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cinnamonest · 2 months ago

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I assume this is because I criticized Kamala Harris in my last post.

I want to address this because it's important to me and frustrations currently consuming my life, and I'm very emotionally unwell right now. I want to share my experiences and make a point I feel is important at this time.

Once again, this is very unfitting of the smut fanfiction blog and will be deleted later, even though I'm sure this is a huge follower-losing post, but whatever.

Forgive me for rambling so much, but I encourage you and people who think like this to read in entirety.

I realize things are tense right now in the US.

Part of the reason for my inactivity the past while (besides multiple hospitalizations) is that I'm glued to my screen every night now because I'm very scared. I've been spending all my time researching, watching videos from economists, etc.

(Preemptively, sources for everything I'm about to say: the FEMA Privacy Act Statement itself, the official CPB database, Helene People Finder, United States Council of Foreign Relations, Samaritan's Purse, NYC.gov, Starlink, Politico, ABC, CNBC, georgia.gov, nc.gov, tn.gov, my own life)

The US is an extremely high-tension, polarized political climate, largely due to the bipartisan system.

However, no one should be immune from criticism.

All politicians should be criticized when they do harm. I am allowed to criticize her, and I will.

Criticizing one candidate is not the same thing as endorsing/supporting their opposition.

3,000+ Appalachians are missing. The current death toll makes this the deadliest single event in the US since 1862. A higher death toll than Hurricane Katrina, a higher death toll than the events of 9/11/2001, a higher death toll than any mass shooting.

However, it is largely going completely ignored, and mainstream news media has barely acknowledged it, in part due to elections, but largely because the people who live in Appalachia are poor, rural people. And the harsh reality is that poor people's lives are not treated with the same value as people of higher classes.

FEMA continues to do nothing, and the feds are now threatening to take children away from homeless parents... yet they blocked donations of trailers and campers from nearby areas that would help those people to, you know, not be homeless. A kind group of Amish have come down from Pennsylvania to build shelters, and FEMA may tear them down too since they don't have "permits."

Harris had the opportunity to do something, and has the authority to order FEMA agents to act differently, but she chose to exploit the situation for publicity, then leave and otherwise ignore them. She then went on to pay Beyonce $10,000,000 to speak for 5 minutes.

That deserves to be criticized.

Her campaign continues to claim a good economy and job market, when inflation and cost of living has peaked, and just this month, their policies actually have officially led to one of the worst employment outcomes the United States has seen since the Great Depression, disproportionately affecting low-income workers.

That deserves to be criticized.

She has a bad track record during her time in the judicial system for the way her actions harshly affected underprivileged people, especially Jamal Trulove, who was terribly wronged.

That deserves to be criticized.

Furthermore, the reason FEMA/the government does not have money for Appalachia is for a few reasons, all of which were ordered, facilitated or allowed by the current administration:

1) we've sent over $100 BILLION to the IDF so they can keep blowing up hospitals and kindergartens,

2) we sent $175 BILLION to Zelensky so he can keep sending young men into violent deaths even if its against their will,

3) we just sent $100+ million to Lebanon even after the hurricane crisis, meaning the federal government explicitly chose to prioritize foreign aid over its own people,

4) money was taken directly from FEMA reserves for crises like ours, and used as part of a whopping $150,000,000,000 spent on mass migration — including free flights, a $20 million welcome center with a free-use "game room" with dozens of Xboxes plus free food/lodging, and in NY, an average of $1400 prepaid debit card per individual each month.

Meanwhile, Appalachians get a one-time $750 per family, and if you have insurance to cover anything, it's a LOAN you have to pay back (many "fact-checkers" are claiming this is false when its literally in the FEMA eligibility statement). Many of the independent line workers FEMA hired for repairs are reporting they have not been paid AT ALL since starting.

In other words, the money that was specifically reserved for saving lives in times of crisis was spent on video games and free money handouts.

That, holy hell, deserves to be criticized.

Secondly, I want to address the message itself.

I realize that a lot of the american tumblr userbase is 1) people young enough that they're still partially financially dependent on parents and/or 2) are, like most of the US statistically, earning middle-class incomes, and live in fairly population-dense environments.

Most people outside the US, on the other hand, are getting their perceptions of life, politics, etc in the US from the posts/narratives of people within the aforementioned groups, popular culture, and their own local media, so their perspective is often quite limited, to no fault of their own. I'm sure my perspective of life in other countries is also very limited.

Most of you live in places other than where I live, and live very different lives from mine. As humans, we are naturally prone to subconsciously assuming the lives of others are not too different from our own, and do not naturally stop to consider how various factors might affect people's lives and decisions.

We are social beings, prone to adopting the beliefs of others who have the same experiences and thereby the same limited perspectives as us, especially in ideologically homogenous environments.

However, I have just as much of a voice as anyone else.

My hope is that I can use my words and experience to foster empathy for one another between different people in a very polarized climate at a very tense time.

I'm originally from a fairly rural community of about 8,000 people, largely low-income, low-education, evangelical blue-collar workers and farmers, in the Bible Belt.

It is well-known that this demographic overwhelmingly voted for Trump. I don't deny that. I visit home a lot, I see the yard signs everywhere, flags hanging from pickup trucks and farm fenceposts, lots of red hats.

There is a reason for that.

The administration of the past four years has utterly destroyed many rural, low-income communities.

It caused a huge spike in job layoffs, leading to homelessness, drug abuse, hunger and poverty for many already low-income people, and for select communities, violent crime.

I'm fortunate enough to have had parents better off than most of the community, but I'm self-sufficient now, and I am in the bottom 20% of incomes in the US, even with a degree. I could write endless paragraphs on how hard it is to get by, but to summarize for the sake of shortening — it's very, very rough.

Everything has become drastically more expensive, very rapidly over the course of a few years. Groceries are 3x their 2021 prices. I had to get a guarantor for a one-bedroom apartment.

Many rural families resort to drastic measures to get by. Small farmers are being financially strangled out of their way of life.

The actions of the Biden-Harris administration is the reason a huge portion of my extended family was laid off and now face total destitution, as there are simply no jobs left available.

The Biden-Harris border and crime policies are responsible for the brutal rape of a significant number of women and girls in this geographic region. Statistically, these rapes have quadrupled compared to the previous administration.

A woman was raped and stabbed to death about a mile from where I live.

Our nearby neighbor, a cow farmer back home, was attacked on his own property.

I have personally faced multiple instances of sexual harassment and aggression, some of which were very frightening. I know other girls nearby experienced the same or worse.

Alcoholism and hard drugs due to the spike in unemployment and poverty has ruined many lives, and help is often hard to access in rural regions.

A woman my mom was acquainted with ended her own life in 2023 because her children were taken from her due to her drug addiction and poverty. People I played with on the church playground as kids are now unemployed heroin addicts.

I've watched my mom driven to tears after realizing how drastically her income tax increased, and how little she has left after them despite working around the clock.

All of these can be traced back to the policies and actions of the current administration, and the current Harris-Walz platform's proposals will drastically increase it all — largely voted for by people who live in economic situations and locations as such that they are fairly unaffected by these consequences, so they may not understand how it affects these people.

I could write endless paragraphs of all the people I know who have been at best negatively affected, at worst utterly ruined, by the current administration.

Since I have the unique background of understanding these people whilst having more liberal values as an individual, with a broad range of people I interact with now, I have tried to have discussions on this over the last year or so, in real life and virtually. I believed that raising awareness would make people on the left-leaning side empathize with them, and inspire dialogue to work to implement ways to account for the concerns and needs of the rural poor, and incorporate that into their existing proposals.

I was incorrect. I've been very polite and respectful in how I address others in these discussions. In the vast majority of interactions, I was not given the same in return.

A few were receptive, which I appreciate, but in most of my experiences, the same group that is known for encouraging empathy, apparently doesn't apply that philosophy to people they dislike — no matter how I presented it, they immediately rushed to demonize, censor, humiliate, shame and gaslight me, and expressed callous apathy at best, if not active contempt, for my people.

They say "that doesn't happen," and I think they genuinely believe that due to limited perspective — but the reality is that they're simply in a position of privilege as such that it isn't happening to them.

Similarly, what you have to understand is that from the perspective of many rural people in red areas, their experience is that more privileged people inflicted this suffering on them by voting for it, then silence and shame them for speaking out about it.

Likewise, they also have a limited perspective — for them, the issue I see is that they adamantly believe the "other side" is already well-aware of the effects their choices have on others. I don't think this is true, I think many on the other end are unaware of these issues.

