#break time is sleep time and i am under no obligation to remain productive

[headphonemouse]

Left my bag at home and even though I don't draw anything during the day not having the OPTION to was suffocating

[alien-shark]

ZoTash prompt/one-shot: JEALOUSY

Echoes of what appears to be sparring shouts reverberate from the training grounds and soon, a surge of female Marine soldiers flood the halls. What used to be a serene area was now abuzz with gleeful exuberant cheers, their attention aimed at the other five female soldiers surrounding a lone shirtless green haired man at the centre of the training ground. Shinai swords drawn and pointed at their single adversary.

Tashigi, curious at the commotion, followed along the queue of female soldiers lining the perimeter of the ground, “What’s going on?” she asked, sipping at her coffee.

“He’s doing it. He’s sparring with them again!” A female soldier beamed, her eyes glued at the subject of interest.

Standing on her tiptoes, the Marine captain watch as the female soldiers consecutively charge at the man. But with a quick side step, parry, deflect and strikes on the shoulder, behind the knee and hip, each soldiers were disarmed and collapse on the dirt, one after another.

The spectators cheered and some groaned on behalf of their fallen comrades. On refusing to yield, one soldier latched on a nearby shinai and swiped at the man’s leg only for the weapon to shatter upon impact with his own.

“Too slow.” He sighed, disappointed. Spinning his head around, “You are all too slow.”

A wave of excited whispers, some of obscenities, rippled through the crowd.

“Your grasp on your swords are too flimsy! Even a kid can disarm you.” He pauses and releases yet another disgruntled sigh. “And you’re leaving too much opening! Do you have a death wish?! If I used real swords, you’d all be dead!” He turned to a soldier on the ground and offered his hand, she accepts reluctantly but hauls herself up with his help.

“The battle isn’t over until you’re dead.” He growled. “Till then, get your ass up and try again!”

Roronoa Zoro returned in the middle of the field, two bamboo swords drawn on his sides.  His eyes scan the crowd, “Who’s up next?”

Female Marines race and scrambled to try their luck at him, beaming and professing determined shouts.

---

Captain Tashigi narrows her eyes, irritated that her fellow Marine soldiers- especially ones under Vice Admiral Tsuru’s squadron- are so easily swayed by Roronoa’s simple display of swordsmanship. But her resentment only doubled upon realizing that while she goes and makes herself a cup of coffee to begin the day, the man was already in the heat of his training.

While Roronoa trains the female Marines; observing them with a critical eye as they do drills and correct any mistakes and praise any improvements as they spar with one another, Tashigi decides to train with other soldiers who remained wary of the pirate. But it wasn’t long until Tashigi found herself training alone in their usual spot. She discovered her fellow officers figured Roronoa’s teachings yield very effective results.

And so she was alone, much to her disappointment.

Dinner proved tougher to endure when all she hears are praises aimed at Roronoa, how his outlandish teachings opened up new possibilities in their training immensely enhancing their skills.

“He’s truly a great swordsman! Glad he’s an ally now!” A soldier announced cheerfully.

“And he’s surprisingly such a decent guy too!”

“Right?! And he’s gentle and kind!”

“Have you seen that body?”

They giggle. Tashigi stands to leave.

A tremendous divide among the Marines occurred when the highly influential Vice Admirals finally roused and saw the errors of the entire Marines’ belief. It began with Smoker’s G-5 unit followed by Vice Admiral Garp, Vice Admiral Sengoku and most recently, Vice Admiral Tsuru.

Tashigi started as a grunt in Tsuru’s squad. Her skills earned her respect and praise among her superiors and popularity among the entire female Marine soldiers. Her rapid growth caused her to be transferred under Smoker’s wing in Loguetown. Yet to this day, she would return and spend some time with her previous crew. She considered this her place of solitude, a break from her testosterone infested infantry. It was a breath of fresh air to be around fellow female soldiers and they were always glad to have her back even for a short period.

However, the Marine/Pirate integration has altered her previous comrades regard towards her. (Roronoa and three of his nakamas: Nico Robin, The God-Usopp and The Soul King, temporarily stays on the island under Tsuru’s watch for Nico Robin to decipher a poneglyph. Which explains why and how the pirate is within their vicinity.) Now, the female soldiers’ attention has long abandoned Tashigi and are directed at Roronoa, much like the G-5.

“Give it to him! I bet he’ll love it!” A soldier nudged her companion.

“I hope so. He did say he loves quality sake.”

“Haha! He’ll fall head over heels for you!”

“W-what?! No.. I just wish to thank him..!” The other soldier blushed.

Soon, things took a sudden turn. An ample amount of female soldiers developed a budding infatuation towards the man. Tashigi couldn’t contain her hackles from rising when one evening, during a bonfire, another soldier gifted Roronoa sake. He drank and celebrated with them for yet another productive day. As Tashigi observes the exchange, she notices Roronoa smile almost slyly towards the gushing female Marines. Her suspicions towards the man intensifies. He was still a pirate after all. Tashigi witnessed the vulgar glances Black Leg and The Soul King displays when around women. Who’s to say Roronoa is different? She knows nothing about the man.

That very night, she confronted him. When finally he was alone, walking groggily through the empty streets, she blocked his path.

“Roronoa, a word, please.” She gestured to an empty alley.

“If you need private lessons, you’re gonna have to wait for two days.” He smiles. “I’m a busy man. Tonight’s not a good ti—”

“I know what game you’re playing, pirate!” Tashigi interjects. “You may blind the others with your swordplay but not me.”

Immediately, the pirate’s drunken stupor evaporated and he stares unblinking. But Tashigi refused to falter.

“If you’re training them just to create your little ‘fan-club’ or to invite them in your bed, I will not ask you again, please stop. These are prominent honourable women and some are already developing feelings-- bonds to you deeper than they intended. Feelings I doubt a pirate such as you even have. Whatever dark intentions you have planned, abandon it if you still wish to see the light of day.” She stepped closer and jabbed a finger on his chest. “Respect these women or I will make you.”

Roronoa stares at the finger on his chest and slowly creeps his gaze towards the woman.

“I always wondered why you never attend the training. I thought it was just your stubborn pride that makes you lurk behind the trees, watching from a distance.”

For the first time, Tashigi hesitates and draws her hand back.

“So this is how you still see me.” He narrows his eyes at her, as realization hits. “I trained your soldiers because they asked me to. I won’t apologize for my actions.  I am not responsible for the feelings your soldiers harbour towards me neither will I apologize for how you interpret my actions towards them. That’s on you. I’ve never disrespected your soldiers in any way and I never intend to. I only wish to help… because-”

He takes a deep breath. “This may be empty words to you but… I feel obliged- I had a friend—,” Roronoa paused, dropping his gaze to the ground.

His voice suddenly grows quieter, jittery. “I wanted to prove to her… wherever she is I—I want to prove that women can be strong and capable of so much more. At first I didn’t believe it was possible.” He meets her eyes, his own glassy under the moonlight.

“Then you came along and changed my mind. How you handle yourself and radiate that irritating confidence and headstrong determination that affects the people around you. You made me realize that women are capable of so much more. And I want to help even in the smallest way. I want to prove to her that she was wrong for thinking so little of herself because of her gender.”

Roronoa hardens his gaze and almost doubles in size as he straightens himself, towering over the Marine captain. “But she’s dead. And she will never know. And I guess it’s too late for it now. And the person who opened up my mind to the possibilities and gave me hope continues to view me as a petty low-life. And whatever ounce of help I provided in the end didn’t matter.”

The man shakes his head and before stepping around her says, “What do I know? Pirates don’t have feelings, right?”

That night, Tashigi couldn’t sleep. Roronoa’s words cut her deeper than any wound inflicted in battle. How petty and shallow of her to view Roronoa in this light.

His late friend… Of course. How could she forget? When will she ever see beyond herself? She was insecure, blinded by her weakness. Jealousy remains to be her biggest vice, the wall that prevents her from moving forward- the gap between their abilities. She was right about one thing however, she knows nothing about the man.

The following days, Roronoa stopped showing up at the training grounds and began training somewhere else, alone, and refused to train and spar with the female soldiers, however he allowed them to watch.

“Could we have been too much for him?” A soldier during lunch muttered weakly.

“Maybe our progress was too slow he got impatient.”

“Ugh. I shouldn’t have pushed him to try our family’s sake.”

“Face it, ladies. The man didn’t see anything special and probably got bored.” Another stirred at her lunch dully. “He’s still a pirate. Open your legs at him and he might—”

“He’s not like that!” Tashigi snapped. All eyes on her. Upon realizing her outburst has generated attention she wasn’t used to, she trembled and cast her eyes down. “Roronoa is… a lot of things. But he’s not like that.”

She quickly dislodge herself from the predicament. She needed to find the man- for the sake of the Marines. But more importantly give him the apology he deserved. She cannot allow her frivolous mistake sever the unity between Marines and pirates. Tashigi could not locate him that evening so she woke up early the next day and luckily found him in his new training spot, surrounded by female soldiers urging him for a spar.

Tashigi apprehensively stepped closer into his area. A twitch of his eye suggest he’s aware of her presence.

“Roronoa, please… please train them again.” She whispers and hopes he hears amidst his grunts and loud thrusts of his sword.

“They can train themselves.” He grunts.

“They can.” She swipes a quick glance at the inquisitive soldiers. “But they prefer your guidance. They enjoy your company.”

“They’ve trained without my supervision long before I arrived in the island. They don’t need me.”

“Roronoa, please-“

“No.”

Before her tears threaten to spill, Tashigi knelt down and pressed her forehead on the ground and bowed deeply before the man.

“I apologize for every malicious words I insinuated. You didn’t deserve the accusations. I was wrong. It was unjust- I was,” She bit her lip and forced the trembling words out, “— ignorant. I figured my misplaced vigilance for my fellow Marines only causes harm than good. And I realize my accusations reflected more about my insecurities than of your character.”

The thrusting of sword stopped and louder whispers emanate from the growing onlookers.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I only wish for you to know how deeply I regret my misdemeanour.” She sobbed. “Please do not punish them because of the lapses in my judgement. Roronoa… Roronoa-san, it would be an honour to gain your insights.”

Tashigi took a deep breath and lifted her head slightly, “Please train them—train us!!”

“Tashigi-san…” Echoes of her name ran through the crowd but she refused to lift her head.

A surge of delight rushed through the swordsman’s chest and instantly felt an entire lightness of being, as if the overbearing weight he’s been carrying the last couple of days was lifted off his chest and he was engulfed with unexpected satisfaction. A single apology from the woman would have suffice, but this almost evaporated every affliction he’d ever experience. Had this happen months ago, he would have a quip to counter, instead he clears his throat,

“Then what are you waiting for? Grab your shinai. We’re losing daylight!”

Tashigi finally raised her head, face coated in watery dirt but she didn’t care. Altogether, the entire female Marine squadron exclaimed, “Haiii!!”.

----

Apologies for going over the word count! I hope this was worth your time! 

[chefjarredjarred]

Anxiety. (excerpt)

People. “They're the worst,” Jerry once concurred with Elaine. And they are.

So I didn't really want a job as a verification specialist for a background check company,  making a hundred phone calls a day to anywhere in the country, but there was a time when it was a job I needed; it was remote so I could do it from my living room, it supplemented my main income from cooking and barbacking, and I was allowed to adjust my own schedule around that other work and my Tuesday morning therapy sessions.

But Jesus Christ, the people: the combative, the confused, the cavalier, the crotchety; the mousy, the crazy, the stupid, the lazy; the disgruntled, the bitter, the hateful, the bossy; the scammers, the liars, the paranoid; the unintelligible, or, through no fault of their own, the foreign; the mouth breathers, the assholes; the fast food workers, who are always a grab bag. I got them all, every day. And just one nice old lady from Florida, Ms. Charlene.

I got the job in part by cherry-picking some of my old chef experience and molding it all up into a wad of passable bullshit in the interview. Not lies, you know, just bullshit. I sold the personal importance of always speaking concisely and effectively, and of remaining cool and courteous and logical even when being angrily berated by the most ignorant, disrespectful know-nothings. Okay, so that one tiny lie. I made no mention of smashing saucers, slinging sheet pans, or every chef's favorite, smiting servers. (But come on, FOH, y'all know when you're asking for it.) I gave no indication that my rage, anxiety, and feelings of undeserved victimhood and exhaustion were a nest of coiled snakes, something every person who has ever worked in a kitchen around me could sense. Do your job, leave the attitude outside the kitchen doors, and speak only of pith and pertinence during service. Don't fuck with me, don't get fanged.

A bartender I worked with for years once called me unapproachable. It was in the same breath that she called me a dick, proving that the robotic personality of feigned professionalism and phony positivity (every company has their Stepford Wives, don't they?) on which she prided herself—loathed by so many in the restaurant—could be cracked, and I loved that I had been the one to do it. But the part about being a dick wasn't a bold quotable. My being unapproachable became a favorite running joke for years, perverted and perpetuated by me. Y'all think I'm unapproachable? I am. Fuck off.

But that's truncated, for effect and time. Fuck off, I have a job to do, is the real, full statement, and a linchpin tenet of my style of cheffing. I don't need loud voices, loud noises, disrespect, emotional clouding, confusion, excuses, etc., or that irritable anxiety snake could be disturbed. “Just the facts, ma'am.” There's just no time for the extraneous.

Don't disrupt the flow of food.

That's the principle I emphasized in the interview, just folded into the bullshit wad that made it applicable to phoning idiotic, ornery strangers—and Ms. Charlene. Obviously, I had to omit the venom, violence, viciousness, the vitriol. There was already a tiny stumble in there when the interviewer asked if I would describe myself as an introvert, and I, being honest to a fault at the most inappropriate moments, confessed that I would.

“You do know what this job is, right?”

I actually didn't, right up until about two seconds before that question, but I recovered gracefully, explaining some crap about being able to turn on the smiles and pleasantries when I meant business, something like that.

Fake smiles. Ugh. God dammit. I actively campaign against them. A fake smile is the opposite of Fuck off, of the pith and pertinence, the order and efficiency I expected, of just the facts. It's a capitulation, a white flag.

You know what I absolutely hate more than people? The expectation that I'm obligated to give them a fake smile. It's a banner that says you're willing to accept the extraneous, the unexpected, that whatever they are about to say and the way they will say it has some compelling power over you, and that you have all the time in the world to stand there and graciously let it be unloaded onto you. That your anxiety is not there and not real.

That you are approachable.

Fake smiles are blood in the water. That's right, when it goes from snakes to sharks.

“What we always say here is 'Smile and dial!'”

It was a virtual interview, and he couldn't see or hear my feet double-kick-drumming the floor. But what he did hear and what I couldn't believe was the fake laugh I forced through my fake smile. Jesus, Jarred, you're escalating? Allowance is support. “Sure, sure,” I said, as if I were a lifelong brown-noser. You're a disgrace.

“If you can run a kitchen, I have no doubt that you can do this.”

