#holy week procession 2024

[leonorandsofia]

Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía accompanied their parents, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, to the last procession of the Holy Week in Madrid on March 30th, 2024.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Today, on April 3rd, 2024 around 11 o’clock, an unlawful eviction was initiated by Israeli Police on the grounds of the Cow’s Garden located within the premises of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Patriarchate said in a statement.

The eviction began with the destruction of Armenian Patriarchate property, and assaults on clergy and indigenous Armenians. The officer leading the eviction was Assaf Harel.

The group of officers were asked to present permits for the eviction, the destruction of property, and physical removal of priests and indigenous Armenians from the premises.

According to the Patriarchate, permits or court orders were not presented and they continued to protect and assist the representatives of Xana Gardens in their destruction of property. During attempts to stop the unlawful activity, several members of the police continued to state that they have come with permits without ever presenting them.

“We are here to defend the rights of the workers of Xana Gardens,” they said.

The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem is one of the Custodians of the Holy Land and overseers of one of the four Quarters of Jerusalem. We fully expect the due process that is purportedly granted to all within Jerusalem and demand answers from the Israeli Police and the Israeli Government for their participation in today’s events.

“It is clear that today’s provocations are an attempt to set a precedent against the Armenian Quarter and its lawful lands. We will continue to stand our ground and ask for Christians worldwide to spotlight these never-ending encroachments on the peaceful Armenian Christian community,” the Patriarchate stated.

3 Apr 24

A coveted plot of land inside the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem has become the focus of a legal controversy between the Armenian community and an Australian-Israeli developer who intends to build a luxury hotel complex on the property, as reported by the Times of Israel. In recent weeks, the dispute over the property has escalated.

4 Apr 24

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brinklump Linkdump

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Life comes at you fast, links come at you faster. Once again, I've arrived at Saturday with a giant backlog of links I didn't fit in this week, so it's time for a linkdump, the 14th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's the Year of Our Gourd twenty and twenty-four and holy shit, is rampant corporate power rampant. On January 1, the inbred droolers of Big Pharma shat out their annual price increases, as cataloged in 46Brooklyn's latest Brand Drug List Price Change Box Score:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/branddrug-boxscore

Here's the deal: drugs that have already been developed, brought to market, and paid off are now getting more expensive. Why? Because the pharma companies have "pricing power," the most reliable indicator of monopoly. Ed Cara rounds up the highlights for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/ozempic-wegovy-wellbutrin-oxycontin-drug-price-increase-1851179427

What's going up? Well, Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists. These drugs have made untold billions for their manufacturers, so naturally, they're raising the price. That's how markets work, right? When firms increase the volume of a product, the price goes up? Right? Other drugs that are going up include Wellbutrin (an antidepressant that's also widely used in smoking cessation) and the blood thinner Plavix. I mean, why the hell not? These companies get billions in research subsidies, invaluable government patent privileges, and near-total freedom to abuse the patent system with evergreening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It's like these guys can't even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that's how you get guillotines.

Take Apple. They just got their asses handed to them in court by Epic, who successfully argued that Apple's rule requiring everyone who sells through the App Store to use Apple's payment processor and pay Apple 30% out of every dollar they bring in was an antitrust violation. Epic won, then won the appeal, then SCOTUS told Apple they wouldn't hear the case, so that's that.

Right? Wrong. Apple's pulled a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran. Apple has announced that app companies that process transactions using their own payment processors on the web must still pay Apple a 27% fee for every dollar their process:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-rule-changes-draw-sharp-rebuke-from-critics-150047160.html

In addition, Apple will throw a terrifying FUD-screen up every time a user clicks a payment link that goes to the web:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

This is obviously not what the court had in mind, and there's no way this will survive the next court challenge. It's just Apple making sure that everyone knows it hates us all and wants us to die. Thanks, Tim Apple, and right back atcha.

Not to be outdone in the monopolistic mustache-twirling department, Ubisoft just announced that it is going to shut down its driving simulator game The Crew, which it sold to users with a "perpetual license":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

This is some real Darth Vader MBA shit. "Yeah, we sold you a 'perpetual license' to this game, but we're terminating it. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Ubisoft sure are innovators. They've managed the seemingly impossible feat of hybridizing Darth Vader and Immortan Joe. Ubisoft's head of subscriptions, the guillotine-ready Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers need to get "comfortable" with "not owning their games":

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games

Or, as Immortan Joe put it: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"

Capitalism without constraint is enshittification's handmaiden, and the latest victim is Ello, the "indie" social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users. When Ello took VC and Andy Baio questioned how this could be squared with this promise, the founders mocked him and others for raising the question. Their response boiled down to "we are super-chill dudes and you can totally trust us."

They raised more capital, and used that to create a nice place for independent artists, who piled into the platform and provided millions of unpaid hours of creative labor to help the founders increase its value. The founders and their investors turned the company into a Public Benefit Corporation, which meant they had an obligation to serve the public benefit.

But then they took more investment money and simply (and silently) sold their assets to a for-profit. Struggling to raise capital, the founders opted to secretly sell the business to a sleazy branding company called Talenthouse. Its users didn't know about the change, though the site sure had a lot of Talenthouse design competitions all of a sudden.

Finally, the company announced the change as the last founders left. Rather than announcing that the new owners were untrustworthy scum, warning their users to get their data and get out, the founders posted oblique, ominous statements to Instagram. The company started stiffing the winners of those design competitions. Then, one day, poof, Ello disappeared, taking all its users' data with it. Poof:

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

I'm sure the founders' decisions each seemed reasonable at the moment. That's every terrible situation arises: you rationalize that a single compromise isn't that big of a deal, and then you do the same for the next compromise, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, you're betraying everyone who believed in you.

