#but those were both preexisting items turning into new ones

[stingyslegslookweird]

okay, cool. ace might be jesus and that’s not even the most insane thing in the episode.

heck yeah it’s geats time 😎

[vaalthus]

The Lost Constellation

Alright, it's time I finally talked about this. Do forgive the rambling

I gotta say I my interest into further covered Atealan history was already piqued with the release of the Lost Constellation, and with it the introduction of Dardarayu and Yahvro.

What initially caught my curiosity regarding the lore surrounding these two mysterious beings was the design note that accompanied our encounter with them in the Inn

Now that first sentence is curious for a couple of reasons. The first being that it notes that the Ateala "rarely" sing of the legends surrounding these two figures.

To rarely speak of a particular point of history would seem to suggest that it carries negative or at least not the best of connotations within the minds of those telling the story, almost as if the subject were taboo. From my perspective, this a story with hushed breaths or ones meant serve as a warning to listeners.

The second note of interest is the fact that the design notes refer to this tale as a shifting nebula.

Nebula at their core are just a massive collection of dust and hot gas in space that either have the capacity to form new stars or happen to exist because they formed from the deaths of preexisting stars that went supernova. A fact that might make the story of both Yahvro and Dardaryu potentially that of a tragedy. What leads me to this thought process is that if we take into consideration the essence of what a nebula is, as has been established, then the text might be implying or alluding to the fact that these two characters held potential or promise but, either one or both, fell from grace or had tragic conclusions at the end of their story.

What makes me even more certain of this angle is the fact that the design notes state their constellation once "shone" upon their homeworlds. We know, based on what details can be derived in-game that time after time that the Ateala have either settled new planets on their own independently or were forced to due to one calamity or another, taking all their histories and culture with them as they did so.

When I think of the word "shone" in this context, it makes me think that the story of these two Atealans was one that previously made their people rather proud before it might have been regarded poorly or somberly.

The question here is this: What could have happened to have caused this shift in their perception? I believe the biggest clue lies solely with Dardarayu. When the Inn challenge for them was first released, three things about them immediately stood out to me: the fact that a good portion of their face was hidden in shadow, an all too familiar golden ornament, and of course the fact that their body and magic was coated in tithril.

Now admittedly, at first, I didn't think the portion of Dardarayu's face being hidden was any different from Isiri's face being hidden until I remembered that Isiri's face was obscured by the hood she wears. Dardarayu's face is completely out in the open meaning there's something about their expression the devs wanted to keep concealed beyond their simple smile. For the longest time, I couldn't figure what that could be until this last Mogloween event when we receieved both their mask and that of Yahvro.

I don't know about anyone else, but those squinted eyes seem to turn an easygoing smile into something that would appear to be more sinister in my view. Furthermore, what little can be derived from this expression is made worse by the fact that the text that accompanies this item, which merely state that "the stars weep," reinforces that the events that surrounded Dardarayu were ones that did not end on happy terms as far as the Ateala remember.

Then, there's that golden ornament that they wear. Prior to the release of their inn fight, we have seen it on two occasions. The first instance being the release of the Atealan Standard helm, the second time, and most alarming of the two, being the Star-Eating Serpent.

Based on their appearance and the appearance of the Standard helm, we can reasonably conclude that Dardarayu was the Unael of old that at one point in their history had rallied their people against an unknown adversary or adversaries. It's likely these battles Dardarayu lead against the Ateala enemies is why their reputation originally started on a high note when they became more well known.

Whether or not this was the reason they were declared an unael I cannot say, but we might be able to speculate they might not have completed their process in becoming a full-fledged unael, a suspicion possibly supported by Dardarayu's polearm weapon.

The description would seem to imply that while Dardarayu received the title of an Unael from the Empress, they hadn't actually gone through the process of being connected to the cosmos. Either that or they did go through the process but merely was among those that never merged with the Empress when they came back down. Regardless of which is the case, the details provided by the text lay it out flat that Dardarayu disappeared eventually and that no one knows what happened to them.

This would appear to be where the story for them gets left off on. They were a respected hero and then suddenly something happened to cause them to never be seen again and the Ateala mourn their lost hero forevermore. End of the story, right? See I'm not so sure.

As I mentioned previously, the obscured expression they give off seems very off during our encounter with them, I daresay it appears ominous. However, a countenance is obviously not enough to indicate that something suspicious has taken place.

Which brings me back to Dardarayu's powers. They're clearly based in tithril. Now if that's true then that has some concerning implications if it also happens to be true that tithril forms from the remains of dead Ateala, once their bodies have crystallized.

Now I don't believe this necessarily would have been problem for the Atealan people considering they crafted a weapon clearly made from Trithril and they were willing to follow someone who wore a helm made of the stuff into battle, but I think it does potentially connect to the reason why Dardarayu may have suddenly vanished without a trace.

There's also again that elepant in the room in which the Star-Eating Serpent has the exact same golden ornament attached to their head. The creature is also coated in tithril and was responsible for devouring the Ateala wherever they fled to until another unael, Anohirn, defeated them. Yet, in our boss fight with the creature, it too wears a similar adornment that was also held by another Atealan hero. I'm not entirely sure what the connection here is, but it's not looking too good to me at the moment.

That all being said, this leaves a final question: where does this leave Yahvro, our mysterious riftwalker, in the equation?

How do they fit with Dardarayu's story? Truthfully, I'm stumped on them. So, I'm go through what little can be derived from them. We know based on their weapon's description that they were a well-regarded warrior within Atealan society, perhaps even an unael like Dardarayu.

We can infer they likely shared similar, if not the same, problems with Dardarayu based on the fact that their horn descriptions are identical.

And lastly we can speculate that in spite of an event or outcome that has taken place they're still listening to someone or something that might have caused that situation to have gone poorly.

What these all mean combined I couldn't say with clarity but given that we do fight both Yahvro and Dardarayu in the same place I'm going to suggest that either Yahvro followed Dardarayu wherever they vanished to or at least suffered the same fate they had in the end.

Ah, but that concludes my thoughts on these two. It'll be interesting to see if the devs cover them when we refocus on the Ateala as a whole in the future.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Christian Paz at Vox:

The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency have put Democrats in a frustrating bind. He’s thrown so much at them (and at the nation), that they’re having serious trouble figuring out what to respond to — let alone how. He’s signed dozens of executive orders; attempted serious power grabs and overhauls of the government; and signed controversial legislation. And in the process, he’s further divided his opposition, as the Democrats undergo an identity crisis that ramped up after Kamala Harris’s loss.

Immigration policy is a prime example of this struggle: Long before Harris became their nominee, the party was debating just how much to adjust to both Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign promises and to the American public’s general shift away from openness to immigration. Now that he’s in office, Democrats aren’t really lined up to resist every one of the president’s anti-immigrant moves — and some are even backing some of his stances. The party is now divided into roughly three camps: those in the Senate and House willing to back Trump on certain tough-on-immigration measures, like the recently passed Laken Riley Act; those who see their constituents supporting some of his positions but are torn over how to vote; and those progressives who are committed to resisting his every move on immigration. Today’s public opinion is one main contributor for the divide: Americans are still largely in favor of more restrictionist immigration policy. Democratic losses in November are another contributor, particularly in areas with large immigrant or nonwhite populations. But lawmakers are also confronting longer-standing historical dynamics that have divided the working class and immigrants before. Newer and undocumented immigrants can appear to pose both economic competition and threats to existing senses of identity for immigrants who have already resided in the US, or to those who have assimilated and raised new generations. Combined with a resurgent Republican Party that has capitalized on some of these feelings, these facts might be complicating the Democratic response to Trump now.

Working class and immigrant divides aren’t new

On the campaign trail last year, Trump and various other Republican politicians repeated a specific line of reasoning when making a pitch to nonwhite voters: The “border invasion” that Joe Biden and Harris were supposedly responsible for was “crushing the jobs and wages” of Black, Latino, and union workers. Trump called it “economic warfare.” This line of reasoning — that immigrants are taking away economic opportunities from those already in the US — has historically been a source of tension for both native-born Americans, and older immigrants. Much of the economics behind this has been challenged by economists, but the politics are still effective. The main claim here is that an influx in cheaper low-skilled laborers not only pushes down the cost of goods but negatively impacts preexisting American workers by lowering their wages as well. The evidence for this actually happening, however, is thin: Immigrants also create demand, by buying new items and using new services, therefore creating more jobs. Still, the idea remains popular.

Even as far back as the civil rights era, this thinking created divisions among left-wing activist movements trying to secure better labor conditions and legal protections. Take the case of the most iconic figure of the Latino labor movement, César Chávez, himself of Mexican descent. As his movement to secure better conditions for farmworkers faced challenges from nonunion, immigrant workers who could help corporate bosses break or alleviate the pressures of labor strikes, his efforts on immigration took a more radical turn. Chávez’s United Farm Workers even launched an “Illegals Campaign” in the 1970s — an attempt to rally public opposition to immigration and get government officials to crack down on illegal crossings. The UFW even subsidized vigilante patrol efforts along the southern border to try to enforce immigration restrictions when they thought the government wasn’t doing enough, and Chávez publicly accused the federal agency in charge of the border and immigration at the time of abdicating their duty to arrest undocumented immigrants who crossed the border.

Of course, Chávez’s views were nuanced — and primarily rooted in the goal of creating and strengthening a union that could represent and advocate for farmworkers and laborers left out of the labor movements earlier in the 19th and 20th centuries. But they are great examples of the deep roots that economic and identity status threats have in complicating the views of working-class and nonwhite people in the not-too-distant past. This specific opinion has stuck around. Gallup polling since the early 1990s has found that for most of the last 30 years, Americans have tended to hold the opinion that immigration “mostly hurts” the economy by “driving wages down for many Americans.” And swings in immigration sentiment tend to align with how Americans feel about the state and health of the national economy: When economic opportunity feels scarce, as during the post-pandemic inflationary period, Americans tend to pull back from more generous feelings around both legal and illegal immigration.

Democrats also face the challenge of anti-immigrant immigrants

What makes this era of immigration politics perhaps a bit more complicated on top of those existing economic reasons is the added concerns over fairness and orderliness that many nonwhite Americans, and even immigrants from previous generations, feel. US Rep. Juan Vargas, a progressive Democrat who represents San Diego and the part of California that borders Mexico, told me that there’s a sense among some of his constituents that recent immigrants, both legal and not, are cutting the line. This feeling about newcomers not paying their dues is, again, a longstanding sentiment among immigrant groups across American history, but it appears updated for the post-pandemic era. While older immigrants feel they have worked hard and waited their turn, they feel newer ones have taken advantage of the asylum system, or gone through less of a struggle than they have. Vargas told me about a conversation he had with a constituent in his district who told him she disagrees with his stance on immigration policy, even though she once “came across illegally too” and lived in the US for 15 years without documentation. “I started talking to her, and she said, ‘You know, these new immigrants, they get everything. They get here and they get everything. We didn’t get anything, and so I think they should all be deported,’” Vargas said. “I said, ‘Oh, so, because you were given a chance, you don’t think other people should get that same chance?’ She goes, ‘Well, it’s different.’ … Really, in what way? How is it different? … And she didn’t have a very good answer.” Some immigration researchers describe this as part of a “law-and-order” mindset: folding border enforcement and immigration crackdowns with a renewed desire by the public for tough-on-crime policies in the post-pandemic era.

[...] These views help explain why there’s a vocal group of Democrats, including Latino Democrats, willing to work with Trump and Republicans specifically on immigration reforms that take a tough-on-crime approach, like the Laken Riley Act, which expedites deportation for undocumented immigrants charged with certain crimes. Some 46 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats ended up voting for the Laken Riley Act, including perhaps the most vocal pro-enforcement Latino Democrat, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona. He argued that the bill represented where the Latino mainstream is now on immigration. “People are worried about border security, but they also want some sane pathway to immigration reform. That’s who I represent. I really represent the middle view of Arizona, which is largely working class and Latino,” Gallego said after the vote. Even some Democrats in solid blue areas of the country agree, to an extent. Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner, who represents Houston and was an outspoken supporter of immigrant rights during Trump’s first presidency, told me that his constituents back tougher immigration policies, particularly when it comes to undocumented immigrants charged with violent crimes. He himself didn’t vote for the Laken Riley Act because he disagreed with the bill’s application to those merely charged or accused of a crime (as opposed to those convicted), but he said that he feels the public’s mandate to support other kinds of proposals.

[...] They’ll fight back against Trump when he tries to undue birthright citizenship, for example, but they won’t necessarily criticize the continued construction of a border wall with Mexico, or increased deportations. They’ll point out that deportation flights using military aircraft are mostly for show, while standard ICE-chartered planes can do the job for less. Many supported the bipartisan border bill that Biden tried to pass a little less than a year ago, for example, and would theoretically support it again.

[...] And they see room to defend DREAMers, DACA recipients, and those who have benefitted from asylum protections, like temporary protected status, because they see moral value in it, and political value as well: many of those categories of immigrants are popular with Republicans, and polling backs up these nuances.

Vox has a good story on how immigrants who have been here for a long time and those assimilated are opposed to a new arrival of immigrants, and that is hurting the Democratic Party.

[judediangelo75]

Happy Mother’s Day, Mama!

In honor of Mother’s Day, I decided to write a fluff, cavity inducing story featuring the Winger family!

As those of you who got to know my MC, Judith Harris, she’s, in a sense, like a background character. She loves her friends and someone who would do just about anything for someone she cares about but in a sense fades in the background.

Once she moved to Britain, her mother took it upon herself to “raise” her. Which was through abuse: physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Judith truly believes she doesn’t deserve anything nice. For many years, a lot of her friends never knew when was her birthday. For several reasons:

-Her preexisting mentality about not deserving anything, gifts included.

-Her birthday is just a month after school starts, so a new curse would already be wrecking havoc throughout the school. And she practicing for the Quidditch matches that are in November.

So when she found out she was going to be an expecting mother, she flashed back to one of her mother’s last words to her. Which was basically she’ll be just like her.

While she was anxious about being a mom, she was determined to be the best mother she can be for her children, Bakari and Kendrick.

Who, in turn, want to show their appreciation for their mama.

Enough rambling, on with the story!

------------------------------------------

(2006)

It was Sunday, March 26. In the early hours of the morning, two boys can be found sleeping peacefully in their beds.

It wasn’t until the early morning rays began to filter through the room when the eldest awoke. Red eyes slowly blinked open, lazily taking in his surroundings until they landed on the calendar on the wall. 

The young boy shot up from his bed, scrambling off his bed to get a closer look at the date. A giddy smile formed on his face before he rushed to his little brother’s bed side.

“Kendrick... Kendrick... wake up,” he whispered, poking at the lump hiding underneath the blankets. He heard a grunt and the head of his little brother poked out of the blanket cocoon.

“Too early,” the younger boy grumbled. Bakari chuckled at his 5 year old brother’s obvious disdain. Pale gold eyes glared back at him.

“Kendrick, it’s Mother’s Day, remember,” the eldest reminded. It took a few moments for Bakari’s words to fully settle in Kendrick’s sleep ridden mind, but when they did, the younger boy perked up.

“Oh! Do you think Dad is up,” he asked, remembering their plans. Bakari looked thoughtful for a moment before replying,

“Maybe, maybe not. Let’s get ready though, just in case he is.” Kendrick nodded, eager to surprise their mama...

-------

Not even ten minutes later, another pair of red eyes opened. 

Talbott was naturally an early riser. He always liked the peace and quiet of the mornings, as well as getting a head start of his day.

But today, he made sure to wake up early for a particular special reason. 

And that reason was still sleeping soundly in his arms.

He smiled and pressed a chaste kiss to his sleeping wife’s cheek.

He and Judith have been married for over a decade. He remembered proposing to her just a year and a half after they graduated on New Year’s Eve in their apartment flat at the time. He remembered seeing her walk down the aisle alongside her older brother. He remembered the shy happiness in her beautiful eyes when the priest gave him permission to kiss his new wife. He remembered the nervous breakdown she had when she found out she was pregnant.

There were a few times that Talbott witnessed her in the midst of an anxiety attack. He knew it was thanks to the emotional scars left by her mother. While Judith has gotten better mentally, she did had her down periods. 

That was a drastic down period.

Talbott never felt more heartbroken when he heard his little bird’s cries and sobs through the bathroom door. Her broken words that she wouldn’t be a good mother.

It killed him on the inside since Judith locked him out and he couldn’t hold her and give her the comfort that he knew that she needed.

He spoke to her gently from his side of the door, reassuring her that she wasn’t anything like the woman who gave birth to her. He seen her heart.

Despite her semi cold exterior... she had the warmest personality.

She was always there for someone in need.

She would do almost anything to get a person to smile. To open up. 

She’s been there for her friends for years.

She’s been there for him for years. 

He could trust in the fact that she would do the same for their child.

After his speech, silence fell between the two before the tell tale sound of the door unlocking hit Talbott’s ears. Talbott only had a few seconds to brace himself before the door swung open and his wife basically leapt into his arms.

She didn’t say much but Talbott knew she was appreciative by the way she was hugging him.

Fast forward to now, they had two beautiful boys and he couldn’t be more grateful.

Bakari and Kendrick simply adored their mother and all that she does for them, so they had asked him to help make a mother’s day breakfast for her. Along with a few other things.

Lucky for him, his wife was a rather heavy sleeper. Making slipping away much easier. Carefully, he slipped his arms from around her and quietly crept out of bed. 

Judith grunted softly in her sleep, rolling over to Talbott’s side before settling there. Talbott stifled a chuckle at his little wife’s adorable behavior before heading into their bathroom to freshen up.

---------

Within the next hour, Talbott and his two sons were in the kitchen making breakfast for the sleeping woman. Thankfully after Judith’s lesson on how to make pancakes, there was less of a mess and no fire.

Bakari was helping their father cook since he was a bit older. Kendrick was happy to help fetch any ingredients they needed as well as organizing their gifts. 

After an hour and a half, everything was prepared...

-----------

Judith was still sound asleep when her three loves quietly crept into the bedroom. Her nose twitched at the smell of food, causing her eyes to flutter open slightly.

Though she hid underneath the blanket when sunlight assaulted her eyelids.

“Whyyyyyy,” she groaned. Bakari chuckled, glancing at his little brother who had the decency to blush. Talbott ran a hand along the visible curve of his little bird’s body.

“Wake up, darling... we have a surprise for you...” Judith let out a curious grunt. 

‘We?’ she thought. Sitting up, she pulled the blanket from her head.

“Happy Mother’s Day!” Judith stared wide eyed at her two beaming sons, who looked up at her with the most adorable hopeful expressions on their faces. 

Bakari held a breakfast tray with a plate with heart shaped pancakes, eggs, bacon, sliced mangos and melon and a tall glass of passion fruit juice.

Kendrick held a bouquet of dwarf sunflowers, yellow tulips, and dark purple roses in one hand and a card in his other hand.

Judith slowly turned to her husband, who had a smile tugging his lips and a box in his hand.

“I-I... what?” Bakari and Kendrick sported the twin frowns, red and pale gold eyes staring up at their mother with worry reflecting in them.

“We wanted to surprise you for Mother’s Day... don’t you like it, Mama,” Kendrick asked quietly. Judith felt tears building in her eyes, her chest filled with emotion.

“I-I do, my love... you guys didn’t need to go through this trouble for me,” their mother said softly.

“But we wanted to, Mama! We really wanted to show that we love and appreciate you,” Bakari said. Tears were now running down Judith’s cheeks, worrying the two boys.

“Oh... come here you two...”  Bakari and Kendrick set the items on the bedside before crawling into bed. They were quickly engulfed in a tight embrace by their mother.

“Thank you my two little princes, you two have no idea how much this means to me...” they heard their mother whisper. They nuzzled against her, taking in her comforting scent they grew accustom to from they were babies.

Talbott silently observed the scene with a small smile. He knew this was something Judith needed. She was a lovely mother, and needed to be reminded of that from their two sons.

Leaning over, he placed a kiss on her temple.

“Why don’t you read the card we got you, darling,” he offered. Judith perked up a bit, releasing her boys so she can sit up straighter. Talbott handed her the card. Bakari and Kendrick remained on either side of their mother, eager to see their mama’s reaction.

Judith opened the card and silently read.

“Dear Mama,

We wanted to wish you the best Mother’s Day. We can’t express how much we love and appreciate you. You’re always there for both of us. When we’re learning. When we’re sick. When we’re scared. When we’re sad. When we’re mad. We always know that you’ll be there. With your bright smile that’s like sunshine. With your pretty voice, especially when you sing. Your warm hugs and loving kisses. Your pretty gold eyes.

We’ll always be your princes, just like you’ll always be our queen.

Love, Bakari and Kendrick”

Kendrick smiled when he saw the soft look in his mother’s eyes.

“Dad wrote something too,” the youngest pointed out. Judith spared a shy glance at her husband before reading the other side of the card.