I didn't either. That's misinformation, that anxiety is simply fear. I wasn't afraid I would fail (literally anyone, barring anxiety, can be a verification “specialist”). In fact, I was totally confident I could succeed...theoretically. He said it: If I could run a kitchen, I could do this. The things that worried me were the scheduling, sleeping, caffeinating, eating, speaking, putting on my fake personality with my fake smile, and juggling and maintaining it all every day without falter, without letting on that there was any internal difficulty. I worried not about my actual job performance, but how I might struggle to simultaneously perform and hide my character flaws, i.e. the stuff that I left hanging out in the open when I was a chef. Does that make any sense?

Anxiety, not fear.

So the job was simple, but not easy, and there was a lot to make an anxious person anxious: the people, of course; the never-ending flood of calls; the quick navigating of the system when someone backpedaled or said something inaccurate or swung their mood in an instant; the software glitches; the hold music. Every second of the workday, even your coffee-caused poop break, was timed and factored in to your production average. You were judged and graded by making a ton of calls and/or closing as many cases as you could, which sounds fine, but is actually decided by chance more than some mathematical guarantee. That angered me the most, watching my closes and “touches” tabulated throughout the day, working against each other, my percentage of success being stretched thinner and thinner as I piled up calls that became mere touches rather than closes. It was the opposite of what we really wanted, and the secret little opposite of what we were trained to believe. The pessimist in me knew that the given goals were just out of reach, of course, so we would unknowingly meet the real goals and feel worthless at the end of the day, like we hadn't done enough. The realist in me hated the pretending that we had any control over it. The fatalist in me knew that it didn't matter, but could not force the crippled, anxious existentialist in me to just shut the fuck up.

...Oh, there is no optimist in here, if you were waiting for it.

I knew the fatalist was right after a sweet, timid childcare worker put me on hold to find something useful for me, which would only be a different number or a different person or, if life were easy, the name of a recognized third party verification website. This was 10:40 in the morning, in my first hour of the workday that was already a little too unfruitful. I watched the timer tick away, and when she returned, she had found...an unrecognized third party verification website. That meant I had to type a message into our Teams chat to request a supervisor's review and approval to put the name of the website in the little box and move to the next call.

Eight minutes had now passed as I waited for an answer. I had let the worker, Taylor, hang up already so she could get her eyes back on what wild heathens she may have had under her watch. It was a personal rule of mine to never hold restaurant workers or childcare workers hostage on the phone, because their work was more important than mine. I thought about the time my mom came to pick me up from one of these daycare facilities, walking in at the same time as another little boy's father, together to catch the perfect and precise moment that I socked that boy right across his jaw with full force, superhero super-spinning into that punch in defiance of his superior strength and grip of my head as he had tried to slam my skull into a wooden shelf for a second time. We were bloody, snotty, and sweaty in the throes of killer instinct, but I still caught the looks of horror on our parents' faces. Why the fistfight happened, I don't remember, but how? Well, because someone who was supposed to be paying attention, wasn't. Kids will go feral and push the boulder on Piggy as soon as your back is turned. I let Taylor off the phone for that reason. I waited for a supervisor's response in the chat, watching the seconds count on and that first hour, and thus the rest of my day and any hope of average achievement, drift away from me. They told me the site was no good and I needed to call poor Taylor back and try again. I sighed, copied the number and clicked the button, explained to her what was happening, and with real politeness she placed me, again, on hold. She came back with a phone number but the same uncertainty.

But in the chat, a supervisor had offered another phone number, different from what I was now taking down on the call. I was urged to try that one instead, so I let Taylor go back to the children a final time, and made my third phone call of the case. An automated message finally pointed me to a recognized third party verification website, and gave the particular employer code needed to access it. The anxiety snake and the rage snake were waking and knotted. I clicked the Other Automated Method button...and the system skipped on to complete the case, without letting me input the website or the code. “No, hell no.” I backed up and tried again. Same result, the skip. I went back to the chat and explained, and typed “Can someone please help me before my head explodes” with no punctuation.

A supervisor called me, and I shared my screen with her. “Let's see what happ—Oh, the client put it on hold, so just exit. It doesn't matter.”

It doesn't matter.

11:01. One close, 13 touches. I was white hot.

The anxiety, the rage, the pessimism, realism, fatalism, the whole nest of snakes was awake and wiggling, tossing, tangling themselves up like a... Well, you know. Like a rubber-band ball. I violently ripped the headset off of me, pushing breath through my teeth like the snarling little Jarred who punched that stupid kid in the mouth in the daycare brawl. I thought about that famed image of the snake eating its tail, whatever it's called. I thought about quitting. I thought about how two days before, my therapist and I had tried to come up with a suitable and available grounding technique I could try to prevent this exact, inevitable moment, this kind of anxiety attack. I thought about telling her how I thought that I was failing at everything. You're a disappoi— Shut the fuck up, Jarred—

It doesn't matter? I thought about that, that every moment of the day was part of the calculation of my performance grade for something ultimately shrugged off. That I spent 20 fucking minutes wasting my fucking time to get something that doesn't fucking matter but earns for me a judgment as if it does fucking matter.

But I thought about how I needed that little bit of extra money, and the other reasons for seeking and taking the job. Breathe, Jarred.

And that was not an isolated incident. Every day I fought for the energy and will to tether myself with the headset, log in, and hear the first ring. It came immediately, every single morning. I'd close my eyes and siiiigh through that first ring, just before being snatched along and pummeled by the frenzy.

I tried earnestly the smile-and-dial one time. I felt like Nicolas Cage in one of those especially wacky scenes of Face/Off. A total psycho, unhinged.

The calls were recorded and scrutinized, for quality and legality, and a handful a month were sent back to me to review whatever I had done wrong, or what I could do better.

Ah, yes. So there was another itchy, irritating thread of anxiety even on the less violent days.

Do you ever hear your own recorded voice and you hate yourself and wish you had never been born? Yeah, me too. So I only ever listened to one call and that was enough of that. I didn't want to hear myself. That voice wasn't mine, it was some cartoon-like, nasally Billy Bob Thornton's voice, reverberating somewhere way up high in the sinuses.

A hundred calls a day is a lot of talking. I began obsessing over how I pronounce—among many other things—the number four. There were fours everywhere, embedded, like chocolate chips in cookie dough, throughout almost every case number, and in our callback number I had to recite on dozens of voicemails per day. I wondered if I could trust my own ears in hearing the way I would say it, or if in reality I sounded like I was four. Fohwuh. Every day I ran this mental gamut of self-critique and insult, concentrating insanely on the most minute and deliberate flicks and curls of my tongue and lips. Any word becomes weirdly unnatural when you pay such specific attention to it. But I put so much (too much) effort into working on a competent phone voice not only so I wouldn't sound like a jackass, but so I could be efficient in my work and thus keep up with the production quota. I needed 20 touches an hour, not 13, so I needed people to understand me so I could get in, get out, and get on the next call. My strategy was to try and emulate the radio voice of Christopher Kimball—polite, proper, pronounced, professional. In my dirty pajamas, sitting on a lumpy pillow on a hand-me-down office chair as it was clawed to pieces by my screaming cats, I wanted to sound like I was wearing a bow tie. Like I was in a real office without cats, with a real college degree framed proudly on the wall. Polished and prepared.

It's hard work, if you can imagine. I'm not a talker. I don't like strangers. They're unpredictable. Any unexpected wrench in the routine could prove how fragile the facade is, that I'm actually a wobbly stack of quivering, anxious gremlins pretending to be a presentable person in, I guess, an imaginary bow tie.

It's hard work, if you'll let me say that again. But I thought I was doing pretty well. I hadn't cussed anyone out and I hadn't hurled the computer through the window, at least.

Then one day I called an office in Shelby, North Carolina. A woman answered, lazily, and I stated my reason for calling. She just said, “Hold on,” dismissively, with no practiced professionalism whatsoever. There's a lot of that out there. A rare treat then it was when I spoke with anyone trying to exude the same level of maturity as I, during business hours. My Kimball voice was for your benefit, lady. You didn't care. I know this because instead of really putting me on hold, instead of pressing a button to leave me in that telephonic waiting area listening to one of those overused cheap songs, like the one with the incessant MIDI claps that makes my toes tense and my teeth clench and jarringly reminds me that the anxiety is always bang-bang-banging at the door of the closet I locked it in, instead of just conducting two seconds of mundane business like a normal goddamn person, this woman just set the phone down on her desk and, evidently sickened beyond composure, blurted to her coworker, “God, I hate when someone clears their throat while I'm on the phone with them.” I did?

There I was, exposed, a bunch of phlegmy gremlins, collapsing and scrambling. Instantly I remembered the time my dad and stepmom asked me if I was on some kind of drug, because I cleared my throat “a lot.” Yeah, I don't know what they were talking about either, but apparently this involuntary habit is remarkably frequent. And a hundred calls a day I was doing this. How many of these people find me disgusting, inhuman, or think I'm on drugs? How about people in everyday life? Do my friends mock me? Who taught you how to function, Jarred? My mind spiraled, the snakes squirmed and seethed.

The rest of the phone call was stiff and clumsy, tears welling like a porn star's while I silently packed down the coughs and chokes congesting behind whatever ball of bile bottlenecking at the back of my throat, because I should die right on the living room carpet, sacrificial and blue, lest I irk this absolute cuntbag's social sensitivities, gurgling grotesque and oozing disease.

But am I crazy or...ahem...is that just trivially fucking inoffensive? If I had frog squatted on my desk and—“Verify this, bitch!”—farted into a metal basin full of Cracker Barrel gravy, then sure, be mad. Slam the phone down. Say to the guy by the copier, “Why me?!” and vow to get me fired. But if a natural, nonchalant throat-clearing infuriates you enough to comment on it, you're honestly just an asshole. It's not a frog squat gravy fart, it's not a rude personal affront. It's somewhere way below open mouth chewing, there around unfortunate but necessary nose blowing. I'm gross, you're gross, we're all gross. Get over it, and then, Fuck off, I have a job to do.

I did briefly wonder if maybe she's an anxious person too, a gremlin, maybe her facade is as fragile as mine, but I don't think so, because her attitude when she answered my call had already indicated to me that she never dressed up in a fake bow tie. She thinks she's a normal person: reckless, careless, unprofessional. No phone tone, no Kimball timbre. And because of that, she gave me another thing to worry about, to nag at me, something uncontrollable that I'd be trying to temper, something unconsciously mechanical now made noticeable and manual and clumsy. Thanks.

I was just worried about my goofy voice.

If you're thinking that it's all just a little silly and ridiculously minuscule, then congratulations, you're one of those “normal” people, like Ms. Shelby North Carolina. You make our lives worse.

[anangelicday-mrwolf]

Wolfsbane : Noblesse Fanfic (post-ending)

(previous chapter)

Chapter 40 – The Collaborators

“Sol, we have a job to do.”

The man she addressed turned around, looking somewhat short of a man due to his appearance – a face wrapped with metallic mask, not a single speck of skin visible.

It was the “man in the iron mask,” as dubbed by Frankenstein, now his mask void of golden lining, his face much sharper, and his physique larger and more edged, with slick curves under his lab coat.

Though such changes did nothing to invalidate the fact that he was nothing short of a mannequin’s head attached atop human shoulders, equipped with not a single hole that would allow vision or olfaction.

Had he not been given a voice, no one would have deemed him a human, let alone a man.

And he was debatable in terms of his biological classification, considering what he could do.

“How are you hanging in there? Would you say you’re adapted to your body?”

“I’m fine. There was no need for the adaptation in the first place. I was made this way; unlike other modified humans, my brain was cybernetized into a form of data, to settle into artificial bodies for survival.”

“But you’re no longer inhabiting the models you’ve been making use of. Now you’re sitting in an artificial body the Union manufactured for mass production of weapons against heads of noble clans. Which is not based off of a human body so rigorously cybernetized that it’s basically identical to a pure machine. Or emptied to house a cybernetized human brain, like in your case. It was constructed with alloy and machine parts in the first place, to implant with an AI. Your previous bodies would have allowed you somewhat human interactions – the sort you’d expect from daily life. But I doubt your body as of now is flawlessly coordinated by your brain. After all, the AI I just mentioned are but imitations of a biological brain, albeit well-made.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s true that my body must go through optimization tuning, which is never enough to perfectly optimize my body. Which is why each body does not last more than a week and a half. But instead, now I can finally take part in battles.”

“Still, if this keeps going we’ll have to lose our weapons to let you walk around. We already lost a good number of weapons in the werewolf realm, and we can’t produce more weapons as of now. So don’t you think it’d be better if you go through a long-term optimization? We can make use of that dog I brought in. Besides, that’s exactly why I decided to adopt that dog for the time being.”

“I suggest we use the time and resources for the job instead for our mission. And I see you give much credit for him, surprisingly.”

Helga held her tongue before she soon scoffed and smirked – the smirk she exhibited just before walking up to him.

“I know when to give spotlight when I have to. Though it doesn’t change the fact that he’s nothing but a dog.”

“Honestly, I didn’t think you’d get to find such a talented researcher in biotechnology, especially in relation to brain biotechnology. The topic happens to be the most professional field in the...”

“Knock it off, Sol. Don’t forget – we are the Union. We are nothing like those amateurish scums pretending to be the gods that we are.”

After poking the air with her nose, her sky-blue eyes glinting, Helga cut to the point.

“We have an intel from the 3rd Elder. Frankenstein is suffering from a sleep disorder.”

“Sleep disorder?”

“There is this drink he’d regularly take, and its components include substances from wolfsbane, along with substances that prevent sleep.”

“Wolfsbane...? As far as I’m concerned, the species does not contain any substance that fends off sleep. Perhaps Frankenstein came up with the use.”

“Yup. But now we have found a way, don’t you think?”

Helga proudly placed her hands on her hips, and Sol silently stared at her as he cocked his head.

“You mean...”

“Yes. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“The Union harbors a technique of inducing a chemical effect the other way around. If we can apply such technique on that drink...”

“We can put the man to sleep for a certain period of time. Enough time for us to do whatever we want.”

“But the technique requires a chemical not available for purchase in public. Even if 3rd Elder gets the ingredients needed, I don’t believe he can cook it up on his own. The recipe is complicated, and it sure needs a lot of time.”

“True. Which means it’s up to us to deliver the complete product.”

Both of them fell quiet, as they could not come up with an answer.

“We’ll take our time and think about it. In the meantime, I shall get it ready.”

Sol turned on his heels to start the job, before he turned back halfway towards Helga.

“Speaking of which, how is that accomplice of ours doing?”

Immediately, Helga squeezed her brows, making it very conspicuous that she was in a foul mood.

“Which reminds me, I suddenly lost connection with him. If he’s avoiding me on purpose, I’d so very like to have a word with him later on.”

Though Sol’s face was invisible, he seemed cautious as he talked.

“Perhaps he withdrew his standing. After all, we promised each other a deal – not an alliance – because there were certain agreeing points in our motives. It wouldn’t be strange to find out that he was biding his time to stab us in the back, just like how we are waiting for a moment to let go of his hand from the cliff.”

Helga nodded as a sign of comprehension, but at the same time she raised a corner of her lips, as if reprimanding Sol for worrying for nothing.

“That vermin? Betraying us? Even if he does so, it won’t be long before he wails and breaks down in regret. That I can guarantee.”

Helga raised her head and stared into the air, wondering what her accomplice could be up to by now.

‘Go ahead. Try. Whatever it is that you want to do with that thing. And whatever is the reason why you’re not picking up, and whatever it is that you’re thinking, nothing will go as you wish. I never let my dogs loose without leash.’

