#i have to undo lines one billion times more often too though

[dawnblade]

it takes like 10x as long to fuckinggggg draw anything with 0 stability but i like how the lines look much more OTL

[regrettablewritings]

I really love all your Bruce Wayne writings, so i'd like to request numbers 7, 17, 18, 29 for him.

Aaawww! Thank you so much!!! Stuff’s below the cut!

7. What do they get up to on a night out?: Given that Bruce is the closest thing Gotham has to royalty, there’s only so much the two of you can get into without a few pitfalls. While Bruce isn’t against giving back to the community by supporting small businesses, he can’t always just march into the local greasy spoon -- no matter how much he wants to. He used to be able to do that in his youth but sadly, expectations became a bit heavier as he got older. Plus, given that he has to play the part of the owner of a billion-dollar corporation in addition to moonlighting as a local vigilante, date nights aren’t exactly a thing that can just spontaneously happen.

But when they happen, Bruce does whatever he can to make it count. Sure, dinner at the finest restaurants in Gotham or Metropolis is a given. Yes, a night out at the Metropolis Ballet is a nice treat. There are even occasions you’re able to convince Bruce to accompany you to the local donut hub for artisan baked goods. But the truth of the matter is that even when these things manage to get off the ground, there will often be a risk of watchers. Paparazzi. People sneaking photos and videos on their phones. It’s an absolute headache.

During which cases, the con of Bruce’s fame and wealth can also be used to your advantage.

It’s amazing what strings can be pulled just to get a night at the Gotham City Museum of Natural History to yourselves, for example.

It’s absolutely freeing: Security and management allows you both to freely roam the grounds, wandering from exhibit to exhibit. You’re free to dress as you like, talk without any airs that might’ve been posed in the public face. Jokes can be shared, absurd trivia dispensed, and you needn’t worry about how your displays of affection could be interpreted and broken down by the local tabloids and media. (Though let’s be real, you’ll be too busy holding hands because who wants to kiss when there’s model towns to look at?!)

Nights like these don’t happen very often. Not because Bruce doesn’t want to do them, but because of time. And because the both of you don’t want the magic to die off too quickly. Normally, ventures like this are reserved for when you need a pick-me-up from your favorite exhibit, or when a traveling exhibition makes the museum its temporary home. But you don’t mind: Every time is magical. (Plus, every time you go, Bruce lets you go nuts in the gift shop.)

17. When they find a time machine, where do they go?: While the immediate expectation would be that Bruce takes the machine back to the night his parents died in order to thwart the attack, that’s actually . . . not likely. He may consider going back to stopping Robin from dying, but even that falls flat. The reasons are both the same: Time is a very fragile thing. Even if a bullet were mere centimeters away, something could change for the worst down the line. He barely trusts Barry to rewrite timelines, and that’s Barry’s actual thing!

As tempted as Bruce would be the entire while to undo everything, to undo something that would change everything, he just can’t bring himself to do it. It’s too risky.

18. When they fight, how do they make up?: Bruce has had many girlfriends in the past. And just about every one of them expected the same things: Bags, dresses, grand gestures to show just how far he was willing to go to earn their forgiveness (even if they were in the wrong). It became to frequent that towards the end of certain relationships, he just couldn’t be bothered anymore and would just send out assistants to do it. It had become a chore, a new way of exhausting him and making him feel less like a boyfriend who was wanted and more like a piggy bank that was tolerated. He hadn’t meant to lump you in with the lot, but it had become nearly second nature to him. In hindsight, of course, this was not the best way to go about things after your first fight. You’d never chased after his wealth after all, why start now? Nevertheless, he found himself acquiring gifts for you: Dresses in your favorite color, jewelry made form your favorite minerals, at least two more Switches so you could have even more Animal Crossing (“That’s how that works, right?” “Master Bruce, please -- ”). But he found himself at a loss when, even after presenting you with the bounty, you still didn’t seem to be happy, nor voice your forgiveness. Instead, you sighed deeply. “Bruce . . . Thank you. I appreciate the gesture. I really do. But can we please just . . . talk?” He blinked. That . . . wasn’t what he’d been expecting. Of course, it was an adjustment: He had to avoid the impulse to go about grabbing things he thought you’d like; and then there was the fact that if you knew you were wrong, you’d eventually come to him with an apology. That just wasn’t a thing Bruce was used to in his date mates. And as painful as it could be to open up in some respects, he does appreciate it after the fact to some degree. It forces you both to confront your faults and face maturer ways of dealing with the problem. From it, you can grow together as a couple, into a relationship Bruce actually feels is good for him.

29. Why do they fall a little bit more in love?: For Bruce, it’s when you prove to him more and more that maybe not everything in Gotham has been corrupted. Bruce loves his city but he would be lying if he said it was the most embracing in the country. His parents saw potential in Gotham before their untimely ends, ans they took special care to help Bruce see it for himself. But as time went on, things got harsher. Harder. And in order to combat it, Bruce himself got harsher. Harder.

Maybe he didn’t need to, but that’s what he became convinced he needed to do. As a result, as he grew older, more cynical. Even when he wasn’t going about in a bat suit, he was still surrounded by less-than-pleasant company: Fair weather friends, sugar babies, people who wanted something from him. Nobody really saw him as a person after a while so much as they did something to siphon time, energy, and money out of. And it drained him of his patience, happiness, and hope. But then you came along. And you were like a flower blooming out of the dim, grey cracked Gotham City sidewalk: You were bright, you were patient, you didn’t want anything from him. But when you wanted his time, it was so you could get to know one another or talk. When you wanted his energy, it was so the two of you could go check out a strange, new exhibit at the aquarium or so he could help you run errands without getting bored. And the only thing you wanted with his money was for him to just pay for his own half of whatever meal you two had had while on a date.

You didn’t fetishize him or laugh at him or with him for your own benefit. You weren’t afraid to tell him when he was being too stiff or tell him that you needed to “eat the rich.” He appreciated that kind of honesty. But most of all, he appreciated that you made him feel . . . seen. He feels like he’s actually present now. Seen. Felt. Loved. And he wants you to feel that way, too.

The good news is, this sort of give-and-take is almost symbiotic in a sense: You making him feel seen and loved makes him want to open up to you even more. And when he does that, you can’t help but love what you’re seeing. Bruce has spent so much of his life putting on facades, be it to present himself as a playboy to the unassuming, or to be a stuff, rigid businessman so nobody would suspect debatable lunacy, or whatever’s going on with the whole Batman situation. So when he chooses you to be one of the few people in his life he wants to open up to, you can’t hep but welcome what he gives with open arms and an supportive mind.

When he smiles, it’s not the same, rehearsed grin he gives at press conferences; when he puts his heart into something, it’s not for the benefit of the company; when he laughs, it’s husky and tinged with genuine mirth and not canned and stale. He doesn’t talk to you like there’s a business proposal on the line because he actually likes talking with you. It’s a sign of trust and an effort being made on his part to communicate more, and you can’t help but be excited for what his true self will reveal next!

(Also, when he actually wears the Scrooge McDuck cuff links you got him as a joke, you know love is real.)

Thank you for asking!!!

[irondadgroupie]

Peter never gets over Tony’s death

A/N: Spoilers for Avengers Endgame. Heavy subject material ahead

When Tony dies, he becomes an angel.

Everyone has access to heaven but also world. Higher beings were very understanding. Dying is a shock, were you prepared or not. Things are very often left unfinished.

Tony know how to use the gift. He watches over his family.

Pepper is strong but grieving. She sleeps on his side of the bed, fights against sobs while clutching his pillow.

Morgan doesn’t really understand the concept of death. She still expects him to come back. Tony guards her sleep, makes sure she has only happy thoughts, brushes her hair though his hand goes through every time.

Peter- his kiddo- is not fairing well. The boy is a mess, the world had forgotten him for five years. May had given up their apartment, he was marked as deceased and had to start everything over.

The boy sleeps on the couch in the new apartment and screams.

Tony tries to be close but he is selfish. He can’t handle grief he has caused.

Had they only been smarter and quicker-

Tony sees over his funeral and is pleasantly shocked how many people attend. His family and comrades in one group, supporting each other.

Morgan looks confused the entire time.

Peter gets sick after the ceremony and rests in the guest room. Tony sits by him and does not like what he sees. The boy’s eyes are vacant, red, he has lost weight. He wants to tell him everything will be fine, wants to tell Peter to be strong.

Useless words.

Life begins a new. Morgan goes to kindergarten and makes lots of friends. Pepper focuses on charity work, having billions of people suddenly reappear is a huge toll on the economy. It causes famine in poor countries.

When Tony hears the news, he wonders if they ever did the right thing undoing the snap.

Peter starts school again but without the light in his eyes. The boy had always been eager to learn but now he just goes through the motions. He stares out the window, ignoring all the questions and calls.

Tony knows something is not right.

He starts spending more time at the Parkers’ apartment. One day, May gets a phone call and it leads to an argument. Peter is failing at school, not returning homework and skipping classes.

“Why should I even go to school,” Peter mutters and kicks the wall. “I died! I come back to a world that has not given a shit about me!”

Peter starts crying. Tony knows the warning signs when he sees them.

“This is about Stark, isn’t it?”

Of course, Tony realizes.

“He left me,” Peter whimpers and May hugs him. Tony leaves the world with Peter’s sobs echoing in his ears.

Tony has now become third father-figure Peter Parker has lost. He had known his death would be tough on Peter but this makes it worse.

That night, Tony finds to his surprise he can still cry.

He starts watching over Peter’s sleep. He tries to clear the boy’s thoughts, put happy memories to the front but nothing much helps. The boy wakes up screaming. Sometimes he even throws up from night terrors.

After a week, May calls Pepper and the women discuss the situation. Strange recommends a psychiatrist and follows Peter to the first session.

It leads to nothing. Peter refuses to answer questions.

“I don’t deserve help,” The boy mutters and bites his fingers. Tony remembers how Peter used to bite his nails when he was nervous: a nasty habit that Peter had never managed to break.

The boy’s fingers leave red marks on pale, dehydrated skin.

“I couldn’t stop Thanos. I didn’t get the stones to the van.”

No, Tony shakes his head. He wants to tell the boy it was team effort, they all succeeded and failed. Nobody blamed Peter.

“I can see it in Pepper’s eyes. I saw it in Tony’s eyes.”

No! He had not blamed the boy. He had watched at Peter with nothing but admiration and love.

But Peter’s mind was sick. It twisted reality according to what it needed to hear.

Psychiatrist describes Peter strong antidepressants and recommends therapy alongside it.

“If it doesn’t work out, we can try to get Peter a place at an institute but I must warn you, lines are incredibly long. Your nephew is not the only one suffering.”

Tony doubts even money could get Peter the help he deserves.

The meds cause awful side-effects: the boy sleeps through the day, can’t hold down food and gets electric shocks in his brain. Tony remembers those all too well.

Peter withers away in his eyes. May takes time off from work to take care of him, she tries to force him to eat, go outside, lead a normal life.

Peter tells he doesn’t see a reason to.

Pepper reads Tony’s prayers and invites Peter over to play with Morgan. The boy declines but May forces him to go.

Pepper makes them pizza and Peter is reminded of internship days when Tony would either order in or alternatively they would make a pizza of their own, putting everything they found in the fridge on top of it. The boy starts crying uncontrollably. Morgan, little angel, pats his hair but Peter ignores her.

At night, when Tony is guarding Morgan’s sleep, he has been ignoring her because of his worry for Peter, he hears the door open. He frowns, it’s three in the morning. He looks out the window and sees a figure walking towards the lake.

Dread settles in his stomach, the figure is too short to be Pepper.

He jumps from the window and runs after Peter.

“Peter!” He screams as the boy trudges forward, his pajamas soaking through in the cold autumn water. He has on sneakers, bringing in extra weight. “Kiddo, go back! Please! Go back to the shore! Peter, you don’t want to do this!”

Peter is not crying. He looks more alive than he has since Tony drew his last breath. Peter’s eyes are fixated on the moon.

“Shit,” Peter gasps as the water reaches his chest. The boy’s lips are turning blue. “Help.”

“We’ll help you, Peter,” Tony tries to grab Peter’s arm but his form goes through. “You just have to go to the shore. We will help you.”

But Peter had made his mind.

Tony screams as the boy goes under the water.

“No!” He grasps his hair and turns to the house. Lights are not on. “Pepper! Pepper! Wake up! Pep!”

But nobody is in the same state of being as him.

Peter was convulsing under water, cold paralyzing his muscles. Tony felt sick watching it but he knew that if this was to be Peter’s last moments, he had to be there.

He dives.

“It’s okay,” He prays somebody will notice Peter missing and come looking for him. But if not, his boy was not going to die alone. “It doesn’t hurt. I swear it doesn’t hurt.”

He wants to hold Peters’ hand.

The boy gasps and coughs out air.

“You’re okay, you’re okay.”

Peter stops moving, his eyes blink tiredly in the sweet water. Tony is still there, looking straight at him, with a soft smile.

Peter blinks.

“Tony?” He mouths and for a moment, they are on the same level. Peter extends his hand and their fingers meet.

Then Peter is grasped away from him.

Tony is glad, it was not too late, Peter could still be saved.

Pepper’s voice is distorted. Tony stays in the water, looks at his fingers.

For a second, he had not been so lonely.

He rises up and walks to the shore where Pepper is pumping Peter’s chest frantically and blowing air into his mouth.

“You can’t do this,” Pepper sobs. “We can’t lose you too.”

As Pepper does a compression, Peter chokes and spits up a large mouthful of water. Tony watches as Pepper helps the boy to his side, thumps his back and grasps his hand. Peter curls up while water drips from his mouth and nose.

Tony is relieved, the boy got a second chance.

If only he could appreciate it.

Peter lies.

Tony hears him tell Pepper, May, everyone that he sleepwalked.

Nobody fully believes him but who would dare to be the first person to call him a liar?

Besides, Peter seems to have gotten some of his fight back. He goes back to school, takes his meds and at least tries to eat. It doesn’t often work, nausea trips to the bathroom are still too common.

Psychiatrist calls it minimal improvement but it was still something they could work on.

Not even once does Tony notice a smile on Peter’s face. Not when watching funny videos or looking at old pictures.

To him, there is nothing to work on.

Looking back, he knew the boy was already lost.

That night he is with Pepper and Morgan and listens to a bedtime story. He miss telling those.

Pepper gets a phone call and frowns at the number. She tells Morgan to read for a moment by herself and leaves the room. Tony debates whether to follow but he is having too much fun watching Morgan try to spell out words. He corrects her mistakes.

Pepper comes back ten minutes later, her eyes red and tear tracks on her face.

“Morgan, honey,” The woman sniffles and takes the book gently. “You remember Peter?”

