#also i am posting this on march 21st which IS the day that i’ve marked as renée��s passing 🥺 so pour one out for her!!

[lumiereandcogsworth]

heyyyyyyy hey wait I forgot I follow up on this, you mentioned there was tea regarding Adam’s dad and his first wife 👁️ is that something you’re willing to share bc I am all ears

ahhhh yes yes yes. my LORE!!!!!!! i am absolutely happy to spill that tea. i did indeed mention here that adam is the product of his father’s second wife, not his first. so let me divulge all the stuff that went down before adam came around!!

so, first, some backstory on louis, adam’s father. he was his father, king antoine’s, firstborn. four years later, he has a brother named adrien. adrien dies of illness around age five, and young louis is devastated, but his father is tough and hard and tells his son to buck up! crying is for the ladies. a few years later, louis’s mother, anne michelle, also dies. louis doesn’t cope well with this at all, but he’s so scared of his abusive father that he hides his feelings once again. soon, king antoine remarries. he and his new wife have a daughter, and they name her genevieve after her mother. they entirely dote on genevieve, completely neglecting louis, leaving him to his own devices. he becomes miserable and cruel, and an entirely reckless young man.

when prince louis is 24, king antoine has a health scare that causes him concern. he fears he may not live much longer, and he sees that his son is in no place to take the throne, should he die. so, he arranges for his reckless son to marry an upstanding young lady, to ensure that louis could become king at the moment of antoine’s passing. louis is less than thrilled about his bride, but when they meet on their wedding day, there is actually a spark between them. her name is agnès claudine marie. she was chosen because their marriage would be politically advantageous, as well as look very perfect to the public eye. louis was all ready to loathe this new wife of his. but he just… didn’t.

agnès was firey and stood her ground. she challenged him constantly and louis was pretty shocked by it. (but also… turned on by it as well.) louis was still a very shitty person, like, agnès did Not make him a better man. but they sort of got along in their own twisted way. they appeared a perfect, prim and proper couple to the public eye, but behind closed doors they were very just… toxic and messy. and what made matters worse was that king antoine died shortly after they were married, so louis had to grapple with his father’s death (sprouting the classic, complicated grief that comes along with losing an abusive father), and handle being king, all while never being mentally or emotionally prepared for it, nor having anyone to lean on in the process. it’s ROUGH.

louis had such a quick temper and was insanely jealous. he got pissed at agnès for even so much as talking to another man at a party, even if he was right there by her side. after the parties would end, he’d throw things and break things and scream at her and she’d scream right back, bullying him just as much as he berated her. these arguments almost always ended in ridiculously hot sex. which is funny and i don’t know why i feel the need to mention it but. as a fake historian it’s my duty to share all fake facts. anyway.

eventually, louis and agnès had a daughter. they named her claudine. louis doesn’t feel MUCH about this, as he very much needs a son to be his heir, but he does care enough about agnès to not completely despise his daughter. he’s a pretty indifferent father at this point. although i’m sure he always made claudine feel fairly useless, just for being a girl.

about six years later, agnès became pregnant with their second child. tragedy struck, however, when she died in childbirth. she delivered a boy, but he did not live longer than a day.

THIS is really the turning point where louis goes from bad to the absolute worst. it’s all buried and complicated inside him but he’s truly devastated by agnès’s death. she was always so alive with passion he just never expected to lose her. and the fact that he loses their son, HIS SON, within a day, it just breaks him for good. he goes from awful to downright ruthless. he grows more wicked toward his daughter, seeing too much of her mother in her and blaming her for it. blaming her too, for not being his much-needed male heir. he also becomes a terror in his court, and in general just a horrible person to be around.

unfortunately at this point, the psychological damage that has been done to him just really causes him to spiral out of control. he’s blinded by unprocessed grief and unfounded rage. and the people are in an uproar! who will be their heir! where is the dauphin of france!! all this just makes him desperate to find another wife to give him a male heir. it’s all he cares about now. so, less than a year later, louis found someone. it was similar to prologue adam’s parties where the villages and towns were taxed to send all their maidens. and renée elizabeth aubert was the only daughter of five children. her parents OF COURSE wanted to give her the opportunity to marry THE KING!

and… it worked. louis saw her and found her to be beautiful. (oh, shall i mention here that he’s 30 and she’s 17?) renée wasn’t as tenacious as agnès but she was gorgeous and held her head high. she intrigued him. (and her mentioning that she had four brothers was definitely a factor for louis.) so, he courted her and married her swiftly.

renée settled into her new life as queen. louis distracted and enticed her with the finest clothes and jewelry, making her feel so very adored. she tried to get along with her step-daughter, claudine, who was around 7 years old at this point, but poor princess claudine was so traumatized from losing her mother and from louis’s abuse, so she didn’t really want to connect much with renée. so, claudine spend the vast majority of her time with her governess, who was basically raising her fully at that point.

soon, renée became pregnant, and successfully delivered a boy! huzzah!! adam is here!!

for a few years, things carry on. louis grows more twisted and disinterested in his wife and children. he hardly sees claudine, and he’s disappointed in adam thus far. (adam didn’t start speaking or walking until he was like 2-3, so louis was convinced he was just “stupid” and they all got worried he was possibly deaf. but renée knew her boy wasn’t deaf or stupid, because she actually spent time with him and could see that his mind just worked differently. and he always looked up at her when she called his name.) regardless, louis was also getting increasingly frustrated with renée, because she kept miscarrying pregnancies. (i think giving birth to adam very nearly killed her, and left damage that just made carrying any future pregnancy to full term impossible.) so, louis was now stuck with a useless daughter and a worthless son and a dysfunctional wife. and he made sure they all knew it! he continued to drink and be abusive. claudine sort of gets out of it, eventually going to live in paris for private tutoring and finishing school.

but! claudine would still come home for christmas, and other events. well, approaching one christmas, louis and renée had been away on a trip for diplomatic reasons. on the trip, renée had caught some sort of illness. when they returned, they kept adam away from her (for fear that the heir would catch it) but unfortunately, princess claudine was there, and caught the illness. renée recovered in a couple of weeks. the princess, however, died. she was 12 years old.

adam was 4, and doesn’t really have any memories of his sister claudine. especially since they didn’t really grow up under the same roof. but anyway, louis is just angered by yet ANOTHER death in this godforsaken family of his. and he, despite caring very little for claudine, IS saddened because she WAS his last piece of agnès. he decided to blame renée, since she’s the one who brought the illness home.

well. time carries on. some years later, when adam is nine and a half, he loses his mother, queen renée, to illness as well. he’s left alone with his father, and you know how the story goes…

anyway my take is that the de beaumont family is quite literally cursed by death and for generations they’re just plagued to lose people but Just Enough survive to maintain the family line. and adam, breaking his own separate curse by the enchantress, does then, in turn, break the beaumont family death curse as well. because true love conquers ALL. thank you 💙

[stealingpotatoes]

I am OBSESSED with your Desmond lives AU!! I want Shaun and Rebecca to be able to give Desmond all the hugs, I want Desmond to be able to choose to be an Assassin, to be able to help save the world again. Also, I am very curious about how you would resurrect Desmond, because I’ve had similar thoughts on such an AU, but I currently stick it near the end of Valhalla with the stuff that happens there. If you ever feel like expanding on it, I'd be super excited to see more!!!

first of all, AH THANK YOU!!! Yes those are ALL points that are very important to the Des Lives AU! Second of all, thank you so much for this ask in general!!! I was hoping someone would send an ask like this so I’d get an excuse to talk abt the AU more lmao XD!! I made this AU back in March last year, so there’s no Valhalla stuff in it, and it’s set right after/ during the Odyssey DLCs. 

The long story short for my Desmond Rez (rezmond, if you will) is “shroud of eden, abstergo, and some Isu bullshit”. The long story long, however, is uh- you know what? I’m going to use this opportunity to explain the vague story I worked out last year -- but dw, I WILL get to the full ressurection explanation I thought through. However... I’m gonna have to tell the story in smaller parts because I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to write the whole thing out right now. So rez comes later and not in this post. 

also uh-- before we start: I’m going to apologise for like… everything about the way I wrote this. It’s sort-of half fic, half that-way-your-friends-colloquially-tell-stories-that-you-can’t-keep-up-with. Mainly the latter. If you can make sense of this babbling, well done.

 Anyways, without further ado, welcome to:

POTES TRIES TO EXPLAIN HER DESMOND (SORTA) LIVES AU: PART ONE

On the 21st of December 2012, Desmond Miles dies. 

It’s not for nothing -- his sacrifice saves the entire world from a solar flare -- but he is dead. big ripz. The Assassins, his family, do not manage to recover his body. Abstergo gets it first. The Assassins hold a funeral as best they can. They mourn (all in their own ways), they keep fighting (for his memory), and they try to move on (they can’t). 

On the 21st of December 2012, Desmond Miles died -- so when he shows up in a city in October 2018, almost 6 years later, it’s a bit of a shock for everyone. What’s even more of a shock is the fact he’s glowing like an Isu and has some abilities he DEFINITELY didn’t have when he died.

So Desmond wakes up in the middle of some city in he doesn’t know where (yeah ok i just never really worked out where the secret lab would be), with 1. no idea of how he got there and 2. no idea why his arms are glowing like that. He doesn’t get much time to think about it because then there’re a load of Abstergo goons with guns surrounding him. Des may have no idea what’s happening, but he knows one thing: when u see an Abstergo, it’s on sight. So he’s fighting them -- which is admittedly not fun or easy when you’re in the middle of a road and only have your fists as weapons. It’s not going well and then someone definitely manages to shoot Desmond which is very bad -- but then Des feels some very weird (but not unfamiliar) feeling and when he looks up from the bullet wound, every one of the Abstergos are on the floor???? He doesn’t think to check if they’re dead, just legs it out of there lmao. 

//

Elsewhere, in an Assassin safehouse in an undisclosed location (can you tell I just didn’t think about the geography of anything), Mr Shaun Hastings is chilling on a balcony after a mission well done. Good for him. Then Rebecca Crane (queen ilu) yells “Shaun?” from inside. 

“Rebecca?” 

“Come inside. Now.”

Shaun immediately does so because he assumes it’s important or they’re under threat. “What happened? Have we been compromised?”

Rebecca doesn’t answer. 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Shaun says, mostly joking and with a little smirk -- though Becs looks spooked. 

“Desmond’s alive.”

Shaun’s not smirking anymore. “What?”

“Desmond’s... he’s alive.”

“What are you talking about? Are you high?” he’s totally about to look at her eyes to see if they’re all dilated and druggy. 

“No Shaun, I mean it!” Becs harshly shoves her tablet into his hands. 

Shaun doesn’t really know what he’s expecting to see when he looks down at the screen. What he’s not really expecting to see is Desmond Miles, who’s been dead for six years, fighting a load of Abstergo people -- while lined in Isu markings (also he’s not wearing a shirt forgot got to mention). ??? But wtf??!?! Desmond’s dead. That’s...

“It’s security camera footage from [the city]... About two hours ago.” Rebecca then swipes through more footage with shaky hands and explains that Des very violently burst out of an Abstergo facility in the city with glowing eyes and light leaking out of him (almost like an Apple of Eden). Then the glowing eyes and shining lights shuts off abruptly and Des is standing in the middle of the road looking very confused at his precursor-ass arms and chest. But Shaun is barely listening to what she’s saying and barely even looking at the screen. 

“Where did you get this?” Shaun asks with a hollow voice, not looking up. 

“The Initiates.” (bc who else)

Shaun looks at it again, then at Rebecca, and he’s mildly aware of the fact he’s slightly tearing up; “That’s fake. That can’t be him. He’s dead, Becs. We both saw the…” They both saw the autopsy footage the ac4 researcher got from Abstergo -- or at least, tried to watch it; they shut it off as soon as Shaun ran to the bathroom to throw up and Rebecca quickly joined him. They spent the rest of that night crying and drinking way too much. 

“He died.” Shaun concludes firmly. 

And so Becs is all like “yeah but what if he didn’t?? We need to find him. We need to investigate this.” There’s a determination in her eyes and Shaun knows he’s not going to be able to convince her to drop this -- not that he would. Desmond might be alive, and there is no way they’re going to leave him again. 

They’re both standing there in pure shock and confusion, not saying anything. 

Rebecca’s comm device lights up and starts buzzing, snapping them out of their general ????-ness. Becs goes to her desk to grab it, glances at the caller id and then shows it to Shaun. It’s William Miles. 

The two of them share a Look. They know what he’s calling about -- what else would it be? There’s a stilted moment of neither of them doing anything before Rebecca finally accepts the call. “William?” 

“How quickly can you and Shaun get to [city]?” William sounds shaken -- probably the same way Rebecca and Shaun are -- which is a very weird way to hear the Mentor of the Brotherhood sound. He’s seen the footage, hasn’t he? 

“In a few hours,” Rebecca replies. 

“Good. You need to get there as soon as possible.” 

Everyone’s silent for a few moments. 

“Is this about Desmond?” Rebecca asks. Dumb question. 

There’s a pause. “You’ll be briefed on the ground.” And then he hangs up before Shaun or Rebecca can yell at him.

This is all moving very fast. Shaun and Rebecca share another look. Guess they’re going to [city].  ???

// 

Fast forward several hours and Rebecca and Shaun are in The City [might just have to make the city london bc it’s the one city i actually know well -- however for plot reasons we’ll see later, a swiss city might be better… moving on!]. They get to an assassin base and meet up with Galina Voronina and 2 local assassins. Idk if you’ve read the comics, but to sum things up quickly, Galina and her team were investigating and then ended Project Phoenix -- so Galina now really wants to find out if the whole Desmond thing has anything to do with that. 

Galina also wants to help Shaun and Rebecca get their friend back. They’re her friends, but equally she just lost one of her teammates to Abstergo (while ending Phoenix like 2 months ago, in the comics) and is uh- idk how to say it but she wants to help Shaun & Becs who have a chance to get their lost teammate back.

What follows is cool gang-gang trying to track down any trace of Desmond. You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to find a person who literally glows, but Desmond’s had centuries of Assassin training and knows how to hide lol.. which is making the Assassins’ job harder lol. 

What’s making it even harder is the Assassins know they have to be quick because they know Abstergo is gonna be looking for Desmond too -- and they have way more resources and stuff. That being said, they’re also currently dealing with the fact one of their building and a decent amount of their guards just got absolutely mullered by weird-glowing-desmond. 

The third issue with their entire thing is that they have no idea what they’re going to find when they find Desmond -- or if he even is Desmond. Is he going to be the man they knew but with weird powers? an Abstergo isu-clone? evil? they don’t know, and so they know they’ve got to be wary with him. 

The Assassin gang spend some time (a couple of days at the very most) trying to track Desmond down. Rebecca is using all the tech she can get her hacker mitts on to find a trace of him and equally throw Abstergo off Des’ trail. 

Soon enough, they get a solid lead -- don’t ask for the specifics, i don’t know them. But they get a lead, and it winds them up in an abandoned apartment building or also abandoned building site or something (a building in the city where there aren’t any people, basically). 

Galina scans the place with Eagle Vision and she’s like “There is something very strange about this place.” (someone?) But she doesn’t see a person-shape anywhere. The 5 of them are hopeful but somewhat on edge. 

They go about searching for any sign of Desmond. Galina’s pretty sure her Eagle Vision is just… Messing Up A Lot lol. Like something’s trying to heck with it. So she’s not quite sure it’s working correctly when a load of red figures appear somewhere below them. 

She becomes a lot more sure when the red figures come into sight and START SHOOTING AT THEM! IT’S ABSTERGO!! CRAP! they found them!!

The assassins get down and a really cool fight scene w them vs the Abstergos in the building/ building site starts playing out. Woo Shaun and Rebecca electro-hidden-blade moments!! The fight splits the squad up and Shaun and Rebecca are away from Galina & the others -- but they dispatch the Abstergo guards near them.

They’re about to radio in that they’re all okay/ check if Galina & co are also good when they hear a slightly-too-loud footstep. They whip around to see an Abstergo guard aiming right at them, too far for either of them to get him before he shoots them. crap crap crap.

They would have been shot -- if someone hadn’t come up behind the Abstergo guard and snapped his neck (ouch). 

The Abstergo drops to the ground, revealing the person who saved them and… Shaun and Rebecca stare in shock. 

They’re both looking at Desmond Miles. 

Desmond Miles, who is very much alive (and wearing a hoodie that is 100% stolen). And… with a load of glowing yellow lines on his face. But it’s Desmond -- it’s Desmond for sure. Holy shit.  

Desmond doesn’t seem so shocked, only relieved to see them. Then his expression turns into serious confusion; 

“What the fuck is happening?”

///

ok sorry leaving it there for now! hope you enjoyed what is here will continue soon

[finnishcrimestory]

Anni Törn

Anni Törn, 29 years old, was healthy, well educated young woman from Savonlinna. She had always loved writing about her life, so she did it in a form of diaries and her blog. Her blog surrounded a lot around her active lifestyle, and she had plans to compete in figure competitions. She loved to travel and experience different cultures, so she volunteered in Tanzania, where she apparently helped local orphans and visited schools. When she returned to Finland she started to study BBA in Mikkeli, but left to be an au pair in The Hague, Netherlands during the same fall. In 2017 Törn moved to Rovaniemi with her sister, because she started an internship in a local insurance company. After the internship ended, Törn applied for a job from the same company, but this time in Mikkeli. The man who interviewed her was 33 year old Jukka Hyttinen.

In March 2018 Anni got the job and moved to Mikkeli. She did not particularly like moving and living in Mikkeli, but she was satisfied with it since it was very close to her hometown Savonlinna. Törn’s boss was the same man who interviewed her, Hyttinen. They grew close and very soon they started dating. According to Hyttinen, they had good chemistry between them and the relationship moved ahead fast. Very soon they stopped using protection and tried to conceive. Törn’s family liked Hyttinen, even though Törn’s mother was a bit confused because the relationship moved forward so fast. Törn’s family described Hyttinen to be polite person who dressed neatly and was ambitious.

Törn and Hyttinen did not live together immediately, but they had plans on getting a house together where they could build a life. In summer 2018 they carried out with this plan and purchased a house from Mikkeli. During this time Törn also revealed to her family that she was pregnant. According to Törn’s mother, she was happy and thriving. The pregnancy was very happy news for Törn, and her friends were glad she had found such a good man for herself.

On 21st of July 2018 Törn and Hyttinen were invited to a birthday party. Hyttinen was quite new to all the guests present, but they welcomed him well. Törn of course did not drink any alcohol during the night, but Hyttinen drank even for her behalf. The host of the party also noticed how much Hyttinen drank, and according to him it was over 20 servings. After 12 am people started to leave from the party and the people left were Törn, Hyttinen, the one who’s birthday they were celebrating and his girlfriend. At some point the topic of the conversation changed and they started to discuss Törn’s ex boyfriend. Hyttinen got very upset because of this and asked if they could change the subject. However Hyttinen himself continued talking about the ex. Törn tried to make Hyttinen change the subject by talking about other things, but Hyttinen did not stop. According to people present, Hyttinen’s behaviour changed and he was very angry and uncomfortable. The situation escalated and Törn yelled at Hyttinen and slapped him. After this Törn was going to leave the party and suggested that Hyttinen should walk back home, not come with her car. Hyttinen however managed to get into the car and they left together. 