This dual lack of understanding creates mutual resentment and bitterness, which fuels tension.

I will say that trying to explain how girls in my community were assaulted or my own harassment, only to have it spammed with replies along the lines of "don't care" or "deserved" or calling me a liar, seeing posts mocking or wishing harm on people like my family accumulate tens of thousands of likes, having people I care about referred to as "trailer trash," passive-aggressive statements implying I'm too unattractive for a man to harass — this, along with other distasteful actions I've seen, has pushed me away from the left as a community, and I don't think that's unreasonable.

Similarly, labeling people you know nothing about as bad people, without making any effort to understand their circumstances or what they actually believe and why, will drive people away and make them resentful.

My community is multiracial, women are highly valued in southern culture for various reasons, and they themselves are marginalized and underprivileged. They're kind people who have been good to me.

I haven't really met any people who are hateful, nor is hate the reason for their votes — they're all voting as they do because they are scared, exhausted, grieving and desperate. A lot of people in the area never voted before, but are now registering to vote in droves because they feel their backs are against the wall, so to speak.

Moreover, Orange Man himself redirected $14 million dollars to Appalachia, continues to raise awareness for them in speeches, and Musk, who is associated with him, has a team working to help Appalachians. He's also the only noteworthy figure that has acknowledged certain issues affecting them.

They realize that the situation in Appalachia could just as easily be them in the future, that they'd be given the same treatment.

This has resulted in a lot of rural poor people feeling that he cares more for their lives, compared to Biden/Harris who more or less neglected them. Which, considering that, is a fairly reasonable conclusion on their end.

Finally, it is true that blue voters tend to be in favor of abolishing or ruining crucial aspects of our way of life that, I say this politely, they do not fully understand, while the people here want to preserve their way of life.

So, while I have more liberal values that differ from most people back home, I don't believe they are bad people. They are reacting very reasonably to the circumstances they're in.

All I ask of others is to consider, no matter where you are or what beliefs you align with, and no matter what happens tomorrow, that the "other side" to your own may not be the evil people you have been led to believe they are, but are humans whose lives are simply different from yours, and they are acting in accordance to their experiences, circumstances, and fears.

The growing trend of demonizing political opposition with no attempt at empathy, only creates more pain in the world. I hope this has helped to foster better understanding, and that people can be kind to one another.

That is all I wanted to say.

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sahraeyll · 11 months ago

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19659001 Rejections can be complicated, however do not tension! Jasmine is here to speak about how to work rejections in medical billing, so bring all your rejection concerns and be all set to discover This month we are highlighting our CPB Readiness training program! If you are trying to find assistance getting ready for your…

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rodrigocarvalhosantiago · 2 years ago

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@ana thanks for this invitation at CPB to speak on the SEBRAE stage. It was a great emotion to share the stage with my son @luccatrilha to present our story and also about our work with the extended reality as a tool to reduce socio-economic inequality. It was great to hear the questions and have this super inspiring chat with them all. Our team thanks all of you very much, proving that it is worth every effort to bring knowledge and change the world through STEM. Thanks to: @nasachints @isaacfc4 @andrewwebbbuffington @neyt_soto @luccatrilha @unitytechnologies (at São Paulo, Brazil) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm-rrltO-0O/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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coolpolarbear123 · 3 years ago

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Band Camp Day 4

I'm sore in muscles that I didn't even know I had. Which is saying something since I took a 300-level anatomy class last semester

August 18th, 2021

<< 4 >>

this is,,, late:

Forgive me, I know how late this is, but band camp got hectic really fast, and then classes started, and I'm trying to do these now while I remember

today's senior prank: plastic wrapping the tower. It went very well

when rehearsal started, our band director immediately said that he was taking the two drill instructor librarians to make pregame drill copies, so that's where I went

we learned how to copy drill, and apparently we missed the snake, which was a huge thing last year (bc piccs started and dominated it)

and we missed step-2 drill, which I'm completely okay with

tho when the drill instructors demonstrated it, apparently my SL had to go up in my place so that it'd be an even amount of people, which I'm actually okay with bc that makes sense, and it's not ML2

i mean what

anyway, back in the copy room, my accomplice and I were counting how many drill charts each section needed, then labelling the sections with sticky notes. I drew a bear on each sticky note

THAT REMINDS ME

I drew a lot of bears yesterday, and none of them stuck for more than two hours. it's been a really hot and sweaty week

oh also our band director mentioned that he's leaving for a funeral tomorrow night?

anyway, about an hour and a half later (10am), we returned to the field and handed out drill

the drill instructors were then called to go get numbers (basically we each get a number, and the drill instructors are told which numbers are for which section)

and I guess everyone was talking about the bears? bc my DI got up there and was like "wait, you guys are getting bears?" and then showed the piccolo sticky note, which reads "diccalos" with a drawing of a penis

that penis is poorly drawn and captioned "this is clearly a pair of scissors"

the mello DI took a picture he thought it was so funny, which has been fueling my serotonin levels

and!! people kept mentioning that they liked the bears! I was very excited about it

we learned the first half of pregame. I got the same spot as last year, surprisingly. And I'm next to more piccs, which is also really cool

the drumline's been facing a lot of issues with not knowing what number of people should go on which instrument bc things keep getting switched around by various people

this caused a lot of confusion on the field when there were 6 snares but only 5 charted snare parts

and our band director was NOT happy about it. He kept saying useless stuff like "it seems like you found a place, just use that" and other things like that

one of my good friends is on drumline and she cried. Apparently her drill instructor was really close to crying too

lunch time/passport to campus (a thing that helps people check in and does not apply to me since I live off campus and am a senior)

although we did get lunch from 12-3 because of that. I had time to shower, which was so nice

I currently am drenched in sweat as I type this, tho, so it does sorta feel like it was for nothing

the clarinets started sitting with us, and our freshman is talking to their freshmen, which is really good bc she needs friends who aren't just seniors. I'm very excited

okay but also during lunch we heard some CRAZY tea like. There's this sophomore clarinet player who wanted to get with this sophomore drumline dude and they were this close but APPARENTLY she has chlamydia like wtf and then he blocked her on all social media they had each other on?? and then she kept trying to add him on everything?

AND the drumline is recruiting, so she's like "imma switch to drumline" so yikes @ the drumline good luck

we had outdoor playing rehearsal since we can't be in the band room and ig the previous room we were using is now being occupied by people returning to campus or smthn idk

also the music librarians asked one of the old librarians for help with something EVEN THOUGH us drill librarians knew how to do it so um

we started playing songs that we're gonna do in our first halftime show, and the key signature on the first one is funky, so he had us play that scale, and the piccs sounded so bad that he relocated us so that we could spend time tuning

well the problem was that one of us was playing the wrong scale so yes i'm sure we sounded out of tune

but then we had to tune everyone, then we did it note by note, and then half an hour later we rejoined the band

our band director was like "some of them are smiling, some... aren't" that was awkward

and then we played some more, and at one point he's like "drumline only play this" and then they did, and we politely, softly, clapped

emphasis on SOFTLY and the band director got mad because we shouldn't congratulate them for not being good

like jesus fuck give the drumline a break

and then to top it off, we didn't even get sectionals. the closest we got to sectionals was the piccs tuning

there's also this random man who's standing with our band director, but the kick is that I know who this random man is

my friend from drumline said that her old band director was coming to be our sub while our band director was away for the funeral

sure enough, we got the intro. he's our sub, he's taught 7 people in the band, etc, etc, alumni of my uni, played sousa, etc etc

then we had dinner, which was the last free meal we got for band camp. The pickings were slim, but it was all fine. the other drill librarian didn't sit with the piccs and that was mmmmmm bc I get that she's trying to be an Older Sister to one of the fish clarinets but pls sit with your section

Then we were back outside for more marching rehearsal, where we learned the rest of pregame, marching AND playing. Which like. Yeah, that's pretty on track for a normal band camp? Usually it's good by Thursday and today is Wednesday, so not bad!

I'm mostly worried because two years ago, we didn't do a lot of pregame during band camp and he got angry during the season when we didn't know it very well like

maybe you should have stuck to your normal schedule

also I fckn hate the pregame song. Hooray for Hollywood can suck my rectum

our band director said we might do halftime drill tomorrow? which means the other drill librarian and I have more to print? maybe? tomorrow morning?

our fifth year DI was noncompliant! for the first time in five years! our DM made sure the band knew that

also two other piccs haha. picc party in the noncompliance

half the band was noncompliant which kinda... wasn't fun bc it takes the purpose out. It's not as humiliating when everyone's doing it with you

it's kinda bc the mellos are doing the thing that the trombones do, where when one is noncompliant, everyone is, and personally I think that should Only be a trombone thing

it's better and funnier when only one section does it

after singing the alma mater and fight song, we flash mobbed dance again

the after band camp stuff was trivia night, which didn't have a huge turn out, but it was fun. I learned that I HATE one of the clarinet freshmen.

