#fairfax high school

[lesbiangummybearmafia]

Just because their the number one rated doesn't mean their the best!

[thankyouforthememoriesworld]

Updated Version 2.

They were both overlapped in Minnesota for the North Tartan Summer Jam-June 2016. They had a lot of basketball overlap in June/July 2016 but again, separate age groups, with Azzi playing in a higher age group than Paige.

USA U16 Trials in May 2017 when they met.

Won Gold together with U16 on June 11, 2017.

Flew to Minnesota together where Azzi probably spent the summer doing her camping and State Fair in August 2017. Before this though: they participated in the North Tartan Summer Jam-June 2017 but different groups. I think that first birthday post from Azzi is probably from this tournament. Also, they may have also had an EYBL tournament in Indianapolis in July 2017. This is also when those crush snapchats were most likely sent because the song itself was released July 7, 2017.

Generally, they always have a lot of overlap in the summer because of AAU

Their visit to Maryland, Notre Dame and UConn in Fall 2017. Offered scholarships by UConn at that time.

Azzi and Paige were together at the beginning of Feb, training. Azzi's high school is WCAC Champs at the end of Feb 2018 and Azzi was also player of the year as a Freshman.

Late March 2018, both participated in the 2018 USA Basketball 3x3 U18 National Championship. Paige’s team got first, and Azzi’s got second. Paige’s team went on to rep in the youth Olympics.

April 2, 2018 Paige and her Hopkins teammates watched the UConn Notre Dame 2018 Championship game. Paige apparently watched this match up twice by April 2019 and Azzi watched the 12/3/17 game against ND in Hartford. Maybe overlap?

Paige and Azzi played in the Nike Boo Williams Invitational for their separate AAU teams in Virginia on April 20-22, 2018. Azzi's team (Fairfax Stars 17s EYBL) won platinum undefeated in their division where she stood out as one of the best players at 15 years old. Paige's team (North Tartan 15s EYBL) won platinum undefeated in her division. Geno was apparently at this tournament from what I read.

Paige was in DC to play in the Capitol Classic on April 28, 2018. You can watch the entire game if you want.

Reunited in Colorado May 2018 for USA trials.

The 11th annual North Tartan Summer Jam in Hopkins Minnesota was held June 15-17, 2018, where both Paige and Azzi's AAU teams played against each other. Paige’s team beat Azzi’s team 79-63 but both ended with a 3-1 record with Paige's team getting second place. Azzi watched Paige's final game.

Basically, together all of July because training was July 4-20, with a pre-tournament invitational in Latvia. Afterwards, won Gold with U17 on July 29, 2018.

Azzi attends her first Curry Camp in August 6-7 2018. She blows up after the three point contest. At this point I also assume Minnesota cabin trip and state fair was spent together. Azzi was recognized while on a cruise with Bueckers family after the contest (Date unknown but assuming summer). Azzi also helped with Paige's charity clinic at the end of August in Montana.

Azzi and her family were also in Minnesota for a family wedding in September 2018.

11/2/18 Visit to UConn together. Azzi’s sweet 16 on 11/11/18. We know Paige was there.

March 2019 Azzi is presented Gatorade National Player of the Year for Basketball. Azzi's team is 2nd in the nation.

Paige wins state championship on March 16, 2019. Azzi is there supporting (she's in that day after vlog episode of Paige's teammate wearing her St. Patty's day necklace and referred to as National POY which she just got beforehand).

Both of them flew to Montana and I'm guessing that's when the Yellowstone trip happened. Probably Spring Break.

Buckets with Bueckers camp in Montana - March 25, 2019. Azzi was there.

April 1, 2019, Paige commits to UConn (signs letter of intent in November 2019). I think this is also the day Azzi got her puppy Stewie.

April 4-6, 2019 Azzi’s high school team makes the Geico Nationals final but loses. Not sure if Paige was there.

April 13, 2019 Azzi tears hear ACL/MCL at USA 3x3 championship. Surgery on May 29, 2019 in Indianapolis. Paige was with her before surgery (video proof from Azzi herself).  

April 26-28, 2019 AAU together (Azzi not playing).

June 2019 – Paige participates in Summer Jam 2019 with Metro Stars.

July/August 2019 – After Azzi attends the ESPYS and SC30 Select Camp for both of them, Minnesota tradition (they have tiktoks from that time at the cabin and started their joint account that summer). I also think this is when that one Overtime video was filmed with the competition.

10/10-16/19 – Paige is in Doha Qatar for USA Basketball 3x3 tournament. Then she went to First Night at UConn and I think visited Azzi before she went to LA for ESPNW. Azzi visited UConn the week before First Night supposedly.

Dec 16, 2019: First HUDL recruiting video. End of December 2019, Azzi was presumably training with Mamba family in NYC.

Reunited in January 2020 in DMV. Azzi’s first games back from ACL were around this time and Paige was there (they filmed tiktoks together and there are videos of her in the stands). During her visit, Paige's second HUDL recruiting video for Azzi was published.

Azzi’s high school team wins state championships in early March 2020. Azzi travels to Minnesota in mid-March 2020 for Paige’s final but Covid shutdown occurs.

Paige stays with the Fudds from the end of April until June 2020 where she goes back for her graduation in early June and I think possibly packing up her stuff because I know her family was relocating to DMV at this time. She rejoins the Fudds in late June and stays with them and travels with them for Azzi’s GTS team up until end of July. Paige also gets her Gatorade award presented to her at the Fudd’s house on July 24, 2020.

Azzi is in Minnesota with her GTS in August of 2020 and Paige starts UConn.

Azzi visits Paige on her birthday and I believe tells her she’s committing to UConn in October 2020.

Azzi's Togethxr video of her day in the life with the facetime call was filmed November 5, 2020 (pop quiz had a date).

Azzi commits to UConn in November 11, 2020 and turns 18.

Paige's UConn season starts with her first games being cancelled because everyone is in a 14 day quarantine when one person tests positive. This was the reality of that time - they had to contact tracing and couldn't risk getting Covid during the season. They didn't have anymore cancelled games after the end of January but it certainly was an issue early on. UConn had nearly 75% of their courses online or hybrid for entire Fall 2020. Out of state students enrolled in online courses didn't live on campus. This was the reality of Paige's first year. Most likely not as social as people think and really just FTing Azzi at 1 AM apparently.

Azzi attends UConn-Tennessee game on January 21, 2021 to cheer on Paige.

Azzi attends UConn Final Four on April 2, 2021 and also attends the final (while being on FT with Paige).  

Paige has ankle surgery afterwards and hanging out a lot with the Fudds as she rehabs during April and May 2021.

Azzi has USA U19 Trials in May 2021. Then graduation and prom for high school at the end of May (Paige was present during this time). Then summer session at UConn. Paige has her ESPY award speech in July 2021.

Azzi wins gold with team USA before landing back in Mn in mid August 2021 and reunited with Paige and heading to UConn.