On the next day Törn’s family got worried when they couldn’t reach her with a phone. Törn’s brother, Antti called Hyttinen who told that he is in Joensuu and couldn’t tell where Törn was. Hyttinen had fled the argument from last night to his hometown in Joensuu. Antti described the call as follows: “When Hyttinen called me and told Anni was missing, I knew he had done something to her, because I’ve been living in a world where I’ve witnessed horrible things to happen for so long. I wen’t to Joensuu and started to search for Anni.”

Antti and Törn’s mother made a missing persons report on a Sunday night approximately at 10:30 pm. Törn’s mother also called some hospitals and asked if Törn would be there. Antti searched for her from her previous apartment in Mikkeli, Hyttinen’s previous apartment in Savonlinna and from Joensuu where he met Hyttinen. He had been asking about Törn and noticed a bruise on Hyttinen’s hand, which had been bandaged. After this, Antti informed police of everything and they decided to search Hyttinen’s apartment and interrogate him.

Antti also wrote a post on Facebook about Törn’s disappearance. He wrote: “Anni Törn has gone missing on the night between Saturday and Sunday. Anybody who knows something of her movements, could you please contact me. And Anni, if you see this, my dear sister contact me. I’m dying of worry.”

When the police talked to Hyttinen, he told that on Sunday Törn had a meeting with a man who had been serving time in a prison. He apparently referred to Törn’s ex boyfriend who was currently in prison. The police contacted the prison and found out that the man in question was not on a furlough or anything, so he couldn’t not have been meeting with Törn. The police searched Hyttinen’s apartment but didn’t find anything. However they noticed that the shower curtain was missing from there. Törn was never late or missed her work shifts, so the police decided to wait til Monday to see if she would go to work. This didn’t happen so she was declared missing. 

The police interrogated Hyttinen who told them about the argument and that Törn had woken him up during the night and told him that he had to leave. Hyttinen told that he had done that and left the apartment. He also told that Törn had started to show aggression towards him after she got pregnant. The police looked into Hyttinen’s movements and he indeed had left the apartment during that night. When they were searching his car, they found grass from his car’s bumper. This was suspicious to the police.

When the police talked to the friend from the party, they had told that Hyttinen had called them on Sunday. He had told that he and Törn had became reconciled right away after they arrived home. He told that he however couldn’t sleep, and that was the reason he had left the apartment. 

Törn’s brother Antti took part in the search very closely since the beginning. He used social media, volunteered as a searcher and gathered other searchers as well. He noticed contradictions in the things Hyttinen told and sensed that things are not like Hyttinen has told. Antti had visited Hyttinen’s apartment and noticed weird blood marks in the staircase. Antti called Hyttinen and tried to find out about the blood. This is what Antti told about the call: “If something has happened, tell me now. I’ve thought of you being a person who has backbone, so I hope there is enough man in you to be honest with things.” Hyttinen had answered that he knows more than he has told. 

When 4 days had passed of Törn’s disappearance, the police started to investigate it as a manslaughter and Hyttinen became their main suspect. On 26th of July 2018 Hyttinen called the main inspector of the case and asked if they could talk. Hyttinen was brought to police station, and while he was there, crime scene insvestigators investigated his apartment. Hyttinen’s bathroom was very clean and they could find clear remnants of detergent, which meant that during the cleaning, detergent had been used with large amounts. Even though the bathroom was cleaned very well, the police found Törn’s blood from there. 

(In the picture above, you can see police arresting Hyttinen.)

Again Hyttinen told about the argument which had continued in the apartment. In the middle of the argument Hyttinen had wanted to take a shower, but Törn had prevented him of doing that. Hyttinen claimed that Törn had been kicking and hitting him. Hyttinen confessed that he had hit Törn. First once, then twice and in the result of the third hit, Törn had collapsed on the floor and lost consciousness. After that Hyttinen had called his friend and told that Törn is not alive anymore. Hyttinen had packed Törn in his car and driven to Joensuu. During the drive, Hyttinen had dropped Törn’s body off of a bridge. 

The police searched the waters but they did not discover the body. The police started to suspect what Hyttinen had told so they contacted the friend to who Hyttinen had called after killing Törn. He told that Hyttinen had revealed that he will bury Törn in his parent’s property in Joensuu. During the interrogation, Hyttinen told the police that he had buried Törn in his parents property. The police started the investigation there, and very quickly a sniffer dog found the grave. According to the coroner, Törn had big bruises and sores in her head and legs. Törn had been laying on the bathroom floor, while she had been hit in the head and choked. Bruising from Törn’s body revealed that she had been kicked, hit and that she had been hit with a triangle shaped object. All this abuse had resulted to Törn getting a brain damage that resulted to her death.

Hyttinen didn’t really comment of the abuse, but according to some sources he had told that he hit Törn three times which killed her, and to other sources he remembered holding her down. He had tried to stop the blood from flowing with a towel, which he later threw away alongside with the shower curtain. At one point Hyttinen told that he had dropped strawberries on the floor, which was why he had cleaned there so well. 

The trial

During the trial, Hyttinen only confessed on the abuse, but all the evidence from the body told otherwise. Törn had suffered hard and long lasting abuse and she couldn’t have defended herself. Hyttinen tried to defend himself by telling that he does not remember the situation so well, but he did remember things that suited him some way. The court was not happy about this, and were able to find out that Hyttinen had continued the abuse even after noticing that Törn wasn’t conscious anymore. Hyttinen told that Törn as well had been violent, but the police weren’t able to find any evidence from his body to back this up. Törn’s family had never seen Törn to act violently, and they don’t believe that she was violent towards Hyttinen. Törn’s mother told that Törn was that type of person who always tried to avoid conflict and not take part in arguments. 

Hyttinen was sentenced to 9 years and 10 months to prison for manslaughter and violation of the grave. He complained to the court of appeals but the sentence stayed the same.

After

Törn’s funeral was on 1st of September 2018, where her loved ones ate her bravura, cheesecake. Törn’s sister Riitta wished that people would remember Anni for something else than just a victim of manslaughter. She described Anni to be brave, who was not afraid to make her dreams come true. Anni was very close to her family, especially her brother Antti and they were in contact daily. People said that if Anni ever got any problems in her life, she would always tell Antti first. Anni was people loving, cheerful and bright woman. When reading articles of her and the case, I got the general image of her being very kind and lovely person. I truly hope her loved ones can find peace in their lives, and keep Anni’s legacy alive.

[honeyjaez]

A solo stan who is thinking about checking other groups out?

There is nothing wrong with being a solo stan (as in only liking 1 group) as long as you are kind and courteous to other groups.

Also this post might not be for you.

But if you are a solo stan (usually starting with BTS) or just in need of finding new groups and thinking about spreading your wings here are some suggestions. 🙂

When I first got into kpop way back in the 2010 years I had no clue what I had stumbled on and I only liked 2 groups max for the longest time because I didnt know about any other groups. Since then I’ve come to love so many groups that I wish I knew about sooner.

Now mind you. I am primarily a boy group stan so there are not a lot of girl groups on her so please forgive me. -*edit I’ve decided to do a part 2 of just girl groups so stay tuned

This is also under the impression you already know BTS and their brother group TXT.

also if your fav is not on this list I dearly apologize. I picked groups that might be a good intro to like multiple groups.

Groups down below ˅˅˅˅

SEVENTEEN:

-13 Member group under Pledis Entertainment.

- Debuted May 26, 2015

-Popular in Korea and slowly gaining popularity internationally.

-AMAZING dancers.

-Like the synchronization is unreal for 13 people.

- Divided into 3 sub-units; Performance Unit, Hip-Hop Unit, and Vocal Unit

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Don’t Wanna Cry. Hit, Clap

iKON:

-Currently a 6 Member group under YG Entertainment

-Debuted September 15th, 2015

-Addicting Chorus’s and bad ass rapping

-Their Leader B.I recently left the group early this year, but fans are hopeful for a reunion. But that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate OT7 right now.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Bling Bling, Love Scenario, B-Day

ONEUS:

-6 Member group under RBW Entertainment

-Debuted January 9th, 2019.

-They are a crazy good for a rookie group and have a lot of bangers.

-Their choreography is no joke

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Valkyrie (Debut song), Twilight, Lit

(Seriously they have no bad songs)

NCT 127:

(NCT is actually a massive group divided up into sub-units)

-10 Member group under SM Entertainment.

-Debuted July 10th, 2016

-Crazy Powerful dance moves.

-Look mean, but are actually sweethearts.

-Gaining popularity in the west.

-Some songs to introduce you to them:Cherry Bomb, Touch, Highway to Heaven

NCT Dream:

-Currently a 6 member group under SM Entertainment

-Debuted August 24th, 2016

-Cute Charm and Powerful stage presence. 

-NCT Dream is as this moment not a fixed unit and based on idols age.

-When they get old enough the members “graduate” and join other NCT sub-units

-Mark of NCT 127 was once the leader but he reached the age limit and “Graduated” and thus no longer apart of the group.

-Many fans detest this concept and wish SM to make them a fixed unit but that doens’t mean you can’t love OT6 or OT7 at the moment.

-Some songs to introduce you to them:  Boom, We Go Up, Go

Stray Kids:

-8  member group under JYP Entertainment

-Debuted March 25th, 2018

-Gained a lot of popularity through their survival show of the same name

-Strong and Meaningful songs that deal a lot with self struggle and depression. 

-All songs are produced by members Bang Chan, Changbin and Han who make up the sub-unit 3racha.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Hellavator Levanter, Voices, My Pace, Double Knot, God’s Menu, Back Door (I mean this list can go on and on)

GOT7:

-7 Member group under JYP Entertainment

-Debuted January 16th, 2014

-Another amazing dancing group

-Strong Charisma on stage.

-Variety Kings

-Goofballs

-Some songs to introduce you to them:Hard Carry, Eclipse, You Are 

VAV:

-7 Member group under A Team Entertainment

-Debuted October 31st, 2015.

-Severely underrated 

-Has lost some members and gains some as well.

-They work super hard year round with hardly and rest.

-Please stan VAV.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: She’s Mine, Poison, Spotlight. 

ASTRO:

-6 Member group under Fantagio Entertainment

-Debuted February 23rd, 2016.

-Cute, Charming group.

-The boys are actual angels.

-The group is a breath of fresh air.

-Super Talented.

-Addicting songs that just make you smile

-Can have the same concept as literally any other group but still make it their own.

-Vocals are beyond this world.

-Also just overall very pretty.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: All Night, Blue Flame, Baby, Always You. 

The Boyz:

-11 Member group under Cre.Ker Entertainment

-Debuted December 6th, 2017

-A really fun and charming group.

-Their song’s are very addicting

-Dance like songs

-Sweet sweet boys who deserve love.

-Member Hwall left in October of 2019 due to health reasons 

-Some songs to introduce you to them: D.D.D, No Air, Giddy Up 

Day6:

-5 Member group under JYP Entertainment

-Debuted September 7th, 2015

-An actual band so they don’t dance on stage

-but crazy talented

-Their songs are known to make people feel happier.

-I don’t think it is possible to have a bad Day6 song.

-Jae’s twitter is quite possible my favorite place on this earth.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: I smile. Time of our lives. Colors, I need Somebody. Dance Dance. Literally any of them.

PENTAGON:

-Currently a 9 Member group under Cube Entertainment.

-Debuted October 10th, 2016.

-Also Underrated.

-Such amazing discography.

-UNIQUE VOICES 

-Strong vocals and major crackheads

-Went through their survival show “Pentagon Maker” and debuted as 10 members.

-Former Member E’Dawn was basically kicked out of Cube and Pentagon after revealing he was dating label mate HyunA. Fans are still hopeful for an OT10 reunion.

-But we can support OT9 now.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Sha La La, Shine, Like This, Cosmo (Japanese song).

SF9:

-9 Member group under FNC Entertainment

-Debuted October 5th, 2016

-FNC’s first dance boy group.

-SEVERELY UNDERRATED.

-If you want any songs to put on your workout playlist, or just get you hyped then their are your boys.

-AMAZING Dancers.

-They are almost all actors as well. If you watch K-Drama’s you might recognize Chani (their maknae) from widely popular Sky Castle and Rowoon from new K-Drama “Extraordinary You”

-Stan SF9. Stream RPM

-Some songs to introduce you to them: O Sole Mio, RPM, Now or Never, Easy Love

Monsta X

-A SEVEN Member group under Starship Entertainment

-Literally the definition of hard-working.

-Powerful Choreography, crazy stage presence, intense charisma...must I go on.

-Literally deserve the world.

-Were formed through the survival program No Mercy and have not stopped since.

-Their songs are so addicting and on top of that are actual sweethearts.

-Only want to make people smile and feel loved through their music.

-Would possibly die for their fans.

-Okay I’m talking too much.

-Gaining popularity in the Western regions.

-In October of 2019, member Wonho (the orange hair in the gif) left the group due to rumors and lies being spread about him. He didn’t want to hurt Monsta X’s reputation so he left the group but fans have strongly opposed this, fighting for starship to help clear his name and have him return. The protest continues on even after almost a month.

(Trust me, if you knew this group and Wonho, you would understand why fans are opposing this.)

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Follow, Shoot Out, Beautiful, Dramarama, All In, Alligator.

NU’EST:

-5 Member group under Pledis Entertainment

-Debuted March 15th, 2012

-Very unique style and concept with their albums.  Sticks to their own specific style.

-Addicting chorus.

-Honey Sweet vocals. 

-Had a sub-united called NU’EST W while Minhyun was promoting as a member of Wanna One. (The W stood for ‘Waiting’ which should tell you the type of guys they are).

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Bet Bet, Love Me, Face (Debut  Song), Help Me (Nu’est W song).

BTOB:

-7 Member group under Cube Entertainment

-Debuted March 21st, 2012.

-Ballads anyone?

-Are primarily a vocal focus group

-But understandably because BTOB has one of the strongest vocals in Kpop.

-But can also dance.

-Honest to good crack heads

-Variety Kings #2

-Currently 3 members are serving their military service but you can still support them in their quiet time.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: I’ll be your man, Only one for me, Beautiful Pain, Missing You.

ATEEZ:

-8 Member group under KQ Entertainment

-Debuted October 24th, 2018.

-ROOKIE KINGS.

-In their one year so far since debut they have shown the world that they are not a group to underestimate. 

-Strong Dancers, powerful choreography. 

-Their stage presence is no joke.

-Songs are super addicting and go hard so if you need a workout playlist Ateez is your group.

THE DUALITY OF EACH MEMBER. 

-San is Satan in disguise.

-Prepared for debut for a really REALLY long time. 

-Already signed up with a US record label.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Wonderland, Pirate King, Treasure, Say My name, Wave. literally any of them.

EXO:

-9 Member group under SM Entertainment

-Debuted April 8th, 2012.

-If you know BTS, you probably know about them.

-But EXO are worth all the hype.

-Korea’s chosen representative (Whether you agree with it or not, it’s true) 

-Deadly Stage Presence and Charisma

-Their songs are always iconic.

-Leader Suho just might be god I haven’t figured it out yet.

-As of November 2019, 3 of their members are not promoting with the group. Lay is off promoting solo stuff and stuff in china and america (because SM doesn’t want EXOLS happy) and the other 2 members, Xiumin and D.O are currently serving in the military.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Monster, Love Shot, Lotto, Tempo.

Golden Child

-10 Member group under Woollim Entertainment.

-Debuted August 28th, 2017.

-Underrated group x 10.

-Dancing is on point.

-Stage presence on point

-Hardworking

-cute songs

-They are just charming boys who smile more than the sun i swear.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Wannabe, DamDaDi, Genie, Let Me

A.C.E:

-5 Member group under Beat Interactive

-Debuted May 23rd, 2017

-I literally don’t understand why they are so underrated.

-They have created their own unique style in kpop with a rock vibe that is hardly used in the community. 

-POWERFUL dancers.

-Rude as fuck but thats besides the point.

-Another great group if you need workout songs.

-Some songs to introduce you to them: Undercover, Savage, Callin, Take Me Higher.

Other groups that I did not talk about but I think should be mentioned:

-AB6IX

-CIX

-VICTON

-VIXX

-Great Guys 

-Infinite

-JBJ95

-Kim Donghan(solo)

N.Flying!

-Noir!!!!!

-Spectrum

[dansnaturepictures]

07/01/2021-Part 2 of 2: Walk at Riverside Park, the ten pictures in this photoset are different to the ones I tweeted tonight 

Following on from my previous blog we walked at the local Riverside Park along the River Itchen during my birthday afternoon, and it another wonderful wildlife especially birdwatching and photography walk for me this week off. This began at the start of the walk when we were thrilled to spot a lovely Grey Wagtail flying around a shore type area and across the water by Woodmill a part of the area I showed in one of my photos on Twitter with water rushing from the mill which I don’t believe I have seen here before. This bright and beautiful very yellow bird was another year tick for me, and one I was delighted to get as after three consecutive years of seeing this bird further upstream beside the same river on my work lunch breaks in Winchester I am obviously not going to be going there as I am working from home as I have been since March so it was less of a bird that felt certain in the early weeks of the year this time around. So it was a relief to see this bird I love so much, my year list now sits on 95 just one behind how many bird species I saw all year in 2012 and my second highest ever amount of birds seen on this date after this time last year in which at Slimbridge where if things were different this year we would have been going again for my birthday as I said the other day my 2020 year list reached treble figures. I am thrilled especially given the circumstances this year that I have been able to get quite close to that again already! I felt we have been so lucky on our walks to exercise to see so many fantastic species. Its quite a nice thought looking at my records all bar two of my first sightings of Grey Wagtail in a year have been along the River Itchen be that here, Bishopstoke or Winchester so that was interesting and feels nice. We saw another Grey Wagtail further on in the walk too as I tweeted a picture of. 