*****

Meanwhile, in the werewolf realm...

Frankenstein emitted not a single sound as he gaped down at a monitor blinking with light.

There was no question the transmission was on its way as he stood, yet he could not abandon his anxiety.

He remained stiff from head to toe, until the monitor sparked with life and portrayed someone’s face.

And his face grew stony again, the moment he realized it was not the face he was picturing in his head.

<Sir? Why am I seeing you in the werewolf realm...?>

“Rael? And why am I seeing you in the Lukedonia’s communication chamber...? Where is Mr. Jang?”

The two blonde Adonis’s rolled their eyes and blabbered; neither of them was anticipating each other.

<Uh... I’m afraid he’s unavailable right now.>

Rael peeked behind, his countenance troubled.

“Your face tells me it’s not because he’s too occupied. Did he fall unconscious due to overload of work? Or did he step on a part rolling around in the middle of his battle against an uncooperative computer and hit his head in a corner or something?”

Rael instantly sealed his lips, and Frankenstein asked no more, having seen he was very close to the answer.

He instead decided to loosen up the Kertia’s shoulders, still rigid with fluster.

It was not because he wanted to applaud the boy; he wanted to divert his attention from the reason why he is sending transmission from the werewolf realm.

“I see you have a lot of work as well. You wound up in this project regardless of your will. And ended up babysitting a researcher. And you happen to be the head of the Kertias. Not that this is a disgrace for a head of a clan.”

Frankenstein meant nothing in particular, but his words brought upon Rael much bigger influence than he had imagined.

Rael zipped his mouth tighter instead of replying.

‘...Was it that obvious?’

Just like Frankenstein said, Rael was going through a lot.

He was bringing it upon himself.

Ever since Yuhyung was half-forced to stay longer in Lukedonia to give life to QuadraNet, Rael accompanied him wherever he went.

To make sure someone will be there in case he collapses again, according to him.

In reality, he wanted to be there when Yuhyung manages to pick up something in relation to his soul weapon.

He was so anxious that he was compelled to do something, including what is not mandatory.

And someone noticed his stance and came to see him that day.

After Frankenstein was gone, leaving a message for Yuhyung to please get back to him as soon as he can, Rael sighed.

And a familiar voice chimed in his ears even before his sigh dissipated into air.

“Sir.”

The voice was nothing close to loud, but Rael started as if he were static-shocked.

“...Lady Seira?”

“It’s been so long.”

Seira nodded calmly despite Rael’s reaction.

“What brings you here...?”

“I heard recently you could rarely take yourself out of this chamber.”

Seira provided no further explanation, as if that was a reason good enough for her to visit him.

Did she come to see me simply to see me?

There’s no reason for her to do that.

In the past Rael would have jumped in glee, like a schoolboy reciprocated by his first love.

However, he felt nothing but despair.

‘There’s no need for you to do that for someone like me.’

Now that he stood before Seira, he could feel exactly what he was.

Seira used to be evaluated as the head of a clan most not like one.

When her father was forced into eternal sleep, she had to take on his Death Scythe even before having her rite of passage.

Rael learned later on that for such reason even a human, once called the 10th Elder of the Union, sneered at her in her face.

Nonetheless, now she is worthy of being called a head of a clan, having fought valiantly in their warfare against the Union.

On the other hand, he used to label himself as more than worthy enough to be the head of his clan. And here he was, unable to call forth his soul weapon for a reason nobody could fathom, and wasting his time while obliging himself with a task that a nameless Central Knight can handle.

So Rael listened halfheartedly as Seira was offering him words of condolence, something he would not have dreamed of in the past.

Which is why he had no idea that Yuhyung finally woke up to rub his head, decorated with a huge bump for an unknown cause, to watch what he and Seira were doing.

And he had no idea how hard Deneb grit his teeth upon hearing Yuhung’s report before bedtime.

“Rael Kertia... I figured you’d be busy running errands outside Lukedonia, but here you are, working your way to Seira’s hand. But no, you don’t. Not if I can help it. You brought this upon yourself – just you wait. Since your soul weapon can’t help you now, I will take away your life by my own hands in days soon to come.”

(next chapter)

Like I said before, by “the man in the iron mask” I mean this guy. His name was never revealed in the original webtoon, so I decided to call him “Sol.” It was inspired by the fact that he can enter and leave artificial bodies as he’d like (though the exact mechanism he employs for the job was not revealed). That reminded me of “Project 2501″ from Ghost in the Shell (1995), and I alphabetized “501″ into “SOl,” from which his name for this fic derives. I’m not going to give much details about Project 2501, as it contains the key spoiler for this amazing work of cyberpunk film lol. Anyways, my fic is finally reaching the main event and the grand finale. I hope I can do a good job until the curtains are closed XD. I hope you’d stay tuned!

[jawnjendes]

i don’t know why | shawn mendes

university au a totally perfect summer babey, shawn x goth gf

AN: u know how life imitates art or vice versa???? yeah sometimes i hate that. anyway i thought i was gonna slow down with updates but i had one (1) free day before i move (tomorrow) so here is this do with her what you will

******let me know if you wanna be tagged in future chapters

masterlist | playlist

In the past, if there was ever a time I could trade 120°F weather for literally anything else, I would have taken it. I would have given anything to stay in Toronto over the summer if it meant I wouldn’t experience heat exhaustion from the moment I stepped outside. I would sell intense SoCal weather to Satan for a single cornchip.

It’s halfway through May, and I still wore a long sleeve and jeans when I went out. It rained sometimes, and when it didn’t, it was cloudy. I could appreciate the coziness that accompanied the weather, but for the time of year, it was also putting me into a weird headspace. I couldn’t shake the feeling of my body unconsciously waiting for sweltering, dry desert heat. I was supposed to be in shorts and a tanktop in my hometown, and Shawn was supposed to be there with me. We were both supposed to be facing the chaos that was my extended family.

On top of that, I was hating having to go to the dealership five times a week. That was all I had going for me now that school was out. I didn’t even work five days during the semester. I never worked in the summer at all in the last few years, and again, I was wearing sweaters in May.

On the bright side, Shawn went to his first therapy session, and it went well for him. Said he had a breakthrough, and ways to combat the night terrors, but he had more that night anyway. I had to time when his body would start twitching, and then wake him up 15 minutes prior. It worked well, and it brought some relief to us and our sleep. I was just glad he was finally doing something about all of this, even if he was still reluctant to talk to me about it.

Sometimes, we were on different wavelengths. Shawn was in the process of getting his perkiness back, and it showed when my pessimism was out and about. There was a balance of light and dark between us, and today Shawn had all of the light.

I decided to go barefaced today. I felt the need to not hide how tired and done I was with the world and its bullshit. My eyebrows were incredibly sparse, and the under eye bags were just a little sunken in. While I was eating solid food again, I was lacking in other nutrients, therefore I was still dropping weight. Why hide it, right?

Shawn just had to point out that I was not wearing makeup, and I just had to take it the wrong way.

“I can’t look pretty all the time,” I snapped.

“But you do look pretty all the time,” he replied, unfazed.

I rolled my eyes and turned away from the bathroom mirror. Shawn was standing next to me, putting product in his freshly washed hair when he noticed my body language.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I have nothing to complain about. I should be grateful.

I left the bathroom and went to change into my uniform. My company shirt needed a wash, but I made a mental note to douse myself in perfume before I left. I was also on my last pair of clean white leggings, which gave me another thing to do when I got home because Shawn doesn’t do laundry. He waits for his mom to come over and do everything for him.

He came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, in his white Sting t-shirt and black jeans. I don’t know why I envied the fact that his only uniform was a stupid apron. Or the fact that he actually looked forward to going to work.

“Okay,” he spoke firmly, “not that long ago, you were pushing me to talk, now it’s your turn. What’s wrong?”

I sighed, not wanting to destroy the last chances I had at pulling myself together before my shift. “It’s nothing. I’m totally happy to be here.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means exactly what I said.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

My skin was crawling with unreasonable annoyance. I wanted to yell at him, and for what? Was it his fault that my insides were the actual worst?

I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Then I looked at him, and the underlying sadness started to creep in. “I just miss my parents… and California. I kinda wish I was there.”

Shawn’s eyebrows scrunched together. His tone was something I was not expecting in the slightest. “You don’t wanna live here?”

It didn’t take much to get me back to my angry state. “I didn’t say that,” I defensively argued. “I said I-”

He interrupted me. “No, no. You don’t wanna be here. You don’t wanna live with me. It makes sense, you’ve been moody this whole time!”

My eyes narrowed into a death glare. “What, am I not allowed to miss my hometown? Am I not supposed to be angry that my large intestine refused to cooperate and part of it had to be removed? Should I not be pissed off that I’m eating bland rice everyday?”

He looked more confused than angry. “I think you should be happy you made it, that you’re okay now.”

I scoffed. “I should be happy? I don’t get to go home until December! I don’t get to see my family this summer! It’s almost June and I’m wearing a fucking sweater!”

“Don’t you hate the desert?”

“You don’t understand!” I yelled. Well, I did it.

“What don’t I understand?” Shawn shot back, raising his own voice. “You hate living here, right? You want to leave, eh?”

“I never said that!” My fingers pulled at the hair on my scalp. “I’m pissed that this is how I ended up living with you! And I wasn’t ready to live with you to begin with! I’m pissed that I won’t get to see my family until the end of the year! And I’m pissed that I’m the one who almost died and you’re the one who’s traumatized!”

That definitely silenced him. Shawn's face fell in a way I had never seen before. My rage faltered a little bit, but not enough to take back anything I said. He asked what was wrong, and I told him. I was too impatient to wait for him to say something, so I grabbed my purse and my keys and I was out of the apartment in a flash.

~

Under normal circumstances, I was very good at keeping my personal problems under wraps for the sake of remaining poised and professional. A customer could yell at me and throw a tantrum, and I'd keep my face neutral and polite. When I ended things with Luca, I feigned composure so well that I was named employee of the month.

But no, a stupid fight with my boyfriend threatened my professional-but-mildly-bitchy reputation! I was able to be polite to customers, both over the phone and in person, but I was testy to any coworker that came within a five foot radius of my desk. The finance, sales, and parts managers all fell victim to my signature death stare at various points in the morning. I was honestly shocked I wasn't fired by lunch.

Shortly after my lunch break, Stacy made her departure, leaving me with Jason and Luca. I gave them the cold shoulder from the moment they entered the office, a signal for them to leave me the fuck alone. They obliged, but they still clowned around at the back of the office.

"Dude," Jason said in his stoned out drawl, "they should replace lube… with hand sanitizer."

Luca chuckled. "The fuck? What'd you smoke today?"

"Nah, dawg," he continued, "replace lotion, with IcyHot."

I had my back to them, so they didn't see the puzzled expression on my face. As if I haven't heard such crackheadery like this before. Sometimes it made me laugh, but obviously not today.

"Okay, I got one," Luca said between laughs. "Replaces pads… with aluminum foil."

"Replace tampons with paintbrushes."

"Or! Sticks of dynamite!"

There was only half a brain cell in this room, clearly. That half was taken by Jason, who had a customer come in asking for him. He left the office, giving Luca a smug look through the small window.

There were plenty of people still in the building. The other managers, sans Stacy, and the rest of the salesmen were running around doing boring business things. I wished I had things to do, like file repair orders in the filing closet that was nowhere near this office. Or add up more gas receipts… Or have a long, pointless conversation with a customer over the phone. I literally wished I could do anything to avoid the fact that I was alone with Luca for the first time in months.

Of course, he could never keep his mouth shut.

"So, did your boyfriend break up with you?" he asked in a teasing, childish tone.

I ignored him and pretended to be busy with car repair orders. I didn't even know how to read them most of the time.

"You know I helped Shawnie boy write a song," Luca went on.

My blood boiled remembering how badly Mercy was ruined for me. The real meaning behind the lyrics messed me up more than I liked to admit. I hadn't listened to that song in months because of him, apart from when Shawn would perform it. Still, spite kept my mouth shut.

"Answer me, you little whore," Luca deadpanned. "Thought we were cool."

No, I do not know where the logic is behind that. Luca's mind was unlike anything I've ever encountered, and I can't believe I used to find it so attractive and endearing. I used to take his degrading name calling as terms of endearment. Maybe it was in a twisted way. But that was then. Now, he couldn't even compare to the man I had now.

Luca grew impatient, and decided to approach my desk. He leaned against the surface, practically sitting on it, and his brown eyes burned a hole into the side of my head.

"That song was about you."

Brand new information!

"And I'm assuming you've heard it," he continued. "So you know how I really feel."

Finally, I huffed out a sigh and looked up at him. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you know it's true and it gets to you." He smirked, showing off dimples that I used to adore. He talked like this was some sort of challenge, and god knows he loved to challenge me.

"You're a lot of things," I said, "but you're not a liar. Why start now?"

"I'm not a liar. You just don't wanna believe that someone could love you."

I really did not know where to start with that. He never loved me because he frequently went to me when he was bored and horny. He never loved me because he didn't want the things I wanted, and instead of letting me go, he kept stringing me along. He knew I wouldn't leave.

I  scoffed and got to my feet, not wanting to be looked down on anymore. "You don't know that. You don't know anything about me."

Luca turned his whole body towards me. He was still smirking as he fixed the stupid RayBans perched on his nose. "If anyone's gonna know anything about you, it's me. I know you better than anyone here. I probably know you better than Shawn does. And you hate that, huh?"

He was the only person who wasn't intimidated by my death stare. He was the only person who made me powerless and small. And yeah, I really fucking hated that.

"Oh, so now you suddenly wanna admit that? Now I'm worth something to you?" I spat.

Whatever cockiness Luca had on suddenly faltered. He took a step back, ready to shut down, but I wasn't having it anymore.

"You had feelings, eh?" I asked, internally cursing the vernacular that planted itself into my vocabulary. "So where was all of that last year? Where was all of that when I was tearing myself apart to put you back together?"

"I never asked you to fix me," Luca said. "You just didn't want to fix yourself. I know I was just another person you didn't want to commit to in the long run."

"I wanted you to-" I tried to say, but he interrupted me.

"Oh, I bet you wanted me to be your boyfriend. But I know a crazy bitch when I see one. Doesn't look like anything's changed. Wonder how Shawn deals with you."

It felt like the glass bubble surrounding me was shattered with a sledgehammer. It felt like the wind was knocked out of me, or like my spirit had been forcibly removed from my body. My face was hot to the touch, and angry tears were threatening to come out of my eyes. Everything around me suddenly turned grey and went in slow motion. This feeling in my chest was dull and aching, and I wasn't sure how to deal with it.

Even when Jason entered the office again, I still felt like I was floating. Luca went back to his desk, and my body moved back into my chair. Memories of finishing up my shift were spotty. This darkness was awfully familiar.

I found myself wandering around Walmart after work. My legs felt numb, but they moved and worked like they should. My breath was constantly getting caught in my throat, and my spirit was just following its vessel around the store. I felt like I could collapse at any moment, and I could just let the ground swallow me whole. I tried looking at the video games in the electronic section to get myself back to normal, but I just felt numb. I ended up buying a stick of deodorant and an ice cream bar I couldn't eat.

