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llamagoddessofficial · 1 year ago

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And thank you again aiza, for commissioning a lovely part 2 to this scenario!!

---

... Movement, in the water.

That wasn’t anything unusual. You were in a rowboat, after all, it was perfectly normal to hear the sea sloshing around the tiny vessel, colliding sloppily with its oars and front and back. But you’d lived by the ocean long enough to know what was a normal splash, and what wasn’t- you knew the rhythm. You knew what was a natural wave, and what couldn’t be... you could when something was out of time.

At the sound, your head whipped around.

... A smooth dark shape moved out of sight, a few metres away from you. It wasn’t a shape you recognised.

Siren. Your skin prickled. And not the one you were expecting, whatever lower half you had sighted, it wasn’t a shark, it was something with silverish fur that had been slicked back into a pelt by the salt. You stared at the now-quietened water- you were nervous, certainly, but you weren’t scared. This wasn’t your first encounter with a siren, after all. You just needed to get to the crab pots and leave, get back to the shore, and leave.

Your suspicions were confirmed when a face rose halfway out of the water, a few metres from you, out of reach of a good oar strike to the gills. Not Sapphy’s siren. You could see the top of the head, the first curve of the nose, and a mass of long thick seaweedy hair surrounding it. A pair of incredibly dark eyes. So dark, they were almost black.

The skin wasn’t really ‘skin’, per say. It was green and textured, almost leafy. Akin to the fuzzy look of moss, or the short weed that grew on tidal rocks. Some kind of plant monster siren- a kelp siren, perhaps.

You lifted your oar to hold it across your body, defensively. Your heart was beating in your mouth. Calm down, it can’t hurt you. There’s a truce.

“... What do you want,” you let your voice carry across the water.

No response. It just floated there. Silently watching.

A little more volume. “What do you want?”

...

It rose, fractionally. Enough for you to see its mouth.

... The wide smile of razor teeth.

Then it lunged.

You didn’t even have time to raise your oar, your boat lurched hard like a bucking horse, sending you tumbling off the edge, you struck your arm on the sideboard and fell into the water. You didn’t have time to scream. It was cold- so cold it squeezed your chest, squeezing precious air bubbles out of your mouth. You couldn’t see, you couldn’t tell where anything was...

Something moved past you, fast, under the water. You felt the shifting current against your skin. On pure instinct, you fought upwards and broke the surface, gasping in as much air as possible. Your legs felt so weak, so exposed, so grabbable.

... But nothing grabbed you. Instead, the ocean beside you exploded. You felt furious movement, through the water- spray flew up into the air and hit you in the face as masses of white foam were thrown up from something thrashing just below the surface. The water, just like that, had turned into a war zone. What the hell?

A horrible high-pitched sound was filling the air. If you weren’t using your hands to tread water, you’d want to clap them over your ears. You’d never heard anything like it before, was it a siren screaming? You couldn’t see anything in the action, saltwater stung your eyes and filled your ears. But it wasn’t like you were going to stick around and find out. Nothing grabbed you, nothing dragged you down or restrained you, so you immediately turned away from the chaos and swam as hard as you could toward the shoreline. It was too late for the boat, you had no idea where it had drifted off to, you focused completely on the rocks; you swam toward them harder than you had ever had before... your arms were full of the kind of strength that only fear could muster.

Your hands met something solid. Not caring where you were, you hauled yourself up onto a black volcanic rock, anywhere that wasn’t the water. Sopping wet, cold, cutting your hands on the sharp barnacles. But safe, and out of the sea.

When you turned, the water was still boiling and thrashing, but the action had moved deeper below the surface. Less whitewater was spraying upwards... but now, the sea in that spot was turning a dark purplish colour, and the few fizzing bubbles that made it to the surface were pink. Blood.

You could feel your heart in your mouth.

... A flash of grey. Grey, marred with scars. It was a shark siren.

Red?

One final, large splash. Just as quickly as it had exploded, the waters suddenly stilled, the pink bubbles disintegrating and disappearing. The only thing that remained was that horrible dark red, slowly spreading further and further.

You waited. You could hardly breathe, hair plastered to your face, water dripping off your chin and nose. Your clothes felt heavy.

...

This time, when a head broke the surface... it was a very familiar skeletal one. He turned around- and when he saw you, he gained an equally familiar skeletal smile.

“... well. hey there, angelfish,” his voice sounded different. Strained. He floated like he was pretending nothing was wrong. “fancy seein’ you here.”

“You! A-are you okay?!” You didn’t even think to be suspicious or frightened of him, scrabbling closer to the edge of the rock. Across his cheekbone was a gash that had red dribbling out of it, the injury almost perfectly parallel to another cheek scar just above it.

“course i am.” His expression said otherwise. “s’just a scratch. are you worried about me, beautiful?”

You ignored the flirtation. He must’ve driven away the other siren- holy shit, did Red just save your life? “You’re bleeding!”

“i’m alright. Injuries just look worse in water.”

“But it’s big. And deep. Where’s the other siren? Where did it go?”

Looking around, you realised you’d accidentally ended up back in the hidden cove that Sapphy had taken you to to meet Red for the first time. You recognised the steep rocky outcroppings, and the very small strip of steep secluded beach.

“it cleared off when it realised who the bigger fish was in this pond. you ok?” He seemed steely, for a moment. “she didn’t get you, did she?”

“No, but she got you!”

“i’m fine, angelfish.”

“Stop calling me angelfish. Get over here.”

He paused. Then a toothy grin spread across his face. “you’ve never wanted me closer before...”

“I’m being serious!” You snapped. You could taste the saltwater that was dripping down your face. He finally seemed to get the hint that you weren’t in the mood for games, and he drew up to the rock you had pulled yourself onto, placing his skeletal hands over the edge of it.

He looked up at you, sunlight glancing off his golden tooth. You peered down at the injury on his cheekbone- it looked pretty bad. But to be fair to him, it seemed like something that would heal with a bit of time...

... Then looking down further, you caught sight of his chest.

“Your ribcage! It’s even worse!”

“oh,” he looked down. “it-”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence. You already knew where this was going, some bullshit about him not needing help. You weren’t having it.

You spoke with a clipped voice. “Go to the shore.”

He blinked. Perhaps, as a dominant shark siren, he wasn’t used to getting attitude from someone. “... huh?”

“Are you deaf? Go to the shore.”

Was that crimson you saw, on his cheekbones? Either way, his expression melted into something smug that you didn’t like looking at for too long.

“yes ma’am,” he purred, as he pushed back from the rocks.

You quickly hopped from stone to stone, over to where the jagged stone peeled back for a moment. Though the tiny strip of sand was no good as a beach, only a few metres wide and relatively steep into the ocean, it was good for what you had in mind.

Red approached the sand, as you had demanded, coming to where the water was at your hips. Already soaked, you didn’t care to wade into the water over to him. He seemed somewhat pleasantly startled by how forward you were being.

You didn’t care. You knelt down in the water, at least the sun was keeping you warm. He drifted over to you, on his back, grin stupid.

You leant over him again, checking out his injury, your silhouette blocked the sun from touching his face. Unlike his superficial cheek injury, this one was bad- a deep, wide gash across most of his chest, catching several bones and still dripping with blood.

“awh. don’t look at me like that, angelfish. i might start thinkin’ you care.”

How was he so calm and so together, in the face of such a horrendous wound? You looked at him with an expression that must’ve been halfway between pleading and angry.

“Red. I’m not fooling around. This is a bad wound. Really bad.”

“... hey,” he lost some of the flirtatious bravado in his voice, sockets softening. The crimson colour of his eyelights was rather beautiful, in the light, surrounded by emerald water- not that you’d ever admit that to him. “i’m a siren. our injuries don’t work the same way as human ones. trust me when i tell you i’ll be fine, ok? i’ve had much worse. yeah, it stings a little, this’ll heal up as soon as i get myself some sun and some rest.”

You didn’t like it. Your heart was still beating hard. “You’re sure?”

“certain.”

... You sat back, onto your heels. A shallow oncoming wave washed over your hips and stomach. Much like the wave, exhaustion rolled over you, your arms and head starting to ache.

...

“yer welcome to keep starin’, though.”

“I’m not staring.” You said abruptly, line of sight darting away, embarrassed at being caught admiring his chest. He was attractive, that was the worst part; you couldn’t deny that he had a good physique. A nicely shaped skeletal upper body and a muscular, toned shark lower body... ignoring the big gash across his front, his bones were solid and a healthy colour, he had broad shoulders and a handsome smile, and he was decorated head to toe with pretty healed scars. He was a looker, not that you’d ever tell him.

“... are you ok?” He asked, narrowing his sockets. “feels like yer fussin’ me because you’d rather be doin’ anything other than thinking.”

“I’m fine.” You said, on impulse. It was your go-to defence against anyone who tried to peer too deep.

... Unlike everyone else you knew, though, Red was completely unaffected by your personality shield. Completely unaffected by your aggression, too. Goddamnit, knowing him, he probably liked when you were aggressive with him.

“are you, though?” He pressed.

“Yes. I’ve just...” you looked away. “I’ve never been attacked by a siren before. I didn’t see it coming, I didn’t know what to do.”

He hummed. “my guess is she thought you were from the mainland. your boat looks too new.”

“Well. That won’t be an issue, anymore. That boat’s gone.”

“gone?” He cocked his head a little. “don’t be so glum. it’s probably just drifting nearby. i’ll go find it, later. put it back in the harbour.”

...

You stared at him. Intently. He stared back; after a few seconds of silence, your eyes narrowed, and the question blurted out of you.

“What are you doing?”

“... uh...” he blinked. “floating?”

“No, what are you doing? Being so nice to us- nice to me?” You leaned forward again. “What do you want?”

He finally started to lose some of that smug edge to his face. “... it’s... damn. it’s complicated, angelfish.”

“... I don’t get it.” You looked blankly at him. “Why won’t you go? Why do you just stick around being so suspiciously nice? You won’t kill me or my daughter, clearly, you’ve had more than enough chances to do that. So you don’t want to eat us. But you won’t leave, either. You’re a siren. With all due respect, a siren. Nothing is going to change that.”

“i know.” He replied, gently.

You felt your face scrunching up in aggravation. That didn’t make sense. None of this did. Who did he think he was? You always found yourself sliding between trying to understand him (when you were safe in your own home), and hating his guts (the moment you got anywhere near to the water).

“So what? What do you want with my daughter, you suspicious fuck?”

A soft grin spread across his face. “love it when you’re mean to me.”

Heat rose to your cheeks- “Answer my question! I’m not playing around.”

“i know you aren’t. you don’t play around, when it comes to her. i like that.”

“Red.” Your tone was a warning.

“... it’s not an easy question to answer.”

“I don’t care. Figure it out. We’ve both got time.”

... He exhaled through his nasal passage, slowly. As he did, the bizarreness of the whole situation struck you- a siren had just saved your life, and now you were sitting in the shallows of a beach with him, so close he could lay his head on your lap. What had your life come to?

“... i want a family.”

...

“What?”

His eyelights wandered off, watching the small clouds pass overhead.

“i didn’t, until i saw you and sapphy. i’d never even thought about it before. if i’m honest, i didn’t really see the appeal of kids, until her. i saw you two go crab fishin’. i’d seen you around the shore before, an’ i already thought you were beautiful, worth pursuing. but then i watched you playin’ with her.” His eyelights started to grow... fuzzy at the edges? “you looked so happy. and i just... wanted to be part of that”

His claws hovered over his chest for a second, before retreating again.

You didn’t know what to say. It felt like the waves had rolled right over the tiny flame of anger you’d mustered, putting it right out again. You could’ve guessed that he wanted to be a father figure to your daughter, the way he acted with her was so caring, so gentle, so... present. And you still remembered his face when you’d first encountered him- the way he’d been looking at her like she was his whole world.

... You weren’t anticipating the part about you, though. He’d already seen you before? I mean, it made sense, he must’ve been to the island before. And there wasn’t much to do outside of going to the shore. But... ‘beautiful’?

“That wasn’t what I was expecting,” you said, honestly. “I can’t think of the last time someone complimented me.”

His crimson gaze turned to you. For a moment, a hopeful edge creeped into his tone. “do you think... you’d want to...?”

“... Red.” You didn’t need to know what he was going to say to know where he was going with that. “I appreciate your help, with everything. I really do. And... I can’t thank you enough for saving me. But I’m not going into any relationships anytime soon. Sapphy needs my full attention, things aren’t easy for her at the moment. She will always be my priority over anyone else.”

You thought he’d pout. Especially after that little spiel about thinking you were beautiful.

... Instead, his grin just lifted again, that damned warm smile spreading over his face.

“i really like you.” Red said, softly. “i don’t mind waiting.”

Why’d that make your chest tight? Why the fuck did you chest get tight, at such a simple and sweet gesture? You swallowed it down, trying to keep yourself detached and professional.

“Thank you, that’s very kind. But I’m serious. What if I never want to be with you?”

He shrugged. “guess i’ll just die instantly.”

... You weren’t expecting that reply, and a quick laugh escaped you against your will. He clearly really liked that.

He leaned back somewhat in the water. “i’m here for sapphy, too, y’know. not just you. sorry to hurt your ego.”

You splashed him. Of course, he didn’t care, being a siren- but he let out a little chuckle nonetheless.

“You know she loves you. You’re all she talks about.”

Red was beaming. You didn’t mind him, like this; when it seemed like he cared as much for your child as you did. You had to admit, you felt a lot more forgiving of him now. Especially since he had saved your life.

You sat back on your heels.

...

Perhaps it was the exhaustion. Perhaps it was relief from being rescued. Perhaps it was the fact that it didn’t seem to matter how aggressive or defensive you were with him, he never stopped being warm with you. But before you could stop yourself, the words fell out of your mouth.

“... Her biological dad tried to ‘reconnect’ the other day.”

You hadn’t told anyone else that. Not the people in the village, not your friends, not the parents of Sapphy’s friends, and definitely not Sapphy herself. Not only did gossip spread like wildfire on the island, you just didn’t have anybody you wanted to open up to. Nobody you trusted enough to share that information.

... Why Red? Why now? Opening up to a siren wasn’t something you ever thought you’d do. You’d never felt the urge to share until that very moment, sat with him in shallow water under the sun. But there was no going back now.

Red’s eyelights flashed. It was an undeniable glint of... something. But he kept the rest of his face steady.

“oh? he did?”