As we moved on I as I said in my previous post about today loved trying out my new 70-300 Nikon lens. Tasked primarily with capturing landscapes and sky scenes, those beautiful views I see when out or at home which I want to capture to remember and like sharing I rather thought it seems to do very well at that. Such pictures I took with it include the first, fourth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth in this photoset all of which I was pleased with how they came out I think they were of a pleasing quality and this lens as I said in my last post does seem an upgrade from the previous lens I had that just simply got too old and stopped working. But as we walked on I saw signs today that this may not be a landscape only lens and for the first time in a while I may have this lens which I may term as normal meaning general could be used for other subjects. When a Robin was so nearby instead of reaching for my big zoom lens which I use for all birds and mammals usually I had a go with this one and I felt the quality was good I did tweet this picture on Dans_Pictures. When as I speak about in a minute a Redwing flew into trees a bird I don’t have an extensive record of photographing over the years in case it flew off before I could get the big lens out of my bag and on I took a picture with this one on 300 and then it did stay for me to get a different angle with the big lens and I could see little difference in quality between them. My macro lens didn’t make the bag for today’s walk with my bridge camera included too, this len’s shape especially and possibly weight could make days where I bring my DSLR and normal lens, big lens, macro lens and bridge camera instead of either/or from the latter two could increase, but this lens proved able to take pictures of flowers and berries and some at home when I was playing around earlier too that I would take with my macro lens quite well. So I think this is a great option for me on days I don’t bring many lenses or those moments where I’m just not ready with the right lens and could really alongside the landscapes do its job as a general lens. I am so happy and as I said in my last blog so thankful I was gifted this lens by my whole family today. I took the second and fifth pictures in this photoset of Mute Swan in nice light and Black-headed Gulls with my new lens. 

As we walked on I realised I had rather under-celebrated the general bird value of this place alongside the water birds I know its brilliant for on the river as I saw a variety of woodland species, Nuthatch and then whilst taking in more great Blackbirds after this morning and Robin I was thrilled to see the Redwings come through. Brilliant views of these striking, so well marked and coloured and beautiful birds, absolute stars of any winter here. It was easy to see why them and Blackbirds were around today with berries their favourite food visible too. This felt like one of the most exceptional wildlife watching moments of my week off with a bird I saw for the first time in 2021 at Blackwater in the New Forest on Sunday, and one that presented great photo opportunities that really stood out today I tweeted pictures of these birds. 

Also as we walked on we were delighted alongside probably into the hundreds of Feral Pigeons gathered beside the water a common sight here which was interesting as I tweeted photos of adding well to the varied pigeon and dove experience at home today as I mentioned in my last post to see the group of Black Swans here. Five in total we saw today, mixing with the Mute Swans and Mallards just before Cobden Bridge which is shown in the fourth picture. It was brilliant to make out their alluring colours, my favourite colour scheme of all and fantastic to watch these beautiful birds - considering this whilst ignoring the facts of whether they should be here or not - for a few minutes. They are always such elegant and entertaining ones to watch as with all swans but these are nice being a bit more petite. There is a great thrill about seeing these birds I saw them elsewhere last year after a few years of seeing this colony here so I was pleased to see them today and I took the third picture in this photoset of one. Also whilst walking we got a brilliant Common Gull view among many Black-headed, Herring and Great Black Backed seen today another real star bird of this week my fourth sighting of them in 2021 this was and this view it was nice to see their greenshank-esque greenish legs and as a bird I have become more familiar with on identification within our family with my Mum discuss with her how to tell them to the full extent of the bird instead of it just flying at a distance or swimming with its legs below water. I tweeted a picture of this gull. 

We walked the other side of Woodmill a piece of the River Itchen we very often walked when I was a child when I first started to love this river so I know it so well but had not seen the area for years, it was amazing how short a walk it now felt this area shown in the last three pictures in this photoset. Here we saw a few more star birds of the week, including many Little Grebes always a fairly different I find and great bird to see on a river a fast flowing type habitat and another New Year’s Day year tick in appropriate trees a Siskin a key moment today. 

But best of all along this stretch we encountered one of the birds of my young year when we saw a sixth in 2021 for us of one of my favourites the Kingfisher which I took the seventh picture in this photoset and another that I tweeted of it. It is just phenomenal how many of these I have seen this year a true highlight of my week off. I think this is so synonymous of my theme of my 2021 start to my birdwatching and bird year list in that instead of perhaps a usual year where its a mad dash to see species at different locations and we may not dwell once we have seen certain ones but do still enjoy everything the week has been a local one for obvious reasons and not without its star species some usual others not so much but we’ve gone onto see species again and again something I am sure will not be exclusive to our week off, which has been brilliant and really allowed us to focus on the star birds of the week off something always so key to any time off I have to build up bird year lists this was the primary purpose of this time off I have obviously done a lot else as we are in lockdown so are just seeing birds from home and on daily exercise walks. The Kingfisher has been the star and this view today was a top one. And I’ve got form for seeing it on my birthday admittedly on more notable ones my 18th in 2015 at Lower Test and 21st in 2018 at Lymington to my 24th birthday today but its still a great link to one of my favourite birds and for what birthdays should be about really doing what one loves. 

Wildlife Sightings Summary: My first Grey Wagtail of the year, one of my favourite birds the Kingfisher, Pied Wagtail, Woodpigeon, Feral Pigeon, Carrion Crow, Robin, Blackbird, Redwing, Nuthatch, House Sparrow, Starling, Siskin, Black-headed Gull, Common Gull, Herring Gull, Great Black Backed Gull, Little Grebe, Moorhen, Cormorant, Mute Swan, Black Swan, Mallard and Brown Rats. 

I had a fantastic birthday today, it really was such a nice way to spend it within lockdown focusing on lots of great stuff. Thank you for all your wonderful birthday wishes and incredible support for my photos and posts today and this week. I hope you are all well.

[queenofallwitches]

Venus trine MC, my MC lies in Saturn and Saturn is in 9th house Aquarius.

Saturn Return, and my Soul Journey into 12th house Sun conjunct Mercury (in Aries) bound by the 12th house Shadow Secrets. Jupiter is Leo and Mars is softened by my conjunct cancer moon, both in my 3rd house. The kicker is Chiron simultaneously sitting over in my wounded goddess divine feminine Luna moon compelling me to build a home, a base and a clan of like minded souls. cancer and Chiron sit together and Chiron is akin to the wounded healer. I have a complex but alchemical natal make up and its been 6 years of accepting the square and oppositions in difficult places to come to terms to work with my natal astrology in a way I can become creatively involved in.

23/3/20 initiated the formal induction of my Saturn return as saturn transited to Aquarius for the first time since 92/93.

It’s a taste of the full saturnine swing coming up after the December 21st astrology grand conjunction. Saturn will be in Aquarius up to July. before moving briefly back before that grand Conjunction with Pluto/Jupiter later in 21/12/2020. (activity period from 14 April 2020 until mid-July 2020) Venus trine MC

Yeah on a tangent but one day I will be thankful this was forged. I am will using my moonchild manifesto to track the astrology and transits for my own wounded healer journey. I don’t have the consistency of a computer to hoard things as I did before the big brother fascism came full formed this year and cannot freely trust anything can be stored. I will be putting things online purely to keep a record of what may soon be lost, unable to be accessed.

Plus I’m burning my journals after I take the photos of them and upload them for a ritualistic purpose.

It’s part of this creative alchemy and trauma soul retrival quest I’ve found myself on. I note this as my Saturn is returning home for my FIRST Saturn return. I have been formally initiated for the infamous, enigmatic Saturn return that marks the passage from “adolescence into adulthood”. (Funnily last time I heard a university lecture on neuroscience, the latest research noted recent findings that the brain of a fully, functional prefrontal cortex in adult brains don’t become fully formed until age 28-30. This first sparked excitement and also uncertainty about the privilege cast to the “teenage myth”. As kids brains are still developing when things like getting a driving cars, choosing a life career, alcohol privilege and making other major life changes at those critical developmental stages are still as risky when a 12-16 year old does it. So now psychology and neuroscience knows that the adult higher order thinking that marks the turn of a mature and civil adult come in the late 20s. Not the teens. So until after 25 a brain cannot be fully assessing its choices due to underdeveloped prefrontal higher order thought processes This was fascinating in the social science side of things where we look into social constructs of society and how teenager was a made up archetype for a post war period. I remember being in my early 20s at the time and my life was no longer a race as it had been made to be prior.the schools of the latest brain neuroscience confirm my impulsive nature could change before age 30. I was hopeful. Maybe I wasn’t a gifted genius who was highly sensitive and afflicted with the contrasting “ADHD or Attention Deficit Primaily Inattentive” which could only be “treated” (as far as I had experienced), via heavy duty schedule 8 drugs. The kind of medication that calmed me down but other people wound beg me to have. Meaning in the past people in my life around me were constantly trying to turn into their party high by taking advantage of my disdain for psychostimulants. But my love and need for money back in that time. Fuck fake friends I say. Taking advantage or dysregulated prefrontal cortex with or without all my labels was still, after all, a risky business, when it comes to juggling psychopharmacology and a myriad of labels that resulted in other medicines given to me that may or may not be accurate. No brain scan or confirmation has been given that my brain is anything aside from ADHD. So my academic quest in childhood was confounded due to this.I learnt a lot about my childhood and growing up with a long list of multiple mental illness diagnosis, and the medical pharmacology given to me for those things; was beyond measurable.

But my neurochemistry was tweaked ineffably by both psychiatric pills pushed on me from age 9 and for things I may not even need. The end result of what my social science teacher termed “social constructs akin to mental illness medical model DSM labels”. My self pursuit of understanding my own brain was a hard thing to understand in the sense that prior to hearing about this from the side of academic and professional training, I had spend 12 years in expensive and possibly more damaging than beneficial treatment for “mental illnesses”. My life was a focal point for the goal I set to help women with the “borderline stigma” after I had fixed my own borderline.

Clinical psychologist was my end game until I found the trauma truth sweeping me into a existential soul contusion merged with trauma after trauma therapy went into flooding memory. Academic research and the psychology and counseling journals I spent my spare time fine combing. For answers. For my why and how. By the time I found any sense of this it became a painful limbo of dancing with my demons, coping destructively and limbo between the underworld and the reality I found my body and mind entwined in.

Now it’s even more synonymous to my own Saturn return journey and how the Saturn return is the mark of adulthood. This can be a speculative musing I make now on celestial astrology and how it aligns to our inner psychological makeup. (The Jupiter return is age 12, puberty ; and the other inner planets all mark significant development milestones in growing up. I’ll go into that more in later blogs).

Astrology is a map of the soul, psychology makeup, can be so deep too. How does it measure up to statistics? Sun sign horoscope is nothing versus the natal chart and how it corresponds to planetary magick and Kabbalah. I have been seperate in my magick and academic work but it was always my will to merge these at one stage I could research it. But now the sands of time are shifting, and Aquarius Saturn is calling for novel innovation I never could convey due to academic being seperate as spiritual, magickal practice is something I was careful to keep silence on when working with clients, peers and mentors, forget telling my psychologists or doctors who wound dismiss any test as “bipolar mania”. I remember once I read “the difference between the mystic and the mad man is the mystic knows who NOT TO TELL.

Now it’s my time to informally but officially start logging my journey into my own healing, soul mapping, I call it cognitive alchemy, gnostic psychology, soul psychology, metagnosis.. I’ve had many a name for the potential inspiration from my true will calling. But I can now forget about the archaic bonds from the academic world I was schooled to excel in by confirming. I am also a high iq gifted kid and having been labelled gifted but “adhd” simultaneously while having traumatic events left right and center is a mix of confusion for me. Teachers classed adhd as a learning disability, my in attention confused with inability to listen to simple tasks. This meant my mind never adapted to that school conditioning but my education was still installed due to the private school system somehow making my alters succeed without effort. Most of my spare time as a kid that wasn’t dissociative was reading books. By me processing my own literature in my spare time, I knew so much random stuff but hid it in order to seem dumb bc that was accepted. But in private in encyclopaedias and non fictional library quests I’d devour books. for my 10 maximum haul of borrowing books. This was a routine my mum and I went to do each week but my reading speed was beyond anything known, as I read and synthesised up to 10 books mostly in one day, from age 6 onwards.

I also stole books and hid my reading habits at school due to a deep shame of not being liked due to reading being for losers without friends, as girls bullied me over my gifted weird quirks. I was pretty but saw my self as ugly for trauma will deprive the mind of seeing it’s own true perception. I was never understood how my looks became a thing used against me by girls who were jealous until I learnt about this myself. I recently accepted and remembered this all after 3 years of integrated healing. I was doing this all on my own. the spiritual and metaphysical work is my primary tool that was keeping me here. Actually saving my suicide program from self destruct after the March 2017 incident I shall not talk about now. But I’m here now, alive, kicking, Saturn here to shove my shadow to consciousness without prompt and this change can bring me into a 30 year blueprint of setting things right.

Now in order to build a solid and functional framework and foundational life. I have a litany of secrets I need to get off my chest. I think to share my growth, my thoughts and my experiences for my own liberation of my deep dark secrets finally free to be released into the public domain.

I have no choice but to share this.

I do this co consciously as a part of my integrative process.

Maybe One day it might be a guide for someone who was as alone as I feel doing all of this self work without support. Maybe it will fade into the cyber void forever. Maybe I’ll use this as a tool to help clients in the future. Whatever this is means nothing but what the process of alchemy can do to forge my liberation from soul loss and traumatic dissociative trauma.

As a therapist I always wanted to avoid what I went through growing up. Now more so. I never want another lost dissociative mental health client who was also stuck between professional and academic pursuits being my “purpose” and having to sacrifice career and my study and research to sit in my shadow to see the shit.

In order to break the shit therapist mould I list journey through my own shit first. This meant I needed to be away from all therapy both as a client and practitioner and student for awhile. I’ve been off since the end of 2017 and now it’s clear it was neeed, how do I heal without healing my own shit first? Am I not the finest example of how bad therapists can get away with their bullshit and be paid for it but never really know who they are. I’m never doing that. I never was about that. So due to therapeutic negligence. I am finding my gift was the lesson. Those a shitty therapist who are a dime a dozen were the anti mentors I saw too often: but my purpose was to be a therapist. But a therapist who did things the way I never had.

Never did I want another to go into the heavy weight of shame from the secrets of sexual wounds, childhood schemas, mixed up and messed up conditioning made to seem functional to outsiders. But that was all alters. Now it was a spiritual journey as magick and my mystical path entwines to save my soul. The self awakening, trauma revelations, merging with the dark night of soul, and the shadow work. Plus everything else coming out is not a journey I can say is or was at all easy, I suffer more now as a co conscious intergrating my trauma. I feel it all without the dissociative switch to save me from witnessing all the shit. Now I see my entire life and it’s fucked up raw and grim reality and I have to do something because I survived it this far? Again I never suicided or stopped into self destruction when I knew my own inner child’s wounds were no longer blacked out but burning bright longing for love. Symptoms for survival and the survival was part of the dissociative switching making my outside self seem so functional, but never seen. It’s not something they needed to drug me for, but it’s another thing I have to address now. My symptoms they drugged with medications that were mind altering and powerful for anyone let alone a developing child’s brain, were suppressed by many meds. Who knows where that ends and the damage via trauma and other things begin? It’s a mess of some thing I was never aware of but always trying to silence due to the need for people to accept me. But that was many mes all living a life that appeased many people, but not for me. Here we are.

[gdwessel]

Wrestle Kingdom 13 - 1/4/2019; Ibushi Concussed; G1 Climax 29 Begins in Dallas, WK14 Will Be 2 Nights

Today is The Day. Wrestle Kingdom 13. You can watch it on NJPWWorld in Japanese or English. You can pay $35 on FITE TV for the same. You can wait until later tonight and watch a 2-hour version (continued the next 2 weeks) on AXS TV. Whatever the case, you can see it.

Wrestle Kingdom 13 - January 4, 2019, Tokyo Dome (NJPWWorld, FITE TV, AXS TV on tape delay)

NEVER Openweight  6-Man Tag Team Championship #1 Contenders Gauntlet Match: Togi Makabe, Toru Yano [CHAOS] & Ryusuke Taguchi d. Yuji Nagata, Jeff Cobb [FREE] & David Finlay Jr. and Hirooki Goto, Trent Beretta & Chuck Taylor [CHAOS] and Minoru Suzuki, Lance Archer & Davey Boy Smith Jr. [SZKG] and Adam Page, Yujiro Takahashi & Marty Scurll [The Elite] Order of Eliminations - Finlay > Yujiro, Schoolboy, 4:39 - Finlay > Taylor, Schoolboy, 7:30 - KES > Finlay, Killer Bomb, 2:44 - Yano > Smith, Schoolboy, 8:09

NEVER Openweight Championship: Will Ospreay [CHAOS] d. Kota Ibushi [FREE] © (Stormbreaker, 18:13) - Ibushi fails his 1st defense - Ospreay is the 23rd champion

IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship 3-Way Match: BUSHI & Shingo Takagi [Los Ingobernables] d. Yoshinobu Kanemaru & El Desperado [SZKG] © and SHO & YOH [CHAOS] (Takagi > SHO, Last of the Dragon, 6:50) - Kanemaru/Desperado fail their 5th defense - BUSHI/Takagi are the 58th champions

RevPro Undisputed British Heavyweight Championship: Zack Sabre Jr. [SZKG] d. Tomohiro Ishii [CHAOS] © (Hurrah! Another Year, Surely This One Will Be Better Than The Last; The Inexorable March Of Progress Will Lead Us All To Happiness, 11:53) - Ishii fails his ? defense - Sabre is the 21st champion

IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championship 3-Way Match:  EVIL & SANADA [Los Ingobernables] d. Tama Tonga & Tanga Loa [Bullet Club] © and Matt & Nick Jackson [The Elite] (SANADA > Matt, Rounding Body Press, 10:15) - GOD fail their 1st defense - EVIL/SANADA are the 82nd champions

IWGP US Heavyweight Championship: Juice Robinson d. Cody Rhodes [The Elite] © (Pulp Friction, 9:02) - Cody fails his 1st defense - Juice is the 5th champion

IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship: Taiji Ishimori [Bullet Club] d. KUSHIDA ©  (Bloody Cross, 11:17) - KUSHIDA fails his 1st defense - Ishimori is the 83rd champion

Jay White [Bullet Club] d. Kazuchika Okada [CHAOS] (Blade Runner, 14:18)

IWGP Intercontinental Championship No-DQ Match: Tetsuya Naito [Los Ingobernables] d. Chris Jericho [FREE] © (Destino, 22:35) - Jericho fails his 2nd defense - Naito is the 20th champion

IWGP Heavyweight Championship: Hiroshi Tanahashi d. Kenny Omega [The Elite] © (High Fly Flow, 39:13) - Omega fails his 4th defense - Tanahashi is the 67th champion

Hoo boy, a lot to break down here.

Every single title changed hands during this show, including the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. The last time that belt changed hands at a January 4 Tokyo Dome show was Wrestle Kingdom V on 1/4/2011, by, how about that, Hiroshi Tanahashi, beating Satoshi Kojima. Eight years since then, including last year's controversial retaining by Kazuchika Okada over Tetsuya Naito that some people are still salty about. So, essentially, the entire Bushiroad era. The (frankly piss-poor) reign of Kenny Omega as IWGP champion is at an end, and the rest of the Elite (including Kota Ibushi) are title-less as well. So let the speculation about Omega and All Elite Wrestling begin in full force. It will be interesting to see which direction he goes in either way. For his part, Tanahashi is now an 8-time IWGP Heavyweight Champion, cementing himself with the record number of reigns. (The next closest is Tatsumi Fujinami at 6.)

