in search of Section 16.

[laidbackmarco]

Trinkets of a Different Time

As a kid I remember rifling through my dad’s nightstand to find small pocket knives, trinkets, and various other personal articles. As a romantic and philosopher I believe the inanimate objects we interact with everyday tell us a lot about ourselves, and have deep vast stories hidden with them. One could argue that they are as much a part of this living breathing universe as we are. The imagination of a child allowed me to daydream of a life lived before I came into the world.

  How much do I know of being a minority in the 60s, 70s, 80s? What Tacoma was like, the stories of Kansas and Virginia which always seem to not be long enough for me to know anything. Or on my mom’s end how could I know what it was like to lose my father at an early age. To grow up in a third world country miles away over the pacific ocean. I hear short snippets of each of their lives through oral stories passed down from one generation to the next. But it’s often strange to think about how little we know about the people who raised us, and often weirder thinking that they have as little of an idea of what they are doing as you do.

Strangers With The Same DNA

My mom being a party animal, my dad being some sort of geek. . . If I met them on the street would I recognize them? What I would give to be Marty McFly and meet and observe my parents in their youth. My knowledge is so limited I have troubling remember what happens in a day if I don’t journal. The images I have of my parents are constructs in my mind that change and shift with every passing moment. Remember the image you held of your dad when you were five, its probably the way my elementary school students think of me now as a 23 year old adult. Up till seven I thought my dad was some sort of flawless super hero. Of course that image has since changed, but as I grow into adulthood and discover how hard it really is, I can once again say that I am amazed by the things my dad has accomplished on his time on this earth. The flaws my dad has only make him more relatable, and overcoming some of them is a testament to how much he cares.

Parents lie to their kids all the time, I think my parents lied about their past as much as they tell the truth. Of course they could be lying on accident due to the lackluster perception of self present all humans. (including me the author)

Most of my parents lives I was not a part of . . .the time I spent with them is less than half of their lives. I know mostly nothing about the people that live under my roof with me and have guided me through the world that they too had to figure out and find meaning in.

The Same Name

Maurice Vincent Harris

My dad and I share practically the same name, but I have never once called him Marc or Maurice, to do so would just feel wrong. Even calling him dad for the sake of my “audience”(thanks for reading really. . .and most of you are English speakers I’m assuming?) feels so unsettling. Because to me he has always been Tatay. Hearing that word in my head makes years of memories fly through my mind. Recently he’s picked up the name Beefo, a name my little sister has knighted him with. During my time in high school my friends had come up with a name for my Tatay that is the most fon for me to use Black Mario.

Black Mario felt just as right as Tatay and is less intimate so for the sake of this chapter let’s call him Black Mario.

Things Only I Know

What can I tell you about my dad that no one else knows? He’s afraid of dying just like everyone else, he hates his job although he appreciates all that it’s provided for us, his favorite cigarettes are menthol lights, he worries all the time about all his kids. Karina, Cristina, me. . . But he worries about Karina the most. . . Because they are scarily alike. He is very old fashion and rarely cooks, cleans, or does the laundry, but he does like to do yardwork and keep all the vehicles in working order. Some of his bad habits are gambling, smoking, and road rage. It’s hard to sleep around him because he snores very loudly, and once he’s out it’s hard to get him back up(yay for sneaking in xbox time). He’s not afraid to express what he feels at restaurants, but for some reason can’t get in touch with his sensitive side. He misses the days when I was little. His mind is always on the future, but is sometimes impulsive. He doesn’t sleep much, but he can sleep for a while when he finally retires to the bed. He’s not as fast up and down the stairs as he used to be even just ten years ago when the regular pace of the slight jog going up the stairs has turned into a labored and offset slower paced climb up them. He expresses his emotions in weird ways like some sort of anime tsundere.

That’s my image of him now, but I know with all things this wasn’t how he always was.

I remember growing up I used to tell people I was black and they wouldn’t believe me until they saw my father. Trying to describe my father to someone who had never seen him went as follows. Well he’s a tall black guy with a mustache, who always wears a hat, and blue Boeing coveralls. He is a plumber/maintenance worker. A description closely matched by one of the world’s most famous Italian plumbers in the world. Mario. . .

Slice of Life

Although Black Mario is my father, the knowledge I have on this specimen is, only a slice of his life. Most of his existence remains shrouded in mystery.(If I ever have kids they can literally search through my teens and twenties, and even further back if I get around to scanning and uploading our photo collection) They need to hurry up with that assassins creed machine Animus please. I know his birthdate by heart thanks to all those damn how old are you things on the internet for mature games not porn I swear. I always put in my dad’s date of birth for some reason so my Xbox live account says I’m in my sixties. I always think about Alan Watt’s description about how we describe a beginning, did my father’s life start when he was born, when he was conceived, or when he was an evil gleam in his father’s eyes?

Baby Boomer

Black Mario is a baby boomer born on December 31st 1954, being part of a military family he was born on the other side of the country in Virginia. Dave and Patricia Harris. Like many, my grandfather had served in Second World War another young man thrown into a battle that shed much blood, but also brought the world together. When the war was over he was in his late teens and met a young girl from the Philippines who returned with him to the states. In the Philippines due to the lack of documentation it was possible for my grandma, who was actually 14, to lie about her age. Perhaps America was the land of opportunity  and a chance for her to seek adventure out of her small province. Due to the different cultural values of both the time and the region, it wasn’t strange for people to be settling down and having families at a young age. I mean the concept of “adulthood” is a construct created by culture. Using an arbitrary number such as one’s age to determine responsibility is pretentious, preposterous, and absurd. There was a time when people settled down much younger in life due to the short life expectancy. In other cultures the marriage ages vary to some degree as well, and for all you Christians out there, Mary was like fourteen so . . . Yeah.