No, Tony’s eyes snap open.

Morgan nods.

“He-” Pepper tries to find the words. “Peter won’t be coming over anymore”

Where was Peter? Where would Peter go?

“He is dead, baby.”

“Dead like Daddy?”

Tony panics. Peter was not supposed to be dead.

“Yes. He is with Daddy in Heaven.”

“Will Daddy take care of him?”

Pepper nods with a sad smile.

“Yes, sweetie. Daddy will make sure Peter is alright.”

“Will he read him bedtime stories?”

Tony leaves before he hears the answer. He has to find Peter.

He goes up to Heaven and seeks out the Higher Lords.

“Where are the ones who have just died?”

They appear here, Tony doesn’t know if the words are spoken aloud or if he understands it through a bond.

“I need to find my kind”

Seek in the hall

He does and finds countless new faces. He calls for Peter but finds nobody. But he finds too many people he had seen on the vanished list, mostly old people. Their health had declined after multiple shocks about how their lives had changed.

“I couldn’t not find him. He is not here.”

Everyone who dies comes here

“But Peter is not here! Where is my kid?”

If he died a natural death, he appears here

Tony blinks. “What do you mean natural?”

“Sickness, old age or accident.”

Tony feels sick

“What if- what if Peter- what if someone does it themselves?”

Silence

They go to limbo

“Limbo?”

They are there for undeemed time

“Why?”

Giving away your life is a sin

“He was suffering!”

Nevertheless, if he killed himself-

“You punish him! You punish a hurting child! What kind of sick fucks are you?!”

Tony rubs his face, tries to force down panic.

“How long is he there?”

It is not certain- time loses meaning here

“Are we talking about a week?”

Silence

“Month? Year?”

Never an answer

Next few weeks Tony spends sitting on the ground at the undertaker’s. He guards Peter’s body. He sees people come and see the kid. He witnesses the long gashes on Peter’s wrists. No autopsy is needed, the boy died of blood loss.

During the funeral, he sits beside the casket. He doesn’t look inside after the lid is closed. Peter had on makeup to hide the paleness of his skin and lips.

“I- I had hope he would be the next hero of this world,” Rhodey whispers as the Avengers look down on their youngest member lying on velvet pillows, hands crossed and a bouquet of white roses over his chest.

Pepper doesn’t let Morgan see Peter’s body and Tony agrees with the decision.

Peter is laid down to rest in a cemetery in Queens, besides his parents.

There is still no sign of him in heaven.

Tony doesn’t know when he will arrive there, how long it will take. Maybe Peter will only get to rest once everyone on their team is dead.

He sits down beside the grave, looks as snowflakes start covering the small hill under which Peter’s body resides.

“Oh, kiddo,” He cries and touches the ground. “You’re alright.”

Those were the last words he ever said to Peter.

Maybe they would once be Peter’s welcoming to Heaven.

[newstfionline]

Friday, January 15, 2021

DC locks down a week before inauguration (AP) All through downtown Washington, the primary sound for several blocks was the beeping of forklifts unloading more fencing. There were no cars or scooters and seemingly no tourists Wednesday, just the occasional jogger and multiple construction crews at work. The U.S. Capitol that proved such a soft target last week was visible only through lines of tall, black fence. Two blocks from the White House, a group of uniformed National Guard troops emerged from a tour bus and headed into a hotel as a state of lockdown descended on Washington that will last through the Jan. 20 inauguration. More than 15,000 National Guardsmen from multiple states, some of them armed, will be in Washington. “Clearly we are in uncharted waters,” said Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser. The FBI has warned that armed protests by violent Trump supporters were being planned in all 50 state capitals as well as in Washington for the days leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Between the pandemic and the security threat, Bowser is flat-out asking people not to come to the District of Columbia for the inauguration.

Republican Party faces rage from both pro- and anti-Trump voters (Reuters) After riots at the U.S. Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters, the Republican Party is facing defections from two camps of voters it can’t afford to lose: those saying Trump and his allies went too far in contesting the election of Democrat Joe Biden—and those saying they didn’t go far enough, according to new polling and interviews with two dozen voters. And the choice confronting party leaders as they ponder a renewed impeachment effort—whether to continue backing Trump or make him a pariah—will almost certainly cost the party voters it needs to win future elections, Republican party officials and strategists say.

A tinderbox (The Media Today) Sam Lessin, an early Facebook staffer, wrote at The Information that “the move by social networks to deplatform President Trump last week was the right call.” But he added that the moment will be “remembered as a watershed moment for the history of free speech and the globally open internet. It has the potential to be a tinderbox that undoes the core of the internet as we know it.” Lessin says the moves will “create intense pressure to censor private messaging (starting with email) and that other countries will “now have a very legitimate argument they need their own control” of information platforms, and even the internet itself.

Defiance of virus dining bans grows as restaurants flounder BORING, Ore. (AP)—A line formed out the door during the lunch rush at the Carver Hangar, a family-owned restaurant and sports bar, and waitresses zipped in and out of the kitchen trying to keep up with orders as customers backed up in the lobby. Indoor dining has been banned in much of Oregon for nearly two months, but the eatery 20 miles southeast of Portland was doing a booming business—and an illegal one. The restaurant’s owners, Bryan and Liz Mitchell, fully reopened Jan. 1 in defiance of Democratic Gov. Kate Brown’s COVID-19 indoor dining ban in their county. “We’re not going to back down because our employees still need to eat, they still need that income,” said Bryan Mitchell, as customers ate at tables spaced 6 feet apart. “The statement that we’re making is, ‘Every life is essential. You have the right to survive. Nobody should tell you what you can and cannot do to provide for your family.’” Even as coronavirus deaths soar, a growing number of restaurants in states across the country are reopening in defiance of strict COVID-19 rules that have shut them down for indoor dining for weeks, or even months. Restaurants can serve people outside or offer carry-out, but winter weather has crippled revenues from patio dining.

Colombia struggles to keep social leaders safe (AP) Just taking a walk in the streets of Colombia’s capital can feel dangerous for Luz Nelly Santana. The Afro-Colombian community leader always wears a bulletproof vest. And she’s followed by a bodyguard assigned by the government. “I get death threats on the phone every month,” Santana said, “and once a man entered my office and said he was going to kill me.” Santana, who runs an organization that helps community leaders fleeing violence to settle in Bogota, is one of more than 3,700 activists given some sort of protection from Colombia’s government. The country is widely seen as one of the world’s most dangerous places to be a community leader or advocate for human rights or environmental issues. Last year 120 community leaders were murdered in Colombia according to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. Decades of bloody civil conflict involving government forces, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries linked to landowners and powerful drug trafficking groups have created an atmosphere in which many factions feel little hesitation at trying to kill or intimate those who oppose them.

‘At 6 p.m., life stops’: Europe uses curfews to fight virus (AP) As the wan winter sun sets over France’s Champagne region, the countdown clock kicks in. Laborers stop pruning the vines as the light fades at about 4:30 p.m., leaving them 90 minutes to come in from the cold, change out of their work clothes, hop in their cars and zoom home before a 6 p.m. coronavirus curfew. Forget about any after-work socializing with friends, after-school clubs for children or doing any evening shopping beyond quick trips for essentials. Police on patrol demand valid reasons from people seen out and about. “At 6 p.m., life stops,” says Champagne producer Alexandre Prat. Trying to fend off the need for a third nationwide lockdown that would further dent Europe’s second-largest economy and put more jobs in danger, France is instead opting for creeping curfews. Big chunks of eastern France, including most of its regions that border Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, face 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. restrictions on movement. Overnight curfews have become the norm in swaths of Europe but the 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew in 25 regions of eastern France is the most restrictive anywhere in the European Union’s 27 nations. Others countries’ curfews all start later and often finish earlier.

Facing New Outbreaks, China Places Over 22 Million on Lockdown (NYT) When a handful of new coronavirus cases materialized this month in a province surrounding Beijing, the Chinese authorities bolted into action. They locked down two cities with more than 17 million people, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. They ordered a crash testing regime of nearly every resident there, which was completed in a matter of days. They shut down transportation and canceled weddings, funerals and, most significantly, a provincial Communist Party conference. By this week the lockdowns expanded to include another city on the edge of Beijing, Langfang, as well as a county in Heilongjiang, a northeastern province. Districts in Beijing itself, the Chinese capital, also shut down. More than 22 million people in all have been ordered to remain inside their homes—double the number affected last January when China’s central government locked down Wuhan. The flare-ups remain small compared with the devastation facing other countries, but they threaten to undercut the success the country’s Communist Party has had in subduing the virus, allowing its economy to surge back after last year’s slump and its people to return to something close to normal lives.

The rise of Chinese financial technology (Foreign Affairs) China’s emerging dominance in financial technology, known as “fintech,” poses a fundamental problem for the United States. Washington cannot trust that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will harness its growing influence in financial markets for the benefit of all. More likely, Beijing will use fintech to occupy the high ground in global commerce, bolster its surveillance state, and lay the groundwork to challenge the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The rise of Chinese fintech companies threatens to strengthen the world’s most pervasive surveillance state. The so-called data exhaust from billions of digital transactions supplements existing data from facial recognition, search histories, and social network connections, furnishing the CCP with GPS time and location stamps, transaction histories, travel logs, bank account details, and more. Together, this information allows Chinese authorities to closely monitor and control specific individuals and communities by reducing or canceling access to bank accounts, freezing travel routes, and denying entry to specific locations. Ominously, financial authorities in Hong Kong have recently begun asking banks to report transactions to help authorities identify pro-democracy activists.

“But in America…” (Foreign Policy) Chinese state media is still focused on the dysfunction revealed by the assault on the U.S. Capitol last week. As with Soviet propaganda about U.S. racism, Chinese propaganda is most effective when it goes after genuine U.S. failings. But the media has bent the Capitol story significantly toward Beijing’s own needs. Emerging themes include the chaos of democracy, the righteousness of China’s own censorship, and that the United States is making a mistake by going after China instead of fixing its domestic problems. One theme has especially resonated, though: guns. Like most of the world, the Chinese public views the U.S. attitude toward firearms with horror. The sight of armed marchers baffles people. In China, the issue has tragic salience in the death of Yiran Fan, a talented Ph.D. student in Chicago who was killed on Jan. 9 during a gun rampage.

‘Rent-a-person who does nothing’ in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude (Mainichi/Japan) A 37-year-old Tokyo man who says he rents himself out to other people “to do nothing” has been inundated with gratitude from Twitter users. “I’m glad I was able to take a walk with someone while keeping a comfortable distance, where we didn’t have to talk but could if we wanted to,” one user wrote. Another reflected, “I had been slack about visiting the hospital, but I went because he came with me.” Shoji Morimoto has been advertising himself as a person who can “eat and drink, and give simple feedback, but do nothing more,” since June 2018, and has received over 3,000 requests. He has about 270,000 followers on Twitter. Initially he had offered his “rent-a-person who does nothing” services for free, but he now charges 10,000 yen (roughly $96) per request. People rent him for various reasons. At times he will participate in a gaming session to make up numbers, turn up to send off people who are moving away, accompany those filing for divorce, or listen to health care workers who have become mentally unwell due to their exhausting work. It may be the case that somewhere in their hearts, everyone is longing for someone who will cheer them on. It seems that this may be why the “rent-a-person who does nothing”—who doesn’t tell you to “do your best” or that they “support you,” but stays by your side in silence, has seen endless demand.

Fire destroys homes of thousands in Rohingya refugee camps—UNHCR (Reuters) A huge fire swept through the Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh in the early hours of Thursday, the United Nations said, destroying homes belonging to thousands of people. The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said more than 550 shelters home to around 3,500 people were either totally or partially destroyed in the blaze, as well as 150 shops and a facility belonging to a non-profit organization. More than a million Rohingya live in the mainland camps in southern Bangladesh, the vast majority having fled Myanmar in 2017 in a military-led crackdown the U.N said was executed with genocidal intent, charges Myanmar denies.

Lebanon begins all-day curfew as virus spins out of control (AP) Lebanese authorities began enforcing an 11-day nationwide shutdown and round the clock curfew Thursday, hoping to limit the spread of coronavirus infections spinning out of control after the holiday period. For the first time, residents were required to request a one-hour permit to be allowed to leave the house for “emergencies,” including going to the bakery, pharmacist, doctor, hospital or airport. Authorities came under pressure to take a tougher approach after the country’s hospitals ran out of beds with daily infections reaching an all-time high of 5,440 cases last week in the country of nearly 6 million people. Even before the coronavirus, Lebanon was going through an unprecedented economic and financial crisis that has seen its national currency and bank sector collapse and locked depositors out of the savings. Hospitals, long considered among the best in the Middle East, struggled to pay staff, keep equipment running and secure necessary medical supplies as dollars grew scarce. Furthermore, the country has been without a government since the old one resigned in the wake of the catastrophic Aug. 4 explosion at Beirut port, which put a further strain on hospitals, inundating them with injured. At least three hospitals were destroyed.

Central African Republic soldiers repel rebels at capital (AP) Security forces in Central African Republic repelled attacks by rebels trying to seize the capital early Wednesday after intense fighting on the city’s outskirts, officials said, in a major escalation of violence that has rocked the country since last month. At least one Rwandan peacekeeper has been killed, and another injured, according to the U.N. mission in the country. At least 30 rebels have been killed, according to Prime Minister Firmin Ngrebada. The rebels are protesting the re-election on Dec. 27 of President Faustin-Archange Touadera. Following the Jan. 4 announcement of Touadera’s victory, the rebel coalition threatened to take the capital. They had also taken towns in other parts of the country before the election. The army is supported in its battle against the rebels by forces from Rwanda, Russia, France and the United Nations.

Lack of Tiny Parts Disrupts Auto Factories Worldwide (NYT) Automakers braced for turmoil when the pandemic hit. They expected supply chain disruptions and plummeting sales. But they never figured that a year later one of their biggest problems would be PlayStations. Strong demand for gaming systems, personal computers and other electronics by a world stuck indoors has sucked up supplies of semiconductors, forcing carmakers around the world to scramble for the chips that have become as essential to mobility as gasoline or steel. Virtually no carmaker has been spared. Toyota Motor has shut down production lines in China. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles temporarily stopped production at plants in Ontario and Mexico. Volkswagen has warned of production problems at factories in China, Europe and the United States. Ford Motor said last week that it was idling a Louisville, Ky., factory for a week because of the shortage. When Covid-19 hit, automakers slashed orders for chips in anticipation of plunging sales. At the same time, semiconductor makers shifted their production lines to meet surging orders for chips used in products like laptop computers, webcams, tablets and 5G smartphones. “Consumer electronics exploded,” said Dan Hearsch, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners. “Everybody and their brother wanted to buy an Xbox and PlayStation and laptops, while automotive shut down. Then automotive came back faster than expected, and that’s where you get into this problem.”

