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silvokrent · 2 years ago

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Ennui - 2

ennui /ɒnˈwiː/ n. a gripping listlessness or melancholy caused by boredom; depression.

Somewhere overhead, a Wingull cried.

Flocks of the small white birds circled above, visible in the gaps of sky that Flint could glimpse from below the walkways.

He would have denied the accusation, once, but Flint suspected that he was becoming sentimental. Not that he couldn’t appreciate the rest of Sinnoh’s beaches—all glittering water and long, uninterrupted stretches of sand—but Sunyshore’s geography really was a sight unparalleled. The tidepools and stark, jagged rocks that dominated the southeastern coasts were rather breathtaking.

Bone-breaking, too. Flint paused to watch as another wave slammed into the cliffs, sending up a spray of brine.

The area was signposted, although that did little to deter the locals from training here. The hospital and Pokémon Center were something of a revolving door for the idiots that persisted.

Flint still had the scars to prove it.

Another patch of shadow fell over him as he passed under the skywalk. The bulk of the foot traffic was confined to the actual modules, since the infrastructure was nearly as much of a tourist attraction as the lighthouse and markets were. Any other time, he would have taken the paths on the upper level.

Flint lingered under the bridge, waiting until the group above him passed, before he resumed.

Avoiding crowds was something of a necessity this time around. Regrettably, his presence also counted as a tourist attraction, and anonymity was hard to come by.

Not that he was complaining, but…

As Flint neared one of the support columns, he came to a stop.

…he had a job to do.

The technicians repairing the module hadn’t noticed him yet. They were preoccupied with installing the new panel into the frame, as a Machoke steadied it for them. Another crew member was doing something with the inverter mounted to the column—rewiring, by the looks of it. Flint had never been tech savvy, and he wasn’t about to start pretending now.

It would have been an otherwise mundane sight, if he didn’t have context for it.

“Routine maintenance?” The technician glanced up as Flint approached.

“I wish.” He wiped the sweat from his brow. “It’d be easier if we gutted it and just replaced the whole thing, but management wants us to try and salvage it first.”

“How bad is the damage?”

The technician scowled at the inverter. “Bad enough that I’m going to be at this for the next five hours.”

Flint leaned against the column. “The solar grid can’t handle a blackout?” he asked.

“It can. There are redundancies in place for that sort of thing.” The technician popped open another panel, and peered at the cables running through it. “But repeated stress wears the entire system down. It wasn’t built with consecutive power failures in mind.”

“‘Consecutive’?” Flint straightened. “I thought it was just one outage.”

“You must be from outta town.” The technician didn’t bother looking his way. “That’s the third blackout this month.”

Flint would have been lying if he said he wasn’t nervous, as he stood before the Gym doors.

Outwardly, the building looked no different than it did since his last visit. Nothing to suggest that it had been the culprit behind the power failure.

One of several power failures, apparently.

Not for the first time, he would have appreciated a hint. Something, at least, to help make sense of what he was walking into. The better part of his flight yesterday had been spent perseverating over a reason, and after nine hours, he’d ruled out everything practical. Flint finally gave up around the time sleep deprivation was starting to kick in, and he’d begun entertaining the idea of elaborate Rube Goldberg machines, or enthusiastic raves.

Flint sighed.

He was stalling, and he knew it.

With little enthusiasm, he moved past the sliding doors, and stepped inside.

His first, incorrect impression—as the doors shut behind him, and he froze on the lobby threshold—was that he’d entered the wrong building.

It was still, for all intents and purposes, a Gym. But not one he recognized. The reception area looked like it had been given a recent facelift. “Expensive-looking” was the first thought that came to mind, but “upgraded” was probably more accurate.

Volkner’s handiwork, no doubt.

The receptionist glanced up from the monitor as he neared the desk. “Good afternoon, and welcome to the Sunyshore Gym.”

“Afternoon.” Flint inclined his head. “I’m here to see Leader Volkner.”

“Do you have an appointment scheduled with him today?”

“Last-second visit, I’m afraid.”

The receptionist furrowed her brow. “I’m very sorry, sir, but any meetings or battles with the Gym leader are through prior booking.”

New hire, if Flint had to assume. Usually his reputation preceded him with most Gym crowds.

“That won’t be a problem.” He reached into his back pocket, and held out his license. The receptionist accepted it with an expression that looked no less skeptical than it had a second ago. “I try not to drop in unannounced, but it’s a long flight between here and the League.”

The words registered at the same time she read the name printed on the card. Her eyes widened a fraction, before darting back up to him.

He smiled, not without a hint of amusement. “Any chance I could have a chat with him?”

Strangely, the request seemed to put her on edge. She returned his license, but didn’t quite meet his gaze. “Of course.” She stepped out from behind the desk. “If you’ll follow me…”

It wasn’t a particularly long walk, but it was informative. The overall layout of the building was still familiar, but as Flint was lead down the hall, he spotted more evidence of renovations. Machinery, for the most part. A classroom with its door ajar held something that resembled a scaled-down version of a PC terminal. Elsewhere, they passed a room which emitted a soft, ambient hum.

If the change in scenery was unsettling, it paled next to the reception from the Gym staff. Flint recognized a handful of the resident trainers, though when he waved, they didn’t return the gesture. The tension was palpable, and it followed in his wake.

He wasn’t left with much time to dwell on that particular development, before the receptionist halted at the end of the corridor.

“He’s in here.” Again, she refused to look his way. “I’ll be at the front desk if you need anything.”

“It’s appreciated.”

The receptionist hesitated. She opened her mouth, as if she wanted to say something else, before clearly deciding against it. Her footsteps echoed as she hurried back toward the reception area.

Well. No point in waiting.

Gingerly, he turned the handle, and let himself in.

It was a space that Flint was acquainted with, though—judging by the scattered tools—it looked like it had seen an uptick in recent use. Volkner’s workshop was something of a glorified janitor’s closet that he had commandeered shortly after his promotion to leader. No one had ever protested, since his side hobbies generally benefitted the Gym.

Though going by his staff’s newfound jumpiness, Flint wondered if that hadn’t changed.

It took a second to actually spot Volkner. Half of Volkner, technically. His torso was obscured beneath a rather menacing-looking generator.

“Jordan, pass me the solder.” His Raichu pawed through the toolkit as a burst of orange light illuminated the underside. “The silver-tin alloy, not the zinc.”

His pronged tail flicked in response.

Jordan emerged with the spool clutched in his paws. He went to hand it off to his trainer, only to freeze when he caught sight of Flint.

His eyes lit up, and his back legs braced.

With a muffled grunt Flint managed to catch him, before he could properly tackle him to the floor. The Raichu let out a soft, pleased noise as he tried to burrow his face into his shoulder.

At least someone was happy to see him.

Careful not to dislodge him (it was cute and all, but Jordan wasn’t a thirteen-pound Pikachu anymore), Flint plucked the solder from his hand, and crouched next to the generator. Evidently none the wiser, Volkner took the spool when Flint held it out.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Flint.

There was a satisfying bang as Volkner smacked his head.

Something scuffed against the floor tile. Flint moved out of the way as the wheeled platform rolled back, and Volkner surfaced from underneath. He was sans his signature jacket and down to the black, sleeveless undershirt. It was impossible to make out his face beneath the welding mask, though by the way he scrubbed at his forehead, Flint could take a guess.

“Flint?” Volkner set the blowtorch down next to him. “What are you doing here?”

He rolled his eyes. “Nice to see you, too.”

Flint didn’t miss the huff under his breath. His hands skated up the back of his neck, as he undid the clasps, and slid the visor from his face.

If Flint felt tired, then Volkner looked exhausted.

There was a dark, discolored quality to his face, not helped in the least by how much thinner it was. His expression wavered between several different emotions—they passed too quickly for Flint to accurately gauge them—before settling on impassive.

Jordan squirmed in his arms, and Flint obligingly lowered him to the ground. He shoved his now-vacant hands in his pockets. “I see you’ve been redecorating.”

Volkner didn’t comment. Merely watched him through half-lidded eyes.

Flint nodded to the generator behind him. “Something extremely dangerous, I hope?”

That managed to elicit a reaction from him (even if it was mild exasperation). Volkner shucked off his welding gloves on a nearby cart, and stood. “Close,” he said. “It’s a docking station, of sorts. The prototype, at any rate.”

“What's it supposed to charge?”

“Electric-types.” Jordan’s ears folded back as Volkner rested a hand on his head, and lightly scratched. “Most species that are electrogenic aren’t actually immune to incoming charges. Only a handful of Pokémon can safely absorb them—Jolteon, Electivire…” He frowned. “I was trying to figure out how to replicate the effect, so it could be applied to other species. It could have possible electrotherapeutic benefits, too, but…” Volkner combed a hand through his hair. “Repairing this is going to take a while. It got fried during the power outage.”

“So I heard,” Flint said.

Volkner stiffened.

“I also heard that you were responsible for them. All three of them.” Some of the anger crept back into his voice, as Flint’s stare hardened. “You mind telling me what that’s about?”

Volkner seemed to be struggling for an immediate response. Eventually, his jaw snapped shut, and he bent to retrieve his tools. “I take it this isn’t a social visit.”

“Would you actually care if it was?” Flint asked. “I’d find that hard to believe, since you haven’t answered your damn phone in weeks.”

Jordan dutifully pitched in and began returning equipment to its rightful place. Volkner didn’t lift his head, as he continued to reorganize the toolkit. “Did the League send you? Or did you volunteer?”

It might have sounded accusatory, were it not for the flat tone.

“That’s not the point.” Flint watched as Volkner inspected a wire brush, and thumbed over the bristles. Flakes of rust drifted to the floor. He made a displeased sound in the back of his throat, before placing it in the container. “Your Gym knocked out the entire network.”

There was a subtle shift in his posture; a tightness that coiled in his spine. “That wasn’t intentional.”

“I’m sure that’s a real comfort to everyone who lost power.”

Volkner had the audacity to shrug.

An unpleasant burning sensation lodged itself firmly in his gut. Flint pressed a palm to his face and pinched the bridge of his nose, willing it to subside. The accompanying exhale didn’t help much. “If it were a one-off thing,” he muttered, “fine. But after a certain point, you must have realized there was a correlation. And that maybe it was time to call it quits.” Flint narrowed his eyes. “Since when are you this careless?”

Pride had always been one of Volkner’s touchier subjects. At minimum, Flint expected that comment to annoy him.

Volkner didn’t even react.

There was a chisel near his foot. Jordan went to reach for it, only to skitter backward as Flint stepped on it with his sandal. He scooped up the errant tool, inspecting it. “Is any of this actually necessary?” he asked.

His hands slowed. “…It’s useful,” he conceded.

“More useful than a working solar grid?”

Volkner’s reply was blunt. “Does this conversation have a point?”

Flint’s fingers dug into the chisel. He was half tempted to throw it at him. “You tell me.”

The floorspace had been marshaled back into some semblance of order. Nearly, anyway, Volkner was just now realizing, as he scanned the toolkit, and then the surrounding tiles. At last he glanced back over his shoulder, only to blink at the chisel still in Flint’s grip.

He stood, and held out a hand.

Flint absently continued to study it. “Improvements are nice and all, but they shouldn’t be coming at the expense of everything else. Surely, there’s a better way for you to be doing this.” He arched a brow, with an air of deliberate nonchalance. “Though for the life of me, I can’t figure out where you’re finding the free time to be doing all of these projects. You’d think being Gym leader would keep you busy.”

The silence was deafening.

A sudden, nagging suspicion began to creep in. Flint met his gaze, searching. “Volkner,” he said. “When was the last time you—”

“Excuse me? Volkner?”

The receptionist stood in the doorway, a clipboard tucked under her arm. Every word looked like it was being forcibly dragged out of her. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but—you have a battle scheduled with a challenger at three o’clock. You need to start getting ready.”

Volkner shut his eyes. “Did they clear their preliminary match?”

“They’re currently getting set up. Preston should be finished shortly.”

“Fine.” Volkner sighed. Though he directed his words at her, his eyes never once left Flint. “We’re done here, anyway. Have them meet me in the main arena in fifteen minutes.”

“Of course.”

The receptionist fled as quickly as professionalism would allow.

Volkner didn’t budge. He continued to regard Flint expectantly, the hand still hovering between them. His eyes narrowed.

With slightly more force than necessary, Flint slapped the chisel into his palm.

Volkner tossed it over his shoulder into the open toolkit, and left without another word.

Jordan started to bound after him, only to stop, and hover in the doorway. The Raichu’s tail curled around his back legs as his head sank between his shoulders. He fixed Flint with wet, black eyes, before—rather dejectedly—following on the heels of his trainer.

It took a minute before he finally forced himself to move. Stiffly, Flint exited the room, and headed back toward the lobby.

It was the first time he’d ever seen resignation on Volkner’s face.

#pokemon #pokemon fics #ennui #volkner #flint #ignitionshipping #my posts #i speak #pokemon thought dump #in case it wasn't obvious: volkner's gym upgrades aren't a labyrinth of OSHA violations

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loop-hole-319 · 3 years ago

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R/Users of Reddit who was the weird kid at your school and what made them the weird kid?

Boy, do I have a story for you

For a little bit of context, I live in Amity Park, yes, the most haunted place in world. Yes, ghosts are real if you want to fight me on that do it somewhere else this is not the page to do so.

The kid is the son of the town weirdos, God I could go on and on about that family’s antics, But I will save it for a later post. The two parents are ghost hunters and have two kids one older daughter and one younger son. The eldest daughter is a certified genius, she plans to study in psychology and beat the school record academic intelligence or something, she even saved my ass from having to retake algebra. She is going places; she'll end up in one of those great women magazines.

Her younger brother on the other hand... is an interesting fella.

He was pale as a a sheet of paper and had black hair and bluest eyes that I had ever seen, I do not know even how to begin to describe the shade of blue that his eyes were. They were such an intense blue that there was no way for them to be natural, although sometimes they would shine green if the light hit them just right.

I think he also had Tapetum lucidum. I found this out the hard way when there was a power outage. I had just gotten out of the bathroom when the lights flipped off and was rushing to my classroom for safety, (ghost attacks often mean power outages) I had turned the corner and saw him opening a closet door and made the mistake of making eye contact with him. Those were the most intense 30 seconds of my entire life, and that's saying something living in a town where there are supernatural creatures attacking almost daily

But his eyes, I will never get them out of my head. Although it was dark in the hallway I could see his irises clearly, they were almost glowing. I will never forget the way I felt, it is what I imagine to be facing down a lion or Panther, there was an oppressive feeling on my chest and the air grew cold, I swear to myself I could see my breath. I was literally frozen in fear, then he slipped behind the door and the feeling instantly cut off. I ran the rest of the way to my classroom and never told any of my classmates about my encounter.

We started our freshman year together and he was a normal kid until halfway through the first quarter. Apparently, he got into some kind of lab accident, no details were released although it took out the power grid for about half the city. It must have Fucked him up or something because when he got back to school all of his shit went downhill. He must have had some kind of nerve damage because for the first month and a half after the accident he would constantly tripped over nothing and just collapse in the middle of the hallway. Oh he was also short he never grew an inch past freshman year I think it has to do with the accident he was in, maybe damaged part of his skeleton or something.

He also would drop stuff all the time including his pants, I remember he dropped so many beakers in the science room that he was banned from holding anything fragile and they actually had to order an entire new set to replace the ones he broke.

But then the ghost started showing up and he took it to whole new level. He carried around this soup thermos thing 24/7, he never left it anywhere always stayed by his side even to the bathroom.

The kid would go to the bathroom all the time and then just disappear and not come back sometimes for the whole school day. it got to the point where teachers would deny him access to the restroom but he would get up and leave anyways. But yeah when he did come back to class, he always looked like he had gotten run over by a bus multiple time.

I remember one time my friends and I we're headed to the bathroom to vape and saw him running down the hall and enter the restrooms ahead of us, when we got there, we the entirety of the boys room and he was just gone, vanished like fucking Houdini.

When he was in class, he was always either sleeping or just nervously sitting there like someone was about to attack him. He always looked so tired and whatever the teacher called on him he always shut up like a damn rocket.

