#I find it great that neither Life Below The Great Blue nor her overseers are actually blue despite the name

[capricoopla]

Local overseers !

[aboveallarescuer]

Daenerys Targaryen's tropes - Powerful and Helpless

A hero or villain can have superpowers, fighting skills, knowledge, wealth, power, technology, political and social connections, all of which help them to achieve their goals. But sometimes a situation arises where their power is rendered useless. No, they haven't wandered into the range of a Power Nullifier or been Brought Down to Normal. They don't have Useless Superpowers that regularly fail to work properly. They'll still punch as hard as they normally can, or use their genius intellect to try to think their way out of the problem, or they'll call on all their connections and resources and favors owed, but none of those things matter here.

*

“I have the dragons,” she pointed out.

“Hatchlings,” Ser Jorah said. “One swipe from an arakh would put an end to them, though Pono is more like to seize them for himself. Your dragon eggs were more precious than rubies. A living dragon is beyond price. In all the world, there are only three. Every man who sees them will want them, my queen.”

“They are mine,” she said fiercely. They had been born from her faith and her need, given life by the deaths of her husband and unborn son and the maegi Mirri Maz Duur. Dany had walked into the flames as they came forth, and they had drunk milk from her swollen breasts. “No man will take them from me while I live.” (ACOK Daenerys I)

~

The Pureborn heard her pleas from the great wooden seats of their ancestors, rising in curved tiers from a marble floor to a high-domed ceiling painted with scenes of Qarth’s vanished glory. The chairs were immense, fantastically carved, bright with goldwork and studded with amber, onyx, lapis, and jade, each one different from all the others, and each striving to be the most fabulous. Yet the men who sat in them seemed so listless and world-weary that they might have been asleep. They listened, but they did not hear, or care, she thought. They are Milk Men indeed. They never meant to help me. They came because they were curious. They came because they were bored, and the dragon on my shoulder interested them more than I did. (ACOK Daenerys III)

~

“I will not throw away Unsullied lives, Grey Worm. Perhaps we can starve the city out.”

Ser Jorah looked unhappy. “We’ll starve long before they do, Your Grace. There’s no 
food here, nor fodder for our mules and horses. I do not like this river water either. Meereen shits into the Skahazadhan but draws its drinking water from deep wells. Already we’ve had reports of sickness in the camps, fever and brownleg and three cases of the bloody flux. There will be more if we remain. The slaves are weak from the march.” (ASOS Daenerys V)

~

“The city bleeds. Dead men rot unburied in the streets, each pyramid is an armed camp, and the markets have neither food nor slaves for sale. And the poor children! King Cleaver’s thugs have seized every highborn boy in Astapor to make new Unsullied for the trade, though it will be years before they are trained.”

The thing that surprised Dany most was how unsurprised she was. She found herself remembering Eroeh, the Lhazarene girl she had once tried to protect, and what had happened to her. It will be the same in Meereen once I march, she thought. The slaves from the fighting pits, bred and trained to slaughter, were already proving themselves unruly and quarrelsome. They seemed to think they owned the city now, and every man and woman in it. Two of them had been among the eight she’d hanged. There is no more I can do, she told herself. (ASOS Daenerys VI)

~

“But how can I rule seven kingdoms if I cannot rule a single city?” He had no answer to that. Dany turned away from them, to gaze out over the city once again. “My children need time to heal and learn. My dragons need time to grow and test their wings. And I need the same. I will not let this city go the way of Astapor. I will not let the harpy of Yunkai chain up those I’ve freed all over again.” She turned back to look at their faces. “I will not march.”

“What will you do then, Khaleesi?” asked Rakharo.

“Stay,” she said. “Rule. And be a queen.” (ASOS Daenerys VI)

~

When Missandei was sound asleep, Dany slipped from her arms and stepped out into the predawn air to lean upon the cool brick parapet and gaze out across the city. A thousand roofs stretched out below her, painted in shades of ivory and silver by the moon.

