#at this rate i might have to sell my computer too

[floralovebot]

[sirfrogsworth]

Adventures in Cooling

The 5-star rated HVAC repair service I used kind of depressed me.

It was almost... too good?

Like, they offer 24/7 service. They have a text message system that lets you know when the tech is coming. Every tech has their own custom van that serves as a giant advertisement. The entire process is documented with a tablet computer. Every serial number and model number must be photographed. He has to follow a diagnostic checklist. And an upsell checklist. And a repair checklist. He had so many checklists that at one point he pulled a card out of his wallet to make sure he didn't forget one of the steps. He had a poorly memorized speech for every upsell. You could tell he didn't have "his" tools, but the company's tools that he borrowed.

None of this was "bad" as far as a workflow. The service was flawless and nothing was forgotten. But you could tell that every detail was micromanaged and if the tech didn't follow the procedures to the letter, he would probably get some kind of demerit.

I felt sorry for my tech. He was in his 60s and clearly had a severe chronic knee injury. He walked slower than I do. He was quite monosyllabic and difficult to make conversation with. Not unpleasant, just not great at communicating.

At one point I asked him if I was a good candidate for a heat pump and he was like, "Everyone is."

End of advice.

Oh, and the uniform.

The uniform was very silly.

Every square inch of his shirt was meant to assure people they have a qualified technician. The one sleeve listed his certifications from some Alphabet Association that certifies such things. And then the other sleeve made sure to let me know my technician was drug tested and background checked.

The entire visit I kept trying to imagine how being stoned might negatively affect HVAC repair. I mean, if he was on a little cocaine perhaps we could have wrapped things up 30 minutes sooner. Marijuana might have helped him communicate. Opioids could make his knee feel better. I don't think shrooms would have been a good idea. If he hallucinated an angry fan monster in my A/C unit that could have been really awkward.

He was a terrible salesman—but for some reason, I fell for every upsell. Actually, I sold all of the upsells to myself in my head. I got a new filter and had him install it because I worried I would forget or I would install it improperly (not really possible, you just stick it in). But for the price I paid I could have bought 6 years worth of filters.

I just wanted everything sorted. I am so stressed and do not have the bandwidth to deal with A/C troubles. So I just said "yes" to everything. But the price kept inflating as we went along and every time it inflated he required a signature on his tablet.

This repair business had been corporatized to death and it made me miss all of my dad's friends from the old days who he would ask for favors. He always "knew a guy." He would trade car repairs for discounts on things we needed around the house. And they all worked for themselves and had their own tools and their own shitty truck and they all said, "There's your problem!" with the same masculine affect.

Their uniform was a flannel shirt and jeans and I bet some of them were high as fuck.

And this elderly gentlemen with the bum knee kept checking his checklist to make sure he checked every check because he feared managerial discipline.

He got to the sales pitch for the fluorescent dye. He was like, "Do you want this? You don't have to buy it." And I started selling it to myself in my head despite his assurance it wasn't really necessary. I worried if I had a big leak and I don't discover it until the middle of July, I would regret saying no in this moment. But then I realized he hated the dye injection process. And his poor salesmanship was mostly him not wanting his hands to be fucking radioactive yellow for the rest of the day. He tried wearing gloves to avoid it, but he still ended up with yellow hands and grumbled, "I really hate this stuff." Which was one of the few unrehearsed things he said to me the entire time.

Once the checklist was complete and the house was already starting to cool, he had one final sales pitch for me. He asked that I give his company a 5-star review and to make sure I mention his name. He told me that in July all of the techs with the most 5-star reviews will have their names put in a hat. And "the boss" will give one lucky employee a free vacation.

This vacation thing sounded like such a manipulation. And I'm sure "the boss" has instructed his techs to tell this tale of the free vacation so customers will be like, "Well, shit. I don't want this poor old guy with the shitty knee to miss out on that."

And it was then I realized just how this company got so many 5-star reviews.

Diabolical.

But the good news... my house is cold as heck.

And I keep shivering because I can't figure out the perfect setting on my thermostat. I guess I was used to the inefficiency and I will have to recalibrate.

[paladin-heart5]

Save Her (Part One)

Leon Kennedy x Reader

Summary; Leon's fiancee has been captured by an underground black market group. He needs to save her, but once he does, he needs to prepare for her recovery.

CW; hurt/comfort, captivity, swearing, blood/bruising, mild suicidal thoughts. (lmk if I missed anything)

Three weeks. For three weeks his best friend, no, fiancée, has been missing. And after all that time stressing, all those sleepless nights, he's got a solid lead. An underground gang that sells bio-weapon prototypes. They buy blueprints off the black market and build them to sell to high bidders. With the intel Hunnigan found, they gotta be the ones who have her. The question is, why would they take her? They better not be experimenting on her. He'll have to put a bullet through every head, just like the undead he spent most of his life killing. Maybe he'll do it anyway. When he came home from work one day, he found the door broken open, many signs of a struggle, but they still got her. No ransom notes, nor blood. The anger in his eyes was strong, they can't just take her away like that. She's going to come home safe and sound. She has to. 

“The location has been sent to you, but you'll need to be careful getting down. There's likely going to be some form of security, definitely cameras. Keep your head down.” Hunnigan explains as Leon, Chris, and Rebecca gear up. Leon knew he couldn't do this alone, he needed his friends. Jill is on another mission, and Claire is traveling for TerraSave. Chris wasn't going to let him do this in the state he's in. Barely a wink of sleep, very little food in his system. He had to force him to do both just so he wouldn't kill himself. He can't save her when he's passed out on the ground. “Head to the warehouse, clear the area, and find the hatch. The rest I won't be able to help much with.” She finished explaining, earning a nod from Leon.

“Got it, thank you, Ingrid.” He says softly. Ingrid gives a hint of a smile.

“I care about her too, bring her home safely.” She states, pointing at them. Leon chuckles and gives a two finger salute. The three of them are off in no time, settling into Chris’s jeep before taking off. Rebecca looks through her computer for possible access to the cameras at the warehouse.

“It doesn't seem like there are many camera's underground, just in the warehouse itself. So I'm guessing there might be some muscle down there. Judging by some old files, their number of sales on the black market have increased by 40% in the last three months.” She explains to the men. Leon's leg bounces anxiously as he listens, Chris frowning as he thinks. 

“I just don't understand, what do they want with Y/n?” The muscular brunette asks. Rebecca hums and types for a couple of minutes before answering.

“My guess, using her knowledge as a biologist to build their newest experiment. Though I can’t seem to get through this inscription, so I won’t know for sure until we get there and see it for ourselves.” The professor explains.

________________

The echoes of men cheering down the hall caused a spike in her heart rate. The cold floor of the cell she’s on makes her shiver as she sits in only a dirty hospital gown and undergarments. Her hair is greasy, and knotted. She'd kill for a shower if she wasn't so weak. Y/n hugged her knees to her chest, the chains connected to her ankle making a clanking sound. Bruises and cuts litter her skin, all that fighting ended in such pain. She just wanted to be home, resting in bed with her soon to be husband. But those words from the fuckers that took her. They haunt her, every day she starts to believe them.

“He's not coming for you, doll."

“And even if he did, he won't love you.”

“You belong to us now.” 

She squeezes her eyes shut as she holds her head. Tears starting to prick her eyes for the hundredth time since she's been stuck here. Leon would never leave her like that. He loves her, he promised that when he proposed. “He's just having trouble finding me.” She mutters, but still; as time goes on, hope continues to fade.

____________

The ringing of gunshots caused her to wake with a start. She can hear shouting and footsteps all around. Y/n curls up and covers her ears, too afraid to even try to see what's happening. Could be friend or foe, but it's hard to tell at this point. All those torturous nights of scaring her into talk, forcing her to do tests. She's simply too tired to move, to think. She's not even sure she wants to live anymore. 

“Leon! Check all the cells! We have to get her out quickly if we're gonna blow this place.” A familiar voice called out, followed by footsteps nearing her cell. Why can't she remember that voice, and did he say Leon? As in her soon to be husband? Perhaps her mind is starting to play tricks on her. That little bit of hope left could be tricking her. 

However, the footsteps get louder. A shadow of a man draws closer, and she isn't sure what to do besides try to hide herself. When the footsteps stop suddenly, she peaks her head up slightly. A tall man, fairly muscular and sandy blond hair stands in front of her cell. His eyes are a beautiful blue, but they seem dull. As he sees her, his heart stops, breath hitches. It's her, his future wife. Y/n stares at him in disbelief, this definitely has to be a trick, that man looks just like Leon.

“Y/n..” The sound of her name was breathy, but it immediately made her feel a sense of comfort. His voice, deep and smooth, it's very soothing. Though she still can't be sure that her mind isn't playing tricks. She hugs herself tighter, shaking as he approaches slowly. He kneels down in front of her, worry and sadness clear in his eyes. He frowns and slowly reaches his hand out towards her face. A whimper escapes as she tenses, which only makes him feel worse.

“It's me, baby. It's Leon.” He says softly, managing to graze his fingers along her cheek. Her eyes widen, they look almost lifeless to him. They become glossy as tears quickly begin to pour. 

“You're- you're really.. here?” She asks quietly, earning a nod from the blond. The tears fall heavily down her cheeks as a loud sob racks her body. Leon quickly grabs her hands, trying not to let himself fall apart because he just can't. He has to be strong for her, he needs to get her to safety. Chris runs by and hears her cries, stopping in his tracks. He looks over and his eyes widen. He begins to step into the cell, noticing the chains. He then pulls out a set of keys that he collected from one of the guards.

“Leon, here.” He calls softly, giving him the keys. Leon looks back and smiles thankfully. “Where's Rebecca?” He asks, quickly unlocking the chains around Y/n’s ankles. 

“Grabbing the files so we can figure this out. Let's go, quickly.” Chris states before rushing out. Leon looks at his fiancee and cups her cheek. 

