#Schwartz Textbook

[bracketsoffear]

Spiral Leitner Reading List

The full list of submissions for the Spiral Leitner bracket. Bold titles are ones which were accepted to appear in the bracket. Synopses and propaganda can be found below the cut. Be warned, however, that these may contain spoilers!

Abbott, Edwin Abbott: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions Amato, Mary: The Word Eater

Barker, Clive: Abarat Basye, Dale E.: Fibble Borges, Jorge Luis: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Calvino, Italo: If on a winter’s night a traveler Carroll, Emily: A Guest in the House Carroll, Lewis: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/ Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there Chambers, Robert W.: The King in Yellow Coltrane, John: Giant Steps Cortázar, Julio: Rayuela (Hopscotch) Cutter, Nick: The Deep

Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Danielewski, Mark Z.: House of Leaves de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote DeLaney, Samuel R.: Babel-17

Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land Ewing, Frederick R.: I, Libertine

Gaiman, Neil: Neverwhere Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: The Yellow Wallpaper

Hall, Steven: The Raw Shark Texts Hamilton, Patrick: Angel Street/Gas Light Hawke, Marcus: Grey Noise Hodgson, William Hope: The House on the Borderlands Hunter, Erin: Warriors

Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake Juster, Norton: The Phantom Tollbooth

Kte'pi, Bill: The Cheshire

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Color Out of Space Lyons, Steve: The Stealers of Dreams

Mathers, Edward Powys: Cain’s Jawbone Mearns, William Hughes: Antigonish Miles, Lawrence et. al.: The Book of the War Morrison, Grant: Doom Patrol Moore, Christopher: Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art Muir, Tamsyn: Harrow the Ninth

National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers: Common Core Math Textbook Nikolson, Adam: Life between the tides

O’Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman Ogawa, Yoko: The Memory Police Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Pelevin, Victor: The Helmet of Horror Pratchett, Terry: Moving Pictures Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49

Ryukishi07: higurashi no naku koro ni (When The Evening Cicadas Cry)

Sachar, Louis: Wayside School Is Falling Down Schwartz, Alvin: "Maybe You Will Remember" (short story from Scary Stories 3: More Tales To Chill Your Bones) Serafini, Luigi: Codex Seraphinianus Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare, William: King Lear Shakespeare, William: The Winter's Tale Silberescher: SCP-1425: Star Signals Stine, R.L.: Don't Go to Sleep!

Unknown, Voynich Manuscript

Wells, H.G.: The Door in the Wall West, A.J.: The Spirit Engineer Whorf, Benjamin Lee: Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language Wyspiański, Stanisław: The Wedding

Abbott, Edwin Abbott: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Both a satire on Victorian hierarchies and a mathematical examination of lower and higher dimensions, Flatland's narrator has strange dreams of a one-dimensional Lineland where he can only be seen as a series of points on a line. Following this, he meets A. Sphere, whom he in turn can only see as a circle, and is exposed to the three-dimensional space of Spaceland. When he returns home to try and explain what he has seen, he is thrown into an insane asylum.

Amato, Mary: The Word Eater

The titular Word Eater is a worm born with eyes and the magical ability to eat words instead of dirt, named Fip. Whenever Fip eats a word, the object or subject that word was referring to vanishes, at one point accidentally erasing a recently discovered star. When used on a subject, erasure removes any ontological effects, as when used on a torturous dog training method the dogs it was used on all suddenly become docile instead of vicious. The conflict of the story comes in the fact that words are the only thing Fip can eat, so keeping anything else from being erased becomes a matter of starving him. There's also some disgruntled students who almost use him to erase their school, with the protagonist worrying that the effect could abstractly extend to the staff and students, necessitating their thwarting.

Barker, Clive: Abarat

Candy lives in Chickentown USA: the most boring place in the world, her heart bursting for some clue as to what her future may hold. She is soon to find out: swept out of our world by a giant wave, she finds herself in another place entirely...

The Abarat: a vast archipelago where every island is a different hour of the day, from the sunlit wonders of Three in the Afternoon, where dragons roam, to the dark terrors of the island of Midnight, ruled by Christopher Carrion. (...)

Abarat is an extremely Spiral coded place working so differently from the real world and being extremely nonsensical that I think this book deserves to be the Spiral Leitner.

Basye, Dale E.: Fibble

"When Marlo Fauster claims she has switched souls with her brother, she gets sent straight to Fibble, the circle of Heck reserved for liars. But it’s true—Milton and Marlo have switched places, and Marlo finds herself trapped in Milton’s gross, gangly body. She also finds herself trapped in Fibble, a three-ring media circus run by none other than P. T. Barnum, an insane ringmaster with grandiose plans and giant, flaming pants. Meanwhile Milton, as Marlo, is working at the devil’s new television network, T.H.E.E.N.D. But there’s something strange about these new shows. Why do they all air at the same time? And are they really broadcasting to the Surface? Soon Milton and Marlo realize that they need each other to sort through the lies and possibly prevent the end of the world—if Bea “Elsa” Bubb doesn’t catch them first."

The Fauster twins are caught up in yet another apocalyptic scheme as hellish figures plot to stoke a ratings war into a holy war, using elaborate lies and propaganda to provoke the end of humanity itself.

Borges, Jorge Luis: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

A short story concerning the author and his friend stumbling upon a mention of the Uqbar region in an encyclopedia, a place which is found in no other literature. One of the myths of Uqbar concerns Tlön, a fantastical place where people do not believe in the reality of the material world, and only the most outre scholars would dare suggest that objects have permanence. Objects there "grow vague or sketchy and lose detail" when they begin to be forgotten, culminating in their disappearance when they are completely forgotten. One year later, Tlönian objects begin to appear in the real world. Then a complete encyclopedia of the world turns up, transforming the human understanding of science and philosophy. As the author writes his postscript, the world is transforming entirely into Tlön.

Calvino, Italo: If on a winter’s night a traveler

The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ("you") finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones.

Carroll, Emily: A Guest in the House

"After many lonely years, Abby’s just gotten married. She met her new husband—a recently widowed dentist—when he arrived in town with his young daughter, seeking a new start. Although it’s strange living in the shadow of her predecessor, Abby does her best to be a good wife and mother. But the more she learns about her new husband’s first wife, the more things don’t add up. And Abby starts to wonder . . . was Sheila’s death really by natural causes? As Abby sinks deeper into confusion, Sheila’s memory seems to become a force all its own, ensnaring Abby in a mystery that leaves her obsessed, fascinated, and desperately in love for the first time in her life"

While most riffs on the Bluebeard story are probably slaughter, buried, or eye aligned, much of the horror in this story is the uncertainty and loss of a clear sense of reality. Also the art of Sheila feels very spiral.

Carroll, Lewis: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/ Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there

Both books have a similar structure and are spiral for the same reasons: little Victorian child Alice founds herself in a strange world with rules vastly different from hers (for example, there’s no real geography and the scenery changes suddenly from one place to another very much like in a dream). The characters she crosses constantly defy her understanding of the world and applies logics she struggles to understand. Even though she ends up going with the flow most of the time she never ceases to question whether she’s experiencing real life or a dream; sanity is brought up a few times, and there’s also the popular quote "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad", delivered by the grinning cat that appears and disappears like a slippery distortion. Lastly I may add that the TMA episode whose title references the book (Mag 177, Wonderland) is a spiral episode.

Chambers, Robert W.: The King in Yellow

A collection of short stories, most of which revolve around a fictional two-act play of the same title: The King in Yellow. Although the play is never described in any great detail, anyone who reads it is driven to madness.

Coltrane, John: Giant Steps

At first a reader simply sees the rapid changes, seemingly random and discordant. Further investigation will begin to reveal patterns, the chords begin to outline other chords, that in turn outline further chords, only to loop back to the beginning. A master or his craft, the creator can seemingly effortlessly navigate this fractal of potential sound. You, can only hope to keep up as the endless, rapidly twisting patterns give you no time to comprehend the page in front of you.

This is specifically against tournament rules, but I still wanted to at least give it a submission.

Cortázar, Julio: Rayuela (Hopscotch)

The story of two young writers whose lives are playing themselves out in Buenos Aires and Paris to the sounds of jazz and brilliant talk, Hopscotch, written in 1963, was the first hypertext novel. Anticipating the age of the web with a non-structure that allows readers to take the chapters in any order they wish, Hopscotch invites them to be the architects of the novel themselves.

Cutter, Nick: The Deep

A strange plague called the ‘Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget— Small things at first and eventually their bodies forget how to function involuntarily. There is no cure.

But far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a universal healer hailed as “ambrosia” has been discovered. In order to study this phenomenon, a special research lab has been built eight miles under the sea’s surface. But when the station goes incommunicado, a brave few descend through the lightless fathoms in hopes of unraveling the mysteries lurking at those crushing depths."

At first glance you might think this book is much more aligned to The Buried than The Spiral and while it does have a lot of claustrophobic elements, the true horror the protagonist (Luke) faces, comes from slowly losing your perception of reality. The relatively small laboratory soon becomes a labyrinth, as he moves from room to room he also moves through memories that become more and more vivid as time goes by. He has hallucinations, falls asleep and dreams of being awake while sleepwalks, he is chased by monsters that are very real and some that are just his own demons.

(spoilers) At the end we find out he and all the other people in the laboratory were lured by two ancient creatures trapped both at the bottom of the sea and another dimension and needed Luke's body to be free. The Figmen are tricksters, they enjoy doing "experiments" seeing how much a body can twist and what it takes to break a mind. The people inside the laboratory were little more that mice they wanted to see run around for their amusement before being freed

Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I want off Mr. Wonka's wild ride. Why the fuck is this man dragging children through his acid trip pun-tastical Saw movie. OSHA get his ass

Danielewski, Mark Z.: House of Leaves

The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled the Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant's footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals the Navidson Record's supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house.

***

Come on, its the book that gaslights you. Some pages are literally typed in spirals. Its about a beautiful new house that breaks the laws of physics and also eats some people- Helen Richardson would be PROUD. Its a story in a story IN A STORY. The introduction of the book is about how the man annotating the manuscript of the documentary and his friend used to pick up girls by telling fantastical and false stories about their lives. Everyone in the books universe thinks the documentary was faked. What can i say that hasn't been said before? The “M” in Mark Z. Danielowki stands for “Mr. Michael Distortion”

***

I mean, look at the book. Look at it. I feel like I'm going mad every time I see its pages.

de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote

After reading too many courtly romances, Quixote's perception of reality is warped, and he seeks to become a knight and restore the courtly chivalric graces. Also he thinks windmills are evil giants.

DeLaney, Samuel R.: Babel-17

Rydra Wong is a top linguist, acclaimed poet, and former military cryptologist. When the Alliance military come across a new code used by the enemy, which is beyond their ability to crack, they come to her for help. She informs them that it is not a mere code, but an actual language, and agrees to accept the challenge.

Quickly assembling a crew, Wong heads to the Alliance War Yards to study the raw data on this new language, which the military calls Babel-17. However, shortly after she arrives, an enemy attack forces her to flee in disarray, and she falls in with a privateer, who is, fortunately, on the Alliance side.

Or mostly so. On board the privateer's ship, she begins to learn more about Babel-17, and the surprising benefits and dangers it offers to someone who learns to speak it. The language literally twists the thought pattern of its speakers, making it easier to conceptualize certain ideas, but more difficult to translate your thoughts into anything others can understand.

Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land

Here's a link to the text if anyone is curious

The Waste Land is a poem that describes a...place? state of mind? an arc of history?...in a series of fragments. It weaves together fractured dialogue, mythology, language, and popular culture of its day into a bizarre but beautiful landscape that defies easy explanation.

Ewing, Frederick R.: I, Libertine

New York Times Best Selling novel by acclaimed author, Frederick R. Ewing, “I, Libertine” tells the story of a social climber who styles himself as Lance Courtney.

I highly recommend those voting seek out the book to read for themselves, as it is truly one of the great works of modern American literature.

Gaiman, Neil: Neverwhere

"Under the streets of London there's a world most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. "Neverwhere" is the London of the people who have fallen between the cracks. Strange destinies lie in wait in London below - a world that seems eerily familiar. But a world that is utterly bizarre, peopled by unearthly characters such as the Angel called Islington, the girl named Door, and the Earl who holds Court on a tube train. (...)"