Somewhere beneath those roofs, the Sons of the Harpy were gathered, plotting ways to kill her and all those who loved her and put her children back in chains. Somewhere down there a hungry child was crying for milk. Somewhere an old woman lay dying. Somewhere a man and a maid embraced, and fumbled at each other’s clothes with eager hands. But up here there was only the sheen of moonlight on pyramids and pits, with no hint what lay beneath. Up here there was only her, alone.

She was the blood of the dragon. She could kill the Sons of the Harpy, and the sons of the sons, and the sons of the sons of the sons. But a dragon could not feed a hungry child nor help a dying woman’s pain. And who would ever dare to love a dragon? (ADWD Daenerys II)

~

“Is it true that dragons never stop growing?”

“If they have food enough, and space to grow. Chained up in here, though …”

The Great Masters had used the pit as a prison. It was large enough to hold five hundred men … and more than ample for two dragons. For how long, though? What will happen when they grow too large for the pit? Will they turn on one another with flame and claw? Will they grow wan and weak, with withered flanks and shrunken wings? Will their fires go out before the end?

What sort of mother lets her children rot in darkness? (ADWD Daenerys II)

~

“It is good that you have come,” she told the Astapori. “You will be safe in Meereen.”

The cobbler thanked her for that, and the old brickmaker kissed her foot, but the weaver looked at her with eyes as hard as slate. She knows I lie, the queen thought. She knows I cannot keep them safe. Astapor is burning, and Meereen is next. (ADWD Daenerys V)

~

I have no more help to give, Dany thought, despairing. The Astapori had no place to go. Thousands remained outside Meereen’s thick walls—men and women and children, old men and little girls and newborn babes. Many were sick, most were starved, and all were doomed to die. Daenerys dare not open her gates to let them in. She had tried to do what she could for them. She had sent them healers, Blue Graces and spell-singers and barbersurgeons, but some of those had sickened as well, and none of their arts had slowed the galloping progression of the flux that had come on the pale mare. Separating the healthy from the sick had proved impractical as well. Her Stalwart Shields had tried, pulling husbands away from wives and children from their mothers, even as the Astapori wept and kicked and pelted them with stones. A few days later, the sick were dead and the healthy ones were sick. Dividing the one from the other had accomplished nothing.

Even feeding them had grown difficult. Every day she sent them what she could, but every day there were more of them and less food to give them. It was growing harder to find drivers willing to deliver the food as well. Too many of the men they had sent into the camp had been stricken by the flux themselves. Others had been attacked on the way back to the city. Yesterday a wagon had been overturned and two of her soldiers killed, so today the queen had determined that she would bring the food herself. Every one of her advisors had argued fervently against it, from Reznak and the Shavepate to Ser Barristan, but Daenerys would not be moved. “I will not turn away from them,” she said stubbornly. “A queen must know the sufferings of her people.” (ADWD Daenerys VI)

~

Bless me, Dany thought bitterly. Your city is gone to ash and bone, your people are dying all around you. I have no shelter for you, no medicine, no hope. Only stale bread and wormy meat, hard cheese, a little milk. Bless me, bless me.

What kind of mother has no milk to feed her children? (ADWD Daenerys VI)

~

This is peace, she told herself. This is what I wanted, what I worked for, this is why I married Hizdahr. So why does it taste so much like defeat?

“It is only for a little while more, my love,” Hizdahr had assured her. “The Yunkai’i will soon be gone, and their allies and hirelings with them. We shall have all we desired. Peace, food, trade. Our port is open once again, and ships are being permitted to come and go.”

“They are permitting that, yes,” she had replied, “but their warships remain. They can close their fingers around our throat again whenever they wish. They have opened a slave market within sight of my walls!” (ADWD Daenerys VIII)

~

The Brazen Beasts did as they were bid. Dany watched them at their work. “Those bearers were slaves before I came. I made them free. Yet that palanquin is no lighter.”

“True,” said Hizdahr, “but those men are paid to bear its weight now. Before you came, that man who fell would have an overseer standing over him, stripping the skin off his back with a whip. Instead he is being given aid.”

It was true. A Brazen Beast in a boar mask had offered the litter bearer a skin of water. “I suppose I must be thankful for small victories,” the queen said.