My God, you did it 👑. Here's Pazzi's updated timeline for the people.

[mindblowingscience]

Heman Bekele is not your typical high school student. Rather than spending his free time playing video games or staring at his phone, this 14 year-old from Fairfax, Virginia was calling professors and conducting experiments, all to invent a product he hopes could help change the world. His goal is to create a soap that could treat skin cancer, and to make it affordable for everyone who needs it. His work won him the grand prize in this year's 3M Young Scientist's Challenge, a competition that encourages kids to think of unique ways to solve everyday problems. Bekele's award-winning soap was inspired by his childhood in Ethiopia before moving to the United States at the age of 4. The soap delivers cancer- fighting drugs via lipid nanoparticles – which work to activate the body's immune cells to fend off cancer.

Continue Reading.

[ms-hells-bells]

Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized green jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Va., courtroom tell a judge that in one night I’d single-handedly changed suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. “He needs a long penitentiary sentence,” the prosecutor told the judge. I faced life in prison for carjacking the man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old. The old heads in prison would call me lucky for walking away with only a nine-year sentence.

I’d been locked up for about 15 months when I entered Virginia’s Southampton Correctional Center in 1998, the year I should have graduated from high school. In that prison, there were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of us had lengthy sentences — 30, 40, 50 years — all for violent felonies. Public talk of mass incarceration has centered on the war on drugs, wrongful convictions and Kafkaesque sentences for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the robberies, home invasions, murders and rape cases that brought us to prison.

The most difficult discussion to have about criminal-justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. You could release everyone from prison who currently has a drug offense and the United States would still outpace nearly every other country when it comes to incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, of the nearly 1.3 million people incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incarcerated for murder; 17,000 for manslaughter; 165,000 for sexual assault; 169,000 for robbery; and 136,000 for assault. That’s more than half of the state prison population.

When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn’t lose sight of what violence, and the sorrow it creates, does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became: “She’s a cop,” meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.

In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen ample evidence of how corrupt the system can be: Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book, “The New Jim Crow,” which argues that the war on drugs marked the return of America’s racist system of segregation and legal discrimination; Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” a series about the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, and her documentary “13th,” which delves into mass incarceration more broadly; and “Just Mercy,” a book by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, that has also been made into a film, chronicling his pursuit of justice for a man on death row, who is eventually exonerated. All of these describe the destructive force of prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants public shame.

My mother had an experience that gave her a different perspective on prosecutors — though I didn’t know about it until I came home from prison on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That day, she sat me down and said, “I need to tell you something.” We were in her bedroom in the townhouse in Suitland, Md., that had been my childhood home, where as a kid she’d call me to bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell me that despite my years in prison, everything was good now. But instead she told me about something that happened nearly a decade earlier, just weeks after my arrest. She left for work before the sun rose, as she always did, heading to the federal agency that had employed her my entire life. She stood at a bus stop 100 feet from my high school, awaiting the bus that would take her to the train that would take her to a stop near her job in the nation’s capital. But on that morning, a man yanked her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her head and raped her. When she could escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic.

My mother’s words turned me into a mumbling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how this could have happened to her. I knew she kept this secret to protect me. I turned to Google and searched the word “rape” along with my hometown and was wrecked by the violence against women that I found. My mother told me her rapist was a Black man. And I thought he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that I knew so well.

The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do? The outrage at this country’s criminal-justice system is loud today, but it hasn’t led us to develop better ways of confronting my mother’s world from nearly a quarter-century ago: weekends visiting her son in a prison in Virginia; weekdays attending the trial of the man who sexually assaulted her.

We said goodbye to my grandmother in the same Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala Harris, still pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, went to give a major speech about why she became a prosecutor. I hadn’t been inside Brookland Baptist Church for a decade, and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary and the eight years of letters she mailed to me in prison. The occasion for Harris’s speech was the annual Freedom Fund dinner of the South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P. The evening began with the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and at the opening chord nearly everyone in the room stood. There to write about the senator, I had been standing already and mouthed the words of the first verse before realizing I’d never sung any further.

Each table in the banquet hall was filled with folks dressed in their Sunday best. Servers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced tea to the tables. Nearly everyone was Black. The room was too loud for me to do more than crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble notes about why they attended. Speakers talked about the chapter’s long history in the civil rights movement. One called for the current generation of young rappers to tell a different story about sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said he just wanted to be safe. I didn’t hear anyone mention mass incarceration. And I knew in a different decade, my grandmother might have been in that audience, taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsibility, all the while wondering why her grandbaby was still locked away. If Harris couldn’t persuade that audience that her experiences as a Black woman in America justified her decision to become a prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved.

Describing her upbringing in a family of civil rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized Black people and protecting the rights of Black criminal defendants. “I was cleareyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me,” she said. This mattered for Harris because of the “prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” When she became a prosecutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of Black people in her office. When she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she recalled, she was one of just three Black D.A.s nationwide. And when she was elected California attorney general in 2010, there were no other Black attorneys general in the country. At these words, the crowd around me clapped. “I knew the unilateral power that prosecutors had with the stroke of a pen to make a decision about someone else’s life or death,” she said.

Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence of the importance of a Black woman’s doing this work. Once, ear hustling, she listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial-profiling manual existed, their signals would certainly be included: baggy pants, the place of arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she’d told her colleagues: “So, you know that neighborhood you were talking about? Well, I got family members and friends who live in that neighborhood. You know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed? Well, that’s actually stylish in my community.” She continued: “You know that music you were talking about? Well, I got a tape of that music in my car right now.”

The second example was about the mothers of murdered children. She told the audience about the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco’s D.A. — women who wanted to speak with her, and her alone, about their sons. “The mothers came, I believe, because they knew I would see them,” Harris said. “And I mean literally see them. See their grief. See their anguish.” They complained to Harris that the police were not investigating. “My son is being treated like a statistic,” they would say. Everyone in that Southern Baptist church knew that the mothers and their dead sons were Black. Harris outlined the classic dilemma of Black people in this country: being simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Harris told the audience that all communities deserved to be safe.

Among the guests in the room that night whom I talked to, no one had an issue with her work as a prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that only people doing dirt had issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that in a way, Harris was talking about Black people’s needing protection from us — from the violence we perpetrated to earn those years in a series of cells.

Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when both the political culture and popular culture were developing a story about crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then, films by Black directors — “New Jack City,” “Menace II Society,” “Boyz n the Hood” — turned Black violence into a genre where murder and crack-dealing were as ever-present as Black fathers were absent. Those were the years when Representative Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, argued that “we should not allow people to distribute this poison without fear that they might be arrested” and “go to jail for the rest of their natural life.” Those were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that ended federal parole for people with three violent crime convictions and encouraged states to essentially eliminate parole; made it more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in court; and made it nearly impossible to challenge prison conditions.

