#george is so convinced of being a monster that he will behave like a monster

[tornrose24]

Storytime and nightmares (Red Diamond AAU Drabble)

The original Gem AU, Red Zircon!George and Yellow Sapphire!Harold and Orange Peridot!Melvin belong to AngryDJ. Check their stuff out to support them.

Featured cameos include Bo and Gooch.

Alexandra belongs to me.

The small family of gems was growing. Harold and George reunited with a Bismuth from their Rebellion days and Alexandra found an abandoned Tourmaline. Finally Peridot had been won over to their side and had taken on the name Melvin (that he chose for himself, even if Harold and George found it dorky).

Yet Alexandra couldn’t help but remember when they faced off against Jasper. How the bully allowed himself to be corrupted while his three hench-gems escaped. His chilling final words to her:

“You shattered my Diamond! Your Diamond! Red Diamond!”

She knew there was more than one Diamond, but she never heard of Red Diamond until then.

“Who is Red Diamond?” She asked George and Harold one day.

“‘Who is Red Diamond?’” Melvin gapped. “You never told her about Red Diamond?” He demanded as Bismuth visibly shuddered. “She’s friends with Red Quartz’s most trusted warriors and she doesn’t know who Red Diamond is?”

“We were going to.” George admitted.

“Just not yet.” Harold added. “How did you know about him?”

“Jasper said Dad shattered him.” Alexandra told them. “He said Red Diamond was his diamond and not Yellow’s.”

Moments later, the group gathered around as George lead the story.

“As you know, Red Quartz and the Rebellion was fighting to protect the earth.” He began. “Each of the diamonds conquered several planets and ruled over them with an iron fist. Red Diamond.... well, he was known for being the worst diamond ever.”

“Worst?” Alexandra asked.

“Impulsive, immature, and idiotic.” Melvin told her.

“Red was looked down upon by the other diamonds for not being as patient or smart and many gems hated him.” George continued. “When he finally got a planet like he wanted, he was very strict and wouldn’t let us do fun things. We had to do everything his way and work all day whether we liked it or not. He even forbade laughter and smiling. Like other gems, he didn’t care what he was doing to the planet.” “But Red Quartz did.” Harold added. “He worked like the others until he saw beauty and promise where Red Diamond did not. He was shown many wonderful things and he understood what was going to be lost. We saw it too and together we three tried to bring awareness to how great Earth could be.”

“We were there when Quartz tried to convince Red Diamond that what he was doing was wrong.” George closed his eyes and remembered the details–remembered how passionate Quartz was in his speech as the other gems watched on. “Diamond had heard word that Quartz was acting out and trying to halt the colonization. Quartz pleaded, but Diamond laughed.” Then George recited the words “’Me?! Give up the colonization of my first planet because you value the lifeforms of this planet for your own?! After all that I’ve done to ensure that I could finally have my own planet! Don’t make me laugh! Get back to work and stop this nonsense, or I’ll shatter you, bub!”

“Quartz was dragged away and expected to do as he said, but he didn’t go back to work.” Harold recalled the hurt Red Quartz felt as well as his determination later. “He gathered others who saw the world like him–outcasts, dreamers, and rebels and pranksters like me and George. We all fought back–we wanted earth to be left alone, but we wanted to live there too. Quartz wanted us to get to live there too–to have a place where we were free to be ourselves and not have to hide. And so we fought back and ruined the perfect system Red Diamond set up.”

“Red Diamond hated it.” George continued. “He fought back at first, but when it got too much, he’d start whining like a coward for the other diamonds to help, but they barely moved a finger for him. Red Quartz also gained help as well and unlike the diamonds, they actually did whatever they could. However Red Diamond’s forces grew too strong and Quartz had to do something very drastic. He personally confronted Red Diamond and in the moment that the tyrant was caught off guard, Quartz shattered him with a fist to the gem.”

“Wow,” Alexandra was speechless. She frowned. “But wait, that should of meant earth was free for good right?”

“Not quite.” George frowned. “Something... unexpected happened. Not even Harold or the other Sapphires saw it coming.” “The diamonds apparently didn’t take Red Diamond’s shattering well.” Harold admitted. “So they attacked right back. They used their combined powers to end the Rebellion for good. Your dad was able to protect me and George, but the others...”

“Were either corrupted or worse.” Bismuth frowned. Tourmaline gave him a sympathetic frown and hugged him.

“Maybe if Red Diamond just left earth alone, then things wouldn’t have been so bad for everyone.” Alexandra thought. “Did it even occur to him that there were other planets?”

“Hah, he was known for being stubborn and he’d never give up so easily!” Melvin snapped.

“Also, he was really mean.” Bismuth remembered. “Like, he’d personally enjoy punishing anyone who stepped out of line or went against him.”

“Yeah, he doesn’t sound like he was that great to begin with.” Alexandra decided. “Maybe it was better that Dad shattered him.”

She didn’t notice the uncomfortable glances George and Harold shared.

When Alexandra went home to her mother and the others went to get some rest, the zircon and sapphire went out and stared at the night sky.

“I remember that first time Quartz met him face to face.” Harold thought back. “That was your best performance. I swore that it really was him and not you on that throne for a second.”

“The encore wasn’t so pretty though.” George winced before he sighed. “Alexandra still doesn’t know yet.”

“And we were told to wait until she was old enough to accept the truth. I can’t believe Edith was able to keep it a secret for so long.” Harold let out a pained sigh. “At least Alexandra doesn’t know how painful it is to miss someone. Not just him, but...”

George gave his best friend a gentle hug. “Hey, we’ll find Pink Sapphire someday.” He reassured him. “Your sister is still out there.”

****

Later that night, Alexandra couldn’t help but have a strange dream.

In it, she was trying to talk to Harold, but the boy gem was in his adult form and dressed like Yellow Diamond for some strange reason. He was sending out commands and coordinates onto a screen and for some reason Alexandra was speaking with words that didn’t feel like her own.

“What do you mean ‘too soon for me to do this too?!’” She growled at the tower sized gem. “I should be doing this right now! Instead I’m being forced to do work around Homeworld while you get to conquer planets that you get to keep for yourself! Soon there won’t be any for me to have!”

“I’m not in the mood for this.” Not!Harold sighed.

“It’s not fair! You and Blue get planets but not me?!” She snapped and punched a nearby cabinet the size of a building. She used a force similar to her own super strength, yet it also went flying into a nearby wall where it stuck half-way out and stayed that way. “I want my own planet! I want my own colony! I want my own army! I deserve it! I’m just as important as you!”

“Then why don’t you act like it, Red?!” Not!Harold growled back as he made a disgusted face that the real Harold would never make. “Stop behaving like a bratty child, have patience, and take things seriously for once in your life! If you keep this up, any colony under you is bound to fail!”

Alexandra scowled as she walked away from Not!Harold. She waited until he was out of sight and began to tighten her hand into a fist. She looked up to see a mirror, but the reflection was not her own. Instead it was an overweight man with skin the color of fire engine red, with a spider like mop of what seemed to be black hair with touches of red in it. He wore something like a cross between armor and a shirt and tie which met the tip of a red diamond on his navel. His face was in shadow so she couldn’t properly see his features.

In a burst of anger, both she and Red Diamond’s fists crashed together and the mirror shattered. His face was still in shadows but she could see the shark like teeth bared at her, scowl lines, and bags under eyes that reflected equal rage back at her for one split second.

Alexandra snapped awake in her bedroom and her heart began to race. The eight year old got up and hurried around the toys and the old video game systems George and Harold gifted to her before stopping in front of the full length mirror by her dresser.

Her reflection wasn’t that of Red Diamond’s. She could she herself–a miniature version of her own mother with messy hair and pink jammies with strawberries on them. She pulled up her shirt and the quartz was still where it normally was where her belly button should have been.

She sighed in relief. If that was what Red Diamond was like–if he truly was a horrible monster–then she was glad that she never met him or that he never got to keep earth after all. Yet she couldn’t shake off the feeling that there was something oddly familiar about him.

She turned to the picture on her dresser–her mother was in her early twenties and bundled up for winter. Red Quartz was beside her with an arm around her–apparently he had been made to wear a jacket with a hood flipped over his head. His pink skin tone was light enough that (unlike George and Harold) he almost passed for a regular human. They were both smiling for the camera.

“I wish you were here to tell me what to do about this, Dad.” She whispered.

[hufflly-puffs]

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Chapter 16: A Very Frosty Christmas

“‘Fred and George tried to get me to make one when I was about five. I nearly did, too, I was holding hands with Fred and everything when Dad found us. He went mental,’ said Ron, with a reminiscent gleam in his eyes.” – If Ron was five that means the twins were seven and I doubt they could have done any severe damage. They didn’t even had wands back then and the spell to do the Unbreakable Vow seems a bit too complex for children.

There is an obvious difference between the way the twins talk to Ron after they found out he had a girlfriend and the way they talked to Ginny about her boyfriend. They tease Ron, but they never act like his reputation is at risk. It is a very obvious example of sexism.

“‘They didn’t hear him,’ said Harry flatly. ‘No one’s that good an actor, not even Snape.’” – As a matter of fact he is probably the best actor of all time.

“Fred, George, Harry and Ron were the only ones who knew that the angel on top of the tree was actually a garden gnome that had bitten Fred on the ankle as he pulled up carrots for Christmas dinner. Stupefied, painted gold, stuffed into a miniature tutu and with small wings glued to its back, it glowered down at them all, the ugliest angel Harry had ever seen, with a large bald head like a potato and rather hairy feet.” – I need some fan art of this, asap.

“‘I neither like nor dislike Severus,’ said Lupin. ‘No, Harry, I am speaking the truth,’ he added, as Harry pulled a sceptical expression. ‘We shall never be bosom friends, perhaps; after all that happened between James and Sirius and Severus, there is too much bitterness there. But I do not forget that during the year I taught at Hogwarts, Severus made the Wolfsbane Potion for me every month, made it perfectly, so that I did not have to suffer as I usually do at the full moon.’” – I mean we ignore the fact that Snape had wanted to see both Lupin and Sirius dead, despite the fact that there was proof that both were innocent. And while Lupin is right to feel grateful towards Snape for keeping him healthy, I think Snape did not make the potion out of the goodness of his heart, but on Dumbledore’s order and because he obviously did not want the risk of a werewolf wandering around Hogwarts. But despite the fact that they are both in the Order it does not seem like Snape continued to make the Wolfbane Potion for Lupin. By now of course Lupin is undercover among other werewolves, but still. Snape’s helpfulness only went as far as Dumbledore ordered it to be.

“’Greyback specialises in children … bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents, raise them to hate normal wizards. Voldemort has threatened to unleash him upon people’s sons and daughters; it is a threat that usually produces good results.’” – Enough has been written and said about Greyback being a predator and how problematic it is to portray him as someone who prefers to bite children, so I leave it with that.

“‘But you are normal!’ said Harry fiercely. ‘You’ve just got a – a problem –’ Lupin burst out laughing. ‘Sometimes you remind me a lot of James. He called it my “furry little problem” in company. Many people were under the impression that I owned a badly behaved rabbit.’” – Harry of course had almost an entire year, where he got close to Lupin, before he had learned about him being a werewolf (and even then he didn’t trust him immediately). But most people don’t even get there. They wouldn’t even bother to find out what kind of man Lupin is once they know he is a werewolf. They most likely never met a werewolf in their life and are full of prejudices. They only see the monster, not the man. Whereas Harry first and foremost sees the man and forgets about the monster.

“‘There are no wizarding princes,’ said Lupin, now smiling.” – But has there ever been a Wizard monarchy? Or did they always have a democracy and government? And if they had a monarchy did it stop having power at the same it did in the Muggle world?

“Ron fell asleep almost immediately, but Harry delved into his trunk and pulled out his copy of Advanced Potion-Making before getting into bed. There he turned its pages, searching, until he finally found, at the front of the book, the date that it had been published. It was nearly fifty years old. Neither his father, nor his father’s friends, had been at Hogwarts fifty years ago.” – Because obviously using a second-hand book is a thing Harry has never heard about.

“‘Well … we don’t really talk much,’ said Ron. ‘It’s mainly …’ ‘Snogging,’ said Harry.” – No offence though, like we all had those relationships as teenagers that simply existed to get some experience. But I think that’s something else about Ron and Hermione, even though they might be different, they do know each other really well, they know how the other works (and also unfortunately what would hurt the other the most), so despite their differences they have a deep bond and trust.

“[…]Mrs Weasley herself, who was sporting a brand new midnight-blue witch’s hat glittering with what looked like tiny starlike diamonds, and a spectacular golden necklace. ‘Fred and George gave them to me! Aren’t they beautiful?’ ‘Well, we find we appreciate you more and more, Mum, now we’re washing our own socks,’ said George, waving an airy hand.” – The twins might be the children Mrs Weasley had to scold with the most and it always seemed like their mother was the only one Fred & George ever feared, but they are not ungrateful. They do appreciate all the hard work their mother did for them and they try to give something back to her.

“She gave Lupin an annoyed look, as though it was all his fault she was getting Fleur for a daughter-in-law instead of Tonks, but Harry, glancing across at Fleur, who was now feeding Bill bits of turkey off her own fork, thought that Mrs Weasley was fighting a long-lost battle. He was, however, reminded of a question he had with regard to Tonks, and who better to ask than Lupin, the man who knew all about Patronuses? ‘Tonks’s Patronus has changed its form,’ he told him. ‘Snape said so, anyway. I didn’t know that could happen. Why would your Patronus change?’ Lupin took his time chewing his turkey and swallowing before saying slowly, ‘Sometimes … a great shock … an emotional upheaval …’ ‘It looked big, and it had four legs,’ said Harry, struck by a sudden thought and lowering his voice. ‘Hey … it couldn’t be –?’” – I really love how completely misinterpreting Harry is the entire situation. Mrs Weasley does blame Lupin for Tonk’s absence, but for completely different reasons. And of course there is more than one big creature with four legs.

“[…]Well, if anybody cared to show me your charming garden … ah, that young man’s finished, why doesn’t he take a stroll with me?’ The atmosphere around the table changed perceptibly. Everybody looked from Scrimgeour to Harry. Nobody seemed to find Scrimgeour’s pretence that he did not know Harry’s name convincing, or find it natural that he should be chosen to accompany the Minister around the garden when Ginny, Fleur and George also had clean plates.” – Scrimgeour’s plan is so obvious that it hurts. And obviously this is yet another way Percy breaks his mother’s heart, because he must be aware that they would find out the real reason for their visit, and that the family reunion is nothing more than an act to get to Harry.

“‘It’s fine,’ he said quietly, as he passed Lupin, who had half risen from his chair. ‘Fine,’ he added, as Mr Weasley opened his mouth to speak.” – I totally get why neither Lupin or Mr Weasley want to leave Harry alone with Scrimgeour. Harry is still 16 after all and Scrimgeour wants to manipulative him for his own advantages. But I love the entire conversation that follows, how Harry knows exactly what the Ministry wants from him and how he stands his ground. The last year gave him a rather ugly look at how politics work and disillusioned him.

One of things Scrimgeour mentions is that it is Harry’s duty to help the Ministry and I wonder why he would think that. In which ways does Harry owe the Ministry anything at all? When did they ever help him? Sure, Fudge made it possible that Harry was not accused for underage magic after he blew up aunt Marge, but two years later he tried everything in his power to damage Harry’s reputation. Fudge had used Harry because he is a public figure and now Srimgeour does the very same thing. Furthermore Scrimgeour mentions the Head of the Auror office, implying that he could help Harry with his wish to become an Auror, but between the lines it also means he could prevent Harry from becoming one. He holds Harry’s future as a bargain.

