#google how to tell someone that their 6 year old dubs of 10+ year old games fixed you without sounding weird

[marshmallowloves]

I found a some really good fandubs and they're obliterating me

[yutaya]

what was your first Conan fic?

Oh boy, storytime!

So there is a short answer and a LONG answer to this question. 

The Short Answer:

You didn’t ask this for the whole story, you asked because of what I mentioned in my tags: that the first DCMK fic I ever read had a scene where Conan lays out exactly how easy it would have been, after Kaito’s slip up referencing the great magician Kuroba Toichi while in disguise at the lodge on that one case, to just... look up Kuroba Toichi. With the filters from other things Conan had extrapolated, such as likely age range, combined with the kind of closeness to Toichi indicated by Kid’s bringing him up, it would have taken maybe half a day to narrow down the likely identity of the new Kaitou Kid. Conan knew that was all he had to do. And then... he didn’t. He purposefully never looked there, let it remain a mystery.

UNFORTUNATELY, I remembered wrong. My first DCMK fic, while the gateway to a whole new world for me, is not actually the fic that has this scene. :/

There was a little community of DCMK fics I was reading back in the livejournal days (ManyCasesOneTruth LJ community, whatup!!!) and it was one of those that had that scene, but I’m not sure which one. :( If someone reads this monster and happens to know, please tell me so I can reread it. Haha.

Anyway my first Conan fic was Windfall by Ysabet.

The Long Answer: (AKA how Detective Conan changed my life)

The year was 2004. I had finally started watching the Case Closed dub on Adult Swim - videotaping it because I couldn’t stay up to watch it at 1AM - after half a year of being too afraid because the commercials involved dead bodies and it looked scary.

That summer, my family was on vacation, and there was no way for me to watch the episodes that would be piling up on the VHS back at home. I had briefly ventured onto the ff.net page before, but found so many summaries centered around unfamiliar names that I assumed I had to watch more and meet all these fan favorite characters before I’d be able to make heads or tails of any of it. But - I was at ends, and so I decided to give it another shot. A google search brought me to a site called something like The Red Thread, and a list with winners of some fanfiction awards. Best overall for... whatever year it was - 2003? - was Windfall by Ysabet.

Now, the funny thing about Windfall is: not only does it use all the Japanese names that so confused me back then, not only does it center completely around characters I had not met yet and assume knowledge of events and backstory that I didn’t have - it’s also actually the fourth fic in a series. Not that I was aware of that. Character that isn’t in the canon? I assumed it was yet another canon character that I just hadn’t met yet. Everyone else was. Probably the only name I recognized in that fic was “Conan” and he ended up playing such a small part (though I extrapolated that “Ayumi” was “Amy” pretty easily). But it was so good, and I devoured it anyway.

Only 7 chapters of Windfall were posted on TheRedThread. I finished this fic about Kaito, who I didn’t know, and Aoko, who I didn’t know, and Ayumi, who I had seen trapped in a car trunk with a “severed head” in one CC episode but who I had not at all seen grow a friendship with a thief sheltering on her balcony, and I wanted more.

When I got home, I found the wait for Case Closed episodes to air more agonizing than ever. I took to google again, seeking out more information, and somehow, someway, stumbled through my first ever torrent download. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I didn’t know episodes of television could be available online. I couldn’t believe it when I saw a link titled “episodes 1-10″ and just blindly followed whatever instructions I could to see what it was. Downloading Bittorrent, downloading VLC... Imagine my surprise when I finally opened up the show I was looking for but.. in another language. With subtitles!

It all took off from there. I learned all about how most of the cartoons I liked were actually anime from Japan and that when they were dubbed in English the companies often also changed characters’ names and censored stuff and altered large swathes of dialogue to make things more palatable to American audiences. I learned about manga that I could buy in Waldenbooks and that most of them were flipped but some of them weren’t because the original artwork was meant to be read right to left. I learned about, basically, everything that I had been missing out on from the stories I liked, that had been diluted out of the original versions for my consumption.

I started following a Detective Conan fansubber and downloading their latest episodes as soon as they came out, and learned all about “Shinichi” and “Ran”.

I discovered that Windfall was actually part of an entire Wind series, and had a lot more than 7 chapters besides. Fanfiction was my entire introduction to Kaitou Kid and I used to draw fanart based entirely on descriptions in fic and then was super excited when the preview for the next Detective Conan episode  (76!) included Kaito! Kaito Kuroba, the main character in Windfall, my introduction to this entire world! (And my mental image of him from fanfic was a fair ways off - it was elating to see the actual character. I think I immediately drew like 8 different pictures based on that preview, since I had a reference.)

As I mentioned earlier, there was a very small community of Conan fics I was reading back then - probably about 5 or 6 core authors on a Conan fanworks livejournal community (Many Cases One Truth!) who wrote a number of fics that I recall fondly. There was the psychic detective Heiji series by KosagiNoLegion - I LOVED that one. The Shinichi and Kaito find out they’re actually identical cousins fic (Relative Truth, by Becky Tailweaver).  Ysabet‘s entire Wind series, obviously. The most notable BNF was probably Icka M. Chif, who I always remember was once described to “own 3/4 of the Magic Kaito fandom in fic.” To this day I will idly doodle fanart for Billie Jukes’ The Impossible Murder. I could go on for ages about all the now quite old DCMK fic from back in the livejournal days, but... that would take a lot of writing. Haha.

Anyway, the Detective Conan fandom and its explanations about dub names, etc. is the reason I found out about anime and manga and dubbing and censorship and rewrites and how very different the Digimon movies are from The Digimon Movie, and all about 4chan One Piece vs actual One Piece, and is the reason I now always try to watch foreign films in their original languages with subtitles and basically altered the trajectory of my entire life at 13 years old.

(Well, probably not. Probably I would have discovered all of these things anyway, and sooner rather than later. But I didn’t, and Detective Conan will always get the credit for my life.)

[kirinda-ondo]

Rant/tell me about Cobalt and why u love him so much??

Ok so this is probably going to get very long, and very, very cheesy, and I hope y’all are ready for this.

Cobalt is a very special character to me and is absolutely my favorite character of all time, from anything in the history of ever. It doesn’t matter what other fandom I’m hyperfixated on or what character I’m saying is my son at the moment, if you bring him up at any time, in any context I will be there.

So you’re probably wondering how I got here.

Once upon a time, it was 2009 and I was a young weeaboo, constantly absorbing everything anime or manga I could. I had just come out from the Astro Boy movie, and I immediately wanted to watch the source material. I’d already seen a bit of it on adult swim when they were running an Astro Boy marathon, but I had to go to bed at 11:30 then so I didn’t get to see much. So this time, I went to youtube and I found all the (dubbed) episodes of the 60s series. (Sadly you can’t find them all there anymore and it’s a crying shame).

I basically marathoned them, but over in the sidebar where the recommendations were, I kept seeing the thumbnail for part 2 or 3 (this was back when youtube only let you post 10 minute videos and you had to watch anime in 3 parts) of the episode “Brother Jetto.” You could plainly see him, and so it was clear this was supposed to be Astro’s brother. I thought it was neat that Astro even had a brother, as I’d only known about Uran before. I wanted to know more, but I promised myself I wouldn’t skip ahead. Though it was very tempting at times, I stuck to my guns and watched all 83 episodes up to that point.

However, it was not actually love at first sight. When I finally got to this episode 84, I wasn’t really impressed. “Wow, he’s kind of annoying, what’s the point?” I had thought like a fool, but I was still willing to accept him as part of the canon, as I figured I’d be seeing a lot more of him now that he had been introduced. After all, that’s what they did with Uran! But then…. that pretty much didn’t happen at all, which I thought was kind of weird. After all, why introduce a new sibling if he’s not going to show up again?

But then I got to the episode “A Deep, Deep Secret” about 6 episodes later, and I found myself a little relieved that he wasn’t completely canned. Upon watching that episode, I’d found that he’d started to grow on me a bit, but he still wasn’t my favorite. However, the trend of him being gone for several episodes only to show up once in a blue moon continued until I’d run out of episodes. I moved on to the 80s series next (and then the 2003 series) having learned that Cobalt had been replaced by Atlas as Astro’s brother. While I enjoyed those series (the 80s one a bit moreso than the 2003 one), I found myself kind of missing Astro’s dingus brother that had barely seemed to get a chance. After marathoning all the series (at the time), I started doing some googling and found out he had a slightly better run in the undubbed Japanese episodes (which was also how I discovered AB-O! Hi fandom!) and I’d learned a lot more about him. But the most important thing I’d learned was that I was in fact very emotionally invested in this character now and I was in deep.

