#Some Humpty Dumpty Level Shit

[runningfrom2am]

the sea around us; chapter one

In which Rafe Cameron has to choose between his dad and a pogue who's changing his outlook on life more and more every day.

(rafe cameron x f!oc)

(eventual!jj maybank x f!oc)

warnings/tags: violence, drug/alcohol use, smoking, sexual content (if you squint), slowburn, older brother’s best friend, (these tags are obv not exhaustive but regardless it’s pretty PG13)

wc: 1.9k

my masterlist, series masterlist, requests

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

The Outer Banks. Paradise on earth. At least, that is what the giant sign on the bridge described it as, as we drove into the city that has been my home since eighth grade. I remember seeing it for the first time, I was so young, so sad to be leaving my home- and so damn tired after a two-week drive. Seriously, it was like my parents tried to get us as far as humanly possible away from Moose River BC as possible while staying on the same continent. My parents had told me we were moving to paradise, in hindsight I see that they wanted us to be less sad about uprooting our lives so they could get us out of the country without a fuss- because we somehow ended up on The Cut. To be fair, it does remind me of home every day. I missed my friends for a couple of years, but I made new ones and moved on. Never looked back.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

"Snowy- are you seeing this right now? That's like a three story drop." Pope says to me as I shield my eyes with my hand so I can look his way just as he gestures up to John B standing on the roof of the McMansion to be that were hanging out at this afternoon. I sit up slowly from where I'm laying along the railing of the deck, looking up at the curly brunette as he lifted one foot off the edge of the roof.

"Hey, John B, what if you like, didn't risk your life like this right now?" I say, leaning back on my hand that's steadying me. "How'd you even get up there?"

"They're gonna have Japanese toilets with towel warmers." Kie states, walking out of the unfinished patio door onto the porch with us before John B can respond.

"Of course they are, why wouldn't they?" JJ shrugs. Of course, any of us would have that if we could. I'm actually quite certain that Kie herself has heated bathroom floors at her parent's house in Figure Eight. Oh, the Kook life- I'm jealous.

"This used to be a turtle habitat, but who cares about the turtles, right?" Kie sighs just as John B looks like he's losing his balance. "Can you not kill yourself?" She adds, shielding her eyes as well as she looks up at the boy who she just noticed was standing on the edge of the roof.

"Don't drop that beer, I'm not giving you another one." JJ says, and right on cue, John B drops the can in question off the roof as he wobbles on one foot.

"Oh shit! Nooo.." He whined as it hit the ground. Everyone laughs as JJ kicks the can and John B is sulking about it.

Pope and I look over to the temporarily gravel driveway and see a small car pulling in. "Security." I state and Pope picks up his bag.

"Uh, yep let's wrap it up." Pope adds, and John B climbs down from the roof.

"Boys are early today."

I shrug a little at John B's statement as I throw my bag over my back. "Alright Humpty Dumpty, let's roll." JJ says, stepping down the exit ramp he was on with John B close behind.

"Let's go boys." Kie says, joining my side as we pick up a light jog through the construction site. We hear a man's voice behind us, who now seems to be chatting away with JJ like they're friends. If you asked JJ, he'd say that, anyway. "He's asking for it at this point." Kie says as we both glance over at him and giggle.

JJ grabs my hand and laughs as he responds, "Oh am I?" We all pick up the pace to a run through the empty house, down some concrete stairs to ground level. I slip a little on the last step, and JJ half falls with me as we hear the man's voice again just to our left.

"Hey! Stop!"

"Gary! Oh my god, you scared me!" I laugh as JJ pulls me just out of Gary's reach and we run the other way. He yells to the other security guard that we're heading toward him, and I step out of the way right as he reaches for us, and I drop JJ's hand as he gets a hold of him instead. "Not much of a hugger man." JJ says as he instantly slips right out of the man's grasp and runs after me.

I sprint out to the lawn and jump into the back of John B's van, the Twinkie, as he calls it, with Kie right as we see JJ and Pope coming and jumping in behind me. "Come on!" Kie and I shout at the boys, and John B guns it right as they get inside. We keep an eye out the door and back window, as Gary chases after us.

"Check out Gary running for a raise!" Pope laughs as JJ continues a one-sided conversation with the security guard running after us and throwing him a beer- because they couldn't possibly pay him enough.

"You little pricks!" Gary shouts after us as he gives up the chase and we speed away. I climb into the passenger seat next to John B and turn up the music coming from The Twinkie's old speakers.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

We're a glowing example of what everyone in Kildare county knows as the Pogues. Our mission? Have a good time, all the time. Right here, we're cruising Figure Eight- the rich side of the island. Home of the Kooks, where we obviously don't live. Rich folks with vacation homes in two different places, or, Kie put it best, heated towel warmers at the expense of only a few thousand turtle lives lost. The other, superior side of the island, The Cut, is what we call home. Pogues, pogies, the people of the working class, where our people bust their asses to make a living. Lowest members of the Kildare county food chain. So, a downside of being a pogue is that we're ignored and neglected. Upside? We're ignored and neglected, which means we can do whatever we want, whenever we want.

It's two tribes, one island.

Now, for the interesting part, my crew. The people that make my life go 'round. Firstly, there's JJ. Founding member of our club, and the life of every party, the only one who can beat me at a shotgun. It's never a dull moment with him around. He's got a mop of dirty blonde hair, sunkissed skin, and the most beautiful set of blue eyes I've ever seen. I would never live it down if he found out, though. He's about as local as they come- the latest in a long line of fishing, drinking, smuggling, vendetta-holding salt-lifers who make their living off the water. He's also the best surfer I know. Again, don't tell him I said that. Also a ~light~ kleptomaniac and future tax cheat. If we're including that stuff.

Then there's Kie. Kiara. My best girlfriend and platonic soulmate packed into one. She has the prettiest dark curly hair, and when she's not saving turtles, listening to Marley, or getting Dolphin tattoos, she hangs out with us. I don't know why she chose us, but she did and we're all the better for it. She's a rich kid, technically- a foot in both worlds. Her family owns The Wreck, this Outer Banks institution. Total cash cow with the tourists, and actually my first place of employment. Not sure how much her parents love us though, I kind of lost my touch with them after I threw a drink on a customer while I was clocked in. They didn't fire me though, I still work there occasionally when they need the help.

Next in line, there's Pope. Always the brains of the operation and our collective voice of reason. Taller than me by a mile, and a finalist for the Lucas T. Vanderhorst merit scholarship. Definitely the smartest person I know, but often loses his shot with girls when he brings up that he plans on being a coroner. Someone has to do it, I guess. His father's this legendary character, Heyward. Anything you want on the island, Heyward could get it for you. Now I'm not sure what Heyward knew what to make about his son and his friends, but it didn't matter. He's a pogue like us.

Lastly, John B. John Booker, if you want to be technical about it. He's the most loyal person I've ever met, and the other founding member of our club, a true golden retriever boy when you get to know him. You can always rely on JB in a pinch, which happens more often than any of us would care to admit. He's the temporary, not legal, owner of the chateau, our typical hangout and clubhouse. He's the name sake of his dad, and looks just like him. Big John, by now, has been missing at sea for around 9 months. The rest of us have lost hope that he will ever come back, but John B refuses to admit he's gone until his fathers body is found. I understand that. DCS is hot on John B's tail, considering his uncle, his current legal guardian, is quite literally in another state and has been for months.

Then, there's me. Snowy. Snowy Hansley. It's a nickname I never shook from when I first moved to the OBX, being from Canada and all. I'm one to be picked on for using Canadian slang, and an occasional "kick a ginger day" victim. I haven't cut my hair since I moved because my mom says hair holds memories and feelings, so I suppose I'm unintentionally the superstitious type. I was adopted by JJ and John B at a dance a few weeks after I moved to town- my parents wanted me to go and make friends. I held the door for them as they were stepping behind the building to go shotgun before going back in, and JJ asked me to come with them. I'd never drank before, but I supposed I learned to shotgun from the best. Then, the rest is history.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

A/N;

Hi to anyone who's reading this! I hope it's not too cringey, I'm trying to emulate the right vibe.

(EDIT: This first chapter is so shit- I swear it gets so much better so please don't give up on me just yet, I'm going to come back and rewrite this one when I get the chance)

Anyway, thank you for being here and give me your thoughts! I'm not going to give any spoilers but I've got a lot planned for this :).  That being said, please share your ideas and stuff you want to see here with me! Literally I am open to absolutely any suggestions.

Thank you for reading!! It'll get more exciting shortly- I promise. -R

[mastcrmarksman]

[ Prompts / Accepting ] ⸻ @overclocks sent in ❝ Agh... I just wanna... lie down and never get up again... ❞

When Iron Man plummets from the sky, invincible suit of armor taking a beating, there is an oh shit that his heart goes. However, when presented with a situation with that; Clint can't cave to the fear that does slither along his spine and try to coil around his heart. If he stopped, even for a second, to think about how terrifying what he did, what they all did, what the universe was filled with.

He'd be a pancake, less than a pancake, human soup maybe. Clint would have no chance at surviving; but the time for harrowing thoughts of his own fragile morality weren't spare a single second. Thankfully, the help they had called for had come; so this whole world conquering problem will be over with. However, there was still a Tony Stark whose crash landed, and it looked liked it had hurt a lot; Clint looks to see if anyone else is rushing for him but his feet are already moving.

Doing Indiana Jones-esque heroics is not uncommon for him, but it's not exactly the wisest thing he'll ever do nor the safest. Let's not become a pancake yourself before getting to make sure we have scrambled Stark eggs on our plate ⸻ DAMMNIT! His stomach grumbles, the breakfast metaphor having made him hungry. Clint was going to need the food after swinging from a steel cable anchored by arrow to get down to ground level faster.

The landing sticks, managing not to injury anything and is able to spring to his feet, making a full sprint beeline for where Iron Man went down. He makes it to the crater of dirty that Tony had made, which at last Clint isn't having to worry about having to lift chunks of concrete and steel beams. That would have been a better job for literally anything else. ❝ Hey, good job finding an empty lot, moving a mountain of rubble is so annoying. ❞ He laughs, not entirely sure if Tony can still hear him. He may or may not have passed out.

What he hopes his voice doesn't reveal is always how worried he is when any of his friends go down; they were suppose to be invincible, able to take a whole lot more than Clint ever could. ❝ How Humpty Dumpty, are ya? Can all the king's horses and men put you back together again? ❞ Please say something. Dropping out of the sky that high up, flames around the suit, Tony had looked like a comet for a moment. A scary, terrifying, please don't be a dead friend comet.

❝ Agh... I just wanna... lie down and never get up again... ❞

OH THANK GOD for that modulated voice coming through; Clint still rushes over to Tony and prays to God again that the suit isn't too hot to touch, risking burning his hands off, as he reaches to lug Tony up. That's always a pain in the ass, it's the suit fault for that, but it doesn't stop him from trying to help him to his feet.

❝ The crater you made, which you could totally argue you were helping with construction, is not a good place to take a nap. ❞ There was probably never going to be building here, this lot probably locked in some endless legal battle. That is going to be a nightmare for Tony's lawyers to deal with. ❝ The hospital bed with your name on it will be. ❞ The team and the Guardians seem to have wrapped things up from the sound of the comms chatter now. He says something along the lines that Iron Man was fine, only a little toasty. Clint's keeping an arm on him even if Tony doesn't need it or anything, it's more for him. ❝ Good job, Tony, you saved the day. ❞

[the-last-human-war]

GodofWar Punisher WarMachine FutureWinterSoldier MolagBal Sauron

and Turrets, Clogging them Tight... Then we Detonate their Explosives that can only be Triggered by our Command. Also they will Seek and Destroy any and all Machine Gun Turret Artillerymen, and Devour them Alive til there's nothing left, like a Pack of Tasmanian Devils. From under the water come the Juggernauts. It's as if they were Marching across the ocean bottom this whole time, but wait!! Children what the Hell!!?? The Most Cold-blooded Child Soldiers pop out of these Giant Juggernaut Suits wtf is this!!? These Kamikaze Children charge at them armed with only Machetes, except wait a minute, they're wearing some kind of Chemical Bomb Vest, Dispersing a barely visible smoke into the air. It is the next Wave of Hallucinogens and Fear Gas. Meanwhile what the Hell!!... Invisible Soldiers!! They use these Special Energy Beam Guns look like some kind of Ghostbusters shit, except what it does to a Living Body is Scatter the Shattered Pieces of the Soul acrossed the Quantum Realm to be Lost Forever. And it looks Painful too. These crazy Invis Fucks use some fucked up Swords too. Don't let it Impale you. These Swords will Inject Spider Larvae inside you FUCK THIS!!! And I also heard that you might Imagine it's ur Loved Ones stabbing tha shit outta you. Like what kind of fucked up Republic Shit is this?!!!! To make matters worse they sent in their special Drones to make little EMP microbursts just to jam our Radios like that's really even necessary we're all Dead already. Some of the soldiers get their heads chopped off by a Ghost, then Spiders come crawling out like Look at Me, Here I am, FUCK YOU Kermit. Speaking of Frogs I mean seriously KILL MEEE I'M RIGHT HERE DO IT DO IT NOW GET TO THE CHOPPERRRRRRR!!! We're all gonna Die... Them Drones have smothered the Beach with Poison Dart Frogs. The Child Soldiers aren't even Immune to them, I find that even more odd. It's as if they want the Children to die. Hold up wtf is this? All the Coast Guard is Randomly Vomiting and experiencing super Nausea. How the fuck did that happen? Hmmmm. Okay now I'm mad. So this whole time... The Invis Soldiers and Drones have some kind of Kinesis Module, where they could just Snatch the Guns outta our hands whenever they so please??!! FML!!! And even the Juggernaut Suits too, somehow they're operating themselves I'm not totally sure if they're remote controlled Drones, or one of them Invisible Fucks hopped into one. I swear this is Abuse. War Abuse!! I'm calling War Abuse!! Yeah I called it first! I'm surprised they don't use Radiation Bullets fuck me. Okay so the Juggernauts take Easter to a whole new level. Remember that Kinesis Module I mentioned?... They just grabbed a whole Soldier and started Smashing him like Humpty Dumpty. You know... I have seen some SHIT!! Four Juggernauts surrounded one poor little Coast Guard, and RIPPED HIM LIMB 4 LIMB, in Mid Air!!!! This is painful to watch dawg I don't know how long this Hashish is gonna last. You think that's nasty, they finally Rolled in their War Beasts. And when you think of War Beasts you think of Giants right?,,, Battering Rams to Breach the Gates na. Yeah this is actually kinda clever how come I never thoughta that... Velociraptors are you Fucking Serious. Here just take my gun I don't need it, I don't need it. And take my Dick, my Face, my Ass Cheeks, my Arms and my Legs too while your at it. Oh yeah and my Dog Tags too sure I don't need those. Now

[lazybarbarians]

The Secret History of Twin Peaks: A Novel by Mark Frost

Ragnell: It was with a little trepidation that I picked this week’s selection. This is a tie-in to a television series, one that hasn’t been on the air for 25 years, and part of the marketing for the upcoming third season. That’s not a recipe for a great reading experience. But I’ve been itching to read it, partly so I can listen to the podcasts and fan-theories that reference it and partly to get myself back into the Twin Peaks mindset by the 21st I put this. What better way to do so than with a friend?

With that in mind, and preparing for Twin Peaks spoilers pertaining to this book, the first two seasons of the series and the movie, join us below the cut for a review of The Secret History of Twin Peaks: A Novel.

This book takes place from the time of Lewis and Clark all the way past the end of season 2, with annotations from an FBI agent reviewing the material in 2016. As a result there’s a lot of spoilers and information in it, as well as the results of some cliffhangers.

Kalinara: I have to admit, my memory of Twin Peaks isn’t nearly as sharp as yours. I watched, enjoyed it, but I had to resort to the wikipedia entry more than a few times to remember individual character names and who was who. :-) For best effect, I would recommend that casual Twin Peaks fans refresh their memory about the series before they tackle the book.

R:: Well, I do rewatch pretty much the whole series every year. Often live-tweeting it. This year should be fun.

It starts with Lewis and Clark meeting the ancestors of the Nez Perce tribe, who relay to them some legends about the area and show them Owl Cave. From that point forward we go through American History from the tragic fate of Merriweather Lewis through the disgraceful treatment of the Nez Perce tribe with a backdrop of Illuminati vs Mason conspiracy theories and the founding of Twin Peaks and boy scouts witnessing events near Glastonbury Grove until we get to the 40s. A good chunk of the book is spent in the 40s, 50s, and 60s following the investigation of UFO sightings, and the involvement of one Dougles Milford in covering them up. We learn the true origin of the Log Lady, and some interesting bits about some otherwise minor characters. We get plots involving Richard Nixon and Jackie Gleason over this time, with a particularly interesting one involving Jack Parsons, L Ron Hubbard, and Aleister Crowley that implies that rather than the mystical being explained scientifically as evidence of aliens as we usually see when sci-fi and horror collide, the alien encounters may actually have a mystical explanation. It’s all very engaging and interesting and makes me wonder how many of these anecdotes are based on real stories about this historical persons. (A quick google search shows that L. Ron Hubbard actually did run off with Jack Parsons’ girlfriend after they all tried to summon the Goddess together.) We also learn that, aside from Dougie Milford being more important than previously realized, Gordon Cole also knows quite a bit more than he let on.