Los Ingobernables all hold titles now as well, barring Hiromu, of course, being out injured and all. CHAOS holds one title, as does Bullet Club, who lost one and gained one. The Seikigun hold two, after Tanahashi and Juice won their matches, however lost one with KUSHIDA.

Tetsuya Naito regains the title he hates over Jericho in a brutal brawl, taking full advantage of the No-DQ stipulation,and with it, begins his redemption story, having to come to terms with the IC belt to finally truly move beyond it. Really interested in seeing how his 2019 will go.

Jay White winning over Okada is interesting. It redeems White for having a poor re-debut at WK12 last year, and sets up a continuing feud with the two. Kazuchika Okada having his redemption arc is going to be a major part of 2019 creatively, I think, as will Naito as stated above, and eventually the two will collide. Okada does not take a hit here. It only sets him up to be stronger in the end. And hey, the Longboys are gone, so we have the Rainmaker back!

Shock of shocks, neither of the three-way tag matches ended with the reigning champions being pinned. The junior tag match was REAL short. (So were many of the matches today) Three-ways are stupid and are there to a) not make the champions do the job b) cover up for a bloated roster. Perhaps with the Elite moving away from NJPW this will be minimized in future. But let's face it, now we'll get rematches with the previous champions v. the current ones coming up real soon.

Juice regains the US belt, and writes Cody Rhodes out of NJPW. Trent Beretta challenged Juice post-show. That'll be good. Hopefully they can do right by Juice this time. They made him look like an absolute star at G1 Special in San Francisco, and then proceeded to squander and ruin that the rest of 2018. ZSJ regaining the RevPro title is about what I expected. Now he can take the belt home to England. Yes, that is the na.me of that finisher

That... was a nasty looking elbow Kota took. Ibushi has been reported as being concussed, and that stretcher job was legit. NJPW says the concussion is not severe. Will Ospreay is trying to be in characer gloating about it, because he is a dipshit. Who knows what Ibushi's future is in this AEW era. He's been a freelancer this entire time, so if he too were to leave NJPW (again) so be it. I really think he has the potential to be a drawing IWGP champion, but that's up to him. He did decline a WWE contract after all (as did Sabre). His is the bigger question mark looming than Omega's, if I'm honest.

The mixed Seikigun/CHAOS team of Makabe/Yano/Taguchi won the pre-show gauntlet match, so will most likely challenge for the NEVER Openweight Comedy 6-Man Tag Team titles tomorrow at New Year Dash!!. Yuji Nagata filled in for the injured *spits* Michael Elgin, and made the match actually watchable now, because fuck Michael Elgin. The Most Violent Players still being a thing makes me think there really is going to be a unit shakeup coming soon. We already saw it with Jay White and Gedo earlier in 2018, and the continued CHAOS/Seikigun teamups point that way too.

All in all, a really good show that was weak on paper but in practice did really well. The attendance was announced as 38,162, up from 34,995 for last year's, but not as much of a jump (Nearly +10K last year from WK11). It's also the highest attendance listed since Bushiroad started using actual numbers rather than papered, which was 36,000 in 2015 for WK9. So as critical as I've been of Kenny Omega as champion, using the Meltzer Standard for attendance, it looks like Kenny was, in fact, a decent draw as champion, even if creative and match quality was the shits. Online, it seems that there were some issues during the show on NJPWWorld, for which apologies have been doled out.

The attendance is an interesting issue. Bushiroad owner Takaaki Kidani has said for years that he wanted Wrestle Kingdom 14 to be the sell-out show at the Dome, as it falls on a Saturday...

As part of today's show, upcoming big events were announced for the coming year, and the biggest one of these was the announcement that WK14 will be, in fact, a 2-day event, on 1/4 and 1/5/2020, both Saturday and Sunday. Not sure how that is going to work out for selling out the Dome in 2020. In fact it might dilute the attendance by splitting it. It's an interesting conundrum, and we'll see if NJPW has the momentum to sell out just one, if not both, of those dates this time next year.

Other major show dates were announced, some we already knew (if you look at the Upcoming NJPW Events post from 2 days ago). There is a mega-card announced for 4/20/2019 at Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium, without a name given, but no word on Sakura Genesis, so I'm wondering if there will even be one this year. Wrestling Dontaku 2019 is a two-day event in Fukuoka, much like last year's edition.

This year's Best of the Super Juniors 26 Final will be held on 6/5/2019 at Tokyo Ryogoku Kokugikan, which is great, finally giving the Final the prestige it deserves with such a massive venue to hold it in. A mere 4 days later, we go back to Osaka-Jo Hall for Dominion 6.9 in Osaka-Jo Hall on, oddly enough, 6/9/2019.

G1 Climax 29 will begin and end in interesting fashion. This year's tournament will actually begin in the USA, on 7/6/2019 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, TX, making this the only time G1 Climax matches have been held outside of Japan. As for the ending, following the success of last year's Finals at Tokyo Nippon Budokan, which was due to necessity of renovations happening at Ryogoku, they are going back this year from 8/10 - 8/12/2019 for this year's G1 Finals as well.

The last one to be announced is a solo date in London, on 8/31/2019 at The Copper Box, located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hackney Wick. This is the place where feuding YouTubers Joe Weller and KSI held a boxing match. I am sure there will be RevPro involvement in this show.

That's it. That's all I got. New Year Dash!! is tomorrow but they never announce the card for it ahead of time. Hope everyone enjoyed WK13, and we start a good year in New Japan Pro Wrestling.

[lokirupaul]

Lokiru Paul : The Life and Suspicious Death of Cachou the Bear

The Life and Suspicious Death of Cachou the Bear



Cachou the brown bear was found dead on the mountains just above the village of Les, in the Aran Valley.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Conservationists saw the 6-year-old brown bear as a symbol of hope. Villagers saw him as a menace. Then he turned up dead.

By Laura Millan Lombrana for 

Bloomberg

July 8, 2021, 7:01 AM GMT+3

Para leer el reportaje en español.

Ivan Afonso checked his computer one last time before picking up the phone. It was April 2020, and like most of Spain, Afonso was stuck at home under a strict Covid lockdown. But his mind was in the mountains.

An environmental scientist, Afonso also served as head of the environmental division in the Aran Valley, a tiny area of the Pyrenees mountain range that forms a dent along Spain’s border with France. For the past three years, his duties had included monitoring the movements of Cachou, a 6-year-old, 130-kilo (287-pound) brown bear. The bear was a local celebrity, one of the few males born in the wild in the Pyrenees and living proof that conservationists’ efforts to rejuvenate the region’s struggling brown bear colony were working.

The task had been a nightmare from the start. Cachou was young and fiery, and—to the dismay of conservationists and farmers—prone to wreaking havoc. Like most bears, Cachou had a sweet tooth. He’d started with assaulting bee farms, but by 2019, he’d learned to hunt horses many times his size. Eventually, authorities put a tracker on him, but even that didn’t work. At one point he was blamed for four attacks within two weeks.

Aran Valley

Source: USGS, EarthExplorer

Cachou had given Afonso and horse breeders in the valley some rest during winter. But the tracker showed the bear had come out of hibernation earlier than usual. He’d been in France in March, but a more recent ping put him somewhere in the mountains above Les, a tiny village of fewer than 1,000 people. After that he’d ventured deeper into the forest, close to a trail—and then stopped. The next 24 pings were all in the same spot. Afonso couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

“Either the tracker had dropped, or he was dead,” he thought. 



The Garona river, seen here from the village of Bossost, is born high on the Pyrenees and flows into the Atlantic Ocean in France.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

In light of the vast extinction event currently underway on Earth, the death of a single bear might seem less than significant. And yet, on the morning of April 9, 2020, Afonso decided it was time to do something. He called the head of Aran Valley’s government first, then dialed the valley’s ranger corps and requested two trustworthy agents who could discreetly hike to the place the pings were coming from.

Finally, he dialed the head of Catalonia’s park ranger corps in the Northern Pyrenees, Anna Servent. Spry in her early 40s, with a resolute expression and brown hair cut short on one side, Servent heads a small, semi-secret team of investigators who specialize in animal poisonings. Their methods are unconventional. While most rangers focus on analyzing animal remains, the people on Servent’s team spend years building networks of local informers. They wear plainclothes, change vehicles often, and tend to visit their sources in the middle of the night to avoid drawing attention.

By the turn of the 21st century, brown bears were almost extinct here after decades of indiscriminate hunting and poisoning. In 1996, just three survived in the entire 430-kilometer (267-mile) mountain range. While the population has recovered after several European Union-sponsored conservation projects, it remains Europe’s smallest colony, with a count of 64 bears as of 2020. The lower Aran Valley, with its thick forests covered in old beech, oak, and chestnut trees and a milder climate, has become a breeding ground for the endangered predators.

But what conservationists consider a victory, many who’ve grown up in the mountains see as a declaration of war. “Naturally, when you reintroduce a species that has been previously eliminated on purpose, you’ll run again into similar conflicts that caused the reduction in numbers in the first place,” says Elisabeth Pötzelsberger, head of the resilience program at the European Forest Institute, an EU research center. “It would be quite naive to think everyone will be happy and clapping hands.”



Anna Servent heads a small, semi-secret team of investigators who specialize in animal poisonings.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

After talking to Afonso, Servent and one of her investigators—whose identity can’t be revealed to avoid compromising ongoing cases—jumped in a car and drove fast through deserted, meandering roads into the Aran Valley. The view on the way in is bucolic, with rocky peaks covered in snow and slopes so steep one fears they might collapse onto the bright green pastures below. The stone towers and slate roofs of Romanic churches dot the expanse, which is split in two by the Garona river. Those who live there still speak a modern version of Occitan, a romance language troubadours used for songs and poems before the Renaissance. They’re proud of their rural roots and tend to look suspiciously at anyone coming from south of the Pyrenees. 

The Aran Valley community is so tight, Servent’s rangers hadn’t been able to groom informants in the area, so she hoped their car would go unnoticed as she and her teammate neared Les. They headed up the mountain trail, climbed through the steep forest, and reached Cachou’s body at roughly the same time as the local rangers.



Joan Vazquez, founder of environmental organization Ipcena, holds a picture of a book showing Cachou’s body in the forest where it was found.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

The bear was lying belly up at the bottom of a 40-meter rocky cliff, a single canine sticking out of his half-open mouth. There were signs he’d been there for a long time, but that the death was quite recent, indicating that he could have lay there suffering for a long time, which happens sometimes in poisoning cases.

Servent speaks in a low voice and a calm tone as she details their inspection of the body and the surrounding area, but her face is serious behind a blue surgical mask. “We didn’t see any signs of poisoning initially,” she says. That made them even more restless. Before they left, Afonso had told them: “If you don’t find an obvious cause of death, look for antifreeze.” 

Ivan Afonso likes to think of himself as a man between two worlds. He was born of the Pyrenees, but not of the Aran Valley, and completed his university degree in cosmopolitan Barcelona. At 47 years old, he still feels more at ease in the mountains looking for endangered birds or scouring remote ponds for rare frogs than he does in his small office in the Aran government’s headquarters.



Born in the Pyrenees and educated in Barcelona, Ivan Afonso likes to think of himself as a man between two worlds.

Photographer:Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

It pained Afonso not to be able to go out into the mountains to find Cachou, but he had reason to believe that they’d be walking into a crime scene, which meant that the fewer people there disturbing evidence, the better. Twice during 2019, he told Servent’s rangers, he’d overheard a man from Les talk about using antifreeze against bears, according to court documents seen by Bloomberg Green—once during a private meeting, and once during a public speech. This same man had once headed the Aran Valley Land Department, and was partially responsible for overseeing 2.4 million euros ($2.8 million) of EU funds intended for brown bear conservation in the Pyrenees.

“I didn’t pay attention to him at that time. Maybe it was a mistake, but I was skeptical,” Afonso says. “There are rumors about killing bears all the time. People boast about having killed a bear and the next day we see it appear on a surveillance camera.

“Even if I had paid attention,” he goes on, “what could have I done? Everyone in the valley has antifreeze. I’ve got two bottles at home.” 



A rusty trap used to catch bears is kept on a storage room on the basement of the Catalan rangers’ headquarters in Tremp (left). Aldicarb (right) is a pesticide now banned in Europe. A small quantity is enough to kill a wild boar.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Antifreeze is a ranger’s worst nightmare. Used to prevent car engines from freezing and therefore widely available in shops and petrol stations, it goes undetected in common post mortem tests and vanishes from corpses within days, if not hours. It can only be found if the body is fresh, and if pathologists are specifically looking for it. 

A few hundred miles from where Cachou’s body was found, wildlife pathologist Roser Velarde was sitting in in her office at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, surrounded by microscopes and deer skulls, when she got a call from Afonso, telling her that the bear would be on her operating table by the next day. With 20 years of practice behind her, Velarde didn’t flinch—Cachou’s would hardly be her first animal autopsy, and certainly not her most challenging. Once, much to the amusement of her students and colleagues, she performed a necropsy on a whale on the patio outside because the animal wouldn’t fit inside her lab. 

During Cachou’s necropsy, Velarde spoke in the same patient, explanatory tone she uses with her students. The body had no bullet wounds, no broken bones, cuts, or major signs of violence. Some superficial teeth marks on the side of his head suggested that an animal, most likely another bear, had bit him, but that was ruled out as the cause of death. As she opened him up, she also ruled out death by common poisons, as most cause massive internal bleeding. Velarde spent four hours cutting, weighing, measuring, gathering samples, and taking pictures, but she found nothing. It wasn’t until after all that that Servent’s investigator, who attended the necropsy, told Velarde about Afonso’s antifreeze suspicion.



A professor at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Roser Velarde has been performing necropsies, mostly on wild animals, for 20 years.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Back in her office, Velarde processed samples of urine and brain tissue. Three days later, the university’s head of wildlife eco-pathology confirmed that the samples contained crystals of calcium oxalate, which are consistent with the presence of ethylene glycol, the chemical that comprises between 90 and 95% of antifreeze. 

About 12 hours after ingesting the antifreeze, Cachou’s neurological system would have started to malfunction. He would have felt severe stomach irritation and possibly slipped into a coma. His lungs and heart would have started to shut down within hours, but he could have stayed alive for as long as nine days later, until his kidneys finally failed. 

“Cachou the bear suffered a slow and very painful agony that went on for days—until he died,” Velarde concluded in her report, according to court documents. That, combined with the signals from the tracking device, meant Cachou was poisoned on or around March 26. 

“The first thing we did was to request the judge to keep the investigation secret,” Servent says—something typically only done in highly sensitive cases such as those involving drug trafficking and political corruption, and never before for the suspected murder of a wild animal. “It terrified us that people would find out and start getting ideas—and obviously we didn’t want the poisoner to know we knew.” Her request was granted. As a result, details of the investigation haven’t been made public.



Bees in the Aran Valley were among the first victims of Cachou’s attacks—like many bears, he had a sweet tooth.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

With no reliable sources in the area, Servent knew her team’s usual methods wouldn’t work, so she put in a call to the Catalan police, also known as Mossos d’Esquadra. 

Deputy inspector Cesar Jou tried to hide his surprise as the voice on the other side of the line told him about his next case. After 25 years as a policeman, most of them on the Mossos’ crime unit in the Pyrenees, he was used to homicides, drug trafficking, and organized violence. But Cachou was his first bear victim. “I was surprised when they asked me to investigate the death of a bear, but we treated it as if it was a homicide. It was a challenge,” he says.

Jou’s first move was to go to Les with his agents and ask locals if they’d seen anything strange in the days around when Cachou was poisoned. In places where everyone knows each other, crime is often seen as an attack on the community as a whole, Jou says. With the country on a strict lockdown, surely someone would have noticed something, he thought. 

He was wrong. “No one knew anything, no one had seen anything,” Jou says. Cachou’s killer was perceived as the savior of the village. “There was a sense of angst among the ranchers.”

Anti-bear sentiment in the region goes back generations. “Living with the bear is an obligation, something we haven’t decided,” says Frances Bruna, the current head of the Land Department in the Aran Valley government. A horse-breeder himself, Bruna talks dearly about his mares and explains that he, too, has suffered bear attacks in the past. “They’ll give us subsidies, aid, they’ll pay back whenever there are attacks. But inside us there will always be that feeling.”

Bruna’s various responsibilities are often at odds with each other. He’s charged with leading environmental and bear conservation initiatives in the valley, but he also looks after the wellbeing of farmers and their animals. Catalan authorities have spent years trying to mediate between these two worlds. The regional government now compensates ranchers for each animal killed by a bear, and last year spent 84,500 euros to install fences and pay for shepherds and mastiff dogs to watch over sheep and cattle in the Pyrenees during the summer months. It also pays for the animals’ insurance and has hired an external company that acts as a mediator between farmers and the administration.

“Bears were something imposed from Europe, paid with European funds that I guess someone was very happy to collect,” says Marc Cuny, the president of the Association of the Pyrenees Catalan Horse in the Aran Valley. “No one asked for our opinion, they just told us it would be the panacea—and it wasn’t.”



Marc Cuny feeds two of his mares at a field near Vielha. Breeders’ bond with their animals is emotional and goes back generations.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

It isn’t a matter of money, says Cuny. Standing in his field next to Ines, Monica, and Nera, three of his 16 mares, he keeps a close eye on a filly born just hours ago that his young daughter has named Peppa Pig. Horses are an important part of the valley’s traditions, and breeders’ bond with them is emotional, he says.

“Poisoning the bear was a mistake, and whoever did it wasn’t thinking about the consequences,” Cuny says. “But when a beast kills 12 or 13 horses and is not removed from the mountain, you can understand that someone decided to do it themselves.”



Two Mossos d’Esquadra agents hike across the steep slopes of the Pyrenees to the place where Cachou’s body was found.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

With no cooperation from locals, the investigation into Cachou’s death advanced slowly. Eventually, police identified five potential subjects, including the official who had talked publicly about poisoning bears; a local ranger who was part of the bear restoration program and had access to Cachou’s positioning data; two people whose phone signals showed they had been in the area around the date of the killing; and one who’d installed a surveillance camera near the place where the body was found.

Still, the investigation bore no real clues until the end of June. After weeks of fruitless interrogations, one witness—a ranger with the Aran Valley government—finally broke the code of silence, divulging the existence of a WhatsApp group called, bluntly, the Anti-Bear Platform, according to court documents. All the messages in the chat had been deleted, but Jou’s investigators could see that the group had over 140 members. Among the administrators was the official who’d talked about poisoning bears.  