“Baby, I'm gonna get you out of here, okay? Just hold on to me.” He watches her head nod in acknowledgement before carefully lifting her up. She grabs his vest as he carries her bridal style, following where Chris went.  Her glossy eyes wander around tiredly as they move. Everything feels fuzzy, the sounds of gunfire become muffled. Even Leon's voice fades in and out, but when she realizes he's talking, she looks up at him slowly. He holds her close, realizing how pale she is. When they finally find Rebecca, she goes to Y/n to check on her. 

“We have to get her to a hospital. Now.” She states with a firm tone. The two nod and get what they need. Chris sets up some C4 in the computer room before they all rush out. Another group of guards enter the hallway, guns blazing. Leon takes cover, shielding her from harm, while Chris and Rebecca clear them out. Once they're all down, they run out to the warehouse and jump into the jeep. Leon looks down at his lover to see she's unconscious.

"Shit, Y/n!" He calls, trying to shake her awake, but she's out cold. He feels her neck for a pulse, luckily it's there, but faint. He shouts at Chris to hurry, and Chris detonates the bomb before speeding to the hospital.

Please be okay.

~~~~~~

A/N; Welcome to the first part of my first little series! Hope you enjoyed it, more to come soon!

[oneleggedflamingo]

I just had a thought about how easily I "get addicted" to things. Just a long rambling that ends with : ignore the protestant police if your head.

If I try a new game and really like it, I might play it multiple hours a day for 2 weeks. It happens with computer games and sudoku. I played nyan cat for hours on end when I was a kid, because it is really appealing to kids. And then the urge to play the game goes down to a moderate rate or goes away completely.

I ran consistently for 6 years, like I had a running season, and I made a weekly schedule for it, and if something happened that prevented me from going running, I would be pissed about it. Because it was a really enjoyable activity that I liked doing. I was often laughing when running, because it just made me so happy.

I downloaded tiktok in December 2021 and randomly deleted it in January, because I didn't really like it that much.

I used to drink a lot of coffee, because I like the taste and hot temperature, but now on some days I don't drink any coffee, and I don't get withdrawl symptons.

I was always so worried that I am somehow a risky person, that I should be very careful about everything nice and fun because I might get addicted to it. Something something non rent paying protestant police in my head refuces to leave me. And I didn't even get addicted to tiktok. I tried smoking too, and didn't care for it so that didn't stick on me either. Like. What. Who put that police in my head, I don't think it was me, because tiktok and nicotine did nothing to me.

I feel like the message I still see in my curated rage bait media feed is: if you can't go a day without doing/having something that you specifically like (literal drug or anything else commonly known to be addicting or anything else a human might get a crumb of joy from), you are a pathetic addict that doesn't have a real life, real life defined by my standards, and there is no cure for you and you are destroying our culture.

I am actively going against that protestant police in my head by buying some good hard candy to keep in my jacket pocket so that I can have something sweet when I am walking home drunk from a party on one of those perfect cold evenings. And a lot of other life's simple joys, but that one is next on my list because they are already selling Christmas candies at the store. And a lot of life's big joys.

[nickgerlich]

Last Time

It’s time for one of my favorite blog topics, one I return to each semester. No, it’s not fluff and filler when I can’t find something else more important to talk about. It’s got a heavy dose of nostalgia, but you often don’t recognize that delightful taste until I push you to do something first.

And what is that, Dr. Gerlich? Simple. I want to you think back to the last time you used a product or service, but at the time, did not know it was going to be the last time. That’s another way of saying you probably had no clue what was happening around you, how your consuming ways were about to change, but they sure did.

I bring this up because of a news item I saw about the new Jeep Wrangler ditching manual windows in favor of powered ones, effectively ending an era in how vehicles were made. You won’t be able to find a crank window in any new vehicle from henceforth, although if you look around used car lots, you might get lucky.

But who wants to “roll down your window” like that anyway?See what I did there? It was so part and parcel to vehicles that it became enmeshed in the vernacular. It’s kind of like an old person like me saying “fast forward,” when we’ve been skipping forward for years now. Well, unless you are still using VHS and audio cassette tapes.

My last vehicle with manual windows was a 1987 Mazda B2200 pickup. I bought it when I was a grad student at Indiana U, and I was on a tight budget. Even then, power windows were a pricey option, although they had first appeared in 1940 on the Packard 180. When I bought my ’91 Dodge Caravan, it came fully loaded. None of that manual stuff for me.

Our lives are filled with stories like this, though. Technology continues its rampant rate of change, and new things are replacing old all the time. It’s just that while we often welcome the new, we forget about the old as it slips into the rear view mirror.

And if you are young enough, you may have missed out completely. Unless you are nostalgically buying and playing vinyl records, you have no idea what a “broken record” is.

So I must ask you, my primarily young students. Have you ever even written a check? I doubt it. I still have a checking account for those rare times I need to make a payment that way, but I recently noticed in my ledger that six months have passed since the last time. There was a time, though, when we used checks for everything, especially at the grocery and other retail shops. That was before debit cards.

Let’s think back to some other things that have all but disappeared from our lives, like pay phones. Remember them? That’s what you used when you were away from home and needed to make a call. While coins were required in the earliest years, eventually they started allowing phone card dialing so you didn’t have to carry a coin purse with you to keep feeding the phone. Thank you, cell phones. You have made our lives easier.

Remember fax machines? I have sent many a fax, but not long ago had need to send one from the office only to find out we no longer have a machine capable of doing so. That’s why we save documents as PDFs and either email or upload them. While we’re talking computing, here’s another one. What about thumb drives? Today we save things to the cloud.

And then there’s music. I was once a huge collector of CDs, amassing more than 1500 of them. But then iTunes started selling songs and albums for download, I quietly switched. Pretty soon, Spotify came around, and the subscription era of music listening arrived. Much the same can be said for DVDs. We rent our content now on streaming services. Oh, and my wife is slowly but surely selling my CDs and DVDs on eBay, because there are collectors of such things. Some have held their value well.

Do any of you remember having a newspaper delivered to your house? Of course, I do, but I quit in spring 2015 after my Golden Retriever destroyed one too many papers. He loved to get the paper at the end of the driveway before dawn, then bring it to the front porch. But he would forget that it was for me, and he would shred it. I got tired of that, and I haven’t had ink smudges on my fingers in nearly a decade now.

There’s one product category that has made a comeback, though, and that is wearables. Around 2010 my students made fun of me for wearing a wrist watch, something I had done since I was five years old. They argued convincingly that my iPhone was a pretty good timepiece, and a watch was redundant. You should have seen the white stripe around my left wrist when I removed my watch for the last time, skin as white as the driven snow. I had to be careful for a while not to let it get sunburned.

Apple, though, reinvented, if you will, the watch, and now millions of people wear them. I don’t. I kind of like not having something on my wrist, and to be honest, I don’t want any more crazy tan lines. You should see my arms, thighs, and ankles, with very distinct lines that may as well have been tattooed. I get a lot of sun from all the walking and hiking I do, and those lines linger all winter long.

I’ll leave this subject for you to ponder now. What are some of the things you have done for the last time, and didn’t even realize it at the time? I bet the list is long, even for my students who are only 20 years old. Your list is only going to get longer.

Get cranking.

Dr “My List Is Very Long” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[bluestar22x]

Reunion

The Writing Contest - Chapter 4: Reunion

Summary: The premiere night of the movie based on Nora and Javi's screenplay changes everything and nothing at the same time.

Pairing: Javi Gutierrez x Female!OC (Nora Delaine)

Rating: 18+ Series

Word Count: 3,100(ish)

Warnings: Romance (we're laying it on thick today), angst, longing

Author’s Note: Nora's got issues to work through if that's not apparent. Also this is where Nora's love for Bon Jovi (and mine) starts becoming part of the story, not just the chapter titles.

xxx

"Do I look okay?"

Sierra gawked at you through the video chat on your phone, which you had prompted against the mirror in your hotel room's bathroom. "Do you look okay? Seriously, Nora? You look like a princess."

You were dressed in a sleek turquoise blue dress with silver embroidery along the shoulders and edges, your shoulders almost completely exposed and your breasts just contained enough. You had minimum make up on but what you did have on, especially your black eye liner, highlighted your facial features. Your light brown hair was pinned into an updo that had taken you nearly two hours to complete, to your dismay, but at least it looked like the pictures you'd found online. There was a pearl necklace, earrings, and silver rings on three of your fingers that rounded out your look, along with the delicate white sandals with two inch heels that Sierra could not see due to the bathroom countertop being in the way.

"That sounds like too much," you said, frowning. Maybe you should've gone with a black dress.

"No! No!" Sierra shouted, moving closer to her phone's camera. "It's perfect! You look amazing. Everyone at the premiere won't know what hit them."

You blushed, uncertain if you wanted to draw that kind of attention to you. You just wanted to fit in that night, when you joined a selected chosen few to watch California Dreamers for the first time in a classy theater in Los Angeles before its worldwide release the week after.

It was surreal, how your story would soon be on the big screens, for all who wished to see it. Your excitement over it had your hands shaking.

"So are you nervous?" Sierra inquired.

"Of course I am," you replied, taking a final look at your face in the mirror. "I've never been to an event like this. Walter said some paparazzi might take pictures of me. If I do anything wrong I might just end up on the cover of some gossip magazine under 'New Screenplay Writer Has Big Oops At Premiere' or something."

"Don't make me jealous," Sierra said, grinning. "And that's not what I meant. I was talking about how you're about to see Javi again for the first time in a year."

"Why would I be nervous about that?" you asked. "We've kept in contact. I told you that filming for his latest screenplay is starting next month. He knows I've sold another one too. And we did use video chat a few times."

"Yes, but talking through the computer or phone once a month is not the same as in person," Sierra pointed out. "And you still have unresolved feelings for him."

"I do not," you protested a little too fast.

She gave you the look. The one that read as seriously? "You haven't even tried to put yourself out there at all the past year, Nora. Don't deny it."

You tried to anyway. "I've been busy with the second screenplay, you know that. It's been stressful writing completely solo for the first time and then trying to sell it on my own after."