K: The historical background was interesting, but I felt a little disconnected from the material. It was almost like a setting book in a roleplaying game: “look at these possible plot hooks”, but I didn’t really see the connection to the modern day...or the early 90s show that I remembered. Though I did wonder about “Denver Bob”. It was far more interesting once we got to the scout trip with young Andy Packard and Dwayne Milford. (The picture that was used for young Dwayne Milford looks REALLY familiar to me, and it’s bothering me to no end.)

R: Yeah. “Denver Bob” cannot be a mistake. Also, I have a suspicion about who the “walking owl” (or something with large eyes) was meant to be.

K: I suppose the Illuminati/Mason stuff will be connected to whatever the new series does with the Black Lodge, but it still felt a bit opaque to me. I think maybe I’d like to reread it after we see the new series. The relevance will probably be clearer then.

R: Personally, I think the American History bits are there to establish that most of the bad stuff in Twin Peaks stems from screwing over the Nez Perce.

Aside from that we get the generational background of the Martells and Packards, and Jennings and Hurleys, in the form of town histories and journal entries from characters who observed the messes. We learned what happened after the explosion at the bank, that only Audrey survived and that Catherine never recovered from the loss of her remaining family. We get another version of the story behind Nadine and Ed’s ill-fated marriages, which contradict the stories told in the show, and we find out how Hank Jennings died. And we also get a little bit on the Briggs family, and some tantalizing bits in the footnotes about Cooper’s fate (implied to be tragic.) And what eventually happened to Lana, because you know you wanted to know what happened to Lana Milford, right?

K: Did we know the thing about Josie’s body weighing only 65 pounds or something when she died? I didn’t remember that detail, but as previously established, I’d forgotten a lot. I remember always having mixed feelings about Josie’s plot on the show and I’m not sure the extra backstory really helped. It almost seemed like a checklist of cliches: prostitution rings, Triad connections and so on. I do remember that Josie wasn’t the innocent girl that she seemed on the show, but this seemed like a bit much to me. Either Josie is a delicate flower or a complete Dragon Lady. One stereotype to another. There’s no nuance there. But that was kind of my problem with the character even on the show. I still feel like Joan Chen deserved better.

R: Yeah, her body weighed less but I don’t remember the exact weight. The dossier was overkill. She was implied to be somewhat victimized by Thoams Eckhart, though responsible for her own share of evil. Much more nuanced, but this account (in Cooper’s voice) coldly paints her as a pure predator. Which could be more kicking the character when down, especially as she had arguably the most horrifying end, or could be another inaccuracy in the book. It’s certainly more in line with David Lynch for characters to be rounded, capable of great evil and goodness, sympathetic even in their sin. Particularly women. He doesn’t do “Dragon Lady” very often.

I did really enjoy the book, and I want to watch the series again now that I’ve read it. It puts a new relevance on the Milford plot, gives us closure for a lot of the characters we know won’t be in season three (Catherine, Pete, Andrew, Hank, Major Briggs), leaves some threads open that may be picked up in Season 3 and just fills out some of the mythology without actually explaining it. It gives us some neat stuff from the POV of characters I love like Major Briggs, Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill (although it reveals he hates the nickname Hawk), Agent Cooper and leaves plenty of fodder to argue about which of the supernatural characters match with which of the supernatural occurrences in the book.

It wasn’t as scary to me as the show, but the frightening parts of the show are due to the mood and atmosphere of the film, not the black and white facts and our two main guides through this history, the Archivist and Agent TP, are not atmospheric storytellers, they are direct fact relaters. Also, it’s a Frost book and I believe in the collaboration Frost was responsible for the details of the mythology and the backstory of the characters while Lynch was responsible for making sure the audience felt genuine terror at it.

It is also riddled with contradictions and inaccuracies and I hesitate to call them mistakes because there are simply so many and some are so obvious. The one that stuck out the most to me was Maj. Briggs description of his experiences in the second season. He places his disappearance at the campsite and his return from that closer to the finale, and completely cuts out his experience with Windom Earle. This could be attributed to general confusion from both experiences being so close together, though. He doesn’t mention seeing Sarah in the finale either.

I also noticed the weirdness with Norma’s family. No mention of Annie, Norma’s maiden name is Lindstrom, not Blackburn, and her mother is listed as dying before the show starts. Some of the other reviews I’ve heard have pointed out that the book contradicts itself, such as with Doug Milford’s middle name. The dates are off. The story of Nadine and Ed directly contradicted the story told in the show. Audrey’s reason for being at the bank was different. I don’t think this stuff isn’t on purpose, though. (There’s a whole list others have found.)

It’s not really in character for the Archivist, as his identity is revealed (and for the record, I guessed it around the Roswell stuff) to make so many mistakes so I hope it’s a plot point and not just attributable to human error. Come to think of it, the Ed story is related by Hawk, and he’s one of the characters who never lies in the series.

Despite the reported statement by David Lynch that he hasn’t read this book, I suspect we’ll see the document in some way during the show and that an inaccuracy in it may be a plot point. (Even if Lynch didn’t read it, Frost wrote it and he’s involved in plotting and scripting the show.)

In the end, it’s a good bit of history and “local color” for Twin Peaks when you rewatch the show or watch the new stuff. I know I’ll never look at Doug Milford the same way again.

K: It’s definitely interesting. Given how Twin Peaks originally ended, I can’t begin to guess how much of this book will be relevant or not. But it’s definitely worth a look.

[garblegox]

• Humpty Dumpty Elegy 3 | five books on ☠DEATH🌼 •

The group held a vote on whether to kick Mr. Dumpty out for a year.

Yes won.

I wasn't in on the deliberation, behind the scenes. I'm not a big wig; didn't even get a vote. But I know three big things tipped the scales: Our safety, the perversion, and content violations in chat.

Once we had all taken off our pity goggles, we started to wonder why we overlooked all the murder-suicide commentary. We also thought, in horror, about the reactions of our loved ones, girlfriends, or wives, if we exposed them to Humpty's antics.

A few long-time regulars on the discord were becoming noticeably more absent since he joined. One said a year ago that he wouldn't tolerate Humpty Dumpty's bullshit. He meant it, and he made his point through his actions from the start.

We wanted our other friends back. Friends we'd known for many more years; who actually participate in games with the group; who are gregarious and entertaining; Friends that haven't designated the entire group to be their therapist.

Not everyone had bad memories of Humpty. Because some never logged on when he was in voice chat.

It's officially an elegy.

We all feel gross. Our admin, despite all the negative testimonies, including his own, felt that booting Dumpty was a bitter pill to swallow. He's only ever banned people for egregious, obvious, suicide-by-admin type behavior. But he also felt a bit ashamed for letting people in his group be exposed to such an individual.

In a way, we could hold ourselves responsible for not being more firm in enforcing our boundaries. Five "no"s, and one "yes", means "yes". Five "no"s, a "yes", and a "man, Humpty, you're really a piece of shit, you know that?" also means "yes" just the same. I know how to say "no". And with Humpty, I didn't do my best.

But again, we were never actual therapists, and Humpty rarely acted like a friend. What kind of friend makes you have to consult with books by FBI agents on establishing firm boundaries? Nutty fuckin douchebag friends. I did appreciate him buying me Doom, though. That felt genuinely nice before he cracked a whip at me about it.

This time, I'm gonna try to be far more respectful. He is a human. He is lonely. He does have a lot to learn. And I get no pleasure from his exile. Maybe relief, but no schadenfreude.

Before, I was writing from the perspective of someone at the end of their rope. After experimenting with every level of intensity, trying to get these points across, the only level I hadn't tried was the furious, "Okay fuckhead, you're dead to me. If you don't want to do it the easy way, we'll do it the humiliating way" level of intensity.

It's been fun. But my anger has only one thing left to do, and that's diminish. I got a lot of books for Humpty Dumpty to read, and it's going to be hard to keep the fire hot.

My overall goal is still to share books with people, and to learn from the finest anti-model I've ever met. I told Dump about what I was writing, the reason why, and the fact that I was trying to eviscerate him. He chuckled at me and never got around to reading it, which kind of emboldened me to crank up the spice.

Now that he's cut off, there's a far greater chance he revisits this series. I'll focus on making it actually readable for him too, and not a massive diarrhea cannon aimed at his face. I'll sound like how I spoke to him pre-Twelve Days of Christmas, when I was in investigation mode; When I had hope for him. I got into this mess via sympathy.

"I'm going to kill myself" was Hump's #1 catch phrase. I still reckon he stole it from Wednesday for attention, but whatever, lets just humor him. I don't want that to happen. And if he was ever tempted to really do it, it might be after getting swept off into the goatscape.

So, as we kick off our more namaste-like, Dumpty-free future, let's begin with my favorite books about DEATH. Books a suicidal cat might dig. I know I did.

• #1 Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl •

Cried like a silly bitch at work, the other day, thanks to this book. I re-listened to it on my phone, and you'd think I spent the whole shift slicing onions.

I'm blessed with coworkers whom I can joke about it with. In the kitchen, we have two types of conversations on line: peep-to-peep chatter; or shouting from one corner of the room to the other, as a sort of performance to make front of house laugh.

Our favorite hits include shouting about: Familial trauma or neglect, sleep disrupting insecurities, suicidal thoughts, political cynicism, nihilistic bile, and the last thing we had a good fuckin cry about. Like a half dozen Statlers and Waldorfs, heckling existence itself.

This one produced some rare tears, though. Tears of awe. This feels like one of those, "Read-every-few-years-for-the-rest-of-my-life" type books.

Known as "the third school of Viennese psychology," Viktor Frankl's "Logotherapy" was first put to the test when he survived three years, in four different Nazi concentration camps. From, "logos" meaning, "meaning" or "reason", logotherapy focusses on the existential meaning of a patient's existence.

Frankl would often ask patients, after they spilled out all their woes, "So, why haven't you killed yourself, yet?" It wasn't rhetorical, he wasn't just trying to be hilarious, the "why" was the point of his entire practice.

"One who has a why to live can bear almost any how" -- Friedrich Nietzsche (aka Frick Nitzels)

Viktor witnessed what happened to a person when their meaning was lost. A man, who lived to see March 31st, the day he prophesized would be his liberation, died two days later when it became clear his dream wouldn't come true. First, he went catatonic, then came typhus. Death by April Fools.

Meanwhile, another man, who prayed to god to transmute all of his suffering into protection for his loved ones in other camps, took every measure of sadism and misery with a steady return of hope. That's not masochism, that's alchemy.

I discussed with Humpty the importance of how he constructs a narrative around his life. That he cultivates nihilism at his own peril. That his big strong brain only has access to half of the truth, if he only focusses on the objective ones. Psychology has a reductionism problem, where mechanical focus on clinical diagnoses reduces people to barely animals.

For some people, their neurology is perfectly sound. Not an imbalance in sight. Their lives? Ship-shape & Bristol; Ivan Ilyich approved; all rites passed; A G R E E A B L E. But how do they feel to be alive? Like the biggest bag of worthless shit.

Why? What makes some people seemingly impervious to psychiatric intervention? Because not all psychiatrists think "the meaning of life" is a scientific topic, and therefore not their role to discuss. Which means you can spend a lot of time learning about psychology, and never learn a single subjective truth.

This is why self-diagnosis is so risky. Where is any of this bullshit I'm writing about on Web MD?

So start here. Evaluate self-help by more logotheraputic standards. Ask, "does this even acknowledge the importance of meaning in my life, or help me pursue it?"

This is my favorite shit to summon tears with. I'm not fully sure why. But if I need tears on queue: "I am here- I am here-..." and I'm away. Same at work, as while I write this now. Makes me wonder what madness even means.

• #2 The Road To Character by David Brooks •

What does Dumpty value?

Not dating fat or ugly women; Getting the negative attention of Japanese videogame developers on Twitter; Being seen as the brother of a girl who isn't his biological sister, or in his family at all; $750 Shadow The Hedgehog statues; Not being a "normie"; and many other purely worthless things.

He's where I started wondering if chronic depression might be a philosophical issue for some people, as opposed to a contextual or neurochemical one. The man will never improve till he wraps his head around the idea of intrinsic values.

There's zero hope of Humpty living a happy life without a moral compass. Sadly for him, he's not a real psychopath, who can easily find all the eudaimonia he wants, just at other people's expense, guilt free. He's a dull narcissist, whose fate is just a crescendo of greater and greater solitude; a deeper and more empty abyss, till annihilation.

This is a book I read early, in my journey to deconfuckulate my brain, and it played a major role in most of my Humpty-scolding, largely without me recognizing it. Upon re-reading, I was surprised to find it influenced my decision to read 4 other books over the years. Including Man's Search For Meaning, and Culture And Anarchy (BANGER) by Matthew Arnold.

Btw Matthew Arnold is the guy who gave us the modern usage of "philistine." I'll be writing more about him, because his book is as applicable today as it was seven generations ago. That book is 2 Yosemite Sam guns/2 Yosemite Sam guns, bang bang bang.

Maybe you're like me, and "moralist" sounds like an insult. Well, Brooks isn't here to scold anyone or be a nerdy little bitch. Don't let anyone fool you, this isn't religious or conservative propaganda, it's another contribution to logotherapy. Take it from a pathologically anti-authoritarian douchebag like myself.

He gives a couple handy binaries to help organize your priorities. "Adam I vs Adam II" virtues, or "Resume vs Eulogy" virtues.

The Adams refer to how in Genesis, Adam displayed two different sets of virtues at different times. Adam I is practical, marketable, flexible, conditional, and Hellenistic. While Adam II is spiritual, self-contained, disciplined, unconditional, and Hebraistic.

Adam I is a great object, but a vacuous subject. Adam II puts little value in the objective world, in favor of a richer subjective one. Not everyone is in a rush to hire Adam II for a job, but everyone's coming to his funeral to pay their respects. Spending time around Adam II is mind expanding, and spiritually enriching.

You see the orange of that cover? That's the yolk I've been trying to get into Humpty's empty fucking shell the whole time. But little did I know I'm just a stupid normie, trying to argue against the axiom that life is meaningless. Am I really that cruel for calling Humpty empty? He's the only motherfucker I know to be like "Yeah, sonder is bliss, but leave me out of it. I'm an ant, not a hill, in this useless head of mine."

We could hold modern psychology responsible for a lot of this. When people dropped faith, and abandoned priests, they created a vacuum in their hearts. I think you can fill it with a multitude of things, without going back to church. But to fill it with psychology exclusively is a disastrous mistake. If you want dogma, just go back to church. Way better chance of turning out friendly.

When Humpty asked for help, what did he have in mind? He claimed he was continuously improving, just by being in our presence. But I know "improve" has nothing to do with eulogy virtues, coming from him. It's why I became convinced he was just looking for attention. The sweetness of a spotlight.

Everyone in the group has got eulogy virtues, and the kind of worries that'd fill Adam II's heart with the warmest sympathy. Wednesday is someone who has exhausted all conventional strategies for fighting depression; all the neurochemical and contextual battlefronts have been braved by him. But the real victories have been existential; A change in philosophy. (Plus, our frontal lobes grew in. If you're under 25 look forward to that shit. It's nice. 👍👍👍👍)

There's no such thing as building character through osmosis. Brooks, like many others in this series, see it as a painful reconstruction project. Parts of you need to be dismantled, examined, and often thrown away. This is why this series is so heinously mean. Humpty is the only one that can humble himself; For me to do it is just humiliating. I tried to lead this horse to this water, and this horse stomped it into a mud puddle.

Another thicc scoop of logotherapy, with a stoic cherry on top. I said that it got me to read four other books, but really it's a bibliography of more than a dozen great authors we should all read before we die. From Mary Ann Evans to Montagne. He makes St Augustine sound like Iceberg Slim. Bestseller for a reason.

• #3 Denial Of Death by Ernest Becker •

Hey, I was just wondering if it'd be cool if I could just be immortal and unforgotten forever? At least for a few millennia. I'm thinking Giza pyramids level longevity. Should be easy. I like a good bite-sized goal.

A lot of people will tell you that the reason they, or anyone else, do anything is to get laid. That at the nucleus of all their heroism, striving, and anxiety, is sex. But why is sex so important? Because we're mortal. The real nucleus is death. The one bone our subconscious chews away on, day and night.

