#his whole thing is that he works in a nuclear power plant who rarely takes the correct precautions when handling hazardous waste management

[videoviolence]

RADIOACTIVE PUKE! ☢️🐺

[the-firebird69]

It's a huge deal going on that Ken is having trouble understanding the instructions but our sun is out and he's taking a break looking at the water and we have a couple announcements

--+there's a war going on in the rings and it's pretty fierce there's a lot of problems and there's a lot of people getting hurt it is not a nice time okay people are not having a good time it is a rare thing to see people who are walking around happy there are a couple things that are interesting that people need to know about this place stinks and smells this s*** in the water everywhere all over Earth actually but in Florida it's very bad because it's full of minerals and the minerals are like feeding on the poop and is making the water in the aquifer very awful there's only a few people who are really savvy about the rest of them look like crap and the radiation is getting to them and it makes your bowels hurt and they're getting killed and there's a kidnapping plan people have against our son and they're not doing well and they're dying themselves a lot of them will be gone this coming week in the next month or so

--does a bunch of minority warlock here for real and they come and go and people are not really aware and they're getting information and they're getting to work and these people are getting killed overseas and on the islands where they are.

--+other things to talk about the war in the rings is huge getting bigger right now it's going to be a billion in about 15 minutes there's a lot of casualties just too many to mention. People are up in arms about Tommy f and they're starting to get violent and they're fighting him out of the turkey nuclear power plant and Turkey point Florida south of Miami and there's other power plants they're fighting the man one of them is not near West Palm or Mar-A-Lago is about 50 miles to the north 20 miles of north of fort Pierce they're having a fight up there and it's a big one it's about 10 800 ft circles all around there and they'll probably end up trying to break those that could be what they're calling for this year Newport. Although he thinks he'll break the whole thing open and go back the end of October and fight it won't be a north of fort Pierce it's too small for what he thinks is happening and it's actually true these huge cities are having wars and people are trying to get the edge but we think it might hold we're going to check. There's other stuff happening that's rather slow but we do think that this war in the rings and their leadership falling almost completely they're both around 10% is going to harm them severely and Trump is taking a beating his percentage is way down it's like 7.5% to around 4.5%, so far there's a couple more things

,-this crowd is obnoxious and they're always pressuring our son and they're constantly trying to move him and we hate them so we're going to go at it with them but we have a way of doing it there's a couple things happening that are going to enable it.

---we're selling a lot of rum and that sells here in Florida and supposedly helps against Rock cut because of what it's made out of that it's really the opposite but people drink a lot of it. It tastes good. And I like it. They like sugar. It's made from cane. We're making a ton of it all over the world and we're going to start shipping it probably mid-week they'll see huge huge lots of rum from Bacardi from Captain Morgan's and Seagram's and several other huge brands it's going to be a hell of a day there's going to be a ton of sales just a giant giant amount huge numbers of orders are coming in and once this hits Florida they're going to be beyond imagination it's going to be just a massive massive amount of rum huge huge lots are ordered already this is going to add to it and it's going to make it very very attractive to a lot of people there's more to it as well

---+and we're watching John remillard screw you around out at the waterfront and he's an a****** this guy's a f****** huge dick we need him out of my face I mean f****** loser and the Sun is a big f****** huge bag but we have a couple other things to announce and those are that we find that these people are being huge crits so we don't like them being huge pricks and we're going to go after them and trying to remillard and his son have to go he's a f****** huge dick

---+there's a lot of people around who can't stand them and I'll tell you what he's he's a he's a liar and a menace and boy is he a slob but we have other things to announce there's a huge amount of people coming in to Charlotte county right now a lot of minority molok but more so pseudo empire and there's going to be a giant giant influx in a moment more shortly

Thor Freya

Olympus

[dp-marvel94]

Fractured

For the Phic Phight 2021.

Prompt by @blueoatmeal. Fracture: At his creation, he was a fusion of two mismatched halves. Now, the Dark Phantom is split into two pieces again.

Word Count: 4828

Also on A03 and Fanfiction.net

Warnings for suicide mention, mention of blood, general TUE timeline awefullness

This took me so long to finish but I'm done. I've actually really wanted to write something like this for a while. It's also inspired this post, a conversation with @all-out-disney based on a prompt by @danphanwritingprompts.

When he had first been created, it was painful. The combination of two mismatched parts, two fractured pieces that never should have come together to form a whole. In the beginning, Phantom and Plasmius had fought against each other. Everything had been confusion and pain. So much information, so many memories and sensations clashing together. The two had nearly fallen apart at the start. But the thing holding them together? Anger.

Kill it! Kill the brat!

No! No! The new being’s hands held their head while it screamed.

Weak! It was his fault! In his head, one voice screamed. His fault they’re gone.

His fault? The other voice asked, the words echoing in their head.

An enraged hiss. His fault! His fault! 

They’re gone.

Gone! He threw us away! 

A fresh memory. Being ripped out of his body, his souls being pulled apart. Oozing, bleeding. A pain in his inmost being.

He threw us away...But...

In front of the lanky, blue skinned ghost, a blue-eyed boy trembled. Danny’s human half whimpered. “Please! Stay away!”

Quick! Do it now! In the air, the new ghost twitched, hunched over in pain.

But...I don’t want to-

He didn’t want us. Didn’t want us. Pain. Pain. His fault.

That licked at their anger. He didn’t want me. A growl. This was supposed to fix things, supposed to make the pain go away.

It’s his fault.

The human pressed up against the wall, his breath quickening. “No. This is wrong. This is wrong.”

“This is your fault.” The new being hissed, his voice a sick, twisted echo of the human’s.

Danny shook, eyes widening. “No. I didn’t...I didn’t want this.”

I didn’t want this. One voice echoed the human’s words.

Kill him! Before he destroys us!

Shakily, one hand lit with an ectoblast. Their eyes widened with terror even as a wicked grin stretched across their face.

No! I don’t-

The being shot the blast anyway. Danny screamed as the energy burned him. He scrambled to get away, his hands reaching for something to protect himself with. He grabbed a green and silver device and jabbed it at the ghost.

The flaming-haired figure growled in pain. It hurt. Everything hurt. It wasn’t supposed to hurt anymore.

Make the pain go away. Destroy the weakness.

Weakness. The part of them that was, that had been Phantom, remembered. Pain. Too weak, too slow, too stupid to save them. Curled on his bed, crying until he couldn’t breath. Wishing he could just die. There’ll be no pain if he’s dead.

Die then. The part that was Plasmuis, remembered. His phone dropped out of his numb gripp. He never got his revenge, never got Maddie as his bride. Listening to Daniel weep, the boy broken, withering away. Pathetic, weak.

Anger surged at the sight in front of them, worsened by the pain of the attack. The new ghost lunged, red hot rage coalescing the battling thoughts into a single line, a single drive.

Make the pain go away.

The human Danny never had a chance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The new ghost settled, smoothing out into something like one being. He grew in power and ability. He didn’t worry about things like names. Everyone who really knew where he’d come from was dead. As was his past. His past didn’t matter. (But it did. It did. It still hurt so much. He still missed his parents. His dear Maddie, the oaf Jack. Sam and Tucker. Daniel’s little friends. His sister. Jasmine.)

No, that didn’t matter. None of it mattered. None. All there was, all that matter was his work. He had important work to do. He needed to amass more power so he could take what he wanted, do what he wanted. And what he wanted? For the pain to go away, at a global, no, a universal scale. No one would hurt if they all were dead.

He was never supposed to exist. Really all things considered, he shouldn’t. He was two fragments clinging to each other. (But...that gap, that hole it was still there. It was still there. He shouldn’t have killed Danny Fenton. He missed...he missed Danny. He missed being Danny). He was better without those weak human halves (Lie.) He was never supposed to exist  and yet...here he was. And he would do what he needed to.

Years passed. The new ghost, called The Dark Phantom or just Phantom by his enemies and victims, (The name sickened him.) raged. He killed and maimed and destroyed. Ghosts were warped by his hand. Blood was spilled. The world was ravaged. He tried to destroy humanity but they were resilient. (He should stop. He needed to stop. He didn’t want this.)

He started collecting objects of power. The crown of fire. The ring of rage. He destroyed the Ghost King. The Infinite Realms were under his thumb. 

And then...he discovered the Reality Gauntlet.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Dark Phantom floated over the ravaged battlefield. Builds crumbled around him, the smell of smoke and fresh spilled blood filling his nose. He grinned wickedly, clutching his prize in his hands. The humans had fought to keep it from them, they really had. Those idiotic GIW had hid it deep underground years before, their only intelligent action before he’d overpowered them. They’d destroyed all physical and digital records of it.

But he’d found it. He’d found the Reality Gauntlet anyway, killing and destroying anyone and anything in his path. Even now, his greatest human enemy, Valerie Gray the Ghost Slayer, laid dead at his feet. Even she’d fallen in the futile attempt to keep ultimate power out of his hands.But she’d failed. They all had failed. And now he held the glove in his gasp.

The ghost laughed evilly. And now he could have anything, anything at all he wanted. He floated higher, looking towards something at the horizon at the green glow of a ghost shield. Within that barrier laid Amity Park, the last resistance, humanities’ last stronghold. And now he could destroy it. One thought and he could destroy everything.

The ghost flew closer, coming to stop at a hill overlooking the city. It was a rare bare area, free of the usual twisted metal and broken concrete of apocalyptic landscape. Instead, there was just knee length grass. He landed and slid the glove onto his right hand.

Now, how did he want to do this? How did he want to destroy this thorn in his side? Fire? Nuclear explosion? Maybe he should freeze it solid? Not that was stupid. Asteroid impact? Suck it into a black hole? Maybe he should just suck the whole planet into a black hole. The ghost tapped his chin. He had always wondered what that would be like. What did a black hole actually look like in person? What would it be like to fall into one? What would it feel like? Would you really sit at the event horizon and watch all of time for the rest of the universe pass in the eternal moment before you were ripped apart?

The Dark Phantom shivered. There was the space nerdiness again. It did love to rear its head at the strangest moments. He shook his head. He needed to focus on how he would destroy his hometown. The place where he’d grown up, where he’d learned to ride a bike and meet his friends. Where he’d watched the stars and gone to high school and where he’d died the first time. Where his friends and family had died. 

The images flashed in his mind and the ghost pinched his eyes closed. A fiery explosion, concrete and metal, his pounding heart as he stood intangible in the middle of the wreckage. (He should have died with them.) Numb, sitting with the paramedics. Shock, they said. It was weeks before he spoke again. Standing in the rain, the two half ghosts together. Danny hadn’t even had the energy to flinch away when Vlad had put his hand on his shoulder, smuggly smiling down at the boy. Staring at the grave. Graves that were on the other side of the shield.

The ghost shivered, pushing the images away. No, stop that. Stop that. He would destroy them. He’d destroy the graves and the city. The plants that Sam loved so much, all the technology that Tucker tinkered with. Every single last book that his sister, Jasmine, studied. Every, single damn blasted ghost that his parents, his dear friends, were obsessed with. He’d destroy all of it, all of it damn it. He pressed the Gaunlet’s gems in sequence. He’d never have to look at their graves, remember any painful memory ever again.

The Dark Phantom pressed his will into the gems. With his eyes closed, his fractured soul poured its deepest desire into the glove. Power surged out of the Gauntlet, the smell of ozone burning the air. The ghost braced himself. It would happen any second now, the one thing he wanted. It would be his and all of this would be over. But...there was nothing. No heat, no cold, no explosion, no screaming, no crying. Nothing.

Instead, there were five soft thumps in front of him and one behind him. The ghost didn’t dare look yet. Then finally, after what felt like forever, there was a gasp. The ghost opened his eyes and his jaw dropped. There in front of him were five people. Each was sitting on the ground, rubbing their heads. None were looking at him yet. But his eyes flickered between the figures.

This couldn’t….this couldn’t be. It couldn’t...He knew...No...He didn’t….he didn’t. They couldn’t be...these weren’t….but….

Sam? Tucker? He wanted to ask, but the words choked him. He glanced between the two. Sam, who was staring angrily at the ruined environment. Tucker, who was taking his glasses on and off, as if that would change what he was seeing. 

But the image didn’t change, no matter how many times the ghost blinked. Here they were. They were really here, right in front of him. His (Daniel’s little) best friends. These two who’d been with him through it all. Through tests and projects and long days at the arcade and the waterpark. Through the accident. Through the power malfunctions and the late night ghost fighting. (No, he’s been alone. His friends had left him in that hospital to rot.)  Through injuries and secrets and- 

“Madds? Where are we?” Dad’s (Jack’s) cut through. 

The ghost’s eyes widened. It was his Dad. His Dad! The man who read him bedtime stories and chased away the ‘ghosts’ in the closet and hugged him close when he was scared. (That oaf always ate all the food he’d bought from himself! He made a mess of the dormroom.) 

The ghost whined, clenching his head. It ached with the contradictions. Happiness, relief, pure joy, the love of a child for their parents. Dad had taught him how to tie a tie and had driven him to the movies and took him stargazing. Anger, Hatred, The Longing for vengeance. (He stole the love of his life! He couldn’t obey the most basic laboratory safety!)

“I don’t know.” Mom’s (Maddie’s) voice cut through. She rapidly looked side to side, eyes widening with fear. “How did we get here?”

His Mom, his core sang. His mom. The woman who’d kissed his bo-bos and made him cookies and taught him self defense and took him out for milkshakes. (The most beautiful woman he’d ever laid his eyes on.)

Head throbbing, the ghost doubled over, feeling sick. No. NO! That was wrong. This was wrong. No.

“Ghost!” Dad (the oaf) suddenly yelled.

The sound of feet stomping towards him. “You! Do you bring us here, ghost?”

The ghost looked up, shakingly meeting the woman’s (beautiful) purple eyes. “Yes...no...I..I..” His insides churned, painfully as he shrunk back from her angry glare. This was his mom. She was supposed to be happy to see him. He’d brought her back. Now he could finally steal her from Jack. The ghost growled. “Shut up.”

“What did you say to me?!” Mom glared, pulling an ectogun from her holster.

“Mo-addie.” The ghost cried, his quickly fragmenting mind switching between the two names. He stumbled backwards as Sam and Tucker finally seemed to notice the adults. 

“Mrs. F!” Tucker exclaimed. 

“Mr. Fenton!” Sam shakily stood up, rushing to the man.

“Sam. Tuck.” The ghost whispered. He was shaking, his knees knocking together. It hurt. His insides hurt. This was...he was wrong. This wasn’t...he wasn’t...this didn’t….

Mom...Maddie...Mom continued pointing the gun at him. “Where are we?”

He groaned, falling to his knees. The flame of his hair flickered erratically.

In front of him, Jack...Dad...Jack...had run to the still unconscious Jazz. He shook her roughly and the girl groaned. Sam and Tucker found the pair, helping the older teen sit up. 

“Who are you?” Mom spat out.

Who? Who...he didn’t….

Jazz blinked, taking in her surroundings. She then turned to the side, her eyes falling on his. Her gaze flickered to the emblem on his chest. Her mouth feels open. “Danny?” She whispered.

His mind stopped. Danny? That was (not) his name. Or it had been. (No it wasn’t). It had been his name. No. He...he missed...he missed that name. (That brat, that fool, pathetic). The ghost whined, his insides revolting. His eyes flickered. Red. Green. Red. Green. The black and white on his suit swirled, shifted.

“Danny.” Jazz repeated, more certain.

The ghost nodded. Then he shook his head. Yes. No. Both. Neither. Both….Yes...No...

“What...what’s happening to him?” Tucker asked fearfully.

What was happening?! What was happening?! He wrapped his arms around his middle as if that could hold him together. Maybe….no…

“Never mind that!” Sam hissed. “What happened to us? How did we get here?”

“The last thing I remember is….” Jazz’s eyes widened with shock and pain. “We...we..all of us, we….”

“You all died.” A voice, a new voice behind him, whispered. 

The ghost tensed, stiffening. He shook torn between wanting desperately to look and being terrified (disgusted) with what he’d see because-

“You all...you all died.” The young male voice choked out again.

That voice, it was so familiar. It was...it was...Rapidly, Jazz, Sam, and Tucker looked between the ghost and the figure standing behind him.

Shakily, Jazz stood, her eyes focusing on the speaker behind the ghost. "Danny?" Her eyes flickered to Dark Phantom (?) again. "You're both…. How are you…?" She stuttered, unable to ask the vital question.

But the ghost knew what she was asking. He knew who was behind him but-

"Jazz." Feet shuffled towards him. "You're...you're alive. You're all alive." A whisper. "I'm...I'm alive."

The ghost felt a sensation, so similar, almost like a heart skipping a beat. Shakily, he started to turn. 

It made sense, in a strange way, for him to have brought back his friends and family (but why would he care about Daniel's little friends or that oaf?) A shake of the head. No, stop that. It did make sense. It did. But bringing HIM back?

Another foot step sounded behind, to his left. The ghost's eyes finally met the speaker's eyes, familiar blue eyes.

Danny, Danny Fenton, identical to the the day he died, stood in front of him. The boy stared at him with a complicated expression. Fear, shock, confusion, awe. It was all there. He blinked, lip twitching. "You….you brought me back." 

His core squeezed and pulsed, his form rippling as pain shot through him. Danny Fenton. He'd brought Danny Fenton (himself, his human half; the insolent brat) back to life. Back to life. Because he never should have killed him in the first place. (Why shouldn't he have?) No! He shouldn't have! That was a mistake! A mistake! The pain was supposed to go away when he destroyed his humanity but it did, it didn't! 

His whole body was smoking, cracks forming along his skin. The ache had just grown, gap yawning wider. Instead of being whole, complete, he...they...were two fragments clinging together for stability, for survival. He wasn't supposed to exist like this.

Questions, demands were buzzing around him but there was no registering the words. In front of him, Danny was rapidly backing away, eyes widening with fear.

Danny. Daniel. An arrogant hiss. He missed Danny, he missed being Danny. He missed being alive. No he didn't, that was ridiculous.

"No!" A roar, two voices screaming at once.

The being writhed, hastily made connection tearing. They weren't supposed to exist like this. So they didn't.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Phantom and Plasmius broke apart, flying in opposite directions. The younger ghost skidded across the grass before careening to a stop. He curled in on himself, shaking and whining. 

Around him, alarmed and confused questions rose in volume but he couldn't hear over the brief sound of someone cackling and the sound of his sobs.

Wait, sobs? When had he started crying? He sniffled, a tear falling down his face. Yep, crying. He was crying. He shook, great emotion overcoming him. Horror, sorrow, grief, guilt. He...he remembered everything, all the horrible things he'd done with Plasmius.

"Danny! Danny! Get away from the ghost!" Mom was yelling.

Sneakered feet approached, a lithe figure falling to his knees in front of Phantom. Warm, peach colored hands reached out, grabbing his arms and pulling him into a seated position. 

The emotions intensified, hitting the ghost like a brick wall. A double memory. Killing his human half. Being killed by his ghost half. The first murder of his reign of terror. His botched yet successful suicide. It was excruciating, tearing his soul from both sides.

"I..I…" Phantom gasped, finally meeting the blue eyes through the tears. 

"You and Plasmius...you killed me." Fenton said without accusation.

"I...I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Phantom begged. The words didn't cover it at all, the width and depth of his iniquity, of the travesties he'd committed in his insanity.

"I asked you to." Fenton whispered, looking down guiltily. "I wanted to die." He shifted, pulling Phantom towards him. "Oh god. I shouldn't have split us. I shouldn't have done that."

The ghost didn't resist as Fenton wrapped his arms around him. Instead, he clung to the human as if he would disappear. "I shouldn't...I shouldn't have joined Plasmius. I shouldn't have killed you." His core spasmed, again threatening to fracture under the strain. "I shouldn't...oh god I...I destroyed everything." 

He could barely comprehend what he and Plasmius had done, all he'd been through. And the guilt wared with other feelings at the edge of his perception. Part of him wanted to be hopeful, happy even if it was so abominably selfish. He'd missed being human, being alive. He missed being Danny Fenton. But…. Danny Fenton was in front of him, his still living soul and body pressed up against his chest. He'd brought himself back to life.

And his friends and family. They were behind him. Sam, Tucker, and Jazz were holding his parents back and offering them cursory explanations. For a brief moment, Phantom wondered; how did Jazz know his secret? 

But then the greater issue reared its head. His loved ones didn't know what was going on here. They didn't know the world he'd dragged them into. And now, they didn't need two broken, inconsolable pieces. They needed all of him. They needed Danny.

Phantom breathed, pulling this human self closer as he felt Fenton's agreement. He relaxed, feeling his body become tingling and numb. He let go of tangibly, becoming nothing more than a cloud. He was fog being burned away by the morning light. No, he was a cup of water poured back into the lake he'd come from. He was liquid, spreading out, diffusing into a larger body of water, the newly added molecules indistinguishable from the old. Phantom dissolved.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There was a flash of light. Danny Fenton-Phantom remained frozen on his knees. His arms wrapped around himself as he cried. 