I remember one time in class we were doing silent reading, this was one of the few times that he was actually in class and awake. When something crashed through the window, I think it was one of his parent's inventions and it focused in on him like a heatsinking missile and cracked him right in the back of the head knocking him out right there and then. His parents had to pay for the window damage.

or he also would constantly be targeted by the anti ecto devices that were installed in the school, he claimed to have ecto-contamination. but this just raised concerns about his home life and lead multiple people to speculate that his parents were experimenting on him. He profusely denied these claims.

Another time he came into class with a glowing arrow sticking through his leg when asked about it he just waved it off and said it would be fine.

He threw up in the middle of the hallway, his vomit was glowing, and it eat about an inch into the floor. On multiple occasions he would enter the classroom bleeding profusely, deny that he was bleeding and then sew himself up in the back of the classroom.

He also got bullied a lot by one of the football players at the school, they would always stuff him into the lockers, but he would always manage to somehow magically teleport to his next class sometimes even before I got there.

One time he punched a ghost, and another he cursed my friend out in some language that nobody was able to identify later on. I do not think it was a human language.

He would also carry around ectoplasm in a separate thermos and drink it for lunch. One of the jock bullies stole it from him and chugged the whole thing before realizing what was in the container, he was sent to the emergency room to have his stomach pumped and had severe chemical burns down the back of his throat and entirety of his stomach. Apparently the ectoplasm had been “weak” so it had less of an effect, what if it was “stronger” he might have had to have his stomach removed or been placed on a feeding tube. No charges were successfully pressed.

He had also been banned from bringing lunch from home as it came to life and attacked students and staff on multiple occasions.

The bitch was cold as ice to, I'm not talking about cold as in personality. No his skin was freezing to the touch. His friends literally used him as their own personal air conditioner during a heat wave last summer.

But aside from his eyes the biggest thing that made him weird was actually something pretty useful.

His Bladder. It was more accurate at predicting ghost attacks then the highly advanced technology specifically designed for doing so, it came with a 99% accuracy. The 1% is the times he actually had to go to the bathroom.

He also had his own stalker who accused him of being Phantom, the town superhero who was a ghost. although everybody thinks that he is just gay for the guy. But honestly, I think he's on to something not necessarily him being a half ghost superhero who lives with ghost hunters which is stupid but that guy is definitely not 100% human.

He still is super gay for him though.

#Danny Phantom #danny fenton #in universe memes #dp in universe memes #danny phantom meme #dp #dp Reddit #wes weston #dp in universe reddit post

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riverdale-retread · 2 years ago

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Riverdale S6B Ep #107 (“The Fog”)

Consider for a moment the exceptionally difficult life of Jughead Jones. Limited to just his adult life (after 21) he has coped with drug addiction, career failure, homelessness (again!), surviving a bomb and hearing loss, and now, in this episode, bad weather and the apocalypse. The new core four, apparently consisting of two straight couples (Barchie and Jabitha - which is a very curious concession to heteronormativity in a show that is obsessed with making every single one-off and side-character gay), are conferring at the Andrews residence about what to do.

Given the grab for power that Percival has successfully pulled off, Archie wants to stage a coup. I’m surprised that Archie knows what a coup is. Jughead actually uses the phrase “coup de town” to describe an attempt at disrupting the machinations of the council. French speakers, help? If the common coinage is coup d’etat, is what they’re doing considered coup de ville?? coup de village? Jughead just intones, ‘coup de town’ yet nobody chuckles. Why does no one laugh at Jughead’s jokes?

Jughead sensibly says that they need to get ‘public’ support then immediately goes on to list the people he considers ‘the public.’ As a longstanding Veronica Lodge fan I’m appalled that Veronica is the first person he lists as being in the outer circle. The list is Veronica, Reggie, Toni, Fangs, Cheryl. (This is, not coincidentally, the sequence of storytelling in this episode.) I think V and C are gonna want words with Jughead. Also Jughead always just fuckin’ hated Kevin (and possibly, vice versa?) because he entirely forgets that Kevin exists - Tabitha reminds him, even putting in a good word for the increasingly problematic Mr. Keller. Tabitha is such a saint. All of them are overheard plotting a secret meeting by Alice Cooper who demonstrates a stealth mode that she has never had before. Is this a gift from Percival to Alice?

Alice is appalled that the four kids who appointed her to the council for no very good reason (well, other than Betty Cooper’s delusional belief that she can somehow control her mother and it’s not the other way around) now want to remove her. When Alice tells this to Percival he’s polishing something in his curiosity shop. The face he makes (eyes closed, inhaling a deep calming breath) briefly raised my hopes that he would whack her over the head (in this instance and in this one instance alone, I support violence against a woman) but instead he says he’s tired of the agitators. To stop them, Alice decides to issue a damning weather report about the ‘wrath of god’ fog that is ‘rolling in’ from somewhere.

On TV, Alice Cooper announces that a fog on the scale of the very unimaginatively named Great Fog of 1922 is coming in, and that 1922 was 100 years ago. IT’S 2022 IN RIVERDALE PEOPLE, IT’S OFFICIAL. (Maniacal laughter). I’m fascinated by the map of Riverdale that she has behind her which gives absolutely no geographical context clues about where Riverdale is beyond the fact that Sweetwater River is to the west of Riverdale in general and that Greendale lies across the river from the river in a southwesterly direction from my favorite fictional town.

Fog causes ‘imminent’ power outages (which … how? why? what? is there something about North American fog that does this in particular?) and hazardous driving conditions (fair), the council institutes a curfew. Tabitha makes the prettiest What The Fuck face in the history of humanity in response.

Veronica is annoyed at the lack of customers, so tells a lackey that if inclement weather is to blame, everyone should be sent home and she will lock up alone. Betty is crossing off dates on a paper calendar using information stored on her smartphone calendar. I wasn’t sure what the heck she was doing - apparently she doesn’t know that period tracking apps exist? She’s informed by that a woman has escaped from TBK “just like you.” Eyes wide as saucers, Betty wants to talk to her right now, but the show is saving it for a later episode (assuming they don’t forget?).

Meanwhile, a gay man and two bisexuals fail to figure out how to be a family together. I’m talking about Kevin, Toni and Fangs (thanks to the beloved mutual who gave me FONI as the pairing! To that I will add a bit and call the threesome FONIN, pronounced Phone In. Get it???). Toni tries to make peace, Kevin is a smug dick, Toni finally girds her ovaries and threatens him right back (FINALLY FINALLY OMG FINALLY). The thing is, the whole thing makes me feel for the rubber doll that is Baby Anthony because oh my god that child does not have good options. Gun addict Serpent dad, failed Serpent Queen mom, sex addict other dad. But the real problem is that none of the three of them actually respect each other.

I was so irked by all of this but then Riverdale brought me right back in with the ever delightful pair of actresses that play Penelope and Cheryl Blossom. The very fascinating nun outfit that Penelope wears is probably a reference to something but I have no idea what (do you know?). All I know is that I love it. I love the wimple, I love the modified peter pan collar, I love the short cape, I love the baby-blue-and-maroon color scheme. I want this outfit.

The story that Penelope tells is absolutely batshit insane. She traveled the world seeking sanctuary because her daughter kicked her out of her home until she found the OG Sisters of Quiet Mercy, who are in fact a Christian order (this was the most shocking part to me) located in THE HIMALAYAS, which accepted her. Cheryl’s blanket response (“You’ve got to be kidding me”) applies to every single part of this story. I think Cheryl has forgotten how Catholicism works because Penelope’s past would not disqualify her from joining a convent. What really stuck out for me are three other things: 1) The way Penelope pronounces the word weekend as wee-kend and 2) the fact that flying from Kathmandu to JFK/Laguardia are 23-24 hour long-hauls but Penelope made the trip for JUST A WEEKEND somehow to wrap up her prior life is either exceptionally draconian or the whole thing is a lie. (Or maybe nobody on the Riverdale writing team actually thought about the logistics of traveling from the Himalayas to upstate New York) and 3) SHE DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO MAKE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS PROPERLY.

Cheryl’s vulnerability to her monster (literal monster, mind you, someone who wanted to watch children kill themselves on her grounds) mother is heartbreaking.

Speaking of heartbreaking, Jughead Jones over in the diner asks Tabitha if there is any way she might use her time travel powers to alter events so that he doesn’t have to be deaf. So it’s confirmed then, that Jughead Jones is still deaf but with a not very great exception: He can hear thoughts and only thoughts . That gave me shivers of horror. To hear nothing - no normal sounds, no music - but just an endless readout of other people’s thoughts? OH NO. Tabitha, in the gentlest possible way (I love her so much) tells him that the bomb and his deafness are somehow essential events to the universe that cannot be altered without bringing about further disasters of a cosmic kind. I’m as upset as Tabitha looks at the way Jughead smiles so nicely at her after she delivers this terrible news, that his affliction is unalterable.

Just in time, the fog moves in. I mean they call it fog but it looks like smog and now I understand what Alice meant about the corrosive effect of this thing. Betty Cooper tries to leave her house. She stops dead in her tracks when she sees a big TBK sized man standing down the driveway from her front door, then runs directly to the “I’m Invulnerable” Archie, who wants to go out immediately to deal with it for her.

The song that plays over Archie and Betty making out immediately after they cancel their evening plans to stage a coup de town is called “Don’t Bring Me Down.” It has ominous lyrics: “The darkened skyline/ outside my room/ a kingdom that i gave up too soon/ to be without.” What the heck.

Can we stop for a moment and appreciate the way Betty smiles into kisses? She’s so beautiful.

Post coitus Betty and Archie affirm that their relationship feels right to them, which is sweet, but then it’s revealed that they never discussed birth control which is not so sweet. Betty thinks she might be pregnant. The abduction at the hands of TBK made her go off of birth control, never to get back on it, which is the weirdest thought sequence ever voiced by a reproductive aged woman. The power goes out right after this.

At the Diner, Tabitha has a brief phone call with her grandfather, then thinks: What Am I Going To Do When I Lose Him? Jughead hears her thought. His response is - “Pop Tate is gonna outlive all of us.”

I already know from US-based Tumblrinas that Jughead is somehow slated to die this season like he was in every other season, so I guess Pop Tate at least outliving Jughead Jones is being foreshadowed here??

Tabitha gets very irked, telling him that it’s an invasion of privacy, he says he’s not doing it on purpose, then the power goes out here too.

What occurs next is an exceptionally candle heavy episode of Riverdale. I’m surprised they’ve never mentioned nor had a candle related sponsor. In the high school years, Jughead and the Stonies were the truly candle obsessed people so when we cut to the extreme amount of candles that Betty and Archie have lit in the Andrews House, I wondered if this had all been a stash that Jughead had built up over the time he lived there. Speaking of which - Did Uncle Fucking Frank move in with Sheriff Keller or something? Where is he?

Archie actually asks Betty an intimate question which Betty actually answers in an honest (seeming) way and I am blown away. One of the traits that I find very off putting about Archie (because it reflects something about me obviously) is that he’s a very incurious character. If someone directly makes a blunt request he will often try to either accommodate or render assistance, but in the absence of such explication it just doesn’t occur to him to ask questions (he never asked Jughead wtf was going on with him in the entire time post time jump when they lived together, for example). So it means a lot that Archie asks Betty exactly what happened when she had been captured by TBK. I tend to rant about Betty’s tendency to creatively lie whenever she doesn’t want to admit to something, so the apparent veracity of this story, which is rough and disturbing, is as important for her.

We get a TBK flashback. I keep checking out TBK’s body with close attention to see if I can recognize him from just his biceps but I cannot. Maybe spotting people with just their abs is a Veronica Lodge specialty. Betty did not fight off or outwit TBK. She just went along with what he obviously wanted, did what he asked, and was released by him because he found this option more entertaining. All Betty had to do was dismember the corpse of a TBK victim, a big man laid out on a table in a garage.

Moved by her ordeal, plus the fact that Betty says she feels like her soul is dismembered, Archie finally admits that he thinks Riverdale is cursed. Archie announces his statement of purpose: He wants to raise a family in the Andrews house, the home of his childhood. He calls it ‘My dad’s house.’ The ownership of this house is something the show keeps playing with - Fred owned it but upon his death ownership passed to Mary, such that Frank called it her house, and Mary made sure to make Archie give him money to hand over the house, but in a complete (and deserved) erasure of his mother Archie calls it his fathers’s house, rather than ‘our’ house or ‘my parents’ house.’

As Betty sheds a tear, Archie promises her commitment and support and expresses a desire to start a family with her. They kiss in a warm hazy orange glow of the fog.

We cut directly to Veronica Lodge sitting by herself in her casino pouring herself a stiff drink (rum?). LOL!

Reggie enters stage left, carrying a box of his belongings. Veronica invites him to stay, drink, and play strip poker. This is when the power goes out at the casino. Are the power outages following some sort of grid or am I supposed to understand that these are lights going out on these couples in order of their priority in the current hierarchy? (Barchie → Jabitha → Veggie.)

Tabitha is lighting a bazillion red candles at the diner. Jughead comes out of the kitchen (he calls her Tabs! So cute!) with an idea for how to restart the generator. He goes out to get the gas after telling her to fire up the old ham radio out back. Lots of ominous music plays as Jughead heads out.

Veronica appears to successfully seduce Reggie after besting in strip poker but there’s something about their hooking up that is so commercial it’s kind of upsetting to watch. The very grim lookin’ Hiram portrait staring them down leads Reggie to suggest moving to a champagne suite. Many of the candles lit in the champagne suit post Reggie x Veronica hookup are green. That’s probably just to match up with their forest green robes, but I noticed them. In the same slightly depressed, commercial tone of their sexual activity, Veronica suggest that perhaps their relationship is worth maintaining to Reggie, and he agrees in the same room-temperature tone.

However they then immediately commence fighting again - about the Hiram portrait, about Archie, about Reggie always feeling like he’s second best to some man who is consistently more valued by Veronica. Very, very brutally, Veronica confirms that he is right. I love Veronica Lodge for many reasons, but the way she treats Reggie Mantle always takes the gloss off of her. She’s just so harsh to Reggie. She spells out ‘You’re my consolation prize because I failed out of New York and got rejected by Archie and you’re about what I can manage right now.’ Reggie gives her a dark, heavy look before telling her his statement of purpose - to find someone who will finally say to him with their whole chest, “You, Reggie. You're the one.” Veronica fully fails this test, so Reggie conveys his very incisive analysis that he is reproducing his father’s sad-sack life as a man who couldn’t get himself to be prioritized by his woman, and she’s reproducing Hiram who dragged Hermione around unhappily until she finally broke free. Yeowch!

I must say, I did very much appreciate the very gentle way Reggie tells Veronica these thoughts. He’s giving her every chance. Sadly, Veronica agrees that they’re toxic together and for each other. Reggie makes a very dignified exit from the relationship and Babylonium and his fantasy of Veronica being his future.

Kevin, alone, is filling out forms and thinking of his life - flashback to Joaquin, to a random hook up in the woods, that homophobe who got violent with him instead of just saying no thanks when Kevin hit on him. Just as he’s about to go visit Foni, enter Moose! Looking fine and handsome and very hirsute and broad chested. He’s been hired as Riverdale HS’s new PE teacher! He persuades Kevin to stick around and ‘really talk’ with him for half an hour. Kevin always chooses sex over everything else in his life given half a chance, so of course he stays.

TOSTITOS PRODUCT PLACEMENT because this is what Toni puts out in anticipation of Kevin’s visit. Foni are trying to discuss what their individual visions of the future are. Fangs is doing a very, um, straight man thing (sorry Fangs) of positing a glorious past that never ever existed and calls it ‘old school’ and wants to hearken back to this imaginary thing he just made up in his own mind. Toni wants the Southside Serpents to be the Sweetwater Serpents (which admittedly is THE DUMBEST name of all time. This is what happens when you write off Sweet Pea in that way that they show did and no I will not shut up about it). He thinks political activism is just as dangerous. Toni has a continual inability to stand up to her chosen male partner for things she actually believes in. This is very retrograde heterosexual of her. What is wrong with these people? The only thing Foni agree on is that they don’t want to waste money on legal bills fighting the custody issue.

And about Baby Anthony - I am calling it. Baby Anthony is going to grow up to be a Republican orthodontist.

In any case, this is when the lights go out on the Fonis. (Barchie → Jabitha → Veggie → Foni, so my priority theory still holds.)