[a-beast-of-prey]

🌷 (DO IT!)

[ANGST DRABBLES (or starters, if requested)] (still accepting)

🌷- My muse is forced to come forward and admit a terrible secret they have been hiding from yours.

{{OH I’LL DO IT, ALRIGHT. ( ͡O ͜ʖ ͡O)  Under readmore for length cuz I got mega carried away. :,,) And yet I still couldn’t end it properly. *rips out my own hair*}}

-

Making a round through the crew quarters in the wee hours of the morning before caffeinating herself up in preparation for the day’s work had become somewhat of a habit for Reyna.  A minor ritual, even.  Cracking open every door in turn to ensure her Rogues were all safe and sleeping soundly gave her peace of mind.  And the various sprawled forms and snores she was met with brought a warm smile every time.  However, the newest addition had a pretty eclectic sleep schedule; awake far more often than he was asleep.  And in the rare instances she did mange to catch him sleeping, it was generally fitful.  K’ hadn’t taken kindly to her brief intrusions initially, chasing her out with a lot of growling and snapping that fouled her own mood.  But he’d toned it down to the occasional scowl or a cocked brow in recent weeks, which was decent enough progress, she supposed.  Baby steps was better than nothing.

Before she knew it, Reyna found herself at his door.  It was the last, right at the very end of the hall; a purposeful pick so he was less inclined to mingle with the rest of the crew.  He still wasn’t all that warm with them, but he was starting to become civil, at least.  Except towards Orendi, who he continued to avoid like the plague where he could and greeted with distasteful lip curls when he couldn’t, even after she’d ceased bothering him in the middle of the night some time ago.  Mostly.  By comparison, he seemed to enjoy working with Pendles - learning the ropes to help out with his business here and there, and participating in some sort of underground fighting ring or another while bearing the EE logo on his jacketed back (she kept meaning to attend one of his matches sometime, but had to keep taking hard passes due to work or sheer exhaustion) - quite a bit on the side.  And (contrary to his rebuttals on the matter) he was developing a budding friendship with Shayne.  Something she quietly but wholeheartedly encouraged, even if she found the majority of music they listened to together at full blast terrible.  To each their own, and all that.

Reyna sighed, bracing herself in case he was in an especially terrible mood before entering.  The room itself was rather barren; no posters or photographs to speak of, and almost devoid of any knickknacks.  If not for the boots by the door, jacket slung over the back of the desk chair, sunglasses on the nightstand, and bin half full of crumpled paper and jerky wrappers, she might have thought it unoccupied.  She wasn’t entirely sure if it wasn’t tonight as her eye swept across the darkened room, since he wasn’t slumped over his desk, datapad under his cheek.  Which was how she found him most often.  That said, he did tend to crash on the common room couch in lieu of his own bed, so maybe he was…? Nope.  He was actually in bed for a change.  Not laying down, though.  Instead, he sat with his back pressed flush against the headboard and face buried against his knees, which had been drawn up tight to his chest.  She had to do a double take.  No way… was he upset? Despite her concern at the sight, Reyna found herself hesitating.  K’ seldom showed any emotion unrelated to anger or outright apathy.  And when he did, he’d hastily attempt to reestablish his cold barrier or play it off.  She’d managed to needle out quite a few softer moments from the kid, but none even remotely like this.  Cautiousness aside, she wasn’t entirely sure how to approach him if he truly was feeling upset.  Or if she should even bother in the first place, figuring that he was even more likely to snap and demand to be left alone; just clam up all the more and undo all of her progress in one swift move.  But it was the shaking of his shoulders and the muffled sob - so quiet she almost missed it - that made the decision for her.  Screw it.  He was under her care and part of her crew.  There was absolutely no way she could leave him alone like this in good conscience.

She raised a fist, rapping it gently against the wall to claim his attention.  “Hey,” she called out softly.  He’d stiffened instantly, shoulders taut, and probably would’ve gone entirely still if he was able to put a lid on his shuddering breaths.  Her own trepidation mounted but there was no going back now.  For better or worse, she was committed to this now.  “You doing okay?”

The response was a typical one.  But the delivery wasn’t nearly as venomous as it would’ve been any other night.  He also didn’t remove his head from his knees.  “Go away.”

“Sorry, kiddo.  No can do, this time.“ She slipped further into the room, padding over to the bed on soft feet.  After a brief moment of internal debate, she sat beside him.  The glower he shot her from over his knees was wet and bloodshot.

“I’m not in the mood right now, Valeria.  Get lost before I fry you.”

“Clearly,” she said dryly, casually choosing to ignore the threat he was highly likely to act upon.  “But that’s exactly why I ain’t leaving.  You’re hurting, and I wanna know why.”

“… Is that an order?” he hissed, garnering a frown from from her.  The continued lack of trust despite all the months spent being nothing but accommodating of his temper and mostly courteous of his impossibly high boundaries, all while slowly helping him ease out of his thorny shell, stung.

“No.  It’s not.  I could make it one, but I’d honestly rather not.” She huffed out a sigh, running a hand through her bedraggled crest of hair.   “Look.  It’s completely up to you if you wanna talk or not; I won’t force you to if you’re that adamant on keeping quiet.  That said… I think it’ll do you good to get whatever’s wrong off your chest.  It’s obviously eating you up.”

It took a solid five minutes of heavy silence, but K’ ended up surprising both of them by relenting.  For reasons he wasn’t all too sure of himself.  He gave his knees a squeeze, voice coming out small and hesitant.  Vulnerable.  “I just… I don’t even know who or what I am… I’ve been told I’m a half-baked clone.  And that I’m not; that I’m the original.  But I don’t exactly have much by way of memory to confirm or dispute that either way.  And what little I do have I’m not sure is real, let alone that it even belongs to me.“ Aside from everything that had come after waking up strapped to an operating table a couple of years ago, that is.  The feeling of a hundred billion angry ants running beneath his skin - concentrated primarily around his throbbing right arm - through a haze of pain and lingering anaesthesia remained one of his handful of clearer memories, to date.  Everything that seemed like it had come before that first memory of self-awareness was fragmented and murky, if not outright elusive… So he couldn’t help but question their authenticity.  Especially when they only seemed to rear their heads in his dreams, then faded like morning mist upon waking.  “Not to mention whatever information I pick up keeps leading to dead ends…”

So that was what all his little ventures were about, Reyna realised with a jolt.  He was hopping about the remaining sliver of universe - disappearing on his own, or with his towering guardian in tow, for periods of time upwards of two or three days to a couple of weeks - in search of answers.  That… made some of his pricklier moments make more sense; added some context to them.  When his temper had been more frayed and his words snappier, or he’d been more silent than usual and looking hollow, those were the times his searches had turned up nothing.  And there had been a lot of those.  She kicked herself for not catching on sooner.  For not prying more, regardless if it pissed him off, so he wouldn’t’ve have bottled this negativity up for so long.

K’ swiped an arm across his eyes.  A quick, frustrated motion that only served to pave the way for more unwanted tears that just didn’t seem to want to stop.  Now that he’d started letting this out in the air, he found he couldn’t stop.  Something that alarmed him.  He took pride in how well he hid the chinks in his armour; it kept him safe, prevented him from being hurt further by anybody but himself.  So he couldn’t even begin to fathom why he let the Valkyrie - some woman he’d barely known a few scant months - catch a glimpse of all the weakness he hid behind his stony demeanour.  He felt weak because of it.  Pathetic.  And overall disgusted with himself for letting himself get caught indulging in this moment of weakness.  Another frustrated and ultimately vain attempt was made to clear away his tears.  It did nothing to prevent the crack in his voice either.  “I’m just a broken, fucked up kid with a shitty attitude… All I’ve got going for me are my flames, and I can’t even use those properly.  And to top it all off, I don’t even have a real name; just a goddamn letter and a line.  It’s all NESTS left me with and I fucking hate it; I hate them!“

[creativesage]

(via More Start-Ups Have an Unfamiliar Message for Venture Capitalists: Get Lost — The New York Times)

By Erin Griffith

On a sunny Saturday morning in New York a few months ago, a group of 50 start-up founders gathered in the dank basement of a Lower East Side bar. They scribbled notes at long tables, sipping coffee and LaCroix while a stack of pizza boxes emanated the odor of hot garlic. One by one, they gave testimonials taking aim at something nearly sacred in the technology industry: venture capital.

Josh Haas, the co-founder of Bubble, a software-writing start-up, told the group that he and venture capitalists “were pretty much totally on different wavelengths” about the trajectory of his business.

Seph Skerritt, the founder of Proper Cloth, a clothing company, said that the hype around raising money was a trap. “They try to make you feel inferior if you’re not playing that game,” he said.

The event had been organized by Frank Denbow, 33, a fixture of New York’s tech scene and the founder of T-shirt start-up Inka.io, to bring together start-up founders who have begun to question the investment framework that has supercharged their field. By encouraging companies to expand too quickly, Mr. Denbow said, venture capital can make them “accelerate straight into the ground.”

The V.C. business model, on which much of the modern tech industry was built, is simple: Start-ups raise piles of money from investors, and then use the cash to grow aggressively — faster than the competition, faster than regulators, faster than most normal businesses would consider sane. Larger and larger rounds of funding follow.

The end goal is to sell or go public, producing astonishing returns for early investors. The setup has spawned household names like Facebook, Google and Uber, as well as hundreds of other so-called unicorn companies valued at more than $1 billion.

But for every unicorn, there are countless other start-ups that grew too fast, burned through investors’ money and died — possibly unnecessarily. Start-up business plans are designed for the rosiest possible outcome, and the money intensifies both successes and failures. Social media is littered with tales of companies that withered under the pressure of hypergrowth, were crushed by so-called “toxic V.C.s” or were forced to raise too much venture capital — something known as the “foie gras effect.”

Now a counter movement, led by entrepreneurs who are jaded by the traditional playbook, is rejecting that model. While still a small part of the start-up community, these founders have become more vocal in the last year as they connect venture capitalists’ insatiable appetite for growth to the tech industry’s myriad crises.

Would Facebook’s leadership have ignored warning signs of Russian election meddling or allowed its platform to incite racial violence if it hadn’t, in its early days, prized moving fast and breaking things? Would Uber have engaged in dubious regulatory and legal strategies if it hadn’t prioritized expansion over all else? Would the tech industry be struggling with gender and race discrimination if the investors funding it were a little less homogeneous?

“The tool of venture capital is so specific to a tiny, tiny fraction of companies. We can’t let ourselves be fooled into thinking that’s the story of the future of American entrepreneurship,” said Mara Zepeda, a 38-year-old entrepreneur who in 2017 helped start an advocacy organization called Zebras Unite. Its members include start-up founders, investors and foundations focused on encouraging a more ethical industry with greater gender and racial diversity. The group now has 40 chapters and 1,200 members around the world.

“The more we believe that myth, the more we overlook tremendous opportunities,” Ms. Zepeda said in an interview.

Some of the groups are rejecting venture capital because they’ve been excluded from the traditional V.C. networks. Aniyia Williams, who started the nonprofit Black & Brown Founders, said a venture-funded system that encourages many failures for every one success is particularly unfair to black, latinx and women founders who “are rarely afforded the opportunity to fail, period.” Members of these organizations, she added, see more value when whole groups in their communities thrive, rather than venture’s winner-take-all model.

Other founders have decided the expectations that come with accepting venture capital aren’t worth it. Venture investing is a high-stakes game in which companies are typically either wild successes or near total failures.

“Big problems have occurred when you have founders who have unwillingly or unknowingly signed on for an outcome they didn’t know they were signing on for,” said Josh Kopelman, a venture investor at First Round Capital, an early backer of Uber, Warby Parker and Ring.

He said he was happy that companies were embracing alternatives to venture capital. “I sell jet fuel,” he said, “and some people don’t want to build a jet.”

Right now, that jet fuel seems unlimited. Venture capital investments into United States-based companies ballooned to $99.5 billion in 2018, the highest level since 2000, according to CB Insights, a data provider. And the investments have expanded beyond software and hardware into anything that is tech-adjacent — dog walking, health care, coffee shops, farming, electric toothbrushes.

But people like Sandra Oh Lin, the chief executive of KiwiCo, a seller of children’s activity kits, say that more money isn’t necessary. Ms. Oh Lin raised a little over $10 million in venture funding between 2012 and 2014, but she is now rebuffing offers of more just as her company has hit on a product people want — the very moment when investors would love to pour more gas on the fire. KiwiCo is profitable and had nearly $100 million in sales in 2018, a 65 percent increase over the prior year, Ms. Oh Lin said.

“We are aggressive about growth, but we are not a company that chases growth at all costs,” Ms. Oh Lin said. “We want to build a company that lasts.”

Entrepreneurs are even finding ways to undo money they took from venture capital funds. Wistia, a video software company, used debt to buy out its investors last summer, declaring a desire to pursue sustainable, profitable growth. Buffer, a social media-focused software company, used its profits to do the same in August. Afterward, Joel Gascoigne, its co-founder and chief executive, received more than 100 emails from other founders who were inspired — or jealous.

“The V.C. path forces you into this binary outcome of acquisition or I.P.O., or pretty much bust,” Mr. Gascoigne said. “People are starting to question that.”

Who dares question the hoodie

Venture capital wasn’t always the default way to grow a company. But in the last decade, its gospel of technological disruption has infiltrated every corner of the business world. Old-line companies from Campbell Soup to General Electric started venture operations and accelerator programs to foster innovation. Sprint and UBS hired WeWork to make their offices more start-up-like.

At the same time, start-up culture — hoodies and all — entered the mainstream on the back of celebrity investors like Ashton Kutcher, TV shows like “Shark Tank” and movies like “The Social Network.” Few questioned the Silicon Valley model for creating the next Google, Facebook or Uber.

Those who tried to buck the conventional method experienced harsh trade-offs. Bank loans are typically small, and banks are reluctant to lend money to software companies, which have no hard assets to use as collateral. Founders who eschew venture capital often wind up leaning on their life savings or credit cards.

Jessica Rovello and Kenny Rosenblatt, the entrepreneurs behind Arkadium, a gaming start-up founded in 2001, initially avoided raising venture money. It took four years before the business earned enough to pay them a salary. The sacrifices were “very real and very intense,” Ms. Rovello said. Nevertheless, the business grew steadily and profitably to 150 employees.

By 2013, though, as investors poured capital into some rivals, the lure of easy money became too tempting to pass up, and the company raised $5 million. Tensions ensued as Arkadium’s investors expected the company to continue raising money with the goal of selling or going public. Ms. Rovello wanted to keep running the company profitably, growing revenue at 20 percent per year and developing a new product that could take years to pay off.