#band camp #cbc #2k21 bc adventures #rant #marching band #cpb speaks #i'm #so #behind

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tallmadgeandtea · 3 years ago

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I want to be her

#literally the queen of cornwall #move over CPB #amanda speaks #amanda hates ross poldark. amanda watches poldark anyway.

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cpbs-void · 7 years ago

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I’m so tired I can’t see straight but I hate sleeping and I really don’t want to and I want to talk to someone but I also don’t trust myself to talk to anyone right now and the people I trust most are busy, sick, asleep, etc, and I just really, really had a bad day I guess but I’m fine right I’m fine

#cpb speaks

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sexatoxbridge · 3 years ago

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this is the only press thing ive seen https://twitter.com/euphoriazine/status/1432735180054306825?s=21

It looks like absolutely no one had photography access besides Louis’ team. Which, again, makes sense if you’re trying to film a documentary. But also I’ve covered a lot of festivals who are filming the sets for the BBC and have still managed to allow photographers in as well, so who knows. The emphasis on Louis curating the entire thing in the press releases might mean that this is how he wanted it, but again if you’re trying to promote the livestream next week you would think that you’d at least make it easy for people who are actively trying to write about it to have access to some photos or even review tickets to watch it beforehand.

Euphoria is using a photo from Crystal Palace Bowl, which also looks like a photo that was taken from the audience and not from the backstage or in front of the barrier.

Usually venues (like The Forum) have their own photographers, but everything CPB has been putting on their stories is from fan posts.

I can’t speak to whether the Euphoria writer had a ticket because they were writing this article or wrote this article because they happened to have a ticket…but I’m not entirely sure that this would be the one and only publication Louis and his team would choose to cover the festival.

I think it’s fair to assume there was no press photography allowed. I could be very wrong, but this is based on a couple weeks of trying to figure out wtfuck was going on with the organising of this festival.

#sao replies #louis tomlinson #sao louis #away from home festival

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pomsandpersep · 2 years ago

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The Consumption of Black Artistry and The Apathy For Black Lives

I’m fascinated by the way white people engage with black art. Not the fact that they like it, of course. In a world full of Doja Cats and Amanda Gormans and Kendrick Lamars and so on and so on, it would be a lot harder to imagine black art not being enjoyed and consumed voraciously. No, what fascinates me is the way that white audiences interact with it. At its best, it can spark social change and open eyes to the way the other half lives. At it’s worst…it’s hard to explain but I think the best way is by categorizing it in two ways: appropriation and blind consumption.

Appropriation is usually a little easier for people to grasp. Recently, the word critiques fashion trends associated with the black community like box braids or locs co-opted by non-black communities. When it comes to music, however, the conversation becomes murkier. Take, for example, Willie Mae Thorton. In 1952, she recorded her song “Hound Dog” to minimal acclaim and even less money. When Elvis Presley re-recorded the song four years later, however, it easily entered the record books as one of the most iconic rock songs written… with little to no credit given to Thorton. If you want a more recent example, try to think of the originator of the viral Tik Tok dance, the “Renegade”. Most people credit its origins to influencer Charli D’Amelio, pushing her to stardom. Very few people know the actual originator (myself included considering I had to Google her name twice before I wrote this), Jalaiah Harmon who received a fraction of that same fame. Ultimately, whether it’s fifty years ago or now, it comes down to the same idea: a willingness to interact with our products but not with us.

This of course begs the question, if that’s appropriation, then what do I mean by “blind consumption”? Glad you asked. In 2017, rapper Amine came out with the song “Carolina'' which used the n-word in the chorus and went viral. In live performances, however, he eventually began replacing the word with the phrase “If you ain’t black, don’t say it”. Five years later, I stood in front of my predominantly white high school and performed a spoken word on the dangers of white supremacy to accolades and praise from teachers and students alike, days after the school had received backlash for instituting metal detectors and heavy security presence during a basketball game against a visiting predominantly black high school. While those two instances seemingly don’t have a connection (I’m in no way implying my poetry will someday make me famous), they both highlight the same problem. It’s enjoyment of art created by black voices without critically examining your actions surrounding that enjoyment.

While these behaviors are bad enough, it ultimately shows a lack of empathy for black artists themselves. When it does come to bite back, it comes in the form of silence for the Eric Garners and the Trayvon Martins and the George Floyds and so on and so on. It speaks to how dehumanized we are that you like us when we’re entertaining you, as if in some modern-day minstrel show, but when it comes time to see us for our humanity you’re silent. In an interview, black author James Baldwin said, “I’m terrified at the moral apathy…which is happening in my country… they have become…moral monsters.” I’m terrified that what we’re dealing with is an ever-growing new generation of moral monsters. One that can bump our music in their cars while running over our bodies in the street.

Link to the Baldwin interview: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_15-0v89g5gf5r

#blacklivesmatter #writers on tumblr #text post #social justice #tumblr

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haritrash · 3 years ago

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Would you happen to know of any sources or videos or starting points to understanding socialism/leftist ideology or just anti-capitalism stuff really? I want to get more into politics but I’m not sure where to start.

indoctrinate me 😩 /j

welcome to the red side ! ☭

idk where you're from but the best place to start is your national/local communist party (linking cpusa and cpb in case they apply) . they normally have a lot of short/simplified content on the history and current state of local working-class struggles, which is the most precious information you can get . (cpusa actually post 'marxist classes' every now and then . keep an eye on them)

other sources :

marxism : a free course ;

the marxist-leninist reading hub collect introductory/'easy reading' texts ;

prolekult make some great explainer/documentary videos on all the above ;

super popular course on the capital (even if you never pick up the book, you still learn a lot) (david harvey posts a lot of other explainer videos, too) ;

luna is a vietnamese communist youtuber i follow who often speaks from experience ;

this is not at all an easy start point, but it's always worth linking all the open-source marxist texts on the web--sometimes you might not find a translation or so bc it's a volunteer project, but i think the english archive is quite good . the easiest classics are the communist manifesto and the conditions of the working class in england ;

authors of colour tend to cut straight to the chase and free copies of their works circulate here on tumblr every now and again . if you come off anon, i'll send you what i have . of the open-source authors, i love amílcar cabral ;

afromarxist post snippets and full interviews of some of the greatest non-white revolutionaries on their ideas, struggles and criticisms of the system .

#. . . i hope that's fine for an introduction ?? . . .#. . . idk my intro was at uni and from a pretty complex philosophical background so im not v good at recc'ing simple clean explanations . .#. . . also im in the portuguese communist party and most of the content i consume is in portuguese . . .#. . . our website is also great and translated into english if anyone is interested . . .#ask #ref

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proxyflans · 5 years ago

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Happy Magical Girl Monday! (I just realized that I saved this as a draft but didn’t post it yesterday, oops!)

I mentioned in the previous Monday that the code should be done by the end of the year. And it pretty much is! While I still have to do full versions of cutscenes (instead of the snippets I’ve been doing to make sure room transitions work), all the background code that makes the game work should be in place by now, unless I run into something major.

The save system still needs a little bit of tweaking, but that’ll be easier to fix once the cutscenes are all in order.

Anyway, I’ve written out a timeline for finishing the game’s art in the coming month. The four pictures above are a preview of what I’ve been working on! The first two are my process in Pyxel Edit, and the latter two are the tile sets actually implemented. When you enter or exit the school building, the wall fades in and out! I decided to do this to make a certain cutscene easier. (If you read the light novel sample, you’ll know which one!)

(Speaking of which, this month I received some requests to view the light novel sample, so I’ve made the link public again. Please fill out the form at the end!)

Timeline:

January 1 – 7

School Location Sprites

NPCs (minor classmates & teacher)

Polish cutscenes, using placeholder sprites for characters without sprites

January 8 – 14

Battle Sprites

Player (CPB, Plants, Mascot)

Villains (Deadly Omen, Water Droplets)

Battle GUI

January 15 – 21

CG art (may start this earlier, depending on completion of other sprites)

New, easier to read font

January 22 – 28

Character RPG sprites

Manami, Hotaru, Tsubasa, Miku, Wakana, Tomoko

Kenji

January 29 – February 4

Tweak anything I’m still not happy with

In the previous Magical Girl Monday post, I said my goal was to get the art done by my birthday. My birthday is February 6, so in addition to that last week above that’s dedicated to tweaking, I’m giving myself some wiggle room on that end. (Along with these last few days of the year that I’m using as a head start.)