Back then, it felt like I was just one of an entire generation of young Black men learning the logic of count time and lockdown. With me were Anthony Winn and Terell Kelly and a dozen others, all lost to prison during those years. Terell was sentenced to 33 years for murdering a man when he was 17 — a neighborhood beef turned deadly. Home from college for two weeks, a 19-year-old Anthony robbed four convenience stores — he’d been carrying a pistol during three. After he was sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years.

Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having witnessed or experienced brutality before committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence and despair, introduced us to more of the same. And though there were organizations working to get rid of the death penalty, end mandatory minimums, bring back parole and even abolish prisons, there were few ways for us to know that they existed. We suffered. And we felt alone. Because of this, sometimes I reduce my friends’ stories to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terell and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discussing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the men around us. I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez the way others praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the word “patina” and introduced me to the music of Bill Withers. There were Luke and Fats; and Juvie, who could give you the sharpest edge-up in America with just a razor and comb.

When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades left. Then I went to law school and believed I owed it to them to work on their cases and help them get out. I’ve persuaded lawyers to represent friends pro bono. Put together parole packets — basically job applications for freedom: letters of recommendation and support from family and friends; copies of certificates attesting to vocational training; the record of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanation and context. We argue that today each one little resembles the teenager who pulled a gun. And I write a letter — which is less from a lawyer and more from a man remembering what it means to want to go home to his mother. I write, struggling to condense decades of life in prison into a 10-page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the parole board’s office in Richmond, Va., and try to persuade the members to let my friends see a sunrise for the first time.

Juvie and Luke have made parole; Fats, represented by the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, was granted a conditional pardon by Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam. All three are home now, released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of so many others still inside. Now free, they’ve sent me text messages with videos of themselves hugging their mothers for the first time in decades, casting fishing lines from boats drifting along rivers they didn’t expect to see again, enjoying a cold beer that isn’t contraband.

In February, after 25 years, Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least 20 years for crimes they committed before their 18th birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined they would die in prison now may see daylight. Terell will be eligible. These years later, he’s the mentor we searched for, helping to organize, from the inside, community events for children, and he’s spoken publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victim’s family. My man Anthony was 19 when he committed his crime. In the last few years, he’s organized poetry readings, book clubs and fatherhood classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program at Dillwyn Correctional Center, Anthony was among the graduates, earning all three of the certificates that it offered. He worked to have me invited as the commencement speaker, and what I remember most is watching him share a meal with his parents for the first time since his arrest. But he must pray that the governor grants him a conditional pardon, as he did for Fats.

I tell myself that my friends are unique, that I wouldn’t fight so hard for just anybody. But maybe there is little particularly distinct about any of us — beyond that we’d served enough time in prison. There was a skinny light-skinned 15-year-old kid who came into prison during the years that we were there. The rumor was that he’d broken into the house of an older woman and sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had three life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People threatened him. He’d had to break a man’s jaw with a lock in a sock to prove he’d fight if pushed. As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate, had I known him the way I know my friends, if he reached out to me today, I’d probably be arguing that he should be free.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

My mother purchased her first single-family home just before I was released from prison. One version of this story is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn’t spend a single night more than necessary in the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to burn the place from memory.

I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong. The first time she missed work to attend court proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a kid the same age as I was when I robbed a man. He was probably from Suitland, and he’d attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time, my mother attended a series of court dates involving me, dressed in her best work clothes to remind the prosecutor and judge and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time, my mother took off days from work to go to court alone and witness the trial of the man who raped her and two other women. A prosecutor’s subpoena forced her to testify, and her solace came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others.

After my mother told me what had happened to her, we didn’t mention it to each other again for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she and I were interviewed on the podcast “Death, Sex & Money.” The host asked my mother about going to court for her son’s trial when he was facing life. “I was raped by gunpoint,” my mother said. “It happened just before he was sentenced. So when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial for myself.” I hadn’t forgotten what happened, but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger made it far more devastating.

On the last day of the trial of the man who raped her, my mother told me, the judge accepted his guilty plea. She remembers only that he didn’t get enough time. She says her nose began to bleed. When I asked her what she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied, “That I’d taken the deputy’s gun and shot him.”

Harris has studied crime-scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted men in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lovers. In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” Harris praised the work of Sunny Schwartz — creator of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the first restorative-justice program in the country to offer services to offenders and victims, which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to help inmates who have committed violent crimes by giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations. Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health treatment. And she argued that safety is a civil right, and that a 60-year sentence for a series of restaurant armed robberies, where some victims were bound or locked in freezers, “should tell anyone considering viciously preying on citizens and businesses that they will be caught, convicted and sent to prison — for a very long time.”

Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the 1990s have largely not been revisited. While the evidence of any prosecutor doing work on this front is slim, as a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to “unravel the decades-long effort to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh, to the point of being inhumane”; criticized the bail system; and called for an end to private prisons and criticized the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and electronic-monitoring services.

In June, months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and before she was tapped as the vice-presidential nominee, I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone. A police officer’s knee on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him as he called for help, had been captured on video. Each night, thousands around the world protested. During our conversation, Harris told me that as the only Black woman in the United States Senate “in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery,” countless people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism. Harris said that she was not about to start telling them “about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country as part of the greatest stain on this country.” Exhausted, she no longer answered the questions. I imagined she believes, as Toni Morrison once said, that “the very serious function of racism” is “distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”

But these days, even in the conversations that I hear my children having, race suffuses so much. I tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Micah, told his classmates and teachers: “As you all know, my dad went to jail. Shouldn’t the police who killed Floyd go to jail?” My son wanted to know why prison seemed to be reserved for Black people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell.

“In the criminal-justice system,” Harris replied, “the irony, and, frankly, the hypocrisy is that whenever we use the words ‘accountability’ and ‘consequence,’ it’s always about the individual who was arrested.” Again, she began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the system accountable. And while I found myself agreeing, I began to fear that the point was just to find ways to treat officers in the same brutal way that we treat everyone else. I thought about the men I’d represented in parole hearings — and the friends I’d be representing soon. And wondered out loud to Harris: How do we get to their freedom?

“We need to reimagine what public safety looks like,” the senator told me, noting that she would talk about a public health model. “Are we looking at the fact that if you focus on issues like education and preventive things, then you don’t have a system that’s reactive?” The list of those things becomes long: affordable housing, job-skills development, education funding, homeownership. She remembered how during the early 2000s, when she was the San Francisco district attorney and started Back on Track (a re-entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drug charges), many people were critical. “ ‘You’re a D.A. You’re supposed to be putting people in jail, not letting them out,’” she said people told her.

It always returns to this for me — who should be in prison, and for how long? I know that American prisons do little to address violence. If anything, they exacerbate it. If my friends walk out of prison changed from the boys who walked in, it will be because they’ve fought with the system — with themselves and sometimes with the men around them — to be different. Most violent crimes go unsolved, and the pain they cause is nearly always unresolved. And those who are convicted — many, maybe all — do far too much time in prison.