In September, Arkadium used its profits to buy out the investors, allowing the company to remain independent and grow on its own terms. Ms. Rovello said she had no regrets about stepping off the venture-funded path.

“If your end game is having a business that you love and continuing to thrive and making careers for people,” she said, “then I’m winning.”

New kinds of capital

In September, Tyler Tringas, a 33-year-old entrepreneur based in Rio, announced plans to offer a different kind of start-up financing, in the form of equity investments that companies can repay as a percent of their profits. Mr. Tringas said his firm, Earnest Capital, will have $6 million to invest in 10 to 12 companies per year.

Hundreds of emails have poured in since the announcement, Mr. Tringas said in an interview. “They’re almost entirely from people who assumed there was no form of capital that matched any version of their expectations,” he said.

Earnest Capital joins a growing list of firms, including Lighter Capital, Purpose Ventures, TinySeed, Village Capital, Sheeo, XXcelerate Fund and Indie.vc, that offer founders different ways to obtain money. Many use variations of revenue- or profit-based loans. Those loans, though, are often available only to companies that already have a product to sell and an incoming cash stream.

Other companies are inspired by the investor buyouts executed by Buffer, Wistia and Arkadium, and are asking investors to agree to similar deals — at potentially lower returns on their investments — in the future.

Indie.vc, based in Salt Lake City and part of the investment firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, offers start-ups the option to buy back the firm’s shares as a portion of their total sales. That caps the firm’s return at three times its investment. In the typical venture capital model, the earnings for a home-run deal are limitless.

When Indie.vc started three years ago, it saw two or three applications a week, mostly from venture capital rejects. Now it gets as many as 10 applications a week, mostly from companies that could raise venture capital but don’t want to, said Bryce Roberts, the firm’s founder.

“We think there is going to be a tsunami of entrepreneurs who have experienced the one-size-fits-all venture model and want to cherry-pick the pieces of it that work for them,” Mr. Roberts said.

Some venture capitalists have applauded the shift; their style of high-risk investing is not right for many companies. In a recent blog post, Founder Collective, a firm that has invested in Uber and BuzzFeed, praised Mr. Roberts’s offerings while warning founders of the dangers of traditional funding. “Venture capital isn’t bad, but it is dangerous,” the post reads. The firm created ominous warning labels and brochures to send to its companies.

Privately, some venture capitalists have bemoaned the way they’re locked into rigid investment mandates with perverse incentives. “We heard from many investors who said, ‘I can’t say this publicly, but I’m in the machine and I know it’s broken, and I know there is a better way,’” Ms. Zepeda said.

Others have dismissed the trend, according to Mr. Roberts. “It’s amazing how thin-skinned and threatened V.C.s tend to be around people who question their model,” he said.

Even if venture capitalists ignore the companies rejecting their model, some of their investors — endowments, pension funds and mutual funds — are exploring ways to participate. The tech industry’s year of bad headlines has inspired some soul-searching.

“I think we should, as investors, take seriously our role in driving some of these destabilizing forces in society,” said Rukaiyah Adams, chief investment officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, an investor in venture capital funds and nonprofits. “As one of the controllers of capital, I’m raising my hand and saying, ‘Wait a minute, let’s really think about this.’”

Still, the new growth models represent a tiny percentage of the broader start-up funding market. And venture capitalists continue to aggressively pitch their wares — even to companies that aren’t interested.

Notion, a collaboration software company based in San Francisco, has just nine employees and close to one million users, many of whom pay $8 a month. The company is handily profitable. Aside from a small seed round in 2013, it has avoided outside funding.

Venture capitalists, desperate to get a piece of the company, have dug up Notion’s office address and sent its founders cookie dough, dog treats and physical letters, company executives said. Every few months, a new investor inevitably shows up unannounced at Notion’s gate.

Notion’s ambitions are big — the company wants to replace Microsoft Office. But its executives don’t believe they need hundreds of millions of dollars in financing to do it, nor do they want the strings that come attached.

“We’re not anti-V.C.,” said Akshay Kothari, the company’s chief operating officer. “We’re just thinking for ourselves, rather than for them or other peers.”

Correction: Jan. 13, 2019

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the order in which members of Zebras Unite appeared. They are [above] from left, Mara Zepeda, Aniyia Williams, Astrid Scholz and Jennifer Brandel.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at the New York Times.]

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Why the Doctor saved Clara and not Adric

With Series 10 just around the corner, a number of people on forums, news site comment areas, etc., are revving up their “let’s bash Moffat” engines for another year. And since we’re also getting a new companion some of the criticism is turned towards how the character of Clara Oswald was handled.

One chestnut I see popping up is how Moffat supposedly broke continuity by undoing the death of Clara. Well that’s an error to start with - he didn’t undo anything, the Doctor simply delayed the inevitable by pulling her out of time (not that he didn’t try, mark you). Just like he delayed the inevitable by “saving” a data ghost representation of River Song in CAL.

What continuity are they talking about? “You can’t change history - not one line,” as the First Doctor said back in The Aztecs in 1964. The Doctor isn’t supposed to do what he did with Clara because his earlier self said he couldn’t, they say. Father’s Day more recently showed he couldn’t, either.

But the complaint I see most often is “Well, the Fifth Doctor didn’t save Adric. What made Clara so special?”

I’m not making that one up. I actually saw that actual question posted to a forum. Presumably by somebody who stopped watching Doctor Who at the end of The Angels Take Manhattan and resumed watching with Hell Bent and missed the answer to that question in-between. (Even if one takes the view that Clara and the Doctor were no more than buddies a la Donna and Ten, Clara’s actions and contributions and sacrifices alone answer the question as to why she was “so special”.)

After the break, I’ll answer the question (at least in my opinion) of why Adric was not saved.

First, the Fifth Doctor was still (relatively) young when Adric snuffed it, less than 900 years old based on the on-screen age given by the Sixth Doctor a couple of seasons later (we’ll save the debate over why Nine claimed the same age for another day). He wasn’t even halfway through his prescribed regeneration cycle yet. So that means he was much closer to the days when he told Barbara “You can’t change history - not one line”. Watch the opening of the story that followed Adric’s death in Earthshock, Time-Flight, and Five basically says the same thing. In his opinion, he could not do a damn thing to save Adric. Possibly because ...

Second, Adric’s death was part of a fixed point in time. This is a concept RTD and Moffat have hammered home time and again since 2005 (the Classic Era touched on it, but only occasionally). The concept is that, despite what the First Doctor said, elements of time can be rewritten, but certain events cannot without causing paradoxes that could destroy everything. “I know when I can, I know when I can’t,” Twelve later tells Clara when she demands he prevent Danny’s death. The fact Earthshock indicates that Adric’s death was a prime factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs, which changed the course of Earth’s history, I think qualifies as a pretty big fixed point in time, don’t you? Even if the Doctor wanted to, he could not do it. Remember again that Clara still died on trap street - the Class spin-off has given us on-screen canonical proof of this - so her death remained fixed. 

Third, the Fifth Doctor had yet to experience the Time War, a period of loss and “do evil unto evil” that completely changed the Doctor’s worldview, even as he tried to suppress his memories of the War Doctor. He might have become more apt to take risks (though once again, Father’s Day took place during Nine’s era, so there are some risks he wasn’t yet prepared to take, at that point in his life which - by the show’s current dating standards - was more than 1,000 years (or 4.5 billion) before Hell Bent from the Doctor’s perspective.

Fourth, the Doctor was not in love with Adric. I know naysayers and haters roll their eyes at this one, but I call it as I see it. The Doctor falling in love with somebody is bloody dangerous. I’ve written about this before. The Doctor blew up a star just to say goodbye to Rose. The Doctor appeared to be prepared to change history by taking Madame de Pompadour away with him in the TARDIS rather than see her meet her prescribed end. And a real biggie: he put off saying goodbye to River to the point where the entirety of creation would have been destroyed had he died on Trenzalore and Clara hadn’t convinced the Time Lords to save him. And then we know what he tried to do with Clara. (Also, though I do not ship the Doctor and Missy, one could make the case that his allowing Missy to continually escape rather than killing her or doing something else to stop her for good puts the universe in jeopardy, too. Note the only time he seriously gave thought to ending her was, basically, for Clara.)

The Doctor in love is dangerous and so saving Clara is completely in keeping with the character as he has evolved over the last decade. And we have no real point of comparison with the Classic Era because with the possible exception of Peri, none of his companions that he might have had feelings for were ever killed - or otherwise made forever inaccessible. And of course with Peri, the Doctor learned within hours (from his perspective) that she hadn’t really died, so he had no need to pursue the matter.

Adric’s death was a watershed moment for the Classic Era, and it served to provide a rather divisive character with some eleventh-hour respect. But there is no way the Doctor could have or would have done anything to undo it, no matter how much Tegan and Nyssa begged him, any more so than he could have undone the deaths of the others under his care, like Sara Kingdom and Katarina and some of the audio companions. And again, he never undid the deaths of either River or Clara - yes, he tried, but he did not succeed. Nardole confirming River’s death in Return of Doctor Mysterio and Twelve seeing Clara’s name on the memorial wall in For Tonight We May Die (plus the very fact the Whoniverse still exists) proves this. Sad as it may be, River and Clara are as dead as Adric. Only difference is Moffat created outs for both to come back postmortem, such is the wonder of this show. River’s had her turn, so now hopefully Clara will be next.

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  9 minutes (2,284 words)

I hate jocks. Like a good Gen X’er, I walked around my high school with that patch on my backpack — red lettering, white backdrop, frisbee-size. A jock high school. It’s impossible to overstate the contempt I had for sports as a kid. I hated what I took to be phony puddle-deep camaraderie, the brain-dead monosyllabic mottos, the aggressive anti-intellectualism. More than that, there appeared to be a very specific cruelty to it. The way there were always a couple of kids who were always picked last. The collective bullying if someone didn’t measure up to the collective goals. And none of the teachers ever seemed to be as mean as the coaches. They strutted around like grown children, permanently transfixed by the ambitions of their adolescence, actively excluding the same kids they had mocked in their youth.

When I hear about sports stars who kill or commit suicide or generally behave antisocially, I always think: no wonder. In a culture that destroys your body and your mind, no wonder. It’s something of a paradox, of course, because, as we are repeatedly told, physical activity is often essential to psychological health. But why is it so rarely the other way around? I watch Cheer and I watch Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and I watch former NBA star Delonte West get callously thrashed and I wonder why these athletes’ inner lives weren’t as prized as their motor skills. That’s not true; I know why. It suits a lucrative industry that shapes you from childhood to keep you pliable. And what makes you more pliable than mental instability? What better way to get a winning team than to have it populated with people for whom winning validates their existence and for whom losing is tantamount to death?

* * *

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the Hernandez doc when there’s an unexpected crossover with Cheer. A childhood photo of the late NFL star and convicted murderer flashes on-screen as we learn that his female cousins made him want be a cheerleader. It was the same for Cheer’s La’Darius Marshall, who is shown in one snapshot as a young cheerleader, having discovered the sport after hanging out with one of his childhood girlfriends. Both men came from dysfunctional backgrounds: Marshall’s mom was a drug user who ended up in prison for five years. He was sexually abused, not to mention beaten up by his brothers; Hernandez found his own mother distant, and he was also physically and sexually abused. Both found solace in sports, though Hernandez had the kind of dad who “slapped the faggot right out of you,” per one childhood friend, so he ended up in football, his dad’s sport, instead. But their similarities underscore how professional athletics, when so closely tied to a person’s sense of self, can simultaneously be a boon to your mental health and its undoing.

Killer Inside is a misnomer for a start. Everything pointed to Hernandez’s conviction for murdering another footballer (semipro linebacker Odin Lloyd) — or at the very least a fair amount of psychological distress. (I’m not certain why the doc chose to focus on his sexuality — besides prurience — as it seemed to be the least of his concerns.) As he said himself to his mom, who almost immediately replaced her dead husband with Hernandez’s cousin’s husband when he was just a teenager: “I had nobody. What’d you think I was gonna do, become a perfect angel?” The way he fled from his home straight into the arms of a University of Florida football scholarship, having wrapped up high school a semester early, is telling. Football made him somebody. He depended on being a star player because the alternative was being nothing — as one journalist says in the doc, at Florida you had to “win to survive.” 

If the NFL didn’t know the depth of his suffering, they at least knew something, something a scouting service categorized as low “social maturity.” Their report stated that Hernandez’s responses “suggest he enjoys living on the edge of acceptable behavior and that he may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.” But his schools seemed to care more about his history of drug use than his high school concussion (his autopsy would later show chronic traumatic encephalopathy) or the fact that he busted a bar manager’s eardrum for confronting him with his bill. Physical pain was something you played through — one former linebacker described a row of Wisconsin players lining up with their pants down to get painkiller injections — and psychological pain was apparently no different. “It’s a big industry,” the ex-linebacker said, “and they’re willing to put basically kids, young men, in situations that will compromise their long-term health just to beat Northwestern.”

Cheerleading, the billion-dollar sport monopolized by a company called Varsity Brand, has a similarly mercenary approach. While the money is less extreme — the NFL’s annual revenue is more than $14 billion — the contingent self-worth is not. A number of the kids highlighted in Cheer had the kind of childhoods that made them feel like Hernandez, like they had nobody. Morgan Simianer in particular, the weaker flyer who is chosen for her “look,” radiates insecurity. Abandoned by both her parents, she was left as a high school sophomore in a trailer with her brother to fend for herself. “I felt, like, super alone,” Simianer said. “Like everyone was against me and I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t important to anyone.” Though Marshall’s experience was different, his memories of growing up are almost identical to his fellow cheerleader’s. “I felt like I was really alone,” he said. “There was nobody that was gonna come save me.” Like Hernandez, sports was all they had.

And if a competitive sport defines you, then its coach controls you. Hernandez’s father, the ex-football heavyweight, was known as the King; Monica Aldama, the head coach on Cheer, is the Queen. Describing how she felt when Aldama remembered her name at tryouts, Simianer said, “It was like I’m not just nobody.” For her ability to literally pummel a bunch of college kids into a winning team in half the regular time, Aldama has been characterized as both a saint and a sinner. While she claims to be an advocate for the troubled members of her team, she fails to see how their histories skew her intentions — her position as a maternal figure whose love is not unconditional ultimately puts the athletes more at risk. Aldama proudly comments on Simianer’s lack of fear, while it is a clear case of recklessness. This is a girl who is unable to express her pain in any way sacrificing her own life (literally — with her fragile ribs, one errant move could puncture an organ) for the woman who, ironically, made her feel like she was worthy of it. “I would do anything for that woman,” Simianer confesses at one point. “I would take a bullet for her.” Jury’s out on whether Marshall, the outspoken outsize talent who regularly clashes with his team, would do the same. His ambivalent approach to Aldama seems connected to how self-aware he is about his own struggles, which affords him freedom from her grasp. After she pushes him to be more empathetic, he explains, “It’s hard to be like that when you are mentally battling yourself.”

