#They could have carried the show with their interpersonal dramas alone

[fizzigigsimmer]

The group dynamics of Steve, Nancy, Jonathan and Billy in a better season 2, with the addition of Robin and Heather in season 3... y'all just don't understand how my soul mourns for this.

Billy would be the "leather jacket" guy of the group. The semi reformed bully whose still 'too cool for any of you', but since there are monsters to slay point me at em. But Robin would clock his desperate cries for Steve's attention so quick, and Heather would be the first to see past the facade and like truly give a shit about him.

Imagine Heather and Billy bonding over smokes in the locker room at the pool, and her warning him away from Karen because she knows all about the desperate housewives of Hawkins, and if he's looking to get creeped on by a woman old enough to be his mother he can just come to her house for dinner friday night. Her mom's a great cook and it will get her dad off her back about dating for awhile.

Imagine Billy and Nancy competing over grades and kinda just barely tolerating each other at first, but she is so confused because he and Jonathan seem to have found common ground and he's like low key the biggest champion of their relationship.

Imagine Eddie is the one who gets flayed and it's the teens who figure it out because Billy's obsessed over the fact that the only dealer in town just up and quit, and is acting like he had a full personality transplant. Yeah Eddie was a dork, but he had good weed okay and Billy needs his hits god damn it if he's supposed to keep his shit together about monsters and the end of the world with Neil breathing down his neck.

Imagine Steve Harrington's very first gay kiss being when he's taunting his rival/maybe friend, sometimes monster hunting partner Billy Hargrove with a joint he found stashed in his glove compartment and Billy shot guns him like it's nothing.

Imagine Nancy on her "I don't know, maybe it was Steve all along" bullshit in season 4, and Jonathan self sabotaging with everything he's got. And they're like in the upside down and Nancy is doing her thing making gooey eyes at Steve, wrapping his wounds and Billy just pops off out of nowhere, "Make sure she wraps those tight. You're topping tonight no excuses. Oh and stop being such a pussy Byers. Communicate with your girl."

Everyone's just like gobsmacked, bamboozeled, and Steve is just so embaressed, exasperated, but kinda happy too.

"Is this you communicating?"

Billy all sly, "We understand each other don't we?"

[millenniumblog]

[ID: A chart describing the core values of each of the nine Enneagram personality types with YuGiOh characters correlated to each of the types.]

YuGiOh Enneagram Analysis, Part #1

Please note that this is the “boring” informational post about Enneagram with the Types listed and explained as well as a few other things. The next post is what has the actual, in-depth character profiles promised!

Introduction & Motivation

Over the past several months, I have been trying to analyze my strengths and weaknesses as a writer and learn more. I have been writing fanfiction since I was a little kid, making my first FF.net account in 2003 when I would have been twelve years old. Even before that, I was a lurker and wrote fics to share with my childhood best friend on paper or floppy discs.

YuGiOh came into my life at some point shortly thereafter. I know this, because I spent my thirteenth birthday in a comic book shop, mostly watching some of my male friends play the trading card game. I had some of the cards, but I was never much of a player, unable to keep up with the seemingly rapid rule changes. Besides that, I was always way more interested in the story and characters than I was in the card game. I remember I even wanted to call “YuGiOh cards” “Duel Monsters” instead to make it seem a little closer to tween-y LARPing.

Eventually, I gave up on collecting cards or trying to ply the game. I felt that while my male friends didn’t mind me being around when they played, they weren’t extremely interested in helping me learn or keep up. I felt I had other strengths, so I started carrying around a notebook even more than I already did. I started my fledgling forays into online fandom. And YuGiOh was a big part of the beginning of that.

I can’t remember posting any YuGiOh fic in particular, and I’m sure that if I had it would make me cringe now. What I do remember is reading some and also spending a lot of time lying on my bed, headphones plugged into a small purple stereo, listening to the first of the two American-released CDs with YuGiOh-inspired music on them. In particular, the last three tracks were pieces of music from the original score composed for the 4Kids dub, which is - for some reason - different from the original Japanese music.

During that time, I would fantasize and conjure my own YuGiOh plots in my head, most of which were focused on the Ancient Egyptian and more spooky, spiritual, and horror themes in the show. I was really fascinated with the reincarnation angle, though my understanding of and opinions on how that works have grown with time.

Years went by, and I didn’t think about YuGiOh much at all. Then, something happened in 2018. I don’t know what got in my head, but it was like all the joy I once found in thinking about the YuGiOh characters came back in a giddy conversation with my childhood best friend. Then, for a little while, it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I started writing for the fandom then, and after several detours, I’m trying to get back in the groove of it.

My approach to the tone of YuGiOh-fanning is that it’s a bit serious, but it’s also with a tongue placed in my cheek because of how incomprehensible or silly the plot can be on a meta level. Sometimes, it almost brings tears to my eyes by being so over-the-top about something that, in the real world, would make no sense at all. But the drama, in the context of the universe, somehow rings true.

I think that’s all owing to how most of the primary characters are just... really freaking great characters.

It has often puzzled me. Like, did Takahashi do all this layering on purpose? Is it really there, or did earnest fanon just make it seem like it? And, as a person, I am always here for a good fan-and-canon symbiosis.

This post is going to be, from here on, an effort to match the YuGiOh characters to the 9 Enneagram Personality Types. I am writing this for my own benefit as I continue to work on my pet YuGiOh fanfiction project, It’s Always Sunny in Domino City, which is a mixture of YGOTAS-vibes-and-concepts taken seriously and a sincere take on fanfiction for the actual canon. It’s dramedy about a sizeable chunk of the main cast a few years post-canon with some canon divergence such as the Memory World arc not yet and possibly never-happening. If that sounds like something you’d like, I would humbly request you check it out!

Either way, this will be an in-depth character analysis cheatsheet for all of the characters above, based on my observations, opinions, and feelings. I invite discussion, but it’s fine if we need to agree to totally disagree!

If you are interested and enjoy what’s below the Read More and in the coming second post, then you are welcome to utilize the character analyses to aid you in your own fanwork!

Enneagram

What is Enneagram, and why am I using it?

Enneagram is a personality categorization system that one might compare to the somewhat better-known MBTI. However, in the words of excellent writing-advice YouTuber, Abbie Emmons:

MBTI shows us how we behave.

Enneagram shows us what we believe.

I will be referencing Abbie’s video Using The ENNEAGRAM To Write CONFLICTED CHARACTERS and her free Enneagram-cheatsheet, available in the description of the linked video. Whether it’s before you continue reading or after, if you’re interested in writing, I would highly recommend you check out her channel!

The Enneagram system has nine basic personality types that overlap and interact in really interesting ways. It is not a hard science, and it’s not a horoscope. Instead, it’s supposed to be “based on conventional wisdom and modern psychology.” All I can say is that with every set of characters I’ve tried it with, it works! Once you get the hang of it, it feels kind of like ~✰~magic~✰~!

Below, I will list Abbie’s simplified definitions of each of the personality types, in order:

Type 1: The Reformer

The Rational, Idealistic Type:

Principled, Purposeful, Self-Controlled, and Perfectionistic

Basic Fear: Of being corrupt/evil, defective

Basic Desire: To be good, to have integrity, to be balanced

Key Motivations: Want to be right, to strive higher and improve everything, to be consistent with their ideals, to justify themselves, to be beyond criticism so as not to be condemned by anyone.

Type 2: The Helper

The Caring, Interpersonal Type:

Generous, Demonstrative, People-Pleasing, and Possessive

Basic Fear: Of being unwanted, unworthy of being loved

Basic Desire: To feel loved

Key Motivations: Want to be loved, to express their feelings for others, to be needed and appreciated, to get others to respond to them, to vindicate their claims about themselves.

Type 3: The Achiever

The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type:

Adaptable, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious

Basic Fear: Of being worthless

Basic Desire: To feel valuable and worthwhile

Key Motivations: Want to be affirmed, to distinguish themselves from others, to have attention, to be admired, and to impress others.

Type 4: The Individualist

The Sensitive, Introspective Type:

Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental

Basic Fear: That they have no identity or personal significance

Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance (to create an identity)

Key Motivations: Want to express themselves and their individuality, to create and surround themselves with beauty, to maintain certain moods and feelings, to withdraw to protect their self-image, to take care of emotional needs before attending to anything else, to attract a "rescuer."

Type 5: The Investigator

The Intense, Cerebral Type:

Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated

Basic Fear: Being useless, helpless, or incapable

Basic Desire: To be capable and competent

Key Motivations: Want to possess knowledge, to understand the environment, to have everything figured out as a way of defending the self from threats from the environment.

Type 6: The Loyalist

The Committed, Security-Oriented Type:

Engaging, Responsible, Anxious, and Suspicious

Basic Fear: Of being without support and guidance

Basic Desire: To have security and support

Key Motivations: Want to have security, to feel supported by others, to have certitude and reassurance, to test the attitudes of others toward them, to fight against anxiety and insecurity.

Type 7: The Enthusiast

The Busy, Variety-Seeking Type:

Spontaneous, Versatile, Acquisitive, and Scattered

Basic Fear: Of being deprived and in pain

Basic Desire: To be satisfied and content—to have their needs fulfilled

Key Motivations: Want to maintain their freedom and happiness, to avoid missing out on worthwhile experiences, to keep themselves excited and occupied, to avoid and discharge pain.

Type 8: The Challenger

The Powerful, Dominating Type:

Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational

Basic Fear: Of being harmed or controlled by others

Basic Desire: To protect themselves (to be in control of their own life and destiny)

Key Motivations: Want to be self-reliant, to prove their strength and resist weakness, to be important in their world, to dominate the environment, and to stay in control of their situation.

Type 9: The Peacemaker

The Easygoing, Self-Effacing Type:

Receptive, Reassuring, Agreeable, and Complacent

Basic Fear: Of loss and separation

Basic Desire: To have inner stability, "peace of mind"

Key Motivations: Want to create harmony in their environment, to avoid conflicts and tension, to preserve things as they are, to resist whatever would upset or disturb them.

Now that you’ve seen all those, what do you think your favorite character is? In YuGiOh or anything else! It works great for original characters and even yourself and your loved ones.

The actual Character Profiles will be in coming post(s), but continue reading if you want me to explain more about how and why the Enneagram is a great personality typing system. #nonspon, or whatever.

The Enneagram Chart

Now, you could just go to the Enneagram Institute’s page on How the System Works, but below I’ll cut it down to only the parts I’m interested in and explain those in a way that helps me.

Unlike in astrology or MBTI, which are both more restrictive in different ways, the relative position of each type matters a bit on the Enneagram chart, because it can be used to visualize a lot of things about a person!

The Basic Chart

The Types are shown in a clockwise fashion with “1″ in the 1 o’clock position on an analog clock. The interior lines mean things, but I have trouble reading it without further delineation.

Centers of Response

Below are two small charts, displayed side-by-side. (If it’s too small, try right-click, open in new tab!)

The chart on the left shows the three “centers.” The “centers” indicate the first ‘processing language’ a person would use to respond to stimuli.

Type 8, Type 9, and Type 1 respond first based on instinct (primal, gut-feeling). If you want to go Freudian, this is from the id.

Type 2, Type 3, and Type 4 respond first based on feelings (social or personal desires, the heart). If you want to go Freudian, this is from the ego.

Type 5, Type 6, and Type 7 respond first based on thoughts (analytical rather than emotional, the head). If you want to go Freudian, this is from the superego.

Remember that, of course, every single type and person engages their instincts, their emotions, and their thoughts at different times and to different degrees, and some of these are learned or changed behaviors. This is about what their innate drive toward that would be.

Likewise, the same “centers” can also be used for the chart on the right. You will notice that all three of these are defined by what is typically considered a negative emotion. This is because this is about a person’s instinctive, not particularly conscious emotional response when they are backed into a corner and deprived of something that is core to the needs of their personality type.

Type 8, Type 9, and Type 1 tend to respond to a threat to their psychic well-being with anger/rage.

Type 2, Type 3, and Type 4 tend to respond to a threat to their psychic well-being with shame.

Type 5, Type 6, and Type 7 tend to respond to a threat to their psychic well-being with fear.

Stress vs. Growth

We all know that there are times when a person isn’t acting like themselves, for better or for worse. Usually, “You’re not acting like yourself,” means that a person is behaving badly. Of course, it’s way easier to withdraw and bristle and defend rather than growing in the midst of adversity. However, it is certainly possible to experience character growth in response to experiences, good and bad. Unlike a lot of other personality typing schemes, the Enneagram has a way to display and predict what stress and growth do to a person.

The Enneagram never suggests that any Type is an island unto itself. Every person contains multitudes, but a person’s Type is likely to remain relatively stable throughout their lives, once they have had a chance to develop any personality at all. This means that when a person is stressed or growing that they do not become the type they emulate. Rather, they are more highly expressing that aspects of their personality that reflect those drives and desires but in a way that is either fraught, sickly, or unwell (in the case of stress), or aspirational, flying-high, and incorporating the hard-lessons into who a person is going to be going forward (in the case of growth). The latter, especially, isn’t a sustainable mode, while a stressed person can become more entrenched in their bad habits and defensive coping mechanisms.

Stress

Note the white, directional arrows. Each number has an arrow point pointing to it and an arrow leading away from it. The point indicates that this is the stress manifestation for the Type at the origin of that arrow. The origin of each arrow indicates the Type being described.

Confused? Let me finally give you a YuGiOh example.

When I was trying to identify the Types of the characters, defining Marik was difficult, because he has a “Yami,” or Dark Side, which has its own personality and will but which is not its own separate soul or person than Marik himself. Rather, it’s a kind of fantasy/magic-assisted personality splintering where Yami Marik is a full manifestation of the negative traits Marik needed to embody to survive.

So, for reference:

When stressed, Type 1 behaves more like Type 4. 

When stressed, Type 2 behaves more like Type 8.

When stressed, Type 3 behaves more like Type 9.

When stressed, Type 4 behaves more like Type 2.

When stressed, Type 5 behaves more like Type 7.

When stressed, Type 6 behaves more like Type 3.

When stressed, Type 7 behaves more like Type 1.

When stressed, Type 8 behaves more like Type 5.

When stressed, Type 9 behaves more like Type 6.

Alternatively, you can use these sequences to follow the stress lines:

1-4-2-8-5-7-1

9-6-3-9

Growth

Think of the above-explanation in reverse.

The sequence:

1-7-5-8-2-4-1

9-3-6-9

As a Type 1 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 7.

As a Type 2 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 4.

As a Type 3 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 6.

As a Type 4 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 1.

As a Type 5 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 8.

As a Type 6 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 9.

As a Type 7 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 5.

As a Type 8 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 2.

As a Type 9 grows, they incorporate more positive traits of Type 3.

Wings

The final thing to know about the Enneagram chart for my purposes is about wings. The wing of your personality traits accounts for the complementary and contradictory aspects of your personality. They are the inconsistencies that make you human, predicted and jumped in. Typically, a person is not thought to have both possible wings but one or the other. A wing is one of the two adjacent Types to yours, the number before, or the number after, and it is annotated, for example:

Type 1, Wing 2: 1w2

Type 1, Wing 9: 1w9

Link to Part 2 Here!

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #226: AN EYE FOR AN EYE

December, 1982

“Beware the -- EVIL EYE!”

Okay but which one though?

Because I’m pretty sure that Black Knight is carrying the Evil Eye but Balor probably has a pretty evil eye. Plus, that title.

I like the black/white tv static like background for this. I dunno why but it feels very fitting for whats going on.

That has been ART COMMENTARY with me.

Last time on Avengers, the Avengers were minding their own business when Dr. Druid burst into their meeting, hypnotized them, and kidnapped the team minus Iron Man by shooting smoke out of his chest eye.

The Avengers ended up in Crusade Times in Avalon where Black Knight and Amergin needed help fighting the Fomor of Irish mythology who were awfully mad that Amergin did a colonialism to them.

The team managed to kick some Fomor ass for the most part after they applied the barest amount of strategy (although the Fomor Dres escaped through Amergin’s eyes) but then biggest, buffest Fomor Balor was freed and he wiped out She-Hulk and Thor in a blink. Also, Dres escaped to the present day and he’s going to kill Dr. Druid! -crickets- Which will strand the Avengers in the past times forever!! -crowd gasp-

Are Thor and She-Hulk totally dead forever? Can anyone stop Dres from conquering the future aside from the one thousand other superheroes?

No and yes.

This time:

... That’s an unbearably smug Hawkeye on that pillar of team roster. 

Dres gloats to a trancing Dr. Druid because villains love to hear themselves talk. And also love a captive audience. And aren’t too fussed about active listening.

Dres: “You were a fool, Doctor Druid! You sought to ensure the safety of this world -- but instead you have sealed your own destruction! Who can help you now? The Avengers? They battle my demonic brethren in legendary Avalon, eight centuries gone! The golden one -- in the grip of the hypnotic trance you placed him into? You yourself, who are in a trance that allows you to sustain a mystical path to the past -- through which I came to this time! Why waste breath? He is insensate, and unaware of the danger that overwhelms him! By his death, I will trap the Avengers forever in the past -- and unleash my power on this unsuspecting world!”