~

Shawn was already home when I got there, and he still wasn't talking to me. There wasn't anything in me that wanted to try to fix that. He needed to sit with his angry boi feelings anyway. My body moved past the living room, where he was sitting watching Netflix. He looked at me, I saw it from my peripherals, but I just silently turned into the bedroom.

I spent the next hour leaning against the wall in the shower, hot water coming down on my back. I had a specific Halsey song on repeat blaring through the bathroom, even though my spirit floating above my body knew it wouldn't help the situation. I just needed to feel something.

"Tell me how's it feel sitting up there

Feeling so high but too far away to hold me

You know I'm the one who put you up there

Name in the sky, does it ever get lonely?"

Eventually, I was back on Earth, and the water was cold. My limbs ached as I moved around again to shut the shower off, but at least I was feeling something. Once the noise from the running water was gone, I was forced to hear more of that damn song. I still didn't bother to change it as I stepped out of the tub and wrapped a towel around myself.

"Gave love 'bout a hundred tries

Just running from the demons in your mind

Then I took yours and made 'em mine

I didn't notice cuz my love was blind"

I made quick work of drying off and getting dressed. I didn't bother with putting leave-in conditioner in my hair or moisturizing my skin. I stared down at the sink and processed what went down at work.

"I didn't ask you to fix me. You just didn't wanna fix yourself. I know a crazy bitch when I see one. Doesn't look like anything's changed."

Shouldn't you want to fix the one you love when they're down? Wouldn't you do anything you can to ensure that the one you love would be okay? Why else would I give up therapy so Shawn could take my place?

Oh, crap. Shawn.

Before I knew it, I was walking out of the bathroom, back to the living room. Shawn was still on the couch, take out box in hand. I watched him eat pasta as I leaned against the doorway. My voice came out raspy and wavering, but still coherent.

"I'm sorry about this morning. I didn't mean to snap at you."

Talking alone caused a crying fit to form in my chest and throat. I turned on my heel, not expecting much of anything until-

"Did you eat?"

I stopped in my tracks, but I didn't face him. I cleared my throat before speaking again. "Not hungry."

"Hey, I know we fought, but you still need to eat."

"That's, that's not why…" I trailed off. This was a time where I wanted to sit and cry in his arms, something I never did. (The hospital doesn't count - I was under the influence of morphine.) I knew he was still mad at me, though. I couldn't ask him for anything. The only thing I could do was clear my throat some more.

Mad as he was, Shawn was still persistent. "Do you feel sick?"

Yes, but not the way he was probably thinking. I wouldn't even know how to explain it.

"No," I said simply.

I heard Shawn move from the couch, but I still kept my back to him.

"Is something-"

I cut across him. "Don't try to be nice to me. You don't have to after the way I acted."

"We had an argument, we didn't break up," Shawn said.

Slowly, I turned my head to look back at him. The only thing between us was the doorway. Shawn didn't seem as wound up as he did this morning, but that didn't mean he probably wasn't feeling it anymore. I didn't want to risk another fight.

"I didn't mean anything I said this morning," I told him, my voice still small. I couldn't find it in me to fake composure. "I like living with you, and I appreciate everything you've done for me."

He nodded. "I'm sorry too. I understand that you miss your family. I miss mine, and they're only a half hour drive from here."

If I didn't have this surgery then I would be at home and I wouldn't have been irrationally shaken to the core by Luca's words. I could literally be in my childhood bed right now.

"Yeah," I mumbled, reaching my threshold. "Yeah, I do miss home."

Shawn then waved me over. "Come on. Come here."

I felt like I was going to fall apart as I stepped out of the small bedroom. My knees shook slightly, but Shawn took my hand and led me into the spacious area, over to the couch. He watched me as I sat down. I must have looked like a right mess if he was giving me careful eyes, like I might break into pieces at any given moment.

He got up and grabbed the grey, woolen blanket from the other end of the couch and draped it over my lap. "So… how was work?"

"I don't wanna talk about it." I stared at the TV, but I didn't really care about what was on.

"Alright. Do you wanna play Breath of the Wild?"

Tears welled up in my eyes in a split second, and I rapidly nodded my head and sobbed out, "Yeah…"

[republicstandard]

The Dark Vision Of Renaud Camus

“The Game Of Global Domination”—the motto of the board game Risk

“They are dismantling the sleeping middle class.  More and more people are becoming poor.  We are their cattle.  We are being bred for slavery”---from the movie They Live

“Once the science of management had been perfected and everything was reduced to a unit of production it was perfectly natural that they turned their sights to their final prey, man”

Renaud Camus has gained fame and notoriety for his theory of the Great Replacement, for suggesting that perhaps Jews might not be the best interpreters of French Culture, and for being prosecuted right and left for saying sensible things about African immigration.  The Great Replacement is of course the hallmark of his work but it is only one component, and he possesses an even darker and more dystopian vision of our future, a future run by a hostile and malevolent elite clique managing the world, managing the “human park”, a neo-feudal system with full rights of ravage and no obligation of the honorable.  In short, he has a theory of the case.

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His vision shares much with that of William Pierce’s idea of the New World Order. Pierce pointed out that in 1999 then NATO commander Wesley Clark gave voice to the emerging feudal overlords, the “we” being the most important part of what he said, and few grimmer words have been spoken:

“There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states.  That is a 19th Century idea, and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with muti-ethnic states”

Pierce himself outlined the vision when he said that:

“The New World Order schemers have the ultimate aim of creating a homogeneous population of coffee-colored serfs---docile, predictable, and interchangeable”

Camus takes up this vision and shows how it operates, what the crime is, and who it’s perpetrators are.   He calls what they’re doing Global Replacism, the elites’ creation of a Global Slum which they will rule from their feudal redoubts, rule the docile serfs, who in the end will be dispensed with entirely, hence the catch phrase “genocide by substitution”--substitution is the means, genocide the goal.

In describing the global ruling class Mr. Camus cancels the distinction between the so-called democracies and the authoritarians indicating that they are but differing sides of the same global coin, they are all one overlord class seeking  to exercise universal rule and global domination:

“The torturing Chinese dictatorship and the self-liberating Western democracies reveal the same background, the generalized surveillance, the aspiration to the total control of the sections of the human park of which they respectively manage.”

In the future it will be humanity itself which will be the central obstacle to the dreams of our elites.

It is the “human park” that they are after, the relegation of human beings to zoo animals, penned in, livestock, serfs, slaves.  The central means by which this is accomplished is “Global Replacism” the reducing of everything to units of production that can be interchanged with anything else.   This happens on a global scale:

“For better or worse, everything is being replaced by something else: something simpler, more convenient, more practical, easier to produce, more at hand and, of course, cheaper. Las Vegas displays a fake Venice in Nevada, Spain establishes a mock Las Vegas in Castilla, China has its own Paris near Peking — a much safer place than the real one for the traveler and for the local dweller alike.”

His ultimate vision is dark indeed:

“Men, women, women's football ... The Clique presents this as a progress of equality, therefore of democracy. This is a progress only of Undifferentiated Human Matter, the industries of man, of the scraping of the species in standardized liquid for the plastic cans of the global slum.”

So if one were bent on the creation of a neo-feudal system, complete with dishonorable rights of ravage, a global slum, of global substitution, global replacism, of genocide by substitution, extermination, how would one go about it?  What are these crimes?   Who are these criminals?   And what judgment?

RACE

The first way the Replacist Power operates is by means of race-mixing, race-mixing in the sense of miscegenation  (the flood of ads showing black men and white women coupling) and race-mixing in the sense of mixing the races together, multi-racialism, multiculturalism (the famous French vivre ensemble “living together”).  Camus insists that anti-replacism is a humanism, and that he is for the preservation of all races in their indigenous, pristine, and original form.  So like the Dalai Lama he would say Europe is for the Europeans, Tibet for Tibetans etc.  But elites know that there is an unimaginable strength in these primordial identities and hence their desire to break them up via race-mixing, to demoralize and disorient the peoples of the world so they can offer no resistance.  They want to pick us off, one free white man at a time.

The nominal belief in the non-existence and the equality of the races preceded World War 2 but it was the negative reaction to Hitler’s racial nationalism that allowed it to prevail wholesale. To paraphrase Peter Brimelow the entire ideology of the modern left, of the official anti-racism as dogma, is the posthumous revenge of Adolf Hitler.  Camus believes that the turning point came in the 1970s:

“I am convinced that the termination of the concept of race in the 1970s was the moment which made everything that followed possible; and made (almost) impossible any resistance to what was to happen — mass immigration, invasion, colonization, ethnic substitution.”

“The dogma of the inexistence of races, proclaimed in 1970s, is the credo quia absurdum of both anti-racism (in its second phase) and global replacism. It has much in common with the Roman Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.”

The not so subtle sleight of hand is that if races don’t exist then there can be no objection to their mixing, because there’s nothing there to be mixed, nothing mixing, so of course it’s not a problem for a country to be inundated by different races, to be subject to racial swamping, because, of course, that’s not what’s happening---because races don’t exist.  Such is the absurd logic foisted on us to such an extent that is has become official ideology, unimpeachable dogma.

The title under which belief in the non-existence of the races goes is “anti-racism”, the evil teaching of our time.  Like it’s progenitor, human rights, anti-racism is inherently genocidal.  As a hatred of war led to the Second World War so anti-racism has led to the racial swamping of France, Europe, and America.  Anti-racism and it’s offspring, tolerance and diversity, is what has made everything possible.

“Anti-racism plays exactly the same role leading to the Second Occupation and its Collaboration, as pacifism did to lead to the First Occupation and to it’s own Collaboration. One cannot want to step out of history and at the same time pretend to remain free.”

And if there is one thing that the Ruling Class knows except that the races don’t exist it’s that these non-existent entities are all equal (even as some of these things that don't exist are more equal than others).

EQUALITY

“Equality between parents and children has destroyed family and transmission. Equality between teachers and students destroyed the School. Equality between citizens and non-citizens has destroyed the nation. The equality between Christianity and Islam destroys France.”

If anti-racism is the official ideology of the Ruling Class, the Replacist Power, the belief in equality is it’s evil twin.  Equality is the official dogma of Human Rights which, as such, are inherently genocidal. Equality is a leveling of all distinctions into the great digested mass of undifferentiated human matter (UHM).  It is an industrial process of liquefying meant for easy handling and for best storage.

“The principal ideal involved is equality. The principal interest at work is normalization, standardization, similarity, sameness — needless to say, equality is the condition to those.”

“Do you know that every time someone proposes to abolish a border, between nations, between peoples, between civilizations, between races, between classes, between genres, between genders, between levels, this person works for Human Nutella?”

Camus calls any indication of inequality “ideological bad news” which is the one thing the Ruling Cass is unable to bear.  So thorough has been this brainwashing and this indoctrination that it is impossible even to think anything other than equality:

“The conceptual apparatus of our time do not allow, by chance, for the conviction that men and women are not equal, or, for that matter, that there is any statutory, or natural, inequality. It is impossible to think that, just as it is impossible to reach by car a fishermen village which is not linked to the hinterland by any road”

The famous Old Republican John Randolph said “I love liberty, I hate equality”.   Camus feels much the same way:

“I believe in the equality of nothing—except by chance, or by a sometimes legitimate coup d’État of the law. Equality, as soon as it leaves its legal and political bed, destroys everything it touches — vessels, ramparts, cities, men — as Æschylus said Helen of Troy did. Equality between parents and children has destroyed the family, transmission, civilization. Equality between teachers and pupils, or between good pupils and bad pupils, has destroyed schools, teaching, knowledge. Equality between high culture and entertainment has destroyed culture. Equality between citizens and non-citizens is destroying citizenship, states, nations. Equality between century-old local traditions and mores and imported ways of life and foreign traditions will leave nothing standing, or worth standing, of any nation. In France and in Europe, equality between Christianity and Islam spells death for French culture and European civilization.”

Thus equality is a dissolving agent, an evil homogenizing scourge which wrecks everything in it’s path, liquefying it, cutting it down and cutting it down to size. Equality is the path of least resistance, the path of genocide.

And equality takes the lead in the creation of what Camus calls undifferentiated human matter (UHM), an eradication of all differences, everything reduced to a common denominator in a flat standardized mass.  It’s also what he calls Human Nutella, something liable to be easily and smoothly spread across the face of the earth.  For the Replacist Power wants nothing more than to do away with, to abolish all differences, between nations, peoples, cultures, races, sexes, because they know that nothing presages the totalitarian like Global Humanity.

“Who does not see that the incessant appeals for more equality, between the sexes, between ages, between souls, between classes, between races, serve in fact only to better grind down man, to make him more homogeneous and standardized, for the industries of the UHM?”

And, of course, we see that massive push for “gender” equality, for trans rights, for the denial of biological sex, for men in women’s sports, for hormone blockers, for boys being girls and vice versa.  Rooting out the most fundamental of all natural differences is the most fundamental of their wishes:

“It is becoming more and more evident that the Replacist Davocracy and its Clique now consider the question of races as outdated just as they planned. It is the question of the sexes which it now wishes to settle and, like the preceding one, by disappearance, fusion, UHM.”

What they did to the races they want to do to the sexes, make them disappear.

When man is ground down, when he is but an equal mass, he becomes defenseless in the face of slow if relentless assaults by the Ruling Class.

Concomitant with the denial of race and the ideology of equality comes the wholesale attacks of the root of everything, of culture itself, of civilization, for the small replacement heralds the big one like the sea water receding precedes the tsunami.

SEVERING THE ROOTS

Camus is a prolific author; two of his books are called, respectively, The Small Replacement and The Great Replacement.  In his theory the small replacement is what he calls “deculturation”, the end of culture, what T Lothorop Stoddard called “the revolt against civilization”, the creation of an anti-culture, an anti-civilization.  It is the attack on high culture and replacing it with the low, it is an attack on the classics and replacing them with Gender Studies.   It is a universal daze, a kind of stunning of the cattle, and the small replacement heralds the big one like the sea water receding precedes the tsunami.

If you want to destroy a people you destroy their heritage, you destroy their history, you destroy their classics, their past, their heroes, their culture, their language, their literature; perhaps in the end you leave them only with their eyes so they can witness their destitution.

Recently we have seen Mark Zuckerberg’s sister attack the Western Classics, no less a personage than Meghan Markle has suggested that we “decolonize the curriculum” and of course as far back as the 1980s at Stanford anti white zealot and too slick by half race impresario Jesse Jackson made the infantile chant “hey hey ho ho western civ has to go” which set Peter Thiel on the road to anti PC.  And of course Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had some reason to know, said that if you want to destroy a people first sever it’s roots.

Mr. Camus calls this severing the “small replacement”, that which heralds the big one the way the sea water receding precedes the tsunami. The small replacement is the eradication of standards, the erosion of taste, the disqualification of distinction, the outlawing of discrimination.  It’s a world where seventy year old thinks nothing of dancing as if they were twelve.

His prime culprit, at least in France, is sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.  Mr. Bordieu came up with the novel idea that people with educated parents tended to be more educated, determined that this was unfair, and solved it by recommending that no one become educated.   An ill educated mass of people equally ill educated is at least equal.