“We split when I got pregnant.” Why couldn’t you stop the words? It felt cathartic. Finally spitting out years-old bile. All you could focus on was how pretty the water was, so clear and crystalline. “I wanted to keep her. So he left. I tried, y’know, I tried to get him involved. I was young, I guess I thought if he knew how important she was to me he’d start feeling the same way. I told him when she first rolled over, when she said her first word... when she took her first steps. But he never wanted anything to do with her.”

“... huh.”

“... I told him... that I needed help. Once. I said I needed his help, I felt like I couldn’t manage it. Y’know what he said to me?”

Red’s stare was one you’d never seen on him before.

“He said ‘You got yourself into this mess. Don’t come crying to me.’”

Oh, you knew exactly what look was on Red’s face now; a flicker of rage between his brow bones, that settled into a barely-restrained look that was something he probably thought was more appropriate to the conversation.

“... he called her a ‘mess’.”

“... Yeah, I’m glad it’s not just me who picked up on that. To him, she’s a ‘mess’. A problem.”

“so... how’d he come crawling back? what’d he say?”

“He said he missed me. And he wanted me back, because I was ‘looking good’.” Red’s claws visibly clenched. “He didn’t mention her in his big ‘I want you back’ text. Not even once. He only mentioned her when I brought her up. Said he was willing to give it a go.”

His eyelights were intense. Incredibly defined around the edges. “what’d you tell him?”

...

Crap. You came reeling out of the moment- you forgot about that part. You felt your cheeks suddenly get hot, recalling the heated text conversation you’d had with your ex.

- Sorry. I’ve got a new guy

- WTF? - Since when??

- A month ago. he’s amazing with Sapphy, he plays with her every day, he treats her how she deserves. He’s hotter than you ever were. and he’d kill you if I asked him to. So never speak to me or Sapphy again.

... Red’s anger began to ease when he noticed your flushed expression. But like hell you were going to admit that to him- you couldn’t tell him you’d called him hot, you couldn’t tell him you’d called him your ‘new man’. You just couldn’t.

You lied. “... I told him he was shit out of luck, unless he fancied catching up on all of his old child support payments.”

Red barked out a laugh- despite the loudness, it was a handsome sound. You couldn’t help but smile. If he knew you were lying to him, he didn’t pick you up on it.

“he sounds like a piece of work.”

“He was. I feel stupid for ever missing him.”

Gentle pressure, around your hand. You flinched- but when you looked down, you just found that Red had closed his claws around yours in the water.

It felt... nice. It felt nice. His hand was warm, and gentle. “easy. my hand don’t bite.”

How long has it been since someone held me?

Doubts still swirled in your head. You couldn’t quiet them; even though your brain was telling you the doubts were because he was a siren, you knew yourself better than that. You knew you were just afraid of loving romantically again, and being abandoned a second time.

You stared, nonplussed, at your joined hands.

... Would it be so bad if I...?

...

A familiar voice rang out through the tiny hidden bay.

“Mom! Red!”

Your head snapped up, and at the sound of the voice, your hand yanked out of Red’s- his grip felt as if for a few moments he hadn’t wanted to let go. You saw a little shape scrambling down the rocks, sporting her worn pink backpack, her favourite sandals, and rolled up shorts with more than a few grass stains on the butt.

“Sapphy?” You blurted. Red’s delighted “sapphy!” was far more inviting.

She continued down the rocks with the confidence of someone who had been navigating steep seacliffs her whole childhood. Red rolled over in the water; perhaps to hide his chest wound from her view. “I’m coming!”

“What’re you doing here?” You sat up, off your heels, moving as if you were going to jump up and run over to her. “You’re supposed to be at Lacy’s.”

Eventually, she made it down the rocks, her little legs carrying her right up to the shoreline. She stood just out of reach of the waves, cheeks flushed from the exertion. “It’s ok mom, everyone went to the beach. I wanted to go see Red so I went over the rocks like how you showed me how to. I didn’t know you were here, too!”

“hey, lil’ snapper.” He had such a nice tone, with her. It sounded completely different to the tone he used when the two of you were alone together. “nice climbing.”

Her eyes were bright. “You were holding hands, weren’t you? Were you guys swimming together?”

“N-no!” You flushed. “No, we weren’t.”

“But your clothes are all wet.”

“I fell in.”

Her eyes lit up even more. “Did Red rescue you?”

“No.”

“sure did.” He grinned. You nearly hit him.

Suddenly, her eyes widened. “Wait, Red, you’ve got a cut!”

“... oh, yeah. don’t worry. it’s-”

“You’re hurt! Wait a second. Wait a second.” She took the pink backpack off and plopped it down onto the sand, opening it up and rooting around inside. She soon procured whatever she was searching for; and to your horror, she proceeded to march right into the water.

“Sapphy!” You exclaimed, as she unflinchingly waded over to you and Red. “You’re in clothes!”

“It’s ok! I have my clothing swimming badge, remember? We swam with clothes on in swim class.” Her eyes narrowed. “Also, you’re in clothes too.”

... Caught on a technicality. “I fell in.”

A serious look fell over her face. “You need to be careful around edges, mommy.”

One of your most frequent experiences, as a mother, was the need to bite your tongue. For a split second, you felt a rush of stress-induced frustration, and the immense temptation to defend yourself- you wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to lecture you about water safety, you’d been living on the coast your whole life. It wasn’t your fault you fell in, you were forcibly knocked out of your boat by a siren attack.

... But there was absolutely no point to that. She was a child, expressing genuine concern for her mother. Not only was there no intent to harm, you had absolutely no desire to tell her that you had been attacked. All that would do is frighten her.

“... You’re right.” You said. “We all need to be careful.”

Sapphy nodded resolutely. She then turned her attention to Red, using a serious voice that you vaguely recognised. “Look at me please.”

He was clearly trying very hard not to laugh. He hummed, lifting his head a little.

... Sapphy reached out, and stuck a sticky band-aid onto his cheekbone, over the scar. It was blue, with little pink cartoon jellyfish.

“There we go!” she looked incredibly proud of herself. You realised why you recalled that serious voice- it was the tone she used when playing doctor.

“... woah.” Red’s eyelights were all but twinkling. “thank you, sapphy. i’m all better now.”

Another confident nod. “Of course. It’s a waterproof one. And it’s got jellyfish on it, because you live in the ocean.”

...

“... hey. angelfish.” Red looked up at you. “i know you said no before...”

... The word rose to your lips again before you’d even thought about it. He’d asked, twice before- if Sapphy could get in the water to swim with him. Every time, your answer had been a flat out no, much to her dismay; it was one of very few areas you had absolutely refused to budge on.

But for the first time, you found that rather than immediately falling out of your mouth, the word had lodged itself behind your tongue.

... You hadn’t allowed it before, because you just didn’t trust him. But... now...

Water exploding around you. The high-pitched, glass-on-metal sound of a siren screaming. Crimson filtering into the water, bubbling up around them both.

The gash on his chest.

...

You bit your tongue.

“Okay. Fine.”

Red’s eyelights glittered. Sapphy looked up at you, confused. “Fine what?”

“You can swim with Red. If you come back home with me, and change into your wetsuit first.”

It was impossible not to feel emotional at the dawning joyful look on her face. “For real?” “Yes.” You refused to let yourself smile. Red was doing enough smiling for both of you. “C’mon, let’s go. Before I change my mind.”

Thank you @aizawasluckylady for this commission!! I love this twist on Siren Red. What's the twist? Well... you'll have to read to find out <3

---

“Mom. I made a new friend.”

You looked up from your meal. Your daughter was picking out her greens, as any seven year old would. But you were so taken aback by her statement that, for once, you didn’t think to mention it.

... You put your fork down. “Oh. You... did?”

Another parent would’ve been less shocked, for certain- probably not even shocked at all. But you had a good reason to be so confused.

She nodded with the confidence only a child could have. “I met him near the beach.”

Near the beach?

You and your daughter lived in a very small coastal village built across an island. Though the island was certainly well within the reach of the mainland (swimming distance, at low tide it was barely worth getting the boats out of the harbour) the community was cut off, and incredibly tight-knit. It was the kind of place where nothing happened, and everyone knew everyone.

There were only a handful of local children; all of whom your daughter Sapphy had known her entire life. There weren’t any other friends for her to make. The group of around twelve would go out to play together, in the complete safety of a town surrounded by beaches where crime just wasn’t a thing. And sure, they had fights- all groups of children did. But they still all considered each other friends.

... So how had she made a new friend?

“... That’s nice.” She had your full attention. “What’s his name?”

“His name’s Red.”

...

You glanced away. You didn’t know anyone in town with that name. And as a single mother, you knew everyone’s names. She continued to eat, oblivious to the healthy amount of concern starting to build inside you.

“Is... is Red his nickname?” You asked, gently. You didn’t want to frighten her, or make her think she was in trouble, in case she decided to stop talking.

“Hm... I don’t know." She was talking with her mouth full. "I can ask him tomorrow.”

“Is he someone’s dad?”

“No. He doesn’t live in the village. But he likes to visit when it’s rainy.”

... Your mind was racing. ‘Doesn’t live in town’? Did a passing fisherman talk to her, and just say they were friends to be polite? Red, Red... no, I definitely don’t know a fisherman called Red. Maybe one of the kids changed their name? But then she would’ve just said someone changed their name. She wouldn’t have expressed that it was a ‘new’ friend.

You continued. “... Is he an imaginary friend?”

Sapphy got a look on her face that said ‘ugh, mom, you’re silly’.

“No, mom. I’m too grown up for imaginary friends. Red is real.”

...

The only other option you could think of was...

... That wasn’t possible.

You tried to keep your expression easygoing, even as your thoughts became more and more tumultuous. If she was talking to a siren, it wouldn’t have been so friendly as to introduce itself to her. A close encounter with a siren would’ve resulted in it ignoring her, or killing her. Even thinking about the second option made you feel too sick to keep eating. The sirens in the waters around the island had a truce with the locals- a famous truce, at that, from hundreds of years ago. Sirens and humans, on your island, quite happily left each other completely alone.

(They only went after stupid tourists who treated the island like a personal play park, ignoring the very clear ‘do not swim’ signs.)

... Besides. If a siren was going to try to charm someone, it would be a beautiful sailor or a lonely maiden. What would a siren want with your kid?

You smiled. “I’m glad you made a friend. Is he nice?”

“Yes.” She visibly brightened. “He’s very nice. He makes jokes about fish. They’re not very good but they’re still funny.”

“... Could I meet him?”

Her smile grew even more. “Yeyeah! He said he’s seen you at the beach before. He said he wants to meet you too. And, and he said he’d like to be friends with you too. You’re gonna like him too. He’s very cool. He has a gold tooth."

Hm. Well, the fact that he wanted to meet you made you feel less nervous. Someone with bad intentions would most likely be trying to keep things a secret. Perhaps it was an imaginary friend after all? She was around that age. She’d never had one before, maybe now was the time. And with a name like ‘Red’...

“Could I come with you tomorrow, then? To go meet him.”

“Yeah! We can go to the rocks after breakfast!”

She was beaming. It made you relax a bit.

There was no need to worry- it was probably an imaginary friend after all.

///---///

“Mom, it’s really important that I go first on my own, okay?” She looked up at you, full of all the worldly seriousness of a small child. The sea wind was tussling her hair, the sounds of the beachgoers muffled behind layers of cliffs. “Red only comes out when it’s just me."

She had taken you down a steep rock path that lead to a very isolated, very quiet cove, hidden from view on all sides. You were completely relaxed about the whole situation now; this was a lovely place to make a secret hideout out of.

“All on your own? You’re very grown up.”

Her little chest swelled with pride, and she nodded resolutely. “Ok. You stay right there, behind these rocks. I’ll go wait for Red.”

She let go of your hand. You let her go, watching her move confidently over to the water. She found an edge that only a few inches above the sea line- there, she sat down, crossing her legs to wait.

... You assumed she needed some time for dramatic effect, to get into the game. So you settled behind the rock. Your eyes naturally wandered off, admiring the jagged cliff face around you, the clear blue sky overhead, the seabirds wheeling around each other.

...

“Red!” She said, excitedly. For a moment, the delight in her voice made you smile.

... Then you heard the distinct sound of something very large moving in the water.

What?

You jumped, coming back out from behind the rock, your gaze immediately snapping back over to your child.

... Your heart stopped.

Sapphy was still sitting on the ledge, right by the water. In front of her was a massive skeleton monster.

His chest alone as big as she was tall. He had his hands on either side of her; the same way you would’ve put your hands on either side to stop her from falling in. You could see his razor teeth, the cruel sharp edge to his phalange claws. Bloody crimson eyelights. The large curved fin on his back, the scars decorating his ribcage.

It was a siren. A huge male shark siren, close enough to your little girl to bite out her throat.

... He was smiling at her. He looked just as happy to see her as she sounded to see him. His huge violent maw, pulled into a grin that was almost loving- he was looking at her with an expression that was so gentle, so caring. You’d never known anyone else but you to give her that look. He was looking at her like she was his daughter.

...

... You weren’t thinking. Stories flashed through your mind, stories you’d forgotten until that moment. Stories of sirens becoming attached to human children and stealing them away on stormy nights. It was far from night, and far from stormy... but all you could see was a monster that wanted your baby.

At the sound of you running, his crimson eyelights flickered over to you. A glimmer of shock.

You grabbed Sapphy by the back of her shirt, sharply pulling her away from the edge, away from him- and in a flurry of pure parental instinct... you balled up your fist, and punched him.

You punched him. Right in the skull.

Pain immediately ricocheted from your knuckles and up your hand, because of course, it was a TERRIBLE idea to hit solid bone like that. You'd basically just punched a rock at full pelt. But you were still just running on pure adrenaline. You picked your daughter up, high out of the siren’s reach, staggering back a few steps- what was he going to do next? Was he going to attack?

...

He was looking at you. His eyelights were starry. Awed. And a ruby colour had spread across his cheekbones, like... a blush.

“... you punched me.” He said, breathlessly.

///---///

Red knew, deep in his Soul, that you and Sapphy were his family.

... His feelings started out simple enough. A particularly strong infatuation with you- a pretty human that made his non-existent heart sing. He had spotted you one evening, sitting by the harbour with your legs hanging over the edge and your hair moving gently in the wind... he’d instantly tumbled head over fin. Who wouldn’t? He hadn’t felt such an instant attraction to anyone in a long time, and he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t returned to the island’s shores inbetween hunts in the hopes that he would catch another glimpse of you.

He’d had crushes before, though. He hadn’t thought anything of how enarmoured he was with you. Sure, the feelings were intense, but he it hadn't occurred to him that it was anything out of the ordinary- anything particularly special.