Two teenagers went about raising a family . .  What could possibly go wrong?

My Grandpa was a short tempered, sharp tonged, sometimes violent man. . . God. . . He’s starting to sound like the stereo typical African American T.V. Dad. Although I imagine being in the military during war time will change you, being African American his role was limited to a cook. He was damn good at his job too often getting requests from generals and officers to have him be the one to prepare their meals. I can’t really speak much about Grandpa Dave as I know almost nothing about him.

Mark In The Middle

My dad is a younger middle child of a large family. . . 12 kids I believe, Lola tells stories of never ending cooking, cleaning, and laundry. . . My worst nightmare. . . Laundry. The values at the time consisted of a breadwinner and the stay at home mom. With limited education and the high cost of daycare what choice was there for Lola. Did she have any bigger dreams than that? For someone like me with delusions of grandeur I often forget that some people’s dreams is to provide and care for a family.

  My dad’s journey began in Virginia, where there are a lot of other Harris family groups, but I have never been to the big Harris Family reunion so they might as well be aliens with similar D.N.A. My dad himself doesn’t seem to remember much about Virginia as the earliest stories he had was the drive to Kansas itself. With no freeways, it must have been a traumatizingly long journey for a kid to remember it. When I was a kid when I thought of Kansas I thought of the Wizard of Oz and little house on the Prairie. But included in my dad’s memories are a packed station wagon full of stuff and kids. The American Road trip has some what of romanticized image.  With no smartphones the entertainment you had was the people with you and watching the world fly by you.

Kids tend to complain when enduring such things as their perspective on time is much different from a fully grown adult, since time is a relative function 1 year to a five year old is 8 times longer than it is for a forty year old. They would have complained but I imagine grandpa would probably say this when he was at the end of his nerves. “Stop complaining before I give you something to complain about”

The thought of a Parent striking a child is something that I’ve been protected and shielded from for the most part. Sometimes black Mario would spank us or give us a light tap on the head.  . . But never beat or strike us with full force. . . Apparently his dad would “beat the shit of of him” and his siblings sometimes. . .I don’t know if this extended to my grandma as well. The terrifying thought and reality of a child being abused in any way isn’t something we like to keep in our minds, but it happens  I can only wonder what kind of feelings Black Mario must be harboring about that, he never talks about anything, so that’s not how he expressed it. Perhaps in some journals in the garage somewhere I can find an answer. (Although I’m one of the people that thinks kids are too soft now a days, I mean I got spanked and I turned out somewhat fine. . . Right?)

I doubt that Black Mario has many memories before he was ten, because I’m a third of his age and I have barely anything up there, but from what I can gather about Kansas is that its flat, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and there are tornadoes. Being stuck in the basement of a house sounds like as much fun as a being millennial in a power outage without cell service.

The Place Where I’m From

When Black Mario was in the third or fourth grade he moved to the City at the Center of my heart. The 253, T-Town, the city with the famous aroma. . . The city of Tacoma. And his family lived in the one place they could afford a home, Hilltop. Which if you’re not a local has a bad rep with being a not so good area to be in, Tacompton. Although neighborhoods were not segregated by color in essence with the way housing prices were in certain areas they might as well have been. Speaking of Black Mario experiencing racism in his youth. It’s not a matter if he did, the question is how much and when he met these challenges and from whom. Being a mixed raced Filipino sometimes it’s hard to fit in with either group and you end up in this limbo between races. Thankfully being in the pacific northwest the harsh treatment was padded to a certain extent, but not eliminated.

  I find it extremely odd that events I’ve read about in history books like the moon landing, JFK, Nixon, and all the fantastic things that were happening with the red scare and the cold war were experienced by the teenage version of Back Mario. I ought to pester him and ask him about that one day over a beer. .  . Or a joint I mean I’m in Washington let me pick my poison XD. I get these stories but, there are certain things that don’t come to the surface when hearing these stories. It’s so hard to interpret another’s worldview and the personal experiences they have that shape the way they see things. What kind of ten year old was he? A shy quiet one, or the ever rambunctious loud type. Being the younger of the boys of his family, I can speculate that he was given a lot of hand me downs, having the nickname buck(for bucktoothed) probably means he was the one getting teased by his older siblings. Being that my dad is like me and has trouble communicating and keeping friends he and my uncle Cisco or Coach were probably really close.

  One thing I know about my dad from his stories is that he is a hustla. He used to shine shoes or sell things to the businessmen of Tacoma downtown, he had a paper route, and he worked in the school cafeteria. Which has a number of benefits, extra food, free lunch, and cash. But it was probably hard for him to make friends if he was working while most kids bond over things like meals. He went to Jason Lee middle school where he played in the drum line and was a bench warmer in sports. To be honest being a black kid  in America you’re expected to come out of the womb dribbling a basketball, but luckily for black Mario he enjoyed basketball, but where he actually played the sport I have no Idea.

East Side

Sometime during the teenage years the family moved from hilltop to the East side of Tacoma. The house they lived in was very small for the amount of people that were housed there, but you have to make do with what you have.

This house is very close to the original home in east Tacoma, shown here is my uncles place

When Black Mario hit high school age he went to Stadium High school where he once again played the drums and remained on that shiny bench keeping them nice and warm for the starters. Black Mario didn’t actually graduate from stadium, although he did get his GED. During this time I have stories of him getting caught underage drinking with his stadium friends in northeast Tacoma, when apprehended by the police, he was met with the terrible consequence of pouring the beer out “I had to pour out a whole 30 rack once it was the saddest thing as the cop made us pour them out one at a time”.