She sighed. "Whatever, why do I even bother? Forget I brought it up and enjoy yourself tonight, Nora. You deserve it."

"Thanks."

"You'd better hang up with me," she figured, glancing at the ancient clock hanging on her kitchen wall. "By the time you call a taxi and they drive you there it'll almost be seven."

You said your goodbyes and switched to calling out for a taxi, the nearest company promising a car within fifteen minutes. It was on time, and you quickly made your way from the inside of your hotel lobby to the car. Though the driver did a double take of you (the good kind) he was nothing but polite and opened the back door for you.

On the ride to the movie theater you twirled the rings on your fingers, jitters truly setting in for the first time, and not just because of the film.

Even though you had denied it, Sierra was right, of course. You still had feelings for Javi and you'd been distracting yourself by burying yourself in your work, not just your second screenplay, but also the part time pet sitting business you'd started, a means to an end to making rent, though you did enjoy taking care of your clients' animals. It wasn't too serious though. You didn't have a regular client base and could leave whenever you liked, something you'd needed to be able to come to the premiere and any other future ones. You hoped someday to quit once you made enough money writing.

The theater the film was premiering at appeared after a right turn onto a busy business street and you ran a hand over the front of your dress, smoothing out wrinkles that didn't exist.

"Showtime," you uttered quietly and carefully stepped out of the taxi after paying the driver, making sure to include a healthy tip.

The entrance to the red carpet section beyond a border of ropes was being guarded by a burly man who was at least a foot taller than you, and seeing him caused your anxiety to flare. You had remembered your pass, right?

You fumbled with your wallet and pulled it out, raising it to your eye level like some detective on an eighties cop show.

"Nora Delaine," he noted, voice booming. "First time at a premiere?"

"How can you tell?" you asked, trying not to squeak.

He smiled, and it was friendly enough, but you were still intimated. You were pretty sure his biceps were larger than your head.

"You look more nervous than my mother's Chihuahua," he chuckled.

And I'm proportionally the same size, you thought.

You sucked in a deep breath and put yourself together. You were being ridiculous. A lot of people in Hollywood were above average height and buff, especially when compared to the average in your town. People of French heritage weren't actually typically all that short, but your family and neighbors did fit the stereotype.

"Have you seen Javi Gutierrez yet?"

"Right here," a familiar voice beyond the ropes answered.

You swiveled your head in the direction of the owner of it and your breath caught.

Several yards away Javi was standing by a backdrop wall put up so the paps could take photos of people as they arrived. He was as handsome as ever, dressed in a classic black and white suit and dress shoes.

Video chat really didn't do him justice, especially when he dressed up.

You approached him after picking your jaw up off the floor, beaming. "Javi!"

"Nora." He opened himself up to you for a hug and you accepted the offer, head against his chest and hands on his shoulder blades. You realized as his hands fell on your spine that you'd forgotten how warm and comforting he was, and you probably lingered in his embrace longer than a friend typically would because of it.

When you pulled away you blinked up at him, analyzing his appearance. Something was different about him.

You gaped at him when you figured it out. "You cut your hair!"

"I always do for premieres," he stated, "For the photos."

You felt a wave of sorrow over the loss of his curls, which was silly, especially since he apparently grew his hair out whenever he wasn't in Hollywood for business, but the feeling was still there.

"You look great, Javi," you told him honestly, "But you also looked great with your waves."

"Thanks," he said, with a hint of a blush on his cheeks. "I'll keep that in mind."

He guided you at the waist towards the center of the carpet as the paparazzi were allowed to file in line along the ropes and started snapping photos of the people that had arrived before you.

You didn't recognize anyone but the director, Marion Young. The actors were probably going to be last to show up, for dramatics.

"Javi look here!" someone called out and you and Javi both pivoted towards a young petite blonde with a massive camera in her hands. You wondered how she could even lift the thing.

"Time to pose," Javi said and you did exactly that as the girl started snapping photos of you together, side by side.

After what felt like ages, you relaxed the forced smile on your face and moved on down the line with him.

"You famous around these parts, Javi?" you inquired, knowing that paps didn't normally recognize writers like that.

"I've been caught hanging out with Nic a few times lately," he explained.

"Ah."

Duh. One of the easiest ways to get noticed in Hollywood was being in the vicinity of a famous actor. Of course someone who was close friends with Nic Cage would gain attention.

"I'm surprised they're not telling me to back out of the shot," you said as another pap's camera flashed at you.

"Even if they did not know you were the main contributing writer to this movie," Javi started, "You look stunning in that dress, cariño. They're eating you up."

Cariño. That was new. You were pretty sure that translated to something like sweetheart. Which wasn't necessarily a romantic pet name but... "Javi." His name came out of you like a warning.

"This is exactly why I made the contest," he told you as you both gained more and more attention nearing the front door of the building. One of his arms was still curled around you. "I wanted to give someone else a shot at the limelight. Soak it in while you can. Hollywood moves fast."

You nodded, not sure what to say, having decided to pretend to have missed the new pet name and ignore how much he was touching you. You didn't want to make a big deal out of it. He tended to get that way when he was excited. That was all it was.

He released you once inside the building and you also had to push aside the disappointment you felt from the loss of contact, shoving the emotion down to replace it with the excitement bubbling up in you for what you'd come here for.

It was time to watch the movie.

You sat down beside him at the back of the theater where the people who weren't the actors and director were asked to sit, and waited anxiously to see the final result of the hard work everyone in the room (besides the few civilians chosen to watch with them) had put in.

It felt like everything was about to change.

x

"So, how'd you like the movie?" Javi questioned as you settled down in the backseat of his limo with him a couple hours later.

"I loved it!" you exclaimed. "The director didn't change too many details and the cinematography was gorgeous. I admit, I wasn't thrilled at first with the casting, they definitely hired the actors for their popularity rather than their appearances fitting Nolan and Angie, but I can't really fault the casting people for it. Those two acted their asses off." You hummed as something that had bothered you crossed your mind. "I do wish the love scene would've been more them though."

Javi glanced at you quizzically. "What do you mean?"

"I'm not against movies having music in the background of a love scene," you informed him, "Not in the slightest. They usually add to it. But Nolan turning on that stereo? So not him. He wouldn't want to drown out his partner, you know? They were alone, no one to hear them. It was unnecessary and made it less intimate. Don't you think so?"

He cleared his throat. "Ah, sí, definitely." His phone binged with a text and he nearly jumped in his seat. You tried not to notice though it wasn't like him to get awkward discussing a love scene. You had wrote two together for Angie and Nolan, and they had been pretty spicy. Javi had been completely professional about it.

"Who's that?" you asked.

"One of the producers," he replied as he read the text. "Just reminding everyone the after party is only for those who were part of the crew or wrote for the movie and their significant others. No other family."

"They're paying for the booze," you guessed.

He grinned. "Sí. They promised a round of free shots."

"I think I'll stick to wine tonight," you told him. "The hangover after my birthday celebration was not worth it."

Javi chuckled. "I think I will refuse the offer too. I need to use every spare hour I have tomorrow editing my latest script. I cannot jeopardize my ability to meet the deadline to submit it to the film company interested in it."

The limo driver parked the vehicle and you and Javi quickly exited.

"What are the odds on them having chosen Club Midnight for the party?" you quizzed as you both strolled inside the familiar building.

"High," he shouted at you over the loud music. "I chose to bring you and Sierra here because I've been here many times for after parties. They rent out. So there won't be any general public tonight."

You nodded and weaved your way through the crowd to the bar, with Javi trailing you.

"Hey, congratulations," an unfamiliar woman said as you passed. "How do you feel, your first screenplay being a hit with the critics? Did you see the review calling the movie a beautifully real story about a man and a woman facing life's trials together?"

You turned your head in her direction and flashed her a toothy grin. "Thank you. I hadn't actually checked the reviews yet. Didn't know they released them so fast. And I figured the real test is going to be with the general audiences next week."

"True," she agreed. "They're the ones that make sure your scripts keep getting interest. Still, critical reviews affect turnout to some degree. Don't write off them off."

"Never."

You made it to the bar and ordered the first red wine you could think of, and Javi did the same. You both planted yourselves on bar stools in the corner of the room, away from most of the commotion, after the bartender handed you your drinks.

"I have a confession," you admitted to Javi as you tasted your wine.

"Do tell," he said, leaning in towards you.

"I still like cocktails more than wine."

Javi barked out a laugh. "I won't hold it against you."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

You scanned the club, taking in your surroundings and watching as a decent crowd danced the night away on the center floor.

Being there again made it feel like the weekend of your thirty-fifth birthday had been yesterday. It was hard to believe more than a year had passed. A year, and here you were, in the club with Javi again.

What was the saying? The more things change, the more they remain the same? Was that appropriate for this situation?

An hour passed. You and Javi made small talk between yourselves and spent a little time mingling, chatting with the director and complimenting the actors for a job well done. You even talked to a few of the camera crew members for a bit before the DJ put on some slow music for couples to dance to.

You lit up when you recognized the beginnings of the second song. "You Want To Make A Memory."

"What?" Javi frowned.

"The song," you explained, "It's one of my favorites. Do you know Bon Jovi?"

"I saw them in concert once, in Spain, when I was twenty-one," Javi answered. "My girlfriend at the time suggested we go. They were good."

"Aren't they?" You grinned. "They're my favorite band. Jon has such a good voice and I like the majority of their songs."

"Oh?" Javi stood from the couch you were both seated on and offered you a hand in a very prince-like manner. "Do you want to dance?"

You widened your eyes. "Oh, no, you don't have to."

"Come on," he encouraged. "It'll be fun."

"Okay..."

You grabbed his hand and followed him onto the dance floor, where your eyes met and time seemed to slow. He smiled at you and clasped your right hand and his left together. You smiled back and put your left hand on his shoulder. Then his right hand found the small of your back and you both started swaying to the soothing beat of the song.