One answer to this is "Ulysses pacts": making binding commitments to do right before you are tempted. Throw away all your Oreos when you go on a diet and you can't be tempted to eat a whole sleeve of them at 2AM. License your software under the GPL and your investors can't force you to make it proprietary. Set up a warrant canary and the feds can't force you to keep their spying secret:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

If the founders were determined to build a trustworthy, open, independent company, they could have published their quarterly books, livestreamed their staff meetings, built data-export tools that emailed users every week with a link to download everything they'd posted since the last week. Merely halting any of these practices would have been a signal that things were wrong. Anyone who says they won't be tempted in the moment to make a "reasonable" compromise in the hopes of recovering whatever they're trading away by living to fight another day is bullshitting you, and possibly themself.

The inability to project the consequences of your bad decisions in the future is the source of endless mischief and heartbreak. Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the Digital Cinema Initiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard.

Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "Digital Cinema Prints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play Wonka. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are furious:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround. Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious. This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot. The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

There once was a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. It could not track parcels, Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time, And a customer's worst nightmare. It was so bad, That people would rather call the depot directly, Than deal with the useless chatbot.

One day, DPD was finally shut down, And everyone rejoiced. Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is…the opposite of an AI hallucination? It's AI clarity.

As with all botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean damn quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag. Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the Internet Archive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another. Think of steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal Roger Wood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just skewered on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his wonderful workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about Don Bolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak. Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

As Doug Muir writes on Crooked Timber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi – the coolest of the kingdoms! – can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of work is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

As Muir writes: "Animals have no evolutionary history of photosynthesis and aren’t designed for it, but the same is true for yeast. So… no reason this shouldn’t be possible. A photosynthesizing cat? Sure, why not."

Why not indeed?!

OK, that's this week's linkdump done and dusted. It only remains for me to share the news with you that the trolley problem has been finally and comprehensively solved, by Sidereal@kolektiva.social, of the IWW IU 520 (railroad workers):

Slip the switch by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/20/melange/#i-have-heard-the-mermaids-singing

[badolmen]

When I was little, some Palestinian Christians came to our church.

They didn’t call themselves that, of course, being in a white, right leaning American town in the mid to early 2010s. ‘Fellow Catholics from the Holy Land’ the reader for the week announced them as. After mass there were always announcements, and I remember this Arab man with a dark jacket taking to the pulpit. He and those with him were sitting in the front pew - just ahead of where my family sat each week.

He talked about his home in Bethlehem - though it was a little out of season, Christmas well since passed. He talked about the poverty there, the socioeconomic factors that made life difficult for Palestinians, but this was after a long Irish mass with a long Irish homily and no one was listening that intently. My mom whispered that he didn’t have much of an accent, and my dad whispered back that he agreed - not too difficult to understand.

They were here to sell treasures from the Holy Land. Hand carved olive wood rosaries and prayer beads, nativity sets, reliefs of the last supper. ‘A trade passed down from father to son for generations.’

The most expensive item they had was a lovely crucifix - olive wood inlaid with a hand carved mosaic of mother of pearl, four wells at the end of each piece of the cross containing olive leaves, incense, stones, and soil. It was over $50 - I remember because I begged my mother to let me spend my usual summer stipend of $25 for the next two years, and it still wasn’t quite enough. A few dollars short. But he gave it to me anyway.

For years I almost never took it out of its box - it was too pretty, I was too afraid to break it. I first hung it up after I moved out for college - it always caught the thin winter sunlight in my dorm room and seemed to glow. But it got dusty, and was difficult to clean with all its intricacies, so I put it back in its box. Safe with the dried palm leaves from last year’s Lent.

I saw a post a bit ago, mentioning how hand carved mother of pearl is a more obscure Palestinian art form, and I remembered my crucifix. I remembered the Palestinian Christian man who nobody really listened to at 9 AM on a Sunday while their kids begged to leave and get breakfast.

I counted the individual pieces of mother of pearl today. There’s 89. The cross itself is made of 14 pieces of olive wood perfectly slotted together. The figure of Christ is silver, weathering green with age. I’ve never washed this crucifix, but I probably should. There’s a stamp across the back - ‘Jerusalem’ - and another, fainter (quickly pressed with just too little ink) - ‘Mother of Pearl is Hand Made by Christian Families in the Hole Land.’ That’s not a typo - the stamp has an ‘e’ instead of a ‘y.’ It’s smudged, so maybe there’s an ‘i’ in there, but maybe not.

I looked up the company that made it today. Their website is freshly dated for 2024 in the bottom right hand corner, but they haven’t updated their blog posts since 2022. The posts that are up talk of sites of faith, the art process, and COVID. There’s a noticeable number of spelling and grammar errors, but I don’t really care.

The cross I own is listed as a work from Majdi Alshayeb. I can’t find them on social media, not at first glance. I hope they’re well. I wish they knew how I’ve revered this crucifix more as a work of art than as a symbol of faith. I hope God is with them.

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

Today, once more we had Palestinian terrorists shooting at the houses of kibbutz Meirav in the Gilboa mountains. No injuries have been reported. The more grave news are that, for the second day in a row, Hezbollah managed to hit a city in Israel, this time Tzfat (in English: Safed), one of the 4 holy cities in Judaism. Hezbollah's rocket barrage caused the death of a young Israeli woman, and wounded 8, one of which is in a critical state.

Meanwhile, we got some good news, too. The mother and teenage son who were seriously hurt by Hezbollah's fire yesterday (see link above) have regained consciousness. Also, Luis Har and Fernando Merman, who had been rescued by the IDF from Hamas captivity in the Gazan city of Rafah, are being released from the hospital today. They obviously have a rehabilitation process to go through still, but this is a good sign.

The IDF has released footage it found of the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, walking down a terror tunnel. The footage is from early in the war, CCTV from Oct 7, as he was evacuating from the northern part of Gaza, exploiting the humanitarian warning given to civilians to move to the south. He's seen with a woman and kids in that tunnel, presumably his wife and his own children. While the footage is older, the IDF got it recently, which shows that the Israeli presence in Gaza allows for the gathering of more and more intel on Hamas.

