#he just pairs it with a recognition of the people he's exploiting as children

[wellnoe]

its sooooo fun to me that all of gojo's little 'leave it to me!' solutions also suck. yuji won't die immediately, but he'll just die later, after being exploited to the utmost by gojo. yuta won't be killed, he'll just be beholden to the 'higher ups' for the rest of his, presumably short, life, caught between what they can make him do and what gojo will stand in the way of. megumi won't be taken in by the zenin, he just has to work as a sorcerer as collateral to support himself and his comatose sister (under gojo's watchful eye of course). isn't gojo such a good teacher?

[roguishcat]

Chasing perfection

Chasing perfection is not only impractical but mostly unattainable. Instead of boosting our achievements, it shrinks them. Why? Because when we aim too high, "failure" becomes the norm, chipping away at our self-confidence bit by bit. But then again, maybe perfection is overrated. (Astarion/Tav)

Pairing: Astarion/(Female)Tav

Word count: 2k

Part 1/10

She hated when he looked at her this way. As if he knew exactly what she was doing.

At first, she thought that she was just being paranoid. But now she was almost certain that he knew.

On the day when she woke up on the beach and realised that she was thrust straight into some kind of adventure novel, she knew that she would be absolutely useless. Everyone in their motley crew had some kind of skill, they brought something to the table. Her upbringing did not come with any skills required to survive in the wilderness, with or without a tadpole guest in their brain. Because she was raised to ensnare a husband, bare children, and keep a grand house functioning perfectly for the said husband and children. She did not know how to cook or even build a fire, had no clue how to pitch a tent, and was woefully inadequate when it came to combat or magic of any kind.

She was good at getting people to do what she wanted though.

So, when it was her turn to cook, she asked Gale to tell her once again that simply charming story about the time he almost burned down the library or some other boyhood story that he was so fond of.

She did not actually care, but he did.

Gale would chuckle fondly at the memory, so eager to relive the good old times that he did not notice that it was actually him who prepared the meal, and she was merely going through the motions near him. She now knew far too much about his Tressym, mother, and other details of life in Waterdeep. But, it was worth it. Later in the evening, when she ladled the stew into bowls and handed it out around the campsite, she humbly brushed off her companions’ compliments. It was nothing much, really. It wasn’t that good. But it was. It was delicious because all she did was salt it a little towards the end. Gods know it would turn out burnt and undercooked if she was the one preparing the meal.

And that was her game in a nutshell. Notice details, exploit others for her benefit, be all smiles and compliments. It has been this way as far back as she could remember. She has never been good at anything, unimpressive in every way. But, somehow, growing up surrounded by the best of the best, she realised that it wasn’t the talented or the cleverest that would always get recognition. It was those who grabbed every opportunity, exploited every possibility and shamelessly pushed themselves to the forefront of others’ minds that always came out on top. So, she gained others’ trust, learned secrets, manipulated others into doing the work for her, and they happily let her take the credit for everything.

She knew it was objectively wrong, but quite frankly, boo-freaking-hoo. If they weren’t smart enough to see through her act, then they would get exploited anyway. And why shouldn’t she benefit from it in the meantime?

And so, she praised Wyll on his perfect fighting technique and got him to give her pointers. She knew that he might take her asking for sparring sessions as flirting, but what was the harm? He was a Ravengard, he probably had enough people fawning over him back in the city. And he was a little too good, too proper and righteous for her rotten self anyway. After a while, she moved on to Lae’zel, all smiles as she excused herself when Wyll came by her tent. Because of course she was such a ditz, she completely forgot that he asked her to come by, but she couldn’t possibly upset Lae’zel now. She would gladly spar with him tomorrow.

This was how pretty much everyone, everyone but one annoying elf, did everything that she required of them. She got reasonably good at casting a limited number of spells, good enough with a dagger and a bow not to get killed in a fight, still completely rubbish at cooking. And every single time she approached someone with a request; he would be watching. She knew she was good at what she did, but he could practically write a book on the subject. So, whilst everyone else was oblivious, she knew he could tell that she was a fraud.

At first it was nothing much, just a sly look here and there. But then came the comments. Oh, how she despised him in these moments!

“My, my. You seem to be getting awfully chummy with Lae’zel. Was it anyone but you, I would think that you caught feelings,” he mocked, looking down at her as she tried to lift herself off the ground after a particularly tough sparring session. “And for shame, leaving Wyll feeling all blue time and time again.”

She wiped her brow and faked a girlish giggle.

“Astarion, for shame!” she swatted at his arm playfully. “Someone might think you actually care.”

What was his deal anyway? What did he care? It wasn’t as if he was any better, he was just as rotten as she. Perhaps that was it. Like sees like an all that.

Except he was nothing like her because he was actually good at many things. Locks opened in seconds as he worked on them with quick and precise movements. He was a great shot and hardly ever missed. In fact, if he wasn’t, she would be dead three times over by now. He could sew and mend things so beautifully, with such careful stitches, that if they were back at the city, she would have hired him in a heartbeat. He mentioned in passing that he was a magistrate back in the city, which made her feel even more worried. The man saw through lies for a living! And to top it all off, his stupid, stupid, ridiculous good looks would set any living, breathing thing ablaze.

It just wasn’t fair.

Be that as it may, he wasn’t going to throw her off with his looks, or comments, or that annoying manner of his to hover nearby whenever she approached someone with a request. She would survive and make it home in one piece. Even if it meant that being calm around Astarion and not showing just how much he got under her skin was driving her absolutely mad.

The annoying part was that it made her a little less charming, a little more short-tempered or distracted with the others. Because now doing what she did best, being amicable and pleasant, charming and flirty, did not come as naturally. She started second guessing herself. Because if he could see through her lies, maybe the rest could too?

“A copper for your thoughts,” Gale’s voice startled her.

She blinked owlishly. “Sorry, I was a million miles away,” she smiled at him. “Do sit,” she patted the space next to her.

Gale smiled and lowered himself to sit beside her. 

“Yes, I can tell. This was the second time I asked.”

“Was it? Sorry. I- I’m just thinking about our little group.”

It wasn’t entirely untrue.

“About how much we’ve accomplished. About how much more we have to do,” she bit her bottom lip as she said that. It was a habit of hers, to bite her lips when she was worried or stressed. It drove her mother up the wall when she did that. Because cracked lips look so unattractive on a lady! She flicked her tongue out a little to check. No, not cracked yet.

“Well, we will get to the goblin camp by tomorrow,” Gale watched her bite her bottom lip and turned away when he saw the dart of her tongue through the briefest parting of her mouth. “Perhaps we will be able to find out more about the little guests in our brains. You should get some sleep.”

“Yes, goodnight,” she answered absentmindedly.

Gale looked like he wanted to say something else, but changed his mind and left without another word.

She sighed and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Great. All that effort in making friends being undone in seconds. She would have to be extra attentive tomorrow to make up for it.

A tree branch crunched as Astarion approached the campfire.

“Well, if it isn’t our fearless leader. No doubt thinking about the strategy she will utilize tomorrow at goblin camp,” he mocked. Because he knew that she realised what he was referring to. He wasn’t speaking about strategies in combat. He was eager to see how else she would try to use their companions for her gain tomorrow.

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Tsk, language!” He wagged an elegant finger in front of her face, looking delighted at her little outburst. “Wouldn’t want anyone to think that our perfect, wonderful leader has a potty mouth.”

“Go bother someone else.”

“I would much rather bother you, actually, my beautiful fraud, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Do what you like.”

Because telling him to stop would likely have the opposite effect. If she acted disinterested, she could probably get him to leave faster.

“Well, isn’t it just splendid that what I’d like to do right now is stay right here. So, move over, darling. I will stay up with you, as you seem to be in no hurry to turn in for the night.”

She shot him a look full of distaste, but otherwise did not protest.

As Astarion sat down, his sleeve brushed against her bare arm, and she shivered involuntarily. It was just a breath of fabric, but she was so alert when it came to him, so aware of him being in her space, that it felt like her senses were completely on fire.

“I can’t sleep,” she cleared her throat a little. “It is much too hot.”

“Then why don’t you refresh yourself. The river is just there,” he pointed to the glittering expanse.

“You know what? I think I’m good just looking at it.”

“Nonsense! You will feel so much more refreshed after a dip. I know I would.”

She did not like his tone. Teasing and a little threatening at the same time.

Suddenly he pushed her, and she fell backwards and into the water, squealing in a most undignified manner.

She came up sputtering, completely soaked and even more frazzled than before. She shot him a murderous look. Astarion did not seem bothered in the least, laughing at her expense.

“Just what is your problem!” she hissed, struggling to climb onto shore because apparently chivalry was dead, and she was supposed to get out without any help at all.

At least she was just in her cotton shirt and trousers, rather than in her armor. When she finally did manage to flop ashore, acutely aware how that looked to Astarion, she marched straight up to him.

 “Fine! I know that I am not this perfect leader. We both know that I’ve been bulshitting my way through this since the word go. And yes, I’ve abused everyone’s trust to learn how to survive out here, and that is probably why for some reason they see me as capable. And I know full-well that I am not special, or talented, or much good at anything. And I also know that if you breathe even one word about this to anyone, I will deny it tooth and nail. And guess whom they will believe,” she finished with a smirk. She did not exactly have the upper hand, but at least she stunned him into silence. Except he wasn’t really looking at her face. Or rather he was trying but failing. Because whilst the night was quite warm, apparently-

“Hm, nippy tonight, isn’t it?”

She short-circuited. If goblin raiders came by at this moment, she would volunteer to be their pincushion and just die. But one did not show that one was embarrassed. So, instead of imploding there and then, she flicked her sopping wet hair into his face, lifted her chin defiantly and marched past him.

“Goodnight, Astarion.”

“My dear, I’m wounded by your dismissal. If this is a challenge, don’t imagine that I’m not up to it,” he laughed as he watched her walk away, her back stiff and her steps too hurried.

And it was in that moment that she decided that she would most definitely, most certainly get her revenge. But that would be tomorrow. Because tonight she just needed to get changed and then scream into her pillow because Astarion got under her skin, and they both knew it.

💖 Tag list 💖:

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[aliyah-the-creator]

This is my very first post, so I hope I do good! Please give me some feedback, I would love to hear it.

The Umbrella Academy Life Swap:

The Hargreaves switch lives instead of powers.

• Ben ran away at the age of 13 and got lost in the dimension inside his stomach, the Handler eventually finds him and recruits him to the Commission. He works as a super powered agent that saves his victims from his sadistic partners, Hazel and Cha-Cha. Ben doesn’t come back in a 13 year old body like Five, he’s the same age as his siblings, and Ben does know about the apocalypse and has the eye. And unlike Five, Ben actually tells his siblings about the apocalypse and how he was a super powered assassin that acted as the kidnapper and lookout. When the Hargreaves were 13, Ben had tried to talk to Five out of time traveling because logically, he may not know where he would end up, but Five wouldn’t listen to him and started arguing with him. The fighting got so loud that Vanya and Klaus eventually got pulled into the argument as well and it turned into a fistfight with all 4 of them. All of them ended up with scratches and bruises on their faces, a few chunks of their hair missing, and cleaning the mansion floors and ceilings from top to bottom and every single room without using their powers as a punishment for fighting by Reginald. At 2 am, Ben woke up after a nightmare and felt bad about getting Vanya and Klaus into trouble when they didn’t even started the fight in the first place and tried to go to their rooms to apologize, but he never did because the Horror became restless and angry that it didn’t get anything to eat and wanted to make Ben feel how trapped they felt when Reginald always had them kill people, so Ben’s tentacles grabbed him and opened the portal to their world, which was the apocalypse, and trapped him there for 10 years until the Handler came and recruited him and was never seen after that day again. Because of Ben’s disappearance, Vanya and Klaus blamed Five and his ambition for time travel since it was him who argued with Ben in the first place and Five had never forgotten it. Ben hopes that Klaus and Vanya would forgive Five in time. Ben read Klaus’s book about what happened to his family when he disappeared, he read about Luther running away to Dallas to forget about the Umbrella Academy, about Diego staying at the Academy to keep fighting crime, about Allison’s death and how she’s now mute, how Klaus is trying to get sober and stabling himself, how Five became a professor at a prestigious university and a vigilante, and how Vanya took a dark path into alcoholism.

• Five became a lowly-paid physics professor at community college after he was fired for punching a colleague at prestigious university and he’s also a vigilante, but his fiancé Delores doesn’t like it though. Five met Delores at a professor’s conference in Canada where she was presenting her findings on the science of gems and geodes since she’s a mineralogy professor (someone who teaches the study of rocks and crystals) and where he was discussing the possibility of time travel. Those two immediately hit it off and are now engaged, Five proposed to her by using different types of gems to spell it out. Five uses his powers of teleportation to be a mysterious assassin and hero.

• Klaus is a dancer at a local theater and he has somewhat control over his powers, but if the ghosts get too loud, he smokes cigarettes instead of weed so he wouldn’t be high at a recital. He became friends with Leonard Peabody aka Harold Jenkins when Klaus was 23 after his family abandoned him for writing an auto-biography about him having a power that traumatizes him and what the Umbrella Academy was really like behind the scenes, it’s called “The Ghosts Inside the Umbrella Academy: the life of Klaus Hargreaves”. Harold makes him more isolated by threatening to kill himself and haunting Klaus for the rest of his life if Klaus tries to leave him. Since Klaus never had someone ,besides Ben, care for him and give him a home and food since he was living at a homeless shelter when he met Leonard, Klaus thinks that this type of friendship is normal and doesn’t think twice about it. In his book, Klaus portrays his remaining siblings as people who knew about his drug abuse, but didn’t do anything about it; he portrayed Luther as a hotheaded daddy’s boy who was treated like the Golden child, Diego as a momma’s boy with daddy issues always trying to compete with Luther for everything, Allison as his favorite sister who was taken too soon, who’s death was the final straw that tore apart their family, and who acts as a silent ghost mother since she’s mute (no one believes him that he can see her though), he portrays Five as the cause of Ben’s disappearance and as a heartless gremlin who doesn’t care about his siblings enough to see that his siblings are hurting and have real problems of their own, he portrays Ben as his kind-hearted and favorite brother who was the glue that hold their family together and who’s disappearance drove a wedge between the family, and he portrays Vanya as his ordinary violin playing sister that desperately wanted to belong with their family in any way she could, but turned to alcohol when she learned that her dream of being in the Umbrella Academy was crushed by Reginald and who had the easy life of not being exploited by their father for her powers like he was. Vanya actually confronted him about her portrayal in the book and they said some things that they shouldn’t have, but they eventually forgave each other and Vanya moved in with him and Leonard a month later. Klaus didn’t mind that Vanya and Leonard were dating, but saw a striking difference between Vanya and Leonard’s relationship and Vanya and Sissy’s relationship when Vanya came back from the 60s. With Leonard, Vanya was walking on eggshells and isolated from her brothers and couldn’t be herself around him, but with Sissy, Klaus saw that Vanya was happier and could be herself around Sissy and loves Harlan like her own son. Klaus was the one to kill Leonard with his powers by having Allison choke him to death when he badly hurt Harlan with a gun and tried to drown Sissy.

• Allison dies at the age of 17 when her throat was slit by a serial killer on a mission and now acts like Klaus’s mother by always keeping him sober enough to conjure her and giving him healthy advice, but ultimately going along with almost every crazy idea Klaus has. Since she has a slit throat she can’t talk, but she does sign language instead and like Ben, she ages like Klaus, but still wears the same outfit she was buried in: a yellow and green striped dress with a blue flora printed jacket with red heels and a pair of black leggings. She HATES Leonard Peabody because he’s manipulating Klaus into isolation from their family and she tries to get Klaus out of their toxic friendship, but Klaus always denies Leonard’s abuse. She misses her siblings so much that she’s deeply hurt that she had ignored their problems for so long.

• Diego stayed at the Umbrella Academy because he didn’t know how to be anything else but a hero, he also didn’t want to Mom behind, so he began reading and writing code to free Grace from her restrictive rules that Reginald put on her, but after his accident that had him have scars all over his body and face to the point where he lost his left eye and his face is almost beyond recognition, Diego left the Academy when he realized that there was no point in staying and became a recluse in his good friend, Eudora’s house. Unlike Luther, Diego doesn’t have the monkey body because I just couldn’t see that type of body build on David Castaneda. Diego met Eudora at a local boxing gym, Eudora was impressed Diego’s fight skilled and was shocked to know that he was Diego “The Kraken” Hargreaves because Reginald told the whole world including their city and Luther, Klaus, Five, and Vanya that Diego died in an explosion a year ago when he had his accident. Diego ,of course, was pissed that his own father told everyone and his siblings that he was dead instead of saying that he survived the mission and was just scarred for the rest of his life, but he wasn’t surprised that Reginald did that to keep up his reputation. Him and Eudora immediately became fast friends and roommates at her house since Diego had nowhere to go when he left the Academy 6 months ago and was living at an run-down and moldy apartment. They actually tried dating at one point, but because of their conflicted personalities, they decided to just stay friends and roommates.

• 3 months after Allison’s funeral, Luther ran away to escape his father’s tight gripped and cold stare and the house that reminded him of his lovely yet dead Allison when he was 18 years old. He ended up in Dallas, Texas where he became a famous boxer named King Kong since he’s so huge and muscular, met and married a successful TV salesman named Elliott Gussman, and they adopted an African American baby girl who they named Claire Allison Gussman. Luther decided to take Elliott’s last name ,even though it was Luther who proposed to him, to cut his ties off from the Umbrella Academy and the man who turned 6 children into soldiers and who blamed the death of an innocent 17 year old girl that happened to be his adopted daughter on his 4 sons and 1 daughter instead of the person who killed her in the first place. Luther and Elliott had a happy marriage for 3 years until Klaus’s book came out that exposed the secrets of Luther’s past and made him into a hotheaded bully with daddy issues who followed Reginald around like a eager puppy trying to get a reward and a coward ran away from his problems instead of facing them. Elliott was furious at Luther because when Luther came to Dallas he lied about being from a mob family that did all types of shady businesses and that he ran away because his “family” couldn’t understand and accept him being bisexual instead of telling him truth about his abusive father who raised them to be child soldiers, how his brother Diego would always tried to be better than him to their father’s approval, how his brother Five was too smart for his own good, how he loved his sister Allison more than he should, how he tried to forget about Ben’s disappearance, how he ignored Klaus’s drug abuse, and how he denied Vanya’s problem with alcohol for so long. When Elliott read Klaus’s book about what Luther did and who he was, Elliott immediately started arguing with him about his true identity. Luther tried to deny it, but couldn’t because he loves Elliott too much to even hurt him in a way. Elliott actually threatened to separate from Luther when their arguments gotten too much, but he didn’t and instead drove Luther and him to see a marriage counselor so that they could actually talk to each other instead of just arguing. Luther and Elliott eventually made up, but because of the book, Luther is the one that’s more pissed about it and at Klaus for almost making Elliott lose his marriage to him. Btw, Claire is 6 years old in 2019 and was adopted as a baby in 2013 by the Gussman family when Luther was 24 and Elliott was 30, a year after Klaus’s book was published.

• Vanya was introduced to alcohol at 13 years old when Five and Klaus were drinking 2 cases of beer that Five stole, Klaus persuaded her to take a sip of his beer and she hasn’t stop drinking since. Besides the violin and her pills, alcohol was the thing that defined Vanya and her personality. Vanya thought that no one would care about what happened to her since she was so ordinary and isolated that she dumped all of her pills in the garbage disposal and drinks her problems away. With her new coping mechanism, Vanya’s personality changed from quiet and meek to sarcastic and drunk. Five and Vanya left the Academy for college together, but ended up separated by the time they were 20 because Vanya kept drinking her tutition away. By the age of 22, Vanya ended up being homeless because she got kicked out of her apartment for not paying her rent with the money she used to buy alcohol. She still plays her violin, but only for cash instead of at The Icarus Theatre. She also read Klaus’s book and was upset about her portrayal as his alcoholic sister who had an easy life of being ordinary and never going on missions because she doesn’t have a power that can’t be turned off willingly or that can kill somebody; she cried and drank her misery away for 3 weeks until she confronted Klaus about the book, they both admittedly said things that they regretted, but ended up apologizing to each other in the end. She also meets and dates Leonard like in the show and instead of Allison finding the truth about Leonard, it’s Five and Delores who both tried to convince Klaus and Vanya that Leonard is a snake, but they both denied it. Vanya ends up living with Klaus and Leonard when her and Klaus made up when she’s 23. In my first draft I made it Five and Delores that Vanya ended up rooming with, but I wanted to make Vanya and Klaus isolated further by Leonard manipulating both of them. When the house is attacked by Hazel and Cha-Cha, Vanya is the one that’s kidnapped and tortured by them for 2 days and is rescued by Eudora who arrives with back up this time, but is injured in the spine by Cha-Cha. Vanya takes the briefcase and time travels to October 12, 1963 where she ends up falling in love with a woman named Sissy Cooper, a widowed housewife who accidentally ran Vanya over with her car, and becoming a nanny/second mother to Sissy’s 5 year old autistic son named Harlan. Vanya stayed with them until 1966 when a neighbor reported their “unholy” relationship to the police, so to keep them safe Vanya used the briefcase to go back to 2019 with Sissy and Harlan.

—When Vanya gets back to 2019 with Sissy and Harlan, no one believes her story except for Klaus, who promises to her relationship with Sissy a secret from Leonard, and Ben, who was the only one that was worried about her whereabouts in the first place besides Klaus. Vanya tries to become sober for the sake of Harlan not being afraid of her when she gets drunk and for Sissy and her’s relationship since her late husband was an abusive alcoholic, instead of conjuring the one she loves’s ghost like Klaus did in the show. When Vanya was dating Leonard, he would constantly have her and Klaus practice their music and dance at 12am-6am to train them more and if one of them mess up, he’ll have them locked up in a dark and tiny closet with only one dimly lit lightbulb and they would have to balance on a stool on one leg for the duration of their training. Leonard would also take his anger out on Klaus and Vanya if he had a bad day at his shop, which would leave Klaus with bruises on his arms and a black eye and Vanya with scratches on her back and bruises on her neck. (Trigger Warning for those who can’t handle stories with domestic violence) When the 3 of them were 27, Leonard gotten pissed at how independent and successful Klaus and Vanya were getting in their lives by Klaus getting paid more from his dance recitals and Vanya going to AA meetings more to the point of being sober for 3 weeks that he took his frustrations about losing his control out on them by punching and slapping Klaus and choking and scratching Vanya, but thankfully a neighbor called the police after hearing their screams and Klaus and Vanya were taken to the hospital and Leonard was arrested, but unfortunately Klaus and Vanya bailed Leonard out due to dropping charges against him as an apologize.