“Dear Judith,

Happy Mother’s Day, my beautiful little bird. Words can’t describe how much I love you. You gave me a life I never thought I could have. A family. For that, I’m forever grateful for you. Forever indebted to you. You deserve all the love in the world. And our sons believe so as well, this was their idea after all. You are a Queen and you deserve to be treated as such.

Thank you for all that you do, my darling.

Love, Talbott”

‘I’ve gone soft, I can feel the waterworks coming again...’ Judith thought. Bakari and Kendrick leaned in to place a kiss on their mother’s cheeks.

“We love you, Mama,” they said. Judith let out a chuckle, kissing their heads.

“And I love you...” Judith looked up at her husband with a shy smile.

“All of you,” she whispered. Talbott chuckled, placing a peck on her lips.

“There’s still one more thing before you eat,” he said. He handed her the box with a smile. Judith opened it to find a gold necklace. Two gold feather charms with the engravings ‘B’ and ‘K’ were found on it. 

“Birds of a feather flock together,” Bakari chirped. Judith let out a laugh, allowing her husband to put on the necklace for her.

“What’s so funny, Mama,” Kendrick asked.

“Many years ago, your father was someone who flew solo,” Judith chuckled, smirking at Talbott who in turn playfully rolled his eyes.

“That was before I found my mate for life, little bird. Now hush and eat, we all know how you get when you’re hungry.” As if on cue, Judith’s stomach rumbled, causing the males around her to laugh. Judith blushed, grumbling underneath her breath before smiling.

The rest of the morning, the family laid in bed happily chatting. 

The males gladly showing their love for the woman they were grateful to call “Wife” and “Mother”.

[wevegottogetaway]

A hundred percent (Part 2 of Crashing into you)

It looks like the same bottle you had reached for before all hell broke loose. You found it lazing on shore, in that space between water and dry land where objects greet the wet sand but still submit to the waves. Along with the plastic container, you’d encountered a wet blanket you’d immediately laid out to dry, a corkscrew and the ice bucket that had accommodated the champagne you turned down during the flight (you’d gladly have a glass or four now, but alas the Champagne bottle wasn’t accounted for in your scavenger hunt). All things considered, it’s a relatively good inventory; it seems the currents were in your favor.

It makes sense actually, that the waters would shepherd the lightest of items to you. Yet your heart remains heavy with doubts and fears. You’re not versed enough in geography to have the slightest clue as to whereabout you’ve strayed in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. And with that comes the big question: if you don’t know where you are, how the people meant to save you will? Then how much time will it take for them to figure it out and will you be able to hold on for that long?

Everything is a big question mark as of now, and you hate it. You’re resourceful and quick on your feet, but you like to be prepared; you usually study the situation ahead and plan in accordance for every potential contingency, positive or negative. This however, never in a billion years would you have thought, much less prepared for the appropriate M.O. to follow in response to a freaking plane crash.

If anything, it makes you twice as grateful to have Harry by your side. Once for obvious reasons; the mere thought of associating his name with death in the same sentence could make you physically ill. But also, if there were one person that could make this ordeal that much bearable and give you the strength to withstand the pain for that much longer, it was him. He’d done it before; granted times weren’t as critical as they may be now, but he’d always been your beacon of light in the darkest of times. You’d just have to be his as well this time. Like a planet reflecting back the light of the star it revolves around.

Speaking of stars, the sun is unbearably warm. It feels like it is sitting right on top of your shoulders and breathing down your neck, as opposed to hundred millions kilometers away from your sweltering form. You’ve been pacing up and down the shore for over two hours, and you don’t think you’ve ever been so uncomfortably hot. Your skull is throbbing from the heat,(though the brutal impact of the crash and your brief encounter with death probably have something to do with it as well) and your top is positively drenched in sweat. Harry’s shirt didn’t fare much better and is now rolled and folded atop is head in a makeshift hat. You’re both very aware that a sunstroke is highly likely in this sort of climate, and very much the last thing you need in your preexisting predicament.

"Think we should head towards the forest before this heat grills our skin to the crisp, love." It’s the first thing either of you have uttered in a while, but you’re quick to agree to Harry’s proposition.

"You’re right. Let’s see if we can find a water source nearby," you nod towards the stretch of green wildness awaiting you, before shooting one last glance at the ocean behind you.

Harry is closely watching you before putting a hand at the small of your back to usher you both out of the beach. "We can always come back later and see if there’s anything new on the shore," he guesses the reason for your hesitation. You swear this man can read your mind sometimes.

As soon as you cross the border into the forest, the sound of the waves quickly fades to be replaced by the chirps, squeaks and buzzing of the jungle’s inhabitants. It sounds like the all jungle community is in conversation, and you gulp as you wonder what kind of animals are also roaming this place. It’s clear the smartest option is for you to set up camp closer to the beach so you can be safe both from the wildlife and the unforgiving sun, as well as be in plain sight in case rescue is scouring the vicinity. For now though, you have no choice but to wander the very much alive woods if you count on fending dehydration off.

As you weave through the thick and luxurious foliage, Harry is staying glued to your side, not willing to let is sight off of you. His shirt finds its way back over his torso to protect his smooth skin from the somewhat hostile vegetation. From the way nature seems to prevail over every inch of this seemingly impenetrable space, it is clear this land has never witnessed the wrath of human activity. The realization is rather unsettling as it weakens your hopes of finding civilization in this godforsaken place.

Once again, you feel indefinitely grateful for the man walking by your side. You’d always felt lucky to have him in your life, but that soft tug in your chest from his hand grazing your shoulder blades as your tread the muddy earth, has never been so strong and comforting than in this moment.

"Careful, love," he is quick to tug you against his broad frame when you’re about to step on a small snake. The creature hisses as your footsteps disturb its tranquil existence but apart from shooting what you could swear is an annoyed glare, the serpent remains put and lets you go on your merry way.

It takes a second for your heart to calm down from the sudden movement and you realize your fist is still clenching the soft cotton of his shirt. You mutter a small but genuine ‘thanks’ as you quickly remove your hands from him, and despite the tropical heat you find yourselves in, Harry can’t help but feel a coldness on the spot your hand just abandoned.

An hour goes by and you’ve yet to be successful in your quest. The sun is finally starting to relent some of its intensity and the air feels slightly easier to breathe. At least in theory. In practice, every minute that ticks by without you encountering even the smallest of water source, feels like a new brick dropping in-between your ribcage to crush your lungs. You are running out of time for the day and the anxiety that comes with that realization is not one you can gulp down and just ignore.

As the sun slowly retires, so does the light of your surroundings, and it’s enough to have your own light start flickering before finally shutting down. You need to make your way back to the edge of the shore and set up camp before darkness engulfs everything in its black coat. Your hand find Harry’s before you shift your body towards his. "We should head back before it’s too dark," you utter dejectedly.

He nods with the same despondent expression before wrapping an arm across your shoulders and directing you both towards the beach. "Come on, then," a small kiss is pressed against your temple and your heart leaps back out of its gloom for a moment. You’re not a total stranger to gestures like this one, but they’re usually spurred by a drink too many or they occur for these special occasions where joy is so exuberant it pigments your cheeks and leaves you no choice but to show your affection in a more physical manner. You relish those moments as much as you can, wrongly assuming they mean more to you than they do him.

You don’t day anything back as you wrap your arm around his waist and start making your walking again. You’re both in need of comfort right now, is how you rationalize it. Still, it doesn’t stop you from staying as close to him as humanly possible, your body molding his curves better than a puzzle. He doesn’t seem to mind, on the contrary, his grip on your arm tightens briefly, and though you don’t see it, his lips also twitch in a side smile.

You arrive just in time for what must be the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever witnessed in your life. The ocean has calmed some, waves now gently licking at the sand and in the far distance, a large sphere of tangerine flares, rests upon a blue canvas whose only bounds stretch to the horizon. "S’beautiful," Harry softly comments before your eyes meet for a minute. You answer with a small smile, admiring the tenderness of his gaze. It’s partly due to tiredness at this point, which is what you surmise, but you’ve been on the receiving end of this gaze countless and non-tired times before, unbeknownst to you.

Fifteen minutes later, you are trying your best to light a dry piece of wood on fire while Harry endeavors to built some kind of shelter. It takes you both a few attempts and a lot of cussing, but eventually you find yourselves sitting under a makeshift branch-made roof in front of a small fire. Thankfully, the blanket you’d recovered from the crash had dried entirely - one of the few perks of the scalding sun, you suppose - and is now wrapped tightly around you both. If the situation wasn’t so critical, you’d rejoice at the opportunity of being cuddled up with Harry so closely. Every intake of breath he takes you feel against your ribs. Your bones ache from tiredness, thirst and hunger, but as your head lays on Harry’s shoulder, you also feel lightness in your heart. Things will be all right. Tomorrow you’ll go back to explore the jungle and you’ll find water, maybe even catch a fish or two and you’ll repeat the process until the rescue team comes to get you. Soon.

"How’s your leg?" Harry gently breaks the silence. You’d almost forgotten about your respective injuries, and the question has your eyes shift to the cut on your shin. There wasn’t much to do anyway, your fateful time in the angry waters had taken care of all the cleaning that could be done without proper medicine. It’s uncomfortable and the sort of wound that would linger on your mind if you were back home, but there and then, you’d minded the sting for all of 5 minutes before more pressing matters needed your undivided attention.

"It’s fine. I was too distracted to notice the pain, I guess," you answer just as quietly even though you are the only two souls breathing for hundred miles around if not more. The mention of your injury also reminds you of his, though you don’t quite need as vocal a reminder as the gash above his eyebrow is much more conspicuous. "How’s your face?" you decide to return the question even though you have a feeling his answer won’t me much different from yours.

"Itchy but it doesn’t hurt."

Your eyes once again focus on the cut, making sure that no dirt made its way on the damaged tissue. Your lips curls slightly to the side when you take in the probable reason for the itch. "C’mere, your hair keeps falling into it," you say while your hand reaches up to tuck the rebellious curl behind his ear. The strand goes straight back to its previous spot as it lacks a bit of length to obey your ministration. You reach up again, this time running your fingers towards the back of his head to get the curl out of the way. Harry doesn’t dare move an inch, air caught up in his throat as he revels in your tender touch. You’re oblivious to his intense stare, as always, while you inspect the cut. "Shouldn’t leave a scar, I don’t think," you offer in reassurance.

"Well, that’s a relief," Harry answers almost absentmindedly though there’s humor lacing through his voice. He couldn’t care less about a scar, not after everything you’ve been through. Hell, you’re both lucky to have escape the crash with just superficial wounds. Besides, he’ll take a thousand scars over having your unconscious body under his palms again.

The conversation feels much lighter than the ones you’ve entertained all day, so you keep the playful tone going. "I know right, can’t have permanent damage on that Grammy winning face," you quip back with a smirk. Mischief is distinct in your eyes and Harry has never been more thankful to see that sparkle lit up your iris. If he focus hard enough, the sand beneath him can disappear to morph into the fluffy cushions of his sofa back home, and this can just be a regular hang-out where you pretend to watch movies and banter over every character’s decisions.

That’s why it’s so easy for him to indulge in the oh-so familiar back and forth; it’s a dance he could do eyes closed. "My career would be over," he retorts with a faux distraught expression.

You giggle and give him a smile before copying is fake air, "the end of the world."

He chuckles and for a moment there is nothing but silence between you two. You can feel the playfulness dissipate as Harry’s eyes don’t waver from yours. They suddenly hold a fervor that tells you he’s gonna say something serious. And of course he does, you know him so well. "I think my world would have ended today if you hadn’t woken back up on that beach." The statement is uttered barely above a whisper but it echoes like a hundred church bells chiming Cinderella’s midnight in your head.

"Harry…" Needless to say, you are speechless. Neither of you have ever shied away from voicing your affection towards the other, but this, coupled with the intensity of his stare, has your heart stopping for the second time today.

"You have no idea how terrified I was," he continues quietly, like his own heart is threatening to jump out of his throat if he dares speak louder. It’s obvious it’s painful for him to remember, perhaps even more painful than it was for you to actually endure. "The longer you wouldn’t-"

"Shh, stop, stop," you quickly halt him with a hand to his cheek. "Don’t torture yourself with the could haves. I’m here, alive and breathing. All thanks to you. And you are too. Alive and breathing." You say it all in confidence though you have the same chocked up feeling he did when you think of the alternatives. "That’s all that matters right now. You have me and I have you and nobody’s losing anyone." Your thumb is drawing soothing circles onto his skin as he nods at your statements as if to make their truths stronger. A second passes and your eyes shift to the ground before you gulp, "my world would have ended too. Had you not made it to the beach."

It seems the sentiment strikes a chord in his chest too, as Harry pinches his eyes close as if to make sure he is not hallucinating your words. His body is taken by a strong pull to kiss you but he knows his lips can’t quite fall on their most desired destination. He settles for a harsh forehead kiss instead, taking your head between his two shaking hands.

When he leans back, his eyes frantically search your face and you can see his breathing picking up from the motion of his chest. "Y/n, I…Fuck it’s…" the more the words escape him, the more frustrated he becomes, running a hand through his wild curls even though they’d stayed in the place you had brushed them last.

"Shh it’s okay. Harry, you’re working yourself up," you try to calm him down with a hand on his heart. Just as you suspected, the organ beneath your palm is jackhammering against his skin, but Harry shakes his head at your suggestion.

"I just have something that I need to say," he gulps, "and it’s terrifying-"

You can’t stand the way his voice wavers ever so slightly. He looks exhausted despite the wild look in his eyes and you realize that’s probably not helping tame the stormy thoughts in his mind. "M’not going anywhere, Harry," you reassure him, "we can talk tomorr-"

"No. No." He shakes his head forcefully between your hands. "I need to say this now because I already should have done it a long time ago, and as much as it is scary for me to say, today was a hundred times more scary."

You take in his adamant look and realize this is far more serious than you were led to believe. "Okay, you know you can tell me anything."

He nods at your reassurance before taking a deep breath. "You’re my best friend, y/n. The one person I don’t ever want out of my life, the one person that understands all of me and that is besides me for everything." You try to remain impassive and not wince at the f-word as you listen to his sorrows. "And I can only hope that will never change, because like I said, my world wouldn’t be the same if I had you any less in it. And that’s the thing that is scaring me, because as much as I need you as my best friend, I’m also in love with you and that has the power to change everything." He barely pauses before carrying on, still locking eyes with you. "I used to be able to pretend, but earlier on that beach, when your life was hanging by a thread in my hands, all I thought was that I couldn’t ever look at myself again if you left and I was too much of a coward to tell you the truth. I don’t want to be that guy anymore, because now I know. Being that guy is more terrifying than telling you I love you."

The words are buzzing in your mind. Ones you’ve heard before in daydreamings and fantasies but that you never thought you would get to receive in the realm of reality. At least not from the person you wanted them from. "Harry," is all you can muster to say without tripping over the rest of your words. You realize your vision is getting blurrier by the second, and you could swear there were droplets pearling at the corner of his eyes too. You let out a nervous chuckle, quickly wiping a tear from your cheek with the back of your hand. "Fuck, you dumbass, making us cry when we’re already fighting dehydration." The exclamation has him mirroring your smile as his thumb replaces yours at the crease of your eye. "I love you too, Harry," you say shakily through your grin. "So much it is the scariest thing to feel for a best friend. But you’re right, today was much scarier and I don’t want to be that girl anymore either."

Harry doesn’t think he’s ever been this happy and he makes a note to call his Mum as soon as his back on civilized land, to tell her she was right. Love does work in mysterious ways; sometimes you need to be the most lost to finally find it. And part of him hates that he wasted so much time with you everyday he wouldn’t say anything, but the other part of him also feels like it was worth the wait. "Fuck, promise? You’re not concussed from the crash and you really l-"

"I love you, Harry," you don’t let him finish vocalizing any doubt about your feelings. "Hundred percent sure."

"A hundred percent?"

"A hundred percent." He loves how confident you are when you reiterate the affirmation, looking straight in his eyes. Your faces a barely inches apart and your bodies still tightly embraced in the flimsy plane blanket.

"Christ, this is the best day of my life," he marvels before kissing the wrist of your hand still cupping his face.

You raise a brow at the statement, "the day you were in an air crash and found yourself stranded on a desolate island is the best day of your life?" You tease him in humor though you know exactly what he means by it and share the sentiment equally as strongly.

"The day I made you mine," he proudly explains with a smirk.

"Mmm am I?" you tauntingly bite your lip, though you’re not fooling anyone. You are absolutely and irrevocably, a hundred percent his. Knowing this perfectly well himself, Harry doesn’t even give you the curtesy of an answer and kisses the sass right off your mouth. It’s a fierce contact at first, as though he was kindly telling you to just shut up. Then he eases into a slow and emotional kiss, as your lips wrap around each others. He doesn’t pull back until you’re both out of breath and he’s had a proper taste from licking your supple lips. When he does, you only want to dive in for more, and it seems he shares the same desire as he barely retracts from your face.

"You most definitely are," he asserts with that same teasing smirk.

"Hundred percent?"

"A hundred percent, darling," he acquiesces before giving you the second best kiss of your life (the first having occurred a mere minute earlier). This time he drags his hand away from your face to wrap his arm around your small frame. "C’mere, come closer so we don’t freeze." It feels like close enough will never be an achievable concept for you both, but you’ll content yourself with the weight of his limbs intertwining with yours as you lay down besides the small fire. He brings the blanket high enough beneath you so you don’t have your heads directly on the sand, and you don’t realize how physically exhausted you were until your head is tucked underneath his chin and all your muscles loosen up some.

"Comfy?" He inquires as he hears you sigh in relief. You nod against his collarbones a small ‘yeah’ whispered against his skin and the feeling has him shoot a smile to the stars. He’s quite comfortable himself if he may say so.

"Good, now gimme a kiss."

"Making demands already?" You keep teasing him because let’s face it, you’ll never get tired of watching his reactions to your taunts. The cute crease between his brows, the twitching of his button nose or even better, the small pout enhancing the cherry color of his lips are probably the things that made you fall in love with him in the first place.

"You’re not complaining."

You laugh at his self-assuredness, sad not to see his precious pout though the newfound spark in his eyes makes up for it and then some. You can’t help but to confirm the bold statement, "yeah, a hundred percent not," and he smiles at the now familiar words, like it has become an inside joke that only belongs to the two of you.

For a while you just cuddle in silence, reveling in the embrace you’ve shared a couple times in the past but that now beholds an entire new meaning. You’re just about to surrender to Morpheus’ arms when Harry muses aloud, "imagine this was all a dream and we just wake up in LA tomorrow morning."

Paradoxically, the suggestion forms lump in your throat. Had he asked an hour ago, you would have let a wistful sigh and longed for a reality where you didn’t hop on a doomed plane and landed both yourself and you best friend in what can only be the hardest trial of your life. And yet, now you find yourself unsettled at the idea that your very much reciprocated feelings wouldn’t be out in the open if none of this had happened. You wouldn’t know the taste of his lips had you not plummeted in the sea only to wash up on a desolate shore.

"It doesn’t matter. I’ll still tell you." You affirm confidently. Now that you know; not about the mutuality of your feelings, but about how scary it is to find yourself on the precipice of forever regrets, you’ll take the chance every time. Wiser from the same tribulations, Harry just smiles softly before returning a faint ‘me too’.  

"Yeah?"

"Not that guy anymore, ‘member?" He is quick to remind you, eyebrow cocked upwards, to which you simply respond with a whispered ‘good’ against his chest. Harry kisses you on last time and then you both let your unconscious take over at last, still wrapped in each others’ arms and not even caring about your perilous surroundings anymore.

[aion-rsa]

Godzilla Singular Point: The Weird History of Jet Jaguar

https://ift.tt/3jvPBwC

The latest take on Toho’s iconic, building-crushing lizard comes in the form of Godzilla Singular Point, an anime series now available in dubbed form on Netflix. Taking place in the not-too-distant future, this reimagining of the King of Monsters involves a group of human characters becoming aware – through rather bizarre ways – of a coming apocalyptic event. Now the only thing that can save them is a behemoth out to punch monsters and look out for the little guy.

No, not Godzilla. He’s actually the apocalyptic event. No, our hero is none other than Jet Jaguar.

Yes, it’s finally time for Jet Jaguar to get his due.

A concept nearly 50 years old at this point, Jet Jaguar is one of those characters who was initially doomed to fail, but lives on due to nostalgia and the golden notion of, “I realize most people hated that thing from my childhood, but I bet I could make it good!” At best, he was a rad addition to the Godzilla mythos. At worst, he was a dumb idea from a dumb movie. For the most part, he’s remembered as something goofy that gets laughed at, despite having some genuine earnestness.

Jet Jaguar was created from both a fan contest and a corporate game of telephone. Back in 1972, to jump on the bandwagon of tokusatsu giant superhero/robot shows, Toho asked fans to design their own superhero design. The winner was a half-man/half-bird robot with a lengthy neck resembling a stack of rings named Red Alone. The concept was turned into a full-on rubber costume, but they changed the color scheme, which upset the young winner. They later decided to just scrap the whole thing, keep the color scheme, and make their own new design. And so, Jet Jaguar was born.