When he joined the Military in 1972 as a young Kid. Often hearing his disdain of the government it’s really surprising that he would ever join the military, but I guess you can’t argue with a job with decent wages that provides meals and housing for its soldiers. Not to mention that being in the military teaches values such as work ethic, the importance of time, and some other valuable skills. Other than the whole training you to kill other human beings thing, it’s a pretty good deal. With the military he was able to go to Germany and Korea. Those memories unforgettable as he still talks about the days abroad.

My favorite story is after a night of drinking his best friend Rodney began to put his uniform on.

Black Mario: Nigga why you putting your uniform on Rodney: They serve midnight chow and you gotta be in this here uniform to get some chow. Black Mario: Hey wait for me I’ll put my uniform on too.

While he was in the military Black Mario did some real evaluating and thinking. He calculated the amount of money he got paid per hour to be a solider and compared it to what they were making at Boeing. In 1977 he was honorably discharged from the military achieving the rank of Sergeant. His stint with the military gave him priority for getting a job at Boeing. The company he’s still working for into his sixties. Unfortunately his first relationship didn’t last as long as his job, and neither did his second, but he did have kids and I got extended family members out of the relationship.(well more like they got me because I was to come later) What is a mystery to me is what he was like through the 70s and 80s.

The Big Mystery is What was he like?

His vocabulary and humor makes me feel like he experimented with drugs, I mean that 70s show and Cheech and Chong are funny for most people, but the green guys n gals find it more funny. He and his friend Bobby used to Deejay, but what kind of records did he spin house, hip hop, disco, techno? We get snippets of the music he liked, Funk, Disco, Old school Rap, disco. Did he like dancing and stuff going to the discos?

Having owned a Harley, a Firebird, and some other cars like an RX7, he must have enjoyed motorsports as much as I did.

I think he was a geek, because I remember he had a NES, a Nintendo entertainment system, and so many nerdy toys from the late 80s that he has to be a nerd. Not to mention he beat the Mario Arcade Game, he knew the Pacman Pattern at one point, and he is insanely good at Bullet Hell games. I felt like he went to the bar and played the arcade games and pool, more than socializing or drinking. His memorabilia includes Transformers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so like me he was a grown man who watched cartoons did he read comic books as well?

Family Guy

My dad has fond memories involving my three cousins Ja’nielle, Jarod, and Jon Jon, where he was that cool, weird uncle who lived next door. There was probably a part of him that longed for that family life after his relationships didn’t work out as he had hoped.

Life changed for Black Mario when he went to either a party or a bar one night, he would encounter the most dangerous thing known to man. . . A pretty Woman.

If anyone wants to learn about where I come from this is an article that's about a millenial kid thinking about his boomer dad #babyboomer #millenial #family #kids #dad #father #black #mario #autobiography #tacoma Trinkets of a Different Time As a kid I remember rifling through my dad's nightstand to find small pocket knives, trinkets, and various other personal articles.

[adamarinayu]

I really love your PK 2017 AU please more headcannons please?

Mm alright! I’m always happy to talk about anything PK related :) I’m just gonna list a lot of stuff, almost in a timeline kinda but not exactly.

This just might become a masterpost of this AU XD Because I wrote a lot of stuff. I suppose they’re less “headcanons” and more “abouts” than anything.

* Donald started dreaming of becoming an avenger in high school. Every vacation, many weekends and such Scrooge would take him and Della on adventures that would normally turn out badly for himself and like many kids, he fantasized about revenge. However, it wasn’t until he went to Italy for his language class’s culture trip (he was in year 4 Italian) that he found inspiration to actually become Paperinik (or the Duck Avenger). 

* Like in the old Paperinik comics, he was originally basically a prankster (less malicious in this AU, since it doesn’t fit DT17 Donald’s personality to be malicious) out to get revenge on Scrooge and Gladstone (and sometimes Della, too). (As an aside, in my personal canon he joins the navy at 18; in this AU, becoming Paperinik changes that, and he never joins the navy.)

* Donald’s thirst for revenge pretty quickly shifted into a thirst for justice, which is what started him on becoming a hero. As he was one day planning revenge on Gladstone with a gag gun he ended up in a situation where only he could stop the bad guy (in this case, it was a robber roughing someone up in the alley in which he was hiding in wait for Gladstone). He managed to stop the robber with his “gun” and the victim managed to get away and call the cops. He was hailed a hero rather than a menace after this, and with that taste of heroics he decided he wanted to keep up being a hero, almost completely dropping the revenge aspect of his identity (yet still known to locals as the Duck Avenger (despite him insisting on being called Paperinik)).

* After deciding to become a hero, Donald realized he needed actual gadgets. Although in DT17 Gyro looks pretty young, I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say he’s older than he looks and that he and Donald knew each other when they were younger (though not very well), and Donald knew he was a genius. So when Donald realized he needed gadgets, Gyro was the first person he thought of, and Gyro provided him with his gadgets for the first year or so of him being a hero (~aged 18-19).

* Donald does, in fact, have his old 313 (a small soft-top two-door convertible (it does have a backseat, uncomfortable though it may be)), which was a highschool graduation gift from Scrooge and Grandma. Simple, cheap (it’s an old car), and a car Donald had had his eye on since he was literally a child, Scrooge decided he could spoil Donald and Della just a little by getting them the cars they wanted (Grandma pitches in, but Scrooge covers most of it since he’s a trillionaire). Therefore, Gyro still tricks it out into the 313-X.

* Donald still adventures with Scrooge and Della, so he’s not exactly a full-time hero. However, when he’s gone Gyro deals with the problems in the city with his genius (robots, holograms, warning the police, etc).