Here are the things that I changed

• Klaus and Vanya both cause the apocalypse by combining their powers at Klaus’s dance recital with Vanya’s violin because Leonard isolated them from everyone, manipulated them to the point of denying the abuse he put them through, and because of him trying to kill Sissy and Harlan for taking Vanya away from him.

• Five and Delores tries to explain to Vanya and Klaus that Leonard only liked them to get revenge on the Umbrella Academy and it was him that kidnapped Sissy and Harlan to get them to come back to him, but Five gets stabbed in the stomach by Klaus’s new found telekinesis and Vanya makes Five and Delores’s apartment collapsed after knocking Delores out. When the apartment collapses, Allison , who’s coperal at the moment, immediately grabs both a bleeding Five and an unconscious Delores and saves them from death and takes them to the Academy to be treated by Grace. Delores unfortunately loses her right arm to a huge piece of shrapnel lodged into it that’s cutting the circulation.

• When Ben goes to the apocalypse for the first time, he finds Luther with the eye clutched in his hand, Diego wrapped in black bandages holding a woman with a long black ponytail (Eudora), Five in an Armani suit with his eyes opened, and a red headed woman in a polka dotted blouse and a black skirt holding one of Five’s hand (Delores). All of them are dead and Ben finds out that they’re his brothers by the faded black umbrella tattoo on Luther’s wrist when Ben was inspecting the bodies. The bodies that Ben couldn’t find were Allison, Vanya, and Klaus’s, but after learning about Allison’s death from Klaus’s book, Ben kept looking for Vanya and Klaus.

• Vanya gets her burst of powers when Harlan almost drown in the summer of ‘64 in the lake 10 miles away from the farm. Harlan was playing with a beach ball when it got away from him and he tried to get it while Vanya and Sissy were cuddling in the sand and a wave pulled him under the water. Sissy started crying and panicking when Vanya couldn’t get Harlan to the surface, but after a minute of silence she was shocked and relieved to see Vanya holding Harlan in her arms while she’s floating in the lake with glowing white eyes. As soon as they get to shore, Vanya gives Harlan cpr which transfers her newly found powers to him like in the canon.

• Diego doesn’t show himself to his siblings until episode 3 when Hazel and Cha-Cha attack the house because everyone thinks he’s dead and he’s a recluse. He finds out about the attack from Grace (mom) when she calls him from her bedroom phone since they talk every day so that he can know what’s going on and because of these calls, Diego knows about Ben being back, how the funeral went, and how much each of his siblings changed over the years.

• In episode 1, since the siblings’ lives are switched around, the way they found out that Reginald died is slightly different from canon. Luther finds out from the press badgering him after he won a fight, Diego finds out from Eudora when she comes home after work and turns on the Tv in a flash, Klaus finds out during rehearsal on the radio that him and his group are listening to to practice the recital while Allison is dancing in the shadows behind him when the news suddenly comes on, Five finds out from his phone on social media when one of his students sent him the news link after Five teleports to his apartment after saving a 12 year old boy from being abducted by a creep and almost killing said creep by beating him senseless, and Vanya finds out from a bar Tv when she and Leonard are on a date. She immediately calls Klaus who was immediately going to call her to tell her the same thing when he was done rehearsals.

• Just to clarify, since Vanya spent 3 years with Sissy and Harlan in Dallas from 1963-1966, she is 33 years old and Harlan is 8 years old because he was 5 when he and his mom met Vanya. Even though Vanya spent 3 years in the ‘60s, she was only gone for 2 days with Klaus, Five, Delores, Ben, and Leonard searching for her.

• When the Hargreeves all come back for the funeral, the introduction of them to each other are very different. Diego doesn’t show up to the funeral to keep up the reputation of him being dead. Vanya and Klaus show up together, but immediately split up when Vanya goes straight to the bar making drinks for her and her brothers (mostly for her though) and Klaus goes to his old room to reminisce about his past. Five checks their father’s room and office for evidence of something other than a heart attack, he is the one that thinks that Reginald was murdered by someone, and he also greets Vanya and Klaus with Delores who went with him to meet his family. Luther is trying to get through the funeral as possible by almost avoiding his siblings, but that backfires when Five calls a family meeting to talk about their father’s death and Luther sees a tipsy Vanya holding a mix of vodka and rum, Klaus talking to Delores who is laughing at a funny story Klaus is telling, and Five lecturing the remaining siblings on how their father might’ve been murdered.

• Eudora is more present in the show since she survives the gunshot wound in her spine by Cha-Cha, but she ends up being paralyzed from the waist down in a wheelchair. She helps Five with discovering how Reginald actually died and Diego with stepping out into the world and seeing his family for the first time in years. Like in canon, she is the first one to find Vanya at the motel after finding the message that Hazel and Cha-Cha left on the van when they burned down the prosthetic factory after they got drunk off of Vanya’s “special lemonade” which is just lemonade mixed with wine and vodka. Unlike in the show, Delores and Ben go with Eudora as back up in case something goes wrong and it does end up going wrong with Cha-Cha and Eudora having a shoot out with each other in the parking lot that ultimately ends up Eudora becoming paralyzed by Cha-Cha’s bullet ricocheting off a lamppost and lodging into Eudora’s spine with her laser gunand Ben wrestling with his former partner Hazel in the motel room while Vanya is escaping through the vent with the briefcase in her arms and Delores in tow.

Ben breaks Hazel’s wrist and almost beats him to a bloody pulp for kidnapping Vanya, but he stops when he hears Eudora’s screams from outside and sees her on the ground behind her car and he immediately drives her to the hospital while Hazel and Cha-Cha get away before the police show up. Delores and Vanya get on a nearby bus to escape the chaos and they talk about what’s going on in their lives and Delores talks about how Leonard treats Klaus when they’re alone, but Vanya denies any abuse and opens the briefcase. The last thing Vanya hears is Delores screaming.

• The episode “The Day that Wasn’t” doesn’t exist in my AU and is instead replaced with an episode called “Welcome to the 60’s” where Five interrogates Sissy and Harlan about the past while working on the beat up briefcase to learn more about how to time travel. Eudora and Diego talk about how their long time friendship has become into a sibling relationship and about how Diego can reconnect with his siblings again. Luther and Delores discuss how they both want a normal and ordinary life with their husband and fiancé respectively, but fail to see that things can never go back to way they were. Ben goes off on his own to find the truth about Leonard Peabody, but finds himself at Griddy’s where he sees Hazel kissing Agnes and talks to them about his problems. Agnes gives Ben advice about how he can reconcile with his family by actually giving them time to process him being a time traveling assassin and him telling Five to not feel guilty about causing a rift between him and Vanya and Klaus because it wasn’t Five’s fault that Ben “ran away”.

I’ll continue the rest of the story when I have the time. Right now I just want to post this.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

💣, 💖, 💢 for ship ask?

💣- Ship that pisses you off

We're just jumping straight into the salt, I see :P

So, there are a lot, but I think the biggest one is Cao Weining/Gu Xiang. Just... deeply, deeply unpleasant to watch.

Also, the Lan parents - I might, possibly, feel better about that if it were leaning into the dark premise of it (although, given that we don't know much about these people outside of that, I'm not super compelled), but so many of the shippers seem to get very intense about "it's actually super consensual forbidden love! how dare you think anything sketchy was going on!" and I'm not about that life.

Also, I'll just throw in Wen Qing/Jiang Cheng, because of a combination a) it didn't really interest me much in the first place, and b) the way it's done, I think, does a major disservice to both characters. (The way fandom generally characterizes the woman in many m/f pairings.... well it irks me a great deal.)

💖Ship that needs more love -

So many!! I would love to see some content for Xiao Jingyan/Mu Nihuang from Nirvana in Fire - preferably angsty pre-canon proxy sex that goes against all Jingyan's concerns about propriety, and is thus awkward and uncomfortable. (I have specific tastes, okay?) I would love to see a broader variety of content for Wei Wuxian/Nie Huaisang - there's a good amount of teenage experimentation, but less post-canon dysfunctional mildly antagonistic FWB horribleness (feat. Nie Huaisang and Lan Wangji being deeply resentful of each other and trying to one-up each other in sexually satisfying Wei Wuxian). It's just very good.

Also, see my previous response about Shi Mei ships. A scenario involving him with Mo Ran, Chu Wanning, or both, could be very very good and crunchy. Gay love triangle drama!!

💢- Ship that is most misunderstood -

Hmm, there a lot of ships whose common interpretations I disagree with. But sticking only to ships I like here, I'd say it happens with Wenzhou a fair bit. Admittedly, I think some of this comes down to characterization changes in the adaptation, but even I, someone who has watched all of Word of Honor and is only 11(?) chapters into the book, kind of headtilt at some of the takes on them I see. Zhou Zishu sometimes gets cast as a moral foil to Wen Kexing in ways that seem deeply odd to me, as he's someone who's also done a lot of evil in his life! Not everyone has read Qi Ye, but even if you don't know the specifics of his crimes, I feel like being part of a secret police organization who demonstrably employ torture has pretty clear implications.

I also see him being cast as oddly naive in contrast to Wen Kexing, despite him having been enmeshed in court politics in the past, and being well aware of how cruel and exploitative the world is. For example, I've seen him be characterized as being shocked at discovering that Wen Kexing was sexually abused in the past - something that really doesn't ring true once one has read Qi Ye. But even without that bit of backstory, he's well aware of how widespread the abuse of power is, and how vulnerable people (including children) are harmed by that. That's not to say he wouldn't feel anything about someone he loves being hurt (and something I love about them is how, at least in my hc/interpretation, they're fairly myopic in their morality when it comes to each other), but... he wouldn't be surprised that it happened, you know?

In general, I think people cast Wenzhou as being much less similar than they actually are. In basic terms, this is not an "opposites attract" pairing - this is two people who are pretty similar to each other, and whose connection is based in that unique understanding and self-recognition they find in each other.

Also, for another example - I think anything involving Nie Huaisang is going to be at least a little bit of a dysfunctional trainwreck. Which I love! But in the context of shipping, he's so often characterized as being much nicer and more considerate of others than I think he is/than he's shown to be in canon.

[whumpbby]

on the subject of deity!Dick, please consider Persephone!Jay who used to be the lover of harvest/fertility deity (Demeter-esque)!Dick except Jason dies and then after dying, catches the eye of death deity (Hades-esque)!Bruce and spends half the year w his respective partners (they came to an agreement)

I was sleeping on it and it came up to me that, hey, maybe Gotham deities are all about Death -  Bruce is the Lord, a pensive deity ruling the Underground, the one who comes for the heroes and gods, he’s the deity of oaths and keeping scores of deeds, the unavoidable shadow at the end of the road. 

Dick is the calm kind of death that comes to people as relief from pain or suffering, or simply a life long enough, lived well. A gentle closing of the eyes that brings peace and rest, untarnished by regret. A good death that comes as a friend.

Tim takes the pure ones - children born still and the ones that didn’t lead a long life, he’s a sad god, as his lot is considered the most painful, but he himself doesn’t see it like that - the children he takes didn’t have the time to experience too much pain in life, so he’s happy to take them to a happier place before they can get hurt. Such untainted souls get another chance at living, he passes them on to the gods of life who take care to start them on anew journey.

Cass takes the warriors, gloriously fallen in battle, brave heroes and humans that died with honour and have nothing to regret as she leads them to an afterlife of celebration and rest after their exploits. She takes mothers who died in childbirth, as that battle is the most dangerous and the most honourable.

Damian comes for the ones that decide to cut their life short - he’s the shadow perched over the shoulders of these that take their own life, stone-cold and silent, eyes unclosing, silent witness to the last breaths of these that didn’t value their life enough. He finds no joy in his duty, but hopes that his presence serves as a shred of comfort for these lost souls, because the place they are led to is grey and washed out, and soon enough they disappear withing the fog without a whisper just like they wanted.  

Steph is a messenger, the omen floating above the households marked for tragedy, the cold shiver when a grave is stepped on, a breath of cool air on the back of your neck. She’s the banshee, the black dog, the owl perched on the rooftop, the reflection that blinks. But she’s not dour, she’s not a bad omen, but a last warning to enjoy the life before it’s gone, the signal to celebrate the days left and to make preparations for the Long Journey - and those who can read the signs right are her friends, grateful for the warning and a chance to truly appreciate the world they’re about to leave.   

And then there’s Jason - a hero (half god bastard that has to prove himself to other gods to achieve immortality) who was born under the bad star and lived a life of strife and suffering, trying and failing to first get the god’s recognition and then to live outside of their influence. And he was at the Death’s doorstep so many times - and so many time one of Bruce’s lot stood above him, waiting with a pensive frown for the boy to give up his breath and every one of these times the boy caught second wind and refused to die. 

It’s impressive, to be honest, for someone to escape their  grasp so many times - Tim almost got to touch him at birth, when the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck and it came to the world pale and silent. But the moment Tim’s hand touched  the baby, Jason opened his eyes and started to wail. Steph was present at the time, an omen that, on one of the rare occasions, wasn’t needed, even though her roads crossed with the growing boy many more times in the future. 

Cass saw him more times than she could count, always a step away form her grasp bleeding across the battlefields of the world, over the roads and in the back alleyways, always fighting for the ones that couldn’t fight for themselves, a honourable soul that made her hands itch with want to hold on to him, but never touch him fully. 

Bruce was present during many of Jason’s trials, saw the boy achieving superhuman feats that somehow never got appreciated as they should, so many moments of accidents aligning in a way that made these feats inconsequential, bad luck following the boy like a shroud. So many times he stood over the poor child, reaching out for him, but every time his hand was pushed away and the life blazed within the heaving chest. It became something of a ritual, to watch the boy stand up after being beaten down, to almost have him, but not really. An intriguing happenstance, unparalleled in Bruce’s monotone life. 

Except... not one human is strong enough to keep raising forever, there are beings able to kill even a hero, and things that can break every soul. And even when Jason wasn’t looking for trouble, when he retreated from the humanity and tried to live outside of the gods’ games and human cruelty, the strife followed and cruelty of fate.

And this time Bruce was accompanied by Cass, because Jason was a hero and the wound that was bleeding him out was a result of a honourable fight. They waited, breath held in, for the boy to push them away and get up. But he wasn’t getting up... 

“I warned him!” Steph wailed overhead in uncharacteristic distress. “I warned him!”  

“You did.” Damian’s voice startled them all and Bruce heart seized at the truth his youngest son’s presence revealed. Could it be...? Damian walked up to the man dying in the cold snow at their feet. “I will take him.”

“No, little brother,” Dick’s hand stopped the boy. “This one is mine.” 

Bruce’s heart was breaking, even thought Dick’s hands were better than Damian’s, the idea that this incredible child was so young - and yet death seemed to him as something to look up to already - was suddenly painful enough to be unbearable. 

“You’re... just as beau... pretty as they... say...” the boy breathed out, sea-green eyes meeting the calm blue of the Death that came for him. 

Dick rested a hand on his bloody forehead. “You can sleep now. I will stand guard over you.” When he removed his hand, the sea-blue eyes were unseeing and Dick closed them gently.    

****

When Jason woke up again, it was to the sight of a sculpted ceiling of a rich chamber, the feeling of resting in a plush bedding, of lack of pain in his body and soul. To the pair of dark eyes set in the handsome, chiselled face of the Lord Death himself and his hand gently brushing his fringe up his forehead. The kiss that landed on his brow chased a shiver down his spine and ignited a spark of warmth inside of his chest.  

“If no other god wants to claim you, I will,” the Lord Death told him with another tender caress. “If there’s no place for you amongst humans, there will be one with me and mine.”

And that’s how Jason became a part of the Underworld. 

[persephonesfill]

My OCs: TYatD

@anarchscry you asked for this very long post so you’ve made your bed, now lay in it. (jk jk i love you)

Osanna Gaza, 17 (on the verge of 18), She, Her, Hers. Osanna is the eldest child of Ivon Gaza (who is a fucking BITCH) and Adelina Gaza (who has never done anything wrong in her life ever). Osanna is the princess of Astoria (one of the kingdoms I created) but she’s not the heir to the throne since Astoria doesn’t practice equal primogeniture. She’s not bitter at all. Really. She has long golden blonde hair, dark blue eyes, tall, lithe stature and fair skin that tans easily (yes that’s relevant to the plot). Osanna is prone to bouts of jealousy and pettiness, especially when she doesn’t get her way. She’s headstrong and as stubborn as an ox, much to her father’s chagrin. It’s a struggle for him to get his daughter to do anything he wants. She isn’t all bad though. Osanna would do anything for her family, especially for her youngest brother, Eden, and isn’t one to balk at confrontation. Osanna is smart, resourceful, and ambitious. All she wants is to be recognized for her mind, which is her greatest strength, and she spends the majority of my book trying to get that recognition. She’s also bi as fuck 🌈🌈 I’m putting the rest under a read more bc holy fuck this got long 

Lani Neda, 17 (on the verge of 18), She, Her, Hers. Lani was orphaned at a very young age. Her parents were found mauled to death in her family home after they refused to let her leave home to attend the school meant for spellcasters secreted away in the mountains of Maras (another kingdom I created). Coincidentally, the caster who came to visit was also the one to pull her from the orphanage and take her to Magai (the school/city for casters) anyway. Totally not related at all. Lani was basically a child soldier, trained in magic, combat, and espionage, and only concerned with protecting the royal family of Maras, especially princess Mai, who’s her closest friend. Lani had short, dark, curling hair, brown skin, and eyes so brown that they appear black. She’s short but well-muscled from her training (and reliable palace meals). Not every orphan is as lucky.  Even when she's not aware of it, Lani carries herself like a soldier; back straight, firm stance and arms at her sides ready to salute or unsheathe her weapon at a moment's notice. Lani is quick on her feet, abrasive, and not the easiest person to get to know. All her life she's had her weaknesses exploited and vowed to never show weakness again. She's intuitive and relies more on instinct rather than logic. She's loyal to a fault and can be absolutely ruthless in battle, holding nothing back. Lani is brave and willing to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. She's serious and seldom jokes around with others. She hates when people don't apply themselves or give up prematurely. She always gives it her all and expects everyone else to do the same. She values hard work, tenacity, and strength. She’s also gay as fuck (for Mai and later Osanna) 🌈🌈.

Aidan Aterra, 18, He, Him, His. Aidan, like Lani, is also an orphan, except he never knew his parents. His caretaker at the orphanage, Dame Mara Finch, or Dead-Eyes as the children called her behind her back for her pale grey eyes, said that he had been left out on the porch of the Foxbrook orphanage in the middle of one the worst blizzards Iskald (another kingdom) had ever seen. His lips had been bluer than death, his skin cold to the touch. She told him that she had contemplated leaving him outside and letting nature continue to run its course but as soon as she had turned around to close the door, the most ghastly wail had burst forth from his lips. He grew up in the orphanage constantly being reminded of her kindness and her generosity, even when he went to bed without supper, or was forced to sleep in the manor’s old dungeons when he misbehaved. When Aidan was ten, he had decided enough was enough and that he was going to run away from the orphanage, making it as far as to the marketplace of their town. Aidan tried to pickpocket a mercenary and ended up following him home instead. The mercenary, and his mercenary company, the Fox Claws, took him in and Aidan was raised in their life of killing, thieving, and the occasional case of vigilante justice. Normally, Aidan is a fun-loving and spontaneous boy who isn’t one to shy away from a party or conversation (only with people he’s let in).  He’s also observant, a trait that has saved his life more times than he can count. However, in extreme situations of distress, such as his childhood at the orphanage and his life after Asher’s disappearance, Aidan withdraws on himself. He’s more prone to risky behavior and uncaring about his wellbeing. He feels a growing numbness inside of his chest and wonders why he should even bother doing anything at all. He also experiences intense regret and self-loathing. He’ll never tell anyone though. Lord knows Dead-Eyes didn’t like criers. All Aidan’s life, he's been met with derision and prejudice due to him being an orphan and likely a bastard. His personality is a result of that. He's sarcastic. Evasive. Shuttered. He puts on a devil-may-care facade to keep others out. Although he can be selfless and kind around children, Aidan is usually self-concerned. He rarely thinks about the consequences of his actions. Some view him as brave for all of the dangerous situations he welcomes with open hands. Others think he's just plain stupid and has a death wish. Aidan always likes to jape that it's a little bit of both. Aidan has black hair that touches the tips of his ears, and strange eyes for an Iskali, who all typically have blue or gray eyes. Aidan's eyes are hazel. Not quite brown. Not quite green. That paired with the olive cast to his skin tone makes him an outsider among the Iskali. After the disappearance and suspected death of his best friend and partner in crime, for which he is the main suspect, all Aidan wants to die is fuck off from the main continent and drink his way into an early grave so he can be with his best friend, Asher, again. He’s also pan as fuck 🌈🌈

Kali Sylva, 16, She, Her, Hers. Kali is the daughter of Alwin Sylva and Tiatha Meimri, and the crown princess of Dererra (another kingdom. you get the idea). Kali is also the sole heir to the throne, due to her being the only child of Alwin and Tiatha. Her very existence is a bit controversial, at least in Dererra. Dererrans are extremely traditional (read: pretentious, prejudiced fucks) and expected for Alwin to marry a Dererran noblewoman. Instead, he married Tiatha, a Khosagho (another kingdom) native. Princess Kali Sylva is a walking contradiction. Quiet, yet opinionated. Shy, yet brave. Sweet, yet fierce. Kali has little confidence in herself and often thinks the worst of others—mainly because they assume the worst of her. Half-breed, they call her. Part Dererran, part Khosaghi. Kali is straightforward and doesn’t much care for silver-tongued folk. She likes to keep to herself and more often than not, prefers the company of animals over humans. She struggles with being from two different worlds and doesn’t feel as if she belongs anywhere. Around friends, Kali can let loose and be herself, and even be playful. With strangers, Kali is reserved and keeps to herself in fear of being reprimanded. Kali is prone to reading into something too much and jumping to conclusions. The only time she feels at peace with herself is when she’s in woodlands of her home with her bow in her hands. Part of her feels as if she doesn’t deserve the throne due to the years of scorn and derision she’s been faced with from other Dererrans. Kali has jet black hair, done in one of the traditional Khosaghi styles, with it being in long, uniform braids. She has smooth dark brown skin, and her father’s bright green eyes. Kali has broad shoulders and strong arms from years of firing a bow and elegant, high cheekbones. 