I like how he becomes self-aware of how pointless it is to do a villain rant to a guy who can’t hear you and then just keeps going anyway.

Anyway, here’s why you don’t do that, if you’re a villain.

(This is a free tip to any aspiring villains out there)

Thor and She-Hulk just pop into existence randomly just as Bres is finally going to actually do something.

She-Hulk mentions that they were just fighting a one-eyed giant which lets Bres put together that they were fighting Balor and why they’re here now.

Bres: “A giant? My cousin Balor, no doubt, whose glance disrupts all spells -- including that which held you in Avalon!”

And then instead of just killing Dr. Druid when he has the chance (Thor and She-Hulk aren’t even looking at him when they appear), Dres runs over and clocks Thor right in his face.

(Another free tip for aspiring villains here: do not clock Thor in the face)

Sooooooo, I’m of two minds here.

I expected Iron Man being left behind in a hypnotized trance was for this. That he’d come to somehow and stop Dres.

On the other hand, Thor and She-Hulk appearing out of nowhere to fight this guy because Balor inadvertently screwed over his cousin’s plans is pretty hilarious.

Also, pretty lucky that the time-travel spell was disrupted first, snapping Thor back to the future. If Thor had been fighting Balor on his own time, who knows what his malefic stare would have done to the enchantments on Mjolnir.

That’s a fun plot bunny.

Anyway, you wouldn’t think that Bres could stand for long against both Thor and She-Hulk. Thor was kicking Elathan’s ass and Elathan was the boss Fomor.

But Bres blasts She-Hulk away and then uses magic to tear Mjolnir from Thor’s grasp. Without Mjolnir, Bres and Thor are on more equal footing. Also that whole thing where Thor is going to turn into a powerless mortal in sixty seconds, which will put them on very much unequal footing.

She-Hulk decides she’s useless in a god fight, based on how much a glancing blast hurt. So she ducks behind Iron Man and uses her unconscious teammate as cover.

Pretty cold, She-Hulk!

But then she notices that Bres’ magic is splashing off Iron Man like magic water off an iron duck.

So she has a really good idea.

She picks up the unconscious Iron Man and throws him at Bres.

I’ve changed my mind. I’m glad that things shook out exactly this way.

So Iron Man hits Bres in the ass like a missile at about the same time Thor punches him in the shoulder.

Under this synchronized and silly assault, Bres folds like a sack of potatoes, with Iron Man slumped on top of him.

With Bres out cold, his spell keeping Mjolnir away fades, letting Thor retrieve his favorite hammer.

Looking ahead, Iron Man doesn’t show up for the rest of the issue and neither does Bres so I assume they just leave Iron Man laying on top of Bres to keep him out of trouble for the rest of the story.

Iron Man is going to have a bunch of questions when he wakes up.

Despite taking care of Bres, Thor realizes that they can’t go back in time to help the other Avengers because Dr. Druid remains entranced. So they’ve got to sit on their thumbs and hope that the Avengers do okay without their two strongest members.

Well they’re doing.

Not quite okay but not dying either. That’s pretty good against Balor.

Hawkeye has the bright idea to shoot Balor in the one eye with a smoke arrow so he’ll stop shooting death beams at them.

I don’t mean for that to sound sarcastic, it really is a bright idea.

Meanwhile, in the halls of Avalon (considerably less cool than the ones of Justice), Black Knight is ditching the plan to go help the Avengers and Amergin is unhappy.

But Black Knight is like nuts to your happiness, it was Black Knight’s idea to bring in the Avengers so he’s not going to watch them fight alone just because Amergin says so!

He has a flying horse! He can do what he waaaaaaaaaaaants!

And he takes off on the flying horse, which is something he has.

Amergin: “Your chivalry will be the death of us all!”

Hey, that’s no way to talk about a man with a sweet flying horse.

Black Knight and his sweet flying horse arrive in time to see Balor randomly blasting the ground and complaining because the Avengers are no fun.

Balor: “Puny flesh-things annoy Balor! Balor lives for fighting! If you will not fight -- go away!”

Balor is a guy of diminishing returns. He’ll never be cooler than that moment right when he wiped She-Hulk and Thor from existence while barely noticing he did it.

The fact that we’ve seen them pop up unharmed doesn’t help.

Black Knight attacks Balor, assuming he killed the Avengers and he wants to avenge the Avengers because if the Avengers need avenging someone needs to avenge the Avengers.

And Black Knight gets almost instantly slapped off his sweet flying horse because its Black Knight.

The Avengers were fine. They dove into the mud to hide from Balor but now they have to launch into Emergency Rescue Procedure which is something they’ve totally practiced! And its totally a procedure they specifically have for situations where they only have Wasp, Hawkeye, and Captain America.

Because its PRETTY SPECIFIC.

Hawkeye shoots two parachute arrows (Something that he just has, why question it? Its like Batman’s utility belt in his quiver) to slow Black Knight’s fall.

Wasp buzzes around Balor to distract him because being small and vaguely distracting is something she’s practiced around 200 issues for.

And Cap jumps up and catches Black Knight to further slow his fall.

They specifically have this specific emergency rescue procedure in case a man dressed as a medieval knight is falling off a flying horse due to a giant cyclops. For this specific situation.

Anyway, the sweet flying horse is doing fine too. Nobody needed to catch Valinor. He took care of himself.

On Black Knight’s suggestion the Avengers do a strategic retreat, all piling on Valinor and flying away as Balor shakes his fist and wonders who he’ll fight now.

Valinor doesn’t look thrilled at carrying three grown men, to be honest.

He deserves to be a Pet Avenger for his hard work but alas. No respect for Valinor.

Elathan and the rest of the Fomor creep out of wherever they were hiding and Elathan presents Balor with an offer.

Elathan: “Join with us, monster, and you’ll have fights for the picking, as many as you want!”

He tells Balor that there’s a whole new world beyond Avalon that they can raze and that Balor can destroy to his heart’s content.

Mmmmmmmm. I don’t like this. If Elathan can just talk Balor into joining the Fomor then all the build-up about how Balor was too dangerous to friend as well as foe kind of falls flat.

I’d really have preferred something where Balor becomes a third side unto himself plus maybe Cethlann as the Fomor and the Avengers have to sort of work around him.

But we get what we get.

Balor’s much smaller wife Cethlann tries to tell Balor to not trust Elathan but Dulb and Indech threaten to stab her much if she doesn’t shut up.

Poor Cethlann. Sure she’s evil but also she has no friends on team evil and her own husband is barely aware of her.

And of course Elathan is planning to betray both Balor and Cethlann after they win because villains be like that.

This is a whole lot of Fomor interpersonal drama info we’re getting in these two issues.

Meanwhile, within Avalon, Hawkeye is throwing a mini-tantrum about how bad things went.

Hawkeye: “Face it, Avengers! We blew it! Those Fomor clowns have us outnumbered and outpowered!”

Captain America: “We’re not finished yet, Clint -- and I’ve seen more than one apparent loser win the war!”

Geez, Clint. Settle down.

Amergin agrees. Particularly because the Avengers have played their unknowing part in his secret master plan perfectly. I mean, except for the part where Thor and She-Hulk died*.

(*They’re just fine, true believers)

But the plan always was for the Avengers to force the Fomor to release Balor because Amergin’s Evil Eye looking weapon needed a power source to power it and Balor is just the one.

No clue how the Avengers would react to being manipulated like this because the Fomor start attacking again and Amergin plops to the floor and then teleports away to confront them.

Outside the gates of Avalon, Balor’s DEATH BEAMS are making short work of Avalon’s defenses.

Then Amergin shows up standing on top of the walls, waving the Evil Eye, and telling the Fomor to get off his lawn. Well, basically.

Amergin: “Do not seek to taunt me, Elathan! Once I drove you and all your allies before me, and one could resist my might! Do you wish to see that day again?”

Elathan is like ‘yeah well you’re old’ and has Balor strike him down with an EYE BEAM.

Elathan: “Farewell, old enemy! None will mourn your passing!”

Ice cold, Elathan.

But, nah, Amergin isn’t dead so easily. In fact, This Is All According To Plan.

He climbs out of some rubble holding an Evil Eye which now glows with an awesome power.

And when Balor tries to EYE BEAM him again, Amergin absorbs Balor’s power into the Evil Eye.

Amergin: “You have always placed too much stock in your supposed power, Fomor! I too have loved power too much -- but I am wise enough to turn an enemy’s strength against him!”

Balor finally seems aware of Cethlann, asking her to make the pain stop. Cethlann, being Cethlann and not here to be helpful, points at whats happening and starts talking about how screwed they all are.

Elathan tries to jump the distracted Amergin but he is a noun and therefore when he opposes Captain America’s mighty shield, he must yield.

Even if he didn’t know that he was opposing Captain America’s mighty shield. Thems the rules.

Elathan decides ‘hey fuck this human a little bit’ and uses magic to make the Earth start growing up around Cap. As he’s swallowed up, he throws his shield at nothing.

The Avengers end up squaring up against the Fomor. And to Hawkeye’s irritation, he ends up facing Dulb again.

Wasp tries to block the tathlum balls but. Yeah. They’re still magic and dodge around her just to mess with Hawkeye.

Meanwhile, Black Knight realizes how stupid this entire plan was.

Black Knight: “This isn’t working out -- I was stupid to get the Avengers mixed up in this! What happened to Hercules, Iron Man, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch... all the people who were Avengers when I was a member? That’s who I wanted!”

Huh! That’s a good point. Black Knight would have no idea who the current Avengers would be and that line-up would have been a lot stronger for this situation.

(Of course, Iron Man is on the team. He just can’t join because magic reasons)

Black Knight goes to save Captain America but when Captain America throws his mighty shield, all who oppose his shield must yield. Including the Earth.

When he threw his shield at nothing he was really planning a ricochet to free himself.

Good work, Cap.

Meanwhile elsewhere on the battlefield, Amergin is still absorbing Balor. And he’s so totally focused on draining every drop of Balor’s power that he has no defenses against Elathan zaming him in the back from behind. Which is exactly what happens.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Wasp comes up with a plan to turn the tide of the fight. And as a side-benefit, make Hawkeye’s day a little less annoying.

She dzats Dulb in the face to get him pissed at her and throw his tathlum balls.

AND THEN SHE FLIES INTO TETHRA’S MOUTH

Thank god this isn’t the ultimate universe.

Anyway, this makes the tathlum balls hit Tethra right in the face and knock him on his ass.

So, on the one hand. Very effective plan and good thinking, Jan.

On the other hand, that’s gross. That’s gross what you just did.

Black Knight notices Elathan attacking Amergin. Cap tells him to go help the wizard while Cap holds off the other Fomor.

And then Cap immediately runs away.

Because he needs to think of a plan. Unluckily, one presents itself.

Cethlann is lurking around the wall of Avalon and when Cap runs by she grabs his foot.

Cethlann: “Not so fast, human! Cethlann wants to play with you!”

Cap thinks off his foot and flipkicks her into gooey, gooey Indech, gumming both Fomor up. Neither of them are thrilled by this.

Also, Cap, don’t be rude.

Over at Amergin, Elathan decides it will be both hilarious and ironic to leech Amergin’s life, as the wizard was draining Balor.

Black Knight jumps in to save Amergin, his cursed sword reflecting Elathan’s magic. Which is a handy feature. I had thought the Ebony Sword’s curse mostly thirsted for blood and made Black Knight brood. Anti-magic is a significantly nicer feature.

Elathan has a counter-plan though! Black Knight’s arms are going to get tired eventually and when they do, Elathan is gonna git him!

But Amergin realizes that he’s lost the Eye and that Balor has found the Eye. And Balor wants his power back and obviously thinks that the Evil Eye works like one of those Capri Sun drink pouches and just tries to squeeze the power out. Into his mouth.

Even though Amergin tells him not to do this thing!

Anyway, yeah. It explodes.

That’s not how Evil Eyes work and it explodes.

Balor is disintegrated by this (and oof Cethlann in the background looking distraught at her husband’s death).

The Fomor take off for the portal to Crusade Era Earth, telling the Avengers that they stand no chance with Amergin dead, because he’s probably totally dead, forever.

Black Knight finds Amergin (who is dying and not quite dead) while Wasp tells the Avengers to Assemble. To the portal to stop the Fomor.

Hawkeye thinks its a little cold to just leave Amergin to die but Cap points out that they can’t really do anything for him that Black Knight couldn’t.

Although, I’d argue that with Black Knight’s anti-magic cursed sword, he should head to stop the Fomor and someone, probably Hawkeye, should stay behind to do last aid. But it’d be a dick move to suggest that so lets let it be.

Black Knight digs Amergin out of the rubble and the dying druid wizard tells him that he won’t last the hour but that there’s still hope.

As catastrophically dumb it was that Balor tried to squeeze the Balor power out of the Balor sucking device, it did the trick. Balor has been completely converted into energy and is stored in the Eye.

Except its too much power and now whoever uses the Evil Eye will be destroyed.

Black Knight: “I’m just borrowing this body, Amergin -- my real body is stone rubble eight centuries away! Tell me what to do -- I’ll do it!”

.... I’d argue that the fact that you’re not in your own body means you shouldn’t be so quick to sacrifice it! What happened to the original occupant??

Amergin: “Yes, my son. You... must. Though it means your death. Find the Eye! This broken body has one last spell left in it! You will have your sword and horse in the next life, brave knight. Where all things are restored!”

Well, that’s a nice consolation to a heroic sacrifice. Your extremely cursed sword and sweet flying horse are going to heaven with you. Or maybe hell. You did do a Crusade, for fun.

Meanwhile, the three remaining Avengers show up to thwart the Fomor from exiting Avalon.

Ethalan: “Again? You are tenacious fleas!”

Hey, didn’t we just have a whole recruitment story because of the Avengers being shorthanded? Now they’re at three. Stupid magic, excluding Iron Man from the fun.

Hawkeye starts the futile hold the line strong, making me slightly sorry about making fun of him a little earlier.

He fires a sonic arrow because sure the Fomor are beefy sacks of magic beef but high pitched noises still hurt and distract. Maybe more, what with their elf-like ears.

Hawkeye: “If you liked that one, you’ll get a bang out of my patented exploding arrow!” -Elathan explodes the ground at his feet- “Or maybe not.”

Hah.

But maybe next time, shoot first and gloat later.

So Hawkeye is knocked out, leaving just Captain America and Wasp.

Wasp: “This isn’t working out so well, Cap! What do we do now?”

Captain America: “The only thing we can do -- keep going until we can’t go any further!”

Yeah, he can do this all day.

Not very effectively. But at least all day. He tries to wade through Thethra and Indech but he gets caught by gooey gooey Indech. And also Dulb helps.

Elathan is about to step through the portal to Earth when he spots someone on the other side who flings him away from the portal.

THE BLACK KNIGHT!

Amergin used his last bit of life to cast a spell to plop Black Knight over to the other side of the portal so he could stop the Fomor.

The Fomor say that Black Knight won’t strike with the Evil Eye if the Avengers are in the thick of it but Cap tells Black Knight to just go ahead and do it anyway, because that’s what Cap be like.

Black Knight: “I was ready to seal off the gateway at cost of my own life -- but not that of the Avengers! I can’t handle the power of the Eye... I’ll destroy us all! I - I’m sorry... my friends... I’m sorry -- but I don’t even have a choice!”

And then he explodes. Because he couldn’t hold it in anymore.

When the explosion fades, there is but a tranquil field, some Balor residue. And a skeleton where the Black Knight had been.

Welp.

Oh, and the Avengers are fine.

Captain America, Wasp, and Hawkeye pop back to Avengers Mansion. With the spell ended, they rubber-banded back to the future.

So they also get to see that She-Hulk and Thor are fine! They didn’t really have time to mourn them in the heat of the action so now they don’t have to. The superhero life. Always hoping your friends will turn out to be actually alive before you have to grapple with mortality.

Dr. Druid wakes up to Explain Everything now that everything is over with.

Hawkeye mentions hey maybe ask before you fling someone into the past to save the world maybe, huh?!

Dr. Druid: “In other circumstances, I would have asked -- yet your intervention allowed the Black Knight to triumph!”

That doesn’t sound like an apology to me.

Hawkeye asks what happened to Black Knight so Dr. Druid opens up a scry to reveal the skeletonized Black Knight.

Geez.

But before the Avengers can really grapple with mortality, the scry shifts by itself to Garrett Castle and the pile of rubble that is all that was left of the Black Knight statue.

The rubble moves by itself and reassembles into a Black Knight shape AND THEN unstones.

Black Knight: “What?! I - I’m home! That’s what Amergin meant by the next life! His... final... gift!”

Hey, not bad!