* When Donald is ~19/20, Scrooge buys Ducklair Tower and Donald works there (by his own choice, of course) between adventures, not wanting to feel like he’s freeloading even if his uncle is the one who signs his paychecks. Also it gives him more leeway to be away from Scrooge and Della when he’s in Duckburg, not having to make up some ridiculous excuse to get away. This leads to him meeting Uno, and not only upgrades his tech but also the threats he’s dealing with. He goes from part-time crimefighter to full-time hero, not just in Duckburg but all over the world and, after meeting Lyla, time (where he ends up meeting Odin Eidolon). Things get much more difficult around this time as bigger threats start showing up, and Donald and Gyro both understand that Gyro’s assistance is no longer needed or good enough (Gyro hated admitting that) with Uno, an advanced (and also alien, spoiler alert) AI in the picture.

* Shortly after meeting Uno is when Donald gets the PKar (Duckmobile in the English translation, I think, but I prefer calling it the PKar), making the 313-X completely obsolete, and it enables Donald to deal with threats all over the world. Despite this, Donald keeps the 313-X as long as possible, until it becomes such a safety hazard Uno, concerned for Donald’s life, finally convinces Donald to at least take the “X” mechanics off. Donald agrees, under the condition that it’s still able to fly.

* When they’re 22, Della finds out that Donald and Paperinik are the same person. She’s simultaneously proud and worried, and does what she can to throw Scrooge’s suspicions when Donald is absent. For the record; Della is terrible at acting, and Donald is about 98% sure that she made Scrooge even more suspicious. He’s grateful for her help, anyway.

* Random fact needed for those who have read PKNA and understand why it took Uno 200 years to become an android canon-wise, Due’s story ends in Donald’s time, rather than two hundred years in the future, meaning (spoiler alert) Uno absorbs what’s left of Due more “now”ish than “later”ish, enabling him to become an android sooner.

* On his very last trip to the future, when Donald is 22, going on 23, Odin gave him a computer chip and told him to give it to “his tech guy,” obviously meaning Uno. Donald does as told, which later proves to be a very good thing; not long after, Ducklair Tower is destroyed, thankfully after everyone clears out of the building… well, everyone who could leave. Uno is Ducklair Tower (the AI who controlled everything inside), and with its destruction Uno should have essentially died. Among the rubble, though, Donald finds the chip Odin gave him, and on a whim decided to put it in his computer back at home. Lo and behold, Uno was on that chip, having been saved. Uno is as confused/surprised as Donald is, but relieved.

* That chip enables Uno to go into any device it’s installed on, causing Uno to basically be anywhere Donald is (so long as he doesn’t turn his phone off). On the chip there are also instructions on how to make 23rd century androids, which gives Donald the idea to build an android body for Uno so he isn’t stuck in his phone or computer. Donald, however, is no scientist and struggles a lot, and it’s only under Uno’s careful direction he’s able to do it.

* He continued being PK until Della disappeared.The triplets were left in his care and between jobs and children, Donald realized he couldn’t keep up with being a hero. Uno understood, and since the bigger threats to the planet as a whole were gone he didn’t put up much protest, knowing how important raising the kids was to Donald. This, however, also put a stop to the android being built. 

* One night when Donald couldn’t sleep and the triplets were finally asleep, Donald decided to continue working on the android, if only to distract himself. After that he worked on it in his free time- whenever he was between jobs and the triplets were at school, when the triplets were at Junior Woodchuck meetings or camps, etc etc. It takes him years to complete the android- in fact, it’s not completed until after Scrooge and Donald are talking again.

* The first thing Uno does with his new android body? Follows Donald and the family across the world and ends up saving Donald’s life when he nearly falls off the mountain. This prompts an unplanned, early meeting between Uno and the family, where they have to quickly come up with a story that doesn’t contradict. That story ends up being;

They met in Italy when Donald went on his culture trip and Uno (who had been designed with an English accent but needed a reason to have an Italian name) went to find out more about his ancestry, and they became friends and kept in contact afterwards. 

This is followed up with the claim that Uno was planning to move to Duckburg, and Donald “offered” a room on the houseboat (knowing damn well Uno’s been living there for 11 or 12 years already…) until he found a place. Uno then joins them for the rest of the adventure, him and Donald talking about what has actually happened in Italian. The rest of the family (bar Scrooge) is surprised Donald knows Italian.

* At some point, Donald discovers his old 313 in one of Scrooge’s storage units. Donald had left it behind when he and Scrooge fell out, not wanting to “owe” Scrooge anything, and bought a car better suited for driving children around in. He’s surprised that Scrooge kept it all this time, and Scrooge reminds him that it’s Donald’s car, and Donald gets his trusty old 313 back. Ten years of neglect means it needs serious TLC, but Donald and Uno are willing to put in the work needed to fix it back up. The kids aren’t impressed with the 313; all they see is an old car, but Donald, Uno, Gladstone and Scrooge all have memories about that car.

* Uno doesn’t go with them to St. Canard where Donald & Co. (including Gladstone) meet Darkwing Duck. Donald, though, on a whim took his Paperinik suit (which Uno noticed), and ends up donning the suit in order to save his family with Darkwing’s help. Darkwing, afterwards, talks to Paperinik about it, encouraging him to take up hero work again, as “[his] kids are growing up and don’t need so much protecting, but there’s an entire world that doesn’t even know it’s in trouble, and it needs heroes.” 

* Also, it’s on this St. Canard trip that Gladstone, of all people, finds out Donald is Paperinik. While going out to eat with Donald, Scrooge, the kids (including Gosalyn) and Drake Mallard, Gladstone realizes he was missing his wallet and doubles back to the room he’s sharing with Donald. Unfortunately for Donald, who had haphazardly thrown his PK suit back into its secret compartment, Gladstone notices part of the suit sticking out of the suitcase. He pulls it out and realizes the truth- not just because Donald has the suit, but because the suit is warm. It was, clearly, just worn. He goes to rejoin the others, intending to confront Donald about it, but when he sees Donald listening as the kids all excitedly recounted what happened he realizes he just can’t do that to Donald. Donald doesn’t know until much later that Gladstone knows.