And yet, I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contacted my mother, informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for parole. I’m certain I’d write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn’t go to work because she was in a hospital; tell the board that the memory of a gun pointed at her head has never left; explain how when I came home, my mother told me the story. Some violence changes everything.

The thing that makes you suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having it. Terell, Anthony, Fats, Luke and Juvie have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should be free is our friendship. Learning that a Black man in the city I called home raped my mother taught me that the pain and anger for a family member can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if parole agencies should contact me at all — if they should ever contact victims and their families.

Perhaps if Harris becomes the vice president we can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses around crime and punishment. For three decades, as a line prosecutor, a district attorney, an attorney general and now a senator, her work has allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient target. But if the system is broken, it is because our flaws more than our virtues animate it. Confronting why so many of us believe prisons must exist may force us to admit that we have no adequate response to some violence. Still, I hope that Harris reminds the country that simply acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it — any more than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and trauma that landed them there.

In light of Harris being endorsed by Biden and highly likely to be the Democratic Party candidate, I thought I would share this balanced, understanding of both sides, article in regard to Harris and her career as a prosecutor, as I know that will be something dragged out by bad actors and useful idiots (you have a bunch of people stating 'Kamala is a cop', which is completely false, and also factless and misleading statements about 'mass incarceration' under her). I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be criticised or that there is nothing about her career that can be criticised, but it should at least be representative of the truth and understanding of the complexities of the legal system.

[jackiestarsister]

Thoughts while rereading Jane Eyre

I first read Jane Eyre in its entirety when I was in high school, and it has remained one of my all-time favorite books! After reading the Manga Classics adaptation and seeing both the old and new editions of the stage musical, I finally reread it, or rather listened to the audiobook.

These were my thoughts on this reading (with spoilers):

~ Jane’s autobiography begins with the line, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” I take this to mean that if she had taken a walk that day, none of the following events would have happened! John Reed would not have attacked her at that time and place, leading to her traumatic punishment, her meeting with Mr. Lloyd, and going to Lowood Institution.

~ Charlotte Bronte vividly shows the intensity of children’s emotions. I don’t think that was common in British literature at the time!

~ Jane enters and leaves the lives of the Reeds, the Thornfield residents, and the Rivers siblings in very Gothic fashions! I can imagine parts of the story being told from other characters’ perspectives to great dramatic effect.

~ Knowing the whole story, there are many seeds of foreshadowing to be found throughout the story! Great setup and payoff.

~ Jane says about Helen’s grave, “for fifteen years after her death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a grey marble tablet marks the spot.” Jane must have gone back to Lowood when she was about 25, and paid for a fitting monument for her first and life-changing friend!

~ Pilot seems almost like a Disney hero’s sidekick, urging the two love interests to meet each other!

~ Mr. Rochester seems to judge Jane’s character partly by observing how she treats Pilot and Adele, and the contrast against Blanche Ingram’s treatment of them!

~ If Eliza and Georgiana are supposed to represent the extremes of unfeelingness and too effusive feelings, are they basically Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood? I know Charlotte Bronte disliked Pride and Prejudice; maybe she was pushing back against Austen’s other characters too?

~ Rochester actually calls Jane the “adopted daughter” of Mrs. Fairfax and “little English mother” of Adele! I wish this familial dynamic had been brought out more.

~ The impulsive way Jane flees from Thornfield reminds me that she is still a teenager! She does not think of the fact that she has an uncle who wants to give her an inheritance, or of the solicitor’s advice to stay put until she hears news of him. She does not seek help from Mrs. Fairfax or the Leavens family to find a new situation. She might have spared herself a lot of suffering if she had formed a better plan for finding a new home and had her mail forwarded there!

~ St. John, Diana, and Mary Rivers are like a reversed reflection of John, Eliza, and Georgiana Reed—both sets of cousins, but completely opposite dynamics with Jane.

~ Jane’s relationship with St. John Rivers is waaaay more toxic than her relationship with Edward Rochester. Jane can stand her ground with Rochester, who would never force her to do anything she decidedly did not want; but she feels compelled to do whatever St. John tells her, and he urges her to do things against her own desires.

~ Rochester literally loses his eye and hand, just like Jesus says about temptation in Matthew 18:8-9!

~ Jane and Rochester’s relationship is bookended by scenes of her supporting him as he walks!

~ Were the parson and clerk who officiated Jane and Rochester’s marriage the same ones who were at the interrupted wedding?! Unless there was a change in position during the year of separation, they probably were the same ones!

~ My headcanon is that all the Thornfield servants placed bets on how long it would take Jane and Rochester to work things out. This is supported by the innkeeper’s account of how the servants observed Jane and Rochester, and John and Mary’s reactions after they finally get married!

[zepskies]

Hello dear friend, tofics here! 🥰 (Will Tumblr ever allow to send asks from a sideblog? Who knows!) Thank you for the tag in WIP tag game! I'll definitely be participating later, but just had to drop by first and ask about that Dean WIP? 👀 'Don't You Forget About Me' is definitely a very intriguing title! Sounds like perhaps angst will be involved? 👀👀 Must. Know. More. Please! 😄💕

Hello my friend! Yes I got your message. 😘 You're very welcome, and I'm excited to see what you've got in store in your WIP bank!

But thank you for asking about Don't You Forget About Me (Dean Winchester x Reader).

It's an idea I've had for years, actually, but have never gotten around to actually writing it. It's based on the episode 4.13: After School Special, but with a Breakfast Club twist. (If you haven't seen that 80s movie, do yourself a favor! The title of the WIP is from the song played at the end, by Simple Minds.)

Here's some more detail:

Don’t You Forget About Me

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Reader || Teen!Dean x Teen!Reader

Summary: 1997. Fairfax, Indiana. Pullman High School. Somehow you find yourself in detention with Dean Winchester, the new kid at school who wears a leather jacket and a bad boy smile better than John Bender ever did.

This one is also outlined but not written yet. I'm eyeballs deep on Lost on You right now, but stay tuned!~ 😅💜

[indelen]

Alright, I'm hideously behind and the world is awful so I’m just going to blitz through to the end because the next readthrough is starting soon and I'm not even done with this one, like what is this, high school English? So ....

This is my reread of the Lockwood and Co. Books, organized by @blue-boxes-magic-and-tea, I'll make a general summary of several chapters and then post bits and pieces that jumped out at me.