This is where "monkey brain" doesn't apply. Death anxiety is a unique byproduct of human intelligence. It's based on our ability to treat abstract symbols as if they were as concrete as the things they symbolize. A banknote, representing cold hard gold glows in the hand of its owner, like real precious metal; a man wearing a hat, that signifies his leadership over 50 armed men, can be as threatening alone with his hat as he is with his all his men in tow; And looking at the corpse of another human is a glimpse at one's own future. As if your death were mine too.

Every bit of psychological progress is just a wobbly house of cards if you built it before grappling with death. It's the "worm at the core of our pretentions to happiness."

We've all heard the story, someone reaches the tippity-tip-tap-top of the hippity-hip-hap-heap and what do they do? They stoop, put their chin to their fist, furrow their brow, and bum everyone the fuck out with an unsolicited existential crisis.

Because you ain't a pyramid you silly bitch. You a poopy worm.

This book though, in all seriousness, is all seriousness. When I read this I was like "FINALLY! Freudian psychology without all the awkward erections!" See, Freud was 95% right, but his dogmatic obsession with orgasms left his work in need of some decryption.

This book is where we all stop pretending we're any different from Humpty Dumpty. When we act out, we're lashing against our fear of death; fear of heroism; fear of success. When we reach to great heights, we're grasping at immortality.

Lets be straight up, Humpty's not stupid. He can give you a crystal clear description of objective facts, plus secondary and tertiary details. That brain of his is firing on all cinderblocks. The problem is, the neurotic are people who see things with perfect clarity, rather than confusion.

Humpty knows he's mortal. He knows heroism is just a reflex, to either uselessly distract yourself from death, or futilely attempt to negate it. He knows success will just leave him with one last thing to do: die, and be forgotten.

But he doesn't handle those facts, lets say, gracefully. His solipsism has him convinced he came up with all these notions himself. Anyone who appears to grasp them, AND put them towards a happy life, must not grasp them properly.

A little stupidity could do Dumpty some good. Or as Ernest calls it, "legitimate foolishness". The religious call it, "faith". His biggest fears are, making a fool of himself, and buying into comforting lies. He won't talk to women because of course they're going to reject him; He won't join a meatspace community because of course they don't want an autist, or an independent thinker; Of course he won't spend time on self-help, it's either redundant, or futile.

Maybe he's right, because you know, each "of course not" has a long flowchart of if-thens and either-ors behind it, that he spent DAYS ruminating on. Instead of one moment, where he tests his pessimistic hypotheses. Testing would be foolish, when you consider the prior arithmetic.

If Humpty looks even a little foolish, people instantly spot his autism and then he's DOOMED.

He's such a god that he can predict the future, but not withstand it. And such a worm that life is a joke, but too sacred to play with it.

You think "worm" is an insult. But most people don't even live up to a worm's standards; worms leave the world around them a better place. All they do is enrich. I bet if we didn't have worms, plants and fungi would officially cancel this "terrestrial animal" project they've been experimenting with for a while.

For want of a worm, the dirt was lost. For want of a dirt, the food was lost. For want a food, the poop was lost. For want of a poop, life was lost. For want of a life, the Earth was lost. For want of a Earth, God was lost. And all for the want of some shit little worms.

• #4 The Worm At The Core by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski •

Giving myself only a month to discuss this was HUBRIS. Good fuckin JESUS god! Then again, the work has all been done, I'm just trying to waft some air from these books at people's noses. It's gloomy, but this is the bread isle for the existentially starving. Virgin Mary toast, by tha loaf.

All that stuff back there? Ernest Becker? Not a scientist, that guy. It was one of those dirty rotten philosophy books. Eew! If you ask any traditional scientist nowadays, what they think about the importance of philosophy, a heartbreaking percentage think it's obsolete. Which to me, means a heartbreaking percentage of scientists are arrogant brainless fuckin' tumors.

When Denial Of Death dropped in '73, it garnered a ton of hype. It inspired a lot of art. But the scientific community abandoned it like a mamma bird, ditching her nest of chicks because they carry a foreign smell. They felt a little cucked by Kierkegaard, the pre-Freudian post-Freudian. And they'll never be outshone by a theologian. Not willingly.

But there were still scientists looking to bring Becker's work into the realm of the empirical. People like our authors here. Data, studies, models of predictability, nice science shit. The result? TMT, or "Terror Management Theory." Sounds so metal.

It's a treatment lane. Some people are mentally ill due to life circumstances, genetics, physical sickness, etc. For which, there are drugs, CBT, and lifestyle adjustments. One illness can be the result of many different influences, and can thus be treated by many different things.

One drastically overlooked influence however is existential dread. Yes, it can kill you.

Drugs won't change your relationship with mortality. All they can do is take away the physical manifestations of our inner conflict. But they don't answer questions once and for all. With the exception to psychedelics, which I highly recommend. A psychedelic near-death experience is a good time. Try experiencing a little eternity, and tell me you long to live forever.

You're longing for the scariest thing IN THE UNIVERSE!

Cognitive behavioral therapy is great for misbehavior. But behaving like a content person, when you're not, doesn't make you a content person. It's painful, like bone tinnitus. It doesn't answer important subjective questions. Doesn't wipe away the oily film of the absurd.

Lifestyle adjustments are great, but again, it's all extrinsic. Perfect in the meantime, as you're working on coming to terms with your mortality. But your lifestyle will adjust itself anyway, as your fear of death diminishes. It's one way you know its coming along. However I'd never assume I'm over my fear, rather that I'm just artfully dancing around the topic in my head. Once again, an art, not a science.

Do I have a healthy relationship with death? I think I do. Sadly, I think it has a lot to do with my parents, a healthy dosage of dying pets and peers, and most importantly, 3 catastrophic nightmare psilocybin trips. Things I can't share with others; All non-fungible experiences.

The shroom inhibitions were another big reason I gave up on Humpty. You gotta be humbled, you gotta be scared, you need to practice your death before you die. You can't just manage death terror with sarcasm, and catatonic pessimism. He needed to see what the fuck a "monkey brain" can really do.

Our generation has made such a mockery of suicide. All the yapping about it is becoming profane. Whether we play that card for laughs, or just to hear another person beg us to keep on living, we play it as often as we can. Why? Why cry so much god damn wolf?

I think it's a "proximal defense" against terror. We construct what they call proximal and distal defenses against death's effect on our emotions.

Distal defenses are like a roof over your head, and mortal terror is like the rain. Distal defenses do most of the work, keeping subconscious thoughts under control, long before they emerge onto the surface. But when the rain gets through our roof, our proximal defenses play the role of a bucket, catching individual leaks.

Humpty's roof is rusty, corrugated swiss cheese. He thinks the scheme of things is all a sham. Group oriented values are the values of a sheep. He's abandoned all hope of having kids, and has sour-graped on the topic entirely. The rain gets in with full force.

His bucket? He turned it upside down, painted "suicide" on the side, and now wears it on his head. He's soaked up to the neck, shivering, and laughing from the dark. You won't fire him, he'll quit. Everything in his life has been pure fate, except for his death. That'll be his creation.

• #5 The Myth Of Sysyphus by Albert Camus •

Camus and I are perfect examples of the fact that being super handsome and cool doesn't make your life happy or more meaningful. Don't worry 'bout it. 'Sno big deal.

I'm barely smart enough to read shit like this. I re-read everything before I write about it, and I re-re-re-read this one. Felt like an Aesop Rock song, where I'm carried along by isolated little lines and phrases that blow my mind. And only after repeated exposure, do I start to get the thread from start to finish.

The point is, Sisyphus is a bad muthafucka. Don't pity the man, he's a hero. Life is an absurd Sisyphean bunch of goofishness. This book focusses on the question of suicide, in the face of this reality. The rock is going to roll back down hill. Why push it up?

I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure all four of the previous books have referenced sexy ass Albert Camus. That wasn't intentional, but it's pretty neat. If this book feels like it's really tearing your mental asshole open, try easing into it with the other ones. I'm still loosening up for Kierkegaard. The one guy all five books can't stop slobberin' on about.

One thing I liked about Humpty was that he recognized the absurd, and it consumed him too. We shared the same harrowing passion. I think he had a bitchboy response to the issue, but to be engaged with it at all was something I respected deeply within him.

In a way, a "normie" is someone who has either never grappled with absurdity, or lives to avoid it at all costs. We share a disdain for people like that. Especially the avoiders. Humpty wants what Camus calls "living without appeal"

That is, appeal to a god, an ideology, a fiction, or hope. Anything that would insult his genuine gift of lucidity. His atheism, individualism, rationalism, and cynicism are virtues of his. I got no books on abandoning any of those things. But they're a heavy ballast, and they can sink you if you're reckless. An issue that really only effects the smartest people, to toot all our horns. Hey you, give yourself a toot!

Honestly, I've probably spent more time telling Humpty he needs Jesus, than I've said he needs Camus. Because I think he's too Dunning-Kreuger to take him seriously. If something resembles a stupid movie, TV show, or game he likes, he'll consider himself already schooled on the topic. And there's plenty of flippant absurdist media out there to distract him from that good-good shit.

Albert gives 3 examples of living an "absurd life" without appeal. An actor, a seducer (Don Juan), or a conqueror. It should be noted that Humpty is quite deliberately none of these things, and Wednesday is dying to be all three at once. The act of wearing a mask in social settings is extremely degrading, in his opinion; he says women reject him, but he wouldn't dare approach them anyhow, for love is short-lived and exceptional; And he knows everything conquerable is re-conquerable. The point is, you ain't gonna make Humpty look stupid, by fooling him into carrying that rock anywhere.

He also discusses Dostoyevsky's character, Kirilov. A man who committed "logical suicide". After grappling with the absence of god, and his lack of spiritual purpose, Kirilov sought revolt, freedom, and passion through taking his own life. This is the character I think Humpty most resembles.

It's as if Dumpty has the myth backwards in his head. At the top of the hill is death, and at the bottom of the hill is life. Like death is the burden he shoulders, and life is the inevitable retrograde from all his hard work. He can kill himself, or millions of others, and the worms will eat, nutrients will flow. Life will flourish like nothing happened. Fed only sooner in his haste.

This book has drastically improved my attitude at work. Few jobs are more blatantly Sisyphean than cooking food and washing dishes. And I think few cooks handle it with as positive an outlook as me.

Granted, I can't wait to leave. It's also one of the few jobs where you just get burned every day. The palms of my hands are a permanent strawberry bubblegum colour, while the backs are a ghostly pale mick beige; I'll fucking destroy you in a game of hot potato. But in the meantime, I'm proud to carry my daily rock with dignity.

In fact, inspired by the masterpiece, Holes, I like to think of my work like Madam Zeroni's pig. When I'm carrying a 50lb flour bag down four flights of stairs twice a day, or dumping 180lbs of canola oil into their fryers to start the morning (240 if it's dump day), I hear her spooky ass voice in my head. I watch my body get stronger, and I feel some squaring of my debt to the universe. Whatever it takes to be Sisyphus with a smile.

I guess Humpty was looking to be my rock. I was hoping he'd find his own.

• End bit •

(Oops, this was late. Real dickfuck move from someone trying to give life advice. Although I get a free pass thanks to Atomic Habits, so long as I don't fuck up twice in a row. Considering the massive topic, the drastic change in direction, and waiting 15 days to start writing... well I don't have any valid excuses either way. Just gotta not do it again. Okay? Capeesh? Prick?)

It's amazing how quickly the worst memories began to fade the second I didn't have Humpty Dumpty around to resent. It helps that he's a pretty textbook case of himself, and there are countless other people like him to remind me of our time together.

You gotta wonder, "what kind of hyper-demanding asshole friend expects one to read this many books?" honestly I never expected that. I thought Humpty came to Wednesday and I, believing we had knowledge to share, and I spent close to two years, thoughtfully trying to inject lessons from our reading/life into conversations with Humpty. Not only did he breeze by them with zero feedback, he often chose to argue with us directly.

It's not like he's just never been exposed to these things, but would have loved to be. He's always been bent on disproving them.

This series had a different aim, just before I turned on Dumpty. I called it "Books My Dumbass Friends Need To Read." I used the same five books, with 5 different write-ups, posted it, and after all the fun of writing it, it felt completely wrong.

I've been teasing my other friends for a long time, that they all gotta read some of this shit, instead of just getting the sparknotes from me. These books have patched up issues for me that my friends continue to grapple with, and one of the only tools I know of to fix them is a nice book.

(and shrooms)

But my heart wasn't lashing out at them at all. For a number of big reasons. First, they all read books, unlike Humpty. It's what makes book recommendations possible in the first place, and why I don't need to blog at them. They're all bonafide seekers, who are finding happiness at respectable paces. I learn from them just as well. God bless em. Second, none of them use the group as an emotional barf bag. We all expect ourselves to bring something to the table to REWARD people for giving us attention.

I was furious with Humpty Dumpty. I was tired of wasting the group's time, interviewing him about his made up psychoses. Hours on this fucking piece of shit, who'd move the goalpost to a new fantasy dimension of cum and shit and sarcastic scoffs the second you got an eye on his shadow's true form. I needed to put this iceberg of wasted patience far from our boat.

I might replace my anti-model with a role-model. My boy Wednesday. Hump Day, not Humpty Dumpty. He got two different eyes, he seen so much death, and he knows the future. He's Odin. He's Moondog. The Witcher to my Dandelion. The warrior to my poet.

We'll see. I'm gonna be vague about him. Then again I've been super vague about Humpty.

Toning down the venom is a must, though. These aren't books for pieces of shit. They're books so robust even pieces of shit can put them to full use. Albeit, maybe with the help of a jail sentence. Humpty Dumpty is a nauseatingly relatable human being. He's not of a different form from us, but of a different scale.

Oh boy! Next month I bring you 5 more of these dirty little whores! You had better fucking like reading! Oooooh SHIT!

[bitch-of-the-wilds]

Dragon Age 2: Abridged

You start the game and as you're running 🏃‍♂️💨 away from the Zombi- I mean Darkspawn, the very first thing that happens is one of your 2 younger siblings fucking dies. ⚰️💀🥀(RIP Carver)

Then there's a dragon 🐉 which is awesome! But also: fuck, there's a dragon and you're level 1. But wait, now the dragon's an old lady who you swear sounds familiar. 🧙‍♀️ But she won't teach you how to become a dragon, so who cares.

Anyway, your mother cradles your sibling's cooling corpse to her chest and blames you for their death because you're the oldest and (somehow⁉️) you were supposed to protect them from the massive 5-ton ogre and stop it from crushing their rib cage like a gerbil in the hands of a vindictive toddler. 🐹

It's mentioned in passing that "At least they're with father now," and oh, yeah, guess your dad is dead too.

Surprise! Welcome to Dragon Age: 2 -The game where the plot is made up and your feelings don't matter. 🎆🎇

After you finally escape the fuckin 🍭🔥Candy Land from Hell🔥🍭: you're sold into servitude (see also: slavery) to pay your way into the city because your drunkard of an uncle has gambled away every penny of wealth your family ever had, including the house (and the dog too, but don't worry, there's DLC for that 🐕)

Then, after a year of smuggling and/or shady mercenary work for the dickheads that hold your leash, you're still broker than a ramen-filled Millenial with an undergrad degree in psychology, so you have to go into the Deep Roads to find your fortune.

Do you take your only remaining sibling with you into one of the most dangerous places in Thedas? Or do you leave them in Kirkwall, an almost equally as dangerous place, without even little ole' you there to protect them or your aged, decrepit, spiteful mother (who still kinda hates you for letting your sibling die)?

📱VOTE NOW ON YOUR PHONES! 📱

The kicker is that NO MATTER WHICH CHOICE YOU MAKE, you still lose your sibling! They're taken by the Chantry, (the ⭕Circle/⛑️Templars) if you leave them at home, and if you take them with you, they fucking DIE.

Oh, UNLESS you brought that one edgy, possessed, fugitive Gray Warden you met in the ass end of Darktown with you. Then they don't die. Instead, they themselves are given to the Gray Wardens to try and save them from 🤎😩The Taint 😩🤎 who then disappear back into the Deep Roads for 3 fucking years. IN FACT you don't even know if your fucking sibling LIVES or DIES until Shit City winds up on fucking 🔥FIRE🔥 and they just happen to run into you while you're up to your tits in body organs.

And also that one edgy Gray Warden rebel, Anders -who you actually kinda like, even if he is a whiney bitch, happens to stay on with you because you helped him kill his ex boyfriend (*Micky Mouse voice* it's a special tool that will help us later!🎁)

Oh, and let's not forget that Grand Adventure where your ancient ass mom 🤶 is kidnapped by a Coo-Coo for Cocoa Puffs serial murderer and then canabalized into a semi-living sex doll 🧟‍♀️(that smells a bit like formaldehyde under the stench of rotting old lady flesh) just because she happens to look a little bit like the dude's dead FWB/wife. 👩‍❤️‍👨

So, when you finally fucking find her -buried under a cesspool of blood, shit and demons (where else?)- you obviously have to kill the dork-ass, serial-killing, LITERAL MOTHERFUCKER who took her.