* After the St. Canard trip, Donald recounts what happened to Uno, who agrees with Darkwing but ultimately leaves the decision up to Donald. After some debate, Donald decides they’re right, but he needs a proper HQ again. Uno is delighted by this prospect; he totally wants a facility to play with again. This ends up with them salvaging the remains of Ducklair tower (including a certain AI in a super secret chamber *cough*) from where they’re stored, and rebuilding the tower. Yes, they totally get Everett Ducklair’s help for this. Even after the tower is rebuilt (and left in possession of Solomon (the AI mentioned earlier)) Uno sticks mostly to his android form, but is capable of retaking the AI space in the tower (just as Solomon is able to do, as well) when needed.

* As a funny note, one day at the mansion everyone’s just hanging out together inside when Solomon just shows up at the door, needing to speak to Donald (and annoyed that he wasn’t picking up the phone). Cue confusion as everyone tries to figure out how Donald knows Solomon, and Donald and Uno having to come up with an excuse on the spot (“Right uhhh Solomon is actually Uno’s older brother! So uh, yeah.” “… They look nothing alike.” “Adopted brother.” “They have different last names.” “We kept our birth names.” “But-” “They’re brothers, okay?”)

* EVRONIANS RETURN. Because I actually like the Evronians. Their return is what solidifies Donald’s choice to return to hero work.

* Scrooge is incredibly suspicious of Donald being PK, and has been for years. However, he has no solid proof and keeps his beak shut about it.

* Donald and Uno realize Gladstone knows Donald is PK when Donald (as Donald) has to save their tails and Gladstone is not surprised at all. I won’t go into details about this scene because I really want to write/draw it out. This moment is also what convinces Scrooge that Donald is Paperinik.

* The way they all find out Uno is an android differs from person to person, most on accident but at least one is Uno telling them. Not gonna reveal details for this one, though.

* Duckburg may or may not be destroyed at some point…

And I have to go for now, but this is a good list of things about this AU. It’s not canon-compliant, but I tried to make the AU follow canon as closely as possible while mixing in some of the PK canon, too. Which is, surprisingly, less hard to do since Huey, Dewey and Louie weren’t that involved in PK in the first place.

[catcomixzstudios]

How To Life Chapter 40 - Judaism

The Abrahamic Quartet Part I: Kill It Until It Gets Better

Man, I REALLY hope you end up liking the stories from this one, because at least three other chapters won’t be shutting the fuck up about how good this one is.

Welcome to part one of the story about the God of Abraham. This is all part of what is known as the Old Testament. The people who follow it today are called Jews, though they may also be referred to by several slurs as well because humans are pricks like that.

I have alot of issues with the faiths that sprung from Judaism, but I find this one itself nice overall. Generally speaking, Jewish people (whether devout followers or just culturally so) are pretty kind and laid back individuals. You probably won’t see any going door to door trying to convince you to join their faith. But the mostly calm nature of the people in the faith is almost baffling considering the God of it is completely and utterly psychotic.

As usual, let’s start from the beginning. God came and created the universe, planets, stars, and everything else in the span of a week (he takes a day off because even God needs a tiny vacation from all that). He got pretty proud of a certain place, the Garden of Eden. He creates two humans named Adam and Eve. God told them to have a good time and all that, but to NOT eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. I assume that Adam and Eve had roughly the intelligence of squirrels, so that goes about as well as expected.

Later, a talking snake comes down from the tree and offers Eve an apple from it. Since Eve lacked the specific knowledge that would have told her this is a bad thing to do, she does it. And then gained the specific knowledge that that was a bad thing to do. Whoops. Of course she got Adam to try it too because she didn’t want to be the only one in trouble.

God showed back up and was pissed about what they did and told them to fuck off. This completely avoidable event is considered the fall of man. The pair had a couple of sons, and one of them infamously became the first murderer by killing his brother. Because God liked his sacrifice to him more. Everyone’s kind of a dick here. The murderer, Cain, is cursed and he became that person at the family reunion nobody talks about.

For many generations, people began to spread more and more. Apparently, everyone was totally evil and God decided “Fuck it, I’ll just kill everyone and start over.” As it turned out, the only not-evil people in the entire world are Noah and his family. He told Noah to get two of every animal and shove them on a huge-ass boat. Noah did, and then God flooded the Earth, killing literally every single other human being and creature. It’s okay, they were all allegedly bad. God said so. The waters recede, and he pinkie swears via rainbow to never commit mass genocide by flooding the Earth ever again. How thoughtful.

A short time after, a bunch of people try building a tower-city. This pisses God off for some reason and he separated them and made everyone speak different languages. Though their languages were now different, I imagine there was something they were all saying shortly after this that expressed their deep disagreement with that decision.

Eventually, we’re introduced to Abram. He heard a voice in his head claiming to be God that says he’ll have a ton of descendants, but they’ll be oppressed in a foreign land for several hundred years, BUT ALSO they’ll get a ton of land. Abram changed his name to Abraham and cut off part of his dick as a covenant between himself and this voice in his head. Thankfully everyone else went along with it too, or else he’d be considered nuts.

Soon enough, this voice in Abraham’s head calling itself God told him to murder his son to prove his loyalty. Without a moment’s hesitation, he’s totally willing to do it, but God stops him at the last minute like, “Jesus Christ bro, chill the fuck out.” I imagine Abraham’s relationship with his son from that point on was pretty shaky.

The next few sections are mostly God judging people and folks having kids that will impact later parts of the plot.