There are still download keys available on Tumblr, so until they’re all gone, I will not be making The Magical Girl in PROXY a public download.

Thank you for following the stories’/games’ development! If you like what you see, please like, reblog, comment, and share with your friends! Feedback is my greatest motivator!

#magical girl anime #mahou shoujo #video games #indie gamedev #pixel art

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stfumras · 6 years ago

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WORLD

Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn't Get The Care They Needed

Pregnant women in immigration detention under the Trump administration say they have been denied medical care, shackled around the stomach, and abused.

Two weeks after arriving in the US seeking asylum, E, 23, found herself in a detention cell in San Luis, Arizona, bleeding profusely and begging for help from staff at the facility. She was four months pregnant and felt like she was losing her baby. She had come to the US from El Salvador after finding out she was pregnant, in the hopes of raising her son in a safer home.

“An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me,” she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. “I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.”

Stuck in detention and having lost her baby, E says she wouldn’t have come to the US seeking a safer life if she’d known what would happen. She asked that her full name not to be used out of fear of repercussions while in detention and for her family back home.

“My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them,” she said.

About a week after speaking with BuzzFeed News, E gave up her fight for asylum, accepted voluntary departure, and was deported back to El Salvador.

In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly introduced the “zero tolerance” immigration policy that has led to children being separated from their parents at the border, sparked national outrage, and triggered an executive order from President Trump. While the national focus has been on family separations, another Department of Homeland Security policy quietly introduced by the Trump administration five months earlier has devastated women fleeing violence in their home countries: the detention of pregnant women not yet in their third trimester.

“My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did.”

Before that directive, which the Trump administration implemented in December before announcing it in March, ICE was under an Obama administration–era directive not to detain pregnant women except in extreme circumstances or in relatively rare cases of expedited deportation.

The new ICE directive states that women are not to be held into their third trimester and that ICE is responsible for “ensuring pregnant detainees receive appropriate medical care including effectuating transfers to facilities that are able to provide appropriate medical treatment.”

But BuzzFeed News has found evidence that that directive is not being carried out. Instead, women in immigration detention are often denied adequate medical care, even when in dire need of it, are shackled around the stomach while being transported between facilities, and have been physically and psychologically mistreated.

In interviews and written affidavits, E and four other women who’ve been in ICE detention and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody while pregnant told of being ignored when they were obviously miscarrying, described their CBP and ICE-contracted jailers as unwilling or unable to respond to medical emergencies, and recounted an incident of physical abuse from CBP officers who knew they were dealing with a pregnant woman. Those descriptions were backed by interviews with five legal aid workers, four medical workers, and two advocates who work with ICE detainees.

The incidents were not limited to a single detention center. Three medical workers and five legal aid workers who spoke to BuzzFeed News all said they had seen — and some had documented — cases of pregnant women not receiving or being denied medical care in more than six different detention centers in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Manoj Govindaiah, the director of family detention services for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), said that the majority of the pregnant women they work with in the ICE-run Karnes family detention center in Texas have told RAICES that ICE staff promised to bring them to off-site medical professionals but never did. Lauren Connell, a pro-bono attorney who also does work at Karnes, confirmed that she has had to fight for some of her pregnant clients to receive the medical care they ask for.

Sera Bonds, the founder and executive director of Circle of Health International, and Leah Little, the group's chief operations officer, who keeps records of the women the group sees, said the pregnant women often say they did not receive medical care while in detention. Both women recounted caring for a woman in their clinic in McAllen, Texas, who, in her eighth month of pregnancy, fell directly onto her belly but still was not taken to a hospital.

In written testimonies — taken by RAICES for their records and provided to BuzzFeed News, and signed by the women under “penalty of perjury,” with the names redacted — two pregnant women held at the Karnes center complained of not being provided with adequate medical care for their pregnancies. On top of this, one said she was given clothes that were so small for her pregnant belly they gave her welts and “pain in [her] uterus”, while the other said she underwent repeated X-rays despite this being against the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendations and against CBP(but not ICE’s) policies for pregnant women. “I saw on the machine that [it said] pregnant women should not have an X-ray,” she wrote.

In an email, ICE reiterated that it follows the policy on detaining pregnant women as written on its website, noting that ICE makes the decision to keep people in custody on a “case-by-case basis” based on criminal records, risk of flight, “any known medical conditions,” and whether she or he “poses a potential threat to public safety.” It added that private contractors that operate the facilities where pregnant women are housed also are required to adhere to those standards, but it declined to comment on specific facilities.

“All detainees, determined to be pregnant, are provided appropriate education, pre-natal care, and post-natal care,” the statement said. “Such care includes referral to a physician specializing in high-risk pregnancies when high-risk pregnancy is indicated.”

CBP referred BuzzFeed News to its national standards, and DHS did not individually respond to a request for comment.

Amanda Sluss Gilchrist, the director of public affairs for CoreCivic, the private prison group that owns the Otay Mesa detention facility where E was held, told BuzzFeed News in a statement that CoreCivic staff “do not make medical or mental health treatment determinations,” and that ICE and their 500 officers assigned to the detention facility are “solely responsible for contracting, staffing and oversight of any medical and mental health services.” Gilchrist added that detainees “have daily access to sign up for medical attention.

A pregnant woman from El Salvador at a Catholic Charities relief center June 17, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. Catholic Charities is not one of the centers accused of mistreating women.

In a congressional hearing in May — just weeks before the news broke that immigration officials were separating immigrant families — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Congress about the care she said ICE provided to pregnant detainees.

“We provide them with prenatal care, we provide them separate housing, we provide them specialists, we will take them to appointments if they need to go somewhere else, we provide them counseling,” Nielsen listed.

“They are not only given adequate care in facilities, but it is much better care than when they are living in the shadows.”

When asked about the list of resources Nielsen said pregnant women in ICE custody were receiving, each of the three women BuzzFeed News spoke with said they had received none or only one or two of the services — often with significant delays while in dire situations.

“We provide them with prenatal care, we provide them separate housing, we provide them specialists.”

“It’s a lie. They didn’t give me anything,” said Rubia Mabel Morales Alfaro, 28, who was in ICE detention from around Dec. 23 to March 15 this year. E also said she had received none of the services. “If they had had that, I would not have lost my son. I don’t understand why they won’t take care of pregnant women,” she said.

Three lawyers and two medical workers who work with detainees told BuzzFeed News that the treatment of pregnant women was substantially different before Trump took office. Pregnant women were often released from CBP centers faster than other detainees, particularly after August 2016, when ICE issued a policy limiting detention of pregnant women to only “extraordinary” circumstances or cases of mandatory detention. Often it took only a phone call to the center to get a pregnant woman released on parole, Linda Rivas, the executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, told BuzzFeed News. After Trump entered the White House, these calls stopped working, she said. And after the new policy was announced, advocates stopped having a reason to think they would.

Still, five legal and health care advocates who work with women detained after crossing the border illegally or seeking asylum said ICE does provide women with a pregnancy test, prenatal vitamins (not always regularly, two advocates said), and, sometimes, a standard entrance exam by a nonspecialist medical worker.

One woman said that when her pregnancy test came back positive, ICE facility staff gave her a “diet for health” label to wear on her ID. An obstetrics-trained nurse in West Texas told BuzzFeed News that some detained pregnant women are transported to her clinic for one checkup during their time there, often in their second or third trimester. Some (but not all) detention centers also make sure pregnant women get the lower bunk bed. But according to the 17 people BuzzFeed News interviewed, the special treatment stops there.

Lawyers and medical workers said the treatment of pregnant women was substantially different before Trump took office.

Five legal aid workers who have worked with dozens of pregnant women inside the detention facilities told BuzzFeed News that they had never heard of pregnant detainees being provided with separate housing, despite what Nielsen told Congress.

“I can’t say this doesn’t happen anywhere, but separate housing doesn’t seem like a realistic option to me at all,” Govindaiah of RAICES told BuzzFeed News.

“There are so many horror stories of medical neglect that I’ve heard inside [detention centers] that I can’t even remotely fathom a scenario where a pregnant woman would be better off in detention than being released,” Luis Guerra, a legal advocate at Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), told BuzzFeed News.

