#also personal notes because this is more reliable than paper

[beigetiger]

More writing-based notes for scenes I want to put in Where the Wild Things Go when I get back to my computer:

- Go back and input a scene talking about why the Hummingbird wants to leave their parents permanently, preferably by showcasing the parent’s attitude towards Wild Things.

- Go back and show more of the Hummingbird adjusting to living in a forest and the culture that goes along with it, probably before the Hummingbird has their full transformation and they’re still living with the Spider alongside the other young Wild Things

- Show the Hummingbird learning to craft a spear that they can use in hunting and learning how to use said spear.p

- Show how the Wild Things typically survive in the wintertime, since large farmland is pretty much impossible given the circumstances. As a result, the Wild Things are more social with each other and hunt in groups to ensure that nobody dies of cold and that everyone gets to eat.

- The Hummingbird creating a place to live, possibly sharing a living space or living nearby the Cyclopean Feline, basically finding the materials to decorate it and make it livable.

- Show a different winter, and a much harsher one, where a group of Wild Things are nearly shot to death after chasing some sort of animal into the field near the Civilized Society. This leads to a Civilized Person leaving a couple bags of food near the edge of the forest, which leads to a debate about whether or not the food is safe to take or if it’s been poisoned/if they’ll be shot upon entering the field to grab the food. But desperation leads the Hummingbird to go out and grab the bags before quickly retreating to the forest.

- The Hummingbird, now a much better flier, doing air trickshots through the trees alongside other flying Wild Things.

- The Cyclopean Feline adopting a young Wild Thing (maybe 12-13?) and the Hummingbird agreeing to co-raise the kid with them. The kid is probably on-par with a griffon but has the front half of a tiger and the back half (including the wings) of a dragon. Basically show them raising and interacting with the kid.

- The Hummingbird unwisely getting near the Civilized Society and spotting a partially transformed kid inside the wall who is being chased. Hummingbird then dives down, grabs the kid, and flies away with them, which causes a ruckus within the wall and gets the Hummingbird in vague trouble when they get back.

- Another average day in the Hummingbird’s life now that they’re slightly older and a more functional adult, plus them checking in on the now fully-transformed Wild Thing they saved. They also fly around with the Tiger-Dragon.

- The Civilized Society getting more and more aggressive towards the Wild Place, which eventually leads to a party of them going out to capture Wild Things. They nearly capture the Tiger-Dragon, who’s probably around 16-17 at this point, but the Hummingbird saves them and gets captured instead.

- The Hummingbird is caged inside the wall and meets an old classmate of theirs, who is their jailer. The classmate recognizes them and is horrified by their transformation, but the Hummingbird eventually convinced them to unlock the cell and let the Hummingbird fly away.

- Civilized Society continues to be aggressive, which causes more and more Wild Things to leave the forest in search of somewhere better. The Hummingbird, Cyclopean Feline, and Tiger-Dragon stay as long as they can, but eventually also choose to leave together in search of somewhere safer. The Spider, however, opts to stay so it can continue to care for young Wild Things. The family wishes it luck and then leaves.

- Show a couple different places that the family travel to and see if it’s a good fit for them, leaving for various reasons. They do, however, eventually find a place they like and decide to stay. They then have to learn to adjust to this new place and to having fewer Wild Things around.

- The three of them continue to live their lives and they all slowly get older. They also reminisce along the way about the Wild Place, and the many creatures who lived there alongside them.

- Eventually, the Hummingbird and Cyclopean Feline are quite old and struggle to do many tasks, but are still relatively happy and enjoy their life together, especially since the Tiger-Dragon is capable of caring for them. The Hummingbird does eventually die (although not of violent causes), and dies looking up at the sky and seeing the birds flying around.

[sophiamcdougall]

You're a reasonably informed person on the internet. You've experienced things like no longer being able to get files off an old storage device, media you've downloaded suddenly going poof, sites and forums with troves full of people's thoughts and ideas vanishing forever. You've heard of cybercrime. You've read articles about lost media. You have at least a basic understanding that digital data is vulnerable, is what I'm saying. I'm guessing that you're also aware that history is, you know... important? And that it's an ongoing study, requiring ... data about how people live? And that it's not just about stanning celebrities that happen to be dead? Congratulations, you are significantly better-informed than the British government! So they're currently like "Oh hai can we destroy all these historical documents pls? To save money? Because we'll digitise them first so it's fine! That'll be easy, cheap and reliable -- right? These wills from the 1850s will totally be fine for another 170 years as a PNG or whatever, yeah? We didn't need to do an impact assesment about this because it's clearly win-win! We'd keep the physical wills of Famous People™ though because Famous People™ actually matter, unlike you plebs. We don't think there are any equalities implications about this, either! Also the only examples of Famous People™ we can think of are all white and rich, only one is a woman and she got famous because of the guy she married. Kisses!"

Yes, this is the same Government that's like "Oh no removing a statue of slave trader is erasing history :(" You have, however, until 23 February 2024 to politely inquire of them what the fuck they are smoking. And they will have to publish a summary of the responses they receive. And it will look kind of bad if the feedback is well-argued, informative and overwhelmingly negative and they go ahead and do it anyway. I currently edit documents including responses to consultations like (but significantly less insane) than this one. Responses do actually matter. I would particularly encourage British people/people based in the UK to do this, but as far as I can see it doesn't say you have to be either. If you are, say, a historian or an archivist, or someone who specialises in digital data do say so and draw on your expertise in your answers. This isn't a question of filling out a form. You have to manually compose an email answering the 12 questions in the consultation paper at the link above. I'll put my own answers under the fold. Note -- I never know if I'm being too rude in these sorts of things. You probably shouldn't be ruder than I have been.

Please do not copy and paste any of this: that would defeat the purpose. This isn't a petition, they need to see a range of individual responses. But it may give you a jumping-off point.

Question 1: Should the current law providing for the inspection of wills be preserved?

Yes. Our ability to understand our shared past is a fundamental aspect of our heritage. It is not possible for any authority to know in advance what future insights they are supporting or impeding by their treatment of material evidence. Safeguarding the historical record for future generations should be considered an extremely important duty.

Question 2: Are there any reforms you would suggest to the current law enabling wills to be inspected?

No.

Question 3: Are there any reasons why the High Court should store original paper will documents on a permanent basis, as opposed to just retaining a digitised copy of that material?

Yes. I am amazed that the recent cyber attack on the British Library, which has effectively paralysed it completely, not been sufficient to answer this question for you.  I also refer you to the fate of the Domesday Project. Digital storage is useful and can help more people access information; however, it is also inherently fragile. Malice, accident, or eventual inevitable obsolescence not merely might occur, but absolutely should be expected. It is ludicrously naive and reflects a truly unpardonable ignorance to assume that information preserved only in digital form is somehow inviolable and safe, or that a physical document once digitised, never need be digitised again..At absolute minimum, it should be understood as certain that at least some of any digital-only archive will eventually be permanently lost. It is not remotely implausible that all of it would be. Preserving the physical documents provides a crucial failsafe. It also allows any errors in reproduction -- also inevitable-- to be, eventually, seen and corrected. Note that maintaining, upgrading and replacing digital infrastructure is not free, easy or reliable. Over the long term, risks to the data concerned can only accumulate.

"Unlike the methods for preserving analog documents that have been honed over millennia, there is no deep precedence to look to regarding the management of digital records. As such, the processing, long-term storage, and distribution potential of archival digital data are highly unresolved issues. [..] the more digital data is migrated, translated, and re-compressed into new formats, the more room there is for information to be lost, be it at the microbit-level of preservation. Any failure to contend with the instability of digital storage mediums, hardware obsolescence, and software obsolescence thus meets a terminal end—the definitive loss of information. The common belief that digital data is safe so long as it is backed up according to the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies on 2 different formats with 1 copy saved off site) belies the fact that it is fundamentally unclear how long digital information can or will remain intact. What is certain is that its unique vulnerabilities do become more pertinent with age."  -- James Boyda, On Loss in the 21st Century: Digital Decay and the Archive, Introduction.

Question 4: Do you agree that after a certain time original paper documents (from 1858 onwards) may be destroyed (other than for famous individuals)? Are there any alternatives, involving the public or private sector, you can suggest to their being destroyed?

Absolutely not. And I would have hoped we were past the "great man" theory of history. Firstly, you do not know which figures will still be considered "famous" in the future and which currently obscure individuals may deserve and eventually receive greater attention. I note that of the three figures you mention here as notable enough to have their wills preserved, all are white, the majority are male (the one woman having achieved fame through marriage) and all were wealthy at the time of their death. Any such approach will certainly cull evidence of the lives of women, people of colour and the poor from the historical record, and send a clear message about whose lives you consider worth remembering.

Secondly, the famous and successsful are only a small part of our history. Understanding the realities that shaped our past and continue to mould our present requires evidence of the lives of so-called "ordinary people"!

Did you even speak to any historians before coming up with this idea?

Entrusting the documents to the private sector would be similarly disastrous. What happens when a private company goes bust or decides that preserving this material is no longer profitable? What reasonable person, confronted with our crumbling privatised water infrastructure, would willingly consign any part of our heritage to a similar fate?

Question 5: Do you agree that there is equivalence between paper and digital copies of wills so that the ECA 2000 can be used?

No. And it raises serious questions about the skill and knowledge base within HMCTS and the government that the very basic concepts of data loss and the digital dark age appear to be unknown to you. I also refer you to the Domesday Project.

Question 6: Are there any other matters directly related to the retention of digital or paper wills that are not covered by the proposed exercise of the powers in the ECA 2000 that you consider are necessary?

Destroying the physical documents will always be an unforgivable dereliction of legal and moral duty.

Question 7: If the Government pursues preserving permanently only a digital copy of a will document, should it seek to reform the primary legislation by introducing a Bill or do so under the ECA 2000?

Destroying the physical documents will always be an unforgivable dereliction of legal and moral duty.

Question 8: If the Government moves to digital only copies of original will documents, what do you think the retention period for the original paper wills should be? Please give reasons and state what you believe the minimum retention period should be and whether you consider the Government’s suggestion of 25 years to be reasonable.

There is no good version of this plan. The physical documents should be preserved.

Question 9: Do you agree with the principle that wills of famous people should be preserved in the original paper form for historic interest?

This question betrays deep ignorance of what "historic interest" actually is. The study of history is not simply glorified celebrity gossip. If anything, the physical wills of currently famous people could be considered more expendable as it is likely that their contents are so widely diffused as to be relatively "safe", whereas the wills of so-called "ordinary people" will, especially in aggregate, provide insights that have not yet been explored.

Question 10: Do you have any initial suggestions on the criteria which should be adopted for identifying famous/historic figures whose original paper will document should be preserved permanently?

Abandon this entire lamentable plan. As previously discussed, you do not and cannot know who will be considered "famous" in the future, and fame is a profoundly flawed criterion of historical significance.

Question 11: Do you agree that the Probate Registries should only permanently retain wills and codicils from the documents submitted in support of a probate application? Please explain, if setting out the case for retention of any other documents.

No, all the documents should be preserved indefinitely.

Question 12: Do you agree that we have correctly identified the range and extent of the equalities impacts under each of these proposals set out in this consultation? Please give reasons and supply evidence of further equalities impacts as appropriate.

No. You appear to have neglected equalities impacts entirely. As discussed, in your drive to prioritise "famous people", your plan will certainly prioritise the white, wealthy and mostly the male, as your "Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and Princess Diana" examples amply indicate. This plan will create a two-tier system where evidence of the lives of the privileged is carefully preserved while information regarding people of colour, women, the working class and other disadvantaged groups is disproportionately abandoned to digital decay and eventual loss. Current and future historians from, or specialising in the history of minority groups will be especially impoverished by this.  

[whetstonefires]

I think a part of the reason I feel so connected to JGY and XY is that I, too, think everyone is lying about what a good person they are. Sure, there may be a few genuinely good people, but those are in the minority and never claim the title.

I don't know about never; some people are pretty straightforward.

And in some ways the whole point of the concept of 'a good person' is that the feeling of losing the right to consider yourself one can impose instinctive recoil from doing wrong, in situations where you don't have the leisure of working your way through an ethics diagram and choosing the logically moral path before reacting to a situation. It has practical utility.