“‘Yeah, and others might say it’s your duty to check people really are Death Eaters before you chuck them in prison,’ said Harry, his temper rising now. ‘You’re doing what Barty Crouch did. You never get it right, you people, do you? Either we’ve got Fudge, pretending everything’s lovely while people get murdered right under his nose, or we’ve got you, chucking the wrong people into jail and trying to pretend you’ve got the Chosen One working for you!’” – Harry clearly sees the parallel to what has happened the last time Voldemort was in power, how the fear and terror lead to injustice, how the Ministry tries to show strength and becomes a dictatorship in doing so. But I think it also reflects Rowling’s own opinion on politics. There are no good politicians in her world. Neither Fudge or Scrimgeour got it right; both abuse their power and both use Harry for it (first as a scapegoat, now as a mascot). Arguably the message here is that power will always corrupt, at least the ones who crave for it (as we will also see in book 7 regarding Dumbledore).

“‘Well, it is clear to me that he has done a very good job on you,’ said Scrimgeour, his eyes cold and hard behind his wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Dumbledore’s man through and through, aren’t you, Potter?’ ‘Yeah, I am,’ said Harry. ‘Glad we straightened that out.’” – By now this seems like a positive statement, as if Dumbledore is the only one we can trust and who is always right. But with the things we learn about Dumbledore in book 7 we see Scrimgeour’s statement in a different light, because there is some (ugly) truth to it. Dumbledore did in fact a good job on Harry, he did manipulate him in his own ways, so that Harry at least by now puts blind faith in him.

[wolfpawn]

Life is a Game of Risks, Chapter 53

Chapter Summary - Lily starts her new school and Tom realises there are steps in a child's life he is not 100% ready for.

TRIGGERS - Past domestic abuse, Past emotional abuse, Past sexual abuse.

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Tags: @damalseer​​ @hiddlesbitch1​​ @winterisakiller​​ @theoneanna​​

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“Now, you have a great day and remember, if you have any issues, tell your new teacher,” Alexianna hugged Lily close to her, trying to steady her breathing so she would not scare her daughter, Tom beside her, his hand on her shoulder, attempting to settle her nervousness while masking his own.

“I promise Mommy,” Lily smiled brightly, looking around at all the other girls as they said their farewells for the day to their parents, some of whom were looking at her, some of the parents looking to Tom and Alexianna. “Will you collect me?”

“I will be working, Sweetheart but Tom is collecting you today.”

Lily looked to Tom who winked, causing her to smile excitedly. “Yah!” She declared, grabbing onto him for a hug.

“You’re to tell me everything, do you hear?” Tom insisted as he pulled her into him, kissing her forehead as he did so. “We love you and we know you are going to have a great time with your new friends.”

“And no Shawn!” Lily declared happily.

“And no Shawn.” Her mother confirmed.

“Actually…” Lily looked around. “There are no boys here.”

“No, it’s an all-girls school, Lils.” Her mother pointed out.

“Was your school an all-girls one?”

“Both of them were, primary and secondary.”

“So...where are the boys?”

“The girls here who have brothers are more than likely at a boy’s school close by.” Alexianna guessed. “I am not sure, what is the nearest boy’s one?”

“I think George’s Academy,” Tom tried to recall, he was basing that on Ben and Sophie placing Kit and Hal’s names there.

“Sounds about right.” Alexianna looked at Lily’s uniform, pristine and tidy. “Now, stop dallying and into class with everyone else.” She ushered, giving Lily one last cuddle before she went.

“I love you.”

“We love you too, Lil’s.”

“Daddy, if I am good today, can I have the last chocolate bar when I get home?”

Alexianna frowned before looking at Tom to see the guilty look on his face and noting that he was not looking at her. Rolling her eyes, she shook her head. “You are too honest for your own good, Lils.”

“But can I?” Lily refused to be deferred from her target.

“We’ll see.”

“That’s a yes,” She cheered before turning and rushing into the building without so much as a second look at her mother or Tom.

“Bye, I guess,” Alexianna stated plainly.

“Evidently,” Tom chuckled, putting his arm around her and urging her to the gate. “Are you okay?”

“My daughter just walked into a school filled with new faces without so much as a backwards glance. I am just shocked.”

“You have raised her to be confident and outgoing, she will take this in her stride, as she always does.” She smiled back at him. “Now, we better get to our day’s work.”

“Are you sure you’re okay with getting her later?”

“I just need to do a thing or two in town now and I am free after lunch, so don’t you fret.”

“Thank you, Tom. Having you there after her first day...it is the only reason I did not call in sick today.”

“That is not to be recommended,” He chastised. “I don’t think you ever tried to skive anything in your life, and we are not letting you start now.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Behave.” He growled quietly into her ear, both of them smiling as he did so.

*

“Tom?” Due to an issue with a Brexit announcement, there was an emergency meeting in work and Alexianna was delayed as a result, leading to her being home after Lily went to bed for the night. Upon her return, Tom seemed upset. “Did…what happened?”

“Lily.”

“What happened, did she have a bad day? Were they nasty to her?” She asked fearfully.

“No, she had the day to remember, the best day ever, apparently.”

“So...what happened?”

“She is growing up.” Tom seemed forlorn at the comment

“She’s five, Tom.”

“She said today that she doesn’t like the Paw Patrol anymore, Spirit is the best.”

“She has liked that for a while.” Alexianna pointed out since Lily watched the horse movie more times than she could count.

“It has a TV show now, and she is not interested in Paw Patrol, it’s for babies apparently. She is growing out of it.”

Alexianna gave a knowing smile. “It’s weird the first time you see it.” She acknowledged. “Yes, she is getting bigger and it is scary to see but that’s great, we can introduce her to new things now.”

“I don’t want her to grow up.”

“But as she grows, we get to do more with her.” She sat beside him. “Besides, no matter how big she gets, I don’t think she’ll ever be too big to be your little girl.”

“No, she won’t. She will become a teenager, and wait and see, I’ll get the whole ‘You’re not my real dad’ treatment.”

Alexianna looked at him sadly, knowing that there would come a day when they were dealing with a hormonal and angered teenager that more than likely, that statement would be used when Tom would correct Lily if he was still around then. “I wish I could say it won’t happen but let’s face it, it probably will, and I will get the whole ‘You’re the reason my dad left, I would have him if you weren’t such a cow/bitch’ or whatever other words she can think of for me.” Tom looked at her horrified at such a thought. “And afterwards, after she realises she has been silly or unnecessarily nasty, she will know that we love her more than is possible to explain and that she is everything to us and she will see that come whatever, we are there for her and she will still call you ‘Dad’.”

“You see us still together then?” Tom asked curiously, having never thought so far properly ahead before.

“I do, I hope we are, at least.”

He sighed. “I just...I love how adorable she is, to think of her getting bigger...I am not ready to think of teenagers yet.”

“No, it’s terrifying,” Alexianna agreed.

“She won’t be like that though.” She looked at him curiously. “She won’t be nasty and call you a bitch.”

“What if she asks?”

“About him?” Alexianna nodded. “Then we tell her that he was not a good husband and was not the sort of man fit to be in someone as special as her life. That he left, you did not push him. Bar having the audacity to not have a son, of course.”

“Well, I mean, I practically forced him out the door for that.” Alexianna scoffed, causing them both to laugh slightly.

“You have come so far,” Tom commended. “Before, even reference to him would make you clam up.”

“Mr Burrows has made me realise a lot.”

“You realised a lot, even before him. Remember you are the one that refused to bow to his demand for the divorce papers.” Tom pointed out. “Don’t shirk any of the credit onto others, that was you.”

Alexianna smiled slightly and leant against him. “Thank you.”

“Anything more on Oliver?” One look at her face answered. “What are you going to do?”

“Ignore him, he did it to me for over twenty years, I am just extending the same courtesy back.” She rose from the chair. “Is there food in the fridge?”

“Yes, though I thought you said they ordered food at work because of the meeting?”

“Finger food.”

“Then let’s get you fed some actual food.” He rose from his seat and walked over to the kitchen. He prepared some food for her before realising she was looking at him curiously. “Lexi?”

“Hmm?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing much?” She smiled dismissively.

“Darling?” The tone he used told Alexianna he would not desist. “Tell me.”

“I was just thinking of how much time you spend here.” She smiled. “You’re very at home.”

“Of course, my girls are here.”

“Your girls, you say?”

“Yes,” He put the pot on the hob to cook before walking over and putting his arms around her. “You are mine, Lexi, and I am not letting you go. I missed my opportunity with you when we were younger. I have lost sleep since we started dating on how different it would all have been, if I had been braver that day and continued to you in the water. How sooner or later, I would have braved telling you how I felt, how I would have kissed you, and…” He swallowed. “You would not have been so low after your crash, I would have shown you that you are still beautiful and she would be my little girl biologically.” His voice was tight.

“DNA is not everything, Tom, she adores you, you love her.”

“But she would have a biological father to be proud of, she would have a father who…”

“She has a father to be proud of, who loves her more than the sun, moon and stars.” She leant forward and pressed her lips to his. Tom, for his part, kissed her back, passionately. “You have witchcraft on your lips.”

“That was my line.”

“I know. I saw it.”

“Hearing you quote Shakespeare only makes me more irked at myself.”

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”

“That’s not Shakespeare.” Alexianna shook her head. “I think I know it.”

“Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss.”

“I think I read that.” Tom tried to recall.

“You did.”

“And pray tell, how would you know?” He asked curiously.

“Because I stole it from your ‘read’ pile one day and read it.”

“Naughty Lexi.” He leant down and kissed her again. “I wish I had been brave.”

“I wish I had not been stupid and let someone convince me I was not as I am, but I did, and I refuse to regret it, because the reality is, without what happened, Lily-pad would not be the little monster we know her to be and therefore, she would not be as loveable.”

“Very true.”

“Thank you for today, Tom. For being there for her.”

“I always plan to be, no matter what. For both of you.” He kissed her head again, not saying anything of the turmoil he felt of regretting the past.

[potterwatch-transcripts]

First Broadcast: 23rd September 1998

Lee Jordan: Hello again Wizarding World. You’re listening to Potterwatch, and I’m your host, River. A quick update on the Dork Lord. He’s like, insanely dead you guys. And now over to Rapier with the news.

George Weasley: Thank you River. Lovely to be back. So our top story tonight, Harry J Potter, the chap who survived himself, has helped bring in no less than three Death Eaters, who have been on the run since the fall of ‘You Know Who’. Eyewitnesses report Potter and two fellow Aurors engageing in a duel on a busy street in muggle London.

Lee: what is it with Potter and blatantly ignoring the statute of secrecy?

George: I don’t know River. Two of the death eaters have been identified as Yaxley and Goyle, although the identity of the third remains unknown.

Lee: Why is that Rapier?

George: It would appear that Potter cast some sort of Jinx that caused the face to swell so much they couldn’t be identified, although we do know it is a male in their sixties.

Lee: You heard it here first folks. Harry Potter attack’s senior citizens.

George: Is anyone safe from this monster?

Lee: Maybe Umbridge was right about him.

George: possibly. Next up tonight, Newt Scamander has been charged with illegally bringing Swedish Shortsnout eggs into Britain. When asked for comment he claimed he thought they were from the non-magical bird ‘an ostrich’.

Lee: that seems vaguely unlikely.

George: you’re not wrong River. When asked to prove it by making an omelette, Scamander relented and asked the eggs would be sent to the Romanian dragon sanctuary.

Lee: Charlie Weasley will be thrilled.

George: darn right. I bet Mu...Mrs Weasley will be knitting tiny dragon jumpers come Christmas. And finally Garrick Ollivander has finally reopened his shop after a sabbatical to study international wandmaking.

Lee: A relief I’m sure.

George: he has indicated interest in allowing his son to takeover much of the work, but with the his return I’m sure the wand quality will pick up again.

Lee: thank you for that Rapier. And now, I’d like to welcome back our number one Harry Potter correspondent, Roonil.

Harry Potter: A pleasure to be back River.

Lee: First up, can you comment on the Potterwatch exclusive that Harry Potter hates and attacks the elderly?

Harry: River, you realise Professor McGonagall listens to this show, and if I said yes, Harry would go from ‘the boy who lived’ to ‘the boy who was transfigured into a tree and used as firewood in the headmasters office’

Lee: so that’s a no?

Harry: emphatically.

Lee: how dull. Next, can you confirm that Harry Potter intends to propose to a Miss G. Weasley upon her graduation from Hogwarts?

*distant oi from George, followed by 2 thumps*

Lee: I apologise listeners, I have been accosted by both Rapier and Roonil. I’ll take that as a no comment. A final question, what is Potters relationship with his fellow former Triwizard champions, Fleur Delacour-Weasley and Viktor Krum?

Harry: well of course being close to the Weasley family he’s very close with Fleur. And is in contact with Krum, who’s been helping hunt Voldemort’s continental supporters. I can also announce the three are helping organise the Cedric Diggory memorial award for International cooperation and wizarding excellence, to replace the Triwizard tournament.

Lee: oh wow, a true Potterwatch scoop.

Harry: Yes indeed River.

Lee: Thank you so much Roonil.

Harry: Anytime.

Lee: Before I introduce our final guest, I’d like to thank our sponsor, Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. And now, with some reservation I welcome our final guest, Rancid.

Krecher: It’s the Jordan boy. And there’s the Weasley brat.

*Harry in the distance ‘Krecher, behave’*

Krecher: sorry Master.

Lee: so Rancid, you were integral in helping bring down you know who.

Krecher: Yes Krecher helped stop the Dark Lord with Master Regulus and Master Harry. Krecher found the thief Fletcher and helped locate the Dark Lords locket.

Lee: and for that you recieved an Order of Merlin, 2nd Class, correct?

Krecher: Krecher did. The first of his kind he was, with Krecher’s fellow elf Dobby. Krecher brought pride to the ancient house of Black.

Lee: I’m sure Krecher did. Finally Rancid, can you comment on the rumours spread by Rita Skeeter that Harry Potter is in fact a muggle magician who’s tricks are just really convincing?

Krecher: The Jordan whelp jokes? Krecher would never serve a filthy muggle. Krecher will find this Skeeter woman and torture her until she stops spreading lies about Krecher’s Master.

*Harry off mic ‘Krecher will bloody not’*

Krecher: As Master wishes. She impunes on Masters honour. The Potter family is old, although not pure but Krecher respects. Maybe Krecher will just take her thumbs.

*Harry: KRECHER GET OFF THE MIC*

Krecher: Yes Master. Goodbye Jordan boy.

Lee: well that was different. Thank you all for listening. Rapier and I will be back next time, where the password will be ‘Rita’s thumbs’. I’ve been River, goodnight.

[incorrectpredators]

a summary of what personalities i give the boys

The Dumb Boys

kevin fiala - the slutty dumb boy. usually flirting with someone else. young, dumb, and full of You Know ;) has been essentially adopted/taken in by kyle turris

juuse saros - not so much dumb as he is clueless. he is like a little baby whom needs someone to tell him what to do essentially adopted/taken in by pekka rinne

ryan johansen - the greasy dumb boy pt 1

craig smith - the greasy dumb boy pt 2

The Fathers

pekka rinne - the most mischievous of “the fathers”, most likely to joke around with and prank his adoptees, still loves taking care of them though, most notable children: juuse saros, eeli tolvanen, miikka salomaki, patrik laine, sebastian aho, mikko rantanen, and Possibly connor brown (based on photographic evidence i have). someone please stop him

kyle turris - the new father. he’s new around here and he has already adopted a child. he’s a little messy with it bc he’s so new to it but is the most organized of the fathers. most notable children: kevin fiala

dan hamhuis - hammer is technically new here, but he really isn’t. he may be just over a month younger than pekka, but is the oldest soul of the fathers. he is wise and the most responsible of the fathers. notable children: none so far, but that may be because he just got back to nashville and is having to take care of Everyone.