Mind you at this time the undubbed Japanese episodes were nearly impossible to find without purchasing the complete DVD set and a player that could play them (on account of the fact that the set was region locked from western DVD players) so for years I sat wondering more about what those Japanese episodes were like, as the forums only had plot summaries with a handful of screencaps to go off of. Nowadays you can watch all the undubbed (and sadly unsubbed) episodes here but 13 year old me did not have the knowledge to do foreign language googling at the time.

But still, my Cobalt-loving heart wanted more, so I scoured the English speaking internet for whatever I could find, official or fanmade. Official content was virtually nonexistent, and the amount of fanmade content, I could count on one hand. The general fan consensus at the time seemed to be “Who the hell is Cobalt” or “Eh, whatever,” which was a far cry from how it is now. But being horribly deprived back then, I did the only thing I could: I combed through the dub for every episode he was in, coming up with a whopping total of…..four (well technically five but in that one he’s literally only in the last five seconds with no animation or lines), and I watched them religiously. I could pretty much quote Cobalt’s debut episode by heart. (For the record I can no longer do this to the extent I used to, but should the opportunity arise, I can still quote large chunks of it).

As I did this and learned more about him in my desperate googling, I started developing jokes for what would become my first silly comics, for which I am known in this fandom for. The art and writing for these was….. painful, to say the least, so I don’t even like to think about it, but as I’d already had a decently sized following from drawing silly (read: bad) Sonic comics, they caught on decently well, and I’d even managed to drag my friend and son down with me into Cobalt Hell™. Together, we made a group for Cobalt fans on deviantart (which is still up, but I no longer run it, as I deactivated the account that modded it without transferring ownership, so now it’s likely a wild west hellscape that I’m a little scared to look at).

This seemed to help do the trick though, as Cobalt fans were slowly coming out of the woodwork and appreciating this good boy. On and off I’d spread my yelling about Cobalt (and my silly drawings) to different platforms like the Astro Boy forums and tumblr, and even as I got into different things, after awhile, things kinda grew without me. Now I’m not gonna be out here claiming I built this city myself with my own two hands, as a lot of people got dragged into this hell of their own accord, but I do like to think my, umm….passion at least helped generate some interest, and I can’t help but be proud of how far this fandom has come from “Who the hell is Cobalt” to “Look at this good boy, I love him” and literally all the other Cobalt fans I’ve met have been the coolest people (in general, not just because of their good taste).

I think what really changed my life though was when AprilSeven, a mod on the Astro Boy forum and also probably the original Cobalt fan, as she’d seen the 60s version back when it was originally airing, finally got a hold of the undubbed Japanese episodes, and graciously allowed me and a few of the other big-name Cobalt fans get in on that action, and boy howdy, the screenshots and plot summaries really did not do these episodes justice (at least in terms of Cobalt content). My understanding of him as a character expanded like tenfold, and my appreciation of him expanded even more than that.

…Which brings me into a nice segue in which I shift more into just exactly why I like Cobalt so much. Yes, there’s more. I warned y'all, this was gonna be a Pandora’s Box that could not be closed once it was opened.

I honestly just find him a joy to watch. A lot of what made him grow on me was just how funny he is. I’m a sucker for comic relief characters in general, and he has a personality that lends itself to comedy. In the anime version, he’s literally introduced right out the gate as being kind of a dingus. He’s naive, he’s way too trusting of obviously suspicious people, he’s easily confused, he’s easily distracted, he’s a klutz, and he just… regularly destroys the laws of physics and/or the fourth wall just because. Sometimes he also gets weird ideas in his head to do things that could have been done a completely different, easier way and weirdly enough, it actually kind of winds up working? It’s so fun to watch him approach problems because he’s just… so far out there sometimes.

But beyond being absolutely weird and hilarious, he’s just a really sweet kid. He doesn’t like to fight, he wants to make friends with everyone and everything, he will drop literally anything he’s doing, no matter how important it is, to help someone in need, he’s good with babies and small children and puppies (sometimes), he would fight (and sacrifice himself) for his family, and just means well even if he tends to bungle things up and make them worse sometimes. Honestly, and this is gonna sound dumb, but he helped me be a better person. I used to be an absolute asshole when I was younger, but once I’d gotten into Cobalt Hell™, I was like “I wanna be that sweet and good (but with a better sense of stranger danger)” and I made that effort and did that shit.

That being said though, he’s not perfect, and I wouldn’t want him to be. His flaws, though they kind of give him the short end of the stick in life, are a lot of why I find him so endearing. All the naivety and confusion and general lack of coordination I mentioned before aside, he’s honestly just really relatable. He’ll say jokes so bad that Uran wants to punch him, he’ll opt out of the plot because he doesn’t want to get out of bed, he’ll fight with his siblings over silly petty things, he’ll get frustrated if he tries something and it doesn’t go his way, he’ll absolutely partake in his siblings’ mischief (if not start it sometimes), and just so much more. He just feels like a kid you would know (or maybe a kid that you were at one point) and I really appreciate that about him.

Unfortunately, the canon was not kind to Cobalt, and I think a lot of that comes from Osamu Tezuka just… not knowing what to do with him after making him? Like in the manga, he was just kind of created as a really rushed contingency plan because they thought Astro was missing. Sure, he was taken in as part of the family afterward, but not many appearances later, he was killed off in a firey explosion… Until Tezuka decided to change his mind and let him live in the end. His grave’s still there though. He gets to see it. I know it’s a framing device to explain the circumstances of Cobalt’s retconned death but it’s kind of fucked up to let a boy see his own grave..

Even being brought back, Cobalt didn’t get to do very much. He’d get some good scenes with Uran, but a lot of the time, he was sort of just relegated to filling up space in the background, provided he actually survived til the end of the chapter. When he wasn’t getting forgotten by the plot and thusly zapped out of existence, he would wind up sacrificing himself in some way that wouldn’t allow him to continue to take part in the plot anymore (be it parts, energy, etc.) The most painfully egregious example of this is in the chapter “Youth Gas.” Astro and Cobalt are convinced to fight each other to the “death.” They’re not really dead, but Ochanomizu says they are and can’t be repaired. At first, there’s mourning for “two of the world’s greatest robots,” but then we see a funeral service in which only Astro’s body is shown and his parents are only mourning him, completely forgetting Cobalt exists. He’s never seen again for the rest of the chapter. Now I would assume this is just a writing mistake, but it really does make it look like Cobalt’s own parents wouldn’t even bat an eye if he died, so there’s that.

The anime isn’t quite as horrible, and it is kind enough to give Cobalt a more prominent role once he finally shows up (even getting a handful of focus episodes!), but he doesn’t go unscathed either. In this version, he has the misfortune of being created by Dr. Umataro “Father of the Year” Tenma before Astro was made and was scrapped because, to quote dub!Ochan, “his electronic brain wasn’t as perfect as Dr. [Tenma] wanted.” (read: he thought Cobalt was a dumbass). Cobalt is eventually found and brought into the family, but because he still winds up not being relevant to the plot a lot of the time, he is once again zapped out of the existence and looks like a victim of child neglect. As a result, he gets left out of family vacations and holidays, even in favor of Chi-tan, who is usually even higher on the scale of irrelevant Astro Boy characters. Unlike Astro, Cobalt doesn’t have any consistent friends to even remotely justify what he could possibly be doing offscreen by himself, so it just kind of implies a very sad and lonely existence in-universe.

And of course, the final, meta blow that literally every fan of Cobalt is still despairing about to this day: basically being yeeted out of the canon. After the 60s series, he disappeared off the face of the earth until 2015 when some lovely soul decided to bring him back for Peeping Life TV: Season 1?? (The question marks are part of the title). He’d be referenced again a couple years later in Atom: The Beginning, and will be here for the game Eshigami no Kizuna sometime in 2019 as a… moe anime girl. That’s a little weird, but I’m hoping these sorts of weird appearances will mean a trend toward putting him back in the canon (and hopefully being treated better).

It just hurts my heart to see such a good character get treated like this by canon. He deserves way better and it just seems really clear to me that Tezuka didn’t really know what to do with him. I feel like he has a lot of potential as a character, though. Regardless of what origin you pick for him, Cobalt is essentially existing as a worse version of Astro. I feel like you could have some good character development regarding how he would feel about himself in relation to Astro in sort of a parallel to how Astro might feel about himself in relation to Tobio, the person he was based off of. You could go some neat places with these sort of questions about identity and expectations, I think. Or if you want to just do something funny because your character arcs are getting too real now, you can just let Cobalt do some silly shit. He’s a versatile character!

I’ve done all this rambling and now I’m not really sure how to wrap all this up, so umm

Cobalt is a good boy and deserves better, please hire me Tezuka Productions, and thank you for coming to my TED Talk

[mentalcurls]

1. Sembri una pu***na

So I started the all-Skam Italia rewatch last Sunday and it turns out I have a lot to say about it. Like, four pages on Word of stuff to say. It took me three days to get evrything out and make it readable. So here, for you reading pleasure, my thoughts on ep.1 season 1 “Sembri una pu***ana”. There’s some kind of heavy stuff and I draw some parallels to my personal experience, since I was, unce upon a time, a teenager and a student at the same school all the highschoolers in SkamIT attend, and I’m also beginning to do the Bechdel test on the episodes!