But that system can backfire pretty horribly too, in a lot of ways. It can be hijacked by definitions of 'good' that actually make you recoil from ethical acts because they're deviant. It can lead to disappearing up your own ass lmao.

And definitely the threshold for 'talking about how you're a good person' enough that it makes you suspect as either a) a liar or b) someone who values that self-image over objective reality and other people's wellbeing is. Not very high.

Jin Guangyao, ironically, is one of those people who's so performatively A Good Person in his public life that in retrospect it looks like a red flag. Which knowing this about himself in an ongoing fashion ofc just reinforces his own cynicism about everyone else lmao.

Even Lan Xichen, who I think he may see as a genuinely good person, he also sees as an easy mark who will reliably choose what is comfortable over what is 'right,' if you just structure the scenario to make that an easy choice that's easy for him to justify.

Xue Yang's bitterness is in many ways more exciting than Jin Guangyao's because he has a way more unusual relationship to reality, but it does share a lot of notes.

The role of deception in his psychology fascinates me because as far as I can tell he's as instinctively straightforward a person as Lan Wangji, albeit along quite different lines involving a total lack of impulse control, but has adopted 'deceit' as a weapon against the wicked world in the same way he has adopted 'murder.'

But when he feels someone is not merely lying but papering over bad behavior with principles they are not living up to he is livid.

People claiming to be better than him because they're 'good' when 'good' is a construct of privilege, is the underlying idea he's not equipped to articulate. Except he takes that and applies it to 'hitting me to interrupt my random murder of some guy who happened to be within arm's reach when I wanted to hurt someone.'

Which isn't like philosophically perfect, but the underlying problem he's actually reacting to is that he understands the social contract as a lie that has never protected him but seeks to control him, while protecting rich men it has no power to control.

Which it is fair to be mad about, but then his feeling is that since that's the nature of the world and all people, he is entitled to amass for himself the power to inflict hurt without consequences as much as he possibly can, and to use it against the vulnerable for fun, and no one is entitled to interfere.

Which brings him to a place where he is violently angry at anyone talking about trying to treat other people well as a value, because either they're a hypocrite and a liar or they threaten his entire system of rationalization for why he can be The Worst and still In The Right.

'Everyone is equally bad, actually' is like, an understandable take for anyone who's had cause to become embittered. Everyone is free to make whatever philosophical peace they can with the world and by and large there's no ethical weight to any such opinion, in itself.

But it's an ideological crutch people tend to wind up leaning on very heavily when they can't or don't want to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Which is an approach that Xue Yang, Jin Guangyao, and Su She all share, and which not only is shitty of them, it...traps them in a wheel of doubling down on their own worst impulses because rather than going 'that was bad and I shouldn't do it again' they've repeatedly invested all this energy into making what they did actually the correct thing, according to their interpretation of the context. Which means they're more likely to do it again.

(I think this is how Jin Guangyao became a serial killer, for example. He followed a doing-a-murder-impulse and then internally doubled down on how he had nothing to be ashamed of, so he was more likely to do it again, every time.

Wei Wuxian's strain of self-righteousness about his revenge was less...thorough than Jin Guangyao's, because he had the benefit of going after people on the opposite side of a war from him while Meng Yao's first known murder plot was against a shitty boss. But it probably didn't help him not try to solve army-shaped problems with mass murder, even after that stopped being allowed.)

If any of them had just like, zero moral sensibilities they would have created very different problems, and very possibly fewer of them. It's making a central goal of your operations 'self-vindication in your own internal narrative, created retroactively via reframing' rather than 'figuring out what I think I should do and trying to do that' that traps them in the self-reinforcing murder pissbaby vortex.

So if you look at it one way, these three villains are themselves perfect examples of how pursuit of the 'feeling of being good' (or at least 'not the bad guy') can make you worse.

Notably Wei Wuxian was also extremely sensitive to hypocrisy in his youth; it was the only part of Madam Yu's behavior he was ever shown objecting to. But he's sufficiently mellow and cynical from regret and burnout by the 'present' timespan after his resurrection to just get disgusted and alienated about it, rather than outraged.

He wasn't even all that mad at Xue Yang, though honestly that may be partly because he stopped entirely characterizing him as a person at some point during their interaction. Like, there's no point being angry at someone whose moral sensibilities operate exclusively on the plane of 'is this unfair to me' for manipulating and destroying people who were good to him, and then getting obsessed with his own self-pity about it. This is not a person who understands how not to be, metaphorically speaking, a cannibal.

And Wei Wuxian did know better and still got roughly the same result, so what business does he have getting angry?

Anyway yeah those two villains are both delightfully relatable if you sit down and put their perspectives together; they are clearly operating with the same basic suite of human needs and emotions as everybody else, without that being in itself particularly exculpatory, which is honestly refreshing. They've just got the most fantastically toxic interpersonal habits that knowing them counts as some level of Suffering A Curse.

Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang do both stand as scathing rebukes of the society that created them. But within the narrative, wherein they're people, the fact is that each of them had agency and one of the things they chose to do with it was develop rationales for why they were the most special little guy and everything was someone else's fault.

And their moral nihilisms, while also grounded in serious trauma, ping me as emotional masturbation of this variety.

[dramadramallama]

Love Supremacy - brain rot part 3 (hopefully that's it, last part, i'm done PHEW)

As stated here, the story within a story structure makes for a cool viewing experience. Different readings for different levels.

Layer 1 - Myung-ha abandons himself Layer 2 - Limbo: an intermediary, temporary, blurry state Layer 3 - The Game, roleplaying yourself (Layer 4 - Us, watching the show haha)

It grants both the audience, and the characters a chance to get a new perspective. 

As Myung-ha sinks into himself, he has to rise back up.

The game framing is interesting, as it makes Myung-ha an active participant in his own fate. He is more likely to act in the safety of a game, with defined, clear goals, and “easy” missions to complete on the side of the main quest. It compartmentalizes the universe in neat little game notifications, and relieves some of the pressure of the hardest part of life. Finding happiness? Pfff, EASY, right?

Myung-ha is given the opportunity to do what all of us have probably wished at one point: re-start, from the latest save point, where it all went wrong. As argued in part one, the characters aren’t just words on paper, or pixels in a game. They have agency, just like Myung-ha.

1. Mirrors/Symmetry

2. Fate, Free Will, and Happiness

▶️3. Game/Reality

Very soon, it appears the lines between the so-called game and so-called reality are getting extremely blurry. 

First, the stakes are incredibly high for a simple game. The penalty is death. 

Myung-ha doesn’t seem fazed by the threat of death, he’s not scared of it. It could be because it's "just a game," but I personally think it's because he's technically already "dead." He ignores the penalty and focuses on his mission(s) at face value. Subconsciously, he works towards changing his own fate, and he gets there!

Debuffs (negative effects) need to be corrected

His efforts are slightly slowed by “debuffs.” These incidents happen due to Yeo-woon’s general dislike for everyone (including himself). They slow the process down enough to teach Myung-ha how to build friendships and relationships. The trick here is that Myung-ha is supposed to learn by proxy, through Yeo-woon’s self-love journey, how to love and be loved, and speak his true feelings.

“Bad” things seem to happen because Yeo-woon isn't quite ready for that unstoppable wave of affection Myung-ha unleashes. At first, the debuffs are incredibly mild and inoffensive (Fondness/Affection level around -10 or -5 = a LEAF falling on his face, a defective streetlight, and spicy tteokbokki lmao) and are easily transformed into something positive, bringing them closer.

But Yeo-woon’s affection is directly related to how honest Myung-ha is with himself and others. For example, he is disappointed to realize the urgency of Myung-ha’s text was fake (="Myung-ha doesn't trust me like I trust him"), and he doesn’t reassure Yeo-woon about the fact that he smells like someone else (lol cat energy). By refusing to open himself up to be cared for, it backfires with direct consequences. 

Myung-ha is allergic to listening to his own advice. All "do as I say, not as I do." When he told Yeo-woon "when someone cares for you, just accept it, why do you have to [question it?]" I almost screamed. We're all mental health experts when it comes to someone other than ourselves lol.

As for most things in life, the answer is balance. His side quests involve, for example, making other friends, who can be reliable and provide help in return. Kyung-hoon helps with a part time job and Sang-won offers to drive him to Yeon-woo.

Also interesting to note, his knee jerk reaction to anyone trying to enter his sphere is to close himself off, keep some distance. The above is in response to someone using casual honorifics (hyung/oppa).

Kyung-hoon, as if expressing Myung-ha's interiority, explains he's ok with long distance dating. Why? Simple: he likes his boyfriend, and wants to enjoy every moment until it ends. This is in direct opposition to what Myung-ha chooses: he places the certainty of pain/suffering above the mere possibility of happiness.

(...relatable tbh)

Myung-ha's inner desires clash with his depressive state constantly, and it gets worse after Yeo-woon’s affection levels dramatically drop from a positive number, back to zero, and then negative again, due to Myung-ha struggling to accept, and balance his own feelings. Too much love for everyone but himself, too scared to need anyone who might end up leaving him. The debuffs get more serious (Grandma gets hospitalized), and he starts fainting. Myung-ha is falling back into old traps, and like vicious circle, by trying to fix the errors incorrectly, in turn, makes the system shut down.

Thankfully, he does come to understand things remain worthy, even though he cannot have them forever.

The mysterious texts from an unknown number

Myung-ha faints several times, like things aren't quite going right. The nonsensical texts keep pouring in.

These read, to me, like close friends/family grieving, like they're in a columbarium (?). Besides the one from his sunbae at the end, they're all unsigned. There's one text saying they have "followed someone wearing the same clothes as [Myung-ha], knowing it couldn't be [him]", and one about a broken vase. Are they all from his sunbae, relaying the things said to him once? Or after his death? At his funeral? As a prayer? Thinking of him?

While the game server experiences extreme instability, memories, “real-life” happenings parasite the safety of the game.

Very personal elements keep permeating the game play; lines go beyond blurry, and disappear entirely.

Elements outside of the game keep popping up. Soon, the edges of the gameplay aren’t so clear-cut anymore, as Myung-ha gets more precise with defining happiness. His own handwriting shows up in the game notifications.

The answers are his own: he filled in the blanks himself. But he constantly tries to apply them to someone else.

It becomes impossible to dissociate the game from Myung-ha’s existence. I’m sure I haven’t caught them all, but there are many instances where Myung-ha's reality bleeds into the game.

Bubbly, water sounds are heard at key moments, and before long, his "memories" with his sunbae also get a underwater backdrop. To say nothing of the water/wave imagery around Myung-ha.

His world is leaking through the seams, the wave is rolling him over, and he’s sinking deeper. Which way will he come up? Water symbolism is always, MUAH, chef's kiss.

He is given ultimate freedom - a symbolic pen, to overwrite the program, and solve the system errors

Myung-ha for better or for worse, whether he likes it or not, is in control, quite literally, of the game, and by extension, of his life. When he starts to understand he's the origin of the errors, he panics, chooses to end it early, and saves Yeo-woon's fate over his.

That same pen has been used to write all the answers to the questions that appear in the game. He chooses Yeo-woon over himself. The game fails, the universe wavers. Beautiful contradiction: he fights to stay. Just like the way he regretted it after walking into the water. His true intentions come bubbling back up to the surface, and he runs to Yeo-woon, away from death and towards life. He doesn't want to disappear.

Time's up

In the previous post, I went more in depth about how he only gives, never takes. He doesn’t reach out to be pulled out of the water, thinking himself to be alone, and his system slowly starts shutting down. 

The scenes end abruptly, we jump from seemingly disconnected locations, faster, while Myung-ha frantically tries to outrun his own errors. I’ve seen some criticism of the pace and editing getting a little hectic in the later episodes, but I think it was purposefully reflecting Myung-ha’s state. 

Yeo-woon, with his newfound agency, defies his own story ending. By changing the game’s core mission to “make Myung-ha happy” he counters Myung-ha's one-sided choice and the balance can be restored.