Extremely weird world that unsuspecting civilian can be stuck in, and there is a door motive. This is a Spiral Leitner if I ever saw one.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: The Yellow Wallpaper

Link

From Wikipedia: "The story is written as a collection of journal entries narrated in the first person. The journal was written by a woman whose physician husband has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the husband forbids the journal writer from working or writing, and encourages her to eat well and get plenty of air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a common diagnosis in women at the time. As the reader continues through the journal entries, they experience the writer's gradual descent into madness with nothing better to do than observe the peeling yellow wallpaper in her room.”

***

Epistolary novel about a woman who's being made to live in a single room to treat her post-partum depression. Over the course of the story, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the patterns of the room's wallpaper, spending hours gazing at it and trying to make sense of it. By the end of the story, she believes that there's a woman trapped in the wallpaper, or perhaps that she is the women trapped in the wallpaper. Throughout the story, she's also gaslit by her husband.

***

It's a short story and I highly recommend that you read it. Spoilers (of course) are ahead, so if you want an unspoiled experience, skip past.

This story follows the narrator, as she is locked up by her husband who cares for her and ultimately makes all decisions for her. He makes her doubt her state of mind as she suffers from a nervious disorder. As she stays in the ex-nursery attic, she writes of the horrendous yellow wallpaper. She becomes obsessive of it, watching it night and day amd watching as the colours change with the lighting of the room. She begins seeing a woman locked behind the twisting patterns, and in the end she becomes it - or it becomes her, and she has a hysteric breakdown.

Hall, Steven: The Raw Shark Texts

Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of who he is or any past experiences. He is told by a psychologist that he has a dissociative condition known as fugue but a trail of written clues purporting to be from his pre-amnesiac self describe a more fantastic and sinister explanation for his lack of memories. According to these, he has activated a conceptual shark called a Ludovician which "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self" and is relentlessly pursuing him and will eventually erase his personality completely.

Also at one point there's about 30 pages of an ASCII shark moving towards the reader. Could easily be interpreted as the Ludovician actually approaching the reader in a Leitner-ized version.

[SPOILERS] When the Ludovician attacks Eric, he decides to go in search of a doctor named Trey Fidorous, identified by the letters from his previous self, in the hope he may be able to help to explain what happened to him and how to defeat the shark. Eric travels through Britain in search of clues and is contacted by a mysterious figure called Mr. Nobody, who is part of a megalomaniac network intelligence called Mycroft Ward. Mr. Nobody attempts to subdue and control Eric but Eric manages to escape with the help of an associate of Fidorous named Scout. Scout takes Eric to meet Fidorous, travelling through un-space (an underground network of empty warehouses and unused cellars). They begin a romantic relationship during the journey but Eric feels betrayed when he discovers that Scout has brought him to Fidorous to use him as bait for the shark in the hope of destroying Ward.

With their help Fidorous builds a conceptual shark-hunting boat and they sail out on a conceptual ocean. After a battle with the shark they throw a laptop hooked up to the Mycroft Ward database into its mouth, destroying both Ward and the shark. Eric and Scout remain in the conceptual universe while Eric's dead body is discovered back in the real world.

Hamilton, Patrick: Angel Street/Gas Light

Under the guise of kindness, Jack Manningham is slowly torturing his fragile wife Bella into insanity in his efforts to cover his search for treasure from his diabolical past. He makes her think she is forgetting things and rattles her nerves with the flickering gaslight, which he controls from another room. One day, when Jack is out, Bella has an unexpected caller: kindly Inspector Rough from Scotland Yard. Rough is convinced that Jack is a homicidal maniac wanted for a murder committed fifteen years earlier in this very house. Gradually the Inspector restores Bella's confidence in herself and as the evidence against Jack unfolds.

The play that inspired the movie 1994 "Gaslight" which brought the term "gaslighting" into the public eye.

***

The literal origins of the term "gaslighting," the play follows the recently-married protagonist as her husband tries to convince her that she's going mad.

Hawke, Marcus: Grey Noise

Evan is just trying to get his store, REWIND VIDEO, up and running. Fate, unfortunately, often has other plans. Then he finds something that would be the perfect touch, an old vacuum tube TV. One that keeps turning to static. And it too has other plans. It follows you. Drives you. It’s already inside you. Lose yourself in...GREY NOISE.

Hodgson, William Hope: The House on the Borderlands

Fishing buddies Tonnison and Berreggnog didn't bargain for what they found while on holiday near the remote Irish village of Kraighten. While walking along the riverbank, they're astonished to see that the river abruptly ends. It reappears as a surge from a chasm some 100 feet below the edge of an abyss, where also stand the remains of an oddly shaped house, half-swallowed by the pit.

Exploring the ruins, the friends discover the moldering journal of an unidentified man--the Recluse--who had lived in the house with his sister and faithful dog years ago. Its pages reveal the man's apparent descent into madness--how else to account for his chronicles of otherworldly visions, trips to other dimensions, and attacks by swine-like humanoid creatures that seem to have followed him home? After one particular vision in which he witnesses the end of the earth and time itself, the Recluse awakens in his study to find nothing has changed--except that his dog Pepper is dead, dissolved into a pile of dust. And then the "swine things" return...

Hunter, Erin: Warriors

Can you keep track of who the fuck is related to who and who died when and what these cats look like and what they're named? No you fucking can't, there's four writers all sharing a pen name and metric shit ton of books in the main series alone, let alone the spinoffs. Continuity is dead and these cats murdered it.

Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

Uzumaki follows a high-school teenager, Kirie Goshima (五島桐絵); her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito (斎藤秀一); and the citizens of the small, quiet Japanese town of Kurouzu-cho (黒渦町, Black Vortex Town), which is enveloped by supernatural events involving spirals.

As the story progresses, Kirie and Shuichi witness how the spiral curse affects the people around them, causing the citizens to become either obsessed or paranoid about spirals. Shuichi becomes reclusive after both of his parents die from the horrific psychological and physical powers of the spirals, but also gains the ability to detect when the spiral curse is taking place, although he is often dismissed until the next paranormal effects of the curse become obvious. Eventually, Kirie is affected by the curse as well, when her hair begins to curl into an unnatural spiral pattern, drains her life energy to hypnotize the citizens, and chokes her whenever she attempts to cut it off. Shuichi is able to cut her hair and save her. The curse continues to plague the town until a series of typhoons conjured by the curse destroys most of its structures. The only remaining buildings are ancient abandoned terraced houses, which the citizens are forced first to move into, and then begin expanding as they grow more and more crowded.

As a series of increasingly powerful earthquakes and additional destruction from delinquents able to utilize strong winds strike the town, Kirie and Shuichi devise a plan to escape Kurouzu-cho, but when they attempt to escape, their efforts are unsuccessful. After returning to the town, they discover that several years have passed since they left, as time speeds up away from the spiral. The other citizens have expanded the terraced houses until they connected into a single structure forming a labyrinthine spiral pattern, but have become mutated as a consequence of overcrowding, their limbs twisting and warping into spirals. Kirie and Shuichi decide to search for Kirie's parents, which brings them to the center after many days of walking through the labyrinth.

At the center, Shuichi is hurled down a pit leading deep beneath the earth by a mutated citizen, with Kirie herself descending via a colossal spiral staircase to find him. She falls but is saved by countless bodies making up the ground of a vast, ancient city consisting entirely of spiral patterns in various arrangements. As Kirie looks for Shuichi, she finds her parents twisted and petrified, resembling stone statues, along with many other citizens of Kurouzu-cho who have met the same fate. Then, she hears Shuichi call for her and goes to him. Both are overwhelmed by the ancient spirals surrounding them and Shuichi points out how it seems as though the spiral ruins have a will of their own. Noticing that the petrified citizens of Kurouzu-cho are all facing the spiral city, Shuichi theorizes that this is the source of the curse; the city expands on its own periodically and has cursed the land above out of jealousy from having no one to view it.

Shuichi urges Kirie to leave without him as he can no longer walk, and that the curse should be over soon, but she replies that she does not have the strength and wishes to stay with him. The two embrace with their bodies twisting and intertwining together, signifying their acceptance into the never-ending curse. At the same time, a stone tower in the shape of a drill bit rises out of the city, and breaches the surface, forming the centerpiece of the abandoned town. As Shuichi and Kirie lie together, Kirie notes that the curse ended at the same time it began, for just as time speeds up away from the center, it freezes at the center. The spiral's curse is eternal, and all the events will repeat when a new Kurouzu-cho is built where the previous one lay.

***

I was debating if I should just do the first volume but three in one horrors sounded great to me. So Uzumaki is largely about spirals, to put the most obvious reasoning first. That's that Uzumaki translates to, after all. Spirals begin enveloping this small town, causing supernatural events. But the madness side of things comes as quickly as the spirals are there. You see it first in completely opposite ways with Shuichi's father and mother, with one becoming obsessed with spirals to the point of madness and eventually becoming one himself and the other being so terrified of spirals that it turns into its own psychological torment as she tries to remove spirals from her life and eventually realizes that those spirals are part of her naturally, causing her to try to take apart those aspects of her as well. Over chapters, characters become warped and characters succumb to the madness of spirals. Some fear the spirals, while others embrace them. Escaping the spirals is proven futile, and through that, it is also proven how out of sync the town is from reality as a whole, with time being sped up. Also, it has a labyrinth at this point, built by those suffering from the curse, so I think the Spiral would love that. In the end, the spirals are proven inescapable, and the two main characters warp together into a spiral of their own. The curse seems to end here, but really, it's a never ending cycle, and a curse which will never go away. The curse and the madness it brings won't fade.

***

Kurouzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but a pattern: UZUMAKI, the spiral—the hypnotic secret shape of the world.

***

Plot is about a town cursed by spirals which make you go insane

Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake

Considered to be one of the great literary mindscrews. The plot is covered in about a tenth of the chapters in the book. The rest tell a series of unconnected vignettes, describe minor characters in excessive detail, give allegories for the main plot, and teach you geometry. One chapter was described by Joyce as "A chattering dialogue across a river by two washerwomen who, as night falls, become a tree and stone." Some chapters feature random doodles in the margins. The first sentence is the ending part of the last sentence, making the book circular. Finally, it's written in a combination of five dozen or so different languages, random puns that you need a doctorate in ancient mythology and the aforementioned languages to understand, and general stream of consciousness. In short, it makes no sense. Which is awesome. Joyce stated that it was supposed to be a dream-like "night book" in comparison to his "day-book", Ulysses, which described a day in the life of some ordinary Dubliners but whose style and construction was almost as weird.

***

Finnegan's Wake is one of the most experimental novels of the twentieth century. Rather than write using conventions of novels--or of the English language--Joyce structured his book on language itself. The result is surreal, dense, and famously difficult. To get a sense of just how strange and dreamlike the whole thing is, even its Wikipedia page compares it to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" before pointing out the the book begins with the second half of a sentence, which it gives the first half of at its end. Tl;dr Finnegan's Wake is so unsettlingly experimental that Joyce had to break the English language down to its components to get his vision down on the page.

Juster, Norton: The Phantom Tollbooth

Milo receives a package one day, from an unknown source. The package takes him on a journey where he meets the judge jury and executioner, the princesses rhyme and reason, and more

Kte'pi, Bill: The Cheshire

If you don't want to read this whole summary, here's a song based on the story

Alice Little came out of a showing of Disney's Alice in Wonderland sixteen years ago with nothing but a blue gingham dress, a faded daguerrotype of cats, and jumbled memories of being Alice Liddell. Specifically the fictional character: "she'd never thought of herself as the 'real' Alice, the one Charles Dodgson wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for - she had no memories of that Alice's life, only of the life chronicled by Lewis Carroll - madness and tea parties and talking animals. Worse, her memories conflicted, as she remembered Alice's Adventures Underground, Wonderland's first draft, as vividly as she did the two published novels." After years of attempting to return to Wonderland failed--she'd "tried every drug she could, hallucinogenic and otherwise [...] meditation, trances, pain rituals, sweat lodges, prayers and madness and hypnosis and psychotherapy"--Alice tells herself that her memories are merely symptomatic of a dissociative disorder and tries to go clean. But she puts an ad in the paper asking "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" (which includes a coded message saying "SAVE ME"), searching for answers despite herself, and eventually gets an answer. She meets a grinning man "in a purple-striped turtleneck, with odd-shaped nails and a tattoo of a mushroom on one of his knuckles" at a bar and they talk about her struggles, with him eventually getting her to ask what she really wants to know--if he can take her back. The man replies, "'There's no back to take you. You never left [...] Maybe we recognise each other because you're Alice and I'm the Cheshire Cat. Maybe we're descendents of the originals. Maybe we're brother and sister, separated after our parents' deaths and so traumatised we sought refuge in the books Father read to us as children. Maybe we're simply mad.'" After giving her LSD, the man tells her that a raven isn't like a writing desk at all, "And he faded away, leaving nothing but a grinnnnnnnnnn."