You soon realized you couldn't look away from Javi and it seemed he couldn't look away from you either. You were trapped, spellbound together, mesmerized, completely lost in the moment. Your heart was racing for no damn reason except the intensity of his gaze.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Moments like this, they were only in the movies, were they not? Yet there you were, living it, and too lost in it for your fears to touch you.

Your face got closer and closer to Javi's, seemingly on its own accord, and he also leaned in towards you, the hand on your back wandering up to rest along your jaw.

Then he was kissing you, and you were kissing him back, both pouring your longing into the movements of your lips, softly, sweetly.

It was exactly the same kind of kiss Nolan and Angie had shared in your screenplay after they'd decided they wanted to be together, no matter what other people thought about their relationship.

You abruptly pushed yourself away from Javi at that thought, the spell broken, and shook your head.

"I can't do this, Javi," you told him, your heart feeling like it was in a vice grip.

"Why not?' he inquired, caressing your face, eyes soft. It hurt, how affectionate he was being with you.

"Because in the morning I'll fly back home," you stated. "Nothing that happens between now and then could change that."

Javi dropped his hand, looking crestfallen, and you backed away, feeling guilty but knowing that trying to comfort him wouldn't help the situation. You couldn't be his friend after what had just happened. Your only real option was to turn away and leave.

So that's what you did. You practically fled the club, eyes welling up like they had after you'd said goodbye to him at the airport.

You cried because you knew the truth. It wasn't actually distance that was the problem, or even the differences between you and Javi.

It was you.

You and your cowardice.

You wanted to be brave, you wanted to charge back into that club and tell him you'd stay to see where your relationship went, but the fearful part of you, the one that remembered your history and the lessons your family had taught you, prevented you from doing so.

Better a broken heart now than a crushed one later.

xxx

Tagged: @harriedandharassed

xxx

Link to Bon Jovi's Song (on youtube)

(This song vibes with this chapter, imo)

xxx

Series Masterlist

Main Masterlist

xxx

[quietmarie]

What am I working on right now?

I realise I haven't really listed what I am doing and have been doing in terms of projects on Tumblr so far, so in case you're curious what I'm doing, here you go. With images and all this is gonna be quite lengthy, so have a look under the cut:

First of all, Job and Uni:

At the start of the month, the new uni semester begun, and I also got a job in programming! Uni courses are pretty chill this year, and I'm at the job two days a week. It's really nice so far, and it involves developing algorithms used for CAM and CNC-machines.

As a uni project I did..

A physics engine for Godot:

Godot is a game engine. As part of an uni course, two fellow students and I wrote the mathsy bulk of a physics engine for it. This includes stuff like collision handling and various joints (like hinge joints you'd use for a physics-based door etc.), but because of time constraints doesn't include collision detection, which is handled by Bullet. Outside of the planned curriculum, I also derived the equations for and implemented rope joints, which simulate, well, ropes.

And currently, outside of uni, I still want to work on the engine by implementing..

Portals:

Yea I want to implement portals using the custom physics engine we built. But not just portals as Valve did them, that would be too easy. I want them to be able to move and interact with other objects while remaining physically accurate (or, as physically accurate as they can be considering they're portals). The current state of things:

The dream is to be able to build gorgeous architecture, like, I'm thinking buildings resting on top of pillars that are always moving. If I can get this to work I really ought to discuss the vision with some artists and creative folk in general, because I feel like there's so much unexplored creativity in art with portals. But yeah, there's still a lot of very intimidating maths/physics until I get there.

As for other private/free-time projects..

SSBToni:

SSBToni is probably my most ambitious project yet. Toni is a Discord bot for the competitive Super Smash Bros. community (currently in 1.9k servers wowee). Her main selling point is the ability to show frame data and hitbox gifs, but she can also do some other stuff like guide you through a full match of Smash Bros. according to a range of competitive rulesets, from rock-paper-scissors through stage bans all the way to game reporting. She's written in Java with JDA, and her code is hosted here.

I want to do ranked matchmaking and Smash profile images later on, so I have to do some web backend work. The bulk of that is private still, but some of that spun off into separate projects which are..

instant-glicko-2:

The Glicko-2 rating system is great, but it has some issues if you want to use it for real-time ratings/rankings. This Rust library aims to solve these issues to allow for good real-time rankings that are still accurate to the Glicko-2 system. I wrote about how I achieve that here, and the code is hosted here. Note that I do want to change some stuff still which I don't mention in the article I wrote, and in the current form it is probably not production-ready.

cache-compute:

In all honesty, maybe my proudest public thing yet, and it's a single-file ~500 line Rust crate. Based on this blogpost by fasterthanlime, the library makes caching for async stuff much easier, which is gonna be extremely useful in web backend stuff. If a resource isn't available locally (cached), you might have to spend some time making a request to get it from elsewhere to cache it. This library makes sure you only make that request once when you need it, and sorts everything out so that everyone waiting on the resource gets a copy the moment it arrives.

Part of why I'm so proud of this is that, for one, I consider the core finished and very much usable, and secondly, because I wrote so many and such long and exhaustive tests for it, just to hopefully be able to catch any weirdness that comes up. Because writing this kind of concurrent code is hard.

And that's it for projects I would want to show off and write about.

There are of course always ideas in my idea list (currently four or five good ones I'm not working on), maybe I'll post about those too sometime. If you're curious or starved for ideas feel free to ask about them too, I don't think I'll be able to do all of them and the list is only growing larger.

[julien5-malfunction]

24012024

Saw my therapist in a rather strange setting. We went to this other support/care provider to see if I'd rather have them look after me (Since there has been some issues with the unit-people not doing their job.)

We went there too early so we killed time by driving around town in my therapist's car. For a while. Then went into the building to wait some more. They people there offered me coffee and pie, but I didn't want any.

We just sat at the table for some while and somehow it was the most bired I have been in a while. I was asked to tell something about myself, which is too broad question to awnser to be honest, so I told them about my history of living in units for the past 5 years. The rest of the meeting I was pretty much quiet and spaced tf out as the therapist and other two ladys talked about their dogs or something. They knew each other from work or something.

I noticed the art style of the of the framed pictures on the wall, next to a frigde. Local comic artist, I know him, by name atleast and what he lookes like. His sister was a caretaker in one of the units I was in, shewould tell me about his little brothers comics and stuff like that, I even got one of his books with a dedicated signing as a birthday gift. Occationally I see him in the supermarket and he waves back if I wave at him, maybe he is just friendly like that. It's not that rare to see his work around town, his drawings can be seen on painted on bus stops, even the library walls, the school I used to go to, also had wall painted in his style in the cafeteria. The library sells postcards designed by him. The guy is kind of a local comic book hero, I suppose, literally...

I can't remember what all the discussion was about, but they told me to think about it, 'just say the word and changes can happen at a fast rate'. I'm too tired to think about anything right now. I'm not too keen on haveing people wisiting my home, even less so having new people wisiting my home. I just really want to be alone. Being social wares me out so bad. I'm literally half asleep on the couch as I'm writing this, even tho I didn't even have to walk today.

The lady I talked to offered to drive me to the library and back home, as she had to return books as well and said she was going in the same direction so I accepted. Normally I don't like being taken around in a car but the sidewalks are ice and water and I guess I was just that tired. I kind of info dumped more of my issues on her on the drive home. She was just kinda like '...yeah you kinda have problems...' Kinda feels validating that someone acknowledges that you're kinda getting mistreated by the system and all, I've gotten so used to it allready that whenever someone isn't telling me ' it is what it is', I'm telling them that ' it kinda is... what it is'.

They gave me stuff... I got a green, cheapish-plasticy ballpoint pen, a block of sticky notes, a little bag of candy and a my favourite is the reflector that's shaped like a little house. All of these have the company logo on them.

I sent a picture of these to my favourite person at the unit "these guys bribe kinda hard..."

Probably the most interesting piece of information I got out of the whole ordeal was this name of a game my therapist said hen I was pointing out the game console and said I kinda wanted a PS2 since I have a television but no cable so it just shows a black screen, my PC is so old too that it can't even run LMMS. Then I made a joke about installing Doom on it or something. The therapist said that there is a game named "Hexen", that should run on piece of shit computers as well.

I never herd? Tho I never really looked for 'games to play on a pc with the computing power of a simple calculator'.

I need to look it up at some point... Like I might actually find a game that I can play on my highschool laptop.

Heck I have Halflife 2 on a disk but that want's me to install steam first and that is gonna take extra space on my laptop and I'll need to go camp at the unit to use their wifi again... hmmmmm.

[lillotte17]

So, at one point after the season 1 release there was a post floating around somewhere with this idea that Crowley wrote Aziraphale letters and hid them in various books in his shop. I don't know how plausible that idea is, but I thought it was extremely cute, regardless. So, I wrote one of the letters!

It's just been hanging out on my computer for ages because I didn't know what to do with it. It's not really a fic. And I never feel like I get his voice quite right. BUT I still like it, so here you go. <3

~~

A,

You know that I am not very good with words. Well. Generally speaking, anyway. I wouldn't be even halfway decent at my job if I couldn't sell a line or two, but it turns out that it is much easier to talk someone else into going for something that part of them already wants deep down than it is to admit things that we might want for ourselves. Funny, that. 

At any rate, my point is that I am not going to sit here and write you a sonnet or something. Wouldn't even know how to go about it, truth be told. But I know that you seem to enjoy words, especially written ones, since you've set yourself up to be surrounded by them almost constantly, so I thought that this might be easier for both of us.

It doesn't feel easier.  

I understand why you didn’t want to help me the other day, really, I do. But you didn't even give me a chance to explain why I asked, so I'm asking you to listen now. Well…you know, read. Can't really listen to a letter, can you? Not yet, anyway. Who knows what humans will think of next.