The montage at the beginning is really powerful when you link the images from Giovanni and Eva’s class’s time at the Succursale to Gio’s essay, that Eva’s reading in the background, in particular the first part: LudoBesse is basically telling us how much of a waste Eva thinks her and Laura’s friendship is to Laura now

Something else about Gio’s essay (as someone who attended classico): it’s a YES from me because criticizing liceo classico is peak classico culture, it’s a HELL NO because classico is actually the best school in the world and I sincerely hope that if anyone else but himself said/wrote that kind of stuff about his school Gio would be at their throats

Eva has that “seeing someone outside the school gates and static fills your ears” moment just like Marti when he sees Niccolò for the first time! Hers is of course with Laura and Sara, who are with... Silvia and Fede! I like that they showed us a bit of this friendship that we didn’t really get to see in the og.

Martino and that iconic first “A zozzoni!” ❤️

Marti and Gio are competing for who got the best grades in the History test and I have a lot to say about this: we know Gio has really high grades (we are told he has an average of 9/10 in Latin and he got 8,5 in History) and that thing he does, bragging about it with his friend, the friendly competition between them, the actual talking about his grades without worrying who’s listening to him? That shit wouldn’t have flied for me, a once-upon-a-time student of liceo classico with an average of 8/10 in Latin, 8/10 in Ancient Greek and 9/10 in History and in part it was because I didn’t have the best classmates, but for the most part I couldn’t have done that because I am a girl (and my friends and classmates were 98% female)

girls are socialized to be humble about accomplishments, first and foremost, to avoid bragging AND humblebragging as well, and to always care about other people and their feelings; basically, whenever the topic of marks and grades came up while I was in high school, I had to try my best to avoid disclosing my own; if they were brought up directly, say them as dispassionately as possible and then try to change topic; I had be conscious of the fact I was talking someone who had much worse grades than me most of the time, so I had to keep into mind their experience of finding things I found doable (like translating from Latin) extremely hard, of disliking subjects I enjoyed (and most of the time the professor who taught them too, especially when they’d recently gotten a bad mark) and of being frustrated by their grades. I could never have competed with any of my friends about who got the highest marks (most of the time there was actually a sort of “gallows humor” competition over who got the lowest). I couldn’t show I was happy about my good grades, because I’d get negative comments from my friends (yes, even close friends, people I get on with and love to this day) who would dismiss my accomplishment as obvious, something that came easily to me because I was a nerd (the translation in Italian is “secchiona” and it doesn’t have any of the “cute” connotations pop culture gave its English counterpart) and something I shouldn’t “show off”. On top of that, if something was hard for me, it was whatever and what right did I have to complain when I had such high grades anyways, it wouldn’t be a problem in the long run.

So yeah, Martino and Giovanni, right now I kind of hate you for not having to take on any emotional labour in these kind of situations and society for socializing males and females in different ways when it comes to accomplishments and for accepting different behaviours from boys and girls.

QED Gio and Marti turn to Eva and ask her about her mark, she’s reticent but they get an answer out of her (that is not even the truth) and they mock her for it. Yes it’s all fun and games but Eva’s mark is really bad compared to Giovanni’s and Martino’s (especially her real mark) and grades are important for teens, no matter how much they deny it, if nothing else then because they influence their relationship with their parents

you can see Eva is hurt by their careless mocking, by Gio’s fake attempt at placating with “stuff she’s good at” (among which is re-heating pre-cooked food which is at the same time a way to have her “stay in the kitchen” and not even be able to properly cook) and by the way he and Marti underestimate her and laugh at her in the following exchange, when Marti shushes her and she calls him “asshole” with that annoyed face. It’s silly, “loving” mockery but it affects people anyways and it shows a lack of empathy only guys are allowed. She’s expected to take it with good grace (and this takes additional emotional labour) because it’s just for fun and they’re friends and they don’t mean it, but it’s not fair

“There are no secrets in a couple, but there aren’t between friends either.” THE WAY MARTINO PUTS HIMSELF ON THE SAME LEVEL AS EVA in Giovanni’s life, straight away! This boy. And Gio agrees! That shit must’ve been so frustrating, poor Eva.

This conversation  between Gio, Eva and Marti: G: Today we’re going to Elia’s place to study. E: Oh, so that’s what you’re calling it now, studying. M: Oh c’mon, 6 minus, shhh. is the beginning of the reoccurring dynamic between them in the season that will make Eva paranoid and will bring her to confronting Laura and to cheating aka Giovanni keeping a secret, lying to Eva about where he goes and what he does, Martino enabling him by misdirecting or distracting her or Gio doing it himself, then either or both the guys calling her crazy or paranoid for doubting their words. You know what’s that? It’s called gaslighting.

[Gaslighting means manipulating a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity. It’s the same technique that, according to some of his critics, Donald Trump used to get gain traction with voters (see Trump giving “alternative facts” and dubbing the media that fact checked and corrected him “fake news”).]

[I’M NOT SAYING THAT GIOVANNI IS THE SAME AS TRUMP, I DON’T THINK THEY’RE THE SAME, I only want to present an example of how this form of psychological manipulation is an actual thing in the real word and is really effective and dangerous.]

I am aware that Giovanni is just a dumb teenager trying to hide his weed habit from his girlfriend, that Martino is just being a good bro and covering for his best friend, that they’re doing this without any malicious intent towards Eva and that she’s insecure all by herself. Still, gaslighting is not a behaviour our societies should excuse, especially because it’s usually practiced by the usual suspects over women and minorities. I’d never seen it pointed out in the context of Skam Italia so I thought I’d bring it up, especially in light of S2 and of the “unproblematic” label Gio’s been given. He’s not perfect, he does shitty stuff too, then afterwards he simply grows up and becomes better. Let’s not forget about it and celebrate the person he’s become.

Case in point is the whole 1.2 Online clip. This is conversation between Eva and Gio: G: My battery died. E: But you were on-line. G: No, I wasn’t, my phone died a couple of hours ago. E: But I saw you. G: Eva, I don’t know how it happened. There must be something wrong with my phone, I don’t know. Sometimes I see you online and you’re not, too. I mean, everyone knows it happens. We can Google it if you want. E: No, it’s okay. And where were you? G: At Elia’s. E: Till now? G: Yeah. E: That’s weird. I talked to Martino earlier and he said you guys left a while ago. G: Eva, what’s wrong? Martino left earlier and I stayed till now. What, you don’t believe? Don’t you trust me? Are you insane, uh? [G kisses E] Everything’s alright. Little koala? Little koala always works. [G carries E to her room, then they have sex.] Giovanni lies about his phone being dead, then tells Eva that her seeing him online is impossible or a fluke, that everyone knows those kind of flukes happen, then lies again about being at Elia, when she tries to expose him he adjusts and starts questioning why she doesn’t believe him, finally calling her crazy and distracting her with kisses and sex. This is gaslighting.

(I had actual chills as I watched the scene again and typed this.)

Those theatre kids are so awkward, but quoting weird passages from greek/latin/italian poetry by heart is peak liceo classico culture

unsupportive boyfriend Gio shows up again when Eva suggest they go to the Easter party: his first reaction is “What? Why? You don’t even like that”, so savage, but fair Eva reminds him he’s actually a loser who, at 16, plays card to have fun with his friends like a 60 year old

Gio is being an asshole, he only considers going with Eva’s suggestion in exchange for something, then guilts her into accepting his “deal” bringing up Marti’s difficult family situation and her grades, implicitly, by promising to volunteer for the philosophy oral test, plus he’s rude and insensitive af because he brings up her inviting a friends when he knows fully well that when they cheated on Laura she got completely cut off

this will show up again, but let me just start to say it in the first episode: how unfair is it for Eva to be suffering most of the consequences in her life for getting together with her best friend’s boyfriend, when Giovanni faces no consequences that we know of for cheating on his girlfrien? And how unfair it must feel, deep deep down, to Eva

then, when she agrees, he takes back his side of the deal and Eva has to say it’s fine, it’s nothing because he says sorry and that’s socialization kicking in, telling her not to be difficult, not to be needy and not to complain cause that’s annoying and girls guys want to date are not any of those things; honestly, the emotional labour Eva has to go through

that getting ready montage, Eva really goes full on revenge mode like Lady D and she’s fully feeling her oats

the first dress Eva tries on is the same we saw Laura wearing at the party, but Eva’s red while Laura’s blue: I put all my money o it being a dress they bought together and on it being kind of their go-to dress, Eva thought about wearing it to remind Laura of their friendship but in the end decided it would only make things harder

oh, the conversation with Laura at the bar. God, if the situation is this tense can you imagine being in the same class as her and as Gio six hours a day everyday? We’ve talked about how shit it must have felt for Niccolò to be in the same class as Marco Covitti in S2, but Eva’s situation is awful too. I wonder how much of that factors in her bad grades and troubles with school

how more people don’t ship Italian Evanora is beyond me, have you seen this interaction?