The Pretty Boys

roman josi - viewed as the prettiest boy, but is he?, the Dumb pretty boy. he literally admitted he never read a book. thats very concerning to me. he is the residential dumb pretty boy, but kevin fiala is definitely coming for his role. “can we talk? one ten to another?”

pk subban - the answer is no. jos is not the prettiest boy. i love josi but pk just came in and not only took his spot as prettiest defenseman but is also the prettiest player in general. he’s the pretty boy who is just here to have a genuinely good time. he’s also pretty smart, do not doubt him. he is regina george if regina george wasnt white, a girl, and a complete asshole. he is possibly the nicest on the team. “i’m an eleven but continue”

The Cryptids

ryan hartman - hartsy just got here from chicago and he is still a mystery to me. my profile may say filip forsberg is secretly the grunch road monster but hartsy is definitely the most likely to be an actual cryptid. i think it’s possible he’s the goatman. so watch your back shane madej bc hartsy is coming for you.

dan hamhuis - listen, i may not like the fact that we signed him but i do love hammer. im a little disappointed he’s never played for the sharks though, as i really want to call him a hammerhead shark. but hammer is a cryptid, perhaps simply because i have no idea what he’s been up to since he left nashville. how well will he mesh w our d core this year? is he happy he finally got his number five in nashville? does he like beets? i know nothing about him.

frederick gaudreau - i was tempted to put him in the final category of this post but i just couldn’t. freddie hockey is a pretty boy, but he isn’t around enough to be classified With the pretty boys. he’s definitely a cryptid though. who is he? does he like his nickname? does he have any pets? did he ever get his damn locker? these are all questions i may never get the answer to.

The Inbetweeners/Other

note: this is a category that is a combination of players who 1. had traits of at least one category, but not enough to be put in it 2. players who are alone in their own categories and 3. players who technically probably shouldn’t be on this blog, but are

eeli tolvanen - exhibits cryptid traits, but isnt used in that role on here. tends to hang out with the younger guys (juuse and kevin most often) but is a bit of a wildcard. he is usually being flirted with by kevin or being paired of with his “boyfriend” (note that this is a joke blog, i dont actually believe him and the player who will be talked about later on are dating. it’s simply a joke and i tag posts that show hints of any of the players being in a relationship as “rpf” because i know even just the implication can make some ppl uncomfortable) is mostly known for being unskilled in the comforting/emotion side of things (“would a glowstick make you feel better?”) and tends to be a bit blunt or cynical at times, although he might throw around a joke or two if necessary.

filip forsberg - is both a cryptid and a pretty boy, but not enough to be put in those categories. is the meme loving fuck of the jofa line. known for fidget spinners and being put down for chicken (as he’s watching his figure)

viktor arvidsson - could be one of “The Fathers” but he really isn’t. he is just forced to be because JOEY AND FIL DON’T KNOW HOW TO BEHAVE THEMSELVES. but neither does he so it tends to be a big old mess when they’re together.

calle jarnkrok - calle is just tired ok. he’s tired and pretty grumpy. he’s a new dad and he’s surrounded by grown adults who act like children, so cut him some slack please. known for tearing up at a marshmallow rendition of himself and hanging out with ekky

mattias ekholm - ah the swedish elk himself. is also a new father and is usually just too tired to even show up in my quotes. when he does, he’s usually hanging out with calle. 

anthony bitetto - PROBABLY should’ve been in the dumb boys category but im not going back to put him in there. a flat earther? most likely. i really need the colorado avalanche to send colin back please he was the only smart one on the team now tony is lost. also im not entirely sure him and colton sissons are seperate ppl.

colton sissons - is the most normal of the group. but is also lowkey dumb. doing his best i think? i hope? once again im not entirely convinced him and tony are seperate people

colin wilson - one of two players who fall into the  “once a pred always a pred” tag. usually seen trying to help tony understand.... literally anything.... and being mourned by me. i miss him. colorado give him back to me :(

james neal - the other “once a pred always a pred” player. he doesn’t appear often but when he does usually something about hating himself is involved. he’s a greasy boy and used to be the pred’s greaseball but now that he’s gone craig smith has taken his place as Main Greaseball

sebastian aho - isn’t on here a lot, but he’s mentioned from time to time. one of pekka’s kids but their relationship is strained due to aho not being on the preds.

miro heiskanen - the Honorary Pred of the account. he may be a dallas star but he’s a pred in my heart. most commonly used as the goofy sidekick boyfriend of eeli tolvanen, which is taken from a commercial they were in together. i joked about them being forbidden lovers and now its just the role he plays on this account. all posts that (keep in mind, i mean it jokingly) refer to miro and eeli as being boyfriends is tagged with “rpf” so you can blacklist it if the implication of players dating makes you uncomfortable

[rainyrowan]

New Year’s Day

Summary: With Cory and Topanga celebrating the New Years with Feeny, and Auggie spending the night at Ava's, a lonely Riley Matthews invites her boyfriend, Lucas Friar, over for the night to celebrate with her!

- ONE SHOT - 

December 31st. 6:00pm. 2017.

Riley Matthews, now a sophomore, spends her first ever New Years celebration by herself. Her parents, Cory and Topanga were invited to spend the event in Philly with their teacher of 16 years, Mr. George Feeny. It was a tough decision to make for the couple, but Riley thought that they really deserve this trip and eventually convinced them that she was responsible enough to take care of their home, without throwing some sort of wild party behind their backs. She’s not that kind of person anyways. “Behaving is fun,” she had once said.

Auggie, on the other hand, is spending the night with his so called “wife and in-laws.” It bummed Riley out that she would be alone, but Auggie was genuinely excited and was definitely looking forward to it.

She almost calls up her friends, but then remembers that they’re off somewhere celebrating with their families, even Maya, who happens to be spending her first New Years celebration with a complete household.

She thinks for a moment, grabs her phone anyways and rings her boyfriend.

“Riley? What’s up?”

“Lucas, hi! You guys in Texas yet?”

Lucas and his family planned on flying down to Texas to visit his old Pappy Joe, so that they could celebrate together.

He lets out a sigh into his phone. “No. An emergency came up at work, so Mom had to leave and have that taken care of. Dad left this morning to God knows where. He said he’d be back by 12, but he’s still hasn’t come home… So basically all our plans for New Years Eve have been blown off.”

Irritation takes over Riley. She despises Lucas’s father. She doesn’t hate him. She just ends up being disappointed in him over and over again. He leaves, and we all know it’s never to work. He comes back home around 4 in the morning practically everyday. He’s constantly fighting with his wife, who is basically the only one keeping their household going, in terms of finance and whatnot. Riley knows that if Lucas could get a job, he’d apply in a heartbeat. His mother refuses it, though. She always told him to focus on his studies.

“I’m so sorry to hear that…” Riley whispers.

“Me too.”

“Say, why don’t you celebrate with me? I mean, my parents are out on a weekend couples trip and Auggie is with Ava… You can come in and spend the night if you’d like.”

“Really?”

“Of course!”

“Thanks, Riley.”

“No need to thank me, I’m just killing two birds with one stone!”

“Alright, I’ll be there in a few.”

“Can’t wait.”

And with that, they both ended the call.

Riley always loved having her boyfriend around, so she is certain that this’ll probably be one of the best New Year celebrations she’ll ever have.

---

It took Lucas a little longer than expected to arrive, judging by the fact that his building isn’t so far away from the Matthews’. But when Lucas shows up at the other side of the bay window, Riley smiles at him just as she would if he’d come earlier or on time or ever, really.

She lets him in, giving room for him to crawl inside.

“Hey, you.” He says with a grin.

“Hi, yourself!” She wraps her arms around his neck, giving him a soft kiss. When she pulls away, she looks down at Lucas’s duffle bag. “You stayin’ the night?”

“Yeah, is that okay?”

“When has it not been?” she giggles. Lucas stares at her. “What?”

“Nothin’,” he mutters. “I’m just glad that I’m spending tonight with you.”

“Aw, Lucas!” She gives him a quick kiss.

Suddenly, the doorbell rings.

“Are you expecting anyone?”

“Pizza guy. He’s spending tonight with us as well!” Riley jokes as Lucas laughs sarcastically.

Riley leaves the room to fetch their pizza, with Lucas trailing behind her. Once the pizza guy leaves, they both plop down on the couch.

“Finally… I’m starving!” she exclaims, opening the box. As they’re eating their food, they discuss their plans for the evening.

“We should go up to the roof to watch the fireworks.” Lucas suggests.

“Ooh, great idea! But until then?”

“Well,” he scoots closer to her. “We enjoy each other’s company.”

“That shouldn’t be an issue for us.” Riley smiles.

“Never has been.”

From then on, Riley and Lucas did everything they could possibly do to kill time. They played board games, watched cat videos (under Riley’s request, of course), and they talked. A lot. They were always into those deep, meaningful conversations. They were great at those. Later on, Lucas proposes watching a scary film.

“No.”

“C’mon, Riley.”

“Lucas, I'm not planning on having any nightmares tonight!”

“Hey, we spent about a good two hours watching cat videos.”

“Ugh, fine.” Then a smirk appears on her face and her tone changes as she starts to speak. “I get scared at scary movies. You’ll protect me though, won’t you Lucas?” She does a little pose and blinks ferociously. Lucas laughs at her Missy Bradford impersonation.

“No thanks, Missy. It’s Riley who I’m protecting tonight.”

“Aww.” She says losing Missy’s voice. She rests her head on his shoulder, both reclining into the couch. “In that case, what are we watching?”

Took them awhile to find a movie, but they finally agreed on The Conjuring. Before the movie starts, Riley goes into her room to fetch a blanket. Then, she snuggles next to Lucas.

Halfway into the film, Riley’s beyond frightened to the point where she begged for a break from it.

“Lucas! Turn it off, turn it off!” She cries, hiding underneath the blanket.

He immediately does so. “Are you okay?!”

She uncovers herself and sighs. “How do you endure these? Especially when seeing them with Zay or Maya!”

He chuckles. “Well, to be honest, I do get quite frightened. But then, I remind myself that it’s not real. And now I’m reminding you… It’s not real, Riley.”

“I guess so. But I am still scarred, and that’s all thanks to you.” She jokes. “Hey, wait. What time is it?”

Lucas pulls out his phone. “10:58. We should get dressed.”

“Oh, we’re getting dressed?” Riley asks in confusion.

“Well, we’re not starting the new year looking like this, are we now?” Riley looks down at herself. She’s in her red John Q. Adams shirt, that still surprisingly fits, and sweats. Lucas has on a lousy sweater and a pair of plain old jeans, but he still manages to look dashing as ever.

“I guess not.”

“Alright, I’m gonna go get changed in the bathroom.”

“Umm, okay?” And with that, he gets up and leaves.

Huh… Okay then. She thinks to herself.

---

Riley’s thankful that Lucas has them both get ready an hour before. It takes awhile for her to pamper herself. First, she throws on a sparkly red dress. She then curls her hair. Afterwards, she puts on makeup. And finally, she slips into her boots.

She’s just about ready to grab her coat and head out of her bedroom until she gets a FaceTime call request from Topanga.

“Hi, honey! Wow, you look gorgeous! Do you have plans? We never talked about you going out…”

“I’m actually going to see the fireworks up on the roof with Lucas.”

And in a blink of an eye, a paranoid Cory Matthews pops up in the screen.

“WHAT?”

“Riley, isn’t he supposed to be in Texas right now?” Her mom questions.

She sighs. “Something came up. They had to cancel.”

From Riley’s expression, her parents get the idea. Cory loses his paranoia.

“We understand.” He says calmly. He eventually goes back into protective father mode in a split second. “But if you two are doing things that you aren’t supposed to be doing…”

“Cory!”

“I’m just saying, honey…”

“Ugh, ignore your father.” Topanga says looking into the camera.

Riley smiles into the screen, thinking about how she’s definitely not bringing up the fact that her boyfriend is staying the night.

“Just have a good time, okay? We really wish you could be spending tonight with us!”

“Me too, momma. Well, I should get going.”

“Okay. Bye!”

“See you soon!” she says before ending the call. She checked the time. 11:45. She really should get going.

Riley grabs her coat and rushes out into the living room. “Lucas?!” He isn’t there.

“Huh.” Given the fact that she was just watching one of the most frightening films of her life, she’s scared that a crazy demonic monster would pop up from behind her.

Riley finally notices a single rose and a notecard lying on top of their coffee table. She grabs them both and reads the card.

“Follow the rose petals.” She offers a glance at the trail of rose petals behind the table, leading out into the hallway.

Riley being Riley, she did what she’s told. She followed the path of rose petals, which lead her up a couple flights of stairs, and eventually to the rooftop.

She gasps out of exhaustion when she reaches the top, but her eyes widen as she takes a good look at what’s in front of her. The rooftop had been decorated with what seems to be an endless supply of fairy lights, along with a bunch of New Years-themed decor. And in the middle of all that, waits a charming young boy who holds a little bouquet of roses. The boy who Riley fell in love with ever since she fell onto his lap on the subway.

“Riley…”

“Lucas,” Because you can make a Riley Matthews cry very easily, her eyes become all glossy. “Y-You did this?”

“All of it, yeah.” He chuckles.

This is probably why he was late. Riley thought to herself.

She walks up to him and gives him a big hug. “Thank you.” She whispers into his chest.

“Of course.” He pulls away. “Hey, why are you crying?”

“Well, how can I not be? This is all so magnificent!” Her tone softens. “I’m lucky.”

He grins, giving the bouquet to Riley. “That makes both of us.”

Lucas then walks over to grab a vintage boombox from the side. He places it on the bench and pops in a tape. Riley’s favorite piano piece then starts playing.

“Gymnopedie… How did you know?”

“You told me a while back, actually. We were taking a walk through the city, late at night. And we saw that man, he looked homeless-”

“And he was playing it on his old wooden piano.” Riley says in realization.

“Yes. And you see, there was this dance too…” He extends his hand out.

---

The old man was French. “S'il vous plaît danser ensemble comme je joue.” He said with a friendly smile.

Riley didn’t understand what he said. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m not quite sure what you sai-”

“Riley, he wants us to dance while he plays.” But Lucas did.

“Oh.” She smiled.

And they did. They danced the night away, and this lead to being one of the most memorable moments in their relationship. It wasn’t big, but it was magical.

--- Riley sets the roses down and takes Lucas by the hand. He grabs her by her waist, pulling her closer, as she wraps her arms around his neck.

“I’ve probably said this far too many times, but thank you. Thank you for everything. You really made this year a real good one for me.” Riley expresses.

Lucas stays silent for a bit. “My favorite thing in the world is when I talk to you,”

“So I’ve been told.”

“It’s not just that, though. You’ve always been there for me.” He pauses. “You’ve stood by me through my darkest moments, especially when my family’s having issues… Riley, you just make me the happiest. I’m beyond grateful for you and I’m not really sure that I can repay for all that you’ve done for me.” Riley smiles. Lucas has told her this so many times and in so many different ways.

Seconds after their song ended, the crowd below them starts screaming. The pair walked over to the ledge to take a look.

“It’s time to count down!”

“10, 9, 8…”

“Hey, Riley.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s a couple seconds till 2018, and I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“7, 6, 5…”

“I’m always with you.” Riley offers him a smile. “You and me. Next year?”

“4, 3, 2, 1… Happy New Year!!!” The crowd goes wild as Auld Lang Syne somehow starts playing.

“Bring it.” Lucas finally responds.

[theliterateape]

Now Is the Time to Be Gracious and Get to Work Being Honest with Ourselves

by Don Hall

Whew.