Sure, I’d have liked Black Knight do more grappling with him being stranded in the past without a future body to return to but that exceedingly long plot point of Black Knight being turned to stone finally has a happy ending!

Doubly so because Black Knight’s sweet flying horse is with him, as promised.

Hawkeye wants to contact Black Knight to celebrate but Dr. Druid suggests that they give him some space.

Dr. Druid: “The Black Knight has just come back from death. He thinks he has gone against principles and brutally murdered his friends to achieve his ends. Let him know you are alive, but give him time to adjust. When he is ready, he will come to you.”

That’s.... good advice actually.

You don’t just let him think you’re all dead because its easier than picking up the phone (X-MEN) but you let him cope at his own pace.

Maybe Dr. Druid isn’t such the Worst Avenger after all.

And then he leaves because he’s not much for mingling, telling the Avengers “until we meet again, my friends” which I feel is jumping the gun a little bit.

You just met these people and spent maybe two minutes total with them.

So Hawkeye isn’t just being sour when he says “Don’t call us, Curly -- we’ll call you.”

Just slightly sour.

So!

Two-parter fill-in between runs focused on the Black Knight!

It was okay.

Like I’ve said, I like Black Knight out of proportion of actually reading anything with him in it. I think I just like him in concept. High-tech knight cosplayer who falls assbackwards into a cursed magical family heritage when he just wants to be a scientist knight.

I feel like the two-parter doesn’t actually have enough of Black Knight in action? He sort of stays out of things for most of the first issue and doesn’t have a lot of action beats in the second? He gets a heroic sacrifice that also ties off his plot cul-de-sac of being in the past so there can be new Black Knight content in the future, if anyone cares to use him. So that’s good. I just wanted more Black Knight content.

Fomor are okay as antagonists. I feel like we get pretty deep into their interpersonal dynamics despite them not being in a lot of stuff outside of this two-parter. I appreciate that they had individual powers and looks so that they’re more memorable than the Zodiac at least who only have one of those sometimes.

Also its nice? To get Irish mythology in something? Its probably less accurate even than Marvel’s takes on Greek/Roman and Norse mythology but I learned a thing. Mostly about tathlum balls.

Speaking of not being in a lot of stuff, what about Bres? He gets knocked out with an Iron Man to the butt and then just disappears to the off-panel.

Well, the Avengers dumped him on Project PEGASUS which used a machine to keep him depowered. A power failure let him make an escape attempt and he tried to get Super-Skrull disguised as a child to kill Iron Fist but couldn’t even manage that and got locked back up. That was in 1985 so who knows what happened to him after that, what with all the nonsense that happened to Project PEGASUS over the years.

I don’t knows and neither does marvel wiki.

Next time on Essential Avengers, not Avengers. There’s a Spider-Man I need to do to make things make sense.

Follow @essential-avengers​? Maybe? Like or reblog? Possibly? Enjoy the posts either way?

[merryfortune]

Day 2: New Year’s Wishes

Compendium Game Route 2019 for @vrainsrarepairweeks

Ship: Superheroshipping | Aoi/Takeru/Yusaku

Rating: T

Word Count: 1,722

Tags: Alternate Universe – Save Me! Lollipop, Polyamory, Minor or Implied Miyu/Spectre

  The past six months had gone so quick.

  From the moment that Aoi had accidentally swallowed the prized and magical Crystal Pearl required for the Magic Exam held by those of the Wizard World to assess the skills of their students, those who passed the test, therefore protecting the Pearl, became Professional Sorcerers. It was an exam which would last one hundred and eight days and Aoi thought that her escape to this absurd situation would never come but day by day, time did pass and now, Christmas was nearly here. But it was kind of scary. Since meeting Takeru and Yusaku, Aoi couldn’t wait until they were booted out of her life because of all the drama that they brought with them. From scary fellow examinees with all sorts of magical powers to other, more sinister powers above them at hand, Aoi wanted them gone. It was only in some grand twist of irony that the Crystal Pearl had fallen out of the sky and into the plate with her cake as she discussed with her friends what considered to be the ideal boyfriend.

  Someone kind, someone handsome, and above all: someone who would protect and value her above all else, someone like a prince.

  Her friends had teased her at the time, calling her unrealistic and that she had her head in the clouds and her hands on too many books on fairy tales. They sat corrected moments later when not just one but two young gentleman to Aoi’s near exact specifications literally fell out of the sky, with a beautiful, white Mustang in tow, sweeping her off her feet, and yanking her into a zany world of magic and other antics: all whilst they sped off with an humongous owl in pursuit of them.

  It had been distressing to say the least, but they did seem to tick all of Aoi’s boxes. Their primary goal in coming to Den City, the Human World in general, was to protect Aoi. Well, they wanted to protect the Crystal Pearl which now resided, all but permanently, in the pit of her stomach but to protect it, they had to protect her. Not to mention, they valued her for her.

  They were also handsome. Takeru was the glasses pretty boy type with a fit physique and Yusaku was the slovenly pretty boy type with gorgeous green eyes. Everywhere they went, they attracted all sorts of attention, some good and some bad as their good-looking faces did little to quell the fact that they had an eccentric taste in fashion, as per the custom of the Wizarding World that they hailed from.

  As an unexpected bonus, they were bonkers strong too. Magic would do that to a fella, Aoi supposed, as she watched in awe, time and time again, as Takeru blew the world around them to smithereens using his destructive Fire Magic and as she watched Yusaku minimise said damage by using his more defensive Link Magic which allowed him to conjure barriers and the like. In combination, they were easily the strongest of the Sorcerer Examinees which had been sent to Den City to hunt the Crystal Pearl.

  And best of all, they were kind too. Yusaku couldn’t stand seeing people getting hurt, so he always carried a little medical kit around with him and even if seemed like a minor stupid injury, he would take it seriously. Being the damsel in distress came with a lot of skinned knees, Aoi had discovered but Yusaku never scolded her for not doing better and he had kissed her band aids more times than either would admit.

  Though, by all those virtues, they had their vices too. Yusaku was annoyingly evasive. He never told Aoi, or even Takeru, anything. Like upon their first meeting, once they had scrambled into safety, away from the monstrous owl and the Examinees who controlled said monstrous owl, Yusaku had clammed up. He refused to divulge any information which could have potentially helped Aoi understand why exactly she had been damn near kidnapped by him and Takeru, what the Crystal Pearl was, or any other element about the situation that they had become entangled in. He only gave her said information once Takeru had blurted it all out in frustration. Even after that, Yusaku very rarely told Aoi everything that she needed to know, and again same for his partner, Takeru.

  Meanwhile, Takeru was downright brutish. He picked unnecessary fights. Where Yusaku was perhaps more level-headed, Takeru was most certainly not. He was a punch now, ask questions later type of guy.

  Yet, despite these differences, they truly did work in beautiful combination of one another. As bizarre as an afternoon as their first meeting was, from meeting them, to being separated from them, and being kidnapped by Examinees Three and Four, partners Miyu and Spectre, to being nearly killed by Miyu and Spectre to being rescued by Takeru and Yusaku, only for them to almost kill everyone via Takeru’s magic, but it all worked out eventually. It had been terrifying.

  Miyu and Spectre had taken her to the basement of some ice cream shop and had tied her up. They had gloated that Takeru and Yusaku would be unable to find her and Miyu, with some very pushy insistence unto Spectre, then rewarded herself by going to find some cake and other sweets to purchase using Spectre’s money. Something which he agonised over, especially given that Miyu did not bring back the change in favour of simply buying more than what ought to be humanly possible to eat. Though, she was kind enough to share with Aoi, and that was quite nice, all things considered, right up until she and Spectre unanimously decided that enough was enough. It was time to extract the Crystal Pearl from Aoi but any means necessary and both were a little more than ecstatic to use unsavoury and honestly rather sharp methods of extraction.

  But, fortunately, Takeru and Yusaku had made it in the nick of time. Aoi had gasped and her heart began to beat thunderously in her chest. Yusaku gathered them all around behind one of his barriers, thin as a crystal, and Takeru fought back with blasts of fire which evaporated the very moisture in the air. With Takeru’s attacks, he courageously fought off Miyu’s Summoned Beasts, her precious friends she called them, and Spectre’s Hypnosis magic whilst Yusaku gallantly defended them.

  In a smack of brilliance, Takeru had blasted off the opposing team and for that day, it seemed all good and done. Of course, that was just the first of many onslaughts that Aoi would encounter as the one who swallowed the Crystal Pearl. Some assaults, of course, coming from opposing teams of examinees; Miyu and Spectre just being one coupling. Other assaults came from within their own team. From invasions of personal privacy, such as Takeru and Yusaku joining Aoi at her own high school to them deciding the best place to live was in her closet, as modified by magic, to near kisses and compromising walk ins, as well as other spats, interpersonal bickering had proved as powerful a force as most supernatural magics around them.

  But, when it was all said and done, Aoi decided that she wouldn’t trade any of those moments in for anything else; anything normal. No matter how horrifying or humiliating the memory, Aoi cherished it. All to the point where she didn’t want Christmas to come but there wasn’t a single type of magic powerful enough to pause or reverse time, she had come to learn by spending time with Yusaku and Takeru. She had truly come to love them both but there was no place for her outside of the present.

  She had never felt more content than when she was squished between them both, and this contentment, Aoi realised, was fleeting. Another seven days and it would be all over. Christmas will have come and gone, the medicine that was required to separate the Crystal Pearl from her body would be made, and then, if things all went to plan, then Takeru and Yusaku would get their qualifications and return to their home.

  Aoi had asked Takeru about it once. About magic, about the Wizard World, about what it meant to be a professional and he loved to gush about it, unlike Yusaku. His power, magical in general, mystisfied Aoi, charmed her beyond all belief. He showed her teeny tiny tricks with his fingers and flames, showing a deft control over them which rarely reared its head in scuffles whilst he talked about how denizens of the Human World weren’t permitted in the Wizard World due to a treaty from millennia ago.

  Though, he did admit, history wasn’t his strong point. He got dates mixed up all the time and Aoi could attest to that. She, and Yusaku, have had to remind Takeru of what day it is more than a handful of times. He could be a little be doughy like that but they both found it endearing, more often than not, anyway.

  Regardless, what Takeru had said was true, as vague as it was. That was something confirmed to Aoi time and time again; by Yusaku who was coldly awkward with her, Miyu who sympathised with her, by Spectre who chastised her, by the very Magical Council which had come up with these rules all those eons ago. But Aoi wanted to have some hope that maybe things would change.

  Once Takeru and Yusaku were made to be fully fledged in their magic, maybe they could petition some changes from the inside. It seemed a little too ridiculously hopeful for Aoi, but she always seemed to have some in spades, no matter the situation. After all, she had met Takeru and Yusaku seconds after proclaiming that she wanted to fall in love with someone just like them so maybe it wasn’t all that absurd after all. She mightn’t have magic but maybe that was hers.

  Hers was to hope. To hope that by New Year’s Eve, she wouldn’t be alone after becoming so used to being one of three. To her, that sounded lovely, hand in hand, like a princess, with the two young men whom she had come to regard as her wonderful, magical knights.

[lovetheplayers]

Taylor Swift brings so many nice things to Heinz Field on Reputation tour

Taylor Swift ended her concert Tuesday night singing “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” and while the song might be about love, respect and interpersonal drama, we can say for sure that Taylor Swift has nice things.

Some of those things showed up in a shiny fleet of trucks carrying a concert production into Heinz Field that was the most elaborate we’ve seen since U2’s 360 Tour in 2011. It took 80 trucks, in fact, many stylized with her image, to haul the 110-foot tall main stage and two sizable satellite stages in the opposing end zone.

It takes a big stage to hold a big talent.

And the 28-year-old mega-star from Reading, Pa., has proven that many times over in a career that started quaintly and countrified, in flowered dresses, at 16. Over the last decade, as she’s gravitated toward electropop and EDM, her romantic life has been like a Hershey Park rollercoaster that propels her album narratives and keeps her fans with their hands in the air.

“Reputation,” the focus of Tuesday’s show, is another wild ride, a jet-setting, alcohol-fueled one, with a few different guys in the mix and a couple detours to address the haters.

That explains the snakes, a running reputation tour theme taking a direct shot at nemesis Kim Kardashian West mocking her on social media with a snake emoji. A giant inflatable cobra loomed over her and the dancers while she shed her anger on “Look What You Made Me Do.” It came with a Tiffany Haddish onscreen cameo for the part where fans are told that the the “old Taylor” can’t come to the phone -- “because she’s dead.”

Tuesday’s eye-popping spectacle, for a sold-out crowd of 56,445, navigated the album’s story in six acts, starting in bad-girl mode with Swift, in a black sequined bodysuit and thigh-high boots, arriving after Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” to strut the stage to the heavy beat of “...Ready for It?,” the closest she gets to hip-hop.

The high stage came to life with tiers of red lights, topped with sirens, while bracelets glowed on the screaming fans. You could feel the heat of the flames and fireworks shooting from the top of the stage on “I Did Something Bad.”

“Well, good evening, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” she said. “The first time I sang in this stadium, I was 15 years old and I was singing the national anthem at a Steelers game, and I remember thinking this was an unfathomable amount of people to be in this room… And here we are, this is my fifth time headlining in this space [it’s actually the fourth] and I’m so grateful.”

In the first of many compliments to the fans, she added, “Looking out at this crowd, you guys are really taking it up a notch. You’re not only singing the words but actively screaming them.”

Indeed, they were, in all varieties of Taylor-ed outfits.

There will be future tours where Swift takes a long, loving look back at her full career, but these recent productions are mostly about the right now. Some of the greatest hits were served in snippets and medleys, like the first tangent away from “reputation” with “Style” and hearty crowd sing-alongs on “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me.”

Act 2, the snakiest part of the set, came with “Endgame,” minus the Ed Sheeran and Future parts, and a “King of My Heart,” powered by towering tribal drums.

“These are songs I usually wrote alone in a room,” she said, adding that some came out of “loneliness, confusion.”

One of those was “Delicate,” a ballad from the new album where she drops her guard to embrace a new love. It was sung while floating over the crowd in a lighted chariot to a b-stage, also equipped with blow-up snakes. There, she changed the groove to an aerobic workout to “Shake It Off,” joined by fun-loving opening acts Charli XCX and Camila Cabello. For the first time, you could actually feel the stadium shaking under your feet.

While she was out there, fans got the first of those cherished just-Taylor moments. She told fans that the lighted bracelets helped her see everyone there. Stripped down to an acoustic guitar, she was free to chat -- about this being the most fun she ever had on tour -- and vary the setlist, strumming through an upbeat “Dancing With Our Hands Tied” and going way back to her roots with a Pennsylvania-written song, “A Place in this World.” Did the young fans know the words to a song from her first album? Of course they did!

Swift made her sideways dash across the field on foot, slapping hands along the way, to the other satellite stage for “Act 4.” A rousing “Blank Space” slid perfectly into “Dress,” with a light, airy vocal for the seductive come-on “I only bought this dress so you could take it off.”

One of the other nice things in the trucks was a silver coiled snake with glowing red eyes that carried her back to the main stage, all aglow again in red, while she belted out a booming “Bad Blood” that had to be heard in the North Hills. Same with “Should've Said No,” so thunderous it felt like the end of the show.

Instead, she settled back down. Seated at a gorgeous marble grand piano, she thanked the 200 to 300 people who travel with the show and “the thousands of people from Pittsburgh [working at the stadium] who helped build the stage and will clean up the confetti.”

We got the best sense of how pretty her voice can be while she was at the piano for the fragile “Long Live” mixed with “New Year’s Day.”

She launched the show’s final run, fittingly, with the Bonnie and Clyde fantasy “Getaway Car,” backed by desert scenes, arriving at “Call It What You Want,” singing of new love on the run, from her detractors and her semi-bad reputation.

Can a Taylor Swift concert have a pure, sweet, happy-ever-after ending?

Not really. She brought it to a fun, fiery conflicted conflicted one by stomping through breakup/revenge songs “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things” with fireworks and then lightning lit up the North Shore.

Once again, Swift demonstrated that while her much-documented love life might have its ups and downs, there are few performers more natural on a stage and more connected with her fans. They left Heinz Field with the feeling that, yeah, we can have nice things.

Link

[syzygyzip]

His Cage pt. 2: Wheel of Fortune

This essay may be read on its own, but it is a follow-up to another essay which psychoanalyzes the figure of Holy Knight Hodrick, a character from Dark Souls 3. In this section, the method and purpose of Dark Souls analysis comes under investigation, catalyzed by other images from Hodrick’s environment.

