#i want his reaction to high geologist

[nerdylibertarian928]

I know we don't want celebrities but I think Matthew Lillard should be allowed on here

[housewarningparty]

So Bad Girls, real good, gets even better with Consequences (also cool more drowning in Consequences with Faith drowning Buffy this time), with Buffy's reaction to the coverrup and Faith spiralling and she really comes into her own as a mirror for both Angel and Buffy around about now, I love Angel as her murder sponsor I wish it lasted longer. I also love that the whole Slayers murder people sometimes it happens Watcher'sll generally just move past it. It's just great fallout and great mess. Her dynamic with the Mayor also great, perfect mixture of affection and veiled threat from him and her just wanting someone to tell her she's doing a great job, and it's also a good mirror for the Buffy Angel dynamic in parts I have written down for Choices a quote from the Mayor talking about Angel and Buffy "Keeping a blossoming young girl from the life she should have," which is also gonna happen to Faith since I know she's gonna end up in jail at some point as a result of siding with the mayor. Also like the gradual building her up to be his Dragon with him not sending her to kill Willow in Doppelgangland, her killing the demon who had the books in Enemies (sidenote I have written down great outfit for Faith this episode, and I just checked what she was wearing and yes that was a correct note(Double sidenote: I also did not see that the Angelus turn was a fake coming either)) but clearly not handling the blood on her hands well reminding her of the deputy mayor to casually killing with the bow and then chopping off the guy's hand in Choices and then even more casually killing that Geologist with a knife in Gradutation Day, its a good step by step it wasn't like immediate.

The big sewer break up in The Prom was worth all the mini break ups, I guess, Sarah Michelle Gellar is just so good at that crying she does and that line and delivery she gives in the scene with Willow afterwards "I think horrible is still coming. Right now is worse. Right now I'm just trying to keep from dying," was sooo good. Also I knew the Class Protector moment was coming but it was still nice to see.

Anyway I watched Graduation Day part 1 last night and I gotta say they did a great job this series with keeping Faith looking strong for the big fight with Buffy, they've thrown down a few times but gone out of their way to make sure there's not been a clean proper ending to one of them yet, unlike last series with Angelus who IIRC got slapped down pretty conclusively the episode he lost his soul and survived entirely on the merit of Buffy not wanting to kill him (which is a fair dynamic don't get me wrong and Angelus got a lot of good psychological play), and that combined with the dynamic of Buffy going hard for the kill in this fight and Faith loving it along with the actual fight itself, it's definitely my favourite of the show thus far, and then falling off the roof onto the truck just to spite Buffy so she's killed her nothing great stuff.

Also wasn't expecting Anya to become a regular, she's fun I like her, but also shout out to Willow for being the only core cast member capable of a relationship not with a demon vastly older than them or worse Wesley.

Also also since I watched Graduation Day Part 1, gonna watch Part 2 tonight and then I gotta figure out what the rotation I'm gonna go with for Angel I assume there's gonna be some crossover even though I don't remember anything that seemed particularly weird from back when I watched it all that time ago, though I do wonder if they cover the whole the sun got turned off for a few weeks, Satan himself walks the Earth and Angel lost his soul again, guess that's a job for Faith in jail to solo she's got it.

Really enjoyed the first have of Series 3 but I really really enjoy the second half

okay sorry this took forever to reply to! i'm just bad at answering asks sometimes!

anyway as always, love hear your thoughts, and very glad you enjoyed s3. i don't think the high school years of buffy are better than what comes after (some of my favorite episodes come in the later seasons!) but I do think 1 - 3 are really special in the way they're very tightly woven together. season 3 is about season 2 which is about season 1. there's still continuity and reverberating themes in the later seasons, but nothing AS direct and i honestly love the 1:1 moments.

now that you're caught up through s3 i'll leave you a few of my favorite fics to read:

moonshot by aliceinwonderbra - this is a two-shot canon-divergence AU starting at hearshot that focuses on what could have been different if faith had been present. if buffy had insight into faith's fractured mindset, could that change things? first chapter is the episode re-write and has some incredibly good character study. second chapter is the timeskip happy ending, very cute. and very smutty.

