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creepyalienghost · 3 years ago

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Reunited

Deep down in the studio the ink creatures know only pain and struggle. The dreaded Alice Angel sacrifices all who she could get her hands on to fix her scars and her former beauty. The poor prophet sacrificed anyone he could find to please his lord. The projectionist struggled to remember anything other then his loop. Many lost souls struggle to even remember who they were anymore. All they could do is hear the voices swirling in there heads. With others not in the hive mind they either fight to keep themselves alive or hide in their spots, hoping to never run into the ink demon or the Angel.

The prophet was wondering the halls looking for my soup cans when suddenly it dawn on him that creatures were few and far between. Unlike before when you can’t turn the corner without running into one of the Butcher Gangs or seeing a Boris hiding. He found that strange and decided to take a look around though the walls.

He looked through holes, peaked in rooms and even going deep down below and sure enough so maybe we’re missing. All the butcher gang seen to have disappeared. The projectionist was no where to be found and even that new comer Sammy almost sacrificed wasn’t seen. Something was going on. Could this have been his lords doing? Or worst, that wicked angel’s? Sammy wanted to find out but he was also wondering of angering his lord. If it was his doing then maybe his lord would do the same to him...

He was caught up in his thoughts while walking that he didn’t notice the footsteps rushing up behind him until it was to late. The prophet was bagged over the head and tripped. He struggled and yelled for his lord for help as several creatures held him down or sat on top of him. They managed to tie his hands behind his back right before he felt a sharp pain in his neck. He screamed and cursed them out until the drug they infected him with started to work. His body went heavy. His hearing muffled. His sight started to fade. The prophet feared he was dying and had failed his lord. Hell, maybe this was his lords doing. Maybe this was what happened to the rest of them. He thought of this until his mind was even talking from him and soon after that the darkness of ink took over everything.

——-

It all felt like a dream. The sacrifices. The ink. Bendy and Alice. Everything for the pass so many years felt like a long band dream. But Sammy new it wasn’t a dream when his eyes flickered open and vision cleared. The first thing he noticed was that he was laying in hospital bed, hooked up to many Wires going to many different machines. There was one for his heartbeat. Another for monitoring his brain waves. A Machine pumping in blood inside him and the casual iv needle.

Sammy slowly sat up on the bed with Extreme exhaustion to looked around the room he was in. The walls were painted a pale blue and the floors were your typical white polished floor. It looked like any hospital but one from a sci fi movie. There was Technology Sammy has never seen before and has no idea what it is or how it’s use. Ones with big screens and buttons.

Just then a knock came from the door, making Sammy jump a bit and a nurse opened the door with a small smile, walking in. “Hello Mr. Lawrence. I’m glad to see your awake.” She held out hand as she introduced herself. “I’m nurse Beth. I’ll be taking care of you in here.”

Sammy took hold of her hand and shook it. “Thank you.” He replied. “I uh...I’m confused...what happened? How did we get out?...what ...what year is it” he asked as more and more questions start to form.

The nurse sat beside him and sat her clipboard next to her. “We’re not supposed to tell you guys everything right when you come to. It’s going to be broken in parts but I promise you. All your questions will be answered.” She relieved him. “But I am allowed to say you and your friends our at a government base and you guys are all free. Your old coworker Henry Stein came to us and told what Joey drew was doing. You are all safe now.”

Henry stein? Joey drew? His friends. Sammy hadn’t thought about them in so long and now his heart acted. He remembers Norman and the amazing guy he was. But he also remembered Joey. Joey was also a great guy before he lost his mind to the darkness. He missed both of them and badly wants to see them. “Can I see m-my friends?” He asked the nurse.

Nurse Beth nodded her head. “Yes. You may in a bit. I need to give you your daily check up first.”

Through out his check up, nurse Ann explained they would be here for a few weeks to watch and see how they would respond after being ink creatures for so long

and will be helped getting back into civilization with a new job and a home. She told him there be daily health checks in the morning and classes to understand the would now days.

After the check up, nurse Beth lead Sammy down the hallway to the wing where he and his friends would be staying at. “There’s access to a cafeteria for y’all and a tv room with games and books so y’all don’t get bored.” She informed him as she punches the code in for the wing.” Your room is Numble 20.”

“Thank you.” Sammy replied as he walked in. She nodded and closed it behind him. Sammy was on his own know.

There was chatter from down the hall. Some of the voices he recognized. Like Susie’s Jack’s and Norman’s he couldn’t wait to meet them again. He hoped they didn’t have no hard feelings from his role he unwillingly played in all this. However when he rounded the corner they all went silent pretty fast when they one by one noticed him. Sammy could see ether hatred or disappointment in each of their eyes. Norman’s hurt the worst. Sammy quickly got the hint we wasn’t welcome and left to find his room.

He sat in his bed staring at the green wall for some hours before a few security guards came to checked their wing. Sammy overheard one of them talking about Joey to his partner as they passed his room. “The psycho was placed in wing E.” Sammy Heard.

It got Sammy thinking again of their good times before. Joey was such a funny and sweet guy back then, handsome too. He spoiled Sammy with fancy dinners and parties as well as taught Sammy the wonders of magic and occult. It was fun and safe at first, but once Joey got the taste of the darkness is when everything changed. The abuse started, madness and control took over his mind and by then it was far to late to leave everything.

He wondered if Joey was still like that or like the way he use to be. He wanted to take the chance and see him. He stopped the security guard before they left the wing. “Can I see Joey Drew. Just once.” The guard didn’t laugh but looked at him like he was insane. “I know it’s crazy. But please just one time.”

The guard signed in hopelessness for the lost man. “I’ll ask and see if you two can meet.” With that the guard left though the wing doors.

———-

After receiving his check up the next morning, the same guard as before meet him out in the hallway. “Come with me.” He said right as Sammy stepped out. Sammy did so. They walked out the doors to the wing and down hallways, went further down an elevator and came to a new wing. The E wing.

This one was more Secure. The door here was metal and had an automatic lock that would lock it self if an alarm went off.

There was two guards station at the door to in case something went wrong. His guard had his ID checked and a minute later they both were though and heading down that hallway. The guard stopped at one of the meetings rooms and unlocked it. “You two have an hour.” Sammy nodded stepping though. His heart skipped a beat when he saw Joey sitting at one of the tables. One where their breakfast sat waiting.

He was much older unlike them. Of course he was he had been out in the real world growing older. Sammy could see the exhaustion in his face when he looked up at him. He was old and tired. Hair turned gray and wrinkly skin. Sammy realizes he doesn’t have much time left on this earth and this was likely the last time he would see him.

“It’s uh..nice to see you again.” Joey said to fill the silence between them. “ please...have a seat.” He offered and Sammy took it.

“Why?” Sammy ask, ignoring joeys attempt at welcoming. “Why did you ever let yourself get this mad? To start abusing me? To force me to hurt the others and putting us all in that hell?” He ask.

Joeys face turned to guilt and shame then. “I...I had a dream.” He answered Sammy’s question and continued. “That dream lead to magic so I could bring that dream to life which that lead to dark magic which corrupted me.” He sighed, disappointing in himself. “I shouldn’t had let it took me to a dark path, Sammy I am so sorry. If I could go back and changed everything I would.” He buried his head in his hands. “None of y’all deserved that. And you didn’t deserve the abuse I did. I’m really an sorry and I hope you can forgive me enough to enjoy one meal together?”

Sammy thought of this for a moment. He does seem genuine sorry and Is in his last days. He also missed these things they did together as well. Sammy nodded and smiled at Joey. “Let’s share one last meal together.” He replied and switched seats next to Joey. “And. It’s good to see you to”

#bendy and the ink machine #sammy lawrence #joey drew

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xkandy · 5 years ago

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Psycho Pass - timeline and why you shouldn’t hate on S3 that much

I’ve been following Psycho Pass ever since the original run of Season 1 back in 2012. I’d like to make you and everyone who disliked S3 understand some things. Hope I structure this well, here goes.

Obviously there will be some spoilers.

First let’s take a look at the releases in the PP universe so far. We have:

Season 1

Season 2

Movie

Sinners of The System 1,2,3 (2 being a prequel)

Season 3

First Inspector

Before I write anything I’m going to stop you and say that nothing tops Season 1. So there,now that we have that out of the way let’s continue.

Season 1

Takes place in late 2112-2113

Central characters are Akane and Kogami and let’s face it, for many Kogami is the one who carried the show, even if some consider him to be a “generic edgy” protagonist I think he’s pretty solid as a character at this point.

Akane has had MAJOR character development throughout the whole season and I’ll never forget how upset some people were that she was a noob. That was the whole point, she is a newbie and a model citizen who trusts the system, her character evolution revolves around coming to the realization that the system is flawed.

Makishima as a villain was phenomenal and not because quoting from books , but because his motives and reasoning were clearly established and he made both protagonists question themselves and the system.

Season 1 is written by Gen Urobuchi , the following seasons (except the movie) are not written by him.

Season 2

Takes place in 2114.

A trainwreck, don’t even want to go here. The disappointment was huge.

I found Mika to be extremely annoying and unbearable with 0 character growth. The only highlights for this season for me were Gino and Akane.

Onwards.

The Movie

Takes place 3 years after the events of Season 1, in 2116.

Nothing of major impact happens but if you love the old cast , namely Gino, Akane, Kogami you’ll enjoy this and I have a feeling this is what they were betting on and wanted to see: the public reaction to the old cast.

The interaction between Akane and Kogami is the highlight (another one being Gino vs Kogami).

It’s clear as day that Akane evolved as a character and Kogami is questioning his past, so let’s say some minor character development.

Sinners of the System

If you enjoy the universe and aren’t too attached to the main cast you will like these, although case 3 is about Kogami so I’m sure it’s the one most people will like.

Case 1 has some minor Mika character development (she still sucks imho)

Case 2 is a prequel that sets up some details about the storyline that will be the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Case 3 is the one you’ll want to watch if you want to see S3/First Inspector as it revolves around Kogami and him coming to terms with his thoughts when he is asked by a young girl to train her as he sees in her a version of himself and where this will lead (girl seeks revenge) .

His story arc regarding Sasayama’s death, revenge, Makishima is complete, it ends here as he decides to head back to Japan.

This triggers the potential for the future series/movies in the Psycho Pass universe to deal with the (possible) unresolved storyline of dealing with Akane once he gets back to Japan, because he will have to face her at one point.

So after Case 3 Kogami is already a complete character , there is no strong conflict or drive for him as the one which had driven the plot of season 1.

We already know everything about him.

Let me jump back to Gino for a brief moment, his first arc concluded when his father died and he became an enforcer, his current arc might be related to what I’ll get to in a second.

Season 3

Alright so here we are,a new season nobody was expecting and 2 new protagonists we expected even less.

Taking place in 2120 , 8 years after the events of Season 1 it follows Arata and Kei in their own CID adventures.

The tone of the series is vastly different from both S1 and S2, most notably :

it feels like those friendly buddy cop TV shows

the violence is greatly reduced, no more “shock value”

the side characters aren’t invested into, they’re just there for being there and plot devices (they’re alright, the new enforcers get some characterization but it’s not season 1 level)

Arata’s “skill” - if you think about it as high level empathy it’s gonna feel less dumb

Being new protagonists, the writers had to make sure we get to like them by offering us details about their past and what drives their motives, I’d say they did an ok job at that.

There’s no room for comparison to Akane and Kogami, those 2 are already established characters who have resolved story arcs and suffered changes.

Keep in mind Akane is 28 now and Kogami is 36, whereas the new protagonists are in their early 20s. They have time for character evolution, it’s easier to write new characters into the universe than deal with established ones such as Akane and Kogami.

Also, we see Kou visiting Akane while she’s in jail, her not being surprised means this may have happened before, which leads to further questions in the storylines that will definitely be explored in the new PP installments to follow:

Details on the incident which caused her to be in jail

What happened when Kogami returned to Japan and how the Sibyl system dealt with this

Kou reuniting with Ginoza, since both work for the hot blonde now

etc, you get the idea

First Inspector

It’s actually not that bad, I’m not going to spoil anything (well...not everything) but I suggest giving it a chance. If you don’t want to watch S3 just read about it and watch this, the most important things to take are from episode 3′s last scenes

Akane is released AS AN ENFORCER by Sibyl and will help Mika

Kogami is sent to get her, there will definitely be a recap between these two

Arata and Kei both have secrets regarding the case they worked on, not gonna spoil anything

Yayoi is alive, and will live with Shion. Just puttin this out there since they’re everyone’s favorite lesbians

Mika is still shit.

Gino is still based as fuck

Also, there is a post credits scene with Akane saying something along the lines of “ let’s talk about the incident that got me jailed “ . This was only in the theatrical release so you can bet your ass we’re getting more PP in the future.

Thoughts

Lastly, what everyone needs to understand is that S1 made PsychoPass become a franchise. A franchise revolves around different characters in the same universe, sometimes the focus is on the OGs , but sometimes it isn’t.

I would like to note here that Gen Urobuchi is responsible for Season 1 (you know, the dude who wrote Madoka and other stuff like that...) and he did a great job writing a compelling story. Did he want PP to turn into a franchise? This I do not know and I have a feeling this might explain his absence from the later installments of the series.

He wrote a complete story in 22 episodes which could have been left at that but seeing how well received the first season was it spawned a franchise.

What I want to say is please give Arata and Kei a chance (S3 protags) . They’re not that bad and they help the franchise stay alive as it seems they were pretty well received in Japan. Would you rather Mika be the main character again?! HELL NO

Now I love the main trio - Akane,Kou,Gino - as much as everyone but at this point they’re so high level it’d be hard to write a series just about them. Make one wrong move and the fanbase will hate you.

Also, this one is for all you Kogami x Akane shippers, I view their relationship as professional only but I’ll be damned if I didn’t scream at those 2 short scenes these 2 had in S3 and FI .Can’t wait to see the interactions between grown up Akane and seasoned peace-of-mind Kogami.