I go into a longer analysis of Fairfax and Annie’s relationship and how it relates to Lucy but I do want to say kudos to Stroud for portraying such a realistic unhealthy relationship. This is a young adult book and he could have easily made Annabel Ward a saintly abuse victim, but she wasn’t. She was in a complicated toxic relationship with a powerful man, she feared him but wanted his love and approval, she acted in ways that provoked him, which obviously was not smart but abused people do not act in relatable, logical ways. Abuse victims fight back, act in toxic ways, return to their abusers and do any number of seemingly illogical things and I think that it says a lot about Lucy that despite all her baggage, her young age, her “not like other girls” tendencies, her inability to relate to the life Annie had, she still felt an enormous amount of empathy for her and it was that empathy that saved them in the end.

Part IV, Chapters 23-24:

Lucy’s family and her past in Cheviot Hills is fascinating because she never speaks about them except for the very succinct and detached way at the very start and these small moments throughout the books that indicate they mean a lot more to her than she would ever admit to anyone. The fact that she keeps some kind of memory box far under her bed, the fact that she sees her sisters as concussed visions alongside Annie Ward and Lockwood who, for very different reasons, currently occupy her mind quite a bit, shows the family she left behind still has a huge hold over her.

I love George so much because he sasses and analyzes everything in front of him from literally the moment he regains consciousness.

Never going to be normal about Lucy using this sort of imagery about Lockwood. She’s reaching near Victorian levels of Beautiful Death prose. Lockwood is always ethereal, otherworldly and doomed. Too good and beautiful for this sinful earth. What’s interesting is that in literature this sort of imagery is usually reserved for the hero describing the heroine. It’s one of many times the “hero” and “heroine” tropes between these two that are pretty regularly subverted.

Fairfax is like Combe Carey Hall itself in that at night he transforms and the posh and valuable facade recedes to reveal a grotesque and horrible true nature underneath.

Fairfax is an abuser who cannot understand that his toxic relationship with Annie is entirely of his own making. From the beginning their relationship was not that of equals. He was of a higher social class than her and never did anything to bridge that gap because it would threaten his precious inheritance and he never viewed acting or this part of his life as permanent or worth preserving. He was just partying and having fun before he settled into living a rich man’s life. He hid his relationship with Annabel and Annabel, naturally, resented the shit out of being treated as someone’s dirty secret. She sensed how disposable she was to him and got jealous, manufactured conflict and fights, flirted with other men, all to get attention and to provoke a reaction from Fairfax. And he rewarded her for this behavior. He was obviously controlling and his lavish gifts were meant to pacify her. They also normalized their unhealthy dynamic, the locket explicitly referred to the toxicity of their relationship as romantic. You can’t write “my torment, my bliss” on a jeweled locket and give it to a girl and then be surprised when she kinda thinks you’re ok with the torment bit. And so round and round it went until … frankly I’m not even sure that one fight was any worse than all the others. Fairfax never saw Annie as a person, he saw her as beneath him, and disposed of her, out of possessiveness and anger sure, but also out of pragmatic convenience. As long as Annie lived she was a liability and posed a risk to his reputation and name. He can try and pitch their relationship as mutually toxic and harmful all he wants but the truth is only Annie was ever in danger in it.

And here is where I put my tinfoil hat on.

Because my theory is that Annabel Ward was drawn to Lucy and formed such an empathetic bond with her specifically because she saw Lucy as being in the same situation as her. Ghosts seem to have limited capacities and see things on a loop and devoid of context. To Annabel’s spirit the story of meeting a dashing young man through work, work both are passionate about and work that brings them intimately closer together, but he is of higher social class and is financially better off and also he holds a significant amount of power over her is, on paper, very similar. Lucy might not think Annabel is much like her, but Annabel’s ghost sees things in Lucy’s mind she recognizes. Her hidden emotions, the desperate besotted love she feels for a magnetic, powerful person in her life and the feeling of inadequacy and desire to be seen as good, as valuable to him are all familiar ones Annie latches onto. And while Lucy is too young and repressed and traumatized to recognize any of this, I think she still learns a lot from Annie. It’s not a coincidence that the biggest conflict between Lockwood and Lucy is that of inequality and disbalance of power. Lucy, from this point onward, will grow to dislike that Lockwood does not share anything with her emotionally and that he overrules or does not consult her opinions professionally. And to some extent I think it’s her learning from poor Annie Ward.

Yea OK this is where I have trouble buying the “killed instantly” story Fairfax tells to everyone including himself. The human neck is not made of LEGO bricks and it’s hard to kill a fully grown adult with a single blow. So unfortunately, and this is NOT A NICE MENTAL IMAGE so like, skip to the next point if you don’t want to read something that describes grievous bodily harm, abuse and murder, but unfortunately it’s very possible Fairfax very badly injured Annie but she did not die instantly. Like, he may have broken her spine, but while that would inacapitate her, it would not necessarily kill her. If this is true then she died a much slower and more terrible death. And a few things in the above section support this. Annie repeating she’s “cold” but not understanding why. The manifestation of sounds and how they overlap - the hammering that entombed her, tapping of a finger on plaster, the slowing beating of a heart. Did Annie die on some level aware that her lover was disposing of her even before her last breath? Ghostlock was not enough. She should have eaten him.

Very early on we get these hints of just how much of a capitalist nightmare Fittes is and how it slowly swallows up smaller agencies and clearly aims to become a monopoly and discards kids they have no use for. And also how many of those kids clearly fall through the cracks and end up in criminal organizations or doing the dirty work of wealthy unscrupulous magnates.

Book Lockwood is pretty violent in these low key, concentrated and brutally efficient bursts and it’s one of those things that remains enigmatically unexplained. It’s not just fencing too, it’s all sorts of stuff. In the next book he folds Ned Shaw like a tablecloth. Did Gravedigger Sykes teach him? Flo? Unexplained! Very hot though. You 100% can see where Lucy is coming from.

Smile counter is still at 9 since there was nothing much to grin at in these chapters, but I want to give a shout-out to George for chasing after Percy, a grown man armed with a gun remember, alongside Lockwood. Like that's good guts, George doesn't like action, he doesn't live for it like Lockwood does, but he doesn't shrink away from it either.

[somethingvicked]

True love of mine part 5

An Eddie Munson story

Stranger Things AU (no Upside-Down)

warnings: Female reader, slight angst, fluff, flexible time-line

Chapter 4

Now

Y/N

It had been a week since you sent the letter to Eddie. A week since you had sat down and talked to Brent, telling him that your relationship was over and that you couldn’t marry him.

Your ringfinger felt strange and empty after you had taken off the engagement ring, even though you knew it was for the best and that it had felt strange having it on too.

Instead you had looked around in that special box of yours and located another memory you’d saved from your time with Eddie. A ring he had won you at a fair once, shaped like a cat – for his nickname for you; kitten.

You were looking down at the ring when Brent rushed into the living room from your… well, what used to be his and your bedroom, holding something in his hands. Your eyes widened when you realized what it was. Your box with the notebooks, the flower made of steel wire, the notes. It would have held the ring too if you hadn’t put it on so recently.

Brent was breathing heavily. "I found these when I was packing up my stuff and I shuffled through them."