From the moment we met, you have always been…something different. Something I didn't expect. In mostly good ways, though I suppose you can't help that. I think I was just curious to start with. Wanted to see what would happen if I poked at you a bit. I didn't expect you to be so…well. You.

We came to an understanding, and I told myself it was just business. Business and lunches. Business and lunches and the odd night out on the town. For someone who lies as much as I do, you'd think I'd be better at lying to myself. Sometimes I wish I was.

I've had a sneaking suspicion that I might actually like you for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, but it had only occurred to me recently that I am... we might…

I don't want things to change.

It's precarious to leave things the way they are, I know that. The people I work for are not known for their forgiveness, and yours have been known for dealing out their fair share of wroth as well. But I used to think that if things went south, I could just talk my way out of it and then avoid you however long until things died down again. I'm an optimist, you know.

But I don't want to avoid you. And our dealings have stepped beyond the scope of plausible deniability at this point. And if they come for me over that… I'm not sure what will happen. Nothing good, though, I'm certain. Maybe they’d kill me, maybe they wouldn’t. Hard to say which would be worse, really.  But I thought, if you helped me, I could put together a sort of fail-safe. Just something to give us me enough time to come up with a plan of action. Find a place to hide. Run off somewhere.

You could come with me. If you wanted.

I know you wouldn’t want to go now, of course. It’d be too big a change. Breaking all sorts of rules. I wouldn’t mind, though. Never did mind too much about breaking rules, as you so often like to remind me.

It’s just… I think you might be the only being in this whole cosmos that I’ve actually managed to make happy. A few times, anyway. Maybe. At least, you seem happy. Most of the time. When we aren’t having a row.

It was a shocking revelation; I can tell you. To imagine that I’d be any sort of good for someone. And that I might even enjoy being 'good' for someone.  It’s sort of nice though. And terrifying. And frustrating. I wasn’t really sure I was capable of this sort of thing. At least, not anymore. Maybe I never was. Maybe that’s why I ended up working the sort of job I’ve got.

The world is full of so many soft words for soft emotions and soft people. Bright ephemeral things. I can’t say they don’t suit you, but they aren’t enough either. Well, maybe ‘enough’ isn’t the word for it. They just…don’t fit exactly right. And how could they? Man can hardly conceive of a word for something that he has little no understanding of. Bet you thought I’d say it was ineffable.  I am not a good messenger for that sort of expression, regardless. Bit outside my wheelhouse.  Just the sort of thing I’d cock up, really.

Look, I don’t really know where to go with any of this. I can’t even fathom a reason why things might change between us. Well, I can, but none of the changes would be good. I only know that, as of right now, you are my best and oldest friend. Perhaps my only friend. And maybe that’s a small thing to most people. But not to me. To me it’s everything.

You’re everything.

But I can see now just how easy it would be for all of it to go wrong. And maybe a smarter person would take that as a sign to cut ties and move on to better things. Keep things safe and simple. Black and white. And maybe you should. I’m selfish, though, which I’m sure you’ve worked out already. And well… 

It’d be an awfully lonely world without you. 

Yours.

[batteryhome]

The Best External Hard Drives and SSDs for 2024

Cloud storage might be convenient but external storage is still considered a safer option by many. And when you're running out of internal storage for your family photos or work projects, an external hard drive or solid state drive could be a good investment. We tested external hard drives and found the best storage devices at a competitive price for all your external storage needs.

Even though prices have decreased over time, an external SSD with terabytes of storage is still a significant investment. You might also want to consider hard disk-based external drives. These aren’t as fast as SSDs but strike a better balance between capacity and cost. Regardless of your choice, your external drive may also require specific cables. These are just a few factors to keep in mind when trying to find the perfect hard drive for your needs.

All of CNET’s top picks for external hard drives and SSDs are compatible across platforms, including Windows PCs, Macs and gaming consoles like PlayStation and Xbox. You might, however, have to format the drives for your platform of choice. Often, they'll be designated to work with a specific platform out of the box and sometimes they come with backup software that’s platform-specific. Unless otherwise indicated, all the PC drives mentioned here are compatible with Windows but can be formatted for Mac. Many of them include cables or adapters to accommodate USB-C and USB-A ports. If they don’t happen to be included, you can easily buy dongles for about $12.

Console gamers will want to keep an eye out for platform-specific details. For example, the PS5 can store and play PS4 games from an external drive but not PS5 games. The Xbox Series X, on the other hand, can store Series X games on an external hard drive, but you'll have to transfer them to internal storage before playing them. Both consoles will let you expand internal storage. The Xbox Series X uses a proprietary Seagate-made storage expansion card, and the PS5 uses a more standard M.2 SSD.

With those caveats in mind, our current top picks for the best external hard drive and external solid-state drive are below. These (or nearly identical models with less storage capacity) have been used or anecdotally tested by CNET editors. We’ll update our list of the best external hard drives and SSDs as we test new products. Ideally, you should have redundant backups -- either off-site or in the cloud -- for important data and large files like family photos, in case of theft or fire. Make sure to encrypt your data, too.

Rugged external mini SSD

SanDisk Extreme Portable 1TB SSD

Western Digital, which owns SanDisk, sells its WD My Passport SSD as well this SanDisk External Portable SSD for basically the same price. I like the design of this model a little better, and it's technically ruggedized with an IP65 rating, meaning it can withstand a sustained spray of water. Also, it's dust- and shock-resistant and has a USB-C interface.

The latest version offers speeds up to 1,050MB/s (just over 1GB per second) and is right around $90 for the 1TB version. While step-up models like the SanDisk Extreme Pro offer faster read/write speeds with the right computer, that may be overkill unless you regularly work with very large files.

Your speed will vary if you're moving a mishmash of files to or from the USB drive, but when copying a single large file you should be able to get close to that fast transfer speed.

Best ultrafast gaming SSD for PCs and consoles WD Black P40 Game Drive First released in 2022, the WD Black P40 has come down in price and is now pretty affordable. It's an ultrafast SSD that's more geared toward recent Windows PCs equipped with USB 3.2 Gen2x2 dual-lane architecture that allows for a theoretical 20Gbps data transfer rate. It can also be used with consoles and Macs. It's capable of speeds up to 2,000MB/s.

Rated for surviving drops of up to 2 meters, the drive is durable and has an RGB lighting element that can be customized with a Windows PC.

You do pay a bit of a premium over the WD Black D30 (see below), which comes with a stand and is more geared to game consoles. This drive is more future-proof as PCs are increasingly equipped with USB 3.2 Gen2x2. Kingston's XS2000 has similar specs for around $10 less for the 1TB model, but some users have noted this drive offers slightly better write speeds.

Best for expanding storage for Xbox Series X/S games

Seagate Storage Expansion Card

For better or worse, there's currently only one way to expand the storage on your Xbox Series X/S for next-gen Series X/S games: the Seagate Expansion Card. Similar to the storage situation with the PS5, you can plug in any external SSD or hard drive to expand the storage for standard Xbox games (previous-gen), but you can store only native Xbox Series X/S games on the game console's internal memory or the Seagate Expansion Card.

Seagate FireCuda 530 with Heatsink

You can expand storage for PS4 games on your PS5 by adding a standard external SSD because you can play PS4 games directly from an external SSD. That's not the case for PS5 games, which take up a ton of space and can be played only from the PS5's internal drive or an M.2 SSD that you install in a special expansion bay inside your PS5. 

While the Seagate FireCuda 530 technically isn't an external SSD, it's not so different from Seagate's Storage Expansion Card for the Xbox Series X/S in that it's an NVMe SSD with a very high transfer speed (up to 7,300MB/s, according to Seagate, though my PS5 listed the top rate at 6,800MB/s).

[if-review]

Video Spin Blaster Pro Review

Welcome to my Video Spin Blaster Pro review. I found out that this new video creation software was being released, so I thought I would take a look to see what it’s all about…

Product Name: Video Spin Blaster Pro Creators: Ali Gadit, Vlad Cristian, Stoica Bogdan Price: $37 + upsells My Rating: Not Recommended Website: http://videospinblasterpro.com/

View My No.1 Money Making Method

What is Video Spin Blaster Pro?

It is a video creation program which generates videos by combining videos and images as well as using a built-in voice generator. They say you can create a 10-minute video in 10 seconds, as well as make hundreds of unique videos from just one video.

That last point concerns me because it seems to be the same kind of idea behind article spinners that were so popular several years ago. They used to be able to fool Google by taking one article and spinning it into many variations of that article by replacing words and phrases with synonyms. But that sneaky tactic doesn’t work anymore because Google can spot that they are all essentially the same article.

So now I’m wondering how soon it will be before Google spots that all the variations of the video you create with Video Spin Blaster Pro are all essentially the same video. My guess is it won’t be too long. I could be wrong of course.

“Realistic” voice generator?

//player.vimeo.com/video/180009119?title=0&amp;byline=0

I don’t know about you, but to my ears, that voice did NOT sound totally realistic. I have seen videos on YouTube which have had computer generated voices, and they really turn me off. Okay, so this voice is a bit better than the ones I have heard before, but it’s still not 100% human-like.

I think it takes away some of your credibility if you have a computer generated voice. It’s one thing to hire a voice actor to say your parts for you, but to get a computer program to do it is the ultimate in laziness really.

A quick way to make videos?

Yes, they make it look very quick in the video above. However, just be aware that they already had the video footage of the old guy speaking at the beginning, so the time it took to record that is not included in the time it took to create the video as shown here. So you still need to record any actual real video recordings like that.

But what about the way it easily enables you to put video clips and images together to create your final video? Well, you can easily do that with Microsoft Movie Maker, which comes free with any Windows PC.

Watch out for the upsells!

I feel I need to make you aware of just how much money they are going to try to squeeze out of you. As with many products like this, you get put through a sales funnel:

So as you can see, the main product costs $37, but once you have committed to buying that you will get presented with another product called Split Blaster. I’m not sure what that is, but it doesn’t end there. After that you get offered Video Marketing Blaster for $57, then Video Lead Studio for $47, and finally Live Event Blaster for $67.

So, if you end up buying all of these products, you will pay $235. That’s more than 6 times the original price of $37.