If you’re still here thanks for reading my rant, hope I made sense.

edited to add some stuff

#psychopass #psycho pass #psycho pass sinners of the system #psycho pass season 3 #psycho pass s3 #psycho pass spoilers #anime #rant #akane tsunemori #kogami shinya #ginoza nobuchika #mika shimotsuki #shion karanomori #anime rewatch

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alvearesss · 4 years ago

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Tow Ubukata hates Ginoza Nobuchika

I don’t know about you guys since a lot of you don’t care all that much about Ginoza Nobuchika as much and believe Kougami is the stardom of the series and should be treated as such despite the show introduces a balance for each character to have their own share of screentime unlike other shows and anime who share a habit of favoritism for the main character and leaving no other character a fair share for their own growth and how the progress among the characters themselves and the plot.

Although Ginoza was not the main protagonist of show, he was still an important character, or the tritagonist (the third important character after the protagonist and deuteragonist) followed after Akane. I have yet to make a Kouginaka anayls essay on why Akane and Kougami (or as in the Shinkane territory) cannot progress or even happen without the presence of the senior Inspector and no matter you all want to deny this but it is true, where did you think the direction would go if Ginoza never existed?

Anyways on to this…

It’s not a unheard for me for having such a hatred for S2 and for good reason. One of my biggest pet peeves for S2 is that it’s a rewritten version of S1; everything Urobuchi worked and developed for the series was thrown in the trash to make room for Ubukata’s gory sci-fi and melodramatic scenario and the characters are watered down from their representative personalities in favor of the new environment and drama playing in his tunes.

But to become an exact clone of his former father? why make him a Masaoka 2.0 if the writers knew on producing another season for psycho-pass, look at Tenma for peek’s shake he’s basically another Masaoka 3.0 (are there any other Tomomi Masaokas I should know about? ok, enough with the Spongebob jokes) By the end of S1, Ginoza became more down-to-earth after being rehabbed and no one seemed to realize and ignore the fact he was not only devastated by the death of his father and Kougami leaving them behind and was possibly dying from blood loss as well, he showed no signs of the former Enforcer and lost father in terms of personality and antics by the end of the series. This just makes Ginoza appear out-of-character and it drove me nuts to this sudden character change and haven’t notice it by the first time watching S2.

In Case 2, we finally got introduced to Ginoza’s mother for the first time after years of curiosity wondering what happened to her, we came to the conclusion to the possibility of her being dead since she was barely mention at all and how did that impacted Ginoza as a person. Masaoka said his son have the same eyes when he was younger meaning that senior inspector have took after his mother in appearance. We can see distinguish them as they don’t look that similar

let’s not us forget the horrible same face syndrome from Frozen (a movie so mediocre that it deserves the same mockery as Twilight did back in the late 2000s - early 2010s, good old days)

Ginoza and Sae manage to dodge the bullet on this one

Plus, there is also the Mika-Ginoza dynamic, because why not? if you notice how in both season 2 and 3; any interactions between Kougami/Akane and Ginoza seem nonexistent? In season 2, they barely talk about anything else outside of the workplace and all Gino does is worry constantly about Akane’s hue despite knowing she is capable of handling her hue very well by the end of S1 after putting her down multiple times for her so called reckless behavior. His reunion with Kougami in S3 was a shallow one and to my disappointment, was expecting a soft of teary-like or grounded, hell even Ginoza and Akane don’t have any interactions in S3 now that I think about it. In Case 1, it is revealed he is worried and misses Kougami and talks fondly about him; how he hated himself for not saving him but is proud of him for being strong which made him jealous. Then there’s the hallucination trope that Shinkane fans are madly in love with and it brutally debunks the notion that it’s only Akane but it turns out Ginoza also suffers from hallucinating Kougami as well!

To me, it’s feels like the team had Ginoza rewritten for the reconstruction of the new dialogue for the show and as a someone whom Kougami and Akane never had interactions in the past and as someone is now given the background character treatment.

While the official website does mention Mika is a lesbian and the show implied it by the end of the Rikako arc but it was never explored, her interactions with Yayoi seems more like sisterly love rather than romantic love, because of this, Mika’s orientation doesn’t share the same treatment as Yayoi’s creating the notion she is not a lesbian after all. So Ubukata decided it to throw it over the window because an enforcer for some reason doesn’t have a love interest so how could he pair him with someone not named Akane? oh! tease ship him with Mika! (plus gino is not gay so why not AGAIN lol)

what a lovely hetero couple despite they don’t have a much of an emotional interaction but birds of feathers am I right?

Say what you want to say about the Butcher and how he likes to the tease Ginoza just for angst but at least he managed to write and develop a well constructed character who went from an indifferent detective who doesn’t bat an eye for what happens to the people he loves after combating the hurt of losing them to level-headed guy who now accepts a new method on how to handle criminals after becoming one himself because he still has that special someone (not Mika) can show him that there is a life outside and it is not the end of the world to be demoted, Ubukata on the other hand doesn’t know what to do with him and do not see Ginoza as important as the two main two and decided that it was okay to not respect his former character.

I know it is not Ubukata who is only to blame for this, the entire team as a whole and it’s very shocking how Shiotani and Fukami who worked with Psycho Pass since the very beginning hasn’t called any of this out and went along with the flow because reasons

Sure, he wasn’t killed off for any reason but is demolishing his character worthy of it? Geez, who knows what will happen to him in the supposed S4

#JusticeforGinoza2020

I had to delete my previous post because it wasn’t showing on the tag so here’s a standard edition and enjoy your reading and let me know if you want to add commentary in relation to this topic

#psycho pass #psycho-pass #ginoza nobuchika #mika shimotsuki #masaoka tomomi #akane tsunemori #kougami shinya #anti ubukata #anti ginomika #anti frozen #anti s3

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miyoron · 5 years ago

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Miyo’s Anime of the Decade though Actually Just 2019

***Before I start this list, I would like to continue to send out good vibes and hope to all those affected by the Kyoto Animation arson attacks this past summer. It still hurts and I hope things can get better for everyone affected by it, even though I'm sure some things will take a long time to heal, if they ever will. Just know that you will always have me wishing you the best I can and sending out hope for you to recover at your own pace.***

I like writing these things every year. Whether it lets me know if my tastes are changing or staying the same, or if I'm just sentimental, writing about things I like is fun. Anime is good and I like watching it. I watched a good amount of stuff this year even if some seasons I couldn't find anything I say would fit this list.

For example, I started watching the Symphogear series and it's fun but I wouldn't say I liked it as much as any of these shows. Anima Yell is a very cute show but I didn’t have much to say about it, same for Aggretsuko again. I liked the main characters of JoJo part 5, but I wouldn't say I liked watching that, especially as the villain was revealed more and more. Fire Force was fun for me for like 5 episodes or so but then I bailed so take that as you will.

But I don't want to sound too mean here. No, this is for stuff I liked a lot and I wanted to write about things I enjoyed. This year I actually kept track of shows I liked as opposed to figuring out what I'd go on this list at the last moment. Crazy, I know, but this could be a good idea. Don't worry, I didn't take TOO many notes so this will be pretty off the cuff of my head like normal though I'm sure. As always, I will be using whatever title is easier for me to write/preference.

With this bit of text out of the way, let's la GO! In no particular order (as always)...

Mob Psycho 100

This entry counts for both season 1 and season 2. I kind of sped through the first one a little so I could catch up in time for the second one. I feel it stuck with me just as much though. Mob Psycho is a solid action series with very silly things going on in the background of it...and foreground honestly). I suspect ONE is very good at making this sort of series. Honestly though, every character in this show is great and there's so many feel good moments. Mob himself is a wonderful character. The most powerful psychic force in the universe but he just wants to get buff to go out with his crush.

There's a lot to like about this series. The humor is on point and anything with Reigen is going to be hilarious, especially if it takes a while. Animation is consistently top notch, especially in season 2, and I love the psychic effects. They end up looking like an old 90's video filter or trapper keeper or something. However, the most impressive thing this series does is show that maybe fighting isn't the way to do things all the time and that the most important thing you can show isn't just sympathy, but empathy.

Mob is a really good show and both of the OVAs are fun as heck. I dunno why I originally slept on Season 1, but I'm glad I came aboard.

Kaguyasama: Love is War

You probably know this one from that one ending with the pink haired girl dancing, that was going around for a while even though it was only for one episode. This series actually took me a little bit to get into mainly due to being WAY too tired to keep up with it. The set up being that the smartest boy and girl in the most elite high school both want to ask the other out. However, being the one to ask the other out would be to give up all power and admitting defeat. Basically it's a battle of two love struck idiots trying to get the other to ask them out.

As dumb as that sounds, the setups are often hilarious. Seeing the main characters trying to out scheme each other and keep a straight face while watching is a challenge in itself. It's like that 4th dimensional chess but the end result is seeing who will hold the other's hand first. Then throw in the wild card of Chika who seems to both not know what's going on while understanding how easy it is to end up on top in these battles and...look it's very funny ok? Even if sometimes the joke is just "weiner".

Shows that made me tear up count: 1

Kemurikusa

Similar to the Kemono Friends and its big gold star award, I felt like Kemurikusa deserved a shoutout this year. It's still janky like Kemono Friends before it, but after everything that went down with that series, it was definitely telling when this was the better of the two. This is a weird series and only some of that is due to the animation. The studio does a wonderful job of making a world that's both interesting and haunting at the same time. Everything that happens all ties to a big mystery that isn't revealed for quite a while.

The characters are fun enough. From the serious Rin to the caring Ritsu. From the voracious Rinas to the dweeby Wakaba. It's a fun cast going on a road trip throughout the apocalypse as they try to find good water for their big plant friend that drives around their husk of a bus. It can get pretty dark at times even with the neon bright colors the titular kemurikusa shimmering softly in the background. Oh also there's a roomba friend and a girl with sharp teeth so I mean, it's got something for everybody.

Hitoribocchi

This series is a cute little show with a setup which is potentially mean if you think about it. Bocchi's best friend is afraid she won't ever be able to make any other friends since they're going to different middle schools. Because of this, she says they can't be friends again until she befriends everyone in her class. The biggest hurdle to this challenge being Bocchi is horribly shy and socially awkward which just makes things seemingly impossible for her to overcome. Luckily, this is a cute comedy series.

The show is basically about Bocchi trying to make new friends so she can hopefully one day reunite with her bestie from the past. As I said before though, she's kind of bad with knowing how to communicate with people so she has a bad habit of say following friend making tips she read in books or online to a t and not deviating from them. Thankfully she is able to meet with lovable weirdos like blunt Nako, pitiful Aru and ninja girl Sotoka. It's a cute little series that also has a lot of heart, especially if you've ever had to overcome your own social anxieties to interact with others before. It's also funny too so there's a bonus even.

Shows that made me tear up count: 2

Carole and Tuesday

Shhhh. Don't let Netflix know I finished this before they did. Carole and Tuesday is a fun show from the creator of Cowboy Bebop, as evidenced in the fact it takes place on Mars and uses the same currency. It's a fairly simple plot, two girls meet up one day on the streets and start playing music together. One's an orphan who's basically lived alone for most of her life, the other is a rich girl running away from her politician mother (whose politics are a little too close for comfort these days). They just wanna make music man, and with a former big time agent with them, how can they lose!

Carole and Tuesday are fun characters and the show has a fun future sci fi vibe while still being grounded in reality. One of the biggest highlights is definitely the music though with lots of new songs in every episode and a good number of them being certifiable bangers. There's an overarching plot that also hits too close to home at times but the big finale at the end made it all worth it in the end really. This is an easy show to recommend and I am doing so to you right now. Go see these girls trying to make it to the big time!

Shows that made me tear up count: 3

Fruits Basket (2019)

I skipped out on Fruits Basket the first time around. I always told myself I'd go back and check it out but, knowing how I do things, this never actually happened. Part of me is kind of glad I waited to check it out though since I really like the style of the new show compared to the one from the early 00s. What I'm saying is I should have checked this out a lot earlier than I did but I don't feel visually bad for doing so.

Fruits Basket is a show featuring Tohru, the most helpful lovable girl, and a cast of characters who all start to love her because she is the most helpful lovable girl. This might sound like a bad thing but it's not. All of the characters are really fun, save one who I don't know WHY they don't just beat up, and I love seeing all their interactions. I just grew really invested in all of them and keep hoping everything will end up ok for them in the end, while in some cases waiting for a really big shoe to drop and biting my nails in the process.

I dunno if I have a super bunch to say about it other than my favorites are Uo-chan and Hana-chan and I can't wait until part 2 shows up. I am ready to see more of these Zodiac weirdos get hugged by Tohru and become animals and have her solve their problems in that order.

Shows that made me tear up count: 4

....Now, as usual, I will take a break to talk about the Precures I watched this year...

Futari wa Precure

This year, my friend Cheapsteaks and I decided to go after the OG Precure scene by watching the series that started it all. School girls run into fairies being pursued by weird monsters from another dimension/world/whatever and have to become legendary warriors to help them out. It's a story we all know well, just with lots of dropkicks and judo tosses.

As much as I like Honoka and Nagisa, and the opening theme...Futari wa has a lot of growing pains which is to be expected. Being the first one, it feels more like other magical girl series of the time compared to the style of later Pretty Cure series. From the rather uninspired villains, including one named Pissard, to the bland crush of Fuji P-senpai, and especially the obnoxious fairies, this is definitely one of the weaker series in my eyes. Again, it's probably not fair to judge it though since they didn't know what they were doing yet with this series.

That being said, there is a dumb fun to watching the Crunchyroll subs for a nostalgic taste of hard yellow subs and often not great audio. Again, the best parts of this are Honoka and Nagisa and I can see why they still get to be super popular today.

Smile Precure!

The other older series we checked out this year was Smile Precure which is much more my speed. The characters are all really good and they're all super good friends and it just makes me feel good. Like just in general they'rea really good and strong cast and I love all of them. Reika/Cure Beauty is the secret funniest character just by being the straight man on a team of doofuses and it works so well.

Miyuki's desire to make everything around her "Ultra Happy" just makes you feel good seeing a character who just wants others around her to be as happy as she is. All she needs is a smile and that makes me also smile. Akane is fiery and powerful, Yayoi is a big sweetie whose artistic trials and tribulations I SUPER identify with, Nao is a super cool big sister and I already brought up Reika being great. This is really one of my favorite Precures I've watched so far and I'm going to be sad to see it go in a few weeks.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that I love the stupid villain trio. Especially Akaoni. I love you big red oni doofus. (Please see oni times in the link below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXA5jfSJz_c&feature=youtu.be

Shows that made me tear up count: 5 (ANY NAO EPISODE AAAA)

Star Twinkle Precure

The newest Precure series! One we also dragged fellow anime friend Metalray into and I feel like it was a fun enough one. Cute alien encounters trying to help space zodiac princesses with a fluff unicorn and a tentacalien? Sign me up my dudes. Star Twinkle is a fun series and has a lot of things going for it, while also having weird similarities to Smile sometimes like soccer related attacks from good big sisters and prim and proper arrow girls.