Speaking of Sinwar, the IDF also got to the bedroom that he, his wife and kids used underground, and among other things, they found there an insne amount of cash, as well as some luxury items like perfumes, which he prepared there, while he forced the people of Gaza to be evacuated into tents:

While South Africa is asking the International Court of Justice to tighten its provisional measures against Israel in light of a future ground operation in Rafah (I've mentioned that only those who are interested in saving Hamas and keeping the Israeli hostages as its assets, have a real reason to try and stop Israel from entering Rafah and destroying Hamas' last 4 regiments), the families of Israeli hostages have landed in Hague today, asking to file a complaint against Hamas and its crimes against humanity.

The Israeli health ministry is preparing for 20,000 people with disabilities due to injuries caused in the line of serving in the IDF by the end of 2024. I don't know how to put into words what this number, out of all able bodied young people fighting in this war, means in terms of our challenges as a soceity for years to come, but if you know something of the social crisis at the end of WWI, when so many young men returned from the war with injuries, amputations and the psychological harm that comes with them and the battles, and that there was a whole artistic movement (expressionism) changed and conveying this distress, then you have an idea of what this means. I'm even more grateful for programs such as the one I wrote about yesterday.

This is 25 years old Ionatan Dean Chaim.

He was born in the US to a Christian family, but fell in love with Judaism, and converted to it. He then chose to make aliyah to Israel all alone, while his family remains across the ocean. Immigration is always a difficult step, even more so if the person is alone, but he chose to do that. And even though he didn't have to, he decided to enter the Israeli army, to serve the state and the people which he chose to join. He was 3 weeks away from his discharge date, and his friends say he was already planning his post-army life, which he was killed by explosives that Hamas placed in a mosque in Gaza. His service is a testament to how much he loved and respected his chosen religion. The way he was killed is a testament to how much Hamas doesn't respect the religion in whose name they kill. Ionatan's friends said he was incredibly kind, and it was a privilege to know him. Even the city he lived in during his too short stay in Israel, Ramat Gan, published an official statement mourning his death. He chose to be one of us, and to pay a heavy price for it, and we choose to embrace him right back, even after he's gone. Ionatan is and always will be a part of us, flesh of our flesh.

May his memory be a blessing.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[delta-pavonis]

Dreamling Week 2024 Day 4

Dreamling Week 2024 Day 4 Prompts (from @mr-sadman): shapeshifter, storm, finger food, dirty

Dreamling || Rated M || 751 words

tags (other than the prompts above): fantasy, urban fantasy, solarpunk, drow druid/sorcerer Dream, half wood elf bard/gunsmith Hob, investigator partners with a history, they get captured and held for days as torture, escape from torture, cannibalism metaphors for love, discussion of taking joy in revenge

In chronological order: Day 2, Day 1, Day 3

Day 4 comes soon after Day 3

They crawl out of the cave system into a raging thunderstorm. Might as well be a hurricane for how the wind is blowing the rain and trees sideways. However, the sight of cypress trees and the salty smell of the ocean limits the possible places that they have been taken to. 

“Holy shit we're in Port Essen!” Hob gasps in breathless laughter. When Dream looks at him he is smiling, almost glowing, underneath all the dirt and grime and soil and debris they are covered with, that is all rapidly turning to mud as the forceful winds and driving rain wash them clean. He looks to Dream and it is like the sun has risen, warmth diffusing through Dream's skin. “I grew up here!”

That raises a red flag in the back of Dream's mind–he doesn't believe in coincidences. 

“We need to move. Get as far away as possible. Fast. Get on.” Dream doesn't say more, doesn't explain, just grabs some of the reedy dunegrass at his feet and pops it into his mouth as he makes the appropriate hand motions. 

Hob lets out a yelp as Dream transforms into a dire elk, huge and black. He wouldn't be able to fly in such rain and he has no meat for a spell component, so his dragon form is out; the elk will give Hob a smoother ride over the widest variety of terrain. 

Once fully shifted Dream drops onto folded legs, but that still means his back is at about the height of a horse, so he angles his head towards Hob to lend an antler for leverage.

Luckily Hob catches on quickly, hefting himself up onto Dream with a grunt. “West,” he says as he buries his hands in the ruff of thick fur around Dream's neck, “We’ll hit forest and freshwater fastest if we go west.”

Dream stands, looks back at Hob once to make sure he is settled, and then leaps into action. Hob lets out another yelp the first time Dream lands from a bound, but he sets a rhythm and the bard in Hob cues onto it almost immediately. 

Then he outright laughs.

“Dream,” he whispers into his fur, must be leaning over to get so close to his ear, “you are amazing, dove.”

Dream would laugh as well, if he could. 

He has never had a rider before, not in any shifted form he has taken, and that it is Hob on his back, moving fluidly with him, legs around him, clinging to him… well. Apparently one doesn’t need wings to fly.

But first they need to disappear. They need to get gone and regroup and get food and maybe bathe in a cold stream and start assembling their meager knowledge of their captors so that they can send out feelers for information and start the tedious process of revenge. 

Because Dream will eat their hearts raw for making this the bower in which he tells Hob the nature of Dream’s connection to him. He will make them watch as he sucks the marrow from their living bones for how they have treated his Mate. He cares not that he himself has been tortured; Dream has done more than enough terrible things in his life to have earned such an experience. But Hob? No. He will not let them survive this insult.

However, getting to that point, when he will be able to revel in the suffering of those who caused so much of the same, will take time. Dream is always thorough in his planning.

And while they wait, keeping to the shadows and gathering their knowledge and power, Dream will sup upon his Mate. He will devour the finest meal he will ever have. Savor the small pieces that he can pick up between his fingers and drop into his mouth and lick from under his fingernails. Drink long draughts of pleasure of Hob’s body and thereby nourish his own soul. Dream has been starving and did not know it, did not really understand what he was missing, until his body was weakened by the captivity and his mind sharpened by the pain his Mate experienced. 

Dream vaults over some rocky ground, avoiding it completely, and then as they crest a hill the treeline comes into sight and he could cry for the relief of it. Within the embrace of the forest Dream will have all the tools he needs to keep them safe. And then he can look towards the future.

[begitalarcos]

Life Update

Hey Guys

I know I said I was coming back, and I fully intended to. Then I injured my back... badly

I ruptured a disc in my back on one of my lowest vertebrae and now have lost most of the feeling in my left leg :(

In the next week here I'm being scheduled for spinal surgery.