From Dec. 14, 2017, to April 7, 2018, there have been a total of 590 pregnant women booked into custody, ICE told BuzzFeed News in July, saying that these were the most updated numbers. As of April 7, 2018, there were around 35 pregnant detainees in custody, they said.

Advocates told BuzzFeed News, however, that they first began to notice an increase in pregnant detainees last summer — even though DHS policy at the time prohibited their detention — and that that increase has continued every month, along with the general increase in ICE arrests and detentions seen across the country. As the number of detainees increases, the amount of attention afforded to each individual by officials decreases, advocates said.

Rivas, the director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, said her organization had noticed the change in the detention of pregnant women long before the Trump administration issued its change in policy in December. She said the number of pregnant detainees being held in the three detention centers where her organization works — El Paso Processing Center, West Texas Detention Center, and Otero Processing Center in New Mexico — began rising in the summer of 2017.

“It was a real shock to us at first, but then we just started seeing it more and more,” said Rivas. “It was an accurate reflection of what the Trump administration wanted to happen, they were just late to making it official.”

Guerra and Govindaiah told BuzzFeed News that they also saw an increase in pregnant detainees in Texas and California before the new policy was issued, and immigration advocates, including RAICES, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Immigration Council, filed a complaint with DHS in September. The complaint included allegations by 10 women detained while pregnant before the policy was in place in Texas, California, New Mexico, and Washington state, many of whom told similar stories to the ones shared with BuzzFeed News.

Several women quoted in the complaint said they were ignored by detention staff when requesting medical attention, even in obvious emergencies or during and after a miscarriage, and all of the women reported experiencing severe psychological and emotional damage in detention that they feared affected their pregnancies.

A pregnant woman seeking asylum at a pedestrian port of entry from Mexico to the United States in McAllen, Texas.

Women who are pregnant during their journeys to the border often arrive with high-risk pregnancies, three medical professionals told BuzzFeed News.

“They’ve been traveling for at least two and a half weeks, often without sufficient food, experiencing unimaginable stress, they haven’t been able to urinate when they need to or drink the amount they need to while pregnant,” said Virginia Sushila Schwerin, a midwife and nurse who has worked for two years as a volunteer at a Circle of Health International's clinic near the border in McAllen, Texas. The clinic serves hundreds of immigrants a day who were just released from short-term CBP custody, and roughly 20 pregnant women a week, the center estimates.

She and two other medical professionals who work with former ICE detainees told BuzzFeed News that women often experience emotionally traumatic incidents on the trip, like sexual assault or separation from their partners, which can also threaten their pregnancies.

“They’re coming in at risk from that, and then a lot of them develop illnesses in detention because they are coming from a very warm climate into an extremely cold place filled with people and circulated air,” Schwerin said. “Pregnant women have highly specialized needs and this is a high-risk group. I think it’s inhumane to detain them.”

All three of the women who spoke to BuzzFeed News were pregnant when they presented themselves to Border Patrol officers at the San Ysidro Port of Entry and requested asylum, as US law permits. Still, they said, they were shackled and placed in CBP facilities, where they were denied medical care during their first weeks in custody. All said they miscarried while in custody.

All the women said they'd been shackled around their hands, legs, and belly while they were in custody. Shackling of pregnant women in their second trimester is prohibited by ICE and CBP’s most recent policies.

Each told similar stories: that they informed officials at the CBP facility shortly after being taken into custody that they were pregnant. Morales and another detainee, Jennye Mariel Pagoada Lopez, said they brought the results of their pregnancy tests and ultrasounds and showed them to the CBP officials, but, like E, both were told they couldn’t receive any medical attention until they were moved to longer-term detention facilities.

Morales said when she was first taken into custody by the Border Patrol in December 2017, CBP officers pushed her to the ground and “threw [her] around.” She told them again that she was pregnant, she said. “They didn’t believe me, they said it wasn’t important, that it wasn’t their problem.”

“They said I didn’t have any rights there and I told them I was asking for asylum because it was dangerous in my country,” Morales told BuzzFeed News, “but they said lies, lies, lies, that El Salvador was fine to live in.”

After that, she started feeling sick, “vomiting horribly, like all day,” and asked to see a doctor but was denied. She was held in the CBP facility for four days before she was transferred to Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.

Pagoada, 24, was four months pregnant and already feeling dizzy and vomiting when she approached CBP agents at the port of entry on July 23, 2017, she told BuzzFeed News. In custody, she asked ICE officials for medical attention, she said, but they responded by saying they didn’t speak Spanish. Late that night, she started feeling intense pains in her abdomen and was bleeding so heavily that one of her 15 fellow detainees in the room started shouting and waving for help at a security camera, she said, but when the officials arrived they still denied her care.

All of the women said they had been shackled around their hands, legs, and belly while they were in CBP custody, mainly while being transported from the holding centers at the border in California and Arizona (where E was moved to for more than a week after entering in California), and then to Otay Mesa, the privately run longer-term detention facility in San Diego.

Shackling in such a manner is standard practice for prisoners in the US while they are being transferred between facilities, but for pregnant women in their second trimester it could cause issues with the pregnancy, medical professionals say. ICE facilities are contracted under three different versions of detention standards of care, depending on when they signed their contracts. Shackling is prohibited by ICE and CBP’s most recent standards-of-care policies as well as by a congressional directive.

“If a woman is jostled while wearing shackles around her belly, it can affect the child, as can any fall onto the belly, which is more likely to happen if the woman is chained,” Dr. Anjani Kolahi, a family medicine and obstetrics physician with Physicians for Reproductive Health told BuzzFeed News.

Nevertheless, a nurse who works with pregnant detainees at clinics operated by Texas Tech University and the University Medical Center in El Paso said the women are “almost always” shackled around their hands and feet, and sometimes around their stomachs. In the past few months, staff at the center have seen at least two women shackled within a few hours of giving birth, she said.

“We were all really shocked because we hadn’t seen that before … Women are most at risk of experiencing a hemorrhage within the first 24 to 48 hours [after birth],” she said, explaining that if there were complications, shackles would delay the medical team’s response and put the woman’s health at risk.

“This is not the US standard of care in any way,” Kolahi said after being told of the various claims made by women and the people who work with them. “This is absolutely medical negligence. Overall [detaining pregnant women] is a cruel, inhumane practice. It’s creating all sorts of unnecessary risk for the women” and their children, she said.

Gilchrist of CoreCivic said she “cannot speak to what occurs prior to a detainee coming into our custody,” but that Morales was “classified as level one, or low-level detainees at Otay Mesa, and would not have been restrained.”

During and after their miscarriages, the women still did not receive adequate care, they said. All of the women were transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, run by the private prison group CoreCivic, which, as BuzzFeed News and other outlets have reported, has been accused of lax medical care previously. They were connected with BuzzFeed News through legal aid workers while in detention at Otay Mesa or after being released while their cases are pending. The interviews were conducted in Spanish.

E didn’t see a medical professional until more than a month and a half after she first was taken into custody, and nearly two weeks after she had started miscarrying, she said. For Pagoada, it took five days after she started bleeding heavily for her to see an on-site medical professional at Otay Mesa, who performed physical exams without an ultrasound. Two days later, the medical professional told her she had lost her child.

After that, the bleeding didn’t stop for several days, Pagoada said. “They were refusing to give me sanitary towels, I needed like 30 per day and we were given three per day. They told me I could buy more in the commissary.” Pagoada is one of the 10 women who filed the complaint about their treatment with DHS in September.

“When the doctor examined me, he said there were many reasons for the miscarriage but it was likely because of the conditions they had me in.” —Rubia Mabel Morales Alfaro.

Morales started bleeding soon after she got to Otay Mesa and saw an on-site doctor, but that doctor told her the bleeding was normal. The next day she fainted in the middle of the cafeteria and was finally taken to an OB-GYN at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center hours later. The OB-GYN told her she had lost her baby.

“When the doctor examined me, he said there were many reasons for the miscarriage but it was likely because of the conditions they had me in,” she told BuzzFeed News.

BuzzFeed News obtained a copy of Morales’s discharge records from Sharp Chula Vista dated Jan. 10, 2018, showing that she had suffered a miscarriage. No cause was given. The records said that Morales should “follow-up” with her OB-GYN “within 1-2 days” of her hospital discharge, and “return to ER for any concern, if symptoms worsen, if you do not feel better.” The hospital declined to comment.