The characters as always really make the show I feel when it comes to Precure and Lala is adorable enough to carry it entirely herself? But the enthusiasm of Hikaru is always fun because it usually just involves her being really into outer space and everything in it. Hey there's even Elena who is Mexican-Japanese and the show even explores a bit of her growing up being different from others so like, that's pretty cool I think? If it helps little kids learn to accept others and be cool through lil hermit crabs and dog space police officers, I think that's a real good thing.

...Now Precure time is over but I'm looking forward to next year's offering and seeing what old ones we go after next. (Spoilers, we will probably do Max Heart and Fresh!)...

How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift?

So this series has some problems in that like...wow sometimes during the exercise segments of the show, it just gets way too horny like...I dunno if I needed to see sensei in nothing but a bedsheet to show off how she worked her lats fellas. But I digress.

The main reason this show is on here is because it affected me enough to actually look at myself and start wanting to become healthier? Like the show is just a framing device for jokes and showing off exercise routines but the characters are all really sincere and the translation of the opening is even moreso? Like I feel this show helped me out a lot and I'm gonna let you all know about it cuz maybe it can help you out too if you need it.

I don't have a whole lot more to say but I will leave you with the opening I mentioned. Turn on the captions for this banger and remember that you can do it too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxi2Y4-NNXY

Wasteful Days of High School Girl

Hey, so can I say something amazing? Much like Asobi Asobase last year, this series was a very weird comedy that I absolutely ended up loving a lot in the end. The cast is full of delightful idiots, one aptly named Baka by her friends being the standout moron of the cast. The title pretty much says it all but you will find all sorts of high school girls here just wasting their youth away in their favorite ways.

You want a girl who draws BL doujin while listening to vocaloid tracks? We gotchu. What about a girl who is more invested in micro organisms in Petri dishes than her friends? Yo, we're set. A dipshit chuuni who climbs on top of absolutely anything tall and regularly needs to be rescued/leap out of trees because of it? Yea, that's here too. The show is not afraid to be weird any chance it gets and there's something I can respect about that. This series also had one of my number one laughs in an anime this year in one of the last episodes too and it still makes me laugh as I recall it right now.

Also like Asobi Asobase, it has the plus of having a lovable witch girl who is as pure as she is into weird occult shit. Majo you're a sweetie. Even if your room is creepy.

The Demon Girl Next Door

This show feels like something that should have come out about 5 years ago in terms of animation style, story set up, characters and even the jokes. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing though because not only is it pleasant and cute, it also knows when to step back from teasing its unfortunate main character. Shamiko, the demon girl formerly known as Yuko by everyone who isn't her family, is a kind of pitiful character and this series could easily just make jokes that punch down and humiliate her way more than it did.

Thankfully, the show actually does it's best to show that she is comic relief but also that she is genuinely a good person. She's not very good at being a demon as she is still learning so maybe she gets easily tricked by resident blase magical girl Momo more than she should. However, she will go out of her way to make sure her rival is eating more than the crappy instant food she frequently microwaves. Like I said, it's ultimately a silly, kind of dated feeling series but the character interactions are nice and it's just genuinely good

hearted to see these girls become friends, even if sometimes it's due to trickier. The show makes sure not to be mean at all times to Shamiko compared to say Satania in Gabriel Dropout's treatment, or the snake girl in that Dropkick show I dropped after one episode. Shamiko is good and hopefully one day she will be able to use her demon powers to rule the world so her family can have a bigger, non cursed, budget to live on.

O Maidens in Your Savage Season

Puberty is hard. Puberty is also maddening, wanting to drive you up the wall with new urges you are not used to. Simple joys like trains are replaced with weird videos you order off websites or somehow get from the back of a video store. Puberty is an inherently frantic time but it's also kind of funny if you think about it enough.

Maidens explores the tales of the Literature Club members as they go through this important stage of life and that's the fun of this series. All of the girls are each trying to find out exactly what it is they want out of a relationship. Is it just friendship? Is it Ess Ee Ecks? There's a lot of fun to be had as the series goes on. Whether it be Kazusa trying to get a bit further with a childhood friend, President Rika questioning her stance on relationships being even proper to have in high school or the writing adventures of HItoha going to sex chatrooms, there is a lot of different things going on in this show.

It's got a very good sense of drama as well; there were more than a few episodes where I found myself worried about what would happen next and hoping things would be ok. Niina's arc is very intense and gave me creeper vibes any time her old mentor appeared. The show is very good in general at just showing emotions and none of it felt like it was shoehorned or phony. The writing is top notch and I love all these girls. Puberty is a weird time but...they got this I'm sure.

Here are a couple of other shows I watched that didn't come out this year but enjoyed a lot!

SSSS.Gridman

Thank God Trigger was able to come back from its previous offering to give us Gridman. At first I was afraid that all of its Transformers color scheme easter eggs were just trying to lure me in with a mediocre show. This was not the case because Gridman just rules hard. A sequel/spinoff to the old 90's series, localized here as Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, this show was a love letter from the creators to the show and other tokusatsu shows in general.

Kaiju appear to devastate the city, shown from low angles that just make it seem even more like you're watching an old toku show. The toyetic nature of Gridman's various powerups and the design of Gridman himself just further pay homage to this. There was one Kaiju for a moment I swear you could see a string operating it (for the record, it was not a string but was in fact part of the Kaiju). It's not just a cheap nostalgic trap though because the animation is superb, the action is top notch and the main theme song just kicks ass. This is a really cool series and if you have any passing interest in toku shows, are a Trigger fan, or like seeing Actionmaster Thundercracker's color scheme, go and check this thing out!

Other highlights include another version of Inferno Cop and Rikka's mom who is always fun and good.

Dirty Pair (TV series)

Dirty Pair is a series I watched a good chunk of before but never actually finished. Thanks to the #DirtyDecempair hashtag though, I finally went and did it and well...Dirty Pair is still really good y'all. It's got space babes who kick ass and are not afraid to go after hunks along the way. Seriously, it's great when you watch a show older than you and it lives up to its hype.

Kei and Yuri are really good characters because they will snipe at each other but in the end, they are still besties and will mess up anything that gets in their way. I appreciate that they always try to get more PTO and pay out of their boss. Even more, I appreciate that the chief will put up with all their shit, whether it be the aforementioned blackmailing for vacation or the sheer amount of destruction they leave in their wake, and still is 100% behind them. He knows they're the best he has and nothing will get in their way.

So yea, Dirty Pair. Still a good show over 30 years later. You should check it out next December! Or sooner, whatever!

That abut wraps up my list of anime I watched this year, but I'm also gonna throw a little bonus round on you! Some anime movies I watched and liked! Lightning round go!

Promare Good fucking movie, good fucking soundtrack. Good Trigger things this year. It lives up to its hype for sure. Go see this when it is out on DVD and Bluray!

Sound Euphonium - Our Promise: A Brand New Day This was a nice movie that felt like a good third season condensed into about 2ish hours.

Love Live! Sunshine!! The School Idol Movie: Over the Rainbow I actually like the music from this one more than the movie itself but seeing Ruby's arc gaining confidence is good and I love it.

Bonus Saint Snow Track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUNNWxK2Dfs

Redline A movie I kept meaning to see and finally did thanks. Stylish and cool as hell, and the dub is really good too.

Dragon Ball Super: Broly They made Broly a compelling character finally, holy shit. Also some good Frieza comedy.

KonoSuba! Legend of Crimson Imagine a village full of dipshit chuuni wizards. This movie was fun and funny as shit. Warning: It does have one awkward joke related to gender but it thankfully passes by it real quick.

So I think this is my list. I hope you enjoy it. The next time you'll see one from me will be in the distant future of 2020! Hopefully things will be cool by that point to go with the good anime.

#MiyosAnimeListISatItAgain

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dr-gloom · 6 years ago

Text

The Makings of Greatness: Chapter 5

Fandom: Sanders’ Sides

Pairing: platonic logince, platonic moxiety, platonic anxeit, familial ThVi

Tags/Warnings (for this chapter): Virgil is suspicious, and salty

Ko-fi

AO3

Masterlist

Prologue Ch 1 Ch 2 Ch 3 Ch 4 Ch 5 Ch 6 Ch 7 Ch 8 Ch 9 Ch 10 Ch 11 Ch 12 Ch 13 Ch 14 Ch 15 Ch 16 Ch 17

Logan’s every angered step clanged along the wooden staircase down to the galley, face pinched and absolutely fuming. “That man, that… feline! Who does he think is working for whom?”

Virgil stops next to him. “Hey, it’s my map, and he’s got me bussing tables?”

Emile walks up behind them, gripping their shoulders. “I will not tolerate a bad word about our captain. There’s no finer officer in this galaxy.” He lets them go to continue through the galley, following Logan and Virgil. Logan stomps ahead, pausing as whistling catches his ear.

Past several rows of large wood tables to the kitchen, a man moves about, whistling a strange tune to himself as he works. “Mr. Moran!” Emile calls.

The cook straightens up, wiping his hands on his apron and smiling. “Ah, Mr. Picani, sir! Bringing such fine, distinguished men to grace my humble galley.” His voice is smooth and deep, strangely lulling. He steps out of the shadows the brick stove casts across the kitchen, bowing in good fun with a grin spread across his face. “Had I known, I’d’ve tucked my shirt in.” He laughs at his own joke.

His entire right leg had been replaced with a hydraulic prosthetic; it was an accordion-like mechanism down to the calf, where it turned into a simple metal peg, easy for walking. His right arm was also all machine, though this one far more impressive. Virgil wasn’t sure how it worked, exactly. The top half was simple machine, with typical gears and compressors, while his forearm was a massive, rounded metal shell with long slits in its surface. It was definitely unique, and strange. His left eye and the surrounding flesh were replaced with a machine as well, a golden eye that held a focus lense that could zoom in and out at will and a mechanism where the ear would be to process sound. When he smiled, the skin around the edges of the metal in his face would bunch up. Aside from that, he looked as though he might be a similar species to Logan; small, floppy ears (or, ear…), stout, chubby fingers, and an animalistic nose, though he didn’t have a muzzle. In that respect, he was more like Roman. He wore a plain white shirt, partially covered by his apron, and a loose pair of black pants.

Virgil already didn’t like him. It didn’t help that he was a- Virgil gasped, a phrase ringing in his head. “Cyborg….”

“I came to introduce Dr. Abbott, the financer for our voyage.”

Mr. Moran’s eye turns red, and a laser shoots out to dart across Logan’s suit, taking him in. “Love the outfit, doctor.” He chuckles. Logan resists the urge to cover himself like some exposed damsel.

“Thank you. Interesting eye.” He turns to take Virgil’s arm, pulling him forward. “And this is Virgil Shae.” Virgil gives Logan a scandalized look as the man backs away, leaving Virgil at the cyborg’s mercy.

Mr. Moran thrusts his hand out- or, what used to be a hand. It was now replaced with five tools; a drill, a knife, a strange cross between a mace and a bat, pliers, and scissors. “Virg-o!” Virgil rolls his eyes, shoulders tense as he studies the tools in front of him. Mr. Moran pauses for only a brief moment before tsking himself, and suddenly the metal casing of his forearm is splitting open, and a rotating mechanism is switching the tools with a robotic hand; bare joints and pads for gripping. His grin broadens as he waits, but Virgil just glares up at him. Mr. Moran shrugs, moving back into the kitchen.

“Don’t be too put-off by this… hunk of hardware.” As he speaks, the hand is replaced with scissors. His flesh hand reaches up and grabs a grouping of some alien shellfish, pulling them down and using the scissors to snip the tendrils attaching them to the ceiling. The scissors are then replaced with a multi-purpose tool that he uses to cut open the shellfish, gut them, and toss them into the frying pan with minimal movement. The tool rotates through the functions as it works, so all he has to do is move his arm from one shellfish to the next. The tool is then replaced with a large knife that he uses to cut up some vegetables. He slips his flesh arm into the sleeve to make it seem like he cut his hand off. “Whoa!” He brings his arm up and the sleeve falls down, revealing his uninjured hand, and he grins.

Parlor tricks. Virgil isn’t a child.

The knife is replaced with three small claws, which he uses to break and dispense the contents of three eggs. “These gears have been tough getting used to, but… they do come in handy.” The claws leave to be replaced by a torch, which Mr. Moran lights under the pan as he carries it to the brick stove, dumping the contents into a pot and mixing them together with a normal ladle.

“Now, how about you two try my famous bonzabeast stew?” He spoons out and hands them two bowls; Logan sniffs his curiously. “It’s an old family recipe.” Mr. Moran grins as an eye pops out of Logan’s stew, startling him.

“In fact, that’s part of the family.” He chuckles and grabs the eye, popping it in his mouth. As Logan looks at him, scandalized, he raises an amused eyebrow. “I’m only joking.” He nudges Virgil. “Your friend can’t take a joke, can he?” Virgil shrugs, side-eyeing Mr. Moran. “Go on, try it.”

Mr. Moran moves back to the kitchen to finish preparing the food and Virgil spoons some out, glancing at it skeptically. Suddenly, the spoon curls around the food and swallows it, turning pink. Virgil gasps as it grows eyes, its full mouth grinning up at him. What the…

The rest of the spoon turns pink as it swallows the food and jumps out of Virgil’s hand, seemingly floating in mid-air.

“Morph!” Mr. Moran’s voice calls out fondly. The pink blob smiles and sticks its tongue out at Virgil playfully. It turns into a straw and lands in Virgil’s stew and he watches curiously as it sucks it all up. “You little blob of mischief, so that’s where you went off to.”

Morph turns back into his pink blob form and plops into the now-empty bowl, sighing contently. He burps and flies out of the bowl, rubbing up against Virgil’s cheek happily. “Whoa-” He puts his hand up to block it, the feeling of its weird, almost wet slime-like texture unsettling. “What is that thing?”