Cut back to Kevin and Moose. (Koose? Mevin?) Their lives are both kind of horrible. Unemployed trucker meets Broadway wannabe with two oppressive jobs (high school student wrangler and deputy). They meet in this place of failure-to-launch to make out.

Do Foni ever have sex? Because I don’t think they do, and not just because I don’t want them to for personal reasons (i.e. I hate this couple). When Kevin sends him a “I’m going to have sex with Moose at school” text, Fangs exhibits much more passion than he’s ever shown Toni about anything. It occurs to me that Baby Anthony might be an anti-breeder statement in the worst way. This child in Rivervale was a constant source of stress and finally disaster for Toni, and in Riverdale (or wherever this is) he’s the reason Toni and Fangs put up with each other. Fangs is about to run out to do violence (because he wants to touch Kevin). Toni manages to stop him by begging. They have the most unbearably cardboard dry kiss.

In the diner, Tabitha manages to hear through the aforementioned ham radio Jughead- Rivervale’s phone call to Betty about getting out of the house because of the bomb under the bed. She even recognizes the voice as being Jughead’s! It turns out not to be the Jughead who went out to siphon gas from their car for the generator.

What. Is. Going. On?

Kevin and Fangs have hooked up in the teacher’s lounge, leading to Kevin passing out to have a horrible nightmare about the Gargoyle King. Kevin says something odd: “It’s just a dream. I GUESS.” Is Riverdale going to bring back the Gargoyle King now that Moose’s father is out of prison??

Cheryl at Thornhill (which Penelope with her continued strange pronunciations calls Thorn HILL rather than the more American THORN Hill) knocks her mother the fuck out with a candlestick after finding her communing with the Julian doll that now houses the spirit of the immortal witch Abigail. (That is the most unhinged sentence I have ever written. I love Riverdale.)

Jughead at the diner gets the generator restarted. The symbolic lights of Pop’s turns back on. Tabitha broadcasts that the diner is a true sanctuary with all the necessaries. “Look for the light.”

Cheryl is making Penelope’s body temperature rise, revealing herself to be the pyrokinetic that she is. Her mother was the dragon, she was the maiden, and now Cheryl is “the maiden and the dragon.” I love Cheryl so much. Just as Cheryl is about to murder her, Penelope reveals that she has all the letters from Heather. Reading these letters now, Cheryl weeps and weeps. Penelope brings her tea which I hope Cheryl doesn’t drink.

PENELOPE COMES OUT AS QUEER TO CHERYL. I knew it I kneeeeeeeeeewwwwww it. OMG. So anyway, Penelope seeks forgiveness for her trespasses from Cheryl. This seems genuine. Penelope promises to be gone with the fog.

The next morning, Kevin calls Fangs who is clearly still in love with him, just in the extremely bitter ex phase of being in love, to say that he wants to come to a peaceful resolution. Fangs, who has fucked both Kevin and Moose, can hear that Kevin has fucked Moose in his voice, so in a fit of pique escalates the fight to say “I’ll see you in court” and “Watch your back” to Kevin. Fangs is so very dumb. There is no way that he could ever expect to win against Kevin. There just isn’t.

Veronica, divested of Reggie, finally wants to wrap up the portrait of Hiram in butcher paper.

To send us out of this episode, we learn that Percival has made himself mayor, in order to make himself Dictator Pickens (according to Jughead). Jughead asks “How did we not see this coming?”

Ummmm MAYBE DON’T HAVE MEETINGS AT ALICE COOPER’S HOUSE??? This happened because Betty couldn’t admit to herself that she got roundy beaten by Percival in her own home. Betty! Get it together!

This is when Tabitha chooses to reveal to Jughead that in 1,384 scenarios where she saves Jughead’s hearing by stopping Hiram’s bomb, everything leads directly to nuclear winter. Jughead is the most important person in the story (Jughead really is writing this, isn’t he??) but this also means he’s going to die, inevitably (Jughead is definitely writing this). “In every scenario, you die,” Tabitha weeps. He dies 1,382 times to no avail, but they do win twice. Jughead’s youthful death is fixed. “It’s not the first time I’ve been destined to die,” Jughead says, as he consoles Tabitha. In the way that Tabitha only gave into her despair at the news of Jughead’s hearing loss when he couldn’t see her face, Jughead does the same at the impact the news that he’s fated to die in the battle against evil and very soon. I love Jabitha’s dynamic, of people protecting each other in this way. Very grown up.

We end with Betty and Archie waiting on the results of their pregnancy test.

#riverdale episode 6.12 #riverdale episode 107 #jughead jones #tabitha tate #cheryl blossom #penelope blossom #barchie #riverdale opinion #why aren't we getting a jabitha sex scene when i have to watch foni kiss? ew #reggie mantle #Riverdale s6 #riverdale recap #riverdale episode recap

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2ndstringloser · 5 years ago

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Best Friends Brother (pt. I)

A Tyrus fic

Context: Cyrus has been best friends with Amber since they were little. He's had a crush on her brother for as long as he could remember, but he'd never tell.

"Cyrus stop!" Amber yelled as she pushed Cyrus from her bed onto the floor. Cyrus and Amber were having their weekly sleepover, a best friends tradition that has only been broken three times.This week they were at Ambers house.

As they laughed, with Cyrus on the floor and Amber still on the bed, Amber's brother walked in. He was confident normally, but for some reason around Cyrus he got weird. Amber just thought he didn't like Cyrus.

"Hey Ambs uh, dinners almost ready," He said dryly then walked out the door and down the stairs.

"Why does he hate me still? Your mom and dad are basically my second parents but he's still barely ever talked to me." Cyrus said. The truth was, Cyrus really liked Tj. In more than a friend type of way. He'd never tell Amber though because he thought that their friend ship was worth more than a silly crush.

"I don't know. He's weird like that I guess." Amber replied, then they both went downstairs for dinner.

"Hey Aaron, can I help set the table?" Cyrus asked the Kippen's father.

"Of course Cy, thank you very much. Hey Tj why don't you help him." Aaron replied.

Tj reluctantly started grabbing silverware and napkins while Cyrus put out the plates and a pitcher of water. When they were the only people in the dining room, Cyrus decided to ask Tj a question.

"Do you hate me?" He boldly asked.

"What? No of course not. You're my sisters best friend I can't hate you." Tj said back, his voice finally having some feeling in it.

"Then why have you said like 10 words total to me for the entire like 8 years I've been friends with Amber?"

"I don't know. Sorry."

Just then Amber walked into the room. "Oh my gosh I don't believe it!" she said, over dramatically, "My best friend and baby bro finally talking to each other. This is a miracle."

The boys both just chuckled and the family sat down for dinner. As they were eating a large storm had picked up, and a giant gust of wind knocked out the power in the house.

"I think we have some candles in the garage," Aaron said, "Tj you and Cyrus go look for them. Amber I need you to help me hook up the small generator to the fridge so the food doesn't spoil."

Cyrus looked at Tj. Great, he had managed to not be alone with Tj for forever but now there was no avoiding it. They walked to the garage and looked for the candles.

"Uh- I think there's some up on that shelf," Tj said awkwardly. He climbed up the ladder and tried to reach for the pack of candles, "It's too tight, I can't get it."

"Lemme try," Cyrus. They switched places on the ladder. Suddenly one of the ladder legs broke and the structure gave out, leaving Cyrus to fall. Tj reacted quickly and caught him as best as he could. For a second they just sat there, Cyrus in Tj's arms, them looking at each other. "I got the candles." Cyrus said, breaking the silence.

"Cool. Let's go inside then." Tj responded. They were both aware of how the previous moment made them feel, but neither of them knew the other was feeling the same things.

Tj went to his room immediately, even though he would just be sitting in the dark. Cyrus lit the candles and sat with Amber for a bit.

"Shit, my phones gonna die," she said.

"I have a portable charger!" Cyrus exclaimed, "Lemme go get it for you." Cyrus walked up the stairs to go get the charger from his bag. As he walked back out of Amber's room Tj was standing out in the hallway.

"Why are you up here all alone?" Cyrus asked him.

"Uh. Just trying to think. My phone died though so... " He trailed off.

"Oh. This charger has like three charges so once Amber's done you can have it." Cyrus responded. His palms started to sweat. "Hey thanks for catching me earlier, that was nice of you."

"Well i wasn't just going to let you fall," Tj chuckled. "You're too cute to hit the ground and risk breaking your face."

Cyrus' heart fluttered at that comment, Tj actually called him cute. He didn't respond to Tj, instead he just smiled and walked down the stairs.

Tj stepped back and took in what had just happened. Why did he say that? Yeah he thought Cyrus was cute, but he never planned to actually tell him that. Tj walked back into his room and sat in the dark, alone.

About three hours into the power outage Cyrus went back upstairs to hand off the charger from Amber to Tj. He walked into the dark room and approached Tj who was laying on his bed.

"Hey, Amber's done with this so you can use it now." He said, a bit uncomfortable to be in Tj's room. As long as Cyrus and Amber have been friends Cyrus has never been in there.

Tj sat up to take the charger, "Thanks," he said. As he reached out to grab it his hand brushed Cyrus'. They stayed there for just a second. Suddenly Tj stood up and grabbed Cyrus' face. There was a momentary pause, as if they were making sure the situation was real, then Tj initiated a kiss. It was short, just a peck. Both of them were shocked, but still happy it happened.

"I should get back downstairs," Cyrus said.

"Thanks for the charger," replied Tj. He worried that he made a mistake, that he ruined the small friendship that just started to bloom.

A short while later the power came back on. When Cyrus went upstairs to go to bed he found his charger laying on his bag, Tj's room was empty. 'Maybe he was ashamed of what happened' Cyrus thought. He was the captain of the basketball team, and really popular, so in the small town of Shady Side him being gay would be a big deal.

A little while later Cyrus could hear footsteps come up the stairs, and into Tj's room.

"I'm gonna go to the bathroom." Cyrus lied to Amber, really he was going to talk to Tj. "Hey," he said as he walked into Tj's room. Tj stood up in front of Cyrus. "About earlier I-" Cyrus was cut off by Tj pulling him in for another kiss.

"I like you Cyrus," said Tj, "I've liked you for a really, really long time... that's why I haven't ever talked to you. You make me nervous, I felt like you'd never, ever like me back."

"Well I do. I have. You're amazing, that was amazing."

"Oh shit, are you going to tell Amber? 'Cus I haven't actually come out to her yet." Tj said worriedly.

"Neither have I"

"Okay, secret for now then?" asked Tj.

"Yeah, for now."

#tyrus #tyrus fic #andi mack #im just recycling my shitty wattpad one shots lol #sorrry #like if you want pt II

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bookwormscififan · 5 years ago

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Oblivion: Chapter 1, Part 1/2

Buy me a coffee?

A/N: welcome to the beginning of Oblivion! I hope you’ve read the blurb, because a context on this story is essential! This is just as much a new chapter in my own writing life as it is a new leaf of my blog. I’ll be trialling new formats and structures in this work, and applying things I’ve learnt from uni. Hope you all enjoy.

Warnings: electrocution

Characters: Anton Brodes, Chase Brodes, Jackie Brodes (calling them the Brodes family), Detective Inspector George Wallace, Dr. Henry Schneep

Word count: 1305 words (I’ve split the introductions into two parts so you have time to digest this first batch)

“Name?”

“Septicie.”

“Real name.”

“Anton… Anton Brodes.”

“Age?”

“Don’t know.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Something about the power outage in the town, probably.”

“Anton, I just need to know what happened. Can you do that for me?”

A sigh.

Anton Brodes was working his usual late night shift at the surveillance company downtown during the worst rainstorm recorded in the town ever. Earbuds in, he was whistling to the music pounding in his ears as he ran the mop down the corridor.

He looked up as a flicker of sparks flew into the hall from a room.

“Anybody out there?” No answer. Concerned about the possibility of a humanitarian crisis, he crept to the room to make sure nobody was inside.

The room was an array of brightly-coloured sparks and fizzing wires. As his eyes travelled around the room, Anton realised one of the large circuit boxes had short-circuited and was breaking apart the rest of the room.

“Damn it, why my shift?” Taking a deep breath, he reached out to begin repairing the wires.

As his hand touched the box, a bright flash blinded him temporarily. He vaguely registered falling forwards, and a cold chill running up his arms. As his body fell to the floor, the sparks and wires from the circuit boxes began to seep into his pores, manipulating his DNA and causing him to yell in pain. Then he passed out.

***

“Name?”

“You know my name, Inspector.”

“This is protocol, Jackie. Just say your name for the record.”

“You just said my name.”

“Full name.”

“Jackie Brodes.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-five. Look, if you want me to tell you what I saw, just say. Don’t go through this ‘protocol’ stuff. We’ve been through this a dozen times.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“With pleasure.”

Jackie was sitting on the roof of the police station, surveying the area the same way he did every night. A flashing to his left alerted his attention.

“What the hell?” He squinted at the bright light emanating from downtown, trying to place its exact location.

“Anton!” Unwinding his rope, he began to swing across the city, Spider-man style. His heart pounded in his chest, worry clouding his face.

Arriving at the company, Jackie used his patented electronic lockpick to get inside, following the sounds of yells to find Anton’s cleaning equipment abandoned.

“Strange. He never leaves that alone,” Jackie commented to himself as he looked down the corridor. Flickering lights impaired his vision, and he put on some night-vision goggles to see better.

Heading down the hall to the room with sparks, he saw an amalgamation of wires covering a moving figure. Upon further inspection, Jackie realised it was his estranged brother, wrapped in cables and unconscious.

“Anton, hold on, I’ll help you. Power switch, power switch…” he spun in a circle, finding the master switch for power, and flicking it off. As soon as the cables had stopped fizzing and writhing, he began to disentangle his brother.

“Are you alright? Anton, talk to me.” He held the janitor, feeling static electricity prick his skin with every movement. Tilting his head, the hero activated the communications device sewn into his hood.

“We have a code yellow in the surveillance company downtown. Power surge or short circuit. There’s been a casualty. Please hurry.” He held Anton close, ignoring the pricks of static as he tried to make the man open his eyes.

Anton woke up in the darkness, a heavy weight on his chest. Opening his eyes, the lights of the room flickered, then shone brightly.

He raised his arm to shield his eyes, then held it back to look at the bandages wrapped around it. Curious, he lifted his other arm, seeing the same thing. What happened?

“Oh, you’re awake. How are you feeling?” A nurse walked into the room, clipboard in her hands and warm smile on her face.

“I feel…” he drifted off as his voice crackled. He tried clearing his throat, only for the lights to flicker. He looked at the nurse, who shrugged.

“There’s a thunderstorm outside. The lights flicker whenever that happens.” Anton nodded, slowly, not telling the nurse that the room was dark before he opened his eyes.

“I’ll call your brother in. He’s been sitting outside for hours.” She left, leaving the door open before leading a man in a red hoodie inside.

“Hey, Anton. How are you feeling?” Instead of speaking, Anton raised his hands and began to sign to the hero. The Brodes family had learnt sign due to their father going deaf in their early years.

Something weird is happening to me. Jackie read the signs, then nodded, turning to the nurse and asking to be left alone. She left the room, giving Anton a wary glance.

“What do you mean by weird? Are you sick?”

When I opened my eyes, it was like I turned the lights on. Then my voice…

“My voice crackles, Jackie.” The hero started at the sound of the janitor’s once smooth voice. He sat down, lifting Anton’s arms to inspect the bandages.

“Do your arms hurt? I found you wrapped up in sparking wires. I can call Schneeple if you want-” Anton shook his head furiously, grabbing the hero’s wrists.

I just want to get out of here. Take me home. Jackie nodded slowly, thinking.

“It’s Chase’s week with you. I’ll give him a call.”

***

“Mr. Brodes, I understand your concern about your wife and family, but your brother-”

“He’s not my brother.”

“-Anton has been through and done something terrible to the city. I need to know everything you know.”

“You know, it’s only been two months since he was found at the surveillance company. My family’s been missing for two years.”

“As soon as you tell us your story, we’ll go back to the investigation on your wife.”

“Fine.”

Chase was sitting at the police station, discussing a missing persons’ report for the eighth time in two months.

“They’ve been missing for a year and a half, sir. There must be a priority for that.” The officer sighed, running a hand through his hair.