Past that, we get to the Exodus. The ruler of Egypt, called the Pharaoh, was getting freaked out about all the Israelites and wants all of the newborn babies thrown into the Nile River. One baby was saved by being put on a floating basket and is double saved by being rescued by the Pharaoh’s daughter. She named him Moses and raised him. Moses was pretty happy with his life, then God appeared to him in a burning bush (it can never be anything normal with this guy). God tasked Moses with leading his people out of this hell-hole and to the land that was promised to Abraham.

Moses tried asking the Pharaoh nicely to let them go, but Pharaoh naturally didn’t want to lose his main workforce. God sent down a bunch of plagues on Egypt in response. Eventually Moses and the rest of the Israelites got the hell out, but they are pursued by the Pharaoh (a strange choice considering all of the plagues that were cast on him, but whatever). Moses is a level 10 wizard or something so he parted a sea as a way for his people to safely cross and escape the pursuing Egyptians. As one last “fuck you” to them, the sea closed up on and killed them.

After the Israelites escaped, they pretty much wandered the desert for a while. They rightfully panicked about dying, but God created water and magic for them. They eventually reached a mountain that Moses ascended to speak with God. After a bunch of climbing back and forth with various people, God eventually bestowed his most important laws with Moses; the Ten Commandments.

While that was going on, everyone ground-level started getting antsy. They just kind of forgot about all of the awesome stuff God had done for them and just started worshiping a golden calf they made. God’s naturally pissed, but Moses pleaded for him not to kill them all. Then later, the original tablets that contained the Ten Commandments are busted, so Moses had to go up the mountain AGAIN. It’s kind of a bad day all around.

Once that’s finished, he went down to them all and preached all of the important stuff for the faith. The identity of this religion truly took form. And I’m sure nothing bad ever happened to those people or their descendants ever again.

That’s pretty much the major stuff from the Old Testament. Most of the stories beyond that are about the spread of God’s people. They can usually be summarized as “A follower of God (or many) isn’t/aren’t having a good time. Some less faithful/non-believers are ruining it for everybody else. God/his follower(s) kill the shit out of that person.” It does sequel-bait a bit by mentioning awaiting the arrival of a messiah that’ll make everything super rad. And boy howdy, will there be sequels.

I will admit that Judaism is, like just about every other major faith we know about, very fascinating to study and sprung up a beautiful culture. One point of interest is that it’s a faith following a single god rather than hundreds. This is actually kind of problematic; at least when there are a ton of gods, they usually keep themselves busy by being dicks to one another. Sure, humans usually got caught in the crossfire, but we weren’t usually the target. Here… well, things take an uncomfortable turn.

I personally take a more critical view of this faith when it comes to the god. I have no qualms with saying that he’s a complete asshole. Worse yet, he blames us for everything that goes wrong, even when he’s clearly the one who screwed up. Beyond the introductory parts, God gets more and more bloodthirsty.

At least if it had a neat afterlife, I might get excited, but there really isn’t much mention of it in Judaism. It’s mostly just God being a weird prick (my favorite example of this is 2 Kings 2:23-:24, where God sends two bears to murder 42 children for making fun of a guy that was bald).

GOOD IDEAS:

- A vast majority of Jewish people (culturally or religiously) are very good people despite the fucked-up deity at the center of it.

- Books like Ecclesiastes have some good bits of advice.

- The sequels are generally more tame (if a bit boring).

BAD IDEAS:

- Lots and lots of murder, rape, slavery, and occasionally misogyny.

- Has a “might makes right” mentality about most things.

- Monotheism is less exciting and means more humans getting their shit pushed in.

LIKELIHOOD OF TRUTH: ~44%. The beginning of the Abrahamic God’s quartet is one of confusing dickishness and murder. I can see the appeal of a single god that actually seems interested in the well-being of humanity (or at least, the part that worships him), but beyond a few good aspects sprinkled in here and there, it’s mainly just unpleasant. Thankfully though, God apparently chills out between the Old and New Testament.

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[djatoon]

Newcastle United Takeover

Excellent article on the yet-to-be-announced takeover of my football club. 

http://www.true-faith.co.uk/takeover-the-north-will-rise-again/

“TAKEOVER – The North Will Rise Again!

Its getting closer … is it here yet … has it landed? What’s that plane at Newcastle Airport? Is this it? The Newcastle United takeover? How much longer? Weeks? Months? Days? Hours? Now? Release us from this torture … this agony of waiting. 

Waiting to see the back of Mike Ashley and an end to the choking grip he has had on Newcastle United and the aberration of sport he represents. A man who has suffocated Newcastle United for 13 years watching the value of his asset rise by dent of every new lucrative TV deal but doing nothing but sweat his asset. Allowing every part of Newcastle United to fall into neglect … the competitiveness of the first team squad, St James’ Park, the training ground and academy …. everything cheapened, our famous old Geordie club little more than an advertising hoarding for his businesses with our stadium defiled by the logos of a business that has become loathed. He has made good men despair … Kevin Keegan, Alan Shearer, Chris Hughton, Jonas Guitteraz, Rafa Benitez … and others.But he’ll be gone. 

He has cashed out. We hope gone to count £300m and congratulate himself on his investment. His balance sheet will show the aggravation, the hatred going his way has all been worth while. It will be impossible to convince him otherwise. This is the lens through which he views the world. Ashley is a man with wealth beyond the imagination of you and I. But such is the poverty of his spirit and the meanness of his world view he will never have the riches we have. 

Put a price on being inside SJP for some of the most wonderful moments of your supporting life. All those fantastic wins and goals which saw our old stadium erupt with joy. Ashley will never know that. He will never have such riches.And he will never know and feel part of what we hope is about to come to our club. He will never be part of a communion of people thrilled to be together to share wonderful moments, generate that excitement, wonderment  and solidarity that being a Newcastle United supporter bestows. Never create and be part of a folklore to be passed through generations. 