Cyd Pollock, 15 going on 16, He, Him, His. Cyd is the son of Myra, an innkeeper, and Cyrus Pollock, privateer turned full-blown pirate. For nine years of his life, Cyd never knew his father. It was just him, his mother, and their roadside inn, The Dirty Wolf, and that was all they needed. Everything was fine until a wave of influenza swept through western Masae and his mother, Myra, had fallen ill. Two weeks later, she passed away. Cyd was only nine. His father showed up a week later, stricken by grief, he took in his only son and raised him in the company of pirates, thieves, and murderers. Ever since then, Cyd has had to watch his back. He never knew what his father was like before the death of his mother. He’s only ever known a hard man who was impossible to please. The slightest toe out of line, and Cyd was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. He learned to keep his mouth shut, don’t ask questions about his father’s “business” and to keep to himself. Cyd keeps to himself. As long as he asks no questions, as long as he doesn’t mouth off, he’s safe. Sometimes in particularly emotional moments he loses control and has a slip of the tongue; a witty comment here, a sarcastic barb there, and he takes the consequences every time. Cyd is very insecure and can’t help but care what people think about him, especially his father and his pirate crew. He hates how much he craves their approval but relishes the rare moments where he’s bestowed with praise. He’s smart though. Smarter than people give him credit. All the years he’s sat in silence, he’s picked up a few tricks from those around him. When he puts his mind to it, he can complete any task with accuracy and fervor. Cyd has wavy sandy hair that falls into his dark brown eyes. Cyd has fair skin and his body is speckled with freckles from spending hours upon hours out in the sun. He has rough, calloused hands from years of pulling and tying sailing ropes and hauling heavy cargo. He has many scars, most along his hands and wrist, although there is one particular scar below his bottom lip from where he had gotten a fish hook stuck in his face as a child. Cyd is relatively short, standing at about 5’9. He hasn’t yet hit his growth spurt. The last vestiges of youth are starting to fade though. The baby fat in his face is starting to melt away and revealing the shadow of a strong jaw. 

[like-i-need-a-hole-in-my-head]

Psychopolitics and Surveillance Capitalism

I queued this post quite a while ago and it posted last night while I was asleep. I’m reposting because I’ve been thinking about this a bit more since I first saw it. I’ve shortened the original quote here:

[H]ealing ... refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization ... amounts to total self-exploitation. [...] The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self optimization, that is, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. Healing, it turns out, means killing.

and had a look at this review. From the review: “[W]hat capitalism realised in the neoliberal era, Han argues, is that it didn’t need to be tough, but seductive. This is what he calls smartpolitics. Instead of saying no, it says yes: instead of denying us with commandments, discipline and shortages, it seems to allow us to buy what we want when we want, become what we want and realise our dream of freedom. “Instead of forbidding and depriving it works through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.” 

I’m adding a break because this got long.

(review, cont’d)

And, while not Orwellian, we net-worked moderns have our own Newspeak. Freedom, for instance, means coercion. Microsoft’s early ad slogan was “Where do you want to go today?”, evoking a world of boundless possibility. That boundlessness was a lie, Han argues: “Today, unbounded freedom and communication are switching over into total control and surveillance … We had just freed ourselves from the disciplinary panopticon – then threw ourselves into a new and even more efficient panopticon.” And one, it might be added, that needs no watchman, since even the diabolical geniuses of neoliberalism – Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos – don’t have to play Big Brother. They are diabolical precisely because they got us to play that role ourselves.

At least in Nineteen Eighty-Four, nobody felt free. In 2017, for Han, everybody feels free, which is the problem. “Of our own free will, we put any and all conceivable information about ourselves on the internet, without having the slightest idea who knows what, when or in what occasion. This lack of control represents a crisis of freedom to be taken seriously.”

“Did we really want to be free?” asks Han. Perhaps, he muses, true freedom is an intolerable burden and so we invented God in order to be guilty and in debt to something. That’s why, having killed God, we invented capitalism. Like God, only more efficiently, capitalism makes us feel guilty for our failings and, you may well have noticed, encourages us to be deep in immobilising debt.” 

I think I’m going to get this book. This would make a great pairing with Surveillance Capitalism by  Shoshana Zuboff. (I’ve linked to a review; the book is available on Amazon and elsewhere). I have the book but haven’t read it yet. Think about this:

“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.” 

From the review: “The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart”. 

Part of my job is related to the regulatory oversight of the private sector, and I definitely think that it is an absolute mess. Countries have vastly different rules, but data doesn’t respect borders. Different countries have different goals. The EU’s data laws protect the individual. China’s data laws protect the state. The US’s data laws protect the economy. (With a few exceptions, the laws are really about what can be monetized and what can’t.)

So what is an individual supposed to do? I struggle with the best way to protect my own privacy and personal data, and to teach my teens to do the same, let alone put it into a socio-political context. 

I don’t think it’s possible to completely opt out of the surveillance and participate in modern life. It’s a bit easier for old people like me to opt out but I see younger people whose peer group socialises to such an extent through apps and phones (snapchat, instagram, etc). The problem is that if they are not on these platforms, they are to a very large extent excluded from social life, and humans are social animals. It’s not healthy for them to be isolated.

OTOH, we can make some choices. For example, I have a Facebook account (I have 3, actually), but the one with my real name is just for an online course that uses a FB group for discussion. One is for testing. One is my “real” account that does not use my real name where I keep in touch with family since I live half a world away. I log out every time I use it. I never gave FB my phone number or location or work place or hometown etc etc. I opted out of any advertising that I could, particularly adverts using my own Likes. I opted out of all third party platforms so I cannot accidentally log into a third party site with FB. I do not upload photos of my children. I cannot be tagged. I opted out of facial recognition. I check settings once a week in case they are “accidentally” reset. I check after upgrades and so forth. I don’t use FB messenger. I don’t use the FB app. I log out and clear my cache and cookies regularly.  I download all of my FB data from time to time (I think a lot of people did this after the Cambridge Analytica scandal) and check that it’s accurate and I’m ok with what’s out there. (btw, one of my professional highlights was writing about Cambridge Analytica in 2017, before the scandals broke in early 2018, w00t). 

Also, I do not have any google accounts. At all. I don’t use gmail. I cannot sign into google maps. If someone sends me a google doc for editing, I ask for a copy, edit it and send it back. (This is rarely an issue though; I think it’s happened twice.) I used to have a Youtube account, and when they changed the settings to log in with a google account and not just an email, I created an account on a separate computer, logged in, deleted all of my videos and then deleted my youtube account, then deleted my google account and then cleared my cookies and cache. I think this was 2008. 

But truth be told, this is not much. I know that. Amazon knows which Audible books I listen to, which Kindle books I read, and which paperbacks I buy. It goes on and on. 

Is there a balance? Are our choices to opt in -submit- to this surveillance or live off the grid? This isn’t simply a matter of updating data privacy laws. The issues that need to be resolved underpin the entire economy and political order.

Food for thought, anyway. (So how’s your quarantine going?) 

[coruscantholonet]

The End of the Vreni Island crisis.

The crisis on Vreni Island begun with a Sith attack on the Jedi Temple that seemed to have been lead by Darth Knox.  While the Sith may have been focused on their Jedi rivals another entity would exploit the chaos.  Nec’ron Sk’ar would lead the Scourge to attack the island at that moment and managed to seize it with over a thousand hostages under their control which included many VIP’s in Government and Business.  To this day it is unknown whether the Sith & The Scourge were coordinated in their effort.

The One Sith had their temple raided by CorSec with the Jedi and would withdraw from the public eye on Corellia.  Over the next several months a tense stand off would develop.  The CDF would blockade the island and several in Government such as Councilor’s Turq and Zwee as well as Prime Minister Victoria made diplomatic efforts.  The efforts had mixed result, Zwee would trade herself for the former Republic Chancellor Bok Suthra as well as several other prisoners.  Zwee made several efforts to help the hostages from the inside, and has provided us with some journal excerpts which further detail the occupation that we will publish at the end of this summary.

Eventually a raid was held on the Scourge stronghold in Coronet in which Bones and the Vandangante OutlawTech gang were taken down by CorSec.  During this raid an Imperial Agent was rescued.  They were about to be executed by the Scourge as they had managed to retrieve the codes to disarm the bombs that had been placed on Vreni Island as a method for mass execution of the hostages. With these codes an assault was quickly launched. 

The CDF focused on dealing with the Scourge gunships as CorSec, Jedi, Mandalorians and an unidentified force moved in.  The unidentified force managed to slip in and blow up the power station, killing one of the notable Scourge in Val’kar the Dashade in the process.  The Mandalorians would provide a distraction for the CorSec and Jedi forces to reach the hostages.  It is estimated that the Mandos took on the bulk of Scourge forces and though several were wounded they managed to clear several hundreds of Scourge, capturing copkiller Noj Peesejamo and putting an end to Bofa Treat Gang Leader Nenthus Rordul.

Jedi and CorSec forces managed to secure most of the hostages though nearly a hundred of the 1200 or so that remained lost their lives during the battle.  They also captured CorSec traitor Vakira Crane.

Those still in condition to fight from all the teams then converged on Nec’ron Sk’ar and his Battle Skiff.  Sk’ar would soon see how outnumbered he was and make an effort to withdraw but he did not get far and was captured.  Once Nec’ron was captured the remaining Scourge forces were scattered fully.  Only a few minor officers escaped such as Nsspar the Bothan, a pair of Zabrak twins, and Meru of the White Worms.

It is believed that most of the gangs that had been part of the Scourge coalition have been fragmented beyond being any type of threat anytime in the near future with the exception of the White Worms.  The Worms for their part seem to be laying low after the whole affair.

Over the course of the entire Scourge Saga around 150 hostages were killed, 350 escaping or freed prior to the liberation and another 1100 freed after, and around 250 flipped to join the Scourge, most infamously CorSec high up Vakira Crane.

The Island will need rebuilding in sections and the courts will be busy over the next few weeks.  So far Bones is the only one sentenced having received life and moved to a maximum security prison on Drall.   Noj, Crane, and Sk’ar await their trials, the prosecution seeking the death penalty on Sk’ar following Councilor Turq and Prime Minister Victoria asking for that.  Some believe Sk’ar and the Scourge were the device of someone else’s agenda but who and why..?

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The Prime Minister made a press release following the conclusion of the saga;

“Good Day Citizens of the five planets. This is Prime Minster Victoria to tell you about the Vreni Island hostage.  I’m glad to tell you all the Vreni Island takeover have officially ended and thanks to the brave members of CorSec and allies to the CorFed.  These people deserve recognition and will get that in due time. We have managed to rescue the remaining hostages and capture some of Scourge members including their leader Nec'ron. I would like to thanks the hostages for surviving as long as they did as we work out the best possible plan to save them. I know we have loss innocent lives, but rest assure that justice will be serve for them.  We are currently providing support to the survivors which also include Councilor Zwee as she is in critical condition. We will keep you update if anything else related to this incident."

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Behind Enemy Lines the Journal of Zwee on Vreni Island during the occupation.

DAY 1

   I've settled in here on the island, finally. For the moment, the Scourge are keeping me away from the other hostages, setting me up in a smaller house all on my own by order of Nec'ron. He IS intelligent, I'll give him that, moreso than the media likes to portray him. Far from keeping me in my own hovel for my comfort, I'm certain the move was a calculated one so as to foster resentment for me in the rest of the hostages, both to undermine my attempts while lowering their overall morale. A common theme in his diatribes was railing against our government, to show us as rich and uncaring and aloof...this was a move to bring some factuality to his opinions, and likely will work in the short term. However, it also shows a flaw: this means he cares what the hostages think of him and his goals. Whatever Nec'ron is REALLY after, he'll need the support of 'The People'. I can use this.

DAY 4

   The past few days I've been about my work when I was allowed outside of my new home. PM Victoria and I hatched the plan to place me here so that I could covertly spy upon the Scourge- reveal their strength, weaknesses, attain surveillance photographs satellite images may not be strong enough to get. I went to the Prime Minister and volunteered because I believed that I was the only one capable of such. My cybernetic implants enable me to photograph easily and silently..although a few Scourge agents have given me jeers and made jokes at my expense for seemingly walking around and staring at things. Hopefully this will continue, the last thing I want is to be viewed as a threat.    Luckily for me, the house I am set up in had a holonet uplink (all furniture and the holonet device itself had been trashed, of course), and with a little rigging I was able to connect the uplink to my headjack. This way, I'll be able to transmit my recon data directly and securely to the PMs datapad without having to resort to so-called 'dead drops' and the like. Unluckily for me, the Scourge have taken away the medications I need to keep myself healthy with all this tech implanted in my head. In hindsight, I could have hidden the stash better, but this spywork is pretty new to me. Oh well.    Also, turns out I was right about Nec'ron wanting to foster resentment for me with the other hostages. Earlier today I was allowed to mingle with them and, though the family members of the children, elderly, and wounded were grateful with my successful negotiation of their release (was quite worried about Suthra), the rest were pretty ticked off I couldn't rescue them all. A good many joined the Scourge today, some even killed, but I don't think all hope is lost. I can still reach them, prove Nec'ron wrong and show them their government, we, care about them.

DAY 8

   I'm allowed more and more access with the hostages, by now i think Nec'ron doesn't think much of me at all, much less a threat. Though some hostages are kept in pens, we've negotiated that all the hostages are allowed some time to walk around, occupy houses, for lack of a better phrase 'live a normal life' so long as they stay out of the Scourge's way. As a result, far fewer have been flipped to their cause or killed the past few days. I'm doing what I can to keep them calm and organized, to counteract the resentment Nec'ron is hoping to grow within them. I've taken to assigning chores for the ones willing to do them- just tidying up, some paltry decorating and the like to keep their minds occupied. I've heard Councilor Turq was able to persuade the Scourge away from treating us TOO poorly as well, which has definitely helped with keeping everyone calm. In the evenings, more hostages have been coming to our story-circle...we sit around a small fire and trade happy stories and the like. It may sound ridiculous, but these activities have done wonders for their morale. In a way I'm g-g-glad I could b-b-be here.    Sorry for that. I'm trying very hard not to show weakness in front of the other hostages- wouldn't be good for morale. I was able to 'hotwire' a handful of the Scourge's droids today, and that and my lack of medication are starting to take their toll. Should be f-f-fine.    Damn it.

DAY 10

   Discovered what Nec'ron is really after. Although the CorSec commissioner has flipped to the Scourge's side, Vakira Crane was given some access to Nec'rons little private circle and is a woman that has loose lips. I was able to overhear quite a lot while she was bragging to those few CorSec officers she was able to turn with her. Combined with what I sliced from Nec'rons datapad, the PM will be getting quite a juicy transmission this week!

DAY 12

  Reached equilibrium today with persuasion attempts, most hostages content to stay where they are, onl-on-only a couple joined Scourge, one killed. Garthus Vin, his name was. Painter.   Equilibrium could not have come at a better time. Stuttering more, harder to speak. Our natural charisma, taken...our?   Likely, cranial implants starting to malfunction. We...I? I. I've continued with reprogramming what Scourge droids I can find. It seems Nec'ron and the rest pay little attention with droid upkeep. Beneficial for our wor-wo-work.

DAY 16

   Hostage assesment: complacency high. Turned to Scourge or killed: very few, similar to last week. Equilibrium: maintained. Whispering now, allowing cranial implants control of our speech. Pain: lessened this way. More efficient. Re: efficiency- we were able to reprogram last of Scourge droids today. All thirty under our control. Plan is to use them to disrupt signal that will activate thermal cluster bombs, protect hostages. We estimate in five days: reprogram fully so as they can act autonomously. Many parameters, much reprogramming needs adjustment.

DAY 17

   Informed Prime Minister negotiated release of more hostages. We will be among them. Tried to persuade to stay: failed. Assessment: Nec'ron becoming suspicious of our activities. Result: no time re: droid fine tuning. Optimal course of action: slave thirty droids to our implant control remotely. Most efficient course of action. Cranial/neurological implants: not designed for this solution. Eighty-seven percent chance: severe neurological damage. Suggest another...    ERROR.    Risk assessment: acceptable. We will proceed.    Droid slaving: success.    Consequence: lost usage of lower appendages. Sudden. Cranial implants: slight malfunction audible/visable. Combined:.possible Scourge discover droid slaving.Solution: hide consequence via Scourge provocation leading to physical abuse.    Solution: successful

[charteroldbios]

MARCELLUS

Marcellus "Marcel" Minkovski is fifty eight years old and the head of the Russian Mob. Marcellus lives in The Gates with all three of his children. Marcellus Minkovski is portrayed as Gary Oldman. Fortunately, Marcellus is O P E N.

Marcellus, better known as Marcel, and his wife Ayda married in the year of 1982. The couple had their son Damon in the year of 1988 and move from their townhouse home in maintown to The Gates. In 1992 the Minkovskis adopted Darius Miller, the two year old son of a local addict that Marcel found dead in the abandoned warehouse his family frequently used for down low deals after the rebellion. The family welcome their first baby girl in 1991-- their first home birth, also. Although their first biological child was given a name from Greek culture the couple decided to name their second after Ayda's Armenian great grandmother, Dalita.

Ever since the day Ayda and Marcel met he was infatuated with the woman with light eyes and dark hair, but for her, it was different. Ayda was madly in love with Marcel as well, in the beginning that is. When she finally built up the courage to break things off with the erratic man of the notorious Minkovski family it was just her luck-- that day was the fateful one in which Marcel proposed to his dear Ayda.

Was being a Minkovski so bad? Apparently not, as Ayda's eventual answer was yes. With her newfound surname she found power-- power she would use to keep her affairs under wraps. The first affair her husband learned of was that she had with Edmund Cooper; the one that started the quick travel downhill.

After finding out that his beloved wife was sleeping around, especially with a Cooper, Marcel was furious; his erratic side shining through as he took her hostage, telling the town she had run off. At first Marcel didn't know what to do with Ayda. It wasn't until the all too familiar sighs reared their ugly heads-- Ayda was pregnant.

Until her last breath she denied it was Edmund's, but it was. Marcel watched as the months rolled by and his wife's belly swelled with the child of another man. The night she went into labor she delivered a baby girl, later named Tanzania Belinskaya. Only moments after Ayda had given birth Marcel killed her, not even giving her the chance to hold her child. Weeks later and Tanzania was shipped to Russia to be raised by her new family: Marcel's cousin and his wife. Ayda? Ayda was found bludgeoned beyond human recognition in a dumpster behind Belford Manor. The COPD chalked it up to a "hooker" beating gone wrong; her killer still on the loose. Marcel played his part as a mourning husband, nobody suspecting him of anything but. Ever since the night he beat the life out of his beloved Marcel hasn't been the same.

His erratic nature spiraled out of control, sending him on a never ending rampage. Wherever Marcel went, blood and war ensued; his new attitude teaching those around him to tread lightly. Although he brought bloodbaths upon the town Marcel had to keep his business under the covers-- out of the ears and eyes of the townspeople. Ever since he became aware of his family past Marcel dreamed of holding the reigns over the town once more. 2010 was the year that would present this opportunity to him; not only him though. Both Marcel and Edmund Cooper put their differences aside momentarily in order to seize the moment. The pair came to a sort of middle ground after the mayor, Jeremiah Labeth, agreed to allow them to matriculate their illicit businesses back into Charter Oak; Edmund would remain a major arms dealing while Marcel stuck to his drugs and human trafficking.

Marcel, now one of the wealthiest men in town realized it was time to invest in a shipping company. For this, he could import his goods to sell. It included a myriad of drugs, weapons, and even people from overseas. With his family still remaining in Russia, they often rounded up vulnerable women to ship to Marcel who would in turn, exploit them for his own gain – selling them in to prostitution, slavery and even organ harvesting. He also has a dedicated work force to distribute drugs all over the city, and he is the hub for anyone who wants to get a hold of illegal weapons, although this little bit of his business has not been revealed to Edmund Cooper. Such power began attracting attention from a whole new player in the Charter Oak power struggle – Jeremy Angello, The Italian was determined he wanted a bigger hold on the city, and wanted to try his best to oust the Russians who were a considerable threat to that goal. Jeremy blew up the dock the Russians worked through, forcing Marcel to go into business with Rafael Beaumont.

With the family business back and booming you'd think Marcel would be on top of the world. Au contraire, if anything he was beneath the weight of the world struggling to not crumble. Marcel developed a newfound love through his struggles to come out on top: fear. There was nothing he loved more than striking fear into the very bones of those who were unfortunate enough to come in contact with him. The only words to describe the Russian were volatile, violent.... and suave?

To those who are lucky enough to witness this side of him he appears to be a smooth and sophisticated gentleman. At the drop of a hat he could fly off the handle though. Marcel's violent temper not only lead to blood and death, but the brutal beatings of his own children. Damon and Darius, his boys, they could take it; but Dalita? Dalita was different. For if she was to show up at school with a broken arm or busted lip the excuse of "boys will be boys" wouldn't work the way it did for her brothers. This alone changed the nature of her beatings.

Dalita Minkovski was nothing like her mother. Rather than doing everything in her power to piss Marcel off she would fall to his feet and beg for the slightest bit of notoriety or affection from him. Although Marcel knew she wasn't and never would be Ayda, he would see her in his daughter-- in her eyes, her hair, her smile.....

All of the love that was never reciprocated by his wife was harboring inside him. Dalita was practically screaming off a rooftop for his love, much unlike his sons, so who better than his daughter to give it to? Two years after Ayda's death Marcel would show love to his daughter. Better late than never, right? After learning of his wife's betrayal he wasn't sure if he knew love at all. The harsh truth? He didn't. Marcel's perception of love is horrible distorted-- a fact proven true when the relationship with his daughter is dissected.

June 1998: It had been hours since he had put his children to bed, hours that he'd been nursing a bottle of bourbon. Yet another night he would spend alone, only the ache in his heart keeping him company. Half past two a.m and Marcel was creeping down the hall toward his daughter's room. Once inside the confines of Dalita's lilac purple walls he whispered words of pure love as his hands slipped below the down comforter that covered her body, his hands quick to make contact with her olive skin. Daddy loves you were his choice of words on the nights he spend with Dalita; the words he whispered for just them to hear as he showed her how a man loves a proper woman.