That Cheer and Killer Inside focus on the psychological as well as the physical strain faced by athletes — not to mention that athletics have no gender — is an improvement on the sports industries they present, which often objectify their stars as mere pedestals for their talents. The Navarro cheerleaders and Hernandez are both helped and hurt by sports, an outlet which can at once mean everything and nothing in the end. This is the legacy of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which followed two teen NBA hopefuls and was as much about the intersections of race and class as it was about basketball. Not to mention OJ: Made in America, the 2016 ESPN miniseries that explored how the story of the football star and alleged murderer reflected race relations in the United States in the mid-’90s. Conversely, mainstream film and television continues to be heavily male when it comes to sports, focusing on individual heroics, on pain leading to gain — the American Dream on steroids. Cheer and Killer Inside expose this narrative for the myth it is, spotlighting that all athletes have both minds and bodies that break, that their legacies as human beings are not about what they have won but who they are. But the climate in which they’ve landed cannot be ignored either, a social-media marinated world in which sports stars are no longer just players but people who are willing to be vulnerable with their public, who are even further willing to sign their names next to their problems for The Players’ Tribune, the six-year-old platform populated by content provided by pro athletes. “Everyone is going through something,” wrote NBA star Kevin Love in an industry-shaking post in 2018. “No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside.”

Fast-forward to that new video of former basketball pro Delonte West, the one of him having his head stomped on so hard in the middle of the street that I still wonder how he survived it. He also came from an underprivileged, unstable background. He chose the college he did for its “family atmosphere.” Like Simianer, he fixated on his failures and played with abandon. Like her, he also had trouble verbalizing his feelings, to the point that they would overflow (in anger for him, tears for her). Though he says he was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, he considers his biggest problem to be “self-loathing.” But why? He was a sports star who signed a nearly $13 million contract in his prime — what better reason for self-love? A study published two years ago in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, profiling the psychological well-being of 99 elite athletes, may provide an answer. The study found that those with high perfectionism, fear of failure, and performance-based self-worth had the highest levels of depression, anxiety, shame, and life dissatisfaction. Those with a more global self-worth that did not depend on their performance had the opposite outcome. As if to provide confirmation, a subsequent study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that same year revealed that athletes with contingent self-esteem were more likely to burn out. When sports become your only source of value, your wins ultimately don’t come to much.

* * *

The irony of all of this is that I came back to sports as an adult for my mental health. Obviously, I’m not an elite athlete — whatever the opposite of that is, I am. But having no stakes makes it that much easier to use physical activity for good. Nothing is dependent on it; that I’m moving at all is victory enough. But my circumstances are different. My jock high school was a private school, sports were (mostly) optional, and elite academics were where most of us found validation — and financial stability. “Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an ‘escape’ from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect,” Natalie Weiner writes in SB Nation. “If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe.” This reminds me of Aldama telling a room of underprivileged kids with limited prospects, “If you work hard at anything you do, you will be rewarded, you will be successful in life.” This is the American Dream–infused sports culture the media has traditionally plugged — the one, ironically, dismantled by the show in which Aldama herself appears. As Spike Lee tells a group of the top high school basketball players in the country in Hoop Dreams: “The only reason why you’re here, you can make their team win, and if their team wins, schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.” 

In the same SB Nation article, which focused on how school football coaches combat gun violence, Darnell Grant, a high school coach in Newark, admitted he prioritized schoolwork, something both Cheer and Killer Inside barely mentioned. “My thing is to at least have the choice,” he said. Without that, kids are caught in the thrall of sports, which serves the industry but not its players. Contingent self-worth does the same thing, which is why mental health is as much of a priority as education. The head football coach at a Chicago high school, D’Angelo Dereef, explained why dropping a problematic player — which is basically what happened to Hernandez at U of F, where coach Urban Meyer pushed him into the NFL draft rather than taking him back — doesn’t fix them. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” Dereef told the site. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding.” While the NBA was the first major sports league to address mental health in its collective bargaining agreement in 2018, in mid-January the WNBA signed its own new CBA, which only vaguely promised “enhanced mental health benefits and resources.” That the sports industry as a whole does not go far enough to address the psychological welfare of its players is to their detriment, but also to their own: At least one study from 2003 has shown that prioritizing “athletes’ needs of autonomy” — the opposite of contingent self-worth — as opposed to conformity, has the potential to improve their motivation and performance. In sports terms, that’s a win-win.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[boycenburgfc]

Charity Cannibalism... Two

So in trying to figure out what to write about for this section I kept coming back to neocolonialism. It occurred to me that I had likely chosen neocolonialism in 302 and didn’t really want to write the same thing again so I settled on charity cannibalism. Well lo and behold, charity cannibalism (unsurprisingly) happened to be the key term I wrote about for 302 last semester... Go figure. I did, however notice, that the option is there for this post to talk about a key term in reference to the coronavirus pandemic.This won’t be a rehash of my older post, but will rather try and contextualize charity cannibalism in the pandemic.

If you want to read more about the definition of charity cannibalism but don’t want to read Jean Baudrillard’s 1994 book “The Illusion of the End” I encourage you to either scroll down or ctrl+f charity cannibalism.

In brief charity cannibalism is, according to Baudrillard,  “the economic exploitation of poverty” which is of course relevant to Mohanty and especially Switzer. So, let’s talk about the coronavirus and the exploitation of poverty... Switzer talks about how the Nike Foundation’s “Girl Effect” is problematic by using neoliberal conceptualizations of poverty to sell good feelings to the global north and enhance its image in the minds of its consumers. The videos associated with the Girl Effect not only sexualize girls, but promotes the notion that girls in the global south are merely one western education away from transforming an entire continent and undoing centuries of exploitation by the global north. This of course shows us neoliberalism’s most nefarious quality: the ability to package almost anything to be bought and sold on a market.

The current coronavirus pandemic is ripe for exploitation through charity cannibalism. On one end we see reports from Louisville, Kentucky about people setting up fraudulent COVID-19 testing “facilities” which seek to make money off of desperate people whose health care system (and federal government) is failing them. In the United States health care is a luxury item and the poor (especially the poor who are too poor for private insurance, but aren’t poor enough for medicaid such as myself) are often left to fend for themselves out of desperation. Exploiting disaster is nothing new, in fact economists will tell you that while price gouging is morally questionable, it falls within the “law” of demand. Fraudulent COVID-19 testing, however, isn’t price gouging - it falls more along the lines of economically exploiting poverty, as the former is due to a drastic and sudden increase in demand and the former preys upon a structural issue in society. 

The global south has not yet experienced the infection or mortality rates currently seen in the global north... Yet. This sets the stage, in my opinion, for potential exploitation over the coming months, as the coronavirus is likely to expand through the global south as the north begins to recover. It is easy to imagine many companies, especially those riding high from shifting their production from their traditional products to medical and protective equipment to set up charities and funds to encourage people to buy their products to fight the disease as it ramps up across the global south. Imagine what the Nike Foundation videos will look like as they try and sell their brand under the guise of saving the lives of girls in the global south. 

At the moment we can see the consolidation of government power (look at Viktor Orban in Hungary or the Defense Production Act’s implementation of which I have mixed feelings), and it’s only a matter of time before we see similar corporate consolidation. With small business hanging on by a thread here in the US, and large corporations and private citizens receiving the largest share of the $2.2ish trillion stimulus package and with more tax cuts on the horizon it is likely that we’ll see these large corporations take billions of taxpayer dollars to weather the storm, and when economic activity resumes guess who will be there to buy up former competitors who didn’t survive or couldn’t stay afloat... Though I’m not one to seriously entertain conspiracy theories it isn’t out of the realm of possibility to expect a proliferation in charitable giving and the promotion of corporate charities to keep a smiling face in the spotlight during a time of corporate consolodation. I know that if I were an avaricious capitalist... Sorry, CEO... running a major corporation with dividends and shareholders to consider, I would use the hell out of my philanthropic wing to try and hide the necessarily cruel mechanisms of corporate warfare from mass public scrutiny. 

Charity cannibalism has many uses within the context of neoliberal capitalism, and exploiting poverty during and “after” a crisis is a big one. It is important, especially in the coming months, that we try and be mindful who is saying what and to what ends. With any “luck” factors like the rural and agrarian nature of global south economies will keep the pandemic at bay; perhaps central African states with their recent experiences and successes with infectious diseases (Ebola) will be better prepared for the pandemic. Infection rates are already lower in African and Latin American states, perhaps because a combination of the above reasons. 

[thedeadshotnetwork]

