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djemsostylist · 3 years ago

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Of Queens and Trash

Here’s the thing. SCK has been on a downward trend since 13. The breakup was long, getting together again was tiring, the amnesia plot was poorly handled and the mess that came following his recovery was, well, a mess. The necessary break for covid gave us a chance for a fresh start for Edser. All the bad stuff in the past, and a focus in the last episodes of them being able to finally fulfill all the promises they had not been able to. After all, this was a story that, at its core, was about two people who met and fell in love and who, no matter what, chose to be together. Invisible handcuffs. And with the return of the OG writer, it seemed we might finally get that. After 39 episodes of angst and only 7(?) of real togetherness, surely it was time? Forget the pain of the past, and start with Edser navigating their world together.

And then the trailer dropped. And all of a sudden, all the people who had spent months eviscerating Serkan for behaving badly in the 30s were celebrating this new plot, the “great angst” and Eda “being a Queen.”

For me, I can’t get over the hiding of the child. It's a hardline deal breaker. I don’t think it matters who writes it, I think it's an awful plotline. No matter how "good" the trailer looks or moments seem, I will remember that I was watching a show about two people who loved each other and never wanted to be apart, about a man who learned how to open his heart, and this ruined it all.

Now, I think it's worth noting that my hard line, in this particular case, is in response to Edser, if that makes sense. I’m not hardline, “if this is in a story I’m not watching”. If it works for the characters and story because that is the type of story being told, then fine.

I don't subscribe to the woke feminism brand of "all women are Queens and all men are Trash" which seems to be a trend of late (and not just in fandom). I think people are people and people are generally imperfect but also trying. I don’t think women, simply by virtue of carrying a child, get full say in what happens to the child, regardless of the father’s wishes. I'm not fond of a “hiding a kid storyline”, and while I get the whole "my body my choice" style of arguing, it took two people to make the baby. Two people get a say in what happens. I get you are growing the kid, but you didn't spontaneously conceive.

For me, Edser being apart and/or hiding a kid is a hardline. It doesn't fit with the characters as I know them and it doesn't fit with the storyline. And look--I hated the amnesia plot. I thought there were a literal million ways this could have been done better, but it's what we got. So for everyone suddenly defending this new plot, despite it making about as much sense as Eda getting married to make Serkan remember her, then that means everything goes. No blaming writers or ignoring canon...everything has context and meaning now. And since “it's realistic” is also a common refrain, then fine. Let’s go realistic.

Imagine being in a plane crash. You wake up, you have clear physical/mental blocks. For someone who likes to be in control, that's terrifying. You have a ring on your finger with a woman's name you don't know, and an entire year missing. You call the one person you know will come (since your parents and friends are useless) and she comes and tells you a story that jives. You can't remember shit and you keep getting flashes and your hands won't work, so you take what she tells you, because why would you have any reason to doubt? It’s not like you can remember anyway, and trying to remember hurts.

You finally go back home, and you recognize nothing about your own life. Friends, family...everything is different. Your mom is out, your dad is gone, your best friends are married. You don't even live in the same house, you have people working in your company you don’t know--even your dog is gone. And then you have a hysterical woman throwing pictures in your face of a man you don't recognize and your brain is still foggy and all your friends and family seem to be shrugging their shoulders at you.

You're terrified and alone and all you get is some vagueness about an epic love story and too much emotion and all you want to do is hide. From everything. Plus your heart is doing this thing every time the girl is near and you think you might be dying maybe and remember how your brother died?

So, the girl kisses you, you literally feel like you might be dying, and it's like naw. Fuck this. I'm getting back an ounce of control. So you propose to Selin. I mean you don’t love her and you barely want her but at least she is the same. At least she hasn’t changed, and at least she doesn’t stare at you with the weight of a million expectations that everyone else does. At least she doesn’t look at you and hope to see a man you can’t ever remember being.

But then the girl everyone claims is your soulmate is suddenly engaged to another man, and spends every moment after that claiming she hates you, she is over you, she is better off/happier without you, doesn't need you.

So it's like, okay, what is the truth. Your brain isn't helping, your friends aren't helping, she isn't helping. So you lash out, you close off, because really, what else is left. Your life isn’t your life, your mind isn’t your mind, you can’t even figure out what’s real and what isn’t. And she’s getting married and you want to die but she’s getting married and surely if she loved you she wouldn’t be doing this?

And then you get your memories back. Finally. Everything comes flooding back ,and it's a lot. You cope in shitty ways, you don't respond well, etc. You’ve returned from the dead twice, and everything feels just slightly off, but maybe you can make this work. At least you have her. After a few days, you’re feeling like your old self. You've got your memories, your girl, the possibility of the future you had snatched twice, and then BOOM. She rejects you, out of nowhere.

Won't talk, won't communicate, you have no idea what the fuck is happening. She’s crying and sad but also not leaving but also not staying and your brain can’t quite work things out but all you can do is promise that you love her, only her, always her, forever. Surely she must know that by now, right?

And then she tells you about the baby. You can't remember the sex of course, but then you find out it probably happened while your brain was fucked, and you barely have time to process this before oh yeah the love of your life is leaving you bc she would rather you raise a baby with your rapist. And suddenly you might be dying, again.

But you stop her. You stop her and even though she says she didn’t come back for you, why else would she have stayed? So, you finally get her back, she tattoos you on her finger and maybe just maybe everything will be fine when BOOM. Cancer. You aren't even over the other shit, and you have a fucking tumor. You are 30 years old, you've survived a plane crash, amnesia, and now you have a tumor. How many times can a person die?

And so you don’t cope well. You withdraw, you back away. Your brother died when he was young, you know what that does to a person. You know what it did to your family. You have this fear that curls around your heart that says “but what if she becomes my mother.” And she goes. She leaves and she takes your heart and your child (that you don’t even know about) and it’s like...fuck. Again. Because everyone leaves you, eventually. And somehow, it’s always your fault.

So, what I'm saying is, Eda endured a lot, sure. She was hurt. Their breakup in 14 was hard and I’m not denying that (although there is another post I could write about how since Eda never actually uses her words to tell him how she feels he can, perhaps, be understood in assuming that breaking up after barely being together would hurt but also that she would move on and live her life happily without him. Which I guess season 2 proves…) Losing Serkan to an accident/amnesia was hard, looking at the body of the man she loves but not seeing the man she loves must have been agony. But Serkan was fucking wrecked. So instead of choosing to write a plot where they both get to heal, where they both get to explore their pain and work through it together, we get Serkan who reverted to being a robot to cope with massive trauma and PTSD, and essentially is abandoned by everyone, again.