Some still reserve hope that a sliver of humanity lies somewhere deep, deep inside him. It's a rather foolish hope, as Marcellus Minkovski is far beyond repair.

CONNECTIONS

[networkingdefinition]

Halloween Quotes

Official Website: Halloween Quotes

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• A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween. – Erma Bombeck • A homemade affair that’s just in time for Halloween. Joshua Homme • A lot of adults are very into Halloween. – Suzanne Smith • According to USA Today, 74 percent of Americans plan to hand out candy this Halloween. Although President Obama thinks it should be just the top 1 percent. Jay Leno • Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on. River Phoenix • Apparently, this really was Kill Charley Davidson Week. Or at least Horribly Maim Her…. It would probably never get government recognition, though, destined to be underappreciated like Halloween or Thesaurus Day. – Darynda Jones • At 7 in the morning, Rob Zombie calls. I just let the machine answer it, because I’m like, “Who’s calling me at 7 in the morning?” It’s Rob leaving this message, going, “That was the best birthday present I ever got in my whole life. I looked at Halloween script from cover to cover. No one else will ever get their fingers on this. It’s wrapped in plastic. It’s going in my vault. I love it. Thank you.” – P. J. Soles • At Halloween a lot of young people were wearing Bush masks mocked up as an incarnation of the Devil. – Jon Snow • At Halloween, when fairy sprites, Perform their mystic gambols, When ilka witch her neebour greets, On their nocturnal rambles; When elves at midnight-hour are seen, Near hollow caverns sportin, Then lads an’ lasses aft convene, In hopes to ken their fortune, By freets that night. Janet Little • At the end of the first Halloween, when I shot 6 bullets into Michael Myers, John Carpenter said, Let’s get a shot of you looking out of the window and seeing no one lying there. Donald Pleasence

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Halloween', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_halloween').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_halloween img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Being born on Halloween, there’s always a party. It’s a convenient birthday because you don’t really have to organize a party. Eddie Kaye Thomas • Being in a band you can wear whatever you want – it’s like an excuse for Halloween everyday. – Gwen Stefani • Believers of Jesus be denouncing Satan on every level, But every Halloween they’re dressin’ like devils. – KRS-One • But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts,snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipopsticks all akimbo, the foli ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase. Steve Almond • But I love Halloween, and I love that feeling: the cold air, the spooky dangers lurking around the corner. Evan Peters • Candy corn. For Halloween that is my favorite candy, but it doesn’t come around that often and I like that.- Daniel Jacobs • Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn’t even the star of his own Halloween special. – Chris Rock • Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. Mason Cooley • Comedian Jerry Seinfeld was nominated for a Grammy for his spoken-word children’s album] Halloween… Don’t Give Up on Me. – Jamie Lee Curtis • Dear Great Pumpkin, Halloween is now only a few days away. Children all over the world await you coming. When you rise out of the pumpkin patch that night, please remember I am your most loyal follower. Have a nice trip. Don’t forget to take out flight insurance. Charles M. Schulz • Define the space horizontally rather than vertically in movie widescreen, 2.35:1 just having that rectangular shape and when you think of great horror movies like Halloween and Jaws that just really exploit the space so well and I just think we would have so many more opportunities in creating suspense and shocks. – David Kirschner • Democrats had a secret meeting in Reid’s office on Halloween night at 6:15 and they hatched this plot. They said the only way they could get this investigation going was to do it in secret. They say they’ve been frustrated for a year and a half in getting this investigation into whether the administration twisted the intelligence and they’re making no apologies whatsoever for it. George Stephanopoulos • Do transvestites have to dress up for Halloween or do they pretty much qualify from the get-go? – Dana Gould • Don’t play that game with me, Acheron. Tell me what I need to know! (Xypher) Nice tone. We should rent you out to record Halloween albums. (Acheron) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • During my teen years, for Halloween, I went as a registered voter. Martha Plimpton • Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought. – Stephen King • Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright. Erin Morgenstern • Everyday has to be different for me. Even if people are like, “You dressed up like a character today, it’s not Halloween.” – Iman Shumpert • Everyone has gone trick or treating, everyone carves a jack o lantern with their parents. If you really look at the stories they sort of focus on what Halloween is like at different stages of your life. – Michael Dougherty • Everything is going killer. It’s loud and dirty and everything that people expect from DOPE . This situation is nothing new for any of us and so far it’s been pretty effortless. We are all crazy excited to get back to Japan and party our asses off, not to mention that we can’t wait to kick some Japanese ass on Halloween. Brian Ebejer • Halloween Costume I Hate: kids dressed as their parent’s poltical beliefs. Oooh! Aren’t you a scary health care reform bill! – Dana Gould • Halloween has always been fascinating to me from a very young age. I think any actor would be fascinated by Halloween because it’s one of the only holidays that advocates dressing up in makeup and costumes and transforming oneself. – Nicolas Cage • Halloween is an opportunity to be really creative. – Judy Gold • Halloween is fun, but it wasnt always my favorite holiday. I think Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. – Tobin Bell • Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the “spirits” of things. – Dee Snider • Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the ‘spirits’ of things. A few years back, my wife was frustrated with the same old stupid sound effects tape we would play, which ends with the theme from ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Monster Mash’. I told her that Halloween is way too cool a holiday to suffer through this every year. Dee Snider • Halloween is just a made up holiday, created by the razor blade industry. – Anthony Jeselnik • Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I always go all-out with my costumes.- Ginnifer Goodwin • Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the holiday shopping season for men is Christmas Eve. – David Letterman • Halloween is the day I wish I had boobs the most Michael Clifford • Halloween is the only day I can dress up like a hot Latina woman with a beer belly. – Felipe Esparza • Halloween is tomorrow. A group of wine experts has actually come up with a list of the best wines to pair with Halloween candy. They say, “White wine goes great with Skittles, red wine goes great with Twix, and … we’re alcoholics, aren’t we? Jimmy Fallon • Halloween means that young girls dress up in highly sexualized outfits that would never be acceptable if it weren’t Halloween. – Rachel Zucker • Halloween put me on the map, and I’m very sad to hear of his death.- John Carpenter • Halloween was confusing. All my life my parents said, “Never take candy from strangers.” And then they dressed me up and said, “Go beg for it.” I didn’t know what to do. I’d knock on people’s doors and go, “Trick or treat.” – Rita Rudner • Halloween with kids is top 5 holiday. – Christopher Michael Cillizza • Halloween without kids is tremendously bad. – Christopher Michael Cillizza • Halloween wraps fear in innocence, as though it were a lightly sour sweet. Let terror, then, be turned into a treat. Nick Gordon • Halloween: the day each year when strangers give you even more specific reasons to dislike them based on what they are wearing. – Demetri Martin • Halloween’s my favorite holiday because you don’t have to spend it with your family. – Demetri Martin • He wove those three threads into a talk ranging from annually spending a week at Halloween as a child collecting candy to giving candy to hundreds of children at Halloween as an adult; from childhood assistance he received from adults, particularly after his parents divorced, to saying I challenge you to be a caring adult in someone’s life … Great times call forth great leaders. – Thomas Jefferson • How late is it? How long have we been sitting here? I look at my watch – three thirty and the day is almost ending. It’s October. All those kids recently returned to classrooms with new bags and pencil cases will be looking forward to half term already. How quickly it goes. Halloween soon, then firework night. Christmas. Spring. Easter. Then there’s my birthday in May. I’ll be seventeen. How long can I stave it off? I don’t know. All I know is that I have two choices – stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living. Jenny Downham • I actually have a stash of wigs for Halloween. But only for that. Not to play dress-up. – Alexa Vega • I am unusually Halloween-attentive, because, as it happens, I was born on Halloween, so for me it has always been an occasion of great moment. Susan Orlean • I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn’t have a TV, but television didn’t teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it. David Sedaris • I couldn’t get away with Halloween pranks ’cause my parents owned the health food store. So, it was so easy to bust me. I was the only kid on the block egging houses with those big ‘ole brown eggs. Like, you didn’t have to be a detective to figure it out. ‘Oh, I wonder who Tofuttied my mailbox. Is it the same evil genius who filled my bird bath with Rice Dream? – Arj Barker • I didn’t have to wear a mask on Halloween to scare people, so I didn’t need one to cover my face on the field! – Tommy McDonald • I do love horror movies, but I’m not the kind of guy who would dress up as a ghoul for Halloween. I might go as a member of the Blue Man Group. – Christopher Mintz-Plasse • I do not like candy. I do not like knocking on strangers’ doors. I do not like having to deal with the candy disaster that is Halloween. I resent it. Rachel Zucker • I do think the story in Halloween 5 is a bit stupid, and there’s a lot more blood. They’re obviously going to take the Halloween series in a different direction. Donald Pleasence • I don’t do anything for Halloween. I carry Halloween inside of me.- Mike Mignola • I don’t know that there are real ghosts and goblins, But there are always more trick-or-treaters than neighborhood kids. – Robert Breault • I don’t remember ever dressing up for Halloween but I must have. I do not like dressing up at all. – Rachel Zucker • I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them. Tracy Chapman • I grew up reading comics. I was primarily an ‘X-Men’ fan, but I definitely dressed up as Spider-Man for Halloween when I was, like, 12 years old. Maybe younger than that. – Jake Epstein • I had Halloween parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe. – Bat for Lashes • I hate Halloween. I hate dressing up. I hate – I wear wigs, makeup, costumes every day. Halloween is like, my least favorite holiday. Amy Poehler • I HATE HALLOWEEN. This makes me VERY unpopular. – Rachel Zucker • I have a night off on Halloween. It’s Halloween for me every night. Let everybody else be Ozzy for the night. People go out dressed as me. – Ozzy Osbourne • I have two rules when you come to my house on Halloween. Wear a costume – ’cause if you’ve manned your door at your own house, you know how many kids will roll up, 14 years old with no costume and an attitude. My other rule: don’t grab. Let me assess you and then design a candy situation for you. – Greg Behrendt • I haven’t put on a baseball uniform since about age 12. It’s like I’m wearing a Halloween costume. I’m pretending to be a ballplayer. – Ken Fox • I like Halloween. It gives you a chance to dress up like something you’re not, you know? Like when the Miami Dolphins put on football uniforms. – David Letterman • I love finding things that scare me and doing them. That’s how you grow. • I love Halloween and dressing up. I usually have at least three costumes. Audrina Patridge • I love Halloween! I love it so much that I used to work at a haunted house every year.- Daniella Monet • I love Halloween. It reminds me of my happy childhood days as a student at Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, N.Y., when we youngsters used to celebrate Halloween by making decorations out of construction paper and that white paste that you could eat. – Dave Barry • I love scary movies. I like blood and gore, and I love Halloween movies. • I love the spirit of Halloween and the energy that comes with it. Katharine McPhee • I loved New Jersey. I thought it was the greatest place in the world because on Halloween kids could start trick or treating right after school. Isn’t that great? – Joel McHale • I only eat candy on Halloween. No lie. – Michael Trevino • I saw thousands of pumpkins last night come floating in on the tide, bumping up against the rocks and rolling up on the beaches; it must be Halloween in the sea – Richard Brautigan • I see my face in the mirror and go, ‘I’m a Halloween costume? That’s what they think of me?’ – Drew Carey • I sort of have a dark, twisted, offbeat way of writing, which I see coming up in my kids. It’s funny, on Halloween, one of my daughters said, “Halloween isn’t supposed to be happy, dad, it’s supposed to be dark. ” No smiling pumpkins at the Sixx household! Nikki Sixx • I take the palette with me, but I have a lot of makeup. I was a makeup artist when I was younger, but I’m not that good compared with my makeup artist, so I keep things pretty simple. I explore a lot with pink and nude lipsticks, but I love red lipsticks. I love a line and a lash and a brow. So I don’t need a lot, but I have a lot. It’s all there just in case – for Halloween or whatever. Gwen Stefani • I think a lot of times it just looks like Hollywood actors in Halloween costumes, you know? And I think what we’re going to do with Fantastic Four is going to be very grounded and it made sense to me. When I read the script, I didn’t feel like I was reading this larger-than-life, incredible superhero tale. These are all very human people that end up having to become I guess what is known as the Fantastic Four. So for me it was just a really good story and gives me an opportunity to play something different from my own skin. It’s a proper character and that’s my favorite stuff to do. Miles Teller • I think that Michael Myers is an icon. The bad guys, it’s always the bad guys that everybody loves. It’s Michael Myers, it’s Freddy, it’s Jason, they’re like the Dracula and Frankenstein of our generation. I think it started a new wave of horror films. They’re cult classics and they’re something that everybody wants to watch on Halloween. – Danielle Harris • I told Pat I want to be him for Halloween. I almost got hit and I told Pat I should stop teasing him. Tie Domi • I turned down Halloween parties every year, where people wanted zombies raised at the stroke of midnight or some such nonsense. The scarier my reputation got, the more people wanted me to come be scary for them. I’d told Bert I could always go and threaten to shoot all the partygoers, that’d be scary. Bert had not been amused. But he had stopped asking me to do parties. – Laurell K. Hamilton • I used to compete with my brother to see who could get the most Halloween candy, I remember doing that. – Jermell Charlo • I used to dress up as a model for Halloween, like every year. – Chanel Iman • I want to be Michael Clifford for Halloween. – Luke Hemmings • I was kind of a dark kid. I loved Halloween, and I loved vampires and the black and white old monster movies. • I was offered a choice of a flat salary up front or a percentage of the film’s future earnings. I took the up front money. Nobody could have figured what Halloween would ultimately become. Donald Pleasence • I went to a party at the Playboy Mansion once. For a Halloween Party. And everyone wasn’t in costume, or if they were they were little bunnies or something, and I went as Michael Jackson. – January Jones • I wish everyday could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks. R. J. Palacio • I would love if gay men responded to me. All I want is for many gay men to dress up as me for Halloween. – Mindy Kaling • If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. • If I could’ve picked a birthday it would’ve been on Halloween. Yeah, it’s always been my favorite holiday. Not because it was my birthday, but actually because, I think it was the freedom, you know? When you were a little kid, you got to go out and be an adult for a couple of hours. You got to, like, just go out with your friends and knock on peoples’ doors and be nuts and pull pranks and stuff like that. You could be whoever you wanted to be, you know, I guess that was the appeal to it. – Frank Iero • If I wasn’t even famous or had any success, I would still wake up and put tons of make-up on, and put on a cool outfit. That’s always been who I’ve been my whole life, so that’s never gonna change. I love fashion. I love getting dressed up. I love Halloween, too. – Gwen Stefani • If I were to remake a movie, I’d love to remake Halloween 3 Season of the Witch because even though it’s a very flawed film, at its core is a brilliant idea: An evil toymaker is set to kill all the children of the world on Halloween night – and I think that’s absolutely fantastic. So whoever has the rights can give me a call. – Bryan Fuller • If I’m really honest, I’m not a huge fan of scary films. I remember being a teenager, and people getting out like Halloween [1978] or Saw [2004], and watching them, and I’d kind of just stare at the television logo and blur my eyes and pretend I was watching but I wasn’t because I just found that I would take the movie home with me. I can scare myself like a pro. – Imogen Poots • If people work together, if they can keep a cooperative spirit and use their ingenuity and balance it all with good humor and good will, then there’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s the sappy part of it, … On the other hand, every Halloween for many years when my kids were trick-or-treating I would put on my ‘Ghostbusters’ jumpsuit with a police flashlight to protect all the kids from ghosts. Harold Ramis • If you are an adult, and you are planning to dress up on Halloween… don’t. I will find you. I will hurt you. – Lewis Black • I’ll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween.- Charles S. Swartz • I’m a festive guy to begin with and Halloween is my favorite holiday. I went all out on this one costume. It’s a ghoul that makes me approximately 10 feet tall when I wear it. I actually got an offer to work at a haunted house because the costume is so great, and I did it for about an hour and a half before I got too cold and had to quit to go inside. Michigan winters are no joke. – Andre Dirrell • I’m interested in the self. And in the limits and transformations of self. And in self presentation. And in doubt. And in playing with the audience’s expectations. But I don’t like dressing up like on Halloween. – Rachel Zucker • In Cuba they don’t celebrate Halloween but my favorite moments have been trick-or-treating with my kids here in the U.S.: they really enjoy it. – Erislandy Lara • In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee’s character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities. – John Carpenter • In masks and gown we haunt the street, And knock on doors for trick or treat, Tonight we are the king and queen, For oh tonight it’s Halloween! – Jack Prelutsky • In recent years, there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy. It is no longer safe to let your child eat treats that come from strangers. -Ann Landers • In San Francisco, Halloween is redundant. – Will Durst • In some ways, Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts, and it’s kind of a costume, if they never do any other time. – Chuck Klosterman • In the midst of all the candy and commercialism, let’s not lose sight of the true meaning of Halloween: tree worship and animal sacrifice. – Dana Gould • It hasn’t even been competitive. That’s the first thing we’re going to have to do is just find a way to stay competitive because these (first two games) have been over by halftime. We saw that last year too (on Halloween). It was 21-3 (Steelers) at the end of the first quarter. Bill Belichick • It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being. Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO. The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile. What a scamp. – Jeff Lindsay • It was sort of fun tonight, it was a little exciting on Halloween. Hines Ward • It’s said that All Hallows’ Eve is one of the nights when the veil between the worlds is thin – and whether you believe in such things or not, those roaming spirits probably believe in you, or at least acknowledge your existence, considering that it used to be their own. Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright. – Erin Morgenstern • It’s a very appropriate show to be doing around Halloween because it’s very dark and mysterious. There are some great chorus scenes and some dark stuff and funny stuff as well. It’s a really perfect balanced show in many regards.- James Marvel • It’s Halloween! It’s Halloween! The moon is full and bright, And we shall see what can’t be seen, On any other night. Skeletons and ghosts and ghouls, Grinning goblins fighting duels. Werewolves rising from their tombs, Witches on their magic brooms. In masks and gown we haunt the street. And knock on doors for trick or treat. Tonight we are the king and queen, For oh tonight it’s Halloween! – Jack Prelutsky • It’s not a giant thing, like graduation, Mardi Gras, Halloween or New Year’s. We do get business from it. That’s why we put stuff out; we don’t skip it. It’s our big thing for March. – Suzanne Smith • It’s not that I want you to be a certain way–don’t you want a boyfriend?” “Why bother with that? Let’s find incubi.” “Incubi?” “Demons. Plural. Like octopi. And we’re much more likely to find them”–her voice dropped conspiratorially–“while swimming naked in the Atlantic a week before Halloween than practically anywhere else I can think of. Holly Black • I’ve had some movies that have been ridiculed, but that’s OK with me. I don’t feel that really defines me. Should I change who I am to be popular? – Kevin Costner • I’ve seen lots of Halloween people dressed up like me and they’ll send me pictures. And I found that very rewarding to know that I’ve reached anyone. – Bray Wyatt Joe Manganiello • John and I had a few meetings about what direction the sequel should take. I made some real insane suggestions. True to what you’d expect, he ignored them all and just picked up Halloween II where the original left off. Donald Pleasence • John Carpenter created the idea of Halloween, so his vision remains the most focused and intelligently directed of the series. The directors that have followed have kept the original intent of the concept. Donald Pleasence • just because I don’t have on a silly black costume and carry a silly broom and wear a silly black hat, doesn’t mean that I’m not a witch. I’m a witch all the time and not just on Halloween. E. L. Konigsburg • Last Halloween a kid tried to rip my face off. He thought it was a mask. Now it’s different when I open the door the kids hand me candy. – Rodney Dangerfield • Last Halloween I ran out of candy and I had to give the kids nicotine gum. – David Letterman • Like at Halloween: I knew I’d arrived when I saw people dressing up on Halloween as my character. – Jane Badler • Mr. Crossley suddenly wondered why he was why he was worrying about the note. It was only a joke, after all. He cleared his throat. Everyone looked up hopefully. ‘Somebody,’ said Mr. Crossley, ‘seems to have sent me a Halloween message.’ And he read out the note: ‘SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.’ 6B thought this was splendid news. Hands shot up all over the room like a bed of beansprouts. ‘It’s me, Mr. Crossley!’ ‘Mr. Crossley, I’m the witch!’ ‘Can I be the witch, Mr. Crossley?’ ‘Me, Mr. Crossley, me, me, me! – Diana Wynne Jones • My favorite memories were never about candy or anything like that. When I got to be a teenager, my friends and I used to get together and do all kinds of crazy stuff on Halloween night. We had a ball starting trouble. Now that I’m more mature I realize that wasn’t the right way to act, but it was the time of my life back then. – Tony Harrison • My favorite time of year is October, Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I know that watching horror movies was such a special thing to me as a child and my only dream is that I get to make it feel like Halloween all year round for other kids, for other weirdos like me. – Matthew Gray Gubler • New Rule: If an Evangelical tries to use Halloween to pimp Jesus to kids, they get to egg his house. On Halloween, the president of the American Family Association urged his flock to hand out a Christian-based comic book instead of candy. Excuse me, Halloween isn’t a time to push your beliefs. You don’t see me handing out pot to kids…Okay, well not the little kids. Bill Maher • No matter what time of year it’s always funny when a person walks by me dressed in religious garb and I say Happy Halloween! – Gary Gulman • Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night. – Steve Almond • Now, I have a Halloween mask I think you might get a kick out of. That’s scary. – Jay Leno • On Halloween, don’t you know back when you were little, your mom tells you don’t eat any candy until she checks it? I used to be so tempted to eat my candy on the way to other people’s houses. That used to be such a tease. – Derrick Rose • On Halloween, the parents sent their kids out looking like me. Rodney Dangerfield • On Halloween, witches come true; Wild ghosts escape from dreams. Each monster dances in the park.- Nick Gordon • On the Night of the Halloween, I have never seen any evil apparition or fearsome ghost, but politicians on TV! They are the real goblins and specters! Mehmet Murat Ildan • One of the tours we had scheduled – the gaslight tour of Jack the Ripper’s haunts, and on Halloween, no less, was canceled at the last minute. I recommend making sure you know the numbers of your tours and destinations so you can confirm your schedule along the way. Also, though we laugh about it now, the Eiffel Tower was on strike so we couldn’t go up! Andrea Phillips • People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn’t want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you’d be married and you’d own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. – Heather O’Neill • People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim. – Amity Shlaes • Pixie, kobold, elf, and sprite, All are on their rounds tonight; In the wan moon’s silver ray, Thrives their helter-skelter play. – Joel Benton • Pop culture is more and more about skulls and skeletons and zombies and vampires, and that’s not just on Halloween. Michael Almereyda • Remember when we used to worry about some weirdo having a razor blade inside an apple on Halloween? Not anymore. Like a kid today would eat an apple. Jay Leno • Right. Because there’s no bigger sign of commitment than a Halloween dance – Richelle Mead • Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen, Voices whisper in the trees, “Tonight is Halloween!” – Dexter Kozen • She liked anything orange: leaves; some moons; marigolds; chrysanthemums; cheese; pumpkin, both in pie and out; orange juice; marmalade. Orange is bright and demanding. You can’t ignore orange things. She once saw an orange parrot in the pet store and had never wanted anything so much in her life. She would have named it Halloween and fed it butterscotch. Her mother said butterscotch would make a bird sick and, besides, the dog would certainly eat it up. September never spoke to the dog again — on principle. – Catherynne M. Valente • Since I was 15 years old I’ve never been able to spend Christmas, Halloween or Thanksgiving (with friends and family). This was the first time I was able to enjoy a Super Bowl. – Brendan Shanahan • So when I open the door on Halloween, I am confronted by three or four imaginary heroes, such as G.I. Joe, Conan the Barbarian and Oliver North, who would look very terrifying except that they are three feet tall and facing in random directions. They stand there silently for several seconds before an adult voice hisses from the darkness behind them: “Say ‘Trick or treat! – Dave Barry • So when it came to making the movie I guess I had a really good sense innately of what it was that makes Halloween really great. In that it is a holiday for everybody now. When I was a kid I felt like it was mostly for kids, maybe that’s just the way it always is when you’re a kid, but I think now more than ever it’s for grown ups too. When I was a kid I don’t think there were quite as many sexy adult costumes and we definitely didn’t have all these Spirit Halloween stores that pop up every October. – Michael Dougherty • Speak out, educate, do not be intimidated by the apologists, and do not let extreme racism be mainstreamed. Hopefully there will come a time when we don’t need to tell our kids that Halloween is no excuse for hate, and that blackface has no place in a civilized society. Christine Pelosi • Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. William Shakespeare • Studio 54 made Halloween in Hollywood look like a PTA meeting. Lorna Luft • Target launch date for Falcon I maiden flight is Halloween(October 31) from our island launch complex in the Kwajalein Atoll. For potential customers out there, I should mention that Kwajalein has some of the worlds best scuba diving and snorkeling! It is literally a tropical paradise. Elon Musk • Technically my dog’s naked most of the time. Except halloween, when I dress him up as Liza Minelli. – Craig Ferguson • That’s definitely true! It was before my father died, so I can’t attribute it to an obsession with death. When I was seven, I loved those old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone. The Scarlet Claw was one of my faves. And I loved all the Halloween’s and that film about the haunted house… Burnt Offerings, with Oliver Reed. Every birthday party was a slumber party and we’d watch horror films. – Cate Blanchett • That’s why we’re doing this, to defend our traditions a little. I don’t have anything against it (Halloween), but it’s not our tradition. Fernando Flores • The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination. – Richard Wright • The biggest surprise was a picture my mom sent me, just about the time that we were about to wrap up the book, of me as a 5-year-old dressed in my first Halloween costume that she made for me. I said, “What’s this? I never saw this photo.” And she said, “We made you this black-and-orange Halloween costume out of crepe paper” – we were too poor to have fabric back then – “and you wanted to go as the Queen Of Halloween.” And I was like, “What?” And she said, “Yeah, the Princess Of Halloween, the Queen Of Halloween, something like that. – Cassandra Peterson • The first Halloween was very well made. The second one was also well made, though I didn’t like it as well as the first one. The third one had nothing to do with the series at all and perhaps shouldn’t have been made at all. Donald Pleasence • The holiday is clearly growing in importance for the industry. Halloweens fun, enjoyable and doesn’t require a big investment to celebrate. The primary focus is the child and families typically do all they can to make sure the children have fun. – Richard Hastings • The idea is to make sure that these sex offenders are occupied with constructive matters and not focused on the children who may be knocking at their doors this Halloween Andrew Spano • The idea of dying and coming back is what makes the Halloween films work. Donald Pleasence • The Jawbreaker writer-director Darren Stein was a huge fan of Carrie and Halloween. He was like a kid. He was 26, so he was such a fan. He wanted William Katt and I, from Carrie, to be in the movie as the parents. We had a little bit more that ended up on the cutting-room floor, but that was kind of fun. Everybody that worked on that movie was really cool, including the girls, especially the new girl, the blonde, Judy Greer. – P. J. Soles • The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.- Wallace Stegner • The Queens Of The Stone Age have teamed up with multimedia wizard brain Liam Lynch to make the video for ‘Burn The Witch’ , a home-made affair that’s just in time for Halloween. For the band, playing both the roles of cast and crew paid ginormous dividends, in the form of a video that cuts the heads off all contemporaries . – Joshua Homme • Then, finally, the third year, begging the parents, I got the Superman Halloween costume. Cardboard box, self-made top, mask included. Remember the rubber band on the back of that mask? That was a quality item there, wasn’t it? That was good for about 10 seconds before it snapped out of that cheap little staple they put it in there with. – Jerry Seinfeld • There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. Jean Baudrillard • There’s going to be a Halloween costume [of lavash from Sausage Party]. The whole thing is just so ridiculous. It’s nice. It’s silly, and it’s surreal. – David Krumholtz • They take the greats from the past and compare us. I wonder if they’d ever survive in this era. In a time where it’s recreation, to pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations. – Drake • This Halloween, the most popular mask is the Arnold Schwarzenegger mask. And the best part? With a mouth full of candy you will sound just like him. Conan O’Brien • Two Polish men at Halloween with burned faces. What happened? They were bobbing for french fries. – Henny Youngman • Waiting is one of life’s hardships. It is hard enough to wait for chocolate cream pie while burnt roast beef is still on your plate. It is plenty difficult to wait for Halloween when the tedious month of September is still ahead of you. But to wait for one’s adopted uncle to come home while a greedy and violent man is upstairs was one of the worst waits the Baudelaires had ever experienced. – Daniel Handler • Want to continue to try and break the barrier between male and female. If you want to do that, that’s fine. At our shows, it’s like a Halloween party, which isn’t a bad thing. I’d like to see more of it actually. – Twiggy • We had nine pails of candy for Halloween, now we are down to one. They go for a lot of the candy mixes. I think that they buy them for themselves sometimes. Brenda V. Smith • We post photos of the Halloween costumes and the mustaches made of cupcake frosting. We don’t record the tantrums?and that’s as it should be. But we shouldn’t mistake that for reality. It’s stagecraft. Libby Copeland • We talked to a lot of filmmakers who had worked on other anthologies and we looked at every anthology, and we wanted to just find a different way [for Tales of Halloween]. And being that unity was what the whole spirit of the project was – unity and friendship and community. – Mike Mendez • We used to go around tipping outhouses over, or turning over corn shocks on Halloween. Anything to be mean. – Loretta Lynn • We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brothers winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips. – Ann Hood • We’ve become great friends with Rob Zombie, and I gave him my original script for Halloween for his 40th birthday. Like, Nicolas Cage was there with a shrunken head he brought as a gift, all these things, and I’m thinking, “What can I give Rob Zombie? This is very weird.” And I just happened to look at my pile of scripts and I went, “My kids don’t need all these. I think I’ll give him my original Halloween script, since he told me that was his favorite movie, and I was his favorite actress from that time period.” I said, “He deserves to have that.” – P. J. Soles • We’ve got a major scandal with Clinton. Plus, Halloweens on a Saturday this year. – C. Sue Carter • We’ve never done a coordinated music effort. Everything else we’ve done has been around a holiday – Halloween, Mardi Gras, half way to Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day. – Craig Johnson • What we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night. Chuck Palahniuk • When I came off the Halloween movies, they were very stressful movies to make. That had been four very stressful years. I’m happy with how they turned out, but getting the end results took so much fighting with people and so much craziness, that at the end of it I was so burnt out. Rob Zombie • When I was a kid I got busted for throwing a rock through a car window and egging a house on halloween. – Gavin DeGraw • When I was a kid my family was really poor and I remember one Halloween I wanted to dress up really scary and my parents came home with a duck costume. I wore that costume for years! I hated it. R. L. Stine • When I was eighteen, River Phoenix was far and away my hero. Think of all those early great performances – My Own Private Idaho. Stand by Me. I always wanted to meet him. One night, I was at this Halloween party, and he passed me. He was beyond pale – he looked white. Before I got a chance to say hello, he was gone, driving off to the Viper Room, where he fell over and died. That’s a lesson. – Leonardo DiCaprio • When I was just five years old, I loved the scary layer and the symbolical power of the red cloak. I made my mom make me that red cloak, and I had to wear it on Halloween, two years in a row. – Catherine Hardwicke • When it comes to romance, I’m really simple. I am really a ‘dinner and a movie’ type of person, and I love food, so surprise me and order something different or adventurous when it comes to food, and I’m like a kid at Halloween. Sasha Grey • Who are you writing to, Linus?” “This is the time of year to write to the Great Pumpkin. On Halloween Night, the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children!” “You must be crazy! When are you going to stop believing in something that isn’t true?” “When *you* stop believing in that fellow with a red suit and the white beard who goes, ‘Ho, ho, ho!'” “We’re obviously separated by denominational differences. – Charles M. Schulz • With Halloween coming this weekend, they say not one person in the country is planning to dress up as Governor Sarah Palin. You know why? … The costume costs $150,000. – Jay Leno • With Halloween on a Monday this year, that gives people a chance to have parties on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. – Suzanne Smith • With Halloween, the director was this genius wonder boy who was the writer, director, producer, along with his girlfriend. They were this team, and they were making this small movie, and it was just completely different, but it was really inspiring and a lot of fun, and also allowed me to do a lot of improvisation, because they just depended on the girls to expand their parts to bring some real life, being girls ourselves, to the characters. – P. J. Soles • With the garden I planted for the Reina Sofia, each plant related to different celebrations along the calendar – Christmas with evergreen trees, Valentine’s Day with roses, Halloween with pumpkins. All these symbols are so culturally loaded, but they are organic living entities – just like the fish in the tanks. They grow on their own. The symbolic ecosystem is growing without a narrative anymore. It’s a physical and mental landscape. – Pierre Huyghe • You kids have fun, and be home by Thanksgiving!” our parents would call to us on Halloween night, as we staggered out the front door, weighed down by hundreds of pounds of concealed vandalism supplies, including enough raw eggs to feed Somalia for decades. By morning, thanks to our efforts, the entire neighborhood would be covered with a layer of congealed shaving cream and toilet paper that, around certain unpopular neighbors’ homes, was hundreds of feet thick. This is how the Appalachian Mountains were formed.- Dave Barry • You look at Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Bush – if you saw them on Halloween, they wouldn’t need a costume. You’d give them a treat and compliment them on what great-looking demons they were. They are demons. There’s no doubt about it. Tommy Chong • You would think that Halloweens tomorrow because of their attempt to scare the American public. Jim Sensenbrenner • You’ll see everything from gold teeth to hood ornaments. It’s almost like Halloween during August. David Carson

