#he described exactly what happened

[cowboyunderscore]

my favorite part of crime and punishment (a lie, i have a lot), is when razumikhin describes in perfect detail and accuracy, as a guess, exactly how the murder went down, and then later threatens violence against the man who suggested that *maybe* raskolnikov was the killer. he could literally describe exactly how the crime was committed, and each little action made my the killer, but could not for the life of him figure out who it was. obviously this was entirely on purpose and completely fabricated by himself, as proved by the hallway (breakup) scene, and i could go on and on about the intricacies of his mental process here, but to focus on the comedy: jesus christ razumikhin you would be an awful detective.

[sammaggs]

4x03 I Coulda Been A Defendant | oh

To the writers of due South circa 1997: I just wanna talk

[anxiously-sidequesting]

I personally love and obsess over disillusioned and self-isolating protagonists which is one of the reasons why I advocate for a Young Wizard who just leans so much into their role as the Savior that they're now just this broken down individual who now genuinely shares everyone's fears and legends of them of being this Ultra Powerful, Non-Human, Above-All-The-Peasants Legend Amongst Men. Being picked apart and analyzed (INCORRECTLY might I add) by strangers and people who fear/hate/revere you, no matter where you go or what you do, over and over and OVER it just literally whittles away at who you used to be, what used to make you happy and now you're replaced with what everyone made you into. Not You, but a Hero.

But you know what's even better 😈😈😈 a wizard who cracks in a different way and is now just baaaareeely holding it together. A wizard who just is not All There anymore. A wizard who's Good Maybe, but someone who genuinely gives you a GOOD REASON to fear a switch in allegiance. Someone who reminds you that your entire life depends on their mood

Give me Harley Quinn YW, give me a YW who cackles and shrieks in joy as they batter the evil to the ground, give me a YW who pushes at the very edge of the EXTREMES even when they don't need to. I want a YW who doesn't carry around a gleaming sword, or a mystical staff, but a bat with nails studded inside or a rusty machete; I want poems and songs of not a Hero but a wolf in sheep's clothing who just barely gets by in masquerading as the Commoners. An unhinged YW is the second to best Bad Ending you could ever get from this situation and I want everyone to think about this actually

[orchideae]

1) Opens up drafts with my head empty, ready to be flooded, not knowing where I'll go. 2) 30 seconds later: Okay but I will go feral any day of my life over Perilous Trail, and the fierce dichotomy of Xiao and Yelan. While they're far from being 'the same', they both view themselves as soldiers in one way or another (it's a very difficult word to use for Yelan, so I'm using it very liberally and very loosely), they have both suffered losses on the 'battlefield' and carry the burden thereof in their own ways. And yet they stand so firmly in opposition throughout the entirety of that questline up until the very end of the 'the end of the line' conclusion of the quest. Yes, I know that she offers him her gratitude in its aftermath and it is genuine, but she still never agrees with him and the decision that he made moments earlier. It simply 'worked out' because of Zhongli's interference, he's the only reason it worked out. And it's because of that, that she doesn't give him a hell of a hard time (obviously she can't go down there, but imagine the inner frustration of severe extents; when you condemn someone who you can't even see anymore). In the same way that she would do to anyone who would sacrifice themselves for others, but in this case, I think it's 'beautiful' that it's to Xiao; the one who seems most adamant to do so (which honestly, fits into the contract that the Yakshas chose to sign with Morax; 'the ultimate sacrifice' to protect for Liyue; 'for Liyue', and Liyue has always centered itself around its people), the one who everyone reveres (and so does she, as she notes in her voiceline, 'if I ever have the honor to fight alongside') and respects for good reason, she stands against him, because in that moment, regardless of his status, he makes a call that she considers wrong. And he doesn't even... fight her on it very fiercely, and that's what actually hurts me the most, it's as if the following line hit the nail directly on the head?

"Besides, if you were really so determined to end it all, you wouldn't have given us the opportunity to share our opinions."