“Mr. Brodes, we’ve been looking for years, and gotten nothing. They disappeared. Maybe it’s time to-”

“No, I refuse to believe they’re… that word. If they were, you would have found a record of that, wouldn’t you?”

“True, sir. Look, the man in charge of your case will be back tomorrow, why don’t you come back then?” Chase sighed in frustration, then nodded.

As he left the station, his phone began to play the tune of ‘Bad Case of Loving You’, signalling Henry was calling.

“What’s up, Hen?” The voice on the other end was shaky, a little confused, and strongly laced with German roots.

“You need to come back home. I think you should call Marvin on your way.”

When Chase arrived home, he saw Henry standing in the doorway to the kitchen, eyes trained on a person at the table.

“Who’s this?” Chase took his hat off and hung his wet coat on the coat hanger by the door.

“Did you not call Marvin?” Chase shook his head, trying to get the water off his hair.

“No reply. Where did Charlie Chaplin come from?”

“That’s the weird thing. He just appeared on the stairs when I came home. I thought maybe Marvin had something to do with it.” The doctor paused to consider something, then chuckled to himself.

“Actually, the weird thing is over here.” He led Chase to the foyer, turning on the light and pointing to the stairs. About halfway up, the pastel green paint had faded to monochrome, looking like a broken television set.

“Great, our newcomer drained the colours from our stairs.” Chase looked back at the kitchen, watching the visitor sip on tea.

“He’s certainly fully coloured.”

#Oblivion #Dectective Inspector George Wallace #electrocution tw #enjoy #chapter 1 part 1 #Anton Bradless #Chase Bradless #Jackie Bradless #James Jonee #Henry Sovach

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chasingshhadows · 5 years ago

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on michael & maria

Yup, Imma talk about it.

I’m unfortunately well aware of the ~discourse~ on this particular topic, but I have Opinions and Feelings so I’m gonna share them. In this post, I’m gonna follow their relationship from the beginning of the show through episode 1.11 (Champagne Supernova). (The events of 1.13 are a topic that I’ll be addressing separately and a bit more in-depth.)

I am in what appears to be a minority of Malex Roswell fans that thinks the show did a really great job of setting up and seeing through the relationship with Michael and Maria, both in the ways it became physical and the ways it became emotional.

Before I begin, I want to emphasize something about this relationship that seems to bother a lot of people or maybe just go unnoticed: Much of the development between these two, while absolutely present, is not overt and oft times isn’t even on-screen. I get why and how this bothers people because it’s understandable to want to see character development on-screen and not have to infer it from context or subtext, or have to rely on people like me to do the work of going through the season and finding it. Plus, that means it likely falls through the cracks for most casual viewers who don’t take the time to process and analyze the meanings behind what they’re seeing. I get that, and understand that it’s frustrating.

That said, I’m here to play with everything the show has given us, and that includes the subtleties of the Michael & Maria dynamic. I’m a master extrapolator ok.

And just a ~warning~ to the shippers reading this: This post is about Michael & Maria and their relationship and how it builds and grows. This is not an extended diss post on Maria or Miluca, so if that’s what you’re looking for, this post is not for you. That said, I would be remiss in not acknowledging to any Miluca fans reading this that I am a hardcore Malex shipper and can’t guarantee that my bias in that way doesn’t leak through. Just - you’ve been warned.

Also to clarify - when I use the word “relationship,” I do not mean Relationship like, couple. I mean, any two people that interact with each other have a relationship with each other.

TL;DR: Michael and Maria were and are far closer as friends than most people seem to believe before they became involved. The journey of them hooking up, catching feelings, and coming together is marked by progressively stronger signs of affection and attraction. The development is there, if you care to look for it.

And now that my thesis is clear, let me show my work.

Anyway. Let’s start at the beginning.

We learn right as Michael is introduced that he spends a lot of time at the Wild Pony, and that getting arrested for getting drunk and getting into fights there is a common occurrence for him. As Maria runs this bar, this means the two of them spend a lot of time together, likely at odds considering she’s probably the one calling the cops.

The first interaction they have as characters isn’t an interaction at all, and seems to contradict the last assumption, at least in one way. Because Maria sees Alex looking at Guerin and the first thing she says about it?

She acknowledges he’s “rifraff” but then immediately says she thinks he’s hot. And then at Alex’s dubious look, she tries to justify. Which means that’s something she’s noticed, and the “sex in a truck” is something she’s thought about. And she and Alex have an easy enough relationship even after a decade spent mostly apart that she feels comfortable bringing that up. She’s gossiping about cute boys with her long lost best friend and Guerin is the cute boy on her mind right now.

This, my friends, is what we in the biz like to call foreshadowing.

Now, something that is entirely not stated but is at least tangentially hinted at: Michael is a punchy drunk that intentionally picks fights at the Wild Pony. Now, who do we know who appears to also spend a lot of time at the Wild Pony and are also walking “Hit Me” signs? That’s right, Racist Wyatt & Racist Hank. I’m not saying it happens every night or even every week, but I have to imagine at least a few times over the years, Michael decided to take out his dramatic cowboy angst on the two racist assholes spouting off in the corner. And regardless of her distaste for the violence and her annoyance at needing to call the cops again, I have to imagine that Maria at least noticed that Michael is throwing punches for the right reasons sometimes. (and again, none of this is explicitly stated, but all of the pieces are laid out and it doesn’t take a casual viewer to put them together).

We first see them actually interact at the bar during the blackout and it is hella flirtatious; they’re both smirking, leaning forward, teasing. It’s playful.

More than that though, it speaks to a deeply ingrained familiarity, friendliness, and banter. Michael swipes a bottle from behind the bar - an expensive bottle, apparently - as if that’s just a normal thing for him to do. And Maria doesn’t even try to stop him - sure, she Hey!’s him, but her only objection is, “that’s a health code violation” as she goes about cleaning up the bar and collecting glasses.

Again, I know this is subtle, but it says so much about their relationship before this moment. That Maria lets him grab the bottle. That he hears that he’s caught and just…. continues opening the bottle while making a teasing comment about her power-outage decorations. That she just watches as he takes a drink straight from the bottle. The soft, teasing “Didn’t I ban you for life?”

This isn’t behavior she would allow from just any customer and especially not one who we’re led to believe is a Problem Customer. And their conversation about his tab and such indicates they aren’t like, best friends or anything, but they’re on familiar enough territory that they can joke and tease and steal liquor like it’s habit, like it’s just how they are.

And remember - they both grew up in this town. They’ve probably known each since they were 11 (when Michael was sent back to Roswell) but definitely knew each other in high school. I doubt they ever hung out or even really interacted all that much but they have that awkward “I know too much about you because we’ve been sharing space for 15 years” thing going on.

And now Maria has watched him make a valiant attempt to drink himself to death for half a dozen years and bury his sorrows in anyone that’ll have him. She’s smart, she’s learned her lesson with Chad, she doesn’t just want to be another notch in Guerin’s bedpost.

But, he’s cute and he’s safe, so she flirts.

I mean look at this:

Like fuck, she’s practically purring.

Michael is clearly on board with that mood. This is sexy, this is him fully ready to hear exactly what he can do for Maria, this is his mind in the gutter.

He makes a joke - in a super sultry voice, mind you - about being her least favorite customer, to which she laughs while passing him glasses for the tequila (yes, it’s mezcal, I know) he stole.

This is all very friendly, y’all. And that doesn’t mean they’re the braid-each-other’s-hair, tell-me-all-your-deepest-secrets type of friends, but they are friends. Not best friends, but casual friends. Almost a coworkerly-type of teasing affection. They’re two people wholly comfortable with the other, they’re fond of each other. They tease each other but there’s never any bite - it’s playful and fun and easy. They sit on opposite sides of that bar at least several times a week and yeah, Maria has to call the cops when shit gets rowdy, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t appreciate Guerin’s personality and presence, or that he doesn’t enjoy the teasing banter with the hottie behind the bar that he knows he has no chance with.

From there, Isobel steals the floor, and Maria is annoyed and not taking shit. She makes a crack about Michael’s drinking, and Isobel makes her move.

And then Maria sees something I’m sure she’s seen before when he’s with Isobel but is still at odds with the Guerin in her mind - she sees Michael being soft, tender, and concerned.

And this prompts Maria, for what I believe is the only time in the first season, to call him Michael.

Jump to the day when both Isobel and Mimi go into institutions. Maria has reached her limit. She’s strung out, she’s had to fall back on her last resort because nothing else has worked and she’s feeling like a failure; she’s feeling lost because her mom has been her rock her entire life. And Michael is actually in a similar place. He’s been trying to protect Isobel, his own rock, from herself for so long, he’s let that destroy himself, his hope, his future, and now she’s put herself in the hands of people he vehemently distrusts because he failed.

So, they’re both here to drown their sorrows at the bottom of a bottle. And again, let’s talk about the fact that Michael gets an entirely different treatment than any other customer that might walk through that door. Because what she sees in that mirror? It’s a kindred spirit. It’s a broken man who’s been crumbling on a stool in her bar for years and who looks just like she feels: like he’s just a step away from shattering.

And this is also Michael Guerin, with whom she shares an easy camaraderie, who she knows can be soft. So, she lets him stay.

One drink. No talking.

She passes him the bottle and he sighs in relief because Maria is giving him exactly what he needs right now. To not be alone with his thoughts. To lose himself a little bit in a haze, to let the alcohol blur the self-hatred swirling in his mind.

And Maria, Maria doesn’t wanna crack. She doesn’t want to fall apart, because she can’t, because it’s her job to hold it together - for her mom, for her friends, for this town. She’s supposed to be the fun, happy friend, the bartender, the good time.

She’s not allowed to break.

But she knows if she opens her mouth, she will. So when Guerin starts to thank her, she shuts him right down.

Notice that she calls him Guer? Not Guerin. Not even Michael. But Guer. That’s soft, that’s familiar. That’s a nickname, and it rolls off her tongue like that’s normal. Like she’s used it before.

It’s these things, y’all, the little things that truly show us the depth of this relationship. I’ve seen said more times than I can count that Michael and Maria’s connection, their friendship, him “knowing her”, her feelings - that they all came out of nowhere. That these two went 10 years without liking each other or being attracted to each other and ~one day~ it all just changed. And that’s just not true. This thing between them, it’s been there, simmering, slowly building. The signs are there if you know what you’re looking for, if you know what it looks like before two people that know each other fall into bed, before they catch feelings.

And y’all, these two? Are a veritable construction zone of signs.

What happens next is pivotal to this relationship. Because Maria was right, opening her mouth was a catalyst and she starts to crack, and then loses it completely.

And this, this is new for Michael. Maria never cracks, never cries. She’s a firecracker and a half, fierce and strong, she commands the room, and never shows weakness. It takes him a moment to catch up to what he’s seeing and then-

This is so soft. He lets out a comforting “hey” as he wraps his arm around her shoulder and pulls her close, holds her tight. Tries to give her the stability she’s clearly lacking, lets her lean on him for support.

He’s there for her. He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t try to tell her it’s ok. Doesn’t cross any boundaries. He’s just there, just present, and lets her take what she needs from him in that moment.

This, again, proves the depth of their bond. Their friendship. Maria wouldn’t let any deadbeat from the bar touch her like that, especially not in a moment of weakness. And Michael wouldn’t offer unconditional comfort to anyone either - he’s not cruel by any means, but few people rank high enough to deserve his kindness. But here, Maria not only lets Michael hold her, she leans in, grabs at his jacket, settles in close.

She trusts him, and he cares for her.

And you can see even as he holds her, he’s still confused. He’s still not entirely sure what’s happening, but he pulls her closer anyway. Because she needs it.

This a turning point in their relationship. This is the moment they go from banter friends to comfort friends. The moment their friendship deepens from something fun to something warm. Something real.

A few weeks later, they’ve both come off their respective cliffs. Maria has come to him for help. And as we learn at the end of the episode, there’s an emotional attachment to her request. This sign is special, this sign specifically is important to her - and she’s trusting Guerin to fix it.

Now we know that “no once can fix a car as fast as” Michael, and that Isobel, at least, has a habit of calling him to fix things for her, but what this tells us is that Michael also likely has a reputation around town as a fixer, as a handy man. Enough, at least, for Maria to know Michael can fix this. And between his reputation and her experiences with him, she knows him to be dependable and reliable enough to do this for her.

They’ve fallen back into their banter because it’s easy and it’s not heavy. Because they’re still Maria and Guerin even after a moment of tenderness. Because this is natural to them.

Now, Michael says something that apparently confuses people. Because Max says, “Dude, tell me you’re not sleeping with Maria,” and Michael immediately shoots back with, “Never!” And to some, I suppose, this feels incongruous with his behavior in the next episode. And all I really have to say to that is if I truly “never” slept with any of the people I’ve said I would “never” sleep with, my List would be like…. half as long.

Anyway, Michael brings the sign to the bar later that same day. Which is significant because - remember what else is going on that day. Isobel nearly died. He’s been running all over town with Liz and worrying about losing his sister - the single most important person in his life - and still, he made time to fix Maria’s sign.

He and Max left the junkyard right after Maria dropped it off, and we saw him at the hospital, then chasing down Liz, then taking Liz to his bunker, then to the cave, then he ran back to get Isobel from the hospital.

Which means after Isobel went into the pod, Michael went back to the junkyard to fix Maria’s sign. Just as much because she needed it as because he needed it. He needed to do it, needed to not fail someone he cared about that day. Needed to have something to show to himself that he could fix things, to prove to himself he could fix Isobel.

And when he drops it off, Maria notes how fast it was, having no idea just how fast because she doesn’t know everything that happened that day. He reiterates that he could have made her a new sign, but what he means is that he wants her to know that he would have, for her. Max once said that Michael has never done anything for anyone, while we all know that that line was a flaming pile of bullshit, it’s true that Michael isn’t someone to offer his help to just anyone; he’s picky about the people deserving of his effort and he’s letting Maria know she’s one of them.

And she softens. She opens up. Explains the real reason she needs this sign. Let’s Michael see a glimpse of something she hid from her own best friend.

It gets heavy for a moment, which is a territory they’re still figuring out how to navigate. Maria “hmms” at Michael’s “beacon” comment and he aptly puts together that that’s all she wants to say on the matter. He redirects them into more familiar territory with a teasing joke to break the tension and Maria follows him there with a, “Jerk” and a poorly disguised smirk.

It’s comfortable. Easy.

Six weeks pass before we see them together again, though it’s certainly not the first time they’ve interacted, judging by the fact that Michael has racked up another bar tab.

Maria greets him coolly - whether that’s because of her mood re: her mother, or because Alex is there and Alex has already expressed discomfort at being around Guerin (see: human trio reunion scene) is unclear, but she does greet him. Even if she’s a bit prickly, he still warrants her attention just by walking in the door.

And this may be some of my own projection, but it also speaks a little to me of Maria starting to catch on - subconsciously, at least - that she might have feelings for Michael. After my own experiences with the Chads of the world, I tend to react defensively around people I start to fall for, including being actively cool around them. It’s not pulling pigtails, not quite, but more I’m-terrified-of-you-finding-out-I-have-feelings-and-rejecting-me-so-I’ll-be-extra-unfriendly-so-you-think-I-don’t-like-you.

Michael is flirting - stung, from Alex’s rejection, and trying to get lost in a distraction - but Maria lets it slide right off her.

When we see them again in Texas, it’s awkward, but not because of them. Max and Liz are seeing each other for what appears to be the first time since her declaration that they are not meant to be, after having promised to save the life of the woman who killed her sister because she can’t stand to see Max hurt. So. It’s awkward.

Michael recognizes this immediately - having spent significant time with Liz who I’m sure pointedly refused to talk about Max, and at least some time around Max even before the 4+ hour drive in which he was fully back on his broody bullshit - so he tries to cut the tension by teasing flirtily with Maria. Because that’s a thing he can do. Something that’s natural and fun for them.

Maria teases right back, likely having seen at least some of Liz’s side of this, and makes her subtle exit, knowing full well Michael would join her and leave the two lovebirds to their awkward hello.

Note that when Michael goes into the tent to have his hand healed, he goes in with Maria. Not Max, whose idea it was. But his friend, Maria. Which means they spent the long wait in that line together. She clearly needs proof - or disproof - of Arizona’s powers as much as Max, but we all know what Michael’s hand means to him, and that he was willing to have Maria there while discussing it, potentially having it healed says, again, so much about their friendship.