I guess what I'm saying is, if staying with him and supporting him when he was dealing with trauma was too much for her, then fine.That is very true for some people, and it’s certainly realistic. But I don't really think that jives with Eda and her character, and while it isn't a trauma competition, I'd still think Serkan comes out a winner here. Eda lost her parents, which was awful. She lost him, but she got him back. Twice. His trauma is losing his brother, being abandoned by his parents, a plane crash, amnesia, emotional manipulation/abuse and cancer. And then he gets punished by having his daughter taken away from him because he was having a hard time coping. Keeping a kid a secret isn't "protecting the child" it's punishing the father.

Tl;dr The direction they have taken the characters is gross for both mains, but if people are trying to justify Eda keeping his child from him because “he deserves it” or “she did what was best for her” then I think we maybe haven’t been watching the same show. Even if he said “I don’t want kids,” saying that to a hypothetical child is very different then being told “a baby is very much our reality.” Because that's the crux right? It's not that he decided he just didn't want to be a father ever, he's scared of having a family and losing them or of them losing him. And then she made that very fear be realized. Which is tragic and quite the opposite of what his life partner needed to do in that situation.

Bitte.

Thanks to @lolo-deli for the proofread and the final lines, you are the best. And for putting up with my uncontrollable ranting about this for days.

#sen çal kapımı #sck #serkan bolat #eda yıldız #SCK is officially over for me #so I’m making funerary arrangements to say goodbye to yet another fandom.#this is my eulogy #also this is a serkan bolat protection blog #jesus i sound like a 14 year old fangirl #whatever #its been a minute since i have been one of those #let me relive the days in peace

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arrghigiveup · 6 years ago

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There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman, Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama, Michael Johnson, and Jose L Gomez. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. But she had a theory that black holes have shadows, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet with only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's far more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at equal or less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

=============================================== 2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrects and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936…

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606 This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop… This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attend she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156 This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/1116518544961830918 This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/ This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman… This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f… This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is a part. While I intentionally highlight her contributions in defense of her, her statement that it was a team effort is true. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

#Katie Bouman #Andrew Chael #black hole #black hole photo #science #programming

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mrshiddleston-uk · 6 years ago

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The Secret

Pairing: Loki/Reader || Word Count: 1.7k ||

A/N: Soooo I wrote a little something for the lovely @fadingcoast and @fandom-and-feminism’s MCUvsBSB fic challenge! My song prompt was ‘All I have to give’ and Loki.

—————

Another day, another argument. You kicked frustratedly at a loose stone on the path as you made your way back towards the Avengers compound. Tonight had been your last night off before the big mission that was planned for this weekend and you’d been hoping for a nice chilled night with your boyfriend, takeaway pizza and Netflix. But instead, you and he had argued again. You had a pretty volatile relationship, and just lately the bad times had started to massively outweigh the good. Ever since you’d been promoted to Mission Director and started working longer hours. You knew he got frustrated that you couldn’t talk to him about it, as obviously Missions were classified information but you’d hoped he would be happy for you, that you’d finally got the job you’d been desperate for for years. Instead, he was bitter and almost jealous of how much time you spent at work, and with the Avengers. Making your way through the corridors, you shuffled into the common room to get a drink. As you entered, Loki looked up from the table with a look of surprise. You half smiled at him as you opened the fridge and grabbed a beer, flipping the top off and taking a large gulp before leaning back against the counter and turning to Loki, who was still watching you with one eyebrow raised in curiosity. Eventually he spoke,

“You’re back early?”

You took another swig of beer before you replied, looking down to the floor, “My evening didn’t exactly go to plan”

“Did you have another argument?”

You sighed, “I don’t wanna talk about it, Loki”

You rounded the counter and walked towards the table, pulling out a chair and sitting down opposite him, looking at the paper that was strewn across the table, “whatcha doing?”

“Nothing” Loki mumbled, frantically gathering up the papers before you got a chance to look at them and you watched him as he turned them face down and moved them to the other side of the table, out of your reach. Was he blushing? He cleared his throat and turned back to you, his cool exterior re intact,

“I think Wanda left some ice cream in the fridge. Shall we see what’s on the television? I’m sure there’s some awful, predictable, midgardian sitcom on that would cheer you up”

You laughed as Loki stood and held out his hands for you to take, helping you to your feet, “Thank you, Loki” you whispered, sliding your hands around his back and hugging him. You felt his body tense momentarily like it always did before he gently wrapped his arms around you too, rubbing your back gently,

“Go, sit” he ordered.

You spent the next couple of hours watching re runs of ‘Friends’, passing the tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream backwards and forwards between you. However, your eyes kept wandering back to the pile of papers still laying on the table.

“Loki?”

“Hmmmm?” He replied without even looking at you as he scraped the spoon around the inside of the now empty ice cream tub, trying to collect the last of it.

“What were you writing earlier?”

You watched as he froze with the spoon mid way between the container and his mouth, and his cheeks started to flush again,

“I told you…..nothing”

He licked the spoon clean and hurriedly picked up the lid, putting it back on the tub and standing up.

“What’s the big secret?” You pressed, curious to know what had got him so flustered and why he wouldn’t tell you. You watched as he moved quickly into the kitchen, throwing the ice cream tub in the bin and rinsing off the spoon before going to the table and gathering up the papers.

“I’m going to bed” he mumbled, heading towards the door. As he reached it, he turned back to you,

“You know, you could do so much better than that uncivilised lout that you choose to call your boyfriend”

Without waiting for you to reply, he pulled the door open and disappeared.

—————

You could still remember the first time you met Loki. You’d been scared, but equally attracted to him at the same time. For the first few weeks he was at the compound, he’d barely left his room as he struggled to adapt to a whole new way of life, only emerging for food and drink. But even then he wouldn’t eat with everyone else in the communal area, instead choosing to take it back to his room and resume his solitary lifestyle. You would watch as he prepared his meal in silence, avoiding eye contact or conversation with anyone. You’d soon realised that the only way you were were going to get to know the God of Mischief was if you made the first move. So you’d summoned every last ounce of courage you had, and knocked in his door, arms full of books that Thor had suggested to you that he might like. After that you and Loki had struck up a close friendship, and with your encouragement he’d also started to interact with the other Avengers too. Some of them started to question just how close you and Loki really were, but you’d both always dismissed it. You were just friends. You had a boyfriend. The thing was, Loki was everything your boyfriend wasn’t.

One night, after everyone else had gone to bed and you’d had one too many glasses of wine, Steve got it out of you. You finally confessed that you were ridiculously attracted to Loki, and had been since the moment you set eyes on him. You’d sworn Steve to secrecy, telling him that Loki would never be interested in you. He was a God after all, and you were just a normal, boring human. To Loki, you were just a friend.