The superhero made an entire one movie appearance in 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon. As the urban legend goes, this was initially intended to be a standalone Jet Jaguar movie that the studio just didn’t have faith in towards the end and they hastily threw in Godzilla and recurring Godzilla villain Gigan. While the claim is dubious and unproven, it certainly is easy to understand where the allegations come from.

Everything about the movie feels rushed. As the last-minute replacement for another Godzilla film that didn’t pan out, filming took several weeks and production was a mere six months. Even the Godzilla costume was whipped up in record time. As for the story, outside of the intro, the preexisting elements (Godzilla and Gigan) aren’t thrown in until about 2/3 into the movie. Up until that point, it feels like a Jet Jaguar vs. Megalon movie with the production team hitting the panic button.

The plot of Godzilla vs. Megalon is that a scientist Goro Ibuki is working on a robot called Jet Jaguar, along with his little brother Rokuro and his best friend Hiroshi. They get wrapped up in a plot involving a group of beings from Atlantis-But-Not-Really, who are annoyed at all the nuclear bomb tests going on in their neck of the woods. They steal Jet Jaguar and use him to guide their insect god Megalon to different cities for the sake of smashing them up and punishing humanity.

Goro and friends get their hands on Jet Jaguar’s controls and use him to lead Godzilla to where Megalon is. Then the Seatopians call some alien friends for a solid and have them send in Gigan. Jet Jaguar is able to break away from all control and becomes fully sentient, as well as revealing the ability to turn into a giant. It becomes a big tag team battle, mostly remembered for Godzilla doing the silliest dropkick you’ve ever seen, followed by a second one for good measure.

The villains escape, Jet Jaguar and Godzilla shake hands, they go their separate ways, and Jet Jaguar reunites with the humans heroes after shrinking back down. He gets his own snazzy theme song to close things out.

In Japan, the movie wasn’t all that successful. As the thirteenth title in the Godzilla series, it brought in the worst returns yet. Between public burnout and the movie’s lack of quality, it just wasn’t grabbing people. That said, it came out at just the right time in the United States. Released in 1976, it came out months before the anticipated King Kong remake. The American movie poster for the movie even bit on the King Kong poster by featuring Godzilla and Megalon duking it out while each standing on a different Twin Tower, even though the movie at no point took place in the States.

A year later, the movie would be cut down into 48 minutes so they could broadcast it on NBC in prime time, across an hour with commercials. The only reason I mention this at all is because it was hosted by John Belushi wearing a Godzilla costume, which is sadly somewhere in the abyss of golden lost media.

Getting back to Jet Jaguar – the topic of this article – I feel the need to bring up Germany’s handling of the movie’s translation. Rather than call him “Jet Jaguar,” they referred to him as “King Kong.” I mean…sure, why not. Even weirder, when the next two movies introduced fellow giant robot MechaGodzilla, Germany once again referred to the robot as “King Kong.” Guys, I know what you’re going for here, but it doesn’t work that way.

Anyway, Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla and Terror of MechaGodzilla followed Godzilla vs. Megalon and closed off the classic Showa Era of Godzilla movies. Not only did Japan need to rest Godzilla as a concept for nearly a decade, but this also meant that whenever Godzilla would come back, it was going to be some kind of reboot or new “only the first movie counts” installment. Jet Jaguar was never high on the list to be brought back, especially since MechaGodzilla completely overshadowed him.

He would at least get a little more exposure in 1991 when Godzilla vs. Megalon was featured in the second season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. While much of the episode is spent making fun of one of the Seatopians for looking like Oscar Wilde, they toss plenty of jokes at Jet Jaguar. Most memorably, they “translate” Jet Jaguar’s ending theme, which notes that his mother never loved him and he looks a lot like Jack Nicholson.

Due to rights issues, Godzilla vs. Megalon is one of the few MST3K episodes that is no longer legally available for viewing. This does make the original MST3K Collection Volume 10 box set (which included Godzilla vs. Megalon as one of the four movies) a collector’s item, as it was later discontinued and rereleased with The Giant Gila Monster taking its spot.

A stranger use of Jet Jaguar comes in the form of Certain Distant Suns’ music video for “Bitter” in 1995. While there’s not much of a narrative outside of the band playing, footage of Godzilla vs. Megalon being shown, and a few shots of guys walking around in Megalon and Jet Jaguar costumes, I really insist you give the video a look due to the ending. It certainly goes in a direction I wasn’t expecting.

In 1997, Jet Jaguar made his next official appearance in another frankly bizarre spectacle. In Japan, a series called Godzilla Island appeared on TV in three-minute increments. While it only lasted a year, there were a whopping 256 episodes, meaning almost 13 hours of footage. If you’ve never heard of Godzilla Island, you might be thinking, “Wow, almost 13 hours of Godzilla stuff? Why isn’t this more well known?”

Well, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that instead of using guys in rubber suits, the kaiju action was done with action figures. Yikes.

Not only did Jet Jaguar show up during these adventures, but they gave him the 90s superhero action figure treatment. Much like how they released as many figures of Batman as possible for different crime-fighting scenarios, Godzilla Island gave us Silver Jet Jaguar, Medical Jet Jaguar, and even Fireman Jet Jaguar. Collect them all!

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Movies

Godzilla vs. Kong Writer Talks About Spending 8 Years in the MonsterVerse

By Don Kaye

Movies

Godzilla vs. Kong Director and Writer Talk Future of The MonsterVerse

By Don Kaye

In the early 2000s, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee was released for the GameCube and Xbox under the Atari brand. It was a fighting game featuring various characters from Godzilla lore and though Atari wanted to include Jet Jaguar, Toho refused. Still, at least Megalon was included in the game. There would be two sequels in the form of Godzilla: Save the Earth and Godzilla: Unleashed. FINALLY, Jet Jaguar was playable, because if there’s anything you can count on, it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel when you’re working on multiple installments of a nostalgic who’s who project.

He’d also return in 2014’s Godzilla game for PlayStation 3 and 4. The producer of the game didn’t even plan on putting him in there, but he saw that the programmers already were working on him and just shrugged it off. There was a special trick to summoning Jet Jaguar as a boss character. By ending up in three different Godzilla vs. Jet Jaguar scenarios and winning all three times, you would then unlock a special cutscene of the two shaking hands while a confused military woman would wonder about their history.

Around the mid-2010s, IDW Publishing was all about releasing a bunch of comics with the Godzilla license. Their mainline series was Godzilla: Rulers of the Earth, which went on for 25 issues. Early on, Jet Jaguar appeared out of nowhere during a fight between Godzilla and the team of Gigan and Orga. In human size, Jet Jaguar flew into Orga’s mouth, then expanded into giant size, causing the beast to explode. Especially awesome was that it came with the cliffhanger text, “Next: PUNCH! PUNCH! PUNCH!” a reference to Jet Jaguar’s theme song from the movie.

Jet Jaguar showed up regularly in the series, coming off as Godzilla’s designated driver friend and handler. What I mean is that he seemed to be out to protect Godzilla, but that meant having to keep his violent ally on task (ie. pointing out that Gigan was nearby to stop Godzilla from attacking Jet Jaguar) and throwing punches when the situation absolutely called for it.

This continuity played up Jet Jaguar as more enigmatic than anything, as although he was mechanical, the only human character who knew his origins was killed off before it could be explained. Even one of the invading alien villains saw him on a screen and basically went, “Oh crap. It’s THIS guy!” Regardless, he still came off as a total badass, winning fights against Godzilla, Gigan (the chainsaw-hand version), and Destroyah.

Then again, at one point he needed to be saved by the 1998 American Godzilla, which at least proved as a reminder to the robot hero that there are Toho characters far more hated than him.

Toho started using Jet Jaguar again, albeit in sillier ways. In 2019, as an April Fool’s Day prank, they put up a teaser on YouTube for a Jet Jaguar movie. They also had him appear a few times on Godziban, a Godzilla web series for kids that, once again, used dolls and action figures to tell its stories.

Now Jet Jaguar is a major part of Godzilla Singular Point. To get into specifics on the plot would be like explaining advanced calculus, but to keep on-topic, Jet Jaguar is the creation of Goro Otaki as both a way to ward off monstrous threats and as a company mascot. Considering King Kong’s role in King Kong vs. Godzilla was “kidnapped to be a company mascot,” maybe the Germans were onto something with the rename.

Anyway, this version of Jet Jaguar is more mechanical in appearance instead of having to rely on making him look like a human in a costume. Jet Jaguar is there to protect the heroes from the endless supply of monsters, usually taking some extensive damage. Still, the robot gets rebuilt stronger and stronger and becomes advanced enough to become self-aware and speak in…well, the voice of a teenage girl.

I don’t know, I guess I just figured he’d sound like Astro Guy from King of the Monsters.

There’s a big hard-to-explain twist, but the main thing to know is that Jet Jaguar becomes a full-on badass by the end of the series, turns out to be a huge key to the plot, and has a completely kickass showdown with Godzilla. In a way, Jet Jaguar’s journey in Singular Point is a lot like in real life, going from a lame idea that appealed to kids and gradually being understood as a respected part of the Godzilla mythos. Something initially representative of the worst of the franchise, proven to be something genuinely cool in the right hands.

Now it’s time for America to return the favor. Once again, timing is on Jet Jaguar’s side. The Monsterverse was on its way to the graveyard after the box office intake of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but Godzilla vs. Kong came out at just the right time in the tail end of the pandemic to be a big success and keep the series going a little bit longer. There aren’t too many names in the toybox left to pull out, but at this point, Gigan and Jet Jaguar have to be high on the list.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Make it happen, Hollywood!

Godzilla Singular Point is available to stream on Netflix now.

The post Godzilla Singular Point: The Weird History of Jet Jaguar appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[morning-star-57]

Miraculous Quirk AU

Idk if someone has already done this but here we go!

So, I recently got into Boku no Hero Academia and I got to thinking, what if the Miraculous universe was set in the same one as Bnha?

So, those of us who watch Bnha know the drill, 80% of the population has superpowers, called “quirks.” The other 20% are “quirkless.” So here’s how it would play out in my brain.

Super duper long, oops, so under the cut!

Miraculous:

works pretty much the same way as canon

only doesn’t give you a suit the holder picks that themselves

they work similar to One For All does in Bnha

the power of the previous owner fuels the power of the miraculous and the previous user can still use the power, but a weakened version of it

Ladybug miraculous gives the holder the power to create things and heal

Black Cat miraculous gives the power to destroy things with a touch (at will)

And so on, pretty much like canon but with some modifications

Marinette

was born quirkless

when she was younger, kids (cough Chloe cough) would make fun of her for it

was insecure about it for a long time and then saw all of the ways that quirks could backfire and decided it wasn’t worth it and it no longer bothers her (much)

(seeing Chloe blind herself was funny tho, even if it was temporary)

still wants to be a fashion designer

wary of superheros because of all of that property damage and also some of them are lowkey sus.

parents still own a bakery

Sabine’s quirk is levitation. She can make items and people float with her  mind but they have to be things she can physically lift (it’s okay tho cause she’s smol but strong). The drawback is that she gets really bad headaches and if she uses it too much or for too long, she can get a migraine.

Tom has a smaller, tamer version of pyrokinesis. He can’t make his entire body burst into flame but he can make certain parts, like his hands. He has a naturally high resistance to extreme weathers as his body heat is unusally high (hugs from him during the summer are bittersweet b/c he’s a great hugger but it’s too damn HOT DAD GET OFF-). The drawback is that he can’t control the temperature of the flame so if he’s not careful or if he uses his quirk for too long, it’ll burn him. His arms have many burn scars, rip.

back to Marinette

Decided the Hero Life wasn’t for her but still supports her friends who want to do it

Until she met the Lucky Hero, Tikki, her favorite

After plot happens, Tikki gives her the source of her “quirk”, the miraculous, and entrusts Marinette to carry on her legacy

Lots of angsty turmoil before she accepts the miraculous and decided to become a hero.

Chooses to be named the Ladybug, same as canon

Her hero costume would be the same as canon AT FIRST since her decision to go to a hero school was last minute af but then the suit will go through modifications to better suit her power needs and fashion needs

Got through the entrance exam after training with Tikki and because she’s badass shh

Doesn’t get a crush on Adrien until later once they’re already friends (or at all really idk yet)

Adrien

was the result of a quirk marriage

was the *failed result of a quirk marriage

Instead of inheriting both quirks of his parents, like intended, they combined and created a new one

His quirk is Charm. His body releases an invisible pheromone that makes him seem more attractive or trustworthy, sometimes both, depending on the person who smells it. This makes the “victim” more susceptible to his suggestions, but it’s not a total brainwash, unlike his father, so they can still easily fight it off if they wanted to. The drawbacks are that he can’t really stop it so he has to be constantly covered so that he doesn’t accidentally charm everyone. Also, after a while, people can build up tolerance to him and it won’t work as strongly on them.

Gabriel has Brainwash, which is often seen as a villain’s quirk. Everyone is thankful the he decided on fashion as a career and not villainy (oh those poor naive souls). If he looks into your eyes, you are put in his control and won’t be able to fight it unless he lets you go or if you receive a blunt impact to the head. The drawbacks are that he can’t control it so anyone who he makes eye contact with gets brainwashed unless there’s an obstacle in the way i.e.: glasses

Emilie’s quirk is sleep gas. Her skin cells naturally produce a gas that can put people in a coma-like state. The drawbacks are, again, can’t turn it off and the person has to be within range. She also has to be constantly covered.

Adrien wanted to be a hero at first to spite his father

Gabriel always hated heroes and saw them as a nuisance.

So Adrien basically said “fuck you, I’m going to be the best hero because I can”

And somehow convinced his dad to enroll him in College Francois Dupont, a local hero school

(he acutally just charmed him cause his dad isn’t around him enough to build up immunity to his quirk but shh)

He gets in through recommendations and is put in the hero course

This version of Adrien was still childhood friends with Chloe (who is immune to him) and a lot more distrustful of people, especially if they’re nice since he has no way of know if they’re genuinely a nice person or if they just fell prey to his quirk

rip the sunshine boy he has no friends except Chloe for the first few weeks of class

Becomes friends with Nino after they got paired up in a fight simulation

The slowly gets more comfortable around people and becomes more open to friendships

Doesn’t get the Black Cat Miraculous until much, much later when the Squad gets caught up in a fight with villains and the Unlucky Hero, Plagg (Tikki’s partner and husband) decides to entrust him with it

Impulsive chaotic gremlin that gets threatened to be put on a leash made by Marinette 

Chloe

also the result of a quirk marriage, this one being successful

Her quirk is called Diamond. Her skin has an extra layer that acts very similarly to an actual diamond so she can reflect, refract, and disperse light. This layer can also harden at her will so that she can become a semi-indestructible prism. Her body’s reaction to light intensifies while in this state. The drawbacks are that while her body is hardened, she cannot move easily and her speed will be greatly reduced. Also, her skin is just very sparkly almost all of the time which makes it hard to hide from villains and to see when it’s sunny out. Usually wear large sunhats and sunglasses to try and reduce the shine

Her and Adrien bond by being products of a quirk marriage

also got in through recommendation and everyone thinks she bought her way in but actually tried very hard to earn her spot

is VERY protective over Adrien and will blind someone if they say anything she deems offensive

She and Marinette practically hate each other on a good day before they were forced to hang out since Adrien kept bringing Chloe along with him whenever the Squad would get into shenanigans

They developed a mutual agreement to be civil at one point and that slowly turned into friendship

Y’know the type of friends that insult each other and fight over every small thing but the second someone else tries to come for the other they won’t h e s i t a t e BITCH

yeah that’s them

anyways, I digress

Is surprisingly the sensible one of the group

“no you cannot run headfirst into the fight Adrien, these are actual villains and you can’t even pass a simulation without dumb luck.”

“I don’t care if your quirk can heal you Marinette, stop jumping off of rooftops and go down the stairs like a normal person!”

“Put it down, Nino.”

“Luka. No.”

you get the idea

she is Mom

Says she wants to be a hero because hero’s are cool and she’s cool so it just makes sense for her to be a hero

(actually though because she wanted to make her mother proud of her but you didn’t hear it from me)

Is lowkey really powerful and if she tried to use the full extent of her powers, she’d be a beast

but don’t tell her that, she’s already got a big head

Luka

is working towards becoming an underground hero

His quirk is sound amplification. He amplifies preexisting sound waves to what ever frequency is needed. Depending on the frequency, he can break through almost any object. The drawback is that sound waves can damage his hearing and can become temporarily deaf if he uses it too long or if he creates a frequency that’s too high for his body to handle. Has a chance of becoming permanently deaf if he overuses his quirk too many times

His suit comes with modifications to help with that so he should be fine he hopes

His guitar doubles as a weapon since he usually amplifies whatever chord he plays

Already has his provisional hero licence

is still really chill

is one of the first to figure out Marinette’s secret but is a good boi so he doesn’t tell

you’d think that being the oldest of the group he’d be the sensible one but nope

is accidentally the one that encourages shenanigans 

Luka, innocently: Hey, did you know that the teachers don’t lock up the sim rooms?

Chloe: *Death glare*

Luka: *nervous confusion*

the one who encouraged Juleka to go for the hero course 

Nino

Adrien’s best friend, just like canon

started out as general studies since he wasn’t sure if he was good enough to be a hero but a teacher saw his potential and was transferred into the hero course

His quirk is time reduction. He can slow time or even stop it completely if he concentrates very hard, allowing him to get one place to the next in literally no time at all. He used to think it was super speed because this but found out what it really was when he tried to save a cat from being run over and stopped time. He can also stop  only certain objects in time but that takes up more energy. The drawback is that if he overuses his quirk he starts to speed up his own time in order to compensate for the time he’s losing so he becomes very tired and after “3 hours” of his own time passed he will pass out from exhaustion. Also, he can only manipulate the time within his quirk’s range which can go up to about the size of an american football field (160 feet/49) meters.

is super insecure of his quirk because he thinks it’s not as cool as everyone else’s

they make sure to let him know that that’s bs and he’s very cool

feeds off of Adiren’s chaotic energy during simulations

has been put in timeout by Chloe when this happens

will stop time to bask in the moment 

gets emotional during this

there have been many times where the Squad is chilling and suddenly everyone just sees Nino sobbing 

group hugs ensue

Adrien, probably: “Chloe get your shiny ass in the cuddle pile or so help me-!”

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 I’ll make a part two since this is already so long, but that’s it for now! What do y’all think?

Part 2 is now up!

[kaette-kita-slayers]

July-December 2015 Q&As

Here’s the rest of 2015!

July 2015

Q: Is there any connection between the Elmekian Empire and Elmekia Lance?

K: [Elmekia Lance] was named that because it was developed in the Elmekian Empire.

Q: I recall that Mazoku have to fight using only their own power, or their existence itself will be threatened, as beings of mental energy*. But Shabranigdu gave Xelloss talismans that draw on the power of the Demon Lords of other worlds, and Xelloss used them. Is that okay for a Mazoku to do? I worry about whether using someone else's power might destroy Xelloss. * (This is one of those terms that's simple in Japanese, but a little harder to render in English. It literally means “mind-form”.)

K: He was obligated to pretend to be human, so it wouldn't really have been a problem.

(I honestly don't know if this question is about Slayers or something else, sorry!) Q: Ramika loves cats. Does her teacher, Nero Griffa, like cats, too? Or does he not particularly care, and feel like "If you have enough free time to bother with a helpless creature like that, then why can't you devote yourself further as an apprentice?"

K: Nero Griffa loves hamsters. I think he started down the path of darkness because his pet hamster died, or something.

August 2017

Q: Is the Eternal Queen called that because she's immortal? If she isn't immortal, then does that mean that each generation of the queens of Zephilia possesses the mind (ghost?) of the Aqualord? Also, the Knight of Ceipheed, Luna, can slice up a dragon with a kitchen knife, so can the Eternal Queen do the same?

K: The Eternal Queen isn't completely immortal, but she has a near-immortal lifespan and changes very little physically. The Eternal Queen has inherited the Aqualord's "knowledge", and Big Sis has "power", so they won't necessarily be able to do the same things.

Q: I'm curious about which have personalities you like and which have personalities you hate, among the characters you've written, in both the main series and short stories. If you had to choose---not characters you like or hate, but just personalities---who would you pick?

K: It's not "hate" so much as "have difficulty with", but the truth is that I think I'd have trouble dealing with Lina and Gourry. Someone as pushy as Lina would probably be irritating, and having to explain everything from start to finish like you would with Gourry would also be irritating. There's not really anyone whose personality I can specifically say I like.

Q: Which of these would the Mazoku (especially Xelloss) prefer: the occasional negative emotions of anger and sadness that humans with their eyes on the future feel, like Lina's group, or the extreme negative emotions experienced by the type of humans who would do anything to achieve what they want, like Rezo?