“Bourdieusians and pedagogists in French and other educational systems, whatever they might have wanted to do, have in fact operated along exactly contrary lines. Since they could not insure that the non-inheritors would inherit, they made it sure that the inheritors would not.”

“He (Bourdieu), at least, and, I imagine, most of the innumerable disciples he has had in France — where they have been running the educational system for forty years —, and in the world, wanted the privilege of children with educated parents put to an end, as a privilege, by being offered to all children.”

Of course what you offer to everyone you offer to no one.  For Camus there has to be privilege, there has to be inheritance, there has to be transmission, there has to be lineage, and distinction, discrimination, taste.

“The hereditary class (and it must be a class) has a privilege, it’s privilege, namely culture, won’t always be transmitted: there will always be failures in transmission. For that reason it has to be partly renewed with each generation: lineages dropping out, lineages coming in. But it has to remain partly hereditary.”

When the lines of heritage and the roots are cut the message of our ancestors can’t get through, no longer speaks.   It’s like a plant that has been uprooted and is living synthetically with chemicals above ground.

“History of equality and its ravages, history of the industrialization of man & Undifferentiated Human Matter, history of the end of lineages & transmission, the perpetual present, the anti-inheritance. Needless to say, these three stories are one story, the story of anti-history”

“The educational system has radically collapsed, cultural transmission is in shambles.”

“Civilization of first names, collapse of the school systems, failure of the transmission, teaching of the forgetting, blocking of the inheritance in the name of equality, end of the lineages, presentism - prelude to the end Time, the end of time.”

Culture gives way to entertainment and, though it hasn’t the right, still calls itself by the name. Camus uses music as his prime example, from high to low, from classical to Pop, from Beethoven and Bach to the banality of Beatles, and from there an even steeper and more  precipitous decline on to the unholy abomination called rap, and says that more than anything contemporary popular music is black music, is the imposition of blackness into the heart of the European peoples.

Plato said that when the music changes the gates of the city crash but when it changes to black music the city itself disappears.

“Those rhythms, generally binary, military, insistent and disquieting like the obstinate sound (boum-boum, boum-boum, boum-boum) of an artificial heart in the operation room of a hospital, are themselves largely inspired, if only through jazz, by African musical traditions. Those also manifest their influence directly, in Europe, without the detour by the United-States but unfortunately through commercial filters which are as many philistine adaptations, if not downright treasons, of what would be, all things being equal, African “classical” music.”

“Music in the new sense, combined with dancing, can be seen, through its huge success in all classes and all ages, as a rising back of Africa in the European body.”

This is an abrogation of culture that ends up in nonsense, in baby talk, in babble, in anti-culture, non-culture, non-civilization, savagery.

“Such ascent is obviously made much easier by the highly noticeable infantilization which has been provoked by general deculturation and which so curiously coincides with the growth of violence and brutality in daily social relations. It seems the more people call themselves by their first names on their first encounter, use baby talk even in a political or official context (ministers or other officials speaking of moms and dads, les mamans et les papas, even in public speeches or official appearances), turn to a flabby and namby-pamby way of expressing themselves, replace manners by the expansive expression of a no less conventional good will—in short shorten if not abolish the distances between them (or so they think), the more the common space is becoming a place of constant aggressive and often criminal behavior.”

Glory was replaced by fame, and fame by notoriety, becomes gossip and finally insensibility and senility.

“The said dictatorship and the Small Replacement (of high culture by popular culture) is never so evident as on the days when a pop star, even a minor one, dies: national programs on television are entirely dedicated to them, all other news disappear, and the general consensus is that the dead artist, who may very well have had no importance whatsoever in the life of his cultured contemporaries, was a life companion for the entire people.”

“But if men and women have to be prepared for general interchangeability, distances between them must be abolished as much as possible, and individuals must be deprived of all the social protections that étiquette, grammar, private property, race, sex or nationality could offer them against global replacement.”

It is the classic case of Frantz Fanon, of how colonial subjects are subject and subjected to:

“Expropriation, spoliation, raids, straight murder are accompanied by a ransacking of cultural systems, or to the very least make the enabling conditions of such ransacking. The social landscape is disrupted; values are flouted, crushed, gutted.”

The small replacement precedes the bigger one, the severing of roots, the weakening of culture, the abandonment of rules, the loss of standards, the abandonment of the past, the end of discrimination, the abolition of taste, the killing of heroes, dead civilizations, worlds washed away.

And this decultured culture, this babble of chaos, is of course made available instantly everywhere, and though if someone had a drinking problem you would not recommend they put kegs and a tap in their basement, most of us walk around with devices eternally hooked up to a fetid, open, global sewer.

What they have now is a raceless mass of equal humanity without a past. This creation lacks distinction, distinction between the races, distinction between the sexes, distinction between each other, distinction of any kind, it is pure product, a ground down Inhuman Nutella ripe for being spread smoothly across the face of the earth, ripe for Global Replacism, they have been prepared to be victims of an enormous crime, ritually prepared.

THE CRIME (GLOBAL REPLACISM)

The powers that be want more power and they ask themselves: who's stopping us? And they conclude the only ones in the way of total global domination are the national populists and they notice these tend to be white folk wedded to tradition, so they do all in their power to destroy them, including allying with the left whom they must regard with chilling contempt

“Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) is the common inspirer, for all practical purposes, of nazism, soviet communism and global replacism. What those three have in common is totalitarianism, concentrationnism, standardization, managerial gestion of the human park.”

“Faux, simulation, imitation, ersatz, simulacrum, copies, counterfeiting, fakes, forgeries, lures, mimics, are the key words of modern human experience. Stone masonry is being replaced by ferroconcrete, concrete by plaster, marble by chip aggregate, timber by PVC, town and countryside by the universal suburb, earth by cement and tar, seaside by seaside resorts, mountains by ski resorts and ski lifts, paths by hiking trails, nature by land-use planning in expectation of economic spinoffs, real people by B&B hosts, clients by friends, friends by clients, culture by entertainment and the leisure industry, exercise by sport, sport by the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games by big business, business by corruption, corruption by doping, literature by journalism, journalism by information, news by fake news, truth by fallacy, last name by first name, last name and first name by pseudonyms, intimacy by familiarity, hearts by artificial hearts, every part of the body by spare parts, history by ideology, the destiny of nations by plain politics, politics by economics, economics by finance, the experience of looking and living by sociology, sorrow by statistics, residents by tourists, natives by non-natives, Europeans by Africans, White Anglo-Saxons by Afro-Americans and Latinos, mothers by surrogate mothers, men by women, women by inflatable dolls, men and women by robots, robots by robot-like humans, peoples by other peoples and communities, humanity by post-humanity, humanism by transhumanism, man by Undifferentiated Human Matter (UHM)”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was a direct descendant of a traveler on the Mayflower, descendant of abolitionists, White Anglo-Saxon-Protestant, the father of scientific management and the efficiency movement. It is on his works that rested the unprecedented surge of affluence in the 20th century.  He was a machine worker who turned man into a machine, into a unit of production. He is the Isaac Newton of work, and he has blood on his hands.

“Frederick Winslow Taylor is the central figure in the history of Replacism, or pre-Replacism.   Although he is certainly not a figure of comparable intellectual scope, he is to replacism what Marx is to communism.  That, of course, is an enormous responsibility.  As writes his most recent editor, “Frederick Taylor has blood on his hands”.  I certainly agree with that: not only blood but sweat, tears UHM (Undifferentiated Human Matter), not to mention mad cows and deaths by drowning across the Mediterranean.  And as he wrote himself, “In the past man has been first; in the future the machine must be first”.  In other words, man will be replaced by machines (robots, electronics, computers, numbers, statistics). From a movie buff’s point of view, global replacism is Metropolis + Modern Times + Soylent Green.”

“In the past man had been first but now the machine, the system will be first”

When a city is under siege the attackers are trying to reduce it, the Global Replacist power wants more than anything to be reductionist, to reduce everything, first to units of production, then to nothing.

“Taylor’s central concept is that of normalization, or standardization. Products, objects, instruments, machine parts will cost less, in time and money, and will henceforth yield bigger profits, if they are the same and can be easily exchanged with one another. Taylorization is always a process towards the same, the sameness of the world, it’s looking like itself (but, consequently, not being it). Standardization is a similarization, but this word has two meanings which, although very similar, must not be confused. Making things, objects, products similar to each other means that they will look and may be the same, but it also means that they won’t be exactly what they were, that to look or be like other objects, instruments, piece of mechanics or products they will have to be similis, copies, imitations, same as others but, by this very fact, different from their original version. Imitation, reproduction, factitiousness, are at the very core  of the Taylorian revolution, which amounts to nothing less than a second Industrial Revolution. Imitation for the sake of mass production, precipitating the era of mass reproduction so well observed and analyzed by Walter Benjamin (and so well exploited by Andy Warhol, Pop Art and Pop Music), is what made Taylorism particularly appropriate and suitable for the advent of the petite-bourgeoisie as the new ruling class, which it certainly helped to achieve”

Frederick Winslow Taylor has blood on his hands.   For once the science of management is perfected it becomes perfectly natural that human management comes next, the tailoring of human beings to fit the Replacist System. The future is too important to leave to humanity.

Global Replacism is the science of human management, of tailoring humans to meet the needs of the system and it’s rulers, for when the science of management had perfected itself and turned everything into a unit of productivity, it was perfectly natural that they would then turn their aim towards man.

In addition to reducing everything the Replacist Power wants to devalue everything, to strip it of value.  They want inflation of words and the currency of reality devalued, until everyone is pushing a wheelbarrow of worthless conceptual dollars through Berlin to buy some butter; and when that happens you can be sure soon there will be transvestites roaming the streets, and worse.

One thinks identity is fantasy, they can be what they dream, man-woman, straight-gay, black-white, a whim, the other thinks it's inscribed in blood, lineage, heritage, ancestors, one is rooted in the real the other takes it perilous flight from it headlong into a raving new world.

They can call a newly arrived person an American, more American than the Americans really, more American than the original, this newly made American, that all they lack is a paper, but really the ones saying that are Americans in name only, the only thing American about them is the paper.

America was created by words on paper and has never lived it down.

In America there is a constant battle over identity, there are those who think that America was based on a race, the white race, and the further one gets away from that origin the more perilous things become; and there are those who think it’s based on a creed (‘all men are created equal’, ‘dedicated to a proposition’, ‘make the world safe for democracy’, ‘a nation of immigrants’) that we are a proposition nation and that any border crosser who stands up on his or her hind legs and assents to the proposition (four score and twenty years ago!) is as American as any Daughter Of The American Revolution, or  more American, really, more original  than the originals. But if a national identity is infinitely malleable then there isn’t one.  Race is older than ideology and will always vanquish it.

Judith Butler is the reigning philosopher of the replacement, she says identity has nothing to do with time, lineage, history, heritage, ancestors, blood, but rather it’s as modern as tomorrow afternoon and often as unknown, and, as such, she has blood on her hands.

“To put it simply, once one accepts the idea that a man can become a woman just by thinking he is one, it is remarkably easy to be persuaded, for example, that England can become ‘other’ than the homogeneous home of the English.”---Andrew Joyce

To explicate this devaluing, this fake real, Camus uses the Platonic dialogue between Cratylus and Hermogene.

“For Hermogene words mean what their common users have decided they would mean, and nothing else; and if the same common users, or others, decide to change that meaning, then it will be changed, whether that pleases the speakers or not. Meaning is but a pure convention, a contract, a deliberation, a pact, an agreement.”

“For Cratylus, on the contrary, words are just as many survivors of time, and their letters and syllables have much to say about their signification and their long journey throughout the centuries. What they are and what they mean do not depend on some arbitrary decision, but on their origin, and on the origin of that origin, and on their endless run uphill in the nervous stream of history, like a salmon swimming counter-current towards the singing spring. Do words like French or British refer to an administrative stamp on some legal document, or to an ancestry, a long experience, a shared history, blood, race, love, culture, civilization?”

“Nouns and adjectives pertaining to nationalities are probably the best and simplest testimonies that for every given word there exists a mute and ferocious rivalry between its Hermogenian meaning — the superficial, administrative, official, legal, scientific, triumphant one, with its ID papers always in perfect order — and its Cratylian meaning, real, deep, profound, hard to explain, poetic and literary.”

“Hermogene, champion of stamping, and who has easier, simpler, more authoritative (be it only the authority of the law, or of dictionaries) ways of playing the game, or running the war, always wins. It is highly probable, though, that he has never won more than he is winning now, if only because a Taylorian world of normalization, standardization, general substitution, badly needs the power to name things and people pretty much as it pleases.  Quartiers populaires, in French, popular districts, refer to districts from which the original, indigenous people, have been expelled.”

And here we get to the crux, or next to the crux, of the matter. Global Replacism at it’s heart, not surprisingly, is about replacing.  It wants to replace something real with something unreal or at least with something virtual, to denature nature and deculture culture, to decivilize civilization, until there is nothing left, except their own fabrication.

“What is being French? What is being European?   Is it a physical reality inscribed in time, in history, in lineages, in verticality, in origins, in the origins of origins?  Or is it a pure convention, a treaty, a protocol, a rubber stamp?”

Judith Butler is the reigning philosopher of the replacement, she says identity has nothing to do with time, lineage, history, heritage, ancestors, blood, but is as modern as tomorrow afternoon and as unknown, and, as such, Judith Butler has blood on her hands, blood mixed with Nutella.

“In industrial and post-industrial societies, especially those where the main industry is the industry of Undifferentiated Human Matter, where man is the producer, product and consumer at once, there is no such thing as a genuine product. The product is what the industrialists say it is on the package. Name is all. And if the name vanishes, then the thing that was named is bound to vanish too.”

“Fakeal is the non-stop creation of the Industries of Daze, a colossal conglomerate which operates in three principal fields: schools, and the educational system in general, busy providing lessons in forgetfulness, the teaching of oblivion; mass dumbing down, operated by the media, the Press, television, the show business, advertising industry, keen to offer, as films and series do, permanent misrepresentations of everything, particularly of races relations, much more intense in their images than they are in reality, with crossbreeding given as an obsessive example, its omnipresence amounting, like all the rest, to uninterrupted propaganda; and, finally, drugs, of which it is interesting to note that, if the other two departments are still largely in replacist hands, this one, at least as far as distribution goes, is already the replacers’ reserved domain.”

If identity is infinitely malleable then there isn’t one, which is exactly what the Replacist Power wants, a nameless, faceless, raceless, sexless easily digestible mass, ripe for the picking, one free white man at a time.

One stampede’s cattle, to herd them into the pen.  Whenever anyone accuses the anti-immigrant forces of being heartless they will invariably accuse them of wanting to round people up. If you are going to shoot fish it’s best they be in a barrel.

“The victimization competition between slavery and concentration camp will soon be rendered meaningless, the two phenomena converging under the effect of the global Davocratic Replacism, which makes man an industrial product like any other, undifferentiated human matter.”

“The relations between concentration, replacement and space, especially space division, is also called attention to by the French philosopher and metaphysician Georges Gusdorf, whose thought, at times, reminds one of his contemporary Gunther Anders, the great theoretician of The Obsolescence of Man, to whom my own reflection is very much indebted.