This didn't feel like the last time, with the ghost catcher. Then, when he'd finally come back to himself, there had been relief, the feeling of coming home after a long, tiring day. But now, it still hurt. He was home but he didn't belong here, didn't deserve this. He looked up, heart throbbing with love for his family and friends. He didn't deserve them but they needed him.

Shakily, with great effort, Danny pushed himself to his feet. He met his sister's eyes and she ran to him. Finally the two hugged.

"Jazz." He sniffed.

"Little brother." The girl squeezed him.

"I love you so much." He vowed.

The rest approached, his eyes flickering among each person one at a time. "Sam. Tucker." A pause. Finally. "Mom. Dad."

"Danny." Mom's voice rang with a dozen emotions as she joined the hug. "My baby boy."

"I love you. I love you so much. " Danny repeated as his loved ones surrounded him in an embrace. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you. I love you guys. I'm sorry. "

The others muttered much the same, assurances of love and apologies. Danny never wanted it to end but it did as the group pulled apart.

His loved ones looked around, faces pale with worry. Finally Tucker asked. "Dude, what happened here?" 

"Was it the ghosts?" Dad asked, alarmed.

Danny flinched at the words. Guilty, he looked down.

Sam bit her lip. "Was it Plasmius?"

Somehow, the boy curled in on himself even more. "It was me." He muttered.

Danny paled, bracing himself. He expected horror and disgust. Accusation. Hateful sneers. And he would deserve it, all of it. But instead, the group stared at him in disbelief.

"Dude, there's no way." Tucker started.

"You couldn't have done this." Sam denied, perfectly confident.

"I did. It was me." Danny whined. "You all were gone and I was all alone. And I just...I was so angry." He gnawed on his lip. "And I just wanted to stop hurting but it didn't work and I thought…." He trailed off. 

Thinking back, the rationale didn't make sense. He couldn't grasp it, couldn't understand what his, his and Plasmius' motivation had been. The thoughts  seemed to slip through his fingers, refusing to stay in his brain. Danny wasn't sure whether or not that was a good thing.

"It couldn't have been just you." Jazz softly said, drawing him out of his thoughts. Her hand gently wrapped around his arm. "We saw what happened with that blue skinned ghost." She whispered, as if this was a tightly kept secret.

Nervously, Danny’s eyes flickered to his parents who looked confused and deeply troubled. It was actually surprising that they hadn’t pointed the ectogun at him again, not after they apparently saw his ghost and human halves fuse back together. Obviously, his sister or friends explained that to them and they somehow believed it, or were too overwhelmed to really process. But the bigger problem? Everyone saw the fusion of Phantom and Plasmius fall apart. Again, he shivered at the memory of being even a part of that monster.

“So you and Plasmius….” Sam trailed off, nose wrinkling in disgust.

That disgust was justified, the very idea repulsive. But he’d been angry and desperate after the split. He, the Phantom part, had wanted to be stronger. Because if he had been, then maybe everyone wouldn’t have died. He’d been so angry at the older half ghost, for all the shit Vlad had put him through. And he’d been in so much pain. Vlad was so cold, so unfeeling. If he could be like that, if he could just be numb and selfish for once-

Danny couldn’t bear to say any of that, instead changing the subject. “Plasmius, where did he go?” He looked around, seeing no trace of the other ghost. His brow wrinkled in sudden alarm. “And where’s the Gauntlet?”

“Gauntlet?” His mom blinked, brow furrowing at the question.

Jazz frowned. “That glove thing? Plasmius took it, when he flew off.”

Danny’s heart skipped a beat. He flew off. With the Gauntlet. And he hadn’t noticed until now. No one had said anything either. And….the other ghost could do anything with the reality altering item.

Shakily, the half ghost pulled away from his loved ones. “I need to go after him.” With a thought, he summoned the rings around his waist. His parents’ eyes both widened in alarm while the others looked concerned. He ignored the looks, transforming and floating off the ground.

Danny took an unneeded breath, looking around for any sign of Plasmius in the distance. Which direction would he have gone? The boy frowned, considering. But he didn’t know. He’d just have to set off in one direction and hope he could find him and get the Gauntlet back. He looked around, flinching at the destruction. He’d used it to bring his loved ones back but he still needed it to-

Something blue and white appeared on the horizon, rapidly approaching. The half ghost flinched, recognizing the figure. He shifted in the air, floating to stand between his friends and family and the approaching ghost. Taking a fighting stance, Danny balled his fists and lit them with ectoenergy.

Moments later, Plasmius materialized in front of him. “Daniel.” He looked down at the boy distastefully. “I see you’ve managed to pull yourself back together.”

The boy frowned. “Yes.” He warily eyed the Gauntlet clenched in the other ghost’s hands. “What are you gonna do with that?”

The vampiric ghost scowled. He silently floated for a moment, before his form seemed to glitch, flickering like a broken TV.  His face briefly scrunched up in pain, nose wrinkling. Then his expression smoothed out, turning into something forcefully neutral. He heavily dropped the glove at Danny’s feet. “Fix this.”

The boy stared down at the Gauntlet, blinking in confusion. He bent down and grabbed it, tightly holding the object in his hand.

Behind him, Tucker asked. “Why didn’t he just use it? Ow! Sam!” Obviously, the girl had elbowed him.

Plasmius said nothing, still scowling while Danny considered. Why didn’t the man use it himself? The other ghost’s image flickered again, causing him to let out a low hiss of pain.

“You can’t.” Danny finally said, realization hitting him. “You’re too unstable.” 

It was the other reason their dark version stayed together. Both halves would have faded away, destabilizing into ectoplasm within minutes. And there would have been no solution. Phantom had killed his other half. And Plasmius’ was somewhere in Wisconsin, too far away to be of any help now.

“Fix this.” The other ghost growled again, looking at something in the distance.

This time, there was a greater weight to the words. It wasn’t just a request to be stabilized. It was a demand for more. To clean up the rest of the mess they’d made together.

Danny slipped on the glove. Looking down, he pressed the gems in sequence. Fix this. He needed to fix this. He could fix the damage, heal the people he’d hurt, bring back those who were gone. But…. he remembered his loved ones’ haunted expressions. The horror with which they looked around the destitute environment. 

The halfa closed his eyes, knowing what he needed to do. He took a breath and pushed his desire into gems. The world went white.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Danny Fenton woke up in his bed, the remnants of a long nightmare in his mind. The boy groaned, burying his face in his pillow. 

“Danny!” His mom called through the door. “Get up.”

The boy didn’t respond, groaning again. 

At that, the woman opened the door. “Danny. You have to get up. You’re taking the CAT today.”

CAT? His brow furrowed at the information. He was taking the CAT. Slowly, the half ghost sat up. 

“Good.” His mother nodded. “Breakfast is ready downstairs. Go ahead and get dressed.”

After she closed the door, Danny stood. He started getting dressed as she said. His brow still furrowed with confusion. His dream. He’d been dreaming about? He couldn’t quite remember, except it had been horrible. A sense of dread overcame him. And...he needed to fix something. He had to fix something.

Danny pulled on his shirt. He then turned, grabbing his bookbag. It fell open, revealing a manila envelope. Guilt squeezed his heart. The CAT test answers. He picked up the sheet, stuffing it back inside his bag. 

Dread passed through him again, his stomach flopping. He still needed to fix something. But it couldn’t just be about his cheating, right? There was something else.

“Danny! Your father’s going to eat all the bacon if you don’t hurry up.” Mom called.

Danny frowned. Whatever it was, he would figure it out and everything would be okay. Right?

[newstfionline]

Friday, March 12, 2021

Rich, developing nations wrangle over COVID vaccine patents (Reuters) Richer members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) blocked a push by over 80 developing countries on Wednesday to waive patent rights in an effort to boost production of COVID-19 vaccines for poor nations. South Africa and India renewed their bid to waive rules of the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement, a move that could allow generic or other manufacturers to make more vaccines. South Africa argued the current TRIPS system does not work, pointing to the failure to secure life-saving medicines during the HIV/AIDS pandemic that had cost at least 11 million African lives. Medecins Sans Frontieres in October put together a letter signed by over 375 civil society organisations supporting the waiver. The South Africa and India proposal was backed by dozens of largely developing countries at the WTO, but opposed by Western countries, including Britain, Switzerland, EU nations and the United States, which have large domestic pharmaceutical industries.

US reports surge of kids at SW border, a challenge for Biden (AP) The number of migrant children and families seeking to cross the U.S. southwest border has surged to levels not seen since before the pandemic, a challenge for President Joe Biden. Statistics released Wednesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection showed the number of children and families increased by more than 100% between January and February. Kids crossing by themselves rose 60% to more than 9,400, forcing the government to look for new places to hold them temporarily. The surge has been seized on by Republicans and former President Donald Trump as a line of attack on Biden, though his administration is turning back nearly all single adults, who make up the majority of border-crossers, under a public health order imposed at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The Biden administration is temporarily holding children and families, mostly from Central America, for several days. They are generally then allowed to enter the U.S. while authorities evaluate their claims to asylum or see if they have any other legal right to stay in the country. It is a challenge for an administration that has been working to restore an asylum system largely dismantled under Trump and likely to face increasing pressure. Factors driving the increase include widespread hunger in Central America due to recent hurricanes, the economic upheaval of the pandemic and more fundamental social problems dating back years.

Brazil hospitals buckle (AP) Brazil’s hospitals are faltering as a highly contagious coronavirus variant tears through the country, the president insists on unproven treatments and the only attempt to create a national plan to contain COVID-19 has just fallen short. Piaui state’s Gov. Wellington Dias told The Associated Press that, unless pressure on hospitals is eased, growing numbers of patients will have to endure the disease without a hospital bed or any hope of treatment in an intensive care unit. “We have reached the limit across Brazil; rare are the exceptions,” Dias, who leads the governors’ forum, said. “The chance of dying without assistance is real.” Those deaths have already started. In Brazil’s wealthiest state, Sao Paulo, at least 30 patients died this month while waiting for ICU beds, according to a tally published Wednesday by the news site G1. In southern Santa Catarina state, 419 people are waiting for transfer to ICU beds. In neighboring Rio Grande do Sul, ICU capacity is at 106%.

Athens tackles heat and pollution with pocket-sized parks (Reuters) Tucked between rows of apartment blocks on an Athens street, a strip of green with a few trees, some plants and a bench offers a breathing space in the surrounding crush of concrete. The Greek capital has started creating “pocket parks”, transforming small plots once ridden with garbage and weeds, in a bid to tackle its chronic pollution. “It’s about creating green spaces, lowering the temperatures, giving quality of life and creating new reference points inside the city,” Athens Mayor Kostas Bakoyannis said. “It lets us breathe a bit, because the way we are here ... we are suffocating,” said 65-year-old Dimitra from the densely populated neighbourhood of Kypseli.

Myanmar’s searing smartphone images flood a watching world (AP) The images ricochet across the planet, as so many do in this dizzying era of film it, upload it, tell it to the world: scenes from a protest-turned-government crackdown, captured at ground level by smartphone users on the streets of Myanmar. Images shot across barricades and furtively through windows. From behind bushes and through smudged car windshields. Horizontal video. Vertical video. Video captured by people running toward chaos and away from it. People shouting. People helping. People demanding. People dying. It is a dynamic completely unlike the uprising that spread through the Southeast Asian nation in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone summer of 1988. Then, when student-led demonstrations were violently put down by the government, cementing Myanmar’s global notoriety as an isolated, repressive state, it took months, even years, for the outside world to understand the full story of what had happened. This time around, the imagery is plentiful and unsettling. Filmed by participants on the ground and uploaded, sometimes immediately, the protests and crackdowns are reaching millions of handheld devices around the planet, also almost immediately. It’s a vivid example of a technological truism in an age when capturing images has become utterly democratized: If you can glimpse it up close, you’re more likely to pay attention.

Most Americans support tough stance toward China on human rights, economic issues (Pew Research Center) Roughly nine-in-ten U.S. adults (89%) consider China a competitor or enemy, rather than a partner, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Many also support taking a firmer approach to the bilateral relationship, whether by promoting human rights in China, getting tougher on China economically or limiting Chinese students studying abroad in the United States. Americans rarely brought up the Chinese people or the country’s long history and culture in their responses. Instead, they focused primarily on the Chinese government—including its policies or how it behaves internationally—as well as its economy.

Ten years on, Japan mourns victims of earthquake, Fukushima nuclear disaster (Reuters) Japan on Thursday mourned nearly 20,000 victims of a massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan 10 years ago, destroying towns and triggering nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Huge waves triggered by the 9.0-magnitude quake—one of the strongest on record—crashed into the northeastern coast, crippling the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant and forcing more than 160,000 residents to flee as radiation spewed into the air. The government has spent about $300 billion (32.1 trillion yen) to rebuild the tsunami-devastated region, but areas around the Fukushima plant remain off-limits, worries about radiation levels linger and many who left have settled elsewhere. Decommissioning of the crippled plant will take decades and billions of dollars. The disaster has also left survivors in Tohoku struggling to overcome the grief of losing families and whole communities to the waves in a few frightening hours on the afternoon of March 11, 2011.

Lebanon’s politicians show no sign of saving their country, France says (Reuters) France’s foreign minister said on Thursday time was running out to prevent Lebanon collapsing and that he could see no sign that the country’s politicians were doing what they could to save it. France has spearheaded international efforts to rescue the former French protectorate from its deepest crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war by trying to use Paris’ historical influence to persuade squabbling politicians to adopt a reform roadmap and form a new government to unlock international aid. “I would be tempted to qualify Lebanese politicians as guilty of not helping a country in danger,” Jean-Yves le Drian told a news conference in Paris. “They all committed to act to create an inclusive government and committed to implementing indispensable reforms. That was seven months ago and nothing is moving. I think it’s not too late, but the delays are very small before collapse.”

UN food aid chief visits Yemen, fears famine (AP) The head of the U.N. food agency warned after a visit to Yemen that his underfunded organization may be forced to seek hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations in a desperate bid to stave off widespread famine in coming months, describing conditions in the war-stricken nation as “hell.” The World Food Program needs at least $815 million in Yemen aid over the next six months, but has only $300 million, the agency’s executive director, David Beasley, told The Associated Press in an interview. He said the agency would need another $1.9 billion to meet targets for the year. Beasley visited Yemen earlier this week, including the capital of Sanaa which is under the control of Iran-backed Houthi rebels. He said that at a child malnutrition ward in a Sanaa hospital he saw children wasting away from lack of food. Many, he said, were on the brink of death from entirely preventable and treatable causes, and they were the lucky ones who were receiving medical care. He said the world needs to wake up to how bad things have gotten in Yemen, particularly for the country’s youngest.

Shock and uncertainty after death of Ivory Coast PM Bakayoko (Reuters) Ivory Coast faced shock and uncertainty on Thursday following the death of Prime Minister Hamed Bakayoko, the West African nation’s second premier to die in office in less than eight months. A close ally of President Alassane Ouattara, Bakayoko, who died of cancer a few days after his 56th birthday, was appointed prime minister in July 2020 after the death of his predecessor Amadou Gon Coulibaly, Ouattara’s handpicked successor. A central figure in Ivorian politics over the past two decades as the country was plunged into a prolonged conflict and a partition, Bakayoko, a jovial character with roots in media and showbiz, emerged as a conciliatory figure, able to talk to all sides of the conflict. His capacity to gain the trust of all sides including former rebel soldiers who staged a series of mutinies in 2017, threatening a fragile peace in the world’s top cocoa producing nation, saw him appointed as defence minister in 2017, and kept the portfolio when he became prime minister.

Nuclear power (Scientific American) Nuclear power is waning, but not for the typical fears. Rather, other ways of generating electricity have just become cheaper and more available. Nuclear power in 2020 accounted for about 19 percent of U.S. electricity needs, a figure that by 2050 is projected to slip to 11 percent according to the Energy Information Administration. Nuclear power is over half of low-carbon electricity generation in the U.S., and is about 30 percent of the world’s low-carbon electricity. The coming years will determine how much nuclear power will play a role in the energy future, as new demos of small modular reactors begin to roll out in the United States.

Tiny internal cameras (Times of London) Thousands of NHS patients will be given tiny cameras to swallow to check for cancer in a new national trial. The technology, in a pill-sized capsule, takes images as it passes through the bowel and beams them to a recording device worn on a belt and shoulder bag. It can then be flushed away. Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said that the “ingenious” capsule cameras would allow more people to undergo cancer investigations quickly and safely.

[wykart]

Fix Her

It’s been a while but I’ve decided to commit (??) to finishing this Five and Vanya fic! Sorry if you’ve been waiting :// 

Summary: Five was Vanya's only friend at the academy, once he left, everything changed. A.K.A It’s a fic about Vanya and Five's friendship growing up, and how that friendship kept them hopeful in all the years they spent apart.

Chapter 6 (read on ao3, or read chapter 1) 

28 days before

“Five, what’s wrong?” He seemed moody, even more than usual. He was huddled over the book he was reading, hunchbacked and staring down the page with an unnatural intensity. He wasn’t even reading it, just staring at the same block of text until his eyes grew raw and watery. He pulled out a notebook and pen and began scribbling feverishly onto the page, pressing so hard against the paper that she was sure it would break.

She’d stopped playing her violin to question him, but he didn’t seem to notice that the music had stopped. She’d only had the instrument for about a year and a half now, but already she loved it more than anything. She'd been playing here in the library alone since early that morning, whilst the other’s had trained. Five had stomped in looking distraught, and sat himself down with one of those dense theoretical physics books he somehow found solace in reading.

He slammed the book shut abruptly, snapping up to look at her with wild eyes. “I can’t believe him!” He snapped. It wasn’t hard to guess that he was talking about their father.

“What has he done now?” she sighed, sympathetic.

“He still won’t let me time travel,” he threw his hands up, exasperated. “I’ve been practising my spatial jumps like crazy – you know I did five of them in seven seconds and I didn’t even pass out! I thought he’d be proud or something, after all those times I’d faint after two or three in row, but no, nothing.” He paused for a moment, but started rattling off again before Vanya could get a calming word in. Sometimes it was best to just let him vent. “I mean, I don’t know what I expected, even when we do what the old bastard says it’s never enough. He doesn’t think I’m strong enough, he thinks I’m just some stupid kid like the rest.”

Vanya let him stew for a moment before speaking up, cautious. She wasn’t sure that she wanted him to try something that was apparently so dangerous. Their father was always forcing the others to push the limits of their powers – but he was quite firm on the subject; time travel was a step too far. It was uncharacteristic, for sure, but perhaps only because it was an ability that Reginald couldn’t control, that couldn’t serve the purpose of the academy. She began slowly, “Well, he says it’s dangerous, what if you got hurt or lost or–“

He interrupted her. “I’m not scared, Vanya,” he scoffed, “and I know what I’m doing.”

She sighed, setting down her violin and sitting down on the couch beside him. ”I know you do, Five.”

“Sorry,” he said, a moment later, calmer now. “It’s just that, I put so much effort into showing him I could be what he wanted, that I could be an important part of the academy, but now he tells me I can’t even explore the full range of my power. All that talk about our ‘gifts’ and our obligation to reach our full potential – it’s all just inspiring bullshit to get us to do what he says, isn’t it?”

“That’s his game, he makes all of us care so much about making him proud, but I don’t think he really loves any of us –“ she paused before adding, with a smirk, “maybe Luther, a little bit.”

Five rolled his eyes, “Oh god, he pisses me off so much.” She smiled back, and they sat together quietly for a time before he spoke again. His tone was purposeful, almost whimsical. When he looked up at the warm light of the chandelier overhead, he was staring out into a place she couldn’t see, his mind, his master plan. “We could escape, you know, and not just out of the city, we could go to a different time, somewhere that dad could never find us.”

“You really think so?” She was willing to play his game, it was fun to fantasise about such things, even if she considered it all too good to be true. Hopes were best kept low, She’d learnt as much in her short life already. ”Where could we go?”

Anywhere,” he said, throwing his arms out wide, as if to indicate that the world was their’s for he taking “Or, anywhen,” he winked. She giggled at the smug look on his face, as if he’d just made the cleverest of jokes. Suddenly he was all seriousness again, brows arched in concentration. “I think we should go to the future, wouldn’t that be incredible?” It was hard to wrap her head around, moving through time, but she trusted him. “We should wait though, until we’re a little older and until I’ve practised time travelling enough that I’ll get it right.” Vanya watched him, he was going through the process in his mind, weighing their options, building the scenario in his head. “Just think about it Vanya!” He leant forwards and placed an over-enthusiastic hand on her shoulder. “Dad would never find us, and there’d be all sort of cool stuff there - like robots, even smarter than mom, and teleporters and spaceships that can go anywhere in the whole universe!”