K: Mazoku each have their own preferences. Similar to how some people like fish, while others like meat.

September 2015

(No entry)

October 2015

Q: Lately, a lot of light novel authors have been writing scripts for anime other than adaptations of their work. You were in charge of the script for the Slayers movie, so have you ever wanted to write scripts for other anime?

K: No. Writing a few scripts really drove home the difference in how you have to present things in scripts and in novels. Plus there's the strictness of the deadlines. Most of the time with scripts, you have to be really fast, so I felt that specializing in them would be rough, honestly.

Q: In honor of the surprising spotlight on Lantz at the Slayers 25th anniversary exhibition, I have a question. Did you intend for Lantz to return from the beginning? I heard that the editorial staff was surprised that volume 3 ended up being more interesting than plotted, so when you were writing the plot, did you plan for him to return?

K: As I was plotting it out, I did plan for him to return. However, before I started writing the plot, I hadn't had any intention of bringing him back.

Q: Flare Dragon Ceipheed has the Flare Dragon Sword*, and Ruby Eye Shabranigdu has the Hungry Bone Staff*. It seems like they have weapons for their personal use that require a human form. Do the gods and Mazoku take human form by default, rather than adopting human forms to blend in with humans? Also, Sherra's Dulgofa may be an exception, but are Rashatt's sword or Xelloss' staff support items that increase their combat strength? I would very much appreciate it if you could answer this, if you don't mind. * (I have no idea if there are official/accepted translations for these?)

K: I think I've discussed this before in Megabura's* newsletters, but the Flare Dragon Sword only exists in legends, not in reality. The Hungry Bone Staff is indeed patterned after human weapons, but only because it happened to be the most convenient option at the time, no other reason. As for your other question, they're only external support items, so even if they happen to be useful, they don't actually increase their combat strength. * (The official fan club)

November 2015

(No entry)

December 2015

Q: When Zel was a kid, did he never even once study at school or the Sorcerer's Guild side-by-side with children his own age? If not, then when it came to the reading, writing, and arithmetic that children study, did he learn that from his parents, who were educated by Rezo in academic and magic subjects? In the Slayers Anthology, Zel gives Amelia some advice that makes him sound like a bookish young man, so I wondered who he learned about things other than Shamanistic Magic from. Or did Zel have another teacher aside from Rezo who taught him about subjects other than magic?

K: There's no such thing as compulsory education in that world, so unless you specifically enroll in a large school, you'll essentially never study side-by-side with other people. In Zel's case, I think he learned a variety of things from Rezo and his associates. Such as Noonsa.

Q: How do they develop new magic in the Slayers world? Do they do things like research ancient tomes and records of the Mazoku left behind in in folk tales, then pedal home on a bike from work at the Sorcerer's Guild, thinking up Chaos Words and muttering to themselves like "Darkness deeper than twilight... nah, that's not it...", then pack themselves a lunch on a nice sunny day and go out to some deserted mountain or ocean to try it out?

K: Different people have different methods of devising new spells, but the basis of it is always learning and analyzing preexisting spells. Building on that, they can proceed by trial and error, doing things like picking up information from ancient writings and adding that in, or combining it with the procedure for a different class of spell. It's common for people to attempt to create new spells, only for them to have no effect.

Q: I think there was a place in the main series where it said that even among pure Mazoku, it's easier for high-ranking Mazoku to take human form. In that case, what determines the appearance they end up with? Is it a reflection of the Mazoku's personality? Or can they choose to look however they want? This is an extreme example, but could Xelloss turn into Lina or Gourry? (as in, transforming himself)

K: Basically, if a Mazoku takes on human form, it all depends on the Mazoku's intent. So Xelloss could look identical to someone else. However, he wouldn't do it, because unless it were a necessity, it would be a problem for his sense of self and identity as a Mazoku.

[blogpolakempinska]

Service week 4

13.11.2020

this week for my service part of CAS I give online tutoring english lessons. My goal in this is to rise awarness to important global subjects among the people that i teach. This week we did a lesson on sustainable fashion and what effects the fashion industry has on our world. I asked Nina to read two articles and study voacbulary in order to prepare for our lesson

Article https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/apr/07/fast-fashion-speeding-toward-environmental-disaster-report-warns Artisan is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. When possible, look for clothes made by craftspeople and artisans. This supports their traditional and artisanal expertise, skills and processes to preserve their cultural heritage. Be aware of cultural appropriation (or misappropriation) – this is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture. Biodegradable means that a product can break down naturally without any negative effects on the environment, such as releasing harmful chemicals. In the fashion industry, biodegradable often refers to non-synthetic fabrics and those without dyes and finishing chemicals. This is the case of all the products of Eli´s Boots. All are 100% biodegradable vegetable-tanned camel leather. And remember you can enjoy Free International Shipping in all our fashion products. Carbon-Neutral Carbon is shorthand for all the various greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. These gases absorb and emit radiant energy that increases the temperature of the earth’s surface and therefore contributes to climate change. A company striving for carbon neutrality means they are aiming to eliminate all carbon emissions from its supply chain. Child labor is often defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential, and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development. Circular fashion /economy refers to the entire lifecycle of a product and centers on a circle of “create, use, recycle”, rather than the linear “create, use, dispose”. It looks at products beyond their original function and timespan and focuses on how their materials can be consistently utilized and repurposed. Compliance means that companies are adhering to the law. This might not always be good enough, as labor laws in foreign countries are weak. Cost-per-wear considers the value of a piece in relation to how many times it’s worn. For example, you buy a pair of $200 sneakers and wear them twice, that’s $100 per wear. You wear them 100 times, its $2 per wear, and so on. Think of items less as objects but more in terms of use. It’s much better to spend more on a pair of jeans you can practically live in for the next few decades than a cheap $30 pair that fall apart in under a year. Closed-loop cycle is a common term and its very similar to circular fashion. In fashion, it means that new clothes are made from preexisting clothes and textiles. Once an item has reached the end of its lifecycle, it can be broken down, turned back into yarn/fabric and then recycled into another garment. Cruelty-free means that companies did not test ingredients or products on animals during the production phase. Items that meet this standard normally carry a heart symbol. Cruelty-free in fashion means that no animals were killed or harmed. This applies in the process of manufacture of both the material and the product. Deadstock fabrics are textiles that are no longer useful for big factories or companies. There various reasons for deadstock fabrics. Sometimes the textiles no longer fit for the company´s designs. Sometimes there is an overstock of that particular design, the rolls might have slight damages, didn’t meet the initial color matching, or the simply the color is no longer in season. Eco-friendly fashion, like sustainability, is an all-encompassing term that takes many factors into account. “Eco” is short for ecology, the study of the interaction between organisms and the environment. Therefore, eco-friendly is about min

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 72

The monumental 2008 election was upon everyone's mind in the small town of Pinehurst while I was visiting my grandmother. Somehow, I just hadn't noticed there was going to be an election – I was too wrapped up in my books, my collage art, my old horror films and television shows, and my interest in various religions. Of course, my grandma and my uncles and aunts up north all were McCain hopefuls. I have never met anyone from a small town that far north who weren't on the embarrassingly far right on just about every issue. My grandma was still upset about hippies shirking Viet Nam like it had happened yesterday. I pretended to agree with whatever people said – it's how I survived and maintained some kind of life for myself relying as I did on the charity of others, but the truth is I had no idea what to believe. I was often times told something terrible would happen in response to a left wing policy being passed, and I really didn't know. My head was a jumble of complex philosophical criticism of society on the whole, but I also had been misinformed politically for so many years when I was younger that I had abstained from listening to anyone about anything. I couldn't just 'pick a party', though my grandma's always had Fox News on, and as nonpolitical as I thought I was, I sometimes wanted to reach through the television and throttle the television personalities for their callous view of the poor, their subversive racist ideals, and their focus on none issues and fear mongering. In fact the only things I was certain about were now putting me to the left, legalizing gay marriage, legalizing weed, ending the war in the middle east, ending the death sentence and not bailing out the banks.

I didn't understand healthcare, but I was told Obamacare was essentially the end of my existence as I knew it – which given my life up to that point I questioned if that would be such a bad thing really. The current system was confirmably insufficient though too. For instance, had my father paid for me to finally get confirmed for having PCOS, I would have had to take medication that insurance companies could and would bar me from ever being able to be on their insurance for having a preexisting condition. So as far as I could tell, the system that had currently been in place had in it's own way, low key let me know that my health was not in consideration, and I was not really a member of society that anyone should care about. Maybe it would be better for the system if I just died, preventing future misery to myself and the taxpayers. I didn't ever say anything about it openly, but I had contempt for the current healthcare system, what little I understood, so Obamacare didn't scare me, and actually made me a little more hopeful about the prospects of maybe getting the healthcare I needed.

This was also a turning point for my grandma and members of my family to begin embracing the absurd. I think something really mentally unstable was happening to the right. This isn't to say that there was never something deeply troubling about that rhetoric, but there was this weird desperation, like they were losing their country and a tree was no longer just a tree. There was no agree to disagree, and most of the right wing folk I knew where elderly, or very bitter and the ideas of Alex Jones and many others were beginning to reach them. And that fear was becoming something. Everyone was raving about Barack Obama being a Muslim, being born in Africa, and even more insane theories. My grandma told me that Obama was going to make everyone over seventy-five go into death camps that he had already started paying the Chinese military to come over here and build.  And then at times, the same people who accused Barack Obama of being a Muslim would also say he was an atheist commy. I couldn't see how a person could both be in support of Sharia law and simultaneously be an atheist communist of the Stalin variety. I didn't understand how you could be both, as there seemed to be very little unifying features in the two ideas.

I didn't really have anything against Islam anyway. Aside from the fact that he just clearly was not, honestly, who cares if Obama was Muslim?  And even if he wasn't technically born in the United States (and he completely was), what threat did that pose against my well being? He was clearly not working for any other country. As for the Muslim accusations, furthermore, it bothered me no more or less than someone being a Christian, as I am not religious and I prefer it when wisdom comes from a different place other than socially accepted myths and a really old book that was at odds with itself.

I was a top expert at letting people take control of my life, but finding ways to either undermine that power or slowly but surely gain that person's confidence and gain sway and maybe some level of equality in so doing was always an undercurrent for me. In my heart of hearts, I didn't want to be anyone's pet, or to have to attempt to manipulate others to like me when, had I been given the same independence and freedom I would have been able to stand my ground or walk away. My grandma quickly over the course of these two months, opened up to me more than she had to anyone in a decade or maybe more, and it was in part because I didn't ever argue with her about her beliefs. Instead I listened, until I got to the heart of what she was trying to say and where she was coming from. Nobody realized who I actually was, or what I thought, and it was one of the few power dynamics that I had over those around me. If she really truly knew me, she would have thought I was awful and nihilistic, and likely wouldn't have wanted much to do with me. There is a lot of emphasis on being yourself at all times, but it's very hard to live up to when you are completely reliant on everyone around you. I let her see the side of me that she wanted to see – and that side of me wasn't a lie. I just hid the other half.

My eyesight had diminished even further. My eyes were so runny by this time from a need for glasses that people noticed me in the store. I looked like someone with an eye condition in the dark ages. It was sort of ruining the symmetry of my face, due to my constant squinting. I didn't even open my right eye anymore. It was tightly shut at all times, and when it opened at all, oozy liquid ushered on out and ran down my face. My eyes burned and stung almost continuously. It looked horrible. And of course, nobody really had done anything for me in this regard. Nobody wanted to take me to the eye doctor, or pay that kind of money. They just watched the years go by as my eyes became worse and worse. Somehow, I had become so accustomed to it, that even though it was kind of ruining things for me – even with my facial expression. I looked like I was glaring all the time and people thought I was mean - my grandma Marie, bless her for this, saw this problem for what it was and said no more. She set me up with an eye appointment. She had to pay out of pocket, and it amounted to several hundred dollars that had taken her months to save for, but she chose to spend it on me, to save my eyes. I remember feeling this weird confusion that she was willing to pay full price for me to see the eye doctor and for me to get a pair of glasses (which I now was not too good for). I didn't feel like I deserved it. I apologized and told her everything would be fine. I didn't know how comfortable I felt about anyone actually caring about how I was doing, or what my future held.

I went in and came out with a three hundred dollar pair of glasses and the appointment had cost another three hundred dollars. The idea of anyone spending six hundred dollars on me nearly gave me a heart attack. Thinking I was going to die at a young age had set in motion this idea that I didn't deserve equal treatment. I had very low standards for myself. I hadn't even realized how badly my eyes were, even though it was chronic and psychically obvious. Regardless of the dynamic of control, I will now and forever more say that my grandma getting me that pair of glasses might very well be the greatest acts of kindness ever bestowed upon me. Truly.

The eye doctors told me that one of my eyes was damaged in such a way, that had I not gotten glasses within the next five years I would have eventually lost eyesight in my right eye. Wearing glasses was actually going to improve my vision. The moment I put those glasses on, I was finally seeing the world in a way I never had. The whole world looked completely different, sharp and dramatic and intricate. I didn't realize that when you are driving you are supposed to be able to see the divots and individual gravels in the road. I didn't realize you could see individual leaves on trees even at a distance, or that pines had more depth to them. I could see things in people's faces that I hadn't before. I could see the imperfections of my own face in the mirror, and though this bothered me, it was probably the first time I was having a good honest look at myself – pours and all. Everyday items in the kitchen seemed brighter. Things seemed shinier. The carpet looked interesting with all it's individual soft clumps coming together to make a carpet. Psychologically, getting those glasses created an incentive for me to see the world in a new way, and for me to actually want to see it. I had long stopped going outside in the daylight if I could help it. The sun had just hurt my eyes too much. And now, I could go out and my eyes didn't hurt anymore.

Also, I suddenly realized how hard I had been squinting my eyes and what that had been doing to my cheeks and eyebrows. My eyes looked twice as big now – and when friends and family saw me, they said I looked like a completely different person. When I put those glasses on, I realized that there was no reason for me to clench my eyes, and when I stopped my cheeks began to tingle furiously for days, as this was the first time I had relaxed my face in about six years. It was weird to me that most people just relaxed their faces. I had been squinting so hard that it had permanently caused a slight difference in the muscles of my eyebrows, causing them to become slightly crooked to this day. I notice this more than others do, and it can be hid with make up if I am feeling up to it.

I didn't want to but my grandma hated my hair, so I let her take me to her favorite republican hairstylist and change my hair. Having literally bestowed on me the gift of sight – I didn't feel in the position to be complaining. She thought I looked like a hardened criminal with my bleached blonde hair. Besides I didn't really like my own hair either. It was totally fried due to me wanting to make it as white as possible. The hair near my neck had basically fallen out I learned later, from all the bleaching.

The salon in question wasn't your typical hair salon. It was in a very small building with American flags with matching red, white and blue hibiscus growing in pots by the front door to match. The hair stylist was extremely republican, and she loved the Bush family so much she actually had a picture of George W. Bush on the wall. They gave me the Rachel hair-do – as I was clueless and unsure of what I wanted, and dyed my hair a sandy soft brown. It looked better. I was nervous about having 90's Rachel hair, but my hair being as it is naturally curly, wouldn't take to a true Rachel look unless I straightened it and styled it that way each morning. My grandma and this hairdresser went on about how Obama was going to ruin the world, about how Obama was going to force abortions, and a lot of stuff that never happened. I had thought that controversial subjects were not good for business, but in fact, people seemed to like her because her ideas reflected theirs in this part of the world. I was basically opinionless on who should be president at the time, but I secretly kind of liked Obama – I liked the way he articulated his ideas. He was just likeable.

I was skeptical of 'hope and change'. I couldn't see escaping from all the corruption on an individual anecdotal microcosm of my own life, or the macrocosm of humanity as a whole without the world basically coming to almost an end I didn't think Obama was going to fix everything – and at the time I thought that you couldn't be liberal unless you were obsessed and agreed with every person in power with liberal values – an obvious fallacy. I think the underlying hatred was because Obama was black. Maybe not everyone who disliked him were against him for this, but from my personal experience, it was the deciding factor for many rural white voters. What ignorance.

There was a visit to my aunt Margie, who lived in Bonners Ferry, this gorgeous little town up in the northmost part of Idaho close to the border. My great aunt Margie is this fantastic woman with astounding character and energy, 96 years of age. She grew up incredibly poor. When she was still a teenager, she had decided she would travel the world and shirk conventionally acceptable female roles and lead a life of adventure instead. She left the United States and traveled on her own for several years all over Europe and other continents. She wore pants in the thirties and forties and was a complete contradiction of the typical women of her time. She chose not to have children.

When WW2  came around she became a nurse. After the war, she worked at a post office, where she met her her husband. He died six years later of a rare illness and she never dated or remarried or was with anyone else for the rest of her life. She became a machinist/carpenter/artist/inventor, and started her own successful machine shop that she ran herself in Seattle where she let sculptors and inventors use her shop to make their creations, often with her help. She became a well loved person in the Seattle art scene and she helped entrepreneurs make their ideas become real. I am told that she helped invent certain components to the pellet stove that are still used today.

Margie was a vegetarian for most of her life, though she sometimes ate fish at her doctor's behest. Margie wore whatever she wanted. She would dress up in bright colors, often favoring black and white striped tights, purple dresses, and large sunhats that she would put plastic fruit on. She was famous for her hats, which often times seemed bigger than she was. Obviously Margie was and is the gem of our family.

I had up to this point, never really met my great aunt before. She was having difficulties running her very sizable household and menagerie of animals. Margie was a devout Catholic and I remember when we parked, the day was overcast, and looking at her front lawn which was scattered with various Mother Mary's and crosses of every shape and size (some of them life-sized) and the bright colors and the expressions on the faces of the Mary's was somehow intense and dark and beautiful. We walked in, and blasting from every room (and there were many rooms) was the Catholic channel. She couldn't hear very well, and it was important for her to always be showing her devotion to the church. I watched distantly for hours, seeing nuns and priests chanting in Latin, carrying out Catholic strange traditions involving fancy goblets, crackers and pieces of cloth. It was world I could never fully understand, but there was a mysterious loveliness to it. Mother Mary's were, as I said, absolutely everywhere – even in the bathrooms. She had about six dogs, many of them being Pomeranian fluff balls of happiness, and I spent quite a bit of time with them. Outside she had these crazy Alpacas and a bunch of chickens and ducks and rabbits. It was hard to imagine a woman in her nineties being able to keep up with this.

Margie having all these animals was a bizarre story. One of her closest friends was this Catholic priest in the community who was about her same age at her. He and Margie were probably the last two surviving people from their generation in the town dedicated to Catholicism and for this reason they were very close. This priest was driving down a rural road one day in the middle of nowhere. There had been construction on this road that lead to a bridge, and the bridge was taken down, but there were no people around and there were no signs that indicated that the bridge was essentially a dead end that lead into a deep ravine. I can't imagine this happening in the 21st century but it did. He was pretty old too, and was losing his sight. So he ended up driving right off this bridge, and breaking just about every bone in his body, but somehow miraculously he survived (a good portion of his body was replaced by metal), and sued the company for several million dollars for their negligence on informing drivers that the road was basically a death trap.

He had nothing to do with this money really – he was old and donating it back to the church was probably what ended up happening to most of it, but I guess he wanted to make the best of it in the short time he had left (he died only a few years after the incident), and so he started buying animals like crazy. I guess thinking it would make him happy. And when he couldn't take care of those animals, he gave them to Margie, who was also going blind and was equally as old and would have difficulties taking care of them. However, Margie was very much in denial that she was going blind, and she drove till she was in her nineties even when she should have stopped, and she didn't think she was losing out on any of the spunk she had when she was young. She thought she could run a farm by herself (I think it was something she did at some point in her busy life, as well as build her own house). But she couldn't, and nobody in the community really stopped by to help. The only living relative that seemed to care about Margie was my grandma, and a great deal of my grandma's time was spent trying to convince Margie not to try doing home improvements anymore, and to try to start downsizing her life and changing her lifestyle to match her age, which, for someone as ambitious and independent as Margie was a real challenge.

We spent that rainy day packing things in boxes for Margie. She gave me special rosaries and Catholic charms. She started talking at one point about my grandma's upbringing. She wasn't someone who had a filter. She talked about things that made people uncomfortable sometimes, I am told she was always that way. It's strange because it seems like my grandma has this thick skin about everything that had happened to her in her life, but Margie seemed to see right through that. She started talking openly about how my grandmother had been wounded and mistreated by just about everyone she had ever loved at a young age, and I could see this strange vulnerable moment where my grandma seemed to sort of shrink uncomfortably. This one moment really helped me understand my grandma deeper. It was something I had never really thought about up to that point. I always saw my grandmother as rather invulnerable – a force of perfectionism and ultimate  judgment, and it was at this moment with Margie pointing it out, that I had a small opening to see a crack in that facade. My grandma was still a child underneath all of that.