We squeaked by with that one despite Biden/Harris winning more votes than any other ticket in history. Donald Trump also won the second most votes than any other candidate in history. In more ways than a few this shit was historic.

As obvious the road is all uphill, I’ll admit to bawling like a child when it hit me that we were rid of Trump and that it was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris taking the reigns. Tears of joy, of relief, of optimism paying off.

Still the Left lost some of the House and might take the Senate but this was not the election we were promised. As I wrote last week, the will of the people has been cast and we are almost 50/50 in worldview here, gang. Bitter as it is to swallow, nearly half the country does not buy the progressive vision. This isn’t just the South. This isn’t just cities vs rural areas.

Trump received the largest percentage of non-white votes of any other conservative candidate — you guessed it — in history. Pretty much debunks the monolithic viewpoint that Trump supporters are all white supremicists, huh?

I’ve heard squawk that Biden won because of black voters. And progressive voters. And young voters. Horseshit. How typical, the jockeying for credit in something historic. The credit goes to a vast multicultural liberal numbers not one demographic category. Forty-five million independent voters (neither affiliated with Blue or Red) voted this year. That’s historic, too. Biden won because of people not in line with either party or ideology. Biden won because so many of us hated Trump.

At this phase, Trump ain’t going quietly. Lots of lawsuits. Recounts. Tantrums. Conspiracy theories. We now get to witness the full madness of our King George, a meltdown so massive it would be good to take serious note of how badly we can get things wrong in our democracy. One fact we need to acknowledge before our nipples get hard and we go running in the streets naked, flogging MAGA hat wearers with our engorged cocks:

If it hadn’t been for a pandemic, he would’ve won.

No. It wasn’t the woke message of the victim classes that sealed this win for us. It wasn’t the democratic socialists dressed in black fighting against fascism. It wasn’t the fat, black lesbian instructing white people that they are all racist that brought out the vote for Blue. It wasn’t the Bernie Bots raging against the one percent. It wasn’t the cultmind of the white fragility hucksters and anti-racism grifters that thwarted the horrible man.

It was a virus that he handled like a demented, angry man who truly believed that only the weak get sick.

We did not defeat Trump. He defeated himself. The man has been accused of multiple rapes, tax fraud, and was impeached by the House of Representatives and skated right on past it all but his inept refusal to humble himself to an act of savage nature was his undoing.

Despite his bumbling incompetence in the face of Coronavirus, seventy million people voted for him. Are you so arrogant and morally vacuous to label seventy million people racists monsters? Are you that stupid?

There will be months of justifying why half the country disagrees with the Left in terms of governance. It wasn’t half. We won by five million votes. It was beyond decisive. There will be thinkpieces in Medium claiming that Hispanics are full of white adjacents and that we should round up all the Trump Enablers and have them shunned and shamed (in between essays about how difficult it is to be black in an Ivy League university and how that guy who ghosted her was actually proliferating a rape of feels). Yes. There will be plenty said and absolutely no self reflection.

We (and I use ‘we’ to signify a collective encompassing all of us who value the ideals of a liberal democracy comprising seventy-five million citizens who voted Blue) fucking blew some serious stuff on this one.

What do we know?

Neither Bernie nor Warren would’ve won (even in the razor thin margins that Biden did).

That the loss in 2016 may have been less about Hillary Clinton or her campaign and more about this fifty/fifty split in worldview.

That Hispanics are not a monolithic voting bloc of similar ideologies. Neither are blacks. Or Asians. Or whites.

That race polarization is far less important than class stratification.

That “Defund the Police” is a shit slogan. And a worse strategy.

That seventy million of our countrymen and women would rather have a piece of shit like Donald Trump in charge than hand things over to the humorless cult members of the Woke.

That calling seventy million people racists didn’t somehow convince them that they were and cause the scales to fall from their eyes.

Most people find some humility when they lose. In 2016, we found none. It was sexism! It was racism! It was that we fucked Bernie out of the nomination! This week we won but we won small. We won because of a natural disaster not because of the strength of our ideas or the compassion for our fellow citizens or for our brilliant communications skills (which is a surprise as so many liberals have degrees in marketing and communication).

We won. And we need some goddamned humility for not beating a hopeless incompetent and morally bereft turd like Donald Trump with a repudiation only seen by the light of damnation and hellfire. We won but just barely given the brazen horror of the man (and, no, you don’t take down a dictator by voting meaning as awful and embarrassing as the man was and is, he was and is definitely not a dictator). In any other reality (except for a Black Mirror episode) we should have beaten him so badly that he, Giuliani, and McConnell changed their names and became dentists in Brazil.

We won but we lost.

I’m thrilled to be rid of Trump although we are not rid of the reality that his stances on immigration, the police, democratic socialism, American isolationism, and the idea that COVID only affects the weak are incredibly popular with just a bit less than half the country. Until the man dies, he will have an undue influence on things.

So what now?

We celebrate in direct contrast to the CDC advisories to avoid crowds. The ‘rona loves this shit and is wholly apolitical. A Trump rally and a Biden celebration look pretty much the same to the virus. Republicans caution us to avoid being sore winners as if the rules change if they lose.

I hope the adults in the national room hear the song being played. I hope that we can listen to but not be bound by the complaints of the fringe. I hope we can reframe our ideas to convince a plurality of Americans that progress is a good thing for everyone not just a select few who hunker down in their guns rights and racial division cults.

We’ve spent at least two decades behaving like Donald Trump — angry, self-involved, namecalling, divisive. It took having that avatar of unselfish-reflective narcissism occupying our highest office for just over half of us to get tired of it but wholly adopt his methods to defeat him. We can be better than that so why not try to be?

[clexa--warrior]

In the earliest days of the Trump crisis, just about a month after the inauguration, I received the horrifying news that my best friend and podcast partner, Chez Pazienza, had died of a drug overdose.

This article was originally published at Salon

It was the evening of Feb. 25, 2017, and the shock still hasn’t quite worn off. In fact, I ask myself nearly every day what Chez might’ve said about the most recent atrocity committed by the chief executive. I’ll never know for sure, but there’s something comforting in that exercise, imagining how he’d frame this dark ride with equal parts Gen-X angst, stinging Bourdain-ish erudition and artistically worded blue streaks that would’ve made George Carlin applaud.

I’m convinced, however, that it wasn’t really an overdose that killed him. Sure, it was the weapon of choice, but it wasn’t the ultimate cause of death. Chez possessed the ability to foresee this Trump crisis stretched out in front of him — maybe not the specifics, but a general concept in his big brain for the horror show that was awaiting us. I believe it was the crushing reality of not only being force-fed a Trump presidency every day but also covering it professionally that forced him to drift back to his old addictions to ease the pain. And I wish more than anything that I could have stopped him.

Nevertheless, Chez could clearly see the incoming abuses, the crimes, the ungainly nonsense, the recklessness, the racism, the petty vindictiveness — all of it.

In 2015, he accurately forecast that Trump, if elected, would spitefully withhold federal funding from regions that refused to support his cruel whimsy. Naturally, we’ve watched this play out with Puerto Rico, California and most recently Pennsylvania, where Trump, this week, threatened to withhold funding for the commonwealth because of Gov. Tom Wolf’s COVID plan. In Trump’s view, responsible leadership is worthy of punishment because it makes him look bad by contrast, while incompetence, mainly his own, is routinely lionized.

Trump’s blinding dumbness in the areas of history, the Constitution, the presidency and democratic institutions has infected him with an ugly, bastardized view of his job description, inflamed by his own biases and whatever he’s picked up from watching cable news. He’s a presidential dilettante, even now, nearly four years into the gig.

His wafer-thin understanding of presidential leadership contributes to his most self-defeating misapprehension: that he’s only the president of the red states. Everyone else is the enemy, even more so than our actual overseas adversaries — surely more than Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, whom Trump praises more often than many of his fellow citizens and colleagues. The rest of us are only useful to him as punching bags and targets for his screechy, obscene, misspelled tweets and, more recently, his fascist police force. The upside of his deformed view of the presidency is that if he loses this election, it’ll partly be because he refused to expand his support beyond his loyalists.

This is one of the reasons why he felt compelled to cheat in the 2020 election by attempting to blackmail the president of Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden — a plot that ended with Trump’s impeachment and trial in the Senate. After all, how could he win re-election with only 40-44 percent popular support without making up the difference … somehow?

His relationship with his disciples is a match made in hell, given that his Red Hat fanboys have an equally stunted view of the presidency. I assure you, they’d never allow Trump-style behavior from their doctors, their kids’ teachers or, hell, their airline pilots. If they hadn’t been so badly brainwashed by the conservative entertainment complex, they never would have gifted the nuclear codes and the immense power of the presidency to such an unstable, erratic, incompetent political tourist who has utterly failed to grow into the job and rise to the occasion — who has failed to accept the intense gravity of his post. As Barack Obama said in August, “It’s because he can’t.”

At no other time has that been more evident than in Trump’s response to the pandemic. For the first two years of his presidency, many of us sat on the edge of our seats wondering when Trump would be seriously challenged either by a military threat, a terrorist attack or a global pandemic. From the moment Hillary Clinton conceded, I suspected this buffoonish greenhorn would be put to the test and fail badly. I never imagined that his reaction, untethered from experts, would be quite this calamitous.

His response to the hurricanes that collided with Puerto Rico represented a harrowing preview of how he’d handle the pandemic. I was convinced at the time that he was at least temporarily unaware that Puerto Rico was even part of the United States. I mean, how could he have been so thoughtless and unsympathetic to actual Americans? Turns out, he probably knew — he just didn’t give a shit. Never before has a modern president behaved so callously toward a devastated population of his own people, hurling paper towels at their heads as if he were firing a T-shirt cannon at a college basketball pep rally. Today, the island territory continues to rebuild despite Trump’s reprehensible indifference.

America is better than this. We’re better than him.

There have to be consequences for his indifference to the destruction in Puerto Rico as well as the 225,000 casualties of COVID-19 (and counting). Neither should have happened here. But this is what it looks like when the president and his people fail to do the paint-by-numbers things in response to a crisis — things that so many other presidents managed to achieve. Had Trump listened to the experts at the CDC and WHO, thousands of Americans would still be alive today and we might have been free and clear of this blight by now. Instead, Trump listened to the entertainers on Fox News, not to mention the shrieking voices in his head, convincing him to abandon the effort at exactly the wrong time — in April, at the initial height of the infection curve.

Before giving up, he applied travel restrictions to China, but it was too little too late. Forty thousand people arrived in the United States from China by flying through Europe and landing in New York, magnifying the catastrophic outbreak there. After that, Trump did nothing else to slow the spread, making George W. Bush’s 2005 response to Hurricane Katrina look masterful by comparison. Now, eight months into this disaster, Trump continues to ignore the rules, ignore safety protocols and ignore the experts, holding maskless, undistanced rally after rally, fueling his own ego, even after being infected himself. And there’s no end in sight.

Win or lose, his bungled, herky-jerky reaction to the pandemic will be remembered as the defining failure of his presidency, and it’s the No. 1 reason why he deserves nothing but ignominy and prison.

Rather than accepting the challenge and rising to meet it, as any other president would have, he’s spent all these months of national stress, uncertainty and illness not comforting or proactively leading the American people, but whining, whining and whining some more about how COVID ruined his presidency. Solving the pandemic could have been his greatest achievement — but Trump always makes things worse for Trump. Undermining himself and then playing the victim when things go sideways is the only thing he’s good at.

He possesses the most brittle ego of any president since Richard Nixon — one of many character flaws that undermine his self-identification as a manly alpha. Indeed, he’s nothing more than an easily-ruffled snowflake who constantly bellyaches about how “unfair” the world treats him — you know, the alleged billionaire president. So unfair.

Donald Trump has redefined what it means to be an empty suit. He talks an enormous game, but in reality his entire record is composed of failures and stolen successes. He claims to understand things he’s never able to explain openly or in any detail. Accordingly, he’s obsessed with repealing the Affordable Care Act, but only because it was Barack Obama’s signature achievement, not because it’s bad policy — and it’s not bad policy, he just says it is and his fanboys believe him.

If challenged, I’d wager a year’s salary he couldn’t name anything in the law beyond the mandate and the coverage for pre-existing conditions. I’m sure he doesn’t know about the myriad consumer protections or the mandatory benefits, or how the low-income subsidies work or the Medicaid expansion or the marketplaces — none of it. Yet he’s seeing to it that the entire thing is obliterated mid-pandemic when Americans need coverage the most. He definitely doesn’t know that coverage for pre-existing conditions is made possible, for example, by placing caps on premiums and co-pays, while banning rescission and lifetime limits on coverage. Worst of all, he doesn’t know that many of his own voters are covered today because of the ACA.

Between the pandemic and the possible repeal of the ACA, America is physically sick. And because of Donald Trump, we’re spiritually sick, too. He doesn’t understand that the president sets the tone for the nation. He’ll never grasp that the way he communicates influences the way we communicate with each other. His constant firehose of crapola encourages others to let their hatred, racism and obnoxious, crazy-eyed antagonism fly freely — playing out in our public spaces and on our social media platforms every damn day.

Trump has debased the presidency, replacing decency and humility with unearned self-praise and horrendous sadism. Our nation’s most cherished values and institutions have been randomly crushed by this 90-foot kaiju monster for too long. His constant antagonism has turned father against son, mother against daughter, family against family. Over what? The damaging misadventures of a political fraud — a garish old brat who bankrupted his businesses, defrauded Americans with his sham foundation and university and is currently bankrupting the U.S. treasury while establishing himself as a Putin-style kleptocrat.

In 1860, our nation nearly crumbled under the weight of slavery and secession. Today, our nation is on the verge of collapse under the weight of a painted-up clown whose performative fascism has led to the extrajudicial murder of American citizens on American soil; the use of Homeland Security as a secret police force tasked with assaulting Americans in advance of awkward photo-ops; the use of the Department of Justice as a personal law firm; taxpayer revenue as a personal slush fund; and, worst of all, the construction of internment camps for Central American migrant children, where some have been raped by American guards. Rivaled only by the pandemic response, the Trump Cages are the most disgusting and unforgivable aspect of this presidential crisis.

The 2020 election is about ending all that, while beginning the process of a second Reconstruction — rebuilding our government in a way that guarantees this will never happen again, while convening a Trump Crimes Commission to hold the perpetrators accountable. Part of that process is about remembering what happened here, in this era. There will be voices who insist we should move on and forget about all this ugliness. We would do well to ignore those voices. The minute we forget the damage he’s inflicted upon us all, the next Trump will be waiting to strike.

Indeed, the only way to move on is to punish the crimes and plug the holes. We have no choice but to use this dark ride — one that took my friend Chez and many thousands of others — as an opportunity to repair the gaping Trump-shaped craters in the system exposed and exploited by this unqualified, disgracefully unpresidential and obviously unglued president. If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris successfully oust Trump, a week from today, the Trump crisis will be on its way to ending, while the hard work of cleaning up the mess will begin. In both the election and the aftermath, we cannot fail. Everything depends on what happens next.

[thekillerblogofkillers]

Westley Allan Dodd (1961-1993)

Westley Allan Dodd, also known as the Vancouver Child Killer, was an American serial killer/child molester who was been called “one of the most evil killers in history”. His execution, performed at his own request, was the first legal hanging in the US since 1965.