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Halloween Quotes

Official Website: Halloween Quotes

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• A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween. – Erma Bombeck • A homemade affair that’s just in time for Halloween. Joshua Homme • A lot of adults are very into Halloween. – Suzanne Smith • According to USA Today, 74 percent of Americans plan to hand out candy this Halloween. Although President Obama thinks it should be just the top 1 percent. Jay Leno • Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on. River Phoenix • Apparently, this really was Kill Charley Davidson Week. Or at least Horribly Maim Her…. It would probably never get government recognition, though, destined to be underappreciated like Halloween or Thesaurus Day. – Darynda Jones • At 7 in the morning, Rob Zombie calls. I just let the machine answer it, because I’m like, “Who’s calling me at 7 in the morning?” It’s Rob leaving this message, going, “That was the best birthday present I ever got in my whole life. I looked at Halloween script from cover to cover. No one else will ever get their fingers on this. It’s wrapped in plastic. It’s going in my vault. I love it. Thank you.” – P. J. Soles • At Halloween a lot of young people were wearing Bush masks mocked up as an incarnation of the Devil. – Jon Snow • At Halloween, when fairy sprites, Perform their mystic gambols, When ilka witch her neebour greets, On their nocturnal rambles; When elves at midnight-hour are seen, Near hollow caverns sportin, Then lads an’ lasses aft convene, In hopes to ken their fortune, By freets that night. Janet Little • At the end of the first Halloween, when I shot 6 bullets into Michael Myers, John Carpenter said, Let’s get a shot of you looking out of the window and seeing no one lying there. Donald Pleasence