[mettywiththenotes]

[fettery-fetterie]

if i was an artist with budget i'd be able to draw the buildup and all. i am not an artist with budget tho. so 3 panels will do

Kinda suggestive/nsfw tags btw go there with caution

anyways i think i huave covid

[mcalhenwrites]

I'm responding to AO3 comments, and I'm going to add something here that I didn't in that comment, regarding Gideon and Vivian: While it is extremely fucked up that Gideon responded to a starving teenager he didn't know stealing food by hitting him on the back of the skull, it's even more fucked up when you realize that by that point, the only means Vivian had to make money and feed himself was sex work. Which he resorted to frequently. And the power imbalances and inability to consent were double. 1. Vivian was a minor, and you can bet the men he bed were old enough to be adults. Some might have been near his age, but again: Vivian was a minor. 2. Consent is never present in a situation where your survival depends on sexual activities. In this case, Vivian needed food and clean water and sometimes shelter, and these were not provided for him. So Gideon can fuck right off with his "theft is wrong" - what did he want Vivian to do? Die? Sell himself some more? It's a shame that Vivian came to care for him. Mind, it being revealed later that Gideon also physically punished Viv if he slipped into his native tongue too often is just. Y'know. Another level of fucked. Lots of levels of fucked here.

[trainingdummyrabbit]

i wish kaigaku wasn't evil i would've loved to see him as the thunder hashira potentially

i think kaigaku should get to continue to commit atrocities because its funny <33

genuinely tho god this is such a Concept because like. yes yes the nuances of good vs evil and potential vs execution but honestly i just. dont think thats something thats fully in the cards for him. because like... his selfishness is such a huge part of Him as a character that getting rid of it just feels like itd make him.. an Entirely Different Character. its a Core Character Trait.

like!!! yeah!!!! i would really love to see him actually get along (or interact at all) with other characters!!! but for him specifically, the fact that hes so genuinely selfish is what makes him so interesting. its less of what he does, and more of how does he get there. personally, of course.

and then, especially with the whole pillar thing, i genuinely do not think that would make him any happier. i dont know what would. i dont even know if he does either.

this is getting away from me but tl;dr: seeing him in a non-(solely)-antagonistic role would be really fun but because of how his character is at a core point, it would have to be something intensely worked towards to make it feel satisfying and not disregard the things that are Very Much Wrong With Him

[2024skin]

1 month ago today my exes mom died is it too soon to tell him I unfriended him and ignored his message because I kind of think he raped me

[buttered-toasty]

Lol I’ve been labeling these the wrong days for like three days now rectifying that here anyway

.

Anyways me when I accidentally sentence my girlfriend to death

[awheckery]

DEATH TW and mentions of murder so if that is triggering for you don’t read, but if it’s not then i’d like to ask if you’ve heard of forensic genealogy? while i am uneasy at the prospect of using it to find suspects, it can also be used to find the identities of unidentified decedents, who die of accidental causes or are murdered, and often it’s the only hope to identify those who have been unidentified for decades. the dna doe project is a nonprofit that’s mostly volunteer run, and i think that your research skills could be useful there or somewhere like there. i know this is kind of a random ask to receive, identification of unidentified remains is my special interest but i don’t have the time or training to get better at researching beyond a few tricks here and there.

I feel like we've read the same articles recently; did you see the tumblr post (and linked articles) about Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the Boy in the Box?

Which is to say, yes, I am aware of forensic genealogy and the DNA Doe Project, because like many white American women, I'm a true crime junkie.* My big Thing is investigative procedure tho, so I'm also deeply interested in plane & train crash investigations, medical mysteries, archaeology, anthropology... basically 'what happened, and by which processes and methods do we figure out what happened?'

So far as getting into the game myself, I dunno. I assume there's probably some sort of required formal training, along with the expectation of reliability and sustained effort, and I'm a chronically ill autodidact with ADHD. I'm the research equivalent of a sprinter; investigative genealogy requires a marathoner, because there's so much exhausting, grinding work involved.

Something I've never seen brought up before in any investigation is how many extant family trees are just wrong. Genealogical sites make it too easy to crib notes from other users, and all it takes is one person deciding 'eh that's probably the right guy' for dozens of other amateur researchers to make the same mistake, and then somebody ties that erroneous information to their DNA profile. I don't know how the forensic genealogists deal with that.

You also have to take into account how many people throughout history have just gone missing, or otherwise fallen off the historical record. Just because someone's date of death is absent doesn't mean something nefarious happened to them. (Just because someone's date of death is present doesn't mean it's correct.) People emigrate. They marry. They change their names. They die alone and unknown in a ditch**, or they die somewhere that doesn't make those records public***. Paper records can burn or flood out, and family stories rarely make it down more than one or two generations. History is messy.