It sounded so wonderful, she found it harder than ever to rule out the possibility. “You’d really take me with you?” She asked. Even after all these years, it was hard to imagine why he would. He gave her a sad smile and sat down beside her again, taking her hand in his and giving it an encouraging squeeze.

“Of course I will Vanya,” he said, searching for her eyes beneath her fringe. “Once I learn how, and I get lots of practise, it’ll be no trouble at all. We can take a suitcase and your violin, and we’ll never have to come back here again.”

“That’s sounds,” she grinned, “extraordinary.” He returned the gesture, and the secret plan sat unspoken between them throughout most of the coming weeks, save those precious moments they spent alone here in the library or hidden away in the old, forgotten places that the other’s barely visited. It was a safety net, a promise kept that, if things got bad, they would have each other, they would have an a way out.

He opened his notebook again and began writing. His calm, light scrawling struck a contrast against the dark jagged symbols from earlier, as if he’d been trying to take his anger out on the very page. More sums, he never seemed to tire of them. He was still flustered, though, and he’d made a mistake.

She pointed to the bottommost line, reminding him, “remember to carry the four.”

…

14235 days after

Remember to carry the four.

“Honestly, you think I’d forget something like that?”

Well you did, just yesterday, and it took you hours to figure out what you’d done wrong.

“Yes, alright but I’m paying attention this time.”

You mean you’re not pass-out drunk this time.

Five rolled his eyes, she was always on his case about the drinking. There weren’t any other depressants laying around forty years into the end of the world. It was numbing, sometimes it even created an illusion of contentedness. “Hey, now that’s not fair, it was my fortieth anniversary of being stuck here with you, I was celebrating an occasion of utter hopelessness.”

You love me, she chided.

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sick of eating four-decade-old tinned beans does it?”

I thought you’d given up on going back to your family.

“Of course I have, there’s nothing left for me there. I still have a world to save - if I can, or at the very least, I want to see for myself what did this, and why my powers are useless here.” He sighed, stepping back from the wall at the chalk scratches he hoped would unlock the secrets of time and space. He’d spent the morning reinforcing the canvas shelter overhead. You could never be too careful, especially after that time it rained suddenly a few ears ago, and washed away half his work. “How many times have I told you this, Delores?”

Far too many. Sometimes you need to remind yourself what you’re fighting for. Of course she was right, it was rare that she wasn’t. He was the one who needed reminding of the world he’d lost. He was the one that needed to keep motivated enough not to drink himself into a hole and forget about it all. It was Delores that stopped him from doing just that, almost every day. She was always smiling, so positive and hopeful despite the crushingly poor odds. They’d overcome everything the end could throw at them so far. He couldn’t give up now.

Some decades earlier, he’d stopped searching for survivors. Everywhere he went, he saw more of the same: ashes, ruin, and corpses in various states of decay. He wasn’t about to try and cross the seas, he’d only get himself killed. He remembered huddling under piles of fallen stone, or holing up in an underground bunker that hadn’t completely caved in, just to hide from the blizzards that raged for years on end. The winter was long, but the fire was worse, and surviving the radiation it brought had been a miracle in of itself, though he wasn’t optimistic about his life expectancy. He remembered reading somewhere about what happened to the world after a nuclear strike, or a high-impact meteor. He’d found it fascinating to consider the hypothetical; what an interesting feat of science, of nature. Living it was something else entirely.

First ash, then ice, fire, and now, the world was finally starting to look that way that it used to. Plants had begun to grow again, sprouts of green between the gravelled roads, roots snaking up through rusted metal, leaves splayed out towards the sun, fighting through crumbling stone. It was beautiful, in a way, that life in some form kept on struggling. The weather was becoming more and more stable, the sun beating down pleasantly on his back, and the dark, moonless nights were no longer frigid, bone-chilling affairs. With a fire going, they were pleasant too. If he found a bed of newly-blossomed flowers, struggling to life in this unforgiving wasteland, he thought that it might be a pleasant place to die too. He tried not to think about that, not yet anyway.

Not today, and keep telling it to yourself everyday until you’ve finished the job, or until the job is finished with you.

“I know,” he muttered in reluctant agreement. He realised he’d been slacking, losing himself in his thoughts again. He lifted the chalk back up to the wall and tried to grasp at loose strings of thought. When he was concentrating on his equations, the one great problem of his life, he could block out the rest of it. There was no room to think about anything else. “I’m so close, I can feel it.” How many times had he said that? When had he run out of creative ways to lie to himself?

I know you are. You can do this, you can stop it. This is what the academy was meant for.

That sentiment had made so much sense when he was a child, when he’d been riding on promises from his father that they’d save the world. Of course, nothing about him made sense anymore – I mean, just look at Delores… When everyone else was gone, and your own head was the only place left, sense didn’t count for anything, you made your own.

This goal was all he had, because all this time – his whole life – it couldn’t all be for nothing. He wouldn’t let it be for nothing.

[clexa--warrior]

Fear The Walking Dead' continues its losing streak in Sunday night's episode 'Ner Tamid.'

Credit: AMC

Sunday night's episode of Fear The Walking Dead was a little bit better than the rest of this half of the season, and I think I know why: There was no Morgan!s

Morgan and Al are off doing their own thing, and miraculously we didn't hear from either one this week. That's good! Sadly, we also didn't get any Alicia. She remains one of the only characters I still like on this show, though the past few episodes have done their level best to character-assassinate her (she's probably off painting more trees at this point).

The rest of the episode was pretty much about as pointless as the rest of the episodes in Season 5. Charlie "runs away" from the convoy to go find some place for them to stay, so that they're not always on the move. Finding a place to stay is a really good idea. Running off on your own in the zombie apocalypse is stupid beyond all reckoning, and I wish the writers and producers would stop making the characters act like such absolute dunces every week.

It appears the real problem is June, who is apparently in charge of the caravan and its 36 members. She's driving them all hard, not letting them stay in one place long, no rest for the weary and all that jazz. Even John Dorie is like "Hey June, baby, I love you but this is ridiculous," but it falls on deaf ears. I'm not sure why June is acting like this, or why she's suddenly in charge, or why they have a caravan instead of a base to begin with, but that doesn't matter. Fear The Walking Dead just does stuff, and we're just supposed to eat it up without questioning anything.

I think that's the only way people can still enjoy this show--just don't ask any questions, don't think about anything too much, don't expect anything remotely like logic or realism or human nature to figure into it at all.

In any case, Charlie makes yet another new friend while out on her own. This time it's a Jewish Rabbi, Jacob Kessner, who lives all by himself at his old synagogue. All his former flock are now zombies, calling to mind Father Gabriel from The Walking Dead (though Kessner is much less annoying than Gabriel, who I still can't stand). Charlie thinks this would be a good place for the survivors to settle down, but things don't work out. Before the end of the episode, the safe haven is overrun and Kessner is out of a home. Shocking. We've never seen the survivors show up and ruin a good thing before! (That's sarcasm, by the way. Everywhere our heroes go falls apart, from the family on the island to the Mexican villa, to the ranch, to the kids' treehouse this season).

June and Dorie show up and there's some zombie action, but we know nobody is going to actually get killed by a zombie. That hardly ever happens on this show. The last time I can think of it actually happening was when Madison died, but she died offscreen so we didn't even see it. There used to be some great zombie kills in previous seasons, but there's no reason to fear anything in Fear The Walking Dead these days.

That applies to Logan and his group of feckless, toothless bad guys. At one point they chase Sarah and Dwight--who looks ridiculous clean-shaven, though I suppose it's symbolic of his being totally neutered by the do-gooder sickness that's befallen the entire cast--and almost catch them but the tank shows up and saves the day. Of course, why they were so worried and running to begin with is beyond me. Recall last week when Morgan and Al were faced with a dozen of Logan's thugs and nothing happened. They just blocked the road and that's all. Are we supposed to think that this week things are so different that they pose an actual threat now?

Of course, it turns out that the whole thing was just a diversion. Logan wanted to distract the convoy. Apparently he's figured out where the oil fields are and he wanted Morgan's group as far away as possible which, uh, kind of sounds like what he did in the very beginning of this season by having them fly off to the nuclear power plant region. They're running out of ideas so fast it isn't even funny.

Is there even a story here? I mean, there are things that happen I guess, but is there a story? Let's try to parse it all together, shall we?

Season 5 starts with Morgan and most of the crew crash-landing a plane because they thought they were helping someone but it was just Logan tricking them so that he could take over the mill. The first half of the season is spent trying to get a new plane or fix the old plane so they can fly it back. There's also a nuclear power plant that's going to melt down, and we meet a new character, Grace, who is trying to prevent that. Eight episodes are spent on this dual-plot, with Strand and Charlie ultimately saving the day by bringing propellers in a hot air balloon to the heroes who then use their years of airplane mechanic experience to fix the plane and then fly successfully back to their own area of Texas because apparently that region has zero roads leading. It is a mystical island within the state of Texas that can only be reached by air (unless you're Dwight or his wife who apparently both managed just fine on solid ground).

So that's the first half of Season 5. Crash plane, fix plane, fly out. Logan has the mill. Then, bizarrely, at the very end of the first half of the season Logan tries to make a deal with them. This deal is not struck, we discover in the Season 5 midseason premiere, and Logan goes back to working with the thugs. I can't tell if they're working for him or he's working for them, because the show has done such a lousy, inconsistent job at explaining things to us.

Speaking of which, we learn that during the break, during the period of time that occurs off-screen between the two halves of this season, that Morgan has discovered where Polar Bear's oil fields are. And I guess he's also figured out how to refine oil into gasoline. And I guess this is what Logan was after the whole time, but they just neglected to introduce that conflict in any remotely comprehensible way. Now, five episodes into the back half of the season, the entire plot seems to be "Morgan and group go around helping people more while Logan tries to figure out where the oil fields are." Five episodes of filler with virtually nothing of any importance happening. Alicia meets the guy painting on all those trees. Morgan and Grace try and fail to spark a romance. Logan is mad at Morgan but does nothing about it. They film a stupid PSA and put it on VCRs with generators wherever they can so that people know that they're out there trying to help people.

None of this qualifies as a story, at least not really. The story, if it had to be boiled down, would be the conflict between Logan and Morgan's two groups. But that conflict barely exists, as evidenced by the times they've actually encountered one another and done nothing. At least Negan did stuff. At least the Saviors posed a threat, no matter how badly produced Seasons 7 and 8 of The Walking Dead were. At least there was a story.

Here we just have people driving around wasting gas, talking on walkie-talkies, rarely having realistic conversations or actually interesting struggles or conflicts. It's all contrived. You could probably boil down the entire 12 episodes we've seen so far into two and not lose anything.

Just take away the whole entire plane crash plot and have them tricked into leaving the mill. Then have Logan realize what he wanted in the mill wasn't there and go to war with Morgan to get the map to the oil fields. The oil fields themselves would be useless to Morgan since he doesn't know how to refine oil into gasoline, but he knows that Logan is bad news so he keeps that information from him anyways. Have Logan kill some of the good guys, and have that test Morgan's resolve to be a good person. Have Dwight show up as one of Logan's dudes, on the other side of the conflict, and have that make him question whether he's made the right choice.

I mean, I think you could probably get eight episodes out of this conflict, and then you could twist things around for the second half of the season. Morgan could snap again, go full killstreak mode. He and Alicia could break into two different groups and the conflict could continue between them somehow. This is all just spit-balling. The fact is, it would be fairly simple to come up with a better story for Season 5, with better and more natural conflicts. Actually, I'd have introduced Logan as a sympathetic character and had him join the group, had his treachery not manifest until it was too late. Make the betrayal sting.

But this is all fantasy. I want the same kind of tense conflict that drove Season 3, with sympathetic characters on both sides and no easy resolution. But what we're getting is a bunch of badly written filler episodes with no real purpose and an overarching conflict that makes no sense. Meanwhile, we get things like Al leaving all her tapes in a safe and then not bothering to even shut the lock boxes, and that's how Logan discovers the oil fields. We get John Dorie shooting a bullet at a hatchet blade so that it can split in two and kill a pair of approaching zombies. That's the kind of vapid writing this show has now. It's just sad.

Next week, Logan will use the oil fields to wipe out half of all living things in the universe and the week after that Al and June and Daniel will send Skidmark back in time in a time machine they built out of spare plane parts, and Skidmark's job will be to kill Polar Bear before he ever planted the oil seeds that eventually grew into the oil fields, but little do they know that Polar Bear is waiting for them . . . . it's a trap!

I just . . . I can't. I don't know what else to say. What a sad joke Fear has become.

[sorcererinthestars]

i'm feeling Sky Factory with Simple Farmer Geoff and his refusal of accepting/acknowleding his godhood status. he just wants to tend to his chickens but all these other deities keep messing around with his farm.

…. I may or may not have written this while at work. I’ll go back and add italics and shit when I’m at home. This is what happens when my supervisor is out sick.

Hope you enjoy. I was half writing and half going through emails.

——-

Once the world was built, life was easier. When they were just Created from Ryan, just infant Gods in a small little world. letting it spread around below them, life was challenging. Everything was so NEW, so big, so full of wonders and confusion and mistakes. They lost as much as they made, most of the time. It was a land of simplicity - of Ryan, the Creator, God of Machines and the Night, of Gavin, the simple little Sun God who gloried over the littlest ray of light, of Jack, the God of Plants, and Geoff, the God of Livestock. And then of little Jeremy, god of the blacksmith - of molten metal and the fires of the forge and of valiant Michael, god of Mischief, the extra God who hadn’t yet found a home.

How simple life was back then. It was hard work, getting the world to be created from what they could give it, but it was work they all enjoyed (even when Michael meddled).

Ryan surveyed the world they had created now from his throne in the sky, sitting on it and staring out over what they had created. How different life was than back then. Certainly they couldn’t be called ‘simple’ anymore, now that they had discovered the gift of flight and could make minerals with just a wave of their hand. They had tamed Dragons, they had plumbed the depths of the sea for the greatest and biggest varieties of fish. They had summoned an ethereal demon and killed it and made two portals to other dimensions - one that gave them gifts if they offered their own and one that held horrors beyond compare in a fire-world of death. He had behind him a nuclear reactor made by his own two hands, a system of storage that bent the limits of reality, and Gavin had harnessed the power of the sun so brightly that he could basically run the world off of it alone.

As Ryan glanced down, he smiled at the farm. It had grown, their stalwart fellow God refusing to dive deeper into the wonders of the unknown world. Geoff was comfortable in the land that he had discovered. He liked to tend his chickens and they loved him in turn - it was rare to see him without at least one following him around as if he had grain for them in his pockets. Jack had long since discovered how to make a never-ending supply of the stuff - as long as they had power, they had feed for his chickens. And Geoff was content.

Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for the rest of them), his fellow Gods needed something to amuse them when they had basically run out of things to do. Aiming with his bow, Ryan sited down the arrow and studied Geoff along it. He certainly wasn’t going to shoot Geoff - and Gods help him if he fucking killed one of those damn chickens - but it was fun to play. He caught Michael’s eye from the corner of his own and he smirks a bit. Michael is crouched up in the World Tree, next to his famous creation (the Munchdew), looking for all the world like a beastly warrior with his massive bow and hidden by leaves.

And then Michael shoots him a thumbs up, laughs, and lets loose his arrow.

The thing hits the ground a few feet away from Geoff. The man balks, whipping backwards and looking around, but the rest of them had already hid as best they could (for they could fly and Geoff could not). “What the fuck are you guys doing near my chickens?!” he cries, back-peddling and trying to shepard his chickens away from where the arrow was shot. “Watch out, idiots!”

But before he could do anything, Ryan lets loose his own arrow. It lands near Geoff on the other side - safely away from anything with feathers - and he jumps again, howling and shaking his hand. “Just because I don’t have some demon bow pulled from another dimension doesn’t mean you can be RUDE!” he snarls.

Jack, flying by on his dragon, blots out the sun in front of Geoff for a moment. He squawks in anger, letting Michael shoot a few more arrows. Geoff dances to avoid them and his feathered partners-in-crime squawk and take cover of their own. It was fine - Michael and Ryan were extremely good shots by this point. They wouldn’t miss.

Gavin, curious about what was happening now, lands on the throne next to Ryan. “Hey,” he hums, sitting on the edge and letting his feet dangle. “You terrorizing Geoff?”

“Yup,” Ryan smirks. “Poor guy has no idea.” He lets fly another arrow and there’s another flurry of swearing.

“He’s going to kill you,” Gavin comments, laughing anyways. “It’s gonna be fucking funny.”

They watch as Jeremy joins Michael in the World Tree and it’s pretty obvious they’re having a similar conversation. A few more arrows fly down and there’s giggling and then suddenly Jack flies in between where their arrows go. They’re forced to stop or risk hitting Jack or his dragon, neither of which they want to do.

“Alright, you’ve had your fun,” Jack scolds, but there’s a glint of laughter in his eyes. “Come on, go down and apologize.” He points towards the ground and like scolded kids, Ryan droops and and jumps off the throne, easily flying down to land next to Geoff.

The Simple Farmer looks pissed. Almost as soon as he lands, he’s jabbing at Ryan’s chest, yelling something about how when he said no weapons in the farm, he meant no arrows either, and god help him if that had actually harmed a chicken he would massacre Ryan, potential immortality be damned.

That’s when the B-Team struck. Gavin watched, amused beyond belief, as Michael and Jeremy scurried down from the tree and started grabbing chickens in nets. They snagged all the roosting chickens, the ones that were making something new, and raced away towards the secret passage Ryan had made a few months prior in the World Tree. They did this all with the minimum of giggling and Geoff couldn’t hear anything over the sound of his own shouting.

This was going to be bad.

“Alright, alright, Geoff,” Ryan says, hardly holding back a laugh. Gavin’s almost puce, trying to stop himself from exploding into chuckles. Geoff’s eyes slide between the two of them for a moment before his brows furrow. When he turns around, it takes maybe five or ten seconds before the whole fucking world explodes.

“WHERE ARE MY CHICKENS?!”

He whirls on Ryan and before Ryan can move, he’s got his fucking AIOT jammed under Ryan’s chin. It couldn’t do anything - the armor Ryan had on was heavily shielded - but it was the principle of the thing. Geoff looked tremendously distressed. “WhAT DID YOU DO WITH THEM?!”

Blinking, Ryan held up his hands. “Geoff. Geoff, it’s just a joke. Relax….”

“I spent so much time - they were my nesting… my nesting beauties…” he whimpers, turning around and lowering his weapon, just looking broken. Ryan immediately back-peddles, sensing the joke didn’t go over well. Fucking christ, practical jokes should be banned in this corner of their world. “Geoff, they’re fine…”

“Then where are they!”

“Whoa, whoa!” Gavin yelped. “Relax, Geoff.” The Simple Farmer whipped around on him. “I’m so sick of you all playing around on my farm! I have work to do! You’re stopping them from laying! You’re scaring them with your dragons and your…. your jetpacks … and ….”

Michael’s running back out from the tree. Nets are in his hands and Jeremy is hot on his heels. “They’re here. They’re here, Geoff, we’re sorry, really…”

Geoff whirls around to look at them now, but doesn’t make a move until each chicken is carefully taken from the net and put back into their nesting pens. They squawk, looking disgruntled from their treatment, and go back to pecking at seed.

Geoff just narrows his eyes at the other two, then back at Ryan and Gavin, and finally up at Jack who was swooping around on his dragon. “I get it,” he admits. “I’m not as advanced as you. But I like my farm and I like my chickens and you gotta stop messing with it.”

The others look chagrined, giving each other guilty looks. “It’s just for fun, Geoff,” Michael says gently. “We didn’t mean anything by it - we wouldn’t hurt a chicken.”

Geoff blinks and then sighs as Jack lands outside the farm and walks over, looking guilty himself. “We’ll keep the dragons out of your farm and stop messing with you,” he said, and gave them all significant looks. They all chorused their agreement - even Ryan (who had more or less adopted the title of Mischief God from Michael).

And finally Geoff sighs and smiles a bit. “Fine. Good.” It’s awkward for a moment and then he smirks a bit. “You realize now I get to fuck with your stuff, right?”

“Wait…” Michael says, but Geoff’s running off towards the World Tree and indirectly, the Munchdew.

“WAIT…!”

Ah…. Ryan smirks to himself. Just another normal day in their little world.

[wineanddinosaur]

Lance Winters, Nuclear Engineer-Turned-Distiller, Is Experimenting With American Agave

Lance Winters serves as the master distiller and president of St. George Spirits, a craft distillery in Alameda, Calif., that prides itself on rethinking traditional flavors and ingredients. In his free time, Winters is one of the few distillers in the country roasting and working with California agave.