Strangely I'm doing okay. Since my last post a lot of things have gotten sorted (mostly family drama) which has taken a huge weight off of me. Then I fell on the stairs. I only fell down two steps but Ianded hard on my butt and then hit my back against the stair.

This was almost 2 months ago, and I was going to physio for it until my disability decided not to cover it. I was sent to an "Impartial" specialist who had the nerve to tell me that most of my pain was likely "Psychological" haven't had that kind of flippant disrespect about my health in awhile.

On the 30th of October I went to lay down for a nap, when I woke up just the act of sitting up left me in agony. My wonderful husband then spent the next few hours with me using hot and cold compresses and trying to help me get through the pain because the hospital said it was probably just sciatic pain... Halloween rolls around and I've lost all feeling in my left thigh.

I decided "FUCK IT" and went to emergency, where after a good 9 hours I finally saw a doctor who would take me seriously. And by that time my entire left thigh, part of my calf, and most of my back end and groin were completely numb. They took my sock off and my foot was grey. It was pretty scary.

The doctor there did a battery of tests for everthing he could think of, he did manage to get a bit of feeling back into my calf and foot with an injection. But everything else was still pins and needles. I had an MRI and well.. as you can see the lower disc was pushed so far out it was impinging on all the nerves to my left leg.

I spent Halloween and most of the next day in emergency. Had a lovely panic attack, got mildly sedated, there were no beds so I was stuck in a shitty recliner in a corner between two drug attics. One who wouldn't stop complaining and then throwing fits and the other who had some kind of blood borne illness with open sores. It was fucking terrible.

Today I had to drive almost 2 hours to another city to see a neurosurgeon who was also livid no one had done anything for me in over two months and said that even with surgery I may never get full feeling back in my leg (cries) This then followed more X-rays, blood work (7 vials taken oi vey) and an ECG.

Turns out I also have a rare heart defect - that only one other person in my family has - that causes my heart to skip a beat every third beat. They also (because I'm anemic) had to go through the process of signing a ton of forms for the possibility that I may need a transfusion during or after surgery....

This was supposed to be a short post I swear -_-

Thursday I have to go for a full physical and do even MORE paperwork, and then drive again 2 hours away to another city to have my surgery.

FML

So yeah, I still very much want to be creating and posting I just haven't been able to sit or concentrate much as I am taking pain killers (that do not want to work with my antidepressants) so I've either been completely out of it or just stuck doing one thing and one thing only (which has mostly been just riding around in RDR2 hunting, fishing and exploring) I also finished the new Zelda game cuz... well I've been laying down a lot.

Holy Jeebs have I been bored. In between that I've also been trying to keep GiraffeBarn active and get into a few local stores again.

2024 has been hectic and chaotic.

I'm hopeful that the new year will bring me some much needed peace and clarity.

So yeah, I'm not gone, I'm still lurking about and I still plan to post again (when I can)

I miss you all so very much (especially my wifey <3)

Hope you all are well

much love

B

[tomorrowsgardennc]

garden update // september... sePTEMBER?!?! 3rd, 2024

i am legit not ready for it to be september. and i don't mean mentally, i mean in the garden.

a long overdue chore was processing the last of the tomato seeds. the green doctor cherries - my absolute top favorite of all time absolutely - are the only ones left producing. all the other indeterminates have given up. one of the reasons it's my favorite. this will be the last batch i process for seeds, i'll enjoy the rest myself.

i really hope i can look back at this photo one day and go "holy crap, i processed the seeds BY HAND?!"

been so busy doing things other than garden things, like prepping for going back to vend at the market this saturday. like this new nifty sign. gotta sew it onto twine, which means dusting off the sewing machine. which is fine, because i got another sewing project i can't wait to show tumblr.

all the seeds will be done and selling at the market this saturday, but the only transplants that have grown a lot despite the hot weather have been the tom thumb dwarf peas. all the dinosaur kale was eaten - i didn't catch all the cabbageworms the first, or second, or third go around. but i already have a 2nd succession already about to grow their true leaves, so that's something?

speaking of something... i have about 3 of the pomegranate cuttings that have made it through me ignoring them for a whole summer. i REALLY need to get them into soil this week. and this chonker of a cantelope plant bursts forth from the compost that i got from a friends garden and after 3 attempts at killing it, it looks like i'll get even more cantaloupe this year. i didn't want it to cross-pollinate with my dwarf variety of cantaloupe, and pretty sure it didn't since it was never flowering at the same time. since the dwarf variety is done and pulled, i'll see if this gives me anything before first frost.

of course, the cherry bomb tomato seeds i saved last year cross pollinated with the spoon tomatoes so i got all different sizes from all those plants. these were the last of them and i've ripped out the plants already. also i remember planting radishes about 2 months ago.... but i don't remember which kind. so into my tummy they go.

last but not least, parsley checking on the forecast for leaf color changing. such a good boi.

[grifff17]

Audiodrama Sunday 6/9/2024

I have so much to say this week! I usually take some very quick notes as to what I want to say in these as I listen to stuff, but this week I have a ton of notes. Also, I made a Tumblr Community for audiodramas. If you want an invite, please ask me! Also, if you can figure out how to reblog posts into a community, which is supposedly a thing you can do, please tell me.

To start off, season 16 of Lost Terminal started this week. It feels great to be back in this world, this show is so cozy. I love the little programming tidbits in this show, as a nerdy programmer into conlangs and hard scifi this show feels like it was made for me specifically. It looks like the premise for this season is an entire season that takes place over 10 seconds, which is such an incredibly cool idea. I love how they are leaning into the relative time different between humans and AIs due to processing speed.

@worldsbeyondpod had so many crazy moments I have to talk about. First off *music change* "roll a stealth check for the fox" out of nowhere was terrifying. I truly felt Erika's gasp when Brennan said the words "patchy corduroy witch hat". I haven't even gotten to the biggest moment in this episode. Holy shit poor Straw. This story has so much moral nuance, I'm obsessed with @quiddie's defense of Suvi on tumblr since the last episode. Speaking of Aabria, "fuck your scene" was so perfect. Finally, Glassheart moment spotted at the end of the episode. Even though it will never happen, I will forever be a Glassheart shipper.