CONCLUSION // PLEASE LET THIS END

"Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment." (Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others)

It is unclear whether Myung-ha gets a redo in a new reality, or if he gets to enjoy his own personal heaven after death. The game might be a physical representation of Myung-ha’s mind. It’s as real as any other intangible concept, like love, or happiness. There's definitely something to be said about the aspect ratio changing depending on where he is, but...

But to me, it doesn’t really matter. It's not where he ends up, it's how he got there.

I love that we open with Myung-ha abandoning his life at sea, and close on him returning to the water for a new start.

And I love that Myung-ha loves his own story: on his date with Yeo-woon, he gets emotional over the movie because the Monster Croc is "an alien" (COUGH Myung-ha) who joins the Zombie Gorilla (COUGH Yeon-woo) in his world to "save it"...

[batsplat]

hello dr. batsplat! in your gossip post you listed the post-aragón 2015 rumor that vale went on to interrogate dani about why he raced him so hard, and how that is at the same time wildly unlikely but also would be fascinating from the character standpoint. i watched aragón a couple of times for my own purposes, but there were some bits along the way that made me think of it

first, it's the pre-race comment made by jorge's team manager wilko zeelenberg: "one: one never writes off valentino rossi, and two: we'll need some help from dani pedrosa". the british comms then milked it for all its worth. and after the race, in parc fermé, vale says in his interview, "i needed those five points more!" which is like. not a particularly outrageous thing to say, especially combined with vale's joking/self-deprecating tone, but, as you rightfully pointed out, marca is not a reliable source (don't trust them farther than you can throw their print copy...) you also said there was a second story they combined with the first one, about vale crashing a honda party in phillip island - so did the article come out after the australian race - or even after sepang? because then marca's implication would be that vale counted dani into the spanish conspiracy even if he didn't verbalize it

which overall tells us nothing in terms of like. Did It Actually Happen, HOWEVER. i, personally, think it would be fun and juicy if it DID and kind of marked the start of vale's descent. because, as you've also said, vale excels in one-on-ones, and always had dani covered... but not in aragón. is that the point where doubt starts creeping into his mind, that it's not the same as it was before, that he's not the same as he was? (i may be wildly misreading and dramatizing everything). and a LOT of people commented on how hard dani raced there, which is- first of all, why wouldn't he. but this, combined with his interactions with jorge (that podium is a pedrenzo shipper's paradise), maybe seemed... a touch suspicious.

yeah the story was published after sepang! but... uh, I'm gonna be honest, I wrote that gossip post quite quickly, did not check any of my sources and, well, I'm very sorry to the writers at el pais because I accidentally got my spanish papers mixed up. so, um, my sincere apologies to el pais for calling you marca, it will NOT happen again. here's the article which I'd copy pasted into my actual, y'know, notes (it was behind a paywall):

even though the dani rumour to the best of my knowledge originated here, I've seen only that one spread elsewhere - not the marc one. which isn't really surprising. getting mad at dani feels kinda newsworthy, kinda quirky, who gets mad at dani right. plus, the marc story really isn't all that believable. look, we won't ever know for sure.... but valentino interrupting a honda party to interrogate marc fits in with quite literally nothing we've heard from any involved parties, ever? marc has repeatedly said the sepang thing took him by surprise, that valentino had his phone number and didn't use it and all that, valentino has never made reference to this conversation, nobody at honda has ever mentioned anything like this... you watch the sepang presser and you just don't buy marc went into that with forewarning, right? how would his emotional reaction work in this hypothetical scenario? 'wow, valentino already complained to me directly about the stuff he's now accusing me of during a party a few days ago, but I guess I'm still surprised because I didn't think he'd talk about it in a presser'? like... it just doesn't feel right, does it

and, yeah, if you're reading an article and most of the paragraph you're on kinda sounds like bullshit, then you're going to treat the first two sentences with some scepticism too. the dani one is more plausible in that it hasn't been repeatedly directly contradicted by both major parties, but it does also feel. odd. this isn't how valentino handles his conflicts. if you want to know how valentino handles his conflicts, it's quite literally sepang 2015 - that weekend feels completely in-keeping with his conflict management (and escalation) in a way this aragon story just..... doesn't? he actively evades a private conversation with biaggi, he conducts his warfare with sete completely in the open (cf sepang 2004), same with casey, with jorge, with marc... I think what I wrote in the gossip post is that it'd be interesting because it would feel out of character, in a way that I don't really think anything else in 2015 is really does for valentino? again, I don't want to dismiss the article out of hand, but it does read more like an op-ed than actual reporting. and just to clarify, the piece isn't exactly trying to argue that valentino thought dani was involved with any conspiracy. it's more a general argument that valentino that year was unravelling, that he was demanding some distance from fans, that he'd manage to silence iannone (?) and so on. which, there's some truth to that - but even if everything in the piece is factually correct, the whole thing is pretty shoddy journalism. the aragon story has never to my knowledge been corroborated by another source - and the outlets I usually treat as reputable for motogp news didn't even report on it. could be true, might not be true, but it is very much a rumour spread around by a source with skin in the game

that being said! I do completely buy valentino was more frustrated by that race than he let on in public - and yes, his joking about how he would have really needed those points does encourage that impression. and yes, it is also pretty noteworthy as basically the only time dani bests him in extended combat. it's some very sturdy defending by dani's standards, a bit of a one-off performance in his career. by that point in the championship, every race felt extremely significant... you could say that race bears some surface level similarity to estoril 2006, where valentino lost a very close race to toni elias who really wasn't getting the better off him all that much (well, I suppose that one time he shoved valentino off-track at turkey 2007 lol). maybe also a little phillip island 2009, come to think of it, just a different championship picture. though those two are a little different - and in both estoril and phillip island I reckon it's fair to say valnetino was motivated to be more cautious than he was at aragon. I think it's... hm. I don't hate the interpretation it's the beginning of the end - honestly it is fun for narrative reasons! it's fun to look at turning points! but the way I personally read the 2015 season, I kinda think once you pass assen, pretty much every race contributes to that downfall? in one way or another

let's quickly go through them. *takes deep breath* in sachsenring, you've got a version of marc who is still clearly hung up about assen and shows as much in his presser answers. he does more or less manage to get over it during the summer break, which is the chance for a bit of a reset for everyone, but by that point the damage has already been done. from then on, there's several moments in these pressers where marc is getting asked about the title fight, is saying that 'well valentino is slower but he's been very consistent!!' again and again, is being constantly asked about his potential role as kingmaker and it's all very sword of damocles given valentino is sitting Right There... indy and brno work as this duo of races that make the title feel like it's slipping away from valentino, and at brno valentino relinquishes the championship lead for the first time (if only on countback). at brno, marc also decides to kinda harass him during qualifying (he'd already done his last flying lap so wasn't just catching a tow) - and they're asked about it in press, they joke about it, but it's just another moment where once again.... if that's one of the things valentino remembers from that weekend? not ideal. silverstone is just stress, and yes it massively helps valentino in the championship, the rain was a gift from god... but also you've got this niggling sensation of 'wow marc really is harassing valentino around that track, he kinda wasn't in control of that bike', and then marc crashes - and you end that weekend with a sense that jorge actually got a lucky break of his own to limit the points damage. misano is again helpful for valentino's championship, again is heightened stress due to the flag-to-flag conditions, again there's a sliding doors moment or two where you feel valentino should have gotten more of a points buffer out it, it's also the heightened stress of his home race and how the fans Just Will Not Leave Him Alone... plus silverstone and misano are on-track confrontations with marc that valentino has explicitly referred back to as moments where his suspicions were aroused. aragon, never been one of his favourite tracks where he was already in damage limitation mode but then would have expected to get past dani in direct combat... not the easiest of tracks for making overtakes stick and gets repeatedly cut back and frustrated (just ask marc about that kind of aragon experience lol). the fact that motegi/phillip island/sepang is a flyaway triple header, exhausting and away from home and already so very late into the season... everything about motegi was extremely stressful - that moment in the race when it looked like valentino might be proper fucked when dani got past until it became clear he actually could follow dani past jorge on his slightly healthier tyres in that kinda odd race. after the race, reporters commented that this was as physically exhausted as they'd ever seen valentino - who had worked so hard on his fitness for this season but, y'know, age comes for us all... this was taking so much more out of him than it ever had. and then you get to phillip island!! a mere week later! where he never quite looked like he had the pace for the victory, but kept himself in that lead fight through sheer intransigence and could take advantage of the other riders getting in each others' ways - before ultimately coming away with a disappointing result. and then sepang is a mere week after that, but I've heard that one at least was a quiet one

the point here is that it's a cumulative effect. I think aragon does stand out a little bit in that it's arguably the first of only two times that season valentino actually gets bested in wheel-to-wheel combat. but... I mean, his issue that year definitely wasn't the w2w stuff and all in all he would've LOVED to Actually Fight Jorge. it's a lot harder to fuck with a rival when they're always ten seconds up or down the road. I also don't think he really needed a moment of realisation that season about his waning abilities as a rider. he'd had four years worth of realisation that he wasn't the rider he was in his prime any more! stuff like aragon may have served as a brutal reminder, but at the end of the day 2015 was quite explicitly a campaign of relentless maximisation, a title charge built on podium rather than victories (see here). 2015 is such a defensive title campaign that his prevailing mode isn't cockiness... it's creeping desperation. he was also constantly being reminded by literally everyone that jorge was faster than him (including by marc, repeatedly), which he never complained about but like... how could that not piss you off? or maybe not even piss you off as much as it just... makes your resolve even greater, makes the stakes even higher to you. nobody thought you could do this after valencia 2013, everyone thought it was over for you, now they still won't trust in your abilities and you have to prove them wrong... the worst thing about aragon imo was that it comes just... as a reminder, as a way of twisting in the knife a little further. one more frustration in a season that felt full of them

the fun thing about 2015 narratively is that it's like,, custom-built to gradually chip away at valentino's sanity, at a time when he'd mostly ditched all his old tricks. he's reserved in his race-by-race celebrations (watch catalunya 2009/assen 2015 side by side and this might as well be a different person), he's not massively attempting to fuck with jorge in the press, he shows uncharacteristic restraint every time marc gets a wee bit weird towards him... he's just keeping his head down, working to get his tenth. but, well, in an odd way I do think that probably... didn't help? like, the reason why sepang is so fucked is because valentino didn't just have a normal fight with marc after assen. this entire season was a pressure cooker, and valentino just didn't use any of his usual outlets to blow off some steam. which is dramatically fun and juicy in itself - if valentino had just been kinda normal 2009 levels of bitchy towards jorge throughout the course of the season, if he'd had a go at marc after assen, hell, even if he'd insinuated dani was pursuing a pro-jorge agenda during aragon... I'm not saying bickering with your rivals is a healthy way of dealing with stress, but kinda a little bit? if that's how you've been doing your title fights historically, minus 2006 (which does in itself maybe go to show a little bit of feuding did help him), then if you're just going cold turkey... suddenly you get a sepang 2015 coming out of nowhere. because you have all this stuff festering inside valentino and he didn't just have a go at a rival to clear his head a bit

here's my 'pro aragon 2015 as a turning point' case: I was mentally going through his title-winning years and trying to think of him actually losing this type of duel and... well, he doesn't really do a lot of it? nothing in 2001 I don't think, then you have those two barros wins in 2002 (the streets won't forget) but the title is already extremely wrapped up by then, maybe ukawa at welkom, 2003... okay, that one's the outlier - arguably welkom and catalunya, definitely le mans and sachsenring - but crucially the sachsenring defeat pissed him off so bad it sent him into a bit of an existential crisis... which does go to show that repeated w2w defeats can and will get to him. 2004... I mean, maybe le mans at a stretch. 2005 there isn't really anything. (2006 has estoril and 2007 has qatar + catalunya.) 2008 has... well, depends on whether you count estoril has a prolonged duel, same with what you call 2009 phillip island. but especially like,, this second half of the season 'ooh gotta be sensible with the title fight' type duel he only very, very rarely lost. when you consider that plus his direct w2w record against dani... from that pov, I think you can say that aragon 2015 certainly didn't HELP his flagging confidence levels - and neither did having to perceive his teammate throwing himself onto dani in parc fermé right in front of his salad. that season is death by a thousand cuts, but some cuts will always sting particularly badly. aragon was right before the triple header... perhaps you can call it a tipping point for the ruin to come

[elodieunderglass]

Hi!