... One morning, you came to the edge of the rocks again. He happened to be there already. In one hand, you had a bucket with a crab fishing line... in the other, you held the tiny hand of your equally tiny daughter.

Red had never been one for children. He found them loud, tiring, too needy.

... But... then he looked at her. The small human with her hand in yours. He heard her voice, full of excitement at the most inconsequential things. He saw the incredible pride in her eyes when she held aloft the crab she caught- a tiny thing, barely bigger than her palm. He felt the gentleness in the smile that you gave her.

...

The ache in Red’s chest was unfamiliar. He wanted... to hug her. He wanted to pick her up. He wanted to tuck her close and tell her everything was going to be okay... make bad jokes that made her giggle. He wanted her to smile at him, put her tiny hand in his.

He got the dawning, overwhelming feeling that he'd do anything to keep her safe.

Just like that, he finally got why so many siren mothers fought to the death for their children. He’d do the same.

You picked her up to take her home. Seeing you with your daughter in your arms sparked emotions inside him that he didn’t have words powerful enough to describe. In that moment, Red knew his feelings for you went deeper than a simple infatuation. Deeper than anything he’d ever felt before. It didn’t matter that he was an ocean being, and you and here were relegated to the land; there were more than enough stories of sirens using their magic to solve that particular issue. You were his mate, your little daughter was his child. There wasn’t much else to it, in his mind.

... His family. His mate, his child.

...

... Red knew he had to take the introduction slowly. Relations between sirens and humans weren’t exactly wonderful; as desperate as he was to profess his love for you, approaching you first would be disastrous. You were wary, wonderfully intelligent, and well within your right to be greatly suspicious of any friendliness a random shark siren may show you.

... But human children were sweet. Open-minded, naive.

Things had gone so well with Sapphy. She thought he was cool- she laughed at his shitty jokes, gleefully poked at his golden tooth, and he successfully held himself back from telling her about how he was her dad now. He had never felt so fulfilled before.

...

He should’ve expected that his good luck with her would come at the expense of his luck with you.

Here he was. His cheekbone stung. His mate was bristling with anger, and his baby could sense her mother’s emotions- so now, she was frightened too, slowly undoing the work he’d already done to get her to trust him. Red knew he should’ve been panicked, racing through situations in his mind, racing through ways to win you both back.

...

... But all he could feel, looking at your beautiful angry face, was attraction.

Perhaps it was the shark in him, drawn to displays of aggression. You’d punched him. You, a little human woman, completely on her own... at the sight of your daughter in possible danger you had run up to a shark siren and hit it- hit him- square in the face. How could that not make his Soul shudder in his chest? He felt like his love was well-placed.

Besides. The situation was far from unsalvageable.

“hey... hey.” He kept his tone even, trying to shake off the wave of adoration he felt. focus, red, focus. He held up his hands. “it’s okay. easy.”

“Get away from her!” You were frightened, he could tell. More angry than frightened, though. Hopped up on adrenaline and the kind of parental instinct he knew to be wary of.

“i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to scare you.” He lowered into the water more, to appear less large and intimidating. “it’s nice to finally meet you. i’m red.”

You were shaking. But you were also noticeably confused, probably not expecting him to be polite. Hopefully he could get the confusion to trump the anger.

“you’re her mom, right?” He smiled. “can sea the resemblance. you’ve got the same eyes.”

“What do you want?” You snapped, sharply, missing the joke.

He paused. What did he want? He couldn’t answer you honestly yet. He’d need a few hours to explain fully, and another month at least of bonding to ensure you wouldn’t take it the wrong way and run.

“... just a conversation.” He said. Half true.

You didn’t believe him. It was written all over your pretty face. He kept his voice very, very gentle, trying to lay on the charm.

“c’mon. you’re okay. we both know that if i wanted to do somethin’, i already would’ve.”

“You can’t do anything.” You pulled Sapphy in tighter. “The treaty.”

“... exactly.” As if he’d ever hurt either of you. “if i wanted a meal i would go somewhere else. somewhere with more idiot tourists.”

You exhaled sharply from your nose, jaw shifting. You didn’t take your eyes off him, not even for a moment- but he could tell that you (at least) agreed with his dislike of disrespectful tourists.

... A crease appeared between his brow bones, the waves lapping softly around his body. He had one more card to play- he didn’t want to play it, it felt scummy. But he was more afraid of losing his chance with his family than he was of the moral implications of the tactics he used.

He let his expression soften even more.

“... i’m a siren. not an animal. i don’t just go around killin’ and eatin’ everything i see, y’know? i don’t want to hurt you. or your kid.”

... There was a delay. But... slowly, a small amount of guilt seemed to dawn over you.

He was getting through.

Sapphy, still cuddled against your chest, spoke up.

“... Mom. Red’s my friend.”

You looked at her. Your face wobbled, like you couldn’t decide whether to be angry or not, but your voice came out stern. “You didn’t tell me he was a siren. We’re talking about this, later.”

“don’t be mad at her. she’s just tryna kelp me out.”

...

Sapphy’s face lit up, a smile that allowed hope to settle in his chest again. She wasn’t afraid of him- she still liked him. He had that small victory, at least.

You didn’t laugh at his joke. You were staring.

“i’m the gill-ty one here.” He continued. “it’s not her fault she didn’t think some-fin fishy was going on.”

This time, Sapphy giggled aloud.

“See, mom?” She looked up at you. “I told you he makes bad jokes.”

As her eyes turned to you, so did his. He was delighted to see that you had visibly eased. Though he would’ve liked to have chalked it up to his humoiur, he knew it was probably your daughter’s laughter. The sound of her joy was infectious.

... You quickly hardened again, though. “We’re leaving. We’re going to talk about this at home.”

Her little face fell. “What? But...”

“it’s ok, kid.” Red said, gently. “listen to your mom.”

...

Funnily enough, after everything, it was that that seemed to soften you. You gave him a glance that was far less sharp than anything you’d given before, as if despite all your suspicions and reservations you were still appreciative of his gesture. Although he definitely missed the aggression, still unable to help himself but be drawn to it, he much preferred this gentler glance.

...

You spoke reservedly. Trying not to let any emotion show. “I’m... sorry I punched you. Red.”

“... it’s okay.” He let his grin widen a bit. “i hope your hand is okay.”

With that, you turned, starting to walk away.

Though his logical side tried to calm him (they live on an island, they can’t get far) he still felt panic, deep down, at the sight of you leaving with her in your arms. His mate and baby were moving away from him. no. please don’t go. please don’t take her away from me.

... Nothing his logic could’ve said, however, soothed him more than the sight of Sapphy happily waving goodbye to him over your shoulder.

#commissions #siren red is a man after my own heart #no matter how many other sirens come and go i love him #his sharky fangs took a bite out of my soul

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donveinot · 10 months ago

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xtruss · 2 years ago

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Greening the Burial of the Dead, in Brooklyn

The historic Green-Wood Cemetery—the final resting place of Leonard Bernstein and half a million others—explores a cutting-edge method of processing human remains: electric cremation.

— By Eric Lach | March 4, 2023

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker

Long before Richard J. Moylan became the president of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, his job was to help with the landscaping. “I started cutting grass here in ’72,” he told me, as he showed me around the grounds, which span four hundred and seventy urban acres. Moylan’s father and grandfather were both contractors at Green-Wood, too. “He’s here,” Moylan said, of his father, who died in 1982 and was buried at the cemetery, four years before Moylan became president. “Originally, I had picked a grave for him up by the Prospect Park West entrance. But the superintendent at the time, who I used to fight with terribly, came to me and said, ‘Rich, you don’t want to bury your dad there. Let me find you a nice spot.’ He found a beautiful spot, on a hill.”

Founded in 1838, Green-Wood is the largest and most famous cemetery in Brooklyn. In addition to Moylan’s father, its residents include Boss Tweed, Samuel Morse, Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pop Smoke, and more than half a million others. Perched atop the highest natural point in the borough, many of the cemetery’s best spots—including Moylan’s office, in the main administrative building—have a clear view of New York Harbor to the west. Moylan remembers what Green-Wood was like forty or fifty years ago: the staff would knock off at 2 p.m. to drink among the graves, and the administration worked out of offices in Manhattan. “We didn’t want people to come in here. We turned people away,” he said. “We had to change. We couldn’t be the sleepy hidden place that we were for so many years.”

Throughout the past few years, Green-Wood has become more of a public resource; the cemetery is among the city’s great places for a head-clearing walk, and it hosts a popular concert series in its catacombs. Lately, Green-Wood’s caretakers have been thinking about the next big change they want to make: curbing the cemetery’s carbon emissions. “It’s become part of almost every conversation we have, on everything,” Moylan told me. In the past few years, Green-Wood has bought electric vehicles and equipment, including leaf blowers. With a grant from New York State, the head of horticulture has begun drawing up plans to install water-retention systems, to limit runoff. An increasing number of Green-Wood’s customers are requesting “green” burials, which use biodegradable caskets, or no caskets at all, and no embalming. “Most funeral directors aren’t big proponents of this,” Moylan said. The change that has been most startling for him, personally, is cutting the grass less. To limit equipment and fertilizer use, and to increase the amount of organic matter in the soil, the staff is allowing nearly fifty acres of Green-Wood to turn to meadow. “I never thought I’d be able to look at an area of tall grass and like it,” Moylan said. “But, honestly, it can really look nice.”

Moylan introduced me to Eric Barna, Green-Wood’s vice-president of operations, who also got his start at the cemetery as a grass cutter. (“We’re a dying breed,” Moylan said.) Barna told me about Green-Wood’s biggest carbon problem: the crematory. To cremate a body cleanly, without producing smoke, Green-Wood heats its cremation chambers—called “retorts” in the funeral business—up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Green-Wood’s crematory has five retorts. “We know how much gas usage we have there, and it’s pretty high,” Barna said. “It’s about a hundred and ninety thousand therms a year.” A therm is the energy content of about a hundred cubic feet of natural gas. (Con Edison recently estimated that its average residential gas-heating customer uses around two thousand therms a year.) The city regularly inspects Green-Wood’s crematory smokestacks, to insure compliance with local pollution rules, but it’s “mostly optical,” Barna said. “They’re looking to see what’s coming out,” he said. “You really shouldn’t see anything but vapor.”

More stringent rules are coming, though. New York City is in the process of greatly reducing the use of fossil-fuel-burning equipment in its buildings. Starting next year, gas stoves will be banned in many new homes. (This has made the pros and cons of induction stoves a topic of local fascination, and sometimes derangement, connected to the broader stovetop culture war that erupted last year.) Existing buildings, meanwhile, will also be expected to find ways to reduce their emissions. Local Law 97, passed in 2019, requires a forty-per-cent emissions cut from the city’s largest properties by 2030. Depending on how the law is implemented, Green-Wood, given the combined square footage of its various buildings, could be required to comply. “We really want to be good citizens,” Moylan said.

Last year, the chairman of Green-Wood’s board of directors heard about a concept that was just starting to catch on in Europe: electric cremation. He encouraged Moylan and Barna to look into it. They found a Dutch company, DFW, that sells an electric-cremator model. The e-cremators, which retail for seventy-five thousand euros more than the company’s traditional gas models, make it possible to cremate human remains “completely sustainably,” according to DFW. The process takes a hundred and ten minutes per body, which is comparable to gas cremators, while requiring lower temperatures. (The higher costs are meant to be recouped over time by lower energy bills.) DFW has two dozen electric cremators in operation across the Netherlands, England, and Germany; cumulatively, these units have performed over thirty thousand cremations. Barna said that he and Moylan discussed taking a trip to Europe, to see one of these cremators “in action.” But they discovered that DFW doesn’t ship its product across the Atlantic. (“We don’t sell in America,” Sjaak Zutt, a DFW executive, told me.) Moylan and Barna began looking for an American cremator company with an electric model. “It became kind of hunting around,” Barna said. “Asking different people in different states, ‘Do you know anybody with an electric unit?’ ” But their search has come up empty so far. Green-Wood is back to electric-cremation square one.

Moylan offered to show me his current crematory. We walked down a hallway lined with oil paintings of different schools and eras, all by artists buried at Green-Wood, which Moylan spent a decade collecting. “I got a little carried away,” he said. A doorway led to the crematory’s large back room, where workers remove processed remains from retorts. Leftover bones are then ground up in separate machines and reincorporated with the ashes. Drawers in the back room were labelled for different sizes of urns. Classic rock could be heard playing on the radio, over the thrum of machinery. A second door led to the crematory’s public front room, a more serene setting, with brown-tiled flooring and tan walls framing the steel doors of the five cremation chambers. In a normal year, Green-Wood cremates somewhere around thirty-five hundred bodies. In 2020, during the first waves of the pandemic, it cremated close to five thousand. “Funeral directors were on our case for not working twenty-four hours a day,” Moylan told me. The extreme heat of cremation takes a toll on a facility’s components. They need time to cool off and rest, or they break down. For much of 2020 and 2021, Green-Wood fired its cremators eighteen to twenty hours a day. “And we still couldn’t keep up,” Moylan said. Each of the past two years, Green-Wood has had to rebuild two of its five units.

Another promise of electric cremation, according to DFW, is that the use of lower temperatures result in less wear and tear. This also sounds good, in theory, to Moylan and Barna, but they aren’t sure how long it’ll take for electric to become a viable alternative. What are other options, in the meantime? One is alkaline hydrolysis, or water cremation. “Body melting, basically,” Moylan said. This process, which involves using lye and heat to break bodies down to their constituent elements—amino acids, peptides, sugars, and salts—is legal in more than a dozen states. Years ago, an effort to legalize water cremation in New York floundered in Albany. “They started calling it the Hannibal Lecter bill,” Moylan said. He’d been among those opposed to the measure at the time, but he has since changed his mind, especially after taking into account the climate costs of gas cremation. “People, when they hear ‘body melting,’ they’re horrified,” he said. “But stop for a minute. Is it any different than flame cremation? It’s just flame cremation we’re used to.”

Green-Wood began offering cremation services in 1954, and demand has only increased in the years since, in keeping with nationwide trends. The National Funeral Directors Association says that cremation surpassed graveside burial in popularity in 2015, and has estimated that by 2040, eighty per cent of Americans will be cremated after they die. At Green-Wood, this trend is compounded by a very New York problem: lack of real estate. Grave sites in the city sell like hot condos. “We keep raising our prices, but we keep selling land,” Moylan said. He likes to joke that Green-Wood has been five years away from running out of unused burial space for the past fifteen years. He thinks that these next five years really will be the last, though. “There’s just no big areas left to sell,” he said. “We’re finding spots in between spots.”