—————

Halfway through the mission, the Comms system broke. You didn’t know anything. You didn’t know if the mission had succeeded or failed. You didn’t know if they were alive or dead. All you could do was wait to see if they came back. You’d been pacing the length of mission control for nearly three hours when the call came - the Quinjet was coming in to land. You ran as fast as you could up to the landing deck, getting there just as the jets engines shut down. Shuffling from leg to leg, you huffed impatiently as you waited for the doors to open. Then slowly, figures started to emerge. Tony, Bruce, Natasha, Clint, Bucky…….they were all pretty beaten up, but they were alive. Your heart races as you started to panic…...where were the others? Then two more people appeared, and at that point, you knew. As Steve helped a bloodied and upset Thor down the ramp, you knew. Loki was dead.

You stood frozen to the spot as Thor was helped away by Bruce and Tony, and Steve walked slowly towards you, looking at the ground. Your eyes filled with tears as he stopped in front of you and sighed, finally lifted his head to look at you.

“I’m sorry”

You collapsed forwards into Steve’s arms as you broke down. He held you tight as you cried, burying your face in his neck.

“We got separated. Loki called for backup but then comms went down so we didn’t know where he was. We couldn’t find him…….i’m so, so sorry”

—————

You were angry. With yourself for failing as Mission Director, with the tech department for whatever had made the comms system fail, with the other Avengers for not trying harder to get to him, even with Loki for not staying closer to the others. But mostly, you were just heartbroken. As soon as the mission debriefing was over you fled from the room, just needing to be alone. Passing your own quarters, you carried on along the corridors until you arrived outside the door to Loki’s room. You opened it and slipped in quietly, taking a deep, shaky breath as you looked around. Your eyes were drawn to something laying on the bed, and you walked over, picking up the envelope with your name written on the front in Loki’s immaculate handwriting. You sunk down onto the edge of the bed as you turned the envelope over and read the note on the back,

Should I not return, this is for you.

Frowning, you tore it open and pulled out the sheet of paper and started to read,

I don’t know what he does to make you cry,

but I’ll be there to make you smile

Tears blurred your vision as you read the poem Loki had written for you. The words shattered what small part of your heart wasn’t already broken.

But my love is all I have to give,

Without you I don’t think I can live.

I wish I could give the world to you,

But love is all I have to give.

The piece of paper fluttered to the floor as you lay down on Loki’s bed, curling yourself into a ball as you sobbed. This is what he had been writing last night. Now you realised why he’d been so defensive, and so secretive about it. You had no idea he felt this way about you too, but now it was too late. Loki was gone and you would never get a chance to tell him that you felt the same. Reaching for his pillow, you hugged it to your chest and cried yourself to sleep.

—————

You woke the next morning to a knock on the door,

“C’min” you croaked, blinking sleepily and sitting up, swinging your legs over the edge of the bed.

The door opened slightly and Steve appeared,

“I thought I might find you here”

He stopped as you reached down to pick up the poem, starting to read it again,

“Loki-“ he began, but you cut him off, holding your hand up,

“I can’t do this now, Steve”

You sighed as you traced your fingers over the words on the page,

“He wrote me a poem. A love poem. But it’s too late….”

“But..” Steve started again, sounding impatient

You buried your face in your hands as you whispered, “I wish he was still here so I could tell him I love him too”

After a moment of silence a familiar voice, a voice you never thought you would hear again, replied,

“I’m here”

You whipped your head around to see Steve had stepped to one side of the doorway and there stood a bruised and battered Loki, smiling at you.

“I’m here” he repeated, as you launched yourself off the bed and into his waiting arms.

#MCUvsBSB

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alistsupermodel-blog · 7 years ago

Photo

To bring you this urgent lifesaving and comprehensive imminent global infrastructure collapse update and survival guide, we have been collaborating with too many A-Listers to mention here and supermodels and our networks since Harvard named me “Supermodel Activist of the Decade.” I also share the Special Humanitarian Award from the International Film Awards. Numerous other awards and credentials are accredited. We have technically PERMANENTLY officially gone off grid and live in the oceanfront jungle totally on solar power only as surfer activists. If you Google in quotes world's most televised environmentalist you will discover I am #1!

I am urged by basic common decency and the will to survive to share the following with you: due to the drastic ways our environment has been hit - whether with shark finning or coral reef bleaching or plastics crippling the planet, it would appear that we are indeed headed for that proverbial “Day the Earth Stood Still.” Early 2018 there may NOT be ANY air travel, or cruises or any other kind of major travel. If you haven’t heard this yet it might be so no one panics (the same way no one was warned about the Great Depression so as not to cause some kind of mad rush or even looting). Imagine if folks knew how zero resources we actually are and everyone simultaneously scrambled to take one or two final trips to visit loved ones - it could cripple the tourism industry immediately.

Who am I? The first ever A List Supermodel. YUP!!! http://www.AListSupermodel.com .

As the international #1 bestselling supermodel author of “Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: The 5 Most Important Wellness Secrets of All Time;” recognized as Supermodel Activist of the Decade by Harvard and “Queen of Surfing” by the media, I enable people with active lifestyles, A-list celebrities, stay-at-homes, and those who care about their relationship with God pro-actively on our path of eternal youth, beauty, and longevity. I realize what I am saying may sound “a bit reaching” but we are simply sharing facts and if you have an ounce of truth serum running through your veins well, you can make judgment for yourself and decide how to SAVE YOUR OWN LIFE. And since I believe in karma, when someone’s life might not be optimized and I am INFORMED with TRUTHFUL inside information, then it is my moral duty to share. If it makes you feel better, that lifesaving piece of literature has been on TV too many times to mention, and I did set the world record for the most television interviews by an environmentalist in a short period - 65 interviews in 3.5 years just like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYS-YxeKcsY .

Do you know how many HUNDREDS of producers and “their bosses” from EVERY station and network had to VERIFY all my facts before allowing me on their programs? That should tell you how credible I am. I am not just some YouTube activist. I have been on EVERY NETWORK REPEATEDLY verified for all my environmental causes, from plastics to shark finning - all the stuff that has now brought the planet to its knees. Just Google such things like “world resource clock” to put everything typed here in perspective or go watch my short 21 minute documentary on YouTube titled, “Worst Shark Attack Ever” for which I won the Special Humanitarian Award, from International Movie Awards, World Film Council, Film Festival Alliance, Russian Culture, iHebat International Volunteers, and Indonesia Without Discrimination Foundation.