“What is that thing?” The blog echoes in a higher-pitched voice. Virgil pokes it and it disperses into smaller blobs before coming back together and shifting into a much smaller copy of Virgil. Virgil squints, and it squints back.

“He’s a morph. I rescued him on Proteus.” Morph goes back to his pink form and flies over to Mr. Moran, cuddling against his neck. “He took a liking to me, and we’ve been together ever since.” He pet the blob with a finger as it cooed happily, smiling.

A bell tolls outside, and Emile clears his throat. “We’re about to get under way. Would you like to observe the launch, doctor?”

“Ah, yes, let’s. I must admit I am rather curious to see the process first-hand.” Logan heads for the stairs, and Virgil moves to follow.

A stone hand extends in front of him, blocking his path. “Virgil, you’re staying with Declan, under his charge.”

Declan coughs when he chokes on the stew he’d been testing, wiping his mouth and straightening up to look at the first mate. Virgil’s eyes widen in panic. Please don’t leave me with the psycho cyborg, please please please…

“I… Beg your pardon, sir, but-”

“Captain’s orders, Declan.” Emile states with an air of finality. “Make sure you keep him busy.”

Virgil’s shoulders drop. Oh, right. He was the pest. The unwanted guest.

“Oh, but wait, you can’t-”

Emile disappears up the stairs.

They both sigh.

In a breath, they’re both on guard, arms crossed and chins up, surveying each other.

“So, captain’s put you with me….”

“Whatever.”

Declan shrugs, going back to work. “Ah, well. I wouldn’t be a humble cyborg, to argue with the captain.”

Virgil’s eyes narrow. Have to act casual.

He grabs a purple fruit from an open barrel, tossing it between his palms. “You know… these purps, they’re kind of like the ones back home… on Montressor. Ever been there?” His heart was beating hard in his chest. What would happen to him if Declan found him out? Would he kill him?

“Can’t say I have, Virg-o.”

“It’s Virgil.”

Declan shrugs, back facing Virgil, and he huffs, pulling himself up onto the countertop. “Actually… now that I’m thinking about it, I met this old guy just before I left that was looking for his cyborg friend.” He takes a bite of the purp.

“Is that so?” Declan asks, tone easy.

“Yeah… What was his name? Oh, right. Billy Bones.”

Declan raises an eyebrow. “Bones. Bones…?” He grabs the large bowl he’d been working over, moving it to the other side of Virgil. “Doesn’t ring any bells. Must’ve been a different cyborg. There’s a lot of us out there…”

Someone whistles overhead, drawing both men’s attention.

“Prepare to cast off!”

Declan grins, gently pushing Virgil off the counter to reach a bottle behind him. “Go watch the launch. There’ll be plenty of work for you when you get back.” Virgil gives him a skeptical look before sauntering up the stairs. Declan hums, holding out a cracker for Morph.

“Better keep an eye on him, huh, Morph? Wouldn’t want him getting into things he shouldn’t.”

Taglist: @the5thcoy @dailysandersidesaudoodles @hungry-red-panda @neonb-fly @chemically-imbalanced-romance @punsterterry @dead4sevenyears @metaphoricalpluto2 @tanyatoloni1334

#sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides fanfic #virgil sanders #logan sanders #emile picani #deceit sanders #roman sanders #treasure planet au

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julmar123 · 6 years ago

Text

Umbrella Academy

This is a retelling of the Umbrella Academy show on Netflix I do not own any of the Characters or the dialogue I just wanted to do an imagine where the reader is one of the siblings and is going through the same things that the character are going through. I hope you all enjoy this imagine I plan on doing the entire season.

Episode 3:

“Extra Ordinary”

You all gather inside a room full of surveillance videos. Allison pays the video of the night that dad died. You look at it in shock and disbelieving what you just witnessed in the video “play it again” Luther says as he is trying to figure out what is going on in the video. Allison looks at him “We’ve watched it over and over Luther its the same every time” she says. “What is she doing?” he asks looking at us confused. We both stay in silence unable to answer his question. “The tea, did she poison him?” he asks trying to make sense of the video in front of us. “I don’t know” Allison says unsure.”Where did you find this?” you ask her.”I was looking at old footage of us as kids and I saw the tape just sitting there” she says pointing to the varies tv monitors on display. “Yeah dad must have started using the security system again. He was getting more and more paranoid, he thought people were out to get him...well I guess maybe he was right” he says. “But mom? I mean shes not capable of........Is she?” she adds the last part in almost a whisper. You didn’t now how to feel about this, but you knew you had to tell Diego, he needs to see the video for himself.

After calling Diego and asking him to get home as soon as he can you stood in the living room behind the bar drinking wine. Allison and Luther walk into the room and begin discussing the video and their recent encounter with mom. At first they didn’t notice your presence. “look I don’t like this anymore than you do...but she is hiding something” says Luther. ‘hiding? to me she just sounded confused” defends Allison. “ You saw the tape Grace knew what she was doing” says Luther “Grace? this morning she was mom” you say sarcastically from your spot at the bar. Luther turns to you annoyed “she’s a machine Y/N” he says. “Who read to us, and cleaned up after us and put us to bed. And then we left her here alone in this house for 13 years. I mean no wonder she lost her mind to be away from your kids” says Allison trying to state her case all the while getting worked up. “Hey what happened with Clair with Patrick, you never told me” asks Luther noticing Allison’s discomfort. “Yeah I don’t want to talk about it” She says you realize she doesn’t want to talk about it because of you “Oh no worries I was just waiting on Diego but I’ll be upstairs, I know when I am not wanted” you say before heading upstairs to get a tv monitor and the video. You bring them downstairs but Luther and Allison are no longer there. You continue to set up the video and wait until Diego walks in. You hear Klaus and Luther enter the house. ‘Hey hottie whats all this?” asks Klaus pointing to the tv. “I think its only fair we show everyone the little video Allison found, don’t you Luther?” I question him. “I think you’r right, Allison went to find Vanya” he says. You smile to yourself you almost expected him to hate the idea of showing the video to the rest of your siblings, after all you could already see what he wanted to do.

Diego, Allison and Vanya arrive sooner than you expected. You step back and allow Luther to play the video. You notice everyone is as confused as you are with the video. “And you really think mom would hurt dad?” asks Vanya.”You haven’t been home in a long time Vanya. Maybe you don’t know Grace anymore” says Luther clearly blaming mom. “If it was poison, it would have shown in the coroner’s report.” adds Diego raising his eyebrow at Luther. “Yeah well I don’t need a report to tell me what I can see with my own eyes” says Luther annoyed that Diego is questioning him. “Maybe all that low gravity in space messed with your vision” says Diego as he steps closer to the screen and rewinds the video. “look closer. Dad has his monocle, mom stands up, monocle’s gone” says Diego stepping aside and letting us all see the video again. “Oh yeah” says Klaus once he notices what Diego had pointed out. “She wasn’t poisoning him she was taking it, it’s a cleaning”says Diego before turning off the video. “Then where is it?” asks Luther “I’ve searched the house including all of her things she doesn’t have it” he says confused. We all stay silent before Diego speaks up “That’s because I took it from her, after the funeral” he says playing with his knife. “You’ve had the monocle this whole time? What the hell Diego?” says Allison clearly not happy. “Give it to me” demands Luther angry. “I threw it away” says Diego. “You what?” asks Luther fuming Allison laughs annoyed at Diego’s answer. “I knew that if you found it on mom, you would lose your shit, just like you are doing right now” says Diego pointing his knife at Luther. “Diego your such a” says Luther as Diego starts to get ready for a fight but Vanya stops them both. “Calm down, look I know dad wasn’t exactly an open book, but I remember one thing he said. That mom was..well designed to be a caretaker but also as a protector” she says as you look at her confused. “What does that mean?” Allison ask. “she was programmed to intervene if someone’s life is in jeopardy” you try to explain as Vanya nods he head at your response. “Well if her hardware is degrading then, we need to turn her off” says Luther. “Woah woah woah woah woah! wait she is not just a vacuum cleaner you can throw in a closet! She feels things, I’ve seen it!” yells Diego upset. “She stood there Diego and watched our father die” says Luther raising his voice. “I’m with Luther” says Allison “Well surprise surprise” you say annoyed at them both. “Oh shut up” she says while shaking her head. “I’m with Diego you can’t just turn her off.” you say to her. Luther ignores you and looks at Vanya. “I..I don’t know” she says stuttering trying to come up with words. “Oh she shouldn’t even get a vote” says Diego “I was trying to say I agree with you” says Vanya defending herself “She should get a vote” says Diego correcting himself. “What about you stoner boy, what do you got?” Diego asks Klaus, who is leaning on a pillar. “Oh so what? you need my help now? oh get out of the Van Klaus, oh welcome back to the van.” mocks Klaus. “What van?” you question him. “ what’sit going to be Klaus?” asks Luther. “I’m with Diego because screw you! And if Ben were here he’d agree with me” he says right before he hisses at what I can only imagine to be Ben. “So that’s 4 to 2″ says Diego counting on his fingers.”Wait, its not final yet.” says Allison “What?” he asks her. “Five’s not here , the whole family has to vote we owe each other that” she says making you nod your head in agreement. “Right” agree Luther. Diego looks at you confused. “No, we should wait” says Vanya in agreement. Luther, Klaus, and Allison walk out of the living room. You take a seat on the couch and sip on you wine. As you see Diego taking to mom, it made you sad to think that anyone would agree to turn her off. Vanya and Diego stay talking once mom walks away.

You sit there alone for a while, when you decide to put all the stuff back in the surveillance room. You are on your way to your room, passing by Klaus in the restroom you stop and look at him he had headphone on while in the bath tube and is smoking a joint. He looks at you, smiles and winks before taking another hit. You smile back and continue to walk towards your room when you pass by Diego who is walking around the house. He ignores you and continues to walk down the hall you don’t think twice about it so you go into your room. The moment you close the door behind you you hear gunshots you open the door and look down the hall way and see Diego fighting someone in a mask. “Shoot him!” yells the masked figure. “Out of the way dumb ass!” you hear realizing its two people a man and a women.More gunshots lead Diego towards you. The gunmen follow once they see you they aim at you two. Quickly you activate your fire shield melting the bullet before it touches you. Your run after Diego who jumps off the 2nd floor and lands on the couch. You run down the stairs and into the living room. They shoot consecutively at both of you but you are covering Diego standing in front of him. Luther and Allison both show up. Luther goes after one of the masks people. while Allison trys and fails to take on the other. Diego trys to help her but isn’t strong enough that is until Luther helps him by grabbing the masked man and tossing him across the room. “Who the hell are these guys?” you asks scared. Allison is hunched over trying to steady her breathing. “Your welcome” says Luther acting all high and mighty. “I had him” says Diego “This is not the time” you say turning your fire shield again. Just before they shoot again. “Get out of here now go” says Luther as he shoves Allison out of the room.You run following Allison into the kitchen, you both hide. When the masked women enters the room Allison manages to trip her by waking her in the shins with a billiards stick. You both stand up as the women picks up the stick. “Can’t you just...Fireball” says Allison as she is trying to fight her one on one, or at least help? your suppose to be a better fighter than Diego” she adds in between punches. “No can do i’m in shield mode and this place would go up in flames if I miss.” you says before kicking the women off of Allison. She turns to look at you as You turn off shield mode. You punch her and she returns the hit while Allison is trying to regain stamina as Diego walks in. “Hey you wanna rumor this psycho” he says looking at you and the lady fight. “I don’t need to because this bitch just pissed me off!” says Allison angry. “We just want the boy” says the masked lady. “oh well in that case”adds Allison before lunging at her they both continue to fight as you steady yourself you were a great fighter but you stopped fighting a long time ago so you were not in peak condition. Allison gets tossed across a coffee table. You run towards her helping her up. As Diego fights her you try to find a knife and Allison kicks her away from Diego as the lady runs off. You hand Diego the knife. “Get her!”. He tosses the knife and is able to get her on her leg. “Come on” he says and you follow him.

“Luther!” yells Allison concerned as we come across Luther on the floor. “Come Luther get up” she says as her and Diego go to help him up “you gotta cut down on the fast food soldier” says Diego teasing. “Guys!” you warn them that the lady is on the second floor. she shoots the chandelier. “Get out of the way” says Luther pushing Allison and Diego off and out of harms way. “Luther!” yells Allison scared as the chandelier falls on top of Luther. You look at him and fear starts to surface as you start to cry, the tears burning like boiled water down your face. When he suddenly gets up his shirt and jacket getting stuck underneath the chandelier. You look at him shocked to see that your brother was no longer human. “Oh shit” whispers Diego as he realizes whats happened to Luther. He looks at you all and then runs off. Allison and Vanya are talking when Diego realizes that mom has been in the house and he runs upstairs to check on her. You take your shirt off as the adrenaline begins to fade out. You body burning up the heat unbearable. They look at you confused. “I don’t have my temperature balance suit on!...I’m burning up! ” you start to panic as you continue to take off your cloths and run towards your room. Vanya runs towards the kitchen. Once inside you stand with your bra and underwear underneath the icy air vent. You close your eyes trying to focus on balancing your temperature when a sudden knock on your door brings you back into the real world. “Y/N it’s me open up” says Vanya . You are too focused on trying to cool down that you don’t care to cover up before she enters the room. “here let me help you” she says as she sets a bucket of ice water on the floor in front of you she is about to reach out and touch your leg when you step back. “No don’t! its still to hot, i’ll do it” you say stepping into the bucket. she steps back so that she is no longer directly under the icy vent. she hugs herself trying to keep warm. You can tell she is staring at the scars around your abdominal area. “It’s okay I′m okay.....please don’t tell Klaus... or Diego” you say pleading . She nods her head understanding. “When did this happen?” she says pointing to the scars. “Its been a tough couple of years.” you say trying not to scare her anymore than she already is. After a couple minutes you step out of the bucket and out from under the vent. “Vanya your bleeding” you say pointing to her head. “ I’ll be alright, don’t worry” she says giving you a sad smile. “Well thank you for helping me, now it;’s time for me to help you take care of that” you tell her as you put on a tank top and a pair of shorts your body still glowing pink form the burns. “Are you sure you will be fine?” she asks you concerned. You just nod and open the door signaling for her to lead the way down.