But OOPS! His blood magic🩸 was the only thing keeping her build-a-bitch body alive, so naturally it disperses as he death-rattles on the floor.🤮

She only lives long enough to say her last regret is leaving you alone in 🗡️ Murder City™️ 🗡️ by yourself before she fucking DIES IN YOUR ARMS in front of your sad ass friends and probably your love interest.

Speaking of which, I hope you didn't dick-down the pirate 🏴‍☠️ then fuck around and find out you caught feelings and shit, cause she straight up leaves your ass to skip town on bail with a Super Special Book. 📖

And god forbid you romanced Fenris because his broody ass just ups and leaves you after a mediocre as fuck one night stand, leaving you with Lyium-blue balls. 🧪 Oh, did I mention that it took 3 fuckin YEARS of courting to get him to into bed? 🛌 But at least he stays with you, helping kill bitches and whatnot, casually twisting that little knife in your heart an inch at a time because he has enough emotional baggage 🎒👜🧳🛍️ to sink a fucking naval armada to the bottom of the Boeric ocean. ��⛵🛥️🛳️⛵🚢🛥️🆘

But the fun doesn't stop there! No, no! Because while you may have lost your entire family -i.e. your mother, father and both baby siblings- and potentially your love interest 💔 (You can keep your shitty drunken uncle tho lmfao), that doesn't matter cause we're not done with our field trip through hell just yet kiddies. 🚎 Beep beep, bitch.

So, what's next on 💥Apocalypse Bingo?💥 Oh, that's right, you gotta stop the invading force of massive roid-raging dragon-people with kick ass horns, and their leader just decapitated the king👑 in front of you.

Also they burned 🗑️Trash Town🗑️ to the ground and you have to pick of the pieces of your shitty city. Again.

And after you've done that, after you've done what all the king's horses 🐎🐎🐎 and all the king's men🧍‍♂️🧍‍♂️🧍‍♂️ couldn't fucking do, you're awarded the title of Champion because no good deed goes unpunished!

Yay! You're the savior of Shit City! Hooray. 💩

✨🌟⭐ But wait! There's more! ⭐🌟✨

That one Glowy Red bitch you've seen around the Gallows when you're not ogling Cullen's noodle hair is pissy at Skeletor the Secret Blood Mage. Time to play peace keeper.

It doesn't go well. They're both still assholes. 🤷🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️

Oh but, remember Anders? The edgy Gray Warden dude? The one who hears voices in his head, but swears it's just his 👻☄️Spirit Friend☄️👻 The one who you kinda like?

He needs to go grocery shopping. For... cookie ingredients. 🍪

Here's the list: 📜

-Mushrooms 🍄

-Literal, actual shit 💩

-Sulfur 💨

-Amonium Nitrate 🔥

-Other shit, this time metaphorical🚫💩

Okay, weird request, right? But he did help you kill some hoes and give you the map to the Deep Roads which may or may not have gotten your sibling killed, so you owe him one, right? And, well, maybe you kinda like this edgy weirdo who occasionally turns blue when he's mad 👺, so you're willing to do him a solid.

Well, turns out that trip to Kirkwalmart wasn't for ingredients to Anders' fav cookies.

It was actually

⚡💥💣☢️A FUCKIN NUKE☢️💣💥⚡

which he uses to blown up the church ⛪ which happens to be in the city 🌇 your pathetic ass spent 6 years Humpty Dumpty-ing🍳 killing a few hundred innocent people and probably at least one or two dogs🐶💀🐶 so either way he's a fuckin dildo.

Oh, and that kicks off World War Thedas, and the FBI 🚔 thinks you're responsible, so you have to leave your Shit City and lay low.

But you got to meet Varric so it was worth it. 👍

Probably.

[coquelicoq]

yi city arc, aka: DAD MODE ACTIVATED

what a fun bonding trip this is for wwx and his children! forget throwing the ball around and going camping - exploring creepy haunted towns while trying to avoid the poisonous gas and zombies roaming the streets is the cool new dad activity

wwx inflicts his spicy cooking on these poor innocent children. taglines for his parenting show:

to kill a poison, you’ve got to…eat a poison

a spoonful of paprika helps the medicine go down

if you can’t stand the heat…too fuckin’ bad

or how about a nursery rhyme he wrote to get them to eat his cooking?

there was an old lady who swallowed some dust. i don’t know why she swallowed the dust, perhaps she’ll combust!

there was an old lady who swallowed some congee. it tickled and burned and scalded so strongly! she swallowed the congee to eat the dust. i don’t know why she swallowed the dust, but she’s all better now and so will you be if you just eat the congee i made you.

aww sizhui tries to stay and help wwx. he’s such a good son!!!

oh my GOD lsz like “you and my dad are the same” and then as he’s walking away he’s just thinking about how safe he feels when either one of them is around? what???? are u shitting me?? this sweet baby who had lived through a lifetime of trauma by the age of 4 has finally found comfort and safety with his two dads???

me at my television: don’t look at me. everything's under control. situation normal. we had a slight tear duct malfunction, but uh...everything's perfectly all right now. we're fine. we're all fine here now, thank you. how are you?

wwx to xue yang: don’t talk to me or my son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son or my other son ever again

yes i counted

get this guy some daughters already

(also these kids need to make friends with some girls because right now if you ask them their thoughts about a teenage girl who is clearly in distress, they just talk about how cute she is smdh)

xue yang: the OG wwx fanboy

xy: humpty dumpty sat on a wall, humpty dumpty had a great fall…

wwx: i’m not fixing xiao xingchen’s spiritual consciousness for you, asshole

...and then they just flatter each other for a while like “you’re the best, only you can fix him” “no you’re so much better at it than me” “no you invented this, you’re the master” “i’m not that impressive, you do it”

god wwx is so cool under pressure

he’s SO competent and SO calm and SO collected and SO good at teaching!!!

it’s EXTREMELY sexy. i was not prepared for how sexy it is.

like i’m used to him being cocky and blasé, but this is a whole other level. this doesn’t come from the overconfidence of youth or from trying to impress anybody. it’s just so mature and natural! he has nothing to prove, he’s just actually that good, and i’m very much not equipped to handle the feelings i’m having about it!!

wwx being held at swordpoint all nonchalant like “hey can you not draw your sword on me while we’re talking? were you raised in a barn? where are your manners?!”

wwx is like “it’s all good. hakuna matata. my angel will save me” and then lwj descends from the heavens. he’s just so sure about it. no doubt in his mind. he’s not a damsel in distress, he’s just half of a perfectly synchronized team that he understands deeply and trusts implicitly. this is incredibly attractive of him and i’m gonna. need a minute

WEN NING IS NOT A THING

not a girl, not a robot, and NOT a thing!!

not a corpse, but not not a corpse either? (like if song lan and wen ning are both ghost puppets, why does song lan recover from being all pale and black-veined but wen ning stays like that forever?)

okay so i don’t know what he is exactly, but whatever he is: 1) i will protect him 2) i want to see him grow up healthy 3) i want to tell my friends and neighbors about him

i love it when people say “hey wwx, isn’t lwj the best?” and he gets all awkward about it. he’s like “oh no, that’s the thing i’m repressing!!”

has anyone done a side-by-side gifset of nhs going “isn’t lwj the handsomest man in all the land” and ljy going “isn’t hanguang-jun just so good at everything”?? i feel like yes but i can’t find it, which is too bad because it’s very important content

i’m gonna be real with you: i understood very little of the ah-qing flashback sequence (aka all of episode 38 and part of 39)

so okay xue yang hates xxc for some reason that was probably explained in an earlier episode and i’ve forgotten. hating xxc would account for why he spends three years continuously tricking xxc into killing a bunch of living people and then gets him to stab song lan; i guess he just really really likes revenge. but then why is he so upset when xxc dies? why is he so committed to restoring xxc’s spiritual consciousness?

i don’t understand this whole sideplot, but what i do know is this:

ah-qing is an adorable con artist who deserves all the candy her heart desires and i’m very upset that she dies, and

xiao xingchen is the sweetest, cutest boy in all the land. i think he’s supposed to be older than wwx or something which is hilarious to me because he looks, like, fifteen?? (i was so confused back in that earlier episode when wwx called him shige or similar. i was like, “this guy? you’re a grown-ass man but this tiny child is your older brother? sounds fake but okay”)

there’s more in 39 but it’s after they leave yi city, so i will end this long rambly post here. a hint of what’s to come: sizhui gets a LANTERN, jingyi eats some CHICKEN, and xichen is my ONE TRUE LOVE. stay tuned...

[the-weeping-author]

Hate To Love chapter 1

A/N: This is my first series thank you guys so much for liking my last three fics, I hope you guys enjoy this series.

This series will include: bullying, angst, fighting/arguing, fluff, smut. There will be a Steve vs Joyce show down.

Parings: Steve Harrington x Sara Byers

Trigger warnings: none in this chapter maybe not feeling loved??

Tag list: @ahoy-stevieboy @thehair-ington @galactic-kitten-nonsense @linkispink1995 @theworldisugly-22 @harringtown @phoebethepheebs @spiritsent

(Please don’t copy my fics as your own also I don’t own anything about the stranger tings franchise.)

Please enjoy 😌

Saturday November 5th, 1983

I’ve been home one day, I’ve already got all of my stuff unpacked into the spots I wanted my stuff to go then I decided to go look at the town I once knew like it was apart of me but now with my recent weight loss it feels like it’s foreign to me.

People looked at me like they didn’t know me anymore. Like I wasn’t Sara Byers anymore. I had to remake myself from the person I used to be, I had told my mother about what Lonnie had said about me to that woman over the phone.

I had to stop her from calling and giving him a piece of her mind, I was out and about so I could start putting in applications at any job that would take me. I took a deep breath, walked into a gas station that had a help wanted sign in the window.

I put the biggest smile on my face I could manage walking up to the person behind the register.

“Hi I’m here to apply for the position that y’all need to fill.”

The lady with curly hair smiled at me then popped her gum.

“Okay honey are you good with people?”

I smile shrugging.

“I’d like to think I am.”

She looked at me then at the door when someone came in.

“Alright when can you start?”

I looked at her while my eyes widened, excitement washing over my body.

“I can start right now if you need me too.”

She nodded, telling me to come behind the counter so she could show me how everything worked.

After she showed me everything she took down the help wanted sign then assured me she’d be back.

After she left it was kinda slow, I was behind the counter reading a magazine when a customer put the stuff they planned on but on the counter.

I started to ring them up when I heard my best friends familiar voice.

“Sara?”

My head snatched up to see my best friend in middle school barb.

“Oh hey barb how have you been?”

She smiled at me.

“I’ve been great did you lose weight I barely recognized you?”

I smiled at her, started playing with my hair.

“U-Uh yeah I did do I look bad?”

She quickly shook her head at me.

“Hell no girl you look fantastic I can already tell hearts are going to be broken, I don’t mind seeing them as long as one of them aren’t mine.”

I let out a loud laugh which made her laugh.

“Barb you know I could never stop being your friend.”

She smiled at me while I gave her her total.

“I know Sara and that’s why you’re the best.”

I smiled and I flipped my hair.

“Yeah I know.”

She gasped at me.

“Who is this confident teenager in front of me? What have you done with my Sara?”

I smiled at her then let out a giggle.

“The old Sara has gone out of business. This is the new and improved Sara.”

She laughed at me then hugged me over the counter.

“Well Sara I guess I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

I smiled then nodded at her.

“Alright barb.”

I thought having the friend reunion was over until Tina walked in around six thirtyish. She had grabbed some snacks which I assumed was for some party that was either going on or she was throwing. She walked up to the register and smiled.

“Oh my god Sara? As in Sara Byers?”

I looked up at her then smiled at her.

“It is I, in the flesh Tina.”

She shook her head at me then looked me up and down.

“Damn girl you’ve gotten hot, I mean you’ve always been hot shit but damn this brings it to a new level.”

I laughed at her as I scanned her items.

“Alright Tina your total is $10.27.”

She smiled at me while she put a twenty dollar bill on the counter.

“Alright honey your change is $9.73.”

She walked away, gasping immediately stopping in her tracks.

“Oh by the way Sara there’s a party going on tonight at my house, I know, I know you don’t do parties but you should show the boys at Hawkins high what they are going to be seeing a lot of this year.”

I shook my head at her.

“No way Tina, I don’t want anyone to see what I look like yet, I want them to see that Humpty Dumpty got a makeover.”

She simply just shrugged at me.

“Okay fine but you owe me.”

I smiled at her.

“Yeah, yeah tell who you want that I’ve had a makeover I’m pretty sure they won’t believe you anyways.”

She shook her head as she walked out of the gas station, I went back to reading my magazine. The rest of the day went by really fast, the woman I soon learned was named Emily came back around 7 to show me how to close. That is when I would close the gas station.

I got in the car my grandma had left me in her will, I drove home. When I got there I saw the lights on and Jonathan's car.

“Great.”

I thought to myself while I got out the car, I walked to the front door and took a deep breath unknowing what could happen behind this door. I knew Johnathan was pissed and hurt at me leaving but I was back, he had no right feeling how he did towards me.

I took a deep breath then walked into the house, immediately I was pulled into a hug by Will.

“Hey little dude I’ve missed you.”

He buried his face into my neck when he pulled away his eyes were watery.

“I thought I’d never see you again.”

I shook my head as a stray tear went on his cheek, I quickly wiped it away.

“No buddy what would make you feel that way?”

He looked up at me and bit his bottom lip and took a shakeup breath.

“Cause you left with dad, since he doesn’t ever come around why would you?”

I felt my stomach drop at his words they stung, but I knew he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings but he did. He was my little brother and I’m supposed to be here for him and I left him.

My mother was next to bring me into a hug, she rubbed my back then she kissed my forehead.

“I knew you’d be back, I just knew it.”

I smiled at her then she pulled away.

“Did I ever say that I’m sorry for what you overheard Lonnie saying, I know I can’t control what he said but I can make you feel better?”

She smiled at me while I raised my eyebrow amused at her.

“What’s that momma?”

She put her thumb under my chin and gently rubbed it with her thumb.

“Well since I gotta work tonight why don’t we eat ice cream while Johnathan, you and I watch a scary movie?”

I smiled at her until she mentioned Johnathan.

“Yeah I don’t think Johnathan would like that idea.”

She furrowed her eyebrows at me confusion evident on her face.

“Why would you think that Sara?”

I sighed looking at my hands.

“Well because he hasn’t spoken to me since I got back.”

She smiled at me while she rubbed my shoulders.

“Oh honey he’ll get over it he’s just hurt and being stubborn right now.”

“Who’s stubborn?” Johnathan asked As he entered the living room.

“Oh no one.” She turned towards me and made some dramatic face causing me to giggle.

“Hey Johnathan I’m working late tomorrow night so can you please watch Will?”

He sighed but agreed as he walked into the kitchen I decided to show our mother what I was talking about.

“Hey Johnathan.”

Not only did he not speak back but he didn’t even look my way, I turned to look at my mom.

“See what I’m talking about?”

My mother smiled Sympathetically at me while he walked back to his room.

“Honey just give him time y’all are twins y’all will come together again.”

*Time skip*

I was laying in bed listening to some Cyndi lauper record when I heard a knock on my door.

“It’s open.”

Johnathan quickly walked into my room, I got off my bed and turned my record down.

“Hey so Sara I need to ask a favor.”

I raised an eyebrow at him as I sat back down on my bed.

“Oh okay what’s up?”

He took in a breath then sat on the edge of my bed.

“I need you to watch Will tomorrow night while I pick up a shift.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Excuse me?”

He looked at me like I was speaking another language.

“I said can you watch Will-“

“I heard what you said Johnathan but why talk to me now? You’ve had the last day to talk to me, now that you want something I’m your best friend?”

He opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water gasping for breath.

“You know what Johnathan I don’t mind watching him tomorrow night, all I’m going to say to you is don’t just talk to me when you want something.”

He nodded mumbling a sorry then walking out my room without another word.

I sighed and decided to pick out my outfit for Monday. I knew it was only Saturday, I wanted to make sure I looked my best for Monday.

After I picked the outfit I was cleaning the house when Will had come rushing out of his room, he threw on his coat but as soon as he opened the door I stopped him.

“Hey little bro what’s the rush?”

He stopped in a halt turning to look at me flashing me a smile.

“Oh just over to mike wheelers, mom knows I’ll be back before ten okay?”

I looked at him and raised a brow then decided to pretend hurt.

“Oh okay I guess I’m too lame to hang out with now.”

Panic was written all over his face as he shook his head no at me.

“N-no not at all it’s just we have a DND campaign we started, the guys wouldn’t understand because we all promised we wouldn’t miss a campaign.