Jou’s agents had already begun tapping the phones of the suspects they’d identified, but the Anti-Bear Platform gave them the key they needed to begin deciphering how the group operated. In the latter half of 2020, however, the investigation took an unexpected turn. The taps showed a network of people who were changing phone numbers frequently, working in tight shifts in a house in the valley. Some of them had Colombian accents.

On March 29, Jou’s team arrested 12 people suspected of belonging to a cocaine trafficking ring. Agents seized almost 2 kilos of pure cocaine worth about 200,000 euros, an unprecedented amount in an area where no one had previously suspected of drug-dealing activity of this magnitude. The Aran Valley is famous for the high-end resort of Baqueira, which attracts jet set skiers and mountain hikers from both sides of the border, including the Spanish royal family, and many now suspect the traffickers were serving its rich patrons.

“We thought it was Cachou’s way of saying ‘thank you’ for having investigated his death,” says Jou jokingly before getting serious again. “It’s been the most important cocaine operation for Mossos d’Esquadra in the Aran Valley for several years.” 

More than a year after Cachou’s murder, the investigation is almost complete. 

In November, police arrested two of their original five suspects, including the ranger who had access to Cachou’s positioning data and had been caught on a tapped phone discussing the position of a different bear entering the valley. The ranger denied the charges—which included the commission of a crime against fauna, revelation of secrets, and perversion of justice—and refused to give a statement. He was eventually released and remains a member of the Aran Valley rangers, although he’s no longer involved in bear-monitoring activities, according to the local government. The judge also summoned the official who’d boasted about antifreeze-soaked sponges, but he, too, refused to give a statement. 

Finally, in early June, police arrested the ranger who’d disclosed the existence of the Anti-Bear chat. His statements to the police were full of contradictions, and in tapped phone conversations with the other arrested ranger, he’d discussed deleting possibly incriminating messages. He also refused to give a statement and was freed on the same day.

The inquiry into Cachou’s death is the first criminal investigation into the death of a wild animal in Spain, and possibly anywhere else in Europe, environmental groups say. But it’s unlikely to be the last. The EU has made the conservation and restoration of natural habitats, including increasing biodiversity and expanding forests, an essential part in its fight against climate change, wildfires, and disease outbreaks.

Wolves, lynx and bears play a key role in that plan. These super-predators are known as umbrella species; because they’re at the top of the food chain, they can only thrive if every other animal and plant below them is healthy too. Their success or failure is therefore seen as a proxy for the state of conservation and biodiversity efforts, on which the bloc plans to spend 20 billion euros ($24 billion) a year over the next decade. 



A police agent looks down at the exact place where Cachou was found, deep inside the forest at the bottom of a rocky cliff.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

The trial could also bring further scrutiny to how European conservation funds are spent. In addition to the former Land official who was once in charge of administering this money in the Aran Valley, the ranger who allegedly leaked Cachou’s location was paid entirely by EU conservation funding.

“Aid must come with conditions,” says Joan Vazquez, founder of conservation organization Ipcena, which will appear as an individual prosecutor in the trial. “States are not watching how that money is spent, they just send reports to the EU saying everything’s going perfect. And the EU believes it unless there are cases like Cachou’s proving the contrary.”

This is not an isolated case of dubious oversight. A recent report by European nonprofit Bankwatch Network documented biodiversity plans by several Eastern European countries. Analysts found that some, including Bulgaria and Poland, directly infringe current laws, while others engage in greenwashing or other deceptive practices, all while receiving EU funding and applying for more.

In this harsher, more bureaucratic light, Cachou wasn’t just a bear, he was a bellwether. The fact that he was wearing a tracking device—and that Afonso moved fast to locate him—meant rangers got to the scene before his body deteriorated, which allowed Velarde to prove the cause of death in a way that would stand up in court. Because of Cachou’s fame and the existing tension between the Aran Valley’s bears and humans, the judge encouraged investigators on the case, include Servent and Jou, to use all means necessary to find the killer.

The judge in Vielha, the capital of the Aran Valley, is expected to formally charge the ranger, the public official, and potentially others when she closes the investigation, likely within the next few months. At that point, a different judge will bring the case to trial sometime next year in the city of Lleida, about 160 kilometers south of the valley. The mystery of Cachou’s death has raised so much attention that authorities fear Vielha’s tiny courthouse won’t be big enough to hold all the interested spectators.

Back in Les, locals await the start of the trial with a mix of uneasiness and indifference. On a foggy morning in April, a few of them read the paper and eat breakfast at an old cafe, casually chatting about whether the end of the lockdown would bring French tourists back. On the wall hang black and white pictures of dead bears and smiling hunters.

“I remember old people in the villages telling us stories about bears,” says Bruna, the current head of the Land Department. “Whoever arrived to the village with a dead bear was hailed as a hero and everyone wanted to be in the picture with them.”



Frances Bruna, the current head of the Land Department in the Aran Valley government, remembers the times when bear hunters were hailed as heroes.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

The investigation of Cachou’s murder has done nothing to erase those decades-old lines, Afonso says. Locals who either sympathized with the bears or who didn’t care either way have since turned against them after being summoned to testify, realizing their phones were tapped, or seeing the names friends and relatives written about as suspects in the local press. If anything, it’s made the community even more wary of strangers.

At base, the case is a clash between two ways of seeing the environment, Afonso says: the Araneses’ pragmatic view of nature as a profitable resource, and the outsider’s more romanticized view of humanity’s duty to protect and preserve.

“The most extreme examples of these two worlds are represented in this case,” Afonso says. “Very zealous justice and police systems that acted as if a person had been killed, and a wise guy who decided to take matters into his own hands.”

Servent thinks it will be a turning point in how authorities treat wildlife deaths. About 40 bears have died since 1996, some in circumstances that have never been properly investigated, according to Ipcena. Mysterious bear deaths include that of Cachou’s father, Balou, who according to reports by French authorities was hit by lightning and fell off a cliff.

“Everyone who has participated in this has taken it very seriously so it wouldn’t end in nothing,” Servent says. “Everyone has seen that the death of a bear can’t go unnoticed.”



The Pyrenees mountain range acts as a natural wall that isolates the Aran Valley from the rest of Spain. Its inhabitants are proud of their distinct identity and speak a modern version of Occitan.

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

As for Cachou’s killer, there are different views of who did it. The police and rangers think it was someone from the area who had access to Cachou’s confidential positioning data, knows the forests well, and knows how to use poison. The perpetrator has also likely suffered bear attacks, they say, possibly at the teeth and paws of Cachou himself.

Afonso has a different guess. He suspects someone has been killing bears for a while, but that Cachou wasn’t necessarily the target. The area where his body was found is a route frequently used by bears, and at a time when sightings are increasing everywhere on the Pyrenees, they’re falling precisely in that place.

“If I was the poisoner, I wouldn’t kill the only bear that’s wearing a tracking device,” he says. “That person was unlucky that Cachou passed by. I’m quite sure of that.”

[automaticpostinfluencer]

So, Can We All Start Shipping Hannah Brown and Tyler Cameron Again?

It’s almost as if Hannah Brown and Tyler Cameron knew we all needed a feel-good Bachelor story to fill the void. 

Nearly a year after her season of self-discovery became must-see TV, we’re all stuck at home with no new episodes to binge. And after buckling in for pilot Peter Weber‘s turbulent journey we landed in the exact same spot with nothing more than a bout of emotional sickness to show for it. (Well, except for our new star Barb, who just might end up slinging margaritas in Paradise for all we know.) 

Desperate to slake our thirst for a love story, we turned to our most recent Bachelorette and boy did Alabama Hannah deliver. Unexpectedly self-distancing with Cameron, the runner-up suitor she famously asked out post-show, she’s giving us a daily peek at their increasingly flirty friendship, complete with games of spin the bottle and jokes about the size of his package. 

And it’s not entirely in jest. 

Because while a source tells E! News the onetime pageant queen and the general contractor-slash-model, who won over scores of Bachelor fans with his desirable mix of feminist views and ultra-cut abs, aren’t officially together, they’re not not an item. “There is definite chemistry between Hannah and Tyler,” a source shared with E! News. “They both have expressed they are not in a position to date right now but do care about each other.” 

So you’re saying there’s a chance. 

John Fleenor via Getty Images

Which is really all we’ve been hoping for since that August night when the 25-year-old University of Alabama alum, newly single after dumping disappointing fiancé Jed Wyatt, timidly told the former Wake Forest quarterback, “You’re an incredible guy and I’m a single girl…so? I just thought maybe we could go for a drink and just hang out.”

Because before the ABC Food Tours founder spent a whirlwind two months on supermodel Gigi Hadid‘s arm, there was an ever-so-brief moment in time where we thought he and Brown (a woman he once referred to as “our Queen”) were truly meant to be. 

A mere four days removed from that After the Final Rose plot twist, the 27-year-old was photographed leaving the L.A. rental Brown was using during her ultimately triumphant stint on Dancing With the Stars.

His chaste Fantasy Suite behavior that led Brown to call him “the most respectful man i’ve ever been with. Ever,” was fine and all, but by this point the emotional connection she had worried about during filming was strong. It was time to forgo those individual rooms.

ABC/Mark Bourdillon

“Tyler got to Hannah’s place around 9 p.m. and they stayed in,” a source said. “He spent the night with her and left this morning after 10 a.m. She walked him out to his car and they hugged and kissed. He had an overnight bag and they looked very happy together.”

But then not quite 72 hours later he was squiring around a certain leggy blonde and it seemed Brown and Cameron’s journey had come to an abrupt halt with Brown declaring she found it a little less than respectful that he’d move on so quickly and so publicly and with an internationally renowned supermodel to boot.

“He has every right to do whatever he wants because we were just, you know, hanging out, seeing where it goes. And I am completely fine with that,” she allowed on the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast in August. Still, she continued, “I have no shame in saying I had feelings. I totally did. I totally still have feelings but, at the same time, I am not tied to any man or tied to Tyler and I’m not going to be.”

BlayzenPhotos / BACKGRID

Really, though, it would have been cool if he’d done a little more to keep his dealings on the down-low. “The thing is…we are not dating dating, at all, we hung out, but we also had conversations of both like knowing that there’s still something there,” she surmised. “And when you are in the public eye, you do just have to be respectful of each other.”

By September, he was comforting Hadid through the passing of her grandma, even tagging along to the Netherlands funeral service and deleting all traces of Brown from his Instagram, a death knell for any 21st century relationship.

“It got messy once Tyler hung out with Hannah right after the finale, and then immediately started dating Gigi,” an insider explained to E! News at the time. “Hannah was really upset about it. Tyler didn’t think it was fair since Hannah didn’t even choose him in the first place.”

When things didn’t improve after their run-in at E!’s People’s Choice Awards in November, we had no choice but to ship Brown and Pilot Pete because Alabama Hannah deserves love, damnit.

“I don’t need a man,” she shared on iHeartRadio’s Scrubbing In With Becca Tilley and Tanya Rad podcast last month. “I want a man and I think that’s okay.”

But sometimes things have a funny way of working out just as they should. Following the sudden death of his mom Andrea Cameron in early March, there was Brown, turning up in Jupiter, Florida, any tension of the previous months instantly forgotten. Though this hometown date was far more platonic with her only intentions to share her sympathies and a drink at local spot Miller’s Ale House March 7.

“She reached out immediately and Tyler was grateful for her support,” a source told E! News at the time. “They have gotten closer recently and he’s really thankful to have her around.”

And not just for a one-off hang, either. With a trip planned to visit her family in Alabama, Brown made a pitstop in Florida just a week after that initial meet-up, Cameron scooping her up from the Palm Beach airport himself.

Thanks to social distancing, though, their fun weekend of beach volleyball and swimming has turned into a week-and-a-half-long stay, the pair choosing to shelter together with a group of pals they’ve dubbed the “Quarantine Crew”.

And while couples the world over are complaining about the dearth of personal space and perpetual boredom, their gang is busy living their best lives with daily workouts and endless Tik Tok videos, each one cheekily playing up the duo’s current are-they-or-aren’t-they vibe.

The real answer, the source, insists is that they technically aren’t. But that’s far from the final word on the matter.

Between the loss of his mother and her brother’s recent overdose, “They have both been through a lot recently and are supporting each other through it,” the source explains to E! News. “Tyler has definitely been leaning on Hannah and it feels very comforting to have her around.” What’s more, continues the source, “Hannah gets along with Tyler’s family and friends and everyone loves her.”

His family approves, his friends are on board and we all know the chemistry’s there. So, by all means, ship away. “You don’t just turn off emotions,” Brown herself once proclaimed on Good Morning America way back in August. “I want him to be a part of my life in some way. So I want to be able to hang out.” 

What happens next on this dramatic journey, well, we’ll just have to keep tuning in. 

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[higginsarnott]

Murdoch Mysteries Calendar 2018

WARNING: INCREDIBLY LONG POST

Righty ho! Since @mariannenorway requested to have the entire calendar posted, and I am always one to grant people’s wishes, I’ve got the entire calendar here for you!

And don’t worry if you can’t read the writing on the pages, underneath each photo will be the title of the page, notable dates, birthdays and the writing from the bottom of each page! So let’s begin!

Note: For the different phases of the moon, it should be obvious what they are but if not, here you go:

First Quarter - First Quarter of the moon’s phase

Last Quarter - Last Quarter of the moon’s phase

New Moon - Moon phase starts again

Full Moon - The moon should be completely full in the sky

Current 2017 Months from September to December

Notable dates:

None

Description:

Set in Toronto at the dawn of the 20th century during the age of invention, Murdoch Mysteries is a one-hour drama series that explores the world of Detective William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson), a methodical and dashing detective who pioneers radical forensic techniques to solve some of the city;s most gruesome murders. Murdoch’s colleagues include his wife, the fiery and fiercely intelligent Dr. Julia Ogden (Hélène Joy); Constable George Crabtree (Jonny Harris), Murdoch’s eager but sometimes naive right-hand man; Inspector Thomas Brackenreid (Thomas Craig), Murdoch’s skeptical yet reluctantly supportive boss; and morgue assistant Rebecca James (Mouna Traoré), a resourceful young medical student taken under Ogden’s mentorship.

One of Canada’s most successful and longest-running drama series, Murdoch Mysteries is watched around the world in 110 countries and territories. The Season 10 finale ‘’Hell To Pay’’ marked 150 episodes of the series! Do you recognise and of your favourites in the collage above? Season 11 of Murdoch Mysteries will premiere in 2017/2018.

January

Notable dates:

January 1st - New Years Day

January 2nd - Full Moon

January 4th - 1 Year Anniversary of the Henry Higgins Trash Club

January 6th - Epiphany

January 7th - Orthodox Christmas

January 8th - Last Quarter

January 14th - Orthodox New Year

January 15th - Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the USA

January 17th - New Moon

January 24th - First Quarter

January 31st - Full Moon

Description

In the series premiere, ‘’Power’’ (Episode 101), the electrocution of a young woman finds Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) in the middle of warring rival electricity suppliers, one being Nikola Tesla (Dmitry Chepovetsky) himself! In a case that’s further complicated by bribery, scandal and dirty backroom dealings, Murdoch must find out who killed the woman - and why. This month marks the 10th anniversary of the world premiere of Murdoch Mysteries!

February

Notable dates:

February 7th - Last Quarter

February 12th - Georgina Reilly’s Birthday and Family Day in British Columbia, Canada

February 14th - Ash Wednesday and Valentines Day

February 15th - New Moon

February 16th - LACHLAN MURDOCH’S BIRTHDAY WOOOO! (Also Chinese New Year, Year of the Dog)

February 19th - Provincial Holiday in the following Canadian provinces:

Alberta

Manitoba

Nova Scotia

Ontario

Prince Edward Island

Saskatchewan

It’s also President’s Day in the USA

February 23rd - Heritage Day in the Yukon and the First Quarter

February 28th - Purim begins at sundown

Description

In Episode 714, ‘’Friday the 13th, 1901′’ Crabtree (Jonny Harris) drunkenly challenges Leslie Garland (Giacomo Gianniotti) to a curling match and is forced to hurriedly assemble a team. Unfortunately, Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) is hardly in the mood for games after his proposal to Ogden (Hélène Joy) was rejected, leaving Crabtree and Brackenreid (Thomas Craig) to appeal to Murdoch’s affinity for science in hopes of luring him out to the rink. This February, at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, Canada will defend its gold medals in both Men’s and Women’s curling.

March

@sibylle1898 you’ll like this month’s photo :)

Notable dates:

March 2nd - Full Moon

March 9th - Last Quarter

March 11th - Daylight Saving Time Begins

March 17th - New Moon and St. Patrick’s Day

March 20th - Spring Equinox

March 24th - First Quarter

March 25th - Palm Sunday

March 30th - Good Friday and Passover begins at sundown

March 31st - Full Moon

Description

In Episode 701 ‘’Murdoch Ahoy’’, a new passenger liner bound for Rochester is about to set sail, and Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Brackenreid (Thomas Craig) are called aboard by the owner, who is concerned about threats. When Murdoch spots Ogden (Hélène Joy) amongst the guests, he suggests they stay and monitor the situation. This episode was filmed aboard the S.S. Keewatin, the only remaining Edwardian passenger steamship in the world, which is now moored in Port McNicoll, Ontario. Built five years before the RMS Titanic, the S.S. Keewatin utilizes similar machinery including a quadruple expansion steam engine and Scotch boilers.

April

Notable dates:

April 1st - Easter Sunday and Orthodox Palm Sunday

April 2nd - Easter Monday

April 8th - Last Quarter and Pascha (Orthodox Easter)

April 16th - New Moon

April 22nd - First Quarter and Earth Day

April 23rd - Maureen Jennings’ Birthday and St. George’s Day in Newfoundland and Labrador (as well as over here in England)

April 30th - Full Moon

Description

In Episode 1002, ‘’Great Balls of Fire, Part 2′’, a massive fire consumes Toronto, complicating Murdoch’s (Yannick Bisson) investigation into the murders of two young women. When Ogden (Hélène Joy) is trapped by the intense fire, Murdoch braves the flames to rescue his wife. On April 19th, 104, Toronto’s business district was consumed in flames in what is known as The Great Fire of 1904. While no lives were lost in the fire, the cause of which was never determined, more than 250 firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze. Over 100 buildings were destroyed and 20 acres of the city levelled.

May

Notable dates:

May 5th - Cinco De Mayo in the USA

May 8th - Last Quarter

May 13th - Mother’s Day

May 15th - New Moon and Ramadan begins at sundown

May 16th - Yannick Bisson’s Birthday!

May 21st - Victoria Day all across Canada and National Patriot’s Day in Quebec

May 22nd - First Quarter

May 28th - William and Julia’s Wedding Anniversary and Memorial Day in the USA

May 29th - Full Moon

Description

In Episode 804, ‘’Holy Matrimony, Murdoch!’’, wedding bells finally ring for Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Ogden (Hélène Joy) in the landmark 100th episode of the series. When best man Crabtree (Jonny Harris) loses the ring, Higgins (Lachlan Murdoch) comes to the rescue by finding it just in time for the nearly derailed ceremony. Despite a case nearly getting in the way of the wedding, everything comes happily together for the lovebirds in the end. The two were wed on May 28th, 1902.