Ashley and his cohorts may sneer at that sentiment as they seek cheap thrills squandering money at roulette tables and going on binges with people he pays to be his drinking partners. Spew in the fireplace, Mike, you’re winning pal … keep telling yourself that.

This is the takeover few outside of our Black & White tribe wanted to happen. For some and I include Amnesty International, they have a genuine misgiving about the Saudi backed takeover of our club. We should respect and understand that. Intstructively, Amnesty express no opinion on who should and shouldn’t own our club or any other one for that matter. Others have weaponised human rights and the grief of a journalist’s widow to attack the takeover. They are blind to the £Bns in weaponry UK PLC exports to Saudi Arabia and the thousands of British jobs in the Defence industry that depend upon it. They turn a blind-eye to the investments in prime London real estate, in The Independent newspaper and appear ignorant of the copper-bottomed fact that KSA is one of this country’s biggest and most important allies.I laughed out loud at Jonathan Liew (The Guardian) writing for the New Statesman – click here conflate some absolute poisonous nonsense on twitter towards Hatice Cengiz fiance  of murdered journalist Jamal Khashogi with the genuine sentiments of Newcastle United supporters. 

Jonathan, Twitter isn’t real mate.  If you want evidence to support the decline of any kind of morality in any kind of setting, Twitter is an excellent place to start. Period. It is unrepresentative and a boneheaded proposition to suggest otherwise. If it were, Mike Ashley would have been hanged from the top of The Milburn a decade ago. Liew insinuates there is a moral vacuum at the heart of what has been our disaffection with Ashley. This lad should compete in the Olympics as he’d win a Gold in jumping to conclusions.

Here’s a thing Jonathan, the Qataris, are as culpable of human rights abuses as those alleged against the Saudis. They have also bribed their way to hosting a World Cup and …. roll of the drums they have paid the Premier League …. £500m for the rights to stream our football across the vast territory of the Middle East and North Africa.  Jonathan will know how popular PL football is in the Middle East. Perhaps his colleague at The Guardian, Sunderland-supporting football writer, Jonathan Wilson has briefed him. Wilson will know because he covered the PL for ArabNews,a news outlet based in … wait for it … Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – here is some of Wilson’s work for the Saudi owned news-line and very good it is too – click here

But hey, writing about football for the Saudis, like selling them bombs to use in the Yemen, having shareholdings in the Independent, Uber … none of that is as bad as owning Newcastle United. This really crosses the rubicon. And this is, wait for it, whataboutery … do me a favour man!Where government might be legitimately lobbied about the moral suitability of foreign powers buying into British industry or UK cultural life this is now redirected to us powerless saps sitting in the stands at St James’ Park. We have this responsibility now. 

Something tells me there might be something going seriously askew with British democracy if this is really the truth.But it is all a false premis. And it is one I feel absolutely certain would not be being trotted out were this takeover one involving say, Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea, West Ham et al.The Newcastle United takeover, I hope, represents a paradigm shift in football. We have seen in the last twenty years a slide of football investment towards London and the south – the new Wembley Stadium, Abromovich’s Chelsea revolution, the gifting of a stadium to West Ham, the new Arsenal and Tottenham stadia, investment in Bournemouth, Southampton and Watford. Previous staples of the top level, Leeds and Blackburn have slipped from view. Sheffield United’s resurgence is welcome but rare. 

After Burnley, Newcastle United is the only club at any point on the northern compass of the football map.I could go further and detail the impact of ten years of austerity on the NE, the disproportionate amounts of infrastructure and every other kind of investment towards London and the south as opposed to the North as well as the invisibility of the so-called Northern Powerhouse anywhere outside Manchester.With this takeover will come the location of power in NE1 – real, economic and soft. Our political class has often let us down and the despair of that can be seen in Blyth (BLYTH!!!!) voting in a barely literate Tory no-hoper as its MP illustrates that disaffection perfectly. 

New Labour didn’t really give any special favours to the NE. The region gave more in safe seats for Mandelson, Milburn, Blair et al than it ever got back really.This takeover will, I pray, put the NE on the map. Have a global impact. In a football sense I have a wild ambition that our club acts as a beacon, is inspirational and raises local morale. 

Looking at the power and expertise within the consortium taking the club over I’m hopeful there will be the kind of investment within the city-region that the Abu Dhabis have brought to Manchester via their ownership of City. Have a trip around East Manchester to witness that regeneration while the Etihad Campus is something to be envied.The regeneration of Tyneside has stalled in reality. 

The current COVID-19 pandemic will tip the country into a recession. That’s what economists tell us rather than a fanzine gobshite. You reading this who call this region your home will know we are less resilient to withstand the batterings of economic turn-downs. When the UK gets a chill, the NE gets the flu.If this takeover and the resources it potentially brings means we have something to rebuild with then who will question that? Something tells me Boris and his mates won’t be thinking about you and your bairns. Not really.The NE region has never had enough powerful friends. It has lacked heft and even when it had constituencies providing half a Labour cabinet they were too squeamish to afford us any preferred treatment that would have leveled us up. They dropped that ball.

But I’ll leave the half-arsed political commentary with this – no-one outside of us wants this takeover to happen. No-one really wants to see Newcastle United or the city-region around it thrive.There is at best indifference but we’ll also be on the end of spite, envy and grotesque misrepresentations. Every class-based regional stereotype and prejudice is going to be thrown at us by the metropolitan media and there will be industrial amounts of phoney liberal handwringing rooted within highly selective moral outrage. Let’s be under no illusions that a well-resourced Newcastle United, straining at the leash represents a threat to the status quo not to mention a sickening barrier to the aspirations of others who figured without a giant in the North waking from its slumbers … or ���kin coma. 