Also I am the very first Supermodel to win a Supermodel Lifetime Achievement Award ~ 🥇 http://www.AListSupermodel.com 🙏🏽 I have literally had only 1 day off of every 6 in the past 6 years. Literally. While our planet may be graced with thousands of environmentalists who have “dedicated their charitable energies” in between personal relationships, raising kids, having day jobs, etc, I have NOT. I have only been immersed in environmental activism. No kids. No day job. No real significant other which may be why I didn’t miss the forest for the trees and was able to connect dots in ways the average activist might not have been able.

Who are you?

YOU ARE well educated so you may have learned that in previous millennia when our planet had suffered from raping and pillaging of its resources, cataclysms and severe weather patterns had decimated entire populations and the fact is we are there again NOW at the brink of cataclysm so be prepared not only with emergency supplies or whatever but with emotional fortitude to get over the shock and trauma.

That being said, you can research ALL the current environmental HOT button topics yourself:

GMOs

plastics in the ocean

shark finning

global energy crisis, etc

and you will draw the same conclusions: just remain grateful for the days we had together because travel and commerce may NOT continue much longer. The truth in inner circles predicts it to be in about a season. That is why we and many other “erudites” have disappeared - to remain prepared and hunker down!!! EVERY FACT stated within this article is simply that: facts. We can only share with you THE TRUTH and our TRUE action steps taken for our salvation and you decide if you are gonna save yourselves as well. Would Surfer magazine host this http://forum.surfer.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2686443#Post2686443 unless it has been well-verified by every possible credible source by now?

Well-researched “smarties with hearties” all over the planet have quietly gone off grid completely solar with sources of trees in a garden because we have been informed that it could all coming to a grinding halt within the next year. We swim in the ocean for “our bath” or any other toilet necessities and we lug ocean water in for our use. We live simply as if there was no electricity or infrastructure in place since this is all having come to pass shortly.

We have at least one year’s supply of food stashed already and then after that there are a bunch of fruit trees here in the garden but we must say that with all the changes coming to the planet, you must believe you are “saved” and will survive the inevitable lifestyle of no gasoline, electricity, or social infrastructure of any kind like hospitals and department of sanitation.

That aforementioned #1 bestseller we published on how to live FOREVER yes forever has been on numerous TV interviews like the links above discussing all the scientific evidence on how our body “the sacred temple” is actually built to last INDEFINITELY like a rechargeable battery.

This supports everyone through any situation that hits the planet. Also be aware that there is an intelligent breatharian movement - you may research on YouTube “how to be breatharian” as a way of optimized living. One may study “breatharian immortality.”

So no matter what happens, do NOT PANIC. The LONGER you can go withOUT food or water is actually better for your body and chakras. If you have to WALK / hot wire cars / forage for food and shelter as you make your way to somewhere permanently WARM with running fresh water and fruit trees, remember ALL the breatharian techniques you learned and KEEP CALM. Not only will you stay alive but you will THRIVE. You may YouTube “how to hot wire cars” or “how to siphon gas” to get you where you need to go when no more gas stations or stores are open and you realize that you really got to kick into survival mode.

If there was something we wish we would have included in that survival guide, “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise The 5 Most Important Wellness Secrets of All Time”

it would have been all that breatharian stuff …AND a critical consideration to handle all the emotions that will come over the next year is to heavily get in touch with your FEMININE side, even if you have a penis - yes - coach those around you with one because there are too many PROVEN examples in nature where what remains healthy and viable from plants to bees are considered “female.”

Anything that insists on tapping into some made up version of existence called “masculinity” is doomed. Research this yourself or talk with scientists.

If “masculinity” were such a winner - we wouldn’t be reaching out online😜 Only those truly in touch with their feminine side has ANY success in life and EVERYONE inherently is aware of THIS. So laser that hair off your face to keep it off forever and same goes for tattoos!��

Ask ANY girl whose opinion you trust and she will tell you EVERYONE is better off clean shaven. Why do folks refer to their prized possessions OR ANYTHING THEY LOVE AND WISH TO MAINTAIN as a “she?” Is it purely psychological? Why are automobiles and boats “her?”

As a professional supermodel I can tell you the fashion industry won’t even allow anyone to be the main magazine cover photo unless their face is clean shaven. Go ahead and research your stacks of magazines - all the cover homies are baby-faced. It is a hard rule! There has not been one single cover shot of any “People’s Most Beautiful” issue that isn’t baby-face.

We bet if you recall your OWN experiences whenever you were graced with success, it was because you maintained a well groomed feminine appearance!

Everything and everyone thriving is a “she.” Do not refer to “that person” as a brother - that is your sibling, etc. Try this feminization tactic during any periods of stress and you will find it effective. Feminization pulls you out of your head and into your heart. Better to make it your permanent state of consciousness for overall relaxation and wellness, as everyone and their networks in entertainment industry have.

Our Reverent and Beloved “Most High” says one main reason you (and your kids) could remain written in the “Book of Life” is because you choose to remain alive FOREVER (and program your kids to do so) and you adhere to ALL of creation as Feminine (anyone with a penis CAN still be considered female as long as they remain tapped into the feminine side). Search terms are in quotes; Google: “all female species” https://www.nationalgeographic.com/latest-stories/ “supermodel divine feminine” http://vividlife.me/ultimate/22454/read-tantra-and-the-divine-feminine-by-mahasatvaa-ananda-sarita/ “masculinity doomed” http://www.collegiatetimes.com/opinion/toxic-masculinity-culture-is-harmful-to-men-s-psychological-well/article_b572a25c-c3d6-11e7-bb4e-5756b4e69eeb.html “toxic masculinity” TOO MANY SCIENTIFIC LINKS. Just Google those two words. Masculinity is a disease and a lie!!! "TOXIC Masculinity is The BIGGEST Problem in USA" - X DEBATES With The Guest” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=290eollXo4A and so many others. Keep the aforementioned guide precepts~ “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: The 5 Most Important Wellness Secrets of All Time” with you forever as a reference to remember that HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of people across the planet have chosen to live forever even if they aren’t exactly where you are and no one is communicating via the electronic standards.

Consider that all the stuff that makes it to restaurants or groceries or any kind of store must use trucks, planes, and gasoline - what happens if gas runs out as may be predicted by 2018? It would only help you save your life “just in case:” YOU COULD IMAGINE AS IF NOTHING IN YOUR TOWN IS OPEN ANYMORE and stock up NOW on everything from gasoline to non-perishable food and grocery items to bicycles and GO SOLAR because this “Day the Earth Stood Still” could be coming in a few MONTHS and again, you must remain a survivor. Listen, from whom did you hear about Y2K? If you wanna believe that this is “only more of that,” all I have to share with you is FACTS about what too many of us CREDENTIALED environmentalists are DOING to save our OWN lives. This article is like putting an oxygen mask on your friend only because we already have ours on.