Hodrick as meta-critique of Freudian psycho-interpretation

Dark Souls 3 is known for its skillful, self-reflexive commentary; this game is keenly aware of the subculture that surrounds it. That in mind, what are we to make of the relatively blatant symbolic suggestiveness of Hodrick and the Greatwood? Perhaps their on-the-nose imagery is a reaction to analysis of previous Dark Souls games: the castration narrative is often cited in symbolic interpretation of Dark Souls 1, and the birth canal-esque passage of Dark Souls 2’s tutorial area is a classic introduction for people that play around with interpreting Dark Souls psychologically. And surely those myths and images are semi-intentional, relevant, and illuminating, but they are by no means the place to stop. This lore video points out how the vertebrae shackles collected by Mound-Makers resemble inkblots, the old psychoanalytic tool etched into the cultural memory as an image of Freudianism. One “reads out” of the inkblot the contents of their own unconscious. The understanding of projection, and the compensatory nature of the unconscious was one of the most significant discoveries at the dawn of psychology. Dark Souls could symbolize the principle of this discovery in a number of ways, but it is very intentional with its images, so when it decides to show us an inkblot in particular, the historical context is helpful. It’s an old and simple technique, which traces only the broad strokes of the analysand’s complexes. Likewise, Hodrick, the Greatwood, and Mound-Makers provide the interpreter with the rudiments for symbolic exploration of Dark Soul environments. 

Though this area is introductory, it is – like any part of the unconscious – inexhaustible in its depth and generous in its mutability. Consider the amorality of the Mound-Makers. Are they good or evil? Vicious or tender? Sustainers of maya or karmic accelerationists? There is so much room for the player to read into this allegiance a preferred moral perspective, at least partially determined by the general attitude the player keeps in regards to the slaughter of enemies. For the totally “unimmersed,” Dark Souls is a game and a game only, to be played, poked, prodded, to be mastered and speedran, and in that case of course any covenant is merely functional, there to surround and present a mechanic. For that player, the Mound-Makers are truly amoral. But for those who roleplay, who make at least some of their choices based on the imagined ethics of their avatar (despite extremely scarce moral responses from the game itself!), the issue is a little more complicated. Those who are simply in the habit of asking themselves, “Do I want to ally myself with this person’s values?” will not find an easy answer. On the surface, the covenant is abhorrently nihilistic, but a seasoned player may come away with a different take. So in this way the Mound-Makers, like the inkblot, are a measure of a player(/-character)’s feeling-involvement, which is itself born out of the player’s interpretational attitude.

When analyzing an object in a video game, always take into account the method by which it is encountered! Though the route to all this Freudian material in the Undead Settlement is a little arcane, it needs to be. The cryptic riddle about “Nana”, the obscure side-streets: these are there to make the player feel as though they are uncovering something secret. The obscurity is baked-in to make obvious that this material is repressed.

Though the riddle is strange, it is spoken aloud to the player, which is actually quite a telegraph by Dark Souls standards. The handiness of this secret is also metaphorically descriptive of this level of interpretation. If one stops at the purely Freudian: the mother, the father, the phallus, then they will project that schematic onto every available target. They will see reality as nothing more than a circus of oral fixations and castration dramas. If this stage of psychoanalysis is not passed through, it is nothing more than another cage to be carried around. It is the most rudimentary place to get stuck in the engagement with the unconscious.

The Armory of Symbols

What are we to make of the fact that the treasure of this area is the transposing kiln? This round thing, this simple, Arthurian symbol of the Self? It is both representative of the totality, and a totally profane and reductive simplification. I’ll explain what I mean by that.

On the one hand it is a true grail, because it has the capacity to turn the game’s hardest challenges into new tools. This is a fantastic life lesson, fundamental and perennially true. It is the pure gift of interpretation. It is said that the Buddha, in his realization that there is nothing outside of Nirvana, thereby saw that even the most torturous experiences of life, and the most unforgiving realms of Hell, were not apart from Nirvana, and that seeing them in this way thereby rectified this subjective experience of being in Hell. Once it was rephrased as Nirvana, it was always Nirvana, because all the suffering was born out of false views. Anyway, that is a very lofty height of interpretation, but one can see the boundlessness of the tool. That when the true cosmic appropriateness of an instance of suffering is groked, it is changed. On the other hand, transposition is a cheap parlor trick. It changes the essence of a boss into a weapon. It really only does one thing. Some of these weapons are useful, and most are flashy. It is almost mandatory for these weapons and spells to have a unique gimmick. So most of the time they convey to the wielder some unique flavor, some specific characteristic to consider, but even collecting such interpretations as these is merely a “building a collection.” Pinning down butterflies into a glass case. It is really no different than stockpiling corpses as Hodrick does. This device encourages the player to keep fighting, collecting, stacking bodies, finding new and interesting ways to kill people.

And ultimately, the same is true of collecting symbolism. Stockpiling a collection of unused weapons is no more or less a perversion that keeping a catalogue of archetypes for its own sake. The psychological interpretation of Hodrick, the Greatwood, and their unsightly tableau is relatively simple and straight-forward because it is meant to provide the player-interpreter with an introduction to the technique. The “game” of symbolic analysis is pointless if you spend your time taking potshots.

Wheel of Fate

Understanding the symbolism of the Mother through the eyes of Hodrick may be relatively simple, but the Undead Settlement also provides us with a more complex and transpersonal variation of the birth motif, localized at the far edge of town, hidden in a valley below. There we find catacombs tunneled into the rock, reminding us of the community of villagers who labor all day burying their dead. The Great Mother is thereby invoked, in her role which deteriorates form, which composts. The bodies decay, return to the Earth, and nourish new life. We see the skeletons sprouting branches in this dank place.

Also in the catacombs there are the dual figures of Irina the saint and a statue of Velka, goddess of sin, both of whom sit abandoned. The juxtaposition of these two sacred feminine figures is symbolically dense and deserves its own essay, but I mention it here as an echo of Kristeva’s philosophy that we passed by earlier: that of the child’s necessary bifurcation of the Mother into sublime and abject.

Velka alone is highly useful here, amplifying the Great Mother motif to a vast and cosmic context. Velka is a notoriously elusive figure in Dark Souls: she is never seen, rarely spoken of, her motivations are unknown, her ontological status unconfirmed, her objects and attributes seem to contradict each other. Nevertheless she is a crucial if not essential force in the world, and her presence can be inferred for those with eyes to see.

The main Velkan element that should be addressed here is her association with Karma, which is perhaps her principle attribute. From the beginning of DS1, she is introduced as governess of ethics, law, and equity. She explicitly oversees sin, guilt, and retribution. What practices are promoted through this governance? Mechanically, there are primarily two: keeping track of invasion penalties (in DS1) and resetting the world. If you incur penalty as an invader, the Blades of the Dark Moon will find you and punish you. So Velka prolongs and complicates PvP dynamics.

Resetting the world is an effect Velka provides that suggests forgiveness. If you aggro an NPC, and wish to get on good terms with them again, Velka allows that condition. In this way too, Velka is prolonging interpersonal relationships, but it is the relief of debt rather than the accruing of debt. Velka keeps the cycle going, she is like a keeper of the wheel that turns the age. In Dark Souls 1 a statue associated with Velka turns with the cranking of a wheel, in a room full of bonewheel skeletons. In Dark Souls 3, a similar statue turns with the cranking of a wheel in a room full of flies. In both cases, the wheel is hidden in a wet chamber behind an illusory wall. This suggests that behind the façade of the world, there is a primal place from which time is manipulated (though in this case it is but a single “tick” of the clock, an off-to-on switch which causes a fixed rotation).

Does Karma cause the rise and fall of the great ages? Is the distribution of karma the grease that turns the wheel of the world? It does seem to be that desire is what sustains the age of fire. Consider the enemies in the place where the wheel turns: bonewheels, who cling to their instruments of torture, to their suffering; flies, who bury themselves in a mountain of rotted food, a symbol of greed.

The skeletons who throw themselves into combat, and the flies which gorge on their rotting piles: either is a handy metaphor for Hodrick. His lust for the battlefield is another way of keeping himself stuck on the wheel of Samsara, collecting those shackles, representing the Velkan attachments of karma. Velka’s totem, the Raven, is found in flocks on a ravaged cliff in the settlement, among a wealth of corpses to be looted. The Raven is “associated with the fall of Spirit into that which is impure and enjoys carnage […] To raven is to plunder. This is what the word means. To have a ravenous appetite suggests greed and lust and insatiable desires.”(Valborg) Ravens keep the circus of suffering going!

Grist for the Mill

Velka is a bleak goddess, associated with “lifehunt”, the capacity to drain the essence of life, dreaded even by the gods. For this reason one of her attributes is the scythe, so she is something of a reaper figure. But we have seen she is also life-giver and sustainer, through her arbitrage of karma. This ambivalent nature is expressed by the Raven, which is a solar bird yet dyed deep black, who is cruel and enjoys carnage, yet in many myths is associated with the bringing of light and the creation of a new world.

The raven flies to and fro between the solar orb of eternal life and the dying eyes of man in time. He mercilessly pecks away at the delusions formed like veils over the cornea's shield until he penetrates to the darkness of the pupil's cavity and releases the invisible light within. (Valborg)

If the goal of Dark Souls is the realization of the Dark Soul -- the unique potential of the human being -- then perhaps Velka and her karmic processes are meant to midwife that birth as well. Could all the weight of karma, the pain of enduring a body, the cruelty of life’s entropic march … could it all be in service of birthing the Anthropos? It would explain why the Lords of Dark Souls are so antagonist to the Ashen One -- in Gnosticism and Buddhism the makers, the deities, are said to envy the actualized human being. And to be fair, the theme of surviving hardship and loss is central in Dark Souls’ reputation, and something to which countless players can attest, on practical or psychological levels (eg: “Dark Souls Helped Me Overcome Depression”).

Identity Riddles

I am the one who is disgraced and the great one. Give heed to my poverty and my wealth. Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth, and you will find me in those that are to come. And do not look upon me on the dung-heap nor go and leave me cast out, and you will find me in the kingdoms. And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who are disgraced and in the least places, nor laugh at me. And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.

But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel. Be on your guard!

Do not hate my obedience and do not love my self-control. In my weakness, do not forsake me, and do not be afraid of my power.

-- excerpt from The Thunder, Perfect Intellect ca. 100-230

The abject Mother sits at the edge of the symbolic order, in fact it is her abjection that positions the boundaries of that order, yet it itself does not accept boundary. “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (Kristeva 10), referring to birth and symbolized by the Hodrick and Greatwood scene, but beyond that it also refers to the Dark Souls creation myth: the archaism in that case being the undifferentiated fog of arch-trees and everlasting dragons in the Age of Ancients. For there to be matter and objects, psyche (dragons etc) must be born into time. Once psyche has materialized itself upon the wheel of time, it cannot exist in immediate, gestalt totality – it moves and changes, expressing its fullness over aeons through its becomings. But everything must be accounted for; Karma only brings what is due. The mystery of how psyche is refined by its extension into matter will likely stay with us until the “end” of time. But with common sense we can suppose that the condition of duration allows things to be taken apart and put back together, and that at least in our mundane lives that process frequently brings about some freshness in the object. But neither the meaning nor mechanics of the larger karmic process can be groked, just as Velka and the Mother are archetypes who inherently escape the fixidity of signification. The ultimate force of taking things apart, entropy – symbolized again by the raven and its desecration of corpses – is something that has been deeply culturally villainized, and it usually takes a second to stop and consider how the diffusion of matter engenders the condition for new forms to grow.

[Ravens] tell of the renewal of the world in terms of the past which is yet to be. The unwanted Truth is told and its insatiable desire to express itself may produce terror and loathing in one who is not prepared to give up all to its insistent glare.

This is keeping with Kristeva’s view of the abject as the eruption of the Real into consciousness. Aside from their role in pecking open an aperture of light, crows have another specific job in the renewal of the world, as described in a number of myths: measuring the size and extent of that world, flying in “progressively longer intervals in order to estimate and report on the increasing size of the emerging earth.” The extremes of incarnation, the edges beyond which dwells the abject, are scoped out in order to create the blueprint; the raven brings knowledge of the schematics.

Interpreting by Attention

And what about our own schematics? We’ve thrown away our tools – the colorful cast of characters transposed into weapons of interpretation – but perhaps it’s time to pick them up again. We cast them off because we didn’t want to fix the Dark Souls myth through explanation. Archetypes cannot be superimposed, prefab, onto a tableaux of psychological symbols. Interpretation is rather the act of elaboration: flying, as the raven does, around and around a widening and changing arena, reporting back continually new understandings of what is appropriate.

The meaning of a game is determined by what a player thinks and feels while they play it. What decisions they make, what their attention lingers on. The game is the inkblot. There are special times when the game insists upon a subject, like a film: for instance, when the crank is turned and the Velka statue rotates. But such a sequence has a different meaning in games than it does in film, because of its context: it anchors a player to a single necessary and unchanging action in the context of a world that is typically responding to their decisions with nigh-unrepeatable novelty. The fixedness of the cinematic exposes the malleability of the rest of the game. “Velka” is an approximation, an aggregate; she is not the same goddess in each playthrough, the scope and the flavor of her influence is always changing – but it is always reflecting the actions of the player.

So how then, can we arrive at a judgment regarding Hodrick? We can’t, because again, each player’s experience of him is different. Earlier I implied that Hodrick is clinging to the world, out of horror and alienation in regards to the Mother figure, and that his killing spree is only building his attachments, keeping him fixed to the wheel of incarnation. So what is the difference between his wild manslaughter, and Velka’s own penchant for carnage and lifedrain? Only the intent:

The transformation of relationship can come about through a genuine understanding of the difference between murder and sacrifice. Both kill or suppress energy, but the motives behind them are quite different. Murder is rooted in ego needs for power and domination. Sacrifice is rooted in the ego’s surrender to the guidance of the Self in order to transform destructive, although perhaps comfortable, energy patterns into the creative flow of life. (Woodman 33)

But see, it is only the inner experience of the act that has authority. In my view, Hodrick’s actions are clearly ego-driven, but another player with different exposure to this character could come away with a different impression. And the archetype speaks through the individual encounter itself, not through lore videos, essays, or any other metatext. This is a crucial function of video games that bears repeating and is rarely addressed. Games commonly use the act of killing as a metaphor for the transformation of relationship (the very notion of EXP hinges on that). The unconscious is receptive to these mutations regardless, but the nature of the effect is dependent on the conscious attitude of the player.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Columbia University Press, 1980.

Layton, Bentley, ed. The Gnostic Scriptures. Yale University Press, 1995.

Valborg, Helen. The Raven. Theosophy Trust, 2013.

Woodman, Marion. The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women. Inner City Books, 1990.

[reekierevelator]

A Visitor

A short story by Brian Bourner in times of covid

We had been in the grip of the covid-19 pandemic for well over a year but the new vaccines finally had it on the run. The country was opening up again. We were at last officially allowed to mingle freely. But the world had changed.

Radio and TV still talked endlessly of the problems faced by students who had missed out on education, of how domestic abuse cases had soared and mental health problems had multiplied. The light the pandemic had thrown on endemic problems of race and poverty constantly reverberated. People had reached a new appreciation of who were society’s real ‘key workers’ and knew they were undervalued and criminally underpaid. Floods, fires, and murders, still barely achieved a mention even in the local news.

Business practice had also changed radically. Companies like mine now saw no reason not to allow employees to continue to work from home. Like many other firms they were in the process of selling off their office building for conversion into much needed housing.  Visual contact with other people via computer technology had become the normal mode of interaction. Lack of interpersonal social contact no longer singled you out as unusual in any way. The exotic video meetings and video phone calls of a couple of years ago had long since become boringly routine.

I had always been asthmatic and a brush with tuberculosis a few years back had hardly helped. The constant pandemic fear of infection had marked my psyche indelibly. For people like me, at high risk from the virus, shielding and self-isolating for months on end had become second nature, the new normal, and was psychologically imprinted. I lived like a medieval hermit in a cave, dependent on local villagers to bring me food. At thirty-seven I was otherwise self-sufficient, happy to live alone in isolation. The last thing I wanted was to risk infection from physical meetings with other people.  

Occasionally new variations of the virus still cropped up here and there. Announcements of quarantine arrangements and local lockdowns had become mundane, barely newsworthy.  Likewise, there were still deaths and hospitalisations, but not the thousands experienced at the pandemic’s height. Health was no longer top of the government’s agenda. Despite innumerable ‘long covid’ cases, and people suffering long-lasting psychological after-effects, the government’s focus had shifted inexorably back to the economy.  

 When the doorbell rang on Monday morning I was slaving over my laptop, just as I had been all morning, trying to complete a company report. I was still in my pyjamas. I still needed to wash and dress ahead of a video business meeting scheduled for 12.00 noon.  But the doorbell was insistent. Angrily I threw open the front door expecting to find yet another box of groceries on the doorstep, or some hot food I’d forgotten I’d ordered, or even some parcel delivery man waiting for a signature.