"What?! You had no right to do that…!"

"Shut up," he barked. "It's all... they were all for Eddie? The poems you wrote and the poetry book you published? Love notes for no one? You said it was a bunch of love poems for different guys you were in love with in high school that you had saved? But in here it says they are all for and about Eddie. And not only that, some of them were written just two years ago. I remember - because that's when you downloaded that writing app on your phone and stopped writing them down by hand... are you saying that you were with me... but you wrote all this for this Eddie guy?!"

His eyes widened. "Wait… is that why your pseudonym was E. Fairfax? You said it was from your first fictional crush, Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre – his first and middle name, because Rochester would be to obvious. But the 'E'... is that for 'Eddie'?!"

You didn't even have the energy to reply. Why deny it? You had done that and yes, perhaps that made you a bad person. But that's why you finally had sat down with Brent and given him the ring back and said that it was best if you went your separate ways.

"Yes, I did that,” you admitted with a sigh. “And I'm sorry. It's not like I didn't love you at all, Brent, I did. I just... I don't love you like you love me. I thought I would, if I gave it time. But somehow… no, I have never stopped loving Eddie. Writing those poems was a way for me to get all those words I couldn’t say out. But I realized that it wasn’t fair to you. You are a wonderful guy, you don’t deserve to have a wife that writes love poems to a former lover, that’s why I decided to grow up and set you free. So you find someone that can love you, the way you deserve."

Brent's face softened a little. He was still angry, but he did care about you, that’s what made him such a great guy. Many times you had cursed yourself and your stupid heart for not loving him like you wanted to. "Well, what about you? Will you waste your life for your high school sweetheart that just took off and left? How is that fair to you?"

"I need to be true to my heart," you said, “and you’re right, it’s not fair at all. Sadly I can’t help how I feel. Like I said, the poems were a way for me to talk about it without talking about it. But now… I might need to do something else. Maybe I need therapy, I don’t know. However, it’s not your problem any more, Brent. I appreciate you caring, I do, but this is something I need to handle myself.”

You didn’t want to tell him that you had already started at that. The letter. It might not lead to anything but at least it was a more serious try than just writing poems Eddie would never read.

There was something more about the poems you had published and the pseudonym you used. Yes, it was for Mr. Rochester but… it was also for Eddie. For the little secret he had told you – that his middle name was Francis. And that both of your first loves first initials was E.F. even if they had different surnames.

Your two E.F’s.

You sighed again, rubbing your thumb over the cat ring for comfort, then Brent stroked your cheek before taking the last of his things and leaving, the door closing with a click behind him.

Eddie

Eddie had read Y/N’s letter more times than he he could count over the last two days. The things she told him…

She still loved him, couldn’t get over him, compared every boyfriend she had with him. She had even gotten engaged recently but decided to end it because she realized that she wished she was marrying him, not her fiancée.

Y/N clearly didn’t think he felt the same but she had remarked about him still having the matching tattoo.

Was there a small hope there that he sensed?

She made it clear that she didn’t expect them to start over, she only wished for an explanation. Why he had upped and left so suddenly, why he hadn’t given her some sort of closure.

You didn’t even break up with me in that note – which would have been shitty on its own but at least then I would have known, she had written, now it seemed like you didn’t even think about me at all. Like you were already past everything that had to do with us.

How could he tell her that everything that she had written, every feeling she had described – was like he had written it himself?

When Eddie read that she was engaged it felt like someone had taken the small piece of heart he had that were still intact and crumbled it into nothing but drops of blood. When she added that she had to break it, the relief that filled him made him feel like the relief itself was helium and he was about to fly to the heavens.

What she asked of him, though… how could he tell her the real reason he had bailed back then?

How ashamed he was, how much he still hated himself for it. Would she hate him too?

No, Eddie couldn’t tell her. And he didn’t deserve another chance with her. Not just because of what had happened to make him flee, but because of how much he had hurt her by doing so. He had thought it was for the best back then but… clearly he had fucked up more than one life back then – not even counting his own.

But he did owe to tell her that he didn’t live the happy life she imagined. That she was still the first and last thing on his mind every day.

She hadn’t left a return address but one good thing about being famous like he was, was that pretty much everyone knew everything he did. Y/N would find out, one way or another.

He sat down to write a song. The most important song in his life – except that other one.

Eddie thought back and wondered which moment he would start with. Then a sad smile spread over his face and he started.

When you travelin’ down to the Hawk’s country fair…

Then

Hawkins, 1981.

Eddie

It was the day before Halloween and a fair had come to Hawkins, complete with a Ferris wheel, roller coaster, haunted house and of course all the arcades and games.

Y/N and Eddie were walking arm in arm around on the field where they had set up, both high in spirits and drunk on the beer they had stolen from Wayne before coming here. Eddie loved to hear Y/N’s laughter and see her so excited, even though it was just a small little fair.

Although she wasn’t too happy with the clowns, saying that they should have been forbidden since John Wayne Gacy had been outed.

She insisted that they rode the roller coaster, even though she screamed like a stuck pig, making Eddie laugh so hard he almost choked from loss of breath.

Then Y/N pulled him with her to the Haunted house and when they rode through the dark tunnels, lit up by poison green light and filled with smoke, it was Eddie’s turn to make noise – he yelped when the vision of a ghost came up around a curve, a transparent woman with her head cut off, even though he knew it was just projected in the same way they showed something on the overhead machine in school.

Y/N laughed at his reaction but despite her amusement she pulled Eddie’s face in against her chest, patting his hair for comfort. “Don’t worry, hotshot – I’ll protect you,” she purred, making his nickname for her even more fitting.

He was suddenly hyper aware that his face was pressed in against Y/N’s boobs and that… they were softer than any pillow he had ever laid on. And that his cock had become hard as stone, pressing against the fly of his jeans.

Quickly he pulled back with a choked out laugh, thinking very intensely on the dissection they had made yesterday in biology to make the embarrassing erection go down.

When the two of them came out they went to buy some cotton candy and French fries before Eddie said that he absolutely had to try and win her something at the arcade games.

Y/N insisted that he didn’t need to, but he wanted to. Wanted to give her some little trinket that was just from him.

Y/N had given him his bandana after all, the one he now always kept in his back pocket as a token, like in the medieval times.

When he came upon one of the machines and saw the little cat shaped ring it was like a sign from above.

Concentrating hard, using every dexterous skill he had learned as a guitar player he steered the claw with precision before pressing the button. And he won! He won the ring for her!

“Here,” he told Y/N, holding it out. “Kitten for my kitten.”

“Oh, Eddie!” she had said, eyes misted over as she wrapped her arms around him, once again making him feel that soft bosom pressing against him beneath her denim jacket.

He didn’t have time to ponder much over it though, because Y/N’s eyes lit up and she took his hand and ran toward the Ferris wheel.