I have enjoyed your posts about salsify and would very much like to inflict salsify seeds on my nearest and dearest for them to grow. Do you have any recommended suppliers of seeds? I am in the UK.

Thank you!

In reference to this post about there being food plants you rarely find in shops, because they don’t meet the needs of supermarket supply chains, like white salsify, a plant that bleeds red sticky latex when bruised.

Seed buying season usually starts around December, unless you’re planning a bulk order as part of a collective, so many of these places won’t have their final 2023 collections up. Here are the companies I like best and why.

MoreVeg: https://moreveg.co.uk/epages/bd0b9b93-06b9-4b49-9efb-f179fdacfbdd.mobile/?ObjectPath=/Shops/bd0b9b93-06b9-4b49-9efb-f179fdacfbdd SALSIFY: SOMETIMES, CHECK BACK IF IT ISN’T THERE.

What I like about MoreVeg is that she

1. Only sells a small amount for a cheaper price, I.e. 3 pumpkin seeds, because let’s be real, you aren’t really growing more than 3 pumpkins of the same type at the same time: you want lots of different ones. So, like, while other people sell you an absurd amount of runner bean seeds, like 324 or something wild, she puts 20 in a packet, because that’s what a normal person would want.

2. She writes a little handwritten note in the packet and it makes me feel like she really remembers me every year 🥹

3. She carries some lines I like, like she GETS having weird decorative pumpkins in a way that most British people don’t.

4. She does cheaper collections of useful things, like green manure collections, pollinator-friendly bloom collections, meadow flowers for cutting collections, “carrots of all colors,” all nicely portioned and cheaper.

5. I personally don’t care hugely about everything being heirloom, so it’s nice that she has a mixture.

RealSeeds: https://www.realseeds.co.uk SALSIFY: check back if not there!

The real MVPs. You guys know how I love and value graunchy 1990s websites, right? I love and value the RealSeeds website. From their Art Nouveau paper packets (plastic free!) to the way that they throttled orders during the COVID seed rush to keep staff safe, everything they do is extremely thoughtful and ethical. (Lots of people see the title and think they’re associated with RareSeeds, the USA-based Mennonite heirloom seed people, but they’re not: this is a UK-based band of unproblematic heirloom seed fanatics.) They’re in the business of supplying, preserving, testing and promoting rare heirloom seeds, and do not carry ANY hybrids.

1. Probably the best and funniest part of their business model is how they constantly try to convince you to stop buying seeds from them, because you should really save and grow your own seeds, instead of buying them. I love businesses that try to talk you out of participating in capitalism.

2. This is where I got my Glass Gem popping corn from (and I did indeed save my own seeds to plant the following year!) As nowhere else in the UK carries them.

3. As you may have gathered, I’m a big fan of using The Best Plant For The Job (Rather Than Killing Myself Having All My Plants Be Unproblematic.) so I am not HUGELY concerned about using hybrids for some of my favourite reliable plants - like for example the Summer Ball F1 hybrid courgette, which meets all of my needs so perfectly that I’m just NOT going to wrestle with trying to get all those properties I like in an heirloom that will make my life harder. I’m just not. I already have a day job in saving the world, not everything has to be perfect. However, I really support RealSeeds, so I do my best to buy as much as possible from them - while also putting them out of business, by saving my own seed where it makes sense.

4. All of their listings are so brilliantly and awesomely written and formatted in EXACTLY the style I like, like, please read these: https://www.realseeds.co.uk/otherbeans.html

5. They do a lot of interesting work trying to source heirlooms from around the world and select strains that can produce in the UK’s environment. Glass Gem, for example, is one of the only “Indian corns” you can grow in the UK, and RealSeeds selected the other! They also carry things like edamame, rainbow quinoa, and a particularly productive strain of amaranth - food plants from around the world that don’t mind settling in the UK. I also love how whenever the staff eat something like “a particularly tasty squash they’ve never seen before” in their travels abroad, they find the grower and ask respectfully to trade seeds.

Victoriana Nursery wouldn’t normally stand out in this crowd on seeds, they just don’t have the selection, I see their big strength as being in fruit trees and fruit bushes: but have a great collection of offbeat herbs for natural remedies: https://www.victoriananursery.co.uk SALSIFY: YES

Raid their catalogue for things like dyer’s chamomile (which makes a yellow dye) bergamot (for making your own Earl Grey?) and the original Marsh Mallowroot (a distinctive herb whose flavor is obvious if you think about it!)

King’s Seeds UK in association with Suffolk Herbs: https://www.kingsseeds.com SALSIFY: YES

Our allotment community goes in on a yearly seed order: bulk seed orders that meet a minimum order threshold can get up to 50% discount on seeds. The committee are very keen on pressing the paper catalogues into your hands, with bulk order forms already tucked inside. I got the 50% bulk discount this year, which worked out okay.

1. Their selection is very no-nonsense and the varieties are all the kind of very productive, market-garden old reliables - not very bold or sexy. Honestly? If you mean to be serious about growing food, that’s what the bulk of your land should prioritise. It’s fun to mess around the edges with black tomatoes and purple carrots and experiments in growing heirloom quinoa, and you should DEFINITELY do all of that!!! but if you mean to be serious and have enough vegetables to make chutneys or preserves, open up a catalogue like this one and look for high reliability and disease resistance.

[notyour-valentine]

Because it's there ~ Tommy Shelby One Shot

[Masterlist] [Taglist]

Summary: At one of Ada's parties, Tommy has an interesting conversation. Also Tommy's a bit fruity in this though not necessarily more than canon

Note: Told a few tales about this guy and now I've dreamt about him for three nights in a row now so this is a gratuitous self-serving attempt to get this man out of my system

All my writing is produced by an adult and created with an adult audience in mind (18/21+). You are responsible for your own media consumption. I do not consent to my work being translated, copied or posted elsewhere on this platform or any other.

Warnings: alcohol consumption

Wordcount: 1900 words

Tommy hated everything about this. 

He hated the music that was blaring from a gramophone, some sensory torture they now called music. 

He mistrusted Ada’s guests, a host of flamboyant Bohemians she had plucked off the streets of London. If he had known his sister would open a madhouse for the peculiars in the capitol, he’d have bought her a house between a nunnery and a church, but here he was, surrounded by artists, writers, poets and socialites and he truly doubted any one of them had truly worked a day in their life. 

They were acting like they didn’t, with their newer, more daring styles. 

Some men had let their hair grow long while some women had chopped it short - and others wore trousers and suspenders much to the delight of both men and women gathered. 

But of course this wretched gathering of eccentrics enjoyed it all, the expensive food they gobbled up as if there was no tomorrow, washing it down with that milky green mixture they seemed to brew more than pour. 

Absinth - some fashionable drink that had crossed the channel from Paris and Berlin. 

It was an awful fuss - there was a large basin with four little taps sat on the table and people placed their glasses with a bit of liquor underneath but instead of mixing it with water straight, one had to place a little tray over it, with a sugar cube on top only to have to wait until the water would - not pour - down in an agonisingly slow pace until it dissolved the cube and created that cloudy drink that could fog a mind more than any other. 

Tommy instead, stuck to his whisky. It was less fuss and more reliable. 

But still, he had no intention of getting drunk tonight, although that would make all this more bearable, but Ada had asked him to be here and she was about the only person he would suffer through this for. 

She was having a blast, loudly discussing the role of women with some sharp-nosed brunette. 

She was probably someone important, but Tommy couldn’t place her. 

He was sure he had the names of at least two thirds of these people in the papers, and had skipped half the articles because he had no time to waste on these starlets of the London scene. 

In a moment of being unnoticed he took his glass and snuck outside on the balcony. 

London was a city that never slept, never rested, but even the stinking, smoking air of the city was better than the stuffy haze of shared breath and cigarette smoke had created inside. 

Compared to that, this was almost refreshing. 

With a sigh he placed his glass on the banister and reached inside his jacket to retrieve his cigarette case and lighter. 

As he flicked the flame to life, the reflection caught the glimmer of something metal in the darkness out of the corner of his eye and he turned, realising he wasn’t alone. 

In the moonlight it wasn’t too difficult to make out the outline of another man, one who seemingly didn’t mind the risk of sitting atop the banister, one leg drawn up, the other dangling over the edge. 

“Cities have their advantages, but when it comes to their skies, it’s nothing but a bloody shame.”, he mused, before looking at Tommy for confirmation. 

He remembered the man, recalling he had arrived with the writer Starchey a little later than the others. 

Tommy guessed he was about his own age, give or take a few years, and undoubtedly a handsome man. 

He was taller than he was, with a lanky build, though his limps were strangely harmoniously shaped. There wasn’t much muscle he could see under his clothes, but as far as he could tell not an ounce of fat either. 

He had the kind of hair that looked to have been blonde in his youth and only darkened with age and he had the kind of face that looked as if had been carved from marble. 

He had a shapely nose and didn’t suffer from the English affliction of overly thin lips, but his eyes were the most striking feature - large and pale, like a full moon reflecting on the lake. 

There were the first signs of age on his face, though Tommy wasn’t sure if they made him more or less likely to become a muse of a painter or two back inside the house. Either way, they did nothing to dull the youthfullnes in his eyes, nor the sharpness in his gaze. 

The flame of his lighter, he realised, must’ve reflected off of the man’s watch. 

He was dressed to the nines, in simple colours, but Tommy knew by now the look of expensive clothes, and yet the watch he wore was the standard edition one handed out to every man back in the war. Since he had heard his fair share of illusioned pacifist rhetoric back there, he was more than glad to be in the company of someone who had not only served, but made no attempt to hide the fact, even in present company. 

That instantly made him appreciate the man more than any other he had encountered. 

“True.”, Tommy mumbled under his breath as he retrieved his silver cigarette case once more, holding it out to the man. 

He declined with a smooth shake of the head. 

“I’m more of a pipe man myself.”, he admitted before letting his eyes trail back towards the sky. 

Compared to the country, one didn’t see half as many stars, Tommy thought. 

When he looked back, the other man was looking at him curiously. 

“Everyone’s devlishly curious about you, you know?”, he said. 

Tommy shifted his weight, glancing back at the room. He had never liked attention, and with this crowd - well - the man he was talking to had come with Starchey, and that man had a reputation. He doubted his companion would be any differend. 

“I’m not -ah- like that...”, he admitted, clearing his throught as he brought the cigarette to his lips, wondering just what Ada had told them. 

The man chuckled under his breath. 

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, man.”, he said, unable to hide the amusement in his voice. “But don’t worry, I don’t have time for anymore distractions in the near future.”

Of all the things Tommy had been called, curses and praise, a distraction was a new one. 

“And that’s not what I meant either.”, the man continued, dropping his leg and shifting so he had on the edge of the banister facing Tommy, his back to nothing but thin air and the darkness behind him. 

“Everything is baffled by the rise - a gypsy boy from Birmingham clawing his way up to, well,”, he waved around, “Primrose Hill in what? Three years?”

Tommy only stared at him, wondering what he was aiming at. He already had a hinting suspicion. 

They might accept Ada, she shared their politics, communism and the like, those ideals that feined interest of the poor but were only truly carried by the rich and privileged, and because a woman. 

At the same time Tommy was only the man who had climbed above his station, and far too high for some. 

His glare only ever made the other man smile. 

“And your sister, well, she thinks you are like a bloodhound, always running after the scent of blood - or in your case - money; never content with what you have, always continuing the chase, always wanting more.”

Tommy scoffed and shook his head. 

He had heard that accusation a thousand times over, from Arthur, and John, from Esme and Polly - and now Ada. Funny how all the people who profited most off of his hard work, and his sacrifice. 

“You’ll get used to it.”, the man said. 

 “What?”, Tommy asked, leaning closer to make sure he heard him correctly. 

“You’ll get used to it.”, he promised. “Them not understanding, them questioning, them doubting.”

His pale eyes met Tommy’s. 