There was/is something very warm and special about Margie's presence. She's very honest, and unusual. Looking at her life and her character, she makes it all look so easy. I like to think of her as someone I should aspire to. And proof that you don't have to become dull with age.

We went out to eat with these two people earlier in the day at Bonners Ferry. Margie forgot she made these engagements. It was a couple, both were both in their mid-fifties – obvious churchgoers. I thought they were phony and I didn't care for them much. We went to this small cafe and ordered breakfast food. I let my grandma order for me, as I had no idea what to order for myself (I was too nervous to think at restaurants most of the time). It was a very awkward encounter for me because they kept on asking me questions about what I was studying in college, or what my plans were to get married or have children. When people asked me questions like this it made me feel like a loser. When I explained that none of those things were happening, they looked at me weird, and back and forth to each other. I guess it really seemed particular to them that I wasn't going to college.

Back at my grandma's, I spent a great deal of those dark late fall days cutting up children's books and gardening books in the back room, adding to my collage collection for when I got back, listening to Stephen King novels on audiotape. My grandma was annoyed that I did this to the books – cutting them instead of keeping them, and looking back, I think there were a few I should have not cut up. She let me though, because she wanted to encourage me artistically. She really wanted me to become a successful painter like she had been. I felt some of this was projecting herself onto me, but getting that kind of encouragement meant a lot nonetheless. No adult had encouraged me artistically before. She gave me a large supply of acrylic and oil paints she was no longer going to use, as well as large stacks of canvases. It was a lot. I was set for years. Between getting me these glasses and giving me all these art supplies, I was besides myself.

She eventually offered to let me stay there. It was something she was hoping I would do. She wanted me to live in the back room perhaps, to help her with her garden, to maybe get a job in that small town, painting on the side – and eventually becoming good enough to maybe sell those paintings. She might have been hoping that I would become a small town person, choosing to marry a local and having a family up there. She promised to help me learn to drive. She explained that I would be away from my mother and father and older sisters, away from all that chaos and negativity, that my grandma saw me as too good for.

She didn't want to be alone for the last years of her life. I would have a place of my own. But ultimately, I knew it wouldn't work. For one, I had held back a lot of my personal beliefs and opinions, and I knew I couldn't live that way if it was permanent. She would eventually discover that we had different values. Secondly, my grandma was racist, and this was big issue for me. She didn't think she was of course, but she actually was extremely racist. Yeah, she liked me, because I am white, but it would never feel right to me. It bothered me to hear her go on about how whites were being suppressed, and how black people are basically inherently violent and I couldn't live with that. I would eventually have exploded. And she was too old to change her mind. Perhaps I didn't want the narrow politics and thinking of the small community to rub off on me.

Fox News was blaring in the living room everyday too. I loved her dogs, but if you know Yorkies, they get old really fast, licking you in the face each morning with their weird face hair dangling. They seemed to constantly need me. And I already had Shorty down at my mom's place to take care of. I couldn't abandon him. I would also have missed Allison. I don't think I could live without Allison in my life. My father was beginning to fight with her, and with David too for that matter, and I was afraid he was going to become physically abusive towards them in the same way he had been me. I wanted to be there for her in her early teen years at the very least. I wouldn't see much of her if I lived up north. I didn't feel right leaving her. Ultimately, though, I think my grandma wanted me because she thought I was a younger version of her and she liked the control she had over me. She wanted to be able to control what I ate, my hair, my clothes. I was a project that could have kept her busy. I hesitate to try to paint her as some kind of selfish evil being. She really wasn't – she showed more decency to me in particular than my parents had. But she had issues. She was projecting her own personality onto me, and if I continued to take gifts I would begin feeling more and more guilty about accepting them, and I would get trapped. Plus, this stuff was all comfort. She offered me a sort of stable comfort that didn't match who I was inside. I really felt there was some great calling to me, out there somewhere. I didn't know what it was, but I did know I didn't want to marry some local car mechanic and have two children and own a house and have McCain signs in my yard, regardless of how cheap real estate was.

People often think I am them. It might be because I am submissive, or because I can entertain other people's beliefs without adhering to them. Maybe I am open in a way and it is relatable to others. I can be chatty at times, but there are certain kinds of people I just prefer to listen to. Perhaps it's just this incredibly big hole in my identity, some void that was created  that has caused me to I stayed a child, or some kind of wound that caved in on itself and became a black hole. I seem to know who I am – but then is anyone ever a static entity? We are all in the process of constant change, and the older I get the less I see myself as having a core identity. Perhaps I am vulnerable to people in a way. There is something a little choppy and malleable about me – often times in my psychological blind spots. I often times feel more or less like I am playing a part in a play – tricking myself to believe it's all real. Not like a sociopath. But like someone who's not really a total someone. I just have this void in me, and it's hard to explain. And I think people identify that void on a very primitive level and fill it with their own identity. I don't know if I am explaining that well.

My grandma was right in seeing the symbiosis of the situation, but ultimately, it was a role I was not willing to fill. There were a lot of unspoken aspects that would have become painful future problems And I didn't want to become a miniature her. I would eventually reject what she had offered me. I didn't want to sour a good relationship with her. I can definitely see how me rejecting this offer might strike people as being very foolish. I had  less than nothing at my parents who more or less used me as a punching bag, and I suffered a lot of abuse from the both of them. I still felt this inner fire of wanting to be something more. There had to be more to life than becoming stable. I didn't want to give up that something, and I knew that living with my grandma would have involved me living a very controlled lifestyle that would have eventually cut into who I was as a person. Ultimately, I felt like would be settling. I couldn't just be myself and live up there. There was a price.

I really wanted out of these small towns. I wanted bright lights of a large city spanning out as far as could be seen – so I could see infinite lives and existences crammed before me. I wanted to be around all kinds of walks of life. I wanted to walk down city streets at night and see all the nightmares of human beings up close and personal, and also experience and see the greatest of human potential. I love looking at nature. I love lakes, and the way the mist would gather around the mountains and in many respects, I loved walking into small town diners and being able to see the stars at night. But I would never connect to anyone and it wasn't the kind of growth I needed. And think, when you are fortunate enough in the rare set of circumstances when you get one opportunity in a small town, either you find someone you can connect with, or you get a job you are like, in that small world, once you lose that something, there is no future and every part of that town is tinged with regret and sadness, in a place that small. In a city, there is always a new beginning a new face, and a new way of life waiting for you. It's never the end in the city. You can grow all over. There is always something new to move onto.

Lastly, and perhaps most critical to my decision to continue my futile struggle with my parents was that Sarah emailed me around that same time, and she told me that she was done with living in Texas. Working there was killing her soul, and she didn't see her and Alex going anywhere with their lives. They didn't end up writing songs or making music. She had told Alex that she was moving back to Idaho, and he could stay or go, but she was going. He chose to go with her – but her having decided individually to leave alone – or with him was indication that in a way their relationship was already on the rocks – even if they didn't fight. Sarah told me she was going to do everything she could to help me get back on my feet. She was going to help me get my social security card, help me find work, help me integrate back into society somehow. We were both ready to try being close again, this time without fighting like insecure teenagers that we were. We had both learned a ton of humility from our separate existences, she working and realizing what she actually wanted in life and how to take control of her life situations, and me, having had to confront my own insecurity and ego. I truly missed Sarah. We both wanted to be in a band together still, and to work on manga comics together. We were so excited. I didn't feel like I had to be anyone I wasn't with her. And eventually, we wanted to move away from Idaho altogether, maybe Seattle or something. It almost sounded too good to be true, so of course I was going to move back to my parents and wait it out.

PART 71 - https://tinyurl.com/y6v3ln9a

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-60 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far). 

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-70

[joellbarham85]

Opiate Addiction Rehab - Delray Beach Florida - Transformations Treatment Center

 How Many People Suffer From Opiate Addiction Inr Florida

Table of Contents What Are The Odds Of Beating Opiate Addiction What Drugs Are Used To Treat Opiate Addiction What Is A Great Video To Show Your Teen About Your Life With Opiate Addiction What Resources Are Available For Financial Problems Due To Opiate Addiction What Are The Signs Of An Opiate Addiction? What Medication Is Used To Treat Opiate Addiction

This has to do with double the number in 2012, and fewer people are on wait lists for treatment. Expanded pilot project over the year by supplying overdose rescue sets complimentary of charge at 19 community distribution.

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websites by the end of 2016. Opiate dependency is a main anxious system (CNS) illness caused by using opiate-based compounds( opioidsnatural or synthetic substances with morphine-like impacts, which act through opioid receptors ), such as oxycontin( oxycodone), morphine, heroin, buprenorphine, opium, etc.( Campbell, 2003 ). Opiate dependency is characterized by psychological or physical dependence on opioids, which therefore need to be routinely administered to avoid barely manageable withdrawal symptoms. Secondary illness in opiate addicts typically includes effects on the immune system causing infections (Lucas, 2005 ), lung disease (Bttner, Shopping Center, Penning, & Weis, 2000; Simonovska et al., 2012 ), kidney disease( Simonovska et al., 2012), cardiac illness (Adle-Biassette, Marc, Benhaiem-Sigaux, Durigon, & Gray, 1996; Lucas, 2005), vascular illness (Bttner et al., 2000; Decet & Bianchin, 2005; Lucas, 2005; Simonovska et al., 2012), injury (Lucas, 2005), orthopedic illness( Simonovska et al., 2012), or neurological illness( Lucas, 2005; Sadeghian et al., 2009; Table 1 ). Neurological problems develop within the first months of substance abuse in almost all patients( Lukacher et al., 1987 ). This chapter handles secondary neurological problems triggered by opiate dependency but likewise highlights preexisting neurological disease, which might promote opiate addiction. Table 1. Secondary Disease in Opiate AddictsDiseaseReferencesEffects on the Immune SystemInfections of soft-tissue, solid-organ abscessesLucas( 2005) Lung DiseaseOpiate-induced breathing depressionSimonovska et al.( 2000) Kidney DiseaseProteinuriaSimonovska et al. (2012) HematuriaSimonovska et al. (2012) Heart DiseaseEndocarditisLucas( 2005) ArrhythmiasLucas( 2005 )Myocardial infarctionAdle-Biassette et al. (1996 )Vascular DiseaseVasoconstrictionLucas( 2005) Raynaud phenomenonSimonovska et al. (2012) AneurysmsDiLuna et al. (2007 )ThrombosisDiLuna et al. (2007 )VasculitisSimonovska et al. (2012 )and Bttner et al. (2000 )Spontaneous carotid artery dissectionDecet and Bianchin( 2005) and DiLuna et al.( 2007) Positional vascular compressionLucas( 2005), Simonovska et al. (2000 ), and Decet and Bianchin (2005 )TraumaLucas (2005 )Orthopedic illness (Arthralgia )Simonovska et al.( 2012) Neurological diseaseSimonovska et al. (2012) and Sadeghian et al. (2009 ). Why Are Opiates So Addictive? Opiates can be discovered in several widely-used.

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The Opiate Addiction What Is Being Used

drugs consisting of: heroin, morphine, codeine and hydrocodone. Opiates create artificial endorphins in the brain- which produce in the early phases of usage warm, excellent feelings in the user. But with time, opiates deceive the brain into stopping the production of these endorphins naturally. This process is the reason opiates are so addicting. When the body stops producing its own endorphins, an individual feels sick and depressed whenever they are not taking the opiate. For these individuals, taking the opiate, say heroin, no longer has to do with the positive sensations that were felt the very first few times they took the drug. When this" switch" happens( accomplishing excellent turns to preventing bad) the person has actually ended up being addicted to opiates. Some opiates develop over 100 times more endorphins (natural painkillers) than the body would naturally. Picture the effect this has on the brain and relevant nerve cells. When the brain closes down endorphin production.

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because of opiate use, the addicting nature ends up being clear: there is no other method to compensate for the lost endorphins other than to take more and more of the opiate in concern. What takes place when an opiate addict stop taking the drugs they have been abusing? Withdrawal signs take place almost right away and can consist of: tension, anxiety, self-destructive ideas, anxiety, uneasyness, lack of sleep and other devastating effects. Because of the possibly major nature of withdrawal and the likelihood of the user returning to the opiate in concern during this time, it is crucial that professional aid is sought for the opiate addict. Prescription opioids are powerful pain-reducing medications that consist of oxycodone, hydrocodone, and morphine, to name a few, and have both benefits as well as potentially major risks. Nevertheless, a lot of Americans have been impacted by the major damages connected with these medications, and despite ongoing efforts, the scope of the opioid crisis continues to grow.

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What Percentage Of Opiate Addiction Comes From Prescriptions

Opioids are declaring lives at a staggering rate, and overdoses from prescription opioids are minimizing life span in the United States. At FDA, we're working throughout the complete scope of our regulative obligations to impact this crisis. Our approach to lowering the misuse and abuse of opioids is detailed in FDA's 2018 Strategic Policy Roadmap, which deals with various aspects of this complex problem, as there are no simple responses to reverse this epidemic. This may be accomplished by making sure that only properly showed patients are recommended opioids and that the prescriptions are for periods and dosages that effectively match the medical reason for which the drug is being recommended in the first place. Offered the scale of theopioid crisis, with millions of Americans currently affected, avoidance is inadequate. As we continue to confront opioid abuse and dependency, we must likewise take actions to help those with acute and persistent discomfort who require access to medicines, consisting of opioids, get improved treatment alternatives. Transitioning from the present market, dominated by standard opioids, to one in which most opioids have abuse-deterrent residential or commercial properties, holds substantial guarantee for a significant public health advantage.

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The FDA plays an enforcement function when it concerns the illegal market for diverted opioids and controlled substances. Among those functions is collaborating with Customizeds and Border Defense on interdiction work on drugs being delivered through the mail - how to get opiate addiction treatment discreetly. The company has actually received brand-new funding for processing drugs and other posts imported or used for import through International Mail Facilities. Although the sale of prescription opioids without a valid prescription is illegal, the FDA continues to see these items in the plans we check. In addition, part of our continuous work is guaranteeing that drug approval and removal choices are made within a benefit/risk structure that assesses not only the results of opioids when utilized a recommended, but likewise the public health impacts of unsuitable usage of these drugs. The FDA has actually put together a timeline to offer sequential information about.

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Why Is Trump On The Opiate Addiction Front

firm activities and considerable events connected to opioids. Consisted of on this page is a summary timeline of crucial occasions, followed by tabbed years that supply chosen extra actions and more information about the items listed in the summary. Program Satisfying Summary Agenda Satisfying Summary, 1-4 p.m., Seattle Municipal government, Bertha K. Landis Room cancelled )1-4 p.m., Seattle Town hall, Bertha K. Landis Space Agenda Opiate dependency symptoms can vary rather based on the compounds.

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being used. While addiction to prescription opiates frequently develops slowly and may need sharp observational skills to find in the early phases, the symptoms of heroin dependency normally manifest more rapidly, perhaps in a matter of weeks. Heroin abuse likewise triggers physical changes in the body that are difficult to miss.

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How To Treat Opiate Addiction

There are 11 signs in total utilized to specify opiate dependency, and there are 3 kinds of medical diagnoses that might be offered depending on how lots of opiate addiction symptoms remain in evidence( 2-3 signs.

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= moderate addiction, 4-5 symptoms =moderate dependency, six or more= extreme addiction). These signs include: Extreme does of opiates considered longer periods than anticipated Repetitive failures to stop utilizing these drugs Opiate usage that has actually ended up being a lengthy activity Powerful and persistent yearnings Work, school, and family duties are neglected Continued use of opiates in spite of continuous social and relationship issues Crucial social, occupational, or recreational activities are abandoned Opiate use connected to physically harmful scenarios Recurrent physical or mental problems linked to opiate usage Tolerance for opiates continues to increase Withdrawal symptoms experienced when opiates are not taken in One of the gravest threats for opiate addicts is overdose, which is an adverse effects of the tolerance for opiates that develops in time. The existing epidemic of drug overdose deaths in the United States is practically completely related to the surge of opiate usage and abuse. Of the more than 64,000 Americans who lost their lives to drug overdose in 2016, opiates were implicated solely or in combination with other drugs( usually alcohol or benzodiazepines) in more than 53,000 of these cases - what rehab centers are doing with suboxone to curb opiate addiction. The symptoms of opiate overdose consist of: Extreme drowsiness, to the point of unresponsiveness Considerable respiratory distress Slow heartbeat and a weak pulse Nausea and continuous vomiting Badly dilated pupils Bluish lips and fingers Significant mental confusion and disorientation Total loss of awareness There is a drug called naloxone (offered under.

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What All Happens When You Do The Uams Opiate Addiction Study

the brand name Narcan) that can efficiently combat the results of opiate overdose by obstructing its capacity to bind with brain receptors (which of the following is an accurate statement about opiate (narcotic) addiction?).

Transformations Treatment Center

14000 S Military Trail, Delray Beach, FL 33484

FV9H+MC Delray Beach, Florida

https://www.transformationstreatment.center 

Opiate Rehab in Delray Beach, FL

from https://transformationstreatment1.blogspot.com/2020/08/opiate-addiction-rehab-delray-beach.html

from Transformations Treatment Center - Blog https://transformationstreatment.weebly.com/blog/opiate-addiction-rehab-delray-beach-florida-transformations-treatment-center

[swirlingdisobedience]

Post-truth

“Truth” is of no small importance to human affairs, yet it has been and remains a contested category. Its status shifts radically through time, place, religion, discipline —and today, social platform. Truth can be definite and mercurial, divine and political. As secularism, cosmopolitanism and positivism enter a moment of crisis, and as information seems to be ever more available – while also subject to algorithmic modification – anxieties about the status of truth and the transparency of information are on the rise.

“Post-truth” was the 2016 Oxford English Dictionary word of the year, denoting “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. ”The crisis in objectivity that this new word unveils has been accompanied by an unprecedented proliferation of homemade images that excel the art of “remixology”,the “practice of recombining preexistent content”.These images result in often-fake contents that circulate both virally and ephemerally online. The “post-truth phenomenon”, however, is not only fuelled by low-tech and intimate creativity, but also by technologically sophisticated and politically driven techniques of image creation, alteration, and destruction. These sustain electoral agendas, responses to catastrophe, and affective relationships to power holders.”

 (Reality Machines:An Art Exhibitionon Post-TruthMara Polgovsky Ezcurra)

“A range of artistic acts and interventions meant to challenge the way the truth is presented in different socio-political and economic contexts.

Works that reflect an approach that seeks to act subversively outside the artistic context. Theorist Carrie Lambert-Beatty calls this artistic genre "Parafiction" – a term that denotes the use of techniques of deception and fraud, fabricated identities, impersonation, or production of fictional narratives and events. The works are acts of political imagination with actual consequences in the real world. They are experienced as fact and, under specific circumstances, are granted the status of truth. Thereby the issue of truth gains great importance.

This artistic genre was developed in Eastern European collectives in the 1970s and 1980s. In these countries, ideology was inseparable from historiography – in the way in which the past is narrated in order to generate revolutions and the constitution of ideas and prophecies. The histories and narratives that inspired those regimes are still in place, refusing to vanish and appearing as a psychological and social force.

Artists influenced by the aesthetics of documentary and mockumentary films and reality shows, aiming to offer a new reading of existing narratives. 

They seek to reveal unknown historical aspects and open up the possibility of multiple narratives with respect to history. 

Unlike other works, which play along the boundary between reality and illusion yet remain in the realm of fictional creations, some of these works tend to diminish the position to the illusory dimension. Prominent among them, yet changing according to context, is the intervention with real historical and cultural aspects.

The artist is able to take part in the dominant political, social, or economic discourse, to appropriate and to consume, yet at the same time to criticize.”

FCNN

FCNN News makes visible what has been made invisible

https://fcnnnews.love/episodes/episode-1-of-fcnnnews-white-institutions-and-representation/

FCNNNews is a news-platform and curatorial project initiated by Feminist Collective With No Name in 2018.

The platform is born out of the adverse misrepresentation of BiPoC’s and Queers in the art industry and mainstream media – everything from “de-ghettoising” areas in urban spaces to traumatic defeat and most importantly to public and institutional racism.

In each episode we have invited artists and organizations who work in the intersection of art and activism, to contribute to the program. Our first episode focuses on white institutions and representation; the following episodes explores the politics of gentrification, resistance and organization.

About FCNN:

Feminist Collective with no name (FCNN) was founded in 2016 by artists Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Lil B. Wachmann and filmmaker Anita Beikpour.

Their work is rooted in activism and spans over performance, video, text and workshops often in collaboration with other collectives, individuals and institutions across border, nations and disciplines. Together with Space27 in Beirut, FCNN has been hosting the film and research project: Another Dinner, Ruined since 2018.

FCNN’s latest work is their ongoing news programme: FCNNNews.

The collective was initiated in Copenhagen, Denmark and works today between Berlin, NYC, Beirut and Copenhagen.

Dr. Pinkas The Iranian Ambassador in Jerusalem, 2015. 

A group of Jerusalem artists ( collective Hamabul) opened the city’s first unofficial Iranian ‘embassy of culture’. 