“One step, then the next, and soon we shall be running. Together we shall make a new Meereen.” The street ahead had finally cleared. “Shall we continue on?”

What could she do but nod? One step, then the next, but where is it I’m going? (ADWD Daenerys IX)

[pogueman]

Inside the world's greatest scavenger hunt, Part 3

GISHWHES stands for the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. Teams of 15 have one week to complete a list of 200 difficult, charitable, or hilarious tasks. They prove they’ve completed each item by submitting a photo or video of it; their $20 entry fees go to a charity, and the winning team gets a trip to an exotic location.

This is Part 3 of our five-part report on the hunt. Here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 2.

Part 3: GISHWHES for Good

Each August, as the world’s largest scavenger hunt is under way, the general public is usually unaware—except when teams perform their tasks in public places. Recent tasks have included:

Hug someone you love, motionless, in a very crowded location, for 20 minutes without moving—and time-lapse it.

Stand in a crowded public place. Ask people to sign a petition to Save The Endangered Unicorns.

Get everyone on a subway, bus, or train car to sing “Over the River and Through the Woods.” There must be at least 8 passengers (random commuters, not your friends).

But each year, the list also includes challenges to perform acts of kindness. For example:

Write and mail a thank-you letter to a teacher or mentor from your past that you never sufficiently thanked.

Have a tea party with a special-needs child or pediatric cancer patient, dressed as a character from “Alice in Wonderland.”

More than 10% of veterans returning from war suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome. Post an image of you next to an armed serviceman, with you holding up a sign with a message of gratitude to them and soldiers worldwide.

But for hunt creator Misha Collins (a star of the WB series “Supernatural”), neither GISHWHES nor acting were part of his life’s original master plan.

“[After college,] my objective was to go to law school and somehow try to make a positive impact on the world,” he says. “I thought probably the best way to do that was to go into politics. This was, you know, my 20-year-old brain.

“I was interning at the White House, but I just didn’t love the machine that I saw. I was very naive. I was exposed to this weird environment of, like, nepotism and yea-saying that I wasn’t inspired by.”

So he switched paths.

“I had this great get-rich-quick/make-an-impact scheme: ‘I’ll just go to Hollywood and I’ll become an actor and I’ll get famous enough that I can then leverage that celebrity into doing things.’”

Off he went to Los Angeles. “I thought, like, I’d be the next Leonardo DiCaprio in a couple of months. It took me 10 years to get on a TV show.

“And once I’d achieved a certain modicum of, you know, C-list celebrity, that desire to try to use my celebrity for some other purpose resurfaced.”

GISHWHES was born: a list littered with acts of kindness that tens of thousands of players attempt to fulfill every August.

Crowdsourcing for refugees

In the most recent hunt, item 175 is a perfect example:

“#175. According to the United Nations, 4.8 million people have fled Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Many of these families are living in tent cities with few resources and difficult lives. Let’s change the lives of one family that’s in particularly dire circumstances. The GISHWHES Item is to create a fundraising page for your team, where family, friends and others can donate.”

“We identified one particular family with a heartbreaking story. The mom had been shot in the spine tending to her garden. She was paralyzed, she’s been in a bed in this tent for two years. And we said, let’s just change this one family’s circumstances,” Collins says. “Let’s get them a house, and let’s get her medical care, and let’s pay for the kids’ school. And I woke up the next morning to see, oh my god!”

By week’s end, GISHWHES teams had raised close to $250,000.

“So we added another family, and another and another—by the end of the hunt, we materially changed the lives of four different families. We’ve been getting photos from these families, like them moving into their apartments that we just paid for. It’s just such a lovely thing to be a part of.”

The space balloon, continued

For Team Raised From Perdition, though, there are 174 other items to complete if they hope to win.

My daughter, Tia, also participated in GISHWHES. Several days have passed since she launched a weather balloon into space, bearing a child’s note to the universe. It came down into a nearly inaccessible Connecticut forest; she’s unable to retrieve it even after hours of searching. Item 175 is worth more points than anything else in the hunt; for her team, it will have to be marked “incomplete.”