Instead I found myself facing a woman dressed rather shabbily who was carrying a grubby old holdall.  Initially shocked at the lack of face mask I remembered that things had moved on. Her mud-spattered black coat was buttoned to the top and flapped around a slender body. Though hairdressers had been open for a few weeks now she had clearly been unable to secure an appointment. Her frizzy auburn hair sprouted from her head like weeds. A long narrow face attempted a smile but her skin was lined and weather-beaten. She looked exhausted. Her dark eyes, set far back in her ruddy crumpled skin, bored into mine, pleading and watery. When she opened her mouth and said “Hello Martin” recognition slowly began to dawn.

Over the course of the pandemic I had virtually forgotten what manners and social niceties were appropriate for visitors. “Gina,” I spluttered in surprise, “how nice to see you.”  I cautiously ushered her into my flat, squeezing myself against the wall in commemoration of the recently abolished two metre distancing rule.

“I’m sorry if I got you out of bed,” she said, entering the living room while I rushed to throw a dressing-gown over my pyjamas. And even before sitting down she launched into her tale of woe. “It really drove me crazy. I’ve never ever been stuck indoors for that long before.  Shops, restaurants, pubs, galleries - all shut down; nothing to do and nowhere to go. Work all disrupted too; jobs furloughed or disappearing. Just watching endless murder dramas on TV, or reading books about murders, or listening to radio presenters I’d like to murder.  Still, you look well. I knew I could rely on you.”

It was strange because in fact I had not seen Gina for three years, and it felt like far longer. I searched my brain for her surname and eventually came up with McLaughlan. We had met at Manifest Destiny, a large advertising and design practice. Though we were in different teams there our paths crossed occasionally. She never said much, only once or twice mentioning that she could only bear the work there because the building was almost entirely glass so that inside she almost felt she was outside.

From what I could remember she had mostly been attached to another colleague, Ruby Maguire. She seemed to trail around after Ruby a lot. And Ruby was someone else I had not seen for a three years, not since I’d left Manifest Destiny for an administrative post with Box Clever, the cardboard box manufacturer. It had proved a wise move. The firm had done great business during the pandemic. It had expanded and I had been promoted.

Gina told me she too had moved on from Manifest Destiny, not long after me. She had gone from billboard designs to helping organise and design outdoor film sets. It had entailed working freelance but sounded a lot more interesting than designing cardboard boxes. “But,” she went on quickly, “the pandemic killed it all off stone dead.” She turned towards me with an angry grimace. “And when the wok vanished the pandemic ate all my savings. No official help for the likes of me. I couldn’t even pay my rent. No more sleeping in my lovely sun room. I ended up in a cramped hostel. It was hellish.”  The resentment and hatred in her tone was palpable. “It drove me demented. And when the hostels closed to prevent the virus spreading I tried sleeping on the floor of anyone who would let me. It was unbearable, often like being stuck in a cupboard. Sometimes I couldn’t find anywhere at all suitable and just lived rough, outdoors in all weathers, but at least not suffering, lost in some little, dark, unknown room.”

“Good grief Gina, that’s awful, I’m so sorry.” And having commiserated I told her that of course she was welcome to take a bath and stay the night. I rustled up a quick meal for her which she ate looking longingly out of the window. And later I dug out some spare pyjamas. When I showed her my tiny windowless spare room her face froze and she stood rooted to the spot.  She looked about to turn, dismiss the offer and run away, but recovered herself in time to mutter vague words of thanks.

I showed her round the rest of the flat then raced to turn up just in time for my video conference. My hair was uncombed, I was still in my dressing gown. On screen my boss and our potential customer both wore worried frowns, obviously thinking I would have been as presentable wearing a large cardboard box.  

Gina slept through the rest of the day.

After finishing the meeting, writing up notes, dressing, and grabbing a sandwich I phoned the old unit at Manifest Destiny. I hoped someone here could give me a bit of background since I barely knew anything about Gina.

“Hello, Manifest Destiny, Terry Ryland speaking.”

“Hi, it’s Martin Hislop here. I used to work at Manifest Destiny.  I wonder if there’s anyone there who remembers Gina McLaughlan. She’s popped round to see me unexpectedly, obviously regards me as a friend, and might stay a day or two. I don’t want to seem a total socially inept  idiot but I’m afraid I can’t remember anything about her. I don’t want to put my foot in it. Is there someone who could spare a few minutes to fill me in?”

“Well there’s me I suppose,” Terry replied noncommittally. “All the staff work from home now. It’s my turn to be the telephone exchange today. It’s a rota system. I can’t shout a question out across the office floor any more. I’d have to contact staff individually.”

“Well, do you remember Gina yourself?”

“Yes, I think so. Worked on billboards. She always kept close to Ruby. Ruby Maguire sort of looked after her. She had some kind of problem, couldn’t stand being indoors, got wound up with it. So Ruby would take her for regular breaks outside.”

“You mean she was claustrophobic?”

“Yes, that’s it, good worker but a little bit off her trolley. They called Ruby her mentor but she was more of an unofficial carer.”

I thanked Terry for talking to me and understood why my spare room had not seemed as attractive to Gina as I’d imagined.  It would be much better if she stayed with someone who understood her condition, say Ruby.

 It was later in the evening, just as I’d pulled out my mobile to search for Ruby Ellison’s contact details,  that I heard Gina emerge from her room and rustle around in the kitchen. I was thinking that if she stayed a while I’d need to order more food and my expenses would increase when Gina slipped into the living room beside me.

“I was wondering,” I began brightly, “since my flat’s very small, why not ask Ruby Maguire if you can stay with her for a while?”

The suggestion generated no immediate response but her eyes narrowed and I caught a mean and suspicious glint.

She stared at me silently, her lips curling, and eventually muttered, “No, I’ll be happy enough here.” It came out as a sort of low growl as if she was daring me to argue.  

I looked back at the phone screen.  The search for Ruby Ellison had found dozens of references. But I was shocked to see they were all about Ruby’s death. Police were continuing to investigate the case of thirty-two year old office worker, Ruby Maguire, found dead in her flat. Apparently she had lain there for over a week until her manager had noticed she wasn’t bothering to log in for Zoom calls any more. The circumstances were suspicious. The police were requesting information on anyone seen entering or leaving Ruby’s flat in the week before her death. I looked up from the screen and blurted out “Heavens above, it seems Ruby has died!”

I was even more startled as Gina suddenly leaned over me, grabbed my phone and threw it at the wall. I was flabbergasted. I stared at her in shock.

“If you’re not happy about me staying on here, maybe you better leave yourself,” she said as if it was the most natural suggestion in the world, an entirely reasonable proposition.  As normal as smashing mobile phones against walls. There was a manic undertone to her voice.  Ignoring the question I jumped up and tried to brush past her. But she grabbed hold of the dressing gown I was still wearing and I saw the blade of my own kitchen knife flash in her hand.

 Fortunately, I managed to twist myself around, allowing my dressing-gown to fall to the floor, and rushed out the living-room door as she came after me.  I barely managed to reach my bedroom and slammed the door shut. The door had a lock and though I’d never used it before, I did then.

She was outside the door, fumbling with the handle and breathing quickly. ‘Ok, let’s get together,’ she panted. ‘Ruby always said you liked me. She said you only ignored me at work because relationships had to be kept on a professional footing.”

“Ruby was good to you,” I shouted. “Why did you do it?”

“Ruby tried to lock me up. All night in a tiny room.  I was only allowed outdoors for one hour a day. She tried to blame the government, said it was a lock-in, a government ruling.”

“A lockdown, it was a lockdown.”

“She made me live in a room the size of a cupboard.  Said it was all she had. Said I couldn’t go outside.  We argued more and more.  Struggled. Then she died.  And I left.”

“And came here.”

“She said you were a good man, knew your address.  I thought it would be different for us.  We’d be good together. We could live together, sleep in the living room with the curtains open. But you want to lock me up in little room too. You’re just as bad as Ruby.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I yelled, and then the carving knife was thrust in through the door jamb.

The woman was delusional. God knows what had got into her. I opened my bedroom window and yelled “Help!” over and over at the top of my voice.

Fortunately, neighbours called the police.  By the time they arrived Gina had escaped through the back door but the neighbours had spotted her leaving and the police soon picked her up.

I was still trembling, partly from the shock of the knife attack and partly from seeing several people occupy my flat for the first time in ages. I went over the details several times answering the police questions.

“It was unbelievable,” I kept repeating. “The woman seemed almost normal but she was clearly deranged. She came at me with a carving knife. You wouldn’t think a little thing like claustrophobia would be enough to tip you over the edge like that.”

One of the policemen commented matter-of-factly, “Oh yes, we’ve seen a lot of that kind of thing recently. Mental health problems. Old people’s dementia worsening till they’ve completely forgotten their relatives. A chap round the corner said life wasn’t worth living if he couldn’t meet his old cronies in the pub. Topped himself.  The coronavirus, eh?  It drives people mad.” Then to change the subject he asked “What’s your line of work?”

“Oh, at moment I’m designing cardboard boxes shaped like coffins. Natural burials. Environmentally sound. There’s been a big increase in demand recently.”

[l-in-c-future]

Book Reading: Lawless 

It is written by an exceptional legal professional of interesting background how she overcome and learnt from many challenges in seeking to help her clients and oppressed peoples in Afghanistan over more than 8 years of time.

When I first came across her speeches, she used music and dancing rythms as analogy to express how flexibility and creativity was needed to work things around in different situations at a very difficult country. It turned out that when I read her book, her DJ hobbies of able to choose and decide a list of right playsongs to suit different atomspheres helped her creativity and flexibility when she handled cases at various types of formal and informal parts of the judicial and arbitration system in a country where the concept of rule of law is still at embryo stage constrained by a very conservative social-political-religious culture.

It is so interesting that Ms Motley herself is not a typical stereotyped sort of people that the developing world-mind you-part of the developing world that carries heavy pre-conceptualised perceptions on outsiders, especially the West, in particulary USA.

She started her own story in the prologue that she is an American African lady grew up not really in one of the decent likeable areas (Milwaukee-Wisconsin) in USA. While crimes were common for young people as she witnessed, she suggested that even growing up in that sort of areas might already meant a negative social connotations about her background in her own country. And she was frank and honest about it-she never wants her kids to grow up and being sucked in the same bad environment. (It turned out later in her book that despite she worked very hard to provide for her family to move out and ABOVE, her husband felt sort to become a random teenage gun robbery shootings victim when he took their kids back for unversity classmates re-union catch-up. Shocking enough, Ms Motley discovered that the culprit was one of her distant relative on the trail date hearing. The kid didn’t really seem understood the consequences of his actions nor showing any much sense of regrets of what he did.)

For good or bad, the tough environment Ms Motley grew up has been preparing her for the great adventures with the right characters of toughness, boldness, courage and other live surving and professional skills that become essential pillars for later stage of her life. Probably if she wasn’t grow up in such environment and survived through while excelled in her professional career, this book would have never existed because she probably couldn’t handle the tough and challenging environment of building legal capacity of a dangerous country. Adding to Ms Motley’s interesting unusual background is that she was a Mrs Winconsin.  Here is a lady who had battled with where she grew up and became a beauty pageon contest successful candidate for Mrs USA represented her state. A lady one can immediately associates with both musculine sides of characteristic toughness and professional assertion but also fully polished by the congentiality, elegance and beauty of the feminine aspects of a woman. 

Through her descriptions of how she handled and brought sucesses to the cases in the book, these nice marriage of hard and soft attributes truly made a difference-differences of life and death, successes and failures that changed the future of her clients. People who saw her as their life-jackets.

I like that frank, open, easy to read English style in the book. Ms Motley doesn’t pretend that she is a ‘typical superior’ arrogance filled ‘Western experts’ that people perceived towards the Western experts. 

She began her adventures on her own difficulty and predicaments-”I need to earn sufficient money to move my kids out of Milwakee but my humble public prosecutor job doesn’t provide me the money I need. I was already struggling to pay bills by having a second evening teaching jobs to supplement income but here my husband decided to take full time study. Wherever places and jobs that could offer me a ‘way out’ I would consider.” She did. And it was how the stories of the book began. She DID NOT start as many typical Western experts being sent to Afghanistan (or similar parts of the world) because she was at higher starting point.

That was one of the key reasons as she mentioned from time to time in the book she had to stay on to feed her families, especially when her husband was shot in USA, their entire family savings over years of her hard earned works in Afghanistan had been used up mostly. She was faced with scarry HUGE medical bills of her husband that kept her on the treadmill.  In this sense, the feelings is very down to earth. She is not some out of touch pretended experts like her peers who never really stepped outside the typical heavily guarded barracades of ALL Western organisations and complex sites without going out to explore and understand the day to day REAL LIVES of Afghanistan. Sadly, her passions and the genuine professional driving forces for being authentic and down to earth was not much appreciated by some of her employers and peers. In the course of distress and disappointments, she made a very bold and courageous decision to start her own legal pro-bono legal practice. She became the first woman officially practicing legal professions in Afghanistan simultaneously as the first female legal professional from a foreign country. 

Both being blessed as from non-White ethnical background and Ms Motley’s proactiveness in understanding how to maneuouvr around the primative and informative legal and judicial systems of Afghanstan, she is less being perceived as hostile or imperialistic by locals. (She didn’t give herself credits to these but the ways she mentioned in the books senior people all the ways up to President’s office, the Presidents and people within the judicial and tribal systems were willing to meet and listen to her, allowed her to work within and among them fully reflected the reality.) Her communication, negotiation and interpersonal skills (thks to being a Mrs Winsconsin) are valuable assets that enabled her to help her clients in many difficult situations.

As she described the harshness of the challenges she had to deal with and overcome in Afghanistan, she was realistic, pragmatic, flexibile while not giving up hope for future improvements there-though she never say it is a nice fairy tale of sunny days ahead always. In this sense, she is not really fallen into the typical traps of Western countries-too much over or under expectations of what to achieve, get out of and get to because of their fantasy of heroism. Ms Motley had used her creative, flexibility, boldness, passions and extraordinary courage to demonstrate what a ‘hero’ (at least to her clients who she had successfully helped them out-both Afghanistans and foreign clients) very down to earth be prepared to rolled up your sleeves and to sweat and toil constantly.

At the beginning of her journey, she was driven by the desperation to feed her own family but what makes her respectful is that after years of her successful career in Afghanistan, she DEFINTELY has earned very high profile international repuation and goodwill, money and well connections-both internationally and locally back in Afghanistan- that are not comparable to many of her peers. She could have walk herself out of the harsh environment as MANY other typical international high profile foreign experts would have done so already) and make herself ways to earn even more money easier. Yet she chooses to stay. The reasons are clear: she is truly committed to her own passion and the dedication to help the disstressed, oppressed, deseperated and hopeless people-whether they are Afghanistan local people or her other foreign clientele-that sooner or later, one way or the others, somebody will find themselves completely caught up in a lawless primative governance and society environment. 

She is humble enough to see merits and demerits of just applying a Western approach to make the changes in absence of local context. She is prepared to understand how to make out the best legally possible outcomes for her clients WITHOUT compromising her professional integrity (which she insisted that she WOULD NOT play bribe to achieve the ends and she would ALWAYS look at ways within the existing Afghanistan laws, including Islamic laws and legal means within the existing systems to work her clients’ cases out or if not-she failed with integrity or simply walked out decently). She never show she is on ‘upper hands’ to change a country. She sees both what she had learnt from what was and what is within the existing system while bringing the changes to the ecosystem and people’s hearts gradually-probably she might aware of or not aware of the power of transformations she did. 

Persistence.  The book tells how STRONG such persistence becomes pillars of resilience for Ms Motley to stay on her commissioned path without transgression.  How exactly you can feel the strength of a woman? Imagine you work and live ALONE in a foreign place where the ways of life is VERY different from a well organised civilised society.... She described somebody broke into her home turning everything messy (like a typical TV drama or movie) to send her ‘the message’ that “we are unhappy that you took a case that embarassed us or not letting us know (from the most senior level of the government linking to the current President’s office)” in the middle of the night. As a result, she had to stay inside (locked herself up) her car, drove away to a safer street to sleep over and work over the night inside her car until dawn came. In another ocassion, she described she happened to stay in a hotel being attacked by gunfires only that she could manage to be informed of at the last minute. She supposed to be there to relax and had a good bath and some drinks in her little oasis. She literally ran out of her bathroom, still wrapped up in her bathrope, water still dropping from the body when she hid behind some furniture hearing exchanges of gun fires outside the her hotel room at the outside corridor, seeing men running here and there from the windows. And she had to keep ALL these to herself not mentioning anything to worry her family. On the other hand, she was happy to be contacted by her family and connections all around the clock no matther how big or small the matters were. Amazingly, she did not seem to be bother by these mostly in between her lines.

Despite she fought for many legal injustice, she still takes the brunt of victim that easily happens to a successful briliant beautiful gorgeous excellent woman-her own marriage. She didn’t say why her husband and her separated but it isn’t hard to figure out see years of living apart had taken the toll. (Guy! What can you still blame if you just sit COMFORTABLY in USA while your wife fought day and night to bring the LOT of money to feed you and your kids’ in upper middle class lifestyle-the American dream? And that when the guy was wounded and needed HUGE medical bills, the woman was willing to postpone the divorce.) I felt like reading every cases she shared-she probably be an angel sent by heaven to help a difficult country and to her own family. I cannot explain any reason why such determination never shake in years in such dangerous environment and she seemed to be protected divinely. You ask any folk, they would walk out a hundred times, let alone a woman.