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Halloween', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_halloween').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_halloween img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Being born on Halloween, there’s always a party. It’s a convenient birthday because you don’t really have to organize a party. Eddie Kaye Thomas • Being in a band you can wear whatever you want – it’s like an excuse for Halloween everyday. – Gwen Stefani • Believers of Jesus be denouncing Satan on every level, But every Halloween they’re dressin’ like devils. – KRS-One • But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts,snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipopsticks all akimbo, the foli ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase. Steve Almond • But I love Halloween, and I love that feeling: the cold air, the spooky dangers lurking around the corner. Evan Peters • Candy corn. For Halloween that is my favorite candy, but it doesn’t come around that often and I like that.- Daniel Jacobs • Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn’t even the star of his own Halloween special. – Chris Rock • Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. Mason Cooley • Comedian Jerry Seinfeld was nominated for a Grammy for his spoken-word children’s album] Halloween… Don’t Give Up on Me. – Jamie Lee Curtis • Dear Great Pumpkin, Halloween is now only a few days away. Children all over the world await you coming. When you rise out of the pumpkin patch that night, please remember I am your most loyal follower. Have a nice trip. Don’t forget to take out flight insurance. Charles M. Schulz • Define the space horizontally rather than vertically in movie widescreen, 2.35:1 just having that rectangular shape and when you think of great horror movies like Halloween and Jaws that just really exploit the space so well and I just think we would have so many more opportunities in creating suspense and shocks. – David Kirschner • Democrats had a secret meeting in Reid’s office on Halloween night at 6:15 and they hatched this plot. They said the only way they could get this investigation going was to do it in secret. They say they’ve been frustrated for a year and a half in getting this investigation into whether the administration twisted the intelligence and they’re making no apologies whatsoever for it. George Stephanopoulos • Do transvestites have to dress up for Halloween or do they pretty much qualify from the get-go? – Dana Gould • Don’t play that game with me, Acheron. Tell me what I need to know! (Xypher) Nice tone. We should rent you out to record Halloween albums. (Acheron) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • During my teen years, for Halloween, I went as a registered voter. Martha Plimpton • Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought. – Stephen King • Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright. Erin Morgenstern • Everyday has to be different for me. Even if people are like, “You dressed up like a character today, it’s not Halloween.” – Iman Shumpert • Everyone has gone trick or treating, everyone carves a jack o lantern with their parents. If you really look at the stories they sort of focus on what Halloween is like at different stages of your life. – Michael Dougherty • Everything is going killer. It’s loud and dirty and everything that people expect from DOPE . This situation is nothing new for any of us and so far it’s been pretty effortless. We are all crazy excited to get back to Japan and party our asses off, not to mention that we can’t wait to kick some Japanese ass on Halloween. Brian Ebejer • Halloween Costume I Hate: kids dressed as their parent’s poltical beliefs. Oooh! Aren’t you a scary health care reform bill! – Dana Gould • Halloween has always been fascinating to me from a very young age. I think any actor would be fascinated by Halloween because it’s one of the only holidays that advocates dressing up in makeup and costumes and transforming oneself. – Nicolas Cage • Halloween is an opportunity to be really creative. – Judy Gold • Halloween is fun, but it wasnt always my favorite holiday. I think Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. – Tobin Bell • Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the “spirits” of things. – Dee Snider • Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the ‘spirits’ of things. A few years back, my wife was frustrated with the same old stupid sound effects tape we would play, which ends with the theme from ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Monster Mash’. I told her that Halloween is way too cool a holiday to suffer through this every year. Dee Snider • Halloween is just a made up holiday, created by the razor blade industry. – Anthony Jeselnik • Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I always go all-out with my costumes.- Ginnifer Goodwin • Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the holiday shopping season for men is Christmas Eve. – David Letterman • Halloween is the day I wish I had boobs the most Michael Clifford • Halloween is the only day I can dress up like a hot Latina woman with a beer belly. – Felipe Esparza • Halloween is tomorrow. A group of wine experts has actually come up with a list of the best wines to pair with Halloween candy. They say, “White wine goes great with Skittles, red wine goes great with Twix, and … we’re alcoholics, aren’t we? Jimmy Fallon • Halloween means that young girls dress up in highly sexualized outfits that would never be acceptable if it weren’t Halloween. – Rachel Zucker • Halloween put me on the map, and I’m very sad to hear of his death.- John Carpenter • Halloween was confusing. All my life my parents said, “Never take candy from strangers.” And then they dressed me up and said, “Go beg for it.” I didn’t know what to do. I’d knock on people’s doors and go, “Trick or treat.” – Rita Rudner • Halloween with kids is top 5 holiday. – Christopher Michael Cillizza • Halloween without kids is tremendously bad. – Christopher Michael Cillizza • Halloween wraps fear in innocence, as though it were a lightly sour sweet. Let terror, then, be turned into a treat. Nick Gordon • Halloween: the day each year when strangers give you even more specific reasons to dislike them based on what they are wearing. – Demetri Martin • Halloween’s my favorite holiday because you don’t have to spend it with your family. – Demetri Martin • He wove those three threads into a talk ranging from annually spending a week at Halloween as a child collecting candy to giving candy to hundreds of children at Halloween as an adult; from childhood assistance he received from adults, particularly after his parents divorced, to saying I challenge you to be a caring adult in someone’s life … Great times call forth great leaders. – Thomas Jefferson • How late is it? How long have we been sitting here? I look at my watch – three thirty and the day is almost ending. It’s October. All those kids recently returned to classrooms with new bags and pencil cases will be looking forward to half term already. How quickly it goes. Halloween soon, then firework night. Christmas. Spring. Easter. Then there’s my birthday in May. I’ll be seventeen. How long can I stave it off? I don’t know. All I know is that I have two choices – stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living. Jenny Downham • I actually have a stash of wigs for Halloween. But only for that. Not to play dress-up. – Alexa Vega • I am unusually Halloween-attentive, because, as it happens, I was born on Halloween, so for me it has always been an occasion of great moment. Susan Orlean • I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn’t have a TV, but television didn’t teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it. David Sedaris • I couldn’t get away with Halloween pranks ’cause my parents owned the health food store. So, it was so easy to bust me. I was the only kid on the block egging houses with those big ‘ole brown eggs. Like, you didn’t have to be a detective to figure it out. ‘Oh, I wonder who Tofuttied my mailbox. Is it the same evil genius who filled my bird bath with Rice Dream? – Arj Barker • I didn’t have to wear a mask on Halloween to scare people, so I didn’t need one to cover my face on the field! – Tommy McDonald • I do love horror movies, but I’m not the kind of guy who would dress up as a ghoul for Halloween. I might go as a member of the Blue Man Group. – Christopher Mintz-Plasse • I do not like candy. I do not like knocking on strangers’ doors. I do not like having to deal with the candy disaster that is Halloween. I resent it. Rachel Zucker • I do think the story in Halloween 5 is a bit stupid, and there’s a lot more blood. They’re obviously going to take the Halloween series in a different direction. Donald Pleasence • I don’t do anything for Halloween. I carry Halloween inside of me.- Mike Mignola • I don’t know that there are real ghosts and goblins, But there are always more trick-or-treaters than neighborhood kids. – Robert Breault • I don’t remember ever dressing up for Halloween but I must have. I do not like dressing up at all. – Rachel Zucker • I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them. Tracy Chapman • I grew up reading comics. I was primarily an ‘X-Men’ fan, but I definitely dressed up as Spider-Man for Halloween when I was, like, 12 years old. Maybe younger than that. – Jake Epstein • I had Halloween parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe. – Bat for Lashes • I hate Halloween. I hate dressing up. I hate – I wear wigs, makeup, costumes every day. Halloween is like, my least favorite holiday. Amy Poehler • I HATE HALLOWEEN. This makes me VERY unpopular. – Rachel Zucker • I have a night off on Halloween. It’s Halloween for me every night. Let everybody else be Ozzy for the night. People go out dressed as me. – Ozzy Osbourne • I have two rules when you come to my house on Halloween. Wear a costume – ’cause if you’ve manned your door at your own house, you know how many kids will roll up, 14 years old with no costume and an attitude. My other rule: don’t grab. Let me assess you and then design a candy situation for you. – Greg Behrendt • I haven’t put on a baseball uniform since about age 12. It’s like I’m wearing a Halloween costume. I’m pretending to be a ballplayer. – Ken Fox • I like Halloween. It gives you a chance to dress up like something you’re not, you know? Like when the Miami Dolphins put on football uniforms. – David Letterman • I love finding things that scare me and doing them. That’s how you grow. • I love Halloween and dressing up. I usually have at least three costumes. Audrina Patridge • I love Halloween! I love it so much that I used to work at a haunted house every year.- Daniella Monet • I love Halloween. It reminds me of my happy childhood days as a student at Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, N.Y., when we youngsters used to celebrate Halloween by making decorations out of construction paper and that white paste that you could eat. – Dave Barry • I love scary movies. I like blood and gore, and I love Halloween movies. • I love the spirit of Halloween and the energy that comes with it. Katharine McPhee • I loved New Jersey. I thought it was the greatest place in the world because on Halloween kids could start trick or treating right after school. Isn’t that great? – Joel McHale • I only eat candy on Halloween. No lie. – Michael Trevino • I saw thousands of pumpkins last night come floating in on the tide, bumping up against the rocks and rolling up on the beaches; it must be Halloween in the sea – Richard Brautigan • I see my face in the mirror and go, ‘I’m a Halloween costume? That’s what they think of me?’ – Drew Carey • I sort of have a dark, twisted, offbeat way of writing, which I see coming up in my kids. It’s funny, on Halloween, one of my daughters said, “Halloween isn’t supposed to be happy, dad, it’s supposed to be dark. ” No smiling pumpkins at the Sixx household! Nikki Sixx • I take the palette with me, but I have a lot of makeup. I was a makeup artist when I was younger, but I’m not that good compared with my makeup artist, so I keep things pretty simple. I explore a lot with pink and nude lipsticks, but I love red lipsticks. I love a line and a lash and a brow. So I don’t need a lot, but I have a lot. It’s all there just in case – for Halloween or whatever. Gwen Stefani • I think a lot of times it just looks like Hollywood actors in Halloween costumes, you know? And I think what we’re going to do with Fantastic Four is going to be very grounded and it made sense to me. When I read the script, I didn’t feel like I was reading this larger-than-life, incredible superhero tale. These are all very human people that end up having to become I guess what is known as the Fantastic Four. So for me it was just a really good story and gives me an opportunity to play something different from my own skin. It’s a proper character and that’s my favorite stuff to do. Miles Teller • I think that Michael Myers is an icon. The bad guys, it’s always the bad guys that everybody loves. It’s Michael Myers, it’s Freddy, it’s Jason, they’re like the Dracula and Frankenstein of our generation. I think it started a new wave of horror films. They’re cult classics and they’re something that everybody wants to watch on Halloween. – Danielle Harris • I told Pat I want to be him for Halloween. I almost got hit and I told Pat I should stop teasing him. Tie Domi • I turned down Halloween parties every year, where people wanted zombies raised at the stroke of midnight or some such nonsense. The scarier my reputation got, the more people wanted me to come be scary for them. I’d told Bert I could always go and threaten to shoot all the partygoers, that’d be scary. Bert had not been amused. But he had stopped asking me to do parties. – Laurell K. Hamilton • I used to compete with my brother to see who could get the most Halloween candy, I remember doing that. – Jermell Charlo • I used to dress up as a model for Halloween, like every year. – Chanel Iman • I want to be Michael Clifford for Halloween. – Luke Hemmings • I was kind of a dark kid. I loved Halloween, and I loved vampires and the black and white old monster movies. • I was offered a choice of a flat salary up front or a percentage of the film’s future earnings. I took the up front money. Nobody could have figured what Halloween would ultimately become. Donald Pleasence • I went to a party at the Playboy Mansion once. For a Halloween Party. And everyone wasn’t in costume, or if they were they were little bunnies or something, and I went as Michael Jackson. – January Jones • I wish everyday could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks. R. J. Palacio • I would love if gay men responded to me. All I want is for many gay men to dress up as me for Halloween. – Mindy Kaling • If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. • If I could’ve picked a birthday it would’ve been on Halloween. Yeah, it’s always been my favorite holiday. Not because it was my birthday, but actually because, I think it was the freedom, you know? When you were a little kid, you got to go out and be an adult for a couple of hours. You got to, like, just go out with your friends and knock on peoples’ doors and be nuts and pull pranks and stuff like that. You could be whoever you wanted to be, you know, I guess that was the appeal to it. – Frank Iero • If I wasn’t even famous or had any success, I would still wake up and put tons of make-up on, and put on a cool outfit. That’s always been who I’ve been my whole life, so that’s never gonna change. I love fashion. I love getting dressed up. I love Halloween, too. – Gwen Stefani • If I were to remake a movie, I’d love to remake Halloween 3 Season of the Witch because even though it’s a very flawed film, at its core is a brilliant idea: An evil toymaker is set to kill all the children of the world on Halloween night – and I think that’s absolutely fantastic. So whoever has the rights can give me a call. – Bryan Fuller • If I’m really honest, I’m not a huge fan of scary films. I remember being a teenager, and people getting out like Halloween [1978] or Saw [2004], and watching them, and I’d kind of just stare at the television logo and blur my eyes and pretend I was watching but I wasn’t because I just found that I would take the movie home with me. I can scare myself like a pro. – Imogen Poots • If people work together, if they can keep a cooperative spirit and use their ingenuity and balance it all with good humor and good will, then there’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s the sappy part of it, … On the other hand, every Halloween for many years when my kids were trick-or-treating I would put on my ‘Ghostbusters’ jumpsuit with a police flashlight to protect all the kids from ghosts. Harold Ramis • If you are an adult, and you are planning to dress up on Halloween… don’t. I will find you. I will hurt you. – Lewis Black • I’ll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween.- Charles S. Swartz • I’m a festive guy to begin with and Halloween is my favorite holiday. I went all out on this one costume. It’s a ghoul that makes me approximately 10 feet tall when I wear it. I actually got an offer to work at a haunted house because the costume is so great, and I did it for about an hour and a half before I got too cold and had to quit to go inside. Michigan winters are no joke. – Andre Dirrell • I’m interested in the self. And in the limits and transformations of self. And in self presentation. And in doubt. And in playing with the audience’s expectations. But I don’t like dressing up like on Halloween. – Rachel Zucker • In Cuba they don’t celebrate Halloween but my favorite moments have been trick-or-treating with my kids here in the U.S.: they really enjoy it. – Erislandy Lara • In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee’s character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities. – John Carpenter • In masks and gown we haunt the street, And knock on doors for trick or treat, Tonight we are the king and queen, For oh tonight it’s Halloween! – Jack Prelutsky • In recent years, there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy. It is no longer safe to let your child eat treats that come from strangers. -Ann Landers • In San Francisco, Halloween is redundant. – Will Durst • In some ways, Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts, and it’s kind of a costume, if they never do any other time. – Chuck Klosterman • In the midst of all the candy and commercialism, let’s not lose sight of the true meaning of Halloween: tree worship and animal sacrifice. – Dana Gould • It hasn’t even been competitive. That’s the first thing we’re going to have to do is just find a way to stay competitive because these (first two games) have been over by halftime. We saw that last year too (on Halloween). It was 21-3 (Steelers) at the end of the first quarter. Bill Belichick • It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being. Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO. The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile. What a scamp. – Jeff Lindsay • It was sort of fun tonight, it was a little exciting on Halloween. Hines Ward • It’s said that All Hallows’ Eve is one of the nights when the veil between the worlds is thin – and whether you believe in such things or not, those roaming spirits probably believe in you, or at least acknowledge your existence, considering that it used to be their own. Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright. – Erin Morgenstern • It’s a very appropriate show to be doing around Halloween because it’s very dark and mysterious. There are some great chorus scenes and some dark stuff and funny stuff as well. It’s a really perfect balanced show in many regards.- James Marvel • It’s Halloween! It’s Halloween! The moon is full and bright, And we shall see what can’t be seen, On any other night. Skeletons and ghosts and ghouls, Grinning goblins fighting duels. Werewolves rising from their tombs, Witches on their magic brooms. In masks and gown we haunt the street. And knock on doors for trick or treat. Tonight we are the king and queen, For oh tonight it’s Halloween! – Jack Prelutsky • It’s not a giant thing, like graduation, Mardi Gras, Halloween or New Year’s. We do get business from it. That’s why we put stuff out; we don’t skip it. It’s our big thing for March. – Suzanne Smith • It’s not that I want you to be a certain way–don’t you want a boyfriend?” “Why bother with that? Let’s find incubi.” “Incubi?” “Demons. Plural. Like octopi. And we’re much more likely to find them”–her voice dropped conspiratorially–“while swimming naked in the Atlantic a week before Halloween than practically anywhere else I can think of. Holly Black • I’ve had some movies that have been ridiculed, but that’s OK with me. I don’t feel that really defines me. Should I change who I am to be popular? – Kevin Costner • I’ve seen lots of Halloween people dressed up like me and they’ll send me pictures. And I found that very rewarding to know that I’ve reached anyone. – Bray Wyatt Joe Manganiello • John and I had a few meetings about what direction the sequel should take. I made some real insane suggestions. True to what you’d expect, he ignored them all and just picked up Halloween II where the original left off. Donald Pleasence • John Carpenter created the idea of Halloween, so his vision remains the most focused and intelligently directed of the series. The directors that have followed have kept the original intent of the concept. Donald Pleasence • just because I don’t have on a silly black costume and carry a silly broom and wear a silly black hat, doesn’t mean that I’m not a witch. I’m a witch all the time and not just on Halloween. E. L. Konigsburg • Last Halloween a kid tried to rip my face off. He thought it was a mask. Now it’s different when I open the door the kids hand me candy. – Rodney Dangerfield • Last Halloween I ran out of candy and I had to give the kids nicotine gum. – David Letterman • Like at Halloween: I knew I’d arrived when I saw people dressing up on Halloween as my character. – Jane Badler • Mr. Crossley suddenly wondered why he was why he was worrying about the note. It was only a joke, after all. He cleared his throat. Everyone looked up hopefully. ‘Somebody,’ said Mr. Crossley, ‘seems to have sent me a Halloween message.’ And he read out the note: ‘SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.’ 6B thought this was splendid news. Hands shot up all over the room like a bed of beansprouts. ‘It’s me, Mr. Crossley!’ ‘Mr. Crossley, I’m the witch!’ ‘Can I be the witch, Mr. Crossley?’ ‘Me, Mr. Crossley, me, me, me! – Diana Wynne Jones • My favorite memories were never about candy or anything like that. When I got to be a teenager, my friends and I used to get together and do all kinds of crazy stuff on Halloween night. We had a ball starting trouble. Now that I’m more mature I realize that wasn’t the right way to act, but it was the time of my life back then. – Tony Harrison • My favorite time of year is October, Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I know that watching horror movies was such a special thing to me as a child and my only dream is that I get to make it feel like Halloween all year round for other kids, for other weirdos like me. – Matthew Gray Gubler • New Rule: If an Evangelical tries to use Halloween to pimp Jesus to kids, they get to egg his house. On Halloween, the president of the American Family Association urged his flock to hand out a Christian-based comic book instead of candy. Excuse me, Halloween isn’t a time to push your beliefs. You don’t see me handing out pot to kids…Okay, well not the little kids. Bill Maher • No matter what time of year it’s always funny when a person walks by me dressed in religious garb and I say Happy Halloween! – Gary Gulman • Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night. – Steve Almond • Now, I have a Halloween mask I think you might get a kick out of. That’s scary. – Jay Leno • On Halloween, don’t you know back when you were little, your mom tells you don’t eat any candy until she checks it? I used to be so tempted to eat my candy on the way to other people’s houses. That used to be such a tease. – Derrick Rose • On Halloween, the parents sent their kids out looking like me. Rodney Dangerfield • On Halloween, witches come true; Wild ghosts escape from dreams. Each monster dances in the park.- Nick Gordon • On the Night of the Halloween, I have never seen any evil apparition or fearsome ghost, but politicians on TV! They are the real goblins and specters! Mehmet Murat Ildan • One of the tours we had scheduled – the gaslight tour of Jack the Ripper’s haunts, and on Halloween, no less, was canceled at the last minute. I recommend making sure you know the numbers of your tours and destinations so you can confirm your schedule along the way. Also, though we laugh about it now, the Eiffel Tower was on strike so we couldn’t go up! Andrea Phillips • People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn’t want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you’d be married and you’d own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. – Heather O’Neill • People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim. – Amity Shlaes • Pixie, kobold, elf, and sprite, All are on their rounds tonight; In the wan moon’s silver ray, Thrives their helter-skelter play. – Joel Benton • Pop culture is more and more about skulls and skeletons and zombies and vampires, and that’s not just on Halloween. Michael Almereyda • Remember when we used to worry about some weirdo having a razor blade inside an apple on Halloween? Not anymore. Like a kid today would eat an apple. Jay Leno • Right. Because there’s no bigger sign of commitment than a Halloween dance – Richelle Mead • Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen, Voices whisper in the trees, “Tonight is Halloween!” – Dexter Kozen • She liked anything orange: leaves; some moons; marigolds; chrysanthemums; cheese; pumpkin, both in pie and out; orange juice; marmalade. Orange is bright and demanding. You can’t ignore orange things. She once saw an orange parrot in the pet store and had never wanted anything so much in her life. She would have named it Halloween and fed it butterscotch. Her mother said butterscotch would make a bird sick and, besides, the dog would certainly eat it up. September never spoke to the dog again — on principle. – Catherynne M. Valente • Since I was 15 years old I’ve never been able to spend Christmas, Halloween or Thanksgiving (with friends and family). This was the first time I was able to enjoy a Super Bowl. – Brendan Shanahan • So when I open the door on Halloween, I am confronted by three or four imaginary heroes, such as G.I. Joe, Conan the Barbarian and Oliver North, who would look very terrifying except that they are three feet tall and facing in random directions. They stand there silently for several seconds before an adult voice hisses from the darkness behind them: “Say ‘Trick or treat! – Dave Barry • So when it came to making the movie I guess I had a really good sense innately of what it was that makes Halloween really great. In that it is a holiday for everybody now. When I was a kid I felt like it was mostly for kids, maybe that’s just the way it always is when you’re a kid, but I think now more than ever it’s for grown ups too. When I was a kid I don’t think there were quite as many sexy adult costumes and we definitely didn’t have all these Spirit Halloween stores that pop up every October. – Michael Dougherty • Speak out, educate, do not be intimidated by the apologists, and do not let extreme racism be mainstreamed. Hopefully there will come a time when we don’t need to tell our kids that Halloween is no excuse for hate, and that blackface has no place in a civilized society. Christine Pelosi • Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. William Shakespeare • Studio 54 made Halloween in Hollywood look like a PTA meeting. Lorna Luft • Target launch date for Falcon I maiden flight is Halloween(October 31) from our island launch complex in the Kwajalein Atoll. For potential customers out there, I should mention that Kwajalein has some of the worlds best scuba diving and snorkeling! It is literally a tropical paradise. Elon Musk • Technically my dog’s naked most of the time. Except halloween, when I dress him up as Liza Minelli. – Craig Ferguson • That’s definitely true! It was before my father died, so I can’t attribute it to an obsession with death. When I was seven, I loved those old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone. The Scarlet Claw was one of my faves. And I loved all the Halloween’s and that film about the haunted house… Burnt Offerings, with Oliver Reed. Every birthday party was a slumber party and we’d watch horror films. – Cate Blanchett • That’s why we’re doing this, to defend our traditions a little. I don’t have anything against it (Halloween), but it’s not our tradition. Fernando Flores • The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination. – Richard Wright • The biggest surprise was a picture my mom sent me, just about the time that we were about to wrap up the book, of me as a 5-year-old dressed in my first Halloween costume that she made for me. I said, “What’s this? I never saw this photo.” And she said, “We made you this black-and-orange Halloween costume out of crepe paper” – we were too poor to have fabric back then – “and you wanted to go as the Queen Of Halloween.” And I was like, “What?” And she said, “Yeah, the Princess Of Halloween, the Queen Of Halloween, something like that. – Cassandra Peterson • The first Halloween was very well made. The second one was also well made, though I didn’t like it as well as the first one. The third one had nothing to do with the series at all and perhaps shouldn’t have been made at all. Donald Pleasence • The holiday is clearly growing in importance for the industry. Halloweens fun, enjoyable and doesn’t require a big investment to celebrate. The primary focus is the child and families typically do all they can to make sure the children have fun. – Richard Hastings • The idea is to make sure that these sex offenders are occupied with constructive matters and not focused on the children who may be knocking at their doors this Halloween Andrew Spano • The idea of dying and coming back is what makes the Halloween films work. Donald Pleasence • The Jawbreaker writer-director Darren Stein was a huge fan of Carrie and Halloween. He was like a kid. He was 26, so he was such a fan. He wanted William Katt and I, from Carrie, to be in the movie as the parents. We had a little bit more that ended up on the cutting-room floor, but that was kind of fun. Everybody that worked on that movie was really cool, including the girls, especially the new girl, the blonde, Judy Greer. – P. J. Soles • The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.- Wallace Stegner • The Queens Of The Stone Age have teamed up with multimedia wizard brain Liam Lynch to make the video for ‘Burn The Witch’ , a home-made affair that’s just in time for Halloween. For the band, playing both the roles of cast and crew paid ginormous dividends, in the form of a video that cuts the heads off all contemporaries . – Joshua Homme • Then, finally, the third year, begging the parents, I got the Superman Halloween costume. Cardboard box, self-made top, mask included. Remember the rubber band on the back of that mask? That was a quality item there, wasn’t it? That was good for about 10 seconds before it snapped out of that cheap little staple they put it in there with. – Jerry Seinfeld • There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. Jean Baudrillard • There’s going to be a Halloween costume [of lavash from Sausage Party]. The whole thing is just so ridiculous. It’s nice. It’s silly, and it’s surreal. – David Krumholtz • They take the greats from the past and compare us. I wonder if they’d ever survive in this era. In a time where it’s recreation, to pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations. – Drake • This Halloween, the most popular mask is the Arnold Schwarzenegger mask. And the best part? With a mouth full of candy you will sound just like him. Conan O’Brien • Two Polish men at Halloween with burned faces. What happened? They were bobbing for french fries. – Henny Youngman • Waiting is one of life’s hardships. It is hard enough to wait for chocolate cream pie while burnt roast beef is still on your plate. It is plenty difficult to wait for Halloween when the tedious month of September is still ahead of you. But to wait for one’s adopted uncle to come home while a greedy and violent man is upstairs was one of the worst waits the Baudelaires had ever experienced. – Daniel Handler • Want to continue to try and break the barrier between male and female. If you want to do that, that’s fine. At our shows, it’s like a Halloween party, which isn’t a bad thing. I’d like to see more of it actually. – Twiggy • We had nine pails of candy for Halloween, now we are down to one. They go for a lot of the candy mixes. I think that they buy them for themselves sometimes. Brenda V. Smith • We post photos of the Halloween costumes and the mustaches made of cupcake frosting. We don’t record the tantrums?and that’s as it should be. But we shouldn’t mistake that for reality. It’s stagecraft. Libby Copeland • We talked to a lot of filmmakers who had worked on other anthologies and we looked at every anthology, and we wanted to just find a different way [for Tales of Halloween]. And being that unity was what the whole spirit of the project was – unity and friendship and community. – Mike Mendez • We used to go around tipping outhouses over, or turning over corn shocks on Halloween. Anything to be mean. – Loretta Lynn • We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brothers winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips. – Ann Hood • We’ve become great friends with Rob Zombie, and I gave him my original script for Halloween for his 40th birthday. Like, Nicolas Cage was there with a shrunken head he brought as a gift, all these things, and I’m thinking, “What can I give Rob Zombie? This is very weird.” And I just happened to look at my pile of scripts and I went, “My kids don’t need all these. I think I’ll give him my original Halloween script, since he told me that was his favorite movie, and I was his favorite actress from that time period.” I said, “He deserves to have that.” – P. J. Soles • We’ve got a major scandal with Clinton. Plus, Halloweens on a Saturday this year. – C. Sue Carter • We’ve never done a coordinated music effort. Everything else we’ve done has been around a holiday – Halloween, Mardi Gras, half way to Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day. – Craig Johnson • What we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night. Chuck Palahniuk • When I came off the Halloween movies, they were very stressful movies to make. That had been four very stressful years. I’m happy with how they turned out, but getting the end results took so much fighting with people and so much craziness, that at the end of it I was so burnt out. Rob Zombie • When I was a kid I got busted for throwing a rock through a car window and egging a house on halloween. – Gavin DeGraw • When I was a kid my family was really poor and I remember one Halloween I wanted to dress up really scary and my parents came home with a duck costume. I wore that costume for years! I hated it. R. L. Stine • When I was eighteen, River Phoenix was far and away my hero. Think of all those early great performances – My Own Private Idaho. Stand by Me. I always wanted to meet him. One night, I was at this Halloween party, and he passed me. He was beyond pale – he looked white. Before I got a chance to say hello, he was gone, driving off to the Viper Room, where he fell over and died. That’s a lesson. – Leonardo DiCaprio • When I was just five years old, I loved the scary layer and the symbolical power of the red cloak. I made my mom make me that red cloak, and I had to wear it on Halloween, two years in a row. – Catherine Hardwicke • When it comes to romance, I’m really simple. I am really a ‘dinner and a movie’ type of person, and I love food, so surprise me and order something different or adventurous when it comes to food, and I’m like a kid at Halloween. Sasha Grey • Who are you writing to, Linus?” “This is the time of year to write to the Great Pumpkin. On Halloween Night, the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children!” “You must be crazy! When are you going to stop believing in something that isn’t true?” “When *you* stop believing in that fellow with a red suit and the white beard who goes, ‘Ho, ho, ho!'” “We’re obviously separated by denominational differences. – Charles M. Schulz • With Halloween coming this weekend, they say not one person in the country is planning to dress up as Governor Sarah Palin. You know why? … The costume costs $150,000. – Jay Leno • With Halloween on a Monday this year, that gives people a chance to have parties on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. – Suzanne Smith • With Halloween, the director was this genius wonder boy who was the writer, director, producer, along with his girlfriend. They were this team, and they were making this small movie, and it was just completely different, but it was really inspiring and a lot of fun, and also allowed me to do a lot of improvisation, because they just depended on the girls to expand their parts to bring some real life, being girls ourselves, to the characters. – P. J. Soles • With the garden I planted for the Reina Sofia, each plant related to different celebrations along the calendar – Christmas with evergreen trees, Valentine’s Day with roses, Halloween with pumpkins. All these symbols are so culturally loaded, but they are organic living entities – just like the fish in the tanks. They grow on their own. The symbolic ecosystem is growing without a narrative anymore. It’s a physical and mental landscape. – Pierre Huyghe • You kids have fun, and be home by Thanksgiving!” our parents would call to us on Halloween night, as we staggered out the front door, weighed down by hundreds of pounds of concealed vandalism supplies, including enough raw eggs to feed Somalia for decades. By morning, thanks to our efforts, the entire neighborhood would be covered with a layer of congealed shaving cream and toilet paper that, around certain unpopular neighbors’ homes, was hundreds of feet thick. This is how the Appalachian Mountains were formed.- Dave Barry • You look at Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Bush – if you saw them on Halloween, they wouldn’t need a costume. You’d give them a treat and compliment them on what great-looking demons they were. They are demons. There’s no doubt about it. Tommy Chong • You would think that Halloweens tomorrow because of their attempt to scare the American public. Jim Sensenbrenner • You’ll see everything from gold teeth to hood ornaments. It’s almost like Halloween during August. David Carson

[biofunmy]

MacArthur Foundation Announces 26 ‘Genius’ Grant Winners

This has been an emotionally intense year for the poet and fiction writer Ocean Vuong.

In June, his first novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” written as a Vietnamese immigrant son’s letter to his illiterate mother, came out to much fanfare. Not long before publication, Mr. Vuong’s own mother learned she had Stage 4 breast cancer.