coexist by coraniaid - total s3 AU. canon divergence from season 2, beginning with the question of "what would have changed if angelus had killed giles instead of jenny calendar?" the answer is: A LOT. LIKE. SO MUCH. but also not everything. beautiful, intricately latticed stuff here, dude. major s3 events are changed, subverted or replaced in ways that are gonna have you like :0

to hold off the lightning by cinnamonfiglatte - canon divergence starting after finch is killed. this story explores what would have happened if buffy and co actually HAD been able to get through to faith and pull her out of her spiral. faith's arc is so richly and powerfully written that her lack of full-blown villain arc does nothing to lessen the depth of her journey and complexity. it fuckin owns. amazing slow burn romance here and the characterization is incredible.

[booksandwords]

Realigned by Becca Seymour

Series: Coming Home #1 Read time: 1 Day Rating: 4/5 Stars

The Quote: Heat spread over every inch of my skin. Wicked tongue. My brain had short-circuited at some point in the last thirty minutes or so. I didn’t know if it had started when he admitted his feelings for me or at the mention of seduction. I knew one thing for sure, though: my addled brain could not shake the thought of his tongue. — Shaun O'Ryan

Warnings: None. Just a rock-loving scientist and his selfless idiot.

Realigned is Shaun's story. Shaun O'Ryan is an Australian country boy, a geologist employed by NASA. He's been living in America for 8 years not coming home in all that time, talking to his family by phone and occasional visits by them. Now he's in Australia for a two-week stay. The first event in the book is Shaun getting pulled over for speeding... a joke by his lifelong friend Sergeant Mitch Harris. It is kinda funny and is a perfect example of their relationship dynamic.

The novellas epigraph is Take risks.. This sets the tone for the whole story. Shaun is being headhunted by a big company, his family (especially his mum) wants him to stay in Australia for good, taking the offer and coming home. They decide to use Mitch as a weapon knowing full well that Shaun and Mitch have had a thing for each other for a decade. Honestly, it's simple enough. It is Shaun saying I can't have sex involved if I'm going to make a logical decision here. It's a premise a liked and I appreciated that Becca choose to use a single narrator to tell her story. Sometimes having both spoils the surprise for some events.

Have some of the long quotes I liked.

Since it was midweek, there were only a handful of patrons propping up the bar. I greeted every one of them with a handshake when they declared the astronaut had returned. I simply smiled and indicated to Mitch to hurry the hell up with our drinks. There was no point even attempting to explain I wasn’t an astronaut. Yeah, I was lucky enough to work for NASA, but I was all about geology and research. It didn’t matter in a small town like this though. Six hours from civilisation in the arse of the outback, most of the residents heard NASA and decided for themselves I would be travelling the solar system at some point in the future. Who was I to spoil their fun? — I have nothing to add to this really. It just feels like he is the ultimate hometown boy made good. This quote almost said more about him than anything else we got early on. (Shaun)

Apparently everyone knew whatever it was Mum was failing to act coy about. Even my brothers-in-law looked prepped for a reveal. I took a few moments to try to figure out what was going on before returning my attention to Mum. This time her expression was more relaxed, just too much so considering everyone else’s reaction. — Oh the pure joy of this level of this family dynamic. I love it so much. Meddling mothers are the best. (Shaun)

“Not quite sure yet.” I indicated Mitch with a chin lift. “That’s a question for Sarge.” I looked over at him and threw him a wink. “God help us all.” Lorna chuckled, and I glanced back to see her watching the two of us, an amused smile on her lips and a gentleness in her eyes. “You boys back together again.” She shook her head. “Not sure if it’s a good or bad thing Mitch here is now the sarge. Does that mean you’ll get away with even more, rather than not getting up to any crazy stunts?” With her brows raised high, she studied Mitch then clucked. I had no idea what she’d read on his face, but by the time I looked at him, his face was a picture of innocence. I rolled my eyes, not at all convinced. — There are several reasons I like small-town romance, particularly back home after a long-time romance, moments like this are one of them. The people who knew them as kids, the trouble making them, get the whole oh help us all vibe. It's fun and funny. (Shaun and Lorna)