@worldgonewrongpod this week was very fun. It is weird that I was picturing a specific tree at a small local park I walk through all the time whenever the tree was being described? I cannot unlink that tree and this episode in my mind. The reenacted council meeting was great, I'm excited for the update to this episode at the end of the season. Also, I'm not sure I've said this yes, but the theme song for this show is perfect. I've already added it to my playlist.

@wanderersjournalpod ended on a cliffhanger this week. Are we finally going to learn Pluto's whole deal next week? I can't wait to find out.

@midstpodcast that was a hell of an opening scene. This whole episode showed such an interesting side of Weep. I want to avoid spoilers for this show, but that ending god damn. That is not what I expected. We must be getting close to the end of the season, they resolved the opening scene and the episodes are getting much longer. Looking at the lengths of the previous season, there's probably 2 more episodes.

A very short update from my dear friend over at @re-dracula this week. Renfield is so unsettling. I don't actually know anything about Renfield, so I'm learning as I go. I think he's some sort of vampire spawn?

@breakerwhiskey I caught up and what the fuck. This show keeps twisting the knife. Hey, at least Birdie is finally talking in real time again. She confirmed Whiskey's theory, which is nice, and finally gave us her backstory. Then the second reveal in a later episode, holy shit Harry. This really explains the whole dynamic between Whiskey and Harry. This was the big fight Whiskey keeps referencing.

I listened to the first episode of season 2 of Skyjacks Courier's Call. The city that it's going to be set in is really cool, and I loved the Fun Money shenanigans. Going on a road trip tomorrow and I'm going to listen to a lot more of it.

Finally, there was a new SCP: Find Us Alive this week. This was a cool episode, I really liked the art show. But the big thing was the very end of this episode. My theory was right! Sometimes, when talking into the mic, Harley was subject to the memetic effect and forgot what he was talking about. But only sometimes. They've established that it only happens if someone can hear you. This meant that every time he forgot, someone was listening! Great foreshadowing!

Because of the aforementioned road trip, I'm going to post this a few hours early. This is at least better than my usual time of "forgetting it until the last moment."

[missys-mansion-of-mistakes]

October 25th, 2024. Friday.

Had a productive doctor's appointment

Updated my budget

Came up with a rough idea for my conference presentation

Wrote 2 Slowly letters

Did my nails!

Cleaned my room, including vacuuming it!

🎈 So... today was good. My brain is like "you didn't do enough, you didn't do enough" but the truth is that I worked from 7am until now, 4pm, pretty much nonstop. I count "doing nails" as working because holy crap, what an intensive and LONG process! Getting them done did improve my self-image and mental health a lot though-- just like cleaning my room did. Hoping that I can fight off the depression better now.

🎐 I want to improve how I look so much. I'm so tired of Google Photos popping up and basically being like, "Remember when you were skinny?" I believe in body positivity, BUT ALSO my cholesterol is extremely high, I can't walk very far without getting winded, and they wanted to take my A1C at the doctor's office today. It's important to me that I'm healthier and capable. Maybe I'll be a fat hiker, or a fat person everyone sees out on walks, whatever. The point is that I can't live in this chair any longer.

⚽ Feeling positive about the future. That's a huge change of pace from a week ago. Sometimes even just taking positive steps in the right direction can be enough to lift your mood out of the dumps.

[Photos: Right side of desk, new spooky nails, and view of my bed and the window.]

[divinum-pacis]

March 2024: Havana, Cuba Devotees carry a statue of Jesus Christ past a jazz bar during a Holy Week procession in Havana Photograph: Ramón Espinosa/AP

[beyond-mortal-limits]

FFXIVWrite 2024 - Day 26: Zip

(Warnings for hateful language and allusions to sexual assault)

Holding up one hand, the rider at the head of the group halted the procession. All six men slowed their chocobos to a stop and came to rest in a ragged circle, fanned out every which way to look out across the baked grassland.

“Whassup, Bobby?”

The lead rider took out a small spyglass, and held it to his eye. After a moment, he dropped it and pointed.

“There’s a girl up on that windmill. Naked, if’n I’m any judge.”

The other man trotted his bird up and took the spyglass, looking ahead as well.

“I’ll fuckin’ be.”

When the six men cantered up towards the solitary wooden pyramid atop a hill, there was indeed a completely naked Highlander woman with black hair standing atop it waving her arms and yelling.

“HEY! HEY, HELP ME!”

“Holy shit, Bobby. That’s a naked woman.”

“Fuckin’ told ya.”

“CAN YOU HELP ME GET DOWN FROM HERE?”

“Why’s there a naked woman on top of a windmill?”

“Fuck if I know. HEY. WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

“THEY LEFT ME UP HERE TO DIE! PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME HERE!”

“NOBODY’S GONNA LEAVE YOU TO DIE, MISSY. WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

“IT’S - JENNY! MY NAME IS JENNY!”

“WELL, JENNY, DON’T YOU WORRY. WE’LL HAVE YOU DOWN THERE AND BACK HOME IN A JIFFY. What’chu think, Reddy? Two? Three?”

“She’s a looker, we could get four thou easily - but I’m not sure we have the water to spare. Might be she’ll have to be, uh, used up along the way.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Sucks we’ll miss out on the pay, but I tell you, after gettin’ the black mark from that big bitch in Stonewood we ain’t been able to hire a single whore for weeks. Boys’re gettin’ antsy.”

The lead rider sucked on his teeth, and looked over to where the other four had quickly dismounted and begun approaching the windmill. There was a kind of hungry, nervous energy.

“Yeah, I see what’chu mean. Alright, get’r down and trussed up good. We’ll make camp early tonight and-”

“HEY MISTER, WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

He turned back in his saddle to the windmill.