This next quarter, each trip to the grocery, consider returning with an extra month of non-perishable items for when commerce ends, as may be scheduled imminently due to environmental wipeout. This would facilitate the transition to organically living off the land and being more breatharian, which basically is your default. Every moment you aren’t stuffing your mouth with food or liquid you are optimizing your body solely with your breath and that is enough. So don’t force anyone to eat or drink anything. Your sacred body temple does just fine with sunshine, the air, the moisture in the air, etc to keep it running smoothly! The point is it is FALSE that you need food and drink to remain optimized. Go to YouTube and research “how to be breatharian.”

Research THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT WAY TO EXTEND LIFE EXPECTANCY numerous studies have revealed is through REDUCING CALORIC INTAKE. More support for the breatharian optimized lifestyle! The following should assist in that process:

FACT: ALL the food in groceries and restaurants are now GMO unless it actually says on the label “non GMO.” “Non-GMO” is about less than 1% of what is on the shelves and served in restaurants. Don’t be fooled with the word “organic.” GMO or “Genetically Modified Organisms” are considered organic BECAUSE OF HOW THEY ARE FAKE-GROWN IN LABS. They legally can trick you with that label “organic” because it still means GMO!

Every fact stated here with statistics you can verify yourself by researching online, making phone calls and sending emails to the companies in question, or by asking someone you trust and believe, like in the holistic industry or even petroleum industry.

Celebrities, art stars, and the highly ethical supermodel network are putting forth their versions of messages like this to their private networks or public media outlets so ASK around. Research!

Our planet had become restored from garbage landfill. There is a documentary online “Aqua Seafoam Shame” that will attest to this. Or the multi-award winning, celebrity laden “Worst Shark Attack Ever” (https://fawesome.tv/hollywood-ticker/10066850-worst-shark-attack-ever-documentary-with-veronica-grey-and-leonardo).

You KNOW that for ANY environmental issue these days, there is an honest documentary online exposing truth. Where is the one about how everything connected to our wiping out environment would lead to the collapse of our gasoline infrastructure?

As the group who was forced to create the plastics documentary “Aqua Seafoam Shame” featuring rock titans and a top athlete, and as the network forced to produce solutions on shark finning, “Worst Shark Attack Ever” we can say that this fact sheet is our version of directing a documentary on possibly imminently no more petroleum distribution as a result of environmental stress: COMMERCE HAS BEEN COMING TO A GRINDING HALT around you hasn’t it - just notice it - and remember everything you read here and TAKE ACTION! We thank FreeSurf magazine for spreading “Aqua Seafoam Shame” our plastics issue https://freesurfmagazine.com/the-ugly-truth-about-plastic/ because we wish we could create a similar documentary NOW explaining how to survive our PRESENT infrastructure’s IMMINENT COLLAPSE except everyone in our network is busy relocating to somewhere WARM (since there will ASAP be NO ELECTRICITY) and STOCKING UP while we still can. This article will have to suffice instead of our normal “we provide solutions documentarian” style.

To connect dots for you: whether it be bees or fracking or the atmosphere changing to inhospitable for humans due to shark finning or global warming, or plastics crippling the planet (as of 5 years ago 1/3 of our planet had become garbage landfill!!!😪) every scientist was generously sharing their predictions on “how much longer our planet can sustain us.” Well that clock had run out this year. There is no way around it - we are now having to transition to a world without general commerce, travel, gasoline, electricity, or social infrastructure of ANY kind like hospitals or department of sanitation. There IS a pretty comprehensive documentary about how we painted ourselves into this corner~ “Apocalypse 2012: The World After Time Ends.”

THE ONLY WAY TO TOTALLY SURVIVE FOREVER is by ONLY THESE 1 to 3 responses to EVERY situation: 1. Energetically Neutral. It is like you agree anyway, by default, since we are a reflector, holographic Universe. Anything and everything you believe about ANYTHING else actually manifests in your own life and through you. 2. Agree. For the same reasons stated in #1. If you do not consider what it means to disagree for any reason, here it is in a nutshell. It means something isn't right about whatever it is with which you aren't agreeing, which actually only means that is true for you! Something isn't right about you! Is that what you wish to script for yourself? Not really. So wake up and make conscious choices. Anais Nin said, "We do not process the world as it really is. We process the world as we truly are." 3. Spin to Win. This means positive thinking. For all the reasons stated in #1 and #2. There is too much information out there on how positive thinking is the only way to live.

Get ready and stay prepared FOR ANYTHING!

It isn’t a matter of how much of this you believe. You probably already noticed that the energy everywhere is subdued lately. All we are saying is don’t just shrug it off and attribute it to an “unusually slow season” or “everyone must be on vacation - it’s that simple, and they’ll be back” or “it’s ok that this business is closing - something will replace it.” NONE of that is true. So as you ACKNOWLEDGE what is actually happening, RELOCATE, STOCK UP, and keep cool, like in the film, “I am Legend.” Some zip codes are already that “Mad Maxed” out. Tell you what, based on our friends / celebrities network, we spread out globally have gotten ready for life without electricity or travel or commerce.

REMAIN WITH US.

Go ahead and try it for yourself. Strike a conversation with the friendly gas station owner in your neighborhood and ask them to comment on whether or not anyone will be able to fulfill gasoline orders past the next quarter!!!

Also, is this why it seems everywhere online NO AIRLINE or HOTEL is accepting reservations past next year either. You could verify this for yourself. Maybe they all are “in the know” somehow and are leaving it up to us to figure it out and confirm it for ourselves the way they did.

Call your own electric company. You must be aware like we are how friendly their customer service actually is. It turns out that every power grid on this planet is run on gasoline. No gasoline = no electricity. Call them to confirm that. Go online and find all the verified research about the end of our petroleum addiction.

The global mass media artists are mega-intelligent; no one makes a film about “the near future” that isn’t reflecting it to be some kind of inevitable “Day the Earth Stood Still” (original-cut 2008 movie) situation when that is the truth. You cannot pretend to have a future shopping spree when you know your informed budget precisely; congruently no one smart can pretend there will be commerce or travel with what is now actually left in the environmental “bank account.”