“Alright well did you let Johnathan know cause I have to work so I’ll see you later okay?”

He smiled then nodded at me.

“Yes Sara Johnathan knows I love you, I’ll see you later.”

I smiled then gasped.

“Will wait.”

He turned around halfway out the door, raised his eyebrow at me.

“Yes Sara?”

“You forgot our brother sister handshake.”

He quickly ran over to me then, put out his hand then I slapped his palm, we both put our hands in front of us like we were holding wants to hop around in a circle then hooked both of our pinkies together then kissed the side of our hand then he ran out the door.

“Love you Sara.”

I smiled after him leaving out the front door whispering to myself.

“Love you too nerd.”

A/N: sorry this took so long I was trying to make it perfect even though I feel like it’s not please let me know if you’d like to be added to my tag list request are open thanks. ~Destiny ❤️

[enjoylove42-blog]

The Will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not Protect you

God’s Will… What is it? Why is God’s will sometimes so damn hard to figure out? How do we as mere mortals even begin to determine what His will for our lives is just for today, much less for our whole life?

A few years ago I did some real bad shit. I was stuck in a chaotic life running rampant in My Own Self-Will. I woke up one day, went to breakfast with friends, laughed, enjoyed the beautiful warmth of the sunshine, and was enveloped in God’s beautiful world of love and joy. Later that afternoon, I shot up heroin for the first time. It was actually the first time I put a needle in my body. Unfortunately, it would not be the last. I was 35 years old. It was a good day up to that point. I thought I was living a purposeful life. I had joy in my heart and wanted to share my inner peace with others. I was happy. I had absolutely no valid reason to put the poison in my veins. Or did I?

Back up to those three words, “I was Happy.” My sick demented mind probably assumed that if I was happy and life was good , how could anything possibly go wrong? Boy, it was the beginning of a lifestyle full of the three D’s. DECEIT, DESTRUCTION, & DESPAIR. I’m not sure if it was the drug or the needle, but I immediately spiraled down the rabbit hole. I was hooked instantaneously. I couldn’t get enough. I couldn’t get high enough, stick myself enough times, or just attain the level of out of body freedom i was desperately searching for every minute of every day. The level of insanity and chaos that ensued from that day on until I went to jail can only be described as pathetic, disturbing, deplorable, disgraceful, and wretched.

Within one month of the first rush, I had lost every morsel of inner peace, joy and rays of fucking sunshine I previously described to you. I lost all sense of ME. The woman I had known for 35 slipped away. All of the core values instilled in me since birth vanished. I no longer had the capability to differentiate between right and wrong. The only thing I could comprehend was, “I have to maintain. I HAVE TO do whatever it takes to pull that red rose bud back and push the enervating drug into my dwindling dehydrated veins. Be damned laws, morals, or spirituality. I had to invite the toxic venom into my body as many times a day as I possibly could.

I loved the venom, but I also loved the point. The repeated pricking and sticking of my skin. My track marks were like a map of misery no one seemed to even notice. I was bruised black, blue, green, and purple. A mental and physical avow of what I had to endure to remember I was still human. The pain was good. When all my veins knotted and dried up and the only place left was my neck to inject the forbiddenfruit, I welcomed the misery with open arms. Just one more stop on the road to my madness.

During this time I did the most selfish act of my entire life. I ABANDONED MY CHILDREN. It wasn’t until five years later in rehab, that I stepped out of denial and realized just how shitty I was to my own flesh and blood. My Babies!!! They needed me to pull my wicked shit together and be their mother, but my sick fucking mind convinced myself, they were better off anywhere on this planet but with me. Until the day I die, the look of disbelief and fear on their faces, as well as, the huge crocodile tear that rolled down my youngest son’s beautiful cheek as I dumped them off, will forever be embedded in my mind and heart. In that moment, i honestly believed I was doing the best thing I could for them WAKE UP LINDA!!!!! What would have been best for those precious innocent children was for me to quit fucking up our lives, quit banging dope into my veins, get over myself, turn around scoop them up, and be their fucking Mom. I cannot ever begin to express with words the guilt and shame I carry within myself for this inconceivable action. Yes, it was an action. I drove away that day impregnated with two feelings: grief and relief. I was full of self loathing and self pity. However, I was also discharged from a duty I was no longer capable of performing. As long as my children were with me i was not able to fully bow down to my selfish obsessions and compulsions. I was required to feed them, clothe them, keep utilities on, and provide a seemingly stable environment for them. Finally, I was able to think only of My next attempt to mainline my newfound god. I could feed my desires and fuck whoever dared step onto the pavement leading me down the highway to hell. If you have ever been in full blown addiction, you understand that I was incapable of providing them with their needs for very long. I didn’t love myself anymore and no longer required anything other than my next dose of smack. I was as previously stated, deplorable.

At this juncture in my life, there were absolutely no holds barred. Please understand, I was beyond help. I was in the inner rings of hell and my life point blank fucking sucked. No amount of prayer, tears, or pleading could relieve me of ME. I stole from every single store I walked into. I slept with men for crumbs of dope, I lied to every single person who crossed my path. I was so diabolical in my methods that when someone encountered me, they were meeting a twisted sick chameleon who could and would convince you that what we did was your idea and that it was critical for everyone’s survival in the world. People gave me money, drugs, food, a place to sleep, etc.. and I always made them believe whatever they did for me was actually for them, and it was in their best interest to do it. I was a conniving incorrigible cunt. I hated myself. I hated you. I hated God, I hated the fact that I had to work so hard at being a constant mastermind of corruption. Inside my head, I honestly believed that I deserved to have whatever it was my addiction desired. I believed I was an entitled HBIC, but truthfully, the only thing i really deserved was contempt and mistrust. I had become what my father once said, during my childhood, he hated more than anything: A thief and a liar.

I will never forget the night before I went away. I was lying on some asshole’s couch, and in an instant complete and total desperation engulfed my entire being. Deep down in the core of my soul the real “Angie” cried out a long and sorrowful plea. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I commenced to pray. (Some individuals would argue this fervent prayer to be a foxhole prayer.) That being said, It was as if I had split into two people during that time and the evil diabolical “me” had taken over my body and suppressed the real “me” deep into the depths of my bowels. I had been trapped in the darkness and my spirit broke free with a mighty jolt. I wanted all of the irrational absurdity to end. I prayed for God to help me. To relieve me of the demons that controlled my spirit, for God to take me into His arms and hold me close, to save me from me. I prayed that he would get me out of the situation by any means necessary, but not jail. I didn’t want to go to jail. (At this point I had no idea I was a wanted woman.) I felt in that moment a spiritual awakening, because i felt, for the second time in a few short months, RELIEF. I had just admitted to myself that I was powerless over the drug and lifestyle I had designed and my entire life was undoubtedly and undeniably unmanageable. It was like the ceiling of that crusty one room hole I was sharing with three other people, opened up and God covered me in a hedge of protection for the night.

Do not ever doubt that the God of my understanding has a sense of humor. He does. He also knew the only way to remove me from that “modus vivendi” was to lock me up and sit my junkie ass down. I had charges pending in four mid-Tennessee counties. I had been on the news for theft at multiple large retail stores in Nashville and the surrounding areas.

Please understand, I deserved to go to jail. I had been doing ”the Most” with all disregard for consequences. It was as if in my mind I didn’t comprehend that “I” was breaking the law. I was doing what I had to do to maintain. I couldn’t work with track marks all over my body, I could not pass a drug screen, and first and foremost had to keep myself off sick every morning. How could I possibly maintain the requirements for an honest job during this time? I could rationalize every despicable behaviour until all the king’s horses and all the king’s men figure how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I was, as so straightforwardly stated in the rooms of AA, in a state of spiritual, moral, and physical bankruptcy. In order to help relieve me of my will and help me better do HIs, God saw it fit for me to do 15 long months in various county jails. I took this time and severed myself from a sick toxic relationship I had been in for years. I took every class the jails offered. I did two rehabilitation programs in two different county jails. I reconnected myself spiritually and slowly regained my morals. God began providing me with miracles. My father and I reconnected through letters during this time. I did not get visits like all the other inmates, but I got mail everyday. I began to walk for at least a couple of hours each day in the small pod we were housed in, and my body started to feel better. After a whole year of incarceration my track marks healed and my obsession for the venom of heroin left my mind. When I was finally released on November 7, 2016, i returned home physically, mentally, and spiritually healed. Not cured, for a true mentally disturbed sick addicted individual like me, there is no cure. Only a daily reprieve that is dependent on my spiritual and emotional well-being. At the end of this chapter of my life I learned that God answers prayers. He gives us exactly what we need when we can and will receive it. Ultimately my self will run riot led me into a cold dank jail cell where God’s will began to take over my life and send me down a path I would not believe I deserved, at that time. WIth that being said, I will end this period of my life with one last thought: “Be ok with not knowing for sure what might come next, but know that whatever it is...YOU will be ok.” -author unknown.

[xukunstellation]

Assassin (Part 2) || Fan Chengcheng

Title: Assassin Pairing: Female!Reader x Chengcheng Genre: Agent!AU + Mafia!AU + Action Word Count: 930 words Summary: Your mission is to eliminate the son of the most notorious gang in all of China: Fan Chengcheng. However, you come to realize that Chengcheng is no easy target. Warning: mentions of violence and guns, though no one actually dies or gets seriously hurt in this. i tried not to make this too explicit bc Chengcheng is still a minor. please do not read this if you are sensitive to any of this mentioned! 

Part 1

after a few minutes of running, both of you stood in what looked to be an empty bedroom with an open balcony

“what the hell is going on in there?” chengcheng exclaimed, looking distressed at the situation. he furrowed his eyebrows, looking serious and turned to you, “look, it’s not safe. you have to get out of here”

“sorry love but that’s not going to happen. i’m not going anywhere until i finish what i came here for”

you leaned down and pulled out the gun that was strapped to your thigh that was expertly hidden by the folds of your dress earlier

 chengcheng was hella shook 

as he raised his hands above his head in alarm, you continued to point the weapon at him and moved him back so that he was standing on the balcony with his back facing the edge

“who are you?” he questioned without a hint of fear in his voice or expression. you were slightly surprised at how brave he was. then again, he was the son of a gang leader

“it doesn’t matter who i am, fan chengcheng”

“that’s a shame. i would hate to not have a name to match that pretty face of yours. looks like we’ll have to change that”

before you can register his words, he smacked the gun out of your hand making it skid across the floor. lunging for you, you swiftly dodged him and crouched to the floor, swinging your leg to knock him off his feet. however, he was a lot faster and jumped, avoiding your attack. you twisted your body and rolled away before he could kick your side

seeing your gun, you extended your arm in order to reach it, only to yelp in pain as you felt chengcheng yank your hair from behind and pull you off the ground. he slammed you against the balcony edge, pinning your wrists down to lock you in place and between his arms

 i’m screaming at this image bc that’s some kdrama shit right there

“i think that’s enough dancing for one night, don’t you think?” he sarcastically said, leaning his face closer causing you to lean yours away

“aw, i thought we were having fun,” you retorted with a shrug.

“i didn’t say we weren’t. i just need to know why you’re so intent on getting rid of me,” he mused with a raised eyebrow, “i didn’t even get the chance to see the face of my assailant, though i know you’re probably beautiful”

not being phased by his flattery in the slightest, you pouted in fake disappointment, “but that would get rid of all the mystery, wouldn’t it?”

he looked amused by your response, shifting so that he was holding both your wrists behind your back with one hand but still leaning his weight on you to keep you trapped. 

reaching into his suit jacket, he pulled out a gun of his own and held it to your throat, forcing it back. “a mystery i wouldn’t mind solving. tell me, why do you want to kill me?”

“why do you and your little friends steal from others? is daddy not paying enough attention to you so you have to go and make a scene?” you mocked with a tilt of your head. 

from your research, you knew that the head members tended to favor his older sister, fan bingbing, who was a high ranking leader in yuehua

damn ur a whole savage for coming at him like that

chengcheng’s cool face automatically hardened as he gripped the weapon harder. you knew you had struck a nerve. “you’re one to talk after the little stunt you and your own little friends are pulling right now. you know nothing about me”

it was your turn to look amused, simply responding, “oh, but baby boy, i know a lot more about you than you think”

chengcheng pressed the gun firmer against your throat. you refused to break eye contact with him and stared at him in defiance. neither of you made any motion to move, staring at each other through your elaborately decorated masks. 

“how about we level the playing field and let me know who you really are?”

using the tip of the gun, chengcheng gradually lifted your mask millimeter by milliliter. he steadily started to reveal yourself. first, your nose... your upper cheek... your lower lashes...

as he was midway through pulling your mask over your eyes, you saw red smoke in the corner of your vision, signalling for your team to retreat

“maybe next time”

channeling all your strength, you twisted your body powerfully to the left and shoved your shoulder into him. seeing that majority of his weight was resting on you, you successfully threw chengcheng and his gun off of you in the process, kicking him square in the chest with your heel as he stumbled back

you adjusted the mask back over your face and winked at him. wiggling your fingers playfully as a wave goodbye, you leaned your body back and over the balcony you go

humpty dumpty had a great fall--

racing over to the edge of the balcony, chengcheng looked over only to see you being caught by ruotian and jingzuo with the three of you immediately booking it and over a fence as search lights scoured the area

as he watched you disappear into the distance, chengcheng knew there was something about you that intrigued him

he had to find you

unless you found him first

and he had a feeling you’ll be finding him again soon

aaaand that’s a wrap! there were so many directions i wanted to go for this au and this is what i ended up with. i’m not quite sure how i feel about the ending. i wrote an entire novel for this one request, oml. can you tell how much i love chengcheng-

[petescripts]

in drafting a guide to mental health patient experience dissociations

one of the buggy components of mental health travels is the dissociations of experience ..really common example, feeling like you've fallen under the freeloader consumer nothing trip, wanting to be of service more than anything, but in process of getting there  ...often i think the process of mental gathering falls into the perception of active laziness..

have been thinking about the quirks of travels in mental health recovery a lot recently , ..there are a lot of dimensions that aren't a part of general awareness , especially with the component of chemical experience  ..so kind of working on a guide concept of sorts to help fill some of the gaps (& looking to make this an interactive collaboration piece)

some points-

-societal ins & outs , experience alone in being sidelined , implications of repeated experiences of such & effect on timeline and life connections

-chemical experiences , dissociations can arise even in inpatient settings where one may just be coming off of an 8-12 hour chemical straight jacket experience through the voids of conscious experience and get the "where the hell are they at?"s

     -these combinic dimensions upon reentry to society where its just another day, ..maybe a couple weeks or months gone by, but time is no longer an applicable dimension of measurement in experience , which actually becomes a thing in general relatence department-medication side-effects (potentials from anxiety/akathesia/depression/suicidality to weight gain, sexual dysfunction, gynecomastia, diabetes)

-criminalization complex "they must be up to no good"

-general social implication complex "just stay away from them"

         -catch-22 , isolation = recidivism [...-rentacuddle - https://youtu.be/D1f5lE_j_bU (piece on professional cuddlers) ]

-frustrations via the dissociations with the metabolization or lack-there-of , of ones experience ("putting self in others shoes") that wind up turning any patient into hitler at a board meeting during the fall (which upon recidivisms can become a staple of ones identity ...personally fpr instance, insult trips are my least favorite trips. , sometimes its just the function at hand in breaking up autonomous function in practicioner naturally dissociated from autonomy & autonomous aeffect via being caught up in the "keeping the walls up amidst all the schizophrenia of the sector".  ..or can be just honest nerve reflex upon these dissociations of metabolization of ones current situation.. ...insults=beep beep  ...mental health/nhl analogy, line up shake hands later ..not deemance, rather plea to take a step back) 

            -inpatient interventions catch-22 , later implications e.g. restraint - theres no fix-all answers here, maybe an integration of scooby snacks will help in minimizing situationional arisals? , ..theta rooms? ..just sometimes post-interventions theres the .. "oh, so its like that." ...again its a catch-22, sometimes it definitely does have to be done. ...maybe some scooby snacks in post-intervened could help as well , ...scooby snack in theta room...

                        -its much more common for a mental health patient to receive flack in intervention than credit in intervention ...which often leads to later flack interventions & when someone else breaks in society somewhere with some weak ass dumb ass shit (like mass shootings, etc), it adds weight to those already with a load on their backs.

-PTSD "world against syndrome"  

     -even with macro reassurance, micro components

      -dissociations of cause & effects over time heading to i don’t even                  know”s , &/or "demons" 

-sometimes high cortisol levels upon reentry to society - increased vulnerability to reaction to otherwise benign stimuli

        -general abstract travels that can lead to peaking anxiety levels at something like a coffee shop

tbc in collaboration

general rule of thumb, for everything ...assumptions are no good. cite: humpty dumpty

[spacehamsterboo-blog]

Saturday Night Writing 6

Anna was sitting in her tent on Asmidia, her apparent homeplane if Bellugi was to be believed. She’d gone to the short dragon for clues when plumbing Onakke ruins and one day of impersonating a Wojek Halbedier for Bellugi’s fun and profit later, she had a name. Now she found herself in the middle of some civil war on her homeplane and met a young woman who was apparently Anna’s best friend before she had lost her memories in whatever incident ignited her spark. “Nikita-” Hilda, the young woman, poked her head into the tent, “c- can I come in.”