“Most people don’t understand why one can not just want something but work towards it no matter the consequences, no matter the risks, that we need the challenges, the struggles, not to conquer them but to conquer ourselves over and over again.”

He smirked to himself as if he had just told Tommy a secret joke. 

“They don’t understand why we can still desperately want something even if we do not need it, and are willing to do anything to get it just because it’s there for us to take.”

A cloud of smoke escaped his lips and evaporated in the air between them. 

“Who are you?”, Tommy asked, a frown between his brows. 

“Don’t you know?”, the man asked, genuinely surprised. 

He shook his head, and to his surprise, and maybe a little hint of relief, the other man didn’t seem to be insulted. 

“Well you’ll find out soon enough.”

“Will I?”, Tommy asked. “Why?”

He only smiled. 

“You’ll see.”, he promised. 

At that moment there was a shout coming from inside. 

“In a bit!”, the man shouted back, stopping in his tracks to look at Tommy once more, a soft smile on his lips. 

“Do you know what a Sherpa is, Shelby?”

“No.”, he said truthfully. 

“Hm - thought so.”, he said with a smirk. “They’re a peoples, exemplary Darwinists if you’d ask me.”

Tommy hadn’t but that didn’t deter the man. 

“They have live in the mountains for generations now, and so while the rest of us flatlanders are like a bunch of panting dogs at a certain altitude, they hardly feel a thing.”

“Alright.”, Tommy mumbled, not knowing what to do with this information, and not particularly caring about it either. 

“They are adapted, you see? Because that is their world, the world their people have been born into for generations and so they can do with ease what can prove treacherous for most anyone else.”

His eyes met Tommy’s with renewed intensity. 

“Everyone is adapted to the environment they are born into, Shelby, and when you rise above that, the air gets thinner and thinner but only for those not used to it.”

Tommy’s gaze narrowed, watching the moon play tricks on the other man’s face. 

“Are you saying I don’t belong here?”, he asked sharply. “That just because I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in me mouth I’d keep to Birmingham and Birmingham only?”

The other man’s face split into a wide smirk. 

“You misunderstand me Shelby, you truly do.”, he said, his voice as light as if they were old pals sharing a joke. 

“I may be one of the very few people here - if not in this entire city who neither resents nor riidicules you for what you’ve done and for what you plan to do. Like I said, you and I are more similar than you’d know.”

He leaned in, so close that Tommy could smell his cologne and the natural, earthy smell of his woolen jumper. 

“So let me give you some advice - hope and will can only carry you a step or two but if you want to truly reach the top you need to learn your own limitations if you want to adapt or overcome them.”

He drew back and met his gaze for a final time. 

“And if you don’t you’ll find yourself in bloody big trouble.”

~

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed and as always I'd love to hear your thoughts! Anyone who figures out who Tommy was talking to gets a big hug and an extra pack of cookies

Taglist

Overall

@lilyrachelcassidy @jyessaminereads @chlorrox @watercolorskyy @books-livre @quarterpastmidnight  @lilyevanswhore  @polishcrazyone  @zablife  @just-a-harmless-patato  @stevie75 @flyingjosephine-blog @runnning-outof-time @cillmequick @babayaga67 @butterfly-skinnylegend @shelbydelrey @mrkdvidal1989 @raincoffeeandfandoms @midnightmagpiemama @adaydreamaway08 @trixie23

Tommy

@knowledgefulbutterfly @babayaga67 @signorellisantichrist @lespendy @geeksareunique @look-at-the-soul @lothbrokcore @rangerelik @elenavampire21 @evanore @dandelionprints

[fursasaida]

If you have a bunch of trees, and you chop them down to make paper or lumber or whatever, you can sell the paper or lumber or whatever for money, but on the other hand trees store carbon and cutting them down is bad for climate change. If instead you do not chop down the trees, that is good for the environment, and it is a great innovation of modern finance that, now, you can get paid for not chopping down the trees. This is called “carbon credits.” There are measurement problems.

If you mine Bitcoin, you use a lot of electricity to run computers to perform calculations to get Bitcoins for yourself, which you can sell for money. But this is bad for the environment, because it uses electricity that is probably generated in ways that release carbon.[1] If you were to stop mining Bitcoin, conversely, that would be good for the environment. Can you get paid, though, for not mining Bitcoin? Oh yes, modern finance has solved that one too:

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms Inc. made millions of dollars by selling power rather than producing the tokens in the second quarter as the crypto-mining industry continued to grapple with the impact of low digital asset prices.

The Castle Rock, Colorado-based company had $13.5 million in power curtailment credits during the quarter, while generating $49.7 million in mining revenue. Riot booked $27.3 million in power curtailment credits last year and $6.5 million in 2021 from power sales to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is the grid operator for the Lone Star state. …

The company had $18.3 million in power credits in June and July based on its latest monthly operational updates, including $14.8 million in power curtailment credits received from selling power back to the ERCOT grid at market-driven spot prices under its long-term power contracts and $3.5 million in credits received from participation in ERCOT demand response programs.

Here is the 10-Q; this stuff is described in Note 8. Some of what is going on here is that Riot has a long-term power supply agreement in which TXU Energy Retail Co. has to supply it with electricity at fixed prices through 2030, and Riot has the option to sell the power back to TXU, at market rates, for credit against its future electric bills, when the spot price exceeds the contract price. But part of it is demand response, where ERCOT pays Riot cash for using less than its typical electrical load during periods of peak demand.

As with carbon credits, there are measurement problems; I have never mined a single Bitcoin, yet ERCOT has never sent me a penny for my forbearance. Still, how great is modern finance? Twenty years ago, if you had told people that one day they could get paid for not mining Bitcoin, they would have said “what?” But now it is possible. Modern finance created the problem (Bitcoin mining) and the solution (paying people not to mine Bitcoin); the overall result is that nothing happens and yet people get paid. Just a miracle of financial engineering.

Also: Riot is getting paid for not using electricity, but if you are an enterprising Bitcoin miner surely you should look into getting paid for not using carbon when you are not mining Bitcoin. Riot is not there yet, but it is possible to imagine a warming world in which energy prices go up and Bitcoin prices go down and Bitcoin miners can get paid more for not mining Bitcoin than for mining Bitcoin. Giant fortunes will be made by people who got in early to the business of not mining Bitcoin. The future is so good, man.

This is from Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" newsletter (which yes is under the Bloomberg masthead), which I highly recommend if you want some kind of awareness of what the finance yahoos are doing but want to feel like you're hearing it from a human person

[thorraborinn]

Hey, do you know of any paper or something examining the Baldr myth critically besides Anatoly Liberman's paper? Also, what do you think about Dr. Crawford's Loki misconceptions video or his collab video with ReligionForBreakfast?. I know you said in one of your posts that the question to whether or not Loki was worshiped historically has not been argued successfully either way, so that's why I'm asking if you've seen it since in one of them and others he says Loki wasn't worshiped bc no place names. Sorry if this is too hard of an ask. I decided to ask you since you're the only person who I know won't make up bullshit/give moral reasons to questions about Loki historically/mythically.

A lot of scholars have written about the myth, though not necessarily in the granular detail or from the same angle that Liberman did. I think that more has been written about Loki which touches on the Baldr myth than works which are specifically about the Baldr myth. Here are some that come to mind, and they all have references to others.

John Lindow has written a lot about it, including a book, Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology (which I haven't read). His article "The Tears of the Gods: A Note on the Death of Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology" can be read for free on JSTOR, which is valuable if for no other reason than his very quick rapid-fire summary of the main threads in the history of research up to that point, which also constitutes a good reading list for exactly this question. Lindow also contributed the "Baldr" chapter to Brepols' The Pre-Christian Religions of the North series (which I have also not read).

Jens Peter Schjødt mentions it throughout his book Initiation Between Worlds: Structure and Symbolism in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religion. He's mostly concerned with looking at the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead, so those are the aspects of the myth he focuses on. Schjødt has more experience writing about Loki than about Baldr, but of course you can't write about one without the other.

Kevin Wanner, best known for writing Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia, wrote an article called "Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, Óðinn, and the Limits of Sovereignty," which is mostly about the relationship between Óðinn and Loki (including the Baldr story), and the relationship of the pair to human people, especially poets. It takes a little while to get to the point, but I think it's worth it.

Though it hardly even mentions Baldr, one of the most influential recent works on Loki is "Loki, the Vätte, and the Ash Lad: A Study Combining Old Scandinavian and Late Material” by Eldar Heide. I'm going to bring this up again soon.

Anyway, to the second part of the question, I'd rather get kicked in the solar plexus by a mule than watch a YouTube video so I'm not going to comment on what Crawford says there specifically, but the "Loki doesn't have any place-names" argument is old and usually comes in two varieties. If Crawford came up with a third, then I apologize for the oversight, but I imagine it's one of these:

(the good one): We know from the sagas that naming places for gods was a common way to show devotion, and from archaeology that many places named for gods were important ritual centers; furthermore places named for gods tend to concentrate near centers of social and political power. Therefore, if we're able to demonstrate that place-name evidence was passed down reliably from medieval or earlier times, it can be one of the strongest indicators available to us of cultic activity directed toward specific named gods and its presence allows us to make much more confident statements about worship than we can make in their absence. While this is inherently limited, because it necessarily privileges the beliefs of the people who had the social position to declare names of places and to direct the construction of ritual sites, it's one of the best pieces of evidence available to us.

(the bad one): oh yeah, no, if they don't have any places named for them they weren't worshiped. Yeah, they definitely would have named a place after him and it definitely would have been unchanged until modern times. No, there were no other forms of devotion, just naming stuff.

I don't recognize the statement "the evidence does not permit us to say that there was a cult of Loki" as equivalent to saying "we can say definitively that there was not a cult of Loki."

Moreover, I think it's a failure of imagination to think that all devotion would take the same form. I don't imagine that Loki's idol was ever on the highest platform in a major ritual site like Thor's was at Uppsala but that's also not a useful standard, and it seems to me that it's the standard that the place-name argument holds him to. If we look at the Baltic peoples for comparison, they had very different forms of worship for different gods, so the absence of evidence for worship of Žemyna in a context appropriate for the worship of Perkūnas does not mean that Žemyna was not worshiped.

Anyway these days everyone seems to be on the "Loki was just a regular house spirit for many generations before being assimilated into the gods" bandwagon, one that I have disagreements with, but one which is compatible with "Loki was worshiped but not in a way that would result in place-names." Liberman made a case for Loki being a very, very ancient god; and Riccardo Ginevra's etymology of Sígyn requires that Loki's wife already be thousands of years old by the Viking age. There's lots and lots and lots of ways to argue in favor of him having been worshiped, all of which require modification of the word "worship" from the one the place-name-arguers use, so that eventually everyone is talking past each other. At the end of the day, "We don't know" is the actual answer to most of our questions.

[milquetoast27]

The ✨Frame Narrative ✨

The literature nerd in me must be set free at least every now and then. So let's talk about the frame narrative!

A frame narrative is pretty much, a story within a story, and more often than not, the story of someone else being told to you by a narrator (laughs in John Watson narration).

But the frame narrative/direct narrator has so many uses and can impart completely different things based on the context/events of the story! The possibilities honestly feel endless, and I think it is important to know when and when not to use a frame narrative in writing! (Note: it might also be known as a box narrative or a sandwich narrative). I will also be using Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, and The Time Machine as my main examples.

The frame narrative is a great tool for immersion. This may seem obvious, but having someone else tell you a story automatically makes the events feel more authentic. This may come about in different ways, such as discovered manuscripts, published chronicles, or as epistles/letters. This can be utilised to place the reader themselves in a different position, for example as Margaret Saville in Frankenstein, or in some cases the reader themselves, such as in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Even so, the direct address from the narrators inevitably will position the reader as a character within the events taking place. From a new angle, information communicated through epistles, posters, newspapers, etc. is an effective method for crafting a world that seems genuine.