I've only done serious research into my family background for two years, in fits and starts interrupted by illness flare ups. Half the time it feels like I find more questions to ask than I get answers. I've found a pair of illegitimate daughters and a handful of adoptees. I've found some two dozen 'missing persons' who may as well have disappeared into thin air, for how suddenly they dropped out of the historical record. I've found a murder victim and a (maybe) would-be murderess.

And four months ago, I found the answer to another family's 150 year old missing person case, and it changed everything I thought I knew about my mother's family.

This is how.

Five months ago, I thought I knew everything there was that could be known about John Robert McDowell.

I knew he was born July 1st of either 1868 or 1869, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. According to his naturalization petition, he came to the United States in April of 1883, when the absolute oldest he could have been was fourteen, and at the time of his naturalization in 1896 he claimed his nationality was English, presumably due to anti-Irish sentiments at the time.

I knew John's handwriting was idiosyncratic: he wrote the J in his name with a rightward upper loop that scooped up again before curving back around the center staff, and his uppercase R was a mess of curlicues. I've never seen the like before or since.

I knew that despite living in America for ten years longer than he'd lived outside it, John still had an accent in 1908 when his second son was born. Spelling is incredibly inconsistent across historical records because up until very recently, it was the practice of the record keepers to write down their best guess at what they heard, and in 1908 a midwife heard and recorded John's surname as McDoul.

John's life was actually remarkably well-documented, in comparison to his contemporaries. I bought myself access to Newspapers.com along with my Ancestry subscription, and he made semi-regular appearances in the Newport News Daily Press for the better part of thirty years as a Navy veteran, successful entrepreneur, and president of a labor union that later became the United Steelworkers Local 8888. (A seemingly throwaway notice in the Daily Press was the only record I've yet been able to find for his divorce, which eventually led me to find out whatever happened to his wife, which is another saga entirely. Pauline, you dirty rotten cheater.)

I knew that John was in and out of the hospital with thyroid cancer, but he was such a tough old bastard it took the better part of fifteen years to kill him, and he died in 1954 at the age of 86.****

According to John's death certificate (and the U.S. Government records at the VA hospital where he died), his parents' names were Thomas McDowell and Isabell Rabb (or possibly Robb, the Accent strikes again.)

This is the only record linked to either of them on Ancestry.com at all.

I have most of a history degree, so I wasn't surprised. There are next to no records of the 1890 census of the United States, and that was down to a fire in the National Archives. Ireland was dragged backwards through hell by the ankles for centuries by a succession of British monarchs and governments, and Belfast was in the prime of especially conflicted territory for much of it. No census records from John's lifetime were kept, and the likelihood his parents would show up in the surviving fragments from 1841 and 1851 was slim to none.

There were transcribed indexes from birth and marriage records available, at least, and I scoured them through, looking for a John McDowell, and there wasn't a single damn one born to a Thomas or Isabelle McDowell in a decade on either side of 1868. There wasn't any record I could find at all of a Thomas McDowell marrying an Isabelle Rabb until well after John left Ireland.

Five months ago, as far as I knew, John Robert McDowell was probably a bastard, who'd either been left out of whatever records were taken at the time, or he was one of the unfortunate ones whose birth record had been lost.

Four months ago, I realized that the record indexes on Ancestry included film numbers, which meant there were pictures of those records to be found somewhere. If they were organized chronologically, I could try to find his birth registration that way. Googling "ireland civil registration records" brought me to the Civil Records search page of a genealogy site run by, of all things, the Irish government's tourism department.

Once again, there wasn't a John McDowell born to the right parents during the right time period, so I went looking for his parents' marriage. And found it.

If they married in 1872, John would probably still technically be a bastard, but I had a point to start from. Once I clicked into the actual scan of the record I nearly snapped myself in half sitting upright in attention, because Thomas McDowell's father's name was Duncan, John named his eldest son Duncan, Isabella's father's name was John, I had to have the right two people, this couldn't be a coincidence.

And then I noticed Isabella was a widow. Isabella was a widow.