Anna stared at her, dressed in a military uniform compared to Anna’s outfit which was more suited for a hike than a battlefield. “You’re already halfway in, and it’s Anna,” she said with a slight shrug, she was told Nikita was her real name but it felt about as real as finding out you had a great uncle you never knew until he died, a dull sadness mixed with a dose of ‘is that so?’ like you know you lost something on an intellectual level but the sting is less than the small cafe you enjoyed closing down. “What’s up?” She patted the bedroll beside her and Hilda came to sit down, she was carrying an unwieldy book and opened it up to a specific page for Anna to see.

“Look, it’s you Ni- Anna,” Hilda caught herself as she pointed to a picture of several students gathered together, looking very formal, “That’s the two of us, I’m the girl right behind you.” Anna followed her finger first to a happy young girl with curly brown hair and beaming with pride, and then to a slightly older and much more stern young woman with pulled back blonde hair. Anna recognized her general features in the blonde’s face even if she lacked her scar in the picture and had a bun instead of the short mohawk Anna had started rocking since she decided to find out who she was. “You were one of the best mages in the school,” Hilda said almost wistfully. In the picture, Anna stood directly to the right of a much taller young man with impeccable hair and glasses, there were thirteen students in the image all done up in their regalia with various cords and collars to denote rank.

“What kind of person was I?” Anna asked, running her finger down the face of the blonde in the picture, she felt no more connection to the girl in the picture than she would to any rando on any plane who happened to share her face.

“You were always very nice to me,” Hilda said, nodding to herself, “you always knew what you wanted and how to get it.” Hilda pulled the book away and closed it. “You were a kind person, and a good friend.”

“Sorry,” Anna pushed herself off the bed roll and to a standing position, “but I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit. That girl in the picture, the blonde one: she didn’t have friends, she had tools.” She had seen enough faces, enough people who ‘knew how to get what they wanted’ to know the look of someone who thought only in terms of how people could help them.

Hilda stood up, suddenly in the position of defending past Anna, or rather Nikita, from present Anna. “That’s not true, you risked everything to help Bali when her mind got wiped. You always put yourself on the line for other people.”

“Only when I had a motive, I’m sure.” Anna said and looked back to Hilda who was now looking hurt by the accusations Anna had laid against herself. “Who’s Bali?” She needed to find more people who actually knew who she was, see if that could jog her memory.

“She was part of the Student Affair Committee, with the two of us. Her mind got wiped by the same person who attacked you.”

“And where is she now?” Anna asked, grabbing her coat and putting it on.

“She should still be the care home in the city,” Hilda said following after Anna, “where are you going?”

“We’re going to the care home,” Anna corrected her, leaving the tent and making her way through the camp preparing to attack the city the next day.

“That’s enemy territory!” Hilda objected rather loudly, drawing the attention of some soldiers who had been playing cards over their evening meals.

“It sure is,” she said and as two soldiers came to stop her from leaving the camp, she extended a hand towards the closer one, “your friend over there cheated you last night at cards.” With the suggestion planting itself in the soldier’s mind, he turned and punched the man he was previously working with to stop them. Anna walked past the fight quickly turning into a brawl and soldiers went to look at what was happening. “Come on Hilda, we need to fix an old friend.” Part of her felt bad for talking like she remembered Bali and maybe for that mind magic earlier, but she needed to know what Bali had known even if it meant she and Nikita had more in common than Anna wanted to admit.

Infiltrating the city was relatively easy with just the two of them, using spells to mask their presence and a ‘random’ dragon attacking the city certainly didn’t hurt matters. Anna pushed the door to the care center open to find and older man leveling his crossbow at them “We don’t want any trouble or any part in the fighting, just turn around.” he threatened.

“I just need to see Ba-” She was stopped mid-sentence as a crossbow bolt clipped her in the arm. “Toothfrikballgodsmatted” She clenched her teeth holding her arm, trying not to cry out in pain. “Don’t reload,” she threatened as she saw the man reaching for another bolt from his satchel, “don’t do it, you know what? Shatter!” She threw the spell, causing the crossbow to burst into a thousand pieces in his hands. “Where’s the patient named Bali,” she looked to Hilda for a last name.

“Holfen.” Hilda responded somewhat nervously, which Anna felt was a bit unfair since she wasn’t the one who had gotten shot.

“What she said.” Anna pointed a finger threateningly at the older man, “tell us, or I’ll see how you like getting shot.”

“Room Six,” he said pointing down the left hallway, “please don’t kill me, I’ve got kids.”

“Rela-” Anna was cut off by another cry from the man.

“That was a lie, I don’t got kids,” he cowered from her, “I still don’t want to die.” She lowered her finger and didn’t justify this display with an answer. She walked down the hallway and tried the door with the number six on it, only to find it locked.

“Did you think it wouldn’t be locked,” Hilda asked her, looking between the handle and Anna’s face.

“I mean, it might not have been,” She said, suddenly defensive.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Hilda said, pushing past Anna and knocking on the door, “Bali, are you awake? It’s me, Hilda.” She called into the room.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Anna parroted back to Hilda when there was initially no reaction, but then they both heard the sounds of feet shuffling towards the door. “I guess not.”

The door opened enough for a woman with dull blue eyes to look out “Hilda?” She asked in a rather dull tone. “Do you want to come in?”

“I’d love to,” Anna said before either girl who apparently used to be her subordinate , and Bali stepped out of the way for the mind mage to make her way into the room. “Do you remember me?” She asked plainly and Bali looked her up and down.

“Yes, but you’re dead. Hilda said you died.” She responded flatly.

“She also said that Ivan and I were lovers,” Anna said confidently.

“She never said that,” Bali responded flatly.

“Who’s Ivan?” Hilda looked somewhat disgusted at this turn of events. “Why would you lie about that?”

“Anyway,” Anna pulled on her mana bonds in preperation for a dive into Bali’s mind, see if she couldn’t put humpty dumpty back together, “I’m going to make you better, Bali.” Or try, but Bali didn’t seem like she’d mind if Anna failed.

It was sudden blackness and Anna was falling through an empty void with only sporadic islands of memories marking the passage of space. Every part of her mind urged her to break contact and that staying here was a bad idea but those were the kinds of ideas Anna liked the best. Using her willpower and mind, Anna slowed her descent and started creating ground beneath her feet. Once solidified, she was standing in the ruins of a mental labyrinth, it was one that was made to be solved through cleverness but whoever got through was apparently the kind to blast holes in walls and act like they were smart. She followed the path of destruction until she came upon a specter and more Islands of memories, shattered and orbiting what looked like a small sun. “Wow,” she said, putting her hands in her pockets, “much metaphor, very deep.”

The Specter turned around and had a certain malice in its eyes “Nikita,” it said, “I was meant for you, I was meant to destroy you.”

“You did a pretty shit job of that then,” She said, flinging some counter magic to deflect on an oncoming blast, “so I’m guessing you’re here to keep her mind from being repaired.” She deflected another spell and tried to counter but it fizzled as soon as it left her hand.

“This mind is my domain, you cannot defeat me you pathetic woman!” The Specter started launching a barrage of spells that she either tried to counter to dodge. The air was rife with magical energy “Now, to strip you of that pesky identity.” As the spell was cast, the residual energy was shaped and she saw the spell copied over and over all around her. “So goodbye, Nikita.”

“Goodbye, Nikita,” She responded and as the spells all rushed to hit her at the same time, she unleashed a burst of magical energy, a form of countermagic designed to deal with situations exactly like this. Each spell that raced towards her fizzled into nothingness and nothing the Specter did could prevent it. She walked towards the Specter, cracking her knuckles.

“I’m incorporeal, your brute strength is no-” She sent the specter sprawling to the ground with a well placed punch.

“We’re both incorporeal, you dipshit,” She said, punching the specter again. “The difference between you and me,” another punch to keep the uppity little shit down, “is that you’re the mana construct of a worthless little maggot.” The Specter pushed itself back up but got knocked down again by Anna’s fist and she grabbed it by the head. “And I’m,” her eyes were glowing blue she she channeled her mana into breaking the spirit apart piece by piece, “A GODDAMN PLANESWALKER!” There was an explosion and all was calm as the pieces of Bali’s mind stopped rotating and were slowly pulled towards the small sun.

Anna took in a deep breath as she came back to the real world, Bali was laying unconscious beside her. “Are you alright?” Hilda asked, going in for a hug. “You collapsed, and then she collapsed, everyone was dropping and I was worried that you wouldn’t come back.”

“Yeah,” Anna put a singular arm around Hilda while propping herself up with the other one. She looked to the unconscious Bali was now breathing regularly, “I, I don’t know what happened but whoever broke her mind left a construct behind to make sure it wasn’t put back together.”

“What-what happened to it?”

“I killed it of course,” Anna said, as if to suggest any other solution would be silliness. “Let’s rest here for the night, Hilda.” She said, breaking away to lock the door. Wouldn’t want any strange people to barge in. “Tomorrow we can storm the castle and take back the city.”

[exiled-shadow-blog]

Blonics shit story

So the world starts of at the beginning of Sonic Forces, eggman's fat Albert looking ass took over the world and killed Sonic, which needs to fucking happen imo. The whole little group of insignificant little shits is looking for other a replacement because it never occurred to them that a fucking gun exists and they can shoot eggman's Humpty Dumpty ass. Blonic used to look up to Sonic and came to them, he was devastated at Sonic's death like Letty and the hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. The dumbass pieces of failed condoms sent his ass on a mission and he got his legs cut lol. Tails got to him and said you okay nigga? Blonic said “I think I got AIDS now” and tails looked down and said lol. He picked blonic up and put him in a closed cell but got all the food he wanted. Now he's type 3 diabetic. Blonic woke up one day and tried getting out of bed and broke his fucking back. Then due to lack of showers he got severe psoriasis. Then they forced his fatass to do some exercise and then he got into a little chubby form and then Zarya went up to him and melted his fucking legs off by an order of Stalin. Blonic turned into a floating talking egg (get the reference?) And learned Hitler was against Stalin and he became a Nazi and started a campaign to put in all Russians into concentration camps. Later Blonic started to grow wings that aren't attached to him because he's one of Chips sons and Rouge gave him a BJ for that. Now he had all kinds of sexually transmitted diseases. Later down the line, Sonic came the fuck back and said to Blonic “You ain't needed anymore you fucking cunt lol” and Blonic went away in suicidal depression and died in a corner because his psoriasis just kept at him and his insulin levels were at an all time low and he slit his wrists and that's how Blonic fucking died lmao