But teammate Christine has no intention of giving up on the balloon’s precious footage. She tells Tia that she’ll just drive over to the forest to help look for it.

From Chicago.

Fifteen hours later, she, her husband Vince, and their children arrive, laden with gear. After hours of shaking, throwing things at, and yanking at trees, Christine’s 13-year-old son Josh climbs the tree. After an hour and a half, he dislodges the balloon. Item 175 is in the can!

The Haves and the Have-Nots

Not everything on the GISHWHES list is as exasperating as lost space balloons. Item 15, for example, sounds like fun:

#15. This is the final showdown between the Haves and the Have-nots. Show up at Dolores Park in San Francisco, dressed either as executives or in blue-collar apparel. At exactly 12:10 PM, the ultimate water balloon battle will ensue.

Nearly a thousand Gishers show up. They stand in two long lines, facing off across the park. They’ve taken the day off from work, driven for hours, even flown to San Francisco for this battle.

At the stroke of noon, GISHWHES volunteer Tone raises her megaphone, ready to announce the open-fire.

But at that moment, a San Francisco park ranger runs onto the field.

Ranger: “Hold on! Hold on! You can’t do this! Not without a permit! Anytime you have X amount of people in a park, you have to have a permit.”

“This is like a 10-minute situation for charity,” Tone pleads. “It’s a flash-mob type situation.”

“Yeah, you guys can’t do it without a permit.” (A CBS News camera picked up the audio.)

The two armies can’t hear this, but they see that there’s a problem. It’s not the first time that GISHWHES stunts have tested the patience of society’s overseers.

Will they be deprived of their balloon battle because of paperwork?

Suddenly, a second park manager arrives.

Incredibly, he’s persuaded. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “You have enough people to get this cleaned up?”

“I will personally guarantee it,” Tone says.

“You should have a permit. But if you can make an announcement like that, and get everyone to agree, then OK.”

Tone lifts her megaphone.

“I know and you know that you guys are going to be responsible for these pieces of balloon when this fight is over! Is that right?”

The crowd roars in agreement.

“This can’t happen…unless you guys repeat after me: I solemnly pledge to pick up every last piece of balloony plastic thing on the ground! And I will throw it all away in the proper receptacles!”

The crowd roars.

“Haves and Have-Nots… Commence the water-balloon melee!”

The battle is on.

This time, at least, the forces of merry mayhem win the day.

More from David Pogue:

Inside the World’s Greatest Scavenger Hunt: Part I

Inside the World’s Greatest Scavenger Hunt: Part 2

The David Pogue Review: Windows 10 Creators Update

Now I get it: Bitcoin

David Pogue tested 47 pill-reminder apps to find the best one

David Pogue’s search for the world’s best air-travel app

The little-known iPhone feature that lets blind people see with their fingers

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes nontoxic comments in the comments section below. On the web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here, or you can sign up to get his columns by email.

[onewhodresses-blog]

Best of NYFW Fall 2018

Every season, fashion month rolls around, beginning with New York Fashion Week, and I find myself feeling virtually the same set of conflicted feelings about the whole thing. There's the excitement I feel about seeing the new collections. There's the sense that the event is like a physical for fashion—a check-up on the state of affairs today, giving us a sense of what's living and breathing in fashion at the moment. How great!

Then, there are my more critical feelings. Twice a year, in two four-week chunks, the fashion industry produces a gigantic volume of new clothing designed to promote a kind of churn in our tastes and preferences and closets that feels neither natural nor useful. Case in point: I reviewed 162 collections from NYFW to pull the below list together, and we're only 1/4 of the way in through! I think about the strain this volume and speed of production is—on resources, on creative talent, and our relationship with clothes—and I feel there must be another way, a better way, for us to celebrate and shape the arc of human dress. 