Once down stairs you hand her a read handkerchief and you all gather around the living room. You begin to pick up some of the items that fell on the floor. You can hear Vanya and Allison talking to each other. You can tell Allison is concerned for Vanya. Diego walks in fuming. You stop what you are doing and look at him “Diego?” you ask him trying to make sure he is okay. He looks at Vanya “What are you still doing here?” he says rudely. “I’m just trying to help” she says clueless. “No you could have been killed!.....or gotten any of us killed” he turns to Allison “She is a liability” he adds before walking towards you and sitting on the couch. “Allison?” says Vanya looking for Allison’s support. “I think what he is trying to say is, that this kind of stuff is dangerous.......your just” says Allison carefully picking her words. “Not like you” says Vanya interrupting her she rolls her eyes and gets up and leaves. “Vanya wait that’s not” says Allison going after her. “Let her go... its for the best” says Diego from the couch. “You know there are better ways to say things Diego, you don’t always have to be such a dick” you says to him . He grabs your arm and notices the bright pink tone. “Are you okay?” he asks. You take your wrist away from him. “Yeah thanks to Vanya the pain didn’t last long.” you say defending Vanya. “Y/n you all know that Vanya isn’t safe here” he says trying to defend his actions. You roll your eyes.”Look Diego she isn’t a child anymore, none of us are. You are right she could have gotten killed but all she wanted to do was help and you know what she did.” you say before storming off to your room. “Y/n” he says trying to make you stop but you ignore him and continue to walk.

#The Umbrella Academy #luther hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #David Castaneda #vanya hargreeves #alison hargreeves #aidan gallagher #ellen page

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myaekingheart · 5 years ago

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66. Something Intriguing Thus Takes Root

Dusk overtook the sky as Rei ventured home. It felt nice to finally be returning to her own apartment for once, even if the empty apartment across the hall still haunted her. But she didn’t want to think about that right now. She locked Kaminoki and glanced at the sunset, a somber smile touching her lips. It would be another lonely night.

Kakashi had been so busy lately, and she could tell he was feeling torn. I’m fine, don’t worry about me, she tried to reassure him, but it wasn’t much help. He still felt unresolved on the whole matter. The village needed him, but so did Rei. He hated to see her suffer through her grief alone.

A dog barked in the distance and Rei pressed her hand to the pouch at her hip. When Kakashi returned from his mission, he insisted she keep the summoning scroll he gave her just in case. He didn’t expect to catch a break any time soon, and he felt safer knowing Pakkun was at her beck and call should she need him. It was the least he could do.

She wondered where her boyfriend might be now, what he was doing, if he was thinking about her. Her arms ached to feel his touch, her mouth watering for the taste of him. She looked to the stars flickering overheard and whispered, “Please come home, soon.”

“You’re missing someone” a voice then called; it was a definite statement rather than a question. Rei whipped around, the voice unfamiliar, but found no immediate source. Her hand snapped to the holster on her thigh, fully prepared for a fight. “Stay your weapons, woman. I’m not going to hurt you” he then said, and out of the shadows stepped an old man with a bandage across his eye. He held his arm in some sort of sling and supported his weight upon a cane.

“Can I help you?” Rei asked, surveying the area. There was no one else in sight, and for a moment it terrified her. ANBU or not, being approached by strange men at nightfall was never welcome. Her mind flashed with a million different ways in which he could abuse her if he tried.

“You are Rei Natsuki” he said, “granddaughter of Teiko, and a member of the ANBU black ops.” Again, he said this more as a statement rather than a question. “I have heard a great deal about you.”

Oh, fuck, here we go, she thought to herself. “Listen, if you’re here to berate me for being psycho, I’m afraid I’m out of office and won’t be back until never o’clock” she snapped. She turned to walk away from him, desperate to get out of this encounter as quickly as possible, but then said something that froze her in her tracks.

“Quite the opposite, actually. I think you’re rather talented, and I want to recruit you” he said. Rei slowly turned back around to face him, cocking a brow in suspicion. “In case you haven’t remembered, I am Danzo Shimura and I am in charge of Root, a subsidiary of the ANBU” he explained. “Lord Third implemented a new training program before we could meet, otherwise I would have approached you sooner. I’ve been keeping a close eye on you, and I believe you are not reaching your full potential under the fifth hokage’s jurisdiction. I would like you to join Root, and work under my command. I think you are much better suited for my line of work.”

Rei’s heart pounded in her chest. She had, of course, been familiar with Root and heard Danzo’s name tossed around before, but this was an entirely new level. “What makes you so sure I’m a good fit for this?” she asked. She tried to restrain herself from showing her interest.

A strange smile touched Danzo’s lips as he explained, “The purpose of Root is the total, unhindered protection of Konoha. We work from the shadows in order to keep the ultimate peace and eliminate threats before they become problems. I know of your affinity with the chameleon jutsu—you seem to be rather gifted with invisible work, which is a main tenet of Root. I also know you are much stronger than many give you credit for. I’m well aware you took down a byakugan user when you were only fourteen. Quite impressive, indeed.”

Rei’s face turned red—she was unaware others had known about that. It wasn’t something she necessarily flaunted. If anything, she actually wished it had never happened. “Well…” she started, then asked, “I thought Root mainly recruited members from a young age. Like a lifelong program. I’m twenty-four, it would too late for me.”

“Not necessarily” Danzo replied. “I have made exceptions for special cases.” The way he said that made Rei’s skin crawl, and she recoiled a few paces. Danzo followed, closing the distance. “I suggest you think long and hard about what I am offering. I will not do this again. You are wasting your time working under the fifth hokage. You belong in Root—unrestricted. Someplace where you can reach your full potential.

My full potential. Had she really been limiting herself all these years? She wasn’t entirely sure. “What about my friends and family?” she then asked. As far as she knew, members of Root sacrificed everything.

“Well, sometimes difficult decisions must be made” Danzo replied. “But would you really be happy staying stagnant the rest of your life? How much are you willing to pay for power?” A shiver ran down Rei’s spine. She chewed her bottom lip and considered his offer. She couldn’t care less for power, personally, and was unsure of whether or not she could stand to sacrifice everything. Grandma Teiko’s words echoed in her ears. You have come too far and worked far too hard to give up everything now. But what if giving up everything meant advancing in her career? Feeling the recognition she had for so long yearned for? “I know what Lady Tsunade has done for you” Danzo then said, “Deferring you from your duties for the sake of grieving. She is not doing this for your wellbeing, like she might have you believe. She is simply afraid of the immense amount of power you now wield. If you were under my command, I would implore you to use that power to its full advantage. You are much stronger than anyone else is allowing you to be. Don’t waste your time on people who are only trying to hold you back, Rei Natsuki.” Danzo shuffled forward and placed a hand on Rei’s shoulder, sending a chill throughout her entire body. Yet in that moment, something inside of her shifted. Danzo’s words began swirling through her brain, adjusting her perception of her entire life. She walked the rest of the way home in a strange, misty haze.

Rei had already made up her mind by the time Kakashi returned. She cooked a simple dinner for the both of them, but all the whie seemed distant and distracted. If he didn’t know any better, he’d assume she was hiding something from him. As they finished their food, he finally asked, “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah…everything’s fine” she said, though she couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze. She took his empty bowl with hers and approached the kitchen sink.

“You seem quiet” he said. “Did something happen while I was gone?”

“I’m just tired” she replied. “But, uh…there was one thing that happened.” She wasn’t sure if she wanted to do this. She really shouldn’t say anything. Ideally, she would just fade into oblivion without having to explain anything to anyone. She fully expected to be questioned the moment she revealed her choice.

Kakashi cocked a brow and shifted to get a better look at her, asking “Oh? What happened? Was it something bad?” He quickly scanned her body, searching for any injuries he may have missed. He couldn’t catch anything. He prayed she hadn’t been hurt in other ways.

“No” Rei shook her head. She lingered at the kitchen counter, feeling his eyes burning into her back. She didn’t have the strength to meet them. “Actually, it’s really good. Sort of like a promotion type thing.”

A promotion? Kakashi furrowed his brows in thought. There wasn’t any rank higher than ANBU except for hokage, which he knew she had not reached. Tsunade hadn’t even been in office for a year. And even if that was the case, putting someone of her current mental state in a position of authority was perhaps the stupidest decision. He awaited further explanation, a mild panic growing inside of him.

“I was approached with an offer a few days ago” Rei explained, “and I think it sounds really good. A Danzo Shimura flagged me down on my way home, said he wanted me to join his faction of the black ops and…and I think I’m going to do it.”

Almost involuntarily, Kakashi leapt to his feet and shouted, “No!” Rei froze, her heart pounding in her chest. She gripped the edge of the kitchen sink in an effort to quell her anxiety. The abrupt tension was almost palpable. Sighing, Kakashi rubbed his forehead and added hesitantly, “I mean…have you really thought through all of this?”

“Are you insinuating that I’m being hasty?” she asked, voice sharper than she expected it to be.

“I’m not trying to insinuate anything” Kakashi replied, “I just don’t think this is a good idea at all.”

“Well, I do” Rei replied. She turned on the faucet and began rinsing out their bowls. The minute she shut the tap off, she could feel Kakashi looming behind her, his hot breath on the back of her neck.

“How much do you really know about Danzo and Root?” he asked. “I think if you were aware of the truth, you would have a much different answer.”

“I know enough” she said. “I know that Lady Tsunade is holding me back from achieving my true potential, and that I’m capable of more than people give me credit for. Root can give me what the ANBU can’t. I belong there.”

“No, you belong here. With me” Kakashi said, wrapping his arms around her from behind. Rei wiggled in his grasp. “Root isn’t even supposed to exist anymore. If you go through with this, you’ll risk being branded a felon. Root does dirty work. It’s not a respectable place for a kunoichi.”

“What do you know?” Rei fired back, pushing herself out of his grasp. “This is exactly the kind of shit Danzo was talking about! With everyone limiting me, trying to hold me back! Why can’t you just be happy for me? Why can’t you accept that I’m finally heading in the right direction? This is a good thing, Kakashi! Or are you just scared I might actually become better than you and you want to hold me down?”

“Rei!” Kakashi snapped, voice stern. There was fury in his eyes. “I’d want nothing more than for you to surpass me, but you have serious delusions about what you’re getting yourself into. Danzo sweet-talked you into believing this was the right path, but it’s not. Root will strip you down to nothing and force you to kill people who don’t deserve to die. People who have done absolutely nothing wrong. You’ll be forced to sacrifice everything. It’s suicide.”

The word rang in Rei’s ears like a funeral dirge. Suicide. Suicide. Suicide. She clapped her hands over her ears and groaned, shaking her head. “I don’t want to hear anything else you have to say, Kakashi” she snapped.

“Why?” he asked. “Because you can’t handle the truth?”

“No, because I’m tired of you spitting lies!” she shouted back. “There was a time when you were actually supportive of me. I thought you loved me. If you did, you wouldn’t be acting like such an ass right now!”

“I’m saying these things because I love you” he insisted. “Are you really willing to sell your soul for criminal activity? You’ll never be able to see me or your parents or your grandmother ever again. Our entire future will be thrown out the window. Is that what you really want?”

“What would you rather I do, then? Kill myself? Because this is the much better option” Rei replied. “At least this way, I can do something worthwhile with my time. And I don’t have to interact with anyone or burden them ever again.”

This was far too much. Kakashi was beginning to really lose his cool. “I can’t stand here and watch you do this to yourself” he said. “I won’t let you go through with this.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked. “As if you dictate my every move? You know, I think you seriously underestimate my determination, Kakashi. You put me down when we were kids, told me I could never make it as a ninja, but I did it, didn’t I? This is just the next step. If you’re not going to support me, then that’s fine, but just know I can do this with or without you.”

What was it going to take to convince her that this was a bad idea? He glanced to the sake on top of her fridge and wondered if she had been drinking before he arrived. No one should ever make big life decisions under the influence. As he gazed back at her, crazed and manic, his heartbeat increased with every passing second. He couldn’t stand to lose her, especially not like this. Their entire future was at stake here. He thought of the ring tucked away in his dresser. He cursed himself for not having it on him now. If he did, he would get down on one knee this instant and ask her to marry him, ask her to spend the rest of her life with him, to put away these stupid ideas and choose him instead. He didn’t want to face another day without her by his side and he refused to watch her waste away in a prison like Root. His hands twitched at his sides, desperate for something, anything, but it became clear to him there was only one thing he could manage in that moment. He surged forward, ripping his mask off, and pressed his lips to hers hard.

Rei resisted at first, then fell into the kiss slowly but surely. When he finally pulled away, she looked at him dizzy and dreamy, a sadness in her eyes. He pressed his forehead to hers and cupped her cheek. “Don’t do this” he whispered. “Don’t leave. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

She fought back the tears that were starting to surface, tightening her grip on his forearm. “I can’t…I don’t want to…I mean…there’s nothing else I can do.”

“You act like this is the only way out” he whispered. “But it’s not…I promise, it’s not. Just please…stay with me. Don’t forget how long you’ve wanted this. Don’t forget all those years you pushed and fought…you just wanted to prove yourself, and now you have. I was stupid to have kept my distance all those years. Now that I have you, I can’t afford to lose you. Not now…not ever.”

“Please, Kakashi…” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Please, I just…please don’t put me in a cage.”

Sighing, Kakashi closed his eyes and ran his fingers through her hair, holding her close. “I’m not” he replied, “But I refuse to watch you put yourself in danger like this. Danzo is lying, he’s just trying to get a rise out of you. He wants you to think this is a good idea for his own sake. He’s just going to use you. He’s going to snuff out that will of fire in you…” Here, he pressed a hand to her chest, her heart beating fast beneath his palm. “Don’t let anyone take that fire away.”

By now, Rei couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. She broke down, falling into his arms, her face buried in his chest. “Why does this have to be so hard…?” she asked through her sobs. “Why can’t I think straight anymore? It’s all messed up…everything is so messed up…”

“I know…I know” Kakashi whispered, pulling her into him. He rubbed her back and kissed the top of her head, inching closer to the bed so they could sit down. “Just please…trust me when I tell you this is not the right choice. Danzo approached me once, too, and tried to convince me to join Root. I saw through his lies and ended up stopping him from killing the third hokage. He’s dangerous, Rei, and I don’t want you anywhere near him. If he ever tries to approach you again…I’ll kill him myself if I have to.”