Another fact of cemetery operations is that burials pay the bills: cremation’s popularity among the public is surging in part because it costs thousands of dollars less than interment in a traditional casket. So Green-Wood is ready to pivot again; Moylan hopes that more people pay the cemetery to house and display urns containing their loved one’s ashes. His own office, with its enviable view of the harbor, will soon become space for glass-case niches to house those urns. “Cemeteries aren’t for the dead,” he said. “They’re for the living.” ♦

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huesofblue · 4 years ago

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Maximum Results for Maximum Efforts (A Table Tennis Review - Pt. I)

When you think of a sport that uses two small paddles to pass around a small white ball across a wide green table with a short net in the middle, you would think of either ping pong or table tennis. However, according to Coach EmRatThich from the Ping Sunday (2019a), up until 2011, they were essentially the same thing – they could be interchanged for each other, they were played the same way, they used the same equipment. In fact, ping pong was just a trademarked name for table tennis in 1901.

However, when the new decade of the 2000s started, they soon developed significant differences. Coach EmRatThich enumerated their differences in his blog that aimed to differentiate the two sports, and some of those differences were the following:

[table of differences taken from Ping Sunday]

Aside from that, ping pong and table tennis also differ in the equipment they use, in their rules, in the method of scoring, in their world championships, and in the playing style utilized by their players. Regardless, they are still sports that people from around the world give importance to.

And in this blog post, we will be talking about the Men’s Singles Table Tennis Final Match at the 2016 Rio Olympics. But before that, we shall talk about table tennis’ court dimensions, equipment, basic skills, technical and tactical skills, rules of the game, and method of officiating.

Court Dimensions

Rio Olympics’ Men’s Singles Table Tennis Final Match was played at the Pavilion 3 of the Riocentro, which is an exhibition and convention center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Wikimedia, 2021). There, the sport’s table courts were situated.

In the Britannica article for table tennis, written by Victor Barna (2019), the sport is played on a rectangular table with a surface that is 2’6” (76cm) above the ground and a surface measurement of 9 feet by 5 feet (2.7 meters by 1.5 meters). The net that stands 6 inches (15.25cm) in the middle spans 6 feet (1.8 meters) long across the table.

Equipment

Generally, table tennis only requires the rackets/paddles, the ball, and a table. However, the rackets, specifically, have parts that can and should be customized to fit the player’s preferences in a non-casual game. And according to the Chinese method of coaching, the minimum requirements for non-casual table tennis are the blade, the rubber, clothing and shoes, and glue for the rubbers.

As stated in the equipment page by Coach EmRatThich (2019b), the racket is made of the blade and rubber. The blade is basically the bare wood frame of the racket – it makes up 80% of a player’s playing style because this is the deciding factor of their moves and skills, and whether or not they will perform well, which is why the blade should be chosen fully according to the player’s preferences. The remaining 20% is the rubber, and this is the part of the racket on either side of the blade that adds the speed and spin to the ball. Since the rubbers are in different colors, one racket should not have two rubbers of the same color. Together, the blade and the rubber work hand in hand together in order to provide the player their best performance.

The next equipment is the ball, and it should measure at least 40mm in diameter and 2.7g in weight, and it can be either white-colored or orange-colored. Following that is the table, and it was already discussed in the previous section for the court dimensions. After the table are the clothes and shoes, and they are important equipment because they aid the player’s mobility – too tight clothes will restrict the player’s movement and bad shoes will hinder them from moving as fast as they want to. The clothes also serve as the representation for the player’s identity, especially if they are playing for a team. The last important equipment is the glue for the rubber which decides the amount of spin and renders the high-quality consistency of the rubber’s performance. Many players glue and reglue often during matches, so it is an important equipment to have at all times if a high-quality performance needs to be maintained.

Basic Skills

According to the Ping Pong Ruler (2020a), the basic skills of table tennis comprise only of three (3) things: having a good stance and footwork, holding the paddle properly, and knowing the basic table tennis strokes.

In table tennis, having a good stance and footwork is crucial to a player’s performance because they provide the support that the player needs in order to move fast and hit accurately. Granted that the stance varies with the type of situation that the player is in, the right stance should still be observed all throughout because it makes the player balanced and stabilized. On the other hand, good footwork provides the player the ability to move how ever they deem fit and do that quickly in accordance to their reaction time.

Holding the paddle properly is also an important fundamental skill because it basically dictates the quality of the performance (2020b). There are many types of grips that a player can utilize, and though they each have their own pros and cons, it is important to choose the right grip and to know how to handle the paddle properly in order to maintain control and accuracy in the play and to deliver split-second point-saving decisions during the game.

Lastly, knowing the basic table tennis strokes is “paramount to get the technical basics correct…they are the foundations that can be built upon as a player improves” (Larcombe, 2012).

Technical Skills

Like in every other sport, the technical skills of table tennis are largely presented through the strokes that are done by the players. Based on the Chinese coaching, which was stated in the article by Coach EmRatThich (2018), there are 10 fundamental technical skills in table tennis, that which are the following:

1. Forehand drive technique – helps the player learn the feeling of the ball which advances improvement;

2. Backhand topspin close to the table – helps the player understand how to use their wrist and to relax, and also teach them the right timing of acceleration and the correct grip;

3. Forehand push & backhand push – helps the player become used to and predict accurately the timing to hit the ball coming towards them;

4. Forehand flick – an attacking stroke that teaches the players aggression when on the offensive;

5. Backhand flick – used to return all the topspin or sidespin short serves;

6. Backhand loop the underspin ball – helps the players improve on the usage of their lower body parts which consequently improves the quality of their play;

7. Forehand attack the semi-long ball – helps the players learn how to attack semi-long balls that their opponents may resort to as an attack after a serve;

8. Learn Forehand fast serve – an indispensable skill that can put opponents under pressure, reduces the quality of the opponent’s service return, and other advantages;

9. Forehand pendulum serve – one of the best serves in table tennis because it allows the players to add many spin variations; and

10. Backhand side-spin serve – gives the player the control of the placement and the ability to reduce the pace of the game, which presents the chance of changing the outcome of the match.

Tactical Skills

Table tennis not only requires technical skills but also tactical skills in playing. While the technical skills provide the concrete physical support, the tactical skills provide the mental and situational support that a player needs in order to actually win. In his article about table tennis tactical skills, Ben Larcombe (Tactical Training for Table Tennis, 2015) enumerated some (though not limited to) general tactics that a player can use to specify, improve and win with their play:

Playing into their crossover point (playing elbow);

Using wide angles;

Giving them deep heavy backspin digs;

Keep everything tight and short so they cannot attack;

Always trying to attack (get in) first;

Varying your serves;

Keeping the ball away from their strongest side (usually forehand);

Adding float balls as a variation;

Playing short to their forehand corner and then deep to their backhand corner (or vice versa);

Staying very close to the table; and

Adding sidespin to your shots (hooks, fades, sidespin pushes etc.).

Rules of Table Tennis

In order to make the matches fair and equal, rules are implemented handsomely. The following rules to be mentioned were taken from PongFit (Official Rules of Table Tennis, n.d.) which were summarized from the rules that came from USA Table Tennis:

1. GAMES ARE PLAYED TO 11 POINTS;

2. ALTERNATE SERVES EVERY TWO POINTS;

3. TOSS THE BALL STRAIGHT UP WHEN SERVING;

4. THE SERVE CAN LAND ANYWHERE IN SINGLES;

5. DOUBLES SERVES MUST GO RIGHT COURT TO RIGHT COURT;

6. A SERVE THAT TOUCHES THE NET ON THE WAY OVER IS A “LET”;

7. ALTERNATE HITTING IN A DOUBLES RALLY;

8. VOLLEYS ARE NOT ALLOWED;

9. IF YOUR HIT BOUNCES BACK OVER THE NET BY ITSELF, IT IS YOUR POINT;

10. TOUCHING THE BALL WITH YOUR PADDLE HAND IS ALLOWED;

11. YOU MAY NOT TOUCH THE TABLE WITH YOUR NON-PADDLE HAND;

12. AN “EDGE” BALL BOUNCING OFF THE HORIZONTAL TABLE TOP SURFACE IS GOOD; and

13. HONOR SYSTEM APPLIES TO DISAGREEMENTS.

Who will officiate the sport? And how do they do it?

There is a method of officiating table tennis which ensures that the conduct of the sport is maintained to be fair and equal, and that method banks widely on the officials: the referees and the umpires.

In a nutshell, the difference between both is that the “referees control the conduct of tournaments, and umpires control the conduct of matches” (Table Tennis Queensland, n.d.). Granted that both officials are important, there is still a significant difference between them aside from what was previously mentioned.

According to Martin Hughes (Officials in Table Tennis, n.d.), the referees have the overall power over table tennis games, and they supervise the umpires during matches. The umpires, on the other hand, have their powers concentrated on individual matches rather than the tournament as a whole, which basically makes them the “people on the ground.”

Please direct yourself to the second part of this blog post to find the actual analysis for this review. Thank you, and I'll see you there!

References

Barna, V. (2019, December 18). Table tennis. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/sports/table-tennis

EmRatThich, C. (2018). 10 Fundamental Skills for Modern Table Tennis. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Ping Sunday web site: https://pingsunday.com/10-table-tennis-fundamental-skills/

EmRatThich, C. (2019). Basic Types of Table Tennis Equipment. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Ping Sunday: https://pingsunday.com/table-tennis-equipment/

EmRatThich, C. (2019). Huge Differences between Table Tennis vs. Ping Pong. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Ping Sunday web site: https://pingsunday.com/difference-table-tennis-vs-ping-pong/#:~:text=Before%202011%2C%20%E2%80%9CPing%20Pong%E2%80%9D,Tennis%E2%80%9D%20is%20the%20same%20sport.&text=But%20serious%20players%20call%20it,formally%20train%20in%20the%20sport.

Hughes, M. (n.d.). Officials in Table Tennis. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from All About Table Tennis: https://www.allabouttabletennis.com/officials-in-table-tennis.html

Larcombe, B. (2012, November 16). The Four Basic Table Tennis Strokes. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Expert Table Tennis web site: https://www.experttabletennis.com/basic-table-tennis-strokes/#:~:text=In%20table%20tennis%2C%20as%20in,them%20right%20first%20time%20around.

Larcombe, B. (2015, March 10). Tactical Training for Table Tennis. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Expert Table Tennis web site: https://www.experttabletennis.com/tactical/

Ping Pong Ruler. (2020, October 15). Basic Table Tennis Skills You Need To Know. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Ping Pong Ruler web site: https://www.google.com/search?q=basic+skills+in+table+tennis&oq=basic+skills+in+table+tennis&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.4405j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Ping Pong Ruler. (2020, December 15). Ping Pong Grips: How To Hold A Paddle? Penhold and Shakehand. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Ping Pong Ruler web site: https://pingpongruler.com/table-tennis-grips/#:~:text=Penhold%20and%20Shakehand,a%20game%20of%20ping%20pong.

Pong Fit. (n.d.). Official Rules of Table Tennis. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Pong Fit: https://www.pongfit.org/official-rules-of-table-tennis

Table Tennis Queensland. (n.d.). Officiating. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Table Tennis Queensland: http://www.tabletennisqld.org/?PageID=10&wp=10

Wikimedia. (2021, January 30). Riocentro. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riocentro

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yhella18 · 4 years ago

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Gold Medal Match: Men's Singles Table Tennis of Rio Olympics 2016 || A Sports Analysis

Table tennis, additionally called (trademark) Ping-Pong, is a ball game similar in principle to lawn tennis and played on a flat table divided into two equivalent courts by a net fixed across its width at the center. The object is to hit the ball so that it goes over the net and bounces on the opponent's half of the table in such a way that the opponent cannot reach it or return it correctly. The lightweight hollow ball is propelled back and forth across the net by small rackets (bats or paddles) held by the players. The game is mainstream everywhere in the world. In most countries, it is highly organized as a competitive sport, especially in Europe and Asia, particularly in China and Japan (Barna, 2008). Today's blog will focus on the final game of Men's Singles Table Tennis of Rio Olympics 2016.

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This blog will consist of the following:

Court Dimensions

Equipment

Basic Skills

Technical and Tactical Skills

Rules of the Game

Officiating the Game

Overall Game

Court Dimensions

Table tennis at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro took place from 6 to 17 August 2016 at the third pavilion of Riocentro Convention & Event Center.

Room Size

If there is not enough space in a table tennis room, it will be frustrating, and the players will not enjoy the game. The table tennis players' level will determine the amount of space that they will need in a game. Professional table tennis players need enough space to be able to exhibit their table tennis skills. For instance, a defender would need a lot more space because they tend to play more away from the table.

Therefore, the place needs a clear five feet at each end of the table, where the players will be, and three feet clearance on either side. So, for a regulation table of around 9 feet in length and five wide, you will need a square of clear space of about 19 x 11 feet (579 cm x 335 cm).

Table Size

Table tennis equipment is relatively inexpensive and straightforward. The table is rectangular, 9 feet by 5 feet (2.7 meters by 1.5 meters), its upper surface a level plane 30 inches (76 cm) above the floor. The net is 6 feet (1.8 meters) long, and its upper edge along the whole length is 6 inches (15.25 cm) above the playing surface.(Table Tennis Table Buyer's Guide, n.d.)

Equipment

Basic Skills

Serving

A table tennis' serve is the first necessary skill, and it's a crucial skill since the service is the only time you have complete control of the ball and the game. There are many different types of serves, each with different pros and cons but the basics remain the same.

Stance and Footwork

Before hitting your first shot, it's worth getting your body in the right position. A correct and stance in relation to the table depends to some degree on your grip and whether you're are attacking, defending, or serving the ball. However, even as your arm position and placement relative to the table changes, you should always have the correct stance and body posture. The right stance gives you the balance, stability, and range of movement you need to play the game.

Holding the Paddle

Your hands and arms' exact position in your stance depends on your grip or how you hold the bat. There are two basic grips in table tennis: the shake hand grip and the penhold grip. The different types of grip have specific variations for your hand position on the paddle, depending on your preference and style of play.

Each grip has advantages and disadvantages, but it's also essential to choose the grip that is comfortable and natural for you. Once you have mastered an essential grip, you may want to learn more advanced grips to improve your game further and give you more options. Check out our guide to the different types of table tennis grips here.

Ball Control

Developing ball control in table tennis is probably the most essential skill you need to survive at the game's upper echelons. Ball control refers to the ability to return the ball during play. By this, players need to do many different strokes used during a table tennis match, but forehand and backhand strokes are easily the most common. Learning how your body responds to the backswing, the point of contact, and the follow-through of each stroke is crucial before going on and learning anything else.