Morales felt sick long after her miscarriage, she said, but was treated by detention staff as if nothing had happened. Symptoms of depression started affecting her ability to eat and take care of herself and she lost a lot of weight. She did not return to the doctor.

“I told them I am not well, I just lost a baby. And they said, ‘That’s not my fault, that’s your fault.’”

Kolahi told BuzzFeed News that in the first trimester there is not a high risk for the woman following a natural miscarriage, but in the second or third trimesters or if the woman bleeds for several days, she should, “absolutely see a doctor, because it might not pass on its own,” Kolahi said.

E and Pagoada were in the second trimesters during their miscarriages, and Morales was at the very end of her first.

The hospital discharge pamphlet given to Morales says that women who have recently had a miscarriage should “get help right away” if they “have more bleeding” or “get lightheaded, weak, or you pass out.” All three women experienced these symptoms but said they were not given immediate help.

Months after their miscarriages, the women say they are still experiencing psychological and emotional repercussions.

Months after the physical repercussions of their miscarriages subsided, the women say they are still experiencing psychological and emotional repercussions of their treatment in the detention facilities.

“It’s important that you know the trauma that they inflict on you … It’s not a place for anybody much less for pregnant women,” said Morales, who has been on antidepressants since getting out of detention in mid-March, while her case is pending. “It’s something too traumatic. It’s a punishment that I will never forget.”

“There was no relief. I was dying every day. ... Psychologically and physically you are sick,” she added. “I can’t even say how painful it is to be there without help, without support, and with the pain of having lost something so precious.”

“There are times that I laugh, times that I feel like another person entirely, I just can’t believe what has happened,” E said, only days before she agreed to return to El Salvador.

“For me, this is going to be a pain that I carry for a long time, that because of me, I lost my son. I had a dream to come to this place with my son and to be safe and make a life here. What’s going to happen now? What was the point of this dream? It hurts.” ●

#us mexico border #miscarriage #sex based oppression #immigration #abuse #racism

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rapeculturerealities · 6 years ago

Link

“My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them,” she said.

About a week after speaking with BuzzFeed News, E gave up her fight for asylum, accepted voluntary departure, and was deported back to El Salvador.

CBP referred BuzzFeed News to its national standards, and DHS did not individually respond to a request for comment.

“They are not only given adequate care in facilities, but it is much better care than when they are living in the shadows.”

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coolpolarbear123 · 3 years ago

Text

Band Camp Day 3

"we can either be the picconets or the clarilos." "The picc-a-nut?" "clarilo it is"

August 17th, 2021

<< 3 >>

forgive me if this is short:

4 hours of sleep later, we're heading to the field with literal mugs of coffee in hand to start the senior prank

the prank today: hanging underwear on the band director's podium

it's a tradition. I've probably mentioned it in past posts

at 8:30, we start, I'm more anxious than ever bc of all the drama

practice, fundamentals, the works

ML2 doesn't clap for the DI's and it freaks me out bc I know it's bc she hates that I have it

I've literally been texting the picc drum major (her roommate) about it all of band camp

my marching today??? absolutely awful. I could barely pay attention or anything

it's ML2's bday!! so I have been trying to mention it a lot and get her recognition so that maybe she's not as angry at me

We got put in a temporary band block yesterday and it's??? terrible? I'd like for the temporary part to end bc we're still using it

today I did a lot of messing up, and I feel really bad and gross about it

there's been this issue that when we do stuff in our big band block, someone in the middle will mess up, and by the time it gets to the ends of the block (us, the piccs), it's a huge mess, and we get blamed

this happened and our DM (the other one, the one who plays alto) was like "I know when I'm wrong" and we were scrambling to figure out where we were supposed to be

lunch!

people from random sections have been eating with us. This is fine, but?? it seems really early. Do you guys even know your own sections?

full band rehearsal! it was uneventful

our first playing sectionals! we stickered our nametags, then played through a lot of songs

we actually did really well, which is probably because we're mostly returners (re: one freshman)

and!! we were worried that our SL was gonna be super nitpicky and she's not! she's super reasonable!

back to full band rehearsal. Our band director made us watch a bunch of videos?? like they were sorta related to what we were doing but eh

I've been doing a lot of exchanging glances with the alto drum major. Mostly about ML2

we also?? have to move section bonding? which usually happens on Thursday night? I told our section leader that she needs to take that day off from her CA stuff, but she didn't, and now she works that night. Finding a replacement was aggravating, and we chose an hour and a half window on Sunday

that's not enough time, and it's... mediocre at best, really

it doesn't leave much space for fun things

dinner! the other librarian staff person is very well known for making really weird food combos that are super gross, and she is on a roll this week, lemme tell ya

a couple days ago it was coffee and chicken, there was cake and meat sauce at one point, etc

"If I can eat it, it's not a dog"

after dinner was more marching

our band director said he was writing pregame drill tonight, which means us drill librarian staff will have our hands full in the morning

did i mention the IMMENSE AMOUNT OF ANXIETY i have about being leadership bc of certain other members in the section?

it's so bad that our section leader had to give us the "don't talk about other members behind their back" speech

we did our singing at the end, and the 5th years led. One of my best friends is a 5th year, and there's only, like, 5 total, and it was really cute

very last of the real ones

and then we flash mobbed the hey song to scare the freshmen, like we do every year, even though we usually do it in the band room

our freshman caught on to the movements fairly well

the night activity was the scavenger hunt!

on the drive to the main part of campus, i asked if we are still doing the "not last" chant, and ML2 was like "I think the other sections get annoyed at it"

I texted our DM bc I was sad that we're retiring the chant

we get out of the car and the piccs aren't sitting in their usual spot which is like the icing on the cake for my stress rn

and then my SL comes up to me and is like "I'm gonna start the chant" "did [DM] talk to you?" "yeah, and I wanna do it" "let's just... wait and see"

but then later, one of the piccs started it, so at least we chanted it and I'm not the only one who cares

the clarinets only had one returner show up (one of my really good friends), so they requested to combine with a different section, and the piccolos all raised their hands up after a moment and shouted "PICCOLOS" so they joined us!

it was sorta scary bc that's a lot of people? we had all 10 of us, and there was a good amount of them, and we only have 15 minutes to run around and do things

but literally no one else wanted them (one of the clarinet freshmen even begged the drumline to take them) and we're friends with them, so

the scavenger hunt began, and SL did an amazing job of leading. I got to help with it! i called out prompts

and DANG were we efficient

we werent even late to getting back

usually while the scores are being calculated, we dick around, and every section did plenty of that, including us, but it was kinda awkward bc the senior piccs wanted no part of it

i was upset bc why can't we just,,, not separate ourselves like that. Why do we have to be different and extra and not social

I stayed with the seniors bc I was more scared of leaving them, but I was annoyed

after scores were calculated and we were all standing together, I went around and said "reminder! all we want is not last" and I get back to my place where I was standing to hear the seniors just like "idc what we get, I just wanna go home"

cool thanks

but we didn't get last!! and we did sorta scream bc that's huge!

last place had 41 points

AND THEN WE DIDN'T GET SECOND TO LAST

YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE LOOKS ON OUR FACES

but then we

DIDN'T GET THIRD TO LAST EITHER

at this point we're holding our breath, not screaming, just giving each other Looks

how well did we do? we had such a big section

fast forward to them announcing fourth place, and that wasn't us either, we were all whispering about how we ranked. No matter what, we were first, second, or third, and that's like getting a medal

and we weren't third

"first place had significantly more photos"

that kinda where we all accepted that we got second

and WE FUCKING WON WITH 81 POINTS

WON

WE WON MY FRESHMAN YEAR AND NOW MY SENIOR YEAR

THAT'S H U G E

piccolos don't win things

we don't even know the clarinets

we called ourselves the clarilos

we're so fckn stoked about our win, guys, it hasn't even set in, really

NOT LAST NOT LAST NOT LAST

#I fell asleep while writing this last night #so lets see if I can catch up and write two tonight #band #band camp #marching band #cbc #2k21 bc adventures #rant #cpb speaks

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autoeroticalgolania · 2 years ago

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Tampongate

This conversation takes place during Charles' visit to the Cheshire home of the dowager Duchess of Westminster ( also referred to as "Nancy" in this transcript ). Camilla is at her home, Bolehyde Manor, in the West County. The tape begins a small way though the conversation and lasts six minutes until Charles hangs the phone up. It is noted that, on this tape, recorded on the night of Monday, December 18th, 1989, the references "I can't bear a Sunday night without you" and Camilla's mentioning of her son, Tom's birthday ( December 18, 1974 ) being tomorrow, was glaring evidence that this tape was pre-recorded, and broadcast in hopes that a ham-radio operator would pick it up.