Rei buried herself in Kakashi’s embrace, her head beginning to pound. This was too much. Everything was in a haze. Why couldn’t she think clearly? She heard Kakashi’s words, but she couldn’t comprehend them. She felt weak and small and infantile. She was dependent and worthless. She cried herself to sleep in his arms and that night, she did not dream.

#kakashi hatake #rei natsuki #the scarecrow and the bell #naruto #naruto oc #fanfiction

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southernconundrum-blog · 6 years ago

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Making a Case for 13 Going on 30.

I can still remember my Wednesday evening History of Film class in Film school. (Yes I went to film school, we can still like cheesy rom-coms) And the night my professor, a former DP for Columbia during the “golden age of film” stood in front of the entire class and proclaimed we were about to view, what most experts call the greatest film of all time. You guessed it, Citizen Kane.

He went on to explain that what made it so great was the technicality and the innovation of it. The first film to use flashback and continuous wide shots, blah blah. I thought it was a snooze fest of straight white male nonsense. Yeah technically it’s cool they did all that with cut and paste film. I respect that shit, I do. But Citizen Kane is one of the most un-relatable stories ever. At least to me as a gay woman. It’s like the Catcher in the Rye of film. I have a hard time identifying with rich white dudes who feel like they don’t belong in a world created for and by them. If anyone actually read this blog I bet I’d get ALL the haters up in here leaving me comments about how oppressed men are now. Do it. I masturbate with male tears.

ANYWAYS. Fuck Citizen Kane in it’s boring ass face. I’m here to talk about the greatest movie of all time. The movie that is best picture every year in my heart and soul always and the one movie by which every other movie is measured. 13 Going on Motherfucking 30.

Yes it’s entertaining. Yes it’s a feel good romish-com with a cute cast. Yes it has Judy Greer. But what makes it the best? I’ll break it down for you.

CAST:

We all know about JGar and MRuff, and before we get to Judy Greer, let’s talk about the supporting cast:

Christa B Allen

For you true Jgar fans you’ll note that this was not Christa’s only time playing a young Jen. She also does in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (another one of my faves but more problematic). Christa’s got the looks and the chops. She’s not only a dead ringer for the younger Rink, she’s also actually a great actress. Here’s what she looks like now BTW.

Pretty fucking spot on from the casting director I’d say. So if Christa B. Allen was the homerun, Sean Marquette (young MRUFF) is the grand slam.

Then and now:

Yeah that could be Mark Ruffalo in the early 2000′s. And Sean does a great job himself in the younger role. Moving on.

BRIE OSCAR WINNER CAPTAIN MARVEL LARSON

In a bit part with ONE freaking line. She nailed it by the way. That’s how extra this movie is. Oscar winners as basically extras.

FUN FACT THAT ONLY A PSYCHO WOULD KNOW:

When Jenna is looking at her yearbook with Matty years later, it flashes this picture of the Six Chicks:

Notice Jenna is now “practically their leader” and Brie Larson is nowhere to be found. Presumably she has already been kidnapped and is in ROOM. Too dark? Or too REAL.

ANDY FUCKING SERKIS

You can use IMDB to go through this guy’s laundry list of amazing credits. And don’t stop at Gollum in LOTR because he was basically just getting started in this bitch. He’s also an accomplished director. He plays Jenna and Lucy’s (tom-tom) boss and the editor of Poise magazine. He’s also gay bc representation in 2004 hella mattered.

KATHY BAKER (Jenna’s mom)

Where have you seen her? Bitch, everywhere. She has a staggering list of nominations and awards from film, tv and stage where she’s had a phenomenal career. My favorite roles are between that gem up there in Edward Scissorhands and the woman of many marriages in the Jane Austen Book Club. She’s a legend and she’s NOT EVEN THE STAR OF THIS FILM.

Marcia DeBonis (Jenna’s admin asst)

It’s easier to tell you what she HASN’T been in. Like Kathy Baker, she’s made a career out of small, scene stealing roles. She also has a pretty impressive career in casting.

I’m not going do Jen and Mark because we all know all of their shit. I’m the biggest JGar fan on earth so don’t get me started, but they are obviously mega stars and I need to save some room for.......here it comes...it’s finally here...you know it was coming..and here WE. FUCKING. GO.

JUDITH THERESE EVANS GREER

If Judy BAD BITCH OF LIFE Greer is in a movie? I’m seeing it. Why? BC SHE’s in EVERY MOVIE. Judy Greer is a brilliant silky chameleon with ferrari engine precision comedic timing. I would say she ties with Melanie Lynksey for all time underrated actress in history, but I think she pushes just past her since her body of work is unbelievably large. She has done indie, rom-com, sci-fi blockbuster, you name it. She can and has done anything and everything and I love her with every sad and broken cell in my fangirl body. She doesn’t support scenes, she carries them. And the only reason you think someone else is the star is because Judy wants you to think that. There are like 2 people on this Earth I love as much as I love Judy Greer and they are basically my mom and Claire Danes. She is an angel we do not deserve sent to us straight from a place we can never know. I legitimately worry that not enough people know what a treeey zzzurrre we have in Judy. I will do whatever I can to always spread the Gospel of Greer in this flaming shit bag of a world. If you haven’t seen Addicted to Fresno, please excuse yourself from whatever meaningless nonsense you’re doing right now to go watch it. Thanks.

STORY

A perfect cast, and yes this is one, does not a good film make on it’s own (see all those shitty Gary Marshall vignette films).

Lucky for us we also have a perfect story. This film has everything: redemption, friendship, love, betrayal, materialism, capitalism, competition, fucking TIME TRAVEL. And a dance number to goddamn Thriller.

This movie created the catch-phrase, “Fabuloso”, which would eventually become the best smelling cleaning product of all time. It brought back Razzles, no doubt saving that entire brand from bankruptcy. It has complicated parental relationships, complex female friendships, a pre-wedding love confession scene, an NYC fall photoshoot montage, an accidentally fall-down kiss scene, a popular high school guy now a balding loser scene, a heroine saves the magazine scene, and a Pat Benetar slumber party pillow fight.

SETTING

NEW. MOTHERFUCKING. YORK. CITY. Is there any other place where a 30 year old can be the editor of a fashion magazine and live in an $8 million apartment???

SOUNDTRACK

I mean, you’ve got The Go-Go’s, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Billy Joel, Liz Phair, Rick Springfield, Talking Heads, Soft Cell, I COULD ON AND ON.

CONCLUSION

I am a rom-com SLUT. I have seen all of them, but this one is the stand out. Instead of limiting Jenna to the “she falls in love and finally changes her life” trope, it explores ALL the reasons Jenna’s life went off track. Not just because she lost her best friend along the way, but because now she’s dishonest, disloyal, and though she has the trappings of the life she dreamed of, she isn’t the person she thought she would be. In fact, Matty is not even the main thread of all of it.

The takeaway here is that being present is more important than worrying and wishing about the future.Which is actually some intense deep Buddhist shit.

By living in the moment we’re in, we can shape our lives however we want. Jenna was so intent on creating her idea of a perfect life, that she missed what was right in front of her. When she got a glimpse of what she thought she wanted, she realized how empty it was. The money, the cool job, the $8 million apartment doesn’t mean shit when you don’t have any real connections to anyone. And is there any better moment then when she goes back to her closet birthday party, kisses Matty and slams Tom-Tom’s drink in her face and calls her a “Biatch”? NO. It’s the most satisfying moment in American cinema.

TWO THINGS

1.This movie has 0 diversity and is 100% straight white people problems. I acknowledge it. It is problematic. I don’t know what to say. It was the time, I didn’t make the movie, and thank the lorde things are changing.

2.Lucy’s take on Poise re-branding was 100,000% better than that Abercrombie bullshit Jenna came up. Don’t @ me.

JUDY GREER 2020

#13goingon30 romcoms judygreer jennifergarner markruffalo fashionsuicide fabuloso razzles billyjoel

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years ago

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The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-100-books-every-man-should-read-2/

The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

Groucho Marx once said: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” We’re not quite sure what he meant either, but what we do know is that books are an essential for any man.

So, whether you’re heading off abroad and need a page-turner, or just want to have something other than Harry Kane’s ankle injury to talk about on a Tinder date next week, here are the 100 books that’ll broaden your horizons (and bulk out your bookshelf).

Classics

Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway

Best For: Understanding Women Classic Hemingway subjects – bullfighting, war, women, more war – in a collection of short stories proving that masculinity lacking a softer touch is a dangerous thing. If you’ve been dumped, or you’re just missing your mum, then you need this.

A Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde

Best For: When You’ve Found Another Grey Hair A handsome, innocent young man sells his soul to keep his dashing good looks – and of course it all goes pear-shaped. It’ll make you feel better about the march of time and skipping the gym, plus it’s full of classic Wilde quips you can fire off at the dinner table.

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Best For: Reaffirming War Is Good For Absolutely Nothing Prisoner of war, optometrist, father, time-traveller, plane-crash survivor: Billy Pilgrim is all these and more in a miraculously moving, bitter and blackly hilarious story of innocence faced with apocalypse.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Best For: The DiCaprio Nod Leo rarely puts a foot wrong, but even he couldn’t capture the magnetic Jay Gatsby as well as Fitzgerald did on page. Set in the summer of 1922, with the Roaring Twenties in full swing, this is a terrific unpicking of decadence, social change and excess.

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

Best For: Bratchnys A merciless satire of state control, in which Burgess imagined a dystopian future of ultraviolence decades before it became a sci-fi standard. Much of it is written in the slang spoken by teen hero, Alex; ‘bratchnys’ are bastards (and so are Alex and his murderous crew.)

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

Best For: Intense Moral Conundrum There’s no sugar-coating this one: a man obsessed with the 12-year-old daughter of his landlady and so marries the mother to be near her. From there, the ground only gets dodgier. The most controversial book on this list is a literary hot potato that will never cool down.

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

Best For: Seaside Sins Brighton wasn’t always cocktail bars and vintage shops. In 1938, a gang war is raging, and ruthless Pinkie has just killed his first victim. In trying to cover his tracks, he only digs himself into a deeper hole.

1984 – George Orwell

Best For: A Jolt Of Future Shock No list of great books would be complete without this influential masterpiece, which gets more prescient year by year. Winston Smith rewrites the past to suit the needs of the ruling party, who run a totalitarian society under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver

Best For: Toasting Don Draper A collection of brilliant short stories about the lonely men and women of the American Midwest who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. Along with fellow US short-story master John Cheever, Carver’s words inspired Mad Men.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Best For: Breaking The Rules You’ve probably seen the film, but this really is a case of ‘the book is better’. Evil Nurse Ratched rules an Oregon mental institution with an iron fist until new arrival McMurphy, who faked madness to dodge hard labour in the joint, brings chaos and hope to his fellow inmates.

The Catcher In The Rye – J.D.Salinger

Best For: Angst In Your Pants Any book about the harshness of teenage life will resonate with anyone who is or has been a teen, but the misadventures of Holden Caulfield have become the set text, and rightly so. He is cynical, jaded, dickishly rebellious. And we have, in ways big and small, all been there.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

Best For: Getting Things Done The innermost thoughts of the Roman Emperor from 161-180AD are a genuinely practical and insightful guide to life almost 1,900 years later. Silicon Valley billionaires and their teams love this book and its ideas for the way it helps them to accept the world as it is, then rule it.

The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley

Best For: Keeping Secrets They say “the past is a foreign country”. Well, that’s because it’s the famous opening line of this novel, in which an old man recalls the summer he spent aged 13 at his friend’s country house, as he shipped illicit messages between his chum’s engaged sister and a local farmer.

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

Best For: Page-Turning And Page-Burning In the America of the future, people are addicted to watching soap-opera-style shows on giant screens in their homes. Books are banned, firemen hunt down illicit volumes and burn them. A book about the magic of reading and how we must never let it fade away.

The Odyssey – Homer

Best For: Original Adventure The original homecoming tale – a king’s decade-long slog home after the Trojan War – contains: witches, monsters, betrayal, drugs, cannibals, disguises, a bit of war and quite a lot of slaughter. Every man-on-a-quest story and road movie owes a debt to this remarkable tale.

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Best For: Epic Shenanigans To be fair, the Dickens pick on this list could have been one of a dozen. But this Victorian doorstop, with its massive cast (including the murky London underworld), is the most impressive and entertaining. A legal tussle over a will plays havoc with the lives of the potential beneficiaries and those around them.

Heart Of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Best For: “The Horror, The Horror!” In 1890, the author captained a steamboat up the Congo River. A decade later, his novel about something very similar became a sensation. In 1979 it was very freely adapted into the epic Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now. Also, at less than 100 pages, you have no excuses not to finish it.

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Best For: The Sum Of Its Parts Yes, everybody now knows that the monster isn’t Frankenstein; that’s the mad scientist who makes him. But did you know that science-fiction was basically invented with this book, written by an 18-year-old girl challenged to come up with a ghost story? Still creepy and relevant despite being 200 years old.

The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler

Best For: Prime Pulp Fiction “The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.” “He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.” “A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.” Just a sample of the hardboiled genius on display in this truly great detective yarn.

The Lord of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

Best For: Hobbit-Forming When it comes to fantasy, there is one story to rule them all. The massive success of the film trilogy based on it does not dim the power of the source material. Amazon is spending $1bn making the TV version. For many, though, the original remains the masterpiece.

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Best For: A Whale Of A Time Sperm whale eats sailor’s lower leg; sailor tricks other sailors into crewing his revenge mission; it doesn’t go well. A tale of obsession, adventure, maritime manliness and beast-slaying that does not get old as it ages.

Modern

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Best For: Brutal Beatlemania When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend, Kizuki. Delving into his student years in Tokyo, Toru dabbles in uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire.

Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis

Best For: Learning Restraint Wealthy transatlantic movie executive John Self allows himself whatever he wants whenever he wants it: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food. It’s never going to end well, is it? A cautionary tale of a life lived without boundaries.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Best For: Going Hungry Of the many, many recent stories of survival in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, this one is the toughest, smartest and the one which stays with you the longest. A father and son contrive to survive in the face of cannibalism, starvation and brutality.