On July 3, 1961, Westley Allan Dodd was born in Toppenish, Washington, the oldest of Jim and Carol Dodd’s 3 children. Dodd himself has stated there was never any abuse or neglect in his childhood, but did claim that the words “I love you” were never said to him, nor did he ever recall saying them. It has been reported that Dodd once wrote in a diary during his imprisonment that his father was physically and emotionally abusive and that he was often neglected in favour of his younger siblings. He also stated he had witnessed violent fights between his parents – following one that occurred on Dodd’s 15th birthday, is father attempted suicide. At just 13 years old, Dodd began to expose himself to other neighbourhood children. His father eventually told a news reporter that he knew about this but chose to ignore it, since Dodd was an otherwise “well behaved child who never had problems with drugs, drinking, or smoking”. Dodd had progressed to actual molestation by the time he began high school, starting with his younger cousins before moving on to neighbourhood kids he had offered to babysit and the children of a woman his father was dating. At 15 Dodd was arrested for indecent exposure, but police released him with only a recommendation for juvenile counselling, a recommendation that was never taken up.

Through the years, Dodd was arrested several more times, always with no serious action taken. After some local kids moved out of town, he began molesting children he didn’t know. In August 1981 Dodd attempted to abduct 2 young girls, but they reported him to the police and yet again, no action was taken. A month later Dodd enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to a submarine base in Bangor, Washington where he started to abuse children that lived on the base. On one occasion, Dodd offered $50 to some boys to come to a motel with him for a game of strip poker. This time, Dodd was arrested, but despite confessing, Dodd was released without charge. A short time later, he was arrested again for exposing himself to a boy and was discharged from the Navy in consequence. Dodd spent 19 days in jail and went through court-ordered counselling. In May 1984, he was arrested for molesting a 10-year-old boy but received a suspended sentence. Dodd planned his whole life around easy access to “targets” (the way he referred to children), even moving into an apartment block designed to house families with children, and working at fast food restaurants, as a charity truck driver, and other similar jobs. He repeatedly molesting the preschool-aged children of a neighbour, but the woman feared that pressing charges would be too traumatic for the boys.

In 1987 Dodd attempted to lure a young boy into a vacant building, but the boy refused to go with him and went to police. Again, Dodd received minimal punishment because he hadn’t actually touched the boy or exposed himself. Prosecutors were aware of his history of sexual offences and recommended a 5 year prison sentence, but he spent only 118 nights in jail and probation. After being released, he moved to Vancouver, Washington and got a job as a shipping clerk. In 1989 Dodd decided to scout for victims in David Douglas Park in Vancouver. He was arrested several times over the next few years for child molestation, each time serving short sentences and receiving court-mandated therapy. All of his victims, over 50 altogether, were below the age of 12, some of them as young as 2 years old. Most were boys. Dodd’s sexual fantasies became more and more violent over the years – as a young man, he wrote about wanting to eat the genitalia of his victims and performing experimental surgeries to turn them into obedient zombies. A psychiatrist who evaluated Dodd following one convictions said that he fit the legal criteria for a “sexual psychopath”.

On September 4, 1989, Dodd lured brothers Cole and William Neer, 11 and 10 respectively, to a secluded area where he forced them to undress, tied them to a tree and performed sex acts on both children. When he had finished he stabbed them repeatedly with a knife and ran from the scene. The boys were discovered in the park – Cole was dead at the scene, and William died en route to the hospital. Soon after this incident Dodd moved to Portland, Oregon, where he made several unsuccessful attempts at luring children. On October 29, Dodd encountered 4-year-old Lee Iseli and his 9-year-old brother Justin at a park. Lee was playing on a slide and Dodd managed to convince him to go with him. Justin had left, so Dodd told Lee that he would drive him home. He managed to take Lee to his apartment unnoticed, ordering the boy to undress when they arrived. Dodd tied Lee to his bed and molested him, photographing the abuse. Dodd kept Lee overnight, continuing to molest him, writing down every detail in his diary. The following morning, he strangled Iseli to death with a rope and then hung his body in the closet, photographing it as a macabre “trophy”. He later confessed to police that he hadn’t meant to kill the boy, but decided it was necessary to keep him from telling anyone. Dodd stuffed Iseli’s nude body in trash bags and threw it in some bushes near Vancouver Lake. He burned Lee’s clothes in a trash barrel but kept the boy’s underwear as a souvenir. 3 days later, Lee Iseli’s body was discovered, sparking a manhunt for the killer. Dodd kept a low profile and stayed in his apartment, writing down future plans for child abduction and constructing a homemade torture rack for his next victim.

On November 13, Dodd snatched a 6-year-old body from the bathroom of a theatre in Camas, Washington, but the child began to fight and cry as Dodd was carrying him through the lobby of the theatre. Despite attempting to calm the boy down, theatre employees became suspicious. Once outside, Dodd released the boy, got into his car and drove away. The boyfriend of the intended victim’s mother came out to the lobby and was informed about the attempted abduction. The boyfriend went outside the theatre  in the direction Dodd was last seen, and found him on the side of the road, with his car broken down. In an attempt to not raise suspicions and to stall for time, the boyfriend offered him help before getting Dodd into a headlock and bringing him back to the theatre to await police. Camas police contacted the task force that was investigating the kidnapping and murder of Lee Iseli. Dodd was brought to Camas PD headquarters, where task force lead detectives CW Jensen and Dave Trimble interviewed him over the course of 3 days. Eventually, Dodd confessed to all 3 murders. Jensen and Trimble then served a search warrant at a home in Vancouver where Dodd was known to rent a room. During the search, police discovered a homemade torture rack, along with newspaper clippings about his crimes, a briefcase containing Lee Iseli’s underwear, a photo album containing photos of Lee Iseli both dead and alive, and assorted photographs of children in underwear advertisements. They also discovered Dodd’s diary, in which he had detailed the murders. He was charged with 1st degree murder in the deaths of the Neer brothers and Lee Iseli along with the attempted kidnapping of another child. He initially pleaded not guilty to all charges but later changed his plea to guilty. During Dodd’s trial in Clark County Superior Court, the prosecution read excerpts from Dodd’s diary and displayed the photographs of Lee Iseli. The defence didn’t call any witnesses or present any evidence, only suggesting that Dodd must be legally insane. Prosecutors requested the death penalty, and the jury agreed. Dodd claimed that speaking in his own defence was pointless, and ultimately “the system had failed repeatedly”. He stated that he would like to die by hanging, and that he was willing to die if “it brought peace to the victims’ families”. Dodd was sentenced to death in 1990 for stabbing Cole and William Neer near a Vancouver, Washington park in 1989, as well as for the separate rape and murder of Lee Iseli.

There were less than 4 years between the murders and Dodd’s execution. He refused to appeal his case or his sentence and stated that hanging was the ideal method of death. During Dodd’s trial, he tried to make himself into some kind of celebrity, writing a pamphlet on how parents could protect children from monsters like himself. He also seemed to enjoy giving interview and reliving his crimes at any opportunity. Eventually, the judge ordered the media coverage to stop. Dodd was executed by hanging at 12:05am on January 5, 1993 at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. By Washington State law, Dodd was able to choose the method of his execution, and the options were lethal injection or hanging – Dodd chose hanging, later saying in interviews that he chose that method because that’s how Lee Iseli died. He also requested that his execution be televised, but the request was denied. His hanging was the first use of hanging for an execution in the United States since George York and James Latham were hanged by Kansas in 1965. His execution was witnessed by 12 members of local and regional media, prison officials, and representatives of the families of the 3 victims. Dodd ate salmon and potatoes for his last meal. His last words, spoken from the 2nd floor of the indoor gallows, were: “I was once asked by somebody, I don’t remember who, if there was any way sex offenders could be stopped. I said, ‘No.’ I was wrong. I was wrong when I said there was no hope, no peace. There is hope. There is peace. I found both in the Lord, Jesus Christ. Look to the Lord, and you will find peace.” Westley Allan Dodd was pronounced dead and his body was transported to Seattle for autopsy. The King County Medical Examiner found that Dodd had died quickly and was unlike to have felt much pain. He was cremated, and his ashes were turned over to his family.

[conflictcrafter]

The Humanity of Lord of War

when you make an artwork, you have to figure out your role. being the maker of something is the surface role. and it is necessary. the next step is to pick a shovel and dig. or mine.

we do not determine roles for the heck of it. we do it because it is both the goal and the core. the goal, the core, and the means should align. and when things are in order, beauty emerges, organically, even when the surface looks chaotic.

I.

Andrew Niccol knew what his roles are in Lord of War. one of them is to explore an inquiry: what does it mean to be human?

this question has been explored in many punk films. Ridley Scott and Philip K Dick's Blade Runner films comes to mind. George Miller has also examined the question specially well in the recent Mad Max: Fury Road. these films put humanity in future punks, in a certain point in post-humanity, to hammer the question down.

Lord of War doesnt play with punks (we can call it presentpunk though). the historical events and the political conditions depicted in the film still ring bells. theoretically, the question is easier to grasp since it's set categorically in the present. this film, again, is not a punk where this question of humanity is often explored. but this is why literature or film is so beautiful: narrative elements, in this case the setting, bare different ways to answer the same query. also, familiar settings may bring out the most outlandish of answers.

What does it mean to be human 1: Beware of The Dog

Yuri (Nick Cage), after making his first gun trade, approaches his younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) who cooks in their Jewish family restaurant. while Yuri convinces Vi to be his gun trade partner, Yuri notices a poster in the kitchen that says: Beware of The Dog. "We dont have a dog (also why you put that in the kitchen?)," said Yuri. to which Vi responded:

"To remind myself to beware of the dog in me. The dog in me who wants to fuck everything that moves, fight and kill weaker dogs. I guess it's a . . . to remind me to be more human."

halfway through the film, Vi succumbs into cocaine addiction due to Yuri's involvement in his life. it was as though the film was telling us that Vi is indeed a dog. running and fucking around.

but when Vi finally met "a girlfriend," he changes and leaves the cocaine. Yuri comes back into his life and convinces him again to be his partner. in a deal in Sierra Leone, Vi, now sober, witnessed the bloody effects of illegal gun trade to African civilians. 

in an effort to sabotage the deal and potentially save innocent people, Vi is able to blow half of the arms and is consequently killed by the warlords.

Vi dies a martyr. loyal dogs die as martyrs. martyrs transcend humanity.

What does it mean to be human 2: I Won’t Fail as a Human Being

Yuri returns home to his wife Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan) who now knows about her husband's illegal gunrunning business.

Ava is informed by idealistic Interpol agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) of her husband's illegal arms activities. he reminds Ava that her parents were gunned by people who got their guns illegally from arms dealers like Yuri.

later that evening, Yuri comes home to a naked wife, unable to wear her silk sleeping dress, unable to lie on their bed, because to her, "Everything’s got blood on it."

she confronted Yuri and he finally confessed to his wife his real occupation. she tells Yuri to stop it since they have enough. but Yuri said he couldnt just quit because it isnt about the money. it is what he is good at.

Ava tells her husband that she "is a failed actress, a failed artist. But she doesnt fail to be human."

while Yuri feels that being human means getting one's dreams, having a lucrative lifestyle, proving to other humans that one is the best; for Ava though, humanity is as simple as not inflicting harm to other human beings.

What does it mean to be human 3: The Reptile Tail

after being confronted by Ava and Vi, Yuri finally decides to go legit. suddenly, he is not an arms dealer anymore, and he got agents confused.

this is the part of the film that youd wish the main character has truly changed, with all the things and relationships he has at stake, youd want the main character to change. Niccol teases us that, that narrative relief. but if you know how plot works, you know Yuri hasnt reached that ultimate fall.

so after going legit, he is pulled back into the arms dealing business by the self-proclaimed president of Liberia, Andre Baptise.

you would want to feel that Yuri would be doing it forcibly in fear for his family's safety. but no. when the scene with him and the Andre cuts, we hear Yuri:

"At four and a half months old, a human fetus has a reptile's tail—a remnant of our evolution. Maybe that is why I could't escape. You can fight a lot of enemies and survive. But if you fight your biology, you will always lose."

Yuri's biological mumbling here is based on the evolutionary development studies of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) which theorizes that embryonic stages of development reflect the previous adult evolutionary forms of the specie (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny).

Yuri is basically saying that since humans were previously non-humans, reflected by having actual tails while developing in the womb, humans will always go back in to behaving as animals. and that we can never fight it.

Yuri is wrong. for starters, Haeckel's hypothesis, the Recapitulation Theory, is long defunct.

while embryos have "tails," this does not represent the evolutionary process of a specie.

we don't have embryonic tails because thats how we evolved. we just had tails. that's just it.

thus, we are not echoes of a long evolution of reptiles. and what Yuri is telling himself is merely a rationalization defense mechanism to justify his illegal arms dealing.

and it's completely human to rationalize immoral behavior.

in insisting biology and in exercising rationalization, Yuri has perfectly demonstrated the frailty of human beings: giving intellectual justifications to humans' animalistic tendencies. Yuri has satisfied the id in booming his ego.

but being human isnt only about rationalizing.

being human also means thinking about the welfare of other human beings.

Yuri has become, if not the best, one of the bests in illegal arms dealing. in essence, he has become a superpower in the trade. but Yuri, in Nietzsche's eyes is far from being an Ubermensch.

in Kant's eyes, Yuri has trampled the categorical imperative.

in our eyes, Yuri is not a hero.

and this is what makes him human: his acceptance of life's dramatic irony. he knows, he sees, he "appreciates" the negative implications of what he does, and what's coming. yet he still does it. he is helplessly and happily trapped like all of us.

II.

although we follow closely the life of Yuri, in a "story" perspective, it's Vitaly that ultimately follows the heroic arc. Vitaly is the proxy hero to Yuri, Yuri doesnt undergo metamorphosis. but Vitaly does.

hence the film is a character study of how a human being can become a monster: by allowing and being part of something that is systematically bad and irreversible.

Niccol illustrates the monstrosity of Yuri not by making the character violent. he ingeniously does it by portraying Yuri as a kind and generous person who often describes and treats the people who are really close to him well. he, in his monologues, talks a great deal about them in good terms. yet he never talks about himself in such way. in fact, he never talks about himself at all.

and this where NIccol's genius comes: he makes Yuri seamlessly not talk about himself because in truth, Yuri hates himself. and a monster is a monster is he hates himself.

in the end, nothing is solved. what wins is the human basal instinct to harm others and at the same time, be detached from it. more than a narrative work, the film is a challenge:

how much humanity are we willing to let go to feel human?

III.

the film has managed to be an artwork that also talks about important world issues. and if there is something that an artist should takeaway from the viewing, it should be seeing how art and function can go together neatly.

the only failure of the film, albeit minor, is despite the great research that the creative production team has gone through to parallel real events, it fell short in interpreting Interpol's function properly. Interpol doesnt at all conduct arrests.

aside from that, Lord of War is a solid 9/10 for its take on the question of humanity.

_____ non-film image sources in order of appearance:  1. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/defensemechanism-160520104849/95/defense-mechanism-40-638.jpg?cb=1463741864

2. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/22/3b/30223b65bc57c735199209472b57c0b3.jpg 

3. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/16/e2/c016e21b69049ab2c7a02caa1bd9e24d.jpg 

[nitrateglow]

Halloween 2017 movie marathon: Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (dir. Terence Fisher, 1969)

“Had man not been given to invention and experiment, then tonight, sir, you would have eaten your dinner in a cave. You would've strewn the bones about the floor, then wiped your fingers on a coat of animal skin. In fact, your lapels do look a bit greasy. Good night!”

Forced to lay low after his secret lab is infiltrated and his most recent murder gets press coverage, Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) intends to collaborate with Dr. Brandt (George Pravda), an old colleague, on a brain transplant experiment; however, he learns Brandt has gone insane and is currently confined in an asylum. Taking a room in a boarding house run by the lovely young Anna (Veronica Carlson), Frankenstein encounters Karl (Simon Ward), a young employee of the asylum where Brandt is incarcerated. Upon realizing the borderline-impoverished Karl and Anna are involved in illegal drug-trading for extra income, the good doctor blackmails them into helping him kidnap Brandt, in the hopes that he can cure his insanity so they can collaborate once again. As his control over the young lovers grows tighter, it becomes clear that Frankenstein is less interested in helping others so much as exerting his dominion.