St. George Spirits began as an eau-de-vie distillery, which informed Winters’ process of sourcing and building spirits from the ingredients up. Today, he’s motivated by experiences, not labels, and is equally inspired by sudden smells as he is by lasting memories.

The distillery offers spirits and liqueurs that range from a green chile vodka to a California shochu. The company made waves in 2007 when it released the first legal absinthe, and with Winters at its helm, it prides itself on crafting careful, nuanced spirits that recreate a category’s landscape rather than copy its leaders.

Nearly a decade ago, Winters released a rum made from 100 percent California sugarcane that he describes as the “natural wine” in an otherwise “Bordeaux-like” rum world. To create it, a complicated experimental process led him to trace his ingredients straight to the source and learn a distilling process that prepared him to eventually take on the agave plant. Currently, he’s been tapped to work on agave passion projects with Mark Crotalo of Crotalo Tequila and the soil scientist Joe Muller, who asked Winters to help harvest and roast nearly 7,000 pounds of California-grown agave.

Still, Winters shares his struggles with harvesting, roasting, and distilling agave spirits here in the United States through a refreshingly honest, informed worldview. He recognizes the labor that Mexican distillers undergo to produce agave spirits, and is hesitant to release any of his agave spirits to the public for retail. He also insists that working through agave’s unique challenges makes his team stronger, and details a rare insider’s look into the production of his agave spirits below.

[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

1. Can you talk about your early background in brewing, and with the U.S. Navy — and how that led to your work with St. George?

Yeah, so my time in the Navy was time spent operating nuclear power plants. I trained as a nuclear engineer and was stationed on board the USS Enterprise. With eight reactors, there’s a lot of chemistry, a lot of understanding of physics, and not a lot of great parties.

While I was in the Navy, I started brewing beer at home. When I got out, I got a job brewing beer. A friend gave me a bottle of Lagavulin Single Malt Whisky, and it was the first spirit I tasted that I thought was so remarkable — something that transcended just an ethanol experience. It was a story in a glass, and I was completely enthralled by it. I started learning more about whiskey, and I realized that in making whiskey you start by making beer. So that’s what led me to St. George.

The way that nuclear engineering influences [my distilling is] when you’re working on a still, you have to understand the nexus of the physics and the chemistry that takes place inside that still, so as you’re changing operating parameters for the still, you know how it’s going to influence the product that comes out. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument and understanding how you’re going to affect the music that’s coming out in the end.

2. How do you approach the idea of distilling creatively? Are you generally looking for a white space or navigating these previous memories that you have, and trying to recreate those experiences in spirits?

At the risk of utilizing an overused phrase, it’s a pretty organic process at the distillery. It’s the sort of thing that can be as simple as, I’m out at dinner and I see a flavor combination that gets me going; or, I smell something out in the woods and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I want to capture this.” I think it’s really all about external inspiration.

And, there are times where it’s like, “OK, what would this category be like if it was reimagined from the very beginning? How would somebody approach making this product if there weren’t already hundreds of years of tradition behind it? How would we start a brand-new tradition?” We try to stay away from the influences of the past. The only reason we look at what’s been done already is to avoid doing it.

3. Can you talk a little about the St. George California Agricole Rum? Where did you source the sugarcane from, and what was the inspiration and research for that spirit?

Initially, I wanted to make rum because I didn’t really enjoy most of the rums that I had had. So I stepped back and thought as an eau-de-vie producer, how would you go about making a rum?

When you’re making an eau-de-vie from pears or raspberries, you don’t make it from an extract [or] from a concentrate. You have to get the fresh fruit. In the case of the rum, the “fresh fruit” is sugarcane, it’s grass — we started looking for sugarcane growers in California. The first place that we found was down near Fresno. There was a group of Hmong farmers who were growing it to celebrate the New Year — it was an “eating sugarcane.” We purchased that and started running it through a cane mill. Then, we ended up tracking down a gentleman who was growing cane [near the Salton Sea] with a smaller diameter which [produces] a lot more chlorophyll. So you end up with a really bright, intensely green cane juice and that really bright, intensely green cane juice contributes this incredible funk to the whole thing.

Our Agricole rum is to regular rums what natural wines are to Bordeaux. It’s grassy, it’s got a lot of [notes of] black truffle, a lot of dirt, a lot of olives. It’s really, really interesting and I think that funk helps to balance out and anchor tropical cocktails that are made with it.

4. Tell me about working on your first agave project, Agua Azul, with [St. George Spirits distiller and founder] Jörg Rupf. What was it like sourcing and working with the agave?

I [worked] with Jörg Rupf 14 years ago. We didn’t know of any sources of agave in the United States so we looked around and we found a distillery that was willing to sell us agave [from Mexico].

We had it cooked, then put into a refrigerated truck to make the trip up to the Bay Area; then proceeded to go absolutely crazy trying to figure out how we would process it. They call [agave hearts] “piñas” but it’s not quite a pineapple. It’s much bigger, and they look more like tortoise shells. They’re heavy, sticky, and full of incredibly long, tough fibers. We broke a lot of equipment trying to process these and ended up getting to the point where we were able to bludgeon them just enough to get some fermentation going. And then we distilled, and it was good, but it wasn’t great. It was probably a little too clean.

It was sort of like what we were experiencing on the first goes with the rum: It was bland, kind of boring. It was nothing to be ashamed of, but it was nothing to scream about, either. And it was nothing about the source of the agave. What it turned out to be was about steam cooking versus pit roasting. Think about when you sear something on a grill or when you smoke it; you end up with so much more depth and flavor than if you boil it or steam it.

5. Since then, you’ve worked on a few American agave projects. Can you walk me through the harvesting and roasting of the blue agave used in your project with Mark Crotalo?

Jörg reached out and got in contact with Mark Crotalo [of Crotalo Tequila]. On his property down in Temecula, [Mark had] amended the soil and planted a bunch of agave. We had that harvested, then brought up to a farm up in Winters, Calif., where [his team] had dug a pit for us, lined it with stones, and then filled it with a mix of oak and eucalyptus.

It was about a three-day pit roast, and then all that agave was delivered to the [St. George] distillery. We were still trying to figure out exactly how we were going to process it, but my thought was that we should use our sugarcane mill. It’s a roller mill. We could press off all the juices from the agave, and then ferment it. And that’s what we did. We ended up with a relatively small amount of really, really beautiful, lovely, smoky agave spirit. And it had so much more depth and so much more complexity than the stuff that had been steam cooked.

6. Do you have any plans for Agave American spirits that might hit the market soon?

I’m really torn. It’s a very difficult spirit to distill, so working on that helps us at St. George hone our skills as distillers. We’re always looking for opportunities for personal and professional growth, and agave provides that in spades. As far as actually releasing it, I know that we’re going to release some for a benefit for the group YIIN, Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network. What’s kind of problematic for me, while I love making this stuff, is I feel like selling it becomes a form of cultural appropriation. And the United States is a tremendous act of cultural appropriation –– a cultural melting pot is another word for that, a much nicer way of saying it. And we would be nothing if it weren’t for the assimilation of all these different cultural things. But the people in Mexico who make agave spirits bust their asses to do so, and the last thing that needs to happen is for a bunch of gringos north of the border to come in and start trying to take that business. So, we’ll continue to make it, we’ll continue to have fun with it. But I think if anything, we’ll serve it by the glass at the distillery.

7. What are your favorite Mexican agave [spirit] brands, whether that be for tequila or mezcal? Are there any brands you think our readers should look out for?

One that rises to the top of the pack for me is this small distillery in Oaxaca called Gracias a Dios. And they’re not only great people, they make great products, and they’re also doing things differently. They’re replanting a lot of agave as they harvest, [because] they’re concerned with sustainability. They are also artistic about things: They have a beautiful gin that they’ve produced with agave as a base and it’s got 33 different botanicals representing the different states of Mexico. It’s a really layered, beautiful mezcal-based gin.

I love it when somebody is honoring tradition, but they’re also striking out on their own. To me, that’s what being a new distiller is all about. Being somebody who’s popping onto the scene now, you’re not duty bound to follow traditions.

The article Lance Winters, Nuclear Engineer-Turned-Distiller, Is Experimenting With American Agave appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/american-agave-spirits-lance-winters/

[johnboothus]

Lance Winters Nuclear Engineer-Turned-Distiller Is Experimenting With American Agave

Lance Winters serves as the master distiller and president of St. George Spirits, a craft distillery in Alameda, Calif., that prides itself on rethinking traditional flavors and ingredients. In his free time, Winters is one of the few distillers in the country roasting and working with California agave.

St. George Spirits began as an eau-de-vie distillery, which informed Winters’ process of sourcing and building spirits from the ingredients up. Today, he’s motivated by experiences, not labels, and is equally inspired by sudden smells as he is by lasting memories.

The distillery offers spirits and liqueurs that range from a green chile vodka to a California shochu. The company made waves in 2007 when it released the first legal absinthe, and with Winters at its helm, it prides itself on crafting careful, nuanced spirits that recreate a category’s landscape rather than copy its leaders.

Nearly a decade ago, Winters released a rum made from 100 percent California sugarcane that he describes as the “natural wine” in an otherwise “Bordeaux-like” rum world. To create it, a complicated experimental process led him to trace his ingredients straight to the source and learn a distilling process that prepared him to eventually take on the agave plant. Currently, he’s been tapped to work on agave passion projects with Mark Crotalo of Crotalo Tequila and the soil scientist Joe Muller, who asked Winters to help harvest and roast nearly 7,000 pounds of California-grown agave.

Still, Winters shares his struggles with harvesting, roasting, and distilling agave spirits here in the United States through a refreshingly honest, informed worldview. He recognizes the labor that Mexican distillers undergo to produce agave spirits, and is hesitant to release any of his agave spirits to the public for retail. He also insists that working through agave’s unique challenges makes his team stronger, and details a rare insider’s look into the production of his agave spirits below.

[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

1. Can you talk about your early background in brewing, and with the U.S. Navy — and how that led to your work with St. George?

Yeah, so my time in the Navy was time spent operating nuclear power plants. I trained as a nuclear engineer and was stationed on board the USS Enterprise. With eight reactors, there’s a lot of chemistry, a lot of understanding of physics, and not a lot of great parties.

While I was in the Navy, I started brewing beer at home. When I got out, I got a job brewing beer. A friend gave me a bottle of Lagavulin Single Malt Whisky, and it was the first spirit I tasted that I thought was so remarkable — something that transcended just an ethanol experience. It was a story in a glass, and I was completely enthralled by it. I started learning more about whiskey, and I realized that in making whiskey you start by making beer. So that’s what led me to St. George.

The way that nuclear engineering influences [my distilling is] when you’re working on a still, you have to understand the nexus of the physics and the chemistry that takes place inside that still, so as you’re changing operating parameters for the still, you know how it’s going to influence the product that comes out. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument and understanding how you’re going to affect the music that’s coming out in the end.

2. How do you approach the idea of distilling creatively? Are you generally looking for a white space or navigating these previous memories that you have, and trying to recreate those experiences in spirits?

At the risk of utilizing an overused phrase, it’s a pretty organic process at the distillery. It’s the sort of thing that can be as simple as, I’m out at dinner and I see a flavor combination that gets me going; or, I smell something out in the woods and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I want to capture this.” I think it’s really all about external inspiration.

And, there are times where it’s like, “OK, what would this category be like if it was reimagined from the very beginning? How would somebody approach making this product if there weren’t already hundreds of years of tradition behind it? How would we start a brand-new tradition?” We try to stay away from the influences of the past. The only reason we look at what’s been done already is to avoid doing it.

3. Can you talk a little about the St. George California Agricole Rum? Where did you source the sugarcane from, and what was the inspiration and research for that spirit?

Initially, I wanted to make rum because I didn’t really enjoy most of the rums that I had had. So I stepped back and thought as an eau-de-vie producer, how would you go about making a rum?

When you’re making an eau-de-vie from pears or raspberries, you don’t make it from an extract [or] from a concentrate. You have to get the fresh fruit. In the case of the rum, the “fresh fruit” is sugarcane, it’s grass — we started looking for sugarcane growers in California. The first place that we found was down near Fresno. There was a group of Hmong farmers who were growing it to celebrate the New Year — it was an “eating sugarcane.” We purchased that and started running it through a cane mill. Then, we ended up tracking down a gentleman who was growing cane [near the Salton Sea] with a smaller diameter which [produces] a lot more chlorophyll. So you end up with a really bright, intensely green cane juice and that really bright, intensely green cane juice contributes this incredible funk to the whole thing.

Our Agricole rum is to regular rums what natural wines are to Bordeaux. It’s grassy, it’s got a lot of [notes of] black truffle, a lot of dirt, a lot of olives. It’s really, really interesting and I think that funk helps to balance out and anchor tropical cocktails that are made with it.

4. Tell me about working on your first agave project, Agua Azul, with [St. George Spirits distiller and founder] Jörg Rupf. What was it like sourcing and working with the agave?

I [worked] with Jörg Rupf 14 years ago. We didn’t know of any sources of agave in the United States so we looked around and we found a distillery that was willing to sell us agave [from Mexico].

We had it cooked, then put into a refrigerated truck to make the trip up to the Bay Area; then proceeded to go absolutely crazy trying to figure out how we would process it. They call [agave hearts] “piñas” but it’s not quite a pineapple. It’s much bigger, and they look more like tortoise shells. They’re heavy, sticky, and full of incredibly long, tough fibers. We broke a lot of equipment trying to process these and ended up getting to the point where we were able to bludgeon them just enough to get some fermentation going. And then we distilled, and it was good, but it wasn’t great. It was probably a little too clean.

It was sort of like what we were experiencing on the first goes with the rum: It was bland, kind of boring. It was nothing to be ashamed of, but it was nothing to scream about, either. And it was nothing about the source of the agave. What it turned out to be was about steam cooking versus pit roasting. Think about when you sear something on a grill or when you smoke it; you end up with so much more depth and flavor than if you boil it or steam it.

5. Since then, you’ve worked on a few American agave projects. Can you walk me through the harvesting and roasting of the blue agave used in your project with Mark Crotalo?

Jörg reached out and got in contact with Mark Crotalo [of Crotalo Tequila]. On his property down in Temecula, [Mark had] amended the soil and planted a bunch of agave. We had that harvested, then brought up to a farm up in Winters, Calif., where [his team] had dug a pit for us, lined it with stones, and then filled it with a mix of oak and eucalyptus.

It was about a three-day pit roast, and then all that agave was delivered to the [St. George] distillery. We were still trying to figure out exactly how we were going to process it, but my thought was that we should use our sugarcane mill. It’s a roller mill. We could press off all the juices from the agave, and then ferment it. And that’s what we did. We ended up with a relatively small amount of really, really beautiful, lovely, smoky agave spirit. And it had so much more depth and so much more complexity than the stuff that had been steam cooked.

6. Do you have any plans for Agave American spirits that might hit the market soon?

I’m really torn. It’s a very difficult spirit to distill, so working on that helps us at St. George hone our skills as distillers. We’re always looking for opportunities for personal and professional growth, and agave provides that in spades. As far as actually releasing it, I know that we’re going to release some for a benefit for the group YIIN, Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network. What’s kind of problematic for me, while I love making this stuff, is I feel like selling it becomes a form of cultural appropriation. And the United States is a tremendous act of cultural appropriation –– a cultural melting pot is another word for that, a much nicer way of saying it. And we would be nothing if it weren’t for the assimilation of all these different cultural things. But the people in Mexico who make agave spirits bust their asses to do so, and the last thing that needs to happen is for a bunch of gringos north of the border to come in and start trying to take that business. So, we’ll continue to make it, we’ll continue to have fun with it. But I think if anything, we’ll serve it by the glass at the distillery.

7. What are your favorite Mexican agave [spirit] brands, whether that be for tequila or mezcal? Are there any brands you think our readers should look out for?

One that rises to the top of the pack for me is this small distillery in Oaxaca called Gracias a Dios. And they’re not only great people, they make great products, and they’re also doing things differently. They’re replanting a lot of agave as they harvest, [because] they’re concerned with sustainability. They are also artistic about things: They have a beautiful gin that they’ve produced with agave as a base and it’s got 33 different botanicals representing the different states of Mexico. It’s a really layered, beautiful mezcal-based gin.

I love it when somebody is honoring tradition, but they’re also striking out on their own. To me, that’s what being a new distiller is all about. Being somebody who’s popping onto the scene now, you’re not duty bound to follow traditions.

The article Lance Winters, Nuclear Engineer-Turned-Distiller, Is Experimenting With American Agave appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/american-agave-spirits-lance-winters/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/lance-winters-nuclear-engineer-turned-distiller-is-experimenting-with-american-agave

[theeurekaproject]

Parva Rubrum Marmor

The rice plants waved from side to side in the summer breeze, endless viridian green against a landscape of burnt sienna and umber. The sunlight streaming through titanium white clouds was zinc yellow, and it left sparkles of aluminum powder on a pond of cobalt blue. Cressida swirled the paintbrush through American rose and dotted it on the vermillion of the cliffs far in the background, completing the picturesque landscape of the quadrangle.

She leant back and looked at the painting, somewhat dissatisfied with it. American rose might not have been the right color. It was more candy apple red or electric crimson. And maybe diamond dust would have looked better than aluminum powder, to really capture the essence of sun on water, or maybe-

Maybe she was just overthinking it.

She looked at the painting, and then at her pigments. She eyed the chocolate cosmos. Dark, rich, deep red—it would be the perfect opposite of bright, vibrant American rose, especially in a painting where she was trying to create so much contrast. But was chocolate cosmos really faithful to the cliffs of the Mare Acidalium at sunset?

Cressida frowned and walked over to her window. It wasn’t that she wanted photorealism, exactly, but she wanted something that really matched the soul of the place, the heart of the landscape. Colors were important for that. She pulled open the drapes, revealing the real rice plants, and all of the people who worked in them. The cliffs rose up in the background. Chocolate cosmos did kind of match their character, but it wasn’t really super accurate-

“What the hell?”

Something flashed in the sky, momentarily flickering before vanishing into thin air. Cressida squinted. There it was again—a sleek chrome triangle, pulsing in and out of existence. That was advanced cloaking technology, the likes of which she’d never seen outside of crappy sci-fi B-movies they played at the theater on Fridays. Martian ships didn’t look like that.

“Dad?” she called downstairs. “Dad, there’s something weird in the stratosphere.”

“I know,” he shouted back. “They’re with me-“

“The ones in the ship?” she asked, watching all the workers in the field stop their labor to gaze at the cyan sky. “Because there’s a white thing-“

“What?”

“Come take a look at it.”

She heard him murmur an apology to his visitors—Eleutherian ambassadors, probably, but she had long since given up on trying to keep his various guests straight—and run upstairs, his footsteps pounding on the hardwood floor. He joined her at the window still, shielding his eyes with one hand.

“Look, Dad,” she said. “It’s flickering, see? That’s not one of ours.”

“That’s strange,” he said slowly. “That’s a nice ship. A really nice ship.” Even from this far away, Cressida could tell it was expensive; the way the mid-morning light glinted off the metal was unique to fancy Eleutherian cruisers. But why would the space equivalent of a yacht have cloaking technology unless whoever was flying it really, really didn’t want to be seen?

“It doesn’t look dangerous,” Cressida said, “but civilian ships aren’t even allowed to have that type of tech. That goes against so many regulations it’s not even funny.”

“You’re right. And it isn’t just cloaking, either.” Her father tilted his head up, shielding his eyes with one scarred hand. “See how shiny it is? That’s not for aesthetic purposes—or, well, it is, but those are shields, like on a military ship.” Cressida’s voice caught in her throat. “Military?” The Eleutherian military was no joke; their fleet outstripped anything Mars had by far, to the point where fending them off was laughable. The last war they’d fought had resulted in patches of nuclear devastation all over Daedalia Planum, and the soil was still irradiated and poisonous even centuries later. And, to Eleutheria, that had been nothing—at the time, their Imperatrix had called it a “skirmish.” Millions of people dead and entire cities leveled, a civilization reduced to radioactive ash, and it barely even registered on Eleutheria’s radar. They could nuke the entirety of Mars and barely bat an eyelash. Cressida was sure that her father’s status would protect her in some way—he prided himself on being annoyingly overprotective, and he was rich and powerful in some sectors—but, at the end of the day, he was just a farmer who had gotten lucky. He was high-ranking, but was he high-ranking enough to save his daughter and his planet from the most volatile empire known to mankind?

“What did you do?” Cressida demanded. “Why is the Eleutherian army coming after us?”

“I didn’t do anything, not really,” he said quickly. “And they wouldn’t send the army after us. They’d send the space force.” “That is literally the opposite of reassuring.” The only thing more terrifying than the sight of centuria of mutant super-soldiers was the sight of centuria of mutant super-soldiers riding indestructible starships.