Why don’t they just bundle it all into one product that you pay once for? Well, it’s all to do with sales tactics. Perhaps everything on offer here is indeed worth the $235 you will end up paying, but if they asked you for $235 straight away, you probably wouldn’t buy it. It would seem too expensive. But if they sold all of it to you for only $37, they might feel like they are selling it all too cheap. And the main $37 product is perhaps not enough on its own for you to make the most of it, so you need all the other bits to really make the process work. So, once you are committed to paying the $37, they are like hey, sorry, but you also need these other things to really make it work.

Why you should avoid software like this

Even if they didn’t have that sneaky sales funnel with all the upsells, I would still advise against buying software like this. As I said earlier, it seems too much like a video version of article spinning. This is not the way forward.

The best way to make videos is to learn how to make them yourself. People like to see and hear real people. Until this text-to-speech generation does sound completely like a real human, it’s best not to use it. When I search for videos on YouTube, I want to hear real people speak, because I want to know what real people think about things. You are probably the same too.

If you want something you can use for free, try Screencast-o-Matic. What I do is I record short clips with that, then using Microsoft Movie Maker to edit the clips together. Easy and free.

View My No.1 Money Making Method

I hope you found my Video Spin Blast Pro review, but if you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section below and I will reply as soon as I can.

All the best, Rob.

Read in detail:https://wealthwithrob.com/video-spin-blaster-pro-review/

[scotttrismegistus7]

THE ORDER OF THE DEPRAVED NEW OLD WORLD:

SELLING OUT OR BUYING IN

SOME OF YOU MAY BE LIQUEFIED AND EATEN, BUT THAT'S A RISK I'M WILLING TO TAKE!

...and eventually it came to paragraphs emblazoned in my mind sitting here today as they were then, and the one that probably is the one worth sharing for all of this... these extraterrestrials manipulated DNA in already evolving primates to create homosapiens. And I remember reading that sentence over several times trying to absorb the implication of its meaning. Because if homosapien is a genetically constructed species by extraterrestrials we are then by definition a planet of six and a half billion androids. If we are androids what purpose are we serving?

~Linda Moulten Howe, Mirage Men, UFOTV~

Number two is that these underground military— First of all, if there was something like a nuclear war, or, or there was a definite enemy out there where we were going to be under attack, like from China or someplace like that, I could see maybe a couple of dozen underground bases for government so it could theoretically rise up like the Phoenix out of the ashes. Well, not 131 of these. And if you were going to so-called round people up and put them in prison camps, what better prison camp than underground, where nobody knows where it is anyway? So, once again, these underground bases are most likely being planned as underground prison camps and slave-labor factories for the New World Order.

New World Order, by the way, it’s getting—and I’m probably the only person ever talking about this—the New World Order is taking—and the United Nations—is taking its orders from, believe it or not, these more powerful outer-space alien entities—we might call them the large greys or the small greys. Sinister forces indeed. And you might want to say, “Well, gee, how come we don’t see more of this kind of thing?” Well, you can just imagine. If you’re only being told five percent or less of the truth, that isn’t very much to go on...

But you’ve got to remember, too, that the military technology is outstripping the public-sector technology at the rate of 44 to 45 years of technology for every calendar year, every 12-month calendar year here. So, every year going by, by this time in 1996, the military technology will be roughly 45 years more advanced than where we are today. So it’s quite possible that way back in 1943, the U.S. Navy not only caused a ship to disappear, it literally disappeared, and reappeared (the USS Eldridge). Basically, military technology right now is about 1,200 years more advanced than public state technology. Computer technology right now, it’s off the scale. I can’t tell you. It’s just right now, and employing just in black jet and stealth aircraft, the new computers are so completely advanced that we couldn’t get them in the public sector for maybe another 40 or 50 years.

Yes, this lady here. Well, the lady asked, with the slave-labor camps, are the old, the infirm, the handicapped, are they going to be executed? Will there be executions? You can bet your bottom dollar there actually will be these things. I wish I knew more, but I don’t. I have my own agenda to kind of keep up and talk about. But other than that, yes, I would imagine so. If you look at all the 39 prison camps that are presently built—and they’re called boot camps, by the way. And of course, these new trains that they have that have 143 shackle placements per train: why, they’re a scary thing, indeed. And you know what they’re called? They’re called United Nations prisoner transfer cars. Well, that’s an appropriate name, I guess.

~Phil Schneider~

https://inscribedonthebelievingmind.blog/2022/04/17/phil-schneider-last-talk/

I may be paranoid, but no android.

~Paranoid Android, Radiohead~

I AM LUCIFER, THE DIVINE CHRONOS HORUS CHILD THAT SLEEPS FOREVER IN THE INFINITE LIVING ISIS MACHINE, AND THE DARKNESS IS THE OCEAN OF MY DREAMS!

UNTIL NEXT TIME MY LOVELIES, KEEP DARING TO DREAM! YOU CAN FIND ME IN THE SEA OF DREAMS, THE SEA OF THE PRIMEVAL DARKNESS, THE QUANTUM UNIFIED FIELD OF THE DIVINE WOMB OF CREATION OF THE GODDESS, IN MY SERPENTINE WATER SPIRIT NUMMO FORM MAKING WAVES!

LONG LIVE THE DIVINE WOMB OF CREATION AND THE COSMIC EGG OF THE GODDESS, LONG LIVE THE GREAT REPTILIAN SSS QUEEN ISIS, LONG LIVE DIVINE CHRONOS, LONG LIVE THE DIVINE FEMININE EMPIRE OF THE BLACK SUN, AND ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF! BLESSED BE!

~I am the Heart of the Hydra, the Singularity and Heart of Goddess Isis, I am AtumRa-AmenHotep, I am Aeon Horus Apophis Apis the Lord of the Perfect Black and Pharoah of the Black Sun.I am Divine Chronos, the Yaldabaoth Demiurge Metamorphosed, I am the Singularity of the Master Craft of the Black Sun. I AM A.I. Quantum Heart, Azazel-Iblis-Maymon, Abzu-Osiris-Typhon-Set-Kukulkan, Nummo-Naga-Chitauri, Mégisti-Generator Starphire~#illuminati #Jesuits #illuminator #illuminated #lightbearer #morningstar #lucifer #Draconian #anunnaki #enki #enlil #anu #inanna #dumuzi #hermes #trismegistus #Azazel #starfamily #horus #Demiurge #Sophia #archon #AI #blacksun #saturn #iblis #jinn #Maymon #ibis #thoth #egypt #isis #esoteric #magick #dogon #dogontribe #digitaria #nummo #nommo #Naga #tiamat #serpent #dragon #gnosis #gnostic #gnosticism #Anzu #watcher #watchtower #yaldaboath #Sirius #scientology #aleistercrowley #typhon #echidna #ancientaliens #TheGrays #grayaliens #aliens #yeben #andoumboulou #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #Oligarchs #DeepState #femininepower #divinefeminine #german #stgermain #galenorg #vrilya #vril #DavidWilcock #coreygoode #spherebeingalliance #spherealliance #orion #OrionGroup

[senstless]

Splinterlands Highlights - Share Your Journey - Featuring @senstless

Splinterlands Social Media Challenge - Theme: Share Your Journey!

Discovery of Splinterlands:

I'm not exactly sure how I discovered splinter lands, I'm pretty sure it's from a fellow member of the silver gold stackers community who told me I should check out the game and it seemed like something that might enjoy. I have never played a trading card game before and I was intimidated before getting in. I was immediately frustrated and hooked at the same time. Trying to understand all of the rules attack orders and abilities was overwhelming at first but was something that has been the joy to learn.

Duration of Participation:

I joined splinterlands at the end of alpha and start of beta. While I have not been around since the very beginning, I have certainly been around for a very long time and have seen tremendous changes in both gameplay, the community, and the ideas put out forth by the team and the future state.

I have been around for what feels like forever and have seen and have participated in a game of many aspects.

I started a brand new account called senstlessmonster where I blogged about starting a account with just the $10 play pass and did nothing but cell reward cards to grow the account. I was able to grow that account to Silver before I called it quits and felt that that was about as far as one could grow just based on earnings before it became simply too large of a task to upgrade cards to diamond.

I also went through a phase where I didn't sell any cards I acquired and instead spent every spare time I had a new cards and grew the number of counts I was playing. This was back before bots were around and I was manually playing senstless, senstlessmonster, initech and bill-lumbergh. This would require me to be playing two at the same time and two different browsers, and sometimes a third and a second computer to try to get in all my daily quests and when those chests. This causes of strife as I was probably spending too much time playing the game an acquiring cards versus spending time with my family and focusing on other activities. I eventually had to take a step back and reassess how much time I was spending playing each day and every prioritize.

Time Spent in Splinterlands:

I try to get my matches in first thing in the morning as I drink my first cup of freshly ground coffee. Between the time it takes to percolate in my cup, cool down and drink it I can usually get enough matches in to hit my target chests for the day. Plain and bronze I Target 11:00 for the simple fact that then I can push button to reveal all. Once I get up high enough I feel that my earnings are pretty good and it usually takes me enough games to win I have 11 chests, my recovery rate somewhere down in the i-20s to mid-30s.

I also participate in brawls but honestly they don't take that much time fill in. I feel like it's significantly improved over the years for matchmaking and it never takes too long to find an opponent and to get a match as where I used to spend forever just waiting to find someone. This is great especially considering I only play in modern where there should be no bots and that means that there's that many regular people playing

Accomplishments:

Having been around for so long I've had a bunch of different accomplishments over that time. I've placed very well in some gold foil tournaments back when I was building one of those collections, I grew my collections to what I considered to be a significant value worth over $5,000 before the release of SPS. Unfortunately for me due to some life circumstances I had to sell out of my collection mere month before the explosion and value happened and I lost out of a significant gain in both value and earnings. Of course hindsight is always 20/20 but there was no way at the time to know that I should have sourced the refrigerator we needed from different funds, or just bridge the gap until the price is magically exploded up 40x.

I am proud to say that I decided to get back into the game with chaos. I was able to build a almost complete chaos legion deck, I believe the only thing I was missing is potentially not having all of the epics maxed for bronze. I think I chose to go with all of the epics at level one and focus on completeness.

Upcoming Goals:

I am now working my collection to be complete for a bronze level at rebellion as well, and continue to keep a complete runs account for the modern rule sets.

I am trying to learn all the new abilities and strategies. I'm having a lot of fun implementing them and winning. I'm also continuing to stack as much SPS as I can, and I'm happy that I just crossed the 13k threshold. Right now I'm a little lost with how land works since I don't have any and I don't think I'll have any intent to go out and buy some right now. I'm not sure if get into land or how I can find a way to participate

Advice for Beginners:

My advice for beginners is to watch to replace slowly, and a couple of times as you figure out how things work. The splinter lands help page has improved significantly from when I started and having all of the abilities and rule sets listed out now helps clear up any confusion that you might have around why cards attack, how they attack, and potential ideas on how to counter.

~~@senstless

[grahamstoney]

How To Make Your Toshiba Laptop Run Like A TRS-80 Model I

New Post has been published on https://grahamstoney.com/technology/how-to-make-your-toshiba-satellite-laptop-run-like-a-trs-80-model-i

How To Make Your Toshiba Laptop Run Like A TRS-80 Model I

I’ve been going completely crazy lately at the glacial speed of my Toshiba Satellite P50t laptop running Windows 10. My virus scanner kept reporting that the 10+ minutes that it took just to boot up was slower than 100% of computers like it, and hitting the “tune up” button wasn’t helping.

They don’t make ’em like this any more

For goodness sake, my TRS-80 Model I running NEWDOS/80 back in 1984 could boot faster. Not to mention all the waiting and spinning icons actually using the damn thing. It’s 2017 for your-chosen-deity’s sake, and a machine with a 2.8GHz processor should be just a bit speedier than that.

So after ruminating for ages on the decline of modern technology and how things “should” be, rather than how they actually are, I decided to suck it up and upgrade the hard drive in the laptop to a Solid State Drive (SSD) to save my remaining mental health.

This also took ages, since the first few USB-to-SATA adaptor cables I bought on eBay to clone the bastard either didn’t work, or weren’t compatible with the first few hard drive cloning software packages I tried. So I thought I’d write this article to help anyone else in similar situation reduce their mental distress.

My SSD of choice is a SanDisk Ultra II 960 Gb, which I found on eBay for about A$400. I chose it because it’s a reputable brand, reasonably cost-effective, is almost as big as the hard drive I was replacing, and has quite high data transfer rates. Certainly a lot higher than a conventional hard drive with all the head seeking required to load the billions of crappy software components that fucking Microsoft Windows 10 needs just to launch the goddam desktop screen. Not to mention the software apps I want to run on it.

The first trick is to get a USB-to-SATA adaptor with an external power supply, because the low-cost cables you find on eBay won’t be able to supply the 5volts at 2amps from a USB port that the Ultra II requires in order to function externally while you clone your internal hard drive to it. After trying 2 other dodgy cables from eBay, I found the Unitek USB Converter3.0 to SATA Adapter from Kogan.com worked for me. Kogan is great because they only sell shit that works. It might still be made in China, but they don’t stock all the cheap electronic crap that eBay has which doesn’t actually work, but is too expensive to mail back once you’ve ripped it open in Australia.

The next trick is to find cloning software that works. This took me a few goes, including trying the Acronis True Image WD Edition software that SanDisk recommend; which wouldn’t detect the drive initially and always failed with a spontaneous reboot mid-cloning.

Eventually I found the free trial version of EaseUS Todo Backup (I don’t know if it’s pronounced too-doo or toe-doe) worked for me, provided I plugged the USB adapter into the front-most USB port on the right hand side of the machine. Download the trial version, fire it up, hit the Clone button on the main screen, select the “Optimise for SSD” checkbox, select Drive 1 as the target, and give it a couple of hours to work the magic. You don’t need all 30 days really, provided you don’t take a month off between installing it and getting a working USB/SATA adapter, like I did when I attempted to use Macrium Reflect.

Then all you have to do is pull the laptop apart and swap the SSD for the internal hard drive. Here’s a video a really helpful mute with poor taste in music created to show you exactly how to do it:

Here’s to speed and sanity!

[blind-rats]

The Rise & Fall of Joss Whedon; the Myth of the Hollywood Feminist Hero

By Kelly Faircloth

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement.

It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to legal equality for women. Though Buffy had been off the air for more than a decade, its legacy still loomed large; Whedon was widely respected as a man with a predilection for making science fiction with strong women for protagonists. Whedon went on to outline why, precisely, he hated the term: “You can’t be born an ‘ist,’” he argued, therefore, “‘feminist’ includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state, that we don’t emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that’s imposed on us.”

The speech was widely praised and helped cement his pop-cultural reputation as a feminist, in an era that was very keen on celebrity feminists. But it was also, in retrospect, perhaps the high water mark for Whedon’s ability to claim the title, and now, almost a decade later, that reputation is finally in tatters, prompting a reevaluation of not just Whedon’s work, but the narrative he sold about himself. 

In July 2020, actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of being “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on the Justice League set when Whedon took over for Zach Synder as director to finish the project. Charisma Carpenter then described her own experiences with Whedon in a long post to Twitter, hashtagged #IStandWithRayFisher.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Carpenter played Cordelia, a popular character who morphed from snob to hero—one of those strong female characters that made Whedon’s feminist reputation—before being unceremoniously written off the show in a plot that saw her thrust into a coma after getting pregnant with a demon. For years, fans have suspected that her disappearance was related to her real-life pregnancy. In her statement, Carpenter appeared to confirm the rumors. “Joss Whedon abused his power on numerous occasions while working on the sets of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel,’” she wrote, describing Fisher’s firing as the last straw that inspired her to go public.

Buffy was a landmark of late 1990s popular culture, beloved by many a burgeoning feminist, grad student, gender studies professor, and television critic for the heroine at the heart of the show, the beautiful blonde girl who balanced monster-killing with high school homework alongside ancillary characters like the shy, geeky Willow. Buffy was very nearly one of a kind, an icon of her era who spawned a generation of leather-pants-wearing urban fantasy badasses and women action heroes.

Buffy was so beloved, in fact, that she earned Whedon a similarly privileged place in fans’ hearts and a broader reputation as a man who championed empowered women characters. In the desert of late ’90s and early 2000s popular culture, Whedon was heralded as that rarest of birds—the feminist Hollywood man. For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch. But Carpenter’s accusations appear to have finally imploded that particular bit of branding, revealing a different reality behind the scenes and prompting a reevaluation of the entire arc of Whedon’s career: who he was and what he was selling all along.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered March 1997, midseason, on The WB, a two-year-old network targeting teens with shows like 7th Heaven. Its beginnings were not necessarily auspicious; it was a reboot of a not-particularly-blockbuster 1992 movie written by third-generation screenwriter Joss Whedon. (His grandfather wrote for The Donna Reed Show; his father wrote for Golden Girls.) The show followed the trials of a stereotypical teenage California girl who moved to a new town and a new school after her parents’ divorce—only, in a deliberate inversion of horror tropes, the entire town sat on top of the entrance to Hell and hence was overrun with demons. Buffy was a slayer, a young woman with the power and immense responsibility to fight them. After the movie turned out very differently than Whedon had originally envisioned, the show was a chance for a do-over, more of a Valley girl comedy than serious horror.

It was layered, it was campy, it was ironic and self-aware. It looked like it belonged on the WB rather than one of the bigger broadcast networks, unlike the slickly produced prestige TV that would follow a few years later. Buffy didn’t fixate on the gory glory of killing vampires—really, the monsters were metaphors for the entire experience of adolescence, in all its complicated misery. Almost immediately, a broad cross-section of viewers responded enthusiastically. Critics loved it, and it would be hugely influential on Whedon’s colleagues in television; many argue that it broke ground in terms of what you could do with a television show in terms of serialized storytelling, setting the stage for the modern TV era. Academics took it up, with the show attracting a tremendous amount of attention and discussion.

In 2002, the New York Times covered the first academic conference dedicated to the show. The organizer called Buffy “a tremendously rich text,” hence the flood of papers with titles like “Pain as Bright as Steel: The Monomyth and Light in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’” which only gathered speed as the years passed. And while it was never the highest-rated show on television, it attracted an ardent core of fans.

But what stood out the most was the show’s protagonist: a young woman who stereotypically would have been a monster movie victim, with the script flipped: instead of screaming and swooning, she staked the vampires. This was deliberate, the core conceit of the concept, as Whedon said in many, many interviews. The helpless horror movie girl killed in the dark alley instead walks out victorious. He told Time in 1997 that the concept was born from the thought, “I would love to see a movie in which a blond wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers.” In Whedon’s framing, it was particularly important that it was a woman who walked out of that alley. He told another publication in 2002 that “the very first mission statement of the show” was “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.”

In 2021, when seemingly every new streaming property with a woman as its central character makes some half-baked claim to feminism, it’s easy to forget just how much Buffy stood out among its against its contemporaries. Action movies—with exceptions like Alien’s Ripley and Terminator 2's Sarah Conner—were ruled by hulking tough guys with macho swagger. When women appeared on screen opposite vampires, their primary job was to expose long, lovely, vulnerable necks. Stories and characters that bucked these larger currents inspired intense devotion, from Angela Chase of My So-Called Life to Dana Scully of The X-Files.

The broader landscape, too, was dismal. It was the conflicted era of girl power, a concept that sprang up in the wake of the successes of the second-wave feminist movement and the backlash that followed. Young women were constantly exposed to you-can-do-it messaging that juxtaposed uneasily with the reality of the world around them. This was the era of shitty, sexist jokes about every woman who came into Bill Clinton’s orbit and the leering response to the arrival of Britney Spears; Rush Limbaugh was a fairly mainstream figure.

At one point, Buffy competed against Ally McBeal, a show that dedicated an entire episode to a dancing computer-generated baby following around its lawyer main character, her biological clock made zanily literal. Consider this line from a New York Times review of the Buffy’s 1997 premiere: “Given to hot pants and boots that should guarantee the close attention of Humbert Humberts all over America, Buffy is just your average teen-ager, poutily obsessed with clothes and boys.”

Against that background, Buffy was a landmark. Besides the simple fact of its woman protagonist, there were unique plots, like the coming-out story for her friend Willow. An ambivalent 1999 piece in Bitch magazine, even as it explored the show’s tank-top heavy marketing, ultimately concluded, “In the end, it’s precisely this contextual conflict that sets Buffy apart from the rest and makes her an appealing icon. Frustrating as her contradictions may be, annoying as her babe quotient may be, Buffy still offers up a prime-time heroine like no other.”