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Human Evolution of the Mind Is Like a Hind Teat on a Texas Bull… Here we are witnessing The Great Collective Amnesia of the Western World…. The great Forgetting, from the political crass class (total), intellectual wanderers (not all, but mostly all) and the general public (most, and these huge blocks against intelligence follow from generation to next generation with a fluidity equal to the amount of information – mostly junk – exponentially increasing on the world wide web and the number eye gazes at the weekly sales worldwide a la eBay, Amazon.dot.steal and any other number of aggregators and on-line scams) is like bubonic clouds in our industrial and post-industrial nations’ cortexes. The lack of intelligence is deep, to include all those drone makers, the data collectors, the A.I. freaks, the robotics innovators (AKA, people killers), the war makers, the profiteers of toxicity, and any other shill in the giant Facebook-Mass Suicide (intellect) Media Kingdom with their legions of grovelers in their armies of financial and investment classes. Forget History and Forego Other Peoples. This lack of humanness, which is defined by forced and accepted agnotology – large portions of the human fabric and the positive human condition propagandized into complete lies or chopped into meaningless vestiges, remnants of a complete whole – makes daily the thrust of thinking and saying in this country almost like peering into the looking glass. Confusion and anti-thought, anti-knowing. Thus, the deadening of intellect, atrophying of those so-called smarts, that is, as we hear and see from those Hollywood and Wall Street scum deeming what is and is not smart which includes anyone displaying electronic-coding-algorithmic skills or tinkering or hedge funding acumen, whatever modern business groper brings to the table. They are vapid, lacking true intellect which has always been tied to understanding history and knowing what is right and how to wrest control from the wrong-doers, and, of course, understanding the world, from sea to shining seabed, to lost tribe of Ecuador, to every beetle yet cataloged by science and shaman kind. The depth of stupidity and genuflecting to all-encompassing consumption (suicide) is astounding in its coverage and voracity. It’s a total great collective forgetting that is both serendipitous and planned, and our dementia has created untenable damage to the rest of the globe. Call it Stockholm Syndrome tied to our murderers’ well-being, their own sustainability while we frog-march into oblivion death marches. We just cannot keep from fawning and vaunting corporations and chemical eaters, war mongers, money cachetting freaks, living off the flesh of humanity. This is US, us-ay, USA, this overvalued by every measure exceptionalist country of the so-called tuned-in, wired-up, and dialed-in leaders of the Western World. Our collective raping and then impregnating the rest of the world with Disneyfication stupidity, and then riding that ol’ train a slow time comin’, but rest assuredly comin’ to all corners of the globe with the splash-splash of glaciers Humpty-Dumpty-ing into their own march to catastrophe, oblivion –this DEFINES us, USA! You Shit Here, Piss Here, Dump Your Dump Your Carcinogenic Offal Here . . . And We Get to the Now Generations! The gut reaction and media devolution around probably one of the most coalescing written pieces in the past few years on climate change-global catastrophe caused by humans polluting the planet with cooked up fossil fuels and the various feedback loops of methane releases and the reflectivity (albedo effect) of the earth’s surface going negative (our land masses and oceans sponges for heat, now) are in real time despicable. The flinging shit and mud against the writer and his written facts and projections are now embedded in the very nature of how humanity in this western dystopian paradise of constant growth (with entropy quickly back-filling that sickness) puts the he and the her and the they smack in the middle of creation, which is the middle of destruction. The amount of ire, hate, and condemnation tied to his thinking and pseudo marketing-psychology-rhetoric vilifying the piece by David Wallace-Wells (“The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine, 7/9/2017) is reflective of the insipid quality of thinking that has come to define the consumer-capitalist-predator investing/divesting society we have shaped and embraced for more than 60 years. This piece by Wallace-Wells has garnered absurd critiques in the so-called liberal-left greenie press, and the mainstream disastrous press, the pseudo journalism of the big great and digital kings on the east Coast vying for a new Zion in every nook and cranny of the bankster world. The usual libertarian and conservative suspects are trying to burn Wallace-Wells at the stake, for sure, since his article compiles thousands upon thousands of researchers’ work – that is, evidence and prognostications based on those many webs of writing about the research on climate change (which is a catch-all phrase for global warming, weather destabilization, climate uncertainty, geo-engineering, greenhouse gas expulsion through fossil fuel burning and the various parallel defamation of the earth mostly through deforestation and hyper urbanization/ consumption/over-population of Homo Erectus/ Sapiens/ Consumopithecus). Do we need a list of those thinkers and doers years ago who predicted the outcome of the despoiled commons and over-impregnating Homo Sapiens eating the edges and now the center of all the other species, who, in a quick nod, have so-so much to give than a billion “I Wanna Be A Star” cretins who can’t wait for the next and the next bloody mess viewable in the next Netflix world of lies. The subtitle of the piece, “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think,” has bristled the hackles of the me-myself-and-I bros and sisters, all from the various stripes of the political quagmire. Imagine, truth to power, truth to stupidity, truth against the prevailing Cellophane-wrapped essence of nano-particle humanity. Then the greenies start shedding their thin epidermis of green-o-atic colors to show the real flavor of their existence – eating cool, living cooler and propping up everything that is American. I’ve heard crap from Grist and so many other naysayers splaying (attempting, though) David Wallace-Wells’ thinking; many parts of the many numbers of NGO-like, non-profit “looking” environmental concerns (most are money-making harbors of war-loving, capitalism S & M driving nuts who love Hillary or even think Bernie is twenty-two degrees removed from the party he ran under) think going truthful and objective with the reality of the many dynamics tied to climate disruption which Wallace-Wells does, is worse than being a denier, than a Pence or Trump or any color of them ruling DC and the palaces of the stupids. I’ve been listening to our local Pacifica Station, KBOO-Portland, and today (7/19/17), on one show, Robert Hunziker, who wrote a piece, “Unhabitable Earth?” over at Dissident Voice talked about Wallace-Wells’ piece with Paul Roland, and, Hunziker is more or less right on, spot on, agreeing (to a degree, though) with the predictions and creative thought experiment David Wallace-Wells unfolds in a very prescient piece. Hunziker still has qualifiers, as is the style of the day – you know, us digital kings and writers having so much more with it and together than the real hard researchers and satirists. You have to give it to the ameliorating masses in the liberal class, the so-called environmentalists, and the shills that play this marketing/narrative framing/meme-ing game, saying that “too harsh a picture on the global negative implications of climate disaster can cause people to turn off and do nothing . . . scare them into paralysis . . . push them back to the all-you-can-eat/buy/consume/burn/immolate /dump/throw-away ways.” Yep, the so-called environmental b.s.-pushers, the majority of which are happy campers in their Subaru-tooling, Prius-loving, eco-capitalist REI lovefest, go on hyper-drive attack of this man’s well-reasoned and fabulously important piece of climate change writing. Hunziker and Roland on KBOO talked it out, about the Wallace-Wells piece, and the fallout. The call-in folk, well, they have so-so much mixed-up hope, and some cited Bill Gates as savior (those corporate Nazi saviors, don’t you know), or others talking geoengineering, you know, iron shavings by the millions of metric tons, dumped into the oceans, to, as most readers know, human engineer the planet to absorb CO2 – **“Iron fertilization is the intentional introduction of iron fines to iron-poor areas of the ocean surface to stimulate phytoplankton production. This is intended to enhance biological productivity and/or accelerate carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration from the atmosphere.” ** The absurdity of this human ecocide on the oceans is telling, very telling. How we are living in our own shit and waste, tailings from the crimes of resource theft, the burning and slag piles smoking and curing our unborn, the stripped soils and exploded mountains beautiful images of earth gas chamber, diverted rivers to bred desertification, chemicalized water systems to cause death and migration, the entire mess of genetic engineering ready to latch onto the gene codes of the earth eaters, so perfectly captured in macrocosm with the example of salmon crossed at the DNA level with fat ass bass, and penned by the hundreds of thousands forced to eat soy and chicken entrails tablets. One good fishy example of humanity’s human shit and total species hate makes for emblematic ways to really show how warped a species we are. The ever-increasing Franken-fish/Franken-food/Franken-people experiments funded by tax monies, pushed by the controllers, yet average Joe and Jane Blow think this is the new normal. Then we have confused Rachel Maddows and Al Gores and the lot of them on their Van Jones high horses, empty of intelligence, blasphemers of the precautionary principle, small-minded and closed-headed people who look at a climate change article (which should be a triple-clarion call out) with real mettle, real predictions, not only poo-pooing it, but downright eviscerating the facts in order to play some full-of-shit narrative framing, shit, a la Freud and Bernays and Madison Avenue Zionist slave to consumerism shit. How much shit makes hubris and delusion capitalism? Imagine, the pencil necks at Grist (“Stop Scaring People About Climate Change: It Doesn’t Work”) attacking the reality, calling this man to task, for his look inside and outside at the real and unfolding possibilities of this that’s world a comin’, like a fast freight train a thousand miles long with every species ready for the Mother of All Dachaus — every species but that lying, raping, murdering, polluting, insane, blubbery, superstitious, vapid, inelegant Hominoid of modern atrocities. These people, advertising-seeking, for sure, and vetted by that political and non-profit enviro class so easily despised for their hypocrisy, they are grandstanding saying scaring doesn’t work? What sort of Wallace-Wells work is this writer leaning on, or wanting? It’s not his job to get people to revolt, overthrow, throw down, end the entire shooting match. “Quit scaring people” is so-so telling of the liberal class who gives shit about the illegal wars, the massive murders of millions by this empire, the massive deportations, massive destabilizations, massive inequities within their own shores. Almost anything coming out of their people’s cloud-digital-print asses is worth less than that one political orifice’s total value. Sanity Found Not Between the Lines, but in the Alarms and Emergency Sirens Apparent in the Words To give us a bit more to chew on without replicating the piece, here, the sectional titles of Wallace-Wells’ article: I. ‘Doomsday’ — Peering beyond scientific reticence. II. Heat Death — The bahraining of New York. III. The End of Food — Praying for cornfields in the tundra. IV. Climate Plagues –What happens when the bubonic ice melts? V. Unbreathable Air — A rolling death smog that suffocates millions. VI. Perpetual War  — The violence baked into heat. VII. Permanent Economic Collapse  — Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world. VIII. Poisoned Oceans — Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast. IX. The Great Filter — Our present eeriness cannot last. Even the climate change piece looks at the rotten form that is capitalism, and the great day trading of the commons, the willingness of man to barter for more money with the future commons of ancestral havens. We’re talking war, too, rarely mentioned by greenies. War is the power, the engine, of greed, destabilization, the end of food, the lack of preparedness for everyone to adapt and adjust to the impending collapsed societies. Wallace-Wells nails it. Then, look at these opposing points of view, sick, really, spewing liberal elites with their pedigrees, whatever that means in this sell-out science landscape: “Doomsday Scenarios Are as Harmful as Climate Change Denial” By Michael E. Mann, Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles Analysis of “The Uninhabitable Earth” Published in New York Magazine, by David Wallace-Wells on 9 July 2017: Sixteen scientists (all male, all White/Christian/Jewish) analyzed (attacked) the article and estimated its overall scientific (what is this, really, in a sell-out world of science for their own profits) credibility to be ‘low’. (yet more mumbo-jumbo from the science arena). A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Alarmist, Imprecise/Unclear, Misleading. This grouping of puke scientists, who we all must bow to, don’t you know, with their Ivy-League and powerhouse Stanford and Big 20 university laurels, well, they are vapid, untenable when you think about their own contexts – first world, elite, white, privileged, ivory towered, and never grasping the reality of an uneven world for not only their fellow billions, but for the entirety of the wild world. Hmm, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has been reporting a huge loss of population in thousands of vertebrate species. Researchers have studied 27,600 species of birds, amphibians, mammals and reptiles, finding huge losses in over 8,000 species. The animal species are not yet technically extinct, but the loss of numbers is severe enough to collapse breeding, viability, and their own roles in their eco-webs, let alone their own rights to exist on this planet. The findings mean that billions of animal populations that once roamed the Earth are now gone. This is the great Sixth Great Extinction of animal species caused by climate change and loss of habitat – all perpetrated by Man and Woman and “they”. “The sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.” Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, continues: “If we continue the trend we’re on, we’re going to be looking at 50 to 75 percent of our species lost over the next hundred years.” Here’s what the capitalism-adoring Atlantic magazine says of the work of Wallace-Wells: It’s into that morass that this week’s New York magazine walks. In a widely shared article, David Wallace-Wells sketches the bleakest possible scenario for global warming. He warns of a planet so awash in greenhouse gas that Brooklyn’s heat waves will rival Bahrain’s. The breadbaskets of China and the United States will enter a debilitating and everlasting drought, he says. And millions of brains will so lack oxygen that they’ll slip into a carbon-induced confusion. Unless we take aggressive action, “parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” he writes. “No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.” It’s a scary vision—which is okay, because climate change is scary. It is also an unusually specific and severe depiction of what global warming will do to the planet. And though Wallace-Wells makes it clear that he’s not predicting the future, only trying to spin out the consequences of the best available science today, it’s fair to ask: Is it realistic? Will this heat-wracked doomsday come to pass? Many climate scientists and professional science communicators say no. Wallace-Wells’s article, they say, often flies beyond the realm of what researchers think is likely. I have to agree with them. This is the tribe of elites, the publishing mainliners, the gatekeepers, controllers, the myopics and the critics of anything outside their own narrative frames – America good, or inherently good and all-knowing, all-solving, leaders of the world and technology and in ideas. Words like scary and vision and morass, oh, those wordsmiths, oh those literary kingpins of the big East Coast tribe. Humanity’s chosen people, these publishers and writers and editors and pundits and cultural icons. Here, from Wallace-Wells in an updated and annotated version of his piece: Since the article was published, we have made four corrections and adjustments, which are noted in the annotations (as well as at the end of the original version). They are all minor, and none affects the central project of the story: to apply the best science we have today to the median and high-end ‘business-as-usual’ warming projections produced by the U.N.’s ‘gold standard’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the debate this article has kicked up is less about specific facts than the article’s overarching conceit. Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be? What are the risks of terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue, and what should a journalist make of those risks? The End Game is Capitalism-Delusional Thinking-Soylent Green is People! Now, let’s get really real. How many minds were talking about no-growth, steady-state economics, the three e’s of sustainability (environment, equity, economy, in that fucking order!), small is better, de-industrializing, eco-socialism, and on and bloody on? Forget Muir, or Pinchot or Stegner or Rachel Carson or Mumford or Kunslter or Jane Jacobs or any number of proponents of fair and environmentally gauged communities. One part Wallace-Wells, another part, hmm, Derrick Jensen? While we face ‘hard choices’ about which species and ecosystems to conserve, it’s odd how we face no such quandaries over which of our frivolous luxuries to refrain from, or what murderous weapons system not to build, writes Derrick Jensen. This look at the hard choices of species and ecosystems, over pornography, sweat-shop clothes, next generation iPhones, animal-shit coffee, Ikea lasting six months, endless cruises and buffets, disposable internal combustion vehicles, jets and satellites and drones and backyard pools and chemical trails circling the globe and, well, you know what humanity is not willing to sacrifice! Sure, we’re supposed to choose whether to extirpate or save Bulmer’s fruit bats or Sumatran Rhinos, wild yams or hula painted frogs (with the default always being extirpate, of course); and we’re supposed to make careful delineations of how we choose who is exterminated, and who lives (at least until tomorrow, when we all know there’ll be another round of exterminations, complete with another round of wringing our hands over how difficult these decisions are, and another round of heartbreak; and then another round, and another, until there is nothing and no one left). But just as after Fukushima a Japanese energy minister said that nuclear energy must continue to be produced because no one “could imagine life without electricity”, so, too, entirely disallowed is any discussion of what technologies should be kept and what should be caused to go extinct. There’s no discussion of extirpating iPads, iPhones, computer technologies, retractable stadium roofs, insecticides, GMOs, the Internet (hell, Internet pornography), off-road vehicles, nuclear weapons, predator drones, industrial agriculture, industrial electricity, industrial production, the benefits of imperialism (human, American, or otherwise). That’s the rub, every single SOV day (single occupancy vehicle). I can’t even help my homeless and beaten-down young foster kids without being forced to drive miles upon miles and meet them at the quintessential rot gut everything that is bad about society Starbucks, because that’s company policy. I drive in a rural area near Oregon City, Estacada, and daily, the number of sacrifices on the road, AKA road kill, is in the dozens. Daily. We cut and maul and pave over and build over and divert and seed with invasives, and daily, hourly, each minute, on this planet, not one shit product or idea or lifestyle is sacrificed, but each and every square inch of soil and cubic meter of river and 2000 foot of altitude is raped and re-raped. By us, the supremacists. The dunces. The ones sitting, lying and sleeping in our own shit, using the cadavers of the real world – ecology, environment – as our rationale for putting us at the top of the dung heap. The murder of the planet is not some tragedy ordained by fate because we’re too damn smart. It is the result of a series of extremely bad social choices. We could choose differently. But we don’t. And we won’t. Not so long as the same unquestioned beliefs run the culture. Don’t get me wrong. Anyone who is working to protect wild places or wild beings from this omnicidal culture is in that sense a hero. We need to use every tool possible to save whomever and wherever we can from this culture. But it’s ridiculous and all-too-expected that while there’s always plenty of money to destroy the Tongass and every other forest, and there’s always plenty of money for various weapons of mass destruction (such as cluster bombs or dams or corporations) somehow when it comes to saving wild places and wild beings, we have to pinch pennies and ‘make difficult decisions’. Also, I need to say that the whole Ark metaphor doesn’t work. In the original story, God saved two of every species (as He, like the humans who created Him, destroyed the planet). Here, modern humans are going where even God didn’t tread, and explicitly not saving every species, but instead deciding which species to save, and which species to kill off. This is, of course, both pleasing and flattering to human supremacists: they’re making decisions on questions even God punted. How cool is that? http://clubof.info/

[geekade]

Legion of Spoilers - Chapter 1

This past Wednesday, FX finally premiered the long-awaited Legion, written and produced by Fargo’s Noah Hawley. Although the show is based on the lesser-known character from the X-Men universe, Hawley has described it as an adaptation built on the same foundation as the original’s volatile powers and identity.

Chapter 1 opens with a montage of scenes of David Haller's (Dan Stevens) childhood. The sequence starts innocently enough, with moments that could have been plucked from any family album in mid-century middle America, before progressing through increasingly chaotic scenes that hint at the scope of David's powers and instability. The series appears to have taken a page from Breaking Bad, adopting a saturated and vivid palette in which each color has its own significance. Take the opening two scenes: the montage and the hospital visit. David's early childhood is rendered with the nostalgia of sepia and pastels. As his powers grow and the whispers grow louder, everything darkens, the lighting deepening to more ominous shades that culminate in his attempted suicide. He vanishes downward, leaving only darkness bisected by an orange electric cord.

In the next scene, David has risen from the bottom of the frame and is dressed in a lighter palette, the earth tones that recur throughout the psychiatric hospital where he is being treated for paranoid schizophrenia. Even his hair is lighter. Sitting opposite him is a woman later identified as his sister, Amy (Katie Aselton), clad in bright green and navy blue that pop incongruously against the wan décor of the visiting room and David’s more muted shades. She offers him the saddest birthday cupcake of all time, which becomes improbably sadder when a guard denies David even a taste of chocolatey goodness. The visit ends abruptly when an orderly announces it's time for his next pill, and before he leaves the table, David mutters to his bewildered visitor, "Something new needs to happen soon."

And then it does: David spots a new inmate. Sydney Barrett (Rachel Keller) picks her way through the ward, anxiously and assiduously avoiding physical contact. Smitten immediately, he offers her Twizzlers stolen from his (understandably miffed) ward buddy Lenny (Aubrey Plaza). Thus begins a charming and innocent courtship conducted over evening skylines and cherry pie. But the time is already out of joint: One moment David is standing to receive his pill, and the next an orderly is pushing him along in a wheelchair. It's unclear how much time has passed between those two shots, or since his sister's visit. The transition – so seamless I initially missed it – sets up a series of cuts worthy of Billy Pilgrim’s Tralfamadorian time-jumps.

By his own admission, David is an unreliable narrator. Dogged by voices and visions of a creepy Humpty-Dumpty demon (The Devil with Yellow Eyes), his grip on reality is tenuous at best. That he is aware of this does nothing to help ground him or viewers. The first chapter doesn’t so much play out as it assembles a disorienting collage of non-linear moments. It’s nearly perpetually unclear whether we're seeing the present, a flashback (that is, an accurate depiction of a past event), a memory (an event as recorded by the notoriously unreliable human brain), a hallucination or dream, an alternate timeline, or some cocktail of all of the above. I have a theory about what happened but you probably have one too, and it’s anybody’s guess how well that squares with David Haller’s (or Noah Hawley’s) chronology.

One moment David and Sydney are sharing a quiet evening, and the next David is hunched over a candy-apple red table in a very white room. Now in civilian clothes, he’s being questioned by a polished official in a brown suit (Hamish Linklater) while a sinister whittler with a weird eye (Mackenzie Gray) lurks at the edges of the room. By degrees, the interrogation – intercut with what we'll call flashbacks – reveals that David possesses telepathic and telekinetic powers, that the latter tend to manifest spectacularly in moments of great stress, and that something very bad happened at the hospital. That incident – which coincided with Sydney's discharge from the hospital – killed Lenny, shook the building to its foundation, and sealed every patient behind doorless walls.

Only it wasn’t Sydney who was discharged: When they kissed each other goodbye, Sydney and David switched bodies, and David's mind emerged from the hospital in Sydney's body. Several scenes later, David's body somehow catches up while "Sydney" is sitting in an outdoor café. He makes his way to his sister's place on what turns out to be Halloween and eats every waffle in the house before retiring to the basement to apologize to a hallucination of his former ward buddy. At least, you assume it's a hallucination until David's sister pops in to check up on him and the camera shows Lenny’s reflection in a nearby mirror. Silent and motionless, Lenny watches as David crouches over the fragments of a (telekinetically) shattered lamp and his sister absconds with every nearby sharp implement as diplomatically as possible.

David snaps back to the interrogation to find he's been moved to a filled swimming pool rigged with high voltage cables. In true Bond villain fashion, his interrogator looms over him brandishing a kill switch; and in true Bond villain fashion, he and all his henchmen are incinerated in a near-cosmic conflagration that leaves the building (and of course David) untouched. The explosion announces the arrival of a rescue team led by (who else?) Syd Barrett, who takes them to a boat launch where Melanie Bird (Jean Smart) awaits. After one last leer from the Devil with Yellow Eyes, David takes Ms. Bird's hand, and – what do you mean the next episode isn’t for another week?!