The Sportswriter – Richard Ford

Best For: Knowing The Grass Isn’t Greener Frank Bascombe, it seems, is living the dream: a younger girlfriend and a job as a sports writer. But his inner turmoil and private tragedies show all is not always as it seems, even for those who seem to have it all.

The 25th Hour – David Benioff

Best For: Clock Watching Facing a seven-year stretch for dealing, Monty Brogan sets out to make the most of his last night of freedom. His dad wants him to do a runner, his drug-lord boss wants to know if he squealed, his girlfriend is confused and his friends are trying to prepare him for the worst. It’s a lot to fit in.

We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

Best For: Questioning Yourself The story of Eva, mother of Kevin, who murdered seven of his fellow high-school students and two members of staff. She’s coming to terms with the fact that her maternal instincts could have driven him off the rails. It’s made worse by the fact that he survived and she can’t help visiting him in prison.

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

Best For: Bursting The American Dream The Sixties was a time for sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and, erm, political mayhem. Swede Levov is living the American dream until his daughter Merry becomes involved in political terrorism that drags the family into the underbelly of society. Totally rad.

American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

Best For: Career Killers The film is a contemporary masterpiece, but Patrick Bateman is even more evil on paper than he is on screen. An outright psychopath partly made by life on Wall Street, this bitterly black comedy is a classic that’ll keep you in line should you become a desk drone.

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Best For: Murder Most Moral A group of eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a unique way of thinking thanks to their classics professor, which forces them to contemplate how easy it can be to kill someone if they cross you.

The Watchmen – Alan Moore

Best For: Picturing The Scene The most lauded graphic novel of all time concerns a team of superheroes called the Crimebusters, and a plot to kill and discredit them. Packed with symbolism and intelligent political and social commentary, with artwork as brilliant as the text.

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Best For: Mother’s Day Appreciation After 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid wants to have some fun. But as her husband Alfred is losing his grip on reality, and their children have left the nest, she sets her heart on one last family Christmas. Virtue, sexual inhibition, outdated mental healthcare and globalised greed are all under the tree.

A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James

Best For: Shadowy Thrills One evening in December 1976, gunmen burst into Bob Marley’s house in Jamaica, having shot his wife on the driveway, and shot Bob and his manager multiple times. No arrests were made. True story. James imagines what happens to the perpetrators, with appearances by the CIA and a ghost.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

Best For: Nerd Nirvana The greatest superhero story ever told isn’t about costumed men, but the men who create them. Kavalier & Clay create The Escapist, at the start of comic books’ Golden Age in Thirties New York. He is super-popular; K&C miss out on the big money but can’t avoid the pitfalls of love and war.

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Best For: Magical Realism The tots of the title are all born in the first hour of India’s independence – midnight til 1am on August 15, 1947 – and they all have superpowers. One of them, a telepath, tries to find out why while reaching out to the others. Won the Booker Prize, and twice won Booker best-of votes on anniversaries of the award.

Robert Harris – Fatherland

Best For: Wondering What-If A most chillingly plausible alternate history, in which Germany won World War II (Oxford University is an SS Academy, and the Germans are winning the space race) and senior Nazi party officials are being offed in Sixties Berlin. Turns out there’s a conspiracy to silence the ultimate conspiracy…

The Stand – Stephen King

Best For: Good vs Evil The modern master of genre fiction’s magnum opus is the 1990 Complete and Uncut version of his 1978 novel. A virus has all but wiped out humanity. American survivors gravitate to either Las Vegas (the bad lot) or Boulder, Colorado (the goodies), then the two tribes ready for the showdown.

High-Rise – J.G. Ballard

Best For: Block Party Politics When the residents of a posh tower block find their sweet set-up falling apart, the response is feral. Minor social differences lead to floor-versus-floor violence. The well-to-do become savages, and what that nice Dr Laing does with his neighbour’s dog is decidedly un-vegan.

A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

Best For: The Secret Life David Cornwell worked as a British intelligence officer for almost nine years before adopting the pen name of John Le Carré and quitting spookery. Of his 23 spy novels, this is the best, perhaps because it’s the most autobiographical, although the made-up secret-service bits are first-rate too.

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Best For: The Modern World A cross-generational saga of North London life rooted in the British immigrant experience that’s much funnier than the first half of this sentence makes out. The dentistry of the title is what everyone here – Bangladeshi, Jamaican, white British or otherwise – have in common.

Spies – Michael Frayn

Best For: Playing Detective You’re trying to get through a wartime summer in London, but you find out your mum is a German spy. You bring one of your classmates in on the surveillance, but, without your knowledge, she enlists him in her mysterious deeds. Not a ‘whodunit’, more an outstandingly original ‘whoisit’?

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

Best For: Solving JFK’s Murder In the messed-up mind of Ellroy, crime fiction’s self-proclaimed demon dog, the CIA, FBI, Mafia and Hollywood are all involved in the assassination of “Bad-Back Jack”. The rat-a-tat-tat of Ellroy’s short, slang-centric sentences boosts what would still be a fine secret-history yarn to be something powerful and electric.

Style, Fitness & Mind-Enhancement

ABC of Men’s Fashion – Hardy Amies

Best For: Wardrobe Rules Classic style is forever – which is 99 per cent true in the case of this pocket encyclopaedia written in 1964 by a Savile Row legend. When you get to ‘B’, you can be amused by 150 words on ‘Bowler Hats’, but skip ‘Beachwear’ at your peril: “A plain navy blue shirt with white linen trousers will always outshine any patterned job.”

Men of Style – Josh Sims

Best For: Brushing Up Style guides can often be more decorative than useful, but this one, by the venerable fashion journalist Sims, profiles the best-dressed men of the past century so that you can steal for your look the things that make them so undeniably well-dressed.

Men and Style – David Coggins

Best For: Excavating Your True Look It is hard to be stylish if you haven’t grasped what ‘style’ means for you. Coggins understands that it stretches beyond clothes (although they are mightily important) to the influence of your father – yes, him! – your school days, your surroundings and more.

Thinking, Fast And Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Best For: Mind Games Why is there more chance we’ll believe something if it’s in a bold typeface? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. This book has practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking, so you can make better decisions at work, home and life in general.

How Not To Be Wrong – Jordan Ellenberg

Best For: Number Crunching If the maths you learned in school has slipped your mind, there’s something to be said for this book helping you to re-grasp numbers: a powerful commodity in a post-truth world. You’ll learn to how to analyse important situations at work and at play – and how early you actually need to get to the airport.

Happiness By Design – Paul Dolan

Best For: Living The Good Life As figures prove, we’re all stretched and stressed. So how can we make it easier to be happy? Using the latest cutting-edge research, Dolan, a professor of behavioural science, reveals that wellbeing isn’t about how we think, it’s about what we do.

The Chimp Paradox – Steve Peters

Best For: Retraining Your Brain Peters helped British Cycling, Ronnie O’Sullivan, and other pro sports stars win more. He says our brains are emotional (the chimp bit), logical (human) and automatically instinctive (like a computer). We can’t shut off the monkey, but with work, the other two parts can control it. Reading this won’t make you World Snooker Champion, but you will be empowered to make more successful choices in life.

Reasons To Stay Alive – Matt Haig

Best For: Mental Wellbeing Aged 24, Haig was diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression and contemplating suicide. His memoir of coming back from the brink is an honest, moving and funny exploration of triumph over failing mental health that almost destroyed him.

The World’s Fittest Book – Ross Edgley

Best For: Getting Into The Right Shape Quite the claim in the title there, but ‘fitness adventurer’ Edgley backs it up with straightforward and achievable ways to lose weight, tone up and get shredded. Less about following fitness plans (result) and more about applying basic concepts so you can exercise in the right way.

Feet In The Clouds – Richard Askwith

Best For: Running On Empty If you love exercising, you’ll love this dispatch from the world of fell running. If you don’t, then reading about the people who commit to running up and down mountains will help you understand why they love it, and maybe some of their motivation will rub off on you.

Real Fast Food – Nigel Slater

Best For: Cooking IRL Encouragement to eat out of the pan, ingredients in tins and the secret to a perfect bacon sandwich: Slater has over 350 recipes that take less than 30 minutes and don’t require much cheffing, written so any fool can follow them. His take on bacon? Smoked streaky, nearly crisp, untoasted white bread dipped in the bacon fat, no sauce.

Five Quarters – Rachel Roddy

Best For: Pasta Perfection Italian food done simply and totally authentically. The author moved to Rome from the UK on a whim in 2005 and taught herself how to cook like an Italian nonna. Veggies will find a lot to love in this one, too.

Roast Chicken And Other Stories – Simon Hopkinson

Best For: English Classics A book beloved by chefs and food writers, for good reason: Hopkinson makes everything, even the offal, sound absolutely delicious. He picks 40 ingredients, explains why they’re essential, then gives a few recipes for each. Cooking, he says, is about making food you like to eat, not showing off.

Made In India: Cooked In Britain – Meera Sodha

Best For: Takeaway At Home Totally debunking the ‘it’s too hard to make good curries’ myth, this splendid work also has pictures showing important stages of recipes, not just a food-porn shot of the final dish. Also tons of delicious things even curry-house connoisseurs might not have heard of.

Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker

Best For: Ruling The Land Of Nod Everyone knows that they should get more, better sleep, but actually trying to do so can be stressful enough to cause lack of sleep. This bestseller unpicks exactly what happens when your head hits the pillow. More importantly, it explains why and how to get your head right beforehand.

How To Be A Woman – Caitlin Moran

Best For: Opposite Sex Education Since this is the book that “every woman should read”, according to one of its many, many amazing reviews, then surely every man would benefit from reading it, too? A feminist manifesto disguised as a hilarious memoir (or is it vice versa?) from one of the UK’s funniest writers.

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

Best For: Spiritual Enlightenment The author was approaching 30 and borderline suicidal, when he had an epiphany, separating what made him happy real from what was, mostly, the bullshit dragging him down. Years trying to understand how he saw the light meant he can explain it, better than the others who have tried, so you can do the same, too.

Sit Down and Be Quiet – Michael James Wong

Best For: Boosting Body And Mind The genius of this yoga and mindfulness manual for the modern man is in the way it presents those two practices as things you already do in some ways (habits from childhood and sport, mainly). Then, the ways you’re not doing them – physical and mental techniques – are put forth in a non-preachy manner.

Knowledge

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

Best For: Well, Nearly Everything We could have put this in the science section, given it is a scientific history ranging from the Big Bang to mankind. Anyway: now think of your best-ever teacher. Bryson is like that – curious, witty, in love with his subject – and learning along with him is a pleasure.

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

Best For: A Selfie Of Ourselves Humans came to rule the world, according to this global bestseller, because we mastered fire, gossip, agriculture, mythology, money, contradictions and science. Harari himself is a master of distilling big ideas and concepts, and his book full of them will make your smarter.

Prisoners Of Geography – Tim Marshall

Best For: Mapping It All Out How and why countries do stuff to other countries because of the landscape, the climate, the culture and the natural resources available: that’s geopolitics. And to get a grip on why the world is how it is – no more important time to do that than right now – you read this.

Stasiland – Anna Funder

Best For: Cold War Stories In East Germany, the Stasi was the state security apparatus, which investigated the country’s citizens to an astonishing degree. A few years after the Berlin Wall fell, Funder met with former spies, handlers and resistance operatives, all with incredible tales.

The Plantagenets – Dan Jones

Best For: Past Glory One of the breed of young historians making history TV must-see again, Jones also writes big, juicy, novelistic books. This is the one that takes in 280 years of England and its kings from 1120, including Crusades, Black Death, civil war, war with France, heroes, legends, sacking of cities and all the rest of it. Truly stirring stuff.

Life 3.0 – Max Tegmark

Best For: AI, OK? Artificial intelligence is going to change humanity perhaps more than any other technology, so you kind of owe it to yourself to know what’s coming down the pipe. Tegmark smartly and succinctly puts forward all the arguments for and against the rise of the robots – because rise they will.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – Carlo Rovelli

Best For: Demystifying The World, Quickly As it says on the tin: between six and eight short essays about life, the universe and everything, which will tease and enlarge your brain, not tie it in knots. Perfectly formed into 96 pages that deliver a masterclass in relativity, quantum mechanics and mankind’s place in time in space.

The Sixth Extinction – Elizabeth Kolbert

Best For: Reaching The End Times No prizes for guessing that number six on the list of mass extinction events is happening now, as humankind reduces species diversity on Earth like nothing since the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This book, grippingly, reports on what’s happening now, and those times before.

Behave – Robert Sapolsky

Best For: Why We Do What Do Every one of us is a student of human behaviour, so a book that gives you a distinct advantage over our classmates can only be A Good Thing. That it’s written by a scientist with a sense of humour nailing his mission to demystify complex science is a massive bonus also.

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes

Best For: Explosive Insight An epic recollection of how mankind came to harness, then unleash, the power of the atom. From the first nuclear fission to the bombs that dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Rhodes marshals a huge cast of scientists (and spies) and leaves no stone unturned.

Inspiration

Long Walk To Freedom – Nelson Mandela

Best For: Genuine Inspiration The short version of Mandela’s life is widely known, but his detailed and moving autobiography, published in 1994, the year he became president of South Africa, is a never-to-be-forgotten account of his fight against apartheid.

I Am Zlatan – Zlatan Ibrahimovich

Best For: Ego Boosts And Footy Boots He is, by his own account, one of the greatest footballers of the modern age. Whether or not you agree, his life story is fascinating, and he gets stuck in on the page as on the pitch. “If Mourinho lights up a room, Guardiola draws the curtains.”

H Is For Hawk – Helen Macdonald

Best For: Grasping Nature’s Power This multi-award winning memoir has a most unusual premise. The author, when “a kind of madness set in” after the death of her father, drives up to Scotland from Cambridge to buy a goshawk for £800 and spends a year training it.

Do No Harm – Henry Marsh

Best For: Surgical Precision Marsh is a consultant neurosurgeon and this, his first volume of memoirs, is a glimpse inside his mind and, indeed, those of his patients. He has little time for NHS middle management, and is as precise with (literally) cutting remarks and insightful asides as he is with his scalpel.