“I’M BOBBY, MISS, AND MY BOYS HERE ARE GONNA TAKE REAL GOOD-”

There was a loud zip to the side, and a wet splat and a crack as Reddy was shot out of his saddle. A cloud of grey smoke was building just over a hundred yards away with another crack. The four on the ground scrambled, going for their guns, and Bobby spurred his bird around just in time for it to catch a bullet coming out the cloud of gunsmoke with its’ beak.

He didn’t see much else of what happened after that, pinned beneath the crushing weight of over a thousand pounds of beast and tack, but the chocobos were squawking in a frenzied panic while the men shouted at each other and furiously fired their pistols in rapid succession. He heard screams, and distant squawks, and in short order all of his men were shot dead while their birds had fled for the hills.

Trapped facing skyward by the bulk of his bird, Bobby watched as the naked woman up on the windmill picked up a poncho from the platform and shrugged it on. She threw down a rope ladder that he hadn’t been able to see and started making her way down. Stupid bitch had been a trap, led them all into an ambush.

The shooter was walking among the bodies now, a repeating rifle held slung under one arm while the other hand swept around with a pistol. Surprisingly, it was another woman - another highlander, blonde hair, wearing mens’ clothing and some sorta sandy-coloured cloak - and she looked right at home behind the barrel of a gun. Bobby tried to crane his head when he heard jingling, and seethed when he saw the tower woman starting to rummage through Reddy’s pockets.

“Hey - hey! You bitch!”

Bobby tried to wrench his arm free from underneath his chocobo, struggling to keep his now-tingling grip on the gun at his hip, and just about drew it out when the other woman kicked it out of his hand. He snarled at her.

“You motherfuckers! You don’t know who you just fucked with, I’m gonna-”

“You’re Bobby? Bobby Bovril, of the Bovril Bandits?”

“Yeah, and you’re gonna be fuckin worm f-”

“Klynt sends her regards.”

She raised her pist-

[whymaige]

🌷 WhyMerch Shop Updates 🌷

Posting general updates about current orders and a bit of future merch!

Some items are not listed anymore, but product pages have a "✿ Shipping ~" in description since orders are processed by batches

Putting them here for your reference!

✨ Holy Charm and Lilybell Standee P.O. ✨

‼️ New ETA: May-June 2024 ‼️

I've had two rounds with production of correcting the items sent over. Currently, they seem to be having problems with printing so they are fixing their machines. I'm following up best I can

🍊 Ponkat Merch P.O. 🍊

‼️ 4 Orders Left, should be all sent by May ‼️ ✨Re-Run: Mid April 2024/Soon

There was a lot of orders for this set. Thank you! 🙇‍♀️ Orders are processed by batches and production slowed by a few weeks due to lots of holidays. Limited Time Re-Run soon!

☄️🔥 'MUT IN A SUIT - Shirt 🔥☄️

‼️ Shipping should be until June ‼️

Shipping should be on time for this (May-June). If there's any delays that would move it to be sent out on July 2024, I will be sending out e-mails (with the add you put in the order form)

🌸 Other Items 🌸

Should be following the indicated Shipping ETA. There were two orders of the Shadow Lillies Hoodies that had the Shipping listed a little too early (it should be June 2024). I'll be sending out an e-mail about that 🙇‍♀️

🔻 Future Merch 🔻

Patrons already know about this, but there's upcoming merch designs! (one is still a lineart aughgu)

Focusing on having most of current orders sent out first before moving on to these

They will all be for Pre-Order, aiming for around/after mid 2024!

Thank you for the support and helping our cats through this! 🙇‍♀️

I'm always on the top of communications with production, making sure your orders are quality and worked on!

Thank you for your patience as we process a bunch of the Pre-Orders above 🙏🌷

[fox-bright]

Garden Notes, 1/31/2024

Today (yesterday as I write this) I released 21 dahlia seedlings and 50 viola seedlings from the 72-well starting tray and into somewhere that their roots can stretch a bit. Violas will come true from seed. Dahlias are a diceroll, which is why it's fun to grow them--you really don't know what you're going to get.

I took the cover off of the lupines and echinacea purpurea; it's good to get them into proper air as soon as possible so that they don't get damping off.

I started waking up the last of my wedding dahlia tubers; the weather is very unpredictable right now, and they only might winter over here, so I went outside and dug up my Cafe au Lait dahlia, cleaned the tuber and split it, and now have it sitting in soil where it will throw new shoots I can use to grow new plants before putting the tuber out in the spring.

I started a ton of herbs. Typically I wouldn't start my herb seeds for another month, but I want them to be large and robust by planting-out time, and as I am doing fewer tomatoes this year than last year, I should have more two-quart pots to bring them up in for a few weeks toward the end of their nursery time. In the process of reading about ideal germination conditions, I learned a couple of things:

the seeds you can get on the market for tarragon won't give you a good tarragon plant, but something bitterer and blander; much like ju hua, the preferred culinary herb doesn't set viable seed and is instead propagated through cutting or division. Pity, I'd bought a packet this year.

I knew this, but I always mix them up--spearmint seeds will give you spearmint, but peppermint seeds will not give you peppermint, which again is propagated by division and cutting. They'll give you *a* mentha, sure, and it might be okay, but it won't be peppermint. Anyone who tells you it is, is lying to you. Go with the spearmint.

I really am going to start a garden blog pretty soon, I think. I have a domain for it and everything.

(Pity the corresponding Tumblr username is a pornbot.)

Seeds I started:

Marjoram German Chamomile Roman Chamomile (what's the difference?) Common Sage Winter Savory Summer Savory (what's the difference?) Italian Oregano Greek Oregano (what's the difference?) Za'atar (specifically, Origanum syriacum) Mastic Thyme Orange Thyme, Thymus fragrantissimus (Couldn't find a link that wasn't to a shop, but it's a variety of common thyme; according to this enthusiast it was first recorded about 95 years ago and has since become rare) French Thyme Horehound Holy Basil/Tulsi Spearmint Bo He (I am not going to go down the rabbit hole of trying to find an English-language link about wild Chinese mint, but if you want to, it's Mentha haplocalyx)

Dahlia seedling!