Then, earlier this month, he was back from his book tour, and looking forward to the steadying routines of teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, when he got a phone call delivering some startling news.

“I had to make sure they had the right person, because you don’t want to cry and then have them say it was a mistake,” he recalled. “But then the tears came.”

Mr. Vuong, 30, is one of 26 people chosen as 2019 fellows of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Known colloquially as the “genius” grant (to the annoyance of the foundation), the fellowship honors “extraordinary originality” and comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000, to be distributed over five years.

This year’s fellows, announced Wednesday, include people in the arts who have earned increasing recognition, but hardly household-name status, for work that pushes the boundaries of disciplines and genres. Among them are Annie Dorsen, 45, a theater artist who incorporates artificial intelligence into performances; Valeria Luiselli, the author of the recent novel “Lost Children Archive”; and Mary Halvorson, a guitarist and composer working at the intersection of jazz, rock, folk and other styles.

There are also scientists, historians, legal advocates, community activists and others, all chosen at a moment in their careers when the award might make a difference.

“We are looking for people who have demonstrated what I would call big-C creativity,” Cecilia Conrad, a managing director of the foundation and the head of the fellows program, said.

[See the full list of MacArthur grant winners.]

The youngest fellows, at 30, are Mr. Vuong and Cameron Rowland, an artist who has used objects seized in civil forfeiture, or created by prison labor, to expose systems of racialized exploitation.

The oldest is Mel Chin, 67, an artist whose hard-to-categorize work has ranged from stealth conceptual art interventions on the set of the 1990s television show “Melrose Place” to a 2018 mixed-reality installation in Times Square that simulated a view of the area from underneath rising seas, complete with an overhead nautical traffic jam.

Mr. Chin, who lives in Egypt, N.C., said that the call from the foundation had come soon after he got home from trips to Greenland and Miami for a film he is making about climate change, and was feeling rather morose.

“Of course, my disposition changed immediately,” he said with a laugh, before turning serious.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘responsibility,’” he said. “But this felt like an acknowledgment that maybe after a life’s work, you just need to do more.”

Few honors carry the prestige, and the mystique, of the MacArthur. Potential fellows do not apply but are suggested by a network of hundreds of anonymous nominators across the country, in a range of fields, and then selected by an anonymous committee of about a dozen.

The phone calls — and the stunned reaction they cause — have become the stuff of myth. More than one of this year’s fellows described being struck dumb, melting into their chairs, or wondering if it was a hoax.

While it can seem like a quasi-divine bolt from the blue, fellows described the gratification of knowing that the world — and especially their peers — has been paying attention.

“It’s the most incredible encouragement to keep going, to stay on your track,” Ms. Dorsen said.

The nature of human creativity and its relationship to technology is a theme of Ms. Dorsen’s work, which she calls “algorithmic theater.” In “Yesterday Tomorrow,” from 2018, singers sight-read along as a computer gradually, in a different pattern each performance, transforms the score of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” into “Tomorrow,” from the musical “Annie.”

Creativity itself is also a preoccupation of another fellow, the cartoonist Lynda Barry, though she explores it with more low-tech means.

Best known for the alternative comic “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” and graphic novels like “Cruddy,” Ms. Barry, 63, has also spent decades leading workshops for non-writers, including one pairing students at the University of Wisconsin, where she teaches, with 4-year-olds.

“I’m really interested in what happens when writing splits off from drawing, which is a vestigial language,” she said. “I think both suffer.”

While the fellowship program has no set themes, this year’s group includes a number of fellows doing work in areas heavily supported by the foundation, including climate change and criminal justice reform.

Jerry X. Mitrovica, 58, a theoretical geophysicist at Harvard, uses statistical models to show how melting glaciers will cause uneven rises in sea levels around the globe, because of differences in the Earth’s underlying crust and mantle. Kelly Lytle Hernandez, 45, is a historian at U.C.L.A. who has written about the evolution of the Los Angeles County prison system.

Dr. Lytle Hernandez, who is also the author of what the foundation calls the first significant scholarly history of the United States Border Patrol, said the prize was a validation of the growing body of work by activist historians studying incarceration and immigration detention, which often draws on suppressed or scattered records.

“I hope the fellowship provides an even larger umbrella for myself and other scholars who are doing this kind of movement-driven scholarship to have more flexibility, to have more — you almost want to say credentials,” she said.

Ms. Halvorson, the guitarist and composer, also spoke of the collective nature of her work, and the hope that the fellowship would help build the audience for her genre-crossing music, which she called “not easy listening.”

“When I started playing this kind of music, I never thought there would be that big of an audience for it,” she said. “If anything, I hope I can shine a light on this whole scene.”

As for the financial windfall, some fellows spoke of paying off student loans, saving for family emergencies, plowing it back into their organizations, or just buying themselves space and time.

Sujatha Baliga, 48, the director of the Restorative Justice Project, received the fellowship for her work developing a non-punitive alternative to the criminal justice system that brings survivors and those who have caused them harm together.

It’s an approach she learned about only in her late 20s, after work as a public defender and death-penalty appellate lawyer left her feeling like a cog in a machine. She said she hoped to use the money to write a book, as well as to work on a curriculum that can be used in law schools, to help open the pathway to others.

“This kind of funding, with no strings, means I can just sit down and imagine, ‘What does the next generation of lawyers need to know to help restorative justice flourish?’” she said.

Emmanuel Pratt, 42, the co-founder and executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation, a community organization on the South Side of Chicago that has transformed abandoned buildings and vacant lots into a sustainable farm and cultural center, said he would use the fellowship to cover salaries and to help the group’s planned expansion into housing.

During the call with the foundation, he walked out into a field of sunflowers at Sweet Water’s 2-acre farm. “It was surreal,” he said.

Even beyond the money, he said, the MacArthur is a validation of the idea that there are alternatives to the kind of development-as-gentrification that reigns in Chicago and beyond.

“I don’t do the work to get recognition,” he said. “I do I because it’s a way of life. It’s proving that it’s not just possible, but that another way is already happening. It’s right here.”

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Where’s Messi? Tributes lacking in his aboriginal Argentina city

ROSARIO, Argentine Republic (AP) - Flop ahead kickoff, the plasm TV's were quieten tuned to a tennis meet on deaf-and-dumb person as an alternative of the Barcelona spirited at a intimately evacuate debar owned by Lionel Messi's home in his Argentine Republic hometown. The alone hint at the debar were about photos of Messi. No one seemed to forethought or so the gritty until a pair walked in hurriedly and asked a waiter to modification the canalize. The college students from Deutschland had protected for months to journey on a pilgrim's journey to their idol's indigene metropolis. By this peak they were disappointed: they had seen no Messi statues, plaques or museums. Null. "It seems like I feel more for Messi than Rosarinos," Oshin Gharibi, 32, aforementioned as he watched the twin side by side to his girlfriend, Lena Wagner, 23. She wore a Barcelona shirt decked with Messi's telephone number 10 on the backwards. In this April 17, 2018 photo, customers are reflected in a moving picture of Lionel Messi at the Very important person eating house owned by Lionel Messi's class in his hometown of Rosario, Argentine Republic. In Messi's hometown, where at that place are no statues or museums in abide by of the soccer idol, everyone seems to agree: the Messi's are a humble, seemly family; Lionel was a safe kid, and he only if cared most unity affair only: the association football testicle. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) "Messi is such a big star from such a small place," Gharibi aforesaid. "How can you not give him the recognition that he deserves?" It's a mystery story that confounds many. Cristiano Ronaldo has an airdrome named after him on his Lusitanian home base island of Madeira; Pele has his museum in his Brazilian aboriginal metropolis of Santos; level Bumpy Balboa - a fictitious boxer- has been paying court with a statue in City of Brotherly Love. So wherefore does Rosario appear to let an ambivalent relationship with the world's nearly famous football player? Many Here appear to make out vertebral column to the Lapplander theories: a soccer-insane metropolis shared out by the contention of its deuce beloved clubs; the comparisons to Diego Maradona; and the melodic theme that anything but victorious is worthless. In a decennary of victorious trophies for Barcelona, the trump player of his coevals has sooner or later to deport a World Cup for Genus Argentina - as Maradona did in 1986. Russia power be the finale take a chance for Messi, WHO will sprain 31 during the tournament. Rosario, a river larboard and Argentina's third-largest metropolis is situated near 180 miles Northwest of Buenos Aires. It's better known for organism the country's agricultural hub, the hometown of subverter loss leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and a talent manufactory for just about of Argentina's scoop footballers and coaches. Merely for Rosarinos merely two clubs matter: Rosario Fundamental and Newell's Honest-to-goodness Boys, its perpetual contender and Messi's childhood guild. "You breathe football everywhere in Rosario, but, curiously, the air doesn't smell of Messi," author Guillem Balague writes in "Messi," the prescribed biography. Everybody seems to possess a narrative nigh Messi, only "the city does not seem to want to gloat. It's almost as if it is considered vulgar to have his face posted everywhere," Balague says. Just "when you ask him what his favorite memories are, he is in no doubt. 'My home, my neighborhood, where I was born.'" In the working-family neighbourhood of La Bajada, neighbors recognise for each one former by key out and kids razz bikes on constringe streets. As they pass up to the hoary gate of Messi's puerility home, the German tourists put up hardly hold their joyousness. "We could have traveled to a beach in Barcelona, Thailand or Australia, but we came here," Wagner aforesaid. "It's worth it because we get to see the places where he grew up." Messi is powerfully machine-accessible to Rosario. His accentuate is unchanged, even out though he odd the urban center 18 geezerhood agone. He returns oftentimes and end year, he married his puerility sweetie in the metropolis. "I don't think it's something against Messi, but perhaps something cultural that we have to evaluate and rethink about ... people who perhaps deserve more recognition," said Sandro Alzugaray, a Sculptor. In his atelier, he keeps a ordered series mock up of a Messi statue. He presented the design to urban center officials four old age agone and it has thus far to get favorable reception. Messi was innate a year afterward Maradona led Genus Argentina to the Cosmos Loving cup trophy in 1986. Only he has faced comparisons to the late Argentinian sea captain passim his liveliness. "For us...who took care of him, it hurts to hear the criticism, the comparisons to Maradona," aforesaid Andrea Liliana Sosa, ane of Messi's onetime teachers. A partition of a untried Messi clothed in the red-and-contraband colors of Newell's features at the club's youthfulness dissipated coordination compound. It's the lonesome preindication that the five-sentence FIFA worldly concern instrumentalist of the year was a standout actor hither as a tiddler. "I think we're not using the marketing correctly," aforementioned Gustavo Pereira, a Newell's juvenility division passenger car. Perhaps Rosarinos guardianship so very much close to Messi's concealment because they neediness him to donjon advent support. "When people ask me about a Messi tourist tour, it pains me," aforementioned Hector De Benedictis, Rosario's Tourism Secretariate. In his hand, he held copies for a Messi tour that his situation has well-tried to establish double. But the Messi crime syndicate spurned the marriage proposal because of privateness concerns. "It's a question of ethics." In this Apr 18, 2018 photo, artist Sandro Alzugaray shows his Clay simulate of Lionel Messi at his studio apartment in Rosario, Argentina, Messi's hometown. Alzugaray has proposed to make a monument to laurels Messi in their hometown since the late Macrocosm Cup, four years ago, just is silence confident that about Day it testament be sanctioned by the metropolis governing and that he'll observe the financial brook to pee it bump. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) This April 17, 2018 photograph shows a soccer field of battle exploited by the Newell's Honest-to-god Boys spring chicken teams in Rosario, Argentina, the urban center where soccer avid Lionel Messi grew up. "You breathe football everywhere in Rosario, but, curiously, the air doesn't smell of Messi. There are hardly any photos, or pictures, nor even advertisements depicting Leo," source Guillem Balague writes in "Messi," the administrative unit life story. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this April 17, 2018 photo, children gearing at the Newell's Sure-enough Boys youthfulness education home base in Rosario, Argentina, the hometown of association football majuscule Lionel Messi. Messi was Max Born a year later Maradona light-emitting diode Argentina to the Humans Cupful prize in 1986, and has faced comparisons to the quondam Argentine master passim his life, regular when they could non be Sir Thomas More different away the field of view. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this Apr 17, 2018 photo, a modest wall painting portrayal Lionel Messi as a small fry decorates the bulwark at a soccer area exploited by the Newell's Previous Boys early days teams, Messi's childhood club, in Rosario, Argentina. Messi, Max Born in Rosario, played for Rosario's local anaesthetic team up before sign language with Barcelona at eld 13. The mural is the alone sign that he was a standout musician hither as a youngster. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this Apr 18, 2018 photo, Lionel Messi's former neighbour Marta Rodriguez shows her autographed depiction with the soccer matinee idol inwardly her home, on the equivalent forget that Messi grew up on in La Bajada, Rosario, Genus Argentina. Messi is even real often connected to Rosario. His accent and expressions are unchanged, Casino Online regular though he left the metropolis as a teen, 18 age agone. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this Apr 17, 2018 photo, photos of expectant soccer moments ornament the cafeteria indoors Newell's Old Boys youthfulness education centre in Rosario, Argentina, the hometown of Lionel Messi. Photos of previous coaches and players lifting trophies ornament the cafeteria's walls, merely there's non a bingle figure of Messi, the five-clock FIFA earth player of the twelvemonth. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this April 17, 2018 photo, European country tourists Oshin Gharibi and his lady friend Lena Wagner, both students from Heidelberg, beat for a moving-picture show at the High-up restaurant owned by Lionel Messi's sept in Rosario, Genus Argentina. The mates walked into the bar, nearly-empty, expecting to watch out Messi act a plot disseminate on TV, but had to demand the server to place the gamy on. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this Apr 18, 2018 photo, a partition of Lionel Messi covers a mansion one barricade from his puerility household in La Bajada, Rosario, Genus Argentina. As a wedding gift, around of his puerility friends varicolored the large mural on a fence at a small-scale force field where they victimised to toy as kids. It shows a whiskery Messi encircled by coloured planets, and on a tree it reads: "From another galaxy - and from my neighborhood." (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this April 18, 2018 photo, European country tourist twosome Oshin Gharibi and Lena Wagner, from Heidelberg, parting a handwritten letter of the alphabet at the internal where Lionel Messi grew up in La Bajada, Rosario, Argentina, by chance making the planetary house consternation go away. The duet are college students who saved for months to come up altogether the mode to Rosario for a pilgrimage to their idol's indigen city. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this April 18, 2018 photo, a foosball defer stands at heart the "Escuela General Las Heras" where Lionel Messi went to chief cultivate in Rosario, Genus Argentina. "When I see him on TV, I think of that little kid on this same yard doing those same dribbles," aforementioned Andrea Liliana Sosa, unrivalled of Messi's onetime teachers. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this Apr 18, 2018 photo, Andrea Liliana Sosa, Lionel Messi's primary train teacher, poses for a visualise at the "Escuela General Las Heras" in Rosario, Genus Argentina. "For us, the teachers who took care of him, it hurts to hear the criticism, the comparisons to Maradona," said Sosa. They don't render him the grandness he deserves. It's as if the metropolis can't clutch that Lionel is from Hera." (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this April 18, 2018 photo, an Ernesto "Che" Guevara statue by artist Andres Zerneri stands in a park in his hometown of Rosario, Argentina. Rosario, a river port and Argentina's third-largest city is best known for being the country's agricultural hub, the hometown of the revolutionary leader and a talent factory for some of Argentina's best footballers and coaches, including Lionel Messi. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this April 18, 2018 photo, a woman cycles past Lionel Messi's school "Escuela Ecumenical Las Heras" primary school in Rosario, Argentina. The mural featuring Messi was painted by the school's students and teachers with the help of local artist Ruben Perez Barrios. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In this April 18, 2018 photo, Alejandro Daniel Fernandez poses for a photo by a mural of his childhood friend, Lionel Messi, that reads in Spanish "From my region!" in La Bajada, Rosario, Argentina. Fernandez said Messi's family had always helped him, including living with the family for a while, and that he remains friends with Lionel and his brother who all play soccer together when in town. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) Advertisement

[othersportsnews-blog]

Dad and mom just will not realize: Why kids appreciate LaVar Ball - Men's Faculty Basketball Site

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Dad and mom just will not realize: Why kids appreciate LaVar Ball - Men's Faculty Basketball Site

LAS VEGAS — Immediately after Big Baller Brand’s 111-102 get more than Play Really hard Play Good on Thursday afternoon at the Adidas Uprising Summertime Championships finished, a brood of teens and tykes flooded a back again hallway and waited for their hero to exit the locker place.

LaVar Ball’s entourage organized. An assistant mentor ordered the dozens collected to kind a line. A brother played stability guard.

Cameras filming the new Ball relatives reality clearly show sought favorable positions atop benches and stools.

And then, Ball emerged and a Luke Bryan concert commenced as young enthusiasts screamed and cheered, waiting around for the polarizing personality to play their preferred song.

LaVar Ball appears to have obtained immense recognition with young basketball enthusiasts across the region. Image by Ethan Miller/Getty Photographs

For the past 6 months, gentlemen and gals in the course of the region have debated the purpose, intent, longevity, sanity and ambitions of Ball.

It’s distinct, having said that, the young people right here at the Cashman Center do not treatment for people adult discussions.

They appreciate LaVar Ball. And they are not positive why you might not.

Immediately after securing a postgame photo with Ball, one young person appeared baffled by issues about this week’s youth motion in guidance of the most popular father in grassroots basketball.

“He’s the greatest of all time,” the young person explained. “I indicate, what do you indicate?”

A further teenager approached hyperventilation as he moved nearer to Lakers draftee Lonzo Ball’s father.

“He’s just a comedian, person,” he explained.

Minutes later on, he took a selfie with LaVar Ball and then, he held his mobile phone previously mentioned the fold like a photo of his 1st youngster. Individuals in the hallway all through the scrum could not move without having bumping into many children beneath 13.

If you are convinced Ball represents some special, zany extension of the cultured AAU circuit, you’ve never ever attended a 4- or 5-day grassroots occasion.

On Wednesday, the fireplace marshal’s menace to cancel the substantially-hyped matchup among major-10 recruits LaMelo Ball — who experienced 38 factors, 10 rebounds and nine helps in Thursday’s get — and Zion Williamson because of to overcrowding, and LeBron James’ previous-minute final decision to steer clear of the chaos right after he entered the parking great deal created national headlines.

But South Carolina Supreme mentor Leander Anderson coached the full 1st 50 percent of Wednesday’s match although holding a sleeping youngster.

On Thursday, a braggadocios assistant for one more squad yelled, “That’s what we do! That’s what we do!” every time his staff scored. They were down by double digits then and missing by a healthier margin.

Dad and mom preaching staff basketball at home stood in the stands and boisterously demanded much more individual, scholarship-developing exploits from their children.

On Wednesday, one head mentor of a major school method questioned aloud why he experienced to pay out $600 for a reserve listing the prospective buyers attending the Adidas occasion. “Somebody is generating a great deal of revenue,” he explained.

On Thursday, organizers blasted Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” as a result of a pair of speakers about twenty ft from North Carolina’s Roy Williams, who maybe in the moment asked himself how substantially for a longer period he wishes to do this.

LaVar Ball did not start off the circus. He joined one.

Certainly, he drew a technological foul in Wednesday’s decline. Certainly, he did sit-ups in the second 50 percent of Thursday’s get. Certainly, he’s the most eccentric figure on the circuit.

But the oddities of grassroots basketball birthed LaVar Ball, not the other way about.

Lost in the antics of Ball and his peers on the circuit are the stakes attached to the performances of young gentlemen. The conditions can steal the enjoyment from the match.

Younger standouts pour their basketball souls on to the flooring of these functions and hope to bring in major scholarship presents. Some borderline prospective buyers return to the staff lodge in tears, fearing a very poor work could have ruined their odds to play at the upcoming level.

The futures of young athletes are shaped in these fitness centers each individual yr. And they are all surrounded by gentlemen and gals who frequently take them selves far far too very seriously.

In just the gravity of these functions, Ball’s young enthusiasts uncovered somebody to entertain them. Somebody to make them snicker. Somebody to make them smile.

To lots of grown ups in the place, Ball has stolen the pleasure from youth basketball.

To his young supporters in Las Vegas and past, he’s returned it.

Just before the match, they approached him and asked for selfies. He obliged.

When he stomped down the sidelines with a cartoonish stride in Thursday’s match, they chuckled. When he pointed towards them in the stands right after the get, they pounded their chests in acknowledgement.

And when he entered the back again hallway, they chased him to get a piece of anything refreshing.

“You know, he’s authentic, person,” explained one middle-college child right after he’d taken his selfie with Ball. “He does not sugarcoat issues. I do not like people who sugarcoat issues.”

They’ll all appear back again Friday early morning, searching for much more LaVar Ball, when Big Baller Brand faces Crew BBC at 11 a.m. ET.

And they’ll wait around for the grown ups in their life to appear about.

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[obedmanwatkar]

Savitribai Phule & Tarabai Shinde By: Obed Manwatkar

Abstract

This essay explores the subjectivity and agency of two nineteenth century women who relentlessly fought against patriarchy and the caste system. Not much has been written about them. Savitribai was known only as the wife of Jyotirao Phule or as a teacher of female education and Tarabai Shinde, who was a widow, is still anonymous to the evangelical world. However, this article argues that Savitribai and Tarabai took patriarchy head on and fought against child marriage and female infanticide, opened orphanages, worked for widow remarriage, and for female education. Savitribai and Tarabai created their own identity by coming out of shadows of male dominance and carried the mantle of social revolution that had been handed over by Mahatma Jotirao Phule after his death. They were far ahead of the nationalist discourse on women in 19th century colonial India.

 Keywords

Patriarchy, Caste, Inter caste Marriage, Orphanage, Socially Reforming Education, Female Subjectivity

 Content

The experience of missionary evangelism in India gave rise to notions of social reform and cultural nationalism which led to conflicted relationships with feminism. Modernity also resulted in the relative marginalization of those figures who proposed notions of revolutionary ideas opposed to tradition. Two such figures who emerged in Indian feminism were Savitribai Phule and Tarabai Shinde.