Show runner Noah Hawley is in his usual fine form, with every line, shot, cut, and costume composed with the rigor of Fargo and the panache of The Unusuals. Catchy and eclectic soundtracks are another Hawley trademark, and here as well Legion lives up to its predecessors. The aesthetic genuflects to Pink Floyd even as the show defies viewers to place it in a recognizable historical moment. This appears to be intentional as well, both as a world-building and thematic choice: Asking when all this happens or whether it even happens in our universe distracts us from the more material how. Unfortunately every potential answer to the latter is terrifying; sharing David’s sense of dislocation is less frightening than considering he is in possession of an immense power that he cannot control.

We all construct our own realities, but what happens when you can bend reality – whether you want to or not? What happens when you can’t know whether your delusions manipulate your perceptions or the actual fabric of space-time? David’s power unmoors him from every dimension we rely on to make sense of our experiences – but of course, that’s the point. The combination of his power and mental illness keep him at a remove, inspiring a fear that reaches past allies and enemies into the world we like to call real. I wouldn’t want to have his power, but I can’t wait to see what he’ll do with it next.

QUOTES

"My 260th Thursday as a passenger on the cruise ship Mental Health."

"Do you...wanna be my girlfriend?"

"Okay. But don't touch me." "Okay." "Yeah?" "Yeah." "Okay."

"If he so much as farts too loud, we're moving to Level Two."

"Don't give a newbie a bazooka and then act surprised when she blows shit up."

"What's so funny?" "I'm insane, you idiot. This is my delusion."

ODDS & ENDS

Full disclosure: I haven’t read the Legion comics, although I have done some Internet research in preparation for the series. Any references to the comics will be sourced and linked for comics fans who care to check my work. If you haven’t read the comics either, CBR has a pretty good primer.

Hawley has said the show won’t be a blow-by-blow recreation of Legion’s history or arcs, but he is trying to do justice to Sienkiewicz’s signature visual style. (Related: The Hair has been promised.)

So far, the only nod to the X-Men aside from the X in the show's title card is the yellow and blue color scheme of David’s pajamas. Hawley has suggested that the show takes place in one of X-Men’s alternate universes, but the title card suggests that the two worlds will eventually collide.

I will not pretend to have any idea what was up with that dance sequence, but if you’re interested, it was set to “Pauvre Lola” by Serge Gainsbourg.

The other two songs featured prominently were The Who’s “Happy Jack” (the opening montage) and The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” (David and Syd’s courtship). And yes, Sydney is named after Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett.

Legion opened with several Hawley show alum, and I’m hoping for more. The most notable appearances in this chapter are Jean Smart and Rachel Keller, who starred in Season 2 of Fargo as Floyd and Simone Gerhardt. Mackenzie Gray and Brad Mann have also appeared in Fargo and Hamish Linklater is slated for Season 3.

Other notable cast members: Aubrey Plaza and Dan Stevens. Stevens played Matthew Crawley on Downtown Abbey. Plaza is probably best known for April Ludgate in Parks & Recreation and Daria in a briefly viral CollegeHumor trailer, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn she also voiced deadpan creepytwin Eska on The Legend of Korra.

Hawley is a fan of Kurt Vonnegut and is also working on adapting Cat’s Cradle for FX.

The ambulance parked in front of Clockworks after the incident bears the name Calvino, no doubt a nod to postmodern novelist Italo Calvino. My eyes are now peeled for a sly reference to The Nonexistent Knight.

The character debuted in 1985, written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz. In the comics, David Haller/Legion suffers from multiple personality disorder – his name is based on the biblical story in which a group of demons possessing a human identify themselves as Legion – and each personality controls a different power. I think something similar is going on in the show (more on that in Fan Theories).

FAN THEORIES, or WHAT THE HELL I THINK IS GOING ON

I don’t believe Sydney Barrett is real. Ditto for Rudy (Brad Mann) [I may have gotten the name wrong, but the telekinetic dude in black tactical wear]. My theory is that Sydney is a psychokinetic projection of one of David’s latent personalities, and that Rudy is either psychokinetic or hallucinatory projection of another latent personality. This would explain why Lenny and Dr. Kissinger both see Sydney, why David kissing her generates a concussive energy wave (as David suddenly adopts Sydney’s body and leaves a psychokinetic projection of David behind), and how David finds himself – body and mind – sitting in a chair previously occupied by “Sydney.” Both Sydney and Rudy demonstrate powers we already know David to possess – telepathy and telekinesis, respectively.

The nature of David’s illness prevents him from recognizing these projections as aspects of his own mind.

I’m on the fence about Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) and Kerry (Amber Midthunder). It’s 50/50 between them being additional latent personalities OR employees of Melanie Bird (whose existence I’m buying for the time being). They don’t seem to possess any mutant powers, but they do speak in a slightly stilted manner that seems more imagined than natural.

At least some of David’s hallucinations aren’t hallucinations. He possesses the ability to reach into parallel universes (mentally if not physically) and what looks like unreality to viewers and squares is actually David accessing a world of (if you will) alternative facts. That Lenny’s reflection appears in a mirror that is out of David’s line of sight suggests to me that her existence is not a quirk of rogue brain chemistry.

Chronology: David is sharing a house with girlfriend Philly and several housemates. After a bad fight, Philly storms off and David retreats to the kitchen, where his tumultuous emotions manifest in a poltergeist-type phenomenon that gives us a glimpse of The Devil with the Yellow Eyes. Shortly afterward he laces up an electric cord and tries to hang himself, which leads to his six-year occupancy of the Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital. The cupcake visit occurs in the fifth year of his tenure; after a time jump of less than a year he meets and befriends Syd Barrett. In the latter’s form he eventually convinces Dr. Kissinger to discharge them, performs the psychokinetic switch described above, and escapes the facility in year six. Nevertheless, the stress of Syd’s “departure” provokes the incident that kills Lenny and seals the ward. After approximately a week of freedom, David calls the hospital hoping to talk to Syd, only to be told that they have no record of any such patient. Ptonomy and Kerry try to pick him up, only to be intercepted by The Eye and his SWAT minions. David comes to in the interrogation room, vanishes his lunch tray, blows shit up, and gets knocked out and removed to the pool. From there he musters some nasty pyrokinesis and makes his daring escape.

Every color signifies something. Pastels and sepia tones are childhood memories. Earth tones (muted oranges, yellows, and dull greens) recur throughout Clockworks, both on the inmates and in the décor. Syd’s overcoat and kerchief are also orange, suggesting she is inextricable from Clockworks even after she leaves. However, she carries a bright green suitcase which echoes the lime and then Kelly greens sported Amy Haller; these shades only appear on those free to leave the hospital. David is wearing gray when he loses control, first in the shared house kitchen and again during what I affectionately call the InterroBang. Fittingly, his latent personalities wear black – Sydney’s track jacket is black, as are the clothes she’s wearing the day she leaves the hospital. Dead Lenny is wearing a black tank top under beige overalls, a manifestation that he didn’t create from whole cloth because alive Lenny was real. The last colors that jumped out at me are also the hardest to parse: white and red. Both the interrogation room and the orderlies’ uniforms include broad, geometrically rigid blocks of white. I have no idea what this means. And when David exercises his power with great force, a lurid red glow suffuses the screen. This red glow also silhouettes the dog(?) sitting in a kennel in the government facility where David is interrogated, implying an as-yet unrevealed connection. Red also seems to accompany moments of profound anxiety, reverie, or dislocation: It features prominently in the house kitchen counters, the café tables and chairs, and of course the table in the interrogation room.

[thedesperatehousehusband]

Not Super on Time at this Point but Whatever

Sometimes I am not able to be as timely as I prefer with my posts. This is one of those times. I am still going to pontificate on the Super Bowl even though it was four days ago.

The outcome was appalling. I don’t care for the Patriots. I think Tom Brady is a douche. I think Gisele is the worst. I think Bill Belichick is smug and homeless looking all at the same time. That Julian Edelman is a stud though and even though Rob Gronkowski is dumb as a box of rocks, he’s really pretty funny. But more than that the Falcons should be deported. How do you blow a 25 point lead in the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl? You will never, ever live that down.

The Schuyler Sisters singing America the Beautiful was a delight. Look, y’all, more than just white people can sing patriotic songs! It’s like there’s diversity in this country or something. In stark contrast, white as fuck Luke Bryan sang the National Anthem. It was fine. He’s not the world’s best singer but he’s not the worst. I’m certain he’s helping to make America great again.

Halftime, halftime, halftime. Bring it, Gaga. I will not hear it if you don’t agree with me. That was the BEST halftime show in years and years. Certainly since Prince, may he rest in peace. Like her or not, the woman is a talent. I’m sure there was a backing track somewhere but for the most part ol’girl was singing. I feel like you could tell by how she was breathing. The dancing was kick ass. There were gays and brown people and all sorts of funky folks. Loved it more than my luggage.

Let’s discuss commercials. In a nutshell, they sucked donkey balls. There is nothing worse than mediocrity when it comes to Super Bowl ads. Most were mediocre at best.

1.       Google Home…a little overwrought.

2.       Michelin…been there, done there.

3.       Avocados from Mexico…the secret society has nothing to do with avocados. I laughed. But not for the right reasons and not having anything to do with the product being advertised.

4.       Mobile Strike with Arnold…I’m not a gamer. Maybe it resonates with the target. Maybe Arnold’s ratings are down. Maybe he released his taxes when he was governor of California. Maybe I just don’t care.

5.       H&R Block with IBM Watson…get every last deduction. Get errrry one. This one was decent. In the grand scheme of things, I’d give it a B+.

6.       Skittles…Romance? Is that what it was? Terrible.

7.       Busch Beer…Buschhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh was very clever. But Busch? Really? How fucking white trash. At least AB didn’t rag on the craft beer industry. So there’s that. I’ll give it a B.

8.       American Petroleum Institute…Yep. I get it. Oil is a part of our lives and more that that, it makes things better. But ethanol is going to catch on. Bless my corns, I believe it to be true.

9.       GoDaddy…Rick Astley is trying to make a comeback. Good luck. D+.

10.   LifeWtr…I guess basically introducing a new product on the Super Bowl will generate awareness.  That’s a bazillion dollar gamble. Bully for you for taking a risk.

11.   Intel with Tom Brady…don’t care. D+.

12.   AirBnB…#weaccept. Sharp, sharp, sharp. Makes a nice statement but still feels on target and based on an insight. I’ll give it an A. One of the only A’s, in my opinion.

13.   World of Tanks…Fuck off.

14.   Yellow Tail…Another shitty booze brand. I get it though. Mass market products make sense. Honestly, Yellow Tail isn’t that bad. It was fun and was pretty cute. A-.

15.   Pirate’s Life…I’m not sure how you judge a movie trailer as a Super Bowl ad so I’ll just say I have NO interest whatsoever in this movie. Let the ship sink, Johnny. It’s over.

16.   Pistacchios…Who doesn’t love elephants? It was decent. Final grade = B-.

17.   Buick…with Cam Newton. I guess it was fine. I don’t really like him. He’s kind of a brat. Sack up and don’t whine, you big baby. One must be careful with celebrities. They can be polarizing.

18.   Logan…another trailer. I’m intrigued. I like that it’s rated R. Maybe that means a little full frontal from Hugh Jackman. I wouldn’t complain.

19.   T Mobile…with the Biebs, Gronk and TO. T Mobile is trying to make themselves happen. Who uses T Mobile? It reminds of the final few holdouts who wouldn’t give up their Blackberrys.  Meh,

20.   Honda CRV…chasing dreams. I get it. Potentially overly aspirational for a pretty affordable car but at least it had some sort of strategy behind it.

21.   Bai Bai…with JT and Christopher Walken. At this point all I can remember about Bai Bai is the celebrs in the spot. I think it’s food or beverage. Or maybe feminine hygiene or maybe toilet bowl cleaner. Fail.

22.   Transformers: Rise of the What the Fuck Ever…nope.

23.   Tide..with Terry Bradshaw. I didn’t hate it. That’s saying a lot.

24.   Sprint….I can’t read my notes so I don’t know what this ad was about. My bad.

25.   Coca Cola…tying it all back to food makes sense. I have very strong correlation between eating at McDonald’s and Coke. An A- for sure.

26.   The Handmaid’s Tale…should I know what this is? I’m slightly intrigued and slightly nonplussed.

27.   WeatherTech…America. Fuck yeah.

28.   Febreeze…something having to do with halftime. I don’t remember anymore. I should have written this sooner.

29.   Alfa Romeo…I guess we’re trying to make Alfa Romeo happen in the US. Good luck. I’m not sure now is the best time to introduce a foreign product in this country.

30.   Michelob Ultra…95 calories and you can still do Crossfit when you drink it. Feels like a streeeeeetch.

31.   TurboTax….Humpty Dumpty. A decent attempt at humor. But I have no interest in seeing this spot 100,000 times. Hopefully they don’t run it as part of their regular ad rotation.

32.   Lexus…nothing interesting or different or new. Could have been any Lexus add on during any other show. Make it special. Or at least try.

33.   Fate of the Furious…money talks and that’s why Charlize Theron is in this movie.

34.   Squarespace…with John Malkovich. I don’t really understand what one does on or with Squarespace. Maybe that means the ad wasn’t meant for me.

35.   Wendy’s…othrguys.com. Decent. But Wendy’s will never be chosen ahead of McDonald’s in my world.

36.   Xfinity…I don’t care.

37.   The Hammer Insurance…WTF?

38.   Kaplan University…Really?

39.   Arby’s…2 for $5. Seriously? An offer during the Super Bowl? That’s just dumb,

40.   Menard’s…save big money. This was probably a regional insertion that not everyone saw.

41.   Audi…equal pay for women. This has caused quite a stir because apparently Audi as a corporation has a pretty shitty track record with female pay and female representation at the senior exec level. Ooopsie poopsie. Don’t try to take a social stand when you can’t internally back it up.

42.   Mr. Clean…the man who cleans. In my opinion, this was the very best spot of the Super Bowl. A VERY clear insight. A VERY clear benefit. A VERY clear target. A+++++++++.

43.   Snickers…the live spot with Adam Driver was a gimmick. Gimmicks rarely work. This did not work.

44.   Anheuser Busch…immigration and August Busch coming to the states. I liked it. It told a nice story. Was ironically very topical and relevant even though AB shot the spot 3 months ago and couldn’t have possibly known about the whole travel ban insanity. But, of course, August Busch was white and that makes it OK…..no offense to AB. That’s a dig on errrrything else.

45.   T Mobile…with Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg. Can-o-bisque or cannabis? Get it? That’s almost clever. But what does it have to do with cell phones? Nothing. Fail.

46.   Persil..with Bill Nye the Science Guy. I guess we’re still trying to make Persil happen in the States. I’m not sure this spot is going to push them over the edge.

47.   Kia…with Melissa McCarthy. She’s comedy gold. This sorta kinda worked.

48.   Stranger Things 2…we just watched the pilot episode. Loved it. This is apropos of nothing.

49.   The Walking Dead…They need to bulk up the ratings since people fled like crazy given the completely bleak first half of this season. I concur that it was all a bit much but there ain’t so sunshine and rainbows in the zombie apocalypse.

50.   Fiji…earth’s finest water. I see what you did there. A solid B.

51.   Baywatch…apart from Zac Efron’s body this movie just looks terrible.

52.   Alfa Romeo…see number 29.

53.   T Mobile…with 50 Shades of Grey or Darker or Whatever. Make it stop!

54.   Wix.com…with Jason Statham and Gal Gadot. I do not know what one does with or on Wix.com.

55.   Turkish Airlines…moving free. Not bad and by this point, I’m pretty much over the whole thing so anything that even makes sense is going to be viewed favorably.

56.   Alexa…with My Girl. Not horrendous. That’s positive when considering the amount of dreck.

57.   T Mobile..data limits. I literally can’t even with T Mobile.

58.   Nintendo Switch…I don’t care about video games but this looked relatively cool.

59.   Spuds McKenzie…Bring that dead dog back to life, Bud Light. Nothing better than a recycled icon and the ghost of a deceased pit bull.

60.   Mercedes…I don’t really remember anything about this spot except that it featured Patty the Daytime Hooker who was a character on My Name is Earl. I love that actress. She is simply the best actress working in Hollywood in her ability to play white trash.

61.   Alfa Romeo…the third time is the charm. Except it’s not. No more. See number 29 and 52.

62.   Sprite…with Lebron James. Much as I love Lebron James, I am nearly positive this was not a new spot and the Coca Cola Company can pony up for a new spot for the Super Bowl. That’s cheap.

63.   KFC…something having to do with gold. Meh.

64.   Tide…another go. That’s a lot of Tide for one Super Bowl.

And that’s that. Super Bowl LI is in the books and we have a few months without football. But that’s OK because March Madness is juuuuuuuust about to knock on my door. That shit is my jam.