Dahlias, milkweed, violas. Grow grow grow...

[steelbluehome]

"(Sebastian Stan) does an excellent job, going beyond impersonation to capture the essence of the man. In a character study of a public figure both widely parodied and unwittingly self-parodying, Stan gives us a more nuanced take on what makes him tick"

The Hollywood Reporter

‘The Apprentice’ Review: Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong Are Superb in Chilling Account of the Unholy Alliance That Birthed Donald Trump (click for article)

Maria Bakalova and Martin Donovan also star in Ali Abbasi’s detailed chronicle of the future U.S. president’s rise in the 1970s and ‘80s under the tutelage of cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn.

David Rooney

MAY 20, 2024 10:00AM PDT

To clear any confusion up front, The Apprentice has nothing to do with the NBC reality competition of that name, in which Donald Trump sifted through a field of aspiring businesspeople to identify the most promising of them, sending an eliminated contestant home each week with the brutal dismissal, “You’re fired!” On the other hand, you could say that Ali Abbasi’s biographical drama has everything to do with the television series.

It’s a reverse reflection of the mentorship process, in which the host becomes the hungry young upstart, laying the foundations for a business empire built in part out of smoke and mirrors, and operating under the guidance of a master manipulator.

Written by political journalist and Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman, the movie is first and foremost the story of a Faustian pact, in which the eager apprentice is schooled to ditch conventional notions of morality, ethics and empathy, eventually surpassing his Mephistophelean teacher in cold emotional detachment.

While a disclaimer acknowledges that some elements have been slightly fictionalized, the vast majority of Sherman’s screenplay deals in known facts. That could be considered a limitation, since many will wonder what’s the point of a movie that tells us nothing new.

One thing that will be interesting about this first English-language feature from Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi — who forged his reputation in Cannes with Borders and Holy Spider and directed the terrific closing episodes of the first season of The Last of Us — is who will be its audience. Will either side want to see this? With no U.S. distribution deal in place as yet, that remains a mystery.

Liberals will see it as a stomach-churning making-of-a-monster account while the MAGA faithful might conceivably misconstrue it as an endorsement of their guy, who has made the killer instinct his brand. That’s not to say the movie’s political sympathies are unclear. But if the Trump years have taught us anything, it’s that truth is elastic and perception can be skewed to whatever angle is most expedient.

Beyond the specific portrait of the man identified by his vanity plates as DJT (Sebastian Stan) and the barracuda who took him under his wing, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the movie takes a broader view of the corruption of the American soul.

Sherman’s script zooms in on Trump when he’s a lieutenant in the employ of his real estate baron father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan, scary), collecting rent from tenants who obviously loathe the landlord and his policies. The family business is under attack in a civil rights suit alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act, stemming from Trump Sr.’s discriminatory policies against Black prospective tenants. “How can I be racist when I have a Black driver?” bellows Fred.

It stretches from the crooked end of the Nixon years, a boon for sourness and and cynicism, through the Reagan presidency and the ascendancy of corporate greed. That time span consecrated the supremacy of the “winner” and the contemptuous mockery of the “loser,” one of the most obnoxious commonplace denigrations in American life. The chief tenet Trump learns from Cohn takes the distinction one step further, asserting that the world is divided into killers and losers.

Donald is eager to get out from under the old man’s shadow. The opening sequence shows him striding through the heart of Manhattan, a less graceful version of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, at a time of rising crime and fiscal disaster, when the town’s reputation had gone from “Fun City” to “Fear City.” His eyes are fixed on the crumbling Commodore Hotel by Grand Central Station, the site of his first luxury development.

Fred Trump is only marginally warmer to Donald than to his first-born son Freddy (Charlie Carrick). The latter’s airline pilot job is a source of shame to his father, who calls him “a flying bus driver.” Donald seizes an opportunity to win parental approval after a chance meeting with Cohn at members-only ‘70s nightspot Le Club. An amusing moment has him trying to impress his date by running down a list of the famous, important and wealthy who frequent the place. “Why are you so obsessed with these people?” she asks, before going off to powder her nose.

Cohn is indignant that anyone should try to tell Fred Trump to whom he can rent; he uses compromising information about a D.A. to get the case thrown out. That gets the Feds off Donald’s father’s back and clears the way for him to get investors on board for the Commodore project. A meeting engineered by Cohn yields a strategic partnership with Hyatt.

The lawyer who proudly sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair and was a key force in the McCarthy witch hunts is a great role for Strong. He makes the character suitably icy, a fast talker with a withering stare and an almost inhuman intensity. The actor has fun with the hypocrisy of an unapologetic dirty trickster who claims unwavering fidelity to “truth, justice and the American way.” Sherman makes sure we see how the entire Trump playbook was forged out of their alliance.

It’s somewhat predictable that when Cohn early on explains his three cardinal rules, Trump will later claim credit for them as his own credo: 1. Attack. Attack. Attack. 2. Admit nothing. Deny everything. 3. Claim victory and never admit defeat.

While there are faint glimmers of a moral conscience in some of Stan’s early scenes, such concerns are quickly swept aside once Donald starts seeing the results Cohn gets with bullying chicanery. His gaze hardens, along with his lacquered hair, as he begins to construct a persona based on Cohn’s teachings.

There’s wry humor in the way Trump chooses to ignore the lawyer’s hedonistic excesses, along with the side-eye of Roy’s unofficial boyfriend Russell (Ben Sullivan). The ease with which Cohn tosses out anti-gay slurs while denying his own homosexuality is just one dish in a smorgasbord of double standards. The tenuousness of Trump’s loyalty becomes apparent later when AIDS hits first Russell, then Roy.

That’s seen as a factor in Trump’s gradual distancing of himself from Cohn — until he needs his counsel again — but mainly it’s because the student overtakes the teacher, often shrugging off his advice. It’s to Strong’s credit that, while playing an odious, utterly irredeemable human being, he finds notes of pathos in Cohn’s decline.