Who was your husband, and when did he die, Isabella? I searched again, and found her marriage to a Thomas Logan July 30th, 1866. No men named Thomas Logan died in Belfast between 1866 and 1870, which meant he was probably still alive when John was born. It meant I had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.

John Robb Logan came into the world on July 1st, 1868, in the Ballymacarrett district of Belfast, the second child of four born to Thomas Logan and Isabella Robb. Once I knew what I was looking for the rest came easy.

John's early life was riddled with tragedies. His younger brother Joseph was six months old when he died in March of 1870. His father died of smallpox in December of the same year, exactly one month after the birth of his sister Mary. Three months before his fifth birthday, his first half-sibling Bella died, at just five months old. And in 1879, his older brother William died after a long, miserably drawn-out illness from spinal tuberculosis.

(As an aside, god, poor Isabella. She had four children with Thomas Logan, and a further nine with Thomas McDowell, and before her early death from a long respiratory illness she buried a husband, two sons, and two daughters. How do you go on after that, how are you not forever shattered?)

If I hadn't been sure I'd found the right family, I was after William died. Thomas McDowell was the person who reported William's death to the registrar's office after sitting by his deathbed. The registrar recorded William as a "child of [the] baker" that Thomas was by profession; Thomas McDowell claimed his stepson as his own.

Duncan McDowell, John's step-grandfather, had a family burial plot in Ballygowan, and he named William Adam Logan as his grandson, with no qualifiers, when they buried him.

All the evidence suggests that the McDowells loved John Robb Logan and his siblings, and he loved them back every bit as much. You don't choose to take on the surname of people you hate, and it seems very much the case that John chose to go by McDowell when he came to America. I'm honestly not sure there was a way for Thomas McDowell to bequeath his name to his stepchildren, given John's brother William died a Logan and his sister Mary married as one.

John Robb Logan disappeared from history after his baptism, and John Robert McDowell made his first confirmed appearance in the historical record in 1883, but I was certain they were one and the same. The problem was proving it to my mother, because McDowell was her family name. She'd grown up with it, as had her sisters and her dozens of cousins and her father and his siblings and her father's father; I only had a paper trail arguing the name she knew didn't belong to any of them by blood.

So I went for blood.

I refuse to give my DNA to Ancestry.com on a principle born from paranoia and ethics concerns. It's absolutely not happening, ever, like hell do I expect a corporation to do the right thing with my genetic material. My mother doesn't share my concerns, either now or four years ago, when she bought an Ancestry DNA kit and then did absolutely nothing with her results besides marvel at the unexpected Swedish heritage in her 'Ethnicity Estimate' because doing anything else looked like too much work.

It took a few days to figure out how to hook my mother's DNA results into the tree I've built, and a few more for all the features to populate, but all told it took less than a week between learning the truth about my great-great-grandfather's parentage and proving it irrefutably with DNA, via several descendants of his full-blooded sister Mary and a grandson of his half-brother Wallace.

Ancestry doesn't tell you when new DNA matches are found, or when someone adds you to their tree (and thank god for that, my mother has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand matches). To those descendants of Mary Thomasina Logan, the handful of John's descendants who've shelled out for Ancestry DNA kits could be any random person. Frequently the relationships between matches aren't clear, because of all the folks like my mom who never add a tree to their results, or those who don't try to go any further back than their grandparents.

As far as Mary Logan's descendants know, the sons of Thomas Logan dead-ended his line, and when I do find John in their trees there's never more than a birth year and a blank space where there would usually be a year of death. (They all have the wrong Isabella Robb too, but I don't really blame them; apparently Isabella was one of the most popular names for girls for well over a century, and Robbs weren't exactly thin on the ground.)

Someday soon, I'm going to reach out. People who study genealogy do it because they're looking for something: long lost relatives, answers to questions asked too late, or even a better, more personal understanding of history by learning about the people who were there when it happened. Every family has its mysteries and this one, at least, could be solved.

John's story doesn't end here. Here is where it begins.

~

*I'm aware of the problematic nature of White Lady True Crime Brain Poisoning, but I'm gonna have to pull the 'I'm not like other girls' card. I'm incredibly discerning about my crime shows, I hate the fucking cops, and I'm realistic about how unbelievably low my chances are of ever being the victim of a violent crime. I'm white, I'm broke as shit, I'm built like a running back and walk like the Terminator, and most importantly, I'm single and planning to stay that way for the rest of my life. The only way I'm getting murdered is if I happen to get caught in a random mass shooting, which isn't outside the realm of possibility because America.