on the other hand, I wonder how much Eleonora thought about it later, about how she must have come on too strong, about how maybe Eva thought she was weird or hitting on her and how much that weighed on Eleonora not reaching out first again, cause she makes a face like she regrets her life the minute Eva walks away

it breaks my heart, honestly: Eva has just been told she’s a whore by someone she once considered a friend, but when she finds this person’s new friend, who she doesn’t know, crying in the bathroom she doesn’t bat an eyelash, reassures her and tries her best to help her (so much emotional labour that women “naturally” take on themselves because we’re taught to be empathetic and caretakers even when we’re ourselves in distress)

one question: if Federico Canegallo is as popular as the Villa crew seems to be, how the hell does nobody know him when Eva is looking for “Fede”? Besides, Silvia doesn’t even react to the fact that he’s a friend of Edoardo’s when she sees him in the bathroom!

the interaction between the two Fedes kills me in every version

ok fuck you Silvia for not even saying thanks for trying and looking at Eva like she’s a decerebrate

Bechdel test: the episodes passes the test because of the conversations between Eva and Laura (nice 😑), Eva and Eleonora (though they’re mostly talking shit about other girls, so still not very good) and Eva and Silvia (though we actually don’t know her name yet at this point, we can only guess it from context, so it’s borderline). So this is cute.

This post is part of my complete series of meta about Skam Italia season 1.  If you’d like to read more of my thoughts about the other episodes, you can find the mastepost linked in the top bar on my blog under SKAMIT: EVA. Cheers!

[wsmith215]

Coronavirus: What We Know Now

June 8, 2020 — The first confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. appeared in January. At the time, the world knew almost nothing about how the virus spreads or how to treat it. Six months later, our knowledge has grown, but researchers continue to make discoveries almost daily. Here’s what the latest science tells us:

Symptoms of COVID-19

At first, health experts believed COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, primarily affected patients’ lungs. While it’s still primarily a lung disease, other symptoms have appeared often, and they’ve been added to the list of signs of COVID. People with the disease don’t necessarily have all these symptoms — or any symptoms at all — but any of them appearing 2-14 days after exposure could be cause for concern:

Fever or chills Cough Shortness of breath or a hard time breathing Fatigue Muscle or body aches Headache New loss of taste or smell Sore throat Congestion or runny nose Nausea or vomiting Diarrhea How COVID-19 Spreads

In the early days of the coronavirus, sometimes it felt like just setting foot outside your home might risk your life. We still don’t know everything, but we know considerably more about how the virus spreads and who is most at risk. One big discovery: Infected people who show few or even no symptoms can spread the virus.

Experts believe the virus spreads mainly when people are in close contact (within about 6 feet), via droplets an infected person expels while talking, coughing, sneezing, singing, or breathing hard. If droplets carrying the virus get into your nose, eyes, or mouth, they could go to your lungs.

Recent research has found the tiny droplets that come out when you speak can hang in the air for several minutes indoors. If the person speaking has the virus, those tiny droplets are large enough to contain it. This is one reason closing the economy helped to slow the spread — we stopped spending time indoors with strangers. Outdoors, the risk is much lower since a breeze can carry away the droplets.

While the virus can live for hours or days on surfaces, at this point experts don’t believe it’s the primary way people get infected.

Who Is More Likely to Develop a Severe Case of COVID?

People with certain conditions are more likely to have a severe case of COVID-19. A recent study of more than 20,000 people hospitalized for it in the U.K. found that age, sex, obesity, and a handful of chronic diseases posed the greatest risk. More men than women were admitted, and the patients had a median age of 73. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, pulmonary disease, and kidney disease were the most common other conditions.

While the majority of people with the disease have mild cases or no symptoms, people of all ages in the U.S. have had severe disease. In some cases, patients get what is called an immune system overreaction that leads to a “cytokine storm” that overwhelms the body.

Another group has emerged with an entirely different kind of risk: young children. At first, experts believed that if kids got the coronavirus, they’d either have no symptoms or only mild ones. But in April, some children began getting a potentially life-threatening condition dubbed multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Scientists don’t understand the syndrome yet, but many children who’ve been afflicted either had COVID or had been around someone who did. To date, roughly 200 children have gotten MIS-C in this country, and it’s believed that four have died from it.

Preventing the Spread: Masks, Social Distancing, Hygiene

The thinking has evolved over the last few months here, too. We used to be told that masks weren’t necessary for anyone not on the front lines fighting the pandemic. But now, the CDC recommends that everyone over 2 years old wear a face covering of some kind away from home, especially when you can’t maintain a distance of 6 feet from other people.

In addition to masks, experts suggest a handful of other precautions. Social distancing — staying at least 6 feet away from anyone who doesn’t live with you — is another key. A systematic review (a study of studies) just published in The Lancet found that wearing a mask cuts your risk of catching the virus by 85%, and staying just 1 meter (around 3 feet) from others could reduce it by 82%. The risk goes down even further at 2 meters. Covering one’s eyes with googles or shields helped prevent infection by 78%.

Aside from the addition of masks and social distancing, the basic advice the CDC gave us when the pandemic first started still holds: Wash your hands or use hand sanitizer frequently, avoid touching your face, cough or sneeze into a tissue or your elbow, and disinfect commonly touched surfaces daily.

Protecting Yourself as the Country Reopens

Every state has now eased part of their lockdown restrictions, some more aggressively than others. That means you’ll need to take more responsibility for your own safety. Consider person, place, space, and time when you’re trying to decide if an activity is worth the risk:

Person: Experts advise against gatherings with more than 10 people, or even smaller groups when social distancing isn’t possible. Place: Outdoors is safer than indoors. There are few, if any, instances of people spreading the virus outside. If you must be indoors, try to keep the air moving with open windows or fans. Space: Keep plenty of space between yourself and other people, aiming for 6 feet or more. Time: Your risk of catching the coronavirus seems to be dose-dependent. That is, the longer you’re exposed to it, the more likely you are to get it. Fifteen to 30 minutes in close contact increases your risk significantly.

Getting Tested

Our country was slow to achieve widespread testing, and in some areas it can still be difficult to get a diagnostic, or viral, test. In those instances, local health departments decide who needs one. Because most people get only a mild case and recuperate at home, you may not get tested.

Antibody tests, meanwhile, may be able to tell if you previously had COVID-19. The test works to detect the presence of protein produced by your immune response to the virus. Antibodies can take weeks to develop, so these tests aren’t used for diagnosis. But they’re helpful for people who want to confirm they had a mild case a month or two back, and they help scientists who are tracking the spread of the disease or preparing for vaccine trials.

Antibody tests aren’t 100% reliable, and researchers still don’t know if antibodies provide immunity.

Treating COVID-19

Scientists are working quickly to figure out which treatments work to fight COVID. At least 140 trials are already taking place as part of the FDA’s Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program. Right now, no drugs have been FDA-approved, but several have been given emergency use authorization to use with hospitalized patients. At the moment, the most-discussed candidates include these:

Remdesivir, an intravenous antiviral drug, received an emergency use authorization after showing promising results in patients with severe cases of COVID. A preliminary report from a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial found that patients who received it recovered 4 days faster, and fewer died, than those who got a placebo. But the researchers said those results aren’t good enough to consider remdesivir alone as an effective treatment. Convalescent plasma is the liquid part of blood collected from people who have recovered from COVID. That plasma contains antibodies that may help others fight off the disease. This, too, hasn’t been fully approved by the FDA, but the agency has issued recommendations for transfusing plasma under certain circumstances. A recent study, however, found the treatment ineffective. Hydroxychloroquine is the anti-malaria drug touted by President Donald Trump. But so far, research results have shown little benefit to taking it. A new randomized trial found that it didn’t help prevent the disease among people who’d been exposed. And a British study into whether it helped as a treatment was called off once it became clear it didn’t work. But the National Institutes of Health recently announced a major new clinical trial that pairs it with the antibiotic azithromycin as a possible treatment for mild to moderate COVID. The Hunt for a Vaccine

Because COVID is so dangerous, experts don’t advise letting the disease run its course through the population. Even in a place as hard-hit as New York City, research suggests that only around 20% of the people there have had it. So we’re not looking for herd immunity, which comes when enough people have had the disease that it stops spreading wildly. One study found it would take 70%-90% immunity to create a larger herd protection. Instead, we’re looking for a vaccine.