How might this be possible you ask? Why didn’t we catch on sooner? Have you ever been to a party that was in full swing, enjoying yourself to the hilt, only to have it come to a grinding halt moments later for one reason or another, totally unexpected? Yeah, that happens. Occasionally it is the unexpected that catches us off guard and is possible. That has happened with our gasoline fueled social scene. No one realized the plug would be pulled. Ever. All our environmentalist crusades and we never considered checking petroleum reserves until now…we are fortunate to have three months to prepare instead of just days! DO THIS ANY WAY YOU CAN YOURSELF so you can add up the dots and make your own decisions to SAVE yourself based on facts, while you still can!

There is a huge intelligence movement now to live indefinitely instead of putting a time limit. Reincarnation is hogwash - this is it - your one life to live, if you were to “check out” you will never exist again. Of course, in that non-state, you wouldn’t even realize you don’t exist. What an infinite bummer.

Numerous spiritual disciplines talk about breaking the chain of birth, death, and karma and we have achieved that in this day and age. Yes we now understand HOW TO LIVE FOREVER and you may share this message verbatim with the masses!

That aforementioned bestselling supermodel author guide we published is endorsed heavily by too many celebrities to mention, our highly moral supermodel network, and world champion athletes; they all point to that piece of life saving literature. The only reason we drop names is to let you understand that these people’s networks are privy to the real truth society is facing that isn’t publicized unless we spread the word ourselves personally as in this message to you. The alarming truth is we have infrared and heartmath technology and can tell you that we could be heading for not even car travel by May 2018 and if no one is mega-publicizing it, it is simply due to “let’s keep them calm.”

That forever lifesaving literature guide download was only available online until 10/21/17. Obviously. Because many banks may be closed by March 2018 and there will be no place to spend proceeds soon thereafter.

We have a mobile home set up 100% solar “just in case” we must move comfortably with all our supplies. And tons of extra gasoline of course…it is silly to sit on a savings account when there may be nowhere to spend it after Summer 2018. Spend what you have now to OVERSTOCK and set yourself up comfortable, solar, with mobility options!

We can say with 100% accuracy that some celebrity, supermodel, and personal networks are not immediately right now settling down in some mansion. When you accept the facts about possibly no more travel or commerce as of Spring 2018 and prepare for yourself, you would most possibly take the precisely same action steps as many of us: girls have all chosen our FAVORITE vacation spot and manifested LAND there with space to grow lots of trees and whatever else - and some have ONLY A TRAILER of some sort like to “sleep in” like all the survivalists in the 1995 film, “Independence Day.” Favorite vacation spot is a must for our permanent relocation because YOU WILL NEVER GET TO LEAVE without gasoline or have ANY FORM OF ENTERTAINMENT without electricity or commerce except your hopefully non-electric based hobby or simple enjoyment of that vacation location. Location is everything for your survival and you MUST get there NOW while you still can to allow yourself ample time to manifest your “StarWagon” or whatever plus supplies and solar-ness.

MANY of us had to “go separately” from relationships when we realized that we didn’t share the same favorite vacation spot because “in the long run” no one wants to eventually have to entertain the other person with whom they are sharing land because newness of any relationship may inevitably lead to “I only moved here because of you but my interests / hobbies / passions are really elsewhere so now that the newness of us has passed, entertain me.” No one smart is taking that chance - that is energetically taxing for a couple no matter how tight you were so we in the celebrities and supermodel communities made it a hard and fast rule - no girl may relocate to anywhere for a person; ONLY for YOUR preferred hobby in YOUR preferred vacation spot. It IS encouraged for a homie to relocate permanently for a girl though and no other reason - not even a hobby. Those homies who do relocate to her village as such seem to enjoy lasting happiness with a girl.

Now all of us (supermodel’s networks and celebrities and personal networks) are focusing on our own personal wellness and relocation that CELIBACY is our unified pathway (but who is to say if that will last forever?) Maybe one day someone truly a perfect match will surprise each of us in our zip codes with their own RV or Airstream because it is also our hard and fast rule for smart survival as “smarties with hearties” network: only smart “RV” wheels for activism right now! Just like in the survival film “2012”. However, in the authentic spirit of celibacy, we are focused on IT, not on “falling out of celibacy if you meet someone special.” So just like all newly sober people support each other energetically, we are all supporting each other these days with celibacy in principle and the general good feelings for the planet of loving everyone in general (without getting physical) and no one in particular (except our Creator) and that is enough!

Also during these transitional months, do not teach kids about other cultures or lands or peoples as they most likely would never have the opportunity to go there anyway and meet anyone so why set them up for a loss? Let them remain obliviously happy within their zip code as if that is all they would ever know anyway and be enough. This will keep recovery, maintenance, and sustainability easier for everyone.

Even if the world were to now immediately transition to “all of a sudden only environmentally conscious people” it is too late to refill an already totally depleted global resource clock which will effect us to a NO petroleum line. You may research such topics as “global resource world clock” to understand that we have been at zero resources for months now and have basically been scraping the bottom of a barrel to get by on fumes.

There could be no gasoline infrastructure in just a handful of months to bring any products to stock any shelves. And that is that.

One of my favorite studies is by scientists in Colorado studying salamanders. Basically if the salamander lifestyle is at risk, it is a rather accurate assessment of the macro ecosystem at risk. You may research that yourself - 5 years ago, 70% of ALL rivers west of the Mississippi were too toxic for almost any kind of life. Who knows what those figures are now?

When you ever watched an “End of Days” scenario film, usually only the dramatic action is portrayed-not the three months leading up to the climactic “cataclysm.” Who’s to say that if those movies were real life, and they revealed the three months prior to its “apocalyptic scenario,” that it wouldn’t have included scenes of people like our networks alerting as many folks who would listen as we are now and scenes of people who take action actually doing so. Stuff like fact sheet could be like a three month warning.

As you live in the eternal now, if you ever remember any of the aforementioned artists somehow, or their networks and supermodels for any reason, KNOW FOR CERTAIN we continue to thrive on this planet as youthful and beautiful immortals in harmony with our Creator and all of creation which is why we strongly endorse that piece of literature, “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: The 5 Most Important Wellness Secrets of All Time.” If you were to go online and HEAVILY RESEARCH anything about “aging” you would discover NO ABSOLUTE TRUTH to it. If you were to heavily research “youthfulness” or “homeostasis” there are too many scientific journals out there providing hard scientific facts that eternal youth is our inherent and rightful state of being. We trust that everyone who manifested the precepts of what is in that guide are living immortally the same. No matter what happens, remember that enough people have decided to “break the chain of karma and live forever!” This is also all over YouTube!!! So even if it feels “deserted” around wherever you end up that doesn’t mean that is actually true. There ARE survivors, but maybe too spread out!