Arizona talks about Michael reopening the wound in his mind and he looks to Maria for reassurance. And Maria gives that to him, freely and warmly. Organically. And you can see how much that little act helps him, that he’s able to continue forward knowing she’s there.

And when Arizona essentially blows them off, Maria - who is here, remember, to find a way to heal her own ailing mother - offers Michael the comforting shoulder rub, the defensive “Come on [let’s get out of here]”.

When Maria is upset, following Arizona’s reveal as a fraud, it’s Michael, not Liz, her best friend, that follows her. For all that Michael wanted to go in guns blazing and confront her before, he’s ready to walk away when he sees that Maria is upset.

And no, Michael is not the arbiter of friendship, but he’s pretty sure it has something to do with supporting someone when they’re upset. He doesn’t know, as Liz does, that Maria does not need that, so this is his way of trying. Maria is important enough for Michael to try.

And thus gets us to my favorite scene of the Michael/Maria saga.

She says with a teasing smile on her face. She says with a fond glance at Guerin.

And his wink says he knows and he’s playing along.

When she gets up, Michael is concerned. Asking Liz if she’s going to follow her. “Don’t you think she needs a girlfriend or whatever?” Because Michael wants to make sure Maria is being taken care of.

And then.

I just. Cannot get over. This look. This is awe, this is wonder, this is heat. This is Michael for the first time seeing Maria, seeing just how strong and fierce and powerful and beautiful she really is. This is The Moment that Michael stops thinking of Maria as a fun, flirty friend, and starts seeing her as something more. As someone he might be able to really fall for. As someone who maybe, just might, be able to fill the void left behind by Alex.

And so he just stares. He cannot take his eyes off from her y’all. The whole rest of this scene is Michael just fixated on the marvel that is Maria DeLuca. He’s watching her the entire time Liz asks Max to dance. Watching her sing upon that stage. Hell, Liz has to grab his face to get him to look away and still his eyes find her again.

And Maria, for all her teasing and banter, is the one to make the first move. She extends her hand to Michael, beckons him forward and:

Imma just let that speak for itself.

She doesn’t just do it once those, she reaches for him again, just gently touching him, making contact. And it’s not just comforting contact like Michael did when she cried, or when Maria touched him in the tent. It’s not even really friendly.

No, it’s decidedly sensual. Sexy. She’s touching him in ways that are meant to illicit a reaction.

And it’s a reaction she gets, when Michael follows her from the bar.

Look at that smile. She’s teasing him, but you can see she’s happy that he’s chosen to be there, out there, with her. This is the face of a woman who’s just drunk and high enough to forget her reasons to stay away, and is just letting herself be giddy that the person she likes is here with her. She’s not thinking about her worry of being another one of Michael’s one night stands, not thinking about not letting herself get attached for fear of being hurt (spoiler alert: she was already attached).

That’s the thing, with humans. We’re really really good at lying to ourselves when we’re afraid. We’re experts at denying the existence of something that scares us, and convincing ourselves that we’re safe. Maria has convinced herself she feels nothing for Michael because admitting those feelings, even to herself, when she feels certain he doesn’t feel the same way, would be devastating. So she refuses to acknowledge it, pretends it’s not even there.

And that’s why we see such a drastic change in her behavior from night to morning. Why she was all smiles and wiles and flirtation when she was drunk, high, and looking for a distraction, but was cold and in full denial mode when she was sober and facing down the reality of the door she’d opened. Her subconscious is trying to preemptively protect her from the pain and she’s projecting her anger at herself onto Michael.

Exacerbated, I’m sure, by the fact that by the time they actually kissed, and slept together, neither of them were that drunk. We see them wander off together with a joint before Max and Liz leave the bar, and we don’t see them together again until after Liz and Max have found a hotel, gotten into bed, each tossed and turned long enough to get back out of bed, get dressed, head out to the park and talk, and then go back to bed. So I’d say it’s been at least a couple hours since their last drinks that things heat up.

So Maria doesn’t even have the excuse for herself that she was wasted because she wasn’t. Neither of them were. She let herself give into her feelings and attraction in a moment of weakness and the only one she’ll have to blame when it bites her in the ass is herself.

Even if Maria is refusing to allow herself to believe she has feelings, there is still a gut feeling that what she did was a mistake, was going to get her hurt. The mind can be interesting in that way, warning you of danger without allowing you to see what that danger is.

Michael is in a different place here. He’s upset, but in an entirely different and far more silent way than Maria. Alex broke his heart, again, just yesterday. He had to watch Alex walk away from him and for the first time, it truly felt final. Alex said it was over, full stop. I don’t think Michael had ever before thought about moving on from Alex, not really. He was always just waiting.

“Where I stand, nothing’s changed.”

But now Alex walked away and it looks like this time, he really isn’t coming back. And for the first time Mchael has to consider what his life might look like without Alex in it, and suddenly here Maria is, being the actual walking definition of charm and grace. She’s someone he knows, whom he knows to be good. She’s gorgeous and kind and beautiful and fierce. And he’s seeing for the first time just how strong she is, how courageous.

He’s mesmerized.

And he’s paying attention. To all of Maria’s little touches and smiles. To the way she seems to want exactly what he wants. Which is why he’s so unaffected by her protests and denials the next morning. Because this is Maria, his friend. He teases and pokes fun because they’re friends and he can. And because, as everyone in Roswell knows, Michael is an expert at navigating the awkward morning after, so he eases her panic about people finding out, and then teases some more.

Michael’s in a great mood. The sun is shining, there’s a gorgeous woman lying next to him, and maybe for the first time that he can remember, he’s not thinking about Alex. Or Isobel. Or anything that hurts.

That doesn’t last though. Alex shows up, reignites every emotion Michael has ever felt for him, and leaves Michael more certain than ever that he’ll never get to have Alex the way he wants him. (I have another meta on this coming, I promise). And so he’s hurt and alone again.

And he has Maria’s necklace.

So he decides to give it his best shot. He brings her the necklace, laying on a casual desire. Keeping it cool while still making clear what he wants.

And I’ve already talked about what happened with Maria and Alex between the ride home and Michael showing up, but the important take-aways here are:

Maria did not truly accept her feelings for Michael until she heard herself lie about them to Alex

Maria does not know Alex and Michael’s history beyond “they kissed once as teenagers” and “Alex still loves him”

Maria never wants to see that look of pain on Alex’s face again

And Alex knowing about them sleeping together also tells Maria that Michael, within hours of promising not to do so, told him. So she’s understandably pissy about that.

She cuts right to the chase when Michael starts to flirt.

And Michael’s face is… wounded.

Because he came to Maria to forget about Alex. He came to Maria because he likes her, and because he wanted to see if that spark he felt could light a fire, could turn into something real. He’s exploring, for the first time, the potential of really falling for someone who isn’t Alex.

And that’s what it is, at this point: potential.

But Maria says no, so he does with Maria the exact same thing he did when rejected by Alex - he deflects. Pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “Why do you keep saying it can’t happen again, I got it the first time. That’s not why I’m here at all!” (narrator voice: it was, in fact, exactly why he was there).

And both of their faces when Michael walks away tell us this isn’t want they want.

This scene is a little bit devastating. Seeing Maria refuse herself something she wants. Seeing Michael once again turned away due to something outside his control.

But he takes the hint and leaves. He’d made an attempt and was shut down, and he wasn’t going to push it.

It appears they don’t see each other again until the morning of the Gala, when Maria straight up pretends she doesn’t see him.

And Michael calls her on it, because it’s bullshit and he knows it. They were friends before they slept together and he’ll be damned if he’s gonna let that get in the way of what appears to be his only human connection aside from Alex.

Maybe it’s me, but this line was delivered with exactly the right amounts of relief and disappointment. Relief that she won’t have to endure seeing Michael in a tux. Disappointment that she won’t get to see Michael in a tux. It’s a Mood.

Michael makes a joke because that’s what they do. Maria said no, but he wants to ease them back into their friendly camaraderie. He doesn’t want to lose his friendship with Maria.

But Maria can’t do what she and Michael do. Because what she and Michael do is why she fell for him. So she can’t let them go back to being banter friends across the bar, not yet anyway. She needs time and she needs space so she can get over him.

Not to mention: Maria doesn’t know. Period. Maria doesn’t know Michael’s feelings for her might be genuine. Maria doesn’t know that Alex and Michael’s history is fraught and traumatic and painful. Maria doesn’t know that Michael and Alex were seeing each other over the summer. Maria doesn’t know that their history doesn’t start and end with that kiss in the museum. She doesn’t know that Michael still has feelings for Alex. And while Maria knows Alex is in love with Michael, she doesn’t know he’s made any effort to show that to Michael.

And she doesn’t want to hurt Alex. He’s always been there for her and she wants to protect him. To protect herself.

So she makes a jab about the museum - it was intentional insofar as she meant to drive the wedge of Alex further between them, but again, she does not know what else happened after Michael kissed Alex at the museum. She isn’t trying to hurt Michael here, she’s trying to build a wall.

When Michael says “It’s over. It’s been over,” she has no reason not to believe him.

And Michael isn’t saying that because he’s trying to come on to her again. He’s saying that because he can see that Maria feels guilty and he’s trying to assuage that. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

The look Maria gives Michael here. The glance to his lips. She is gone on this man already. She wants him. She wants to believe him. She wants to be allowed to give in to him.

But she’s not. So she throws up more spikes and walks away.

This moment makes a whole lot more sense if you remember that, as far as we know, Michael has only ever given even a single shit about two humans in his entire life: Alex and Maria. We know what Alex is and was to him, the narrative makes it absolutely clear that Michael has been in love with Alex for a decade and has essentially been idling, just like Max, for Alex to come back. He sees their love as cosmic.

And we know what Maria is to him. She’s his friend. Someone who gets him, at least the little stuff. The light stuff. His sense of humor, his penchant for drowning his sorrows in substances, his compassion and his dependability.

Someone threatening that friendship? The one and only truly painless thing he’s ever found on this forsaken planet? Not a smart person.

Michael and Max make it to the Gala and that protective streak flares again. Because he was right. And Maria is innocent and now she’s vulnerable, and he’ll be damned if he’s gonna let anything happen to her.

This is him continuing to not push boundaries, even when she can’t hear him. She said they can’t continue whatever it was they started, but they were friends before that and he wants to go back to that. Go back to fun.

Not to mention that he is visibly worried in a way we have only seen him express before for Isobel and Alex.

He sits there, holding her, letting his presence be known as a comfort, stroking her hair.

So that when she wakes, she knows immediately that she is not alone. That she is safe and being looked after.

And at the first sign that she may not want him there? He immediately offers to leave, and not only leave, but find someone else she trusts to look after her so that she still won’t be alone.

“You gotta stop showing up for me like this, Guerin.” is what she says, but what she means is “you have to stop reminding me why I fell for you. Stop making it so hard for me to get over you just by being you.”

(And also just a reminder here that Maria is still under the influence of an inhibition-lowering drug. That means it makes her do and say things she would not normally allow herself to do/say. She’d never have admitted these feelings to Michael had she been sober, or under the influence of an intoxicant she’s used to, but this is not that. This is literally a date-rape drug and anyone who has anything shitty to say about Maria in this scene can Fite Me.)

And when Maria says that she never wants him to leave?

Riley put it best: “That is not the face of a man whose feelings have just been reciprocated. That is the face of a man whose life just got very complicated.”

His lips barely twitch towards a smile but he can’t even hold it. He knows he’s supposed to be happy, but he can’t feel it. He wanted to believe that he could want this, that his feelings for Maria could drown out the way he feels about Alex, but like with Maria not realizing her feelings until she heard herself lie, I don’t believe Michael truly recognized his lack of feelings until he heard Maria admit the depth of hers.

I think Michael absolutely, 100%, no doubt cares deeply for Maria. I believe he is unquestionably attracted to her. I think she makes him happy and feel light because she’s not bogged down in the trauma that marks his life, and because she, by her own admission, actively tries to be the Fun Friend.

And I think Michael wants to have feelings for Maria. Because he believes he can’t have Alex and continuing to dwell on that will only continue to hurt him. He wants to move on, and Maria is literally walking perfection. There is no reason Michael shouldn’t absolutely return every bit of her feelings and then some.

But he doesn’t. He can’t. His heart belongs to another.

Now we don’t see the end of the night for Michael and Maria, but we do know that he takes her home. How do we know this? Because there’s no way a man who emphatically threatened to explode anyone who came near her while she was drugged would let her go home alone. Not a chance in hell. I doubt they talked at all, but he made sure she made it home safely.

And that, as far as we know, is the last time that they see each other before the finale, before Michael shows up wrecked and broken and needing to feel something, anything, that doesn’t hurt.

I’ll be diving into his, Maria’s, and Alex’s headspaces, and then taking a look at the dynamic as a whole, but none of what happens in the finale makes any kind of sense if you don’t fully recognize everything that came before it. What lead to it. It was a perfect storm of emotion and heartbreak, and this is just one cloud.

#miluca #m&m #michael guerin #maria deluca #roswell new mexico #rnm meta #rnm #miluca meta #i just have a lot of feelings #on michael & maria #i've been working on this since i finished episode 9 #sooooooo here it finally is lolololol #michael guerin meta #maria deluca meta

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northernrainforest · 6 years ago

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Power

The power went out last night, an hour after I’d stocked the fridge and a half hour before we were going to start making dinner. The last time the power went out, Ladybug was in school and I was just across the parking lot, at the rec center. Somehow the cardio machines were still functional, so I carried on with my workout – and it never occurred to me that my daughter might be fifty yards away, in the dark, and scared. Only when I picked her up did she coming running up to say, “Mommy, the power went out and I was as brave as I could be!” It turns out she was in the bathroom with two other preschoolers when the lights went out; the three of them held hands and walked back toward their classroom. They were picked up on the way by the school librarian who had come to find them, and they were very proud of themselves for being so clearheaded in the face of an emergency.

Last night, once the lights went out but before it got fully dark, we pulled out candles, headlamps, and flashlights and geared ourselves up for the possibility of a long evening with no power. After the lights had been out for ten minutes, I started calling restaurants around town to see who was open. On our way to Fat Stan’s, we tried to figure out where the grid started and ended; the power was on at the post office but off at A&P across the street. I later found out that our Coast Guard friends who live ten miles north of town lost power too. (They had cereal for dinner, which didn’t actually cross my mind. When your preschooler inexplicably hates eating in restaurants, you jump at any chance to say, “Sorry, we haveto go out.”)

I was slightly disappointed that the power was back on when we got home, but I can’t say I was surprised. As many outages as there have been since we’ve lived here – I think it’s up to four – they’ve never been long. It was Flo and Ladybug who reported back from their respective schools the most common reason: bald eagles get tangled up in the wires and blow the transformer. (Or as Ladybug put it, “They break the wire and the power goes out.”) I grew up with power outages, though rarely in Brooklyn. We spent our summers at a little house in Maine (the Canadians across the lake call them cottages, and New Yorkers would call them cabins, but the locals on East Grand Lake all call them camps.) Life at the camp was simple. We kids had a dishwashing schedule which rotated meals by day – really easy with three children in the family. If you had the breakfast dishes you were in luck; a handful of oatmeal bowls and then you could run out and go swimming. Lunch got more complicated, and dinner was the absolute worst, so one of us came up with a compromise: you could choose to cook the meal, and then Mom and Dad had to do the dishes. This is how and why I learned to cook – not because I had some deep love of fine cuisine (although I was always a fan of beautiful illustrated cookbooks) but because I wanted to avoid the odious doing-of-dishes. There was also no television at the camp, and the only person with a computer was our dad – a big hunk of plastic we all called “the IBM PC” – so all fun had to be analog. It’s funny to think that losing power would be such a big deal in that context – we were already living a pretty low-tech life. But it wasa big deal. Some of the most fun summer evenings I remember involve playing Scotland Yard by candlelight. (If you’ve never played Scotland Yard: do yourself a favor.)