**In case anyone's gotten this far and is still interested, there's strong evidence that the mystery of the Somerton Man was finally solved last year. At some point I'd like to take a look at the tree the forensic genealogists built tho, because I have some Doubts. There was only one person in that family that fell off the map in the 40's? Just one? I was lightning-strike kinds of lucky enough to find John's real parentage, but I dug up more unanswered questions with it, because two of his half-brothers dropped out of the records after 1901. Completely setting aside the possibility of infidelity in the Webb family and how common inbreeding has been (both historically and in recent memory) in populations of European descent, I have a hard time buying that Carl Webb was the only person who could be the Somerton Man. It's still cool as shit that they have a strong possibility tho.

***Maryland and Kansas specifically can blow me, if somebody died in either of those states I have to find an obituary or a tombstone to get the mcfrickin' date, and I have to either pay money and prove a relationship to see a death certificate, or show up to an archive in person to search on their intranet, MARYLAND WHY DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO KNOW WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER DIED. (Being fair, I don't know if she died in Maryland, that's just a great-uncle's best guess, because she ran away from her family in 1949 and nobody ever saw her again after the early 60's. Helen, where the hell did you go?)

****One of the big reasons why I got into genealogy in the first place was to see if I could find how far back the predisposition to early deaths and autoimmune disease went in my family. What I hadn't expected to find was a predisposition for extreme longevity on all sides. Longevity as in 'skewing the life expectancy bell curve' kinds of longevity. As long as someone didn't come down with a freak illness or make a looooooooong string of poor life choices, they were apparently immune to death, which honestly explains a few things about Crazy Grandma, god damn.

[imperfectlibrarian]

I'm so upset that jjk entered the It Would Be Good If It Was Good territory with both feet

[emmabirb8]

WHOOOOAAAHH OH MY GOD I just had a dream about the finale of s5 where the Reveal is finally made (and Memo's turning was finally complete for some reason), and Guillermo was, like, intimidating Nandor a little bit with super speed moving around erratically and getting up in his face and then he flashed his FANGS and it was so so cool, I can't believe my brain made that up

[truckstoptigers]

i remember i'd hear about how my state is one of the most dangerous places in terms of sex trafficking and i would think, what an awful thing. how terrible is it that my state has such an issue with trafficking that it's enough for it to be a well-known, well-documented serious danger/risk area.

and i still didn't think it would ever happen to me.

[vamptastic]

a lot of people are being lied to by their parents and teachers and pastors and a lot of people don't want to ever confront that fact. doesn't matter how much access to information has improved, i think the core of the issue is still primarily that people don't feel comfortable with changing their minds, whether it's because it'd isolate them from family, or because they'd have to confront that they were wrong or did something wrong. ive spoken to so many people my age where ive spent hours digging into their misfounded belief, figuring out what misinfo they were told and why, used the internet to firsthand show them exactly what lie they were told and empirical evidence of the truth, and then had them go, yeah, well, i still disagree. i mean, dont automatically assume someone is wrong because they have the same access to info as you and are just stupid, but willful ignorance is definitely still a thing.

[lebelinoria]

tags from @findingfeather

#for real tho: the steady look at his own corpse#“it's how I lived my life and yes I'm aware it got me killed and I'm not sorry”#“it was not a mistake and I'd do it again”#edwin died and suffered horribly because of the pack-instinct of teenage boys#to terrorize other teenage boys when they feel powerless#charles died refusing to be one of that kind of teenage boy#and saving the target of that kind of bullshit#and he's not sorry and he'd do it again#he doesn't regret it and it wasn't a mistake#and neither is this

every day i think about charles rowland and how he chooses to protect people and doesn't regret it even when it literally kills him. looking his dead body in the face and not regretting his actions that lead to it. looking at edwin and choosing to stay on earth with him instead of going to the afterlife and not regretting it. choosing to protect people and stay with people that are kind to him even if it hurts him. no regrets, not mistakes, he would do it again, he would do it every time.

i can see the kind of person who would go to hell to bring someone back in this exchange right here.

your wording and phrasing here is extremely powerful and charles rowland is an incredible person.