“One could even say that one of the tragedies of our times consists of the increasing disqualification of human space.  The natural milieu is more and more obliterated, crossed out by the settlement of technique’s new milieu. Spatial structures tend to become more and more homogenous, the differences between the sites blurred by the growing monotony and uniformity of the ways of living.  All cities tend to look alike, as all houses, as do all flats, all lives as well as all the political regimes.  Modern uprooting makes men interchangeable.  For that matter the value of individuals seems to go down at the same time, as that of places, and the modern man is wondering with anguish whether there will soon be nothing but people being displaced in a concentrationnary universe”

With industrialization people left the rural spaces and moved to the cities, concentrating there, white flight moved them out into the suburbs but with more dark skinned people flooding in the last open, white spaces will be gone soon.

Of the change of people itself we have seen how it has become current for a simple reason, in the single magical word “replace” Camus found something devastatingly accurate, terrifyingly simple, and with tremendous explanatory power, it was like hitting the mother lode with the simple stroke of a pen.  Sound doctrine and a lapidary style have a lightening effect.

The Replacist Power engages in the racial swamping of the white countries for many reasons, for cheap labor, to deracinate the native stock, to create consumers, to drive down wages, to make housing expensive, to demoralize, all of which serve the purposes of the  eradication of the middle class and the creation of slaves, the creation of industrial slaves on an industrial scale.

“Never forget that the proletariat, etymologically speaking, is the class whose function it is to reproduce, to proliferate, to provide slaves.   The proletarianization of the world is the reduction of man to the status of a product, preferably industrial.”

“The Global Davocratic elites advocate the Great Replacement, supporting the change of the people and civilization for the sake of the industry of man, the economic system which produces the Undifferentiated Human Matter, the Human Nutella, spreadable at will.”

In Europe they have Eurabia in America we have the browning of America, it is always aimed at the Europeans because the ruling power knows that it is this people, this singular people, this once great people, this formerly great race, and this people alone who are capable of providing any resistance.   With them gone they will be playing the game of world domination with all borders down, with so many coffee colored slaves for their world-wide plantation, all of the rights of ravage---no noblesse oblige.

“The absences of the races, the absences of the nations.  Soon they will proclaim the inexistence of the species, allowing to be sent into the air with the goats, to put the camel in the Human Nutella and to reassure on the biodiversity.”

“If you can get it in your head that the goal is the abolition of every boundary, all distinctions, hierarchies, nuances, to obtain a homogeneous industrial material, man, undifferentiated human material, then everything will become perfectly clear.”

Human rights are their battle cry, but it’s human rights walking on it’s head, to commit a crime against humanity, to clothe genocide in the rhetoric of human rights, is quite a feat, to dress up tyranny as tolerance, enslavement as freedom, standardization as diversity, and genocide as the rights of peoples.

While the sleeping middle class remains asleep their plans thrive.

Raceless, sexless, genderless, totalitarian global humanity, decivilized, denatured, decultured, rootless, deracinated, demoralized, disoriented, equal, standardized, homogenous, concentrated, allowing them to take dead aim.

So if Global Replacism is the crime, this unprecedented crime, this crime against humanity of the 21st Century, then who are these criminals that no Nuremberg could ever possibly call to account?

THE CRIMINALS

For this unprecedented crime, and for the criminals, there will be no Nuremberg, for what tribunal could judge it?

So who are these criminals?  Frederick Taylor, for one, has blood on his hands.  In the White Nationalist movement the answer would be easy: Jews.  Jews were the Replacist Power before there ever was such a thing, they were the Replacist Power avant la lettre, as it were, but certainly sine qua non.  Camus rejects this identification out of hand and indeed the cry in Charlottesville of Jews Will Not Replace Us! occasioned him to release his only work on the Great Replacement yet translated into English, an amalgam of his various writings on the subject called, pointedly, You Will Not Replace Us!  Now perhaps if you could create an eternal media embargo and shoot him full of sodium pentothol he might admit that somewhere some way there was a Jew or two in the woodpile somewhere, but perhaps not:

“I was deeply shocked to learn that, during the notorious anti-replacist demonstration in Charlottesville, in 2017, next to the people who were shouting You will not replace us!, which, of course, I thoroughly and enthusiastically approve of, as the very cry against post-humanism, some, a minority, and a very small one I hope—I am very much accustomed to the ways of the mainstream press, and I know their delight in mentioning as central, in the actions of their adversaries, what was in fact totally marginal—were shouting Jews will not replace Us! It is not the Jews that are replacing you. Taylor was not a Jew. Ford was not a Jew, and indeed, as we have seen, he was highly anti-Semitic. Soros is, admittedly, Jewish, and he does play an essential part in global replacism, as have done, on a smaller scale and with much more limited means, many a Jewish intellectual, journalist, columnist or writer, red-hot promoters in their time of massive immigration, or mass migration. But this has perceptibly changed, fortunately (from my point of view); and the proportion of replacist Jews and anti-replacist Jews is now almost reversed. In any case, Jews are very much divided on that issue, which makes them no different from any other community.”

Who, then, does he consider the guilty?  He has many names for them: the clique, the hyper-rich, the Replacist Power, Davocratic Replacists, and, most usually and simply, the Davocracy (Macron being it’s foremost errand boy, having ended the traditional parties) Concerned as he is with lineages he writes:

“I have tried on several occasions to sum up (through tweets!) the genealogy of Replacism and its present marital status. It could run more or less like this: Replacism, the son of Antiracism and High Finance (themselves, respectively son of Egalitarianism and Anti-Facism, and daughter of Taylorization and Ultraliberalism, granddaughter of Industrial Revolution and Capitalism) marries Petite-Bourgeoisie, daughter of Democratization and Welfare State, grand-daughter of French Revolution and Proletariat. Several of those names are names of dynasties, that have been running for several generations. It is notably the case of Industrial Revolution, whose dowry provides the opulence of the whole tribe. Central here to the family tree is Taylorization, and, before that, plain Taylorism”

These criminals will always cry human rights, they dress up genocide in it’s rhetoric, which is a neat trick, this international gang of criminals, they have a hundred year plan; is it an accident that space travel is being privatized?  No mere government will ever restrain their boundless perfidy, they have insulated themselves in the prefect cocoon, they have denationalized themselves, slipped surly bonds of their birth, they have made a separate peace, and for these unprecedented crimes, these crimes against humanity, the crime sine qua non of the 21st century, they will never have their Nuremberg, no mere tribunal can deal with the enormity.

Another word for this international gang of criminals is the elite, the managerial class:

“The Replacist Power can also be described in Soviet terms as the media-political-industrial-intellectual complex, empowered by it's judge-like journalists, it's censor-like judges, it's industrial-like publishers, it's media-magnate-like industrialists, it's organic intellectuals, it’s backroom controls, it’s court sociologists.”

Their ambition is limitless:

“We can see the powers, and in this case the Davocratic Replacist Powers, arrogating progressively over all beings all the powers of the ancient gods, and especially the unique gods - hence their easy alliance with Islam.”

It is in short the entire ruling class, the “meritocratic” elite, the creative class, the rich, the hyper rich, the Davos Set, the symbolic analysts, the ones who control the perfected algorithms of the future.

“They all belong to the hyper-rich, and what the hyper-rich want is the uninterrupted mass production of the factories which churn out Undifferentiated Human Matter (UHM). Nothing else matters to them.”

Macron is the perfect poster boy for this set, the emblem par excellence, a Rothschild banker who ran as a technocratic managerial centrist, got rid of the parties and spoke indiscreetly of becoming Jupiter in his court of sycophants and minions:

“As for the other, upper, end of the economic and political spectrum, I think the media and the people did not pay enough attention to an innocuous remark of ex-president François Hollande about his much criticized successor Emmanuel Macron. Asked whether Macron was the president of the rich, Holland snapped:  “No, he is not the president of the rich (long surprised silence).  He is the president of the very rich”.

“Macron is indeed, in my opinion, the best local representative on earth of what I have called Davocracy, the government of the planet by Davos, that Swiss ski resort where the Great Paymasters of the world, bankers and giants of finance, congregate once a year to decide how the planet should be run according to its best interest and theirs.”

“Macron is even, again in my opinion, the best example of the reality of direct Davocracy, the takeover by Davos of the management, without intermediaries, of the human park, to speak like Peter Sloterdijk. This implies the neutralization of the political strata which used to be the interface between the peoples and high finance: now Davos feels strong enough do to without this in-between body, unreliable as it always was.”

These rich masquerade under the guise of any political ideology which will suit them at the moment, they cut their fashions to fit the fevers of the moment, but their only ideology is themselves:

“The official political sympathies of the media, who are the principal instrument of ideological repression—journalists playing all the parts at once, informer, police officer, commissar, prosecutor, judge, executioner—of the Thought Police, are of no significance whatsoever.”

He sees these managers, however, as essentially using the left for their purposes, though there is no power on earth more in favor of open borders than Global Capital:

“Replacism is the implementation of an idea of the left, anti-racism, serving interests of the right, general interchangeability.”

Camus started out a man of the left, a novelist and literary icon, a gay icon, hob nobber with the Warhol set, an enabler of the small replacement (there’s blood on his hands for an in the spirit of the Cultural Revolution 1970s novel called Tricks about twenty-five random sexual encounters, the manual of the Small Replacement clearly specifies that however tenderly rendered eight is the absolute limit); and he still retains parts of this ideology, such as a concern with over-population and ecology; he also has libertarian streak a la Pym Fortuyn.  But whatever else he is he has officially migrated hard to the hard right, or at least he has created fellow travelers of the right, or become one himself, and birds of a feather are tarred together, and has gained the lasting enmity of the left.  As he has said he follows the truth wherever it takes him which is why the swastika follows him wherever he goes, it’s an unerring barometer; where truth has been the swastika follows.

He sees the left as deeply complicit with replacism, perhaps unwittingly so, perhaps cynically so.  We see this in the Bernie Sanders of the world complaining that open borders are a “Koch Brothers idea” and talking about the American working class and the prerogatives of nation states and then turning around and waiving in 80 year old diabetic grandmothers because he has to appeal to the freak show his party has become, deploring the ever laying one finger on one hair on the head of an illegal because, of course, he has no integrity and he wants to win.  It’s how capital, allegedly, famously even, of the right, is woke and takes the side of every far left cause, to beat us down.   It’s how antifa has become the jackboots of global capital. It’s how cultural Marxism led them to abandon the white working class in favor of fashionable and exotic pet minorities, and led them to strip away the substance of the middle class even as it imported global humanity to keep wages down and investors' profits up.  Corporations know that every body added means wages are a little lower, prices are little higher, land is worth a little more, houses are a little more expensive, and so they use global humanity as a hammer, to beat us down. The sleeping middle class is not sleeping, it’s dead, they breed us for slaves.  Corporations had a bad reputation so they decided to take up every deviant notion of the left to buy their silence, buy their complicity, rainbow flags, men in the restrooms with girls, fetus murdering in Georgia, they’re fully on board in the boardroom.  Kowtowing to fashionable minorities is not even a price to pay for getting a pass on shipping the jobs overseas, even as the barista with the green hair and the steel hoop in her septum waives them on.

When Ralph Nader was around corporations were execrated by the left, they had their Battles Of Seattle and their Occupy Wall Street, then in a change of breathless gall they acquiesced to them when Corporations abandoned White America and threw in with the most unholy thing the left could think up, buying their silence, when we were young we used to just call them weirdos and move on but now they are all decked out with their own ideology complete with corporate sponsorship.

“High Finance was an old lady of practically unlimited means but execrable reputation. She was well aware of being obliged, in a media saturated society, where one’s “image” is everything, to try and build a better one. Someone introduced to her Anti-racism, a popular young man of impeccable credentials (at that time)……..”

“Contrary to what one may have thought, those two (High Finance and Anti-Racism) soon discovered they had a lot in common, notably the hatred of segregation, discrimination, borders, frontiers and the like, everything that might lead to a distinction between human beings. They were also highly complementary. Anti-racism provided the couple with a good name and with absolute protection against all criticism: how could anyone criticize virtue, goodness, generosity, equality, fraternity between people from all walks of life? Finance provided it with money, power, total mastery of the media—all the more so that money and power, thanks to that unexpected union, had virtue on their side, which might one day come handy, and it did, to alleviate the qualms of a few idealistic or extremely naive journalists.”

The left love the rich now, and the rich love the left, in America the Democrat Party used to be the party of society’s downward falling and the Republicans of the winners, but the reversal of this in now almost complete.

“One could object here that the power or powers which want this state of affairs, the Great Replacement, global replacism, the industries of replaceable man, and who have chosen Macron to be their representative in France, the local governor for Davocracy, are probably the richest people in the world”

The left love the rich now, and the rich love the left, in America the Democrat Party used to be the party of the society’s downward falling and the Republicans of the winners, but the reversal of this in now almost complete.   Everywhere the rich and the left are in an unholy alliance.

In this way the Replacist Power sides with the "noble" causes that are strictly none of it's concern, selling slavery as freedom, tyranny as tolerance, sameness as diversity, genocide as human rights.

“The genius of the Replacist Davocracy is to make work incessantly for the interests of the hyper rich (the increase of the number of the consumers, the industrialization of the man, etc.) the progressive forces of left, the antifas, the beautiful souls ...”

“If the Left were what it believes itself to be, humanist and the protector of the humanity of man, it would stand up against the industrialization of human matter, the general interchangeability, all that the interests of the hyper rich demand, and that it actually serves.”

The elites, the clique, the powers that be, the left, who specifically is guilty of this unprecedented crime, this crime against humanity?

At times Camus seems to think it’s a machine that’s been wound up, an interplay of evil forces beyond any one person’s or one group’s control:

“Personally I have never imagined that a group of people with evil intentions congregated one day in some big luxurious executive room and decided that they would change the population of Europe for a cheaper one that would growth faster in quantity. I think it is more evil than that. Some people incriminate the Jews, others incriminate the European Union, some think Wall Street or the IMF are entirely responsible. There might be some truth in any of those assumptions, but I would rather think of some enormous, bizarre and complex processes, so intricate that no one can understand perfectly how they work and why, and no one can master and stop them once they are started. They are very much started. It is for us to break the machines which churn out men like other churn out cookies, or Nutella. The problem, as I see it, is not so much the replacement of men by robots as the replacement of robots by men, dazed machines made of flesh, covered in diplomas, extremely violent to one another but fundamentally obedient to the general plan.”

It is that most time honored of things: the Ruling Class, the meritocratic elite, the college professor, the aid worker, the NGO, the State Department employee, the public union employee, the newspaper editor, the fashion magazine publisher, the movie producer, the script writer, the CEO, the op-ed writer, the diversity czar, the barista with the green hair and the steel hoop in her septum,  they all are wittingly or unwittingly in favor of the Great Replacement, they work for it night and day.  That some do it out of what they consider to be humanitarianism is irrelevant; others do it from greed, or malevolence, but once a sound doctrine is in place these distinctions lose their meaning:  and humanitarianism can as easily be misplaced guilt, and all are foes in the friend/foe binary, so the perpetrators of the great replacement, of global replacism are those who are working for it, or who approve of it, or who ignore it when they should know better, or are blind to it, or who do nothing about it when they certainly could.  That there are generals and foot soldiers, collaborators, occupants, fools, traitors, quislings, opportunists, and more, will become less important over time, when the fatal trajectories converge.