Charles: "He was a bit anxious, actually."

Camilla: "Was he?"

Charles: "He thought he might've gone too far."

Camilla: "Ah well."

Charles: "Anyway, you know that's the sort of thing one has to beware of. And sort of feel one's way along with - if you know what I mean."

Camilla: "Mmmm. You're awfully good feeling your way along."

Charles: "Oh Stop! I want to feel my way along you, all over you, and up and down you, and in and out..."

Camilla: "Oh, Charles!"

Charles: "Particularly in and out!"

Camilla: "Oh, that's just what I need at the moment."

Charles: "Is it?"

[ At this point the scanner enthusiast speaks over, to record the date ]

Scanner Enthusiast: "December 18th."

Camilla: "I know it would revive me. I can't bear a Sunday night without you."

Charles: "Oh, God."

Camilla: "It's like that programme 'Start the Week.' I can't start the week without you."

Charles: "I fill up your tank!!"

Camilla: "Yes, you do."

Charles: "Then you can cope."

Camilla: "Then I'm all right."

Charles: "What about me? The trouble is I need you several times a week."

Camilla: "Mmmm, so do I. I need you all the week. All the time."

Charles: "Oh, God. I'll just live inside your trousers, or something. It would be much easier!"

Camilla: (laughing) "What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers?"

Both laugh

Camilla: "Oh, You're you're going to come back as a pair of knickers!"

Charles: "Or, God forbid, a Tampax! Just my luck!" (Laughs)

Camilla: "You are a complete idiot! (Laughs) Oh, what a wonderful idea!"

Charles: "My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on, forever swirling round on the top, never going down."

Camilla: (Laughing) "Oh, Darling!"

Charles: "Until the next one comes through."

Camilla: "Oh, perhaps you could come back as a box."

Charles: "What sort of box?"

Camilla: "A box of Tampax, so you could just keep going."

Charles: "That's true."

Camilla: "Repeating yourself...(Laughing) Oh, darling I just want you now."

Charles: "Do You?"

Camilla: "Mmmmm."

Charles: "So do I!"

Camilla: "Desperately, desperately, desperately. Oh, I thought of you so much at Yaraby."

Charles: "Did you?"

Camilla: "Simply mean we couldn't be there together."

Charles: "Desperate. If you could be here - I long to ask Nancy sometimes." [ AKA Anne Winifred Sullivan, the Duchess of Westminster, called "Nancy" by her friends. At the time of this phone call, the Prince was staying at her residence. Here, Charles is consulting with CPB about whether or not to impose upon Nancy's hospitatilty, by asking her to host their illicit rendevoux.]

Camilla: "Why don't you?"

Charles: "I daren't."

#tampongate #dirty talk #royal family #transcript

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cpbs-void · 7 years ago

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I’m so tired everything is blurry so scrolling through tumblr is pretty worthless, but I don’t want to go to bed because Hi My Name is Worried and

#cpb speaks

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ayearofpike · 6 years ago

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The Grave

Pocket Books, 1999 194 pages, 16 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-55077-2 LOC: CPB Box no. 1856 vol. 22 OCLC: 42262026 Released September 1, 1999 (per B&N)

Keri Weir has a rough life: her boyfriend bores her, her sister is dead of cancer, her dad has abandoned her to start a new family, her mom is addicted to cocaine and is slowly selling everything they own to get a new fix. That doesn’t mean, though, that she wants it to end. But when she meets a mysterious man at her workplace, and feels inexplicably drawn to him, that’s what happens. But the end itself is a new beginning, one that threatens to never end.

And so we come to the end of Christopher Pike’s output under the imprint of Archway Paperbacks, a solid 11-year run whose end was inevitable thanks to the increasing stature and importance of teen and YA literature. If you weren’t there, it’s really hard to understand what the climate was like, how books for young people were seen as less — less important, less prestigious, less work to read and write. Likewise, it’s kind of hard to overstate the importance of Harry Potter, what it did for not just the readers it aimed at but the whole genre of juvenile literature. Prisoner of Azkaban came out one week after this book in the US, which I remember as being the flash point for interest in the boy wizard over here. After that, nobody was going to underestimate the selling power of a kid’s book, and nobody was going to accept an underdeveloped story that stood alone and didn’t (or couldn’t) promise resolution over a series.

It seems like Pike saw the writing on the wall here. He’s talked a little bit about the market changing around him and not being able to catch it. We saw a lot of the crap we were pushed fall off around the same time; a whole bunch of the series I’d mentioned before became too fluffy or lightweight for the new generation of teen book-purchasers. Longer stories became de rigueur, as publishers saw the willingness of kids to push through four hundred pages of the third story out of seven in order to find out how that poor kid with the lightning scar was going to figure himself out and avenge his parents.

It’s not like Pike didn’t have the chops to write a longer book; his four adult novels illustrate how he can dive in more depth into a concept and really flesh it out. (OK, two of them do.) And it’s not like he didn’t have material to expand upon and really explain — if anything, I feel like I’ve been complaining that he doesn’t unpack ENOUGH here at the end. And maybe that’s the real problem. Christopher Pike rose to fame in a climate where it was OK and expected to not give up all your information and secrets, to not explore a thread that didn’t speak to a highly-focused theme, and above all else to keep your page count down. Adapting to the new model of kidlit would take him some time.

This book is no exception. It starts with a strong and promising presence, reaches a conflict point that explains and engages, and then ... just sorta falls off with no real resolution, or at least not a satisfying one, maybe with a mandate to get out of the book before page 200. It opens another door right at the end, one that would have been OK to leave hanging ten years before maybe, but which now is unsatisfying and frustrating to readers who are expecting to know where that door leads. And maybe there are some other problems with construction, but let’s get into the recap before we talk too much about that.

We start not with Keri, but with Ted Lovett, a college freshman who has fallen for a young woman at HIS work site. She is mysteriously charming and bewitching, and when Ted asks to see her again she promises to call. And she does, holy crap. But her calls are scattered and sporadic, and even though Ted isn’t sure whether he wants this kind of a relationship he finds he can’t stay away. The last call leads to a hike into the forest, where suddenly he is beset on all sides by monstrously strong humans and buried alive in what appears to be a Satanic ritual. He feels a prick in the back, pleads with a morose but determined beauty, and then smothers in a shallow grave.

Keri doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know Ted, even. All she knows is she’s stuck in a dead-end with no way to turn around or back out of it. That is, until she meets Oscar, a sensitive and quiet man who has some undefinable quality that draws her to him. He’s certainly a lot more interesting than her doofy boyfriend, who comes across as the worst kind of clingy shithead. We understand this through his behavior as much as we do because Keri wants to shake free of him. It helps that the next night after work she sees Oscar again and asks to go to his apartment to see his paintings. Like, leading up to much? Of course they have sex, and of course Keri’s boyfriend is waiting outside her apartment when she gets home, and of course he’s all whiny and shitty about it.

But then they find Keri’s mom inside, barely breathing after an overdose, and they rush her to the hospital. Once in the waiting room, Keri passes out from the exhaustion of not only having to take care of her addict mother but also from doin’ it all night. She has a dream about a beautiful garden full of happy people, and of journeying from it to a cave full of smoke, where a figure shrouded in shadow asks if he should come. This part was super confusing, because it’s literally a page of one-sentence back-and-forth unattributed quotes, and you almost have to mark it with a pencil to keep track of who’s saying what. But ultimately Keri says yes, and then immediately wakes from her dream to learn that her mother is stable and her relationship is over. Well, OK, she and the now-ex talk about it and agree that they need to be done. Which she should have said before, considering how long she’s felt that way, but I get it. (I’ve had my own relationships that dragged on longer than they should have out of obligation, on both our parts.)

So obviously Keri isn’t going to work today, but she does arrange to meet Oscar for a late dinner and maybe some more shpdoinkling. On her way to the car, though, she’s suddenly waylaid by a strong person who chloroforms her and drags her off. She’s aware enough to realize when she gets shot with a syringe in the butt, and fully awake by the time she’s carried from the vehicle she’s in and deposited in a grocery store freezer. She manages to break her bonds, but there’s no fail-safe to escape the freezer — even Pike’s favorite emergency ax has been removed from its hooks. So she feels her body freeze, go numb, and then inexplicably feel warmer as she blacks out for the last time.