I cannot recommend the Hammer Horror Frankenstein series enough. Beautifully photographed in rich color, dressed up to evoke the fog-shrouded mystique of a gothic nineteenth century Europe, they are as wealthy in atmosphere as they are in entertainment value. Considered risqué for reveling in blood and cleavage during the 1950s and early 1960s, these films seem tamer now, though they remain beloved by horror movie buffs due to their entertaining characters and creepy ambiance. If you’ve never seen any of these movies, then start off with The Curse of Frankenstein and then move onto the sequels in chronological order. Though I’m reviewing Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, the fifth installment in the series, I do think these movies should be viewed in order of release since Peter Cushing’s amoral scientist is the one common link between all of them and he undergoes a strange, if slightly disjointed, character arc over the course of six movies. In many ways, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed could be best described as the film in which Frankenstein loses his humanity, truly becoming more monstrous than any creation of his could ever be.

Seeing as I just reviewed the 1931 Universal Frankenstein, it’s interesting to compare it to the Hammer series. The doctor rather than the monster is the focus of these later films. Compared to the neurotic, guilty Henry played by Colin Clive, Cushing’s Victor Frankenstein is a real bastard, living for his work, and the thrill of grasping the power of life and death. Smug, egomaniacal, and ruthless, this is not a fictional character you would ever want to meet in real life, yet he does exert a bizarre charisma, not only over the other characters in this franchise, but over the audience as well. As it is with Shakespeare’s Richard III, Cushing’s Frankenstein seduces us with his wit and intelligence—he’s so far ahead of his small-minded associates, that much of the time you do want to see him succeed, at least until he goes too far in imperiling the lives of bystanders—which oh boy, does he ever do in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!

The opening scene of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is a perfect re-introduction to the series’ anti-hero—though this time around he’s evolved to pure villainy. As usual, the filmmakers show off the characteristic gorgeous Hammer evocation of nineteenth century Europe. A doctor walks through the evening streets only to be decapitated by a mystery man with a scythe and a hatbox. We follow the killer to his basement lair, only catching glimpses of his feet, building up the mystery slowly. An unfortunate burglar is caught in the basement by the killer; the two struggle among the laboratory equipment, upending the hatbox which held the severed head of the movie’s first victim. After the horrified burglar escapes, the assailant pulls off the mask, revealing the chiseled, aged features of Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein beneath. I don’t know why he chooses to pull off the mask then and there, but it is a clever inversion of the central emotional truth of the character: Frankenstein is a monster who disguises his ill-intentions beneath the veneer of compassionate humanism, while the monsters he creates are the true victims.

In no previous Hammer Frankenstein film is Cushing’s doctor as reprehensible. Sure, he did some terrible things before, both from his ambitions and from pure selfishness (see his cold-blooded disposal of his troublesome mistress Justine in Curse of Frankenstein), but you still felt that at heart, Frankenstein was interested in humanity’s welfare, even if stroking his ego along the way was part of the fun. In the immediate predecessor to this movie, Frankenstein Created Woman, you almost believe he learned his lesson about using people as pawns by the tragic finale. And if you did believe that, then Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed not only replies with a violent “no” to that notion, but laughs in your face for ever thinking as such. If anything, Frankenstein becomes bitterer and crueler in his social interactions, more convinced that he is oh-so-superior to every other member of the species. Though he professes to his unwilling accomplices that he does what he does only to help society, his actions show otherwise. Still, he does have his moments of awesome, such as when he tells off a group of respectable but daft gentlemen for discussing medical science as though they were experts.

Despite Cushing’s charisma, his victims break one’s heart with their guilelessness. Karl and Anna may be drug-dealers, but unlike Frankenstein, their motivation for committing crime is altruistic: Anna’s mother is ill and medical bills need to be paid. However, Frankenstein forces them into even greater criminality, pushing Karl to commit murder and Anna to hide a corpse. While the young lovers characters are usually the dullest part of any given Hammer movie, here they’re likable and tragic in how their hopes for a better future are demolished by sheer chance. Brandt’s wife is also put through pure hell, first informed her husband is incurably insane, then that he’s been kidnapped by a criminal scientist, then much, much worse. Later on, there’s a moment where she and Frankenstein meet face-to-face, and for a moment, it seems as though he possesses genuine compassion for this woman, only to pull the rug out from under her feet as well as ours with his profound callousness. Were it not for the infamous scene where Frankenstein takes advantage of being alone in the house with Anna by doing something particularly heinous, this could have been a contender for the most viscerally cruel moment of the film.

Mild spoilers ahead; skip to the text under the next picture if you so desire

Most people know that that “something particularly heinous” before going into this one: Frankenstein rapes Anna. Oh boy, that rape scene—the one thing everyone knows and loathes and debates about this movie. Though many consider FMBD to be the finest of the series, for some viewers, the rape of Anna is a movie-breaker. Put in for the purposes of T&A titillation, it comes off as incredibly tasteless since nothing in Carlson’s subsequent scenes betray any sense of trauma from the attack. Considering the scene was added at last minute, this isn’t shocking, but is this nasty moment out of character for Frankenstein? I wouldn’t say so, actually. By this point, Frankenstein is a total misanthrope with nothing but contempt for 99.5% of the people around him. He is obsessed with power and control, and what is rape but an exertion of power over another person in one of the most horrible, invasive ways possible? In his insightful analysis of the film, Scott Ashkin has this to say about Frankenstein’s previous behavior in regards to ladies:

Think back to The Curse of Frankenstein; in particular, think back to the way the baron treated both his fiancee, Elizabeth, and Justine, the maid with whom he’d been having an ongoing affair. If that was how he behaved toward women under his power back when he was still youngish and idealistic, then why should we expect the older, bitterer, and infinitely more cynical Frankenstein of this episode to scruple at anything?

The scene itself is also frightening as hell, not because we see any nudity or penetration, but just from the savagery of Cushing’s acting. This character, usually so collected and always claiming he’s the height of civilized humanity, becomes beast-like. Cushing’s face remains aloof and mask-like the whole time too, the contempt for this other human being never ceasing to show through. Just as he seeks to mark Karl as his by trying to corrupt the young man’s morals, so he seeks to mark Anna as his by revisiting his old skirt-chasing ways, only this time foregoing any pretense of seduction. All that remains is a perverse lust for power. (For an extended, interesting take on this controversial scene, I recommend reading “Anna Spengler destroyed,” a re-reading of the film from the tragic perspective of the leading lady.)

With Frankenstein’s heartless ways, it’s awful easy to forget there is a “monster” character in this one, which is a shame, because the reanimated Brandt (played by Freddie Jones) is a great character, so memorable despite being given precious little screen time compared to everyone else. Without giving too much away, let’s just say his insanity gets cured and his brain gets put into a healthier but more grotesque body, making him unrecognizable to his wife. When he attempts to reconnect with her after escaping from Frankenstein’s keep—well, it’s emotionally pulverizing to say the least. Though FMBD is 100 minutes long, I kind of wish it was longer if only so we could have gotten more of this character.

While FMBD is my personal favorite of the Hammer Frankenstein movies, I’m not sure if it could be considered the best: Curse of Frankenstein and Revenge of Frankenstein are sounder in terms of writing. However, I think FMBD is arguably more disturbing than either of them. Nothing in either of those unnerves me as much as half of the cruelties Frankenstein heaps upon other people here, and never do you feel as guilty for liking the doctor despite the evil things he does as you do by the end of this movie. If it weren’t for the beautiful aesthetic and Cushing’s charisma, then this often-nihilistic picture might be downright unwatchable. As it is, it’s an excellent, haunting example of an era of cinematic horror long gone by, yet still powerful and worthy of admiration.

[alightinthelantern]

Oh my god, I want to die. My mother was an abusive cunt to me for twenty years and she’ll never get any punishment, not so much as a slap on the wrist. She got away with it scot-free. All of my abusers got away scot-free, Delaina and Marcus and all of the cunts at Howard Center. I suffer flashbacks nearly every day and they all have positions of power over other children just as vulnerable as me. Delaina is principal of a special-needs school, my mother is on the board of directors at Howard.

They locked me in a basement at Howard Center for whole weekends at a time as a teen when I misbehaved, a dingy little apartment with an electronic keypad lock and a bedroom with a deep square window that glowed red with city lights at night. I had Chef Boyardee from a metal cabinet to eat every day, and I had to ask permission to use the bathroom, and I was locked into the bedroom at night. I wasn’t allowed to talk to whatever staff member was On Duty except to ask to use the bathroom or for food because the metal cabinet was kept locked and I wasn’t allowed to touch anything myself, and they just sat in their little staff room watching tv all day and night. The stays were so traumatizing that it was multiple years before I could look at Chef Boyardee without having flashbacks. And Delaina, the Case Manager who instituted the policy of locking me up and traumatizing me into behaving, runs a school full of vulnerable special-needs children like I was.

“YOU ARE SUCH A SPOILED, SELFISH CHILD, AND I PUT UP WITH SO MUCH FROM YOU!!” my mother and grandmother would scream at me once a week growing up. My mother once served tomatoes with dinner when I was nine and I hated the taste and texture of them so much I spit mine up while gagging. She ordered me to eat them but I refused, unable to bear it, so she put them on a plate in the fridge and punished me by taking away all my toys and other privileges. The next day she served them to me at lunch, and I refused to eat them. She punished me until dinner, when she served them again, and I refused. This went on for multiple days, she getting ever more violently angry at me all the time, and I finally caved after two or three days under fear of physical violence.

She forced me to grow up as a boy when I wanted to be a girl, but I’ve been abused by so many shitty (White) women, who’ve all treated me like a villain because I’m “a boy” and I’m Autistic, that I don’t want to lump myself in with them, and now I don’t know what I am. Once when I was nine I went up to my teacher in school, and said on the verge of tears, “I wish I were born a girl!” And the teacher, an adult woman in her forties, rounded on me, saying “You know, men rule the world, and women have it so hard! You are so lucky to be a boy, and you are so selfish if you don’t realize it!” Those were her exact words. And yes, she was a blonde White woman. Thus, gender is inextricable from trauma for me.

I tried to kill myself when I was 14, and I spent my entire teenage years borderline-suicidal. She spent her entire upbringing of me alternating between neglect and abuse, withholding her “love” any time I had misbehaved, punishing me whenever I tried to show independence, leaving me with no self-esteem and no ability to care for myself. She isolated me from the rest of the world, preventing me from having literally any social life outside of school my entire teenage years, and she always punished me with whatever hurt me the most for even the most minor infractions.

I’m 26 years old and I’m fucking broken, I moved out at 19 and I’ve spent the past 7 years trying to heal myself but I can’t do it, the abuse and trauma haunt me every day. I have Asperger’s, OCD, Bipolar, PTSD, and depression from all of these. I wish I had a gun, I can’t fucking take it. I have a major breakdown every year and a medium-sized one every couple months. And now, when it’s too late to make a difference, when I’m already broken for good and have given up completely on life, she thinks being nice to me will get me to forgive her, being nice by lending me money for a needed new desk, or some clothes, or whatever. This stupid Catholic cunt thinks she deserves forgiveness, when even now she’s so self-absorbed and fragile that the slightest perceived insinuation that she wasn’t a stellar parent makes her purse her lips and glare and shut down and start ignoring me altogether, even when I wasn’t saying or implying anything. Once, a few years ago, we were discussing the movie The King’s Speech, and she said that King George VI’s father was a jerk in the movie. I said “Oh yeah, he was abusive to his children!” which was true. The conversation wasn’t even about her but she made it about herself, and got angry and defensive and stopped talking to me for several minutes. I recently said that I thought I was suffering burnout in response to my childhood, and she just started sarcastically uh-huh-ing (like nasty women do), and took her smartphone out and started scrolling on it so she could ignore me to my face. Even now I’m forced to babysit my own selfish cunt of a mother.

And I love my dad, he’s the only person in my family who’s ever been good to me, but he is such a fucking moron, and he does not understand when I try to talk to him about it. He remembers how my mom treated him during their divorce, how he suffered a life-threatening brain hemorrhage that nearly killed him, how he was rushed to the hospital and when they cut his skull open blood shot out and splattered on the wall over ten feet away from the sheer pressure inside, and how she didn’t care enough to visit him once. But he thinks she’s just a normal person who was going through a rough time, he gives her the benefit of the doubt, he lived a state away and never saw the abuse my mother inflicted on their children behind closed doors, the constant screaming and shaming and pitting us against each other to maintain her obsessive control over us, and it’s exhausting trying to convince him of my childhood was not normal. That most of the problems he was told I had were made up.

I wasn’t an easy child to raise, but I was not the fucking monster I was treated like. I was the scapegoat for all my family’s troubles, and my sisters, angry and hurting at our mother’s abuse, were encouraged to take it out on me, because of course I was ugly and awkward and talked too much and didn’t know how to behave and embarrassed them in public, and for selfish, shallow people there really was nothing likeable about me. And my sisters bullied me and my mother never punished them for it and she always punished me when I fought back. And I tried to kill myself when I was 14, and my mother cared more about how her daughters were upset by my attempt than the fact that I was miserable with life enough to literally try to kill myself. How awful do you think my life was to have forced a naive little Autistic boy who sang along with the hymns in church to think death was the only way out? And still I am villainized! Still I am the bad guy, everyone in my family both immediate and extended view me as the devil incarnate, everyone has always and will always hate me!

And all these snotty young women on the street and in stores glare and snap at me for being Too Male, acting like I’m their oppressor, because I’m male-shaped and I don’t have Good Socialization Skills (when I was isolated growing up and never allowed to develop them), and I talk Wrongly (which is ableism), when I’m just an ugly, awkward, gangly person with such debilitating mysophobia and social anxiety I literally will not leave my apartment if I don’t have to. I can’t work, I live on disability benefits, and I only leave the house for laundry and groceries.

No one has ever taken me seriously, no one in law enforcement or any of the equally imbecilic, incompetent health organizations in this fucking backwater state have ever believed me. Fuck Vermont.

Well fuck the Catholic God and fuck the devil too, and fuck any and every Higher Power that may or not exist. I am so fucking tired. Fuck my life. Just end me already.

[lolbtsaus]

First Day of School (Jimin)

And now it is time for one half of the Busan line, one half of Vmin, an absolute angel who is crushing the comeback as he always does like the last dance bit in Not Today when they do the stomping bit always gets me it never fails, if they ever release a dance practice for it, I would scream, Park Jimin aka chim chim

All of the father related posts are here

For everyone that hasn’t read the original father!Jimin post, he has one daughter but there is another version where he also has a son (who is younger) so for this one, I’ll be using the second version

To avoid repetition and so this post doesn’t get too long, I will be lumping some of the things together since they’d be pretty similar anyways, like dropping them off at school, spending mornings together etc. 