Jerry Brown, President of the Independent Republic of California VATICAN CITY—On his way to the United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany, this week, Jerry Brown stopped over at the Vatican, where a doleful group of climate scientists, politicians and public health officials had convened to discuss calamities that might befall a warming world. The prospects were so dire—floods and fires, but also forced migration, famine and war—that some of the participants acknowledged difficulty staving off despair. California’s doomsayer governor did not express much optimism either. Seated between an economist and an Argentine bishop at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Brown leaned into his microphone and said, “It is despairing. Ending the world, ending all mammalian life. This is bad stuff.” “There’s nothing that I see out there that gives me any ground for optimism,” he went on. Still, he promised action: “I’m extremely excited about doing something about it." Even though President Donald Trump has abandoned the Paris climate agreement and called climate change a “hoax,” and even though he is proceeding to scrap the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and promoting the production of coal, Brown insisted to his audience at the Vatican that these policies do not reflect the true sensibilities of the United States. “This is not just a top-down structure that we have in the United States,” the governor said. The small crowd burst into applause when he added, “Over time, given the commitments that we’re seeing in this room today, and what we’re seeing around the world, the Trump factor is very small, very small indeed.” In the raw balance of power between a governor and a president, Brown has almost no standing abroad. What he does have is a platform, and a proposition: Crusading across Europe in his Fitbit and his dark, boxy suit, Brown advances California and its policies almost as an alternative to the United States—and his waning governorship, after a lifetime in politics, as a quixotic rejection of the provincial limits of the American governor. In the growing chasm between Trump’s Washington and California—principally on climate change, but also taxes, health care, gun control and immigration—Brown is functioning as the head of something closer to a country than a state. In his final term, Brown has lobbied other states and regions to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, while augmenting California’s already expansive suite of climate change programs. But Trump’s election—and the specter of Brown’s own retirement—have lately set the governor on a tear. In a rush of climate diplomacy this year, Brown traveled to China to meet with President Xi Jinping, then to Russia to participate in an international economic forum. This past week saw him address lawmakers in Brussels and Stuttgart, Germany, and he was preparing for roundtable meetings with scientists in Oslo before arriving in Bonn for a climate conference, where Brown will serve as special adviser for states and regions. And he is preparing for California to host an international climate summit of its own next year in San Francisco. In one sense, Brown’s fixation on climate change would seem unremarkable, the predictable conclusion of a career steeped in the ecological and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, early Earth Day rallies and the Stockholm conference on the environment weighed heavily on the public consciousness when Brown was starting out in politics, and observers of a certain age will still recall him mystifying audiences with pronouncements about “planetary realism” and the “spaceship Earth.” He was still talking about the need for a fundamental shift in lifestyle when he said at the Vatican that confronting climate change will require “a transformation of the relationship of human beings to all the mysterious network of things.” “It’s not just a light rinse,” Brown said. “We need a total, I might say, brainwashing. We need to wash our brains out and see a very different kind of world.” But in his climate diplomacy today, Brown is performing a more urgent, final act. For nearly all his public life—from secretary of state to governor, to mayor of Oakland and state attorney general before becoming governor once again, at age 72—Brown’s near-constant state was to run for public office. Now, for the first time, he is not. Term limits will chase Brown from the state Capitol in January 2019, and today he calls climate change his “campaign,” dismissing the idea that after running unsuccessfully for president three times, he might try again in 2020. “I’ve thought because people like you ask me,” he said in an interview before leaving for Europe. “But no, I’m not running.” Now, Brown’s future rests on a family ranch in Northern California, where he is nearly finished building a remote, off-the-grid home. These days, he talks more about rattlesnakes and wild boar than the presidential election, and he has turned his focus from electoral politics to more existential concerns. “I find a lot of what is included in politics doesn’t count that much, at least for my salvation or my peace of mind or my interest in life,” Brown said. The climate, he went on, “is fundamental. It’s not like dietary requirements. It’s not like a tax measure, or a school curriculum, or many of the issues, even a crime bill. It goes to the essence of being alive, living things. Whether it’s humans or fauna, flora, the basis of life is embedded in this chemical structure, biological structure. And it’s threatened.” Sitting in the back of a Ford Crown Victoria on a tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport, Brown added, “This, to me, seems worthwhile.” *** Brown often borrows from the writer Carey McWilliams’ description of California as “the great exception,” a colossus that McWilliams said, “always occupied, in relation to other regions, much the same relation that America has occupied toward Europe: it is the great catch-all, the vortex at the continent’s end into which elements of America’s diverse population have been drawn, whirled around.” Trump’s election nearly spun that vortex off its axis. In a state where Democrats had already battered Republicans to near-irrelevance, voters last year installed Democratic super-majorities in both houses of the state Legislature. They approved higher taxes and stricter gun controls, legalized marijuana and made certain felons eligible for early parole. They handed Trump the most lopsided loss a Republican presidential nominee has suffered in California in 80 years. Then they slumped in front of their TV sets as the rest of America went the other way. The morning after the election, the leaders of the state Senate and assembly issued a joint statement in which they said they “woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land.” Brown had joked before the election that if Trump were to become president, “We’d have to build a wall around California to defend ourselves from the rest of this country.” Now, the state Legislature and a large share of Brown’s constituents expected him to hoist it up—to assert California’s sovereignty in the Trump state. As Trump started dismantling his predecessor’s climate policies, Brown helped organize an alliance of 14 states and the island of Puerto Rico, pledging to meet their share of the U.S. commitment to the Paris climate accord. He redoubled his efforts outside of the United States, expanding on a joint project with the German state of Baden-Württemberg: recruiting nearly 200 mostly subnational governments to sign a nonbinding pact to limit global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold beyond which many scientists predict environmental catastrophe. On top of that, Brown negotiated legislation extending California’s signature cap-and-trade program for an additional 10 years, then signed an agreement with leaders of Ontario and Quebec to integrate their cap-and-trade systems with California’s. Trump’s election shook Brown and his home state in other ways, too: California relied on billions of dollars in federal health care funding that Trump threatened to undo, and the president’s hard line on immigration sowed fear among California’s large population of undocumented immigrants. When the Trump administration started conducting immigration sweeps in Los Angeles, protesters strung “No I.C.E” signs from freeway overpasses, and Brown—who had signed legislation granting undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses and access to college financial aid—negotiated state legislation curbing local law enforcement officials’ ability to cooperate with federal immigration agents. By this fall, California’s feuding with Washington had grown so routine that it barely registered as news when, during the span of seven hours one day last month, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced four separate lawsuits against the Trump administration on issues ranging from health care and education to immigration and oil extraction on public and tribal lands. Before Trump’s election, Brown existed largely at the margins outside California. When he returned to office in 2011, a fellow Democrat held the White House, and no one had to look West for an expression of leftist causes. In that context, Brown presented as a moderate, taking criticism from environmentalists for his permissiveness of hydraulic fracturing, while others dismissed as insignificant the nonbinding climate agreements he pursued. But then Trump, less than a month in office, told a national TV audience, “California is in many ways out of control.” Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, addressing California Republicans shortly after Brown signed legislation expanding protections for undocumented immigrants, said that if California kept this up, it would eventually “try to secede from the union.” The governor factored so heavily in the specter of a civil war that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, himself a Californian, slipped in a speech last month in which he rebuked one “President Brown.” The nation’s most populous state was cleaving from Washington, and Brown was its marshaling force. “Trump is leaving many vacuums, and I think Jerry Brown has long imagined himself as a kind of global player,” says Orville Schell, who wrote a biography of Brown in 1978 and remains in contact with him. “He does see California, as the sixth-largest economy of the world, as capable of playing more of a nation-state-like role.” Brown “sort of accidentally has had the world thrust in his lap through the climate issue, which he passionately believes in,” Schell adds. “The opportunity has presented itself, the inclination is there, and he’s sort of ratcheting the state up to rush into that breach that Washington is leaving.” *** In the role of a statesman, Brown so far has been met with doting audiences in Europe. When he arrived in Stuttgart for meetings this week, local officials sent a seven-car motorcade to the airport to deliver him to his hotel with lights flashing, an unheard-of accommodation back home. And when Brown spoke in Brussels on Tuesday, before the hemicycle of the European Parliament, the body’s president, Antonio Tajani, said the governor’s presence gave Europeans “some comfort” in the era of Trump. Muhterem Aras, president of the parliament of Baden-Württemberg, told Brown through an interpreter, “You and your work are needed more than ever.” She cast Brown as a warrior “facing a mighty lobby as an adversary.” Yet in the polished, grip-and-grin world of diplomacy, Brown can also seem out of place. He has sprinted through his trip on a borrowed charter plane with his tiny entourage—a handful of aides, a small protective detail and his wife and adviser, Anne Gust Brown, straightening his collar. He maintains an exasperatingly loose schedule, suffers posing for photographs and sometimes wanders on stage. Before he strode into the Vatican headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a 16th century summer residence for Pope Pius IV, Brown darted for a table of coffee and cookies that waiters were starting to clear away. “You had to eat, didn’t you, love?” his wife asked her husband, who has a sixth sense for free food. Throughout his trip, Brown has also carried copies of two articles he wrote about the threat of nuclear proliferation, his principal concern other than climate change. The first, “Nuclear Addiction: A Response,” was written in 1984 for a now-defunct Jesuit publication. The second is Brown’s review in the New York Review of Books last year of former defense secretary William Perry’s My Journey at the Nuclear Brink . Leaving a meeting one night in Rome with Arturo Sosa, the superior general of the Jesuits, Brown squinted over his hawk-like nose and said that while “going around enlisting allies … I bring my two little articles and I pass them around.” Depending on his audience and mood, Brown vacillates between optimism and dread for the future. Signing a government guestbook in Brussels this week, he quoted Virgil: “Ad astra per aspera”—to the stars through difficulties. Later, when the elevator taking Brown from a meeting went up instead of down, he first complained, half-joking—“Mistake!”—and then said, “That can happen with missile launches, too.” As frequently as Brown is asked about Trump, Brown has mentioned the president only sparingly on his European tour. Although he has called Trump the “null hypothesis” for climate change, a politician who by “making his case of denial so preposterous, helps the other side,” he insists the problem of climate change is bigger than one leader, and has acknowledged he is trying to make “lemonade out of a lemon.” A year ago, it appeared that Brown might not be able even to do that. Two nights before the election, he was eating chips and salsa at an airport bar in Durango, Colorado, where he had spent the day campaigning for Hillary Clinton. If Trump took the White House, he said in an interview, it would be “game over” for climate change. “Game over,” he said again. Asked about it recently, on the tarmac in Los Angeles, Brown said, “I say a lot of things while waiting for a drink in bars across America.” “We’re fighting,” he added. “The game is over in Washington for the moment … But not in the world.” Later, at the Vatican, he put it this way: “You should despair, but that won’t help. So be optimistic, and do whatever you can.” *** Brown said he has met Trump once, when he was mayor of Oakland in the 2000s and considered bringing a casino to the city. The two flew together in Trump’s plane to Oakland from Palm Springs. The governor recalled being impressed with a Renoir that Trump had hung on a wall in the plane. “I don’t know whether it was real or not,” Brown said last year. “But I thought it was. I thought it was a hell of a statement.” Brown, more than many politicians, could appreciate the populist appeal that swept Trump into the White House—and that Brown sought to capture in his own three presidential campaigns. In 1976, he called for an “era of limits,” then campaigned against the North American Free Trade Agreement and the influence of corporate money in politics in his 1992 campaign. He refused campaign contributions greater than $100 and, in rhetoric reminiscent of Trump’s “drain the swamp,” criticized “the basic fact of unchecked power and privilege.” Pat Caddell, the veteran pollster and political analyst who gave advice to Brown in 1992 and Trump in 2016, says, “Brown was way ahead of his time, really … I think if Jerry had run in ’16, he could have won the Democratic nomination.” Today, Brown’s mind is elsewhere. He deflects questions about his legacy, arguing, “Everything we’re doing can be framed as either a model for everybody else or building my legacy that I’m going to be reviewing in my dotage.” Yet the issues that consume him—climate change and nuclear proliferation—are legacy concerns of humankind. “Human civilization is on the chopping block,” Brown told an auditorium full of lawmakers and students this week in Stuttgart, his voice rising almost to a yell. “We have to wake up the world. We have to wake up Europe, wake up America, wake up the whole world to realize that we have a common destiny.” While climate change has afforded Brown a degree of notoriety outside California, he believes that history is not kind to governors and a politician’s relevance quickly fades. “It’s just a matter of time before your irrelevance engulfs your total being,” he said in Los Angeles, chuckling. “I’m pretty focused on today.” He is at least thinking a little about the near future. Dna Hoover, who is building the Browns’ ranch house, said Anne Gust Brown called recently to ask about stucco samples and a generator, and the couple ran a herd of goats through the property, where the Browns have planted olive trees, to chew down grass to prevent fire. “He’s ready,” Hoover says. “He’s really so connected with that place and is ready to get up there full-time.” Brown has even discussed the possibility of creating some kind of meeting space on the ranch. Before he was to arrive in Bonn on Saturday, he left his aides behind and swung south to Bremen, Germany, to visit with Silja Samerski, who had once helped him organize a salon he called the “Oakland Table,” attracting intellectuals such as the late social critic Ivan Illich. “We’re going to talk about unfinished issues from the Oakland Table,” Brown said of his visit with Samerski. “The good life, and how are we supposed to lead it. What are we doing? So, that’s getting ready for the Colusa Institute,” he explained, laughing a bit. Colusa is the name of the county where he is building his ranch. Brown is also contemplating writing when he leaves office, something he tried, but largely gave up, after his first two terms as governor. His work at the time, he says, “didn’t rise to the quality that met my standards.” Decades later, Brown says, “I have much more to say.” At an event held alongside the Democratic National Convention last year, Brown had compared his retirement to that of a Roman statesman, “a fellow named Cincinnatus who saved the Republic, and then he went back to the plow.” November 11, 2017 at 12:19PM

[thepoliticalpatient]

The 2017 healthcare debate so far (abridged)

This year has been rough for healthcare, but so far things have turned out OK. There is still danger afoot, which I will get into in a later post, but first I wanted to provide a condensed recap on what has gone down since Trump’s election.

Fear started in 2016 when Trump campaigned on a promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare - they’re all the same thing, folks) with “something terrific,” a statement that didn’t give many of us confidence that he had any actual plan.

(If you don’t have an understanding of why the loss of the ACA is a terrifying thought for me or other chronically ill folks, consider checking out my previous post on the topic).

Luckily, what happens to the ACA is up to Congress, not Trump. Democratic senators are a united front against dismantling the ACA, and there are 48 of them right now. Totally repealing the ACA would require 60 votes. But this didn’t mean the ACA was safe, because parts of it could still be repealed through a process called budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation bills only require 50 votes to pass (and there are 52 Republican senators), but they are restricted to only touching policy that affects the budget.

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The AHCA (version 1)

So the House of Representatives began drafting a bill to modify the ACA in ways that are allowed under budget reconciliation. They called this bill the America Healthcare Act (AHCA). The AHCA did a couple of major things:

Eliminate the Medicaid expansion

Medicaid is the program that allows people who are close to the poverty line to get health insurance that is not tied to their employment status. It used to be very hard to get Medicaid if you didn’t have a diagnosed disability and didn’t have kids, because your eligibility was determined by mixture of different factors including income, health status, and household size. The Medicaid expansion, in the states that implemented it, made it possible to get Medicaid just by being near the poverty line. This is the #1 reason why the percentage of uninsured dropped dramatically under the ACA.

Change the way subsidies and costs are distributed

Under the ACA, the price of your insurance is determined largely by your level of need: if you are aren’t making much money, the government provides a subsidy to help you pay for your insurance. This subsidy gets smaller the higher your income is. Age is also a factor, though insurance companies are barred from charging elderly people more than 3x that which they charge young people. You can also be charged more if you’re a smoker.

The AHCA was going to change the subsidy system to be based on age rather than income: the older you are, the more money you get. It ignores your level of need, so a young or poor person would get a smaller subsidy while an older or rich person would have an increase. But it wasn’t all good news for old people, as the AHCA was also going to make it possible for the insurers to change 5x more for insurance based on age, and this increase was more than enough to offset the higher subsidy an elderly person would receive under the AHCA. AARP came out against the AHCA for this reason. So, really, it was only good news for rich people.

Remove the individual mandate and replace it

The individual mandate - the law that requires individuals to purchase health insurance - is one of the most hated parts of the ACA. People don’t like being told they have to buy something. But it is fundamentally necessary to the law, as it funds the portions of the system that are popular, such as the guarantee that people with pre-existing conditions can receive health insurance. It makes sense, right? If we weren’t required to buy insurance, but insurers were forced to cover sick people, we could just not buy insurance when we’re healthy and don’t need it, and then buy it later if we get sick, when we’re expensive for insurers. They wouldn’t have the revenue stream to cover the costs of people’s treatments.

The AHCA would remove the individual mandate, but to prevent the system from falling over, they would encourage individuals to maintain continuous coverage by charging people 30% more for insurance if they try to purchase it after having a lapse. This was strange, though, because it was a punishment for coming back into the system rather than for leaving it. We want people in the system, so discouraging their return seems like a bad idea.

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the AHCA and estimated that it would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion, but kick 24 million people off of their insurance, mostly Medicaid expansion beneficiaries.

The AHCA was scheduled to come to a vote on March 24, but House Speaker Paul Ryan found at the last minute that it didn’t have the votes to pass, so he pulled it from the floor. He gave a speech in which he called the ACA “the law of the land,” leading a lot of people to think the fight was over. It wasn’t.

Version 1 of the AHCA failed for a strange combination of reasons: it was both too liberal and too conservative. House Republicans contain a mix of moderates, who were concerned about kicking 24 million people off their insurance, and hardcore conservatives belonging to a group known as the “Freedom Caucus” who opposed the bill because it didn’t do enough to dismantle the ACA, which they so despise.

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The AHCA (version 2)

But the AHCA came back from the dead when an amendment called the MacArthur proposal was tacked onto it. This amendment would have allowed states to choose to stop assuring coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Those states would then have to set up high-risk pools to cover such people. This made the Freedom Caucus happy. Then they sweetened the pot for moderates by throwing in $8B in funding for the high-risk pools, which was called the Upton Amendment.

The problem is that high risk pools aren’t a magical solution, and they have the track record to prove it: historically don’t work well at all for sick people. Think about it for a moment here. Their virtue is that they lower premiums for healthy people, who no longer have to pay for so many expensive sick people in the pool with them. But that means the expenses of the sick are now only covered by the premiums of the sick, which doesn’t compute at all: sick people’s medical costs are higher than their premiums, that’s the whole reason why they have insurance. So the difference ends up being made up by state and federal funding, AKA your tax dollars. So the general population, including the healthy, are still paying for people in high risk pools - just as a tax instead of a premium. If enough government money isn’t thrown into the pool, which is a common outcome, it ends up resulting in very high premiums - often inaccessibly high - for the sick people in them (and the $8B provided by Upton was a laughably small sum). In this way, high risk pools effectively undo the ACA law stating that insurers have to charge the same premium for everyone regardless of health status. High risk pools also go against the entire philosophy of insurance which is to spread out the costs of the expensive people over as many people as possible such that each individual is hopefully paying a manageable amount.

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The CBO scored AHCA + MacArthur Amendment + Upton Amendment as reducing the federal deficit by $119 billion while kicking 23 million people off insurance. Many moderates still weren’t happy with it, but were willing to vote yes anyway for a few reasons. One is that they knew the bill would be modified in the Senate, so they could look away from some its flaws knowing that their yes vote didn’t mean it was necessarily going to become law. A second is that it allowed them to go on the record as having followed through with their promise to repeal the ACA. AHCA version 2 passed the House on May 5, and the House wiped its hands of the whole mess.

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BCRA

Shit started to get freaky once the bill hit the Senate.

The Senate is, in general, a more moderate body than the House, and they didn’t like the AHCA. Even Trump called the AHCA “mean.” So they set about writing their own law, which basically bore no resemblance to the AHCA.

The Senate bill was shrouded in mystery for a long time, as a group of 10 Republican senators basically retreated into a back room and drafted it without anyone else knowing what the hell was going on. This was VERY unusual and brought a lot of objections from both Democrats and the moderate Republicans who were excluded.

Finally in July they publicized their bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), and here’s what was in it:

Roll back the Medicaid expansion

As before in the AHCA, the Medicaid expansion would be rolled back. In the BRCA, the expansion would be phased out more slowly than the AHCA proposed, but Medicaid funding would actually end up being cut more deeply in the end than under the AHCA.