Relations between Iran and Israel have been tense since the Iranian Revolution, when Iran closed the Israeli trade mission in Tehran, which had operated as a de facto embassy, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dubbed Israel “an enemy of Islam”. Iran does not recognise Israel. As president from 2005 to 2103, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke of the Israeli state being “removed from the page of history”. Israeli politicians like Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, have argued the Iranian regime poses a threat to Israel’s existence.

But Israeli and Iranian citizens have often spoken out of a desire for better ties. In 2012 Israeli peace activists launched a social media campaign to foster goodwill by showering Iran with ‘Israel loves Iran’ messages. Pinkas Matan, the mastermind behind the cultural embassy who displayed red and green nail polish symbolising the Iranian flag, doesn’t believe politics should hinder good relations between citizens. Speaking in front of a projector screen playing a documentary about Iranian fashion, Matan announced the goal of the project as sparking communication between peoples, sharing culture and art, and promoting peace.

Paolo Cirio, Daily Paywall, 2014 

- Newsprints and plastic newsrack, dimensions variable.

This artwork appropriated over sixty-thousand news items from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and The Economist. In Daily Paywall, Cirio redistributed thousands of pay-per-view articles for free by hacking the paywall systems of the three major financial newspapers and proposed a new economic model for circulating news articles. Readers could earn one dollar for responding correctly to quizzes about the featured articles, journalists were invited to claim compensation for their writing, while donors could offer any amount to crowdfund the model. DailyPaywall.com has over 60,000 articles in total; Cirio selected fifteen topics, each featuring eight articles published in 1,000 print copies which were distributed as a free paper available in custom newsracks and bookshops throughout New York City. Eventually, the site was shut down when the publisher Pearson PLC made claims on its own copyrighted material. A year after the legal threat, Pearson sold both The Financial Times and The Economist. As a result, Cirio republished DailyPaywall.com in its entirety. In Daily Paywall, Cirio’s radical action and participatory model elicited reflection on access to knowledge and the contemporary information economy. The work was staged by utilizing the distribution of information as a material to make works of art and to interrogate legal, linguistic, and socioeconomic structures. In the installation, elements of the performance are assembled to document and recall its propositions. Printed copies of the Daily Paywall newspaper are available to the audience, while the flowchart print of the economic model stands as the core concept of the artist’s intervention.

Joana Moll, AZ: Move and get shot. 2012 - 2014. 

AZ: Move and Get Shot  is a net-based piece which shows the landscape of the US-Mexico border in the state of Arizona through the eyes of six surveillance cameras, themselves linked to an online platform. The platform was created by a group of landowners with properties on the US border, whose main purpose was to provide the public with raw images of immigrants crossing the border illegally through their lands. Each camera incorporates a motion sensor, which triggers an image capture when it detects the slightest vibration in the landscape. These pictures were then sent to a server and displayed directly on the web page.While the main goal of the landowners was to disseminate photographs of illegal immigrants, the camera is programmed to detect and record any kind of movement. By delegating the surveillance to a machine, the original human intention is lost, and the original purpose takes shape as a collection of images revealing not only immigrants but all kinds of human, animal, and natural activity.

"they both point towards a possible militarization of civil society through the use of web-based cameras to watch immigrants crossing the border. When combined with interactive media, virtual surveillance becomes a tool to decontextualize the border and crowdsource the police actions to civilians, and, by extension, turn the users into disengaged border officers ...

While the main goal of the landowners is to capture and disseminate photographs of immigrants entering the United States illegally, the camera is programmed to detect and record any movement. By delegating surveillance to a machine, human intention is lost, and the original purpose is transformed, resulting in an accelerated collection of images, which reveal not only immigrants, but all kinds of human, animal and natural activity. Therefore, I conceived AZ: move and get shot with the intention to reveal how this action of monitoring the border becomes something uncontrollable and potentially meaningless.“

Carmen Dobre-Hametner, Consuming History, 2015. 

Consuming History, is a photographic series presented in the group exhibition Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality, representing Romania at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The project documents a participative show which takes place in a former Soviet bunker near Vilnius, Lithuania where a team of actors, employed by a commercial entity, stage traumatic living during communism for locals and foreign tourists alike. The visitors are guided through the following experiences: a propaganda session, KGB interrogation, rudimentary medical examination, fingerprinting, military instruction, shopping in a communist store and having a typical communist meal. The show is not scripted and aims at maintaining a balance between the aggression which is applied to the participants and moments of relieving the tension, thus avoiding its transformation into another Stanford experiment. Rather than reviving the actual horrors of the Soviet past, the Survival Drama (the name of the show) fictionalizes history to the effect of exemplifying a touristic relationship to the past and the transformation thereof in a product ready of consumption.

Amalia Ulman, Excellences and Perfections. 2014. 

On April 19, 2014, Amalia Ulman uploaded an image to her Instagram account of the words "Part I" in black serifed lettering on a white background. The caption read, cryptically, "Excellences & Perfections." It received twenty-eight likes.

For the next several months, she conducted a scripted online performance via her Instagram and Facebook profiles. As part of this project, titled Excellences & Perfections, Ulman underwent an extreme, semi-fictionalized makeover.

She pretended to have a breast augmentation, posting images of herself in a hospital gown and with a bandaged chest, using a padded bra and Photoshop to manipulate her image. Other elements of the makeover were not feigned; she followed the Zao Dha Diet strictly, for example, and went to pole-dancing lessons often.

Through judicious use of sets, props, and locations, Excellences & Perfections evoked a consumerist fantasy lifestyle. Ulman's Instagram account is a parade of carefully arranged flowers and expensive lingerie and highly groomed interiors and perfectly plated brunches. These images are excessive, but also believable—because they're so familiar. For many privileged users, social media is a way of selling one's lifestyle, of building one's brand. And Ulman went to great lengths to replicate the narrative conventions of these privileged feeds, from her use of captions and hashtags (#simple, #cutegasm), to the pace and timing of uploads, to the discerning inclusion of "authentic" intimate or emotional content (a photo of a lover or a moment of despair).

Critic Brian Droitcour has described the rise of social media as a rebalancing of image-making power: the "aestheticization of everyday life in social media…has leeched the authority of image-making from mass media and from art." In an important shift, social media has given far more people than ever before the means to self-publish.

Ulman conceived of Excellences & Perfections as a "boycott" of her own online persona. For three months, she allowed her profiles to be exactly what social media seems to demand—that she be a "Hot Babe." As a result, she garnered the support of other women who had endured similar makeovers or procedures. She earned criticism for seeming to promote retrograde physical ideals, she was the target of cheap flattery, vulgar propositions, and abusive comments. Her close friends were often confused, unable to demarcate the Ulman of social media as a separate fiction, even when she would try to explain the project away from the keyboard. By repeating a lie for three months, she created a truth that she was unable to dismantle.

NO HUMANS INVOLVED: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY COLLEAGUES by HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

http://thewayblackmachine.com/

"The varied projects of transdisciplinary collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? are designed to function as laboratories for the investigation and production of discourse.

HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a multi-disciplinary arts collective made up of 45 artists who have lived and worked together, in various iterations, for the past twenty years. The collective consists of visual artists, writers, poets, composers, academics, filmmakers and performers from around the world who collaborate across disciplines and cities. Projects conceived and created by this transnational collective ultimately function as laboratories for investigation, production and discourse.

This Web Experience is

Curated

by Richie Adomako, Christa Bell and Sienna Shields

Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century. vol. 1, no. 1, Fall 1994.

You may have heard a radio news report which aired briefly during the days after the jury’s acquittal of the policemen in the Rodney King beating case. The report stated that public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettoes. N.H.I. means “no humans involved.”

Stephen Jay Gould argues that “systems of classification direct our thinking and order our behaviors.” [Gould, 1983] By classifying this category as N.H.I. these public officials would have given the police of Los Angeles the green light to deal with its members in any way they pleased. You may remember too that in the earlier case of the numerous deaths of young Black males caused by a specific chokehold used by Los Angeles police officers to arrest young Black males, the police chief Darryl Gates explained away these judicial murders by arguing that Black males had something abnormal with their windpipes. That they had to be classified and thereby treated differently from all other North Americans, except to a secondary degree, the darker-skinned Latinos. For in this classificatory schema too all “minorities” are equal except one category that of the peoples of African and of Afro-mixed descent who, as Andrew Hacker points out in his recent book, are the least equal of all.

“Certainly,” Hacker writes, in Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992) “all persons deemed to be other than white, can detail how they have suffered discrimination at the hands of white America. Any allusions to racist attitudes and actions will find Cherokees and Chinese and Cubans agreeing with great vigor ... yet ...members of all these intermediate groups have been allowed to put a visible distance between themselves and Black Americans.”

[grenadefestival]

October Writing Challenge: #7

Sooooo this one got really long. Instead of using any of my preexisting OCs or any fandom characters for this one, I had an idea for some brand new characters I created just for this story. I’m thinking I’ll keep them :P 

Prompt: Halloween is rolling around and an odd fair has come to town with all manner of old-fashioned clowns, fire-eaters, and jugglers. The character(s) get their hands on tickets to see the show and cannot resist.

Carnivals never came to town anymore. At least, not in the way Steph wished they would. She wanted the covered wagons, the eccentric performers, the huge tents that got set up in abandoned lots overnight and then disappeared a few days later. She thought about it every time Circ de Sole or Barnum and Bailey passed through, and every time she was disappointed. She didn’t care for shows like that at all. Those felt so stiff and controlled to her. She wanted mystery and wonder, and despite what her common sense told her, she refused to believe it wasn’t out there somewhere.

Ping!

A text broke her out of her daydream. She picked up her phone.

“You doing anything today?” read the text from her friend, Meg.

“Eh, not really. You want to hang out?” she replied.

“Yeah, I found this flyer in my mailbox this morning that I think you’ll enjoy.”

Meg sent a picture of the flyer in question. “Traveling carnival” the text read, “all the way from Albany, New York!” Steph’s eyes widened as she continued reading. The flyer advertised carnival games, food, circus acts in the bigtop, an exhibit of oddities from around the world, and even a freak show. All being set up in a public lot off the highway. One weekend only.

“Holy shit!!” Steph texted, “We are going.”

“Lol, I thought you might say that. I’ll come pick you up. Don’t tell your mom or there’s no way she’ll let you go.”

“Ok, but she’s going to kick my ass when she finds out, and you know she will find out.”

“Oh no, how will we survive the wrath of Mrs. Shapiro?”

“Shut up! She’s scary when she wants to be. :(“

Sketchy traveling circus on the edge of town. That couldn’t possibly go wrong.

Meg arrived fifteen minutes later in her beat up Honda that used to belong to her brother. A tangle of Funko keychains and little voodoo style yarn dolls hung from her front mirror. Steph had many memories of the things almost hitting her when Meg took turns a little too hard. It was a wonder a cop hadn’t pulled her over yet, citing the collection as a hazard obstructing her vision.

Steph got in the car and they took off down the road towards the edge of town. As they reached the highway, the tents came into view. One large red and white striped tent took up most of the space. Strings of lights ran off the top and into the rows of smaller tents and booths surrounding it. Further back, removed from the colorful chaos, were short rows of plainer, more modern looking, tents that likely belonged to the workers. Steph wondered how they had gotten to the lot as she didn’t see so much as a pickup truck nearby.

They must have parked those further away or something.

They pulled into the gravel lot that functioned as a parking lot. Surprisingly, there was a handful of other cars parked there as well. Among the tents, Steph spotted a few people milling around. Her concentration was broken as something flew through the air and landed in her lap.

“Take that,” Meg said, “Just in case.”

Steph picked up the canister.

“Pepper spray?! Meg what the hell do you think is going to happen?”

“I don’t know! This is a sketchy out of town carnival. I’m not stupid. Just put it in your pocket.”

Steph rolled her eyes but did as Meg said. They got out of the car and approached the carnival.

A huge sign out front, also covered in lights, welcomed them to the show. Some music played over loudspeakers spread out throughout the carnival, though without any crowds to fill the space, it sounded more eerie than cheerful. Further away, Steph could see some of the few visitors walking down the fairway among a few people in colorful costumes who seemed to be stationed at various points throughout the area. As a couple walked by, one of the performers  began juggling pins, which was met with applause.

“Welcome to the carnival, ladies!” a booming voice called.

Steph and Meg turned as a broad, hairy man in an old fashioned tailcoat approached them.

“My name is Cornelius. I’m the manager of this fine establishment,” he said, holding his hand out to shake.

Steph was surprised by how firm his grip was, though there was little for him to hold. Her hands were completed dwarfed by his.

“Uh, Steph. This is Meg,” she said.

“Are you two from around here?”

“Yeah, we live in town.”

“Excellent! Let me just tell you where everything is. We have games that way, where you can win some prizes. Our curio museum is off to your left, along with an exhibit about this carnival’s history. Quite fascinating, and much older than me,” he sad with a laugh, “Food is directly ahead before the big tent there. The funnel cake is to die for. We will have some circus acts in the big top throughout the day, although…” his voice dropped to a conspiratorial tone, “you really should come back later tonight. We pull out all the stops for our nighttime shows.”

“What’s in them?” Meg asked.

“Oh the usual fire eaters, acrobats, clowns,” he said, “and a few things that are...a bit more bizarre.”

“Is that the freakshow your flyer was talking about?”

Cornelius smiled.

“You’ll just have to come back and see. Admission to all shows is three dollars. Any other admission fees for games or exhibits are posted. Enjoy your day!”

“Thank you!” Steph said before Cornelius turned and walked away. She looked at Meg, “We should come back. I’m super curious now.”

“Same. Let’s hit up some games.”

They walked towards the game booths and looked around at the selection. A lot of the prizes looked like typical carnival fare. Stuffed animals, both big and small. Inflatable swords. Plastic doodads that would break within a week. However, mixed in with the junk were items that looked like they didn’t quite belong. Eccentric hats decorated with lace and feathers. Ornate coffee mugs and tea cups. A string of fairy lights. An Xbox controller. A framed sepia photo of a man wearing a monocle. Neckties. Dolls.

“Man, this place is weird,” Steph said, “Did you see the-?”

She didn’t get to finish her sentence. As she turned her head to look at Meg, she felt her shoulder collide with something. Something rattled as it fell to the ground. She stopped and whipped her head back around to see who she’d bumped into and came face to face with a startled looking boy.

“Uh, I-I’m so sorry,” he stammered, stooping to pick up the plastic crate of cheap carnival prizes he’d been carrying, “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

The boy’s accent was odd, and Steph had trouble placing it. It was subtle, something European. German maybe? She wasn’t sure. He looked about their age, though it was hard to tell with his soft, delicate features. He was very pretty to look at, but the longer Steph stared, the more unsettled she became. His skin was too pale, almost translucent, and against his scraggly black hair it seemed to glow. His gray, wool coat, threadbare around the hem and cuffs with mismatched brass buttons, swallowed him up even though it looked small enough to fit her. His dark eyes never seemed to stop moving, even as he spoke, as if he were afraid to look anyone in the eye. She wondered if this boy was homeless or something and wondered when he’d last eaten.

Maybe I should buy him a hotdog from one of the stands.

“No, it’s alright,” she said, reaching down to pick up a stuffed snake that had bounced out of the crate, “I’m the one who wasn’t paying attention.”

“Whoa, you didn’t win all those did you?” Meg asked.

“Oh, no, no,” the boy said, “I, um, I work here.”

Steph put the stuffed snake in the boy’s crate and smiled.

“Really? That’s really cool,” she said.

The boy just shrugged.

“I’m Steph,” she said, holding her hand out.

The boy hesitated a moment before shifting the crate to one arm and reaching out to shake her hand.

“Wolfram,” he said.

Meg frowned.

“Uh...b-...ball-fram?” she asked, “Sorry, can you run that by me again?”

“‘Vawl-frahm,’” he said slowly, “Though you’d spell it like ‘wolf ram.’”

“Oh. Is that German or something?”

“Germanic, yes, but I’m actually Austrian.”

“Wow, you’re from Austria?” Steph asked.

“Ja.”

“That’s super cool! I’ve never been there before. My family went to Paris once when I was little, but I barely remember it.”

Wolfram smiled a little.

“Paris is nice. I’ve been there a few times,” he said.

“Ugh, you guys are lucky. I’ve never even been out of the country,” Meg said.

Wolfram opened his mouth to say something else, but he was cut off by a gruff shout from across the fairway from a tall man in a colorful silk shirt.

“Wolfram! Stop chatting and get back to work!”

Wolfram’s quiet smile evaporated and was immediately replaced by fear. He hunched his shoulders and looked down at the ground.

“Sorry, I have to go,” he said before immediately hurrying away.

“Nice...talking to you,” Steph started to say, but he was already out of earshot.

Meg frowned at the man who had shouted, who was now walking back behind the various game booths towards the cluster of plain tents near the back of the carnival.

“Dick,” she muttered, “Did you see the look on that poor kid’s face?”

“Yeah, he looked like he was sick or something. I hope he’s ok. He seemed nice,” Steph said.

They made their way through the games, trying their hand at winning some of the weird prizes. By the end of it, their cash was almost gone, but they managed to acquire a steampunk looking top hat, a lace shawl, and a handful of old-fashioned windup toys.

“I’m definitely wearing this for Halloween,” Meg said, adjusting the top hat.

“You’re lucky. I don’t think that thing would fit over my hair,” Steph said.

“I still cannot believe how cheap it is to play these games. And for stuff like this!”

“They must not have given out a ton of flyers, otherwise I’m sure more people would be swarming to this place.”

“We’re coming back later for that show, right?” Meg asked, “That guy at the entrance got me. I’m super curious now. Oh! And we should bring some of our friends with us.”

“Yeah, definitely!”

As they headed towards the entrance, Steph spotted a familiar face lurking by one of the booths, watching them. She smiled and waved.

“Are you leaving?” Wolfram asked.

“Yeah, but we’ll be back for the show later,” she said.

“Oh, I see.”

“Will you be there?” Meg asked.

“Uh...yes. I’m, ah, in it actually.”

“Wait really? What are you doing?”

Wolfram stared at the ground and fidgeted with his coat. He forced a smile.

“You’ll have to come back and see,” he said.

“Oh fine, be like that,” Meg said.

“I guess we’ll see you then,” Steph said.

“Yeah…” Wolfram said, “See you then…”

Spotlights whirled around the big top. The sounds of trumpets and drums battered the air.

“Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls of all ages, welcome to the main event! The show you’ve all been waiting for! We’ve traveled the globe in search of the most talented, the most daring, the most funny, and the most bizarre performers we could find, and tonight they’re all here to show you a sight you’ll not soon forget! Please welcome your ring master, Dervish!”

The spotlights all centered on a tall entryway at the back of the stage. For a split second there was silence before a woman on horseback burst forth into the ring. The horse jingled as it moved due to the dozens of golden metal cones hanging from its saddle and bridle. It ran a lap around the ring, head and tail held high, before coming to a stop in the center. The ring master dismounted, revealing a costume even more colorful. On top she wore a jacket reminiscent of a classic military waistcoat, but on bottom she wore a flowing, uneven skirt made of fabrics of every kind and color. She twirled, showing off the kaleidoscope she wore, and tipped her rather plain fez to the audience. The crowd clapped, and Steph had to admit she was already completely taken in by this woman.

“Good evening!” she said, “Are you folks ready for a great show?”

The audience cheered. A performer in a red and gold leotard ran out from backstage to lead the horse away. Still more performers, all in different costumes, came out and began setting up a few platforms and boxes of covered items as Dervish continued to speak.

“What a great crowd! We’re going to have fun tonight, I can tell, but we can’t get too crazy right off the bat. We’ll warm up with something simple, but don’t be fooled. Here at the carnival, nothing is ever as it appears. Please welcome, our jugglers!” she said, gesturing towards backstage as a team of four came running out, big smiles on their faces.

Meg leaned over and spoke into Steph’s ear.

“The show hasn’t even started, and already I know they should be charging more than three bucks for this,” she said.

The acts came one after the other with very little room to breathe, and all of them left Steph absolutely dazzled. Jugglers, acrobats, daredevil bikers, a dog team, a magician, and a clown that managed to make even Meg, who couldn’t stand mimes, laugh. As the hour wound down, Dervish came out to address the audience.

“We’re going to take a brief intermission, everyone, and when you return we’ll start part two of our show. You’ve seen high-flying talent, now get ready to see feats that no amount of practice can accomplish. Some of what you see may frighten or disturb you, but I assure you...the spectacle will be so very worth it,” she said.

She grinned, and the lights went out. When they came back up throughout the whole tent, she was gone, leaving the audience alone to their own devices. Meg elbowed Steph.

“Hey you know what this means, right? That boy we talked to earlier must be part of the freak show,” she said.

“Gosh, I almost forgot about him,” Steph said, “That was amazing.”