 Savitribai Phule

Early life

 Savitribai was born in Naigaon village in Satara district to her mother Laxmibai and father Khandoji Navse Patil, who was the village chief. Savitribai was just nine years old when she was married to Jyotirao Phule (age thirteen) in the year 1840. According to the Hindu calendar, the tithi, or date, of their marriage was Falgun Vadya panchami, Shakey 1765. Savitribai’s father-in-law, Govindrao Phule, was from Phursungi, with the last name Khirsagar. The Peshwa gave him a horticultural land in Pune, so he migrated to Pune and started a horticultural business. As is generally the case in India, his last name was changed to reflect the family business.  He therefore acquired the last name Phule, from the word “phul”, meaning flower.

 Savitribai’s husband Jyotirao lost his mother at a very young age. His maternal aunt, Saguna, (lovingly called SagunaAau by Jyotirao, with Aau meaning mother) nurtured him. SagunaAau worked as a nanny for a British officer’s son. She therefore understood and was able to converse in English. She used this knowledge to inspire Jyotirao and attract him to education.

 Savitribai had been given a book by a Christian missionary before her marriage which she brought with her to her in-law's house. This shows the attraction she had for words and books despite being uneducated. Savitribai set up a school for SagunaAau on 1st May 1847 in a backward community. This was their first school. SagunaAau started teaching there happily and enthusiastically. A year later, when a school was started in Bhide Wada in Pune, SagunaAau was called there to teach. The first school had stopped working abruptly due to lack of acceptability for education for lower caste people in those days.

 CRITIQUE OF PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY

 Apart from her identity as Jotirao Phule’s wife, Savitribai is little known even in academia. She was modern India’s first woman teacher, a radical exponent of mass education – particularly for women, a champion of women’s liberation, a pioneer of engaged poetry, and a courageous mass leader who took on the forces of patriarchy and caste which certainly should have created her independent identity and contribution. (Braj Rajan Mani and Pamela Sardar 1988: 7) She, along with her husband, realized that the Indian women do not have a monolithic identity and the issues of caste and gender are interrelated. Her thoughts show the sensitivity and understanding of the existing diversity of patriarchies in terms of castes in India with varying degrees of women’s exploitation. Savitribai’s role in the anti-caste and women’s struggle is unique and unparalleled among all the social reform movements in nineteenth century as it linked patriarchy with the caste.

 Savitribai Phule started several initiatives for social transformation much before the early nationalists took up the social reform as a campaign strategy. One of the main focuses of her interventions was the challenge she posed to the well-established patriarchal and brahmanical relations, especially in terms of combating female illiteracy and caste. For Savitribai, social and economic power was located in traditional social structures and practices. The traditional social order signifies a dominant system, ideology and a set of institutions that perpetuate the process of exploitation. It is interesting to note that both shudras and atishudras are generic terms for those who provide service. Hence oppression, exploitation and social discrimination define the shudra and atishudra castes. In this sense, all women are considered shudras by the Phules, since they are also oppressed. Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule are the pioneers for their numerous attempts amongst Stree-Shudra-Atishudra, such as throwing open their doors of learning to “women and lower castes”, opening their drinking water well to the untouchables, and throwing upon their home to the child widows and to orphan children (Lalita Dhara 2011: 13).

 CHAMPION OF FEMALE EDUCATION

 Savitribai Phule was the mother of modern Indian education and a liberator for the women and lower caste people. She was the first Indian woman teacher and the first Indian to revolutionise the traditional fabric of Indian society by opening education to girls and to lower caste children. “She was the first Indian to place universal, child sensitive, intellectually critical, and socially reforming education at the very core of the agenda for all children in India.” (Thom Wolf and Andrade: 2008.)

 Saviribai understood that self-realisation through education is the key to social as well as gender equality. She believed firmly that only education can liberate women from the oppressive patriarchal structures. She goes to the extent of saying that if tradition is bondage for liberation, then smash that tradition. As a first step in this direction she started a school with Saguna in Maharwada in 1847.  Later on, on 1st January 1948, the country's first school for girls was started at Bhide's wada in Pune and Savitribai was nominated as the first head mistress of the school. This was her first dent to patriarchy when she was appointed as a teacher at a time when teaching of girls was supposed to be an unholy, unheard of thing, and moreover, an affront to traditional honour. In times when women were treated no better than the cattle at home, Savitribai earned the distinction of being the first Indian woman to become a teacher. For this she undertook training at Ms. Farar’s Institution at Ahmednagar and in Ms. Mitchell’s school in Pune.

 She faced severe opposition from almost all sections. Savitribai was subject to intense harassment everyday as she walked to the school. Stones, mud and dirt were flung at her as she passed. But she faced everything courageously. Dhananjay Keer describes Savitribai's response to the situation: “Embarrassed by this unholy uproar and upsurge, she would stop in the street and say serenely to her persecutors: ‘God forgive you. I am doing my duty. May He bless you” ( Keer 1974: 68). Relying on contributions from friends, the generosity of individual British administrators, and their own labour, Savitribai and her husband endured the opposition and continued the school, and even replicated the project, proceeding to start several more schools throughout Pune over the next few years. However, the Phules were not exclusivist. The teachers appointed in the schools run by Phules included Brahmins as well as other caste people and a large number of women. Fatima Shaikh, who worked with Savitribai from the beginning, is said to be the first Muslim woman teacher in a modern school in India.

 The first public Til-Gul programme was arranged by Mahila Seva Mandal on 14th January, 1852 in which Savitribai, along with her husband, took an active part. Their family was honoured by the British government for their works in the field of education and Savitribai was awarded as the best teacher in 1852.  Savitribai also learned English. When the Revenue Commissioner went to inspect her school on February 12, 1853, he saw Savitribai teaching and he praised her and conversed with her in simple English. The report says that “The prejudice against teaching girls to read and write began to give way ---the good conduct and honesty of the peons in conveying the girls to and from school and parental treatment and indulgent attention of the teachers made the girls love the schools and literally run to them with alacrity and joy” ( Keer 2011:  28).

 In 1853, the Government and the Board of Education honoured the Phules' efforts in education, presenting them with a pair of shawls. This incident is not a normal one and bears special recognition. This was an official and public commendation of gifting the shawls in pair to both Jotirao and Savitribai. This is perhaps the first known presentation of a shawl to a woman and an indelible mark on the head of patriarchal agenda that Indian society was facing during this period. Also, by 1853, the Phules and their companions founded an Education Society that continued to open schools for girls and for the lower castes, as well as to give lectures to the lower castes in Pune, explaining the benefits of education. Dhananjay Keer says for this memorable moment “For the first time in India during her history of three thousand years…the gates of knowledge were opened to the lowest of the low.” And, it was Jotirao and Savitribai Phule who effected this “miraculous change”( Keer 1974: 29).

 Savitribai Phule and Mahatma Jotirao Phule were on the same page as far as female education was concerned. In a statement made before the Education Commission (1882), Jotirao Phule’s opening sentences note the compatibility of thoughts on education between himself and his wife: “My experience in educational matters is principally confined to Poona and the surrounding villages. About 25 years ago, the missionaries had established a female school at Poona but no indigenous school for girls existed at the time. I, therefore, was induced . . . to establish such a school, and in which I and my wife worked together for many years” (G.P.Deshpande 2002: 102)  Again, when Jotiba and Savitribai were being honoured in a public function in Pune  on 16th Nov. 1852, Jotiba Phule, honestly accepted his wife’s contribution. This is the first time in the history of India that an Indian leader publicly admitted the share of his wife in his thoughts and works.

 Savitribai agreed with her husband in conceptualizing the knowledge as Tritiya ratna, the ‘Third eye’, which they saw as knowledge that went beyond merely alphabetical competence to the power to see through hegemonic ideology.  They also felt the same knowledge also will help liberate people from the system of oppression and to dismantle it. For Savitribai, truth is the true home of genuine spirituality, so critical thinking is never an enemy in the educational process.  Savitribai and the Truth Seekers community envisioned a social function for education, and believed that “in education…lay the key to a fundamental change in social attitudes” (O’ Hanlon Rosalind 1985: 119).  Her goal in promoting education for the masses was not simply to raise the temporary standard of living for a few individuals, but to reshape the entire future of the nation of India.

 Savitribai was an educational philosopher well ahead of her times. She incorporated innovative methods for spreading education – she gave stipends to prevent children from dropping out of school. She was the teacher who inspired a young student to ask for a library for the school at an award ceremony instead of gifts for herself. She even conducted the equivalent of a parent-teacher meeting to involve the parents so that they would understand the importance of education and support their children. Her schools imparted vocational training as well. Savitribai motivated her 11-year-old student Muktabai, to write an essay that became the cornerstone of ‘Dalit literature’. Savitribai's remarkable influence through her teaching and writings is evident in an essay she wrote, which was published in the paper Dyanodaya, in 1855. The essay 'Mang Maharachya Dukhvisayi', which translates as 'Grief of the Mangs and Mahars', is deemed to be among the earliest surviving documentations by a woman writer. It portrays the atrocities committed against untouchables and received accolades even in English translation. The writer's lambasting of the caste system, and the religion that upholds it, reveals the 'potential explosiveness' of education that the Phules were so keen to create. Similarly, no other women’s writing could show the radical spirit which was shown late by Tarabai Shinde’s “Stri Purush Tulna.” Savitribai said, “Work hard, study well, and do good” she constantly underscored the importance of education and physical work for knowledge and prosperity. She felt that women must receive an education as they were in no way inferior to men; they were not the slaves of men (Braj Rajan Mani and Pamela Sardar 1988: 66)   Savitribai Phule emphasised that education is the key to self- reliance and further to the social reform. In her work, Kavyaphule, She went to the extent of calling the ignorant people as animals (Lalita Dhara 2012: 77).

 The three letters that Savitribai wrote to her husband Jotiba during a span of 20 years are a testimony of a boundless love of a wife for her husband on one hand, and a manifestation of her commitment to a wider cause of social reformation on the other. They also reveal a vision of Savitribai’s egalitarian society with full human dignity and freedom for all.

 OPENING OF ORPANAGE

 It was only after spreading education to the women that Savitribai took head on to other taboos of society which victimized women. Savitribai developed a framework of education that sought to revolutionize the society. Savitribai was not a typical docile woman who blindly followed her husband. She was a courageous woman who stood by her husband and supported all his radical initiatives when no other family member or relative assisted him. Savitribai’s first collection of poetry “Kavya Phule” echoed the agony, aspirations and feelings of the modern, liberated Indian Women. The Phules opined that the practice of unequal marriage and child marriage has led to abortion and infanticide. They condemned the double standards of the Hindu traditional patriarchy which, while disallowing widow remarriage, happily permitted remarriage for men. The Phules showed the courage to start an orphanage for such fallen women and their children in 1864.

 Savitribai looked unflaggingly after the children in the orphanage established by her and her husband as if she were their mother, although she had no natural child, and ye,t with her kind and generous disposition, she tenderly and lovingly cherished the infants. It was her practice to invite, from time to time, all children from the neighborhood to dinner. She was the happiest and smiled her sweetest when she was left among the children. Savitribai and Jotirao were moved by the plight of such widows and castigated the barbers for tonsuring their heads. They even organized a strike of barbers and persuaded them not to shave the heads of widows. One time, Jotirao stopped a pregnant lady from committing suicide, promising to give her child his name after it was born. Savitribai readily accepted the lady in her house and willingly assured to help her deliver the child. Savitribai and Jotirao adopted this child, who then grew up to become a doctor. This incident opened new horizons for the couple. Many women were driven to commit suicide by men who had exploited them to satisfy their lust and then deserted them. Therefore, Savitribai and Jyotirao put boards on streets about the "Delivery Home" for women on whom pregnancy had been forced. The delivery home was called "Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha”. Her life style was very simple, she used to wear sari blouse of khadi. Under the supervision of Phule, Savitribai founded ‘Mahila Seva Mandal’ which was first institution of its kind.

 In one of her letters to Jotiba, she came to the aid of a couple entering an inter caste marriage. Inter caste marriages were later cited by B. R. Ambedkar as an important tool to annihilate the caste. To support such marriages in the late nineteenth century required exemplary courage and commitment.

 Rosalind O’Hanlon opines that “Phule’s main point about the interconnected problems of the 19th century low caste majority Indian traditional religious disabilities thus lay at the root of the frustration and backwardness of the low castes. These interconnected problems required a radical solution: a revolution in the worldview of the lower caste individual. In stripping the priestly class of their religious authority, and the social hierarchies of Hinduism of their religious sanction, this would free the lower caste man or woman to understand for themselves, both the workings of the natural world, and the distribution of power and authority in their own society” (O’ Hanlon Rosalind 1985: 125-128).

 FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY, IDENTITY AND AGENCY

 Savitribai was one of the first Indian women in modern India whose works were published, and was able to develop her own voice and agency at a time when women of all classes were ruthlessly suppressed and lived a sub-human existence. Savitribai was a "Vidya Jyoti" for all those who want to do something in the field of education. Savitribai’s writings were an independent expression. Her writings demonstrate the influence of folk songs, bhakti, poetry and the shayari (ballad literature). Though she selected traditional forms, she consistently stuck to rationalism in all her writings.

Savitribai published two works; Kavya Phule in 1954 and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar in 1982 (Susie Tharu, and K. Lalitha 1991: 211-212). Her poetry, Kavya Phule, is a historical document of the time. While some of her poems are basically nature poems, in others she engages with issues like education, equality, slavery, caste system and patriarchy. In Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar which is a biography of Phule, she narrates Phule’s devastating critique of the brahmanical interpretation of Marathi history.

 One of her poems described the new Indian man- one who looks after his family with care and responsibility, one who is always industrious and inquisitive, who quests for knowledge, who is a worshipper of freedom, who is caring, sacrificing and dedicated. She was also aware of the differences among women of different classes and castes, something with which the women’s movement of today is much concerned. Women of different castes had different roles in the domesticity and in the public. She refers to the fact that even though the shudra man and shudra woman work side by side, it is the woman who wakes up earlier and takes care of the family’s needs as well as agricultural duties. 

   Tarabai Shinde

 “...before Pandita Ramabai came to Pune, Tarabai Shinde of Buldana wrote a book called Stree Purush Tulana. In this book she gave excellent advice to men, for most of them behave as they will and sinfully in the presence of their women. Naturally their respectable women feel bad, but since they are powerless and ignorant they are infuriated and great storms of bad deeds arise in their imagination. She (Tarabai) therefore decided to advise the menfolk. Her advice is a little stern and pungent, and an adamant editor of a newspaper did not like it…” (Tatyasaheb’s conversation with Yashwant Jotirao Phule In Book Satsar, Published in 1885)

 Early Life

 Tarabai Shinde (1840-1910) was an inspirational women’s activist who was known for her fiery personality, outstanding self-confidence, and strong sense of independence. Her invigorating book is considered the first modern Indian feminist text where she passionately fights to help women gain privilege and end oppression. Shinde is widely known for her creative, fierce, and controversial book, “A Comparison of Men and Women,” where she critizes the patriarchal society in which she grew up where the differences between the two genders was atrocious. Tarabai Shinde received most of her experience through her work with Jotirao and Savitribai Phule who shared the same ideas of the oppression of gender and caste in Indian society. She was home-schooled by her father, Bapuji Hari Shinde, who taught her Marathi, Sanskrit, and English.  Shinde was recognized across the world for being the first feminist writer of nineteenth century India to write against men and the caste system; however, she did not receive any awards because of her controversial writing.

 Shinde wrote A Comparison Between Men and Women in response to the unfair treatment of women in nineteenth century Indian society. Vijayalakshmi, in Surat, was an upper-caste widow who was sentenced to death for having an abortion. After Vijayalakshmi's death, an article was published insulting women for their “new loose morals,” and portrayed Indian woman as detestable. Shinde wrote her book in response to this article to show Indian society that there are double-standards for men and women, and that women deserve equal rights. Shinde raised awareness on the double-standards of men and women in society. She also discussed the unfair treatment of the different castes in India. This allowed citizens to begin to question the standards they had set for women.

Shinde was an associate of the activists Jotirao and Savitribai Phule. She was a member of their Satyashodak Samaj (“Truth seekers society”) organization. She helped the Phules start a school for Untouchable girls in 1848. She also helped to start a shelter for upper-caste widows in 1854 when they were forbidden from remarrying.

 An Inspirational Change Agent

 The definition of a “change agent” is someone who brings about significant change, whether in terms of individual or communal status, social movement, or the course of history. Shinde fits these criteria perfectly because she composed a book where she voiced her thoughts on women’s rights, even though it was considered extremely controversial at the time. In Shinde’s book, “A Comparison of Men and Women,” she criticizes patriarchal society and the differences between the genders. Shinde was courageous enough to be the first feminist to critique the issues in society without fear of negative feedback.

Shinde started out simply as an associate of Jotirao and Savitribai Phule. The Phules were socio-spiritual activists that helped set up the first ever school for Untouchable girls. Untouchable girls were segregated from society and not allowed to participate in social life. They also created a shelter for upper-caste widows who were not allowed to remarry after their first husband died. The Phules shared an awareness of oppression in genders and the caste system with Shinde. This gave Shinde the start she needed to her fight for women’s rights in Indian society. However, Shinde did not focus simply on the oppression of Indian women; she believed that women everywhere were similarly oppressed.

If Shinde had to handle a social problem that we are dealing with today, such as the lack of rights for women in Afghanistan, she would first bring this problem to the attention of the public by writing about it. She would use her persuasive language and passionate writing to convince society that the issue at hand has a simple solution. She would describe a specific crime committed by an Afghani man and an Afghani woman and show the difference in their punishment. Just like she did in, “A Comparison of Men and Women,” Shinde would ask the reader why the woman is punished more severely, when the man walks away without any repercussions. In her book, Shinde talks about how woman were sentenced to death for having an abortion, when this problem would never have existed if it were not for the actions committed by both men and women. She is known for her strength in the face of adversity, her fierce independence, and her ability to challenge what was accepted by most women of her time. Tarabai Shinde believed that women had to walk the line between a good woman and a prostitute. This belief was greeted with a hostile reception causing publishing for her book to stop for almost one hundred years. Shinde’s actions and beliefs caused turmoil in her society. Indian men were in favor of their dominance in society and some Indian women did not want to cause problems in their everyday life. However, most women were in support of making the necessary beneficial changes to their society.

 By Her Own Hand

Some Extracts from her book “A Comparison of Men and Women”

 “Though every day we see new and more terrible examples of men’s violence, audacity, and cunning, yet no one pays any attention to these; instead people continue to heap the burden of all wrongs onto the women themselves.”

 “So is it true that only women’s bodies are home to all the different kinds of recklessness and vice? Or have men got just the same faults as we find in women?”

 “I’m just a poor woman without any real intelligence, who’s been kept locked up and confined…But every day now we have to look at some new and more horrible example of men who are really wicked, and their shameless lying tricks. And people go about pinning the blame on women all the time, as if everything bad was their fault. When I saw this, my whole mind began churning and shaking.. I lost all my fear, I just couldn’t stop myself writing about it in this very biting language.”

 About remarriages, she has written, “The system of keeping away remarriages has spread like leprosy in many races. It is unimaginable to think of the sorrow millions of women have suffered and will suffer after becoming widows and how terrible are and will be the consequences of it.”

 Writing about the pain and agony suffered by widows, Tarabai says, “Women, who collect the bundle of widowhood in the cloth of their saree, keep talking about good and bad qualities of their dead husbands and die bearing the ill treatment of the members of the family and society.” Because remarriages are forbidden, a large number of young widows are going astray and abort their unborn children, killing them. Lok-hitwadi, a well known scholar of the time, had sent a report to the government that in those days approximately about a thousand fetuses were removed only in Pune district. The fear Tarabai Shinde had expressed in her book was thus supported by Lok-hitwadi’s letter.

It is not only illogical but also unrealistic to forbid remarriages; so she asks, “Arre, have your ancestors brought in a certificate from God to state whether a wife should die before her husband or a husband should die before his wife? Living and dying is only in the hands of the all powerful Almighty.” In this connection, she asks, “Why should women forever live in a dark room after losing their husband like a criminal worse than murderer all their life? Why should they be under the pressure of guilt they have not committed?” She has presented many points in her book in support of argument how a woman’s life has become meaningless in the male dominated system of patriarchy. The time has now come to change all this. She demanded in the book that the British government should pass a law allowing widows to remarry.

 Being a woman, she wrote the book out of her genuine concern for all women. The books is a proof of how Tarabai was a versatile woman having balanced thought and rational attitude towards life. She has quoted many references from scriptures and ancient books to put forward truth. This proves how her reading was vast and balanced. She had also read stories and novels of the times keeping her eyes open. She vehemently attacked the portrayal of women suffering from the weakness of sexual desire written from the point of view of male psychology in novels like Muktamala, Manjughosha, Manorama, and Vidagdha Shreecharitra. She clearly stated that the descriptions in those novels were imaginary, fanciful, unrealistic and downright defamatory for women.

 Although her criticism in the book A Comparison of Men and Women (Stree-Purush Tulanaa) is expressed in candid and attacking words, she has never propagated total freedom for women or uncontrolled man-woman equality. She is not partial in blaming men for all problems either. The style of the book is smooth and felicitous. The writing has become effective because of the imagery used from the sphere of her life experience and the use of proverbs and sayings often used in the speech of womenfolk of the times. It is unbelievable to accept why Tarabai Shinde, who is considered the first feminist woman writer in Marathi owing to her book Stree – Purush Tulanaa, did not write anything else in later life.

 CONCLUSION

 We may conclude that as early as the mid 19th century, Savitribai and Tarabai, through their works and thoughts, sought to bring about a complete change in all spheres of women’s lives. Savitribai was also the first woman in India to enter into the male bastion and light her husband's pyre. Her choice to light her husband’s funeral pyre, which would still be considered audacious, must have sent shock waves across the land at that point in time.  This act portrays her subjectivity and tells us that she was not a conventional Indian Pativrata (devoted wife) following in her husband’s footsteps. She became a breadwinner after her husband’s death and took the leading role in running Satyashodhak Samaj. Her compassion was seen during the draught of 1896.

 Savitribai and Tarabai were revolutionary leaders in their own right. Despite tremendous odds, They rose to become productive, inspiring and capable teachers, leaders, thinkers and writers.  Their life shows that the strongest dent against the patriarchal system has to come by a woman herself. Savitribai Phule and Tarabai Shinde were perhaps the greatest female leader of colonial India who thrashed upon the age old patriarchal system by linking caste to patriarchy.

       REFERENCES

 Dhananjay Keer. 1974. Mahatma Phule, Father of Indian Social Revolution. Popular Prakashan, Bombay.

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