More money for addressing opioid addiction

Cool! Except that most people who are fighting addiction today are doing so under the coverage of Medicaid, which the bill just fucked, soooo......

Allow insurers to offer plans that don’t meet standards set by the ACA

This one was really insidious.

The ACA requires that all insurance plans cover certain Essential Health Benefits, such as prescriptions drugs, mental health care, and pregnancy related costs. Right now it’s not legal to sell a plan that excludes coverage for these things. It also sets caps on how high annual deductibles can be: $7,150 for an individual and $14,300 for a family. The BCRA would allow insurers to break these rule in a couple of ways. They could sell “catastrophic” insurance, which is usually cheap upfront but has a very high deductible - say $30,000. So if you’re healthy, this saves you money on your premiums, and prevents you from total financial ruin if you have an accident or something, but most likely won’t end up covering any health expenses for you during the year. Such plans obviously don’t work for sick people. They could also sell “skinny” insurance, which is also cheaper upfront but just doesn’t cover anything remotely specialized - bloodwork, diagnostic tests, inpatient hospital stays, prescriptions, etc. Basically a cheap plan good for a healthy person who only intends on having an annual physical.

Cruz called this the Freedom Amendment.

Why is this a problem? Well, one great thing the ACA did for chronically ill people is that it required insurers to not only not deny coverage to sick people, but also to charge sick and healthy people at the same rate. It was important because, if you simply outlaw denying sick people insurance but you don’t require that premiums be equal, insurers would still be able to effectively deny you insurance by saying “OK we’ll cover you! Here’s your plan: it costs $10,000 a month.”

The so-called “Freedom” amendment effectively undoes this by allowing insurers to go “Yeah we will sell to everybody, and charge everybody the same price! Here you go, no matter how sick you are you can buy a skinny plan for $100 a month. You can also buy a catastrophic plan for $100 a month. If you want the Premium Plan that actually covers services you need, though, that’ll be $5,000 a month.”

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The BCRA suffered from the same problems as the AHCA - moderate Republicans and the highly conservative alike opposed it. Susan Collins (who I have come to respect greatly over the course of this process) opposed it for taking coverage away from people. Rand Paul opposed it for not dismantling the ACA enough. There are 52 Republican senators, and in the case of a tie, Vice President Mike Pence gets to be the tie-breaking vote. So we needed one more Republican no vote in order to kill the bill. Luckily, both Lee and Moran both came out against it very late in the game. Both are conservatives who felt the bill didn’t dismantle the ACA enough. Coming out against it at the same time was a political move: neither could be blamed for being “the” vote that killed the bill.

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Motion to Proceed

Things were looking rough for Republican senators indeed. The BCRA was dead in the water, the AHCA was unpopular, and they had a 7 year campaign promise to kill the ACA to uphold. We’d been promised for years that if we just gave them power, they could easily provide a much more sensical healthcare system than the ACA, and now they couldn’t even come up with anything that 50 Republicans could agree on.

Another complicating factor was that John McCain had returned to Arizona to have a blood clot removed, and his doctors had recommended he stay there for awhile to recuperate. This removed one Republican vote on any bill they could float now.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, decided at this point to do something risky: call them on their bluff. He thought maybe if he forced senators to actually vote on these laws instead of just making a commitment to vote one way or the other, some would cave and vote yes. He thought, particularly for Senators who are up for reelection soon and are in states that Trump won, that they might ultimately choose to vote yes because their conservative constituents have been pressuring them to repeal the ACA.

So he called a vote on a motion to proceed on a 20 hour Senate session in which they’d discuss the BCRA and other proposals, have the opportunity to tack on amendments, and then finally hold a vote.

Rand Paul, who had been in opposition to everything floated so far, said he’d vote yes on motion to proceed if he was given the opportunity to vote on a full repeal of the ACA during the proceedings. And, surprisingly, John McCain showed up in Washington for the vote. By now it had come out that McCain didn’t merely have a blood clot but brain cancer. He was greeted with applause when he walked in.

The motion to proceed passed on July 25. All the Democrats, plus Republican moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted no. This left Pence to cast a tie-breaking yes vote.

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The symbolic votes

They voted on the BCRA first, almost as a formality. It stood no chance of passing as it turned out to actually require 60 votes to pass rather than 50 - this because they didn’t give the CBO time to score it before holding the vote (if McConnell had thought it actually stood a chance at passing, I’m sure he would have waited for the CBO score in order to bring it down to 50). It failed resolutely, with only 41 yes votes. It did, however, give many Senators a chance to go on the record as having voted yes on some form of ACA repeal, which was important to them politically.

Next they voted on Rand Paul’s repeal and delay. This would repeal the entire ACA after a 2 year waiting period, in which time they said they’d come up with a replacement. This one really pissed me off - they haven’t come up with a replacement now, how do they expect us to trust they’ll figure something out in the next two years? But this was just a symbolic vote too - everyone knew it wouldn’t pass. In fact, Senate Democrats must have been incredibly confident it wouldn’t pass, because they could have made an objection that would have required it to be reviewed by the Senate Parliamentarian in order to determine if it needed 60 votes to pass (and it surely would have, as repealing many parts of the ACA does not fall within the confines of budget reconciliation), but they didn’t. So because they didn’t object, it would have only needed 50 votes to pass, but it only got 43. Again, Republicans got to score political points by going on the record for having tried to repeal the ACA.

There was another symbolic vote that almost isn’t worth talking about. Senator Daines, a Republican, proposed a vote on single-payer healthcare - AKA “Medicare for all,” the model that Bernie Sanders supports, and which exists in many other countries, and which I want. WTF?? Well, this was a political move. He wanted Democrats to have to go on the record voting against it, to alienate more liberal members of their base and expose an ideological divide within the party. Well, the plan didn’t work. Most of the Democrats just voted “present.”

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Skinny repeal

So if all these votes were symbolic, what were they actually hoping to pass? Good question. Nobody really knew the answer to that - not even Senate Democrats, who were kept in the dark again as yet another secret bill was hurriedly drafted - until it finally came out at 10PM on July 27, the last night of the 20 hour session - about 4 hours before it was voted on.

This bill was known as “skinny repeal” because it sought to only repeal small portions of the ACA, including the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and the medical devices tax (the latter being something both parties want to repeal anyway). This was an incredibly irresponsible bill, because the mandate is what keeps the insurance market from going into a death spiral (see above, AHCA version 1, remove the individual mandate and replace it). And yet, amazingly, it seemed very likely that it was going to pass. In fact, even as the vote was happening, no one was quite sure whether it was going to pass or not.

A few hours before the vote, 3 Republican senators, Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy, and John McCain made a joint press release saying that they didn’t like skinny repeal, but were willing to vote for it anyway just to move the process along. After the Senate passes, it goes back to the House for approval before hitting Trump’s desk to be signed into law. But the House has the option of moving to committee with the Senate to discuss and make further modifications to the bill before the final vote. These 3 Senators requested a committee. They said they didn’t want skinny repeal to become law, but they’d vote for it if they were promised committee. Paul Ryan responded, saying the House was willing to go to committee. So, it looked like those 3 votes were secured.

Dean Heller had been looking like he was going to be the key swing vote for awhile, and then he came out as a yes. I was sweating goddamn bullets. I was up, it went till about 2AM, I watched it play out live on C-SPAN. Mike Pence showed up at the Senate, which was an indication that he believed there would be 50 votes and he’d have to break the tie.

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, bless them, were no votes once again. Heller voted yes. Graham voted yes. Cassidy voted yes. Several more key moderates who stood some chance of being the swing vote - Capito, Portman, Corker - voted yes.

And then John McCain voted no.

Holy fuck, McCain voted no. Skinny repeal was dead.

He was in a position where he could do the right thing without consequences. Dude’s 81 years old with brain cancer. He’s not up for reelection till 2022. He probably won’t be alive in 2022.

Thank you, John McCain, for another act of bravery in a life rife with it.

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And that brings us to today. There’s still a lot going on, but the ACA feels much safer now than it did a few weeks ago, that’s for sure. I will get into what could come next in a later post.

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References:

Campaign: http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/249697-trump-replace-obamacare-with-something-terrific AHCA version 1: https://www.healthcare.gov/medicaid-chip/medicaid-expansion-and-you/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/ahca-trumpcare-older-sicker-voters/519423/ https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52486 https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/09/30-million-could-get-hit-with-health-insurance-penalty-under-gop-plan.html AHCA version 2: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/the-trouble-with-high-risk-pools-as-a-conservative-alternative/ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/high-risk-pools-dont-work-have-never-worked-and-wont-work-future/ http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/03/news/economy/high-risk-pools-obamacare-pre-existing/index.html?iid=EL https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52752 BCRA: https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/ https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/essential-health-benefits/ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/us/politics/health-care-overhaul-collapses-as-two-republican-senators-defect.html Motion to Proceed, symbolic votes, skinny repeal: http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/senate-vote-health-care/

[descontext-blog]

Task 3 - Trigun Critique

Often times in critiques of narrative media, reviewers would hold the script as the most vital point in the work of art. Whilst I would agree with them on this approach, I believe it usually disregards 2 other important components of animation and film. This being the visuals and audio. For this reason, I decided to focus my critique on the Trigun’s character art and how this is used to foreshadow events in the story while implying the personality traits of each character.

Trigun (1998) is an animated tv series adapted from Nightow, Yasuhiro’s manga series of the same name and produced by Madhouse. The show is a post-apocalyptic space western, taking place on a fictional planet known as Gunsmoke.

Throughout the show, we follow the adventures of Vash the Stampede, a legendary gunslinger living in a world where humanity has reverted back to the days of the old west. Despite his pacifistic philosophy he often finds himself in trouble due to the rather large bounty on his head. As a result of this, 2 insurance employees, Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson, are sent to make a risk assessment of him.

In many respects, Trigun can be seen as a show about dichotomies, often between the appearance of the characters and their true nature as well as the morals of humanity and the repercussions this would have on their survival. This aspect is greatly reflected in the character designs by Yoshimatsu, Takahiro, emphasizing the unique philosophies of each character whilst also subverting them. This is done through clever use of colour and form.

Most characters seen in the world of Trigun wear rather simple clothing, reminiscent of the cowboy style, popularized by country music and western films. They typically wear tones such as greys, beiges and creams or dark shades of green/blue. Sometimes this is offset with a desaturated cool colours such as purple or blue.

Aside from our main characters, typically those with more vibrant colours are portrayed as rich or powerful. An example of this would be the pink dresses and black, green and blue suits of the rich folk during a “sand steamer” heist, in episode 8 or the red of the police chief in episode 2 to show bravery and strength.

On the other hand, our protagonists are depicted in triadic colours: blue, red and yellow. These colours help give a sense of unity with the characters, whilst helping them stand out against other characters.

Out of all the characters, Vash has the most unusual design. Vash is depicted with long hair sticking straight up in a triangular shape and a long red coat. His body consists of 2 more triangles for his upper and lower half. Whilst Vash is seen as a cheerful, peace-loving fool, these sharp angles betray his rather sinister background and immense power.

The rounded shoulders alongside his circular boots, knee guards and elbow guard is used to display the tender side of him. I believe these circular shapes are not often used due to the fact that his cheerful disposition is often little more than a facade, hiding a deep pain he carries alone. The circles are much more subtle than his striking angular design, perhaps referring to loneliness and desire for a true connection with those around him. This is often shown through his high regard for human life and willingness to help them.

This is further portrayed through his colour design. Trigun often utilises religious imagery and so it seems the characters have been coded with the liturgical colours. According to traditions of Christianity, red is used to portray “the joy of life and love” (Anonymous, West Oregon University 2015). This is reflected through Vash’s dialogue and actions, often using diplomacy to solve problems and only drawing as a last resort.

For the first half of the series, the audience is led to believe Trigun would take on a fairly optimistic tone, allowing Vash to de-escalate situations either through peaceful means or lightly injuring the aggressor. However, we soon see the great suffering his mercy has caused him, manifesting itself as a number of scars and gaping holes in his body. This aspect is also depicted through the red coat as red is often used to depict martyrs in Christian iconography.

The yellow of his hair can be interpreted as cowardice or light and purity. This further plays into the odd dichotomy of Vash’s character as it can be seen as his feigned cravenness or as the hope he brings to those he meets and his virtuous, albeit idealistic code of ethics.

His strange fashion sense also seems out of place in this western aesthetic. Due to this, it gives Vash an otherworldliness. This conveys how his morals do not fit in with the cynical and pragmatic attitudes of those around him.

Wolfwood on the other hand is in many ways the opposite to Vash, though his pragmatism compliments Vash’s idealism quite well whilst also criticising it. This is shown through Wolfwood’s black suit and hair with dark eyes. Although to the viewer, the objective colour of his suit and hair is a desaturated shade of blue. The dark blue was likely chosen to fit the triadic colour scheme whilst preventing a flat appearance due to lack of lighting or shading. 

Along his sleeves, there are 2 white cross shaped cufflinks matching his white shirt and large cross.

Out of all the main characters, he has the darkest colour design. At first glance, these colours appear to illustrate his occupation as a priest. The dark suit and hair gives him an inconspicuous design, if not for the giant cross he carries on his back.

This coupled with his mostly rectangular body type, rounded hair and face gives him a warm friendly aura, not unlike Vash. The rectangles communicate his strength as a character, whilst showing him to be reliable, kind and confident. Perfect for his image as a priest.

However not long after he is introduced we realise he is no ordinary priest but also an assassin. As it turns out, cross he bears actually holds a large arsenal of guns. Whilst he is supposed to be a merciful priest, he can be quite ruthless due to his utilitarian approach to ethics. 

Despite his work as an assassin, Wolfwood does in fact, take his faith very seriously. Unfortunately this lawless society was not made for tender hearts. At times, he is believes it is necessary to sacrifice the few in order to save the many, contrasting with his priestly duty and initial characterisation.

This provides some dramatic irony since the cross is supposed to be the ultimate symbol of mercy in the Christian doctrine. However, Wolfwood uses it as a tool of destruction. Thus the weight of his cross his like that of the sin he carries on his shoulders.

Upon realising this, the black of his suit seems to convey the death that hangs around him, sealing his fate in the end. The white of his shirt points to the liturgical symbol of innocence and birth. This was likely chosen as despite his misdeeds, Wolfwood is eventually brought around to Vash’s way of thinking. Whilst it is too late to undo his deeds, it is heavily implied that Wolfwood was redeemed in the end and maybe reborn in a time where he won’t have to kill. “If I am reincarnated, I'd like to live somewhere where life is easier. Somewhere with nothing but peaceful days.”