Technical and Tactical Skills

MA LONG: This player played accurately and undoubtedly, making sure not to overpower his strength to make the ball out of the court or the table. Although Zhang Jike tends to hit in the player's open spot, he could still receive it as time passed by and until he could accommodate Zhang Jike's strategy of hitting. However, not all of the shots given to the player were successfully defended because of the strength that the player gave, and sometimes Ma Long was not able to control the ball well. This shows that there is still a human in him and showed that he was not perfect. Moreover, his legs, thighs, twisting of the body, upper body, shoulder elbow are perfectly coordinated. Hence, it was quite a useful technique that a player sure had. Due to his stance, he moved skillfully as he endures the shots given by the other player. All in all, Ma Long did great in executing all the necessary skills and utilized them to win the game.

ZHANG JIKE: This player used all the necessary skills. However, he needs to practice controlling the ball since most of his attacks were out of the court. He was slightly aggressive, especially in the second set, due to the gap between the scores and making mistakes. However, he was able to overcome, and he made mistakes frequently, unlike before. Despite his out control ball, Zhang has adequate strength and endurance, especially when a rally happened between him and the other player. His strategy was to attack where the other player would have a hard time in defending it. Overall, he did his best in defending or attacking the other player.

Rules of the Game

Scoring and Games

Games are played to 11 points.

Players serve two serves each, alternating. A player does not have to win specifically off their own serve in order to win a point.

If a game ties at 10-10, a player must win by 2 points. In this situation, players serve one serve each, alternating.

If your hit bounces back over the net by itself it is your point.

An “edge” ball bouncing off the horizontal table top surface is good.

In competition, games are played best of 5 (first to win 3 games) or best of 7 (first to win 4 games). Social games can also be played best of 3 (first to win 2 games).

Legal Serving

The serve can land anywhere in the table.

You must throw the ball up straight, from a flat palm.

Your toss and service contact must be behind the table surface (not over).

You cannot hide the ball from the ball toss to contact, with any part of your body.

If the ball hits the net during service, it is a let, the point is replayed. There is no limit or point deductions for let serves.

A point is lost if:

The service is missed.

The service is not returned.

A shot goes into the net.

A shot goes off the table without touching the court.

A player moves the table, touches the net or touches the table with their free hand during play.

Equipment Basics

A table tennis racket must be one side black, one side (recently approved) any approved color.

The official approved ball is the 40mm+ plastic ball.

Officiating the Game

Referee

He/she decides any question of rule interpretation and ensures that the competition is conducted in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations.

Umpire

His/her primary duty is to decide the result of each rally.

Assistant Umpire

He/she takes over or shares some of the umpire's duties and solely responsible for decisions on edge balls, and has the power to decide on the legality of the player's service action.

Timekeeper

Monitor the duration of the practice, play in a game, intervals between games, and any authorized suspension of plays.

Stroke counter

His/she solely has to count the return strokes of the receiver.

Overall Game

Both of the players used all the techniques and tactics that they have to win the game. However, Ma Long stood victorious over fellow compatriot Zhang Jike in the Men’s Singles final, as China won their second Table Tennis gold medal. With the top two seeds going head-to-head, there was potential for a thrilling final; however, after edging the first end in deuce, Ma thundered past Zhang in the following three games to win the gold medal on his Olympic singles debut (14-12, 11-5, 11-4, 11-4). All in all, Ma’s performance on the game was legendary and dazzled the audience with his play.

Bibliography

Barna, V. (2008, June 9). Table Tennis. Retrieved March 10, 2021, from Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/sports/table-tennis

Basic Table Tennis Skills You Need To Know. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2021, from Pingpong Ruler: https://pingpongruler.com/basic-table-tennis-skills/

Developing Ball Control In Table Tennis. (2012, December 8). Retrieved March 10, 2021, from Table Tennis - Made Simple: http://ttforyou.blogspot.com/2012/12/developing-ball-control-in-table-tennis.html

Larcombe, B. (2012, September 26). Table Tennis Rules and Regulations. Retrieved March 10, 2021, from Expert Table Tennis: https://www.experttabletennis.com/table-tennis-rules-and-regulations/

Maribao, T. M. (2018, November 20). Officials of Table Tennis and their duties. Retrieved March 10, 2021, from Prezi: https://prezi.com/uuswuvndkebu/officials-of-table-tennis-and-their-duties/

Rules of Table Tennis. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2021, from Team USA: https://www.teamusa.org/usa-table-tennis/rules

Table Tennis Table Buyer's Guide. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2021, from Liberty Games: https://www.libertygames.co.uk/store/table-tennis/buying-advice/buyers-guide/#:~:text=table%20tennis%20table.-,Room%20Size,around%2019%20x%2011%20feet.

#sportsanalysis #tabletennis #physicaleducation #blog

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tomorrowsflyingcloud-blog · 6 years ago

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People's Pharmacy: Why Is The Price For Erectile Dysfunction Drugs So High?

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desafia · 3 years ago

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@barnaes sent: 10) receiver sprained their ankle so sender sweeps them into their arms to carry them to get treated.

discomfort is a familiarity. the pain which radiates through her nerves should be sharp and alarming, yet at first, merely registers as a simple twinge. her body holds the memory of greater offenses. pain is as normal to the tissues of her flesh as is the oxygen permeating through her blood. fractured marrow. bruised bones. cold metal which sinks deep enough to leave the memory of it’s violence behind in scar tissue. her tolerances and thresholds for such destruction has been excruciatingly earned.

it’s not the protesting of pain receptors which slows her, but the instability of the ligaments. she is stubborn when she regains her balance. jaw sets and foot plants back upon the ground with determination. one step is taken. another which has her muscles protesting as her ankle wobbles. her head is just tilting down to survey the swelling limb with frustration when he intervenes. lips part for protests which remain unuttered as she is swept up off her feet altogether. ❝ i’m okay, ❞ it’s no more than a mumble, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. ❝ doesn’t hurt. just. not...working. ❞ it does hurt. but she has taught herself how to disassociate from such sensations. her focus settles in upon james, eyes flickering over his features for a moment. he’s going to worry. ❝ no—not broken, ❞ she adds, as if it will be less upsetting to him ❝ i can tell. broken. feels...different. ❞ magnolia leans forward and nuzzles against his cheek ❝ it’ll. work. again soon. ❞

#barnaes #gurl ur ankle is wacked stfu #ANSWERED: ❝ i feel it in my bones，how much you crave to be heard. ❞

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finnishfun · 7 years ago

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I hope this hasn’t been done yet! Inspired by the Finnish list by @languagesandshootingstars and original post here

kutya - dog macska - cat hal - fish madár - bird tehén - cow disznó, malac - pig egér - mouse ló - horse szárny - wing állat - animal vonat - train repülő(gép) - plane autó, kocsi - car teherautó, kamion - truck bicikli, kerékpár - bicycle busz - bus csónak - boat hajó - ship gumi - tire benzin - gasoline motor - engine jegy - ticket közlekedés - transportation város - city, town ház - house lakás - apartment út - way, road utca - street, road repülőtér - airport vasútállomás - train station híd - bridge hotel - hotel étterem - restaurant farm - farm bíróság - court(room) iskola - school iroda - office szoba - room egyetem - university klub - club bár - bar park - park tábor - camp bolt, üzlet - store, shop színház - theater könyvtár - library kórház - hospital templom - church piac - market föld - country; ground; soil; Earth épület - building (világ)űr - (outer) space bank - bank hely(szín) - location kalap - hat ruha - dress öltöny - suit szoknya - skirt ing - shirt póló - t-shirt nadrág - pants cipő - shoes zseb - pocket kabát - coat folt - stain ruhák (plural) - clothing piros - red zöld - green kék - blue sárga - yellow barna - brown rózsaszín - pink lila - purple narancssárga - orange fekete - black fehér - white szürke - grey világos - light sötét - dark szín - colour fiú - boy; son lány - daughter anya - mother apa - father szülő - parent (kis)baba, bébi - baby férfi - man férj - husband nő - woman fiútestvér - brother báty - older brother öcs - younger brother lánytestvér - sister nővér - older sister húg - younger sister család - family nagypapa - grandfather nagymama - grandmother feleség - wife király - king királynő - queen elnök - president szomszéd - neighbour gyerek - child felnőtt - adult ember - human barát - (close) friend haver - (casual) friend áldozat - victim játékos - player rajongó - fan tömeg - crowd ember, személy - person tanár - teacher tanuló, diák - student ügyvéd - lawyer orvos, doktor - doctor beteg, páciens - patient pincér - waiter titkár(nő) - secretary (male/female) pap - priest rendőr - police hadsereg - army katona - soldier művész - artist író - author menedzser - manager riporter - reporter színész - actor munka, állás - job vallás - religion menny(ország) - heaven pokol - hell halál - death gyógyszer - medicine pénz - money dollár - dollar számla - bill házasság - marriage esküvő - wedding csapat - team faj - race szex - sex nem - gender, sex gyilkosság - murder börtön - prison technológia - technology energia - energy háború - war béke - peace támadás - attack választás - election magazin - magazine újság - newspaper méreg - poison fegyver - gun sport - sport verseny - race; competition mozgás, torna - exercise labda - ball játék - game ár - price szerződés - contract drog - drug jel - sign tudomány - science Isten - God együttes, zenekar - band dal, ének - song hangszer - instrument zene - music film - movie művészet - art kávé - coffee tea - tea bor - wine sör - beer gyümölcslé - juice víz - water tej - milk ital - drink, beverage tojás - egg sajt - cheese kenyér - bread leves - soup torta, sütemény - cake csirke(hús) - chicken disznó(hús) - pork marha(hús) - beef hús - meat alma - apple banán - banana narancs - orange citrom - lemon kukorica - corn rizs - rice olaj - oil mag - seed kés - knife kanál - spoon villa - fork tányér - plate csésze - cup reggeli - breakfast ebéd - lunch vacsora - dinner cukor - sugar só - salt üveg - bottle étel - food asztal - table szék - chair ágy - bed álom - dream ablak - window ajtó - door hálószoba - bedroom konyha - kitchen fürdőszoba - bathroom ceruza - pencil toll - pen fénykép - photograph szappan - soap könyv - book oldal - page kulcs - key festék - paint levél - letter jegyzet - note (as in “to take notes”) fal - wall papír - paper padló - floor plafon - ceiling tető - roof medence - pool zár - lock telefon - telephone kert - garden udvar - yard tű - needle táska - bag doboz - box ajándék - gift kártya - card gyűrű - ring szerszám - tool óra - clock lámpa - lamp ventillátor - fan mobiltelefon - cellphone hálózat - network számítógép - computer program - program laptop - laptop képernyő - screen fényképezőgép- camera (for photos) (videó)kamera - video camera televízió, tévé - television rádió - radio fej - head nyak - neck arc - face szakáll - beard haj - hair szem - eye száj - mouth ajak - lip orr - nose fog - tooth fül - ear könny - tear nyelv - tongue; language hát - back lábujj - toe ujj - finger lábfej - foot kéz - hand láb - leg kar - arm váll - shoulder szív - heart vér - blood agy - brain térd - knee izzadtság - sweat betegség - disease csont - bone hang - voice; noise; sound bőr - skin test - body tenger - sea óceán - ocean folyó - river hegy(ség) - mountain eső- rain hó - snow fa - tree; wood nap - sun hold - moon világ - world erdő - forest növény - plant szél - wind virág - flower völgy - valley gyökér - root tó - lake csillag - star fű - grass levél - leaf levegő - air homok - sand part - beach hullám - wave tűz - fire jég - ice sziget - island domb - hill hő - heat természet - nature üveg - glass fém - metal műanyag - plastic kő - stone gyémánt - diamond agyag - clay por - dust arany - gold réz - copper ezüst - silver anyag - material méter - meter centiméter - centimeter kilogramm - kilogram hüvelyk - inch font - pound fél - half kör - circle négyzet - square hőmérséklet - temperature dátum - date súly - weight szél - edge sarok - corner térkép - map pont - dot mássalhangzó - consonant magánhangzó - vowel fény - light igen - yes nem - no darab - piece fájdalom - pain sérülés - injury lyuk - hole kép - image minta - pattern főnév - noun ige - verb melléknév - adjective rajta - (on) top alatt - under oldal - side előtt - in front of mögött - behind kint - outside bent - inside fel - up le - down bal - left jobb - right egyenes - straight észak - north dél - south kelet - east nyugat - west irány - direction nyár - summer tavasz - spring tél - winter ősz - autumn évszak - season nulla - 0 egy - 1 kettő - 2 három - 3 négy - 4 öt - 5 hat - 6 hét - 7 nyolc - 8 kilenc - 9 tíz - 10 tizenegy - 11 húsz - 20 huszonegy - 21 harminc - 30 negyven - 40 ötven - 50 hatvan - 60 hetven - 70 nyolcvan - 80 kilencven - 90 száz - 100 kétszáz - 200 ezer - 1000 tízezer - 10000 százezer - 100000 millió - million milliárd - billion első - first második - second harmadik - third negyedik - fourth ötödik - fifth szám - number január - January február - February március - March április - April május - May június - June július - July augusztus - August szeptember- September október - October november - November december - December hétfő - Monday kedd - Tuesday szerda - Wednesday csütörtök - Thursday péntek - Friday szombat - Saturday vasárnap - Sunday év - year hónap - month hét - week nap - day óra - hour perc - minute másodperc - second reggel - morning délután - afternoon este - evening éjjel - night idő - time dolgozik - to work működik - to work (“function”) játszik - to play (children, games, sports, instruments) sétál - to walk fut - to run vezet - to drive repül - to fly úszik - to swim megy - to go megáll - to stop (moving forward) abbahagy - to stop (doing something) követ - to follow gondolkodik - to think beszél - to speak mond - to say eszik - to eat iszik - to drink öl - to kill meghal - to die mosolyog - to smile nevet - to laugh sír - to cry vesz, vásárol - to buy fizet - to pay elad, árul - to sell lő - to shoot tanul - to learn ugrik - to jump szagol - to smell hall - to hear hallgat - to listen ízlel - to taste érint - to touch lát - to see néz - to watch csókol - to kiss ég - to burn olvad - to melt ás - to dig robban - to explode ül - to sit áll - to stand szeret - to love vág - to cut veszekszik (verbally), verekedik (physically) - to fight (le)fekszik - to lie (down) táncol - to dance alszik - to sleep felébred - to wake up énekel - to sing számol - to count házasodik - to marry imádkozik - to pray nyer - to win veszít - to lose kever - to mix, to stir hajlít - bend mos - to wash főz - to cook nyit - to open zár - to close ír - to write fordul - to turn épít - to build tanít - to teach nő - to grow (by itself) rajzol - to draw etet - to feed elkap - catch (e.g. a ball) dob - to throw tisztít - to clean talál - to find esik - to fall tol, nyom - to push húz - to pull visz - to carry tör - to break visel, hord - to wear lóg - to hang ráz - to shake jelez - to sign üt, ver - to beat emel - to lift magas - tall hosszú - long rövid - short alacsony - short (person); low sekély - shallow (water) széles - wide keskeny - narrow nagy - big, large kicsi - small, little lassú - slow gyors - fast forró - hot hideg - cold meleg - warm hűvös - cool új - new régi - old (object) öreg - old (person) fiatal - young jó - good rossz - bad nedves, vizes - wet száraz - dry beteg - sick egészséges - healthy hangos - loud halk - quiet boldog - happy szomorú - sad gyönyörű, szép - beautiful ronda, csúnya - ugly süket - deaf vak - blind kedves - nice gonosz - mean gazdag - rich szegény - poor vastag - thick vékony - thin drága - expensive olcsó - cheap lapos - flat szűk - tight laza - loose magas - high puha - soft kemény - hard mély - deep tiszta - clean koszos - dirty erős - strong gyenge - weak halott - dead élő - alive nehéz - heavy; difficult világos - light sötét - dark nukleáris - nuclear híres - famous én - I te - you ő - she, he az - it mi - we ti - you ők - they ön, maga - you (formal)