So our power was back on last night, but I tried not to let the power of the adventure fade. We all stayed in the living room together, doing our own separate things part of the night, but then reading some new library books together, playing limbo with a jump rope. I’ve sometimes felt sad for our little one that she doesn’t have any allies in the house; if the grownups don’t want to limbo with her, she’s on her own. It has bred a creative spark in her, which is cool. I often see her instructing an entire schoolroom filled with stuffed animals, or turning empty sketch pads into letter-learning workbooks, a doll by her side. But I do think she’s lonely at times: there is no dishes chart, because there’s simply no one to share the task with. One would think an evening in the dark might exacerbate that, but I’ve always found power outages to be thrilling and to bring people together, and Ladybug seemed to agree. Right when the lights clicked off, she and Flo raced down to pick up a package at the post office – a task she might otherwise not have wanted to do, but she was too curious to see the post office bathed in darkness. Even the drive to dinner became an adventure, as we looked for lights in all the businesses we passed and discussed which friends might also be in the dark.

We had something of a haphazard earthquake kit in California; Flo was convinced that the most important element was ramen, but half the case of ramen ended up in my trunk and I couldn’t tell you where the other half was. (Also. I’d have to be very, very hungry to eat cup-a-noodles at this point in my life.) We did have several big jugs of water at the ready, and a first aid kit. But the tricky part about an earthquake kit is where to keep it: what will be destroyed in an earthquake? Where will you be? If you’re somehow trapped in your kitchen, you’ll be fine for awhile; no one keeps an earthquake kit in the bathroom, but of course that would be the worst place to be stuck – no food or drink if the water turns off, and a window too small to escape from. I lived in LA long enough to feel several earthquakes. I was two blocks from the epicenter of a pretty big one and even though it only lasted ten seconds or so, I’ll never forget the feeling of my feet losing their grip, my body tossed around like I’d come unglued from a snow globe. Flo lived through the Northridge earthquake, which shut down the city. He still talks about the eerie devastation of it, 25 years later.

These are eventualities we don’t have to consider anymore, but it’s a good time to put together a power outage kit. We’re going to consolidate our flashlights and headlamps, buy some more candles, throw in a deck of cards. Maybe we’ll put some sort of treat in the box – something we only have when the power goes out. I’m at the stage where I wonder how many more outages there will be before the baby comes. Could there be one while I’m in labor, the entire maternity ward going dark, Ladybug at home with her aunt or her nana, proud of herself for being as brave as she could be? The funny part about a baby is how little he will require: there’s no need to add anything to our kit for him. All this baby will need, for a very long time, is us. Someday we will have a dishes chart, maybe inspiring one of our children to learn how to cook. Someday we’ll play Scotland Yard (we’ve already tried, but it’s hilarious with a four-year-old.) Someday I’ll look up and see Ladybug building her schoolroom, forcing a little boy to sit quietly and listen to her, the way I did to my very accommodating younger sister. It’s been a tough couple of years, getting us to the family that we want – a blog post for another day, perhaps. But in the day to day, caught up in the mundane details of child-rearing, the grief melts away and it’s all very simple: a board game, some library books, limbo-ing with a jump rope. It’s the stuff of life, and there’s power in that.

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velling18sims-blog · 6 years ago

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Charlotte Movers, Charlotte Moving Company, Charlotte Workplace Movers

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katherinehorn · 6 years ago

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The Old Harbour

I contemplated just posting this essay without context, but it just didn't feel right. I wrote this two weeks ago and although it was a creative writing assignment for my English Literature course, it meant a lot more to me than that. The task was to write roughly 2000 words on a specific place or hour of the day or night. We were instructed to create a story by showing the reader our world rather than simply telling them about it. I think I really needed to write about how I was feeling in constructive way and this assignment definitely gave me the space to do that. But anyway, here it is:

The Old Harbour

I hate Gordon's Bay, I always have. Yes, the harbour may have a stunning view of the sea and it may lead to one of the most beautiful coastal drives in the world. But the town itself has very little aesthetic appeal. The houses are all built with strange, flat iron roofs to withstand the perpetual winds and the architecture looks as though it were designed by an unimaginative twelve year old boy. Most of the shopping centres are run down and have an appearance similar to that of a kitchen floor that had never been scrubbed clean. Even the roads take on a kind of dustiness that only just misses the notion of a charming dirt road.

The civilians here are no beauties either. The town's eclectic mix of people might seem quirky to someone else, but I have found no love for the conservative, bored or sheltered people that roam through the area. For starters, there always seemed to be too much drama over nothing. I frequently heard stories of people having children too young, or teenagers trying to run away from home, or people getting into toxic and violent relationships. Being in Gordon’s Bay was like being in a cliché soapie such as7de Laan. The adults I have met here are the kind of people who read everything in Huis Genoot, obtained all their political views from Facebook posts and lived for Saturday braais and impractical manicures. The teenagers, on the other hand, either have a nauseating resemblance to their parents or a rebellious boredom that usually lead to an interest in hard drugs that I could never quite relate to. I will admit I do not live here and I am sure there are many people who do not fall into these stereotypes. But you see, I have only ever met five people from Gordon's Bay that I actively like.

My dislike for the town, I suppose, stems from the fact that I have never met anyone who lives there, who isn’t unhappy.

However, at the same time I am deeply fascinated by this town. I love hearing stories about the group of kids who used to climb underneath the restaurants in Harbour Island to break into the hotel and about how on one occasion they were caught in the swimming pool and chased all the way to the closest suburb. Or about the woman who lived near the old harbour who used to burn herbs and perform tarot card readings. Or even the sad stories about the woman who had been beaten by her husband and left bleeding on the side of the main road where she was ignored by all passersby with the exception of two teenage boys.

The saving grace of Gordon's Bay is its beachfront. When walking along it I felt like a child, excited by each new thing and constantly finding a fresh thrill whenever I stepped inside Aladdin’s Cave or climbed down Bikini Beach wall to reach the tidal pool. The coastline was an adventure of warm water bottles, crisps and wind that smothers your face like a blind person feeling out the shape of your nose. It was a freedom that skipped over the rock pools until the coastline faded into raging waters beneath Faure Marine Drive. It was kissing a curly haired boy with a mouth dried from the sun and the salt. I spent many summer days jumping from those rocks and winding through crowds of every type of person.

Now, looking back, I wonder if I loved those days so much because of the great love I had for that curly haired boy.

My most treasured memory of the town, however, took place long after the warmth of December had dwindled away. It was the 16th of June and it had been a lazy day of unwinding at the end of the semester in front of a TV screen while my miniature schnauzer lay stretched out beside me. I was restless. I needed company and had driven for half an hour to obtain it.

My best friend lived in a glass house that lay in the very centre of Gordon's Bay. He was my only connection to the town, without him I would never have been there in June. In fact I would only have visited the town once, when I slept over at friend in 2016.

When the lights went off that day I had been sitting on his bed fiddling with his hair and trying desperately to convince him that he'd done enough studying for the day. And although I had not yet convinced him, it seemed I had convinced the universe. The power outage was a gift that nudged us to return to our coastline that I longed for so earnestly.

We decided to join our friends at the pub on Beach Road and so, with a rustle of keys and scarves, we jumped into his old Hyundai Getz and it wheezed us down the mountainside. As we turned into the usually bustling Sir Lowry Lane, a cold darkness greeted us. Much like the rest of the town, it was a street I never normally felt comfortable in. But the new darkness of the town comforted me. The sharp architecture retreated into the gloom and the noises that so often overwhelmed me scurried back to their homes. I felt my worries cease their bubbling and nestle themselves at the bottom of my stomach as I nestled into the car chair.

We stared at the pub for at least fifteen minutes when we arrived, neither one of us talking. The sign that usually flashed the words "The Dock" hung damply and barely noticeable above the small glass panes that hid the interior. We could see the dim lights of candles and cellphones dancing across the glass and hear the laughter that trickled out onto the street. With the usual blare of karaoke night missing, an eeriness trapped us inside the parking lot. It was as though we were seeing the town for the first time, as though the darkness were unveiling all the complexities that every day life glossed over. We had no wish to explore it.

Thankfully the coastline had not lost its familiarity and thus we chose to wonder down to the sand and leave the tired pub behind us. We skirted around the sea, playing between the lines the tide created as it swept in and out. But still the distractions of the world seemed too close to us and we slid back into the car and meandered further up beach road.

We parked outside the navy base and skipped down to the old harbour. Despite its strange comfort I still felt scared in the dark, there were too many shadows lurking behind empty cars and fences. So I clung to my guide, for he knew the area like the back of his hand. I trusted him wholeheartedly, for better or for worse.

He lead me round the back of the yacht club and hid me in his shadow when we noticed how it stood open. There were voices inside, Afrikaans ones, and they echoed out indistinguishably to my ears. I heard someone flipping switches irritably. We pressed on.

On the other side of the building we reached a large iron gate that was chained loosely shut. I'd never seen it before and was so irritated with its sudden appearance that I stepped out from my hiding place. They had fenced off the pier for the construction of the new desalination plant. I thought about how I had crawled through one of the construction pipes in January and about how peculiar the world had seemed inside there. The wind had funnelled so strangely through the pipe that I had thought I was going to cry at the other-worldly sound it created. It was what I'd imagined it would be like to be trapped in a void and I was terrified.

I shook the memory off and looked to my guide for a plan of action. He chuckled quietly and slid the gate open wide enough for us to sneak through. It was like the uncovering of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

We giggled as we raced the wind across the concrete, leaping over pipes and twirling around abandoned equipment. For a while we explored the narrow landscape, crawling in between the nesting dolosse and investigating the way that the moonlight glittered over the yachts. I don't remember us talking during this time, although I'm sure we did. We always do. But that night I felt particularly connected to him in our near silence. It felt good to have someone I could be quiet around; someone with whom I could share the world but still experience it separately. I was suddenly glad for the gate; it had kept the rest of the world out.

Eventually we reached the lighthouse at the tip of the pier. It was darkest and windiest here. Not even the brightest car light could reach us. I stood silently at the edge of it, my feet slipping across the damp moss in slow motion. I watched the way the sea tumbled and rolled against the harbour and traced the path that the moon illuminated across it. I marvelled at the black and silver liquid and thought about how never-ending it was. I felt rooted to the earth in a way that I had never felt before. It was as though the slime had grown through my feet and torn out my soul so that it could be buried beneath the bellowing of the tide. Not even the winds could move me.

Even in remembering that moment it feels as though I am still staring at that water, as though I had never stopped and would never be able surrender that feeling of empty peace. But the truth is I did stop staring, I had turned around in search of the boy I love. But as I did I realised how a part of the landscape he was, he sunk into it, tumbled beneath the waves and burst into air like the chill that flew through my hair. His own wild curls echoed the endless movement of the coastline, the dryness of its summer and the uncertainty of its adventures. He could never be separated from that place; it would follow him wherever he went.

As we walked back to the car, the lights switched on and the humming of the world began again. I knew that I was slowly losing a dream that I would never be able to return to. But still, I climbed back into the car and drove towards the inevitable future. That choice will always be a mistake, for now Gordon's Bay will remain an impossible past that I will never reach and never fail to love.

✬✮✭

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scifigeneration · 7 years ago

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How energy storage is starting to rewire the electricity industry

by Eric Hittinger and Eric Williams

The market for energy storage on the power grid is growing at a rapid clip, driven by declining prices and supportive government policies.

Based on our research on the operation and costs of electricity grids, especially the benefits of new technologies, we are confident energy storage could transform the way American homeowners, businesses and utilities produce and use power.

Balancing acts

Energy storage in this context simply means saving electricity for later use. It’s like having a bunch of rechargeable batteries, but much larger than the ones in your cellphone and probably connected to the grid.

After annual average growth of about 50 percent for five years, the U.S. electricity industry installed a total of 1 gigawatt-hour of new storage capacity between 2013 and 2017, according to the firm GTM Research. That’s enough to power 16 million laptops for several hours. While this amount of storage is less than 0.2 percent of the average amount of electricity the U.S. consumes, analysts predict that installations will double between 2017 and 2018 and then keep expanding rapidly in the U.S. and around the world.

To see why this trend is a big deal, consider how electricity works.

It takes a hidden world of complexity and a series of delicate balancing acts to power homes and workplaces because the grid has historically had little storage capacity. After being generated at power plants, electricity usually travels down power lines at the speed of light and most of it is consumed immediately.

Without the means to store electricity, utilities have to produce just enough to meet demand around the clock, including peak hours.

That makes electricity different from most industries. Just imagine what would happen if automakers had to do this. The moment you bought a car, a worker would have to drive it out the factory gate. Assembly lines would constantly speed up and slow down based on consumer whims.

It sounds maddening and ridiculous, right? But electric grid operators basically pull this off, balancing supply and demand every few seconds by turning power plants on and off.

That’s why a storage boom would make a big difference. Storage creates the equivalent of a warehouse to stow electricity when it is plentiful for other times when it is needed.

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The U.S. Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative aims to reduce the cost of solar energy and to make it easier to deploy.

Stretching power

Energy storage can help in a variety of ways, essentially serving as a Swiss Army knife for electricity grids. It can help balance short-term power fluctuations, manage peak demand or act as a backup to prevent or recover from power outages.

And it can be deployed at any scale and at any point in the grid, from a small home storage system to a pumped hydroelectric reservoir big enough to power a small city. While storage actually consumes a little electricity rather than producing any, it makes the electricity business more economically efficient. As the volume of storage grows, we expect grids to become more stable and flexible.

Storage may also make a big difference with electricity generated through solar or wind power – which can only be harnessed when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

But, in general, it isn’t necessary for that purpose yet. While those industries are growing quickly, wind power generates only about 6 percent of U.S. electricity and solar less than 2 percent. Electricity grids can currently use almost all of that power as it is produced.

Grid operators, accustomed to managing the variable supply and demand for power, can manage the extra unpredictability they get from wind and solar energy now. But as utilities, businesses and consumers bring more renewable energy online, the grid may become harder to balance without additional storage.

To be sure, hydroelectric plant operators have been storing power for a long time. The U.S. has the capacity to store some 22 gigawatts in pumped hydropower, about 2 percent of U.S. generating capacity. Yet its reliance on large water reservoirs, which can’t be easily constructed near power markets, limits the growth potential of this energy option.

The Seneca pumped storage reservoir, on the left, and the Kinzua Dam on the Allegheny River in Warren County near Warren, Pa. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library

Competing with natural gas

Once energy storage scales up, utilities will meet peak demand more easily with less total capacity and fewer power plants. If they can rely on storage to supply power during high-demand hours instead of building new power plants, it can save money all around.

But storage isn’t the only game in town – other technologies offer similar benefits. Utilities can install new transmission lines or rely on flexible natural gas, which is essentially the biggest competitor for energy storage.

Natural gas generation produces about a third of the nation’s electricity today and provides many of the same benefits as storage since these power plants are easy to switch on and off. The relatively low prices for natural gas, less than half of what they were a decade ago due to widespread hydrofracking, have probably slowed energy storage growth until now.

Natural gas has become increasingly popular for power generation, displacing demand for coal since 2000. But if storage gets cheap enough, this equation may flip and storage could threaten the economics of natural gas generation.

Help from the government and better batteries

One reason why this industry is growing is that it’s getting a boost from the government.

California, Maryland, New Jersey and Nevada are subsidizing storage, mandating its adoption or both. A similar measure is pending in Hawaii’s legislature.

And despite the Trump administration’s efforts to maximize fossil fuel extraction, the federal government is now laying the regulatory groundwork for the storage industry to compete directly in open wholesale energy markets for the first time.

Improvements in technology have made a difference, too. Battery technology, led by the same lithium-ion design that powers mobile phones, is making big strides and getting much cheaper.

Lithium-ion batteries are both responsible for most of this new wave of grid-connected energy storage and the critical component inside the rapidly growing number of American electric vehicles. For example, the lithium-ion battery used in the the Tesla Powerwall, a home battery system, is the same as the one the company uses in its vehicles.

Grid-scale lithium batteries often differ from those in cars but use the same basic technology. The price of utility-scale lithium-ion battery systems fell 40 percent in just five years to around US$1,200 per kilowatt-hour in 2015 from roughly $2,100 in 2010 and are expected to continue falling.

Rhonda ‘Honey’ Phillips, alongside the Tesla Powerwall battery and inverter connected to solar panels in her Middletown Springs, Vt., yard. AP Photo/Dave Gram

The future

The grid currently has relatively little storage for the same reason that only about 200,000 of the 17.2 million vehicles Americans bought in 2017 were electric: It’s expensive today.