And now she’s in her sister’s bedroom, back in the before times, when Sis was alive and Dad was around and Mom was coherent. This part is one of the times when I wish we’d gotten more. We learn that Keri has more or less completely blocked out any memory of her sister’s death, and won’t talk about it to anyone. Her sister tells her that she needs to come to grips with reality, that her death has led to so many of the problems and if Keri will just understand and accept this tragic end it could help her. Only maybe not now, because she’s in a weird place where she’s neither dead nor alive and is going to have to face the coming of the shadowed person. And then Keri wakes up, and we almost never talk about her sister again. Like, what was the purpose of this dream sequence? We just needed someone dead who could explain it to her? Shouldn’t the sister play a bigger part in post-death? I was dissatisfied, much like with the mom, who we’ll get back to.

But yeah, Keri wakes up, and she knows it’s cold but it doesn’t bother her, and she knows it’s dark but she can still see quite well (except suddenly without color), and she knows she’s locked in a freezer but a couple of stiff kicks get her out the door. She also knows she’s hungry, and she eats more food than she would have even been able to look at before she went in the freezer. What’s most disconcerting to her, maybe, is the fact that she doesn’t really FEEL anything about these changes. She accepts that she’s changed, that she should have died and didn’t and is now insatiable and powerful, but she’s not bothered by that — which is the thing that bothers her most.

She leaves the market and, after a run-in with a gang where she totally ruins the leader by kneeing him in the crotch up to his sternum, starts to go to Oscar’s house. Only, wait: Oscar was the only person who could have known she was leaving her place when she did, and he exhibits some of the same things she’s feeling now (colorblind, need to eat, unexpected strength). So maybe don’t seek out the person who made some weird manipulation that cheated your death, but then tried to kill you. Instead she goes home and calls her ex and talks about her concerns about Oscar, staying vague but still ominous and foreboding. She can’t sleep anymore either, so she basically eats all night and into the morning before she goes to see her mom. Mom notices a frightened, frail stance that Keri is taking (trust an addict, I guess), but she also wants to talk about a dream she had where they were all watching Sis pack for some kind of a trip. Keri apologizes for her distance, but then she leaves again right away, after determining that Mom can get home safely after being discharged. And this is the last time we see Mom too. Which I’m kinda OK with, because at least we get a picture of her being on the road to recovery, which allows us to imagine she turns out all right ... but wasn’t it the death of her first daughter that made her spiral to begin with? What’s going to happen now that she never sees her second one again?

But Keri has suddenly realized why Oscar looks so familiar, never mind that this was not foreshadowed or alluded to ANYWHERE in this novel. He’s a dead kid who disappeared last year, who had his picture in the paper next to a tragic article. A dead kid named Ted Lovett. And like, you saw this coming; we had enough foreshadowing that Ted was dead but back somehow. I’m OK with that. What I’m not sold on is Keri going to talk to Ted’s mom. Like, why? She doesn’t know he’s alive; if she did, wouldn’t that have also made news? But she does it, because I guess Pike just can’t leave the parents of dead kids alone, and then she goes to Oscar’s place because what the fuck else is there to do when you’re colorblind and hungry and strong and out of options?

Oscar’s not alone. There’s a scientist there, who explains that Keri’s condition is a clever manipulation of her DNA to prevent the body from being able to die unless it is completely destroyed. He created the compound to try to save his daughter, who was succumbing to leukemia ... only she went bad. In fact, she swiped the formula and turned a whole bunch of others, including her brother. The secret, it seemed, was to enhance the dying person’s fear, which would then manifest in cold brutality once they awakened from death. It didn’t work on Ted Oscar, for reasons not sufficiently explained, and now he and the scientist are trying to figure out how to stop the monstrosity that is these other monsters. They have help: an inexplicable vision of a shadowed man, who has indicated that they should impregnate a virile young woman and then turn her so that she brings him into the world.

That’s right: Keri is vampire-zombie-monster pregnant. And the baby she carries will determine the fate of the world.

The bad guys want the baby too, of course. All of a sudden they’re at the door, holding Keri’s ex hostage. Seems they followed her from Ted’s mom’s house. No one has to get hurt, the bewitching beauty daughter says, if they willingly go downstairs and get in the van. Obviously Oscar and the scientist aren’t gonna willingly anything, and Keri wants to get her ex out of harm’s way. Too late she dives after BBD, who calmly and effortlessly rips her ex’s arm off. There’s a monster of a shootout, and our good guys manage to escape (not the ex, who bleeds to death in seconds), only to find once they’re out on the ocean in Oscar’s boat that the bad guys have a helicopter and a flamethrower. So they have to bail as the boat goes up, and sure they have super strength and stamina but Keri can’t outswim a power boat, which is what BBD pulls up in, informing her that she has no choice but to be a prisoner.

They caught Oscar too, and drive the both of them to an abandoned military facility in a mountain somewhere. Their cell is a nice one, as far as cells go, but unescapable: the bars are too strong to break, and the back is raw rock that goes deeper into the mountain. They won’t be able to dig their way out before the baby comes, which thanks to Keri’s enhanced biology should take about a week. After that, the bad guys figure, they’ll just undo Mom and Dad and be able to use this baby for their own nefarious ends.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. BBD still has feelings for Oscar ... it seems that something about the undeath process might make us more susceptible to finding a soulmate or falling in love with a person. At least that’s what I feel like we’re supposed to understand, given Keri’s inexplicable and instantaneous affinity for Oscar; this is one more thing Pike doesn’t go into. Just like the brother, who is a total cocknugget but only really shows up at the birth, so he can menace the couple and torment the doctor before killing him. Seriously: we constantly hear about this dude and what an evil monster he is, but he’s only actually in the book for seven pages. Still, he acknowledges that our other prisoner needs to live, too, as the mother will be critical to feeding the baby while he matures.

And he also does this fast. In twenty days he gains twenty years, reads the entire Internet, and gets crops to grow in their underground cell. Shades of Last Vampire 4, a little bit. BBD tries to get him to explain his goals and doings to her, but he flat-out refuses. In fact, the only person he’ll try to explain anything to is his mom. She asks if he will draw a picture of how he might represent himself before he was born, and it’s ... caprine. Horns, a tail, cloven hooves. And now Keri is all, oh shit, I invited the actual DEVIL into my uterus. But the boy advises her: don’t panic.

So now they’ve been in this facility a month, and all of a sudden there’s sounds of scuffle. It seems that the scientist managed to get away clean, and has given up just enough info to the government that they managed to track these monster fighters to this facility and are now cleaning it out with firebombs. Luckily for our heroes, Oscar has dug up to a boulder that he’s pretty sure is the last blockade between their cell and an underground river. They can’t move it, though, before everyone comes pouring into the holding facility: BBD and Cocknugget with guns, Scientist with an obvious bomb, and then the military. But what if we ask the devil? So he moves the rock without any problem, just behind an explosion and expansion of fire, creating a swirl of water and a gush of ashes and a battering of rocks that leaves Keri unconscious.

She comes to in a beautiful garden, like the one in her dream. Oscar and their son are there too, so obviously they’re dead and in heaven, right? No, idiot, they can’t die, remember? And the son has decided he’s going to say in this nowhere and be one with nature, and that his parents have to go on without him. Keri doesn’t want to, but Oscar thinks they have to, and he has a rationale: he’s pretty sure that their son is not Satan, but instead is Pan, the ancient god of the wild. They both have goat legs and horns, after all, and look at how good this kid has been at making plants grow no matter the lack of water or sunlight. This doesn’t go any farther either, and I need more, specifically: how the shit does tampering with human genes equal giving birth to another fuckin’ Percy Jackson character? We never get to find out. Keri and Oscar leave, they run into BBD (who also somehow made it out alive), they tell her to fuck off, and then they keep walking, and the book ends.

So if you’re keeping count, that’s at least five people whose stories have not been satisfactorily explored in this novel, which pulls up well short of half of the page count that Harry Potter would get to lose a rat. If we’re looking for an inability or unwillingness to expand and explore both the narrative and the changing state of YA, this is it right here. Just like Pike’s career, it fizzles out unresolved and without warning. Couldn’t he have spent just a little more time on some backstory or character building, to explain just why these douche-monsters were so horrible but Oscar was good? Was there no chance at all of explaining the connection between technology and nature that would explore just how and why Pan reincarnated in the womb of a half-dead high school senior? What happened to Keri’s family that it fell apart so hard and was predisposed to forget about a dead sister through running from her? Is it any wonder that The Grave was his last book for four years?

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