“Governments — and not only governments: the Press, the media, intellectuals, judges — are not only coping with this state of affairs, as mere collaborators would. They have created it, either because they think it is right, because they think it is unavoidable, or because they have construed it as an instrument serving their own interest. And most likely they think it is right because they feel (wrongly, in the long run, as we shall probably see) that it is both unavoidable and in their interest. They are not collaborators, they are perpetrators (of the crime of ethnic substitution). And such, and so tragic, is the conjuncture in Europe today, as it is given over to invasion, chaos, Islamization and that worst of all genetic manipulations, the change of people, that all the words which try and describe what is happening evolve through the same three phases as collaboration, occupation, or colonization went through : at first they seem widely exaggerated  then they appear sadly adequate, and finally they prove sorely understated, embarrassingly inferior to the reality of the horror, guilt and grief they are purported to denote.”

The perfect crime is when the perpetrators can brand any one who objects a criminal.

After such knowledge, can there be forgiveness?

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JUDGEMENT

This is the general plan that they are obedient to, these are the perpetrators of the crime, but what judgment can be meted out?   What solution?  What’s to be done? Who will remember the people?

First, Camus is an anti-natalist.  Contrary to many white nationalists who want a proliferation of white people he sees nothing wrong with a slow decline in white numbers provided they can do so in relative peace, relative insularity, the peace of having that thing that seems the most evil to the powers that be, having a country to call their own.

“The state of the Earth requires population decline (and probably all others). The interests of the Davocracy require the permanent increase of the number of consumers.  It replaces declining races everywhere with proliferating races.”

If he has a magical word it is remigration, they have to go back where they came from, the should be famous French Degas!

“Without remigration there will be no liberation. Liberation (of conquered land, occupied country, colonized people) and remigration (of the conqueror, occupying forces, colonialist settlers) are one and the same thing.”

Conservatism has now long since passed it’s sell by date, there’s little to nothing remaining worthy of conservation, only a thorough, remorseless and unsparing and draconian rooting out will do.

“In a world that has become horrible - the global slum - I do not understand how one can be conservative. One must be a reactionary, that is to say, require polluters to clean up, vandals erased, wind turbines destroyed & invaders they must remigrate”

Anti-natalism, remigration, reaction: but what prospect for this is there?  Is not a long stalemate more likely? Given the sad state of affairs in the so called self-liberating democracies, what are the odds that this is not a chimera?  There may be a way, or several ways, but the will, thus far, is sorely lacking, and the media reigning official ideology exerts it’s deadening, monotonous and powerful effects:

“Mind Control has improved in unimaginable proportions. Information is everywhere; it passes into our utmost intimacy; we even produce it ourselves, for each other, and in the dictatorship of petite-bourgeoisie, as we have seen earlier, everyone is the dictator of all the others”

“Acceptance of the unacceptable is a mystery, unless one realizes that technological progress has made the industry of illusion and the manufacturing of daze infinitely more efficient than it used to be even in the relatively recent period of the Soviet dictatorship.”

“Davocratic Replacism and the UHM industries will give a new meaning to the old word of "autocracy": government by the government, management of the human park by robots (sometimes human), dictatorship without dictator other than the algorithm, to profit alone.”

In short, there is an ideological blackout, the truth is forbidden, criminalized, they have turned the neat trick of committing the perfect crime so enormous is it and anyone who says so is branded a criminal or a lunatic.  The people are perishing but talking about it is bad form.

If all else fails there’s always the old American social custom of self defense.

“In all the history of humanity rare are the leaders who have deliberately surrendered their country to foreign conquest and their people to the replacement. This crime is virtually unprecedented.”

Camus says anti-racism, diversity, tolerance is Hitler, but Hitler walking on his head. Silicon Valley introduced itself to America with a famous Super Bowl Commercial where they were hurling a hammer at Big Brother and his oppression but in an insidious twist of fate they've become the power that needs to have the hammer hurled at.   The ones who promised liberation have become the enslaving power.

The very ones who celebrate diversity are the ones who want to abolish all borders, all distinctions, all discrimination, all differences, between nations, peoples, cultures, races, sexes.

Perhaps the only hope is in accelerationism or in playing for time, and perhaps which doesn’t matter.  Eventually things will come to the sticking point, the number of whites will decline and the number of whites who flock to our banner will increase, and these fatal trajectories will converge in the twilight of civil war.

The national populist movements that have been cropping up around the world are in fact the last chance to rein in the present Ruling Class and prevent them from turning the world into what they want it to be, their private plantation.

“Population swamping or ‘demographic invasion’ is a different matter entirely.  It undermines the very identity of a nation or the people targeted by the swamping.  The major threat associated with it is that it might very well be irreversible.”

The signal word “irreversible” here is the headline, what grabs our attention, we all sense the end of something, the coming to the end of the line, the end of the story. That arch racist Jean Raspail wrote a sympathetic novel called Who Will Remember The People?  It is about the eradication of an indigenous South American tribe as the result of repeated encroachment and invasions, and he wrote it because as a humanist he knows that nothing on earth is sadder than to witness the passing away of a people, any people, or to witness the passing away of a distinct way of life.

We all know that ultimately we will need to take our destiny in our own hands, rise up, by political means or otherwise, and do so before the Power perfects it’s last algorithms.

If all else fails there’s always the old American social custom of self defense.

Against this fate of suicidal dispossession may the European peoples speak with one united voice, may they speak in clear tones and with wild cries of execration.

And soon, too, for as Mr. Camus reminds us somewhere we are not bereft of examples, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, South Africa; and their fate could be our fate in the future or, of course, tomorrow afternoon. And should such a fate befall us, as such, there will be blood on our hands

“Truth has a lightning effect, especially on an organism that has been confronted on a daily basis and for years, as the ideal of living together has been, to crushing and often bloodstained denials of its dearest convictions.”

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2Xv4q3D via IFTTT

[trendyelle]

What To Eat For Clear Skin& What Foods Will Wreak Havoc On Your Face

If youre anything like me, someone who is a grown-up adult treats their body like a trashcan, then you distinguish the daily fight that is doing whatever the fuck off want while at the same time wanting to have a great organization and enormous surface. Lifes hard whether it wishes to get fucked up at Heads Ball but too appear 100 years old in your Instagram story. Not that I would know. I did not go to Gov Ball, though I did invest the weekend going through mimosas like water and devouring sufficient food to get me my own TLC reality show. That being said, I want to change. I want to be a brand-new me. A better me. A me who introduces actual vitamins and minerals into her arrangement so her skin doesnt resemble the entire slice of pizza she devoured last-place nighttime. So heres a listing of foods you should eschew like an ex-boyfriend slithering into your DMs and foods you should embrace because theyll fix your fucking heads. Damn, Ive got bars. DONT: Dine Canned Food/ Meats Gross. As if. Like, who even dines canned fleshes anymore? Other than my ex from college who had this weird obsession with eating vienna sausages( which, in hindsight, should have been a ruby-red fucking pennant that this minor was a sociopath. That and his Belk credit card that he was always boasting about ). Canned and/ or highly processed foods have a shit ton of sodium in them and effects your organization to hold on to water, which is why your look is always puffy or you have pocketed under your eyes that can be seen from cavity, and your acne is at World War III proportions. DO: Eat Salmon Aside from giving you a reason to pretend to be a foodie and too be obnoxious on Instagram, dining salmon is a sure way to get better looking scalp. Salmon is rich with omega-3 fatty battery-acids and healthy fattens. These paunches buttress cadre membranes and nourish the scalp to maintain you searching fresh AF. DONT: Drink Green Juice Lol exactly because you frequently say shit like #FitLife and #CleanEating on your IG does not mean you know wtf is good for you, because SURPRISE all those juices youre booze to purge your figure are actually actually fucking bad for you. Juices are sugary as hell, especially the light-green juices which are able to have up to 50 grams of sugar in them, which is actual sabotage when it comes to having clear surface. ^ I suspect every fitstagrammer when the find out they’ve been gushing liquid carbohydrate into their temples bodies DO: Drink A Protein Smoothie Aside from having something to talk about with the hot tutor at your gym, protein smoothies can actually be beneficial for your surface. The more you know. Remain away from the juicer smoothies and opt for one with some protein in it. These the different types of smoothies are high in healthy fats and wont leave your scalp seeming more ratchet than your Snap story last weekend. DONT: Eat Ice Cream Okay, this one I insured coming. Good-for-nothing that savours this good can be anything but sabotage on your body. And since Im not on my season rn in control of my body I guess Im open to suggestions here. Ice cream is chock-full of sugar which are able to sort this fun act called advanced glycation end products which fucks up the protein in your torso. Why is that important you may ask? Because the proteins it fucks with “the worlds largest” are the ones that keep your skin plump and springy examining. So basically snacking ice cream is aging you.* stairs into oncoming congestion* DO: Eat Dark Chocolate Dark chocolate aka the DUD of chocolates has a fuck ton of antioxidants in it, which is v good for your surface. So even though it delicacies health and the whole hour youll be bidding you were snacking real chocolate with real flavor at the least your scalp will search good AF and be protected against wrinkles and other bad shit. DONT: Drink Coffee HA HA HA HA this has to be some sort of sick laugh. You want me to give up my will to live caffeine? Do you likewise want me to commit homicide the next time someone replies everyone to a department email chain? DO YOU? This one is tough for me to wrap my psyche around because coffee is literally one of the only grounds I get out of bunked in the morning, and consequently, the reason you get to experience this sparkling temperament. That tell me anything, coffee is a diuretic( bogus bulletin Im sure !) which causes your torso to lose ocean and your skin to get v dehydrated. Stay away from this shit if you crave glowy AF skin. DO: Drink Hot Lemon Water This replacement sounds about as good as the Republican plan for health care but thats neither here nor there. Even though the prospect of drinking red-hot lemon ocean know it sounds as enticing as sleeping with Jonathan The Tickle Monster, its actually super are you all right. Its hydrating, full of antioxidants, and affords some very much support to your liver. Apparently, the liver is the main organ that detoxifies their own bodies and if youre full of poisons sucking on eras that aim in Y, youre more likely to break out. Sighs. And this is why we cant have neat things. DONT: Eat Bagels Okay, Im starting to feel personally victimized by this list. Like, is person looking at my bank affirmation and be careful to ensure that I spend a large amount of my down time in coffee shop and/ or bagel browses? Because Im detecting certainly criticized rn. Apparently, bagels are the worst for your scalp and can lead to a cascade of hormones aka acne breakouts for periods.* prays this is bogus report* DO: Eat Non-Processed Carbs or Oats Tbh Id preferably starve than eat something that resembles animal feed but I guess thats the price we pay to look like the “after” girl in an acne commercial-grade. Oats are the right kind of carbs probs because it gazes miserable to eat and too because its high in antioxidants which weve fixed will not only give you clear/ glowy surface but too fights against anti-aging. DONT: Drink Soda To perfectly no ones stun except my own because I refuse to read labels written by health professionals people who are out to destroy my gaiety, soda are detrimental to you. And precisely because you suck diet soda doesnt mean youre safe. Because diet soda specially interrupts the necessary and healthy bacteria found in your gut. Likewise sucking any kind of soda can really fuck with your skin. Like, cause rosacea, eczema, and acne fucking with your surface. K. Just fuck me up rn then. Likewise, wtf am I supposed to order at the bar to go along with my vodka then? I cant merely drink vodka straight. I want to have clearer surface , not die. DO: Drink Kombucha Finally something that ogles good on my Instagram story and isnt going to fuck up my skin. About damn meter. Basically Kombucha is good for you because its fermented, and therefore full of probiotics, which will solve all your life difficulties. Im paraphrasing, but still. If you want clear surface by the time this weekend’s brunch moves around then chug some of this and profes like its alcohol something you enjoy drinking. So, in conclusion, anything that brings you exultation is maybe fucking up your skin and you should cut it from your diet ASAP. I am feeling #blessed rn that alcohol did not obligate the index, but thats chiefly because I refused to do any actual experiment that they are able to substantiate otherwise. Who says you cant attain your own predestination? Listen, if all else neglects and you have no self hold dont want to sacrifice your prosperity theres always Facetune. Read more: www.betches.com http://selfhelpantiagingtips.com/what-to-eat-for-clear-skin-what-foods-will-wreak-havoc-on-your-face-26/

[trendingnewsb]

I Survived Burnout More Than a Few Times, and Here's What I Learned

Burnout used to be like an old wild and disruptive friend who would show up in my life at the most unlikely times. One summer in particular when I was on a vacation with my family, I was a wreck. I couldn’t enjoy my time with my husband and daughter who were soaking up the sun, swimming, and enjoying their free time. I, however, could only see life through a very negative lens and spent more time brooding than playing. In the weeks and months leading up to that vacation, I had worked myself to the bone, was feeling under pressure on some personal family matters, and hit the proverbial wall. I had nothing left in my engine for myself or anyone else.

Burnout is a regular visitor to my life as I always step in to help others

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the first time burnout showed up. A hard worker and high achiever dating back to elementary school, my primary focus was on achieving at all costs. I am also a caregiver by nature feeling the need to step in and help when others need help. Through law school and then working in the nonprofit sector, I would work and work and work ignoring my building stress until I flamed out.

On that particular vacation though, I finally grew tired of burning out. Because after I came home, I decided to do something different. I decided I was tired of hitting the burnout wall and instead wanted to figure out how to avoid it the next time around.

In time, I came to learn the early warning signs of burn out and how to face it off before it took over. And here is what I learned.

The fine line between “stressed” and “burned out”

Burnout happens when you are under excessive and prolonged stress. People are often able to respond to short bursts of pressure and demand without much trouble. But when that pressure continues day after day without a break, the stress can mound and potentially become burnout.

Importantly, you can be stressed but not burned out.

When you are stressed you are facing a lot of different pressures both mentally and physically but even still you can imagine getting things under control. On the other hand, if you have burnout, you are feeling empty, a lack of motivation, and don’t see a hope of positive change. Burnout is when you begin to detach and feel cynical or ineffective.

You may not recognize burnout when it’s right in front of you

We often think “burnout” looks like someone who is so incapacitated they are unable to work. Burnout doesn’t have to look so extreme. You can continue to work when you have burnout but instead feel every day at work is a bad day. You could be feeling disinterested in your work or maybe even depressed by it. You could feel overwhelmed by responsibilities and turn to distracting activities like drinking or social media.

The most common sign of burnout is when your stress is so high you start to see diminishing returns at work and you are lacking interest in work or life.

Some of the other warning signs:

Lack of energy

Lack of sleep

Lack of appetite

Inability to focus

Physically and emotionally exhausted

Drained and depleted

Low or no motivation

Forgetful

Physical stress (e.g. chest pain)

Getting chronically sick

Anxiety

Anger

To be clear, there is not an official diagnosis of burnout – unlike depression which is a widely studied condition. And sometimes burnout may start to look more like depression which is why it can be important to seek professional attention. What is most insidious about burnout is that it creeps up on you over time. All of the indicators may be there but you may fail to recognize it when it is right in front of you.

Types of people who are more prone to burnout

The best place to start is to identify what is causing excessive and prolonged stress in your life. This can come from the workplace, home, or both.