“We have to ride the Ferris wheel,” she insisted and as usual, he couldn’t deny her  anything. He would have promised her the Mona Lisa if she had begged for it, no matter the impossibility of getting it.

As they got seated and the guard had placed the bar over them it started and it slowly moved upwards.

“Do you know there’s a legend about the Ferris wheel,” Y/N suddenly said, her cheeks pink.

“Yeah? What’s that?” Eddie wondered.

“That if you kiss when the wheel’s at the top you will live happily ever after,” Y/N  explained, her eyes wide, the lights reflecting in them.

“Really?” Eddie said. “Wow. You believe that?”

She shrugged your shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s a sweet superstition though, unlike many others.”

He had to give her that one.

When the wheel was at the top Eddie turned toward Y/N at the exact same time as she turned toward him, and the next second their lips met, their arms wrapped around each other, even with the bar holding them in place.

Happily ever after, Eddie thought as he tasted the sweet cotton candy on Y/N’s lips and smelled the intoxicating scent of her perfume, while burying his hands in her hair. 

taglist: @ali-r3n @ficsbypix @mewchiili @melodymunson @ches-86 @jenniquinn @eddiemunsonfuxks @stolen-in-moonlight @alastorssimp @pandemoniusstuff

(let me know if you want to be on the taglist!)

please, like, comment and reblog!

Your likes are wonderful but reblogs expand my reading circle.

[popclture]

Slash playing at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles (1982)

[bithablu]

Book Club!!!

Lockwood and Co! The Screaming Staircase! Chapter 8! Featuring the first appearances of the Lockwood Effect, the Problem as a metaphor for end stage capitalism, and hints of the Problem as a metaphor for climate change! Yay!

This scene was cute. I thought the show did a good job with it but I still like the book version better. It's sad how much we lost because Netflix is allergic to any season with more than eight episodes. Pricks.

Annnyyyywho- my notes are there. No real thoughts beyond 'But I like it!'

This is where we start getting outside examples the comparison to end stage capitalism. Quick definition: End Stage Capitalism is the term used to describe how a capitalist society declines over time as companies gain power over the government, control the markets, and ruin the economy. We see throughout the books that companies (Fittes, Rotwell, Fairfax Iron) seemingly get to make their own rules. DEPRAC may act like it's in charge but their authority is often superseded by Fittes or Rotwell.

How many laws have been compromised to make it legal for minors to be treated the way they are? Fourteen year olds are treated as adults with mortgages, eight year olds can quit school to get jobs, literal children are encouraged to work jobs with high fatality rates. In a society that pretends to care so deeply about protecting life, it is a stark contrast to venerate a job that turns children into soldiers. It is a clear exploitation of youth to maintain the untenable status quo that only the rich profit from. Those in power benefit twice- 1. by using a labor force that is easier to manipulate, has a high turnover (hard to unionize when agents die or age out so quickly), and has a lack of education AND 2. by the general public (including former agents) requiring their services to stay safe and protected.

I wonder how guilty people felt in the beginning of the Problem that they had to surrender children's futures to protect the public. I also wonder when that guilt stopped.

I'll stop this here for now since this is going to be an ongoing theme (and it's getting late so I'm getting sleepy).

Oh wait- the Problem as climate change. Ok, I'll make this quick. It's easier to see the analogy if you look at how older character talk about the Problem. They use the same rhetoric as climate change deniers. It's all Deny, Excuse, Justify. Here's some examples; see if they sound familiar.

Grandpa Asshat demeans his granddaughter's observations, dismisses her concerns, and tries to explain away any inconsistencies to what he WANTS to believe. To me, it reads as the same as a climate change denier saying "Oh, calm down. It's tornado season. Happens every year. Just because the 'nados are getting worse and there's more of them every year doesn't mean anything. Why I remember when I was a kid that we had that one bad year. Just because every year gets progressively worse and we're having 'once in a century' storms twice a year isn't a big deal. Calm down hippie."

I'll have more examples later (Looking at you TCS). I might even be more coherent later (don't hold me to that).

[tallmadgeandtea]

Turn Week 2024

Crossover

Fly Like A Jet Stream: A Top Gun AU with @ms-march

California, 1971

The United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, colloquially known as TOPGUN, is in its early stages. Only the navy’s young, best, and brightest pilots are selected for the chance to enter a new era of aviator warfare.

Recent college graduate Elizabeth Walker uses her father’s connections to earn a position as a civilian instructor at TOPGUN. She’s even given her choice of candidates: the brilliant Adrienne Fairfax, the only female pilot desperate to prove herself after a targeted accident; the arrogant draft-dodger (well, almost) Thaddeus Kosciuszko; and Benjamin Tallmadge, a soft-spoken, bookish Long Island boy with blue eyes Elizabeth can’t look into for too long.

But California’s beaches and off base bars barely conceal the cutthroat, high stress environment TOPGUN thrives on. Will they make it through without breaking any rules, or will their careers- and their personal lives- crash and burn?

[ms-march]

TURN WEEK: TOPGUN Crossover with SS:SP

California, 1971

The United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, colloquially known as TOPGUN, is in its early stages. Only the navy’s young, best, and brightest pilots are selected for the chance to enter a new era of aviator warfare.

So experimental, Adrienne Fairfax is returning as part of the 3rd class. She had been at TOPGUN once before, a male classmate cutting her time there short by dismembering parts of her plane pre-flight. Coming back with a chip on her shoulder and scathing remarks for her inexperienced and self-confident classmates, Adrienne will not be so trusting and naive again. The new TOPGUN staff including the impressive young Nathaniel Greene—or so her father says— and the recent college graduate, Elizabeth Walker, have to prove themselves to her NOT the other way around.

Unfortunately, this second trip may not be so easy between Elizabeth’s eyes for the by-the-book, bookish Long Island Boy, Benjamin Tallmadge and the arrogant draft-dodger (well, almost) in Thaddeus Kosciusko, who can’t help but earn his callsign: Casanova. California’s beaches and off base bars barely conceal the cutthroat, high stress environment TOPGUN thrives on. Will they make it through without breaking any rules, or will their careers- and their personal lives- crash and burn?

Happy crossover day from @tallmadgeandtea and I!!

[thankyouforthememoriesworld]

🔎

A full playlist of Team Takeover footage from 2015 when Azzi was 12/ 13.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDLH24kzeVU&list=PLxjhGcezdegc7yhhst8DDJdKWD6-CgDcG

A full playlist of Fairfax Stars footage from 2016 when Azzi was 13/14.