“I’ll say!” one of their friends, Jonah, said, “I’ve never seen any circus that holds a candle to what they’re doing. I’m surprised they have a freak show, though. Aren’t those like...not ethical anymore?”

Meg shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s why they have it outside town,” she said.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine. They’d get shut down if they were doing anything illegal. You guys want to grab a snack?” Steph asked.

The trio got up and walked back outside to the clearing of food stands outside the tent. After grabbing some cotton candy, they wandered around the edge of the tent. Jonah tapped on Steph’s shoulder and pointed towards a smaller tent attached to the staging area. A couple of roadies were moving equipment around, and through the open flap Steph could see a huge cylindrical tank of water.

“What the hell do you think they’re doing with that?” he asked.

Steph shrugged.

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”

A bell outside the tent rang and the audience began filing back in. The trio followed and retook their seats as the lights went out. This time there was no music, and for a moment the tent was bathed in silence. Then, in the center of the ring, a bright light appeared. Steph squinted, trying to identify the source. Then another light appeared, right next to the first. The lights expanded and shifted until they revealed the source: a man dressed in all black. With a flick of his wrists, the lights flew out of his hands, becoming small orbs circling around the ring. Steph’s eyes widened and she leaned forward in her seat.

“I...what the hell did he just do?!” she whispered.

Meg just shrugged, eyes also wide. Jonah looked more skeptical than impressed, though even he was watching intently. The man created more and more orbs of light with broad flourishes of his hands, and as their numbers grew, their colors and movements began to change. The balls danced around in ever changing patterns for several minutes, creating a fantastic light show that culminated in all the orbs coming together to form a huge, swirling ball of flashing colors that seemed to engulf its creator before disappearing in a flash. The spotlights came back up, and for a second the audience could do nothing but gape. The applause that eventually followed was deafening.

Dervish walked back out, a smug smile on her face.

“If you folks enjoyed that, then you’re going to love the rest of the show. We have more performances like this that will shake the very foundation of what you thought was possible,” she said, “Next up, it is my pleasure to introduce Gordo, the colossus!”

Jonah shook his head and looked at Steph and Meg.

“I don’t believe this,” he said, “They got us all warmed up with the normal acts, so we’d be more likely to buy the impossible, but there has to be some trick here. Some angle.”

Meg scoffed.

“How? Do you know how to fake literal floating orbs of light?” she asked.

“Well, no, but that’s why it looks so real, because it looks impossible,” he said, “Come on let’s find another angle to watch from. I bet from the side or from behind we’ll see some of their tricks.”

Without waiting for Steph or Meg to agree, Jonah got up and started leaving the stand. Steph felt a stab of panic and got up to follow. Meg hesitated, an incredulous look in her eyes, before finally relenting and following as well. They slipped outside the tent and walked around the sides. The bottoms of the tent flaps were staked into the ground, but there were some gaps where a person could just stick their head under.

“Um, guys, don’t you think we’re a little close to the backstage area?” Meg asked, “What if someone sees us?”

“They’re too busy with the show,” Jonah said, “Don’t worry about it.”

They laid down on the ground and watched the show from the side as a huge man lifted cars and blocks of concrete that other, far weaker, members of the cast dragged out for him. Jonah elbowed Meg.

“Styrofoam I bet,” he whispered.

“But how do you explain just how big he is?” Steph asked.

“I don’t know, steroids?”

The act ended and Gordo took a bow as Dervish came back out into the ring.

“Next, you’ve heard tales since childhood of mermaids and sirens and spirits of the water, but no one has never really found proof of their existence. That is, until us. From a far away ocean, I present Wolfram, the boy who can breathe underwater!” she said.

“Whoa, what?!” Meg whispered, “That’s so cool!”

The huge tank of water with a wooden platform attached was wheeled out into the ring, and following behind was Wolfram, still wearing his wool coat. Jonah frowned.

“That’s supposed to be a mermaid?” he asked.

“To be fair, they didn’t say he was a mermaid, they just said he was proof of their existence,” Meg said.

“Oooh, ok, I see their angle now. Tell me when you see the oxygen tank I’m sure is in there.”

Wolfram and another performer climbed the ladder up to the top of the tank. Wolfram shrugged off his coat and pulled off his shoes, leaving him in only a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. He paused at the edge of the tank and took a breath before jumping down into the water.

“Start the timer!” Dervish said, waving at two other performers who had brought out a comically large digital clock. One of them hit a button and the seconds began counting up.

“The longest any human in history has ever been able to hold their breath without the aid of oxygen beforehand was eleven minutes and thirty five seconds,” Dervish continued, “Though the average human wouldn’t even come close. I say this only to give you proof of our diver’s power. Now, we could sit here all day watching him, but you folks came here for a show! We’ll check back on Wolfram in a bit, how does that sound?”

The audience clapped, and the performers wheeled the tank and clock off to the side. Steph, Meg, and Jonah quickly pulled back as the performers came closer.

“This is perfect,” Jonah whispered, “There has to be something over here giving him air, you think? Since we’re so close we’ll be able to see it.”

“Or maybe he really can breathe underwater,” Meg said, “I mean, look at the first guy who performed. This is like...this is some crazy shit!”

“We’ll see,” he said, sticking his head back under the tent.

The next act came into the ring, but Steph found she was only half paying attention. She looked at Wolfram, half floating at the bottom of the tank, and she frowned. It was hard to see his facial expressions from her angle, but something seemed off. His face looked blank and neutral, but every once in awhile he would twitch a leg or an arm or a grimace would cross his face. His chest heaved, but Steph had an awful feeling that he wasn’t breathing.

“If he can breathe underwater,” she whispered, “shouldn’t he have gills or something?”

“Aw come on, are you agreeing with Jonah now?” Meg asked.

“Well, I don’t know, it’s just...something feels wrong.”

Another act went on. More time passed. The clock hit the eleven minute and thirty five second mark.

“There you have it folks! A record beat!” Dervish said, gesturing to the tank, “What do you think of that?”

The audience cheered. Wolfram smiled and waved inside the tank.

“But!” Dervish continued, “We can do one better. The longest time anyone has ever held their breath, through any means necessary, was twenty-two minutes. Not an easy feat, but for Wolfram here? Child’s play. Keep the clock going! We’ll check back in on him later.”

Steph felt a twinge in her gut. She watched Wolfram through the glass as the spotlights moved back to the center of the ring. As soon as they did, his posture changed. He wilted, as if he wanted to curl into a ball and sink to the bottom of the tank, but he forced himself to stay upright. Keep the performance going. Steph was sure from the stands the changes were hard to see, but up close it put a queasy feeling in her stomach.

“Something’s wrong,” she whispered, “Look at his face.”

Meg followed her gaze, and even Jonah seemed concerned. Meg frowned.

“You sure that’s not just, you know, his face? I mean when we met him earlier he looked pretty nervous,” she said.

Steph shook her head.

“No that’s not it. I’ve been watching him,” she said, “Something’s off.”

Two more acts. Ten minutes. Thirty seconds. Dervish called the crowd’s attention back to the tank and they began counting down the last ten seconds. The lights illuminated the tank, and Wolfram gave another smile for the audience, though to Steph it looked pained. The digital timer flashed as it hit twenty-two minutes. Cheers erupted from the stands.

“Give Wolfram a hand folks!” Dervish said as performers came out to wheel the tank away.

Steph ducked out from under the tent and stood. She began walking along the edge of the tent towards backstage.

“Steph, where the hell are you going?!” Meg hissed.

“Making sure he’s ok,” Steph whispered back before continuing on. She crept over to the entrance flap and peered inside. All the performers, faces both familiar and unfamiliar, were waiting around, getting ready for their acts or waiting for the show to end. She watched as the tank of water was wheeled off stage and towards the back of the staging area. Dervish followed behind, her enthusiastic showmanship gone completely. Her movements were sharp as she gestured to the performers by the tank.

“Get him out of there! Hurry up!” she snapped.

Two performers climbed the ladder and got into the water. Wolfram couldn’t even grasp their hands to pull himself up, but this didn’t seem to bother either of them as they hauled him up to the platform. He was eerily still as they carefully lowered him off the platform and into Dervish’s arms. She turned him over and gave his back a solid thump, and he immediately began spluttering and convulsing, water pouring from his mouth. She rubbed his back as he gasped for air, unable to so much as cough as he struggled to expel the water from his lungs. Finally he drew in a rattling breath, a haunting sound that no healthy human being should have been able to make, and began to cough.

“Dervish, you’re going to miss your cue!” a man barked.

Steph looked towards the source and saw Cornelius, the manager who had spoke to them earlier in the day. He wore no smile now as he looked at his employees. Dervish looked up at him, not bothering to hide the anger in her eyes. She said something to Wolfram before standing and heading back towards the stage. One of the performers draped a blanket around Wolfram’s head and shoulders as he began to shake, still spitting up water. Steph felt nauseous, but she couldn’t stop watching. She jumped as she noticed Jonah and Meg’s presence next to her.

“Well, Jonah, you were wrong,” she said, “There wasn’t a tank of oxygen in there.”

“How the hell is he still alive?!” Meg hissed, “He should have drowned five minutes in!”

She turned and looked at Jonah.

“Still think it was a trick?”

For once, Jonah was at a loss for words. Steph watched as the performer helped Wolfram up and started leading him away from the others towards the exit.

“Crap! Go, go, go,” Steph hissed, pushing Meg and Jonah away from the entrance. They ran away from the tent and ducked behind a booth nearby as Wolfram and the performer left the tent and headed across the field to the smaller tents on the edge. As soon as the performer was gone and heading back to the bigtop, Steph made her move. She heard Meg whisper something frantic behind her, but she didn’t stop. She bolted across the field, straight for the tent she saw them enter, and ducked inside.

The tent was plain and nearly empty with only a cot, an electric lantern, and a small chest. Curled into a ball on the cot, still wrapped up in the blanket, was Wolfram. His eyes were wide, and he stared at her with a mixture of fear and confusion.

“You,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, “What are you doing here?”  

“I...uh,” Steph stammered. She turned as Meg and Jonah ducked into the tent behind her. She looked back at Wolfram, “Are you ok?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“We saw what happened backstage! You sounded like you were dying!”

“You saw? I...You really shouldn’t be here,” Wolfram said, eyes darting towards the entrance. He sat forward, the blanket falling off his head, exposing his gaunt face to the dim light of the lantern. His lips looked blue, and red rings had formed around his irises where blood vessels had burst. Water dripped from his hair and ran down his face as he continued to shiver.

“Well, no probably not, but...We just watched you drown for twenty minutes! I wasn’t going to just…” Steph stopped and took a breath.

“How the hell did you survive that?” Meg asked.

“Meg, not now.”

Wolfram looked down at the ground, gripping the blanket tighter.

“You really, really need to go,” he said.

“No. Something’s wrong here. I knew it the moment I saw you,” Steph said, “Did you volunteer for that? Or did they make you?”

Wolfram squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead against his knees.

“Please, just leave,” he whispered.

“Tell me you did that out of your own free will, and we will.”

“It’s the least I can do,” he said, “We all make sacrifices to keep this place running. It’s the only place any of us are safe.”

“Well you don’t look very safe to me,” Steph said.

“They can’t hurt me.”

“Then what the hell do you call that?!” she asked, gesturing towards the big top.

“No, you don’t understand, I…” he paused and took a breath, as if debating whether or not he should say anything, “If they leave me in there for twenty minutes or twenty hours it won’t make a difference. Stab me, shoot me, it doesn’t matter. The outcome is the same because I can’t die.”

He looked up, holding her gaze for the first time since they met. She paused, trying to wrap her head around his statement.

“You...you can’t die?” she asked.

“No.”

“What? That’s ludicrous,” Jonah said.

Meg scoffed.

“You’re going to call that ludicrous? After what we just saw? How else would you explain that, genius?” she asked.

“How did...how did that happen?” Steph asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know when it started, I just know when I found out,” Wolfram said, “That was...ages ago. Decades.”

Meg stared at him.

“Sorry, did you say decades?”

“Ok, well, ability to die aside, that doesn’t make this right,” Steph said, “They’re still hurting you! That’s not ok! You need to get out of here!”

Wolfram looked down at the floor again.

“I can’t,” he said, “Where would I go? Besides, it’s really not as bad here as it looks. They feed me and give me a place to live. People to rely on. I won’t find that anywhere else.”

“We can give you that,” Steph said, “If you come with us, you won’t have to figure this all out by yourself. We’ll help you find somewhere safe, and no one will hurt you like this again. I promise. We’ll figure something out.”

“Whoa, hang on,” Meg said, “Steph, you’re talking about bringing some random person into you house! Where the hell is he going to stay? What are you going to tell your mom?!”

“We’ll make something up. My mom’s the one who taught me that if you can help someone, you should. I’m sure she’d understand.”

“I…” Meg sighed, “This is not a good idea.”

Steph looked back at Wolfram.

“Wolfram, please,” she said, “You know this isn’t right. Let us help you.”

He looked at her, eyes wide but not with fear.

“You barely know me. We spoke twice only this afternoon,” he said.

“That doesn’t matter to me. No one deserves this. Are you coming or not?”

She held her hand out towards him. For a moment none of them said anything. Then he reached out and put his hand in hers.

“Alright.”

Steph smiled.

“Everything’s going to be ok.”

[davidmann95]

Justice League: Darkseid War: Green Lantern analysis

So I posted recently on how I was writing a big comics paper for school, and one or two people expressed their interest in reading it, so I figured I’d post it on here. It’s edited: the original paper was a comparison between this as a positive example of a single-issue story and another comic as a negative example, and for the sake of politeness I removed all references to that; this is just the chunk of the paper analyzing Tom King, Doc Shaner, Chris Sotomayor, and Tom Napolitano’s Justice League: Darkseid War: Green Lantern. Since I wrote this for school, it’s much drier and more formal than my usual writing here, and I’m writing on the assumption that the reader of the essay has essentially never read a comic before, i.e. is it successful at basic storytelling principles to carry the uninitiated, can you tell what’s going on if you’ve never seen or read a Green Lantern story in your life, etc. And for the sake of occasionally breaking up the text now that this isn’t in an academic context, I put in a couple splash pages from the story itself.

Spoilers under the cut; the assumption with this is that you’ve already read it.

“Will You Be My God?” opens with a simple non-diegetic caption box explaining the essentials of the situation for new readers, and given their presence in multiple cartoons across multiple generations, as well as an upcoming feature film, it’s difficult to believe a prospective reader of a Green Lantern title wouldn’t have an idea of who the Justice League and Darkseid were. Even without the box however – whether a reader sees it as a courtesy or a crutch – the setting, situation and stakes are established clearly within the first three pages, even for the most disengaged of readers. It is made organically clear, through both contextually-justified exposition and easily decipherable offhand references, that:

A. The Green Lantern Corps is likely a space military of some sort, given their army-esque creed of “We live as Lanterns! We die as Lanterns!” They explicitly utilize their will to achieve their power – presumably via their rings, since John speaks into his – and most likely their Central Power Battery (which we know is tied into them, as it also will-powered) marks this “Oa” as their base of operations.

B. Their enemies are clearly on the side of evil, as they are servants of a deceased being known as “Darkseid”, whose name is a clear tip-off if his noted status as a slaveholder did not make it clear enough, marking the Green Lantern Corps as our assumed ‘good guys’ given they oppose them (their refusal of greater power when offered also speaks to a humility indicating beneficence). The item we will later know as the Mother Box seeks for one of them to become a replacement god, informing the reader as to Darkseid’s status, and therefore the scale of the conflict. Their method of attack in turning Lanterns into Parademons is made clear both in-text and visually; we first see a Lantern brutalized, then many, then one is grabbed, another is strung up, and finally one is shown with the process complete.

C. The recurring figure is assuredly Hal – he is presented as the lead of the story by John Stewart’s text, and the figure clearly flying with purpose in space is almost certainly him, as he is the only figure to appear in more than two panels. The growing and fading light he presents actually serves triple-duty, both transitioning into Page 4 via the color of the candle (a recurring trick throughout the story), and setting up the recurring zoom-in/zoom-out motif of the book in line with its shift back and forth between the macro and micro scale.

D. The stakes are immediately established. The question is not whether this “Hal” can simply overcome the threat on his own: countless like him have already been defeated, and lest we assume he is so much more powerful than them that he may be able to mount a counterattack, John – who addresses Hal familiarly by his first name, and therefore we can assume is at least close enough to him to have a basic grasp of his capabilities – assures this is impossible. The question is simply whether or not Hal will accept becoming a god, and what the consequences will be one way or the other.

Upon entering page 4, the recursive structure of the piece is established – given the similar hair and name, we can safely assume the young Hal Jordan here is the Hal who becomes a Green Lantern later on. And by the end of page 5, we have a clear theme unifying the two established narratives, in spite of their separation by decades, galactic gulfs of space, and the relative scales of a war of cosmic superbeings over the mantle of godhood vs. a child in church grappling with the death of his father: what it means to be god. The craft of King’s dialogue is also worth noting compared to *NEGATIVE REFERENCE COMIC*; along with what (subjectively) comes across as a far more natural cadence and rhythm to the characters’ speech patterns, ideas and thoughts continue across multiple panels to draw readers along, the breaks to a different subject generally being along vertical tiers of panels or at moments of emotion where a pregnant pause seems implicit.

With page 6 (keeping the sense of color transitions between time periods – the sickly green and faint orange of Martin Jordan’s airplane crash fade to a yellow background as the vibrantly green Hal Jordan of the present gets smacked around), we get a fairly complete reckoning of Hal Jordan’s basic attitude, justified by his clear idolization of his bold pilot father in the flashback (switching his opinion to match his father’s, going wide-eyed at the chance to mention his reputation). He’s a scrapper going by the smirk on his face as he recovers from a blow, reinforced further by his simple construct and blunt acceptance of the odds. Without having to be told by captions or preexisting knowledge that a Green Lantern ring requires that one be fearless to wield it, the reader can pick up on that as the base mode of his character. The reader can also determine:

A. The functions of the ring: it creates glowing green constructs (which can reasonably be determined to be generated by his imagination, both by the previous mention of will, and his generation of a simple fist – if the ring operated by a predetermined set of possible actions, one of them would not likely be the formation of a human fist, as we have already seen many alien species are a part of this Corps), and has some degree of intelligence. It also makes clear that each Lantern has a specific ‘sector’, underlining their parallel to law-enforcement agencies.

B. Hal is friendly with other members of the Corps, given he recognizes the first one out of thousands he runs into by name. This also further establishes his confidence, as he doesn’t blink in the face of a mind-controlled ally; we’ve already seen he has empathy, given his mourning for his father, so he must assume there’s a way to get the situation back under control.

Pages 7 and 8 are as much blunt exposition as the story receives, though in the justified context of Hal receiving information he was not previously aware of, and thinking through the consequences– to keep things interesting, he fights an entire battle without turning his back to face his opponent, another solid character moment, graduating from confidence to a degree of cockiness in both his approach and his playfully creative constructs that will be important later and colors his previous attitude as perhaps overconfidence – keying both new and returning readers as to how these disparate, cosmically abstracted sci-fi concepts logically tie together in the context of sharing an expanded universe, casually justifying the existence of the book. We also learn in passing how he became a Green Lantern – he got the ring from someone else crashing and likely dying, a minor parallel to his father.

Back to the church with pages 9 and 10 (one of the only two timeline transitions without a color-based transition behind it, though it is an intentionally jarring scene for young Hal Jordan, and a sense of continuity is maintained with the mention of a god switching to the image of a cross), the emotional as well as thematic stakes are established: Hal Jordan’s reckoning with godhood is not simply a passive theological question, but one rooted deep at a vein of despair stemming from childhood, and whether or not a god can care about his father in the way he cares. Also note that at almost no point is his father’s friend centered in the page, and the few points in which he takes a prominent position – on the left side of a right-side panel here, making him the first thing the reader sees, and on the last panel of page 4 – chunks of his face are visible. For a casual first-time reader moving through the comic quickly, it is conceivable that one could miss noting that you never get a fully unobstructed view of him, as young Hal dominates the scene both visually and textually.

Page 11 is another jarring switch over without a plain color transition, fittingly for a sudden fight scene. It’s here things become serious, as Hal ceases to utilize his more whimsical constructs to fend off his opponents. The text and art tell the same story simply – as the ring counts down Hal’s targets, far too slow to leave any possibility that he could get through those numbers in the space of a 22-page comic, the art ups the number of opponents and thereby the stakes with each panel until he blows them all away in the second-to-the-last, and the increased zooming in with each panel makes clear that this is no reprieve: it gets closer and closer to his agonizing, visceral physical experience of the brawl as it goes along, with the final panel’s depiction of his damaged visage making his lack of hope as clear as the ring’s message.