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Color Out of Space

An indescribable color leaches the life out of a patch of farmland and everyone on it.

Lyons, Steve: The Stealers of Dreams

Synopsis: "In the far future, the Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack find a world on which fiction has been outlawed. A world where it's a crime to tell stories, a crime to lie, a crime to hope, and a crime to dream.

But now somebody is challenging the status quo. A pirate TV station urges people to fight back. And the Doctor wants to help -- until he sees how easily dreams can turn into nightmares.

With one of his companions stalked by shadows and the other committed to an asylum, the Doctor is forced to admit that fiction can be dangerous after all. Though perhaps it is not as deadly as the truth... "

Why it's Spiral: A society where lies and fictions are forbidden is, evidently, a society that will fall for anything. The repression of any untruth -- by threat of violence and by invasive brain surgery to paralyze the region that dreams -- means that people are more desperate than ever to believe in anything. Fiction has consequences on this planet. And what could be a more obvious lie than the time-traveling man in his blue box...?

Mathers, Edward Powys: Cain’s Jawbone

I'm just going to quote an article from The Independent: "Cain’s Jawbone, originally published in 1934, is a murder mystery puzzle composed of 100 pages – all assembled in the wrong order. The only way to solve all six murders in the prose narrative is to reorder the pages and correctly identify the crimes, their victims, and who perpetrated them."

Here's the link to the article

Mearns, William Hughes: Antigonish

It's all pretty much all in the TMA episode (Upon the stairs). The little man who "wasn't there" in the stairs.

Miles, Lawrence et. al.: The Book of the War

Synopsis: "The Great Houses: Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy: Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox: Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage… assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War: A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, THE BOOK OF THE WAR is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past."

Propaganda: A text which purports to be a constantly shifting and updating guide to The War, a conflict so overarching and complete that every other conflict is but a pale shadow thereof; the Time War. Of course, since it would shift retroactively with the changing timelines, there is no way to prove or disprove this claim. Notable entries include cities built from days stolen from shifting calendars, the secrets of removing yourself from history while still leaving yourself free to interfere, Grandfather Paradox, the location of the exact centre of history, how to weaponize banality, and Parablox.

Oh, and there's something else in there. Something that seems to be talking to you...

Morrison, Grant: Doom Patrol

The series in general could easily fit in the Spiral, but I'll focus on a certain arc. A great new evil emerges! The Brotherhood of Dada! Its members: a woman that has super strength when she's asleep, a man that is made of fog and swallows his victims(and then has to put up with their voices inside his brain forever), a woman that has every super power you haven't thought of and is deathly afraid of dirt and an illiterate man that can turn into a hurricane. And their intrepid leader! Mr Nobody! He used to be a boring, average man. With the help of a very criminal doctor he tried to turn into a new man...but he went so insane he's always slightly left of reality and 2D. He doesn't mind though, he rather enjoys the meaninglessness of it all, which is a bit Vast of him. He also calls cops fascists.

The bad guys steal a painting that swallows everything and anything and they put Paris inside it. One of the funniest panels ever is various super heroes sitting around a painting wandering what they're supposed to do. Thankfully, Doom Patrol knows how to deal with the weird stuff. They go into the painting, get separated in different artstyles and beaten up.

But the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse is coming, so they cooperate and put him in the dadaist section, making him lose all meaning and turning into a wooden horse.

A big part of the arc is also narrated by the illiterate hurricane guy, which makes it harder to understand since he writes phonetically.

The whole thing is absurdity, the first bad guys are absurd and the second bad guy gets beaten by the absurd. After a few more arcs Mr Nobody runs for president(with some members of the Doom Patrol endorsing him) and gets killed by the CIA in a similar manner to Jesus. For his campaign he drove a bus that made everyone behind it feel like they've taken lsd.

Moore, Christopher: Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art

The story surrounds the mysterious suicide of Vincent van Gogh, who famously shot himself in a French wheat field only to walk a mile to a doctor’s house. The mystery, which is slowly but cleverly revealed through the course of the book, is blue: specifically the exclusive ultramarine pigment that accents pictures created by the likes of Michelangelo and van Gogh. To find the origin of the hue, Moore brings on Lucien Lessard, a baker, aspiring artist and lover of Juliette, the brunette beauty who breaks his heart. After van Gogh’s death, Lucien joins up with the diminutive force of nature Henri Toulouse-Lautrec to track down the inspiration behind the Sacré Bleu. In the shadows, lurking for centuries, is a perverse paint dealer dubbed The Colorman, who tempts the world’s great artists with his unique hues and a mysterious female companion who brings revelation—and often syphilis (it is Moore, after all). Into the palette, Moore throws a dizzying array of characters, all expertly portrayed, from the oft-drunk “little gentleman” to a host of artists including Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Muir, Tamsyn: Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth is, above all, really fucking confusing. Roughly every third chapter is actively gaslighting the reader about what happened in the last book. The main character is fucking struggling to maintain any sort of grip on reality all throughout the story, and more often than not, she fails miserably. This is due to several factors, including, but not limited to - sleep deprivation, latent schizophrenia, ruthless emotional manipulation from everyone around her, being full of a frankly alarming number of ghosts from several entirely unrelated sources, childhood parental and religious trauma, and a self-inflicted amateur lobotomy.

***

Takes place post(sometimes pre) DIY lobotomy; leaving our protag, who already struggles identifying between reality and hallucination, a paranoid, constantly questioning wreck. It's written in second person and does not follow events chronologically, leaving the reader questioning everything almost as much as the protag.

National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers: Common Core Math Textbook

Drives me up the damn wall insane. This is mostly a joke suggestion but also I think there’s something to be said about fractals’ place in mathematics, and the widespread range of common core math’s influence. To be honest, submitting this is a gut feeling of dread to me.

Nikolson, Adam: Life between the tides

Look this probably shouldn’t even make it into the bracket and this is mostly a very dull book about shoreline ecosystems but there’s this one chapter where the dude gets positively poetic about I think?? winkles?? (a kind of snail) and it absolutely reads like a statement like we are talking fractal winkles-all-the-way-down insanity. I need to tell someone about it bc it was like suddenly reading another book. A better and also worse book. I’m pretty sure he quoted philosophers in it. I wish I had taken notes. He would get along with Ivo Lensik’s dad.

O’Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman

Synopsis from Goodreads: "The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him."

Ogawa, Yoko: The Memory Police

The story is set in an alternate Japan where people's memories of certain things and concepts (e.g. birds, hats, winter, books, seasons, even their sense of self) are slowly taken away from their collective minds for 'their safety' by the titular Memory Police, a government force of sorts. This forced forgetting goes to the point where they can't physically perceive that concept; birds are weird creatures because no one remembers what a bird is like, and it's always winter because no one remembers what spring is. The story even ends with the unnamed protagonist (along with several others) eventually fading away from existence (read: forgetting) as memories of certain body parts and finally the concept of the human body is taken away by the Memory Police. It's like if the vase from MAG 38 formed and entire task force to do its job.

This one has narrative potential too; imagine a statement where someone slowly lose memories of certain things after reading this Leitner, gradually becoming an unreliable narrator as reality slips away from their conscious.

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Pelevin, Victor: The Helmet of Horror

Eight people find themselves in eight different rooms with a labyrinth behind them and a computer in front of them. They try to communicate via the computer that allows them to chat with one another, but has nicknames set for them(IsoldA, UGLI 666, Ariane...) and blocks their personal information. They(and us) can't know if they are lying. When two of them try to see each other by visiting a spot in the labyrinths that should be the same they each then recount a completely different experience and accuse each other of lying. Another character claims they all must be figments of his imagination, he must be very drunk. And they're all afraid of the minotaur. It is a book where no one, even the reader knows what's real, everyone is afraid of what might appear if they turn a corner and no one knows what's going on.

Pratchett, Terry: Moving Pictures

"‘HOLY WOOD IS A DIFFERENT SORT OF PLACE . . . HERE, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO BE IMPORTANT.’

A new phenomenon is taking over the Discworld: moving pictures. Created by the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork, the growing ‘clicks’ industry moves to the sandy land of Holy Wood, attracted by the light of the sun and some strange calling no one can quite put their finger on…

Also drawn to Holy Wood are aspiring young stars Victor Tugelbend, a wizarding student dropout, and Theda ‘Ginger’ Withel, a small-town girl with big dreams. But behind the glitz and glamour of the clicks, a sinister presence lurks. Because belief is powerful in the Discworld, and sometimes downright dangerous…

The magic of movies might just unravel reality itself."

Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas spends the whole book trying to figure out if the conspiracy she’s trying to unravel about the US postal service and a conter-postal service via plays, signs/images, and history is real or if she’s being gaslit by her ex, who just died and made her executor of his will.

Ryukishi07: higurashi no naku koro ni (When The Evening Cicadas Cry)

The series explores paranoia and deceit among friends. It uses its POVs incredibly well, limiting your view of the situation so much that it is genuinely incredibly hard to figure out what happened or why (until you read the answer arcs ofc). Several key plot points involve characters getting so consumed by their own madness that they cannot see reality for what it is and wildly assume false things. This madness repeats and repeats and repeats, consuming the friends group over and over and over, leading them to do horrific things to each other. Many a character become so consumed by suspicion and fear that the world distorts and details change in their mind to match what they think is happening. I am desperately trying to describe the series without spoilers rn

Sachar, Louis: Wayside School Is Falling Down

Obviously all of Wayside School is a little Spirally -- the weird architecture, the cow invasions, occasional hypnosis, and more -- but this one tells a story of the nineteenth floor. Wayside School has no nineteenth floor. There is one teacher on the nineteenth floor, and only one class, who learn about how to alphabetize every number. Sometimes, new students arrive...

Schwartz, Alvin: "Maybe You Will Remember" (short story from Scary Stories 3: More Tales To Chill Your Bones)

A girl, Rosemary, and her mother are on vacation in Paris. Rosemary's mother is ill, so Rosemary is sent to get medicine, but ultimately has her time wasted by the driver on the way back, and when she returns to the hotel, nobody recognizes her, telling her she has the wrong place. Her mother is gone, too, and when Rosemary asks to see the room they stayed in as proof they were there, the clerk shows her a completely unfamiliar setup, making Rosemary wonder what happened to her.

In the appendix of the book, the scenario is explained. Rosemary's mother was sick with the plague, and the doctor, recognizing it, knew she would be dead very quickly. Rosemary was put on a wild goose chase for the medicine and given a driver who would delay her, with the doctor and hotel staff working to dispose of her mother's body and re-decorate the hotel room while Rosemary was away. With Rosemary unable to verify that she was in the hotel, and unknowing that her mother died of plague, the hotel avoided any negative publicity that would have occurred if anyone were to find out a guest had the plague. The hotel's PR was saved, but Rosemary was left doubting her sanity.

Serafini, Luigi: Codex Seraphinianus

The Codex is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods. The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world, such as a bleeding fruit, a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one, and a copulating couple who metamorphose into an alligator. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with delicate appearances and bound by tiny filaments. Some illustrations are recognizable as maps or human faces, while others (especially in the "physics" chapter) are mostly or totally abstract. Nearly all of the illustrations are brightly coloured and highly detailed

***

It's an encyclopedia for a universe that doesn't exist, treated as if it does exist in another universe while being written in a nonsense, impossible to understand language. The things it depict doesn't make sense either, ranging from swimming trees and eye-shaped fishes to absolutely bizarre creatures and technology, like a rainbow-making cloud shaped like Da Vinci's aerial screw. The entire thing comes off as surreal nonsense because it's meant to symbolise the feeling of trying to understand something that you can't understand, but finds cool because of the visuals. It's a book that you aren't meant to read understand, but simply look at, because trying to understand it just... doesn't work.