Electric vehicles do not yet save money for most U.S. drivers. But market experts project that electric vehicles ownership will cost less than standard vehicles powered by gasoline within a decade and continue getting cheaper after that.

Likewise, for the electricity grid, if storage gets cheap enough, its potential market could expand from 1 gigawatt-hour to dozens or even hundreds of gigawatt-hours.

If or when that happens, wind and solar power would become more competitive, increasingly displacing both coal and natural gas – now the nation’s two top sources of electric power. And this cheaper storage would also make electric vehicles more affordable, reducing the amount of gasoline and diesel Americans consume. The electricity and automotive industries operate nearly the same way they did 50 years ago. But a world of low-cost batteries would change them both in exciting and unprecedented ways.

No matter what happens, we believe that storage is “future-proof” because it works well on the current grid and with a wide variety of other technologies. If the wind and solar industries keep up their current momentum (and they probably will), storage will become even more valuable. But if the grid goes another direction – relying more on large and expensive generation plants, for example – storage would make it easier to manage peak demand without surplus capacity. Even if we can’t say exactly what the grid of the future will look like, we are pretty confident that storage will keep it humming in new ways.

Eric Hittinger is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Eric Williams is an Associate Professor of Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

#science #technology #energy #alternative energy #battery storage #grid energy storage

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luisneer · 7 years ago

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selected tweets 2016-17

These are tweets from my first @luisneer twitter account. Recently I made a new twitter account with the same username, after having deleted my account and having been without twitter for several months. These tweets are from August 2016 to March 2017, which was most of my first year of college at Shepherd University, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I don't go to Shepherd anymore; I transferred to West Virginia University, in Morgantown, WV, after my second semester. My tweets from late March 2017 to [July or August] 2017, when I deleted my twitter, were not archived.

I'm creating this blog post so the world will have access to some of my tweets from the deleted @luisneer, in case they have any merit as literature. I'm still not sure if I will continue to use twitter in 2018/the future. Usually when I use twitter I feel like I'm actually wanting to be doing something else, but I don't know what; or wanting to be using "another app" that doesn't exist. Twitter generally seems bad for me. Questions about my tweets August 2016-March 2017 can be directed at [email protected]. Thank you

2016

morgantown has ~48 vape shops

**morgantown has ~480 vape shops

siri has werner herzog-like inflections

considering changing outfits when i take several walks in one day (so nobody thinks im a serial killer, stalker, spy, alien)

think i remember ~5% of things i said today

imagined vague connection btwn 'vitamin d' and 'reptar'

felt distinctly that i was a monkey or chimpanzee while crouching in the corner of my dorm room eating peanuts out of a jar

just thought (as a request to my mom) 'fax me my skateboard...'

looked at toilet in bathroom stall with expression of 'utter terror' for what felt like ~15 seconds while it flushed

listening to bright eyes with headphones at house show

feel that the toothpaste i use is advancing decay of my teeth

feel 100% certain that i could train myself to use telepathy to operate my phone during classes

enjoying the sensation of my right leg 'falling asleep' during psychology class (left foot is also 'asleep')

felt 'sociopathic' after eye contact w library worker who watched me pick up & pocket a pair of apple headphones someone had left on a chair

left stolen apple headphones on gray bench across the street from my dorm

repeatedly placed/removed sunglasses while walking in hallway

strong desire to remove all positive patterns from my life and perpetuate/embrace all negative ones

feel that my laptop 'knows' which parts of its screen im looking at

in winchester, VA

thought of my own music as having 'no compelling audible elements'

thought of myself as being legally named 'the fuck up', then couldnt remember my actual name

successfully, i feel, duplicated 'sociopath facial expression' during eye contact with arch-nemesis in stairwell

ive taken 13800mg ibuprofen since i got to college

feel compelled to ask my 9 yr old brother for advice re 'college-level' personal issues

feel smart after sitting on couch in painting studio + reading art magazines for 2 hours

persistent notion that 100% of students at my college personally hate me

psychology professor muttered something like 'scary snake... endocrine system...'

feeling heavily drugged/sedated in psych class

psych professor seems obsessed with/terrified by snakes

imagined kanye smoking crystal meth and tweeting something like 'please help me... cant feel mouth... need help'

saw a moth at open mic, thought about god

experiencing difficulty trying to smile

enjoying using numerous cliches ('the case is closed', 'taking a step back', 'harsh realities') in an essay

intrigued by conversation i had 9 hrs ago w/ 2 boys who countered my tone (calm, eloquent) exactly by being loud and rude in a friendly way

felt simultaneously really cute and really lonely while giggling with my mouth closed in french class

imagined kanye inventing the word 'compactualize' and using it in a sentence during a televised interview

enjoyed 8-sentence john updike bio in norton lit anthology

perceived person standing outside bathroom stall occupied by me could 'sense', via something like echolocation, that i was/am depressed

spoke to french professor in what felt like a distinct persona/alternate luis neer called 'marge simpson voice' luis neer

feel confidently that the public debut of 'marge simpson voice' luis neer was a success

feel that 'marge simpson voice' luis neer is the culmination of an unconscious process that initiated in my mind maybe 3-5 years ago

i want to identify/analyze additional alternate luis neers

i dont like videos

i came to college and got weirder, better at writing, more arrogant, more defeated, more sensible

simultaneously feel that i should run 3 miles and that, at this moment, i would be incapable of running any distance

feel urged to draw new attention to my 'marge simpson voice' tweets

huge power outage at shepherd lol

realized theres no such thing as a 'nation'

remembered ive blown off obligations to several people, not just one person, so my irresponsibility doesnt 'have a focus', felt comforted

feel that my follower count is 'crystallized' / will never increase or decrease ever again

struggled to convert 'stick-and-poke' to past tense during conversation in line at sheetz

feel it would be pleasurable to take a donut + bottle of coca-cola from this sheetz via armed robbery

crossed busy road, felt really surprised i didnt get hit by a car, also i wasnt wearing glasses, was walking to sheetz, bought an icee

laughed alone in my dorm thinking that i should print out a picture of barack obama to put on my wall

drank from separate glasses containing soymilk, coffee, iced coffee, apple juice, cranberry juice, water, sprite for dinner/breakfas

just thought 'from adorno to zizek' sans context while shitting

opened gmail, emailed my father, closed gmail, opened gmail again, viewed email to my father, forwarded it to myself

'camcorder' would be a good band name

i thought arnold palmer had already died

willem dafoe doesnt make me uncomfortable

i want to stop being mean

i hate bfs but i want to be someones bf

wishing i was in a car with friends and no cellular service

tangled up in myself and others

twin peaks is depicted as a small town but its population is greater than that of every city in west virginia including the state capital

eating shark

thought of my own intelligence as 'frightening'

thought while walking to class that ginger ale should be made public domain

had the stitches on my chin removed today, touched the scar tissue for the first time

i miss being in therapy

i love carpet

i love carpet !!

just thought about my own tweets and lol'd

mood lately very fragile

this is what i get for staying up til 5 am

all night i've felt a wave of dread swelling up, now it's really hitting me

sound of laughter in public still frightening + unnerving

my instinct for when to unfriend people on facebook has adapted so that i unfriend people over statuses that make me feel no emotions at all

fuck, im feeling so much terror

gucci mane was born 3 days before conor oberst

the other day i mentioned that i was a poet and this vape guy interrupted me to say "and you didnt know it" and i went fucking nuclear

interacted with mailman who was picking up mail as i was trying to mail chapbooks, he didnt notice at first that i was talking to him

what if old people have secrets

my dad is making me root for a football team but im in pain emotionally

i feel guilty in general

thought of my poem "portrait of a nation without any people" as the "lead single" for my full length; it appeared in potluck 14 months ago

im close friends with satan rn

feel like travis scott never intended for people to spell his name with a $

from now on every time i get honey on something ill list the thing in this thread

finger

desk

coffee cup exterior

pajama pants

knee

carpet

chin

phone

shirt

shoe

thought that my elderly geography prof. moves by "shuffling"

feeling shorter, broader

the only part of the new bright eyes box set i want is the booklet

is there a booklet? i know there are nvr b4 sn photos

the song "lime tree" came to conor oberst in a dream

i like citing things in MLA

i write essays by pretending im werner herzog

doesnt seem to be getting later

lit professor gave my project (sequence of 6 sonnets) a C, i wish she would have gotten me expelled, shelley + ginsberg both were expelled

heard someone in another room ask "where's wal-mart?" as if wal-mart were a person whose location could change

i think i just swallowed a filling while eating popcorn, i am very scared, please help

crazy how things get worse

there are people on my floor having tons of fun and im upset

bit my mattress while sitting in the chair next to my bed

weird that chance the rapper only has 2.4 million followers when he's sort of one of the most famous artists in the world rn

also weird that donald trump has made 34,000 tweets, seems like an incredibly large number

the strangeness of yesterday was, for me, augmented by people on the internet talking about a tv show that ive never seen or heard about

the sunlight is obscene

im so upset about the sun being so bright im afraid to go outside

im glad im the only poet who likes trailer park boys

i slept in a blanket fort under my bed and havent left it all day

yr = your ur = you're

my favorite things are pdfs

now that ive adapted my living space to allow me to never leave my blanket fort i feel like my roommate, omar, exists in a parallel universe

i hear him but i never see him

i love latte art, i drink many lattes

thought that twitter "isn't worth it" in an upset tone while drinking mtn dew

felt pleasant considering uniqueness of all parent-offspring relationships

went through my closet + made sure all shirts and jackets were zipped/buttoned

my blanket is generating flashes of light from static electricity

record store guy became visibly sick of me several months ago; feel a little guilty every time i enter his store to spend money

i prefer EPs

felt "out of control" walking downhill listening to dead kennedys with headphones

writing an essay is difficult because idk how much relevant information other people have already considered / moved on from

have been wanting to write at least one poem inside my blanket fort but i don't think it's going to happen, i don't know why

the internet isn't big enough

usually when i think "i dont understand the uproar about [event]" i realize there is no "uproar"

"uproar" is media's way of manipulating the public spotlight and distracting people from important tasks

feeling helpless + melancholy after dying 15 times and killing 2 stormtroopers in star wars battlefront

the only way to attain conor oberst-level emo hair is to lay in bed and sob for hours

i'm sad

my mom was confused when i told her my first book comes out today

was luis neer in odd future

thought "sometimes i just want to end it and start all over" in an exasperated tone re my goodreads account

becoming increasingly convinced it would be best for me personally to take myself extremely seriously/never joke about myself

thinking that my tweets would seem terrible if i were a senator/governor/other politician

imagined doomsday device for future @starwars movies: the "death train," a normal train that exists in space and destroys planets

how does anyone do it

in science fiction movies, spacecraft usually look like shopping malls

everyone in the world is high except me

feel like i want to have poems published immediately

having delusions of grandeur

im sitting on my record player

my most-used word in 2016 was "bleak"

prepared and ate garbanzo beans w a lot of rosemart at 2:00 AM

my brother has a friend over and is being mean to the friend

all i want for christmas is to never cheer up, ever

watching eyes wide shut and hugging duckuc

my nose feels like it's going to bleed

im sad because every bf looks like me

getting better at eating ice cream by punching it with my tongue

the internet is too freaky...

i think 2017 will be a year of realizing things

im watching the angry birds movie

the angry birds movie is so shitty... why was it made...

ive never had a new years kiss

2017

im weird

eating medicinal ice cream

im not going to do any drugs in 2017

made a medicinal phone call

i want to drink some blood

i dreamed that roger ebert wrote a negative review of life after ppl and called it "liner notes"

years dont kill people

feel inexplicably/explicably really scared about the future of my poetry career

i've felt stoned since i was a baby

downloading google earth

made eye contact in starbucks with possible luis neer incarnation from ~50 years in future; bon jovi "dead or alive" played through speakers

realised that at some point in the future i will become extremely interested in watching football

i recommend reading poems extremely slowly while touching the text with your middle finger/index finger

experiencing cognitive dissonance

used phonetic clues to correctly predict meaning of & use the word "tandem" while discoursing with myself internally

i miss steel pedal guitar sounds on conor oberst songs

my previous incarnation "college luis neer" has evolved to become "high school luis neer-like luis neer in college setting"

thought "man, i got to stop caring what people think about me" in an emphatic tone that seemed confusing/interesting

mediocore

beyonce is cool i think

i want to re-read "v for vendetta" and to not tweet about it

remembered that i own a pinata

i will be at awp

how could i make twitter a better place

i saw 4 people wearing yeezys in dc this weekend

feeling increasingly self-conscious about how much i use the phrase "in the world" or refer to "the world" in poems

felt robot-like while attaching detachable headphones cord to my headphones while wearing the headphones

watching shepherd univ lacrosse team practice from "safety of" student center

i invented releasing two chapbooks in one day

im dumber than me

reasoned mentally that im more likely to produce accurate drawings of myself because "i basically look like a bird, so i just draw a bird"

i want to have a "fake tweet" (e.g. a simple phrase) to tweet repeatedly every time i feel urged to tweet an uninformed/unimportant opinion

my fake tweet for the foreseeable future will be "i dropped my textbook in the stairwell". when i tweet this it means i have an opinion

i dropped my textbook in the stairwell

does anyone remember the chapter of "the hobbit" where bilbo avoids starvation by ingesting peanut butter, honey, cherry nyquil, and water

sensed that all my college friends just simultaneously shifted from having vague/non-serious negative feelings about me to hating me

resulting from continuous building of irrepressible/inevitable conjecture in the friends' conscious thoughts

eating chicken and squash

i click on 100% of poetry links tweeted by poets i follow

when i was writing Waves i was obsessed with waves (e.g. energy waves, frequencies) and used the word "waves" at least ~10 times every day

i dropped my textbook in the stairwell

white nike swooshes on shoes of boy in library look vibrant/magical

terrified of being cool

walked to library really slowly while listening to noise music through big headphones

i was really, really yung when i started publishing and i'm still really yung

2 chainz always looks like he's walking in an airport

i have 5 twitters

i didnt know what bill paxton looked like, i was thinking RIP gene hackman

why doesnt anyone blog about me

thesis statements arent real

thinking about my book

i deleted both my tumblrs by accident

sad about my tumblr

my name is all over the internet

im a lizard

someday there'll be no more ppl

a lot of conor oberst song titles have parentheses

feeling sad about the actions of my clone, who passed away

idk how to use venmo or what it is

present-day tumblr is like the end of the never ending story where atreyu is talking with the rock biter and the nothing is swirling around

when someone, anyone, is upset with me im afraid im going to be assassinated

the views-era apple music ads that depict drake working hard in the studio have really affected and inspired me

on tumblr i have 4 followers

almost all of my tweets seem unimportant

feel that if someone told me that one of my tweets made them upset i would just apologize and delete it

ground control to commander venus

i like my new tumblr

i would be wearing a cardigan rn but i dont have one

feel that i will continue to generate bright eyes-related content throughout my life

is everything ok

i look like michael moore

#words

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readincolour · 7 years ago

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New Books Coming Your Way, January 30, 2018

The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips 432 p.; Fiction/African-American Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money. But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences? The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory 320 p.; Fiction/Romance Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is something Alexa Monroe wouldn’t normally do. But there’s something about Drew Nichols that’s too hard to resist. On the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, Drew is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend… After Alexa and Drew have more fun than they ever thought possible, Drew has to fly back to Los Angeles and his job as a pediatric surgeon, and Alexa heads home to Berkeley, where she’s the mayor’s chief of staff. Too bad they can’t stop thinking about the other… They’re just two high-powered professionals on a collision course toward the long distance dating disaster of the century—or closing the gap between what they think they need and what they truly want… This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins 272 p.; Essays Morgan Jerkins is only in her twenties, but she has already established herself as an insightful, brutally honest writer who isn’t afraid of tackling tough, controversial subjects. In This Will Be My Undoing, she takes on perhaps one of the most provocative contemporary topics: What does it mean to “be”—to live as, to exist as—a black woman today? This is a book about black women, but it’s necessary reading for all Americans. Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large. Whether she’s writing about Sailor Moon; Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don’t “see color”; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of “the fast-tailed girl” and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the “Black Girl Magic” movement, Jerkins is compelling and revelatory. All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom edited by Deborah Santana 336 p.; Essays All the Women in My Family Sing is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world. Sixty-nine authors — African American, Asian American, Chicana, Native American, Cameroonian, South African, Korean, LGBTQI — lend their voices to broaden cross-cultural understanding and to build bridges to each other’s histories and daily experiences of life. America Ferrera’s essay is from her powerful speech at the Women’s March in Washington D.C.; Natalie Baszile writes about her travels to Louisiana to research Queen Sugar and finding the “painful truths” her father experienced in the “belly of segregation;” Porochista Khakpour tells us what it is like to fly across America under the Muslim travel ban; Lalita Tademy writes about her transition from top executive at Sun Microsystems to NY Times bestselling author. This anthology is monumental and timely as human rights and justice are being challenged around the world. It is a watershed title, not only written, but produced entirely by women of color, including the publishing, editing, process management, book cover design, and promotions. Our vision is to empower underrepresented voices and to impact the world of publishing in America — particularly important in a time when 80% of people who work in publishing self-identify as white (as found recently in a study by Lee & Low Books, and reported on NPR). Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark Whitaker 432 p.; History Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson—and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Mark Whitaker’s Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung community and a vital addition to the story of black America. It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey—and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak. Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires by Shomari Wills 320 p.; History While Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Michael Jordan, and Will Smith are among the estimated 35,000 black millionaires in the nation today, these famous celebrities were not the first blacks to reach the storied one percent. Between the years of 1830 and 1927, as the last generation of blacks born into slavery was reaching maturity, a small group of smart, tenacious, and daring men and women broke new ground to attain the highest levels of financial success. Black Fortunes is an intriguing look at these remarkable individuals, including Napoleon Bonaparte Drew—author Shomari Wills’ great-great-great-grandfather—the first black man in Powhatan County (contemporary Richmond) to own property in post-Civil War Virginia. His achievements were matched by five other unknown black entrepreneurs including:

Mary Ellen Pleasant, who used her Gold Rush wealth to further the cause of abolitionist John Brown;

Robert Reed Church, who became the largest landowner in Tennessee;

Hannah Elias, the mistress of a New York City millionaire, who used the land her lover gave her to build an empire in Harlem;

Orphan and self-taught chemist Annie Turnbo-Malone, who developed the first national brand of hair care products;

Madam C. J Walker, Turnbo-Malone’s employee who would earn the nickname America’s “first female black millionaire;”

Mississippi school teacher O. W. Gurley, who developed a piece of Tulsa, Oklahoma, into a “town” for wealthy black professionals and craftsmen” that would become known as “the Black Wall Street.”