Teams all over the world are working on potential vaccines. According to the World Health Organization, 10 possibilities have already begun clinical evaluation, and another 100-plus are preparing for it. A clinical trial for one promising vaccine is recruiting 30,000 people in this country to start in July, and another aims to start this summer, too. But even with all this effort, we won’t have a vaccine until 2021 at the earliest.

The next 6 months will surely bring us still more knowledge about the coronavirus, but until that vaccine is ready, life likely won’t go back to normal.

© 2020 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.

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[alicesalley]

Okay I got asked to do this ask meme a long time ago and I’ve just started seriously working on it but here are the first 25! 1: when you have cereal, do you have more milk than cereal or more cereal than milk?

More cereal than milk because I don’t put milk in my cereal (I’m mildly allergic and also just not a fan).

2: do you like the feeling of cold air on your cheeks on a wintery day?

I really do. I don’t get to experience it much here in SoCal and I really miss it from when I used to live in colder places.

3: what random objects do you use to bookmark your books?

Scraps of paper and business cards mostly. Back when I used to only wear reading glasses sometimes I’d use my glasses case as a bookmark. Occasionally I’ll use my phone.

4: how do you take your coffee/tea?

I’m gonna be honest here, despite how much I’m constantly asking for sips from everybody’s coffee (@Sara) I really really don’t like coffee!! I generally don’t drink tea that I haven’t made myself and when I make it myself I don’t put anything in it and the strength of the tea depends on what purpose I’m taking it for. Like if I’m making a tea for sleep the strength of it is going to be based on how strong of a sedative I need.

5: are you self-conscious of your smile?

I am but I’ve been smiling and laughing a lot more recently and it’s been really nice. I haven’t been thinking about what I don’t like about it in the moment.

6: do you keep plants?

I have a few cacti right now and I really like them. I’ve always kept plants throughout my youth and sometimes I get to go back to my mother’s place and see the plants I had when I was younger flourishing. I live in an apartment right now but I plan to move into a house soon and I hope to be able to get a lot more plants.

7: do you name your plants?

Kind of? I play this game called Viridi where I have virtual plants and sometimes I like to name those but I don’t name my actual plants.

8: what artistic medium do you use to express your feelings?

I use a lot of different kinds of mediums recreationally but if I truly need to express my feelings then I use poetry. A kind of prose poetry that’s still structured somewhat unusually for true prose.

9: do you like singing/humming to yourself?

I’m kind of really self-conscious about doing both but lately I’ve been singing with my friends more and it’s been really nice.

10: do you sleep on your back, side, or stomach?

I like to either sleep on my back or my side if I’m sleeping alone. If I’m sleeping with someone else it’s a lot nicer to sleep on my side, like, spooning them or even back to back but I do get better sleep when sleeping on my back in that situation. It’s really rare for me to be able to fall asleep on my stomach.

11: what’s an inner joke you have with your friends?

Oh man, there are so many! My friends like to make fun of something I say as a joke when someone is like, super stressing me out by saying something ridiculous. You should ask them about it.

12: what’s your favorite planet?

That’s a really hard one! I’m a big fan of Gliese 876 d, it’s about 15 light-years away and is in the constellation of Aquarius. It’s really not very massive for an exoplanet and actually when it was discovered had the lowest mass of any exoplanet discovered (besides the ones orbiting Lich. By the way, a pulsar called Lich, cool name right? I definitely prefer it to “PSR B1257+12” one of its other names). We had to make some assumptions about the planet to get a mass that wasn’t just the lower limit but if we assume it’s roughly coplanar (orbits in the same plane) as the outer planets of its star we can get a value of about 6.83 Earth masses. Now, I saved the best part for last, this planet is probably terrestrial. And based on two different models either is hot enough to have lava oceans, or has a pressurized liquid water ocean below which there is a layer of ice between it and the core. In the second model there would actually be an atmosphere with water vapor and oxygen. We don’t know enough about the planet or the system to know which model is accurate though but both are awesome!

13: what’s something that made you smile today? I’ll say two things because even though I’m fairly early in my day it’s been really nice. One of my friends sent me a random meme which he does a lot to just make me happy. Another of my friends has now been dubbed the “tag princess” and I find that hilarious.

14: if you were to live with your best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like?

(Preface: I have two best friends I’d like to live with). It’d probably have a lot of bookshelves. A garden is a necessity as are window seats. I’d really like it to be somewhere rainy with a nice view either of a park or the city scape. A fireplace would be nice, a real wood burning one. I’d like a lot of wood in the interior and despite the garden there’d probably be some plants inside. I think she’d like a bathtub and so would I. He’s pretty insistent on a tin roof so I’d try to work that in. Overall though it’s not really important to me what it looks like as long as my friends are there.

15: go google a weird space fact and tell us what it is!

I think one a lot of people don’t know is that despite being so close to the sun Mercury has water ice. It’s in permanently shadowed craters.

16: what’s your favorite pasta dish?

I love spaghetti and meatballs! To be quite honest the main thing I like about it is how sauce of the meatballs can blend with the taste of the pasta, I’m not really so much of a fan of pasta by itself in any situation.

17: what color do you really want to dye your hair?

Silver or white! I’d really love white hair.

18: tell us about something dumb/funny you did that has since gone down in history between you and your friends and is always brought up.

Ah man, once again there are so many. There’s the time where I forgot what an egg was? That gets brought up A LOT.

19: do you keep a journal? what do you write/draw/ in it?

I keep a document on my computer of any projects I might want to do.

20: what’s your favorite eye color?

I like blue and green a lot but I think blue is my favorite? For a while I figured this was mostly in concept because I don’t really look people in the eyes but I realized recently that somehow almost everyone I’ve crushed on has had blue eyes so I guess I notice it on some level?

21: talk about your favorite bag, the one that’s been to hell and back with you and that you love to pieces.

My mother gave me a small purse that I really like, I wouldn’t say that I love it to pieces because I don’t really like bags that much but I do wear this one a lot.

22: are you a morning person?

I am decidedly Not a morning person. It can be really nice to be up in the morning though when it is so quiet and the sun is still low in the sky. It’s just, I’m always so exhausted.

23: what’s your favorite thing to do on lazy days where you have 0 obligations?

It’s nice to lay in bed and read or watch a movie. Talk with friends.

24: is there someone out there you would trust with every single one of your secrets?

I don’t think there’s anyone I know well enough right know that I would trust with every one of my secrets but there are two people I’d trust with most.

25: what’s the weirdest place you’ve ever broken into?

I haven’t really broken into any places that were weird but I broke into a toilet paper dispenser in one of the dorms at college and stole a toilet paper roll for a bit. Well, I returned it. It’s more like borrowing. It was for a good cause.

[victoriagloverstuff]

Trespassing at Ernest Hemingway's House

The signs couldn’t have been clearer. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I had been looking for the dead-end street in Ketchum, Idaho where Ernest Hemingway took his life on July 2, 1961, and reckoned I had found it. Thanks to fierce opposition from affluent neighbors in the Canyon Run neighborhood that has sprung up around what was once a very isolated 22-acre property on the Big Wood River, the home has never been open to the public and the address isn’t advertised.

Hemingway and his (fourth) wife Mary bought the Idaho house in 1959, and it has sat empty since his death, save for spells when caretakers resided in the basement. Although I have a deep respect for Hemingway’s work, I’ve long been even more fascinated with his peripatetic life. As someone who has traveled to 70-odd countries and has moved more than a dozen times in the last twenty years, peripatetic Hemingway is something of a kindred spirit. He never sat still, never seemed satisfied, and frequently sought to cure what ailed him with a change of scenery—I’m the same way.

For years, I lived a short walk away from his birth home in Oak Park, Illinois, and when I learned that Hemingway’s Ketchum home had been preserved as a kind of time capsule, I resolved to try to see the place. I wanted to know why it was still closed when so many of the other places Hemingway once called home are open to the public. And, perhaps more important, I wanted to understand what had brought the restless author to a remote valley in the Idaho wildnerness to live out his final chapter.

Many writers have grappled with this question, but none more perceptively than Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote three years after the Hemingway’s death, “Anybody who considers themselves a writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive cord in America’s most famous writer.”

The Ketchum that the pioneer of gonzo journalism discovered in 1964 had just one paved street and was “no longer a glittering, celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just another good ski resort in a tough league.” Thompson thought that Hemingway had returned to the Gem State because he had lost his way and was pining for the good old days he’d spent there during and after WWII. Hemingway, he surmised, wanted a place that hadn’t changed where he could “get away from the pressures of a world gone mad,” and live among apolitical people who loved the outdoors as he did.

Eager to understand it myself, I left my home in Bend, Oregon, along with my wife, Jen, and two sons, Leo, 10, and James, 8, on a bright Tuesday afternoon in late October (2017) to see what we could find. The eight-hour drive took us through desolate Malheur County, site of the 2016 armed Oregon Standoff, sprawling, ever-expanding Boise, now America’s fastest growing city, and forlorn cowboy hamlets like Fairfield, Idaho, home of the Wrangler Drive-in, where gluttons can feast on two-pound jackalope burgers, which come with six slices of bacon, three onion rings, six slices of pepper jack cheese, and secret sauce among other things.