***

The Codex is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods. It has been compared to the still undeciphered Voynich manuscript, the story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges, and the artwork of M. C. Escher and Hieronymus Bosch. The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world, such as a bleeding fruit, a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one, and a copulating couple who metamorphose into an alligator. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with delicate appearances and bound by tiny filaments. Some illustrations are recognizable as maps or human faces, while others (especially in the "physics" chapter) are mostly or totally abstract. Nearly all of the illustrations are brightly coloured and highly detailed.

The false writing system appears modeled on Western writing systems, with left-to-right writing in rows and an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase letters, some of which double as numerals. Some letters appear only at the beginning or end of words, similar to Semitic writing systems. The curvilinear letters are rope- or thread-like, with loops and even knots, and are somewhat reminiscent of Sinhala script. In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles [...] Serafini stated that there is no meaning behind the Codex's script, which is asemic; that his experience in writing it was similar to automatic writing; and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey was the sensation children feel with books they cannot yet understand, although they see that the writing makes sense for adults. Take a look for yourself:

Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream

The way the fey play with the perceptions and emotions of the wandering youths in the woods is peak Spiral, as their loves and disdains change with the machinations of Oberon and Puck.

Shakespeare, William: King Lear

The play has everything: real descents into madness, fake descents into madness, betrayal by trusted loved ones, loyalty from betrayed loved ones, and would-be wise men who turn out to be fools.

Shakespeare, William: The Winter's Tale

Imagine that you are absolutely, completely, 100 percent certain that your wife is cheating on you with your best friend. Now imagine you're the king, and your best friend is the king of a far-off kingdom. Now imagine that the consequences of your actions spiral outward: your wife and son die, one of your trusted advisors has disappeared with daughter on your orders to kill her.

This first half of this deeply underappreciated play explores the consequences of one man's fear of betrayal. Coincidentally, it is one Shakespeare's more surreal works. It's the origin of the infamous "Exit pursued by a bear," a stage direction that concludes a scene set on the coast of a kingdom that in real life was landlocked. And--spoiler alert--the play concludes with a statute coming back to life.

Anyway, it's a surprisingly Spiral-like play with a dream-like atmosphere, fairy-tale logic, and a Distortion-esque look at the fear of betrayal.

Silberescher: SCP-1425: Star Signals

Stine, R.L.: Don't Go to Sleep!

"Matt hates his tiny bedroom. It's so small it's practically a closet! Still, Matt's mom refuses to let him sleep in the guest room. After all, they might have guests. Some day. Or year. Then Matt does it. Late one night. When everyone's in bed. He sneaks into the guest room and falls asleep. Poor Matt. He should have listened to his mom. Because when Matt wakes up, his whole life has changed. For the worse. And every time he falls asleep, he wakes up in a new nightmare... "

Inception, for kids! Whenever Matt falls asleep, he changes reality -- and a group of special agents want to stop him by putting him to sleep, permanently.

Unknown, Voynich Manuscript

Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” the world’s most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. It's a strange code describing alchemical formulae and unknown life forms, and no one understands it. It's a mystery waiting for you to lose yourself in its pages.

Wells, H.G.: The Door in the Wall

This short story is about Lionel Wallace, who at the age of 5 encountered and entered a weird door. Behind it he found a beautiful and peaceful garden and felt such happiness and bliss, that when he was transported back on the street and escorted back to his home, he was very upset. He would see the door again many times later in life, but every time he will refuse to enter it due to his responsibilities (for example, to not be late to class, to catch a train, to be on time for an appointment). He grew up and became a successful politician, but the perfect world behind the door haunted him, and his success felt dull and boring. The book ends with people finding his lifeless body at the bottom of a pit, and that he had in poor light walked through a small doorway that led onto it. The narrator then speculates that maybe Lionel saw the perfect garden behind the doorway and was finally able to find happiness.

West, A.J.: The Spirit Engineer

Based on a real story about a guy who was convinced that one particular medium was the real deal. He completely upended his career for it, and wrote a paper on the science of the ghostly plane.

He did several shows, and got relatively famous. Eventually, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [someone who wanted to believe] and Harry Houdini [An avid non-believer] invite him over to convince them that séances were real. In the process, Houdini completely disproves him, and outs the medium he thought was real as a fraud.

It turns out his wife and coworker had convinced the 'medium' and their family to run a prank on him. In his fury, he kills everyone involved, and then drinks Poison to try - one final time - to proove his theory.

Tldr: A real story who unknowingly changed his life and ruined his reputation because of the lies of the ones he trusted. When he realises, he looses his sanity and kills everyone around him, including himself.

 Whorf, Benjamin Lee: Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language

The famous text about language as a symbol that can never truly reflect reality can kinda fuck with your perceptions about how our language serves to construct our own realities. We're programmed to experience the world in different ways according to the way we interpret language.

Wyspiański, Stanisław: The Wedding

Relevant parts from Wikipedia

"The play's action takes place at the wedding of a member of the Kraków intelligentsia (the Bridegroom) and his peasant Bride. Their crossclass union follows a then fashionable trend of chłopomaństwo ("peasant-mania") among some Polish intelligentsia, who were often scions of the historic Polish szlachta (nobility). (...) Among the live guests are ghosts of personae from Polish history and culture, representing the guilty consciences of the living. The two groups engage in dialogues. The wedding guests are hypnotized by a rosebush straw-wrap (Chochoł) from the garden which comes to life and joins the party. (Offending a chochoł, according to folk beliefs, could provoke the thing to play tricks).The "Poet" is visited successively by the "Black Knight" (a symbol of the nation's past military glory); the "Journalist"; the court jester Stańczyk, a conservative political sage; and the "Ghost of Wernyhora" (a paradigm of leadership for Poland). (...)Thus the wedding guests, symbolizing the nation, waste their chance at national freedom. They keep on dancing a "chocholi taniec" (a "straw-wrap's dance") "the way it's played for them" (a Polish folk saying), failing in their mission." This play is as if patriotically motivated Spiral avatars crashed somebody's wedding, and I think it deserves consideration as Spiral Leitner.

[carriesthewind]

Thanks so much for your writeup of the 2 Stupid 2 Sanction case. OMG.

As a reference librarian in a special library (i.e. not an academic or public library), the database access of this case has been -fascinating- to me. I regularly struggle with the challenge of how to provide access to materials to my patrons, when we have limited access and an even more limited budget. This case is an absolutely TEXTBOOK in what NOT to do.

Regarding the apparently wonky access to different categories of cases in Fastcase, I can provide a little professional insight, as I have spent FAR too many hours trying to decipher database providers' pricing guidelines. (But, DISCLAIMER: I am not a law librarian and hold my colleagues who are in absolute awe. So I don't have any direct experience with the database in question, just 15+ years of trying to wrangle these kinds of databases in general.)

It is conceivable that Fastcase could be setup in such a way that Schwartz et al. had access to ALL of the 2nd Circuit cases and some of the 5th Circuit cases. Research databases are nearly always broken out into "collections" and you can often pick and choose which collections you have access to, depending on how much money you fork over. I have absolutely seen instances where content I expected to be in one such collection was actually found in another (looking at you, Oxford Scholarly Editions…). This can happen for a variety of reasons: when the content was acquired by the database provider, what kind of distribution rights they were able to secure, or even who was doing the ingesting of that content.

None of which are relevant for Fastcase.

Acquisition and distribution rights are a non-issue for case law (particularly US Federal case law), and the inherent nature of the structure of the court system creates pre-made "collections" for the database to be organized into.

This is supported by Fastcase's own website. On their "Coverage" page, they helpfully break out the different content that they can provide access to into exactly the manner that you would expect. Each Court has its own "bucket" of content, starting from the Supreme Court and working our way down through more and more specialized courts.

So the idea that Schwartz would have access to some of the 5th Circuit cases, but not all? Pretty laughable. They should all be in the same "collection", where you'd either have access to ALL or NONE. It's hard to conceive of it as anything other a binary setup.

It gets even more laughable when you look at Fastcase's helpful Pricing Plans page.

They helpfully breakdown the content that each subscription plan would have access to. Their "Appellate Plan" (the cheapest) provides access to US Supreme Court, US Court of Appeals, and State Supreme & Appellate Court decisions and to "Nationwide Statutes, Regulations, Court Rules & More". Their "Premium Plan" and "Enterprise Plan" both provide access to all of this, PLUS US District and Bankruptcy Court decisions.

(Side note: As database pricing goes, this really is Not Bad. They seem to be making good on their claim to try to provide broader access and tools for legal research.)

Now, the scope of access for a subscriber level probably isn't set in stone; database providers can be remarkably flexible about what they provide access to if it means making a sale vs not. So despite the fact that on their public-facing information page, they give the appearance that a subscriber would get access to ALL Federal Appeals cases, it is certainly conceivable that the Firm negotiated access to ONLY 2nd Circuit cases.

But then how would they have access to ANY 5th Circuit cases?

No, it's far more likely that they had access to everything. And again, it's hard to comprehend how an "error in billing" would lead to partial access. It's generally a binary setup: either you have access to everything in your subscription, or you have access to none of it.

I'm gonna call shenanigans on the "billing error" argument as well.

And all of this is completely aside from the fact that, as you've noted several times, YOU CAN JUST GOOGLE FEDERAL CASES WTIH A REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF SOMETHING USEFUL COMING UP. (There's a whole other discussion of why these cases exist in subscription databases at all, having to do with metadata and search frameworks and site functionality, but that's another whole long thing and this is already far too long as is.)

(As as side note, whoever has written the training documentation (https://go.fastcase.com/teachingfastcase) for Fastcase deserves a goddamned medal. The line "Parentheses are the Marie Kondo of Boolean Operators: Here to bring you joy and sort similar things in similar locations." made me laugh for 5 minutes straight. I'm still giggling about it.)

Thank you for this fantastic writeup of this issue!

This was so much good information (and dam, yes, that documentation is delightful), and I don't have anything substantive to add.

If I may indulge in some brief speculation, if I had to bet on what actually happened, here is what I suspect: the Firm didn't have access to the federal Fastcase database at all (I think this because it would be such a stupid and pointless thing for the Firm representative to lie about, otherwise). But it may have been less of "billing error" and more of a, "we're not going to bother to pay for that, we are never in federal court." However, once he got the Court's order to annex the cases, he got access somehow - maybe someone else at the firm had access, or he had a friend with access, or he did actually go to a bar association library, or whatever. And that's how he downloaded the real opinions. (I think this because it seems like the simplest explanation, and it explains why he/they are so cagey about how he actually go the opinions. Because if had full access, it shatters his excuse that he thought the "opinions" were real because he couldn't check them in another source "because he didn't have a database with access to the federal reporters available.")

(But I want to know! Especially with what you've just laid out, I want to shake everyone involved until the truth falls out!)

[ufonaut]

re my tags on the prev post i think it’s always so fascinating to think of shelly mayer & julie schwartz as the architects of the golden & silver ages respectively and how much their approach differed by circumstances alone. and like the easiest way to understand that is by looking at the justice society of america vs the justice league (of america, in its original incarnation).

and how genuinely few people nowadays are aware that the jsa used to be genuinely bizarre, sometimes awful, sometimes angry, all too human young men with very distinct & complex personalities... because shelly himself was a weird twenty-two year old who challenged people to sword fights in his office and randomly burst out singing and was known as the mad boy genius of the comic world who made it all up as he went along. whereas the justice league arrived fully formed with sort of indefinite personalities, more perfect soldiers and helpful coworkers than anything resembling friends (and remained that indistinct mass of textbook superheroics until the denny o’neil and len wein days) because they’d been put together by a grown man with a very clear understanding of the business because in julie’s own words society sounded sort of like a fan club and a league was the real deal.

and like!!! i’m the biggest julie schwartz fan you’ll find around these parts but it’s so crazy to me how they got the jsa so right in the 1940s and the phenomenon of it could never be replicated ever again

[aestheticvoyage2024]

Day 269: Wednesday September 25, 2024 - "Book 9?"

Ive lost count of what book this is and there were a couple I havent finished anyway - but this one is important just on its own; its the one Audrie and I are reading and learning from together, "You Are The One You've Been Waiting For" - Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz. As we look to expand our family, its time to sharpen the saw and Im all on board.