#hungarian #not finnish #625 words

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oosteven-universe · 3 years ago

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Dark Blood #2

Dark Blood #2 BOOM! Studios 2021 Written by Latoya Morgan Illustrated by Walt Barna & Moisés Hidalgo Coloured by A.H.G. Lettered by Andworld Design Does even the kindness of strangers come with a cost? Avery has adjusted to his post WWII life in Alabama but when an altercation with some local boys leaves him hurt, an unlikely bystander steps in. And while Carlisle, a white university doctor, not only offers Avery immediate first aid but free ongoing medical care... nothing is truly free, not even a stranger's kindness. I am super intrigued by this story so far. Also while I understand that this makes me uncomfortable because of the racism we see, which can be delicate at the best of times, is so in your face. I understand, unfortunately, that this time in American History that this behaviour was all too common but that doesn’t make it any easier to see one human being treat another this way and yet at the same time it is integral to the story itself that we see this happen. Without it I am not sure the variance would’ve happened and that is a huge part of the story. So I applaud Latoya for being so unapologetic in how she is telling this story and how damn powerful it becomes in the process. I am very much immensely enjoying the way hta this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is impeccably rendered. The character development that we see through the dialogue, the character interaction as well as how they act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter continues to flesh the characters out into those we can relate to or empathise with. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing more of the story the more engaged and invested we become in it. I appreciate the way that we see this being structured and how the layers within the story continue to emerge, grow, evolve and strengthen. It is within these layers where we see the backstory, the characterisation and twists & turns happen with so much other finer details. What all these do is add such wonderful depth, dimension and complexity to the story. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is perfectly achieved. The interiors here are absolutely stunning. The linework we see is exquisite and how the varying weights and techniques are being utilised to create this level of detail work throughout is astounding. The faces and facial expressions along with the body language really is sublime and helps to further the characterization. Now personally I wish we’d see more backgrounds being utilised for when we do they enhance and expand the moments perfectly. They also work within the composition of the panels to bring out the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a remarkably talented eye for storytelling. The colour work is beautifully rendered thanks to how we see the various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work. Avery is a great character and he’s trying so hard not to rock the boat, what with a wife, a daughter and another baby on the way, that you cannot help but feel for him. He served his country and in return this is how he’s treated seems like a complete injustice. Part of me wants to befriend him and help him any way I can but I also have to remember this is a story and with the way this is written with this level & quality of writing & characterisation along with such sublime interiors can make you forget it is a work of fiction.

#Comic Books #Comics Reviews #BOOM! Studios

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marriagekiller · 3 years ago

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I facilitate a groups for christian women who have been betrayed.

Here’s some thoughts:

The day of discovering betrayal is so devastating and often the beginning of a nightmare that can last years.

The effects of trauma by betrayal are often not just emotional, and mental but also physical ( I.e. hair loss, body-aches, memory loss etc.)

Some betrayers are genuinely sorry and want healing from sexual addiction, but keep relapsing. I know, it’s hard to believe but these are people that love Jesus.

The betrayal has unfortunately destroyed the bond of trust and has now left it’s ugly stain and for one who has been betrayed and it is confusing and

a shock.

The pain is excruciating and often the betrayed will seek relief to quickly“forgiving” and sweep it under the carpet in the hope of getting relief but is crushed again when there is a relapse.

I think at this stage there’s a flood of questions about the legitimacy of their marriage … Was it just lies and deception? Did they see the warning signs? Is there still hope for the marriage? Etc…

Often the betrayer will deny everything or disclose only parts of the story which leads to layers of trauma which is like repeated assault.

When the betrayed spouse sweeps the “pain under the carpet” it becomes like an air filled balloon held under water. The pressure of the unprocessed trauma and emotions leak out in in triggers of anger, hyper-vigilance, obsessive thoughts , difficulty concentrating, anxiety, suspicion, jealousy and rage.

Trust has been broken.

Usually the shame is so deep, that the only way to cope is by isolating.

Each person and situation is unique and level of the betrayal trauma is intensified by the length of the relationship, if it’s an affair, porn, exposed publicly, illegal or involved a friend…the frequency…

I found this really interesting…

The American Bible Society did a study through the Barna Group on trauma with 1,992 adults (a third being Christians) that had experienced betrayal

trauma.

No. 1 The most devastating trauma experience is when

a loved one dies.

No. 2 Betrayal, especially if it was with a trusted

individual.

What’s astounding in this study, is that betrayal is

considered

more traumatic than

physical and sexual abuse.

As a spouse we often think it’s somehow our fault and internalise the shame

and remain isolated.

NOT TRUE ( It’s not your fault!)

Individuals who struggle with acting out are using sex as a way to medicate the pain of life (stress /trauma, or feelings of unworthiness). The brain has become dependent on this way of relief.

This does nullify the pain that you are experiencing or justify

the behaviour.

It is simply to acknowledge

that those patterns were there long before you even knew them.

Sorry, if you’re reading this and you are feeling overwhelmed.

If you are a christian woman who resonates with what i have said… and you are in counselling, then maybe a safe informed, community is what you need.

Send a pm and I send you some info 💞

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gduncan969 · 4 years ago

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Has the Church Lost Its Purpose

Matthew 16:18 “..and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

If you’re like me, you are probably pretty fed up with Covid-19 and all the ever-changing rules and regulations thrust upon us in our government’s efforts to control it—by controlling us! When will we get past this and back to normal is the question uppermost in many minds but no one is giving any definitive answer and by the looks of it, whatever answer there is, is still a long way off. So we stumble on trying to remember to put our masks on, squirt our hands with another dose of hand sanitizer and then go home to watch the riots and mayhem in the city streets of downtown USA. Where is all this headed and how does the Church fit into this scenario? The Shorter Westminster Confession tells us the chief end of man is to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever” but in these days of closed, or partially “open” churches where singing is forbidden and masks must be worn, the question is: “What is the chief end of the Church of Jesus Christ?” and we can also tack on a second question: “Why does our government think the Church is non-essential when the casino’s and liquor stores are open and the rioters and protesters are given a free hand to assemble?. How we answer these questions very much depends on our view of the Church’s purpose in this time of world pandemic and social unrest. All of us who have committed our lives to Jesus Christ already know that the Church is the body and bride of Christ whom the Lord Himself will return to earth to “present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:27). It is not an organization but an organism which Jesus continues to nurture and grow through the revelation of Himself by His Spirit (Matthew 16:18) and that this present age will come to an end at the “marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9) when the old earth and Heaven will pass away and a new Heaven and a new earth will be created. These are great, all-encompassing statements describing our final destiny to “be ever with the Lord” but there’s a more pressing question that demands an answer at this current moment: “Has the Church lost its purpose in the middle of this Covid-19 pandemic in its compliance with government closures and restrictions, its social distancing rules, job losses, political uncertainty and a host of other issues like suicides, drug abuse, etc.? How is the Church meeting these situations and challenges? One thing for sure is it has not been able to carry on as usual. There is nothing “usual” about being forbidden to assemble together with fellow believers in our homes and churches, about being forbidden to praise God together in song or about having to wear a mask and distance ourselves from one another to avoid all physical contact during our services, but if these are the only things we miss then the “new normal” is really little more than an inconvenience. Perhaps this is the reason most churches around the world have so easily accepted the mantra of the media and the government “It’s all for the common good” and agreed that the Church must do its part along with the rest of humanity to curb the spread of this deadly virus that supposedly is threatening to engulf the entire world in a holocaust of death. Who would dare gainsay such common sense? (I think it was Albert Einstein who declared that common sense is very uncommon!) Let’s re-examine what the Church is and what it represents and then decide what its true purpose is.

Post Modernism

To the post-modern world in which we now live where your “truth” and my “truth” are equally acceptable and tolerable, the Church of Jesus Christ appears to most as little more than a social gathering of like-minded people enjoying each other’s fellowship on Sunday mornings in buildings called churches where we sing praises to God accompanied by an organist or pianist or even a full blown band with drums, guitars and sometimes even laser lights and smoke generators to create the “right” atmosphere. We listen to sermons from the bible about how to be good and afterwards go to the local restaurant for lunch. Beyond that, the world is largely uncertain as to what the purpose of the church is and what it actually does and most are content to leave it to itself with no desire to get involved, especially if (not always when) it talks about things like “sin”, a word no longer acceptable in polite company. Is it any wonder that governments have deemed church gatherings to be “non-essential” and almost all churches have quietly agreed to their banishment “for the common good” because the bible tells us to be “subject to the authorities” (Romans 13:1) while forgetting that Peter resisted those same authorities because “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)? Objections from the Christian community to church closures has been tepid at best and supportive at worst. This is understandable from a point of view that sees church meetings as an unnecessary opportunity for the virus to spread. This may have been OK for the purpose of “flattening the curve” but those days are long past and the current fear of a second and possibly a third wave of the virus is making the long-term outlook for a return to normalcy very uncertain indeed! There’s now plenty of evidence to show the damage being done to the Church by its obedience to these rules.

The Church is Suffering Damage

The harm done to the church by its complicity in its own closure is appearing in the form of a dramatic drop in attendance. A Barna Group poll in the US taken in May of this year shows that one third of “practicing Christians” (I take that to mean those who attend church regularly) have completely quit attending any church—either on line or in person—and half the millenials (young people) have done likewise! Barna’s latest poll, announced this week carries the headline: “1 in 5 Churches Facing Permanent Closure Within 18 Months Due to Covid-19 Shutdowns.” The reason for this is quite simple: one in five churches do not have enough income to keep their doors open even as the restrictions have been eased and partial services allowed! These figures lead me to ask, “What kind of commitment to the local body of Christ do those have who so soon walked away?” This is not encouraging news but my real concern is not church finances or even church attendance, it is the failure of many in the Church to recognize what the Church is, a living body, spiritual in nature and determined in its purpose to reach a dying world with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ who died for it, rose again to empower it with His Spirit and is coming again to receive it to Himself at the end of the present age. Each born again believer is a member in particular joined to every other member by the “joints and ligaments” (Colossians 2:19) that connect us to the Head, Jesus Christ and to each other. The “joints and ligaments” are the relationships between us and the Head that hold the body together and these suffer damage when members cannot assemble together to pray together, worship together and minister to the world around them together. It is very difficult to maintain real relationships through a mobile phone. It is impossible to visit the sick at home or in hospital to lay hands on them or anoint them with oil. It is impossible kneel by the bedside of a dying saint to hug them one last time or wrap your arms around a grieving saint from six feet away and it is impossible to encourage anyone with a smile while wearing a mask. These are not trivial issues, they go to the heart of Christian ministry. How many church members have and will forsake the faith and wander off into the world because their church was obedient to their civic duty and closed its doors? Church gatherings are far, far more than a social event, they are a critical function of the Church to further the gospel in the lives of believers and unbelievers alike. I was not saved by watching a video but by attending a meeting where I went forward before thousands of others to commit my life to Christ. Yes, of course God uses videos to reach others but He doesn’t leave us there, alone in our basement wondering where do I go from here. He joins me to the rest of His body in personal, human, on-going contact with other believers. If the Church is not meeting, lives are being lost!

The Lord is Shaking His Church

Why has the Church been so afraid to disobey the government and so unafraid to disobey the Lord who has told us to “forsake not the assembling of (y)ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25); to “lay hands on the sick” (Mark 16:18); to gather together to pray and sing; to baptize; to go into all the world and preach the gospel. Can you ever imagine Jesus saying to the leper, “Sorry, I can’t touch you because I may get what you’ve got and besides, it’s against the law for me to touch you”? What kind of gospel is that? It is the gospel of fear, not love, of weakness, not strength. Father Damien of Molokai was a Belgian missionary to the lepers in the Pacific who willingly lived among them and became one of them for the sake of the gospel. Countless others have done likewise throughout the history of the Church and have “counted it all joy” (James 1:2). I believe the Lord Jesus is using this present pandemic to shake His Church awake from its slumber. He is removing the old normal and replacing it with a whole new church experience of the power of the Holy Spirit at work through its members to reach the world. The old order with the pastor and the platform team doing all the work while the congregation waits to be led (and entertained?) will be replaced with God’s order as described in 1 Corinthians 14:24 - 26 showing how the early church ran its services: “if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an uninformed person comes in, he is convinced by all, he is convicted by all. And thus the secrets of his heart are revealed; and so, falling down on his face, he will worship God and report that God is truly among you. How is it then, brethren? Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation.” The world wants evidence that the gospel we preach is real and the only way to show it is real is to do as Paul did, “not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 2:4). How exciting and challenging it will be to go to church knowing that the Lord wants to use you in the service to bring something besides your bible and your tithes, (although many bring neither). If you feel you don’t have a psalm, a teaching, a tongue, a revelation or an interpretation to offer and if you feel you are unable to demonstrate the Holy Spirit and His Power, then go to Jesus and ask Him first to baptize you in His Holy Spirit and then open your mouth and let Him fill it as He gives you the utterance. Expect the Lord to give you something to add to the service besides your presence and your praise (but first pray that the elders will make room for your ministry and wait until they do). This may seem all too far-fetched but it is clearly biblical and in the coming time of testing for the Church, clearly necessary.