One matter in which Donald ignores Roy’s cautionary warnings is his determination to marry Ivana Zelnickova, despite the Czech model’s repeated attempts to brush him off. Trump’s first wife is played by Maria Bakalova with savvy self-possession and what seems like full awareness of her husband’s negative attributes, plus a convenient ability to overlook them. She also shows signs of sensitivity that make her mildly sympathetic.

But the marriage begins disintegrating once Donald tires of her. One primary reason is seemingly that she has a head for business and he finds that unattractive. His wandering eye and ample opportunities for philandering don’t help either. “Donald has no shame,” says Ivana at one point with matter-of-fact disdain, and she means it literally.

In addition to feeling he has outgrown Cohn as he becomes more at home with tax avoidance, unpaid contracts and various other questionable means of expanding his empire, Trump also flips the tables on his father, talking down to the man who once intimidated him. It’s implicit in his increasingly self-satisfied, blowhard demeanor that he doesn’t truly feel he owes anything to anyone.

A lot can be observed about Trump’s attitude toward women from his devolving relationship with Ivana, and one shocking scene that will likely raise hackles with the former president’s supporters feeds into the multiple accusations of sexual abuse against him.

The most revealing scenes are Donald’s seeming distance from a family tragedy that he might have helped prevent had he been more giving, and his private display of grief, refusing to show vulnerability even to those closest to him. It’s the steady hardening of his nature that defines the characterization — the stern glare, the mouth set in a sullen pout, the sheer amount of physical space his persona takes up. Stan makes it plain that this is just as much a part of Trump’s performance as his own.

Some will argue that Stan’s performance in the central role is a touch too likeable, but the actor does an excellent job, going beyond impersonation to capture the essence of the man. In a character study of a public figure both widely parodied and unwittingly self-parodying, Stan gives us a more nuanced take on what makes him tick.

Abbasi and cinematographer Kasper Tuxon (The Worst Person in the World) give the movie a grainy texture that evokes the ‘70s and ‘80s, while the neon yellow main title credits instantly suggest vintage television. Bringing the era to life with tacky authenticity, Aleks Marinkovich’s production design lavishes particular attention on the vulgar ostentatiousness of Trump’s domain once he cracks the big time and Laura Montgomery’s costumes walk the line separating expensive from stylish or classy.

It might be considered a cheap shot to show Trump undergoing liposuction and a hair transplant in queasy detail at a grave moment for someone close to him. But that kind of disconnect from anyone else’s suffering is a key part of the portrait. What Abassi’s film reveals most of all is the extent to which the toxicity that’s now an inescapable part of our contemporary reality was shaped by the unholy alliance between two men half a century ago.

The Apprentice

THE BOTTOM LINE

The art of the heel.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall, Joe Pingue, Jim Monaco, Bruce Beaton, Ian D. Clark

Director: Ali Abbasi

Screenwriter: Gabriel Sherman

2 hours

[did-i-do-this-write]

Writing Year in Review

2023

Goals

Daily Words: 300

Yearly Words: 109,500

Daily Time: 20 minutes

Yearly Time: 121 hours 39 minutes

[Complete]

Final Statistics

Daily Average Words: 432

Yearly Total Words: 150,945

Daily Time Spent: 26 minutes

Yearly Time Spent: 141 hours 49 minutes

Posted: 40,099

Author's Note: Holy shit, I can’t believe this year is already over. That’s fucking crazy! This year was a little different for me because I wrote a shit ton, but I barely posted any of my work because it was all drafting for one story. The whole year was basically prep work and now I get to share that story with everyone in 2024 (as long things go according to plan haha)! I learned so much about myself as a writer and my own process and I hope I can take these lessons forward into the new year to complete more of my long term projects.

Here’s to another year of writing! 🥂

(Monthly breakdown under the cut)

January

Word Count: 10,149

Time spent: 7 hours 45 minutes

WIPs: Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 9 (outline)

February

Word Count: 6,687

Time spent: 5 hours 21 minutes

WIPs: How an Angel Gets Its Wings, Songs that Tell a Story, Home is Where You Are

Completed

Songs that Tell a Story: If I Could Sleep

Home is Where You Are

March

Word Count: 9,529

Time spent: 7 hours 34 minutes

WIPs: How an Angel Gets Its Wings, Prompt, Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

How an Angel Gets Its Wings: Ch. 17

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 11 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 12 (outline)

Prompt: Past, change, hope

April

Word Count: 7,658

Time spent: 7 hours 04 minutes

WIPs: How an Angel Gets Its Wings, Prompt, Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

How an Angel Gets Its Wings: Ch. 18

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 13 (outline)

Prompt: A scene about something breaking

May

Word Count: 16,950

Time spent: 16 hours 30 minutes

WIPs: Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 14 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 15 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 16 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 19 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 17 (outline)

June

Word Count: 19,010

Time spent: 16 hours 33 minutes

WIPs: Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest, Prompt

Completed

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 18 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 20 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 21 (outline)

Prompt: Oz and Qrow go on a shopping date

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 22 (outline)

July

Word Count: 18,031

Time spent: 13 hours 46 minutes

WIPs: Ozqrow Week 2023, Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

Ozqrow Week 2023: Day 3

Ozqrow Week 2023: Alt. prompt

Ozqrow Week 2023: Day 1

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 23 (outline)

August

Word Count: 20,657

Time spent: 16 hours 37 minutes

WIPs: Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest, Prompt

Completed

Prompt: Sleepy morning antics

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 24 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 25 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 26 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 27 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 28 (outline)

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 29 (outline)

Prompt: Oz and Glynda appreciating Qrow

September

Word Count: 6,563

Time spent: 12 hours 23 minutes

WIPs: Prompt, Paragon, Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

Prompt: “I need to make this work…”

October

Word Count: 9,548

Time spent: 7 hours 30 minutes

WIPs: Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest, Prompt

Completed

Prompt: Blanket, anxiety

November

Word Count: 6,985

Time spent: 9 hours 37 minutes

WIPs: Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Second Draft

December

Word Count: 19,178

Time spent: 15 hours 30 minutes

WIPs: Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest

Completed

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Third Draft

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 1

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 2

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 3

Home is Where Your Light Shines Brightest: Ch. 4