I started the book a few weeks back on the beaches in Mexico and didn't make it past the introduction before I Was sucked into photographing William and Audrie in the waves. Moments later the book itself was in the waves. If you could see the state of the paperback I just finished, this one is well on that way. I picked it back up today - not in the sands of Mexico where I started it, but in the suns of Tucson and re-read the intro again and got ready to get back to work in having all my little protectors, give up their projects and just take it easy from here.

Song: Zach Bryan - Boys of Faith

Quote: “IFS can be seen as attachment theory taken inside, in the sense that the client’s Self becomes the good attachment figure to their insecure or avoidant parts. I was initially amazed to discover that when I was able to help clients access their Self, they would spontaneously begin to relate to their parts in the loving way that the textbooks on attachment theory prescribed. This was true even for people who had never had good parenting in the first place. Not only would they listen to their young exiles with loving attention and hold them patiently while they cried, they would firmly but lovingly discipline the parts in the roles of inner critics or distractors. Self just knows how to be a good inner leader.” ― Richard C. Schwartz

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Christina Buttons

Published: Feb 10, 2024

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) released its Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care (GAPC) textbook and it’s crazier than I thought. In a recent op-ed, @Miriam_Grossman and @LHSchwartzMD call it a “political manifesto posing as a scientific guide for mental health care.”🧵 

The authors of the GAPC claim the sex binary is “mythical,” created by “European colonial influences," and that scientific neutrality is a “fallacy.”

It says trans-identified youth are oppressed from “living in a cis heteronormative society” created by “cisgender people in power.”

Grossman and Schwartz argue, “If a brain surgeon told you that scientific neutrality is a fallacy and brain anatomy is a result of European colonial influence, you would probably look for another surgeon.”

Unsurprisingly, nearly 90% of the guide’s 56 authors identify as “transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive.”

“Only those committed to the radical ideas and practices announced in the book are considered experts,” say Grossman and Schwartz.

The GAPC demands that medical and surgical interventions be readily available to all patients, regardless of age or psychiatric conditions, including psychosis, stating, “Psychosis alone is not a contraindication to gender-affirming services.” (!)

--

Op-ed:

By: Miriam Grossman and Lauren Schwartz

Published: Feb 3, 2024

In a world of confusing and contradictory messages about the meaning of male and female, where can families, health professionals and the public turn for guidance?

We are psychiatrists who care for transgender-identified youths, and we believe the answer should be simple: the American Psychiatric Association. The association calls for the “highest ethical standards of professional conduct.” Its publishing house claims to offer clinicians “authoritative, up to date ... information.” But with the publication late last year of Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, the American Psychiatric Association has abandoned its professed mission of promoting ethical, evidence-based care.

Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care is a political manifesto posing as a scientific guide for mental health care. According to the authors, the man-woman binary is “mythical,” and more sex categories would flourish if not for “European colonial influences.” Scientific neutrality is “a fallacy,” they assert, unaware or unconcerned that if the public took that assertion seriously, it wouldn’t seek help from clinicians who listen to the American Psychiatric Association.

Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care further asserts that psychiatry and psychology have perpetuated the oppression of transgender youths whose depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicidality are due to the stress of “living in a cis heteronormative society.” These individuals lack access to quality care, we are told, because of “cisgender people in power.”

This faddish ideological language would not be acceptable in any other field of medicine. If a brain surgeon told you that scientific neutrality is a fallacy and brain anatomy is a result of European colonial influence, you would probably look for another surgeon.

Nearly 90% of Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care’s 56 authors, we learn in the forward, are “transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive.” This is not “representation” but a litmus test: Only those committed to the radical ideas and practices announced in the book are considered experts.

The authors demand that we clinicians rubber-stamp even the youngest child’s self-diagnosis, placing them on a path toward permanent disfigurement and possible sterility. Rest assured, we shall not.

Omitted from the 26 chapters is any mention of recent systematic reviews — these constitute the most reliable method of evidence analysis in evidence-based medicine. All such reviews to date have consistently demonstrated that the touted benefits of “gender-affirming care” are highly uncertain. Relying on these evidence reviews, health authorities in countries as progressive as Sweden have said that the health risks of gender-affirming care in minors “currently outweigh the possible benefits.” Along with other European countries, Sweden now recommends psychotherapy as the preferred treatment for youth gender dysphoria. It confines puberty suppression to research settings, recognizing it as “an experimental practice.”

Among innumerable examples of medical misinformation, the Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care textbook claims that puberty blockers are a “fully reversible intervention that allows young patients time to mature.” This is false. Research has consistently shown that nearly every child placed on blockers continues to cross sex hormones. Only a minuscule number step off the assembly line toward life-long dependance on pharmaceuticals. Estrogen and testosterone have a laundry list of serious side effects, and when puberty has been prevented at an early stage, they cause sterility. We were astonished to see blockers described as benign and fully reversible. We have never given them to physically healthy children, and we lack long-term data on their impact on bone health, fertility, sexual functioning and IQ.

“Affirming care” calls for the increase of a girl’s or woman’s normal testosterone level by up to 1,900%. Such high levels in females are typically caused by tumors. Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care makes the astonishing claim that this “treatment” is safe and effective in most cases, referencing a 2017 systematic review. But the authors of that review admit the evidence they used was “low quality” and warned “caution is necessary” when prescribing testosterone to transgender-identifying females. In fact, the ovaries of women given testosterone are similar to those seen in a disorder called polycystic ovaries, which itself is associated with increased cancer risk and metabolic abnormalities.

Long-term use of testosterone by females causes vaginal atrophy and possible infertility and is associated with cardiovascular events. Remember, we are speaking of doctors prescribing a controlled substance to physically healthy young women whose trans identity may be temporary.

Even the World Health Organization, a group known for endorsing progressive viewpoints, recently conceded that the evidence base for the medical interventions endorsed with confidence in the APA textbook is “limited and variable.”

We are also deeply troubled by the authors’ insistence that medical and surgical interventions be available on demand to every patient, regardless of age and other psychiatric conditions. Anorexic? Autistic? Suicidal? No problem. The Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care authors will place even patients with psychosis — meaning they are detached from reality — on medical interventions.

“Psychosis alone is not a contraindication to gender-affirming services,” the authors write.

The American Psychiatric Association asserts its publishing house uses peer-review at the time of selection and again at final approval of any project. But no credible peer-review process could possibly overlook the many errors and omissions that fill this publication. Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care is neither an ethical nor a trustworthy source of clinical guidance. In fact, it increases the risk of iatrogenic harm and puts clinicians at risk for lawsuits and loss of license.

With several other physicians, we composed an open letter to the leadership of the American Psychiatric Association calling for the withdrawal of Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care until our concerns are addressed and the errors and omissions corrected. The letter was sent at the end of the year and, to date, it has more than 6,500 signatories, with a preponderance of medical professionals, including association members, national and international gender experts, psychologists, and researchers. Others who signed are school counselors, patients, parents and concerned citizens.

We call on the American Psychiatric Association to be accountable for its actions, and remind its members of their responsibility to patients, families, medical and mental health professionals, and the public. We deserve the truth. The association has discredited itself by caving to dangerous groupthink.

Dr. Miriam Grossman is a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist and a senior fellow at Do No Harm. Her most recent book is “Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness.” Dr. Lauren Schwartz is a practicing board-certified psychiatrist, a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a fellow of FAIR in Medicine and a member of Do No Harm.

--

Open letter:

An Open Letter to the American Psychiatric Association Regarding the Publication of Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care

January 2024

On November 8, 2023, Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care was released by the American Psychiatric Association’s official publishing house.

We the undersigned strongly support the following Open Letter to the APA. Our letter calls on the APA to explain why it glaringly ignored many scientific developments in gender-related care and to consider its responsibility to promote and protect patients’ safety, mental and physical health.  

On Dec 28, 2023, this Open Letter was sent to the leadership of the APA, asking for a substantive response. We invite you to sign below to support our continued efforts to demand medical and mental health excellence from the APA.

-

We are a group of clinicians, educators, and researchers committed to treating every patient with respect and compassion while upholding excellence in medical and mental health care. We seek an unbiased scientific investigation and discussion of the harms and benefits of all types of care offered to those with gender related distress. We have grave concerns about the American Psychiatric Association’s GAPC textbook. Until those concerns are addressed and the textbook’s errors corrected, we call on the APA for its withdrawal. 

GAPC, released on November 8, 2023 by the American Psychiatric Association’s official publishing house, is touted as “the first textbook dedicated to providing affirming, intersectional, and evidence-informed psychiatric care for transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive (TNG) people.” APA Publishing claims to use a system that “is unique in the extent to which it uses peer review in both the selection and final approval of publishing projects.”  Considering the serious concerns about “affirming care” of minors raised by multiple international systematic reviews, we do not understand how such a review process could grant the imprimatur of the APA. We ask that APA Publishing disclose details of the peer review process for this book and explain why it glaringly ignored scientific developments in gender-related care. 

The book’s claims of being evidence-informed are untenable. GAPC omits any in-depth analysis of the evidence to date, dismisses “scientific neutrality” as “a fallacy” (p. xix), and chooses authors with the correct “lived experiences” and “community impact of prior work over academic titles” (p. xx).   

At the time of publishing, the gender affirmation model promoted in GAPC is under scrutiny from clinicians and scientists worldwide. After conducting careful systematic reviews of the evidence, Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom are drastically retrenching from their earlier affirmation model for treating gender dysphoria in minors. In Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Australia and New Zealand we see either critical reviews by public health agencies, or pushback by professional societies and in mainstream medical journals. Having omitted these international developments and heated debates, GAPC was out of date before its publication.  

Not only do the authors ignore the most current systematic reviews, which count as the most reliable source of scientific information in evidence-based medicine, they also repeatedly undermine well-established standards of care in multiple mental and medical practices. We highlight just two examples of many.  

First, GAPC neglects to address the many known risks of puberty blockers (see Cass Review 2020, Jorgensen et al. 2022, FDA 2022), and cross-sex hormones while presenting fundamentally flawed research to support their gender-affirmative approach. The authors falsely state that “Use of GnRHas in pubertal suppression is a fully reversible intervention that allows young patients time to mature, explore their gender identity, and understand better the risks and benefits of GAHT” (p. 52). It is astonishing to see such an outdated fallacy appear in this book, especially referring to a case presentation of a 10-year-old child. According to Jorgensen et al. 2022, “Over 95% of youth treated with GnRH-analogs go on to receive cross-sex hormones. By contrast, 61-98% of those managed with psychological support alone reconcile their gender identity with their biological sex during puberty.” This contradicts both the reversibility and exploratory nature of puberty suppression claimed by GAPC.  

The authors continue, “This often leads to improvement in psychiatric symptoms, behavioral problems (de Vries et al. 2011), and suicidal ideation (Turban et al. 2020)” (p. 52). The studies cited by the authors have been extensively critiqued by the aforementioned reviews and other investigators (see Biggs 2022, SEGM 2023, Abbruzzese et al. 2023). The European systematic reviews found the de Vries study to be at high risk of bias. The Turban et al. study is cross-sectional, and by the authors’ own admission “does not allow for determination of causation. Longitudinal clinical trials are needed to better understand the efficacy of pubertal suppression.” Additional, equally profound critiques include a) downplaying serious known side effects b) profound methodological flaws that exaggerate and misrepresent reported efficacy and benefits c) inclusion of only the most successful cases in outcome-reporting d) lack of applicability to the currently predominant cohort of minors experiencing gender dysphoria (adolescent-onset natal female patients with severe psychiatric comorbidities) and e) absence of randomized, controlled trials and long-term studies (Ludvigsson 2023).

Second, the authors are disturbingly nonchalant about the high rate of co-occurring mental and behavioral health challenges seen in the context of gender dysphoria. Autism, ADHD, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, suicidality, substance use disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder are all dramatically over-represented in gender dysphoric youth. The Minority Stress Model is used to dismiss such phenomena, unscientifically, as the result of “the psychosocial stressors associated with having to exist within a cisheteronormative society” (p. 50). Minority stress is not sufficient to explain away all psychological distress in the gender nonconforming population, as research has shown no significant change in suicide rates over time in this cohort despite increasing societal acceptance. Rather than comprehensively exploring and addressing these co-occurring conditions, GAPC charges ahead with medicalized gender transition in children and young adults with autism and ADHD (chapter 8), substance use disorders (chapters 1, 13 & 16), eating disorders (chapter 15), and severe mental illness (chapter 18).  