It makes the events so much more human. Typically, frame narratives will be in past-tense, the recounting of events already occurred. Because of this, a character like Watson is able to very kindly speed up his recordings for us. If he skips over something boring-- he is able to tell us it is so and move on. An omniescent third-person narrator may have more difficulty getting this task done. Additionally, the presence of a human narrator introduces the wonderful unreliable narrator, which can give us so much information into the biases/true thoughts of the character we are reading from. Although Watson is probably one of the most reliable narrators that have graced fiction, his keen attentiveness to Holmes tells us where his fascination truly lies-- a very good use of 'show, don't tell'. A narrator like Watson is also able to use hindsight to enhance his writing, but because he is crafting a story, he can still conceal important information when he wishes to.

It makes the story feel noteworthy. Because someone has taken the time to write out and tell you this story, it feels more significant and even allegorical. A Christmas Carole, in fact, had a similar effect, as it was typically read out on Christmas Eve. Or the scientist in The Time Machine. The events he witnessed and heard of were simply too extraordinary to not put to paper. While it is subtle, it does communicate his shock at his experience.

Frame narratives can also indicate levels of power. Frankenstein is full of ideas of having the power to tell your own story. The majority of the creature's words come through the mouth of Frankenstein, and then through the letters of Walton, the explorer. Not once does the creature have means of truly speaking for himself, and ultimately had to rely on two others to have his words heard by even one person: Margaret Saville. This is a subtle indicator of his status in the hierarchy between these characters. Or, in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the fact that he reads of the singular experience of Imrat Kahn still places the focus on the protagonist, as he reads of someone else.

If I think of more, I'll add them! It's a shame that it's largely older literature (from my experience) that uses this technique. Quite often it's stuff like, "a guy at a pub told me about someone he once knew..." But today, omniescent third-person narrator seems to be preferred. I like over-the-shoulder narration, too, but nothing hits like getting it right from your protagonist.

[merchantarthurn]

hello!!! if you dont mind me asking what kind of white pen do you use for adding little highlights in your art? your art inspired me to start inking and coloring my traditional art and ive been having a lot of fun with it for a year or so now but i can never seem to find a good white gel pen to use 😭

you and me both friend 😭 I have a lot of issues with the ones i've tried and im thinking i might switch to just using white dip-pen inks (shirahama has given the brand she uses it's something like icy-white but i'll have to dig that out again).

the best luck i've had has been the following:

General notes of paint/acrylic markers - be extremely careful of smudging and drying times, both of the pen and whatever you have underneath. For any solvent-based mediums (paints, alcohol markers and ESPECIALLY linework inking) acrylic markers can pick up some of the colour or damage the paper and create smudges and tears. This is relatively easy to avoid so long as you wait for stuff to dry and work in small areas. The paint itself will take a while to dry so I usually let it sit for 30mins-1hr before putting it anywhere near my scanner bed. If you need to work on a larger area and the paper you're working on isn't pretty robust you should probably switch to a paintbrush and just use regular acrylic paint (which has a longer drying time).

I've also found that with smaller pen nibs getting a reliable opacity is an absolute crapshoot lol.

Artistro paint market pen - really good when fresh, but god help you if you go without using it for too long after you start using it. it'll gunk up and I don't know how to fix them. They are relatively cheap and come in packs at least. Doesn't seem to have larger sizes though.

Posca paint pens (various sizes) - far more robust than artistro if you store them right but regrettably more pricey. I've also found the finest nibbed white pen to be... deeply underwhelming. It never seems to have adequate pigment no matter how long I shake and prime it. By contrast the artistro gave the same sized line much more consistently, but at the cost of the pen nib itself being pretty unreliable.

Decobrush pigment - I've not got these in white so can't speak for them directly, but the colours I do have are pretty spiffy and it's a BRUSH pen, which gives you so much more control and a range of sizes per pen. There is some difficulty with low opacity on these though (since they're meant to be used with other decobrush markers), so I don't know how a white "corrector" would fair. The colour range is generally pretty gorgeous though, in the long term i'd like to have more of them.

General note on gel pens - I've got a love-hate relationship with gel pens honestly. I find I can get more consistent results out of them because the ink doesn't settle and you don't have to prime the nibs, but that's only if you can find a good brand... and then a good specific pen lol. I've also found an issue when you don't let the medium below dry properly re: smudging, but it also seems like if your work isn't boneeee dry (like overnight or multiple days of alcohol markers drying) the gel can very easily take on the colour of the pigment underneath, especially darker ones. Oddly this doesn't always show up when scanning, but it will look odd in person. Not always a draw back though - it looks great for white detailing in shadow.

Sakura Gelly Roll 08 - Not sure if there's other sizes (or their efficacy) so I thought I'd be specific because if there's one thing about gel pens the specificity MATTERS. I've got a couple of these and they don't disappoint (insofar as my expectations for gel pens go)

Uniball signo broad - this was my favourite until it ran out of ink. I cannot say for the uniball signo (without the broad part) which seemingly just gave up delivering ink and enjoys carving lines on the page and maybe delivering just enough ink that you can see where the ball is on the track it leaves behind. But the broad? I really liked. It honestly probably performs the same as the gelly roll but the pen just feels nicer to use lol, and the fact that it ran out of ink rather than dried out speaks for how much I liked it lol

as a general warning though - basically any gel pen or acrylic pen should be the last thing you do on your piece, because the second it goes down you will not be doing any more colouring in that area (unless you paint with acrylics). You can maybe use lineart pens on top of them once fully dried for at least an hour (ideally more) but it's very likely to smudge.

honestly... if you scan your work, there's no shame in cloning a white area of your work to use as a highlight post-scan. i always feel like im cheating until i remind myself that every digital-artist peer i have gets do to this at their leisure lol. i'd recommend getting a good scan/photo of the work before adding any highlights anyway because it's sooo easy to bugger them up and be unable to fix it (i say this as someone who never remembers and always regrets it lol)

examples:

you can see where the opacity doesn't quite hide what it's covering - an extra layer or digital correction would have been great. pretty sure this was artistro acrylic pen. but the unseen thing is i had to correct around the iris to the point where i said "well fuck i can't do what i want now" and just fixed it digitally.

dot highlights on the left and in/around the eye - definitely gelly roll. gel pens are really good for little pin pricks because you avoid the ball-point smearing things too thin and you can get pretty high opacity from that. also some more digital "help" with a bit of airbrush glow.

Definitely gel pen but i forget which kind, but I wanted to show what I meant by "picking up some pigments" and how can can be a boon, but also how sometimes the scanner just picks it up as white anyway (left is scanned, right is a photo - you can see it's purplish in the shadows)

[frost-eyed-autumn]

What is Chuuya's opinion of each member of the Armed Detective Agency?

I'm going to assume that this is mainly in regards to actual Canon and not any individual muse interpretations so here goes...

Chuuya's Opinions On The Agency

First thing to note is that even though he can seem a bit of a hard-ass, Chuuya's opinions are a little bit flexible (and largely determined by events at the time and Mori's orders). He's never dead set on what he thinks of them, though overall, he thinks the Agency is a bit hypocritical and unfairly praised in the public eye.

After all, the Port Mafia ( / Mori Corporation) has done a lot to protect Yokohama from external threats (arguably, Chuuya alone has done more to protect Yokohama just when he was 16 than the Agency has probably done in its entire career up until the Moby Dick incident ; never mind the rest of the Port Mafia. And Akutagawa was just as responsible for protecting the city from the Moby Dick, but as far as we see, its only Atsushi and the Agency that get praised in the papers).

He also sees the Agency and the public as hypocrites since the Agency technically involves itself in vigilante gang warfare (see: the gang the Agency retaliated against for attacking Cafe Uzumaki, and all the gangs around Yokohama that are blatantly terrified of going against them because the Agency retaliates violently). Its not so much the retaliation that he has a problem with, so much as it is that its treated differently than when the Port Mafia retaliates. The Agency gets public awards, while the Port Mafia are regarded as criminals for doing the same exact things.

The Port Mafia gets away with it because they have a strong network of lawyers and other such people in place to fight / pay off the courts and authorities to turn a blind eye.

The Agency gets away with it because they're the Agency and tote around the "good guy" label.

On a personal level, I wouldn't say he hates them exactly. More just that he finds them to be rather obnoxious and likes to mock them on the regular (he often refers to them as "Toddlers") to be petty and derogatory.

On a professional level, he's loyal to Mori's whims. If Mori says they're allies today, then they're allies today. If Mori tells Chuuya to crush them out of existence tomorrow, he'll do so without hesitation. That's his promise to Mori as his second-in-command.

Fukuzawa

He's generally neutral towards him, though he knows quite a bit more about Fukuzawa's history than your average person through Mori, and views it as "hypocrisy trickles down from the top". That's not to say though he doesn't have at least a little bit of neutral respect for the guy. He knows first hand how hard it can be to run an organization reliably, even a small one.

Ranpo

He used to be fairly neutral towards him, only knowing him by reputation, until the Cannibalism events. Then he got stuck in that book and left there to find his own way out long after Ranpo managed to escape. He's even more peeved because it happened while Mori's life was still in danger, and there's nothing Chuuya hates more than being helpless to protect his people or his Boss. His feelings can be summed up in 3 words: Fuck That Guy. He really wants to pummel him properly.

Kunikida

Likewise fairly neutral, though he's heard quite a bit (through Dazai, obviously) how he can be a bit of a volatile hard-ass and pain in the neck (naturally, because Dazai is an unreliable narrator about his role in things like that, Chuuya just assumes by default that its entirely deserved). Following events with the Hunting Dogs though, he does have to admit he's pretty ballsy though. Almost blowing yourself up to save the rest of your organization takes some guts most people don't have.

Yosano

He's had very little contact with her (though he's heard plenty from Mori since her Ability is so coveted). However, after the one run-in he did have with her when the Three Way Conflict with the Guild was in full swing, he definitely thinks she belongs with / would fit in well with the mafia with how sadistic she is against her enemies purely on principle.

Kenji

He's actually fairly friendly with him (I mean how can you not be? This is Kenji after all). Moreover, he's actually impressed with him, which is a rare feat, given that Kenji is capable of tanking his kicks with hardly a scratch or bruise to speak of. The fact that Kenji also complimented his Ability AND his hat certainly doesn't hurt things. He really wants to fight him purely on the basis that he's curious about how well his Ability and Kenji's would match up in power, rather than out of hostility. Its not every day he finds another Ability user who can take his blows to give him an actual challenge or fun time.

Tanizaki

He's barely met the guy, though he does have some mixed feelings. On the one hand, the guy tried (and nearly succeeded, more than anyone else) to assassinate his Boss during the Cannibalism events, and he really doesn't like that. On the other hand, his Ability would be real handy to have in the hit squad / Black Lizards if the Agency decided to make him the person they traded to the Port Mafia in exchange for helping them against the Hunting Dogs. He clearly has the willingness to assassinate people with it already.

Dazai

Do I even need to spell it out? He's still pissed at Dazai for a lot of things - the list is too long to put here. He hates him now more than ever after he defected from the mafia. He hates that Mori still has a "place" for him set in reserve afterwards. He's also still the only person who can allow him to use Corruption safely, and Chuuya still trusts Dazai not to let him die in action if circumstances force them to work together. Which naturally means he hates and is irritated with Dazai even more.

Kyouka

He's tentatively friendly towards her, being that she used to be Port Mafia, and is important to Kouyou. He's well aware that the Port Mafia simply wasn't good for her, nor was being forced to kill people repeatedly when she's only 14, so he doesn't hold any hard feelings towards her leaving (and her leaving was sanctioned by one of the Executives, so he doesn't count her as a traitor). That said, she's no longer Port Mafia and with the Agency, so he'll put the organization first and won't hold back if Mori orders him to go up against her in battle.

Atsushi

He's heard a lot of things about him, but they really haven't met. He just knows he's newer to the Agency and has worked with Akutagawa a handful of times similar to how he and Dazai sometimes work together, and he knows Dazai wants to make the two of them the next generation of Double Black.

[awheckery]

DEATH TW and mentions of murder so if that is triggering for you don’t read, but if it’s not then i’d like to ask if you’ve heard of forensic genealogy? while i am uneasy at the prospect of using it to find suspects, it can also be used to find the identities of unidentified decedents, who die of accidental causes or are murdered, and often it’s the only hope to identify those who have been unidentified for decades. the dna doe project is a nonprofit that’s mostly volunteer run, and i think that your research skills could be useful there or somewhere like there. i know this is kind of a random ask to receive, identification of unidentified remains is my special interest but i don’t have the time or training to get better at researching beyond a few tricks here and there.