The days ahead are filled with uncertainty but God is faithful and we will not be deserted by Him or left to figure it all out by ourselves. He loves us intensely and will carry us through as long as we hang on to Him. More than that, He will reveal how great His Power is in us if we will but trust Him to use us for His glory. That’s the kind of Church He is building. If you are still uncertain as to the purpose of the Church, pray for God to reveal this to you that you may function as a healthy member. I sense that God is about to judge the earth but first He will judge His Church and cleanse it from every spot and wrinkle. “He that endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:13) and as I said in my last blog, endurance may not be pleasant but it is necessary to get through what lies ahead. The initial acceptance of the closures by the churches is understandable in human terms but given the great damage being caused to the Church (and to society) as it continues, this issue must be faced prayerfully and determinedly. If the Barna polls are correct---and I believe they are---we must decide whether to continue in obedience to man or God!

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easterndaze · 8 years ago

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Budapest’s New Underground

Although the international reputation of the country, whose PM hailed illiberal democracy as his preferred NWO, is not the best (to say the least), there's a parallel culture that largely operates independently of state-run infrastructure, creating several microcosms with their own audiences and worldviews, implicitly turning against misogyny, discrimination, narrow-mindedness, and reflecting the techno-dystopian times we are living in at the moment. "...The goal of our underground is to create a second culture, a culture completely independent from all official communication media and the conventional hierarchy of value judgements put out by the establishment", wrote Ivan Jirous, a member of The Plastic People of the Universe, in 1975. For the purposes of this article, we will focus only on Budapest. Hungary, in general, is very centrist, even more so than its neighbouring countries. Most of the cultural happenings take place in the capital. "It is worth mentioning that to me the 'underground' seems to be an arty, intellectual, middle-class, mostly Budapest-centred, or at least city-centred thing", explains popular music scholar Emília Barna. "For instance, there is so much rap music made in the outskirts or the provinces, extremely poor areas of Hungary, scenes that thrive in these localities as well as on the internet – music that I would certainly call political because these artists directly address issues of poverty, social deprivation, criminality (gangster and prison life) etc. – yet as far as I know this music is never referred to as part of 'the underground'".

UH Fest

"A strong stage performance and powerful art are always political acts", says Krisztián Puskár, one of the organisers behind UH Fest. The experimental music staple was established at the dawn of the new millennium, taking inspiration from the now-defunct Austrian phonoTAKTIK festival. Since 2000, UH Fest (also known as Ultrahang) has staged approximately 500 performances. From noise techno, through avant-garde improv, to an hour of drone, UH Fest aims to challenge its audience's expectations and break the boundaries between various genres and generations. Thus, over the course of the week of the festival, the likes of Romanian spectralist Iancu Dumitrescu rub shoulders with Low Jack, KTL, Sote and Richard Dawson. Unlike many other similar urban festivals in Europe, UH Fest is not institutionalised, and is largely run on a volunteer basis. "To this day, we are just ordinary citizens without an institution behind us. We have a foundation, which is a legal entity, but not in terms of an office or infrastructure. It was a grassroots initiative, a family venture in the beginning, because my sister and brother-in-law were also involved", says András Nun, the organiser of the festival and one of the most pivotal figures of the Budapest underground music scene. Aside from its main event, which usually happens in late September/early October, the festival has also organised so-called "Demo" events for up-and-coming local talent, which acted as a springboard for several successful musicians such as The Death of Rave artist and Mark Fell collaborator Gábor Lázár, Opal Tapes and Lobster Theremin producer S Olbricht (whose own Farbwechsel imprint we'll discuss later), and the improv duo 12z.

OMOH

OMOH is a new addition to Budapest's queer scene, shunning the music played at mainstream gay events and embracing a more abrasive type of techno and underground house. The name itself comes from Russian police special forces and can be interpreted "as a sort of middle finger to all homophobic legislators of the world", explain the organisers, whose identity remains a mystery. "No organisers, no line-ups" is their egalitarian motto. The monthly (or so) OMOH party takes place at the top of a decaying shopping centre built in 1926, the home of the infamous Corvin Club & Bar. This sprawling venue is wedged between the 7th district, renowned for its tourist-filled ruin bars, and the up-and-coming, working-class 8th district. "Lively, chaotic, and most definitely an architectural, urban and social war zone – not postcard material. Which fits our mindset perfectly." The right-wing parties who came to prominence across Central Europe – most prominently in Poland and Hungary – championed heteronormative, Christian, conservative, nationalist values, the resonance of which can be felt in places like OMOH: "Even if club owners and managers have no problem with the LGBTQI crowd, the organisers still have to deal with the suspicion of the staff and the regulars – to put it mildly. And our audience, quite frankly, is a division of brave little foot-soldiers claiming their share of an environment which is by no means a so-called safe space."

Auróra

About 10 minutes' walk from Blaha Lujza Square, deeper into the dimly lit streets of the 8th district, the increasingly gentrified inner-city "ghetto" which is also one of the most ethnically diverse and lively areas of Budapest, lies Auróra. Located in the street of the same name, Auróra is based in an inauspicious building – you will have to ring the bell in order to get in. This family house with a cosy garden has become an oasis of alternative culture and thinking in its purest sense. Aside from its music programming – which largely centres around the weekend – the space also provides offices to several NGOs such as Budapest Pride, Roma Press Center and DrugReporter, maintained by a platform called the Auróra HUB, which is funded from Auróra's profit. The genealogy of the space can be traced back to Sirály, a former squat located on one of the busiest commercial veins of the city, at Király St 50, which was shut down in 2013. Several activist groups and a few political parties emerged from the vaults of Sirály – one of which was the collective behind Auróra (another established Gólya, a venue also located in the 8th district). Auróra's music programming is diverse, and encompasses over 40 gigs per month, ranging from free jazz, techno and punk to experimental electronics – all of this without any official state support. "The political situation doesn't let us cooperate with culture-politics at all", say Auróra's Fanni Tóth, Áron Lukács and Zsuzsi Mekler. "You can see self-censorship, fear and unpredictability across cultural institutes all over Hungary. We think the only possible way to keep this platform of NGOs and the lively discussion about issues in our country alive is to run a social centre like this, totally independently."

RNR666

RNR666, or Rock'n'Roll 666, is a music community established in 2005 by three friends from rural eastern Hungary: Csühes Pali, Lavor and Szabo, whose backgrounds include music, art and fanzine publishing. Initially begun as online radio, the RNR666 RADIO SHOW, the group widened its activities to include concert organisation, online publishing and record releasing. Their collective spirit is marked by a fiercely DIY attitude and punk-inspired ethos. They began in the era of Myspace, which connected them to the global underground and the low-budget, so-called "food-flat-and-beer bands". 10 years later, not much has changed in terms of the frugality and DIY aspect of this scene. "Lots of the venues here don't care about the fact that you want to do small, but subculturally very important events, they are just interested in profit", says Lavor as we sit in Kék Ló, an improv venue/bar in the 8th district. These days, they might do one gig per month, largely due to the lack of resources, inviting mostly foreign bands – they have to finance everything from their own pockets. This is how they released their first 7-inch, a psychedelic garage rock split between Piresian Beach, the moniker of Budapest-based singer-songwriter Zsófia Németh – who is also a member of the collective – and JC Satán. Although event promotion has shifted to Facebook, they still make posters and spread the word IRL: "I still party six days a week, so I get to talk to people that way."

Farbwechsel

Farbwechsel is a truly glocal label based on friendship and personal connections, sourcing its roster almost exclusively from local talent and organically spreading the "Budapest sound" abroad. This happened largely thanks to acclaimed producers like Route 8, S Olbricht – who established the label with Bálint Zalkai aka Alpár in 2012 – Norwell and Imre Kiss, all of whom released their debut albums on Farbwechsel. You'll often find musicians associated with the imprint jamming in each other's bedrooms, sometimes perusing vintage hardware instruments borrowed from Zoltán Balla, an avid collector and member of Farbwechsel-signed project Wedding Acid Group. Even though several artists from the label's roster have gradually begun to release music on foreign labels such as Opal Tapes and Lobster Theremin, they remain faithful and committed to the imprint that brought them recognition, and they also organise regular events in Budapest. Their sonic aesthetic has been described mostly as lo-fi house, but that doesn't do them justice. There's a sense of ghostly melancholia and longing, perhaps an aural appropriation of their home city, a place constantly hovering somewhere between the past and the present. This is most prominent in Mikolai's work, which centres around the dancefloor and transgresses it at the same time. The label roster has become stable over the last five years, with names such as Saint Leidal The 2nd, Aiwa, S Olbricht, Norwell, SILF and Alpár.

Küss Mich

Küss Mich… and follow me to a gritty basement, where we'll dance to abandon and the music will elevate us beyond our physical selves, bodies sublimating in communal spirit. Küss Mich is a romantic event – romantic in its truest, least-saccharine sense. Founded in 2008 as an irregular DJ club event at the iconic drinking den/underground basement Vittula off Blaha Lujza Square, Küss Mich is a legendary night in the context of Budapest nightlife – a place that hailed eclecticism before it was in fashion and steered clear of the corrosive irony inherent in postmodern hipsterdom. Their sonic cocktail contains a blend of DIY-synthwave, punk, Italo disco, acid and industrial – in a concert or DJ format. "The motivation was to entertain ourselves. One of us had an industrial-dark-synth-punk background, the other came from techno and acid-oriented electronic dance music. We were both tired of the narrow-mindedness of these scenes", says Krisztián Puskár who also DJs under the moniker Splatter, one of the founders of Küss Mich alongside Gábor György alias Gördön. Adopting their outsider status and subverting expectations of the then-segregated music milieu, rediscovering past gems and presenting them alongside current sounds and bands, enabled them to navigate the muddy waters of contemporary music, aided by a devoted audience. "To choose a German name was pretty strange, fun and uncool back then. Now it's totally the opposite of that. German party and brand names will vanish or become out-of-vogue, but great people will still be there to do things on their own. And us too. If there is no money in it, there must be another motivation, right?"

JazzaJ

JazzaJ is a compound word combining "jazz" and "zaj" (which means "noise" in Hungarian). The event, which aims to bridge the free jazz and noise/experimental scenes, based on improvisation, was founded in 2011. "We wanted the noise musician to meet the free jazz musician. The underground rocker to meet the folk musician. The baroque player and the avant-garde music-philosopher to meet the electronic music geek", says Ernő Zoltán Rubik, one of the organisers of the event. Over the last five years it has grown into a communal gathering of discerning listeners, who welcome anything that JazzaJ offers them. "Listening is a creative act", adds Rubik. The main task that musicians who play at JazzaJ are given is to leave their comfort zones. "We believe in no style". Recently, JazzaJ began to invite musicians to be curators – each month a musician puts together the line-up, which sometimes creates rather interesting and surprising juxtapositions. This way, they've staged "hardcore-like nights" courtesy of Balázs Pándi, video operas with Miro Tóth, baroque and noise improvisation with Albert Márkos, and 12 saxophonists running around the room via Gergő Kovács. The JazzaJ community is sourced from the sprawling local scene, but remains tightly connected not only to neighbouring countries, but also the European and international scenes. "Our way of promoting improvisation as an act of freedom and tolerance, listening and presence, is already political without naming it so. There were times when we felt that for some people, this was a weekly refuge, a hideout from everyday cruelty and ignorant aggression taking place on social and political fields, or the streets." (photo: Attila Nagy)

T+U

T+U stands for Technologie und das Unheimliche, or the uncanny, the strangely familiar – that which repulses and attracts you at the same time. Established in 2014 as a publishing project and cross-disciplinary movement by Mark Fridvalszki, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z. Nemes, T+U is located somewhere between Berlin, Budapest and Leipzig. Their leitmotif is an exploration of the confrontation between the age-old dichotomy: the human condition – its various manifestations and cultures – and technology, through theme-based issues and events. Music plays an important role in their modus operandi. They have a regular radio show on legendary Tilos Rádio and create guest mixes, employing a specific sonic aesthetic that chimes with their ideology: dark, technoid, dystopian. Some of T+U's members have left Hungary for personal and political reasons. "Within the recent years, mostly due to the socially and morally harmful cultural politics of the current political establishment, there is less and less air for progressive art and subversive thoughts", says Zsolt Miklósvölgyi via email. "This catastrophic hedge-hop mainly caused by the anti-intellectualist, reactionary attitude of the ruling right-wing populist party and its substandard cultural myrmidons, obviously forces many of us into 'exile'. But within our techno-capitalist era, the image of 'living in exile' no longer means that you exchange one geo-cultural location for another, but you are in constant transition. You are not only characterised by the place you are from, but rather by the way you are rewriting these already-existing cognitive landscapes and cartographies."

Drrpnc

If you are a musician or into underground rock and extreme metal in Budapest, you will probably have passed through Keleti Blokk and the adjoining Dürer Club at some point. The sprawling complex neighbours the green oasis of the city park, whose integrity is threatened by a huge makeover that, for the foreseeable future, may replace much of the greenery with shiny concrete. Drrpnc is a secret cellar somewhere in the underbelly of the aforementioned space. A cross between a rehearsal room and a gig space, Drrpnc has become one of the city's most prominent havens for the punk/hardcore and extreme underground metal. Needless to say, the modus operandi of their activities is strictly DIY. "We have always had some challenges, such as leakage, electrical damage, etc., but the Hungarian scene is a community, so we can solve all of our problems through our common strength", says Adam Mjöl. The future remains uncertain. "This building, where we are now, will be probably demolished, so we have to start looking for a new place."

Davoria & Külvárosi Techno

The seeds of Davoria were sown around the year 2000. The collective began organising sound-system parties in the summer, as part of the then-thriving freetekno scene and its annual summer teknival gatherings. Ever since their beginnings they have always been part of both worlds – throwing events at regular clubs as well as the outdoor, illegal parties. These days, Davoria's monthly events take place at Müszi (situated in the 8th district at the aforementioned Corvin shopping mall), a space for alternative culture that also includes the offices of the civil watchdog Atlatszo.hu, as well as Auróra. The sonic identity of the event remains faithful to their beginnings: hardcore techno, noise and experimental electronics. "We call our parties tekno, because we feel that this term is open enough to represent different kinds of genres, from tekno to experimental music", explains Davoria organiser Péter Márton, who also produces uncompromising techno (or tekno) and noise under the respective monikers Telesport and Prell. Davoria also host a stage at the now-legendary underground techno event Külvárosi Techno (Suburban Techno), which takes place several times a year in the industrial premises of the large studio space and now-defunct venue R33. Ideologically, their stance hasn't changed over the last fifteen years. "We try to show that even in a commercial world, you are capable of doing productive, good things while keeping your freedom."