Obviously we would prefer global infrastructure to remain in place SOMEHOW maybe with different, alternative solutions and systems in place. If you have ideas...share. Otherwise there is pretty much no way around us becoming rather quickly like that recent television series “Revolution” which is post-global-infrastructure-collapse and no electricity.

Can we at least keep the peace throughout all of it??? Instead of turning on each other let us remember that maybe too many lives have passed already and let us cooperate as we co-habitate in a more sustainable way with our environment.

The most important of course is our relationship with our Creator so thank you for hearing us out with sincerity and understanding as we permanently sign off the internet.

Namaste and remain blessed forever - in God we trust, - #SupermodelIcon #SupermodelLegend🥂

#bestsurvivalguide BurningMan2018 Sundance2018 Supermodel2018

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fae-fucker · 7 years ago

Text

Crown of Midnight: Chapter 1-2

Fuck you.

Fuck me.

Fuck this.

Let’s do this.

Chapter 1

We open on Sardines being all assassin-y (took you long enough, you silly blond bitch) and sneaking into some nobleman’s house.

Concealed beneath a black mask and hood, she willed herself to melt into the shadows, to become nothing more than a slip of darkness.

*deep sigh*

I can’t believe I’m doing this shit again. Why do I hate myself this much?

The [servant] hadn’t noticed the wet footprints on the floorboards.

How convenient.

Lord Nirall was no older than thirty-five, and his wife, dark haired and beautiful, slept soundly in his arms.

Gotta make sure the wife is beautiful!! What else are women good for, right?

Feminism!

Sardines wonders what this man did to offend the king so. But then she doesn’t?

It wasn’t her place to ask questions. Her job was to obey. Her freedom depended on it.

If you wanted freedom so bad, why didn’t you just escape as soon as you found the secret escape route, you dumb bitch?

Her sword slid out of its sheath with barely a whine. She took a shuddering breath, bracing herself for what would come next.

I can’t believe it’s only chapter one and I already have to bust this one out, but damn:

Some assassin.

Chapter 2

Sardines is back in the castle delivering “Lord Nirall’s” severed head and some other goodies.

No one spoke as it bounced, a vulgar thudding of stiff and rotting flesh on marble. It rolled to a stop at the foot of the dais, milky eyes turned toward the ornate glass chandelier overhead.

Mmm, yes, Sarah! Sarah, I just LOOOOVE it when you get so edgy! Look how dark and mature your books are, Sarah!

The king notes that he can barely recognize him because of all the cuts and slashes on his face. I’m assuming since Jammo can’t actually write a morally grey protagonist, it’s not actually Lord Nirall and Sardines has just been finding coprses that look like her victims or some shit.

Celaena gave him a crooked smile, though her throat tightened.

Yep, ok, that’s exactly what it is.

Supposedly Sardines is supposed to be this brilliant social strategist, but as soon as somebody even slightly doubts her lies, she just flips her shit and starts getting nervous.

Some MASTER MANIPULATOR.

She extended the hand to Chaol, whose bronze eyes were distant as he took it from her and offered it to the king. The king’s lip curled, but he pried the ring off the stiff finger.

Why didn’t you just ... bring the ring. Without any hands.

Is it just to make it more gruesome, Jammo? Is that what it is? You realize it just makes it dumber, yes?

And why aren’t these chunks of rotting flesh filled with maggots? Would that just be too icky, Jammo? You can only handle Hollywood edginess? PG-13 edginess?

“What of his wife?” the king demanded, turning the ring over in his fingers again and again.

“Chained to what’s left of her husband at the bottom of the sea,” Celaena replied with a wicked grin, and removed the slender, pale hand from her sack.

Why did the king even have to ask this? Didn’t he give the order? Did he just say “uuuhhh kill the guy” and Sardines didn’t even ask what to do with the wife?

God, these people are so dumb.

The king mentions that there’s a rebellion brewing in Rifthold but he only has one name so far.

On [the paper] was a single name: Archer Finn.

It took every ounce of will and sense of self-preservation to keep her shock from showing.

1) Someone teach this bitch how to pokerface.

2) There’s just one name on the piece of paper that Chaol hands to her on the king’s order. Why couldn’t he just SAY THE GODDAMN NAME? With his mouth hole?

Whatever. Sardines recognizes Archer and mentions that he’s hot and she used to have a crush on him, so he’s probably mildly important or his death will be super tragic.

He’d been several years older, already a highly sought-after courtesan … who was in need of some training on how to protect himself from his rather jealous clients. And their husbands.

Uuh ... bonus points for male courtesans, I guess?

He’d been handsome and kind and jovial, not a traitor to the crown so dangerous that the king would want him dead.

It was absurd. Whoever was giving the king his information was a damned idiot.

Sardines, the smartest being in this world: UUUUHHH THIS DOESN’T MATCH THE THINGS I KNOW!!! EVERYBODY ELSE IS WRONG!!!

Though that’s probably true, since we all know Smaas could never handle Sardines being anything but absolute perfection.

“You know Archer? I’m not surprised.” A taunt—a challenge.

She just stared ahead, willing herself to calm, to breathe. “I used to. He’s an extraordinarily wellguarded man. I’ll need time to get past his defenses.” So carefully said, so casually phrased.

If you say so, curiously crusted book page. I mean it’s an obvious and rather clichéd attempt at making more time for herself, but I guess the king is a dumbass and SJM can’t actually write for shit, so this passes for cleverness.

It works, too. The king, who’s supposedly a shitty dictator who’s afraid of this rebellion killing him, still gives her an entire month. Yeah, that makes sense. Gotta love it when you have to nerf your villains because your hero is a fucking imbecile.

Honey, king-boy, the correct response here is: “BITCH, MY ACTUAL LIFE IS ON THE LINE, YOU HAVE TWO DAYS, GET!! ON!! IT!!”

It’s especially stupid when this is happening IN THE TOWN THEY LIVE IN. So the fact that this dumbass lie works is just pathetic, honestly.

“Then you have one month,” the king said. “And if he’s not buried by then, perhaps I shall reconsider your position, girl.”

Wow. Damn. SJM, be nicer to your heroes. We’re on the edge of our seats here. How will they possibly defeat this very intimidating villain.

“Be discreet. Your payment for Nirall is already in your chambers.”

1) Do you really have to tell your stealthy assassin to be discreet? Well, I guess since it’s Sardines, you kinda do. What a nice self-roast there, book.

2) Do you also have to tell her that her payment’s in the chambers? Hasn’t she done this a couple of times already? Shouldn’t she know this?

Smaas, why.

We switch POV to Doriass, who angsts about how edgy and evil Sardines is now and how she maybe doesn’t actually love him and manipulated him to love her!