“Does the fact that Hemingway took his life in this house make the prospect of touring it somehow unseemly or even ghoulish? Some might think so.”

Everyone in Ketchum knows about the author’s connection to the place, but no one knew or was willing to give me directions to his old refuge. A spry woman of late middle age years at the tourist information office in the town’s compact downtown gave me an Ernest Hemingway in Idaho brochure but politely deflected my questions about the house. “You can’t see it, but you can visit his grave, see the Hemingway Memorial, go to our history museum,” she said. I called and later emailed the director of The Ketchum Community Library, which was gifted the home last May, but she said they couldn’t show it to me due to ongoing renovations. She later said she’d tell me about their plans for the place over the phone, but I was never able to reach her despite multiple attempts. They are apparently planning to establish a writer in residence program but the details are unclear.

Thompson’s account provided few clues to the home’s whereabouts, though he did admit to stealing a pair of elk horns that once hung above the front door.

A tour guide told me I could see it from a hill behind a place called the Zenergy Health Club. But even with a pair of binoculars, all I could make out through the dense October foliage was a very distant view of what appeared to be men repairing the roof. I had found a few clues after doing some detective work online, so I knew the house was at the end of a dead-end street, on a large, wooded parcel, north of downtown Ketchum fronting the Big Wood River.

I cycled up and down a host of dead-end streets on a balmy Indian summer afternoon, the kind of day that must have seduced Hemingway years ago. But it wasn’t until I returned to my hotel that I actually found the place, perusing Ketchum’s topography on Google Earth. I saw a house that seemed to fit the bill at the end of a street called East Canyon Run Boulevard, and when I went to investigate, with my family in tow, the “private property” and “no trespassing” signs confirmed we were in the right place.

“Maybe you should go by yourself,” Jen said. “It’s not worth getting arrested for.”

We were parked near the signs, adjacent to a large, mid-century home. It was a Friday afternoon and the street couldn’t have been quieter. More than a decade ago, the Nature Conservancy, which was gifted the property by Mary Hemingway upon her death in 1986, had tried to open up the home to public tours but the neighbors had organized to squash the plan. Surely it wasn’t out of the question that if we were seen driving past the “no trespassing” signs they might call the police? And what if the property had security cameras?

As Jen and I debated these questions, Leo said, “Dad, I don’t want to go in.” But we had come so far, how could I justify turning back?

Hemingway first visited Ketchum on September 19, 1939. He was 40 and his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer—his second wife—was falling apart. After what biographer Mary Dearborn termed a “disastrous” holiday with Pauline and his sons in Wyoming, Hemingway drove west to rendezvous with his mistress, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, whom he would wed a year later in Cheyenne. The Sun Valley Resort had been open for nearly three years and was trying to generate publicity by inviting Hollywood stars and famous writers like Hemingway—who had by this time published A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, and To Have and Have Not—to stay at the resort for free.

The resort was the brainchild of W. Averell Harriman, who was the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1930s and was later elected governor of New York. Harriman had traveled by rail to ski resorts in Europe and wanted to develop a European-style ski resort somewhere in the West along the UP rail line. In the winter of 1935-6, Harriman hired Felix Schaffgotsch, an Austrian Count, to scout locations. Schaffgotsch toured a host of iconic spots around the West—Mt. Rainer, Mt. Hood, Jackson Hole, Yosemite, and Zion, among others—but didn’t think any of the proposed sites were quite right.

He was about to abandon his quest when he stumbled upon Ketchum. Schaffgotsch was impressed by the pitch of Bald Mountain, the site’s moderate elevation, abundance of sunshine, and absence of wind among other things. The company purchased a 3,888-acre parcel of land for about $4 per acre and constructed what would become the country’s first destination ski resort in about 7 months. In the years to come, visits from a host of celebrities—Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Lucille Ball, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, and others—helped transform the quiet valley into a hugely popular destination.

“Everyone in Ketchum knows about the author’s connection to the place, but no one knew or was willing to give me directions to his old refuge.”

Although Hemingway had been invited to visit the resort, he hadn’t booked ahead. Nevertheless, he and Gellhorn were given a free room, number 206 (now #338). (A sin that, if committed today, would bar him for writing for many of the country’s most august publications, including The New York Times.) In the mornings, he worked on what became For Whom the Bell Tolls while Gellhorn completed a short story collection, The Heart of Another.  Most afternoons, they explored the area on horseback with friends Ernest dubbed the “Sun Valley mob.”

Ernest hadn’t skied in more than a decade, but came for the chance to hunt duck, pheasant, partridge, antelope, and elk. Martha left for an assignment in Finland in November, and according to Dearborn, Earnest grew despondent, writing to a friend that he was “stinko deadly lonely.” Among other diversions, he shot at coyotes from a low flying plane, which Dearborn says he knew was “not good sport.”

He thought about spending the holidays with Pauline and his sons in Key West, but was told if he planned to re-join Martha after the holidays he wasn’t welcome. The pair divorced in 1940, and Martha and Ernest met to spend another season in Sun Valley on September 1, this time with his sons, Jack, whom they called “Bumby,” then 17, and Gregory, 9.  They were given a $38 per night suite for which they paid a token $1. Life Magazine, which had previously written a cover story on the place titled, “Sun Valley, Society’s Newest Winter Playground,” came to photograph him and the resulting piece generated even more publicity for the emerging ski resort.

Hemingway returned to the area four more times to spend the fall and parts of winter between 1939 and 1947. (By 1946, he was no longer getting a free room at the Sun Valley Resort, which was transformed into a Navy hospital, so he stayed at MacDonald’s Cabins, which is a now shuttered budget motel that was called the Ketchum Korral.)

Ernest and the rest of his Sun Valley Mob were regulars at the resort’s Duchin and Ram Bars. He also liked to drink at Whiskey Jacques and the Casino Bar, both of which are still open. By 1959, he had grown frustrated with his notoriety in Cuba and he decided to buy a home in Ketchum. Hemingway was a document hoarder—he reportedly even saved grocery lists—and he believed that Idaho was an ideal place to preserve his letters, manuscripts and other papers, thanks to its dry climate.

The furnished, l-shaped Ketchum home the Hemingways bought for $50,000 in 1959 was built just six years before by Henry J. “Bob” Topping,Jr., a socialite whose family had made its fortune in the tin-plate industry, at a cost of about $100,000. Topping had built the place as a temple of affection for his bride, Mona Moedl, a native of nearby Hailey, Ezra Pound’s hometown.  But they’d decided to move to Arizona for health reasons and were apparently eager enough to leave town that they accepted what seems now like a lowball offer.

With its faux redwood and stained timbers, the house looked a lot like the Sun Valley Lodge, which is just as Topping intended. A local tour guide and former state representative, Wendy Jaquet, told me, “Locals joked that Hemingway bought it since he was kicked out of the lodge’s bars and wanted a similar place to drink in.”

The Ketchum Cemetery is a modest place situated on the slope of a sagebrush-covered butte just outside Ketchum’s tidy downtown. Hemingway’s grave is a simple rectangular, granite slab engraved with nothing more than his name and dates of birth and death. He was buried in a rose-covered, dark gray casket; his remains lie next to plots for his wife, Mary, near his son, Jack, and a few of his friends, including Taylor “Bear Tracks” Williams, a guide who was one of his closest confidants.

Other visitors to the grave have found half-drunk bottles of rum, shot glasses bearing bullets, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and other tokens of affection. But all I found were some coins, a small pumpkin, an assortment of pinecones, a cheap pen, and a copy of Marie Hall Ets’ book In the Forest. I wondered what the cemetery did with all the booze people left but there was no one around to ask, and no one responded to my phone calls.

Ketchum is a one-time mining town that’s long been a wintery stew of ski bums and affluent second-home owners. Late October is considered shoulder season—Bald Mountain had just a thin layer of snow near the summit—and so it felt a bit like arriving at a party an hour before the dips have been set out. Hunter S. Thompson described it as a “raw and peaceful little village” when he visited offseason in 1964. It still felt peaceful, but more polished than raw and full of fancy restaurants and overpriced boutiques, mostly staffed by people who couldn’t afford to live in town.

Businesses in Ketchum don’t advertise their Hemingway connections as overtly as his haunts in Cuba and Key West do. For example, walking into the Christiania Restaurant you’d never know he ate his last meal at the place the night before he took his life.  (And, according to friends, was in good spirits.)