Worth noting at this point amidst the discussion of text, pencil art and color is Tom Napolitano’s fine letterwork here – again clarifying for the benefit of the readers, aside from the differing bubble designs for the Ring’s text and the Mother Box’s, the text itself differs in ways that help keep things straight. The normal human speech has a touch of curve and character to it; the ring’s text is of the same style since it is an ally, but smoother and sleeker benefiting its artificial nature. The Mother Box’s speech is solid and mechanical, while the PING – which we know to be related as it comes from the monsters the Box has brought with it – is massive and uneven and almost jagged by comparison, setting up a contrast between the calm sterile speech of the box and wild, untamed power it promises.

Page 12 is a simple action shot, but along with another character moment for Jordan, essentially spitting in the face of death, artist Doc Shaner shines here with a none-too-flashy (that comes later) but very effective full-page splash. The vertical alignment highlights Jordan’s upward motion, as do the smoke contrails beneath him curving lightly upwards to match his arc. The Parademons enclose him on all sides and clearly extend beyond the edges of the page, with the one at the bottom being a silhouette ending the frame of impending doom with darkness; at the same time, they form a secondary circle around Hal around with the dust cloud, drawing the reader’s eye towards him as the center of the image.

Page 13 is colorist Chris Sotomayor’s most evocative in my opinion – the green, highlighted by both Hal and the Parademons, starting to be eclipsed by the warm orange of the flames for the second panel as the odds visibly stack further against Hal, heating up to solid orange enveloped by black for the third as the violence reaches a fever pitch, only to be swallowed by darkness.

Page 14 picks up from the last visible image with its warm oranges and browns, and across it and 15 the thesis of the comic becomes clear – even if the next pages will manipulate our understanding of that thesis. That thesis of free will being the difference between god and his creation, as well as a solid theological proposition to anchor a text around in its own right, ties together the three principal strands of the story: the child wondering how to move forward after the death of his father, the significance of being a Green Lantern powered by will as established with John’s final testimony, and the questions of godhood’s nature inflicted on Hal by the effective (but importantly, impartial and ultimately truly heartless) villain of the piece in the Mother Box; that will is what gives Hal the power to move on and become a Green Lantern, and what he believes will give him the power to reach godhood on his own terms.

Page 16 – transitioned into potently by both the fire becoming the Mother Box, and the note of a light searching for something – works to in fact trick the reader into drawing a false conclusion, just as Hal does. His choice here to wrangle the power of a god to his own bidding his borne of everything we’ve seen thus far, in the power of his force of will, his idolization and emulation of his father, and what makes him different from the other Lanterns…as in, why the reader is following him rather than any of the others. That, and the final triumphant note of will conquering the stars, allows it to play out narratively as a seemingly proper thematic resolution to what has come thus far, even as his previously-demonstrated cockiness on display with his acknowledged lack of caution hints that the true resolution is something more complicated, if the final panel of the previous page with a green ring on display wasn’t enough of a tip-off.

Page 17 contains the one notable blip in regards to “Will You Be My God?”’s status as a stand-alone story with the brief appearance of Batman, acknowledging from his own newly-obtained position of godhood the events of the larger story. While a new reader may be able to glean from the original opening caption the nature of Batman’s situation, they’re not likely to be aware of the often-adversarial relationship between the two coloring Batman’s approval (though his endorsement literally darkening the page helps), and in any case reads from its lack of setup as a forced interjection: for all the work King and company put in to make this a totally functional standalone Green Lantern story, it is still an event tie-in comic, and certain elements were surely required for them to observe. Regardless, the zoom-in/zoom-out technique reaches its pinnacle, leaving Hal a minuscule figure as he wipes out the totality of darkness with his light, until he himself vanishes before the Mother Ring.

The shining artistic moment of the book splashes into page 18, a fractured dreamscape portrait of the life and times of Hal Jordan. With the exception of Sinestro – who perhaps merits a bit of leeway as Green Lantern’s archnemesis of over 55 years – each image is justified in the context of the story up to this point. The plane crash has already been seen; the group of Lanterns includes members we’ve seen before. Notably, each of these takes place through his eyes, making the image of young Hal another tip-off as to what’s really going on. In that light, the bottom image of Abin Sur has a chance of registering even to new readers as Hal’s superhero origin story; we already know he gained his ring from a dying alien after it crashed, and here a clearly severely damaged alien is handing it to him.

Page 19 resolves the material conflict, now irrelevant in the face of his power – as noted before, the first 3 pages established the true question of being his acceptance of godhood, not the Parademons. And while fans may pick up on the final panel as homaging a dark previous Green Lantern story involving a very different time Hal grabbed at godhood, even for a reader coming in blind his slightly lopsided, zoned-out grin, stuttered speech and vague proclamation that “I can make everything right” would be evidence enough that he’s on the precipice of something dangerous, particularly with the cockiness that got him the position in mind.

At last at the true heart of things, pages 20 and 21 flip the script on the nature of the story as he travels back, with even readers surmising that it was a future Hal Jordan surely not guessing there was a third in attendance. With 20, the art is worth noting in how it draws the reader’s eye across the page: while Hal as the God of Light moves in a zig-zag pattern down the page, all panel borders vanishing as time becomes fluid, both sets of candles mirror his movements, tracking the eye in either case towards the central candle of the bottom panel, the middle point between the two Jordans, reinforcing their equal importance at this point. And at last, the story reaches its conclusion, as Hal realizes that no amount of will can allow him to conquer any version of godhood, because godhood is mutually incompatible with the bedrock of his identity. Without free will he has no more choice, no more chance to change things on his own terms as a part of the world, no more sky…and that in the end is more than he can bear. And the story concludes with a restatement of first principles for page 22, a final character moment, and a true understanding of what his father did, and what his will permits. Even the reference to the larger story with Batman works as well as it can with his daredevil smirk back in place, ready to cut the sky open.

In every category laid out by which one could semi-objectively measure the success of a standalone comic, “Will You Be My God?” excels. A scrupulously accessible, artfully told self-contained piece with text and visuals working to support one another, it folds satisfying cosmic adventure into a character arc that, while spanning multiple eras and ultimately beyond human conceptions of identity, remains entirely understandable and rooted in the basic established principles of the lead’s character and universe. While very visibly a fragment of a larger story beyond the reach of this creative team, the ideas and concepts introduced here come to a logical conclusion even with the promise of further adventures to come.

[theconservativebrief]

Health care carried House Democrats to victory on Election Day. But what now?

In interviews this fall with a half-dozen senior House Democratic aides, health care lobbyists, and progressive wonks, it became clear the party is only in the nascent stages of figuring out its next steps on health care.

The new House Democratic majority knows what it opposes. They want to stop any further efforts by Republicans or the Trump administration to roll back and undermine the Affordable Care Act or overhaul Medicaid and Medicare.

But Democrats are less certain about an affirmative health care agenda. Most Democrats campaigned on protecting preexisting conditions, but the ACA has already done that. Medicare-for-all is energizing the party’s left wing, but nobody expects a single-payer bill to start moving through the House. Drug prices offer the rare opportunity for bipartisan work with Senate Republicans and the Trump White House, but it is also a difficult problem with few easy policy solutions — certainly not any silver bullet that Democrats could pull out of the box and pass on Day One, or even Month One, of the next Congress.

Winning a House majority to ensure Obamacare’s safety is an important turning point, after so many years in which health care hurt Democrats much more than it helped.

But the path forward for Democrats on their signature issue is surprisingly undefined.

Democrats do have some ideas, of course. Democratic aides emphasized the various investigations they could launch into Trump’s health department, not only looking into any efforts by the White House to sabotage Obamacare, but also focusing on more obscure issues like Medicare payment rates.

But wonky oversight inquires probably aren’t the big-ticket item that new Democratic members and their voters are looking for, especially heading into the 2020 presidential election.

After campaigning in defense of Obamacare, warning about Republicans rolling back preexisting conditions protections and the Trump administration’s sabotage of the health care law, a bill to stabilize the Obamacare insurance markets would be the obvious first item for the new Democratic majority’s agenda.

Several sources pointed to a bill by Democratic Reps. Richard Neal (MA), Frank Pallone (NJ), and Bobby Scott (VA) — who have been serving as the top Democrats on leading health care-related committees — as the likely starting point. The plan is designed to build off Obamacare’s infrastructure to expand federal assistance while reversing the recent Republican efforts to undermine the law.

That bill would expand Obamacare’s premium subsidies, both by extending federal assistance to more people in lifting the current eligibility cutoff and increasing the size of the tax credits people receive. It would also bolster the cost-sharing reduction subsidies that people with lower incomes receive to reduce their out-of-pocket costs, while extending eligibility for those subsidies to people with higher incomes.

The Pallone-Neal-Scott bill would reverse the Trump administration’s recent regulations intended to funnel more people to insurance plans that are not required to meet all of Obamacare’s rules for preexisting conditions. It would also pump more money back into enrollment outreach, cut by the Trump administration, and establish a new program to compensate insurers for high-cost patients, with the hope of keeping premiums down.

Two things stick out about this bill: It would be the most robust expansion of Obamacare since the law first passed and it is just narrow enough that, with a few sweeteners for the Senate Republicans, it could conceivably have a chance to pass. Democrats are waiting to see how the GOP majority in the upper chamber reacts to losing the House.

“Undoing sabotage and bringing stabilization to the ACA markets, that’s something we should really be thinking about,” one House Democratic aide told me. “It depends on what kind of mood the Republicans are in. Maybe they’ll say that actually now that the tables are turned we should probably sit down.”

Senate Republicans and Democrats did come very close to a narrow, bipartisan deal — it wasn’t even as robust as the Pallone-Neal-Scott bill — to stabilize Obamacare in 2017. It fell apart, ostensibly after a tiff over abortion-related provisions, but that near-miss would be the reason for any optimism about a bipartisan deal on the divisive health care law.

The Pallone-Neal-Scott bill might be a nice starting point — no Democrat really disagrees about whether they should help the law work better in the short term — but it still lacks any truly ambitious provisions. It is just about as narrowly tailored as an Obamacare stabilization bill offered by Democrats could be, a fact that aides and activists will privately concede.

Missing are any of the bolder policy proposals animating the left. Not even a hint of Medicare-for-all single-payer health care, which is or isn’t a surprise, depending on how you look at it.

Medicare-for-all is quickly becoming orthodoxy among many in the party’s progressive grassroots, and a single-payer bill proposed this Congress in the House (similar to the one offered by Bernie Sanders over in the Senate) has 123 sponsors.

But House Democratic leaders probably don’t want to take up such a potentially explosive issue too soon after finally clawing back a modicum of power in Trump’s Washington.

Still, the current stabilization bill doesn’t even include a Medicare or Medicaid buy-in, the rebranded public option that never made it into Obamacare but would allow Americans to voluntarily join one of the major government insurance programs. It is an idea that even the more moderate Democratic members tend to support, and polls have found three-fourths of Americans think a Medicare buy-in is a good idea.

The plain truth is House Democrats haven’t reached a consensus yet about what they want to do to cover more Americans. They agree Obamacare was an important first step, and they agree the status quo is unacceptable. But the exact mechanism for achieving those goals — single-payer, a robust public option, or simply a buffed-up version of Obamacare — is still very much up for debate.

“People will want to do something, but any further action is going to be a consensus-building process,” a senior House Democratic aide told me. “Democrats have lots of different ideas on how to continue working to reduce the uninsured.”

That is all well and good, but few issues are exciting the Democratic grassroots right now like Medicare-for-all. During the midterm campaigns, Democratic candidates and even grassroots leaders were happy to let those words mean whatever voters wanted them to mean. For some people, it meant single-payer; for others; it might mean a Medicare buy-in or something more limited.

The unreservedly progressive members who were just elected to Congress will only wait so long before they start pressing Democratic leaders to take more aggressive steps to pick up one of their top campaign issues. That pressure will only intensify as the 2020 presidential campaign heats up and Democrats debate what kind of platform they should run on as they seek to take back the White House.

For now, Democrats have tried to put off a difficult debate and focus on what unites them. But the debate is still coming.

Even with Obamacare and preexisting conditions mobilizing Democratic voters this year, prescription drug prices remain a top concern for many Americans. That’s another area where Democrats know they want to act but don’t know yet exactly what they can or should do.

The issue could be an opening for serious dealmaking: Trump himself has attacked Big Pharma since his presidential campaign. His administration has actually launched some interesting initiatives to rein in drug costs — approving a record number of generic drugs, trying to even the playing field between America and foreign countries — that have some policy wonks intrigued, even if the impact is still to be determined.

Democrats have mostly stuck to slamming Trump for feigning to act on drug prices while cozying up to the drug industry. But it’s a top priority for both parties, and there could be some room for compromise. One progressive policy wonk thought a drug prices bill might actually be the first Democratic priority. It helps that drug prices are a populist issue that the new House majority might really be able to pass a bill on.

But first, Democrats have to figure out what exactly they are for — and what would actually make a difference.

The rallying cry for Democrats on drug prices has been letting Medicare directly negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, a proposal that Trump also embraced as a candidate, though he has since softened as president. But the problem is, the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t think Medicare negotiations would save any money unless the government is willing to deny seniors coverage for certain medications. But adding such a provision would surely invite attacks that Democrats are depriving people’s grandparents of the medications they need.

There are a lot of levers to pull to try to reduce drug prices: the patent protections that pharma companies receive for new drugs, the mandated discounts when the government buys drugs for Medicare and Medicaid, existing hurdles to getting generic drugs approved, the tax treatment of drug research-and-development. Pharmacy benefits managers, the mysterious middle man between health insurers and drug makers, are viewed skeptically by lawmakers and the public.

But none of those are silver bullets to lower prices, and they will certainly invite pushback from the politically potent pharmaceutical lobby, focused on the concerns about how much cracking down on drug companies to discourage them from developing new drugs. Democrats also don’t know yet what specific policies could win support from Senate Republicans or the Trump White House.

“How do you take this gargantuan Chinese menu of things and figure out how things fit together in a way that stem some of the abuses?” is how one Democratic aide summarized the dilemma.

It is a problem bedeviling Democrats on more than just drug prices. Health care was a winner on election night this year, and it has always been a priority for Democrats. Now they just need to figure out what to do.

Original Source -> What the new Democratic House majority might actually pass on health care

via The Conservative Brief

[racingtoaredlight]

Opening Bell: October 19, 2018

The drama associated with the disappearance, and alleged murder, of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, continues to evolve. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump insisted that the Saudi government had categorically denied any involvement in the disappearance of Khashoggi, and that this denial was “firm.” Then the president indicated that perhaps a “rogue�� element of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service had undertaken any alleged killing, a talking point which was parroted by Riyadh hours later. This statement by Trump, however, was made without any reference to Khashoggi’s fate. Then, yesterday, the president acknowledged that it did appear that Khashoggi was dead, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who recently returned from Riyadh, asserted that Saudi Arabia be given time to undertake a “transparent” investigation of the entire incident. Given that several members of the alleged hit-team which killed and dismembered the corpse of Khashoggi have close ties to Muhammed Bin Sultan—popularly referred to in the media as ‘MBS’—the actual level of transparency to any investigation is questionable to say the least. In order to give a patina of legitimacy to the investigation, it appeared yesterday that Riyadh was ready to implicate a senior intelligence official of acting without orders. This entire episode is the stuff of a spy thriller: foreign intelligence agents committing a horrific act, allegedly witnessed by the intelligence agents of another country, both of whom are important strategic allies of the United States. Were there not already preexisting tensions attendant to each spoke of these international relationships, this would still be a difficult time, but Saudi Arabia and Turkey have a profoundly frayed relationship while that of the United States and Turkey, a NATO member and ostensible ally, has also been uneasy for years due to the increasingly nationalistic and anti-democratic actions of Turkish President Recep Erdogan. There are multiple major consequences for everyone involved in this, and no tidy resolution is readily apparent.

Stop me if I’ve started a post with the following words before: This week, in a news story which would ordinarily be a front page potential scandal for a cabinet member, and therefore imputed to the White House itself, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke allegedly attempted to install a political appointee from the Department of Housing and Urban Development as the Inspector General (IG) at Interior. Suzanne Tuft would be the direct supervisor of the current Deputy IG, an Obama-appointee who happens to be overseeing four different investigations into Zinke and his use of department resources for personal and family purposes. At least one of the investigations is directed at Zinke’s wife, which allegedly is why Zinke sought to put a damper on things by placing a political appointee between himself and Interior’s Deputy IG. This took a turn later in the day when, shortly after a public announcement by HUD Secretary Ben Carson that Tuft was in fact moving to Interior to become the IG, only for the Interior Department’s press secretary to deny any move was occurring and that the White House, which nominates IG’s for each cabinet level agency, had not submitted any candidates. This somewhat bizarre turn of events comes off as a clumsy attempt to correct a larger political and ethical miscue before it occurred. Given that two cabinet level officials—Scott Pruitt at the EPA and Tom Price at HHS—have already been forced to resign after they were found to be misusing department funding and resources, the IG’s investigations at Interior could pose a threat to Zinke’s job, which provides a motive for squelching any investigation in the first place. 

In 1994, Republicans scored one of the most decisive midterm election victories in modern American history when they won 54 seats in the House of Representatives, 8 seats in the Senate, and flipped dozens of state legislatures around the country, ushering in a period of Republican legislative power that has persisted; we still live in the legacy of 1994 to this day. 1994 was a watershed election and for the first time in four decades, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. The leader of this Revolution, who would become the first Republican Speaker of the House since the first Eisenhower administration, was Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich. Gingrich had arrived in the House years earlier, but chafed under the collegial relationships which Democratic and Republican leaders fostered with one another. Gingrich represented a new wave of political bomb throwers who cast aside collegiality and compromise in favor of brash rhetoric, crass name-calling, and ostentatious political advertising. Congress was forever changed and many commentators point to 1994 as when modern congressional dysfunction really began. In a long piece for The Atlantic, McKay Coppins interviewed Gingrich to understand his view of politics and why he believes the current political animosity is actually a good thing. While the length of this article is daunting, the writing is breezy and it’s a relatively quick read.

For much of history, everyone but the upper class and nobility was more or less bound to the land where they lived. Travel was difficult and most people lived and died within miles of where they were born. Allegiance to a local lord through an obligation to provide agriculture output and manpower to that lord also generally prevented a person of the peasant, later the working class, from uprooting and moving elsewhere. Travel was largely limited to the wealthy, the merchant class, and those of itinerant occupations, such as sailors. Later, as nation-states evolved to envelope the people who lived within their boundaries, restrictions on the freedom to travel elsewhere came in the form of paperwork and documents which had to procured first from both the nation of residence and the destination country. Visas and passports became a new form of control in the absence of a feudal system of allegiance. In the movie Casablanca, the coastal Moroccan city had, during the course of the Second World War, a jumping off point for those looking to escape the war on the European continent and travel, via neutral Portugal, to unoccupied Europe or the New World. But to depart Casablanca, an individual required exit visas which could only be signed by a local government official, the Vichy French. And, as the movie tells it, the presence of Germans in Casablanca served as a check on who could make their way through the French territory. Today, travel has become more expensive than ever and many  nations place financial asset minimums in order for an individual to become a permanent resident, ensuring that only the ultra-wealthy can afford to move to a new country and start over.

It is well-known among most people that Islamic scholars of past centuries contributed vast amounts to math, science, and literature. Algebra, the concept of zero, great works of literature, and great advances in astronomy are all credited to Islamic academics of a thousand years ago. In recent decades, with a growing fear of Islamic militarism and religious fanaticism around the globe, a reemphasis has been placed on the academic achievements of adherents of Islam. The only problem is that certain artists have chosen to represent Islamic scientific achievements in art, in an inaccurate manner; e.g. showing Muslim astronomers using telescopes at a time when they instead used sextants. The intent of the artists behind these works is probably benign or even positive, but in inaccurately showing the ways in which Muslim scholars contributed knowledge that has benefitted the rest of the world undermines these achievements. This is problematic when such works are featured in prominent collections of Islamic art both in the east and the west. This is a thoughtful piece which explores the importance of procedurally presenting history in an accurate manner.

Perfume has for centuries been used by people to mask their own bodily odors and secretions through smells that evoke nature, flowers, forests, plants, and other deep primal smells. Many of these scents are in turn the product of animal body secretions such as ambergris, civets, and other things which the perfume user would not want to see in their original forms. Perfumes today are still mixed in much the way they were 100 or even 1,000 years ago, though with synthetic substitutes for the natural ingredients of the past: going on whale hunts in order to seek ambergris is generally frowned upon by most of the international community these days. This is an example of just one luxury item that has kind of a disgusting backstory.

Finally, another week gone by and another week closer to the 2018 midterm election. Much has been made of the so-called “Kavanaugh effect” which supposedly energized Republican voters and has closed the enthusiasm gap with Democratic voters. However, recent generic ballot polls do not show any appreciable gain, as Democrats have consistently been between +7 and +9. Most handicappers believe that Democrats are overwhelming favorites to retake control of the House. Kyle Kondik of the Center for Politics takes a race-by-race look at the House and, though a few race forecasts have moved back towards Republicans, on the whole Democrats remained well-placed to retake the House; the only question is the margin of victory.

 Welcome to the weekend.