Similar to Wolfwood, Meryl is depicted with dark hair, wearing blue and white. However, white is the more dominant colour in her design. This is likely due to her resemblance with Vash’s deceased maternal figure, Rem. Whilst it is not obviously stated in the anime, it is heavily implied towards the end of the series that Meryl is the reincarnation of Rem. This could either be in the literal sense or perhaps in a metaphorical sense where Rem’s ideals live on in Rem.

This is further noted by the limitless life giving symbolism of the colour blue. “No one ever has the right to take away the life of another person... and everyone deserves a future.” This reflects Rem’s view that life begins with a “blank ticket”. Afterwards each human is free to follow his/her devices, though no one has the right to kill since life is precious.

To further connect her with Vash, Meryl is given a sloping angular outline, composed mainly of triangular shapes. Though unlike Vash her hair and face are rounded off like Wolfwood and Milly.

Meryl is a single-minded individual thus she has little patience for nonsense. As a result of this she can appear mean and cold at times. However, she can be quite kind to those around her and some what naive at times, illustrated through her rounded features and white colours. 

Lastly to round off the liturgical colours is Milly. Milly is dressed in mostly yellow, with a white under shirt, a green shawl and red tie. Milly is most akin to Vash, thus sharing some of his colours, though unlike Vash, Milly’s character is not a facade.

Milly is a very cheerful character representing the hope each character struggles to maintain. She is caring, loving and benevolent, noted by her warm colour palette. Although there is a certain childish element to her character, depicted through her white shirt. Despite this, Milly can see things with great clarity, realising Vash truly was the $$60 billion dollar fugitive,she and Meryl were hunting from the beginning. 

In particular Milly seems to be rather perceptive of interpersonal relationships and reading the hearts of others, as if gifted with divine eyes. This ability is shown when Meryl wishes to stop Vash from compromising his principles at which point Milly remarks “I don’t think we can stop him”(Milly, Trigun 1998), realising it is an issue he must resolve, himself.

Like Wolfwood, Milly is designed with curved rectangular shapes. This coupled with her hulking physique gives Milly the image of immense physical strength. Although the curved lines denote a sunny disposition, further reflected by her warm colour scheme.

She wears a green shawl around her shoulders which acts as a complimentary colour to Vash’s red coat and an analogous colour scheme alongside her yellow coat, Meryl and Wolfwood’s blues. This is likely used to portray how effortlessly she befriends them and the closeness between each character. 

If we were to read the colour green through a Christian lens however, we get an interesting bit of foreshadowing for the relationship between Milly and Wolfwood, however. Typically green is used as a colour to symbolise fertility, although in the context of Christianity it can also be used to mean hope and the “victory of life over death” (Anonymous, West Oregon University 2015). 

This victory could refer to Milly overcoming her grief over Wolfwood’s death towards the end of the series. Though she was deeply pained by it, her strength of character gave her the will to hold onto hope. Due to this, she is able to comfort Meryl and Vash whilst giving a sense of direction.

Green can simultaneously refer to how Milly and Wolfwood slowly developed a relationship with each other. This is implied to have led to a pregnancy, just before Wolfwood died, relating back into the theme of death and rebirth.

For all the detailed character designs and interesting visual information one can gain from them, it is unfortunate that this creates a trade off with the quality of animation. Since cel animation is painstakingly crafted, frame by frame, it is difficult to draw complex movements whilst keeping track of finer details in the characters’ clothing, hair, ornaments etc. “Just looking at the pictures, I thought, Boy, the artist is going to have a hard time of it.” (Nishimura, 1998).

As a result of this it was Yoshimatsu responsibility to create an abstract version of these characters. This is particularly noticeable with the lighting on the characters. In Nightow’s manga, shadows and reflections seem more subtle and detailed than the block of tints and shades emulating harsh reflections and shadows on the characters. 

Nonetheless the characters remain quite complex, undoubtedly giving a burden to the animators at the time. As a result of this, characters are often shown in still shots with little more than a moving mouth or hair. Albeit, the dynamic perspective shots and strong dialogue helps to ease this issue.

Thankfully the animators are quite talented however and as a result Trigun showcases some rather impressive character animation, often changing the changing the art style to give unique poses or accentuate the character’s emotions.

To conclude, Trigun has some impressive character designs, utilising simple shapes to create a striking design. The colour palette follows follows an interesting motif, referring to the religious symbolism found in the show, denoting the role of each character in the wider story and their background. Unfortunately, the level of detail found in the work may have hampered the team’s ability to animate effectively at times. 

References:

Character Design

https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:637902/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Colours

http://www.pravmir.com/icons-symbolism-in-color/

https://www.wou.edu/wp/exhibits/files/2015/07/christianity.pdf

Staff

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=88

Interview

http://www.oocities.org/sumirechan/tri-nishimura.html

[lodelss]

Be a Good Sport

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  9 minutes (2,284 words)

I hate jocks. Like a good Gen X’er, I walked around my high school with that patch on my backpack — red lettering, white backdrop, frisbee-size. A jock high school. It’s impossible to overstate the contempt I had for sports as a kid. I hated what I took to be phony puddle-deep camaraderie, the brain-dead monosyllabic mottos, the aggressive anti-intellectualism. More than that, there appeared to be a very specific cruelty to it. The way there were always a couple of kids who were always picked last. The collective bullying if someone didn’t measure up to the collective goals. And none of the teachers ever seemed to be as mean as the coaches. They strutted around like grown children, permanently transfixed by the ambitions of their adolescence, actively excluding the same kids they had mocked in their youth.

When I hear about sports stars who kill or commit suicide or generally behave antisocially, I always think: no wonder. In a culture that destroys your body and your mind, no wonder. It’s something of a paradox, of course, because, as we are repeatedly told, physical activity is often essential to psychological health. But why is it so rarely the other way around? I watch Cheer and I watch Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and I watch former NBA star Delonte West get callously thrashed and I wonder why these athletes’ inner lives weren’t as prized as their motor skills. That’s not true; I know why. It suits a lucrative industry that shapes you from childhood to keep you pliable. And what makes you more pliable than mental instability? What better way to get a winning team than to have it populated with people for whom winning validates their existence and for whom losing is tantamount to death?

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There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the Hernandez doc when there’s an unexpected crossover with Cheer. A childhood photo of the late NFL star and convicted murderer flashes on-screen as we learn that his female cousins made him want be a cheerleader. It was the same for Cheer’s La’Darius Marshall, who is shown in one snapshot as a young cheerleader, having discovered the sport after hanging out with one of his childhood girlfriends. Both men came from dysfunctional backgrounds: Marshall’s mom was a drug user who ended up in prison for five years. He was sexually abused, not to mention beaten up by his brothers; Hernandez found his own mother distant, and he was also physically and sexually abused. Both found solace in sports, though Hernandez had the kind of dad who “slapped the faggot right out of you,” per one childhood friend, so he ended up in football, his dad’s sport, instead. But their similarities underscore how professional athletics, when so closely tied to a person’s sense of self, can simultaneously be a boon to your mental health and its undoing.

Killer Inside is a misnomer for a start. Everything pointed to Hernandez’s conviction for murdering another footballer (semipro linebacker Odin Lloyd) — or at the very least a fair amount of psychological distress. (I’m not certain why the doc chose to focus on his sexuality — besides prurience — as it seemed to be the least of his concerns.) As he said himself to his mom, who almost immediately replaced her dead husband with Hernandez’s cousin’s husband when he was just a teenager: “I had nobody. What’d you think I was gonna do, become a perfect angel?” The way he fled from his home straight into the arms of a University of Florida football scholarship, having wrapped up high school a semester early, is telling. Football made him somebody. He depended on being a star player because the alternative was being nothing — as one journalist says in the doc, at Florida you had to “win to survive.” 

If the NFL didn’t know the depth of his suffering, they at least knew something, something a scouting service categorized as low “social maturity.” Their report stated that Hernandez’s responses “suggest he enjoys living on the edge of acceptable behavior and that he may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.” But his schools seemed to care more about his history of drug use than his high school concussion (his autopsy would later show chronic traumatic encephalopathy) or the fact that he busted a bar manager’s eardrum for confronting him with his bill. Physical pain was something you played through — one former linebacker described a row of Wisconsin players lining up with their pants down to get painkiller injections — and psychological pain was apparently no different. “It’s a big industry,” the ex-linebacker said, “and they’re willing to put basically kids, young men, in situations that will compromise their long-term health just to beat Northwestern.”

Cheerleading, the billion-dollar sport monopolized by a company called Varsity Brand, has a similarly mercenary approach. While the money is less extreme — the NFL’s annual revenue is more than $14 billion — the contingent self-worth is not. A number of the kids highlighted in Cheer had the kind of childhoods that made them feel like Hernandez, like they had nobody. Morgan Simianer in particular, the weaker flyer who is chosen for her “look,” radiates insecurity. Abandoned by both her parents, she was left as a high school sophomore in a trailer with her brother to fend for herself. “I felt, like, super alone,” Simianer said. “Like everyone was against me and I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t important to anyone.” Though Marshall’s experience was different, his memories of growing up are almost identical to his fellow cheerleader’s. “I felt like I was really alone,” he said. “There was nobody that was gonna come save me.” Like Hernandez, sports was all they had.

And if a competitive sport defines you, then its coach controls you. Hernandez’s father, the ex-football heavyweight, was known as the King; Monica Aldama, the head coach on Cheer, is the Queen. Describing how she felt when Aldama remembered her name at tryouts, Simianer said, “It was like I’m not just nobody.” For her ability to literally pummel a bunch of college kids into a winning team in half the regular time, Aldama has been characterized as both a saint and a sinner. While she claims to be an advocate for the troubled members of her team, she fails to see how their histories skew her intentions — her position as a maternal figure whose love is not unconditional ultimately puts the athletes more at risk. Aldama proudly comments on Simianer’s lack of fear, while it is a clear case of recklessness. This is a girl who is unable to express her pain in any way sacrificing her own life (literally — with her fragile ribs, one errant move could puncture an organ) for the woman who, ironically, made her feel like she was worthy of it. “I would do anything for that woman,” Simianer confesses at one point. “I would take a bullet for her.” Jury’s out on whether Marshall, the outspoken outsize talent who regularly clashes with his team, would do the same. His ambivalent approach to Aldama seems connected to how self-aware he is about his own struggles, which affords him freedom from her grasp. After she pushes him to be more empathetic, he explains, “It’s hard to be like that when you are mentally battling yourself.”

That Cheer and Killer Inside focus on the psychological as well as the physical strain faced by athletes — not to mention that athletics have no gender — is an improvement on the sports industries they present, which often objectify their stars as mere pedestals for their talents. The Navarro cheerleaders and Hernandez are both helped and hurt by sports, an outlet which can at once mean everything and nothing in the end. This is the legacy of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which followed two teen NBA hopefuls and was as much about the intersections of race and class as it was about basketball. Not to mention OJ: Made in America, the 2016 ESPN miniseries that explored how the story of the football star and alleged murderer reflected race relations in the United States in the mid-’90s. Conversely, mainstream film and television continues to be heavily male when it comes to sports, focusing on individual heroics, on pain leading to gain — the American Dream on steroids. Cheer and Killer Inside expose this narrative for the myth it is, spotlighting that all athletes have both minds and bodies that break, that their legacies as human beings are not about what they have won but who they are. But the climate in which they’ve landed cannot be ignored either, a social-media marinated world in which sports stars are no longer just players but people who are willing to be vulnerable with their public, who are even further willing to sign their names next to their problems for The Players’ Tribune, the six-year-old platform populated by content provided by pro athletes. “Everyone is going through something,” wrote NBA star Kevin Love in an industry-shaking post in 2018. “No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside.”

Fast-forward to that new video of former basketball pro Delonte West, the one of him having his head stomped on so hard in the middle of the street that I still wonder how he survived it. He also came from an underprivileged, unstable background. He chose the college he did for its “family atmosphere.” Like Simianer, he fixated on his failures and played with abandon. Like her, he also had trouble verbalizing his feelings, to the point that they would overflow (in anger for him, tears for her). Though he says he was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, he considers his biggest problem to be “self-loathing.” But why? He was a sports star who signed a nearly $13 million contract in his prime — what better reason for self-love? A study published two years ago in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, profiling the psychological well-being of 99 elite athletes, may provide an answer. The study found that those with high perfectionism, fear of failure, and performance-based self-worth had the highest levels of depression, anxiety, shame, and life dissatisfaction. Those with a more global self-worth that did not depend on their performance had the opposite outcome. As if to provide confirmation, a subsequent study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that same year revealed that athletes with contingent self-esteem were more likely to burn out. When sports become your only source of value, your wins ultimately don’t come to much.

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The irony of all of this is that I came back to sports as an adult for my mental health. Obviously, I’m not an elite athlete — whatever the opposite of that is, I am. But having no stakes makes it that much easier to use physical activity for good. Nothing is dependent on it; that I’m moving at all is victory enough. But my circumstances are different. My jock high school was a private school, sports were (mostly) optional, and elite academics were where most of us found validation — and financial stability. “Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an ‘escape’ from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect,” Natalie Weiner writes in SB Nation. “If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe.” This reminds me of Aldama telling a room of underprivileged kids with limited prospects, “If you work hard at anything you do, you will be rewarded, you will be successful in life.” This is the American Dream–infused sports culture the media has traditionally plugged — the one, ironically, dismantled by the show in which Aldama herself appears. As Spike Lee tells a group of the top high school basketball players in the country in Hoop Dreams: “The only reason why you’re here, you can make their team win, and if their team wins, schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.” 

In the same SB Nation article, which focused on how school football coaches combat gun violence, Darnell Grant, a high school coach in Newark, admitted he prioritized schoolwork, something both Cheer and Killer Inside barely mentioned. “My thing is to at least have the choice,” he said. Without that, kids are caught in the thrall of sports, which serves the industry but not its players. Contingent self-worth does the same thing, which is why mental health is as much of a priority as education. The head football coach at a Chicago high school, D’Angelo Dereef, explained why dropping a problematic player — which is basically what happened to Hernandez at U of F, where coach Urban Meyer pushed him into the NFL draft rather than taking him back — doesn’t fix them. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” Dereef told the site. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding.” While the NBA was the first major sports league to address mental health in its collective bargaining agreement in 2018, in mid-January the WNBA signed its own new CBA, which only vaguely promised “enhanced mental health benefits and resources.” That the sports industry as a whole does not go far enough to address the psychological welfare of its players is to their detriment, but also to their own: At least one study from 2003 has shown that prioritizing “athletes’ needs of autonomy” — the opposite of contingent self-worth — as opposed to conformity, has the potential to improve their motivation and performance. In sports terms, that’s a win-win.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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