GAPC overlooks the risk that rapid affirmation concretizes patients’ dysphoria or contributes to patients’ regret post-treatment, with some even attempting to return to their natal sex. Such detransitioned individuals are now suing surgeons, endocrinologists, and psychiatrists for damages, claiming their doctors encouraged them to follow measures that are not backed by rigorous science and did not address their co-morbid conditions. They are suing health systems employing such doctors and the professional organizations (the American Academy of Pediatrics in the Isabelle Ayala lawsuit) that uncritically endorse unproven and irreversible treatments. It appears that the APA is either unaware of or has chosen to ignore such risks and outcomes for patients and for those that promote, teach and provide these treatments. 

GAPC condemns any attempt to prevent such iatrogenic harm through careful evaluation, wrongly dismissing widely-accepted, less invasive psychotherapeutic treatments as “conversion therapy” (p. 291). Instead, GAPC proposes that patients struggling with gender-related distress be taken at their word that “gender” is the source of the problems and rushed to treatments that may lead to irreversible sterility, anorgasmia, surgical complications, and life-long dependence on exogenous hormones and medical interventions. This aggressive approach discounts the possibility that many of these children, if not initiated on blockers and hormones, would eventually conclude that their early gender dysphoria was the developmental prelude to a healthy, non-heterosexual adult orientation.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has similarly advocated for gender-affirming care by publishing a policy statement in 2018, a stance it recently reaffirmed. The AAP now finds itself named in the Ayala case, cited above, on claims that it improperly endorsed harmful care that is not backed by evidence. Its publishing house was accepting pre-orders for a book promoting gender-affirming care until December 6, 2023 when the book was removed, with refunds offered, pending further review. We hope the APA heeds the AAP’s example and retracts GAPC. 

Encouraging any physician, trainee, program or provider to view this book as “cutting-edge” “best practices” is unacceptable, unethical and unsafe. We urge APA Publishing to consider its responsibility to promote and protect patients’ safety and their mental and physical health, and to uphold its own claim to be “the world’s premier publisher of books, journals, and multimedia on psychiatry, mental health, and behavioral science”. To avoid discrediting itself as a professional organization and a reliable source of gender related psychiatric care, and to minimize the risk of legal liability to itself, we call on the APA to withdraw this book. 

==

“Psychosis alone is not a contraindication to gender-affirming services,” the authors write.

Jesus fucking Christ. Being delusional and divorced from all reality doesn't disqualify you from having your breasts or testicles cut off.

These people are complete fucking lunatics.

[safflowerseason]

josh schwartz is *the* textbook example of how white men can fail upward.

[brian-houchins]

8 Essential Principles of Information Architecture Explained

In the ever-evolving landscape of web design, Information Architecture (IA) emerges as a discipline still in its formative stages, constantly shaping and reshaping its identity. This scenario stands in stark contrast to graphic design, which benefits from well-established theories widely recognized and shared across numerous textbooks. IA’s journey, devoid of a universally accepted theoretical framework, begs the question: Why hasn’t there been a convergence towards standard IA principles similar to those in other design fields?

The quest for a theoretical framework in IA is akin to mapping an unexplored terrain. Comparable to how white space, typography, and color theory provide guidance to graphic designers, one wonders if IA should not also have its own set of guiding principles.

Personal Principles: Charting a Course in IA’s Uncharted Territories

In the absence of industry-wide consensus on a standard theory, the field has seen the emergence of personal principles that offer direction while allowing room for exploration and adaptation to the unique demands of individual projects. These principles, though not prescriptive, serve as navigational tools, guiding design decisions through the complex terrain of IA.

These principles were initially formulated to provide a solid theoretical base in response to a client’s need to justify their design direction. This framework, grounded in extensive research and iterative development, highlights the reasoning behind specific design choices.

1. The Principle of Objects

In IA, content is treated as dynamic, almost like a living entity with its own lifecycle, behaviors, and attributes. This idea, inspired by object-oriented programming, sees each content type as an object with unique properties and behaviors, fostering sophisticated relationships and interactions within the content ecosystem.

2. The Principle of Choices

Inspired by Barry Schwartz’s “The Paradox of Choice,” this principle emphasizes the importance of offering meaningful, focused choices in web design to mitigate user anxiety and decision paralysis, particularly in content-rich environments like corporate intranets.

3. The Principle of Disclosure

Based on the concept of progressive disclosure, this principle advocates for revealing information in layers, balancing content depth with user engagement. It’s about providing just enough information to pique interest and encourage deeper exploration.

4. The Principle of Exemplars

Drawing from cognitive science studies on categorization, this principle uses representative examples to define content categories, aiding users in navigation and understanding the scope of each category.

5. The Principle of Front Doors

Recognizing that many users may enter a website through various pages, this principle stresses the need for every page to function as a potential entry point, guiding newcomers through the site and beyond their initial landing page.

6. The Principle of Multiple Classification

This principle acknowledges the diversity in user search behaviors and motivations, advocating for various classification schemes to cater to different user perspectives.

7. The Principle of Focused Navigation

Focused navigation aims to avoid mixing disparate elements within the navigational structure, ensuring each menu or tool has a clear and singular purpose.

8. The Principle of Growth

Finally, the Principle of Growth anticipates the inevitable expansion of content, advocating for the creation of adaptable and scalable structures that can evolve with the growing digital content landscape.

Conclusion: The Way Forward in IA

These principles, while not exhaustive or universally endorsed, provide a guiding framework in the intricate world of IA. They serve as a starting point for discussion and development, acting as a compass in the still uncharted territory of information architecture. As the field continues to mature and expand, it’s conceivable that these principles might lay the groundwork for a more standardized theoretical framework, clarifying the path for future explorers in the realm of IA.

[cyarskaren52]

Tom Sandoval Finally Apologizes to Ariana Madix for Sordid Raquel Leviss Affair

Better late than never we suppose, huh?

Also, some might accurately say, way too little and way too late.

On Tuesday, Tom Sandoval issued a lengthy statement on Instagram, finally addressing Ariana Madix directly over the painful and personal way he forced her to end the couple’s nearly decade-long relationship.

Madix learned about the affair last week after discovering inappropriate text messages between her boyfriend and her colleague.

“I want to first and foremost apologize to everyone I’ve hurt through this process,” Sandoval began yesterday. 

“Most of all, I want to apologize to Ariana. 

The musician and businessman continued:

“I can only imagine how devastating this has been for Ariana and everyone around us. I feel really horrible about that. 

“My biggest regret is that I dishonored Ariana. I never meant to disappoint so many people, including our loving families and friends.”

Sandoval went on to reflect on his long relationship with Madix. 

“My love for Ariana was stronger than any camera could ever have captured,” he wrote. 

“Some of our best times together were never filmed. The same goes for some of our biggest struggles. I wish things happened in a different order and our relationship was not severely tarnished, and that it ended with the same respect for her that it began with.

Concluded the unethical star in his message:

“I am beyond sad that it ended the way it did.

“The choices I made hurt so many people. I acted in a way that clashes with who and how I want to be. I will continue to reflect and work on myself. 

Previously, Sandoval asked critics to direct their ire over this situation only at him — and to leave his restaurant/business partners alone.

“Hey, I fully understand an deserve ur anger & disappointment towards me, but please leave [Tom] Schwartz, my friends and family out of this situation,” Sandoval wrote via Instagram on Saturday, March 4, adding:

“Schwartz specifically only found out about this very recently, and most definitely did not condone my actions. This was a very personal thing…

“I’m so sorry that my partners, Greg, Brett, and Schwartz and our employees have to suffer for my actions. I will be taking a step back & taking a hiatus out of respect for my employees & partners. 

Among those unimpressed by Sandoval’s statements on this scandal, meanwhile, we present Lala Kent.

She continued to share her unfiltered thoughts during an Amazon Live appearance on Tuesday.

“Tell us you’re a narcissist without telling us you’re a narcissist. It’s just so textbook to me,” she said of Sandoval’s first mea culpa, adding of him and Leviss:

I don’t feel for them at all. But I never have. This just was like, ‘You’re disgusting’ but never liked either of you.

T

Sent from my iPhone

[sushrutalgs]

Journey to Success: Rank 1 – Dr. Jaydeep Aher – NEET SS 2023 – Surgical Group

Dr. Jaydeep Aher, NEET SS 2023 Surgical Group Rank 1, shares his success story in this Sushruta LGS blog. He emphasizes the importance of a balanced approach combining textbook reading with solving MCQs and revision. He highlights the benefits of utilizing resources like Sushruta LGS's chapter-wise notes based on Bailey & Sabiston or Schwartz, which helped him grasp key concepts efficiently. He also credits structured revision and practice tests for his success. The blog emphasizes a focused and disciplined study strategy for conquering NEET SS Surgery. Read the Full Blog Here: Journey to Success: Rank 1 – Dr. Jaydeep Aher – NEET SS 2023

[soggy-waffled-person]

Last song: I/Me/myself by will wood

currently watching:I just finished The Afterparty season 1 and I gotta start season 2!

currently reading:History textbook lol in terms of fanfics, I abandoned one do to loss of interest :( it was so good but I couldn’t stay in the fandom

current hyperfixation: rc9gn, the afterparty, still hanging on to dear life to Rottmnt/TmntMm, and anything else Ben Schwartz related <3

Open to all since I have terrible memory

7 People You’d Like to Know Better

Thank you @skyrim-forever ! I pass the torch to: @john-liberal @theauthor27 @dynamite124 @kynarreth @rock-pikmin-is-funny @serbiadisturbia @gemsweater72

Last song listened to: Be my Everything (English Version). It’s a solo song from one of the members of a K-pop group named Purple Kiss, and it’s fantastic! Great vocals, even though I do prefer the other song from the single more.

Currently Watching: Nashville (2013) and the new season of The Dragon Prince. I only have one episode of Nashville left and it’s the finale, so that’s pretty sad. I’m three episodes into season 5 of Dragon Prince and really liking it! I’m glad the animation has improved since the beginning.

Currently Reading: Nothing now. I just finished Dear Mothman by Robin Gow and loved it though! It is written for young teens, but it’s a really great queer narrative and is written through some very nice free verse poetry.

Current Obession: It’s mainly Skyrim (liked it so much I made a Tumblr blog for it, after all), but since I talk a lot about that, I’ll also mention Hollow Knight. I’m playing it right now and it’s very hard, but very good! I like how little handholding it does.

[dreamerswriter]

I Watched This Recently and It is Actually Pretty Good

Hey everyone! So, I don’t know when I’ll make the youtube video for this, but I plan to once I am done with classes. So, here’s the script for it since I finished writing it. This is basically what I would personally hope for if they ever come back and make another season of this or two. I think two would be better, but it will likely get one. Regardless, there is something here and I love this show way more than I thought I would. I do highly recommend it for the animation, style, story, and if you need a laugh and some good moments. 

To clarify something, I did watch this when I started high school. I didn’t get to finish it, because life happens and Disney wasn’t showing it much on my end. I finally finished it in a month, so yeah.

May 7, 2022: I updated this to add one more part to this. I will have the video on my channel on May 9th! Thanks for reading and enjoying this!

May 9, 2022: Here’s the link to video if you want that. I don’t know if you do since there is this already, but it doesn’t hurt to share. 

https://href.li/?https://youtu.be/uK516qs5BWw

I have nothing else to say other than I would honestly like another season. So, here’s the script I wrote for if this show got another season or two. I’ll make the video soonish. I also plan to do a review video on it too. Either way, I like this. He feels like a high school kid and did half the nonsense my friends and I did when we were his age. We weren’t smart and we are barely smart now. Enjoy! 

Introduction:

Hello everyone, I am the writer, I have no words to describe the nonsense this show is, but here we are. To be honest, I like this, because it is my guilty pleasure with magical girl shows and an idiot clearly in over his head and being a normal teenager.

Again, this show is going through a renaissance right now, and I have no clue. The best I can come up with is that Ben Schwartz being Sonic launched this, but I don't know. Or, it is because Kick Buttwaski got the third season, and fans of this show want it. To be honest, I do too. There is something here and it has a charm to it. The humor and style, and the characters. It is great and consistent and finished the main goal of it.

Rules

So, I don't know where to start with this, but I will keep some rules in mind as I write this.