“Don’t panic just yet. That might not even be a military craft,” he said, though Cressida could hear the waver in his voice. “Military ships are’t sleek and white—more cubic and black and intentionally intimidating.” Cressida squinted, trying to get a closer look. Everyone in the fields had long since stopped working; now, they just stared up at the sky, enraptured. The vessel drew closer, close enough to cause tornadoes of rusty-red dust to swirl up from the ground in jets of spent soil, and then closer still. It was big—admittedly, not as big as a yacht, but big—and Cressida felt a surge of anxiety as she realized just how near it was to the farmhouse. Either it would flatten all the crops and destroy the year’s harvest, which would be a massive inconvenience requiring ten tons of paperwork, or it would completely crush the homestead. Neither were good options, and both were bound to piss off the almighty Algorithm.

But, to her surprise, the ship simply coasted over them with a surprising amount of grace for something so large and unwieldy-looking. It cast a long, dark shadow over the fields as the Martian sun vanished behind glimmering Eleutherian plastic, sending chills down Cressida’s spine.

“Hey, Ace,” her father called to one of his guests. “Can you come up here for a minute?” “Ace?” Cressida asked. That name sounded like it belonged to a frat boy, not a visiting dignitary. “Who the hell is—“ “What?” A teenage boy with wild, curly black hair came barreling into the room in a cacophony of noise. His clothes suggested that he was a soldier, but his demeanor seemed less “military precision” and more “confused.” Maybe Eleutheria’s massive population meant that they were less discerning when it came to their soldiers, since they had so much cannon fodder, or maybe he was smarter than he looked.

“Is that who I think it is?” Cressida’s father asked, gesturing to the ship. Ace considered it for a minute.

“Yeah,” he said. “Oh my god, yeah. That’s Acidalia. We’re so fu—uh, screwed.”

“Wait,” Cressida interjected, “Acidalia? You’re not talking about-“

“You know exactly who I’m talking about,” he replied. “Either that or her psycho mother, because there are only two people I can think of who have rides like that.”

Cressida looked nervously at her father, and his eyes widened slightly.

“You don’t think it could be Alestra, do you?” he asked.

“Alestra Cipher is after you?!” Cressida exclaimed. “What the hell, Dad?” Alestra was the most dangerous woman in the solar system—hell, probably even the whole galaxy. She killed her own citizens on a regular basis, and she did not like Martians, particularly martians from the Mare Acidalium quadrangle. If she saw the opportunity to strike, she’d probably mow down the whole Seren family where they stood.

“I don’t think it’d be her,” Ace said dismissively. “It must be Acidalia. If it was Alestra, she’d have burnt this whole place to the ground already. We’d all be piles of radioactive ash by now. But that’s not the point—it doesn’t matter if she’s on that ship or not, because she’s the hunting dog to Acidalia’s fox. We are so, so, so screwed—and the fact that Acidalia thought it was necessary to come all the way here doesn’t bode well, either.”

“What do you mean, ‘that doesn’t bode well?’” Cressida asked again. “Dad, what’s happening?” Moving away from the window, she knocked over the all-but-forgotten jar of mixed chocolate cosmos, which left a reddish brown stain where it spilled.

She went utterly ignored.

“Yeah, it must be Acidalia’s,” Ace decided. “Alestra wouldn’t have let us live this long—she’s too efficient for that. And Cassiopeia’s an impulsive idiot, but Alestra keeps a leash on her, right?”

“I suppose there’s only one way to find out,” Cressida’s father shrugged.

***

Approximately thirty seconds later, Cressida and her father, trailed by Ace and a strange Eleutherian girl with fluorescent pink hair, stood outside the homestead in a rare patch of grass. Each and every one of them was sweating and tired-looking—something about the heat made standing under the sun exhausting, even when one had barely done anything requiring any sort of labor. Together, they stared at the ship, watching, waiting.

Suddenly, with an odd lack of fanfare, the shields vanished, and in place of their iridescent glow was a set of marble steps that somehow looked as natural on the landscape as the rice plants and the trees. At their very center stood a woman in a white dress and a veil—she could have been a bride, but Cressida knew better. She was flanked by two other women wearing identical gray uniforms, but somehow they gave off the same energy as an entire court full of people, and Cressida felt like she ought to respect this person, whoever she was.

The girl with pink hair, the one who apparently didn’t speak a word of Anglian, dropped to her knees in an awkward sort of worship. Cressida briefly contemplated doing the same thing, but neither Ace nor her father followed the girl, so she did a slight curtsy and remained standing, feeling very small compared to this foreign princess of a person. Even here, surrounded by the spoils of her family’s wealth—a mansion of a farmhouse, fields upon fields of employees, the best technology any Martian could ever hope to buy—Cressida felt like a tasteless hick.

“You know how to make an entrance,” her father said to the stranger, smiling slightly.

She sighed. “Old habits die hard.” Something in her expression was completely humorless, but not in an I-mean-business way, more of a someone-just-died way. Something churned in Cressida’s stomach, and she suddenly got a horrible gut feeling that something had gone very, very wrong.

“Are all the Imperials this dramatic?” her father asked, apparently not picking up on the David-this-is-serious vibes the woman was clearly trying to send his way. It took a moment, but a wave of embarrassment surged through Cressida. Imperials? This woman was an Imperial? Not just an Imperial—if she was standing here, and she wasn’t Alestra, she had to be—

Oh my God, Cressida thought. I’m speaking to Acidaila Cipher. It should have been obvious in retrospect; Ace had identified this craft as her ship, after all, and it made sense that the Imperatrix Ceasarina would be the one person outside the military who would own a ship this nice. But Cressida had been expecting some type of aid or minister to come out first—why would the ruler of the most powerful empire humanity had ever known want to speak face-to-face with the Secretary of Agriculture on Mars, of all people?

“David, I don’t have time for this,” Acidalia said, looking harried, and the tone in her voice made Cressida want to hear whatever she had to say sooner rather than later. She gave off a sort of frantic, panicked aura, even though her stone-cold face was completely calm. It was like chaos and disarray just surrounded her—she wasn’t its source, but it seemed to like her, and Cressida wanted to figure out what the problem was before it turned into a catastrophe.

“Sorry,” her father said. “Generally, when important political figures show up at my house with no explanation or forewarning, I get a little curious.” She glared at him. “There are a lot of things we could be talking about right now that don’t involve dramatic entrances. I’m afraid that I come bearing bad news.”

“Bad news?” Cressida asked, terrified by the vagueness of the statement. “Bad news” coming from a political figure could mean anything from an unfavorable poll to a famine that killed eight thousand people, and that was just on Mars. She didn’t even want to imagine what had happened in order to make Eleutheria acknowledge that it had a problem.

“We should discuss this inside,” Acidalia said, gesturing quickly towards the ship, which vanished into thin air at the movement of her wrist. Every worker in the fields stared, open-mouthed, but the Eleutherians didn’t look surprised in the slightest. As Acidalia walked to the farmhouse, Martian dirt soiled her elaborate white gown, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. She exuded the same type of confidence as Arlen Tycho—the persona of a leader who knew damn well how powerful and famous they were, and didn’t care what the unwashed masses thought of them.

With surprisingly little fanfare, Acidalia and her companions sat at the low wooden table in the kitchen by the foyer, and Cressida almost laughed at the sheer absurdity of the sight. Even she didn’t sit in the kitchen—they had dining rooms for that. The kitchen was the domain of the help and other people whose social points weren’t high enough to let them sit with the big guns. But Acidalia was the biggest gun in the room, and if she wanted to sit in the kitchen, the Algorithm probably wouldn’t penalize either of the Serens for that.

Acidalia said something low to Cressida’s father before turning to her. She gulped, half-expecting to be struck down or laughed at, but the Imperatrix had an expression of almost friendly neutrality, though she still gave off an underlying feeling of dread and anxiety.

“Um… bonus vesper, celsituda tua,” Cressida said, feeling nervous for a reason she couldn’t place.

“Loquerisne Latine?” Acidalia asked, surprised.

“Scio exigua.” I know a little bit. She’d studied Latin at school, too, but not the complicated, intricate dialect that Eleutheria used, if one could even call it that. Eleutherian “Latin” was really more of a creole of Latin, English, random Romance languages, Greek, and a bunch of drunk people adding -um and -us and -trix to words where they didn’t belong. It was created by a slew of college students armed with online translators and some Church documents two thousand years ago, and it showed. But she could hardly insult Acidalia’s mess of a first language in front of her, so she smiled blandly and tried her best not to cringe at the incorrect declensions and pronunciations.

“Ego Acidalia,” Acidalia said, as if Cressida wouldn’t know who she was. She pronounced her name the Catholic way, like the word acid. “Tu es filia David?”

“Sic. David pater meus,” Cressida replied. “Meum nomen Cressida est.” Yes, I am David’s daughter. My name is Cressida.

“Suave te cognoscere est,” Acidalia. “Pater mecum operatur. Qui dixit mihi multus est de te. Quotos annos habes?”

“Sedecim annos habeo.” I am sixteen years old—well, more like I have sixteen years. She was pretty sure that’s how they said it in Latin. That’s how they said it in Spanish, right? Tengo dieciseis años, not soy dieciseis años. And Latin was like Spanish’s ancestor, sort of. So that had to be it. Cressida was suddenly reminded of the Horus she’d spent in Trinity Court’s Academy for Young Women, staring longingly at the languid summer days just outside the window and trying to remember complex webs of verb tense rules for the sake of grammar quizzes. Was Acidalia trying to test her?

“Libens sum. Possumus, eamus intus?” Acidalia asked.

Before she could reply, Ace interrupted them. “Et arripuerit,” he said. “T Ubi est?”

Acidalia sighed deeply and didn’t meet his eyes. With a sweeping gesture, she announced more than said, “Veni. Nos eamus.”

No one moved.

She did not say anything, but gave them a look that wordlessly said, “this is a command, not a suggestion.”

***

“Et mortuus est?!”

Acidalia’s expression barely changed. “Cassiopeia.”

Looking incredulous, Ace sank down on the table. “Quomodo?”

“Et percusserunt eum. Significatum est enim mihi est…. mea culpa, se nunquam mori. Et ego paenitet.”

“Non utique creditur moriturus!” Ace exclaimed. “Erat tantum septendecim annorum… Ego ei ne ire. Cur non ibimus?” He buried his head in his hands and sunk down to the table, muttering frantically to himself in a whispered Shakespearean soliloquy.

Cressida didn’t know enough Latin to pick up on most of the conversation, but she knew enough to judge that someone had died. Mortuus, mori, moriturus… dead, dying, dying? It was difficult to tell; half their words didn’t make sense in Classical, non-Eleutherian Latin, because they had the wrong declensions or wrong grammar or were in the wrong order. But “mort” she understood enough. And “mea culpa…” that meant “my fault.” Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa was part of the Confíteor. Imperatrix Acidalia was claiming responsibility for someone’s death.

Apparently Ace had asked a rhetorical question, because Acidalia didn’t answer him. Instead, she merely looked down at the wooden table, elegantly mournful. Her eyes were watery, but there was no other sign that she was even remotely upset.

Ace, meanwhile, remained with his head in his arms for a few seconds, and the girl with pink hair looked over at him, concerned. She went to lay a hand on him, then redacted it, swallowing hard and looking at Acidalia.

Suddenly, Ace jolted up, his eyes red. “Et scissis vestibus pergens ad te.”

“Fecit,” Acidalia said softly.

“Et occidit se ipsum pro te,” Ace snapped. “Et occidit se ipsum pro te et tu ne quidem curant!”

Cressida caught the word occido—killed. Et occidit se ipsum pro te—“he killed himself for you.” She was taken aback; who would just say that to the Imperatrix? This random soldier had to have been of extraordinarily high rank to get away with this type of open defiance.

“Hey,” she whispered to the girl in gray, the one with long hair tipped with streaks of red (which the Algorithim would have killed her for if she wasn’t Eleutherian.) “Hey, do you speak English?”

“Um, some?” she whispered back. “I’m Athena.”

“Thank god,” Cressida said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“The brother of the Imperatrix—uh, the empress?” she asked herself. “No… she who commands? I don’t know if there’s an English word with the same exact meaning-“

“Doesn’t matter,” Cressida said quickly.

“Yeah, I guess it doesn’t. But, um, the brother of the Imperatrix is dead.” She didn’t use the English possessive Acidalia’s brother, which made her voice sound stilted and awkward in a way she probably didn’t intend.

“I didn’t even know she had a brother,” Cressida said. She saw Acidalia and Aleskynn’s faces everywhere, but there was never any boy with them. If Acidalia did have a brother, his image would be on every propaganda poster ever produced.

“I didn’t know either, until about yesterday,” Athena said. “He’s gone now, though.”

“What happened?”

“Acidalia said Cassiopeia shot him—you probably don’t know who that is. She’s, um… insanus. What’s the word for-“

“Insane. It’s the same, pretty much,” Cressida interrupted. “How did she-“

“I don’t know,” Athena said. “I found out about this five minutes ago, too.”

“Oh.” Cressida felt like she shouldn’t be sitting here watching this—Acidalia had just lost a brother, and Ace was clearly upset about it. At the same time, though, she wasn’t sure how she could get away. Surely if the Imperatrix wanted her gone, she’d have told her to leave, but why would she want her here?

She turned to Athena, who looked like she felt just as bemused as Cressida did.

“Non est vestrum erit flagitium!” Ace shouted, suddenly, standing. The Imperatrix looked momentarily surprised before reverting to the same expression she’d worn before—sad, but strong, determined. She looked like a movie character, not someone whose brother had just been brutally murdered by a madwoman.

“Non ea culpa fuit,” Cressida’s father said gently.

“Sic factum est,” Acidalia replied, looking down at the ground. “Et mortuus est in me. Me paenitet, Ace-“

"Ignosce, non satis!” Ace spat. “Quod illi non erit! Et profecta!”

Cressida cringed internally. This man was going to wind up dead if Acidalia was anything like her mother—which, judging by the white and the theatrics, she was. Insulting the Imperatrix was not a good way to become popular in Eleutheria.

But, to her surprise, Acidalia hardly reacted. She closed her eyes and put her hands on her face for a moment, before sighing deeply. “Scio.” I know.

“Acidalia,” Cressida’s father said. “Prohibere. Quid enim sunt ne putasti?”

The Imperatrix didn’t say anything, but she wiped her eye with the back of her hand so subtly Cressida might not have noticed it if she weren’t so close. Ace just sunk back into the table again, and the girl with pink hair was clearly crying. The whole room filled with a stilted silence for a few minutes. Athena, her friend, and Cressida stood against the wall, bemused. Athena’s friend looked scared and embarrassed, chewing on her lip until blood trickled down her chin.

With a sudden realization, Acidalia abruptly straightened her shoulders, switching from one emotion to another far too quickly for Cressida’s comfort. She couldn’t tell whether the Imperatrix was upset and very good at hiding it or crying crocodile tears for the benefit of Ace, but either way, the transition was too sharp to seem normal. Acidalia looked—and acted—almost like a robot. A creation that had been told what humans liked when it came to looks and personality, and then replicated it, but replicated it wrong. Her oddly symmetrical features, her strange bright brown eyes, her impossible hourglass figure, the way she went from a weepy sister to a strong leader in a nanosecond—it wasn’t right, and it made Cressida slightly anxious. Acidalia was far too deep in the uncanny valley for her liking.

“Aegre fero,” Acidalia said, while Ace continued to look blankly at the wall. Then, addressing Cressida’s father, “David, si necesse est dicere.” We need to talk.

“About what?” Cressida asked, recognizing too late that she maybe shouldn’t have.

Her father’s eyes turned shifty. “Non hic.” Not here.

Acidalia nodded. “Sunt telecameras.”

“Cameras?!” All the times she’d danced around her room singing Vocaloid songs into a brush at top volume flew through Cressida’s head, before she remembered that there were clearly bigger issues at hand. Who would want to bug the Seren farmhouse? Just what types of games were her father playing?

“In Revelatio,” Acidalia said, standing. “Non debeo hic.”

Cressida really wished they would stop speaking Latin—or at least speak normal Latin—but knew better than to say it. She joined her father, glaring at him. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Come with me.”

The stitch in her side returned as her father dragged her back to the ship, which materialized again in order to allow the passengers on. She winced, clambering up the marble steps. They were a lot less beautiful when she was roughly forced up them, and they were steep. Acidalia followed quickly, almost jogging in her seven-inch heels. It was a miracle she didn’t fall. Robotic, Cressida thought again.

The Revelation had entirely too many chairs and too much decor—all blue stones mixed with Greek and Roman art, not like Eleutherians even had any concept of what Greece and Rome were outside of those cool ancient people who made pretty statues. The neon lights immediately gave her a headache, and the architecture was sleek and organic but cold—but not literally, it was about eighty degrees. Everything Cressida disliked was in the Revelation’s sterile insides.

She collapsed on a rounded bench with white LEDs on the edges, blinking at the brightness. None of the other Eleutherians seemed too bothered by the harsh, unnatural lighting, though they’ll all been squinting in the Martian sun. Cressida’s resentment towards them grew suddenly, especially when every last one of them started speaking in rapid Latin, much too fast for her to understand. Who the hell were these people? They could land a ship on her farm, invade her house, make battle plans without her? Who did they think they were?

“Excuse me,” she said.

She was promptly ignored as her father delved deep into a conversation with Athena, the one who spoke a bit of English.

“Excuse me,” she said, louder this time.

They continued their discussion.

“Veniam in me!” she snapped. Six heads turned to look at her. “What the hell is going on?”

They stared at her blankly.

“Quid agatur in infernum?”

Her father sighed, looking worried. “We’re going to Eleutheria.”

“What?”

“Acidalia had a conversation with the Proregina of the Lunar Colonies-“ he began.

“What on Earth is a ‘proregina?’"

“Like a vicereine-“

“A what? None of this makes any sense! You can’t just-“ “Like a female viceroy,” Acidalia added, very unhelpfully. Cressida looked to Athena for help, but she just whispered, “Don’t know either.”

“An important person on the Moon,” her father said slowly, looking like he had a headache. “She said there’s been an uprising in Appalachia—that’s Eleutheria’s capital city. They think Acidalia’s dead-“

“Well, she’s clearly not, unless this chick really is an alien robot,” Cressida snapped, “so I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“I’m a leader of the Revolution,” Acidalia explained, like this was something completely normal to say. “We’re in a difficult spot here. The Novagenetica-“

“The eugenicist crazies,” Athena explained helpfully.

“-have declared a full-out war on us and claimed to have killed me. Obviously, since I’m not on-planet and it’s difficult to contact me out here, many have made their assumptions about my untimely death. The entire reason I’m here is because an assassination attempt that killed my brother forced me to flee, so that likely was a contributing factor in why so many believed the Nova when they declared that I had been murdered. Either way, most people on both sides think I’m deceased, and it’s vital that we correct that in order to preserve the safety of the planet.” “What does that have to do with me?” Cressida demanded.

“Well,” Acidalia said, “meet our Martian contact, David Seren.” She gestured to Cressida’s father. “Ally of the Revolution and close friend to President Tycho.”

Astonished, Cressida stared at her father. “What the hell, Dad? You’ve been in cahoots with a bunch of Eleutherian insurgents and you didn’t tell me?” “Seeing as we’re spearheaded by several members of the federal government, we aren’t exactly insurgents,” Acidalia replied calmly, her tone never shifting. “More like one faction of a civil war. But we need to stop discussing this. Clearly, I’m needed on-planet, and so is your father. For your safety, so are you. Besides, you’re an expert on Martian climate and agriculture and you’ve attended finishing school; the daughter of a Martian aristocrat is valuable.” She smiled in a way that was probably supposed to be as welcoming, but the corners of her eyes didn’t crinkle up like they were supposed to, and she looked too strange for anything she said to come across as genuine.

“Flattery won’t get you anywhere with me,” Cressida said. “I can’t leave Mars. I have a life. I have school, exams are coming up—it’s November, remember? Finals start next month.”

Acidalia looked entirely nonplussed about this. “I can tutor you on anything involving biology,” she said, “and I’m sure you’ll find that there are plenty of educational opportunities on Eleutheria.” “You’re missing the point,” Cressida said, wondering if she was really that thick. “I can’t just not take exams. I need a diploma-" “A what?” Athena asked.

“I’ll write you a recommendation letter,” Acidalia said dismissively. “No school in its right mind would deny you an admission. And, keep in mind, this is only temporary, and for your own safety. Now that I am here and my brother is dead—“ Her voice broke for a second, then she regained her composure so quickly Cressida wondered if anything had even changed to begin with. “Now that my brother is dead,” she continued, “this place is no longer safe for any of us. My mother will find out the truth soon enough, and then we will all be in danger.”