Originally published in Glissando magazine #30

Lucia Udvardyova

#Davoria #Budapest #OMOH #RNR666 #Jazzaj #T+U #Farbwechsel #S Olbricht #Aurora #Uh Fest #Kuss Mich

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badbackgroundscience · 8 years ago

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The Science of Eurovision 2017

The 62nd Eurovision Song Content (ESC) is taking place this May in Kiev. All 43 participating countries have submitted their songs and the corresponding music videos/live performances are available for viewing/listening on the ESC’s official YouTube channel. Feel free to watch them at your leisure if you haven’t. Though if you’re reading this, you’ve likely seen some of them by now. (You could also be completely ignorant about the ESC and are reading this without having a clue what I’m talking about.)

The competition aside, I was listening to one of the songs – Cyprus’s Gravity – and my science!nerd brain had a tangential thought on the opening stanzas: “No matter where you’re going / Now matter where you’ll be / Wherever the wind is blowing / Let me be your gravity“. That thought was that any object with mass exerts a gravitational field – though for non-astronomical bodies (like humans) it’s super duper weak. And a gravitational field exists through all of space, though getting weaker as the distance between the two bodies increases. So, the singer Hovig is already a source of gravity for this anonymous other person (wind blowing or not).

This thought, of course, led to one more general: Can you turn Eurovision lyrics into mini science lessons?

Let me see what I can come up with.

The songs...or at least 9 of them (Edit: 8 of which made it through the semi-finals. Sorry, Montenegro.)

Fly With Me (Armenia – Artsvik)

Lyrics: “Wanna tell a story / About a girl with history Take it from my heart it’s gonna be your beat“

Science tangent: Ignoring what ‘it’ is in the lyrics, can one human’s heartbeats affect those of another?

A 2013 study of 32 heterosexual couples (mostly white & between 20-40 years old) found that, when sat a few feet away from each other and told to “mimic each other” (but not speak), their heart rates and breathing synchronized – usually the women’s patterns changing to match the man’s. Non-coupled pairs did not synchronize under the same conditions.

A 2011 study collected heart rates for 12 male fire-walkers and 26 onlookers – both relatives/friends of the walker (9) and visitors unrelated to anyone in the village (17). The heart rates of fire-walkers and relations spiked at the same time (a sensation called “synchronized arousal”); spectators not connected to the walker did not spike at all. (The heart rates themselves didn’t match, but they increased/decreased at roughly the same time). Basically, your own stress symptoms (well, at least your increased heart rate) can be transmitted to those watching you, but ‘only’ if they know you.

Don’t Come Easy (Australia – Isaiah)

Lyrics: “And if you think I’ve got a heart of stone you couldn’t be more wrong”

Science tangent: Can one actually develop a heart of stone

Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP for short) is a very rare disease caused by a genetic mutation that affects the body’s connective tissues (including muscle, but also tendon and ligament). When damaged, the body doesn’t repair them correctly – instead, they ossify. That is, they turn into bone (So, not stone exactly, but mineralized). Joints eventually fuse together, and the condition will become so severe that the victim is locked inside their body, struggling to breathe; individuals with FOP usually die around the age of 40 or so, assuming they don’t suffer horrible trauma that accelerates the ossification rate drastically. There’s no known cure.

However, the ossification doesn’t affect everything; cardiac muscles are one of the exceptions. (Others include the diaphragm, tongue, and muscles that move the eyes.) So no heart of ‘stone’.

Running On Air (Austria – Nathan Trent)

Science tangent: How might one run on air?

Aerogel is a synthetic material that – as its name might imply – is made from a gel and air. It’s basically the most extreme version of styrofoam you can think of, and is nicknamed “Frozen Smoke”. ‘Cause that’s what it looks like.

Aerogel is about 98% air, an amazing thermal insulator, and (structurally) amazingly strong. Here’s 2 grams of the stuff supporting a brick over 1000x the weight:

It might not be able to support the downward force of a running foot, but if you wore shoes large enough to distribute your weight over a larger surface area, you could totally run on 98% air.

Skeletons (Azerbaijan – Dihaj)

Lyrics: “The world is spinning faster by the minute”

Science tangent: Is the world spinning faster than it was last minute?

Short answer: In general, no. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Less short answer: The Earth’s average rate of rotation (and therefore the length of each day) is slowing down because of the Moon’s gravity. Why? Currently, it takes the Earth less time to complete one rotation than it does the Moon to complete one revolution around the Earth. So, like an uncooperative child grabbing onto their faster-walking parent, the Moon’s gravity is constantly tugging on the Earth – the entire planet, not just the water (causing tides) – slowly slowing down its spin. The length of an Earth day is slowing by about 0.002 seconds every century.

However, on a much smaller scale, the speed of the Earth’s rotation can both speed up and slow down due to factors other than the Moon’s tidal pull. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake sped up rotation by about 0.003 seconds. Anything that redistributes mass can change how fast the planet spins – the melting of large ice structures, the drifting of continents, a mysterious flowing subsurface layer like the mantle…even something as mundane as the water cycle (water evaporating, moving in large masses better known as clouds by wind to new locations, and raining down…).

Gravity (Cyprus – Hovig) - I already stated some thoughts on this above, but here’s a little more detail

Lyrics: “No matter where you’re going / No matter where you’ll be / Wherever the wind is blowing / Let me be your gravity”

Science Tangent: Can a human be a source of gravity for another human being?

To calculate the gravitational force between any two massive bodies (“massive” meaning they have mass – not that they’re large. A single atom is massive…), you’d use Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation:

F = G×M1×M2 ÷ r2 G: 6.67×10-11 m3/(kg·s2), known as the “Gravitational constant” M1: mass of object 1 (in kg) M2: mass of object 2 (in kg) r: distance between object 1 and 2’s centers of mass (in m)

Because G is so small (0.0000000000667), it takes a lot of mass before gravity is noticeable. For 2 human beings (70 kg each) standing 1 meter apart, the force would be 0.000000327 Newtons. The Earth exerts a force of 686 Newtons on each human – about 2.1 billion times stronger a pull.

If the Earth weren’t in the picture – that is, if we plopped Hovig and his partner in the void of interstellar space (say, 2 lightyears from the Sun) – the gravitational force between them would be stronger than the gravity from any other astronomical body. Assuming they were plopped there with no starting velocities, they’d both very slowly start falling toward each other.

That’s an important part I sort of glossed over, earlier – gravity is never one-way. You exert the exact same amount of gravitational force on the entire Earth that the Earth does on you, but in the opposite direction. Hovig’s partner is equally his gravity.

Origo (Hungary – Jaci Pápai)

Lyrics: “You knew my eyes were brown / And they will never change” (Originally “Tudtad barna a szemem / Sosem változik bennem”)

Science tangent: Can you change your eye colour (ignoring coloured contacts)?

Human eye colour is determined by a couple of factors. The first is the colour of the iris itself – determined by the amount of a pigment (mostly melanin, equivalent but not identical to the melanin that affects skin color). This pigmentation ranges from light brown to black (not blue/green/etc.), except in those with albinism where there’s no pigmentation at all. It’s regulated by genetics. The second is how light is scattered within a layer of the iris called the stroma.

Blue: dark under layer + little pigment in stroma – redder light is absorbed by the former and bluer light gets scattered in the latter

Grey: dark under layer + little pigment in stroma. It’s unknown exactly why they’re not blue, but it might be similar to how having more water in the atmosphere makes the sky look grey instead of its usual blue (though here it’s not water, but having larger versions of the protein collagen in the stroma). You can read more here.

Brown: lots of melanin in both

Green: low to moderate pigmentation in the stroma (melanin + the yellowish lipochrome), so scattering still occurs

Many babies with European ancestry are born with blue eyes, but cells in the eyes start producing melanin after birth and the color slowly darkens. Changes in hormones – for example as a result of puberty or pregnancy – can also theoretically alter one’s eye colour, as can physical injury or disease. This study(done on twins) found that 18.2% of hazel/light brown-eyed and 16.2% of brown-eyed white subjects had lighter eyes as an adult than when they were 6 years old. Also, 11% of their mothers had their irises change colour (either direction).

Cosmetic surgeries can artificially change the colour of your eyes, like shooting a laser into the iris to get it to slough off some of its melanin-laden tissue so a brown eye appears bluer (This is not currently available, still undergoing study for both efficacy and safety). Or you could get a coloured disk (an artificial iris) inserted into your eyeball (I’m cringing just typing this…Also, what about the whole hole over the pupil not being able to change size?)

I Feel Alive (Israel – IMRI)

Lyrics: “Walking through the stars”

Science tangent: How long would it take you, traveling at a velocity equivalent to a walking pace (5 kph), to travel from one star to another?

Obviously this depends on the distance between stars. If IMRI wants to go from our solar system to the next star over – Proxima Centauri – it would take about 8 trillion hours, or about 9 billion years. However, Proxima Centauri (a red dwarf only about 13% the size of our Sun) is part of a trinary star system along with Alpha Centauri A (a star just a bit larger than our own Sun) and Alpha Centauri B (a star a bit smaller than the Sun). So they’re all much closer together to each other than they are to other stars in the neighborhood. To the naked eye, stars A and B appear as a single star in the night sky (Proxima Centauri isn’t visible); they orbit one another, so the distance between them varies. At their closest – roughly the same distance as Saturn is from the Sun – it would take IMRI about 38,000 years to ‘walk’ from α Cen A to α Cen B.

The binary system whose ‘stars’ are the closest together (at least currently known) is the catalogue-ly named RX J0806.3+1527. They’re super dense stellar remnants (i.e. white dwarfs) only about 80,000 km apart – that’s a fifth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon! (They orbit each other every 5 minutes.) If you’re willing to extend your definition of “stars” to include the cores of dead ones, this is the best chance IMRI’s got. It’d take him less than 2 years to walk from one to the other.

Setting lone pairs of stars aside, very large clusters of stars also exist. They come in two flavours: globular clusters (spherical in shape, found mostly outside of the galactic disk, and in general the oldest objects in the galaxy) and open clusters (in which the stars are less bound to each other and generally less dense (and with fewer stars) save an optional small core of stars). This is one of the densest clusters we know of, globular Messier 75, packing the light of 180,000 Suns into a sphere of radius 67 lightyears:

Globular cluster cores can pack as many as 1000 stars per cubic parsec of space (1 pc = 3.26 ly), about 1000 times more concentrated than our own stellar neighborhood.

At the very center of the Milky Way, there are as many as 10 million stars packed into a single cubic parsec. At that density, if we made a sphere around the Sun with the Alpha Centauri system sitting on the edge, there’d be 96 million stars inside it. Each star would only be about 20 billion km from the next…which would still take over 450,000 years to walk between each.

Space (Montenegro – Slavko Kalezić)

Lyrics (there’s a whole bunch of references to space): “Let’s soar through the Milky Way”

Science tangent: How far through the Milky Way could you get in a human lifetime?

Assuming you are traveling through regular space (i.e. not using wormholes – which are technically still theoretical – or a fancy futuristic technology that allows you to warp space or travel outside of our established dimensions of space), the fastest anything can go is ~300 billion meters per second (about 1 billion kph). This is the fundamental speed limit of the universe, and the speed that light travels in a vacuum. We define the distance lightyear as the length light can travel in a vacuum over one Earth year. The Milky Way is very roughly 100,000 lightyears in diameter.

The average lifespan for a male from Montenegro is 74.1. Slavko was born in 1985, leaving him 42.63 years of travel time, assuming he starts right now. While no object with mass can travel at the speed of light (It would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate that object to that speed), we can accelerate particles to 99.999999% the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider. Obviously a human being isn’t the same as a single subatomic particle, but let’s ignore that for the purposes of this thought exercise and pretend Slavko and partner can go this fast, too.

Traveling that fast invokes Special Relativity – specifically, time dilation. Slavko and his partner’s body clocks would slow down, meaning that they’ll actually be able to travel further than 42.63 lightyears before dying. In fact, traveling at 99.999999% the speed of light would slow their perception of the passage of time by a factor of over 9000 7000. They’d be able to traverse over 300,000 lightyears in the remainder of their lifetimes. So yeah, they totally could ‘soar’ through a section of the Milky Way – but once they returned to Earth everyone else they knew and everyone they knew would have been dead for hundreds of thousands of years.

The fastest humans ever were the three crewmen of Apollo 10 on return from the Moon, hitting 39,897 kph. At that speed, Slavko and company would only make it 15 billion km in their (approximate) lifetimes, which while far beyond the orbit of Pluto is still inside the Solar System.

Bonus Lyrics: “I have my suit on, no need to worry”

Yes you do. Accidents happen. Equipment fails and suits tear.

Astronaut Luca Parmitano almost drowned inside his suit after water (used for cooling) started leaking into his helmet while performing a spacewalk.

There’s also the threat of micrometeorites – flecks of dust traveling at tens of thousands of kph that still have enough energy to chip a helmet, exposing your body to the vacuum of space. (Luckily, this has not happened to anyone…)

Don’t forget large radiation doses coming from stars, pulsars, etc.

Flashlight (Poland – Kasia Moś)

Lyrics: “Running faster at the speed of light”

Science tangent: Can you ‘run’ at the speed of light?

Only massless particles can travel at the speed of light in a vacuum (that 300 billion number I threw at you earlier), but light doesn’t always travel at that speed. Through any other medium, photons slow down, for the same reason that you’d slow down if you had to smash into a bunch of stuff as you ran between two locations. Back in the late 90’s researchers at the Rowland Institute for Science slowed light down to a whopping 17 meters per second (Not exactly running speed, but about 20 million times slower than it had been going) by sending it through a special ‘extreme’ phase of matter known as a “Bose-Einstein Condensate” – lots of atoms packed together at billionths of a degree above absolute zero and almost vacuum pressure which start acting more like a single superatom. A 2009 paper shows that light was slowed to 10 m/s and also “stored” (effectively stopped) inside a BEC for over 1 second.

If the person running was Usain Bolt – who holds the record for fastest footspeed – 12.4 m/s – and everything was timed correctly so he hit his maxish speed as the pulse of light were entering the BEC, then yes, ‘you’ can run faster than the speed of light.

#tv #eurovision 2017 #eurovision #esc 2017

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