I will keep the episodes in the 15-minute format.

Randy will appear in all the episodes

I will keep all the cast the same. Not adding nor subtracting anyone.

The sorcerer will not return to be a major character in the newer seasons.

Just a personal note, please don't change the animation. I love it. It is so good. I think it is wonderful. Please do not change it.

Also, these are just my ideas. This is just what I think would be fun to see if the show ever continues or gets picked up. This is just what I hope to see. I am sure a ton of fans have ideas of their own and maybe they are secretly working on this and already have the entire thing planned out from beginning to end. Also, this is for fun!  And you can have your ideas. So, just enjoy it and have fun. Again, for fun!

If anyone from the show is watching this for some odd reason, you are free to take this and use it. I am not kidding. I want to see this end, so if this helps, please take it. I just want to see more of this show and the content. Please do more with this show.

I will make this assumption. Randy and his classmates might be juniors if we pick this up. The reason I believe this is because he had a chemistry textbook in season 2. I can believe that he and his classmates wear the same clothes to high school for two years and that he was a sophomore. I do believe he is junior now with most of the cast. I'm also basing this off the public school system in North America because he is clearly from one.

I believe two more seasons would be the best to wrap this up.

Each season is a year of high school which I think is fine. You would normally graduate in four years anyway.

Season 3 will be a junior year and the last and fourth one will be a senior year.

Also, they need new clothes. I do love how they do have different outfits, but for junior and senior years, they should get a new wardrobe. I think it would reflect the passage of time.

Also, and I cannot believe I am saying this, thanks to Disney plus, they can come back to this and work on it. Also, I think this would benefit from a whole release than a weekly one considering it is an animated series. Similar to how Visions was released. That would work out well for it.

I think that’s it.

We will start with season 3.

Sorcerer's Origin

So, let's address one episode I think we all want and will kind of break a rule.

One episode that can be a two-part special is the sorcerer. I know I said we should move on from this guy, but I think an origin story would be fine. It can start the third season off with Randy sitting in his new room and reading the book and seeing the origin of the Sorcerer which can lead to the new antagonist the sorcerers. She got out of the land of shadows once, she can do it again. I think it would work well and even see the return of the First one and his sidekick. This can be two parts to pace itself and also get the audience caught up to the third season.

The Book

I know we love the 800-year-old non-binary book, but I want an episode on it. I know it is alive because it reacts to Randy and the situation he is in. It also created an evil version of him and has done so many things that I want an explanation. That can be 15 minutes, but to tie into this, we could get the second part being the book's perspective. I will be honest, I thought we would've gotten an episode on the book's POV. I'm surprised they never did that. I would love to see the book's POV on some situations Randy gets himself into. We can even have the First one and his sidekick appearing.

Sorceress' Return

Again, she got out before, she can get out again. I also think this would be an interesting parallel to Randy. Look, we all know Theresa is supposed to be his love interest, but I can see her becoming a tri protagonist to Randy and Howard and that's not a bad thing. Sam, Danny, and Tucker are a trio, heck kingdom hearts exists, so it can work. I think she's spunky enough to join them and go on adventures. I'll talk about her in the next section

As for the sorceress, she could return and try to steal energy from others and go after Randy once she discovers that he made the sorcerer turn good and gain peace. Heck, she can take different forms and stay at the school.

She could also stink Randy and Howard, two characters who haven't had those forms. It would be interesting to see and figure out how to save them. I really can see her being the next threat.

Theresa Being a Protagonist

I believe she was going to have a bigger role in the next season since she was featured in the final ish. I know I am grasping at straws, but I can see her becoming a protagonist. She does open a lot of potential storylines in the series.

I feel like her and the Sorceress would be an interesting parallel. We don't know much about the sorceress's relationship with the sorcerer other than they love to cause chaos together, but considering she manipulates boys to do her bidding and to earn her affection, I don't know how long that relationship would've lasted.

As for Theresa, she likes Randy for who he is and what he does. She doesn't want him to change and wants him to be who he is. There are little deleted moments where she is sad he doesn't think about asking her to the dance in the episode. She is confident, but she does love Randy for who she is. Even if we don't quite understand it.

With her, you can also do plotlines that can have her finding out who Randy is, and maybe she gets a turn with the suit. She can get sucked into the book. Her relationship with Debbi would be interesting to see. Heck, maybe something with the cheer team. I can honestly see that being interesting episodes. She would be a calmer version of Sam, but still have the spunk to help out and go on adventures.

Randy's Parents

I know this show has done fine without his parents, but I think it would be nice to see his parents. We know he has a mother who comes and goes. She probably has a job. We know he has a father, but we have no idea what either of them does as a job. He does have a good relationship with both since they do give him a curfew and don't hesitate to punish him when he does mess up. I also think the mother must be aware that her son is the Ninja and that would be a good dynamic. I can also see her supporting her son as being the Ninja. As for the father, I have no idea. We know more about the mom than the dad. I also don't think they need to appear more. Just do one episode with his mother and then the second one with the father. Then, they could appear here and there. They don't need to be main characters, but they will be there on and off which I think is fine.

Prom

This is one of the highlights of high school. One is not all the highlights of high school. I can see this being a huge shipping moment for Randy and Theresa and technically Howard and Debbi too since Howard kind of has an interest in her, but I can also see him and Howard messing up everyone else's prom. I don't know. I feel like this would be an episode where something plot-important would happen along with shipping moments. It is prom! Let them have a dance! Randy can dance and Theresa is a cheerleader, give it to me!

Conclusion to Season 3

To be entirely honest, I have no idea how this will end. I hope it ends similarly to how Howard sort of helps him defeat his enemies, but with Theresa too. Yes, if it isn't obvious enough, I love them. they're so cute together. I think it would be a fitting end to the sorcerers too. Being defeated by their version of love, I don't know. I know romance is not the point of this show, but I think it would be sweet. At the same time, I don't know how many people would be fine with that. I think it would work as a way to parallel how Randy and Howard did work together to sort of stop evil Julian. Having Theresa help Randy beat the sorcerers would be a good parallel too. Either way, I think it would work.

Hopefully, she'll either find peace or something else. I think she'll be defeated than find peace. I think that would be an interesting ending for her, but since this show does redeem or give its characters peaceful endings, she'll have one. Maybe she'll move on from love and magic or find her love. I don't know, someone else writes the ending for me.

Then, we have Season 4

Viceroy as the Final Main Antagonist

The past seasons are a villain origin story if I ever saw one forming besides Harry Osborn. The way his boss treated him! I'm honestly surprised he hasn't started a coup! He could do it. He's evil enough too, but also, he's redeemable too. I don't think it would be like the sorcerers, but something else. Like an apology but heartfelt. Again, this man is one bad day from being a villain and we've seen it throughout the show too. If anything precious to him is lost, he will destroy the city for it. All I am saying is that man did see where the Chaos Pearls fell and would be able to figure out how to use it.

McFist + Viceroy Past

We know McFist and the ninja of 85 had a past together and that his wife was a daycare worker. But how did they meet? What did Viceroy get out of this? Seriously, why do you bother to work for the worst person in the universe? What do you gain out of this?! Please tell me! Also, and yeah, I'm not a fan of the wealthy man, but how did he lose an arm and then give it a brain? That's a story! That's a story! But mainly, I want Viceroy. I do.  Sure, evil college school was cool, but how did you meet this terrible person? Tell me!

The Last 8 Chapters + Spider-Verse But Ninjas

I love the first Ninja and we get another one who is Kronk. I think a good idea would be for Randy to see some other notable ninjas in a spider verse kind of way but either with time travel or something happening to the book. This book has been alive for 800 years. I want to see more of them! Show me more! I think it would work. This could also help them revisit old concepts or even help him finish training the last 8 chapters since this kid is supposed to be the chosen one which is insane. I don’t know who decided that, but all right. I think it would work and show each Ninja helping him learn the last 8 chapters. This would be an interesting arch in this season, because again, Viceroy seems to be a bigger threat.

The Creeper

Going to be entirely honest, I think Randy would keep his memory of the book. I believe some people might’ve kept their memory of being the ninja. I can see him being one of them. Heck, maybe the Creeper will give him the book and become the guardian. Of course, that depends if Randy wants to go to college or do something else with his life which is also a valid way to end this.

Either way, he and the swordsmith need an episode about their pasts. I can see this also being a two-part episode, but I think four would be better to flesh it out.

Tengu's Past

So, he burnt the mask. Unless every ninja goes through this, the Tengu fireball is something unique to Randy, right? I have no clue. I want to know more about the bird. So bad. I want to know how this existed and was sealed into a stone. How does this work? Are there more mythical creatures? Why didn't the first one use it? I have so many questions and so few answers!

And they could even bring back a concept that was featured in the games a cold form of the suit. Again, there are interesting concepts. I wouldn't be surprised that besides the tengu, there is something else in the suit. I believe it could work too. But how did he meet the bird and why don't we see more of it? I want him to summon it like a persona! What can I say, I'll always be a video game nerd first.

Conclusion to Season 4

If anyone is going to reveal Randy's Identity, it's Viceroy. This would be a four-part ending too. I can see Viceroy revealing Randy's identity in the first part of the final and then having to deal with that.

Also, magic and machines are not a combination you want to fight. That would overwhelm Randy. However, I think this final would be in four parts, and Howard and Theresa would do something to help him with Creeper too.

For the first two-part episode, I can see Viceroy revealing who Randy is to everyone as Viceroy goes mad with power and tries to destroy the world. Heck, maybe he damages or destroys the Nomicon. There's your angst to anyone who ships Randy with the book! As for how Howard and Theresa could help, I can see them picking Randy and helping him through the pain of losing the book and possibly dooming their city. They can similarly help him as to how MJ and Ned did in Spider-Man No Way Home and Far From Home. I can see Theresa stealing the Chaos Pearls as Howard destroys the machines. I also imagine Randy not being here, because he feels like a failure and beating himself over this mess. Then, the Creeper comes in and helps Randy back up to his feet to fight the Viceroy. I think what would snap Randy back is seeing both Howard and Theresa getting captured by Viceroy. Randy saves them, thanks to them, and goes back to fight the Viceroy.

The second two-part episode can be Randy fighting Viceroy and doing what he can, but his power isn't enough. Randy realizes that he has to get McFist to make him apologize to Viceroy. Of course, he trusts Theresa and Howard. As for Randy, he gets to use the powers of all the Ninjas. I can sort of see him using their skills and teachings as he gets the Chaos Pearls away from Viceroy. Without the magic, Viceroy is still a threat and uses his machines. He effortlessly beats Randy, because again, the engineer is smart and probably programmed his machines to handle their fight against Randy. So, just as Randy is getting beaten, Howard and Theresa arrive with McFist who genuinely apologies to Viceroy for what he has done.  Viceroy calms down and Randy destroys the machines to then destroy the Chaos Pearls once and for all.

Afterward, Viceroy and McFist make up, and the scene changes to them about to graduate from high school. I can see the three of them preparing to get a mind wipe but don't. I think the Creeper would mind-wiping them and I see him giving Randy the book and mask. This would be along the lines of "my time is done. It is your turn". I can see Randy hanging on to the book and mask, but I can also see him heading to college or doing something else. I think both or either works as an ending. But, I think maybe the Creeper will still stay and watch the book and mask, but I don't think Randy will lose his memory. I can honestly imagine the ending scene where a new ninja is watching the school and fighting evil as Randy looks from a distance and smiling, proud and content. But to be honest, I have no clue how this should end, so again, go nuts with this. I think this has the potential to have any kind of ending and that's pretty awesome.

Stuff I wasn't sure where to put in the video, so this is where it goes.

Everyone does not like Bash

I just think it would be hilarious if there was an episode where Bash leaves and then everyone in the school throws a party. I just think that would be hilarious until the book snaps Randy out of it to teach him a lesson.  As for the ending, Bash does leave because he finally graduated, I don't know. Someone can come up with a better reason, or maybe he doesn’t leave. Maybe they interpret it wrong. That is probably what will happen.