“But I haven’t done anything,” Cressida said indignantly. “I have no part in any of this.” She found it hard to believe that any Eleutherian dignitary could get away with murdering the daughter of an important politician. People would notice that, and then they’d be angry, even if there was nobody left to really mourn the Seren family. Acidalia sighed and looked up at Cressida. “Your innocence doesn’t matter,” she said. “Your father spoke to me once, and that’s enough. She’d murder you in a heartbeat if she thought you were related to a revolutionary, even if you posed no threat to her. I’ve seen her mutilate people for less. And even if the people of Mars rioted in response, there’s nothing they could do to counter Alestra’s immense power. She’d sooner bomb your whole city to ashes than show an ounce of mercy.”

“Acidalia is right,” Cressida’s father said. “That woman is a psychopath, and she doesn’t like Mars—or Martians—very much.”

“But she’s half-Martian!” Cresida exclaimed.

“Yes,” Acidalia finished, “I am. And so is—was—my dead little brother, who my mother’s henchman shot in the head. Nobody is safe from her, I guarantee it.”

A shiver went down Cressida’s spine. “What do you think she’ll do if she finds out—?” “I don’t know,” Acidalia replied. “I can’t say. But if you would like to remain alive—which I suggest you do; it is a dreadful waste to lose somebody so young—I suggest packing and leaving. Once the sirens start blaring, it will already be too late. I’m sure you know what happened to Daedalia.”

“Okay, but…” Cressida’s voice trailed off. She’d be missing school, she realized suddenly, and she’d lose half of her social points if she was absent any more. After that bout of flu in October, the Algorithm was already angry with her, and it would not be merciful if she abandoned her planet without a trace a month before exam season. And then the rumors would start and her reputation would sink even lower—she’d be called a deadbeat and a dropout and all manner of other things, and she’d never be able to go to a good college if she had no status left. The Martian meritocracy didn’t allow for mistakes or variations from the norm, even during a civil war.

But losing merit was still better than being dead.

A surge of fury coursed through Cressida’s veins. There was no way for her to get out of this—if she stayed she’d surely die, and if she left she’d be abandoning the life her father struggled so much to build for her. And none of it was her fault. She wasn’t the one who joined a revolution for the sake of a planet she didn’t even live on, she wasn’t the one who made friends with a woman whose family was insane enough to murder anyone its black sheep of a daughter set her eyes upon, and she wasn’t the one who dragged her friends into a war so violent teenage girls could be shot to death over nothing, absolutely nothing. This was all her father’s fault, and even beyond that, Acidalia’s—Acidalia Cipher, who had the nerve to show up at the Seren home, completely ignorant of the trail of destruction she’d leave in her wake. How dare she? None of this was Cressida’s problem.

But the nuclear war hadn’t been the Daedalians’ problem, either, and they were still the ones who had to pay for it. Such was politics. It was all one big game of chess—you sacrifice the pawns for the sake of the king. And the Algorithm would rather see a game won than save a useless piece.

Still, despite her desire—no, need—to please the Algorithm and her homeland, Cressida was growing tired of being a pawn.

[skarmorydraws]

@tyrantisterror ATOM Create-A-Kaiju Contest Entry #4: Gnashphalt

Aliases: The Tarbaby, The California Creeper, The Unstoppable Ooze

Date Discovered: September 12, 1958

Place of Origin: The La Brea Tar Pits

Notable Stomping Grounds: Western U.S. Seaboard

Height: 80 feet

Biology:

Few living things on Earth are quite as enigmatic as Gnashphalt. It is not precisely known how he was formed from the La Brea Tar Pits, for although there are Yameneon deposits in proximity to the area, no major nuclear testing has occurred near enough to Los Angeles to have affected them. It is possible that continuous geologic activity over the ages led to a buildup of Yamaneon radiation, which was in turn gradually released via disruptive mining activity when the pits were harvested for asphalt. More confusing still is how Gnashphalt even exists; while the bitumen forming most of his body IS comprised of the remains of microscopic algae and other long-expired living things, it is difficult to imagine Yamaneon radiation reanimating these materials without cells to work from. His relatively recent appearance in the geologic time scale suggests that the Yamaneon caused cells from animals that had been trapped in the tar during the Ice Age and preserved in its depths to mutate and begin regenerating haphazardly upon imbibing the radiation, taking in the tar around them to form one giant protoplasmic matrix which often struggles to form some sort of animal-like shape.

About the only identifiable features Gnashphalt can form are eyes, a mouth, and rudimentary limbs, their arrangement giving him an appearance coincidentally akin to frogs and toads. However, these features are often all he really needs - his entire matrix and the cells within work as one giant fusion of circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and nervous systems, giving him rudimentary control of his form and allowing him to move, breathe, sense his environment, and digest everything degradable he oozes over, at the same time assimilating harder things into his hulking form for personal use.

Gnashphalt is slow-moving, hauling himself along with his stubby "legs" and sometimes rolling from place to place. His name comes from his large mouth, which armed with fangs made of bones, broken PVC pipes, metal bars, splintered wooden planks, and other inedible bits of debris. This mouth can lunge forward with deceptive speed and power, inflicting a nasty, septic bite that can snap smaller mutations in two. His viscous, tarry body can also form crude, short-lived "tentacles" to attack and grab things, and mires anything that makes physical contact with it, holding fast the fists and fangs of enemy monsters and dragging in anything small enough to eat for perfunctory digestion. Aside from this, he can also secrete a foul-smelling and highly corrosive vapor, capable of melting through any material - including stone, concrete, or even metal - that hasn't been specially treated to resist oxidization; he uses this vapor to both disable and predigest bigger and/or livelier prey, allowing him to catch up to and swallow it easily.

Gnashphalt therefore adds a number of deadly powers to the standard kaiju power set:

Super strength An enhanced healing factor Immunity to radiation Sticky Touch Acid Fumes

Personality:

Gnashphalt has been compared by frantic media outlets to Pathogen, another monster dictated by hunger and wanton destructive urges. But while Pathogen exists only to consume, Gnashphalt is a more subdued type of hunger. He eats to live, rather than living to eat, but eating is basically the only thing he cares about. No other living thing matters to him except himself, and it is perhaps thankful that he eats merely to derive sustenance rather than for the sake of eating. While capable of devouring most organic matter, he prefers things that have a similar chemical consistency to tar or petroleum, and therefore gravitates towards large cities and oil refineries where these substances are plentiful. If no such substances are around, however, he'll try just about anything once, even scarfing down the contents of landfills and radioactive waste deposits at a whim.

For a time, it was assumed that Gnashphalt was much like Pathogen in that he had no emotions to speak of, just mindless hunger. His rare interactions with other kaiju have proven this notion wrong to some extent, however - he isn't mindless, just incredibly selfish and ignorant. Other monsters dislike his tendency to figuratively strong-arm his way around, carelessly oozing over other life forms and toppling or melting obstacles to reach what he wants; his answer to any problem is to either eat it or dissolve it, with no third options to speak of. That being said, he also seems to be quite aware of his durability, and engages with other monsters with a rather nonchalant air - followed by excited drooling if his opponents realize that they're not going to win. Indeed, it seems that he can sense the Yamaneon-induced mutation in other kaiju, which (in the absence of oil) appear to be just the thing to tickle his fancy, his tastebuds, and sometimes his insides - he has a habit of swallowing smaller mutations whole, enjoying the sensation of their agonized writhing inside him as they're slowly digested for hours at a time.

Despite his gluttonous nature and sheer durability, Gnashphalt has a few weaknesses which are relatively easy to exploit. Being made of an oil-based substance, he is deathly afraid of fire, and avoids heat sources such as volcanoes; a literal firewall can therefore keep him at bay although the risk of causing other fires is certainly an issue. More importantly, however, Gnashphalt is driven by his appetite rather than any form of common sense, and can be easily led away from a valuable area simply by transporting oil or tar; when dealing with other kaiju, chasing after potential food sources could also get him into fights he can't win, as some other monsters have learned to their advantage.

Gnashphalt's greatest weakness, however, is actually himself - indeed, he seems to be dimly aware that he actually requires fuel and waste to not only grow, but also to keep his own overcrowded digestive enzymes from dissolving him from within. In theory, if kept pacified in the short term, he could be managed only until all the fuel and waste in the world runs out, leaving him to "eat" himself to death later while man picks up the pieces and looks for more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways to power his global infrastructure. His time on Earth is thus limited, but when he passes, he will likely leave a cleaner and hopefully wiser world behind him.

And here’s my last entry to this awesome contest - I hope I’m not too late! I feel like it’s kind of a rush job, but I still like the concept enough to submit it anyway.

One of the archetypes that I feel has been missing from the ATOM universe is a trash monster like Hedorah or Raremon, and I decided to work with that along with addressing the lack of a slime monster archetype. (I see the Writhing Flesh, while a solid concept on its own, as not a true blob monster, more like a giant sentient tumor.) Fun fact: The “Date Discovered” references when The Blob was first released in theaters. ;)

I wanted a blob with a giant mouth pretty much right out of the gate, but after I added some crude limbs to its sides I noticed how much it looked like a frog with weird eye placement, and honestly I think it’s appropriate, seeing as some frogs are literally mouths on legs. I also wanted an “antagonist” monster this time around, though he isn’t a mindless force of pure evil so much as a stubborn, selfish, socially inept slob who just wants to pig out on trash and make other monsters’ lives miserable. I also tried to balance him out by having him not in fact spread filth like other trash monsters do but clean it up instead, even if he causes way too much collateral damage in the process; it also means he can’t stick around indefinitely because non-renewable energy and pollutants probably won’t, either. That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous, though - just ask the small monsters he’s probably eaten. :P I wanted to color him poop-brown at one point but I decided that look wouldn’t be in good taste, and I hadn’t had a green-colored monster submitted yet, so I went with a dark sewage sludge green instead - also a subtle hint that tar used to be plant matter. ;)

Alright, with that I’m pretty much done with my entries, ‘cuz I probably won’t have the time to draw and send in another methinks. Good luck to all the entrants, and I’m sure that each and every one of them is awesome in their own right! :D

[sambart93]

2017.01.20 Todoufuken Puzzle

*Todoufuken means ‘Prefectures of Japan’ So basically: The Prefecture Puzzle which is rather fitting.

I went to see my first play of the year about two weeks ago! (Technically my first play cos Touken Ranbu LV doesn’t count because I wasn’t in the theatre in person xD)

Official Website here Stage Details here Official Twitter here

NON SPOILER:

Overall: It was nice and enjoyable with a serious over-tone and random comedy moments that hit really well - oh did I mention it was short?! Only 70mins!! I'm not used to that xD It was a quick interesting, thoughtful stage and I cannot wait to see JP’s next work obviously xD

Rating: 6/10

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SPOILERS:

It was Yasukawa Junpei’s play and I went into it knowing nothing except, judging on the ticket price, it was a small production. And I was right; the audience was practically all kankeishas except like me and 8 other people xD There was probably a total of 40 or 50 people in the audience so yeah, SUPER intimate and the staff were nice and it wasn’t even seat coded! So I chose second row and to the side which was luckily the side JP usually stayed on! Let’s get on with the story:

9 people from 9 different regions in Japan have been selected as part of a committee to decide what they should do as a Reformed Area Festival which will show off each regions famous or iconic food. In this play, the areas in Japan have been split up differently to what they are now - I was going to post a picture but look like I didn’t take one, so you’re getting a list, including each representative from each region:

Hokutouhoku (Literal. North-East-North’s) Region = Hokkaido, Aomori, Akita, Iwate. Representative: Kobayashi Yoshinori as Yagihashi

Nantouhoku (South-East-North) Region = Yamanashi, Miyagi, Fukshima. Representative: Odajima Aniwa as Souzou

Hokuriku Region = Niigata, Toyama, Ishikawa, Fukui. Representative: Tsuji Natsuki as Tsurumaki

KitaKantou (North Kantou) Region = Ibaraki, Tochigi, Saitama, Gunma. Representative: Tsuji Kyohei as Akutsu

MinamiKantou (South Kantou) Region = Tokyo, Chiba, Yokohama, Yamanashi. Representative: Yasukawa Junpei as Kamoshita

Toukai Region = Shizuoka, Aichi, Nagano, Gifu, Mie. Representative: Miyata Yuuhei as Seko

Kinki Region = Shiga, Kyoto, Hyogo, Osaka, Nara, Wakayama. Representative: Yuuki Tsugumi as Inomoto  

Nankai (South Sea) Region = Tottori, Okayama, Yamaguchi, Shimane, Hiroshima, Ehime, Kagawa, Kochi, Tokuyama. Representative: Shinzawa Tensho as Komada

Seikai (West Sea) Region = Fukuoka, Oita, Kumamoto, Kaogshima, Miyazaki, Nagasaki, Saga, Okinawa. Representative: Sodeyama Shun as Takane

As you can see there’s no Kantou, no Kansai, no Kyuushuu which is actually what was going to happen at one point in Japanese history but I’m glad they didn’t xD

And so they’ve come together to have a festival that shows off each area in a cultural, food way. First it started with Oden but then one of them wants to have more than one staple ingredient in the oden (they’re only supposed to pick one) and this leads them to be like ‘wait why we doing oden?! Why not just famous food from each region’ and slowly it moves from the topic of local food to a whole different level. 

My brain is a little fuzzy how we ended up on all these different topics and points of view but I’m going to bullet point all the main points that were brought up: 

 - There ends up being one member in the group who’s against the whole festival and feels that by doing the festival nothing will change; it won’t encourage people to move away from Tokyo, it won’t encourage the populous to move else where and wouldn’t help the regions economically. 

 - But the other members begin to talk about how they used to live in Tokyo and when they went back to their hometowns they felt more comfortable and very much at home and how most ended up working and staying in their hometowns. - One of them has never left his home town but notices how everytime his friends come back from the cities during new year and obon, they always comment and how nice it is to be back. And he’s proud of his hometown and doesn’t intend to leave even if all his friends have. 

- Another thing brought up is marriage and kids. How it’s more difficult to find a partner and such in the small places because everyone’s moved to the cities. But JP’s character is the least experienced of them all. Turns out everyone else is either married or married and kids, or have a partner or are happy just being by themselves and he talks of how even though more people are in the city, people aren’t really looking and it’s harder to find someone. He’s still single. 

- The final point brought up was from the woman who says 'I want people to come to Fukushima and see how great it is… I have a child and she’s perfectly healthy… my husband is from Hiroshima* but our baby is fine. If we think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki now… they’re now symbols of peace! And maybe in 50 years, 100years, Fukushima** also will be a sign of peace. That’s why I want to do this festival: to show the good in my hometown and encourage people to come. 

*if you don’t understand this then: Hiroshima was a victim of the 1945 atomic bomb dropped on Japan on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The radiation caused and still causes deformities and has raised cancer in the families affected.  **Fukushima was victim to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami that caused its nuclear plants to melt and radiation ended up spreading out into the air and cities. Even today a lot of the area near the power plant is a no go zone and maybe families are still waiting to return to their homes. This stage was a serious one but with some off comedy moments that hit really well, and one guy was very hilarious because of how dry and straight forward he was. 

There was a moment where JP's character (who's a born, raised and living Tokyo-ite) who feels he's missing out because every one except him can relate to the whole 'moving to Tokyo but moving back home is so nostalgic and slow paced and much nicer' and he says 'I don't have a hometown to go back to because Tokyo is my hometown. I can't go anywhere. I don't have the same experience as you guys.' And he gets really stressed and talks about him job and then the guy goes '..... please don't commit suicide' and it's so out of the blue and perfect delivery and JP is like 'I don't have such an intention' 'but don’t okay.... it's bad' 'I never said I would!' '....don't' 'I never said anything!' XD 

There's one character called Inomoto and she's from Osaka and she was the perfect stereotypical Osaka girl: Loud mouthed, strong personality, trying to boss everyone around, not afraid to speak her mind and she really lays in thick on JPs character 'why is it a person from Tokyo is holding the meeting? Are you trying to say people outside Tokyo aren't capable?!' and stuff like that. There's this moment after JP has his dark moment (the suicide moment and I talk more about this moment below) where she's like 'you gotta have girlfriend.... there's tons of beautiful girls there (in Tokyo)!' and he replies 'I don't have a girlfriend.... just because they're beautiful and there's a lot of them doesn't mean....' and then she rubs her hand on his face 'WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?! DONT SO THAT?!?! Why did you do that?! And you don't even talk to me nicely/in keigo!!!' Her simple answer is 'it's a bit of skinship!' from there she goes completely frozen for like 10 seconds solid, and suddenly goes all girly and 'wait, you hate me?! I'm sorry, please don't hate me' all cutesy and politely and the switch was rather funny xD she soon went back to normal but I really enjoyed her character and she was a main source of comedy. The audience (although I think most were her kankeishas) laughed a lot when she was on stage.

After all this has been discussed, they decide that this festival, even in the end if it doesn't bring new people to come and live in them, is a good idea and that they should continue and finalise it. 

It ends with JP being accepted in his role as the leader of the group and they start the meeting again. End.

This stage did make me think about my hometown and what I thought about it but unfortunately I must be a rare case of ‘girl from small town goes to the city and loves it and never wants to go back home’ because I couldn’t relate to them; I much prefer living where I am and would never dream of moving and living back home. I might change in a few years when I reach the character’s ages but right now; I can’t relate to the main message of loving your hometown. But I’m glad the stage made me contemplate and thin about such things.

Oooooh and besides JP - who by the way look absolutely dashing in those dark blue suit pants and black rimmed glasses and with his hair slick back!! He looked so good! But he looked a lot older in this role which I'm not used to xD and the first time he came in, he said with his back to me so got a lovely butt shot xD ooooops, ANYWAY - there was another Ikemen! As soon as he walked in I was like 'oh no!!! Who do I look at?! JP or this guy?!?!' This guy’s makeup, he definitely had eyeliner one, really brought attention to how pretty his eyes were and his character was a little immature but super cheery and genki which helped raise the mood during the play at times. He too, like JP, had these lovely dark navy pants on xD he was next to the elevator when I was leaving and he was all smiley and saying thank you. So naturally after I had to find out who he was!! His name is Shinzawa Tensho and he's a baby! A '95er! And a Junon (that's like an Ikemen magazine where you try and win the contest in it and a lot of guys get companies and managers through it) boy winner from 2 years ago! So he's SUPER new! OH! He was in High Low!! So looks like I'm gunna have to rewatch that. He was ALSO in a Midusmmer Night's Dream which I DID watch last year! (See review here and here) but who he was I have NO idea... looks like he was in the ensemble.... oh no! Was he the one guy I was attracted to?! =O 

Unfortunately he's not that photogenic; he's much cuter and prettier in person! But here's some pics anyway: 

It appears he's good friends with Riki which is amazing cos I LOVE Riki! <3

 Okay! Back to more important stuff!! 

Going back to the lovely JP cos that's who I went for so obviously that's who I wanna be bias about; THOSE PANTS!!! I've already comment on how JP looked in the stage so let's talk about his acting, y'know his JOB and what I'm THERE for xD firstly: I was surprised at how small JPs role actually ended up being. There were like 10-20 mins at a time before he spoke. Even though he was credit first on the cast list, I feel like he did the second least amount on stage, of course his body language and reactions fitted the scenes perfectly but I was a little shocked and upset at how little lines he got... BUT I really enjoyed the moments he did have. He had one moment where he gets really angry and just snaps and yelled and I was impressed with this scene from him because I've never seen him do such a role before and I think he did angry very well! Also the comedy moment I mentioned before where Inomoto touches his face; reaction is great! As well as he timing with the guy who's like 'please don't commit suicide' the timing of his replies were great and helped the comedy there. Other than that he was playing a quiet, conserved guy who just wanted the meeting and ideas to be decided. It was a nice slow role for him to play compared to his Dance With Devils character who, he played last month, is bat shit crazy. 

Unfortunately there was one guy in the crowd who laughed at pretty much every line for like no reason. There were some seriously funny moments but not that many. He was annoying.

The audience was full of girls too which is kinda to be expected and again, for small time plays, most were kankeishas anyway xD and I think the majority were Inomoto’s actresses kankeishas because loads spoke to her after the show.

The after talk was the director and two guys from the (same?) production company and they spoke about how many times they've changed companies and how sometimes it's hard when you wanna do your own thing but you gotta work as a group. And they said 'even a one person group can still be an acting troupe' xD and they spoke of how one of them started in Osaka and one of the main members suggested going to Tokyo and so he went but no one follows him xD And then they naturally got into a conversation about two out of the there's parents being divorced and how they have their own kids and stuff and one of them even lives in the Philippines now. I don't remember the point of the story but it was refreshing to hear a Japanese person talk so naturally about divorce and not making it a big deal or acting like it's the worst thing ever. It was very in line with my point of view of divorce: it's no biggie and it happens often. 