His bbys are s o fucking cute, if you’ve ever seen a bby picture or even just a fetus picture of Jimin, you know what I’m talking about when I say those ch eeKS

They look s o so so so much like Jimin, they have that same eye smile, the same cheeks that are so incredibly kissable it’s a wonder that Jimin isn’t forever kissing them, they’re so smol and they have tiny giggles and soft voices and are basically two mini Jimins walking around the house, following the bigger Jimin around

They’re so attached to him they follow him around everywhere, they’re his lil ducklings, they look up to him so much and wanna be just like him when they grow up, even though Jimin tells them both that they can do whatever they want

They’re really really excited about school until Jimin tells them he can’t come with them, that he can only drop them off and pick them up and they’re not on board with that part

“Well can’t you just come anyways”

They’ve never had to spend that long away from Jimin, he’s done a few concerts and rehearsals but if he knows he’s gonna be away from them for a while, he brings them with him bc they’re super well behaved and will just chill out and draw or color while he practices and they prefer it too bc they just wanna be in the same room as him, they don’t like being separated

They’re so stubborn about him coming with them to class and he’s a lil sad that he really genuinely can’t come bc he doesn’t wanna leave them behind just as much as they don’t wanna be left, they’re all infamous for always being together like if you need to find them, just look for Jimin and vice versa

But after they learn that the cousins (the boys’ children) will be there, they feel a bit better about it and Jimin promises that they’ll have fun and that it’ll only be a few hours, like a long concert 

Mornings with the Parks are really sweet and there are s o many kisses, especially cheek kisses

They always wake him up by climbing all over him and kisses his face a lot and he’s a pretty light sleeper when it comes to them bc paternal side kicks in and gets him to wake up the moment he hears their bedroom door open (they prefer to share a bedroom despite chim and you offering up the guest bedroom a million times)

Jimin seems like a morning person, either that or he gets his energy really quickly so the bbys don’t have to whine at him for too long before he’s up and bouncing around with them but he always has to have his cuddles first

You wake up every single morning to see your two tiny bbys snuggled up to your biggest bby and they’re all just chatting about their dreams or what they want for breakfast or what they’ll do that day

They gotta be carried downstairs bc they don’t wanna let go of Jimin ever and he’s not complaining at all, he loves them so so much and is happy to carry them around every moment of the day, regardless of how big they get

They could be in their 30s and he’s still gonna offer to carry them downstairs bc they are his b b y s his munchkins his tiny tots they could have their own bbys and he’d still be calling them prince and princess

They are such helpers with everything ever but especially cooking, they love it so much bc Jimin feeds them chocolate chips along the way or he gives them a lollipop or a piece of gum, just something to keep them amused until he can give them his full attention again

But they’re in charge of taste testing everything and also blowing on Jimin’s tea to cool it down, which ends up with them drinking half the cup to test how cooled down it is, they also sometimes get to pour things into cups, some juice maybe some milk, never anything hot bc Jimin doesn’t even them touch the teacup and they can only drink it once Jimin knows it’s cooled down enough to not burn their tongues (they don’t know that part but Jimin just lets them think they’re the ones that cooled it down and that you so didn’t go downstairs when they were busy and make the tea ahead of time) 

They also eat breakfast on Jimin’s lap bc he’s the dad that feeds them both a bite off of his plate despite them having their own food, they just like to share a lot, they feed him bites off their plates too

On the first day, they’re both super excited but they’re also staying super close to Jimin like he has to put them down when he’s cooking on the stove bc he doesn’t like them near hot objects, so they both just stand next to his leg and hold his free hand and wait until he can pick them back up

He gives them extra long hugs when he wakes up and he cooks their favorite breakfast and they’re all happy but you can still tell everyone’s a lil :( about having to be apart for the day

Bby girl’s first outfit is something laid back and comfy but also super cute so it’s a white dress with a few flowers on the bottom and then some gray tights and then some white flats that have a floral pattern and her coat is also gray and a bracelet you and Jimin gave her that morning (a first day present) that has a heart on it with her name in the middle

She has Jimin braid her bangs back so they don’t get in her face and she wears a headband with a flower on it bc theme of the day is floral 

Bby boy’s first outfit is also laid back but cute, he wears some bby black jeans and then a Cookie Monster shirt with a flannel shirt over it and some bby sneakers then his coat is black and he also has a bracelet with a heart and his name that was also given to him on his first day by you two

He gets a tiny black snapback bc he always sees Jimin wearing them and it also keeps his bangs out of his eyes

Bby girl has a Barney backpack and a Spongebob lunchbox, bby boy has a Curious George lunchbox and a Cat in the Hat backpack bc their faves they pick them themselves

Jimin has to hold back some tears on the way there bc the school’s getting closer which means he’s gotta say goodbye for a few hours and it’s the first time he’s left them with someone he wasn’t either best friends with or related to

On date nights, he gets the boys or his parents or his brother to watch the bbys but that’s way different than dropping them off at school and not being able to just come back and pick them up in an hour or two and he can’t call to check up on them every hour but he knows they’re excited for it so he does his best to be happy for them

He’s so beyond proud that they’re growing up of course but his bbys they don’t need to grow up so much so quickly, they can go back to being newborns he’s totally fine with that

He gives them another really long hug and kisses their heads and just rubs their backs and tries to convince himself to let go before they’re late

The tears are gathering up and they wipe them off of his cheeks with their bby fingers and give him some kisses to cheer him up bc that always works

He’s gotta smile at that bc they’re just so sweet and he fixes their shirts and helps them out of their coats now that they’re inside and he just turns into :D bc they look so cute in their lil outfits they picked out all by themselves

“Look the cousins are right there, go play with them and give them a hug, I’ll be here to pick you up later”

They give him another kiss and then they run off to see the cousins and start their first day in school

Side note, Jimin is totally the dad that hovers over the window for a few minutes after the class has started just to make sure his bbys are doing okay

“Jimin, it’s been ten minutes, they’re fine, let’s go”

“WaiT he’s making a face oh god he’s gonna cry...or sneeze, it was just a sneeze false alarm”

“Oh my god”

[theextraspoon]

Remember Pewdiepie? The Swedish Youtuber once had a slip of a racial slur cost him his YT Red Series, cost him hundreds of thousands of followers and changed the way we use Youtube and Google. Thanks to the media, we've moved from cancelling people, to getting them fired, and when that doesn't work, we call the papers because we know they're the types to give us that feel good by default narrative that sent my view into the spiral of media puppetry. It baffled me that Youtube would want to throw it's poster boy under the bus like said to the advertisers summit in 2015. Since then Youtube ran ad campaigns for some really sketchy places, like the data-mining of Candid to the exploitation of mental health through Betterhelp yet denied completely legal ads from hemp cultivation. That's where we step in.

Last night I was watching one of my favorite streamers, Hyphonix, when it suddenly became clear that he was one of the owners of the businesses stuck in the cross-hairs of the media wars attempting to contact me and he was upset with me for being upset with him, understandable. However, he didn't dox me and he didn't dox my dad. He just didn't. I've tested it. People tried to convince me he was poison and stealing from me.That he was  a "literal Hitler." He's not though. At least, I've not seen it. 

He's a dick, sure, but most of us are dicks too. I think he's funny. Next to another streamer whom I found humorous outside of gamer gate for his delivery was, Jim "Metokur," whom we've mentioned before here. I like the kid. He didn't dox me. So when I apologized for wrongfully judging him, it was then his chat gave me the name I needed. 

The real person who've been behind digging into my personal information, doxing me, doxing my biological and adoptive family and even stole their identity so they can't be held accountable for their actions. This person, PPP, Pepe, AP, Adonis Paul or whatever name he give himself today, decided to claim a gang affiliation with the hells angels (whom he's never met in real life or even spoken to) in an effort to threaten people into or out of working with select sponsors and other streamers. However, I DO know a few angels and they don't take kindly to this behavior and blamed me directly for it putting me in quite a bit of danger I had worked 2 years to get out of. However when I came to ask Adonis Paul to stop, he began to poorly gaslight me. I tried to tell him I could hear a girl by the name of Riley, roleplaying as my uncle Irish (by the same name even) in GTA. For years, my life story has been Riley's online persona and it began to catch up to me, but I had no idea what the hell was going on or why everyone was claiming I was crazy and gaslighting me with "schizophrenia" which wouldn't be the correct diagnosis anyways. It's been terrifying and cost me a lot of money just to feel safe. You see, Adonis Paul drove me away from sponsoring youtubers and twitch streamers due to the threats, alleged theft, sponsored parties pulling and haven't even made a streamlabs donation since 2019 because someone named "FT WORTH, TX HENDERSON" frauded our card for $400. Since my dad was doxed and my child threatened which, as a victim on protection order with a missing child, no youtube channel or stream herself, no public non-business socials it was a very real perceived threat. I went to police. I NEVER go to police, for obvious reasons. This person terrified me that "he and leaf had kidnapped my son to raise themselves" and not having seen him in a year, I was forced to go to police. Since this began, at least once a day, I've been followed into chats mocked for being raped in jail when wrongfully arrested and laughed at for my kid going missing and then mocked for going to the police for it.

Ironically the same guys were still there playing GTA, which you can only watch really if you want to get in on pixel. They suddenly knew I was there. Obviously. They'd been role playing with the online version of my identity, according to someone else, for YEARS. Before you ask, no, I have no idea who this person is. I know who they are now, but I've never met or spoken to this person and many don't even refer to them as Riley but as Lucy or Lara.

You know what was happening today? Live? 

We had just lost George Floyd, the entire country is in protest and getting looted after being shut down for months from Covid-19. The internet socialites were pulling everyone in all types of ways. From God, to Godzilla, Satan, to political parties. Everyone is hurting everyone and I've been watching it get worse and worse for months. 

The gamers were investigating in game after a year of my crying out to no one hearing me. By now, the Youngsliving organization was doing "movie reviews" in regards to... me? The lion tribe had copied and stolen my website. Aiden of Hemp City literally copied my site word for word. It was an attack. So I stopped and I let them start to get the back up and overwhelming stress that comes with my job and... because I would be at a halt, they get no more free work while they harass me. 

The pixel server was already familiar with who I was because it's where the identity was being used most and how everyone kept hearing my info to report me. The GTA cops were investigating for me. Like legitimately talking to real characters that also appeared in real life, because this was real crime being done... in game. It's the wildest thing I've seen. With the zoo, the review channels, the political channels, I honestly was surprised again, not by identity but to see police in a video game behaving better than the real police outside my home during the riots. They were investigating. Who took her? How did they know her? What's she look like? They speculated as much as I had. This was an insane situation and suddenly I realized all of us were placed into this by someone else like a chain reaction online. Hurt people, hurting people. I was taken back and many people told me they had no idea this was happening or they thought it was all in game. They forgot people were watching.

That's when I heard the chatter over the radio.

You can read chat. We can hear her now. Today's nature's law! It came from Metokur. He said it's Nature's birthday!

I heard a two game cops say and that's when I believed it was kind of over. 

That brings me back to the level guys, on the floor. They could hear me and you know. I was so hurt by these people that I didn't for one second think "why are they doing this to me?" I automatically assumed they did it to cause me harm, so I was hurting others in conversation with the ways I lashed out against it.

Hurt people, hurt people.

Everyone has shat on my favorite streamer. Everyone said things so vile against him, I wouldn't have looked twice at his stream if that came first. He was being hurt... right now. Today, in this moment, he was being hurt by not being given a fair shot at business like I had not gotten a fair shot before. I KNOW that feeling. 

So I've decided to be the one to stop the cycle. I know, I know. I'm such a lame, loser, boomer. Thing is when you act out as a real life identity you effect their life and the lives around them. You take more than sales you take away the persons security, safety in their own home, freedom to exist. You hurt everyone around you and if it's bad enough you'll do it to someone like me who will hunt you down and track you like the best GTA cop pixel. 

This is what happened with Pewdiepie. His fair chance was taken from him while people like Jake and Adonis Paul literally threaten SPONSORS, friends, family, jobs and eventually, the papers until they get what they want and all they want is submission and like Pewdiepie, I'm a stubborn Scandinavian who won't apologize if she doesn't mean it and won't say sorry if I'm not. These types of manipulators don't like that, so they attempt to control the narrative on your name. It should be illegal. Look at what the media does RIGHT NOW. Turn on the news and just listen for a few minutes. Isn't that insane?! The reason I bring up Pewdiepie is that he's in this game I'm somehow dragged into as well. You can catch it with the right bot or knowing what to look for with the out of context statements and the random, repetitive words.  It's those words that trigger the mind (or A.I.)  into the game. Point is, I had it done to me and I was about to turn around and do it AGAIN to Pewdiepie, the very man I quit the ad program for in the first place. The very one they threw under the bus. This woke me up.

I'm not going to say the words or things Pewdiepie says is okay or stand by his thoughts and ideas, that's not why I'm here. I'm here to make fair what was made wrong in the first place. It's the whole reason I went private sponsorship and here I am, angry that he's involved, blaming him and even Markiplier of doxing and threatening me simply because they're using the same words in the same game at the same time unbeknownst to one another. I was online, threatening the Wallstreet Journal to Pewdiepie and that is the most disgusted I've been with myself all year. I was hurt. I was going to hurt someone else because of it. 

So, all of these thoughts in my mind, I've been awaken. I've been humbled. I saw myself in the mirror becoming the very same monster I was hunting and collectively, in a way, the "game" these youtubers were playing actually made me a better person. It woke me up. I honestly feel if Adonis Paul had not doxxed me, my biological father, the man who took me in, my fathers motorcycle enthusiast group whom I finally had gotten away from and was now literally handed back to, threatening me, my youtubers and my son, I think the game would have ended much sooner. I had to come to the end myself though or I wouldn't learn.

No, what happened to me wasn't fair and no, it probably will never be made okay but in time maybe it will. All I know is I will NOT become one of them and I will NOT become the monster I hunted to hurt the people I protect. 

I've decided to let the streamer and his business in. I've decided to stop the cycle. I like the streamer and watched as a fan but right now, men are being censored and taken down, presented as nazis and literal Fuhrers. If I let him him sit and watch his friends and accomplices be accepted and moved out of the city it wouldn't be fair as he would have been first. It wouldn't be fair because as long as his labs are legit and not stolen, he deserves to go up like the rest of us or it will feel like he's singled out, attacked, and he will take it personally. It will hurt, he will hurt others, the cycle continues. 

I believe in checking for thorns in the paw before condemning the beast. I honestly see good in these streamers the media has labeled and thus, cost their jobs and finances. I've watched them struggle, yell out for help, have families in need, and now go through a pandemic with not so much as a squeak from the big dogs at Youtube. I almost missed an important video myself clearing a lot of this up by my dog/pig, or youtube friend in the game that guided me a bit, knowingly or not. That pig knows who he is and I don't want to risk his current position in the game by exposing him. I'm not the media, but thank you for exposing the bootlegging in the gulf of our brand lines as they think we own all 150. If you're reading this, you helped all the way to Pewdiepie. That's an impressive reach we can have, guys. 

So, I hope you all understand my stand on this. The cycle needs to stop. We can't leave people behind. This is a movement for all of us. Whether you believe in freedom or you believe in karma, green or light, our future will be grim if people are left behind. We can't build on cracked foundation. 

Please stop a cycle. 

We'll keep everyone updated as we reopen and upload products for our customers, our sponsored creators, our friends and families and as promised, are looking forward to working with unexpected our new friend and partner soon!