But the Sun Valley Museum of History has a “Hemingway in Idaho” exhibit with a host of photos and memorabilia, including one of his well-traveled Royal typewriters, a compact little number that seemed too small for Hemingway’s brawny build. (It was found in the attic of a home purchased by a local man named Jim Harris and was later authenticated. Hemingway likely suffered from the degenerative brain disease CTE and in his later years this condition made it impossible for him to work, so perhaps he gave this typewriter to Tillie and Lloyd Arnold, the family that sold their house without clearing out their attic.)

A mile northeast of the Sun Valley resort, there’s an impressive bronze bust of a contemplative looking Papa Hemingway perched on a hill overlooking the serpentine Trail Creek and the 7th hole of a golf course. It was a bluebird day, not a cloud in the sky, with just a faint chill in the air. Beneath the bust, a portion of Hemingway’s eulogy for Gene Van Guilder, a friend who was a publicist for the Sun Valley resort, is engraved on a slate plaque. His words seem written for a day like this.

Best of all he loved the fall The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods Leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills The high blue windless skies Now he will be part of them forever

The next day was short-sleeve shirt warm, and it seemed hard to believe that in a matter of weeks, the town, now peaceful and almost forsaken, would be bustling with skiers and snowboarders. I fought the temptation to bask in the sun, holing up in the Hemingway room at the Ketchum’s Community Library to peruse stacks of old newspaper articles and files on every aspect of the writer’s life. I asked the librarian, a young woman wearing a sun dress and stylishly retro glasses, for articles on Hemingway’s Ketchum home and she handed me two massive file folders, one mostly filled with articles on his death, the other with photocopies of his FBI files.

The newspaper stories published in the immediate aftermath of his death mostly reflected Mary Hemingway’s attempts to dismiss his suicide as an accident. A UPI story carried the headline, “Gun Takes Life of Hemingway,” which was clearly not written by a card-carrying member of the NRA. An AP story, “Friends Discount Suicide in Hemingway’s Death,” asserted that Hemingway, who had recently received electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic, to treat depression, had been in great spirits of late.

“Everybody definitely knows it wasn’t suicide,” said Forest MacMullen, a friend of Hemingway’s who served as a pallbearer at his funeral.

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But of course, he did commit suicide, just like many others in his family. His father, Clarence, a physician who suffered from depression and diabetes, shot himself in 1928. Hemingway’s brother, Leicester, a diabetic who was about to lose his legs, shot himself in 1982. His sister, Ursula, died of a drug overdose in 1966. Thirty years later, his granddaughter, Margaux, a model, died of a barbiturate overdose.

Ernest used his toes to pull the triggers on the W. & C. Scott & Son shotgun that he had traveled with all over the world. According to the book, Hemingway’s Guns, the so-called pigeon gun was given to a Ketchum welder to be destroyed, but some of the mangled remnants were buried in a field. The welding shop is apparently still in business and is being run by the grandson of the original proprietor.

I found a few clues at the library that helped me find the home on Google Earth, and a 2004 article in The Los Angeles Times provided insights into his Ketchum neighborhood and its opposition to opening the home to tourists. That year, in a bid to defray the costs of maintaining the property, the Nature Conservancy introduced a plan to allow three daily tours of up to fifteen participants, who would be picked up in downtown Ketchum and brought to the home in a minivan to reduce parking and congestion concerns. The neighbors weren’t buying it.

“We came here to retire. We don’t want busloads of tourists coming through here 24/7,” Doug Lightfoot, a retired pharmacist, told the LA Times.

But even as Lightfoot insisted that opening the home would do nothing more than help people indulge their “morbid curiosity,” he conceded to the reporter that he too had once asked the Conservancy for a tour of the house.

Hemingway wrote portions of three books in his Ketchum home. This was the place were he chose to die. His homes in Key West, Cuba, and Oak Park are all open the public. Homes where Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Ernest Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Emily Dickinson, Agatha Christie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Wharton, and may other famous authors once lived have been turned into museums and serve to inspire those who might not otherwise ever pick up their books.

“The newspaper stories published in the immediate aftermath of his death mostly reflected Mary Hemingway’s attempts to dismiss his suicide as an accident.”

Does the fact that Hemingway took his life in this house make the prospect of touring it somehow unseemly or even ghoulish? Some might think so. But apparently not Anita Thompson, wife of the late Hunter S., who shot himself in the head in the kitchen of his Owl Creek farm in Woody Creek, Colorado in 2005. She still lives in the house and has preserved Hunter’s basement “War Room,” where he worked, just as he left it.

According to press accounts, she’s been working with a family friend to open their home, where she still lives, to a limited number of fans. Her initial plan, for those who passed her vetting process, was to offer a free tour plus Hunter’s favorite breakfast: grapefruit, scrambled eggs, juice, coffee, and fresh fruit suspended in Jell-O, with gin and Grand Marnier drizzled on top, served at 2 p.m. just like he liked it.

But, a year later, after visiting the Hemingway home and touring related Hemingway sites in Ketchum, she told the Aspen Times that she was also inspired to create a writer’s retreat, an offsite museum, and a line of cannabis products in her late husband’s honor. She also returned the elk horns, which were sent to Sean Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson (Gloria’s son) for “karmic reasons.”

Hemingway’s descendants are apparently divided on the question of opening the house to tours—his granddaughter Mariel thinks it should be opened, his daughter-in-law Angela Hemingway thinks the house should be sold so someone can live in it, and his son, Patrick, thinks it should remain closed.

But when I arrived at the KEEP OUT signs near the end of East Canyon Run Boulevard on my last day in Ketchum, it seemed obvious to me. It was a sun-drenched Friday afternoon, about 4 p.m., and the neighborhood was so quiet you could have heard a cat meowing a zip code away.

I considered my family’s pleas to turn back, but I thought back to my visits to three of Pablo Neruda’s homes in Chile in 2014, and recalled that each home was located on streets with neighbors. Those places draw visitors by the busloads—if those neighbors could cope, surely the good people of this neighborhood could tolerate some limited form of tourism that would allow people to see the place where the famous writer chose to end his life.

“Let’s just drive by and take a quick look,” I said, easing past the intimidating signs.

I was immediately struck by the wooded, secluded splendor of the no-go area. There was just one home past the no trespassing signs on our left, an expansive affair that appeared to be a second home unlived in at the moment, and then the Hemingway house, further ahead on our right, perhaps a quarter of a mile away from the cluster of neighbors who had united to keep the place closed to the public.

We pulled up in front of the house, a sprawling, concrete, two-story, earth-colored faux-timber construction, and I rolled down the window to take a photo. I felt like if we didn’t set foot outside, we’d be fine. We noticed a pair of men installing a new roof and Jen said, “Let’s get out of here before they call the police.” But one of the men caught a glimpse of me and simply nodded and went back to work.

Sitting in the car, taking a final look at the house, I felt slightly cheated that we couldn’t go in and see the place, which is staged as a 1961 time capsule. If someone was living there, I’d understand the No Trespassing signs, but what’s the point of an empty house with historical value that no one can see?

And anyway, what would Hemingway want? Would he have been on the side of his neighbors, who think opening the home up would ruin their neighborhood?

He guarded his privacy zealously, and wrote in The Sun Also Rises, “Everyone behaves badly—given the chance.” But he also once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

On our long drive home, I had plenty of time to ponder the broader question of what brought Hemingway back to Idaho late in his life, as we motored through the bleak and monotonously scrubby landscape of the Oregon Badlands, where travelers can barely find a toilet, let alone a decent meal in the four-plus hours between Boise and Bend. Thompson, I thought, was right in concluding that Hemingway was a sick, weary man with three failed marriages behind him who felt and looked older than his years. Maybe buying a house in Ketchum, was a last effort to recover the carefree, glory days of yore?

The long drive home gave me plenty of time to consider my own itinerant experiences just four years ago, when we drove west on this same road, after deciding to leave Chicago for Bend. I met my wife in the Windy City, in my twenties, and we’d loved our time living there. Then I joined the Foreign Service, and we’d ended up in Washington D.C., Macedonia, Trinidad, Washington. D.C. again, and then Hungary. I quit in 2007 after a couple years of trying to fight through some difficult times with Multiple Sclerosis.

We moved back to Chicago when Jen was seven months pregnant with our first son (Leo) because both of us associated it with good times. But it wasn’t the same—our friends were now mostly preoccupied with their kids and so were we. After a couple years, we moved back to D.C., then back to Chicago again, and finally, in 2014 to Bend. Somewhere in the Oregon Badlands, on the drive west, a sick feeling nestled in the pit of my stomach as I realized how isolated we were going to be, hours from an interstate—I feared we were making a huge mistake.

Good read found on the Lithub

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A Definitive Ranking of the Best Hair in the Star Wars Universe

With each new Star Wars movie, fans wait to see how their favorite characters, new and old, will be styled. And, with some of the most iconic and influential hairstyles in pop-culture history, the franchise has a high bar to clear when it comes to its characters tresses. Because as Yoda says, “Hairdo. Or do not hairdo. There is no try.”