Once it was officially over a lot of the actors came out and (I assume it was) their Kankeishas were talking and laughing with them. I decided to leave quickly rather than wait around for JP this time, don't wanna be a bother to him xD but I left him a rather long letter and some gifts from England so hopefully he appreciates them. 

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 I doubt there's a DVD of this so just assume this is the best English review of this stage you're ever gunna get. 

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PS. Apologies if this feels rushed or there’s lots of mispellings. I did have a perfectly nice review but then my pc crashed and I lost it all so out of stress and anger you’re getting the shittier version.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Virginia woman does 53 acts of kindness for 53rd birthday (AP) The pandemic didn’t allow Debra Ferrell to gather with her whole family for her birthday. So instead, she celebrated the day by giving back—with 53 gifts from her heart. Ferrell went on social media and asked people for suggestions on acts of kindness that she could perform for others during her birth month, one for every year that she’s been alive. “It’s one of the hardest times in my history, so I figured why not make other people smile,” said Ferrell. The requests for her Oct. 4 birthday arrived from across the U.S.: Parents who hoped for words of encouragement for their kids on their first year of virtual school. A woman who wished for a gift basket for her fiancé, a doctor at a hospital’s COVID-19 unit. A friend of a family in Minnesota that lost their 4-year-old to cancer, who wanted them to feel that they were not alone. “I know that might sound cheesy, but it’s just one of my favorite things to do,” said Ferrell, who works as a resident service coordinator at a retirement community. “I just feel that if we live our life trying to make other people smile, I’m the one who gets the most out of it.”

Some people actually had a pretty good year (NYT) Though a wide array of businesses are suffering this year, many that cater to professionals and the elite are doing better than ever. It’s now well-documented that the coronavirus pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated American inequality. While the wealthy and the highly educated haven’t entirely escaped the soul-crushing effects of the virus—quarantine-induced cabin fever, sharing at-home work spaces with Zoom schoolrooms and a number of other shared losses and stresses—they have also been, on the whole, getting richer. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that jobs that can be performed remotely made up a relatively small share of pandemic-related job losses, and according to The Wall Street Journal “workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher had nearly fully recovered jobs lost in early spring” by September. Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers are without college degrees. And many of those who have been unable to work from home have been struggling in shocking numbers. Women and especially mothers employed in the service sector were more likely to experience pandemic-related job loss. Black and Latino adults, who, because of health inequities, are more likely to contract and die from Covid-19 than their white counterparts, have also faced disproportionate financial struggles during this recession. A small but substantial sliver of America, however, is doing better than ever, or at least just fine: enjoying the freedoms that remote work paired with disposable income can bring, using this pause in the typical 24/7 busyness of professional-class social life to take a breath and to reassess and rejigger their lives.

Barr flies (Foreign Policy) U.S. Attorney General William Barr is out of the job, following an announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday evening. Trump tweeted a letter written by Barr outlining his respect for the president, ending with the confirmation that he would resign on Dec. 23. Barr had reportedly fallen out with Trump over the attorney general’s statement that no significant voter fraud could be found in the Nov. 3 presidential election. Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen will now take on Barr’s former post in an acting capacity.

Unwelcome in other countries, Americans are fleeing lockdowns and flocking to Mexico (Los Angeles Times) The pandemic was raging, but on the beaches of Cabo San Lucas it felt like spring break. Tipsy young Americans in bikinis and swim trunks vied for buckets of beer in a push-up competition at a crowded bar. Vendors in wide-brimmed hats plodded through the sand, offering rugs, massages and—under their breath—cocaine. Down near the water, 24-year-old Kierston Jackson sat entwined with her boyfriend, their matching blue surgical masks a concession to the coronavirus. “It’s a good change of pace,” said Jackson, a Houston resident, as she gazed at the gently lapping waves. “I’d definitely prefer to be here with a mask on than in my home without one.” Unwelcome in many countries as the virus surges worldwide, U.S. tourists are fleeing lockdowns at home and flocking to Mexico. Nearly half a million Americans flew to Mexico in October—the most recent month for which data is available—mainly to beaches on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. The influx of Americans is a ray of hope for the country’s battered tourism sector, which has hemorrhaged more than $11 billion this year.

Natural disasters cost insurance industry $76 billion in 2020—Swiss Re (Reuters) Natural disasters like wildfires which devastated parts of the United States and a record number of hurricanes in the Atlantic caused $76 billion in insured losses during 2020, Swiss Re said on Tuesday. The 40% increase from $54 billion in 2019 dwarfed the $7 billion in man-made losses during 2020, the reinsurance company said in its sigma estimate for the year. The total insurance industry losses of $83 billion made 2020 the fifth costliest year since 1970, the company said. “Losses were driven by a record number of severe convective storms—thunderstorms with tornadoes, floods and hail—and wildfires in the U.S.,” Swiss Re said.

ICC prosecutor sees ‘reasonable basis’ to believe Venezuela committed crimes against humanity (Reuters) The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor believes there is “reasonable basis” to believe Venezuela has committed crimes against humanity, according to a report published by the prosecutor’s office on Monday. United Nations investigators in September determined that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government has committed systematic human rights violations, including killings and torture, amounting to crimes against humanity. The Hague-based tribunal has been examining Venezuela’s case since 2018 and expects to determine in 2021 whether to open a full investigation. Though Maduro’s adversaries have celebrated the ICC’s probe of Venezuela, few believe the process is likely to lead to a short-term change in the struggling nation. ICC criminal proceedings stretch for years, and it has in the past struggled to carry out arrest warrants when it obtains them.

Netherlands to go into tough, five-week lockdown over Christmas (Reuters) The Netherlands will go into a tough second lockdown, with the closure of all schools and shops for at least five weeks, in a government-led push to fight the coronavirus, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Monday. “The Netherlands is closing down,” he said to the sound of protesters banging pots and pans outside his office in The Hague. “We realise the gravity of our decisions, right before Christmas.” The measures, detailed in a rare live television address, include limiting gatherings to no more than two people, also at home. An exception will be made for three days around Christmas, when three adult visitors will be permitted, he said. People were further advised to stay at home, not to travel to work and to avoid contact with other people as much as possible. From Tuesday, all public places—including daycare centres, gyms, museums, zoos, cinemas, hairdressers and beauty salons—will close until Jan. 19. Schools will close until Jan. 18. Supermarkets, banks and pharmacies will be allowed to stay open.

Chernobyl tourism (Foreign Policy) In a year has shown that what you do after disaster has struck is often more important than the disaster itself, it’s perhaps fitting that Chernobyl—the site of the world’s worst nuclear incident—is in a push to be recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site. The Ukrainian government is pursuing an initiative to have the site added to the heritage list in a bid to boost tourism to the area, 20 years after the power plant finally ceased operating, and four years since a protective dome over the doomed fourth reactor was completed. 124,000 tourists—a record number—visited Chernobyl in 2019 amid renewed interest following a popular television drama of the same name. Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko now hopes to boost annual tourist numbers to one million.

Russia’s Putin recognizes Biden’s win (Washington Post) More than a month later than most world leaders, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday congratulated President-elect Joe Biden for his victory in the election, a delayed recognition that could set the tone for icy relations. “In his message Vladimir Putin wished the president-elect every success and expressed confidence that Russia and the United States, which bear special responsibility for global security and stability, can, despite their differences, effectively contribute to solving many problems and meeting challenges that the world is facing today,” the Kremlin said in a statement. Putin was one of the last heads of state to acknowledge Biden’s win; Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un are other holdouts. The congratulations come after Biden’s victory became more formal on Monday, when 306 electors officially voted for him.

Silent nights (Worldcrunch) Catholic church officials in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, have announced Christmas carol activities will be banned, The Philippine News Agency reports. Churches were asked not to organize carolings in order to “protect the public and the choir members” as according to experts, the virus could easily spread through singing, officials say. Christmas carols are an important part of the holiday traditions in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country that celebrates the world’s longest Christmas season, from Sept. 1 to New Year’s Eve.

Package-tour diplomacy: Thousands of Israeli tourists flock to Dubai after peace deal (Washington Post) Ashish Negi prides himself on spotting the nationality of tourists as soon as they walk into his jewelry store—so he can be jokey with Americans, chatty with Brits and ready to bargain with Russians—but he was baffled by the man in the tall black hat and the curly sideburns who came in last week. “This was something I had not seen in Dubai,” Negi said of the first ultra-Orthodox Jewish visitor to reach his corner of the city’s traditional gold market, part of a wave of Israeli tourists who have descended on the United Arab Emirates in recent days. In the two weeks since commercial flights began between Tel Aviv and the Emirati cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Israelis have caused a remarkable tourism boomlet in the Gulf nation. Suddenly, Hebrew can be heard throughout the markets, malls and beaches of a destination that was strictly off-limits until the two countries achieved a diplomatic breakthrough in August and established normal relations. More than 50,000 Israelis have brushed aside covid-19 concerns, a terrorism warning and decades of tension to make the three-hour flight across the Arab Peninsula. Israeli tourism officials expect more than 70,000 to arrive during the eight days of Hanukkah, which began last week, in an unprecedented exchange between the Jewish state and one of its historically standoffish Muslim neighbors.

Ten years on, anger grows in Tunisian town where ‘Arab Spring’ began (Reuters) Ten years ago, a fruit seller set himself ablaze in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid after an altercation with a policewoman about where he had put his cart. Word of Mohammed Bouazizi’s fatal act of defiance quickly spread, sparking nationwide protests that eventually toppled Tunisia’s long-serving leader and helped inspire similar uprisings across the region—the so-called “Arab Spring”. Huge demonstrations broke out in Egypt and Bahrain, governments fell and civil war engulfed Libya, Syria and Yemen. Tunisians are now free to choose their leaders and can publicly criticise the state. Yet for all the chaos they have been through, many people look back on the events of 2010 and regret that their dreams remain unfulfilled. “Something went wrong in the revolution,” said Attia Athmouni, a retired philosophy teacher who helped lead the uprising after Bouazizi’s death by standing on the fruit seller’s abandoned cart to address the crowd the night he died. Protests have flared again in recent weeks across Tunisia’s poorer southern towns against joblessness, poor state services, inequality and shortages.

[ntrending]

What should we do about nuclear energy?

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/what-should-we-do-about-nuclear-energy/

What should we do about nuclear energy?

Within sight of the sunbathers at Old Man’s surf spot, 55 miles north of San ­Diego, California, loom a pair of 176-foot-tall orbs. They’re a strange backdrop, home of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Since its first reactor fired up in 1968, the plant has powered millions of lives. But now these concrete and steel domes house a problem. Inside their frames sit millions of pounds of radio-active fuel no longer of use to anyone.

In 2012, a small radiation leak forced the shutdown of one reactor. Rather than go through the regulatory red-tape of restarting the remaining reactor at reduced power, Southern California Edison, the operator, decided to shutter the whole plant. This year, workers will begin dismantling it as part of the costliest and biggest nuclear decommissioning project ever attempted in the U.S. The initial deactivation should take 10 years, with 700,000 metric tons of infrastructure crushed and freighted off to burial plots in Utah, ­Texas, and Arizona. The most radioactive stuff—3.2 million pounds of spent uranium-235—will be interred on-site in steel-and-concrete casks that will dot the landscape like tombstones.

It’s a fitting metaphor for what seems like the beginning of the end of America’s ­nuclear-energy ambitions. San Onofre is one of 19 ­nuclear power plants in the U.S. ­undergoing decommissioning. Of the 99 remaining reactors in the U.S. fleet, as much as one-third might be taken offline within a decade or two. Some might apply for an extension. But many could close for good thanks to three things that are killing off nuclear energy worldwide: competition from cheap natural gas, the rising affordability of wind and solar generation, and fear of radiation-spewing accidents.

“The nuclear industry is pretty broken in the United States,” says Armond Cohen, executive director of the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, which advocates for low-carbon energies to combat climate change. Cost overruns and delays have hamstrung the few nuclear power plants that were under construction, in South Carolina and Georgia. Even if that weren’t the case, nuclear today makes no economic sense, Cohen says. “You could build the most cost-effective reactor in the world, and it wouldn’t beat the cost of a compressed-gas plant.”

It’s not just the U.S. industry. A number of other nations are dimming the lights on their nuclear plants. Germany, where eight reactors supply 13 percent of the country’s power, has vowed to shut them all by 2022. Switzerland pledged to phase out its five reactors, which provide 40 percent of its energy. And France, which gets 75 percent of its energy from nuclear, vowed to slash consumption to 50 percent by 2025, only to back off that promise in November, worried that a shift from carbon-zero nuclear would prevent it from meeting its climate-change goals and lead to an electricity shortfall.

And yet a handful of other nations are ­accelerating toward a nuclear future. China, in trying to reduce its expanding reliance on coal, is aggressively pushing for more alternative fuels, with plans to increase its nuclear capacity to as much as 150 gigawatts by 2030, up from about 38 gigawatts in 2017. It is adding 20 new reactors to its current fleet of 37. Russia is building seven, India six, and South Korea three.

China, in particular, is pursuing novel reactor designs expected to run more cheaply, efficiently, and safely than those the world has used for decades. The most common today is the light water reactor, in which water cools solid nuclear fuel and generates turbine-spinning steam. Alternatives include a variation on the light water reactor called a small modular reactor that, in theory, could be built quickly and inexpensively, though its design will put out less energy. Another is a molten salt reactor that employs melted salts to cool fuel and produces less waste than the current fleet.

Critics warn that the U.S. is giving up on a reliable energy source and leaving itself vulnerable to strategic threats.

As the U.S. retreats from nuclear power, critics warn it is giving up on a source of electricity that is reliable and emits zero carbon, a boon to any nation looking to trade some of its fossil-fuel habit for clean power. Former Obama energy secretary and nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz cautioned as much this past July. At a summit on energy and security, he said abandoning nuclear would leave the nation vulnerable to environmental and strategic threats, by sidelining a greenhouse-emissions-free power and by weakening national-security ­interests: A brain drain of ­nuclear engineers and technicians to nuclear-hungry countries is sure to follow.

The historic irony is not subtle. The U.S. ­ignited the nuclear age, aided by scientists originally from nations such as Germany, Hungary, and Italy. After it demonstrated the horrific power of nuclear energy on Japan in World War II, the U.S. military and commercial researchers looked for ways to exploit the technology. An early success: nuclear powered submarines that could travel underwater almost indefinitely. The sub’s reactor design quickly became the basis for the light water reactors we use today. The problem is the uranium in a number of those reactor designs operate at high temperature, requiring a massive amount of water to keep from overheating. If anything—for instance, a natural disaster—disrupts the plant’s safety system, the reactor core can melt down, releasing radiation into the environment.

A Cold War nuclear boom saw hundreds of light water reactors spread across the U.S. and Europe. As they proliferated, public fears grew alongside them, and by the 1970s, movies like The China Syndrome evoked the horrors of what might happen if something went wrong. Weeks after that movie’s release in 1979, it did. A partial meltdown on March 28 at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, rattled the nation. In 1986, an explosion at a plant in Chernobyl, Russia, and its subsequent radiation contamination of 90,000 square miles galvanized public opinion. Finally, in 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami triggered a series of events that led to a core meltdown in three reactors at Fukushima, Japan. This history of rare yet dramatic accidents was enough to sway public sentiment, but the availability of cheap natural gas made the choice easy. Much of the world that once embraced nuclear is now dealing with hundreds of silenced reactors and with cleaning up thousands of acres dotted with steel and concrete hulks and spent fuel. A $222 billion industry has sprung up to decommission these behemoths.

The choreography of unbuilding a nuclear power plant is complicated and ­requires hiring companies and workers that specialize in the process. In the case of San ­Onofre, it’s the Los Angeles-based AECOM and EnergySolutions, headquartered in Utah.

The $4.4 billion project aims to sweep clear most of the narrow 85-acre beachfront site. Workers have already moved the plant’s spent fuel into steel-lined cooling pools. After it has sat there for several years, workers will transfer it to 73 steel canisters and then tuck these inside 25-foot-tall monoliths next to the domes.

This repository will sit just 125 feet from the Pacific, behind a seawall that rises 28 to 30 feet above sea level. Its proximity to the coast—and to the 8 million people who live within 50 miles—means many of them want the waste gone. Last April, protesters dressed in hazmat suits and carrying surfboards march-ed through San Diego demanding the waste’s removal. The utility wants it gone too, but it has to keep it safely on-site for now. Tom Palmisano, vice president and chief nuclear officer at San Onofre, says that the storage system, known as dry cask, is designed to withstand an airplane crash, tsunami, even ground acceleration from a nearly magnitude 7.4 earthquake.

Though workers could, in theory, move the casks to a permanent resting place, none currently exist in the United States. The ­Department of Energy is legally bound to take spent commercial nuclear fuel and house it in a permanent spot. But the government never developed a permanent storage place after President Obama scuttled a plan to store commercial and military nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. This past August, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it would resume the work needed to eventually open that site. In the meantime, some 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is stored across the country.

At San Onofre, workers will place spent fuel in dry-cask storage and then demolish the buildings and offices. First, remotely controlled underwater tools will saw through radioactive steel from inside the empty reactors. Workers will store some of this material on-site for later disposal with the used fuel. They will pack the non-tainted portions—some 75 percent of a total 25 million cubic feet of rebar, concrete, and piping—in steel containers to dispose in the Southwest.

Rail cars will haul low-level radiation debris to specialized landfills. EnergySolutions will cart some of it to its desert facility in Clive, Utah, where workers will bury it beneath thick layers of clay, gravel, and rock.

More of these nuclear graves will cover the landscape as utilities take reactors offline around the globe. And unless renewable energy takes the place of nuclear, more carbon from fossil-fuel-fired plants will fill the air. When San Onofre shut down in 2012, natural-gas-fired electricity plants stepped in—adding 9 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the following 12 months.

Despite the financial pressures from ­natural gas and the growth in wind- and solar-energy production, Cohen holds fast in his belief that the U.S. should give nuclear energy another chance. “There are new technologies in the works,” he says. “This isn’t going to be your father’s nuclear industry. It might fail, and it ultimately might be unnecessary, but it’s worth trying.”

For now, though, the nays have it.

Mary Beth Griggs is an assistant editor at Popular Science. She covers space, geology, archaeology, and the environment.

This article was originally published in the January/February 2018 Power issue of Popular Science.

Written By Mary Beth Griggs

[allthingsfantasy]

Blog Tour ~ Chameleon Assassin ~ Excerpt

Book Title: Chameleon Assassin

Author Name: B.R. Kingsolver

Genre: Urban Fantasy, science fiction, post-apocalyptic dystopian

Hosted by: Ultimate Fantasy Book Tours

 Blurb:

 Libby is a mutant, one of the top burglars and assassins in the world. For a price, she caters to executives’ secret desires. Eliminate your corporate rival? Deliver a priceless art masterpiece or necklace? Hack into another corporation’s network? Libby’s your girl.

 Climate change met nuclear war, and humanity lost. The corporations stepped in, stripping governments of power. Civilization didn’t end, but it became less civilized.

 There are few rules as corporations jockey for position and control of assets and markets. The corporate elite live in their walled estates and skyscraper apartments while the majority of humanity supplies their luxuries. On the bottom level, the mutants, the poor, and the criminals scramble every day just to survive.

  Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33218237-chameleon-assassin

  ↓Buy Links↓

 Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N2NVWP5

    Author Bio:

  I made silver and turquoise jewelry for almost a decade, ended up in nursing school, then took a master’s in business. Along the way I worked in construction, as a newspaper editor, a teacher, and somehow found a career working with computers.

 As to my other interests, I love the outdoors, especially the Rocky Mountains. I’ve skied since high school, with one broken leg and one torn ACL to show for it. I’ve hiked and camped all my life. I love to travel, though I haven’t done enough of it. I’ve seen a lot of Russia and Mexico, not enough of England. Amsterdam is amazing, and the Romanian Alps are breathtaking. Lake Tahoe is a favorite, and someday I’d like to see Banff.

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    Past the entertainment district, I turned inland and made my way around the sewage treatment plant toward the old tenement building where Amanda Rollins had her orphanage. The corporate types never saw that part of town, nor did the corporations provide any services to the people who lived there. Neither the subway nor the buses ran there, and they had to pay scamming resellers for electricity and water at far higher rates than people paid in the corporate parts of town.

I passed a small store with a beggar out front. Across the street, none of the windows in the house had glass. I wouldn’t see any more beggars on my route. No one bothered to beg from people who didn’t have anything.