So while there isn’t any one type of person that is prone to burnout, there are some common themes of the types of people who are more likely to face burnout:

People who face heavy workloads or high stress positions.

High achievers

Caregivers including healthcare professionals at the front line of care

Working parents

Students

Burnout may not simply come because of excessive work

Keep in mind that burnout doesn’t just happen because of significant demands on people lives. It can happen if our mindset shifts.

In my coaching work, I have clients that exhibit signs of burnout but it may not come necessarily simply because of excessive work. Take, for example, Jennifer (name changed to protect confidentiality). She has an intensive job that has her working many evenings and most weekends. This is something she has been doing for years. But recently she has realized how exhausted she is from work. She is getting more upset with demands made on her than she has in the past. She is beginning to hate her job and can’t understand why all of a sudden she can’t “deal” with work. For Jennifer, the cause of the emerging burnout wasn’t the demands of the job itself. It began when she felt unappreciated and ignored. Therefore, burnout can manifest when we become disappointed by dashed expectations.

Create ‘margin’ in your reschedule

We tend to over schedule our lives. So our days can be jam packed with work, appointments, and other obligations. This has us running from place to place without a moment to breathe. Look at how you can start to schedule breathing room in your day. Avoid scheduling meetings back to back in your day. Schedule out time on your schedule to do some important catch up.

Adopt resilience tools at work

While work itself can be stressful, there are ways to build in strategies that allow us to de-stress during the day. This includes doing some deep breathing, meditation, or just taking a walk outdoors. Productivity hacks suggest dedicating specific chunks of uninterrupted time (read: no email or social media) and then taking solid breaks around 10 or 15 minutes to clear your mind.

Adopt the strategy of “no”

People feeling burnout are often feel they must “do it all.” Stepping back from burnout means finding ways to lessen the stress which means saying the powerful two letter word NO. It may be hard at first but look for opportunities to delegate demands to others, shift priorities off your plate, or delay obligations.

Find regular times to unplug yourself

Don’t be under the illusion you always need to be moving to make progress. Sometimes, doing nothing is exactly what your body and mind are looking for. Find time to recharge by unplugging from it all. Taking real breaks – to eat, sleep, decompress – can give us the energy we need to remain productive.

To be sure, taking a real break can be difficult in today’s world when we are all expected to remain in constant communication though messaging and email. Consider giving yourself an electronics-free time so you can remove yourself from the noise of work, social media, and email.

There was a time I was convinced that I was on a regular cycle of burnout and that my old familiar friend would re-enter my life maybe once a year or every couple of years. I thought I was just a person who faced burnout and that was just part of who I was. But that trip to the beach woke me up and forced me to finally face down how I was the cause of my own burnout.

I now have a personal program to manage my stress and avoid burnout. Sure, I can still get pretty stressed at times but I am much quicker to see the signs and take immediate action. You too can be empowered to tackle and stop burnout in its tracks.

The post I Survived Burnout More Than a Few Times, and Here’s What I Learned appeared first on Lifehack.

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[trendyelle]

What To Eat For Clear Skin& What Foods Will Wreak Havoc On Your Face

If youre anything like me, someone who is a grow adult treats their body like a trashcan, then you acknowledge the daily struggle that is doing whatever the fuck you miss while also wanting to have a great person and great surface. Lifes hard when you want to get fucked up at Governors Ball but likewise ogle 100 years old in your Instagram story. Not that I would know. I did not going to see Gov Ball, though I did expend the weekend going through mimosas like water and snacking enough food to get me my own TLC reality show. That being said, I want to change. I want to be a brand-new me. A better me. A me who throws actual vitamins and minerals into her method so her surface doesnt resemble the entire slice of pizza she chewed last nighttime. So heres a listing of nutrients you are able to forestall like an ex-boyfriend slithering into your DMs and foods you are able to hug because theyll cook your fucking face. Damn, Ive got bars. DONT: Gobble Canned Food/ Meats Gross. As if. Like, who even ingests canned meats anymore? Other than my ex from college who had this weird infatuation with eating vienna sausages( which, in hindsight, should have been a red fucking pennant that this girl was a sociopath. That and his Belk credit card that he was always bragging about ). Canned and/ or highly processed foods have a shit ton of sodium in them and effects your torso to hold on to ocean, which is why your appearance is always puffy or you have pocketed under your eyes that can be seen from infinite, and your acne is at World War III proportions. DO: Eat Salmon Aside from giving you a reason to pretend to be a foodie and too be objectionable on Instagram, devouring salmon is a sure room to get better gazing skin. Salmon is rich with omega-3 fatty battery-acids and healthy fattens. These paunches strengthen cell tissues and nourish the scalp to continue you gazing fresh AF. DONT: Drink Green Juice Lol merely because you often say shit like #FitLife and #CleanEating on your IG does not mean you know wtf is good for you, because SURPRISE all those juices youre boozing to purify your form are actually truly fucking bad for you. Juices are sugary as inferno, especially the green juices which are able to have up to 50 grams of sugar in them, which is actual sabotage when it is necessary to having clear surface. ^ I imagine every fitstagrammer when the catch out they’ve been shooting liquid sugar into their tabernacles bodies DO: Booze A Protein Smoothie Aside from having something to talk about with the hot manager at your gym, protein smoothies was in fact be beneficial for your surface. The more you are familiar with. Remain away from the juicer smoothies and opt for one with some protein in it. These types of smoothies are high in healthy flabs and wont leave your scalp examining more ratchet than your Snap story last weekend. DONT: Eat Ice Cream Okay, this one I accompanied coming. Nothing that savor this good can be anything but destruction on your torso. And since Im not on my period rn in control of my torso I approximate Im open to suggestions here. Ice cream is chock-full of sugar which can figure this fun circumstance called advanced glycation end products which fucks up the protein in your body. Why is that important you may ask? Because the proteins it fucks with the most are the ones that keep your skin plump and springy searching. So mostly chewing ice cream is aging you.* stairs into oncoming transaction* DO: Eat Dark Chocolate Dark chocolate aka the DUD of chocolates has a fuck ton of antioxidants in it, which is v good for your surface. So even though it flavours healthy and the whole experience youll be caring you were devouring real chocolate with real flavor at least your skin will appear good AF and protection against wrinkles and other bad shit. DONT: Drink Coffee HA HA HA HA this has to be some sort of sick pun. You want me to give up my will to live caffeine? Do you likewise want me to commit homicide the next time someone replies all to ministries and departments email chain? DO YOU? This one is tough for me to wrap my mentality around because coffee is literally one of the only reasons I get out of bed in the morning, and hence, the same reasons you get to experience this twinkling temperament. That tell me anything, coffee is a diuretic( bogus report Im sure !) which causes your form to lose liquid and your surface to get v dehydrated. Stay away from this shit if you require glowy AF skin. DO: Drink Hot Lemon Water This replacement sounds about as good as the Republicans plan for health care but thats neither here nor there. Even though future prospects of drinking red-hot lemon liquid sounds about as enticing as sleeping with Jonathan The Tickle Monster, its actually super are you all right. Its hydrating, full of antioxidants, and yields some very much support efforts to your liver. Apparently, the liver is the main organ that detoxifies their own bodies and if youre full of toxins drinking on daytimes that cease in Y, youre more likely to break out. Sighs. And this is why we cant have neat things. DONT: Eat Bagels Okay, Im starting to feel personally was well received by such lists. Like, is someone looking at my bank affirmation and be careful to ensure that I expend a great amount of my down time in coffee shop and/ or bagel stores? Because Im find actually assaulted rn. Apparently, bagels are the worst for your skin and can lead to a cascade of hormones aka acne breakouts for dates.* prays this is imitation news* DO: Eat Non-Processed Carbs or Oats Tbh Id preferably starve than eat something that resembles animal feed but I guess thats the toll we pay to look like the “after” girl in an acne commercial. Oats are the right various kinds of carbs probs because it ogles miserable to eat and likewise because its high in antioxidants which weve proven will not only give you clear/ glowy skin but likewise fightings against anti-aging. DONT: Drink Soda To utterly no ones astound except my own because I refuse to read labels written by health professionals people who are out to destroy my joy, soda are detrimental to you. And precisely because you drink diet soda doesnt mean youre safe. Because diet soda especially disrupts the necessary and healthy bacteria found in your intestine. Likewise sucking any sort of soda are actually fuck with your scalp. Like, reason rosacea, eczema, and acne fuck with your scalp. K. Just fuck me up rn then. Too, wtf am I supposed to order at the bar to go along with my vodka then? I cant only drink vodka straight-from-the-shoulder. I want to have clearer scalp , not croak. DO: Drink Kombucha Finally something that ogles good on my Instagram story and isnt going to fuck up my skin. About damn era. Basically Kombucha is good for you because its fermented, and therefore full of probiotics, which will solve all your life questions. Im paraphrasing, but still. If you miss clear skin by the time this weekend’s brunch reels around then chug some of this and pretend like its booze something you experience drinking. So, in conclusion, anything that brings you rejoice is possibly fucking up your skin and you are able to cut it from your diet ASAP. I am feeling #blessed rn that alcohol did not oblige the roll, but thats mainly because I refused to do any actual investigate that would support otherwise. Who says you cant move your own destiny? Listen, if all else neglects and you have no self see dont wishes to sacrifice your prosperity theres always Facetune. Read more: www.betches.com http://selfhelpantiagingtips.com/what-to-eat-for-clear-skin-what-foods-will-wreak-havoc-on-your-face-5/

[trendingnewsb]

I Survived Burnout More Than a Few Times, and Here's What I Learned

Burnout used to be like an old wild and disruptive friend who would show up in my life at the most unlikely times. One summer in particular when I was on a vacation with my family, I was a wreck. I couldn’t enjoy my time with my husband and daughter who were soaking up the sun, swimming, and enjoying their free time. I, however, could only see life through a very negative lens and spent more time brooding than playing. In the weeks and months leading up to that vacation, I had worked myself to the bone, was feeling under pressure on some personal family matters, and hit the proverbial wall. I had nothing left in my engine for myself or anyone else.

Burnout is a regular visitor to my life as I always step in to help others

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the first time burnout showed up. A hard worker and high achiever dating back to elementary school, my primary focus was on achieving at all costs. I am also a caregiver by nature feeling the need to step in and help when others need help. Through law school and then working in the nonprofit sector, I would work and work and work ignoring my building stress until I flamed out.

On that particular vacation though, I finally grew tired of burning out. Because after I came home, I decided to do something different. I decided I was tired of hitting the burnout wall and instead wanted to figure out how to avoid it the next time around.

In time, I came to learn the early warning signs of burn out and how to face it off before it took over. And here is what I learned.

The fine line between “stressed” and “burned out”

Burnout happens when you are under excessive and prolonged stress. People are often able to respond to short bursts of pressure and demand without much trouble. But when that pressure continues day after day without a break, the stress can mound and potentially become burnout.

Importantly, you can be stressed but not burned out.

When you are stressed you are facing a lot of different pressures both mentally and physically but even still you can imagine getting things under control. On the other hand, if you have burnout, you are feeling empty, a lack of motivation, and don’t see a hope of positive change. Burnout is when you begin to detach and feel cynical or ineffective.

You may not recognize burnout when it’s right in front of you

We often think “burnout” looks like someone who is so incapacitated they are unable to work. Burnout doesn’t have to look so extreme. You can continue to work when you have burnout but instead feel every day at work is a bad day. You could be feeling disinterested in your work or maybe even depressed by it. You could feel overwhelmed by responsibilities and turn to distracting activities like drinking or social media.

The most common sign of burnout is when your stress is so high you start to see diminishing returns at work and you are lacking interest in work or life.

Some of the other warning signs:

Lack of energy

Lack of sleep

Lack of appetite

Inability to focus

Physically and emotionally exhausted

Drained and depleted

Low or no motivation

Forgetful

Physical stress (e.g. chest pain)

Getting chronically sick

Anxiety

Anger

To be clear, there is not an official diagnosis of burnout – unlike depression which is a widely studied condition. And sometimes burnout may start to look more like depression which is why it can be important to seek professional attention. What is most insidious about burnout is that it creeps up on you over time. All of the indicators may be there but you may fail to recognize it when it is right in front of you.

Types of people who are more prone to burnout

The best place to start is to identify what is causing excessive and prolonged stress in your life. This can come from the workplace, home, or both.

So while there isn’t any one type of person that is prone to burnout, there are some common themes of the types of people who are more likely to face burnout:

People who face heavy workloads or high stress positions.

High achievers

Caregivers including healthcare professionals at the front line of care

Working parents

Students

Burnout may not simply come because of excessive work

Keep in mind that burnout doesn’t just happen because of significant demands on people lives. It can happen if our mindset shifts.

In my coaching work, I have clients that exhibit signs of burnout but it may not come necessarily simply because of excessive work. Take, for example, Jennifer (name changed to protect confidentiality). She has an intensive job that has her working many evenings and most weekends. This is something she has been doing for years. But recently she has realized how exhausted she is from work. She is getting more upset with demands made on her than she has in the past. She is beginning to hate her job and can’t understand why all of a sudden she can’t “deal” with work. For Jennifer, the cause of the emerging burnout wasn’t the demands of the job itself. It began when she felt unappreciated and ignored. Therefore, burnout can manifest when we become disappointed by dashed expectations.

Create ‘margin’ in your reschedule

We tend to over schedule our lives. So our days can be jam packed with work, appointments, and other obligations. This has us running from place to place without a moment to breathe. Look at how you can start to schedule breathing room in your day. Avoid scheduling meetings back to back in your day. Schedule out time on your schedule to do some important catch up.

Adopt resilience tools at work

While work itself can be stressful, there are ways to build in strategies that allow us to de-stress during the day. This includes doing some deep breathing, meditation, or just taking a walk outdoors. Productivity hacks suggest dedicating specific chunks of uninterrupted time (read: no email or social media) and then taking solid breaks around 10 or 15 minutes to clear your mind.

Adopt the strategy of “no”

People feeling burnout are often feel they must “do it all.” Stepping back from burnout means finding ways to lessen the stress which means saying the powerful two letter word NO. It may be hard at first but look for opportunities to delegate demands to others, shift priorities off your plate, or delay obligations.

Find regular times to unplug yourself

Don’t be under the illusion you always need to be moving to make progress. Sometimes, doing nothing is exactly what your body and mind are looking for. Find time to recharge by unplugging from it all. Taking real breaks – to eat, sleep, decompress – can give us the energy we need to remain productive.

To be sure, taking a real break can be difficult in today’s world when we are all expected to remain in constant communication though messaging and email. Consider giving yourself an electronics-free time so you can remove yourself from the noise of work, social media, and email.

There was a time I was convinced that I was on a regular cycle of burnout and that my old familiar friend would re-enter my life maybe once a year or every couple of years. I thought I was just a person who faced burnout and that was just part of who I was. But that trip to the beach woke me up and forced me to finally face down how I was the cause of my own burnout.

I now have a personal program to manage my stress and avoid burnout. Sure, I can still get pretty stressed at times but I am much quicker to see the signs and take immediate action. You too can be empowered to tackle and stop burnout in its tracks.

The post I Survived Burnout More Than a Few Times, and Here’s What I Learned appeared first on Lifehack.

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2uPbBXz via Viral News HQ