A fresh, little-known chapter in the nation’s story—A blend of Hidden Figures, Titan, and The Tycoons—Black Fortunes illuminates the birth of the black business titan and the emergence of the black marketplace in America as never before. amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0"; amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "lisarbobbitt-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "785121bfbf478d195d0518a076e99b57"; amzn_assoc_asins = "1616958723,0399587667,0062666150,0997296216,0062437593,1501122398"; amzn_assoc_title = ""; amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true"; January 26, 2018 at 11:00AM from ReadInColour.com http://ift.tt/2DPL2sd

#Books #ReadInColour #WeNeedDiverseBooks All the Women in My Family Sing #Black Fortune #Delores P

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Trump attacks mayor of San Juan, ratcheting up tensions over crisis in Puerto Rico

By David Nakamura and John Wagner, Washington Post, September 30, 2017

BRANCHBURG, N.J.--President Trump, spending the weekend at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey, attacked the mayor of San Juan on Saturday for “poor leadership” and accused her of conspiring with Democrats to criticize his administration’s response to storm-ravaged Puerto Rico.

Trump blasted Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz in a series of tweets that aimed to deflect blame for the deepening humanitarian crisis on the island and to cast the mounting criticism against him as partisan attacks--from local officials, political rivals and the media.

“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” Trump wrote on Twitter. In another message, he added that Cruz and other local officials “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.”

The outburst came as Trump has bristled over accusations from local officials that the federal government has not moved quickly enough to provide support and aid amid widespread power outages that have left residents without air conditioning, while food, drinking water and other basic necessities are in short supply in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. At least 16 people have died since the storm struck last week, with many others in critical condition, and officials expect the death toll to climb in the coming days.

On Friday, Cruz pleaded for additional help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying at a news conference: “I am begging, begging anyone who can hear us to save us from dying. ... We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency.”

In his response on Twitter, Trump cast Cruz’s criticism as “unfair” to the thousands of federal workers who his administration says are now in place on the island, and he praised the efforts of the military and other first-responders.

And Trump reaffirmed that he and first lady Melania Trump intend to travel Tuesday to Puerto Rico, with a possible stop in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which also is recovering from the hurricane.

“To the people of Puerto Rico: Do not believe the #FakeNews!” Trump wrote on Twitter in the afternoon.

Appearing on MSNBC, Cruz emphasized that she was not trying to be “nasty” to the president and said she remains open to speaking or meeting with Trump.

“I’m fighting to save lives,” she said. “That’s it. This isn’t personal.”

She also made clear she didn’t plan to stay quiet.

“I will always speak my mind,” Cruz told reporters at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan. “I don’t give a damn.”

The president’s tone provoked a major backlash among Democrats, community leaders and celebrities who lambasted him for casting blame and appearing insensitive to the suffering of U.S. citizens.

Many of the strongest critiques came from female lawmakers, including Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif).

“When a hurricane hits, there are no Democrats or Republicans--only Americans, families struggling to survive,” Pelosi tweeted. “Shameful @POTUS can’t see that.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the musical “Hamilton,” wrote on Twitter that Trump is going “straight to hell,” while pop star Lady Gaga wrote to her 71 million followers that “it’s clear where the ‘poor leadership’ lies @realDonaldTrump Puerto Rico is part of the United States. This is our responsibility.”

Russel L. Honoré, the retired lieutenant general eventually appointed by President Bush in 2005 to improve the response to Hurricane Katrina, criticized Trump’s attack on Cruz.

“The mayor’s living on a cot, and I hope the president has a good day at golf,” he said on CNN.

Trump’s senior aides struck back, echoing the president’s assertions that the “fake news” media had failed to tell the full story of the administration’s recovery efforts. White House officials distributed an email to news outlets stating that 10,000 federal workers are on the island and that recovery workers have cleared 11 major highways and 50 percent of the major roadways. The military is airdropping supplies to remote regions in the mountains.

Yet the White House’s own statistics showed how much work remains: Forty-five percent of residents have access to drinking water from the island’s pipelines, and 49 percent of grocery and big box stores and 60 percent of gas stations have reopened.

Doug Heye, a GOP consultant and former communications director for the Republican National Committee, said he found Trump’s tweets “appalling.”

“He essentially said Puerto Ricans were lazy,” said Heye, adding that the mayor had not said anything negative about Trump and his role in the recovery.

Late Saturday, Trump sought to strike a more positive tone, tweeting: “We must all be united in offering assistance to everyone suffering in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the wake of this terrible disaster.”

But he did not relent in his criticism of Cruz.

“Results of recovery efforts will speak much louder than complaints by San Juan Mayor,” he tweeted. “Doing everything we can to help great people of PR!”

To his critics, Trump has seemed more concerned with the reviews his administration is getting than the response itself.

Presidential historians said Trump has failed to frame the catastrophe in the proper context.

“President Trump keeps talking about ratings and reviews,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian and professor at Rice University. “It’s kind of a TV mentality he has. He’s acting like it’s a detached problem.”

In an attempt to blunt criticism, Trump has stressed the degree of difficulty the response in Puerto Rico presents.

At the top of a speech devoted to tax policy on Friday, Trump ticked off a series of issues, including that Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was already in “very, very poor shape,” that the U.S. territory is saddled with “tremendous” debt and that it’s an island.

“This is an island surrounded by water--big water, ocean water,” Trump said.

As for Cruz--who appeared on CNN Friday night wearing a T-shirt reading, “Help us we are dying”--she said on MSNBC that she would like Trump to visit decimated towns to see the public’s “passion for life, see what we are doing to get back on track and listen to their hearts.”

She added that “one can visit as a photo op, or one can visit to make sure that things get done the right way.”

#Trump #Donald Trump tweets #Puerto Rico #San Juan mayor #Carmen Yulín Cruz

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swanirbhar · 4 years ago

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After Weeks Of Online Classes At IIT, Here's The Truth

It is very likely that the next full semester (likely to start around mid-August for IIT-Bombay) will be "virtual" as campuses will continue to be locked down, and we will have to resort to online teaching. Due to this sudden fallback on the online mode, e-learning evangelists have found a new lease of life - they seek to build the credibility of the all-digital classroom by suggesting that it will quickly bring us "back to normal". In this article, I focus only on online remote teaching to students at home, not on the broader canvas of online education covering MOOCS, blended learning etc which may be effective and beneficial in their own context.

Doing some form of academic activity online has been a learning experience for many of us on the IIT-Bombay faculty. We have familiarized ourselves with, and used, various video conferencing tools to conduct live (synchronous) lectures. We have also thought of new ways of collating course material, preparing digital-friendly notes and presentations, and experimenting with video recordings. But after the initial excitement wears off, it becomes monotonous and exhausting to talk to a computer screen with occasional interruptions by disembodied voices.

Most IITs are blessed with high-quality internet connectivity and uninterrupted power supply. But this is not true for students at home. Many students cannot afford high-speed internet access, a very significant section have homes in cities and towns that have electricity outages for many hours and where only mediocre-quality internet connectivity is available. Those from rural hinterlands are constrained by facilities worse than this. Further, while some students own laptops or even expensive tablets, there are many who do not. They depend upon desktop computers available on campus; at home, they have only only smartphones to connect to the internet.

Therefore, some students cannot attend live classes because their internet connection is poor or their devices do not have enough charge. For some, it is feasible only to download low-resolution video recordings or even just text notes. This is a big issue - of unequal access - and there is little that the institute can do to rectify it. Apparently, surveys are being conducted to find out what is the exact nature and extent of this problem for IIT students but the fact remains that there will be a significant difference in the quality of access - and, therefore, learning - that different groups of students will experience. A somewhat representative estimate of this digital divide can be obtained from this recent survey conducted by the University of Hyderabad. Of the 2,500 respondents, only 37% students said they could attend online classes; 18% said they could not. Over 90% said they would prefer to watch lecture recordings rather than attend live classes. The digital classroom is indeed far more unequal than the physical classroom.

The "classroom", in an online class, is far more impersonal than the physical one. It is not possible to "scan" all the students, peering out of their boxed windows on the screen, in one sweep; the larger the class size, the bigger this problem. Mostly, I could not see anyone's face in the windows because the video had been switched off. This "facelessness" accentuates the already impersonal ethos. In a physical classroom, there is eye contact with students. I see their facial expressions and body language, and use these visual cues to emphasize, repeat, reorient material in the middle of the lecture. In the online class, I could not figure out when to ask a question, and to whom, to check or provoke. I missed cues like the collective buzz of the students on some topic, the curious murmurs in one corner or too many students suddenly looking at each other with puzzlement! Discussions were much harder to sustain despite all sorts of provocations and multi-people interactions barely nucleated. At the end, one does not even know whether the lecture "went well" or it "was a disaster"!

One of the biggest advantages of the evergreen chalk-and-talk lectures is that usually the students are in sync with the instructor. The teacher writes and explains while the students make notes. The use of slides and presentations, or even graphics and videos, tends to be much more in online classes simply because sharing these audio-visual items is easier than having a proper "whiteboard" (needs a computer with a writing stylus, unless the teacher is in an e-classroom equipped with cameras and a real black/white board). Often, sharing material (screen-sharing) will "disembody" the teacher so that students are just staring at the presentation accompanied by a voiceover. The pace of teaching speeds up quite a bit "naturally" because of the already-written material on the presentations, the students "unsync" and are "lost". Perhaps a saving grace is that students can revisit recorded lectures again and again, whereas chalk-and-talk sessions are usually just a one-time presentation.

Of course, some of these defects can be controlled if the teacher consciously avoids these pitfalls but that is an extra burden on the teacher to be aware of with content delivery. Tips like breaking the lecture into chunks separated by some interactive activity are easier said than done. Imagine asking random students in (often faceless) boxes to answer a question or comment on something, and then asking some other random student to continue the discussion. In the physical classroom, I do this easily by looking at students to decide who should speak. Another suggestion often made in the context of online teaching is that teachers should curate existing "suitable" material rather than prepare their own. I think this is an inappropriate suggestion in that it ignores that teaching is an intensely personal "art", and preparing original content (other than the flair for delivery) is at the heart of the experience.

It is an irony worthy of rumination that even within the IITs, many times we have to "force" students to "participate" in a course. This is done either by making attendance compulsory or by scheduling regular tests, in a bid to ensure that students keep in touch with the course material. Some students say that these measures are to coerce them to participate in "boring" courses, and while this may be partially true, the deeper reasons for student disinterest has more to do with other factors. As I have argued in these columns, the effects of JEE coaching pedagogy - an obsession with "cracking" exams - and the disjunction between engineering domain knowledge and the kind of non-engineering jobs that students end up opting for, are the primary culprits. In the context of online teaching, student disinterest is exacerbated. Many of my colleagues and I have found that the attendance was lower, often much lower, than in a physical class. Of course, behind the student window on the computer screen, with video and audio switched off, one does not know what the students are actually doing. Are they even in their seats, listening? We often have a hard time getting students to stay away from their laptops and mobiles while in a regular lecture, and now in this scenario, it is impossible.

The problems in holding remote problem-solving sessions and group discussions are equally amplified because there is, in essence, a very poor learning environment. Chat boards and discussion fora simply cannot replace physical tutorials, recitations and even banter.

We also anticipate a severe problem with laboratory courses. It looks like we will be reduced to making videos of experiments and perhaps getting students to analyse dummy data. But there will be no hands-on work. For engineering education, where there is great justification for getting "hands dirty", this will be a great loss in learning.

Some instructors seem to think that the flipped classroom technique may be very useful in the current situation because it can avoid most of the lectures. Students can just read assigned material or watch pre-recorded videos and "attend class" only to clear doubts and indulge in "learned" discussion. It sounds cute on paper but works poorly in the ground. Ponder for a moment how many students, more so disinterested ones, will actually read or watch anything? Even at the best of times, getting students to actually learn by self-study (and even home assignments) so that they are in a state to indulge in meaningful discussion is hard. In the current situation, it becomes even more opportune for students to simply skip all study and prepare "at the last moment" for an exam.

The greatest bugbear of online teaching is assessment of students via exams or home assignments. The problem is one of integrity - how does one conduct assessment tests online that are devoid of copying and plagiarism? In the physical classroom, exams are proctored by teaching assistants and teachers; in the online system, this is very difficult to do. The tendency to use unfair means and in general indulge in unethical behavior "when no one is watching" ensures that unmonitored exams are quite useless for any kind of assessment. There are suggestions that students should take the exams in nearby schools or institutions where someone can be deployed to invigilate physically.

For the same reasons, take-home exams or home assignments will also not work as a means for assessment. Even as a regular practice, homework is given out mostly for students to practice; their weight towards the final grade is usually low because it is recognized that many submissions will contain plagiarized "cut and paste" passages or paraphrased material from someone else.

There is currently a lot of hype and hoopla in the market about software-enabled proctored online exams. Companies offer camera-based face and body tracking, device screen monitoring (what other apps are running on your machine), and frequent camera scans of surroundings. Some even tout the use of artificial intelligence to detect if you are doing "anything wrong" (monitoring facial expressions, lip twitches). Much of this is unproven and impractical, good only for sales pitches and science fiction. There are easy and sophisticated ways (remember how good we are at "jugaad"!) to beat all this highly invasive "surveillance".

In any case, the possibility of online exams stands defeated by the vagaries of electricity supply, the quality of the internet connection and the lack of suitable devices. A simple and viable option may be to hold exams only after the students return to campus.

It is good that we have online options but let us not kid ourselves into the illusion of normalcy. It is worrisome that despite ground realities of this sort, a sense of digital triumphalism seems to hang in the air. Tech-obsessed policy-makers, driven by arguments of "efficiency", low costs and scalability, are beginning to fantasize that in the post-Covid world, there may be no urgent need to build new schools and institutions; all that is needed are video recordings, artificially intelligent teaching bots - hosted on the internet - and a device to connect.

(Anurag Mehra is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Faculty at the Center for Policy Studies, at IIT Bombay.)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

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