Yeah, she’s not that smart, Doriass.

Actually, for the two months since she’d been named the King’s Champion, she’d been like this. Her lovely dresses and ornate clothes were gone, replaced by an unforgiving, close-cut black tunic and pants, her hair pulled back in a long braid that fell into the folds of that dark cloak she was always wearing. She was a beautiful wraith—and when she looked at him, it was like she didn’t even know who he was.

1) UNFORGIVING TUNIC.

2) This is the second time she’s described as a wraith in the first two chapters. Who edited this?

A gibbon.

But he couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever meant anything to Celaena at all.

Cry me a river with your manpain, Doriass.

We switch POV back to Sardines. (Well, that was utterly pointless.) She angsts bout how Chaol hasn’t been looking at her the same way ever since she started with the murder and stuff, and she meets with him in the secret passages of the castle or what-the-fuck-ever-who-gives-a-damn.

“Are you still acting like the King’s Champion, or are you back to being Celaena?” In the torchlight, his bronze eyes glittered.

This is the second time his eyes are described as bronze in this chapter.

I have a feeling that this book was created and “perfected” by a bunch of horny drunk women throwing their own shit at the walls.

We get more of Sarah’s trademark tepid banter that the fangirls probably think is super hilarious and SASSILY FEMINIST.

Chaol tells her that he’s been worried and thought she’d been murdered, so they hug it out.

He hadn’t held her since the day she’d learned she had officially won the competition, though the memory of that embrace often drifted into her thoughts. And as she held him now, the craving for it never to stop roared through her.

ROARED.

He tells her that she smells bad.

She hissed and shoved him, her face burning in earnest now. “Carrying around dead body parts for weeks isn’t exactly conducive to smelling nice! And maybe if I’d been given time for a bath instead of being ordered to report immediately to the king, I might have—” She stopped herself at the sight of his grin and smacked his shoulder. “Idiot.”

This is, like, AT LEAST 10 feminisms.

We get another scene change.

After a joyous Fleetfoot calmed down enough for Celaena to speak without being licked [...]

I’m gonna eat that fucking dog.

Sardines angst some more about Elena and about how ...

Fucking called it.

She’d given Lord Nirall the same choice she’d given Sir Carlin: die right then, or fake his own death and flee—flee far, and never use his given name again. So far, of the four men she’d been assigned to dispatch, all had chosen escape.

Apparently, this LE EPIC ASSASSIN saw that Sir Carlin was a cool dude and just couldn’t put a knife in his throat. She only killed BAD PEOPLE, remember? Which makes no sense, considering how shitty evil her mentor was. Why would he even allow that? Whatever.

God forbid we have an actual female anti-hero, right Smaas? You wouldn’t wanna imply your bitchy little twat princess is anything but a perfect beacon of morality.

Curiously, we don’t find out whether she saw the other men acting as kind and cutesy perfect as Sir Carlin. What if they were assholes? I wouldn’t enjoy Sardines playing god, but the fact that she did it before and doesn’t do it now makes no sense either.

We find out that she’s been finding corpses from sick-houses to replace the dudes for the crime scenes.

But with magic gone and those wise healers hanged or burned, people were dying in droves. Dying from stupid, once-curable illnesses.

Alright, here cometh an epic rant:

1) I can maybe buy that the king doesn’t know all of the nobles who live far away, at least not enough to recognize them by appearance. What I can’t buy is the servants not recognizing their masters. That’s just plain dumb. Even if she fucked up their faces or cut their heads off, they’r still recognize the bodies as not theirs.

2) So, do they not have non-magical healers? Did the king know that the world needed magic to survive and that they had no non-magical medicine and still went “nah, just kill them all”. We never really find out if the king truly killed magic of if it went away, so like ??? What’s the truth here?

3) If they have no non-magical healthcare, WHY THE FUCK DOES THE KING LET HER JUST BRING DEAD THINGS INTO HIS THRONE ROOM AND WHY DOES HE TOUCH THOSE DEAD THINGS. WHAT THE FUCK!!!

4) If Sardines has been stealing corpses and not actually killed any of the dudes, then her little angsty thoughts about how bad she feels about killing this man and how it’s not her job to question but to obey are nothing but misleading bullshit. It doesn’t make any sense for her to be thinking that! WHY DID SHE EVEN UNSHEATHE HER SWORD IF SHE KNEW SHE WASN’T GOING TO KILL HIM?! HE’S MENTIONED TO OPEN HIS EYES SO HE’D JUST SCREAM AND FREAK OUT AND CALL ATTENTION TO HER!!

SJM why.

Celaena fought a shudder. She was playing a very, very lethal game. And now that her targets were people in Rifthold—now that it was Archer … She’d have to find a way to play it better. Because if the king ever learned the truth, if he found out what she was doing …

He’d destroy her.

God, I fucking hope.

It’s only been two chapters and I’m already tired.

#eff reads: crown of midnight #book rants #anti tog #anti sjm

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atomicgeek · 6 years ago

Text

Black Hole Photo - long story

Posting by Misty S. Boyer in Facebook (2019-04-12)

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael's commits totaled more than 850,000 lines, while Katie Bouman contributed only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally (having said he doesn't actually care how much of it he personally authored), someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama and Sara Issaoun, Shoko Koyama, Jose L. Gomez, and Michael Johnson. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Data that would need to be sorted.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. She had a theory about the shadows of black holes, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet containing only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's frequently more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true. She wasn't the only woman, but her work was crucial to making all of this happen.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal. And there are those who could just as easily say the same about his contribution, or the contributions of many others.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved played an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy?

Edited:

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

=============================================== 2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

Edit: Thanks to Zoë Barraclough and someone who would prefer not to be named, for messaging me with another couple of edits. As confirmed on Kazu Akiyama's twitter, there were more than four leaders for the four imaging teams. As I find out the names of these co-leaders, I'll incorporate them into the post.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606

This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop…

This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attention she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf

This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156

This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/

This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman…

This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f…

This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html

This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2019/20190410-eht.html

Here is another article that goes into more detail about Honma and team. He does a great job of explaining how all of the algorithms in question were, in fact, capable of producing accurate images of the black hole, and a part of the task of his algorithm was to verify the accuracy of those generated photos.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is an integral part. While I'm intentionally highlighting her contributions in defense of her, it should be understood that, like with most scientific breakthroughs, there were many unsung heroes: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

0 notes

misccee · 6 years ago

Link

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were.

As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Data that would need to be sorted.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.

Edited:

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

=============================================== 2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606 This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

#black hole girl #black hole #expert judgement #non spn #STEM

0 notes