Dear Nomicon

I thought the second season was going to have Randy start writing in the book and informing it about what he learned over the years. Yes, I am thinking of Twilight who would write to Princess Celestia. I thought that's what was going to happen. I just think that would've been funny to see, but I also think it would be a good way to show he's moving on and writing lessons for the future ninjas to use. I don't know if they can even use this without fear of copyrights. I just want someone to draw Randy writing in the book and saying "Dear Nomicon, today I learned not to do this stupid thing" To which the book is thinking "I can't believe you needed to learn that, but I am grateful you did"

Nomi Randy

For the small-time, he was out, he caused enough chaos. This makes this better when you realize the First Ninja is watching him too. There is more potential with this …. What even is he? He came from the book…. And has a Boston accent. I have so many questions about this being. So… another episode. Make it a two-part special.

Star Crossover Episode 

If you grew up in the 2000s, then you remember how cool crossover episodes. Billy and Mandy meeting the Kids Next Door to Lilo meeting Kim, Jake, and Penny. Seriously, those were so cool! So, I think out of ever Disney shows around the early 2010s, Star and Randy would've crossed over. For one, in the side game, the two of them have been shown to be good friends. Randy and Star would be good friends, because they are both magical girls. One is clearly based off that while the other has the transformations and power ups. Marco would be losing his mind and freaking out about the chaos. Howard would just be questioning what his life is at this point. Magic, dimensions, and other nonsense. Again, this would be an interesting crossover and just be fun to see. I hope they would get some of the original cast to come back and do this. It would just be fun and doesn't have to be canon unless they want it to. This would be fun to see, but very unlikely to ever happen. 

Conclusion to the Video

This was a video. I am not sure where this came from, and this kind of has nothing to do with the channel's content to an extent. I just thought of this and haven't stopped since. I like this show. It is a lot of fun. Making this video was also fun. I want more of this show and I think it is possible to see more of it, I hope. Also, this was for fun. I am sure everyone has their ideas of their version of how this series should end, and hey, you can share down below if you want. Well, that's it for this video. Thank you for watching, be sure to subscribe, like, and comment, and have a wonderful day! Goodbye.

[chaifootsteps]

HINKLES

Next up is another somewhat-rarity in the Seuss world, the Hinkle, which traditionally inhabit the westernmost regions of the Flubrian continent. Known mostly for their prodigious sets of head quills and the problems these cause in less quilled, more litigious areas of the world, Hinkles are easily recognizable by the following traits.

- The aforementioned head quills, which contrary to popular belief, they can’t fire as projectiles. These shed and are regrown constantly throughout their lives. - Broad noses.  - Prominent incisors which lack roots and never stop growing, and need to be worn down with regular chewing. - Small rounded ears. - Short coats, usually of a lighter color. - Short to moderate heights.

The thing you have to know about Hinkles is that they tend to be extremely family-oriented by nature. Unlike Bumbles, who form communes, Hinkles are all about family specifically. This could take the form of a romantic partnership, four generations living under the same roof, or a group of friends that have made a life together, but once that bond is formed, it’s set in iron. Case in point: the Hinkle-Horn Honking Club, well known in the West Flubrian music scene, who famously refuse to sleep more than an arm’s length from one another.

Our Linda Schwartz fan is clearly a cross with something else -- possibly Who, but given her rounded face and the presence of head hair, also possibly Zode. However, the nose, teeth, and effortless mohawk are all textbook Hinkle.

[di--es---can-ic-ul-ar--es]

Lmao one time the business department had a screening of a documentary about aaron Schwartz and the professor who put it together was like "there are both sides to consider" and I heckled her I was like "no theres only one side jstor sucks pirate textbooks" but since i was the only non-deadeyed person in the room and i was participating at all she tolerated it

[yiulee999]

‼️‼️‼️

One handsome, motivational egg please! 📚📚

[awesomerextyphoon]

A Warrior’s Heart

Prologue 

Main Paring: Stucky x Black!OFC (Ifekerenma ‘Ife’)

Warning: Graphic Depictions of Violence, War Crimes, Corruption, Smut, Mentions of Anxiety, Depression, and possible Panic Attacks

Rating: 18+/Explicit

Word Count: 1,461

Summary: Ife didn’t mean to have her employers be the subject of a hostile takeover by Stark Industries. She just held up the city of Novi Grad long enough for the Avengers to defeat Ultron. So naturally, Tony finds and blackmails her into joining the team. No good deed goes unpunished, huh?

A/N: This is my first long form (12+ chapters) story. I’m including characters and/or aspects from Disney’s Atlantis: the Lost Empire, Lilo & Stitch, Big Hero 6, Gargoyles, Inuyasha, and Toriko. Furthermore, I will be including elements of Netflix MCU and Agent Carter as well. Special thanks goes to @jtargaryen18​ for the title. Reposting on any site without my permission is strictly forbidden. Reblogs are welcomed! 😊

Series Masterlist 

Main Masterlist

Just keep the lie going.

That’s the line many of us have to repeat every day, and by us, I mean Non-Humans. Throughout history, humans have created myths and legends about us; some are true, others complete nonsense, but most are somewhere in between.

Let’s rewind a bit, okay?

Life on Earth lines up with most of what the textbooks say until about 5M BCE. Beings that would later be called gods and goddesses start to form with Mother Earth (the Amazing Gaea) as the focal point with other beings such as dragons, elves, and giants start to show two million years later.

The Celestials (sanctimonious assholes) came to Earth to see what’s happening after hearing about various fantastical anomalies (or that they were just bored). Gaea encouraged some (about 30K) of the human ancestors (Homo Erectus) to ‘the Space Gods’ direction. It took a few months, but they were able to create the species that later be known as Eternals. They also did some other shit but Gaea kicked them out when they wore out their welcome.

Around 200KBCE, the Kree (galactic genocidal nationalistic maniacs) happened upon a group of Eternals living on Uranus and traveled to Earth to ascertain whether other beings had similar potential. They experimented on a good number of early humans (about 150K survived) thus creating the first Inhumans (Inhomo Supremis). Several members of the Kree expedition tried to turn the Inhumans into weapons of the Kree Empire but were kicked off the planet by remaining Eternals and Non-Human factions.

Ten thousand years later (190KBCE), other early humans congregated around ‘magical hotspots’ which led to the births of the Homo Magi, Homo Superius, and Homo Animalis sub-species.

Soon after (okay, 15,000yrs later. Leave me alone.), the Mother Crystal (a semi-sentient comet, or Matag Yob) descended onto the island continent of Atlantis, imbuing the human inhabitants with longevity, knowledge, prosperity, and protection. At its height (around 55KBCE), Atlantis became the technological/cultural center on Earth (besides the Eternals).

It didn’t last long, though.

Five thousand years later (50KBCE), the first (and hopefully only) Pantheon War broke out. What exactly happened is lost to history (none of the people involved will fess up.), but what we do know is that shit went down.

Hard.

All that is known (admitted) is that almost all of the pantheons got into a Pantheon War (probably over some dumbass reason), a failed invasion by the Kree (really?), and the whole continent of Atlantis ‘sank’ into the sea in the span of three years (though some escaped).

Neat.

Fast-forward about 38K years (yeah, we’re making some jumps here) to the beginnings of the three most technologically advanced human nations of Earth: Wakanda, Sypavê, and Fetuilelagi; each with their own extraterrestrial metals/minerals.

Earth was pretty quiet until the ‘Christianity Dilemma’. So around 90CE, several ‘deities’ from the Greco-Roman, Norse, Germanic, and Celtic pantheons called for a Council of the Godheads’ to discuss ‘the ‘threat’ with Archangel Michael. It worked out well enough (no one wanted another Pantheon War).

Most of the world was in a pretty good state with a few ‘hiccups’ until the Bubonic Plague aka ‘The Black Death’ hit in 1346/7. It ravaged Eurasia and North Africa killing at least ½ the population and was seen as the start of non-belief in Europe. Worse, it was the beginning of Non-Human persecution and discrimination. You see, while the Black Death took out humans left and right, the worse a Non-Human got was a two-day flu. Many started to return to their respective realms once the Plague subsided and their once friendly neighbors started to accuse and persecute them.

The feeling of unease did not end but rather subsided. A tip from a Non-Human in Queen Isabella’s court alerted several groups in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Genocidal rapist, sex-trafficker, and all-around monster, Christopher Columbus does make it to the ‘New World’ (people were already there, dumbass) and devastated the indigenous population for centuries to come. By the time Columbus was executed in 1498, it was too late.

As many as 40 – 70% of the indigenous population was wiped out due to ‘virgin soil epidemics’ such as smallpox and influenza. Pantheons from negatively impacted areas called for a Council of the Godheads and demanded the ‘deities’ of the colonizers take action.

It went about as well as you’d think.

Earth was about to be embroiled in another Pantheon War until a few ‘level-headed’ individuals struck a bargain. No one was to interfere with human affairs whether it be good or ill. It was later amended to not have any ‘divine’ intervention (Sure). So by 1593, they had ‘bowed out’ of Earth affairs outside of their respective demi realms.

Outside of the matters of the ‘gods’, the rest of the world was dealing with its own problems. Tensions between humans and non-humans grew since the immediate aftermath of the Black Death. The Age of Enlightenment had started to pop up in intellectual circles across Europe around 1647. It focused on reason and free-thinking (Neat), but it also stoked up fear and anxiety towards Non-Humans (Boo!). Things came to a head in the 1670s. It got so bad that the Inter-Realm Parliament ordered all Non-Humans that weren’t exiled to return. They later founded the Bureau of Non-Human Affairs, BNA, in 1692 to deal with such matters in the future.

Two white-passing Non-Humans, Marcus Ashton and Jakob Schwartz founded Ashton & Schwartz Inc in 1809 along with a private partner. The company made waves in biomedical, chemical, agricultural, and climate science (they had to explain it to the populace) as well as pollution cleanup/prevention. One of their biggest inventions was a truly biodegradable plastic-like substance called biokivó̱tio or biokivo for short. The company made an even bigger impact with Non-Humans by solving issues pertaining to agriculture, large scale portal creation, and maintenance.

When the founders’ private partner decided to shut down the company in 1928, Ashton & Schwartz were a household name (especially since all major fossil fuel investments ended in 1900).

Barely ten years later and the threat of World War II rocked the planet to its core, especially the dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war Council went behind current President Henry Wallace’s back and had them done on the same day,  August 7, 1945.

Well, that got everyone’s attention.

The Inter-Realm Parliament issued an edict that every one of ‘age’ (biologically 18+) would have to spend at least five consecutive years amongst the humans. It didn’t take long for BNA to lay the groundwork.

Wakanda, Sypavê, and Fetuilelagi (who will now be known as The Unconquered Alliance or UA.) saw this as a ‘we need to end this’ type of situation. Within three weeks of the bomb dropping, they formulated a plan and got to work kicking the colonizers out of Africa, starting with Belgian-colonized Congo (80% of the uranium used in the bombs were mined from there). They also made a deal with British-colonized India.

Once they were successful in their test run, The U.A. moved forward with similar models until they were to liberate the continent in 1955. Meanwhile, Sypavian forces kicked out most of the Nazis that fled to South America and ended US/European influence in Central and South America.

The United States tried to play it neutral until The UA (mainly Fetuilelagi) freed Hawai’i from US occupation in 1951. The war was sold as “We must fight to preserve our freedom!” (Keep telling yourselves that).

Once both South/Central America and Africa were liberated, other colonized nations asked for their aid. UA agents/dignitaries offered to relocate Black people from the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. As many as five million African-Americans took the offer, including former Howling Commando, Gabe Jones. By then the US was clamping down domestically through the FBI and local/state police.

Irked by the knowledge that the UA had satellites, the US jumpstarted the Space Race (they had more than a few satellites, but good for you).

As with most wars, both sides partook in some ‘questionable actions’ (i.e. Syria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Cambodia, and Laos).

The war climaxed in 1977 when a UA (Sypavian) agent discovered plans for a super-weapon in the US. A Special Ops team led by N’Jobu realized that the weapon was a mega bomb that would’ve wiped out the African Continent.

After weighing their options, The UA came to an agreement with BNA: BNA would gather their most powerful Homo Magi and cast a spell to erase the memory and evidence of the war from every human outside of the UA in exchange for letting some Non-Humans live openly in UA borders.

They shook on it, unaware of the chaos that would follow.

Next>>

---------

Taglist:@opheliadawnwalker3​ @sherrybaby14​ @stargazingfangirl18​ ​ @hevans-angel​ @threeminutesoflife​ ​ @cockslut-padalecki​ @golden-ariess​  @sapphirescrolls​ @holylulusworld