Not everyone is literal Hitler. Some are hurting from the thorns of the past. Pull them out and you tame the beast.

via Natural Healthy: Latest News

[jessiesent-blog]

Dave

I slept at 5am this morning tossing and turning, suddenly intensely thinking about Dave and Kai. This was brought on by discovering a whole file of voice memos I'd kept over the last three years. It made me realise how I'd definitively lost my mind and regained it. I was such a mess. I was talking such nonsense, incoherent shit that centred around the themes of a lack of identity, nonexistence of self, the absurdity of life, love, love and love. What the hell was love to me then? Some kind of infatuation and dependency. Did I really see these two boys I claimed to love? Did I really understand them and their needs? I concluded that I was selfish, and had my head up my arse. I was too messed up and scrambled in the head to have a coherent experience of reality. I thought that Dave was telepathic and he was communication secretly to me while I lived in his house. I hallucinated that he arranged and orchestrated my entire hospital admission and stay, declaring his love for me and his wish to marry me. I was scared and overwhelmed and I ran away, back to Singapore. Later, not being able to make sense of him suddenly becoming cold and cutting me off, I started having delusions that he was still in love with me and was stalking me while I was in Melbourne. I left graffiti on the walls of bathrooms for him to read, I left presents and cards on the street for him to pick up, I arranged things in my bedroom and left the window open, convinced that he would come in whenever I was out, and understand my secret messages. At the student's union in Monash, I was playing the piano and found a simple Casio watch. Later, I found a ring. I was convinced he had left them both for me. I went shopping for jeans and the next day, I was sure that the rips on the jeans weren't there when I bought them and that he'd snuck into the apartment to replace them with a different pair. When I met various people on the streets, I was convinced he'd sent them to talk to me and was communicating with me through them. This may all sound out of the blue, but it all started on the day of my first hospital admission. His roommates showed me a video of his brother marrying a Chinese girl right before him and Louis walked me to the hospital. I thought he was trying to tell me that we were getting married. At the hospital, I heard the receptionist call out "Anna Kendrick" instead of my name, and I thought Dave had planted that too, because I recently told him I'd seen the movie Pitch Perfect 2, which starred as its lead Anna Kendrick. In the first examining room, Dave and Louis were with me. The nurse said, looking between Dave and me, "I can see why you want to marry her." Later, as I was transported to John George hospital in Oakland, I heard in the ambulance the Superman song come on. It was spliced: "It's not easy to be CHEESY me." In the second hospital, a man named Ricardo kept telling me to keep an eye on an old woman with one prosthetic foot, saying that something was about to happen at any moment. She was then attacked by 7 security guards for wanting to go to the bathroom. I was convinced this entire experience was orchestrated by Dave, as a test of my character, to see if I had the leadership to lead a team with him on a mission to escape purgatory. Before the hospital, I had yelled for Dave from his backyard. He had come down and, calm and amused, asked if I wanted to see him. I immediately asked, "When did I die?" To which he answered, "We are in a kind of purgatory. There will be monsters coming after us and we have to stick close to our friends." That convinced me that I really was dead and in a different reality, and started this whole belief that the entire hospital experience was a test set up by Dave to train me for something even tougher. When I called Dave from the hospital, he didn't answer. Now, two years after all that, I'm sure that I must have hallucinated most of that. I'm still in slight disbelief - that my eyes and ears could betray and trick me so thoroughly, creating an entire reality that was unreliable. I'm no longer in love with Dave, but his figure still carries this sense of mystery that would make me pale and scared at the sight of him. For months I thought he was stalking me in Melbourne and there were so many moments I was afraid he was going to appear. Every time I came back home, I was relieved when I didn't find him in my bedroom. I was attracted to him but also freaked out that he was intensely stalking me. My mind didn't create a purely innocent fantasy, it created something of a horror too. I stuck to Kai even more closely, treating him as a shield against Dave. I felt that if Kai was around, Dave would not appear. Now, it is all embarrassing and slightly funny. Dave is just an ordinary guy who liked me but did not love me. He never did all the strange things I experienced; my mind created those. He was never in Melbourne. For months I was behaving irrationally, running away from no one. I'm not sure if it was the antipsychotics or that enough time had passed to convince me that he did not care about me and was not going to reappear in my life. I'd always thought of him as a magician, but now I see him as an ordinary guy, just leading his life far far away, mostly ignorant of my psychosis. I spent many months after my second hospital stay piecing together what had happened, examining all the clues obsessively, analysing every word and expression Dave and his housemates had whenever they said something strange. My world split into two realities: the reality where Dave was going to marry me and appear some day soon, and the reality where I had hallucinated everything that suggested the first reality. Now, I'm certain it was the latter: I had hallucinated and also Dave and his housemates were factually odd people who said odd things, feeding into my delusions. The main reason for that conclusion is that if Dave loved me, there would be no reason for such an elaborate orchestration of events. He would simply show up and look for me, or he wouldn't have cut me off to begin with. He must not love me. I know that now. The reason I fell in love with Dave was not because of who he is inherently. I don't think I even really knew who he was. It's because I was perpetually stoned and becoming schizophrenic, interpreting secret codes and messages in ordinary things. Finding his instagram recently really helped me disperse any remnants of the delusion. In the month I thought he was in Melbourne, he was still in America, working on his passion project, updating his instagram regularly with his progress. Having that proof before my eyes was the final confirmation that he was not a magician but an ordinary guy. All the mysticism fell away from him. I had attributed superpowers to him: telepathy, mind control, genius intelligence, Machiavellian leadership. I even remember at one point I was convinced he was a sociopath who ran the world through mind control, and I was scared. Looking at his Instagram, I was somewhat relieved and embarrassed. He's just an ordinary harmless guy, a little odd but not magical. I have a very open mind, too much for my own good. I believe that telepathy, mind control, hive minds could exist. I believe that the universe could be a simulation which is why we see so much coincidence or signs. But when I got very sick, those things weren't just an open-minded belief. They became certainties, and I acted logically according to those premises, resulting in bizarre behaviour. I know now, without a doubt that I had lost my mind. That knowledge means I've somewhat regained it. There's still some confusion about certain events, real or imagined, but I no longer have firm beliefs of big conspiracies of the fight for world domination, the fight against evil, the quest to kill everyone's egos. I'm okay now, but I'm still scared. I'm scared because I took the blue pill thinking it was the red pill. I'm scared that I can't tell the blue and red pill apart. Maybe there is no blue or red pill. It's just one reality, subjectively interpreted, not black and white, blue and red. Madness is not what you think. It's not confusion. It's certainty about a very different set of premises. One day I'll find the words to describe it all, but now I'm just unscrambling the experience. Dave and I will never be friends again, even if my delusions are gone. Too much has happened between us, even in the absence of him. He will be too wary to ever be in contact with me, maybe unless like 30 years have passed or something. That would be an interesting meeting to have 30 years from now. I wonder how he feels about me. Does he pity me? Does he worry about me? Does he feel scared of me? I will probably never know. And it matters less and less as he fades into a distant memory. He's just a guy.

[theextraspoon]

Remember Pewdiepie? The Swedish Youtuber once had a slip of a racial slur cost him his YT Red Series, cost him hundreds of thousands of followers and changed the way we use Youtube and Google. Thanks to the media, we've moved from cancelling people, to getting them fired, and when that doesn't work, we call the papers because we know they're the types to give us that feel good by default narrative that sent my view into the spiral of media puppetry. It baffled me that Youtube would want to throw it's poster boy under the bus like said to the advertisers summit in 2015. Since then Youtube ran ad campaigns for some really sketchy places, like the data-mining of Candid to the exploitation of mental health through Betterhelp yet denied completely legal ads from hemp cultivation. That's where we step in.

Last night I was watching one of my favorite streamers, Hyphonix, when it suddenly became clear that he was one of the owners of the businesses stuck in the cross-hairs of the media wars attempting to contact me and he was upset with me for being upset with him, understandable. However, he didn't dox me and he didn't dox my dad. He just didn't. I've tested it. People tried to convince me he was poison and stealing from me.That he was  a "literal Hitler." He's not though. At least, I've not seen it. 

He's a dick, sure, but most of us are dicks too. I think he's funny. Next to another streamer whom I found humorous outside of gamer gate for his delivery was, Jim "Metokur," whom we've mentioned before here. I like the kid. He didn't dox me. So when I apologized for wrongfully judging him, it was then his chat gave me the name I needed. 

The real person who've been behind digging into my personal information, doxing me, doxing my biological and adoptive family and even stole their identity so they can't be held accountable for their actions. This person, PPP, Pepe, AP, Adonis Paul or whatever name he give himself today, decided to claim a gang affiliation with the hells angels (whom he's never met in real life or even spoken to) in an effort to threaten people into or out of working with select sponsors and other streamers. However, I DO know a few angels and they don't take kindly to this behavior and blamed me directly for it putting me in quite a bit of danger I had worked 2 years to get out of. However when I came to ask Adonis Paul to stop, he began to poorly gaslight me. I tried to tell him I could hear a girl by the name of Riley, roleplaying as my uncle Irish (by the same name even) in GTA. For years, my life story has been Riley's online persona and it began to catch up to me, but I had no idea what the hell was going on or why everyone was claiming I was crazy and gaslighting me with "schizophrenia" which wouldn't be the correct diagnosis anyways. It's been terrifying and cost me a lot of money just to feel safe. You see, Adonis Paul drove me away from sponsoring youtubers and twitch streamers due to the threats, alleged theft, sponsored parties pulling and haven't even made a streamlabs donation since 2019 because someone named "FT WORTH, TX HENDERSON" frauded our card for $400. Since my dad was doxed and my child threatened which, as a victim on protection order with a missing child, no youtube channel or stream herself, no public non-business socials it was a very real perceived threat. I went to police. I NEVER go to police, for obvious reasons. This person terrified me that "he and leaf had kidnapped my son to raise themselves" and not having seen him in a year, I was forced to go to police. Since this began, at least once a day, I've been followed into chats mocked for being raped in jail when wrongfully arrested and laughed at for my kid going missing and then mocked for going to the police for it.

Ironically the same guys were still there playing GTA, which you can only watch really if you want to get in on pixel. They suddenly knew I was there. Obviously. They'd been role playing with the online version of my identity, according to someone else, for YEARS. Before you ask, no, I have no idea who this person is. I know who they are now, but I've never met or spoken to this person and many don't even refer to them as Riley but as Lucy or Lara.

You know what was happening today? Live? 

We had just lost George Floyd, the entire country is in protest and getting looted after being shut down for months from Covid-19. The internet socialites were pulling everyone in all types of ways. From God, to Godzilla, Satan, to political parties. Everyone is hurting everyone and I've been watching it get worse and worse for months. 

The gamers were investigating in game after a year of my crying out to no one hearing me. By now, the Youngsliving organization was doing "movie reviews" in regards to... me? The lion tribe had copied and stolen my website. Aiden of Hemp City literally copied my site word for word. It was an attack. So I stopped and I let them start to get the back up and overwhelming stress that comes with my job and... because I would be at a halt, they get no more free work while they harass me. 

The pixel server was already familiar with who I was because it's where the identity was being used most and how everyone kept hearing my info to report me. The GTA cops were investigating for me. Like legitimately talking to real characters that also appeared in real life, because this was real crime being done... in game. It's the wildest thing I've seen. With the zoo, the review channels, the political channels, I honestly was surprised again, not by identity but to see police in a video game behaving better than the real police outside my home during the riots. They were investigating. Who took her? How did they know her? What's she look like? They speculated as much as I had. This was an insane situation and suddenly I realized all of us were placed into this by someone else like a chain reaction online. Hurt people, hurting people. I was taken back and many people told me they had no idea this was happening or they thought it was all in game. They forgot people were watching.

That's when I heard the chatter over the radio.

You can read chat. We can hear her now. Today's nature's law! It came from Metokur. He said it's Nature's birthday!

I heard a two game cops say and that's when I believed it was kind of over. 

That brings me back to the level guys, on the floor. They could hear me and you know. I was so hurt by these people that I didn't for one second think "why are they doing this to me?" I automatically assumed they did it to cause me harm, so I was hurting others in conversation with the ways I lashed out against it.

Hurt people, hurt people.

Everyone has shat on my favorite streamer. Everyone said things so vile against him, I wouldn't have looked twice at his stream if that came first. He was being hurt... right now. Today, in this moment, he was being hurt by not being given a fair shot at business like I had not gotten a fair shot before. I KNOW that feeling. 

So I've decided to be the one to stop the cycle. I know, I know. I'm such a lame, loser, boomer. Thing is when you act out as a real life identity you effect their life and the lives around them. You take more than sales you take away the persons security, safety in their own home, freedom to exist. You hurt everyone around you and if it's bad enough you'll do it to someone like me who will hunt you down and track you like the best GTA cop pixel. 

This is what happened with Pewdiepie. His fair chance was taken from him while people like Jake and Adonis Paul literally threaten SPONSORS, friends, family, jobs and eventually, the papers until they get what they want and all they want is submission and like Pewdiepie, I'm a stubborn Scandinavian who won't apologize if she doesn't mean it and won't say sorry if I'm not. These types of manipulators don't like that, so they attempt to control the narrative on your name. It should be illegal. Look at what the media does RIGHT NOW. Turn on the news and just listen for a few minutes. Isn't that insane?! The reason I bring up Pewdiepie is that he's in this game I'm somehow dragged into as well. You can catch it with the right bot or knowing what to look for with the out of context statements and the random, repetitive words.  It's those words that trigger the mind (or A.I.)  into the game. Point is, I had it done to me and I was about to turn around and do it AGAIN to Pewdiepie, the very man I quit the ad program for in the first place. The very one they threw under the bus. This woke me up.

I'm not going to say the words or things Pewdiepie says is okay or stand by his thoughts and ideas, that's not why I'm here. I'm here to make fair what was made wrong in the first place. It's the whole reason I went private sponsorship and here I am, angry that he's involved, blaming him and even Markiplier of doxing and threatening me simply because they're using the same words in the same game at the same time unbeknownst to one another. I was online, threatening the Wallstreet Journal to Pewdiepie and that is the most disgusted I've been with myself all year. I was hurt. I was going to hurt someone else because of it. 

So, all of these thoughts in my mind, I've been awaken. I've been humbled. I saw myself in the mirror becoming the very same monster I was hunting and collectively, in a way, the "game" these youtubers were playing actually made me a better person. It woke me up. I honestly feel if Adonis Paul had not doxxed me, my biological father, the man who took me in, my fathers motorcycle enthusiast group whom I finally had gotten away from and was now literally handed back to, threatening me, my youtubers and my son, I think the game would have ended much sooner. I had to come to the end myself though or I wouldn't learn.

No, what happened to me wasn't fair and no, it probably will never be made okay but in time maybe it will. All I know is I will NOT become one of them and I will NOT become the monster I hunted to hurt the people I protect. 

I've decided to let the streamer and his business in. I've decided to stop the cycle. I like the streamer and watched as a fan but right now, men are being censored and taken down, presented as nazis and literal Fuhrers. If I let him him sit and watch his friends and accomplices be accepted and moved out of the city it wouldn't be fair as he would have been first. It wouldn't be fair because as long as his labs are legit and not stolen, he deserves to go up like the rest of us or it will feel like he's singled out, attacked, and he will take it personally. It will hurt, he will hurt others, the cycle continues. 

I believe in checking for thorns in the paw before condemning the beast. I honestly see good in these streamers the media has labeled and thus, cost their jobs and finances. I've watched them struggle, yell out for help, have families in need, and now go through a pandemic with not so much as a squeak from the big dogs at Youtube. I almost missed an important video myself clearing a lot of this up by my dog/pig, or youtube friend in the game that guided me a bit, knowingly or not. That pig knows who he is and I don't want to risk his current position in the game by exposing him. I'm not the media, but thank you for exposing the bootlegging in the gulf of our brand lines as they think we own all 150. If you're reading this, you helped all the way to Pewdiepie. That's an impressive reach we can have, guys. 

So, I hope you all understand my stand on this. The cycle needs to stop. We can't leave people behind. This is a movement for all of us. Whether you believe in freedom or you believe in karma, green or light, our future will be grim if people are left behind. We can't build on cracked foundation. 

Please stop a cycle. 

We'll keep everyone updated as we reopen and upload products for our customers, our sponsored creators, our friends and families and as promised, are looking forward to working with unexpected our new friend and partner soon!

Not everyone is literal Hitler. Some are hurting from the thorns of the past. Pull them out and you tame the beast.

via Natural Healthy: Latest News