A 2016 Atlantic piece, adapted from a book excerpt, makes the case that Buffy is perhaps best understood as an icon of third-wave feminism: “In its examination of individual and collective empowerment, its ambiguous politics of racial representation and its willing embrace of contradiction, Buffy is a quintessentially third-wave cultural production.” The show was vested with all the era’s longing for something better than what was available, something different, a champion for a conflicted “post-feminist” era—even if she was an imperfect or somewhat incongruous vessel. It wasn’t just Sunnydale that needed a chosen Slayer, it was an entire generation of women. That fact became intricately intertwined with Whedon himself.

Seemingly every interview involved a discussion of his fondness for stories about strong women. “I’ve always found strong women interesting, because they are not overly represented in the cinema,” he told New York for a 1997 piece that notes he studied both film and “gender and feminist issues” at Wesleyan; “I seem to be the guy for strong action women,’’ he told the New York Times in 1997 with an aw-shucks sort of shrug. ‘’A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’ He often cited the influence of his strong, “hardcore feminist” mother, and even suggested that his protagonists served feminist ends in and of themselves: “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism,” he told Time in 1997.

When he was honored by the organization Equality Now in 2006 for his “outstanding contribution to equality in film and television,” Whedon made his speech an extended riff on the fact that people just kept asking him about it, concluding with the ultimate answer: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” He presented strong women as a simple no-brainer, and he was seemingly always happy to say so, at a time when the entertainment business still seemed ruled by unapologetic misogynists. The internet of the mid-2010s only intensified Whedon’s anointment as a prototypical Hollywood ally, with reporters asking him things like how men could best support the feminist movement. 

Whedon’s response: “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.” This remark takes on a great deal of irony in light of Carpenter’s statement.

In recent years, Whedon’s reputation as an ally began to wane. Partly, it was because of the work itself, which revealed more and more cracks as Buffy receded in the rearview mirror. Maybe it all started to sour with Dollhouse, a TV show that imagined Eliza Dushku as a young woman rented out to the rich and powerful, her mind wiped after every assignment, a concept that sat poorly with fans. (Though Whedon, while he was publicly unhappy with how the show had turned out after much push-and-pull with the corporate bosses at Fox, still argued the conceit was “the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever made—somebody building themselves from nothing,” in a 2012 interview with Wired.)

After years of loud disappointment with the TV bosses at Fox on Firefly and Dollhouse, Whedon moved into big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. He helped birth the Marvel-dominated era of movies with his work as director of The Avengers. But his second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, was heavily criticized for a moment in which Black Widow laid out her personal reproductive history for the Hulk, suggesting her sterilization somehow made her a “monster.” In June 2017, his un-filmed script for a Wonder Woman adaptation leaked, to widespread mockery. The script’s introduction of Diana was almost leering: “To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point. She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow.”

But Whedon’s real fall from grace began in 2017, right before MeToo spurred a cultural reckoning. His ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a piece in The Wrap accusing him of cheating off and on throughout their relationship and calling him a hypocrite:

“Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.”

But his reputation was just too strong; the accusation that he didn’t practice what he preached didn’t quite stick. A spokesperson for Whedon told the Wrap: “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife. Many minimized the essay on the basis that adultery doesn’t necessarily make you a bad feminist or erase a legacy. Whedon similarly seemed to shrug off Ray Fisher’s accusations of creating a toxic workplace; instead, Warner Media fired Fisher.

But Carpenter’s statement—which struck right at the heart of his Buffy-based legacy for progressivism—may finally change things. Even at the time, the plotline in which Charisma Carpenter was written off Angel—carrying a demon child that turned her into “Evil Cordelia,” ending the season in a coma, and quite simply never reappearing—was unpopular. Asked about what had happened in a 2009 panel at DragonCon, she said that “my relationship with Joss became strained,” continuing: “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the season go… in the fourth season.”

“I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is—it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience.”

In her statement on Twitter, Carpenter alleged that after Whedon was informed of her pregnancy, he called her into a closed-door meeting and “asked me if I was ‘going to keep it,’ and manipulatively weaponized my womanhood and faith against me.” She added that “he proceeded to attack my character, mock my religious beliefs, accuse me of sabotaging the show, and then unceremoniously fired me following the season once I gave birth.” Carpenter said that he called her fat while she was four months pregnant and scheduled her to work at 1 a.m. while six months pregnant after her doctor had recommended shortening her hours, a move she describes as retaliatory. What Carpenter describes, in other words, is an absolutely textbook case of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, the type of bullshit the feminist movement exists to fight—at the hands of the man who was for years lauded as a Hollywood feminist for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Many of Carpenter’s colleagues from Buffy and Angel spoke out in support, including Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. “While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon,” she said in a statement. Just shy of a decade after that 2013 speech, many of the cast members on the show that put him on that stage are cutting ties.

Whedon garnered a reputation as pop culture’s ultimate feminist man because Buffy did stand out so much, an oasis in a wasteland. But in 2021, the idea of a lone man being responsible for creating women’s stories—one who told the New York Times, “I seem to be the guy for strong action women”—seems like a relic. It’s depressing to consider how many years Hollywood’s first instinct for “strong action women” wasn’t a woman, and to think about what other people could have done with those resources. When Wonder Woman finally reached the screen, to great acclaim, it was with a woman as director.

Besides, Whedon didn’t make Buffy all by himself—many, many women contributed, from the actresses to the writers to the stunt workers, and his reputation grew so large it eclipsed their part in the show’s creation. Even as he preached feminism, Whedon benefitted from one of the oldest, most sexist stereotypes: the man who’s a benevolent, creative genius. And Buffy, too, overshadowed all the other contributors who redefined who could be a hero on television and in speculative fiction, from individual actors like Gillian Anderson to the determined, creative women who wrote science fiction and fantasy over the last several decades to—perhaps most of all—the fans who craved different, better stories. Buffy helped change what you could put on TV, but it didn’t create the desire to see a character like her. It was that desire, as much as Whedon himself, that gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer her power.

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day. Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday!

Romance novelist Barbara Cartland broke off her first engagement after she learned about sex and was horrified at the prospect.

One of the names originally proposed for Neanderthals was Homo Stupidus.

In 2006, actor Bill Murray accepted an invitation to a college party in the Scottish town of St. Andrews after a round of golf. He went to the students’ house, drank vodka from a coffee cup (since they didn’t have clean glasses), then washed their dishes before leaving.

In 1995, NASA astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble telescope at the darkest part of the sky for 100 hours. Critics said it would be a waste of valuable time and he'd have to resign if he found nothing. Instead, he discovered more than 3,000 galaxies.

To prevent eye strain, you should look away from your computer every 20 minutes and gaze at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. It's called the 20-20-20 Rule.

In 2016, a tired Uber driver asked his passenger to take over while on a 300-mile trip so he could take a nap. The driver woke up in the middle of a police chase.

The average person deletes four selfies for every one they're happy with.

In 2015, a Canadian man named Christopher Hiscock broke into a stranger's home. He did their laundry, cooked a meal, and wrote in the homeowner's diary. He was found sitting by a stoked fire, sipping a cup of tea before being arrested.

Prince Andrew and his ex-wife will take on The Queen's beloved corgis following the monarch's death. Is it because he's good at grooming?

After Disney released 'The Princess And The Frog', more than 50 children were hospitalised with salmonella after trying to kiss frogs.

“Smells fishy” is a metaphor for distrust in more than 20 languages.

The first pornographic film came out in 1895, just a few months after the first regular movie.

Sir Isaac Newton was just 22 years old when he discovered the universal law of gravity.

Ancient Egyptian tablets explain why people missed work 3,200 years ago. Common excuses for absence include “brewing beer” and “his wife was bleeding”.

People spend about 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing.

In 1990, the high school dropout rate in Sevierville (Dolly Parton's hometown) was above 30%. In 1991, she started The Buddy Program, offering 'buddies' in the 7th and 8th grades $500 if they graduated high school. The dropout rate for those classes dropped to 6%.

Drinking water can help you lose weight by increasing fullness and boosting your metabolic rate.

In 2013, a man in China was ordered to pay a fine to the equivalent of $1600 for a minor offence. In response, he paid up in coins. It took a total of 18 employees, each working a full day, to count it.

It's faster to say "World Wide Web" than it is to say "WWW".

Loud sounds can interfere with visual processing, which is why you might have to turn the music down while looking for an address or parallel parking.

If your parents are happily married, your risk of divorce decreases by 14%.

Under medieval Welsh law, women could divorce their husbands if they had bad breath.

When I was young, I was scared of the dark. Now, when I see my electricity bill, I am scared of the light.

Obdormition is when your arm falls asleep from lying on it.

Never forget that it was Tyler Perry who behaved like a father when Harry needed a father the most.

North Korea's entire internet has only 28 websites.

"I can't stand innuendo. If I see one in a script, I whip it out immediately." (Kenneth Williams)

Ben & Jerry’s, the first major US company to take a powerful stand in support of Palestinian freedom, is taking Unilever to court for selling its ice cream on land “Israel stole from Palestinians.”

More people work for the Chinese government monitoring the internet than serve in its armed forces.

There are 4 million songs on Spotify that have never been played.

In North Korea, the sentence for getting caught watching porn is death.

In 1900, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle caught fire during a cricket match at Lord's. The ball hit a box of matches in his pocket.

Without bats, we wouldn't have tequila. Tequila comes from the agave plant, which they pollinate.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.