I feel like we've read the same articles recently; did you see the tumblr post (and linked articles) about Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the Boy in the Box?

Which is to say, yes, I am aware of forensic genealogy and the DNA Doe Project, because like many white American women, I'm a true crime junkie.* My big Thing is investigative procedure tho, so I'm also deeply interested in plane & train crash investigations, medical mysteries, archaeology, anthropology... basically 'what happened, and by which processes and methods do we figure out what happened?'

So far as getting into the game myself, I dunno. I assume there's probably some sort of required formal training, along with the expectation of reliability and sustained effort, and I'm a chronically ill autodidact with ADHD. I'm the research equivalent of a sprinter; investigative genealogy requires a marathoner, because there's so much exhausting, grinding work involved.

Something I've never seen brought up before in any investigation is how many extant family trees are just wrong. Genealogical sites make it too easy to crib notes from other users, and all it takes is one person deciding 'eh that's probably the right guy' for dozens of other amateur researchers to make the same mistake, and then somebody ties that erroneous information to their DNA profile. I don't know how the forensic genealogists deal with that.

You also have to take into account how many people throughout history have just gone missing, or otherwise fallen off the historical record. Just because someone's date of death is absent doesn't mean something nefarious happened to them. (Just because someone's date of death is present doesn't mean it's correct.) People emigrate. They marry. They change their names. They die alone and unknown in a ditch**, or they die somewhere that doesn't make those records public***. Paper records can burn or flood out, and family stories rarely make it down more than one or two generations. History is messy.

I've only done serious research into my family background for two years, in fits and starts interrupted by illness flare ups. Half the time it feels like I find more questions to ask than I get answers. I've found a pair of illegitimate daughters and a handful of adoptees. I've found some two dozen 'missing persons' who may as well have disappeared into thin air, for how suddenly they dropped out of the historical record. I've found a murder victim and a (maybe) would-be murderess.

And four months ago, I found the answer to another family's 150 year old missing person case, and it changed everything I thought I knew about my mother's family.

This is how.

Five months ago, I thought I knew everything there was that could be known about John Robert McDowell.

I knew he was born July 1st of either 1868 or 1869, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. According to his naturalization petition, he came to the United States in April of 1883, when the absolute oldest he could have been was fourteen, and at the time of his naturalization in 1896 he claimed his nationality was English, presumably due to anti-Irish sentiments at the time.

I knew John's handwriting was idiosyncratic: he wrote the J in his name with a rightward upper loop that scooped up again before curving back around the center staff, and his uppercase R was a mess of curlicues. I've never seen the like before or since.

I knew that despite living in America for ten years longer than he'd lived outside it, John still had an accent in 1908 when his second son was born. Spelling is incredibly inconsistent across historical records because up until very recently, it was the practice of the record keepers to write down their best guess at what they heard, and in 1908 a midwife heard and recorded John's surname as McDoul.

John's life was actually remarkably well-documented, in comparison to his contemporaries. I bought myself access to Newspapers.com along with my Ancestry subscription, and he made semi-regular appearances in the Newport News Daily Press for the better part of thirty years as a Navy veteran, successful entrepreneur, and president of a labor union that later became the United Steelworkers Local 8888. (A seemingly throwaway notice in the Daily Press was the only record I've yet been able to find for his divorce, which eventually led me to find out whatever happened to his wife, which is another saga entirely. Pauline, you dirty rotten cheater.)

I knew that John was in and out of the hospital with thyroid cancer, but he was such a tough old bastard it took the better part of fifteen years to kill him, and he died in 1954 at the age of 86.****

According to John's death certificate (and the U.S. Government records at the VA hospital where he died), his parents' names were Thomas McDowell and Isabell Rabb (or possibly Robb, the Accent strikes again.)

This is the only record linked to either of them on Ancestry.com at all.

I have most of a history degree, so I wasn't surprised. There are next to no records of the 1890 census of the United States, and that was down to a fire in the National Archives. Ireland was dragged backwards through hell by the ankles for centuries by a succession of British monarchs and governments, and Belfast was in the prime of especially conflicted territory for much of it. No census records from John's lifetime were kept, and the likelihood his parents would show up in the surviving fragments from 1841 and 1851 was slim to none.

There were transcribed indexes from birth and marriage records available, at least, and I scoured them through, looking for a John McDowell, and there wasn't a single damn one born to a Thomas or Isabelle McDowell in a decade on either side of 1868. There wasn't any record I could find at all of a Thomas McDowell marrying an Isabelle Rabb until well after John left Ireland.

Five months ago, as far as I knew, John Robert McDowell was probably a bastard, who'd either been left out of whatever records were taken at the time, or he was one of the unfortunate ones whose birth record had been lost.

Four months ago, I realized that the record indexes on Ancestry included film numbers, which meant there were pictures of those records to be found somewhere. If they were organized chronologically, I could try to find his birth registration that way. Googling "ireland civil registration records" brought me to the Civil Records search page of a genealogy site run by, of all things, the Irish government's tourism department.

Once again, there wasn't a John McDowell born to the right parents during the right time period, so I went looking for his parents' marriage. And found it.

If they married in 1872, John would probably still technically be a bastard, but I had a point to start from. Once I clicked into the actual scan of the record I nearly snapped myself in half sitting upright in attention, because Thomas McDowell's father's name was Duncan, John named his eldest son Duncan, Isabella's father's name was John, I had to have the right two people, this couldn't be a coincidence.

And then I noticed Isabella was a widow. Isabella was a widow.

Who was your husband, and when did he die, Isabella? I searched again, and found her marriage to a Thomas Logan July 30th, 1866. No men named Thomas Logan died in Belfast between 1866 and 1870, which meant he was probably still alive when John was born. It meant I had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.

John Robb Logan came into the world on July 1st, 1868, in the Ballymacarrett district of Belfast, the second child of four born to Thomas Logan and Isabella Robb. Once I knew what I was looking for the rest came easy.

John's early life was riddled with tragedies. His younger brother Joseph was six months old when he died in March of 1870. His father died of smallpox in December of the same year, exactly one month after the birth of his sister Mary. Three months before his fifth birthday, his first half-sibling Bella died, at just five months old. And in 1879, his older brother William died after a long, miserably drawn-out illness from spinal tuberculosis.

(As an aside, god, poor Isabella. She had four children with Thomas Logan, and a further nine with Thomas McDowell, and before her early death from a long respiratory illness she buried a husband, two sons, and two daughters. How do you go on after that, how are you not forever shattered?)

If I hadn't been sure I'd found the right family, I was after William died. Thomas McDowell was the person who reported William's death to the registrar's office after sitting by his deathbed. The registrar recorded William as a "child of [the] baker" that Thomas was by profession; Thomas McDowell claimed his stepson as his own.

Duncan McDowell, John's step-grandfather, had a family burial plot in Ballygowan, and he named William Adam Logan as his grandson, with no qualifiers, when they buried him.

All the evidence suggests that the McDowells loved John Robb Logan and his siblings, and he loved them back every bit as much. You don't choose to take on the surname of people you hate, and it seems very much the case that John chose to go by McDowell when he came to America. I'm honestly not sure there was a way for Thomas McDowell to bequeath his name to his stepchildren, given John's brother William died a Logan and his sister Mary married as one.

John Robb Logan disappeared from history after his baptism, and John Robert McDowell made his first confirmed appearance in the historical record in 1883, but I was certain they were one and the same. The problem was proving it to my mother, because McDowell was her family name. She'd grown up with it, as had her sisters and her dozens of cousins and her father and his siblings and her father's father; I only had a paper trail arguing the name she knew didn't belong to any of them by blood.

So I went for blood.

I refuse to give my DNA to Ancestry.com on a principle born from paranoia and ethics concerns. It's absolutely not happening, ever, like hell do I expect a corporation to do the right thing with my genetic material. My mother doesn't share my concerns, either now or four years ago, when she bought an Ancestry DNA kit and then did absolutely nothing with her results besides marvel at the unexpected Swedish heritage in her 'Ethnicity Estimate' because doing anything else looked like too much work.

It took a few days to figure out how to hook my mother's DNA results into the tree I've built, and a few more for all the features to populate, but all told it took less than a week between learning the truth about my great-great-grandfather's parentage and proving it irrefutably with DNA, via several descendants of his full-blooded sister Mary and a grandson of his half-brother Wallace.

Ancestry doesn't tell you when new DNA matches are found, or when someone adds you to their tree (and thank god for that, my mother has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand matches). To those descendants of Mary Thomasina Logan, the handful of John's descendants who've shelled out for Ancestry DNA kits could be any random person. Frequently the relationships between matches aren't clear, because of all the folks like my mom who never add a tree to their results, or those who don't try to go any further back than their grandparents.

As far as Mary Logan's descendants know, the sons of Thomas Logan dead-ended his line, and when I do find John in their trees there's never more than a birth year and a blank space where there would usually be a year of death. (They all have the wrong Isabella Robb too, but I don't really blame them; apparently Isabella was one of the most popular names for girls for well over a century, and Robbs weren't exactly thin on the ground.)

Someday soon, I'm going to reach out. People who study genealogy do it because they're looking for something: long lost relatives, answers to questions asked too late, or even a better, more personal understanding of history by learning about the people who were there when it happened. Every family has its mysteries and this one, at least, could be solved.

John's story doesn't end here. Here is where it begins.

~

*I'm aware of the problematic nature of White Lady True Crime Brain Poisoning, but I'm gonna have to pull the 'I'm not like other girls' card. I'm incredibly discerning about my crime shows, I hate the fucking cops, and I'm realistic about how unbelievably low my chances are of ever being the victim of a violent crime. I'm white, I'm broke as shit, I'm built like a running back and walk like the Terminator, and most importantly, I'm single and planning to stay that way for the rest of my life. The only way I'm getting murdered is if I happen to get caught in a random mass shooting, which isn't outside the realm of possibility because America.

**In case anyone's gotten this far and is still interested, there's strong evidence that the mystery of the Somerton Man was finally solved last year. At some point I'd like to take a look at the tree the forensic genealogists built tho, because I have some Doubts. There was only one person in that family that fell off the map in the 40's? Just one? I was lightning-strike kinds of lucky enough to find John's real parentage, but I dug up more unanswered questions with it, because two of his half-brothers dropped out of the records after 1901. Completely setting aside the possibility of infidelity in the Webb family and how common inbreeding has been (both historically and in recent memory) in populations of European descent, I have a hard time buying that Carl Webb was the only person who could be the Somerton Man. It's still cool as shit that they have a strong possibility tho.

***Maryland and Kansas specifically can blow me, if somebody died in either of those states I have to find an obituary or a tombstone to get the mcfrickin' date, and I have to either pay money and prove a relationship to see a death certificate, or show up to an archive in person to search on their intranet, MARYLAND WHY DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO KNOW WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER DIED. (Being fair, I don't know if she died in Maryland, that's just a great-uncle's best guess, because she ran away from her family in 1949 and nobody ever saw her again after the early 60's. Helen, where the hell did you go?)

****One of the big reasons why I got into genealogy in the first place was to see if I could find how far back the predisposition to early deaths and autoimmune disease went in my family. What I hadn't expected to find was a predisposition for extreme longevity on all sides. Longevity as in 'skewing the life expectancy bell curve' kinds of longevity. As long as someone didn't come down with a freak illness or make a looooooooong string of poor life choices, they were apparently immune to death, which honestly explains a few things about Crazy Grandma, god damn.

[ragesin]

melizabeth hc dump

Origibeth introduced Meliodas many things, including human alcohol after learning he never tried it before. She showed him a whole new world and simultaneously opened pandora’s box.

After the new Boar Hat was built, Meliodas did let Elizabeth know that since the bar was much bigger, if she’d like she could have her own room while travelling with the Sins and no longer needed to bunk with him due to space limitations. He left the choice entirely within her hands and told her he’d be fine with whatever she decided on. He woke up in the middle of the night on the second day to find her sleeping next to him, right against his side. Forgive the man if he was smiling a little more genuinely than he normally did for the rest of the week.