June

Notable dates:

June 6th - Last Quarter

June 13th - New Moon

June 14th - Eid al-Fitr begins at sundown

June 17th - Father’s Day

June 19th - Henry Higgins Trash Club’s Birthday! (aka my birthday)

June 20th - First Quarter

June 21st - Summer Solstice and National Aboriginal Day in Northwest Territories of Canada

June 24th - National Holiday of Quebec in Quebec

June 25th - Discovery Day in Newfoundland and Labrador

June 28th - Full Moon

Description

In Episode 1008, ‘’Weekend at Murdoch’s’’, after two witnesses in a murder trial are killed while birdwatching, Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Crabtree (Jonny Harris) must protect the third witness. Much to Crabtree’s dismay, the witness is Roger Newsome (Cyrus Lane), the obnoxious playboy who flustered him during previous investigations into crimes at his automobile, golf and puzzle-solving clubs. Unfortunately, Newsome fails to grasp the risk to his life and when he sneaks out and is shot and killed by a sniper, Murdoch devises an outlandish ploy to keep the case alive and smoke out the killer by faking Newsome’s survival.

July

@detectivewatts I believe this is your month :)

Notable dates:

July 1st - Canada Day

July 2nd - William Murdoch’s Birthday! (born in 1863)

July 4th - Independence Day in the USA

July 6th - Last Quarter

July 9th - Nunavut Day in Nunavut and Orangemen’s Day in Newfoundland and Labrador

July 13th - New Moon

July 19th - First Quarter

July 27th - Full Moon

Description

In Season 10, the rumpled and gruff Llewellyn Watts (Daniel Maslany) arrives from Station House No. 1. Upon hearing about Brackenreid’s temporary departure, in addition to being asked to leave his home station over personality conflicts, Watts decides that Station House No. 4 needs another detective and decides to make himself comfortable in the Inspector’s office.

August

@crabtreee your month I presume?

Notable dates:

August 4th - Last Quarter

August 6th - Civic Holiday in every Canadian province except the following:

Quebec

Newfoundland and Labrador

Yukon

August 11th - New Moon

August 18th - First Quarter

August 20th - Discovery Day in Yukon

August 21st - Eid al-Adha begins at sundown

August 26th - Full Moon

Description

In Episode 912, ‘’Unlucky In Love’’, the electrocution of an elderly groom leads Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) to suspect a black widow, while Crabtree (Jonny Harris) meets Lucy Maud Montgomery (Alison Louder) at a writing class he teaches. While the charming constable is arguably a romatic at heart, it seems that he hasn’t quite found the right person at the right time, though at the end of Season 10 he may be falling back into the arms of Nina Bloom (Erin Agostino)...

September

Notable dates:

September 3rd - Last Quarter and Labour Day in Canada and USA

September 9th - New Moon and Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown

September 10th - Muharram begins at sundown

September 16th - First Quarter

September 17th - Daniel Maslany’s Birthday!

September 18th - Yom Kippur begins at sundown

September 21st - UN International Day of Peace

September 22nd - Jonny Harris’ Birthday!

September 23rd - Autumn Equinox

September 25th - Full Moon

Description

In Episode 1005, ‘’Jagged Little Pill’’, James (Mouna Traoré) has been studying to become a doctor at the Medical College for Women at Ogden’s (Hélène Joy) urging. But when one of her fellow students is found drowned from an apparent suicide, she is convinced something is amiss and begins her own secret investigation. She soon discovers some unsettling information with repercussions for Murdoch’s investigation, leaving her in a quandary over whether to reveal her meddling or stay quiet.

October

Notable dates:

October 2nd - Last Quarter

October 8th - Thanksgiving Day in Canada and Columbus Day in the USA

October 9th - New Moon

October 13th - Arwen Humphrey’s Birthday!

October 16th - First Quarter

October 21st - Hélène Joy’s Birthday!

October 24th - Full Moon and United Nations Day

October 25th - Kristian Bruun’s Birthday!

October 31st - Halloween and Last Quarter

Description

In Episode 1016, ‘’Master Lovecraft’’, the discovery of a young girl’s dead body and some grotesque sketches lead Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) to suspect a gang of death-obsessed teenagers, which includes a young H.P. Lovecraft (Tyler East). Meanwhile, the macabre seems to be spreading to civilized society when Margaret Brackenreid (Arwen Humphreys) finds out her reading group has chosen Dracula. After a creepy run-in with Lovecraft, Margaret soon finds him haunting her subconscious when literature’s most famous vampire (East) pays her a visit... in her nightmares!

November

@tommy-two-cakes this is your month I imagine :)

Notable dates:

November 4th - Daylight Saving Time Ends

November 7th - New Moon

November 11th - Mouna Traoré’s Birthday, Remembrance Day in Canada and Veterans Day in the USA

November 15th - First Quarter

November 22nd - Thanksgiving in the USA

November 23rd - Full Moon

November 30th - Last Quarter

Description

In Episode 1006, ‘’Bend It Like Brackenreid’’, as Murdoch investigates the strange death of a footballer, the player’s death puts his team’s run for the Olympics in jeopardy. Brackenreid (Thomas Craig) gets caught up in the team’s training, and finds himself in a position to coach Galt F.C. and the opportunity to bring Olympic glory to Canada. Galt F.C. went on to win the gold medal at the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis in a tournament played from November 16-23, 1904.

December

Notable dates:

December 2nd - Advent and Hanukkah begins at sundown

December 4th - Thomas Craig’s Birthday!

December 7th - New Moon

December 15th - First Quarter

December 21st - Winter Solstice

December 22nd - Full Moon

December 25th - Christmas Day

December 26th - Boxing Day

December 29th - Last Quarter

Description

In the holiday special ‘’Once Upon a Murdoch Christmas’’, brazen robberies target Toronto’s wealthiest businessmen just days before Christmas. Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) and Brackenreid (Thomas Craig) realise that their jobs are under fire if they don’t quickly solve the case. Meanwhile, Jackson (Kristian Bruun) and James (Mouna Traoré) team up to bring Christmas spirit to the Station House with a police choir, Crabtree’s (Jonny Harris) latest novel finds some unlikely fans, and Ogden (Hélène Joy) is stalked by two street urchins who need her help. All the while Murdoch works to surprise Ogden with a mysterious gift.

DONE. NOW IF YOU’LL EXCUSE ME I NEED TO GO AND SEVERE MY HANDS OFF BECAUSE THEY HURT AFTER THIS

[rosetintedglassesbs]

Everything I wish you could read, but also goodbye.

Dear R, I’ve lost track of how many letters I have typed and posted on here, so let’s mark this one letter number 300.

This is the final one, the final chapter, to a story I wish/hoped would of been forever, or however long forever is, but this one I wanna start right from the beginning, this is going to a long one, so bare with me.

I think we met in February 2015 and were together officially March 19th, that’s when you asked me to be your girlfriend, I even remember the date of when we first met, the first night we met is was Friday 21st of February 2015, let’s go back to the start.

21/02/15-

The first night I met you, I honestly was at the point in life where a relationship was really something I wasn’t looking for, a relationship was always in the back of head, sure I wanted someone to call my own, but it wasn’t something I was going out looking for, I was very much in the stage of just wanting to go out have fun every weekend, so you can definitely much say I was a party girl, after every weekend ended another night out for the following weekend was planned, I would go out get too drunk and kiss a few people I didn’t remember kissing in the morning, I was suppose living the life of any other 19 year old.

I remember the night we met really clearly, my best friend at the time fully set me up, do you remember that???, he pretended his phone was dead so he gave you my number instead to met us in town, but tbh I didn’t really think much of it, they were forever trying to set me up with people so again I didn’t think much of it.

We spent that whole night glued to each other’s side, I didn’t really think at first you were interested in me, so I sort of played it cool, in till we drunkley kissed in the night club, and we walked out together, while you insisted I went home with you that night, I knew going home alone was my way of proving I wasn’t one of those girls, I was at one point but with you I actually wanted to see you again and didn’t want it to just be something that was just sex!, but do you think if I slept with you that night we would of even attempt a relationship??. I always believed us meeting was some sort of weird fate, because that night I was dead set on staying inside on the sofa, do you think if we never met that night we would of ever met at all? I wonder that sometimes.

08/03/15-

This was the date of our first date, because despite going out the following weekend together with everyone this was the first prober time it was just us two, when you asked me on the date I nearly said no, but I got dressed and did my make up hair and forced myself out the door, I was so nervous, all the way to meeting you I felt sick, this was the first time I had ever gone on a prober date and the thought of made me nervous, but I went anyways, we went for dinner down the harbour, I think this is the first time I realised you were about to become someone who I would fall in love with, I didn’t get home till 3am that night, and for the first time in ages I felt this feeling were I just felt content, I felt like I didn’t want to waste my weekends on drinking and partying but I wanted to spend them with you. After dinner we sat in your room and watched Netflix and just laid next to each other talking, with you everything was easy, we got along ridiculously well.

19/03/15

This is the date you asked me to be your girlfriend, allot of people told us it was too soon and that we wouldn’t last, but we were happy, and although we did get together very quickly I don’t regret that, you made me happy, and I knew you were someone I wanted in my life for as long as possible.

21/03/15

The first time you told me you loved me, and I swear to god when you said this I had never felt a feeling like it, I was the happiest I had been in months, and you know what in that moment time stood still, I wish time had frozen, just so I could hold on that, although me being the dick I am couldn’t say it back, I knew I loved you but I wasn’t ready to say that out loud, I was new to all of this and was scared of hearing myself say it, but I loved you, I think I knew from the first date that I was going to love you.

The first few months were memories I always cherished, everything felt good, I was falling in love with you, and for the first time in my life I was experiencing what it was like to fall in love, you were my best friend, and I thought we had forever, but we were too young to know about forever, we were on borrowed time, and if I knew that I would of held on to every second I spent with you if I knew there would come a time that I would have to do everything without you.

12/06/15

This isn’t really the most memorable date, well it is but for all the wrong reasons, long story short I got drunk and told you I didn’t want to be with you, and quite frankly I did this because I was scared I was scared you would leave one day, you had a big drug problem to be brutally honest I didn’t know how to handle that, we spent allot of weekends in your bedroom doing nothing while you took drugs and drank, and it wasn’t exactly how imagined I would be spending every weekend with you, there wasn’t many times I saw you sober, not for long periods of time, and I wanted to help you but you didn’t see the problem and I was scared I would lose you, so I cowardly dumped you, and my god have I never felt instant regret in till I did that, I was deversrated, I just wanted you but I couldn’t fix you, even though we were spilt up, we still spoke, you lost your job so I was trying to help, and I thought the only way to make you come back was to be a friend.

19/05/19

Much to everyone’s surprise we got back together on this date, and I knew for that moment that losing you wasn’t an option, I was too far in too not have you in my life I was in love with you, you were the only person I wanted, I didn’t see a future with anyone else, you vowed that it was only going to work if I accepted things as how they were, which I did, and although I should of held my ground I knew not having you was the worst feeling so having half of you was better than nothing, I believe at this point we should of walked away, I should of walked away, because I was losing myself but I wanted you.

Those few months were months I won’t forget, there was nothing but love, and honesty if I were to choose anyone to fall in love with for the first time I would still pick you, because you taught me allot, not all the memories of us were sad but there are moments I try not to think about, I was in love with you, and I wish I told you that more oftern, we weren’t perfect, we were far from perfect but somehow we found a way to make it work, we had to work so dam hard at it, but it was worth it, now these are memories I sometimes think about.

16/09/15

This is also another date I hate because this is where everything changed , this is when I realised you were falling in love with her and there was nothing I could do, but we don’t need to dwell on this date, but this is when we spilt up for the second time, and this time fully broke me, because after this I never felt good enough, I lost you at this date, we ended again here, and I spent the whole weekend wishing and wishing you would come back, because at this point I knew I wasn’t just going to walk away I had to try, I think at this point we should of known better, I don’t remember the dates but we soon got back together promising each other that if this time it didn’t work we would stop trying, but I knew about her long before I told you I did, and things just got harder, most nights I cried, I became more needy because I couldn’t lose you, but you also became someone who was just breaking my heart, I didn’t recognise myself anymore, I was dependent on you, I needed you, because you were my everything, I believe at this point you were cheating maybe not physically but I knew something was going on.

07/11/15

This is the morning you lost everting, you had no job and you had nowhere to live, I was going to stick by you through everything so I held you hand and told you it was going to be ok because whatever was going to happen it was going to be you and I, because I was there for you through everything and I cared about you more than you could of ever imagined, this is the date you moved in, and at first I loved living with you, I loved going to bed every night and you were there, like I had everything I had ever wanted, I felt close to you during these few weeks.

Everything felt ok for a little while, but I couldn’t of felt any low about myself, and well let’s be honest you didn’t fancy me anymore, and I knew you were cheating, but I couldn’t lose you, we argued you allot, you went out most weekends out and each time you went out I was scared that would be the moment you wouldn’t come back again that you were leaving me, I was broken and staying with you hurt me, but I loved you.

03/05/16

I don’t know if I really need to say what date this is, but that morning shattered my heart, I have never experienced pain like it, I wanted it too all be a bad dream and from that moment I knew we were a ticking time bomb, I was losing you but I was still holding on, I blamed myself for why you cheated, and I don’t regret choosing to stay with you because it’s a lesson I had to learn, I had to learn how to put myself first, I wanted to hold to you,but I couldn’t even look at you,you were my everything my best friend, but being with you hurt, nothing was really the same after that, but we had moments were we loved one another.

09/10/16

And this was the point we realised that we couldn’t be together, that we had both hate to let go, you were in love with someone else, and I wasn’t someone you wanted anymore, and I know half hearted we made the right decision, because you loved that girl, you were in love with her, and all I wanted was you to be happy, it broke me, but I knew we had been through too much to just work on it, we had to let go, and tbh I never wanted to let go, I never wanted you to leave, but it wasn’t my choice.

So Reuben there’s the time line, and I’m sorry it’s so long, but I just wanted one last trip down memory lane, some of those memories aren’t the happiest, but we tried so dam hard for what we had, and I’m glad we happened, I won’t ever regret a single moment, because I loved you and shocker but I think a small part of me somewhere will always care for you, you were my first love, you were my best friend at one point, so I will always hold some level of love for you.

It was nice to be in contact with you for these past few weeks, but I have to realise I am not someone who is any good for you, I am not someone who belongings with you, but I wish you nothing but the best, I wish you all the success because you fucking deserve to be happy, I hope you find what you are looking for, and I hope it fills you with so much peace and contentment I really do, because you deserve happiness, and I hope next year and all the years to come bring you happiness and you carry on progressing, thank you for teaching me some of life’s hardest lesson but also showing me love,

So here is where it ends, here is where all those memories fade, so here is the end to something that almost broke me but built me to the person I am today, and for that I’m grateful.

Goodbye, final goodbye.

The final letter to what seems like a life time of letters I wrote out, and maybe I’ll never be done with writing about you, but not in the way that I’m still in love with you because that’s long gone, but in a way sometimes the pain from that relationship still haunts me, but I wouldn’t take any of it back, I wouldn’t of changed anything, I grew from the pain, at in the most fucked up way the pain changed me into someone who is strong but also a work progress, I don’t know when I’ll ever be able to love another person again, but I’m not hurting anymore, not like the ways I once did,

And writing to you helped, helped because pain makes you feel creative, pain makes you want better things for yourself, pain makes you grow and without it,I probably wouldn’t of grew to the person I am now.

I need to stop waffling on, and now let this be.

But goodbye to you, and goodbye to all the memories we shared, all the moments, the laughing, the crying, the shouting, and the days were we loved one another with nothing but love, and goodbye to the day’s I wish I never had to experience, goodbye to the person I thought you were, and goodbye to the idea of you and I.

[coolpolarbear123]

BAND CAMP DAY 7

September 1st, 2017

Albus’ first year of Hogwarts--and my last Speaking of lasts, this is it, guys. The last band camp of my high school career.

10th GRADE BC POSTS (2015) | 11th GRADE BC POSTS (2016) 12th GRADE BC POSTS (2017) | COLLEGE: FIRST YEAR BC POSTS (2018) | COLLEGE: SECOND YEAR BC POSTS (2019) | ALL

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6

My 9th grade year, back in 2014, I did not have a tumblr. That’s one of the reasons those days weren’t recorded. The second was that there was no reason for me to. Why would I? I made new friends, I kept my old--just like that Girl Scout song about gold and silver circles (I should know--I’m still in Girl Scouts) And that band was the best thing of my freshman year. We had games every Friday night, we went to three competitions that year, all 60 people were the most family-like group I can remember. Practice Tuesday and Thursday until 4:30. Band was every day from 1:00-2:15. This was all in EST, of course. I have a lot of good memories from that time.

Of course, I moved, as you guys know. August 21st and 22nd of 2015. And because I moved here, I had to attend band camp here, naturally. So the July before we moved, I went to the band camp here. And it wasn’t the same. It was less strict, twice the size, not as family-like as I was told in an e-mail, and they only went to three or four games. No competitions. We didn’t march for the first days of band camp, and when we did, I was appalled. It was all Not Okay. I absolutely hated it. I went through that year pretty disgusted.

I needed a challenge--I told myself freshman year that being a drum major wasn’t for me. So there I was, as a drum major. 2016 band camp was year one of being a drum major, along with two very fun other guys (HDM and ODM). I was a nervous wreck, but it was better than 2015. Of course, marching and fundamentals were still not there.

Being a drum major was better than being on the field, so now it’s 2017, and I’m the “head” drum major. It was definitely different. The first year that I’ve known what I was doing, and it’s a very strange feeling. As long as I don’t pay attention to any of the marching--everything’s fine, right? Nah. This band will never live up to my old band for a multitude of reasons. I had so much more fun my freshman year, and it was so ordered because of how serious it was. This band will never be that serious--it wasn’t meant to be. No competitions, no away games. Not as many trips on the band bus, either, because of all of that.  So, look. I will always and forever have my old band in the limelight. I was angry from moving, and I’m still angry at times. I was disappointed my 10th grade year, and it carried to 12th. Maybe not as heavily since I’ve gotten more and more used to it, but I’m kind of stubborn sometimes. And annoying. But it’s the last day of my high school band camp, and let’s get into it.

This Morning:

I started the first BC post with the word “tonight,” so it’s only right that this one is “this morning.”

I mean, I could have put “tonight”

But I doubt 9AM is counted as “night.”