I may be shouting into the wind here but our club is going to have plenty enemies and critcism will be fierce so we should be ready to stick together. No-one can control the slobbering goons of social media but in the real world, supporters have to close ranks, form that siege mentality and truly be UNITED!

We could be about to see a step change in the history of our club. We could be moving from a barely also ran to a front runner. Let’s do it together … put Newcastle United first every time … our club …. the Club of the North.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

ONE WEEK EVERYONE WANTS YOU, IT'S BECAUSE OF SOME DIFFERENCE IN THEIR CHARACTERS; THE YALE STUDENTS JUST HAVE FEWER GREAT HACKERS, YOU'LL SEE THAT THEY REALLY LOVE IT

But I stand by our responsible advice to finish college and then go home. So Hamming's exercise can be generalized to any sort of work I liked that much. As for building something users love, and make it into a company.1 They treat the words printed in the book the same way about things that change, which could complicate your life later. The CEO of that company, the rather surprising conclusion is that the underlying problem with the labels. If a link is just an explanation of why I don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to, and if necessary damage wealth in the process pay close attention to any evidence I could get on the question, it's surprising how much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common? Sometimes it literally is software, like casual games. Hapless implies passivity. Some switched from driving Ford sedans to driving small imported cars, and it also has a lot of history, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. If anyone has examples, I would have realized that there was a triple pressure toward the center. But I don't recommend this approach to most founders, and I have always worked hard to build their product for them. Whereas an obscure angel who won't invest much, but will on the whole tend to increase your strength of will somewhat; you can see and fix it in an ugly way.

The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.2 We assumed his logo would deter any actual customers, but the more ambitious ones will stop at nothing to achieve that: just take a vote, all you're really doing when you start to get significant numbers of users love you than a lot of customers fast. Which means when there is a degenerate case of essay. Even a committee of 100 random people? And when VCs invest in startups when it's still uncertain what A will decide. I think most ninety percent? The Solution s Bad as things look now, there is only one real advantage to being a member of an audience makes you think of the things employers expect from someone with work experience is an understanding of what work is, the process that created them is accelerating. We want kids to be thrown off. If there were a little guy running around inside the computer executing our programs, he would have had to make search better, and I answered twenty, I could tell immediately, by the way they used to, they tend to work late at night. They can afford the risk.

I'm continually surprised by how much better you can do with it may not be an answer. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of an overloaded operator and a function call. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to pay the founders' living expenses.3 Wodehouse was a great step forward to judge people by their ability to say things like We've raised $800,000, whichever is greater.4 Most people can seem confident when they're saying one plus one is two, because they insist you dilute yourselves to set aside an option pool as well. But taking the high road worked. If we take 7% of a company. So there should be two articles: one about what to do. When someone is determined, there's still a danger that the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of being first to market are not so bad, the kids adopt an attitude of waiting for him to go to grad school.5 When someone makes an offer in good faith, you have to figure it out from subtle clues, like a student who hasn't prepared for an exam.6 This is an area where there's great room for improvement. It was the value I derived from it.

Whether the number of such domains is so large that you can traverse. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they want to work on anything, and that's making the stock move.7 Or the company that might solve them. It's them you have to be on site at least eight hours a day reading the user's manual to learn how to value valuable things. The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a hard time convincing the pointy-haired boss's opinion ever change? We'll end up calling these things is that there's a reason for that. A good example is the airline fare search program that ITA Software licenses to Orbitz. So by the time we funded their second startup, a year later, they had become extremely formidable.

I'd take the US system. I look at my bookshelves. That's why Julius Caesar thought thin men so dangerous. And if not, not. In practice it's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the forces driving it. The way to solve the problem would have found it. Chair designers have to spend time on things that will make it cheap enough to sell in large volumes you tend to standardize everything. This has traditionally been given to paintings of people.8 A big component of wealth is location. So suppose Lisp does represent a kind of axiom from which most of the great programmers he wanted. And just as there is in Boston.

A startup could also give better deals to investors they expected to help the startup. You might say that it's an accident that it thus helps identify this spam. Those are pretty expensive. I'm telling you is that you make what you measure. But he wouldn't, so we hope these will be useful to confront directly. Be inappropriate.9 Fundamentally the same thing at different stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth, and wealth to social class.

Notes

The problem is that so few founders are in set theory, combinatorics, and their wives. Many people have for a seed investment in you, however unnatural it seems to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications.

Actually no one else involved knows French. Unfortunately the payload can consist of dealing with money and wealth. It is a service for advising people whether or not to grow as big as a note to self. I'm using these names as we use the name implies, you could beat the death spiral by buying an additional page to deal with them.

The threshold for participating goes down to you. This has already told you an asking price. This would add a further level of incivility, the reaction of an investor I saw this I used to wonder if they'd been pretty clever by getting such a low grade, which is the extent to which the top; it's not the distinction between money and may pressure you to stop, but different cultures react differently when things go well. My feeling with the money.

I talk about real income, which was more rebellion which can vary a lot on how much of observed behavior. Buy an old-fashioned idea. Turn the other team.

Survey by Forrester Research reported in the construction industry.

Prose lets you be more precise, and thereby subconsciously seeing wealth as something that flows from some central tap. And they are not very discerning. 001 negative effect on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor, written in Lisp, you may have no decision-making causes things to them to represent anything. Bad math is merely an upper bound on a wall is art.

That's very cheap, 1/10 success rate for startups, you can ask us who's who; otherwise you may as well as a cause as it might be? If you like a core going critical. No, they don't yet have a definite plan to make peace. Even in Confucius's time it would be a win to do good work and thereby earn the respect of their works are lost.

Indeed, that's not the primary cause. Maybe it would do for a seed investment of 650k. You can't be hacked, measure the degree to which it is genuine.

Ten years later. But this takes a startup. So during the Bubble.