By both celebrating fashion and being critical of it, I am confronted with a set of questions that come up for me every time I see a new collection of clothing. What is the role of a fashion designer? Is the purpose of a fashion show to make a statement on the role of fashion in society today? Or is it more commercial- to create a collection of clothes that will sell? Does the concept of clothing on a runway exist to present fashion as fantasy, or is this about how real women dress in real life? Sure, clothes are beautiful, and new things are exciting, but are these clothes necessary? Are they revolutionary, or even evolutionary, or are we just making new things, and wanting new things, to sustain a fashion system that is unsustainable?

I don't have answers, but I'll keep asking the questions until I get closer. Until then, there's much to be said for simply enjoying good fashion from NYFW. Here's what stood out for me. 

______

best in class: marc jacobs

Marc Jocobs came as close as anyone at NYFW, I felt, to formulating a strong, cohesive statement on fashion today. The collection, composed of many pieces featuring oversized silhouettes, boxy shoulders, and tapered bottoms, as well as a number of asymmetrical dresses, was bold and articulate and took up space. Is this women dressing in a #metoo world? Dressing for a #metoo world? Styled with hats shielding models' eyes it almost felt like this could be any woman, and thus every woman.  

Image: Yannis Vlamos/Indigital.tv via Vogue

______

classics done well: the row and carolina herrera

There is something fundamentally gratifying about seeing the same ideas—the same genre of clothing — coming down a designer's runway. It means, to me, they've found their step, their ideal of beauty, their truth, all of which should be celebrated in this time of intense pressure to create something new.

Take The Row, whose collections, it turns out, I am genetically incapable of disliking. The ideas are unified and consistent, but executed differently each time. The clothes are both inspiring and wearable at once. This collection, presented alongside Isamu Noguchi sculpture, made overt oft-alluded-to-connections between fashion and art.

Images: Courtesy The Row via Vogue

 For a sending down the runway a long line of her signature silhouette—a classic button-down white shirt and a floor length skirt—Carolina Herrera, in her last show as creative director of her label, evoked for me the spirit of Azzedine Alaïa. I thought about statements he's made about the responsibilities of a designer to deliver new ideas, saying, "Once I have the shape or the idea I just develop it. It should always work 20 years from now."

Images: Monica Feudi/Indigital.tv via Vogue

 ______

good clothes: sally lapointe, hellessy, zimmerman, marina moscone  

Thematically, what stood out for me this NYFW was lots of long, flowing silk and plenty of monochrome.

Sally LaPointe presented a cohesive collection of fun but sophisticated clothes, in more or less monochrome palettes, starting with whites and grays, and then rusts and reds. Splashes of excitement courtesy of sequins, fur accents placed creatively, metallics, and interesting cuts infused the collection with something special.  

Images: Monica Feudi via Vogue

 I just enjoyed this collection of clothes from Hellessy. The color palette was bright and varied, the clothes moved well and there was a touch of drama in them infused from asymmetric details and an attention to design. 

Images: Luca Tombolini/Indigital.tv via Vogue

 There were some lovely, frilly and feminine clothes at Zimmerman. I liked the long silhouettes, the exaggerated shoulders, and the asymmetry introduced either by design or in how the clothes were styled. And, why don't more silk dresses have turtlenecks?!

Images: Monica Feudi/Indigital.tv via Vogue

 Marina Moscone stood out to me for delivering a twist on a minimal silhouette with a collection of fresh clothing in sumptuous fabrics (I could practically feel this silk!!). This elegantly draped off-the-shoulder wrap was done so well.  

 and, notably...

Courtesy of Area came NYFW's best print mixing moment. I'll take it all; I'll wear it all. Note the gloves!!!

 Bevza delivered this moment of 1990s Calvin Klein bliss with this look: what appears to be a structured top paired with a silky skirt and finished with square toe silk boots. The attention to cut here reminds me of one of the things that excite me most about fashion: seeing something simple executed well. 

 Calvin Luo produced this two-toned wonder of a look: a striking monochrome silk pant set, accented with red nails, gloves (sheer!), belt, tights, and shoes. It made me feel both that the 80s and the 50s (and the 90s, if you count the glasses) were all somehow alive and well. 

Finally, in what was one of my favorite looks of the whole week, this ice blue silk gown from Self-Portrait. In its movement and shine and liquid glamour, it's a winter dream come true!