I get there early, as always, hang out at the front, look at the board, see that the order for our first marching game has changed, and question reality

I don’t even remember much of the beginning

X gets there, and I talk to FHF and probably my brother

And then we start

Y isn’t there, and we’re running through all of pregame, so X and I try dividing up Y’s songs. I’ll do Seven Nation Army, and he can do Illinois Loyalty, and then I’ll do Land of 1000

Of course, while we conduct our actual songs as well

Y comes in during that, though, so they got to conduct two of their songs while I did SNA

That’s a relief, though, because all three drum majors are good to have

We finish that up, and I, of course, have to conduct the SSB at the end. Not as good as that other time, that’s for sure.

Apparently a lot of fish don’t know what SSB stands for

My brother’s doing well, by the way

Honestly the first hour and a half wasn’t anything special

A little bit of sass and sarcasm here and there, but nothing remember-worthy, apparently

There was one song that we played and the band director tossed his drum stick (I think), fell off the drum set, caused the band to completely falter, and then HDM (yes, HDM) had to clap to the beat to get everyone back on track

It was interesting. And funny

I think it was Land of 1000--Y was conducting. I think.

I think the only person who really caught what happened was FHF because she had the biggest reaction

Though she’s loud so all of her reactions are fairly big

When X conducts, HDM makes faces at him, and it’s really fun to watch

But he doesn’t make faces at me so I think that’s Rude

But ODM will occasionally nod so it’s okay

Now we’re on break

Come back, more playing. Halftime show stuff

The drum line comes in and we do a tiny bit of pregame

SSB pt 2 wasn’t good

I blame everyone who wasn’t paying attention to me. No one was.

But that’s fun because then the entire band freaks out when I start counting off. And the band director did say “start whenever.”

I did that twice--by the way. Why call them to attention when you can watch everyone freak out instead?

OH, MY GODS

I FORGOT

So there’s this fish trumpet player, and he was wearing a blue shirt today

And I swear to the gods I can’t stand the dude

The band director said we’d be running through the entirety of pregame, so get all of the music you need beforehand.

This. Kid. Did. Not. He got up to get his music every time we switched songs. Excuse me? No. No. No.

That was disruptive--waiting for him every time

AND THEN HE WOULDN’T EVEN PLAY

He would sit there and maybe dab back and forth

I swear to the gods

Like, you--

--idiot

I asked my brother later on about the kid. Apparently the dude is incredibly smart, in all of the advanced classes, a fantastic trumpet player, etc

Are

You

Kidding

Me

I can’t stand whatever this Prodigy Kid™ is

That was pregame (the first 45 mins)

In the story, we’re in halftime (the second 45 mins)

This might end up being really out of order

We play I Just Can’t Wait to be King first, which, if you remember, is my song

For now

That was a bit of a surprise, but okay

I wasn’t on the podium for it. I was standing next to it with the band director on the podium

All of the drum majors had to do that

But I was the only one who didn’t have to start the band

Anyway, after we finish playing and the drum line is with us, we decide to teach the fish The Kick

This is a kick that we do in parades and the cue is a drum cadence called 1979 or something like that

So we teach the fish

I was on the podium while we taught them that (this was right after SSB pt 2 (after halftime rehearsal, before the halfway point of one and a half hours)

It was interesting watching them learn

I mean, I remember learning

I didn’t get it until our first parade

When someone in my grade was like, “It’s alright--you’ll know it after the parade.”

Yeah, I knew it after that parade

So, we teach them that, and then we head outside!

We decide not to do pregame drill today (yessss)

Drum Majors grab the sound system and the podium, we set up, and we stand on the sideline to figure out the salute

WE FIGURED IT OUT

I mean, a lot of messing around

And we literally high-five during it

But WE GOT IT X isn’t really the guy to have fun with Y and me, as I’m seeing

Then we watch the band because doing stuff isn’t fun

Watching people do stuff is

JUST KIDDING

Watching them wasn’t fun because their fundamentals aren’t anywhere near good, and I want to die

Oh, by the way, ODM and I nod at each other a lot. It’s fun

Eventually, we do “practice pregame” stuff. Nothing official, but it’s to get people kinda used to it. We do some of the moving and some of the run-on

The

Run-on

I ALMOST DIED

OKAY

I ALMOST DID

Basically, I have to run through the tubas and drum line, and the gaps weren’t big and Y and I had to switch places while running because of Things, and it’s going to be like that for the game

But I am not a runner

And running is not my forte

(get it)

and yeah

The band wasn’t that fast, though? We made it just fine. Nothing like last year.

We’ll see what happens when the year starts. 

Anyway, we do that stuff, and we do that stuff more than once

ouch

And then the band director with the mic (the other two don’t have mics and were judging from the sidelines. It’s funny) says to gather by the podium

Logically, he’s going to climb the podium

So I do

And then after a few minutes I’m told to get down

Of course

Y climbed with me

I got down, sat in the grass

There’s a “take a knee” campaign while the band director was talking

A handful of the band took a knee and no one else did

They tried, though

And then the band director wants us to learn a cheer

And the band votes for one of the percussionists to do it, and then for ODM to do it, so they do it together.

ONE BAND

ONE SOUND

x3

It’s not my favourite, but it works

I don’t even remember if my old band had a chant (That’s not good--that I don’t remember)

I think I just don’t like this one because it’s like “Hey this isn’t your old band.”

And then we went in

And got popsicles

Apparently “popsicle” is supposed to be capitalized?

I’m not going to

Before I forget: shouting is a thing

Anyway, those popsicles were really good

OH MAN

There was one point when the band was marching in a block, and us drum majors were sitting on the sidelines. During this block, the band would face us and march towards us until there were only feet away.

They also stopped facing us

Anyway, FHF messed up once, and she landed on her spot, but did a weird spin-thing in frustration and landed off her mark

To which I corrected her

I also made her get some of the sound stuff

Which made her lose her music

And then we “argued” about who was bossy

And she got her music back

And ODM was holding the band room door open, and when I walked in, HDM was like, “QUICK CLOSE IT ON THE DRUM MAJOR” Me: “RUDE” HDM, imitating me: “rOOd”

I have friends who spell that as “r00d”

that’s off track

Anyway, when we get to the band room, ODM and HDM have lockers really close together, so I went to them, put my arms on my shoulders and was like, “I miss you guys” “We miss you too--but you’re doing well” “Thanks! The run-on is really confusing, though” “So it’s when [this] happens, but don’t run right away. Wait a beat.” “You’re the leader. The band will follow the drum majors. Run whenever.” We then joked about running before the whistle

It was really nice conversation

Anyway, I think that’s it. I think that’s all.

I really hope I’m not forgetting anything

I’ll update if I think of anything--or if Y or FHF says something like “What about [this]?”

I usually do update it

But, yeah

It’s been fun, guys

Thank you for letting me rant

And thank you for reading

It’s been one heck of a ride

HERE’S THE DEAL GUYS. I am going into my senior (12th grade) year. This is my last year of grade school, and my last year of becoming disappointed by band camp. I do plan on continuing marching band in college, but as I am a flute player, I don’t know if I’ll be able to. It depends on where I go. I also play clarinet, but there’s no way of knowing if I’ll be good enough. I have this year to practice. I’m not one to get my hopes up, so this might be my last band camp post ever. Thank you guys so much for reading and experiencing this with me. I get absolutely no feedback whatsoever (well, now I get FHF, but besides her), so I don’t actually know what you guys think of this. It helps me and gives me something to look forward to. Thank you guys, so, so much. And if I am in marching band next year, I’ll tell you when I know. I love you guys. I miss my old band, my old friends. Just to say it one last time. Just know it’s true. I miss you guys.

[haydenstudiesblog-blog]

92 Statements Tag!

Rules: Answer / complete the statements and tag 20 people [optional].

Thanks @wisteria-and-honeysucklefor tagging me :)

I’m just gonna tag now: @emmastudies @teaandstudythings @pippistudies

LAST:

1. Drink - milk  2. Phone call - my sister 3. Text message - my boyfriend 4. Song you listened to - a song on the radio that I didn’t know lol 5. Time you cried - 2 days ago

HAVE YOU:

6. Dated someone twice - yup! My current boyfriend haha 7. Kissed someone and regretted it - yes 8. Been cheated on - yes 9. Lost someone special - yes 10. Been depressed - yes  11. Gotten drunk and thrown up - got drunk and threw up in the morning BUT I FELT PERFECTLY FINE AFTER SO NO REGRETS

3 FAVORITE COLORS:

12-14: navy blue, rose gold, charcoal gray

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU:

15. Made new friends - yes 16. Fallen out of love - yes 17. Laughed until you cried - yes omg 18. Found out someone was talking about you - nope 19. Met someone who changed you - yes 20. Found out who your friends are - yes and I’m thankful for that 21. Kissed someone on your Facebook list - yes

GENERAL:

22. How many Facebook friends do you know in real life? oh god maybe like half haha but I don’t have that many  23. Do you have any pets? yes I have a dog named Lilly Beans 24. Do you want to change your name? nope 25. What did you do your last birthday? went out to eat haha nothing exciting (as my again after my 21st in March *wink wink*) 26. What time did you wake up? 6:00 AM 27. What were you doing at midnight last night? girl I was asleep 28. Name something you can’t wait for: my vacation and going back to school and visiting my boyfriend at his school (aka the school I’m trying to transfer to (not just because he’s there I am in love with their writing program)) 29. When was the last time you saw your mom? currently staring at her lol 30. What’s one thing you wish you could change in your life? I wish I had gone on college visits and hadn’t just gone to my current uni just because my sister is there AND I wish I would’ve gone with my gut in the beginning and gone into publishing because I wasted 2 years trying to find something else to go into only to go back to that now haha sorry I’m rambling bye  31. What are you listening to right now? the real housewives of NYC talk to each other drunk on vacation (Bethany is my fav) 32. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom? yeah! 33. Something that is getting on your nerves - my shitty internet 34. Most visited websites - tumblr, youtube, pinterest, Google (mail and Sheets)

RANDOM:

35. Mole(s) - yes  36. Mark(s) - I have a scar on/under my belly button from my incision for my surgery a few years ago and a super tiny scar between my belly button and nether regions where my drain was (”it won’t scar” my ASS) 37. Childhood dream - be a singer like Hannah Montana (yes including the double life I’m not proud of this stage) 38. Hair color - it’s been described as “dirty dish water” kind of an ugly light brown but I’m starting to get low lights to darken it 39. Long or short hair - medium-- a little past my shoulders, short hair suits me better imo but I’ve always had long hair to my butt  40. Do you have a crush on someone? haha yeah my boyfriend and like every actor in the Marvel/DC movies and Eddie Redmayne 41. What do you like about yourself? I can write better than anyone I know, I’m good at spelling words (so lame what), and I like that I have thick hair. 42. Piercings - no I’m too much of a wuss to get anything pierced even my ears 43. Blood type - wait should I know this??? 44. Nickname - "H” “Lil H” “Hay” “HayHay” “Hayden Marie” feel free to call me any of these my favs are “H” and “Hay” 45. Relationship status - taken! 46. Zodiac sign - pisces 47. Pronouns - She/her 48. Favorite TV Show - Parks and Rec, The Office, Jane the Virgin, Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce, Real Housewives (most of them) 49. Tattoos - no but hopefully soon! 50. Right or left hand - Right 51. Surgery - I’ve had two   52. Hair dyed in different color - omg I tried to go blonde in middle school and it looked horrible I have all the regret in the world 53. Sport - I played volleyball and basketball all throughout high school (track in middle school) 54. Was missing from the previous person’s post. 55. Vacation - I’m gonna list all of mine because fun! Disney World, Florida about a million times, drove to Georgia, road trip out West, Cancun, and I’m about to take a road trip out East!

56. Pair of trainers - I just got a super basic pair of Adidas

MORE GENERAL:

57. Eating - basically anything unhealthy I’m awful 58. Drinking - Mountain Dew, milk, water, anything Smirnoff 59. I’m about to - go eat something and watch Jane the Virgin 60. mood: exhausted 61. Waiting for - sleep 62. Want - more time, to write a best-seller 63. Get married - hopefully in the future and hopefully to the guy I’m with :) 64. Career - editor, work at a publishing company, hopefully write my own book someday 

WHICH IS BETTER:

65. Hugs or kisses - Hugs but also love kisses 66. Lips or eyes - eyes! 67. Shorter or taller - doesn’t matter 68. Older or younger - younger I guess (my boyfriend is a few months younger and a grade behind me) 69. Movies or books? : books always but I love a good movie 70. Nice arms or nice stomach - both? omg I’m kidding I don’t care 71. Sensitive or loud - I’m really sensitive so I need someone sensitive but I can be loud so I need that too? Why can’t we have both? 72. Hookup or relationship - relationship, BUT if I weren’t in my current relationship maybe I’d just go for hookup. It’s a life I’ve never experienced

73. Troublemaker or hesitant - hesitant

HAVE YOU EVER:

74. Kissed a stranger - nope 75. Drank hard liquor - haha no girl. I stick to my Smirnoff, Pine Apple-Ritas (I think?? I was drunk when I tried these the first time), and Long Islands (these bitches fuck me up bad but they’re so good) 76. Lost glasses / contact lenses - I don’t wear glasses but I’m convinced I need them 77. Turned someone down - yes :( 78. Sex on the first date - uh NO I’m too shy for that 79. Broken someone’s heart - god I hope not but probably (I don’t mean that in a self-righteous way or something) 80. Had your heart broken - haha yeah it’s great 81. Been arrested - no 82. Cried when someone died - of course 83. Fallen for a friend - uh yeah and now we’re dating lol (he wasn’t into me at first but don’t worry guys I annoyed him until he caved and now he can never leave)

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

84. Yourself - I’m told that I don’t as much as I should but I’m working on it 85. Miracles - kind of but also not really? 86. Love at first sight - hell no 87. Santa Claus - no :( 88. Kiss on the first date - hey sure why not

OTHER:

89. (missing but I made this one up) favorite book: asking me what my favorite book is is the equivalent of asking me which parent is my favorite 90. Current best friend’s name - Jacob (my boyfriend, not ashamed, he’s the best) 91. Eye color - like blue gray 92. Favorite movie - Star Wars: A New Hope

[iknowiambecauseisaidiam]

A Year of Change: aka How Kpop changed my life!

So I haven’t really posted on here much....ever... but I felt like it was time.  Part of that is because I’ve looked back on the year I’ve had since last May and I can’t even believe everything that has happened.

Last year was my step into the real world, I graduated cosmetology school, I had loans to pay, a job to find.  I spent the first 3 months terrified that I would mess up, or be told I wasn’t cut out for this.  I remember being sick to my stomach every time I got a color, so terrified that I would mess it up.  

Then it was announced that Got7 was going to be touring... In the US! Anyone who knows kpop knows, that that doesn’t always happen.  So I saved up, and me, my sister and our friend Kelsey got ourselves ready.  They had already been to a Shinee fan meet in Chicago (leaving me behind : (  because I had just started my job) But this was a concert! A concert with probably our biggest bias group! 

So in July of 2016, I got to go to New York City for the very first time because of Got7! To this day I can barely believe that this is real.  The boy’s put on an especially amazing show, being their amazingly goofy selfs. I ended up crying during Just Right, because it had been the song that first got me into them. We had bought tickets to both shows, My friend managed to get p1 for the first show and p2 for the second, me and my sister for p2 for both.  I still can not believe how beautiful they are in real life.  I still can’t believe they’re real. 

After the second show, as we sat in the seats at the back of the venue, watching them break down the stage as we waited to hi-touch our boys, I thought how sad it was that it had to end.  Sure we had spent two days waiting 10 hours on the sidewalks of New York city waiting for this.  The second show we even had a couple people pass out from heat exhaustion before the show had started.  But it had been the best three days of my life. Getting to see Time Square, getting to see an amazing concert and be with my sister and our friend.  It was an absolutely amazing experience...

And it was over.

We didn’t know when we would see the boys next, or any kpop concert honestly.  

I’m not ashamed to say it made me kind of sad. Really sad.

But we had our memories and our little videos of them that we could watch.  

What we thought was the end was just the beginning of a crazy year. 

Because in September Got7 announced a fan-meet, but no US locations were announced. The closest to us was going to be in Toronto, Canada.  So, being the crazy people we were, we decided Toronto must be lovely in November, and if we’re there anyways, why not see Got7... two more times... (You might be able to see how real the addiction is at this point, we sure couldn’t) 

So it November of 2016, I got to see Canada for the very first time. It was my very first time leaving the country.

We got P2 for the first show, but got the cheap seats for the second.  It was kindof nice to get to sit back and watch them.  It can be a bit hard to see with standing room.

The Kelsey’s (my sister and our friend) ended up being filmed by the Real Got7 crew when we were in line, and Bam Bam complimented my sister’s tattoo during the hi-touch.

While we were in Toronto be got to go to Korea town and found an amazing music store that sold a bunch of Kpop. Needless to say we left more broke then we already were.

Again, it was over. The Kpop depression was pretty real at this point.  We had gotten so lucky being able to see our boys, twice within the same year, Two concerts and two fan meets.  There was no way we could be any luckier.

Then BTS decided to peek it’s head into the US.  December 14th of 2016 we officially had tickets to see BTS!  December 17th, we sunk ourselves deeper by getting tickets to the Washington DC fan meet of Got7.

As if all that wasn’t enough, which it definitely was, Shinee announced a concert as well... the same weekend that BTS would be.  And only in Texas, which was the day of the BTS concert we were attending, and in LA two days after...

But we’ll get to that in a second.  first was the Got7 fan-meet in D.C.

January 21st 2016 I got to travel to D.C. for the very first time.

I still can’t believe it.

We ended up finding a restaurant named Mandu that had amazing Korean food!

Leading up to the concert I had drawn a comic panel of the boys

I had made a bunch of copies and passed out some before the concert while we were waiting in line. Until it started to pour... 10 hrs, in the rain. Well not raining the whole time, but a lot of it. 

Anyway we ended up meeting some amazing girls in line. We’re still friends even now. We bonded over our love of the Got7 boys and all our other mutual groups too.  They had even gotten Tickets to BTS in New Jersey too! So we exchanged Instagrams and stayed in contact.

The Fan-meet itself was amazing, Got7 definitely has a way of making every fan meet different. 

At the Hi-touch, I was holding one of the comic pages as I went through the line.  I don’t know if most of the boys understood it, but the line got held up a bit when I was just in front of Mark (I nearly dies XO) and he read a bit of it and said it was cool! 

Also both Kelsey’s told Bam Bam he was fabulous, he asked them if that was a good thing. So be sure to tell Bam Bam he’s fabulous! 

On the way home we went to a Korea town in Virginia and got some albums and ate at a bakery.

Again, another fan meet was over, the sadness of not seeing Got7 again for a while was still there, but we still had concerts on the horizon.

So like I said earlier, BTS concert was March 24 and Shinee only was going to have two shows.  Dallas was out because we already had BTS tickets.

It started as a joke... Jokes are dangerous.  We kept telling each other, oh we should just go to both hahahahahaha.

I didn’t expect it to happen...