Picking my way through rubble in the street where an old burned building had fallen down, I heard whistles—signals between gang members that an outsider had entered their territory. It was rare that someone who could afford shoes went into that part of town. Most of the people who lived there couldn’t even afford filter masks and had to breathe the raw air. Even with my skills, the danger was very real. My mask alone made me worth mugging. The corporations employed the police, but they paid them to keep the inhabitants in the slums, not to control their behavior.

“I’m a friend of Miz Rollins,” I shouted and continued walking as though I didn’t have a care in the world.

A couple of blocks farther on, a dirty-faced girl of about fifteen stepped out of an alley ahead of me, her skinny legs poking out from what used to be a blue floral-print shift. Her ragged hair might have been blonde if it had been clean.

“Miz Libby?” she called. She looked ready to bolt.

I smiled. “Hello, Glenda. How have you been?”

A big smile split her face. “I been pretty good.” She skipped toward me.

Crouching down, I opened my arms and gathered her into a hug.

“You been gone,” she said.

“Yes, I know. I’m a bum.” I pulled a package of beef jerky out of my pocket and handed it to her.

“You’re not a bum. You’re the best.” She tore open the package, stuffed a wad of the dried meat in her mouth, and fell in beside me.

“The boys been bothering you?” I asked.

“Not too bad. Jorey keeps em off me.”

I controlled a flare of temper. “That’s nice of Jorey,” I managed to say. I didn’t know Jorey, but I doubted he was an altruist.

“I’m nice to him, and he’s nice to me. He never hurts me and he say he’ll keep me warm this winter. You goin to see Miz Rollins?”

Glenda got tired of her alcoholic mother selling her for booze and drug money, and ran away when she was twelve. It wasn’t much better on the street. I met her when I stumbled over two older teens taking turns with her in an alley. Those two, and three more over time, served as a warning to others that tumbling the little blonde girl could carry a death sentence. Most of the street people stayed away from her after that. I couldn’t save all the thousands of girls living on the streets, but I figured that shouldn’t stop me from killing all the rapists I could get my hands on.

Like most of the people in that part of town, Glenda couldn’t read or write. She had been to a doctor once in her life, when I took her to get all her immunizations and an implant. In spite of all the constantly mutating diseases, Glenda amazingly hadn’t caught any. During my sex-ed class in middle school, the teacher told us scientists identified a new sexually transmitted disease every week that were mostly caused by mutations of known pathogens. In spite of growing up in a brothel, those classes made me so paranoid I was still a virgin when I got to university.  

Nellie kept telling me I should take Glenda to my mom. With regular nutrition and hygiene, she would be pretty. It would be a better life, but the thought of her in a brothel turned my stomach. Maybe Nellie was right, though. It would be better than leaving her to the tender mercies of whoever the hell Jorey was. She’d at least have a chance at a decent life.

We arrived at the orphanage, and the place erupted, kids screaming and running around.

“Miz Libby!”

“It’s Miz Libby!”

“Miz Rollins, it’s Miz Libby!”

Most of the kids were able at least to dress and feed themselves. They were all either crippled or disfigured, some so severely they might face harm in the richer parts of town just because of the way they looked.

One boy who couldn’t take care of himself was Walter. *Hello, Miz Libby,* Walter’s voice sounded in my head. *I hope you’re doing well.*

Walter was blind and confined to a wheelchair, but he was the most powerful telepath I had ever met. Of course, I hadn’t met too many.

Amanda Rollins came to the door and waved, a broad smile on her face. Amanda was a tall, thin, light-skinned black woman. I figured she was in her forties but she appeared older. She was the only person in my life that I knew was going to heaven.

We embraced and went inside to the kitchen. She shooed everyone out and closed the door.

“Libby, it’s good to see you.” She shook her head. “That money you sent with Nellie, I don’t know how I can ever thank you. Dear Lord, that’s more money than I ran this place on all of last year. If it wasn’t for you, I think everything would just fall apart. You’re an angel, girl. An angel from heaven.”

“I’ve been accused of a lot of things,” I said, “but that’s a first. I’m no angel, and I’m definitely no saint. That’s you.”

Amanda was Nellie’s aunt, and that’s how I met her. I emptied my bag of the stuff I brought. Beef jerky, dried fruit, children’s vitamins, basic medicines, such as aspirin, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, sterile gauze and surgical tape.

“Oh, Lord,” Amanda said. “It don’t matter what you show up with, it’s always something I need that I don’t have.”

The building didn’t have electricity, therefore no refrigeration. How she managed always amazed me.

I pulled out the credit card Dad had given me for Carpenter’s jewelry and her eyes popped wide.

“I want you to move someplace with electricity,” I said. “I want you out of this neighborhood. And I want you to have a doctor come regularly, at least once a month.”

“Oh, Libby. I can’t afford all that.”

“You can now.” I handed her my dad’s business card. “Call this man and tell him I sent you. Tell him how big a place you need, a place with electricity and heat in the winter. Tell him you can pay a thousand a month, but no more.”

“A thousand a month? There ain’t no way I can afford that. I never seen a thousand a month my whole life.”

“Tell him I’m paying the rent.”

Her mouth fell open.

“I’ll pay the utilities, too. Now, this,” I held out the card again, “is for furniture, food, medicines, doctors, all the other things you’ll need. Let me know when you’re ready to move, and I’ll bring some friends and a truck to help.” I couldn’t think of a better place to spend Kahlil Carpenter’s money, although it was probably his insurance company’s money.

She shook her head so hard I thought she might sprain something. “No, no, no. Libby, you don’t know how much all that will cost. How am I going to keep things going after you spend all your money? Your heart’s in the right place, child, but you got no sense.”

[viralhottopics]

The Far-Out Summit Where Geniuses Learn to Build Starships

To get to the spaceship convention I have to go to Chattanooga. To a former train depot once called Terminal Station, a beaux-arts building downtown, which was built in a time when trains were the apex of industrythe smartest, fastest, most high-tech way to move through spaceand when stations were elegant ports of call. It has a soaring dome, and the bathrooms are naturally lit through stained glass.

Terminal Station closed in 1970, not quite a year after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. The building reopened in 1973, four months after the Apollo program ended, as the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel. The new owners put a neon train on the roof, the concourse beneath the freestanding dome became a lobby, and the baggage room became a dining hall. Passenger cars were moored to the rails and refurbished as luxury suites. The iron horse engine became a thing for guests to climb aboard forselfies. The outbuildings and rail yards sprouteda gift shop, a pizza parlor, a comedy club, an indoor jungle-themed swimming pool, and an outdoor doughnut-shaped swimming pool, among other things.

Chattanooga is not quite the regional transportation hub it was in the latter golden age of rail travel, and in fact these days is kind of a pain in the ass to get to. So after 12hours of planes, delays, and courtesy shuttles, I drop my baggage in my room and go looking for a drink.

Philip Lubin, a UC Santa Barbara physicist, begins his plenary talkRoadmap to Interstellar Flightby announcing that he rarely goes to these kinds of conferences because they are too far on the imaginary axis for me. But Lubin has a plan for launching vehicles from Earth that would reach Alpha Centauri not in 30,000 years but in 20.

Heres what you need: an orbital laser, a small satellite equipped with a square meter of reflective sail, and the sun. Superefficient solar panels power the laser, which can fire the equivalent of about one-eighth the amount of electricity the US consumes each year. That dense stream of photons creates enough pressure against the sail to accelerate the craft to 100 million miles per hourone fifth the speed of light.

Which at first sounds pretty bullshitty. Laser sails? But nobody in this lecture hall full of no-bullshitters snorts. So keep listening: A single photon exerts an infinitesimal amount of force. Cant get much much delta-vee from that. But a lot of photons pushing against a very tiny spacecraft? That will give you a whole hell of a lot of delta-freaking-vee. Which is why Lubin spends a lot of his stage time talking about Moores law, the exponential rate at which computers get simultaneously faster and cheaper over time. His plan requires fully functioning satellitesprocessors, camera, nav, comms, and even a tiny propulsion unit for course adjustmentsweighing less than a gram.

Oh, and a really big laser. Throttling a wafersat up to 100 million miles per hour will take a 100-gigawatt laser array. Or, for the no-bullshit, build-it-with-todays-technologyby strapping together 100 million 1-kilowatt lasers.

The plan has technical hurdles. During the Q&A after the talk, astrophysicist (and third TVIW cofounder) Greg Matloff raises objections about how the Doppler effect will sap photons propulsive force. But for the most part, the plan uses existing or close-enough technology and is therefore very non-bullshit until you start talking price.

A 1-kilowatt laser retails for about $70. Even if you get the bulk discount for buying 100 million of them, you still have to put them in orbit. Current launch rate is about $3,000 a pound. Also, the solar panels that will power the thing are very expensive (and heavy). The whole apparatus could be anywhere from three to 10 square miles across. For comparison, the International Space Station is slightly bigger than a football field.

Lubins talk pisses off a lot of people. Hes up there onstage, basically telling them their ideas for fusion, matter-antimatter, and whatever else are too expensive, too slow, and too imaginary for interstellar travel in this lifetime. Oh, also, dont bother building a worldship or whatever, because the human body is 99 percent wasted mass. Sorry.

Philip Lubin (left) discusses beamed energy propulsion during aworking track following his plenary speech about beamed energy propulsion. Joey O’Loughlin

But then, a little more than a month after the TVIW talk, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces that he plans to seed Lubins idea with $100 million. Thats not Apollo money$200 billion in 2016 dollarsbut Milner also scales back some of Lubins ideas. (He grounds the laser, eliminating a lot of the launch costs). Milner tells me he expects the $100 million will buy the project a proof-of-concept. The complete 100-million-mph mission to Alpha Centauri will likely cost between $5 billion (one Large Hadron Collider) and $10 billion (A James Webb Space Telescopeplus two New Horizons).

If you want to send people to space, propulsion is the least of your problems. It’s not as hard as food, water, and not catching space madness.

Again, that is for a mission with no people. The price tag for a crewed mission to the stars is Apollo squared. Maybe even cubed. Who knows. But despite Lubins ambivalence toward crewed interstellar flight and Milners low investment relative to the goal, this proof-of-concept pushes the humans a little bit closer toward being an interstellar species.

And if you are talking about people, propulsion is probably the easiest problem to solve, spacewise. Even if your sub-bullshit interstellar engine runs on nuclear fusion (which no one knows how to build) fueled by helium-3 from Jupiters atmosphere (which no one knows how to harvest), learning how to create such a thing is still not as hard as feeding, hydrating, protecting from radiation, keeping sane, and otherwise keeping healthy multiple generations of human beings. But thats what you have to do if youre using a sub-bullshit engine to go to another star.

Amodel worldship discussed at TVIW would carry about 10,000 people.Michel Lamontagne

The Worldship

Imagine a rod over 9 miles long, maybe a quarter-mile wide. Now put 12 rings around it, each 3miles in diameter, attached to the central rod with spokes. Spin the wheels to simulate gravity. Thats a generation ship, designed to spend hundreds or thousands of years traveling between star systems. A worldship.

Theres a picture of that one taped to awall ina meeting room at the Chattanooga Choo Choos convention center. The room is temporary headquarters for the Worldship Working Track, an effort to add a little bit of variety to TVIWs propulsion-heavy diet. The dozen and a half worldshippers are split into two subgroups, each gathered around their own round banquet tables covered with laptops, spiral notebooks, elbows, and soda cans.

On a large, easeled, tearaway pad in the middle of the room, somebody on the worldship team has drawn a color-coded cross section of the rings. From outside in: a one-meter-thick structural shell; three meters of two-phase water to shield against radiation; varying thicknesses of substrate, rock, and soil; 500-meter air gap; clear ceiling; and about 2 kilometers of vacuum between the ceiling and central hub.

The worldship rings could replicate any Earthly climate by adjustingheat and precipitation.Michel Lamontagne

The climate subgroup of worldshippers ishuddled over a single laptop, working on the rain problem. A French-Canadian engineer named Michel Lamontagne tells me planet Earth has the best plumbing system in the universe. Solar energy heats moisture, moisture rises, cools, condenses, falls, wash, rinse, repeat. Figuring out the thermodynamics of cloud formation is a pain in the ass, but way more reliable in the long run. No pipes to clog, filters to foul, screws to strip, vents to dent, valves to rust. Maintenance is not just a hassle; any mission-critical system with an abundance of moving parts is bound to failcriticallyat some stage of a multigenerational interstellar mission. Plus, rain helps keep the dust down.

Worldship passengers: cockroaches, dogs, Maine coon cats, rats, crickets, and tarantulas. But nothing from Australia. Everything there wants to kill you.

How much energy does moist ground need for evaporation to occur? On Earth, insolation is about 1200 watts per square meter, Lamontagne says.

Actually, 164 watts per square meter is the day/night average for Earths energy, says Geoffrey Landis, a NASA physicist (and science fiction writer).

Wait, Landis says. Actually, the Earths surface is convex, so it doesnt absorb as much heat. The worldships rings will be concave, meaning energy absorption will be a lot higher. So for now, they figure, 240 watts per square meter.

The subgroup around the other table is figuring out life: flora, fauna, and the nutrient cycles that sustain them. This group is more crowded, but quieter. Three are working out the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycles. Each of the remaining has been assigned a batch of plants and animals by an evolutionary biologist from Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital named Cassidy Cobbs. She is the groups Noah.

Mosquitoes, no; cockroaches, yes. Wolves, no; dogs, yes. Rats, crickets, tarantulas: yes, yes, yes. Except no tarantulas from Australia. In fact, most of Australia is right out, doomed to remain Earthbound with everything else too venomous, fanged, large, or aggressive. The top predator is a Maine Coon cat, Cobbs says. Crops are exactly what you would expect: grains, legumes, tubers, brassicas, lettuces, and nightshades.

I peek over Cobbs shoulder at her master list and freak out a little bit. It includes neither cacao nor coffee plants. Who the hell would want to jump on a spaceship without coffee and chocolate? Later, in the hospitality suite, I corner one of Cobbs team members and ask her: What the hell?

We discussed both crops, Ashleigh Hughes, a high school student, assures me. Both plants could grow along a rings elevated ridges, so long as that ring has a tropical climate.

High school student and TVIW attendee Ashleigh Hughes works out the ecological requirements for various plants and animals in the worldship. Joey O’Loughlin

The table next to the biology group is unpeopled, covered with backpacks, open laptops, and a few books. Includinga copy of Kim Stanley Robinsons novel Aurora. Which I find a little bit surprising, given (no spoilers) Robinsons book about a worldship trip to the Tau Ceti system portrays interstellar missions as dismal and doomed.

Science fiction and space culture enjoy a mutualistic relationship. During presentations, speakers often preface digressions with phases like This next bit would be a cool idea for any science fiction writers in the audience to play with Every physicist, engineer, and enthusiast I spoke to said their career had been, and still is, inspired by books, TV shows, movies, comics about space travel. The physicist Les Johnson, who MCd the talks, is deputy director of NASAs Advanced Concepts Office, principal investigator of a solar-sailed probe set to explore an asteroid in 2018, and, yes, a sci-fi writer. He told me science fiction is part escapism, part aspiration, and part inspiration, bringing broader acceptance to the dream of exploring the stars. Preach.

(I should add that not everybody agrees with this notion of science fiction as an aspirational genre. My editor sees science fiction as primarily a fantastical lens for writers to comment on contemporary society. I posed this alternative hypothesis to science fiction author Jack McDevitt, who counterposited that my editor must have been an English major.)

The Bernal Sphere is a spaceship design with a spherical living area. Population: 10,000. NASA Ames Research Center

It will cost how much?

One night I asked a table full of engineers if they could foresee an inflection point when the relatively flat line of space funding would start arcing into a trajectory that could fund human interstellar flight. This group, which earlier had been holding a graduate-level discussion on the combustive properties of superchilled rocket fuel, basically shrugged. Maybe if there was an impending asteroid strike?

Finally, a retired nuclear engineer sitting across the table uncrossed his arms and growled. Let us make the assumption that we do go into space and build a habitat. If you go back in time from that point and look at a line leading back to the present, we are currently so close to zero that they wont know where to start the graph, he says. $20 billion, $50 billion a year is so far down the graph that its almost in the noise. We have to somehow generate ourselves off the zero point.

No one knows what it’ll take to convince human beings to pay for space.

Robert Kennedy III has thought a lot about this inflection point. He says it will come from a societal change, when a critical mass of people commit themselves to a sustained, multigeneration, self-perpetuating institution committed to the cause. Something like the Catholic Church, or maybe because this is an engineering problem, the Dutch dike builders.

Robert Kennedy III.Joey O’Loughlin

Kennedy III was born in Staten Island and spent his college years in California preparing for the Cold War to become a hot war (he still carries a nuclear effects calculator in his right breast pocket). After stints building robots that work in nuclear reactors, writing computer code, and advising the US House of Representatives on space, he wound up in Oak Ridge, where he consults large renewable energy projectslike an Ethiopian geothermal tap. He also owns a business that publishes media on Russian space technology.

One of Kennedy IIIs coauthored geoengineering ideasa brute-force fix to global warming that involves installing a gigantic shade at the Lagrange point between Earth and the sungot him an invitation to the the International Association of Astronautics Symposium of Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions. Doesnt matter; point is, it was a conference in the Italian Alps. The crowd loved the presentation and especially applauded the plans practicality. (Practicality among engineers typically refers to the soundness of the underlying engineering, not cost or logistics).

After his talk, Kennedy III was standing on a hotel balcony with Les Johnson and astrophysicist Greg Matloff from the New York City College of Technology. They hit upon this idea of a practical, grounded space community based in the Tennessee Valley, and scheduled the first meeting. They have been meeting every 18 months or so since. The group takes the practicality thing seriously and submits its projects (such as the worldship) to peer-reviewed publications like the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

So they do not become a ghetto of insular rocket dweebs, Kennedy III tries to invite younger people, and people from other disciplinesbiologists, chemists, philosophers. Various subcultures who want to get into space, they might do some original thinking on their own, but then what? Whats their next step? Kennedy III says. If you want to actually do something you have to generate a consensus.

One very early morning, or night, or, whatever, it is 2 am in the hospitality suite and Kennedy III is trying to explain the origins of TVIW over the sound of two guys playing space-themed country songs on acoustic guitar (Shes Nothing But Trouble, Shes Just Like Tea-Teb”). Anyway, space culture can be sectarian, or it has been in the past, says Kennedy III. Just about every space group from the 1960s onward has been reaching for the heavens. Their ideologies might have differed. Like, space should be free from the government, so lets cut NASA out of the deal. Or, space should be for whoever can get there first, so lets help out the Soviets. Or, space should be for those who deserve it, so lets build a Randian refuge up in Lagrange Point 5. The groups form and schism, and never really get anywhere. TVIW is trying to stay outside all of that. They just want to go to space.

Two members of the space solar power working track discuss a timetable for launching an interstellar probe.Joey O’Loughlin

No-Go for Liftoff

The evening of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshops opening reception, attendees gather around a projection TV in the corner of a hotel party hall to watch a SpaceX launch livestream.

Customary silence at the one minute mark, then the 10-second countdown, and then the top-down camera angle shows a series of fiery bursts. Before I can begin holding my breath for liftoff, a space enthusiast in the back of the room named Lorraine Glenn pipes up.That doesnt look good. That does not look good. Thats three in a row,” and the room collectively sighs. The chatter comes back up, and even as I am still thinking this launch looks promising, the guy next to me explains that the launch is cancelled, probably because SpaceX couldnt get their oxygen chilled properly. But he cant be sure, so dont quote him on the record.

Except he was right. No-go for liftoff. Problem with the liquid oxygen. Space: still hard.

Les Johnson giving opening remarks at TVIW. Joey O’Loughlin

And the next morning I am up by 7 am and eat a mountain of Southern breakfast and hustle to the big lecture hall for the 8 am opening remarks. Johnsongets up onstage and gives his customary disclaimer. Yes, he is an employee of NASA, but today he is here as a private citizen and space enthusiast who took vacation from his job to attend.

He stands in behind a podium decorated with the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop star-and-rocket swoosh logo and gives a shout out to the Valley Conservancy of Huntsville, Alabama, whose performance of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop orchestral theme music had been playing just before he took the stage.

Then he thanks the volunteers and points out that even they did not get a free ride to the TVIW, because this is a labor of love. Peoples chairs squeak because they are nodding along or maybe just reaching for their coffee mugs, but either way Johnson is on message. This is a room of people dedicated to a better future for our species and our planet, and he is so proud to be a part of what is contributing to that. It is all a part of the bigger goal: to be, simply, a footnote.

That is all most of these people want, really. Forget even being retconned into the decor like the trains next door. They just want to be in the references, a TVIW journal article buried in the citations of a boring history of a human colony on a distant planet, circling a distant star. Someday.

Multiple two-cylinder colonies aimed toward the sun. Population: over a million. NASA Ames Research Center

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from The Far-Out Summit Where Geniuses Learn to Build Starships