I am not going into the details of her cases here because many of her cases shared in the book had probably been long published as international and local media spotlights. However, the person you can read in between lines- that kind of honesty, frankliness and down to the earth that makes a supposed to be ‘typically boring’ full of jardons legal book of bring out justice (actually Ms Motley said it is hard to find justice in a highly injust society, what she strives to achieve is the sense of justness as the best practicable possible outcomes) becomes very interesting to read. I felt like I was reading an adventurous novel of someone’s exotic careers.

At the day when I wrote this book reading-the Trump admin has announced withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan to release the armies to be ready for other difficult parts of the world. Yet, the way for building the capacities of a nation towards a more open modern society in Afghanistan had just begun-and the road is still VERY LONG ahead.  Troops can be witdrawn but the supports and the better approaches to build up the capacities of a country are kids of many long battles. Battling in people’s mindsets and mentality. Battling in finding the right approaches and engagements by wise, tough, humable, flexible, creative and down to earth people like Ms Motley who has commitment to her own passion to pursue possibilities out of the apparently impossibles. 

To the West-if you leave a vaccum, the devil and rogues will find ways to fill the cracks.

“Justness for me entails a common-sense approach to the law. It is about pratical thinking rather than theoratical constructs. I try at all times to take a 360-degree view. The first question is always, “What is going to move this situation forward?” “I can also appreciate the adventures that fighting for justness has taken me on and I am excited about where it will push me to go.”

[acaholessay522]

same day essays

About me

July 4th Is Different This Year, And Also The Same 'Independence' Day Is Complicated

July 4th Is Different This Year, And Also The Same 'Independence' Day Is Complicated Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q incessantly rails towards legitimate sources of data as pretend. Shock and Harger depend on info they encounter on Facebook quite than news retailers run by journalists. In the first group are theories that assume Q is a single individual who has been posting all alone this whole time. This is where you’ll discover the individuals who say that Trump himself is Q, or even that PrayingMedic is Q. This second category consists of Brennan’s concept that the Watkinses are actually paying Q, or are paying someone to carry on as Q, or are even performing as Q themselves. They don’t read the native paper or watch any of the main tv networks. “Your information channel ain’t gonna inform us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to observe CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we all the time have been,” he stated. The third group of theories holds that Q is a collective, with a small variety of people sharing access to the account. This third category consists of the notion that Q is a new kind of open-supply army-intelligence company. Submission of the FAFSA isn't required to receive an admission choice. We encourage college students to submit the FAFSA as soon as potential after October 1. If you are eligible for charge deferral as an undergraduate, it is possible for you to to choose this selection for cost. Go to Portland State University's on-line application system and choose Create Account. QAnon isn’t a far-proper conspiracy, the best way it’s typically described, Uscinski went on, despite its obviously pro-Trump narrative. And that’s as a result of Trump isn’t a typical far-right politician. Q appeals to folks with the greatest attraction to conspiracy thinking of any sort, and that attraction crosses ideological lines. QAnon adherents see Q’s anonymity as proof of Q’s credibility—despite their deep distrust of unnamed sources in the media. Every faction of QAnon has its own hunches, alliances, and interpersonal dramas associated to the query of Q’s identification. Weeks before that, the person who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques had posted a white-supremacist manifesto on 8chan. Hayes tells his followers that he thinks Q is an open-supply intelligence operation, made possible by the web and designed by patriots combating corruption inside the intelligence neighborhood. His interpretation of Q is in the end religious in nature, and centers on the concept of a Great Awakening. “I imagine The Great Awakening has a double utility,” Hayes wrote in a blog submit in November 2019. He had migrated from 4chan (fearing that the positioning had been “infiltrated”) to the picture board 8chan, after which 8chan went dark. The episode had eerie similarities to two other shootings. Four months earlier, in April 2019, the suspected shooter in a murderous rampage at a synagogue in Poway, California, had posted an anti-Semitic letter on 8chan. If you've already began an software, or created one for a previous term, choose Log In. Freshman candidates who do not meet the minimum GPA and high school curriculum requirements could also be subject to holistic evaluate. PSU accepts three nationally acknowledged High School Equivalency exams that show school and profession readiness to permit for admission with no normal high school diploma. Below are the minimum scores required for admission for each exam. If you've submitted an software to Portland State University, you possibly can log in to PSU's utility portal to evaluation the status of your software. You shall be notified through e-mail for each document you submit and your admission determination. The story of Q is premised on the necessity for Q to stay nameless. It’s why Q originally picked 4chan, one of the final locations constructed for anonymity on the social net. “I’ve typically associated Q to earlier figures like John Titor or Satoshi Nakamoto,” Brennan advised me, referring to two legends of web anonymity. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown creator of bitcoin. John Titor is the name used on several message boards in 2000 and 2001 by somebody claiming to be a military time traveler from the yr 2036.

[mysticalmindblog]

It is understandable that so many are quarantined and locked down now and feeling strong fear and anger about their situations, but these are destructive and debilitating things to feel and endure. There is another way to be during this crisis.

Once again, it is the theme of this article to focus on being for others what you want them to be for you.

You don't have to be a Saint, an Angel, or a Sage, to care wholeheartedly and show unconditional love and compassion; and yet to that someone in need, you may just be the Guardian Angel they have been praying for.

You basically have to go from being angry and grouchy to showing some love to those who need it. What you give comes back to you !!

This article is not about the reciprocity of 'love' in a relationship setting. However, whether you are in a reciprocal love relationship or not, this article can definitely help you to perceive other dimensions of interpersonal relationships.

Unfortunately, 'Love' is a word that is thrown around so loosely in today's 'freedom & liberation' modern society. It is the subject of meme after meme, quote after quote, and countless fables and idealized fictional scenarios. Four letters making a word that has such a generalized scope of uses and meanings for so many.

There is no point in going into a lengthy discussion of the meaning of Love in this blog article. If you type "What is love" into Google, you will be met by over 530 million linked articles/videos etc.

Love

I will however, for the sake of this blog, encapsulate my perception of the concept of Love into two words: Unbounded Compassion.

I have learned that Love can originate as a manifestation of Compassion; but please don't misunderstand - that doesn't mean I go around falling in love with the people I 'feel sorry for'. It actually hearkens back to a realization I had many years ago that changed my perception of the way I see people in general, in the world around me.

- "I find it an ongoing challenge to be compassionate in my life. I accept this, and understand it is normal. But how so..?" -

Because I am prone to being careless with my thoughts at times, and I find myself thinking selfishly and putting myself and my needs first.

At this point many would be thinking, "There's nothing wrong with that." - It is seen as part of the 'Survival of the Fittest' paradigm, and the 'Win or Lose' mentality... You know; the COMPETITIVE URGE stuff we have been sociologically programmed with, since our earliest memories. Again, please don't misunderstand - the context of this article, is to explore and understand our ongoing struggles to rise above what is deemed normal and strive to reach higher into new uncharted realms of living purposefully, mindfully, and spiritually.

As such, you will be challenged by my writings to see through your eyes; with my eyes; to share perception, and take the journey of Life together.

A Vow to the Universe

Actually, let me stop right here a minute to tell you... Yes YOU - who are reading this, that we don't know each other; and yet I feel you as I write these words, in a way that escapes vocabulary in description. I made a vow to the Universe quite some time ago that I wanted to be a voice of unconditional love and compassion with no face and no ego to all my human brothers and sisters on this amazing little planet of ours.

One planet, one species of sentient beings with the capacity to love, to laugh, to care, to cry, to hold, and to grow. We are united whether we like it or not by this time in which we share our world. We all suffer the same sufferings, we all idealize and hope for the best in all things, we all feel pain, and sadly we all feel so alone sometimes.

I hope and pray that you will stay with me through this world crisis and through my quotes/articles so we can take this quest together; and I dearly hope and pray that whatever light and love you receive through this article, through my deeply candid and intimate writings with you about the human condition - you will take and pass it on, paying it forward, like a wave of light for those suffering in lonely darkness.

Sorrows

So, it can be so challenging to feel compassion at times, especially when life can be so devastatingly painful and full of personal suffering. The self-preservation instinct invariably remains active as we strive to overcome insurmountable challenges, and odds, and situations that seem entirely detrimental to our very sanity, our very existence.

You and I both, we have faced them. We face them sometimes on a daily basis, like haunting wraiths - family dramas, mistakes we have made, and bad decisions, sometimes trying to dissolve those feelings in things that can become unacknowledged addictions, causing more deep sorrows, so much suffering, in us, and all around us, all these things can afflict and vex us to the point where we can feel emotionally numb, compassion crushed because our own morale has become so burned and damaged.

Empowerment

But what was a personal revelation for me was to comprehend that the very act of setting aside my own issues to focus attention on the issues of someone else that I saw who needed care, attention, guidance, and protection - not only relieved my own pain response to personal suffering through my own challenges, but provoked an internal empowerment that said "Yes, I can..! I can make a difference, I can be a light for someone else even if everything has gone to crap in my own life".

Suffering

Curiously enough, by helping to deal with the problems of another through a heart of compassion I was able to change my perspective on my own issues. I learned not only that so many around me are going through the most intense and insane forms of suffering, many of those sufferings are of a type that are truly dark and shameful to the ones suffering - and very common it is that they are actually victims of the evils of others. I have cried many times from the very pit of my stomach, (you know what I mean, right? The type of uncontrollable grief-stricken crying that wracks your entire body from head to toe) while doing my best to be out of the sight of those who I have attempted to help because, it's not pity we want... - Us suffering humans; it's simple love, a kind smile, a soul warming hug, it's simple compassion, it's simple partnering, a safety net, a mechanism to share our pain in an unobtrusive way.

It is very rewarding, and very fulfilling, to make yourself available to someone who you see is suffering, especially when you are suffering yourself. I promise you.

So that's what I meant with this quote. If it is your friend, and they are suffering, be compassionate and make their dramas and challenges your own - even if it is to sit and listen, and empathize. Be that guardian angel who becomes a mirror of reflection. Very often, if we are able to vent and talk about our problems, we can actually come up with our own solutions. It's a cognitive process that's part of oral communication, on an emotional level. If it is your partner, child, grandparent - or a complete stranger - STEP OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE, and stop thinking of yourself, and be the very best compassionate sentient being you CAN BE, to that one who is suffering and in need. You will rapidly see how your own life, your own troubles and challenges, will either become easier to solve, or just simply fade away, no longer important.

In this perfect storm of a global pandemic and global lockdown - this is a perfect form of Unconditional Love - when carried out with your full, mindful self.

If I was to rank the importance of coming to a higher understanding, and practice, of Unbounded Compassion, I would have to say it is the number One most important aspiration you should look to achieve. It will lead you into an understanding of yourself, and people, and the world around you, that will catapult you into a journey of self-discovery you can never turn your back on. You will begin to see how your life, and the lives of others can be so much more fulfilled, and warm, and beautiful, and peaceful, and productive. You will feel like you have suddenly come into possession of the greatest secret gift in existence.

And in a way, you will.

Think about the following...

Compassion is and was at the center of the lives of so many important and influential figures, some are worshiped, or celebrated, or revered, still today, even aside from such as Buddha, or Jesus, there are Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, John Wesley, St. Francis of Assisi, Guru Arjan, Mother Teresa, John Calvin, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and of course the current Dalai Lama, who said that "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

I created this quote, so that what I had found to be true, could be established almost as a *mantra to self.

[brinazzle]

5

We always have a choice. That’s not so clear-cut when the subject is triggers and our response to them. The terms trigger and response suggest an uninterrupted A-to-B sequence with no breathing room for hesitation, reflection, and choice. Is that true? Are we so easily triggered? How does a trigger actually work within us? Are there moving parts between the trigger and the behavior. If so, what are they? When I was getting my doctorate at UCLA, the classic sequencing template for analyzing problem behavior in children was known as ABC, for antecedent, behavior, and consequence.���  The antecedent is the event that prompts the behavior. The behavior creates a consequence. A common classroom example: a student is drawing pictures instead of working on the class assignment. The teacher asks the child to finish the task (the request is the antecedent). The child reacts by throwing a tantrum (behavior). The teacher responds by sending the student to the principal’s office (consequence). That’s the ABC sequence: teacher request to child’s tantrum to hello principal. Armed with this insight, after several repeat episodes the teacher concludes that the child’s behavior is a ploy to avoid class assignments. In his engaging book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg applied this ABC template to breaking and forming habits. Instead of antecedent, behavior, and consequence, he used the terms cue, routine, and reward to describe the three part sequence known as a habit loop. Smoking cigarettes is a habit loop consisting of stress (cue), nicotine stimulation (routine), leading to temporary psychic well-being (reward). People often gain weight when they try to quit smoking because they substitute food for nicotine as their routine. In doing so, they are obeying Duhigg’s Golden Rule of Habit Change—keep the cue and reward, change the routine—but they are doing it poorly. Doing thirty push-ups (or anything physically challenging) might be more effective than eating more. Duhigg provides a terse, vivid example of the cue-routine-reward loop in action—and how we can use it to break a bad habit. A graduate student named Mandy bites her nails, habitually and incessantly until they bleed. She wants to stop. A therapist elicits from Mandy that she brings her fingers to her mouth whenever she feels a little bit of tension in her fingers. The tension appears when she’s bored. That’s the cue: tension in her fingers brought on by boredom. Biting her nails is the routine that fights her boredom. The physical stimulation, especially the sense of completeness when she nibbles all ten nails down to the quick, is Mandy’s reward. She craves it, which makes it habitual. The therapist instructs Mandy to carry an index card and make a check mark on the card each time she feels the finger tension. A week later she returns to the therapist with twenty-eight check marks on the card, but she is now enlightened about the cues that send her fingers to her mouth. She’s ready to replace her routine. The therapist teaches her a “competing response”—in this case, putting her hands in her pocket or gripping a pencil, anything that prevents her fingers from going to her mouth. Eventually Mandy learns to rub her arms or rap her knuckles on a desk as a substitute for the physical gratification that nail biting provides. The cue and reward stay the same. The routine has changed. A month later, Mandy has stopped biting her nails completely. She’s replaced a harmful habit with a harmless one. I don’t take issue with the first and third segments of Duhigg’s habit loop, whatever terms we use—antecedent andconsequence, cue and reward, stimulus and response, cause and effect, trigger and outcome. I want to modify the middle part—the routine. The habit loop makes it sound as if all we need is an awareness of our cues so we can automatically respond with an appropriate behavior. That’s fine with habits. But when we’re changing interpersonal behavior, we’re adding a layer of complexity in the form of other people. Our triggered response can’t always be automatic and unthinking and habitual—because as caring human beings we have to consider how people will respond to our actions. The fingernail doesn’t care if we bite it or leave it alone. The glass of wine doesn’t care if we drink it or spurn it. The cigarette is indifferent to our craving for it. But the people in our lives care enormously whether we yield to our first unwelcome impulse (for example, rudeness, cruelty, rage) or we stifle the impulse and come up with a better choice. With people in the mix, mere habit can’t guide our behavior. We must be adaptable, not habitual—because the stakes are so much higher. If I surrender to my nicotine craving and smoke a cigarette, I hurt myself. If I lose my temper with my child, I hurt my child. In the matter of adult behavioral change, I’d like to propose a modification to the sequence of antecedent, behavior, and consequence—by interrupting it with a sense of awareness and an infinitesimal stoppage of time. My modified sequence looks like this:   I’ve isolated three eye-blink moments—first the impulse, then the awareness, then a choice—that comprise the crucial intervals between the trigger and our eventual behavior. These intervals are so brief we sometimes fail to segregate them from what we regard as our “behavior.” But experience and common sense tell us they’re real. When a trigger is pulled we have an impulse to behave a certain way. That’s why some of us hear a loud crash behind us and immediately duck our heads to protect ourselves. The more shrewd and alert among us aren’t as quick to run for cover. We hear the sound and look around to see what’s behind it—in case there’s even more to worry about. Same trigger, different responses, one of them automatic and hasty (in a word, impulsive, as in yielding to the first impulse), the other intermediated by pausing, reflecting, and sifting among better options. We are not primitive sea slugs responding with twitchy movement whenever we’re poked with a needle. We have brain cells. We can think. We can make any impulse run in place for a brief moment while we choose to obey or ignore it. We make a choice not out of unthinking habit but as evidence of our intelligence and engagement. In other words, we are paying attention. For example, in 2007 I was a guest on the Today show’s weekend edition, interviewed by Lester Holt. Guests are warned that the time on camera goes by very fast—a six-minute segment feels like sixty seconds. It’s true. My interview went well. I enjoyed myself so much, in fact, that I was stunned when I heard Lester thanking me for being on the program—the customary cue that the segment is over. I couldn’t believe it. We’d just started. I had a half dozen additional points to make. Lester’s words triggered an impulse in me to say, “No, let’s keep going.” And in fact, the words were on the tip of my tongue. But this was national television, with four million people watching. I was keyed up, mindful of every word and gesture. In that nanosecond before the foolish words could pass my lips, I paused to reflect on the consequences of doing so. Was I really considering telling the Today host that I didn’t want the interview to end? Did I want to be the guest who overstayed his welcome? In the end, I took Lester’s cue and responded with the customary, “Thank you for having me.” I’m sure anyone watching the segment’s final seconds saw a guest behaving on autopilot. That’s what most exchanges of gratitude are—formulaic gestures, neither distinctive nor attention-grabbing. A viewer wouldn’t have an inkling of the split second drama in my head during the interval between Lester Holt’s triggering words and the response I finally chose. Though it looked like rote behavior, it was anything but casual or automatic. Even with a trigger as minor as being thanked for showing up, I was weighing my options. I had a choice. If we’re paying attention (and being on national TV will increase anyone’s level of awareness), this is how triggers work. The more aware we are, the less likely any trigger, even in the most mundane circumstances, will prompt hasty unthinking behavior that leads to undesirable consequences. Rather than operate on autopilot, we’ll slow down time to think it over and make a more considered choice. We already do this in the big moments. When we go into our first meeting with the company’s CEO, we are mindful that every word, every gesture, every question is a trigger. When we’re asked for our opinion, we don’t say the first thing that comes to mind. We know we’ve entered a field of land mines where any misstep may have unappealing consequences. We measure our words like a diplomat facing an adversary. Perhaps we’ve even prepared our answers ahead of time. Either way, we don’t yield to impulse. We reflect, choose, then respond.Paradoxically, the big moments—packed with triggers, stress, raw emotions, high stakes, and thus high potential for disaster—are easy to handle. When successful people know it’s showtime, they prepare to put on a show. It’s the little moments that trigger some of our most outsized and unproductive responses: The slow line at the coffee shop, the second cousin who asks why you’re still single, the neighbor who doesn’t pick up after his dog, the colleague who doesn’t remove his sunglasses indoors to talk to you, the guests who show up too early, the passenger in the next seat wearing super-loud headphones, the screaming baby on the plane, the friend who always one-ups your anecdotes, the person standing on the left side of the escalator, and so on. These are life’s paper cuts. They happen every day, and they’re not going away. They often involve people we’ll never see again. Yet they can trigger some of our basest impulses. Some of us suppress the impulse. Whatever the reason—common sense, fear of confrontation, more urgent things to do we opt to ignore the triggering annoyance. We disarm the moment. If there are no bullets in the gun, the trigger doesn’t matter. On the other hand, some of us are easily triggered—and can’t resist our first impulse. We have to speak up. This is how ugly public scenes begin. These tiny annoyances should trigger bemusement over life’s rich tapestry instead of turning us into umbrage-taking characters from a Seinfeld episode. Even more perilous are the small triggering moments with our families and best friends. We feel we can say or do anything with these folks. They know us. They’ll forgive us. We don’t have to edit ourselves. We can be true to our impulses. That’s how our closest relationships often become trigger festivals with consequences that we rarely see in any other part of our lives—the fuming and shouting, the fights and slammed doors, the angry departures and refusals to talk to each other for months, years, decades. For example, your teenage daughter borrows the car and two hours later calls to say it’s been stolen. She left the keys in the car while she ran into a convenience store for a snack. A low-probability event (the theft) made more probable by a silly mistake (forgetting the keys). As a parent, how do you respond? Your daughter wasn’t harmed. She’s not in danger or legal peril. She’s a victim. At worst, you’ve lost property. What’s your first impulse? You can get angry. You can do a variation on “I told you so” or “You always do this,” reinforcing the message that 1) parent knows best or 2) your daughter is not as smart as she thinks she is. You can be consoling. You can ask, “Do you need a ride home?” You have options. I don’t have the perfect answer. I do know that this phone call is a supercharged triggering moment, even though it is brief and unexpected and in the grand scheme of things, small. The damage is done. It’s not a tall tale to entertain your grandkids years from now. But how you respond is important and consequential. Will this unfortunate event trigger more damage in the relationship between parent and child, or will something good come out of it? Will you give in to the perfectly natural impulse to express your scorn, or will you take a breath and make a smarter choice?