Touching The Void – Joe Simpson

Best For: Life Or Death Scenarios Picture the scene (it starts on page 68 of this adventure classic, if you need some help): you are up a mountain, in difficult conditions, when you slip and fall. You are hanging from the rope tied to your companion, but he has to decide: if he doesn’t cut the rope, you likely both die. What would you do? A real-life version plays out in this astonishing story.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

Best For: Madness And Mayhem The inventor of gonzo journalism recalls – lord only knows how – a drugs binge to Vegas with his attorney. In lesser hands, this would have been boring, because reading about other people being high is almost always dull. With Thompson in charge, this trippy travelogue fizzles with mad energy.

Unreasonable Behaviour – Don McCullin

Best For: Life Behind A Lens As life stories go, this one takes some beating. A 15-year-old with no qualifications ends up as one of the great war photographers, taking in Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East. He also takes a bullet in the camera and is pushed to physical and emotional extremes in the theatres of conflict.

Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby

Best For: The Fannish Inquisition The best book ever written about what it’s like to be a football fan, despite the glut of titles that has followed it since it was published in 1992. Hornby’s Arsenal addiction can be mapped onto any club, and his insight and honesty ring so very true.

The Story Of The Streets – Mike Skinner

Best For: Rapper’s Delight It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to lyrics by The Streets that the book written by the man behind them displays both a love of words and a refreshingly honest look at the world. Part guide to the highs and lows of fame, part unpicking of hip-hop as an art form, all good.

How Not To Be A Boy – Robert Webb

Best For: The Male Comedians’ memoirs are ten-a-penny, but this one stands out because the star of Peep Show goes deep into the difficulties of being ‘different’ as a boy in the 1970s and 1980s, his complicated early family life and what it means to be a man in today’s world. Of course, it’s very funny, too.

Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson

Best For: Getting To Apple’s Core As well as the amazing tale of the rise, fall and rise again of Apple, and the stories behind its iconic products, Issacson’s official biog of geek god Jobs does one thing few official biogs do: print the negative stuff. Jobs could be, often, a douchebag, and learning that along with the positives makes this a must-read.

Fast Company – Jon Bradshaw

Best For: Taking A Punt Six profiles of legendary gamblers and chancers, including pool legend Minnesota Fats, tennis hustler Bobby Riggs and poker players Pug Pearson and Johnny Moss. “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned,” says Paul Newman as Eddie Felson in The Color Of Money. Here’s proof.

Killing Pablo – Mark Bowden

Best For: Crowning The Kingpin Even if you have watched Narcos on Netflix, this biography of Pablo Escobar will still make your jaw drop. That TV show, as good as it is, only scratched the surface. Bowden, a newspaper reporter, interviewed dozens of sources, allowing him to piece together Escobar’s remarkable ascent and descent.

The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe

Best For: Reaching For The Stars “This book grew out of some ordinary curiosity,” said its author in 1983, four years after it was published. Yet there is nothing ordinary about it. Wolfe wondered what made a man want to sit on top of a giant tube of fuel and be hurtled into space. In the lives of US Navy test pilots and the Mercury astronauts, he found the answers, and with them wrote an all-time great non-fiction book.

The Lost City of Z – David Grann

Best For: Exploring Your Options One of the reviews called this “the best story in the world, told perfectly” and that’s fair enough, really. In 1925, British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett went missing in Brazil while searching for a mythical settlement. This book investigates why, and the author embarks on his own Amazonian quest.

Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell

Best For: Secrets Of Success Gladwell is most well known for The Tipping Point, but this book about what high achievers have in common is a more in-depth and engaging read. A big part of what makes people make it big is the hard yards: doing something for 20 hours a week for a decade, or about 10,000 hours. Start tomorrow? Why not?

Hit Makers – Derek Thompson

Best For: Being In With The In Crowd If you want to know why Star Wars is so popular, and why nothing ever really goes viral, then Thompson is your man. His study of pop culture’s most beloved items ranges from Game Of Thrones and Taylor Swift to Pokémon Go and Spotify.

Factfulness – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Best For: Rebooting Your World Knowledge Bill Gates has a website on which he posts book recommendations, and liked this one so much he paid for every US college graduate in 2018 to get the ebook version. You might want to join those four million ex-students and be delighted to have much of what you know about the world put right by fascinating hard facts.

Bad Blood – John Carreyou

Best For: Fraud Or Flawed? It’s the story of the age: 19-year-old founds a medical start-up; raises $700m on the promise of a blood-testing machine that never really exists; her $10bn company collapses, with $600m of investors’ money gone. Was it just Silicon Valley hot air or a massive, deliberate fraud?

Doughnut Economics – Kate Raworth

Best For: The Future Of Your Money Experts are divided about Raworth’s ring-shaped model of how economics should be – the flow of money and trade keeping humans and Earth in good shape – but they are all talking about it. She recognises systems and effects, such as climate change and social movements, which standard economics ignore. Her argument is powerful.

Distraction

Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

Best For: First-Person Hilarity The best of several collections of brilliant essays from the American humourist deals partly with his moving to Normandy in France, and partly with his life before that, in rural America and New York City. One of these every morning on the way to work would banish commuter blues immediately.

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People – Toby Young

Best For: Tragic Tragicomedy Young is now a right-leaning columnist and social media ‘star’. In a previous life, he got a job on the American magazine Vanity Fair, and dropped the ball spectacularly. Anyone who’s ever felt like a square peg in a workplace round hole (so, that’ll be everyone, then) will find much to laugh at here.

Our Dumb Century – The Onion

Best For: Mocking The Decades In terms of jokes-that-work-per-page hit rate, this is probably the funniest book in the world. Before social media, The Onion’s parody news site was the funniest thing online (they still do pretty good). This special project magnificently takes the Michael out of news and newspapers from 1900 to 1999. In today’s fake news era, this has become even more hilarious.

Spoiled Brats – Simon Rich

Best For: Eye-Watering Laughs Rich writes the sort of charming and amusing essays that Steve Martin and Woody Allen used to do, and there are a dozen in this volume. But it’s the novella Sell Out that makes this a must-read. A Brooklyn pickle-maker falls into the brine and is fished out 100 years later, to face the hipsters who have taken over his town. Your correspondent cried with laughter.

I, Partridge – Steve Coogan

Best For: Pitch-Perfect Parody A spot-on mocking of celebrity autobiography and a celebration of Britain’s best-loved failed chat-show host and digital radio DJ. Even better than reading this with Partridge’s voice in your head is listening to the audiobook, with Coogan-Partridge in absolutely magnificent form.

The Photo Ark – Joel Sartore

Best For: All Creatures Great And Small As ambitions go, it’s lofty and admirable: take a picture of all 12,000 species living in the world’s wildlife sanctuaries and zoos before an increasing number of them become extinct. As of May 2018, 12 years in, Sartore was two-thirds of the way there. This book covers the first 6,000 species.

Essential Elements – Edward Burtynsky

Best For: Seeing The World Through New Eyes Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who uses a large camera to take vast-scale images of our changing planet, from seemingly endless rows of workers in Chinese factories to aerial views of oil fields in California. He makes the sort of images you can spend hours finding new things in.

Greatest Of All Time: A Tribute To Muhammad Ali – various

Best For: Knockout Storytelling Anyone saying “print is dead” hasn’t encountered this beautiful object, which has collector’s editions at £11,000 and a regular version 110 times cheaper yet almost as powerful. Ali is still sport’s most celebrated story, and the words and pictures on the 652 foot-square pages here tell that tale in the absolute best possible way.

Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern – various

Best For: Design Classics, UK Style A hero of industrial design as good as his more famous peers at Apple or Braun, Grange devised dozens of iconic products including Kodak cameras, Anglepoise lamps, Wilkinson Sword razors, parking meters and the Intercity 125 train. This catalogue of his career is a beautifully designed book full of beautifully designed things.

The Classic Car Book – Giles Chapman

Best For: Four-Wheeled Nirvana Quite simply a treasure trove of thousands of photos of awesome automobiles from the 1940s to the 1980s, with nerdy spec data and potted histories of cars, marques and makers.

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mydreamcatcherblogme · 7 years ago

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Review: Ender's Game [Ender Series #1]

Title: Ender's Game Author: Orson Scott Card Genre: Fantasy/ Science Fiction Publication date: 1994 Summary: In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister. Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives. I ought to start by saying that I am not that much of a Sci-Fi reader, or at least I've never given the genre a proper chance. Apart from Star Wars, Stargate and the Startrek movies I've never watched/read an interesting sci-fi story. Until now. Ender's Game, the first book of the quartet, by Orson Scott Card is indeed a marvelous adventure full of action, beautiful prose and deep, complicated themes about human nature that stay with you long after you've put the book down. The story revolves around three exceptional siblings - Ender, Valentine and Peter. In a world where every family has a quota of two children Ender is an Third, an oddity, allowed by the government due to

the extraordinary intellect and abilities of his older siblings. But while Peter is deemed too vicious and Valentine - too emphatic, Ender possess all the quality the Military seeks for the commander of Earth's space armada. Ender is sent to Battle School where he needs to learn to battle in zero gravity, learn tactics and become a leader. The sad thing is that he is only six years old when he goes there and is constantly belittled, laughed at and shunned by the others. Still, he perseveres, holding onto the thought of the buggers, the alien race bound to destroy the human race, and the need to prove himself. I don't know how I always end up reading books where the main characters are so much younger than me but Ender is an exception to every rule. While it does show he is but a child in rare occasions his intellect and analogical (and sometimes savage) thinking intimidated me a great deal. I love smart characters, not just smart-ass, sarcastic ones, and how can I not fall in love with a genius? I particularly enjoyed his time in Battle School. It was just like a video game. Action after action while the difficulty increases with each level. And while Ender did show what he is made of at every round, it looked so natural, so deserving that I was

simply blown away. If you tell me than an eight-year-old is capable if such advanced analytical thinking, making complicated decisions in a split second and literally capable of killing another person I would have told you to check your head. Or that the kid was a psycho. But with Ender - it is realistic and it is well-devised and laid out that you don't even stop to think about it. It made me feel a bit inadequate but at the same time I was so entertained and amazed by Ender that I read page after page until I found myself staring at the back cover. I assume that many of you have watched the movie from 2013 - it was an amazing one and believe it or not it was so close to the book that I was speechless. The only thing that was not developed in the movie is the role Valentine and Peter play after Ender is sent to Battle School and that is to become incognito spokesmen in net government channels in order to gain enough influence and followers that when the inevitable war on Earth starts they would be able to govern it and shape the new world into a better one. Yeah, we are talking about 10 and 12-year-old :D When I was twelve I was devastated I didn't get my letter to Hogwarts. But in any case the main focus is Ender and his journey to becoming, or rather being shaped into the Fleet Commander the Earth needs against the buggers, an alien race who had attacked Earth many decades ago. I personally loved the idea of the conflict, the fear and violence which drives all humans in everything they do. This theme, as well as the theme of the human nature in the face of their own extinction

is among the most discussed in Card's story. There are so many memorable phrases not just because they sound nice but because they are timeless and you can use them for humans beings at any point. “The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and one will ever save you.” With the risk of spoilers I'll allow myself the small liberty of vaguely mentioning the end. If you are reading the book after watching the movie then you won't be able to experience the full sense of having your teeth punched out with surprise. I remember my reaction when I watched the movie - I was staring with my mouth agape for good two minutes - and even now when I was reading the book I started getting anxious as the moment of truth neared :) I love surprises and Orson Scott Card did his job splendidly. This is by far one of my favorite book endings of all time. I am sure that you'll also enjoy it. I would give Ender's Game a well-deserved 5-star rating. I am very hopeful for the next books and I am sure that if he keeps up on the same course I surely won't be disappointed. What about you? Have you read the book? What rating would you give? What are your thoughts and takes on Ender's Game? Read the full article

#aliens #annihilation #battles-school #buggers #children #commander #ender #games #genius #sci-fi #spaceship #third #war

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years ago

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The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-100-books-every-man-should-read/

The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

Classics

Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway

A Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

1984 – George Orwell

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

The Catcher In The Rye – J.D.Salinger

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

The Odyssey – Homer

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Heart Of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler

The Lord of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Modern

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

The Sportswriter – Richard Ford

The 25th Hour – David Benioff

We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

The Watchmen – Alan Moore

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Robert Harris – Fatherland

The Stand – Stephen King

High-Rise – J.G. Ballard

A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Spies – Michael Frayn

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

Style, Fitness & Mind-Enhancement

ABC of Men’s Fashion – Hardy Amies

Men of Style – Josh Sims

Men and Style – David Coggins

Thinking, Fast And Slow – Daniel Kahneman

How Not To Be Wrong – Jordan Ellenberg

Happiness By Design – Paul Dolan

The Chimp Paradox – Steve Peters

Reasons To Stay Alive – Matt Haig

The World’s Fittest Book – Ross Edgley

Feet In The Clouds – Richard Askwith

Real Fast Food – Nigel Slater

Five Quarters – Rachel Roddy

Roast Chicken And Other Stories – Simon Hopkinson

Made In India: Cooked In Britain – Meera Sodha

Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker

How To Be A Woman – Caitlin Moran

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

Sit Down and Be Quiet – Michael James Wong

Knowledge

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

Prisoners Of Geography – Tim Marshall

Stasiland – Anna Funder

The Plantagenets – Dan Jones

Life 3.0 – Max Tegmark

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – Carlo Rovelli

The Sixth Extinction – Elizabeth Kolbert

Behave – Robert Sapolsky

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes

Inspiration

Long Walk To Freedom – Nelson Mandela

I Am Zlatan – Zlatan Ibrahimovich

H Is For Hawk – Helen Macdonald

Do No Harm – Henry Marsh

Touching The Void – Joe Simpson

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

Unreasonable Behaviour – Don McCullin

Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby

The Story Of The Streets – Mike Skinner

How Not To Be A Boy – Robert Webb

Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson

Fast Company – Jon Bradshaw

Killing Pablo – Mark Bowden

The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe

The Lost City of Z – David Grann

Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell

Hit Makers – Derek Thompson

Factfulness – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Bad Blood – John Carreyou

Doughnut Economics – Kate Raworth

Distraction

Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People – Toby Young

Our Dumb Century – The Onion

Spoiled Brats – Simon Rich

I, Partridge – Steve Coogan

The Photo Ark – Joel Sartore

Essential Elements – Edward Burtynsky

Greatest Of All Time: A Tribute To Muhammad Ali – various

Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern – various

The Classic Car Book – Giles Chapman

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