But how do the buns, braids, blowouts, helmet hair, and headdresses in a galaxy far, far away rank when pitted against each other? We have your definitive, character-by-character guide to the best and worst looks from Naboo to Starkiller Base. Coif it up!

Note: We concerned ourselves with hair, and hair only. That means no heads that are shaped like hair (looking at you, Bib Fortuna).

Best Hair

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1. Leia Leia is a basic choice to top our list, but no hair in the history of film is as iconic as the stylethat spawned millions of parodies, Halloween costumes, ill-advised earmufffs, and people who think its hilarious to hold up cinnamon buns next to their faces. George Lucas has said that the revolutionaries of Pancho Villa were the inspiration for the buns, but others have pointed out that the look more closely resembles the Fallera hairdo from Spain or the Hopi “squash blossom” buns.

Regardless,Leia doesn’tget nearly enough credit for her other styles: Her Hoth crown braid, Bespin look with the braided loops, and her coiled twisted braid situation from the final scene of the original trilogy (dubbed “the hot plate special” by the crew). Props for being the only woman in history to make hair jewelry look cool when hanging out with a giant slug gangster and kudos to her chic, but no-fuss updo in The Force Awakens. Because when youre busy running the rebel uprising and chasing after your good-for-nothing, rogue-ass son, theres no damn time to mess with your hair. We salute you and your fabulous tresses, General Organa.

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2. Padme Yasss, Queen of Naboo! One of the only good things about the prequels is Padmes sense of fashion, ranging from her iconic wedding dress to her ombre, goddess-style flowing gown. But the real showstopper is her hairfrom gravity-defying updos and bejeweled headbands straight out of a Coachella fever-dream to headdresses that would even put Sarah Jessica Parker at the Met to shame.

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3. Kylo Ren Ah, the mane that inspired a whirlwind of tweets and such think pieces as Why Is Kylo Rens Hair So Shiny and Voluminous? An Investigation. With hisfollicularlyblessed lineage, it only makes sense that he never suffers from helmet hair, even after a long day of stomping around with stormtroopers, attacking villages, and interrogating rebels. The hair game is strong with this family.

His hair is, of course, a throwback to the longer hairdo sported by his role model and grandfather, Anakin, while Anakin was being lured to the Dark Side (well get to that soon). Like Samson, do the men in their family derive dark energy from their locks? And, if thats the case, why is Anakin-as-Vader bald? Maybe thats the real answer to why Ren’s hair is so big: Its full of secrets. Hair secrets.

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4. Rey Nicknamed “Three Knobs” on set, this updo looks cute from the front with early-aughts-inspired sidepieces and wispies. From the side or back, though, things get questionable. Why three buns? Whats so wrong with one? Rey doesn’t seem super concerned with fashion, so were left to believe that its a utility thing. Still, we’re game for this look because, well, they’rein space. Things are allowed to get a little weird.

Also, a million points for her goddamn eyebrows. Dont tell us that she hasnt gotten her hands on some wax while scavenging on Jakku because we will call you a liar.

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5. Dorme Only in Star Wars could a style this outrageous look fit into the background. Padme’s handmaiden rocks a kawaii-as-hell hair bow that puts even Girls’ Shoshanna to shame. “Hair bows” (as in bows styled with actual human hair, not cute cloth bows with a clip) are a very real, and wonderfully strange, thing. But we’re pretty sure its impossible to make one IRL with this much volume using only natural hair. Please, though, someone make a tutorial to prove us wrong.

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6. Poe Dameron Poe has some luscious, swept back locks that pair well with his clean-shaven face. Like Kylo Ren, he somehow manages to avoid helmet head. This is very excellent hair. It’s amazing he doesn’t have a line of people from across the galaxy lined up to run their fingers through it.

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7. Lando Calrissian Lando might bethe first majorblack character in the Star Wars universe, but we have to assess some minor demerits forrockinga perm. But well cut him some slack because if “hair” includes facial hair, he takes the cake with his groovy-ass ’70s mustache. This look transcended Billy Dee Williams role in Star Wars. Not only was it an essential component of his signature confidence and swagger, but we maintain that it’s the reason that Williams became the spokesperson for Colt 45 beer. Were you hiring him or the ‘stache, Colt? Be honest.

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8. Jyn Erso We call this look The Bridesmaid. Its nothing as revolutionary as Jyn herself in Rogue One, but its certainly very pretty and easy for fans to replicate with side bangs, face-framing pieces, and a little bun at the nape of her neck.

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9. Mon Mothma Caroline Blakiston once said she opted to use her own mid-length red pixie cut for her role as Mon Mothma, and were glad she did. This look, while later co-opted by Justin Bieber, became an essential ’80s style.

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10. Bodhi Rook This undercut/ponytail combination is very Burning Man. Its a little dirty, but also kind of sexy in a yoga-teacher way. Conclusion: He can rook our bodhis anytime.

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11. Finn Finn’s fashion is best defined by the on-trend Resistance fighter jacket gifted to him by Poe. His hair, thougha classic cut we call the Your Always Grumpy Unclehas never been on trend. Never ever. But Boyega fans can take heart: His hair as seen in the Pacific Rim 2 set photos is extra :fire emoji:.

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12. Han Solo Though Han is a total babe, his hair is a little fluffy and we cant stand a middle part. What else do you expect from a stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking Nerfherder? Still, he’s got a good head of hair and we can’t knock those retro sideburns. We also like his conservative, tapered cut in Force Awakensa solid look for an older Han.

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13. Luke Skywalker Baby Skywalker starts out with a retro ’70s feathered mop. A little dated now, but very “of his time.” When we meet back up with him in Force Awakens, he has transitioned to a scruffy hair/beard combo. Very old-school Jedi. Though, dear hipsters, the next time you think that this is a cute look, think of the fact that the make-up and hair folks working on the film thought this would be the best way to show that someone was literally cloistered away on a fucking island for decades.

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14. Sabe Her style makes for a crazy-couture, runway-ready look. Its not easy imitating the queen, especially when that means you have to wear giant hair croissants on the side of your head. (What is up with these people and hair that resembles pastries?) Kudos to her for rocking it.

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15. Chewbacca One of the few characters who is literally covered in hair from head to toe, his routine includes a complex combination of hair oil, holding spray, careful shampooing, a special hairbrush to comb out the snarls on his butt, and wand-created curls. Seriously.

Chewie is at his best when his locks are wind-swept and looks significantly creepy when his hair is brushed smooth. Whats with the volume? Is his forehead just super long or is he wearing a Bump It? We advocate for him getting a Border Terrier-style trim. Google it and you will agree.

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16. Anakin Skywalker This one is tricky. Anakin has, at points, both very good hair AND the definitive worst hair in the galaxy. Lets start with 20-something Anakin’s wind-blown surfer hair, a look thats later copped by his psycho grandson, Kylo Ren. Carefree! Classic! Two thumbs up! On the other hand, young Anakin has a freakin’ rat-tail. You say Padawan braid, we say rat-tail, and it doesnt matter because, when it comes down to it, we can all agree that its gross. We cant decide if he looks like he just walked out of a Hot Topic with bad rubber bracelets and a t-shirt from a band hes never actually heard or if hes a recent escapee from a hippie commune. Just: nope, nope, nope.

The “Really? You Could Do Better” List

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Obi-Wan Kenobi Specifically, young Kenobi played by Ewan McGregor. Rock me, Sexy Jesus?

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Qui-Gon Jinn The half-up, half-down look needs to crawl back to the ’90s and die there. In recent years, some millennial celebrities (ahem, Ariana Grande) have tried to make this a thing again. We maintain that encouraging anyone to wear this look is straight-up irresponsible.

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Ewoks They need a trip to the groomer. Maybe a nice puppy cut blowout like a Shih Tzu? We say yes.

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Yoda Real talk: Yoda needs to own his hair loss and go bald. If you want to feel truly creeped out, look up Yaddle, another member of Yodas species, and imagine how your favorite pint-sized, green Jedi might have looked in his younger days.

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Queen Jamillia Girl, you look like a sunflower.

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Salacious Crumb Zero points to theweird dude who you might recognize from hanging out withJabba the Hutt. He could use a shoulder waxing and some kind of hat to cover those little tufts on his head.

The Wild Card

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Captain Phasma We have no idea what she looks like under the helmet. Will actress Gwendoline Christie keep her carefree, battle-ready, Brienne-of-Tarth messy chop? Or will she revert back to the real-life long blonde locks that she sported pre-Game of Thrones? Or maybe shes got something wacky going on under there that we havent even thought up yet. The options are literally endless.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/05/27/a-definitive-ranking-of-the-best-hair-in-the-star-wars-universe/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/05/27/a-definitive-ranking-of-the-best-hair-in-the-star-wars-universe/