[bountyofbeads]

The Unraveling of Donald Trump

As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse.

Peter Nicholas | Published October 18, 2019 9:45 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.

The boiling mind of Trump has spawned a cottage industry for cognitive experts who have questioned whether he is, well, all there. But as the impeachment inquiry barrels ahead on Capitol Hill, several associates of the president, including former White House aides, worry that his behavior is likely to get worse. Angered by the proceedings, unencumbered by aides willing to question his judgment, and more and more isolated in the West Wing, Trump is apt to lash out more at enemies imagined and real, these people told me. Conduct that has long been unsettling figures to deteriorate as Trump comes under mounting stress. What unfolded Wednesday inside the West Wing’s walls might be only a foretaste of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described that day, after a meeting with Trump, as a presidential “meltdown.”

“He’s grown more comfortable in the job and less willing to assimilate new information and trust new advisers,” a former White House official told me. “He’s decided to throw caution to the wind and go it alone, especially when he’s stressed and feels under attack and threatened in various ways. Then his worst impulses and vices shine through.”

On Wednesday alone, he peddled a discredited conspiracy theory in an Oval Office meeting with his Italian counterpart; threw a tantrum during the meeting with Pelosi; dismissed former Defense Secretary James Mattis as “the world’s most overrated general”; and released a letter he wrote to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that was so bizarre, people weren’t convinced it was real (“Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!”).

At least one associate has confronted Trump recently about his judgment, specifically his decision to repeatedly attack the Biden family. Isn’t it unseemly for a president to target Joe Biden’s son Hunter? Wouldn’t it be smarter, at least, to outsource this sort of attack to someone else?

According to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations, Trump’s explanation was that he acts as any normal person might, and that he won’t be moved by what he calls “political correctness.” “You don’t get it,” Trump said.

Most presidents in the modern era have had emotional moorings to sustain them during crises. President Franklin D. Roosevelt fussed over his stamp collection as he plotted victory in World War II. President Barack Obama would play miniature golf with his young daughters and basketball with old friends from Hawaii as he navigated the financial crisis. In Trump’s world, these sorts of leavening influences don’t seem to exist. Apparently absent from his life are traditional family bonds, creative outlets and hobbies, even exercise. (While some of his children are visible and vocal advocates for their father, Trump’s relationships with them are notoriously complex.) Splayed out on Twitter, his life has always seemed a limitless diet of Fox & Friends episodes and interpersonal disputes. Long gone are the trusted aides with whom he seemed comfortable (and who were willing to speak their mind), such as the senior adviser Hope Hicks.

“I think what we’re viewing, if you think about the human side of it, is the man has no life. He just has no life,” the person close to him told me.

A common question these days is whether Trump has an impairment of some sort that might explain his behavior. Writing in The Atlantic earlier this month, the lawyer George Conway, who is married to the Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, described how some health professionals have ascribed two personality disorders to Trump: pathological narcissism and antisocial personality disorder.

But the latest concerns about Trump are just a crescendo in a long-running drama. Sam Nunberg, a former 2016 Trump-campaign aide, told me that a colleague once approached him and asked if Trump was losing it, saying they had just had the same conversation twice. Nunberg dismissed such concerns, assuring him that it was only because Trump likely wasn’t paying attention the first time.

His speech has changed over time, too. Software programs show that Trump currently speaks at a fourth-to-sixth-grade level. (Politicians are practiced at speaking to wide swaths of Americans, but Obama, for example, according to those speech analyses, spoke at an 11th-grade level in his final news conference as president.) A study last year by two University of Pittsburgh professors examining Trump’s appearances on Fox News found that the quality of his speech was worsening. They studied his comments over a seven-year period ending in 2017—just as his presidency began—and found that he had begun using substantially more “filler words”such as um and uh, though the authors did not conclude that the change signaled cognitive decline.

Even a casual observer can see the disordered and nonlinear thinking behind Trump’s speech. A case in point was Trump’s rally last week in Minneapolis. Within minutes of taking the stage, Trump launched, without explanation, into a dramatic reading of what he imagined was the pillow talk between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a pair of former FBI officials who had exchanged text messages critical of the president. He gave no context as to why he was talking about them, leaving it to the audience to fill in the Mall of America–size blanks. Trump never even mentioned that they had worked for the FBI or that Strzok was at one point involved in the Russia investigation—just that they were “lovers” who disliked him. (Still, as theater, it seemed to work. When Trump cooed, “Oh, God. I love you, Lisa!” the audience laughed appreciatively.)

Other people who have worked with Trump in the White House and on the 2016 campaign pushed back on the notion that his mental acuity has eroded over time. “Every president has a super-exaggerated ego and personality in some way,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland-security adviser and a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration, told me. I asked him if presidents or presidential candidates should be subject to a fitness test measuring whether they’re up to the job. Various psychologists have floated this idea in response to Trump’s behavior. “I’m not sure what the fitness standard would reveal about people who are already wired that way,” Bossert said.

Conventional wisdom in Washington is that impeachment won’t lead to Trump’s removal, but that view rests on Republicans continuing to stay by his side. Even those most loyal to Trump could lose patience if his rash decision making collides with their own interests. Trump’s impulsive decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria last week, setting the stage for Turkey’s attack on America’s Kurdish partners, has already infuriated some of his closest friends in Congress. It was soon after the House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, rebuked his Syria gambit on Wednesday that Trump lashed out at Pelosi, prompting her to abruptly walk out of their meeting. (Democrats, of course, are seizing the opportunity. “For those who don’t do politics professionally or even follow it closely: It is getting worse. He is getting worse,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted last night.)

At least one lawmaker thinks that Republicans could hit a tipping point—though he’s a Democrat. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me that it might be easier for Republicans to concede that Trump is unwell than that he’s a criminal who violated his constitutional oath by committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The path to removing Trump, in this formulation, might not be impeachment, but the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Raskin, a former constitutional-law professor, is sponsoring a bill aimed at clarifying a provision of that amendment—a vehicle for removing a president who is unable to carry out his duties, with the consent of the vice president—by shifting responsibility for making such a judgment from the Cabinet to a panel created expressly for that purpose.

“It may be easier for at least certain Republican colleagues just to admit that the president is acting increasingly incapable of meeting the arduous tasks and duties of his office,” Raskin told me.

That’s still a lot to ask of Republican lawmakers who fully grasp Trump’s mystic hold on his political coalition and fear backlash. The question is whether Trump’s base starts to notice, or care, that the man it elected, facing pressures he’s never seen before, is devolving unmistakably into a different sort of man.

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Why Turkey Treated Trump’s Letter as Trash

There may be no more vivid illustration of how American leadership has declined in the world.

David A. Graham | Published October 17, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

When Fox News’ Trish Regan first reported President Donald Trump’s October 9 letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, some journalists and pundits wondered whether it was a joke or a hoax. But the White House confirmed: It was genuine.

“History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Trump wrote, signing off incongruously, “I will call you later.”

As it turns out, the Turkish government didn’t stop to puzzle over whether the missive was authentic or a joke: It quickly concluded that it was both.

The letter “was not taken seriously at the time, especially given its lack of diplomatic finesse,” Gülnur Aybet, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, told NPR’s Morning Edition today. The BBC quoted a Turkish source saying that “President Erdoğan received the letter, thoroughly rejected it, and put it in the bin.”

The letter’s language and the puerility of Trump’s attempt at forestalling a Turkish invasion of northern Syria are embarrassing on their own—the language and syntax resembling a tense note exchange in a middle-school classroom far more than the stilted conventions of international relations.

But Trump has long dismissed such critiques of his language as mere tone-policing, another side of the political correctness he decries. His language is, he has contended, “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL”—all caps his, and self-reinforcing. Trump may not sound like a typical president, he and his defenders contend, but his blunt style is more forceful and effective than the mannered language of po-faced diplomats and effete leaders such as Barack Obama.

The fiasco in Syria shows, however, that this style is not only unbecoming—it’s ineffective, too. Faced with a strongly worded missive from the president of the United States—the supposed leader of the free world and the most powerful head of state in NATO, an alliance of which Turkey is a member—Erdoğan snickered and tossed it in the trash. (And not just metaphorically, according to the BBC.) There are perhaps more vivid illustrations of how little respect Washington gets and how American leadership has declined in the world, but none comes to mind at the moment.

The best argument for Trump’s decision to yank American troops out of northern Syria is that Turkey was determined to invade no matter what and the president acted to get U.S. soldiers out of harm’s way. It’s not a very good argument, since Trump successfully held off Erdoğan for two years, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is true.

If so, Trump wasted more than a week of precious time. Erdoğan charged forward with the invasion without regard for Trump’s warnings. When the president moved forward with the sanctions he threatened in the letter, it didn’t rattle Erdoğan at all. American troops were fired on in the chaos of withdrawal. American planes are bombing U.S. munitions dumps to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Independent observers have identified atrocities in the fighting.

Today, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are in Ankara to attempt old-fashioned diplomacy. By now, it might be too late. “They say, ‘Declare a cease-fire.’ We will never declare a cease-fire,” Erdoğan said Tuesday. If Erdoğan sticks to his guns, literally and metaphorically, it will show how little American leadership is respected overseas. If Pence and Pompeo succeed, it will demonstrate the failure of the president’s personal approach. Not that he seems to care what happens. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there,” Trump said yesterday. “So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.” It’s hard to believe that world leaders don’t put more stock in his word.

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The Senate Must Rein In Trump

Unless Congress acts, the Kurds may not be the last allies this president abandons.

Chris Coons, Democratic U.S. senator from Delaware | Published October 18, 2019 10:36 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

After President Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to abandon the Kurds and withdraw our troops from northern Syria, Congress spent this past week trying to decide how best to respond. A resolution of denunciation? Tough sanctions on Turkey? Reconsider our relationship with Turkey? Convene the coalition against ISIS and consider how to recapture or even track the hundreds of escaped fighters?

I think we have an even bigger problem on our hands.

Until now, it was reasonable to debate whether Trump was simply an unconventional president, the first with no prior experience serving in either our military or government, or whether he was truly willing to work with foreign dictators to place his own political interests ahead of our nation’s. This week, we learned that this was a false choice—he’s both.

First, despite the temporary cease-fire that Vice President Mike Pence and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on Thursday, the damage President Trump has caused cannot be undone. He betrayed our Kurdish allies, aided Russia and Iran, and gave ISIS a chance to reconstitute itself—all to serve his own perceived political interests.

Second, Trump’s abrupt order to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria was not a legitimate response to Americans who are tired of “forever wars.” An abrupt withdrawal from Syria that emboldened our enemies and has already led to the death of hundreds of innocent people was not what the American public had in mind. And just days after Trump announced the withdrawal from Syria, abandoning the Kurds and risking the revival of ISIS, he deployed another 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia. The net impact is more American troops in the Middle East.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Trump knew full well how ill-advised an abrupt withdrawal from Syria would be because he tried to do it once before, in December 2018. In response, Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest and a broad coalition in Congress voiced its strong opposition to the withdrawal.

Less than a year later, all it took to convince Trump once again that Mattis and nearly every serious foreign-policy and security leader from either party in Congress were wrong was a phone call with Erdoğan, the increasingly authoritarian leader of Turkey.

The president apparently chose to listen to the Turkish dictator instead of his top advisers and the bipartisan consensus in Congress because he thought it would make a good campaign talking point.

While we need to do everything we can to limit the impacts of the president’s decision, members of Congress also need to ask ourselves what we can do to prevent Trump from letting other dictators steer U.S. foreign policy as Erdoğan has done.

What’s to stop Trump from pulling the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, offering up Taiwan to China’s President Xi, or handing over Estonia to Vladimir Putin? What about withdrawing our troops from South Korea to secure a nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un or abandoning the Baltics to secure peace in Ukraine? Those terrible ideas might strike Trump as bold strokes designed to bring our troops home, too.

We can’t let any of those hypothetical situations come to fruition, because, as we have seen in Syria, the vacuum of American leadership is quickly filled by adversaries.

If the Senate fails to act now to constrain the president and dissuade foreign dictators from asking Trump to desert longtime allies, disregard U.S. interests, and overturn years of U.S. foreign policy, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. It’s true that foreign policy is primarily driven by the executive branch, but it’s Congress’s role to establish guardrails, particularly when the president cannot be trusted to pursue American interests.

The Senate needs to put Trump, our national-security leadership, our allies, and the strongmen with whom Trump regularly flirts on notice. We need to demonstrate to dictators that our system is different: Congress can constrain the president and punish dictators for acting against our interests. There is broad bipartisan support for doing so in this case, and that should extend to preventing a repeat performance.