Goddesses have a thing where they gift one of their feathers to their partner, imbued with magic so that it will never rot, resist damage and hold its form. You can liken it to a ring the humans use. Meliodas still has the one given to him by Origibeth thousands of years ago. Whether worn as a pin, tucked in his hair, hanging around his neck, curled around his wrist, or simply sitting in his pocket, it’s almost always on his person even if not visible to others and very rarely will he go without it. Knowing the feather is there, that he has something left of the original Elizabeth always with him not tainted by the curse, helps ground him. Highly advise against trying to take it from him.

Like how Meliodas plays rock, paper, scissors with Zeldris and patty cake/arm wrestling with Ban, he also played hand games with Origibeth that revolved around giving high fives as quick as you can while switching to different creative positions and trying to make the other miss. Up high down low too slow. It could get crazy though. More than once they found themselves in craters. He will boast about having a higher number of wins. Elizabeth was just happy to see him having fun.

Due to soul reasons, Meliodas will know if Elizabeth dies even if she’s not immediately in his vicinity or line of view but he can’t determine anything else about her status ( ex, sick, in pain, if she’s currently in the process of dying ). Only after she’s dead does he get the mental notification of what happened.

Occasionally during the initial meeting, Meliodas can recognize Elizabeth on sight no matter what form she takes, but most of the time it is a guessing game. Elizabeth’s features are uncommon but it’s not completely unique, and she’s almost never been 1:1 with her original goddess incarnation, so he’s had false flags before. Sometimes he reliably gets it on the second or third try but eventually after a bit of time acclimating to the person’s presence he does 100% determine if someone is her reincarnation or not.

This is why my Meliodas doesn’t harass Elizabeth Liones off rip before they even had a proper conversation during canon. Her appearance sets off instant alarm bells but he doesn’t know for sure. As far as he’s concerned, this is a stranger and he doesn’t know her anymore than she knows him. Course that changes with time once he confirms to himself she is Elizabeth. He starts off more oneshot behaviour, then as time passes he gradually slides down the scale to his more canon behaviour and makes it about 60% there in the end, so while he has his bad moments that other people can and should kick his ass for, he doesn’t take it nearly as far or quite as often as canon.

His recognition of Elizabeth gets more precise the more time he spends around her. It’s the difference between Meliodas having some difficulty early on picking out Elizabeth from the hide and seeks vs him looking at her carbon copy in Ellatte and immediately pegging her as Not Elizabeth. On that note, he was very unnerved by the appearance of Ellatte and all the implications that comes with it.

He has snuck Origibeth into certain parts of the Demon Realm for secret dates, because while it lives up to the reputation it has among other races, his birthplace has places he does consider beautiful and wanted to share those experiences with her after everything new she stepped up to show him. It was nerve wracking but worth it in the end.

Meliodas is the little spoon with Origibeth and big spoon with Elizabeth Liones.

He falls in love with Elizabeth that little much more each time an incarnation steps up for him because someone going out of their way to be protective of him instead of the other way around is just an alien concept to him and damn it he’s supposed to be squaring up but Elizabeth stunlocked him by announcing that for everyone in earshot to hear what is he supposed to do with this full heart throwing him off his game.

Meliodas used to have several scars. They were present when he met Origibeth and throughout his relationship with her. Her healing is capable of removing scars and she offered once or twice but Meliodas always declined so she left it at that. However when Meliodas collapsed after taking another hit meant for her, the gods looming over them, and he just wasn't moving wasn't breathing, she poured her remaining power into him. It stitched up the physical wounds, dug deep enough to wash away the scars, but there was nothing to jog back to life. The limitless healing at her disposal can't revive the dead. After the curse took hold of his body, dragged him back to the land of the living, Meliodas was left all of his hearts beating, not a wound or scar marring his flesh, and a dead Elizabeth beside him in a pool of their blood.

Goddess bodies are like fairies in the sense that they don't decay. Origibeth's body is around somewhere, and Meliodas hasn’t let anyone know that it is, not even Elizabeth.

[suzy-queued]

Hey! I was wondering if you could do a handwriting analysis for Bucky Barnes from Marvel.

What a fun ask! There's not much to go on, but here goes:

The first thing to note is that he uses print rather than cursive, all caps. This is an indication that he is an intuitive person who goes in his own way rather than listening to authority.

His writing is highly legible, which denotes a deep, accurate thinker. His letters are all the same size, which means that he's steady and reliable.

His strokes are more angular than rounded, indicating maturity. The deep, consistent pressure indicates frustration and a need for control. The heavy pressure also shows a very strong drive, meaning he's ambitious and determined. He has a consistent baseline (especially on the unlined paper), which again shows that he is reliable.

His cross-strokes (lines across T and H) are the same thickness as the rest of the lines, which means he is "sensuous" to music, art, and emotion. The tightly controlled lengths of these cross-strokes show that he's repressed (ha!).

The capital "I" is the same height as the other capitals. This means that he has a reasonable amount of self-respect. He isn't overly arrogant or self-loathing. Because all of his capital letters are plain and unflourished (no curls or extra lines), he is modest and refined in his tastes.

His letters angle more toward the right, which generally is a sign or warmth and happiness. But look at the second sample, where he's listing names. Those letters tend to slant to the left. This is a more cold/heartless sample, which makes sense. He feels affection for his therapist (sample 1) and hate toward the people on his list (sample 2).

The page's left margin tends to relate to how you spend money. His left margin in the list is pretty consistent if you look at the first letters. But, man, those gaps after the period are wildly divergent. He would probably be careless and impulsive with money.

Overall, he falls into the classification of "Strong-Willed Person," indicated by his straight lines, heavy pressure, careful strokes, and consistent thickness. "This person knows exactly what he is going to do and when he is going to do it. It is unusual for him to vacillate as it is for a stone wall to bend in the wind. Has set opinions on most things which can be changed only by fool-proof argument. Has strong likes and dislikes."

He meets a lot of criteria for "Lover of Fine Arts" and "Willful Type" as well.

Hope you enjoyed this! :)

[hashiiiiisuniverse8]

Hello mga ka sheesh, my co- pre-service teachers and Pauliniatics. This is your newbie blogger Stephan Hashley Javier, 19 years old and not ready to be an adult huhu! I am currently taking a Bachelor of Secondary Education major in Science, and I believe that cram is the best way to finish your activities!

Come along with me and my journey in TTL promising you that this blog is full of sheshableness! :>

THESE ARE MY ANSWER IN OUR FIRST QUIZ IN TTL 1 UNDER MR. MARK FRANCIS ASTOM.

In this blog I will be tackling the different facets in Ict, and will be able to give real life scenarios in each of them. Sit back and read.

Before you start, here is some ice cream, to be more relaxed while reading. <3

____________________

Cloud Computing

Scenario:

It allows me and my fellow students to access updated learning tools from anywhere, making collaboration easier and saving time. Where we can view some digital notes and modules for us to be easy to access. The remote capacity of cloud platforms means that a more diverse range of students can also be reached by educational institutions while lowering costs.

Software

Scenario:

I use software to help me learn more efficiently. This can include games and simulators, flashcard apps, video conferencing, and some online learning apps for , online encyclopedias, or tools like calculators or spellcheckers. For me to make my learning easy. For the past 3 years we have been using some software in our daily life as students, like Microsoft 365 where it is really necessary in the learning process.

Transaction

Scenario:

We are in a transaction everyday we cannot just notice it sometimes, as a lazy person like me I like purchasing online that going to a mall to buy my necessities one of online platforms that I've been using is Tiktok shop, Shoppe, Lazada, Food Panda, and in paying them I am using gcash, gcash is very easy to use and safe also you don't need your wallet too.

Hardware

Scenario:

As an education student the first thing that we need is Gadgets like phones, laptop, printer, wifi, and etc. So it is easy for us to access some online learning access.

Digital Data

Scenario:

As a student I rely more on digital data to have more accuracy, because judgments and actions are made by computers rather than people, so it is greater accuracy in terms of assigned duties. Also it is faster and wider reached because the digital data can contact and provide data to many individuals simultaneously and at the one push of a button, it is really incredibly and considerably faster to use and to access with.

Internet Browsers

Scenario:

Web Browsers allow me to access websites, search for information, shop online, and connect with my friends worldwide. They can translate complex web code into user-friendly pages, making the internet accessible to everyone and easy to use too and it is also relevant to our journey as students and future educators.

Computers and Technology

Scenario:

Last semester in one of our subjects, the teacher required us to create our own research. We need to gather information on renewable energy sources. Computers and technology help us and guide me on how to use computers and technology effectively for our very own research. Computers and technology have really been a powerful tools for research. First, we begin by identifying reliable online sources. We also used search engines to find reputable websites, academic journals, and research papers related to renewable energy sources. We also made sure to evaluate the sources for credibility and relevance. From this scenario, we, student reallt needs to seeks guidance on using computers and technology in making research. Where even the teacher provides information on finding reliable online sources, the computers and technology still hits diff.

Online Access

Scenario;

I noticed this during the pandemic in 2020 where the pandemic started, the Philippines Local Government implemented the Digital Online Class where the students started to rely on Online sources. Then nowadays we noticed that the majority of the population relies heavily on the internet for various aspects of their lives. Country is known for its strong community spirit and commitment to progress. Where online access has become an integral part of everyday life, enabling the people to stay connected, access information, and even on conducting and relying on their businesses.

In the Philippines the local government has implemented a digital infrastructure plan to ensure that every school has access to high-speed internet. This initiative has transformed the country into a hub of digital innovation, attracting new businesses and entrepreneurs who appreciate the convenience and opportunities provided by online connectivity such as online sellings and etc.

The citizens in the Philippines and also all over the world have embraced the benefits of online access in their daily lives. Students can easily access educational resources and participate in online learning programs. Small business owners can reach a wider customer base through e-commercial platforms. Professionals and un-professionals can also work remotely, saving time and reducing commuting expenses. Even healthcare services have become more accessible through telemedicine, allowing people to consult doctors online without leaving their homes that's another benefit of online access.

The community has also leveraged online platforms to enhance social interactions and support local initiatives. Online forums and social media groups have become platforms for sharing ideas, organizing events, and fostering a sense of belonging. The students have been actively participating in virtual seminars because it is easy for them to access, they don't need to travel at all and it's less hassle, where they can freely voice their opinions and contribute to decision-making processes.

Online access has also played a crucial role ti us as we response to emergencies and natural disasters. The local government uses digital communication channels to provide real-time updates and instructions to residents, ensuring their safety and well-being. Also Online fundraising campaigns have been successful in mobilizing support during times of crisis, allowing the community to come together and help those in need.

Online access has become a lifeline for the people, empowering them to thrive in a digital age. The country serves as an example of how a strong digital infrastructure can enhance the quality of life, foster economic growth, and strengthen community bonds.

____________________________________________

Here I am emphasizing Learning process because all that I've mentioned was all interconnected w/ each other. Online access in the learning process, where the teachers can a make use of the internet by proving the students with extra study material and resources such as interactive lessons, educational quizzes as well as tutorials. Teachers can also record their lectures and provide it to the students for revisions which is better than reading from notes. We cannot deny the fact that every student always uses their gadgets so it is easy for them to access their notes when it is digital.

Online access can be applied in various ways in teaching learning in Virtual Classes Online access can be applied in teaching and learning in various ways to enhance the educational experience. Here are some examples is the Virtual Classes where Online access allows teachers and students to connect through video conferencing platforms, enabling live virtual classes, Online Learnings where we can utilize online learning platforms which the teachers can create and share educational resources such as lecture notes, videos, quizzes, and assignments, Collaborative Projects where nline access enables students to collaborate on projects and assignments, even when they are not physically present in the same location where they can also create group chats so they can communicate with each others, Multimedia Content with this the implementer can incorporate multimedia content into their lessons to make them more engaging and interactive, and also in Online Assessments where Online access allows for the administration of online assessments, including quizzes, tests, and exams or diagnostic exam trough google drives, and etc.