As part of the playlist, she played North Tartan in Atlanta for the AAU Super Showcase ATL Championship on 7/8/16. Remember that other post I did - Azzi played several years up and she wouldn't end up playing Paige until the following year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA9pHTpExvI&list=PLxjhGcezdegeTzq9dSdIDRl2U3iDN6fj6&index=18

A bunch of Paige's old high school games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCmNujSdOV0&list=PL99uGlohtH9V0TEN14E1n0zG7Az_jxDpY&index=11

I can find the semifinal game from 2019 but you are right, the actual stillwater game is gone :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Hyodtc6-M

And now for the cutest thing I found while looking for the state championship....North Tartan NIKE 10th EYBL (50) v Boo Williams EYBL 11th (57) in 2018 Summer Jam (This was the game they lost against Ashley Owusu's team)

It was the final game for Paige's team and at the timestamp of 1:56 you see Azzi's best friend Carly and part of Azzi's french braided head on the sidelines watching. Unfortunately where they are sitting means they are never really in the camera view. I saw clear shot of her face at 57:07 to the end of the video. Anyway, Azzi and Paige's team played the day before and Azzi's team had finished up their game before Paige's game started.

https://youtu.be/gfEaU70QkXk?si=sUcLOLDM0X8d0vLb&t=116

For those wondering how I know the schedule: use this link too look up Fairfax Stars and North Tartan 10th schedule.

https://tourneymachine.com/Public/Results/Division.aspx?IDTournament=h201711150340558176fe6def4d8a440&IDDivision=h20180527130838394bc7cf7b161d340

baby goats in the making 🐐

It's cute to see Azzi and her team supporting Paige but she didn't really care about the game😭. She spent it yapping and at one point even laid down with Carly on the floor (she's so funny).

[thislovintime]

Peter Tork, 1970s, 1990s, and 2016.

“To the outside observer, I’m sure it looked as though I had succumbed to the extremities of a given culture. To me, I simply exhibited moderate good sense. Basically, I lived at a poverty level, scratching for odd jobs. I wore a beard, my hair was past my shoulders, and I was working in a restaurant, singing folk songs and waiting tables. I was playing piano and was in and out of various rock groups. I played lead guitar for a rock group called Osciolla [sic]. No records. I was in the bass section of the Fairfax Street Choir, a thirty-give member vocal group. I also fronted a group of my own and tried to make a demo, but it didn’t go anywhere. I had a job offer to come out here to Venice. I also worked as a high school teacher. The mass media has a tendency to distort. As long as capitalism remains the underpinning of society, what is good will always take a back seat to what will sell. General Motors isn’t concerned with making a quality automobile. Sears isn’t concerned with offering a quality television set. All that counts in a capitalistic society is selling. And to the mass media’s way of thinking, a picture of Peter Tork as a so-called ‘burned-out hippie’ with a beard and long hair implies a hopeless case who can’t lift his hand to his face to get his razor up and who has no interest except in stealing to support his drug habit. If that’s what sells, they’ll print that. The truth of the matter is, my primary concern was and is self-realization in a social setting.” - Peter Tork, Blitz!, May/June 1980

Review: “What are your earliest memories about how music engaged your interest imagination; and at what point did you realize that you wanted to pursue it seriously?” Peter Tork: “I'm not sure it ever did, but let me put it this way. I was always drawn to music as entertaining and diverted away from it for various reasons. As a matter of making a conscious commitment to music that happened in my 50s - long after the breakup of The Monkees. But music always held a fascination for me and I always pursued it. Anybody who knows about my Greenwich Village folk days also knows I was engaged into pursuing interesting arrangements and how to go about things musically, always without a conscious sense of commitment to the music that I did create. Not until much later in life can I say that I made a real decision about how to pursue music in my life, which is kind of funny.” [...] Review: “What/s the most challenging component involved with keeping things on an even keel in the music business?” Tork: “Oh, you're talking a couple of different things. A career takes dedication on the part of many different people. One needs people to believe in one and I cannot muster a career on my own hoof. I don't have what it takes to book shows, make arrangements, and tend to all the details, so it takes a village basically. But in terms of staying personally balanced in the midst of showbiz requires a particular little extra something - the ability to rely on something or someone or some process that I'm included in. In other words it's not me and everything else but a process that I'm included in and can rely upon. Sometimes this works mechanically and sometimes its transcendent; but its got to be greater than my solo self and I need to have something on my side - friends who have insight and a collection of people that I can turn to for spiritual uplifting or a joke here or there. Nobody does this alone, but that's true about everything as far as I'm concerned.“ - Review Mag, May 27, 2016

[worldwide-blackfolk]

10th-grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, as the winner of its Young Scientist Challenge. His prize: $25,000. His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer. It may take years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition.

[sometimes-men-need-help-too]

At least 6 female teachers arrested for sexual misconduct with students over two days across US

*This was back in April of this year, but I'm not sure if you guys heard about this. I didn't until now

At least six female teachers were arrested in a span of two days this week for having sex with students — including a Kentucky staffer who allegedly had trysts with a pair of 16-year-old boys.

Ellen Shell, 38, of Danville, was arraigned in Garrard County District Court on Thursday after prosecutors said she had sex with the teens on two separate occasions in July and August of last year.

Shell worked as a teacher’s aide at Woodlawn Elementary School and was employed at Lancaster Elementary School prior to that, according to WTKR.

The outlet reported that Boyle County School officials sent out a letter to parents alerting them to the arrest.

Shell had been placed on administrative leave pending the resolution of the case.

The bust was just one of at least six recent cases of female teachers engaging in sexual misconduct with their teen charges in recent days, according to reports from across the country.

Arkansas educator Heather Hare, 32, was expected to turn herself in Friday for an alleged sexual relationship with a teen student and is now facing a first-degree felony assault rap, the Arkansas Times reported.

Oklahoma teacher Emily Hancock, 26, was also arrested Thursday after local police were tipped off to her alleged relationship with a student.

A former substitute with Wellston Public Schools, Hancock allegedly began communicating with the teen last October and eventually began sending the 15-year-old nude photos, according to KOCO.

The pair eventually had illicit relations on school property, the outlet reported.

Kristen Gantt, 36, an English teacher at a Catholic high school in Des Moines, Iowa, was added to the tally Friday for allegedly having sex with a teen student five times inside and outside her school, according to local reports.

Investigators said Gantt groomed the student over social media — and that surveillance cameras caught them going into a classroom alone with a papered over window.

She has since been fired by the school and will now answer to felony counts of sexual exploitation.

In Virginia, Allieh Kheradmand, 33, a teacher at James Madison High School, was also nabbed for allegedly sex with a student over the course of several months, according to FFXNow.

A learning disabilities teacher with Fairfax County Schools since 2016, Kheradmand has been charged with four counts of indecent liberties and is being held without bond. 

Finally, a Pennsylvania javelin coach allegedly had sex with a 17-year-old boy she coached, according to prosecutors.

Hannah Marth, 26, was arrested after police learned she had engaged in a sexual relationship with the Northampton Area High School track and field athlete, prosecutors allege.

The 26-year-old sent the teen a text in May 2021 and invited him to her home, where the two allegedly had sex, the Northampton district attorney said in a news release.