So we were going to LA for Shinee, the same weekend we were going to New Jersey for BTS...

This post is not meant to brag, it’s more to reflect on this past year of events.

So on March 24th we headed to New Jersey, meet up with our D.C. friends, and spent the day waiting to see our Boys.

Oh also KENNY was sitting a couple of rows in front of us!

You can see us in his BTS vlog in the background lol.

ANYWAYS~

BTS has by far been the most emotional one for me. Yes I had cried alittle during Got7 but BTS was a trainwreck of emotions.  Jimin’s solo had me alittle teary eyed, Suga’s First Love had tears coming... But as soon as Jin started Awake... WATERFALL! The girl next to me at one point asked if I was okay! I wasn’t, but I just nodded.

And just seeing the Rainbow ARMY Happen, in real life, it was so beautiful!

I pretty much had tears through half of the concert, if not more!

I was still crying after the concert!

Then we went back to our friends hotel room to relax for a bit when one of the girls came back and said she got off on the floor above us and hear BTS was staying in the room above us. Not totally sure if that’s true, but I can dream lol.

So after a couple of hours, we headed to JFK airport in New York and waited for our 7 am flight to LA.

First ever flight, First time in LA!

Luckily I slept through just about the whole flight there, since we hadn’t gotten any sleep that day.

But then we landed in LA at 10 am!

I got to see my first real Palm Tree! 

We spend the first bit of the day just wandering around and went to Korean BBQ that night.  We also found Music Plaza, a full Kpop store! 

Needless to say, again we spent way to much money.

We had some amazing seats, we were in the balcony off to the left side.  We were just before this private little balcony that was blocked off.

My friend nudged me and pointed, we could see into the balcony area and Evan and Steven from Buzzfeed were there! We might have fan girled a bit over that! Not gonna lie.

And Then Shinee!!!

They put on a ridiculously amazing show, obviously! You really can’t expect anything else from Shinee!

As the concert wrapped up, we saw the private balcony start to clear out, and we knew they’d have to go right behind us.  I watched the balcony, waiting. Then I saw Steven and Evan make their way out.  I turned to fast and just waved, “Hi Steven Hi Evan”

I think it took Steven a second to realize we recognized him, but Evan immediately smiled at us! (Steven did too! It just took him a second)

It was definitely such a crazy weekend, but I wouldn’t trade any of these experiences for anything.

And soon the adventures are going to continue! 

July 14th of 2017 I’m going to MonstaX in New York at the same place it all started with Got7 and it makes me get butterflies just thinking of being there again.

July 27th of 2017 We’ll be seeing G-Dragon in Brooklyn, NY.  New venue, new experiences!

I can’t wait for the new adventures to happen! 

If you’re going to be at either of those concerts, or if you were at the concerts I mentioned, leave a comment or message. You can never have to many Kpop friends!!

If you read all this , Thank you for letting me share this adventure with you! It means a lot just to get all of this out!

Have a beautiful Day, and just go find an adventure!

Bye~

[thedreamingdinosaur]

Hello Everyone!

Right first of all, I am so sorry that I haven’t been posting lately. Uni and work and life and yeah you get the picture. This is going to be a fairly long post I feel as I have a fair bit I want to share with you! so lets get started.

1- Spontaneous Trip! So a few weeks ago me and Heather decided we were bored. I didn’t have work… She was off… so what do we do? We go to London. Yes we did a very spontaneous trip to London! And when I mean spontaneous, I mean with probably 1 day in advance planning. This isn’t the first time I’ve done a very last minute trip to London though so I was sort of prepared to leave at any given minute. This was also a great chance for me to really test out my camera on my new phone as well and boy oh boy was I impressed!

We knew the destination but what did we want to do? Well one thing we had talked about previously was doing our own little BBC Sherlock Tour.

Map of our tour for any future references

Now since we only had 1 day in London and a lot to see we had to narrow it down and be very specific with timings and such. So class pay attention as I am about to begin!

We begun at Waterloo station, after a very eventful train journey up there, seeing a very cute dog, lots of protesters and an ex teacher at our secondary school (while bitching about old school teachers…) From here we made our way up to Baker Street.

Baker Street tube station has to be one of my favourites, if it’s possible to have a favourite tube station. The art on the walls of the station are just so eye catching… IT’S SHERLOCKCEPTION! Diddy Sherlocks creating a bigger Sherlock! Outside the station is a huge statue of the consulting detective himself wearing the famous cape and deerstalker while smoking on his pipe. Last time I saw the statue I was unable to get a decent photo so was quite pleased with the one I did get.

After some gawking over a station, we walked down Baker Street to the museum at 221b. Now we didn’t go in the museum (as much as I wanted and still want to) but we did get some pictures of it (THANK YOU TO THE BUS DRIVER WHO STOPPED TO LET ME TAKE A PHOTO!)

221B Baker Street and Hudson’s Restaurant

We then walked down to the Landmark Hotel, where John attempted to propose to Mary and Sherlock intruded LOL! I don’t have a photo to show you unfortunately because I got a little scared of the man on the door… Yeah I’m a wuss. ANYWAY! Once we had visited the hotel we took a nice stroll down to North Gower Street. Our original plan was to walk straight down Marylebone Road but that plan was disrupted by some police saying we weren’t allowed under the tape to pass through, even though other people were!!! So we got diverted the longer way.

Nevertheless we made it!

The filming location for 221B Baker Street in BBC Sherlock is actually 187 North Gower Street just a 20 minute walk away from the well known location. Speedy’s Cafe is run by some amazing and really friendly staff members who seem very willing to talk about the fame the café have received. Because it was lunch time and we were bloody cold, we decided to get something to eat and a nice warm cup of tea while at speedy’s and it had to be one of the best lunch’s in the world! It was lovely and quiet in their too, once we had started eating anyway, but this could be because we actually got there 30 minutes before it was due to close. The café was surrounded with Sherlock memorabilia with photos taken from filming over the years of Benedict and Martin, fan art, and even menu items named after the famous duo. There was even a dollar bill with Ben’s Sherlock on! Which I thought was amazing and really wanted! To top it off we sat in the space that Ben and Martin sat in during filming one series (cue minor freak out)

So after a nice lunch to fill our detective stomachs curtsy of Mrs Hudson, where next? Obviously to St Bartholomew’s Hospital to check to see if Molly Hooper had done a post mortem of course! We decided to tube down to St Barts’ as it was a far old walk and was bloody freezing cold!! When we arrived we first of all got stuck in a little garden/park area which we thought had another gate on the other side… Ohhh nope! Once we got out we naturally did the “SHERLOOOOOOOCKKK!!!” moment from The Reichenbach Fall before moving closer to look at the hospital itself. The hospital itself is more of a teaching hospital, for more information visit http://bartshealth.nhs.uk/our-hospitals/st-bartholomew’s-hospital/. It’s pathology department, where our own little Mousey Molly works in the morgue, is actually a museum of pathology. Although we didn’t fancy a visit inside, the windows of the hospital did assume us greatly.

SHERLOOOOOOOOOCKKKK!!!! 

It’s clear that a lot of Sherlock enthusiasts visit to leave their mark. This wasn’t the only objects with evidences of fellow Sherlockians. The telephone box next to the hospital was covered in various forms of affection. One reading ‘I am gay for John Watson’. Someone also cunningly left a Sherlock Holmes business card in the window of the phone box.

We wandered along the The Old Bailey once we had finished at St Bart’s, which luckily was just up the road. The Old Bailey is one of the most famous courthouses in the UK. It is also where notorious consulting criminal James Moriarty was put on trial, after his triple break in to Pentonville Prison, The Bank of England and The Tower of London.

After our trip to court we walked down to St Paul’s Cathedral. I love this Cathedral. The architecture of the building is truly beautiful and you can really imagine what the vivid colours must of looked like when it was first built. It was even more beautiful at this time of day, when the sunlight was hitting the building at the perfect angle.

What happened next did make us laugh quite a bit. So when we first got on the train to go to London on that chilly Saturday Morning, we were aware that there would be a Woman’s March in London that day, hence the multiple protesters. What we didn’t expect or prepare for, was for us to walk straight into the middle of a protest… Yes that’s right, we got off the tube at Charring Cross… and walked into the middle of an Anti-Trump protest. Now for some truth… IT. WAS. FUCKING. AWESOME! To see so many people come together to voice their opinions was fantastic and some of the sign’s we saw were just brilliant! My personal favourite from the day, which I saw on social media on the way home, read ‘FUCK THE FUCKING FUCKERS’. Brilliant!

I would like to say that although I do not wish to voice my opinion on the subject they were protesting, I would like to say that this was an amazing experience to witness as having never seen a protest of this magnitude in person before in my life!

So once we managed to escape the massive hoard of angry men, women and even children, we strolled down the mall and towards Carlton House Terrace, or more commonly known as The Diogenes Club, Mycroft’s little hide away.

Yet another beautiful example of London architecture.

The next hour or so took us further down The Mall to Buckingham Palace and even to Eaton Square. Since I have so many photos of the Palace, I didn’t bother to take another. When it came to Eaton Square, we walked along to find number 44. If you do not know, this is Irene Alder’s abode. We were going to walk to the house and take a photo… until we saw a guy washing his car outside the house, so Heather took a shot of the road to make it look less suspicious(?).

Earlier that day, I had said to Heather that I would take her to see a very special theatre, which luckily enough was on the route we desired anyway. We walked down Victoria Street and passed The Palace Theatre, where later this year the broadway musical Hamilton will be housed!

Now comes a funny part. We wanted to visit New Scotland Yard and take a photo of the famous spinning sign. So naturally before we went up, I googled the location to NSY… except… it wasn’t the right address. Yes it was indeed Old Scotland Yard. THEY HAD MOVED! So by this point we where extremely confused looking for a spinning box which had been gone for what seemed like a few months now!. Disappointed, we continued down the road towards Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Westminster Bridge… so basically Westminster. It is at this point that Heather comment saying that Big Ben wasn’t so Big and insisted on the name ‘Not so Big Ben’.

Not So Big Ben

Our Journey then lead us to our finally destination, Southbank and the London eye. Where the sunset had provided us the perfect opportunity for some amazing photos!

Heather being all artisticky

London Eye doing a pretty thing with its lights

That concluded our tour. Well the couple of pints of beer and the meal in The Beer House in Waterloo Station before our journey back, miming Hamilton songs in the Quiet Zone of the train did.

If you are wanting to go on the same journey around London we did, here are the locations we visited in order: 1- Baker Street (Tube Station and 221b) 2- The Landmark Hotel 3- North Gower Street & Speedy’s Café 4- St Bartholomew’s Hospital 5- The Old Bailey 6- Trafalger Square 7- Carlton House Terrace 8- Buckingham Palace 9- Eaton Square 10- The Palace Theatre 11- (Old) Scotland Yard 12- Westminster Abbey 13- Westminster Palace & Big Ben 14- Westminster Bridge 15- London Eye

2- TICKETS! Okay so before I go onto the next exciting thing that happened to me within the last two months, lets take a short break for me to tell you that I am going Sherlocked Convention 2017 at The Birmingham Metropole Hilton Hotel in October. I am going for the whole weekend so expect a verrrrryyyyy long post with lots of pictures as I am planning to take my camera with me this time! Next thing is that I am seeing Hamilton next year a week before my 21st Birthday!!! :D

3- Busted Night Driver Tour 2017 So for those of you who are Busted or McBusted fans out there prepared to be very jealous. On Monday 13th Feb, I saw Busted on their Night Driver Tour down at Portsmouth Guildhall.

Now I went their with little preparation for what song they would play as this tour was to promote their new album by the same name. But I did some research and had spent the 2 days before listening to the new album religiously! They did though play a few of the classics including Year 3000, Crashed the Wedding, Air hostess and Sleeping with the Lights on.

I have to say as much as I enjoyed their new album it was very different for them. A lot more slower content for starters but still amazing.

So I think that’ll conclude it for this post. It’s probably my longest post to date! Once again I apologise for leaving it so long to post. Hopefully with all these exciting events coming up, I will be able to tell you some more exciting stories!

Until next time!

SO. MUCH. NEEEWWWWSSSS!!!! Hello Everyone! Right first of all, I am so sorry that I haven't been posting lately. Uni and work and life and yeah you get the picture.

[keremulusoy]

A STREET ARTIST FAMOUS FOR FILLING THE PITS IN THE CHICAGO STREETS WITH MOSAIC ART: JIM BACHOR

It’s not enough just to say a street artist while talking about Jim Bachor. He is an artist befitting for the windy spirit of Chicago, the third largest city in America. The city, the history of which dates back to 1795, set an example with its familiarity, landscape, roads and unique architecture. It is more accurate to say for Bachor that he is an artist who is protective, sensitive and who expresses his reactions in the most effective way in urban life, besides urban people. Jim Bachor is a street artist who is famous for filling the potholes of the streets with mosaic art. While expressing his feelings he found his own unique way  and he is very aware of what he is doing. We have made an interview with Jim Bachor for you via internet:

We know you very well from social media. When we researched about you, we found that you were the most famous street artist in Chicago. Original articles written about you reached out to Turkey. Can we get to know more abou you? It is nice to hear that. I’m so honored. I was born in 1964 in Chicago. I work as a graphic designer, street and mosaic artist. I am making mosaic designs by using ancient techniques. I became famous for the mosaics I designed for the pothole in the streets of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, San Antonio, Nashville, Los Angeles, Carrara, Italy and Jyväskylä, Finland. After visiting Pompeii in Italy, I found mosaics from an old volcano, and in 2013 I began to fill the potholes in Chicago with mosaics by giving the message of “not a pothole”. I wanted to draw attention in some way. The work that I did was going quite deeper than the street surface, rather than art. I can say that it is a little humor, a little information, a little protest and reaching to the solution by drawing attention to the problems. With conferences and exhibitions, I feed my artistic aspect a little.

You say that you make mosaic art to leave a mark in the world. Why is it so fascinating to leave a mark in the world? What does it mean to leave a mark? I fell in love with the art of mosaic when I visited europe (Paris, London, Rome) for the first time in the late 1990s. This initial visit started a fascination for me with ancient history that continues to this day. Europe has so many ruins, something we just don’t have in the USA. My background is as a graphic designer in the advertising business. All the ruins lit my imagination on fire. Like ancient stadiums where you could still sit where spectators sat so many years ago – amazing! Anyways, during my first visit to Pompeii our tour guide pointed out a mosaic. He said “glass and marble don’t fade so this piece of art looks essentially like the artist intended almost 2000 years ago” incredible. The idea that someone could make a piece of art that could last that long just amazed me. That thought drives my work to this day. I know my 12 year old twin boys probably won’t be building a pyramid in my honor so instead I produce artwork that might exist for a long time after i’m gone. People in the future can decide whether they like it or not!.

The idea of filling the potholes in the streets with art is quite interesting. How did this idea come about? What kind of reactions did you get? Potholes are kind of an unsolvable problem. They get “fixed” and a few months later they need to be repaired again. Back in 2013 the potholes were particularly bad in chicago, especially on our street. I applied my passion for this near indestructible art form (mosaics) to this unsolvable problem outside of my house. At first i didn’t admit to doing the first few pieces of pothole art. I was worried about getting in trouble with the police. Also, I had just won a big commission with the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to do a mosaic in one of the city’s train stations.  I was worried about getting in trouble and losing that commission. Ultimately a friend of mine didn’t listen to me and began contacting newspapers and tv news shows to tell them about what i was doing. One thing led to another and then there was a live tv show, newspaper articles, online articles etc.

In the ancient world, images of daily life are expressed in mosaic. You are using the symbols of popular culture in your mosaics. Why do you use these icons? Is this a criticism? What i’ve tried to do is furthering the art of the mosaic in the 21st century when people think “mosaic” they think religious icons or geometric patterns or people in Togas doing things. I saw an opportunity to fill a void and bring this ancient technique into contemporary society. I like to bring some of my subtle humor into my work. Making fun of our current time with people “worshipping” coffee (at least in the US) or junk food. not really criticism – more observational – looking at ourselves and seeing how ridiculous we look sometimes. Plus i also think it’s funny to see subject matter you would never normally see rendered using an ancient technique like mosaic (like a crushed beer can or bag of snack chips).

With my pothole art specifically i sometimes juxtapose universal “truths” – meaning everyone “hates” potholes and everyone pretty much “loves” flowers or ice cream. I like contrasting two extremes – taking something everyone hates and filling it with imagery of something everyone loves.

In your interviews, we understand that the authorities in charge of the streets do not like the work you do. What do you think about that the responsible authorities have this negative outlook? Actually i haven’t had any negative interactions with street maintenance people in any city i’ve ever done work in over the past 6 years until this past summer in New York City. I gave an interview to a newspaper (The New York Post) while i was in town. The reporter asked the city’s Department of Transportation for a response to my work for the story. They did not like it – saying it was a distraction to drivers and that they would be removing them. They were serious! Most of the pothole artwork was jackhammered out of the street within a week! l���ve had many interactions with the police. Once they understand what i’m doing they are fine with it.

Can you describe the adventure of filling a street pothole with art? How do you decide which mosaic you will do and how long does it take? First, I finish the draft in my studio. Each piece takes about 8-10 hours to complete. I keep a list of possible potholes to fill when I have time to do them, when the weather is right and I have artwork ready to go. Installations happen in 2 steps. The 1st step takes about 1.5-2 hours to do. I bring all materials on site (water, concrete, brooms, rags, etc) Once the artwork is installed I protect it with traffic cones . The 2nd step happens about 8 hours later (depending on temperatures) or the next day once the concrete has dried. I scrub the mosaics with wire brushes and it looks as good as it ever will. Then I take final photographs of it and consider it done. I also leave a “goodie bag” somewhere near by for followers/fans to find and then i announce the new work on Instagram and Facebook. Concerning subject matter – I like to work in multi-piece series based on a common theme. When possible I’ll “bend” the theme to fit with the local area I’m doing work in. Meaning if I’m doing a series on junk food I’ll try and do a piece featuring a local product that is popular with people in that particular city.

NOTE:

Do you have a chance to visit Turkey? The history of Turkey is a rich place in terms of mosaics. Would you like to leave a mark on Istanbul’s Street potholes among these historical mosaics? Oh I know! I’ve been to Turkey twice. Loved it. The nicest people and a bunch of ancient ruins to explore! I’ve probably driven over 1000 miles (1600 km) in your country! Spent some time in Istanbul and then flew to Izmir and then drove to Antalya – exploring ruins along the way. I would love to do some work in Istanbul. The big problem of course would be funding! it would be an expensive campaign. All i need is a wealthy sponsor!

By: Bahar Alban / Photo: Jim Bachor

*This article was  published in the  March-April issue of Marmara Life. 

The Man Filling Potholes With Art Jim BACHOR A STREET ARTIST FAMOUS FOR FILLING THE PITS IN THE CHICAGO STREETS WITH MOSAIC ART: JIM BACHOR…