The Senate must preemptively put in place mechanisms to defend our democracy and our network of alliances before Trump acts against our interests once again, whether to indulge his isolationist impulses or to distract from impeachment.

Specifically, we should pass legislation to prevent a U.S. withdrawal from NATO without congressional approval, require Senate approval of any adjustments to U.S. troop levels in South Korea or Japan, and debate an Authorization for Use of Military Force that accurately reflects the conflicts in which we are currently engaged and claws back war-making authority from the executive branch.

Trump’s tragic decision in Syria unleashed ISIS and abandoned our Kurdish partners to the mercy of their new defenders, whether “Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte,” as Trump tweeted. This cannot be accepted on its own, and it cannot be allowed to establish a new precedent for American foreign policy.

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The Intelligence Fallout From Trump’s Withdrawal in Syria

The chaotic withdrawal from Syria will severely weaken U.S. efforts in the country—and could also be a boost for Russia and Iran.

Mike Giglio | Published October 18, 2019 6:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

This version of the forever war in Iraq and Syria was built around the work done by local U.S. allies. The fight against ISIS was America’s, but it was also being fought by Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis—a U.S. strategy known as “by, with, and through.” It meant that local troops carried out ground fighting in battles drawn up by American war planners. It meant that they received arms, training, and logistical support from the U.S. military and were backed by U.S. air strikes. Crucially, it also meant that they were getting help from special-operations forces, the U.S. military’s most elite units, who work in the shadows around the world to carry out difficult and sensitive missions.

Perhaps the best-known unit is SEAL Team Six, which carried out the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011. But task forces made up of SEALs and other officially classified units such as the Delta Force have carried out the dangerous work of hunting terrorists and breaking up insurgent networks since America’s forever wars began. Often, they work on their own; but sometimes, as in the war against ISIS, they work with local counterterrorism units specially trained for the task. In the “by, with, and through” strategy, these special-operations forces, along with the better-known U.S. Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, served as a force multiplier—a relatively small number of American troops who made the war effort by local forces far more deadly.

These partnerships have proved invaluable in the war against ISIS. At the same time, they have also opened a small hole in the secrecy that typically shrouds the special-operations community—by giving the local partners who work with these forces a rare and up-close view of who they are and how they do their jobs.

In Syria, elite U.S. troops among the 1,000 American personnel in the country worked closely with Kurdish counterterrorism units while regular Kurdish fighters carried out most of the ground operations against ISIS. The U.S. partnership with the Kurds grew as America armed and trained them and later merged them with Arab groups under an umbrella militia called the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF spearheaded the fight against ISIS in Syria, rolling back its most important strongholds. It has said that it lost more than 10,000 soldiers in that fight.

U.S. military officials wasted no opportunity to laud the SDF’s prowess. So President Donald Trump’s announcement of a hasty and ill-planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria to allow for a Turkish onslaught left everyone—allies, lawmakers, defense officials, but most significantly the Kurdish-led forces themselves—stunned. Fearing for its existence in the face of an invasion from NATO-allied Turkey, which considers it an enemy, the SDF has rushed to strike a deal with the Iran- and Russia-backed Bashar al-Assad regime. While the details of this arrangement remain in flux, one possibility is for SDF forces to be folded into the Syrian state, following negotiations to which they suddenly bring very little leverage. As a result, the same Kurdish counterterrorism units that have worked with U.S. special-operations forces and intelligence may suddenly find themselves working with—or at the mercy of—the Syrian government. This raises a vexing counterintelligence question for America: Might these units be forced to spill their secrets to some of America’s foremost global adversaries, in Assad, Russia, and Iran?

Eric L. Robinson, a former U.S. intelligence official who worked on anti-ISIS strategy at the National Counterterrorism Center, calls the fact that the SDF was forced to seek Assad’s protection in Syria a counterintelligence “nightmare.” He worried, in a Twitter post this week, that “given years of SDF exposure” to U.S. special-operations forces and intelligence, it would “be forced to give up TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures], names, locations, etc. What a coup for the Russian intelligence services—five years of history regarding the elite forces of NATO.”

Robinson, who was a senior civilian in the United States Special Operations Command until last year, also noted that the same elite troops who served in Syria also work around the world on America’s most sensitive national-security missions. They’re “from the same community that relieves an embassy under siege, identifies [North Korean] mobile missile capacity, rescues hostages, or defends Tallinn from [a] Russian invasion,” he wrote.

“We’re now five years into a relationship that has metastasized from a handful of basically cellphone connections between American special-operations forces and [Kurdish soldiers] into a robust operation,” Robinson told me by phone.

Along the way, Robinson said, the Kurds “got a close look at the way Americans fight war, and [it was] an extraordinary chance to observe segments of the American military within special operations that are not necessarily covert or clandestine but do try to keep a low profile.”

“Whether [the Kurds] like it or not, they are exposed to the way the United States conducts unconventional warfare,” he added. “Whether you’re talking about communications infrastructure or response times for medevac or response times for aviations support, that stuff is all interesting.” Robinson worries that any potential deal between the Kurds and Assad will include “not just speaking with Syrian intelligence officers but Russians and Iranians,” he told me. “It’s going to turn out that, all of a sudden, the ways that elite American counterterrorism forces operate are known to the opposition.”

The chaotic nature of the U.S. withdrawal from Syria—following a snap decision by Trump during a phone call with the Turkish president earlier this month—is unnerving those who have been involved in all levels of the fight against ISIS.

Brett McGurk, the former senior U.S. diplomat who helped to arrange and then oversee the partnership between the U.S. military and the Kurds, told me by email: “The chain of reaction from Trump’s call with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan to a predictably catastrophic situation on the ground led to abrupt abandonment of military posts and relationships that had been built over years.” (McGurk declined to comment on the specifics of potential intelligence ramifications.) “None of these issues were thought through or prepared, no consequences considered. It’s a disaster.”

Several news outlets have reported that U.S. troops who worked with the Kurds in Syria are “heartbroken” and “ashamed,” while senior administration officials were reportedly left scrambling to deal with the ramifications of Trump’s decision. As they made their retreat in Syria, U.S. troops were reportedly fired on by Turkish-backed fighters. U.S. fighter jets later launched air strikes to destroy ammunition that American forces left behind amid the chaos.

“We’re running out of appendages in which to shoot ourselves,” Brian Katz, a former CIA official who recently took a post as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Understanding how the U.S. military, special-operations, and intelligence community operates is going to be very valuable for Russia and Iran—if not in Syria now, then wherever we’ll be competing and fighting in the coming years. They’ll have a playbook for how we operate.”

A U.S. military official with experience on special-forces missions pushed back against the idea that Kurdish counterterrorism units will reveal sensitive information. “It’s not a huge concern if they go and play ball with somebody else, because the relationship that we have at the tactical level endures over time,” he told me on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. He added that “there’s a counterintelligence risk whenever you work with a partner force,” and the U.S. military is accustomed to mitigating it.

I asked whether he was concerned about the identities of special-operations forces being exposed. “I would say that’s by and large an individual’s responsibility,” he said. “I look about 15 years older and like a wild man when I have my beard [in the field], and I’m assuming that the majority of these guys are probably in similar fashion. There are ways that guys protect their identities when they’re down-range. It’s not like we’re giving our Social Security cards and bank information to the [Kurds].”

A spokesman for the U.S. military, Commander Sean Robertson, declined to comment on the issue in detail. “We take information security and operational security seriously. It is integral to our partnerships, and we plan for it regularly,” he said in an emailed statement.

The Kurdish militants who partnered with the U.S. military in Syria hail from the YPG—an offshoot of a separatist group, the PKK, that has waged a decades-long insurgency in southeastern Turkey and is labeled a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. The U.S. relationship with the YPG was controversial from the start, and a major source of friction between America and Turkey.

While regular YPG forces carried out various ground offensives, its specialized counterterrorism units worked with U.S. special-operations forces to disrupt ISIS networks and target its leadership, Nicholas Heras, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who briefs the U.S. military on Syria, told me. That work continued even after the demise of ISIS’s so-called territorial caliphate; in fact, it became arguably even more important, as ISIS returned to its roots as an underground insurgency. YPG counterterrorism forces worked with U.S. troops to capture the Tabqa Dam from ISIS, Heras said, and conducted “other discreet operations to capture and kill ISIS targets.”

Heras traveled to SDF-held Syria this summer and met with Kurdish commanders who oversaw the YPG’s counterterrorism units. He learned how they worked not just with U.S. intelligence and special-operations forces, but also with those from Britain and France. “This was a major line of effort that was quietly being done to improve the capabilities of the SDF and prevent the reemergence of ISIS,” he said. “It means U.S. special-operations forces considered certain elements of the YPG to be so trustworthy that they can go on these sensitive missions.”

Heras stressed that it’s still unclear what will become of the YPG and its counterterrorism units under a deal with Assad, though he noted that integration into the Syrian security forces is one likely possibility. Even setting aside the potential counterintelligence risk that would come with the YPG switching sides, he added, the U.S. will suffer a major intelligence setback with the loss of a crucial partner.

“This kind of hasty withdrawal creates a collapse in our intelligence collection on ISIS,” Katz, the former CIA official, told me. “People sometimes think there’s this magical intelligence button that the military and intelligence community hits—boom, start collection now. But building an accurate and active intelligence picture of a terrorist group, and one as savvy and sophisticated as ISIS, is a tedious and years-long enterprise.”

All of that is now at risk of being lost. “It’s human intelligence that gives the U.S. government its best ability to understand the strategic plans and intentions of terrorist groups—not only their movements on the ground, but their plotting of extremist attacks,” Katz said. “And human intelligence requires proximity and access and trust and building relationships with sources on the ground.”

Another ramification for the U.S. intelligence community is the potential for mass escapes of ISIS prisoners. The SDF holds thousands of suspected ISIS militants, including many foreign fighters, in its territory. Some prison breaks have already been reported, and the fate of the prisoners who remain in SDF hands is uncertain. Heras, the Center for a New American Security expert, told me that the possibilities are grim: More could escape, or all could be handed over to the Assad regime, which could torture and execute them, or perhaps seek to co-opt them, as it did in sending jihadists against U.S. troops during the Iraq War.

Regardless, U.S. investigators will likely lose access to a vital source of information about ISIS. One former U.S. military officer who worked at senior levels of the anti-ISIS campaign told me he doubted that U.S. investigators had managed to interview all the ISIS prisoners, especially those captured more recently. “We’ll lose out on interrogations that didn’t happen and on follow-on interrogations that won’t happen,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “The historical knowledge that’s resident there would take years to get through. And that’s knowledge that we’re probably not going to have access to.”

Anne Speckhard, who directs the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, has interviewed dozens of the suspected ISIS prisoners held in SDF prisons. She told me that many had turned against ISIS and were powerful voices in persuading others not to join militant groups. “Most of the people that we interviewed got disillusioned by ISIS—and got disillusioned because they felt ISIS is un-Islamic, corrupt, and really brutal,” she said. “We’re just losing a gold mine of data.”

[lucehowellenquiry]

How does engaging in the arts creative projects make a qualitative difference to young people’s lives? A personal testimony

From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.

From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools, and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally.  - The Meditations  By Marcus Aurelius  

In Marcus Aurelius meditations, his first book observes how the identity we form is an amalgamation of everyone we know. He laments on the qualities, attributions and experiences of his own extended communities; aims to document how they have multiplied the dimensions of his own personality, and shifted his chemistry further into a deep understanding of ethical morality. When Peter first invited me to write for this book, I considered this reflective process, what the scope is for diving into our own collective  histories, and how this can provide potential points for pinnacle reflection.

My name is Luce Howell, a pracititioner interested in theatre, film and community practice, and I currently study Performance and Creative Enterprise at the Guildhall. I was raised in Leeds in West Yorkshire, and moved to London when I was 18.

Throughout this testimony, I will be looking at my own experiences; how I have found myself moving through a multitude of different worlds, but have ultimately come to learn a steadiness of purpose and survival due to a direct engagement in the arts and communities that surround them. So much of my morality and my route into belonging in places was due to the arts practitioners that allowed me to tap in to different modes of expression and ways of making in my youth. It feels only right in my writing, similar to Aurelius, to pull apart exactly the mechanisms of success in my own life, and offer them as a perspective on how the arts can bring about difference in young people. Participating in socially-engaged projects from an early age provides both direct opportunities to breathe through personal feelings of struggle and isolation, and it also allows space to develop moral understandings of the ways storytelling, play and artistic practice can deeply enhance feelings of compassion, togetherness and empathy.

In a high school in the suburbs of Leeds, before every production, before every exam, Tracey Smith, the head of drama gathers the ensemble of the room to teach the the song Kumula Vista. I’m fifteen years old, about to play my first speaking role. Gladhands in West Side Story; a nervous child in character, and an even more nervous child in reality. I was terrified of the world, utterly terrified of the concept of performing, let alone the potential for failure in front of an audience, I remember observing the buzz on our first opening night of the show. You could see the excitement in the older student’s eyes, their bones and milk teeth warm up for this moment. They know what is to come, they gather ritually in uniform, awaiting Tracey’s call.

I can see the confusion of the younger students, who are newer to the Drama department. I wait for the moment of engagement they are going to commit to; they are being baptized into this community through a wash of sound. This tradition has run through the Drama department of Allerton High School for years, and there will come a time when they, too, will be the older students that cheer upon hearing the first words:  ‘’Eenie meenie desa meenie ooh walla walla meenie’’.   Tracey commands this within the room, asking us to repeat. We all follow in unison.

‘’Ip dididley eye oo whmop and shoop da’’, she continues.  Kumula vista is sung firstly as a vocal warmup, but most importantly as an opportunity for affirmation, a reminder to be silly, to be present and loud, that the drama room is a safe place for students, where not only do you sing together, but you remind each other of the vitality of being young; share out the nerves, celebrate this part of your life that so often is so scary for a lot of youth.  

Now, before every job interview, every meeting, any Guildhall exam,  any first date and every packed tube carriage I have ever encountered, I find myself  singing quietly under my breathe,  just before I’m about to dive in: Kumula Kumula Kumula Vista…

This cognitive process of repeating mantras can be thought of more metaphorically - How can I and many others, as new arts practitioners, instill positive affirmations for young people to carry into their lives? There is no doubt that my time at Allerton High School led me to the career path I am on today, and it enabled me to develop an interest in community arts at large. Throughout my teenage years, I was exposed to the practice of Augusto Boal; learnt theory surrounding the theatre of the oppressed and engaged with local  applied community theatre companies as much as I could. From as young as 17, I was given the opportunity to collaborate among a group of students to devise a series of workshops tackling self-harm in young female students. It is opportunities as simple as this that I believe can provide lasting effects on young people. Teachers that take time to share philosophies outside conventional standardized learning, that are equally concerned with children’s sense of self, as well as their opportunities for gaining knowledge, are imperative within artistic practice. Fundamentally, I feel the interpersonal values the arts can provide for young people, on both a social and human level, speaks out strongly. The state of our political climate can currently feel like a terrifying place in history; there is rising epidemic rates of poverty, mental health issues and widespread oppression in just the UK alone. Equipping a rich artistic community in and outside of school offers a platform for discussion among young people; it can provide tools for thinking both critically and sensitively on their own personal struggles, and the struggles they may encounter socially.

In my own personal view, I believe firmly in the transformative power the arts can have in our human lives. It is not only integral to our cultural needs to question the fabric of how our society changes, but it also provides laughter, enjoyment, capacities for love and healing. There is a guttural sense of anger in me over how government bodies fail to recognize this; that our system at its core is hungry to push art out of education, in favour of standardized testing and exam-based models.

In one of my sessions at Guildhall, Jacob Sam-La Rose, [artist, poet and teacher], proclaimed to the class quite proudly after a discussion around habits and why humans form them, that we are pattern-making creatures. We so easily return to the same thought processes that our muscle memory instinctively craves. As humans, we fall, flop and stumble into the narratives we comfortably know. As a survivor of childhood sexual and physical abuse, I have spent a lot of my life understanding there are overarching statistics stacked up against people like me. Survivors of sexual abuse are three times more likely to suffer psychological abuse, develop physical health problems or fall into cycles of poverty.  There are habits that I could have formed from processing my trauma differently,  a narrative I know I so easily could have slipped into, but the presence of community in my life, my weird little obsession with theatre, the wonderful mentorship I had access to; All these elements gave me permission to survive. My point of contact at school through our devising company LS17 drove me to make, to explore my experience with trauma in a safe environment.   It eventually brought me to the city of London, brought me into an even more vast world of excitement and making, which continues to make positive effects on my life today.

There is no doubt that we are pattern-making creatures. But what stops us from deciding exactly what patterns we weave into our lives and the lives of others? What stops us from rejecting strict hegemonic codes of conduct that suggest fully embracing playfulness, art, and expression is a negative way to spearhead one’s life?