"I’m happy with weird if it means you keep looking at me the way you do.” “What way is that?” I squeaked. “Like you want me to be yours and you don’t want me to ever let you go.” I was done. It was time to stick a damn fork in me. — I just love that last line. I know this is a fairly common quote but somehow it feels like home to me. I can't explain it. I also like the set-up here. (Mitch and Shaun)

I like Becca Seymour for her Australian romance. They have some angst, a whole lot of sweetness and Australian linguistics. Realigned is no exception to this. Better yet it is free on both amazon and Prolific Works (likely other platforms as well), giving this broad access option if a reader wants to try her writing for the first time. I'm giving this 4 rather than 3⭐ because it is free, yes it is short. But it is a HFN, not a HEA and I'm more than okay with that. This does have a follow-up Amalgamated, I will be reading that as well I think. It follows the same sort of ideas.

[myimaginedcorner]

WEEKLY PROMPT: A TALE FROM ANOTHER WORLD

You want a story from a world beyond your own, huh? Isn’t a book precisely that already?

Alright, alright, just joking, dear. Let me think… Ah. I think I have one that you will like.

********************************

There is a world not far from here, hidden behind a star whose light you see each night. It is a world quite similar to yours, with laws and creatures that you might even imagine. It has one sun that heats up its air and soil, one core to keep it warm inside. Clouds fly around its atmosphere, created from deep seas, and oceans are barriers between the land, creating climates, habitats, diversity. There are civilisations there – not one, but two of them, quite different ones. Of course, that means there’s wars, conflicts, peace and commerce, a wheel that turns in never-ending cycles. Their differences from us could be considered significant by some bored sociologist, just like the tiny variations within the soil would brighten up the life of a geologist. Oh, I could tell them so much about their beloved numbers, charts, and elements…

However, literature is unbothered by the intricacies behind the magic of a world, and thus I’ll remain silent.

On that remote planet, in a small village that has no name attached to it, there was a kid that lived with their two parents. I don’t remember who they were, nor what they did – it doesn’t matter now. Their looks, their hobbies and their dreams are also quite irrelevant. What I will tell you is that, each night, that kid left his small, cosy bedroom to feel the fresh nocturnal winds, sitting on the small grass field next to his house for what seemed to be hours. They liked to look up, at the sky, and see the stars. They liked observing their slow movement. They even learned all those imagined names that each civilisation has for every nightly spark. Within the silence of the sleeping hours, they liked to quietly create their own realms between the constellations, guessing who could be hiding behind the brightness of their suns, invisible to the naked eye. And every night, every time they let their mind aim for the stars, they smiled at them.

“Why would you smile towards the sky?”

That question was asked to the small kid various times, by creatures old and young. To that, they only smiled again, shrugging their shoulders with their child-like innocence.

“Because that way, I’m sure that someone else, somewhere far away, is smiling back at me.”

Years passed. From peace to turmoil, the story of that world took a turn similar to many others. Where stagnancy brought some prosperity, now conflict was arising, and loud, strong sounds kept many souls at night awake, afraid to close their eyes. There was no more loneliness left for the kid that watched the stars. There was no peace, either. However, they still kept leaving their small, cold room each night to stay on the grass field, this time avoiding the strong whispers that filled their vigilant house. Their gaze was lowered from the sky now, where a thick layer of dark smoke covered up all stars. Their legs, close to their chest, hid their face from the sharp wind, that brought small pieces of ash caused by the nearest fire. Their ears could hear their mother calling them inside, yet they didn’t want to go. Their mind, now trapped on earth, forgot how to fly high, imagination caged in dark perspectives.

A presence made the kid finally raise their small head from their knees, for a stranger was passing next to their house that night. Their long, straight legs bended abnormally as they sat down in front of the quiet kid, their warm gaze meeting the dull colour of two small iris’.

The stranger said nothing. Only smiled.

“What’s there to smile about…?” asked the kid, surprised by such reaction.

“Nothing,” replied the stranger. “I’m just returning you your smile.”

On that note, the stranger left, their golden, shiny eyes reminding the child of their moon, so beautiful when it was visible on their dark sky. Watching them leave, the kid kept quiet for some time… standing up afterwards, and going back into their house.

Years passed, as they usually do. Where conflict was, peace came to be again. The scars left by anger and sorrow were getting healed by mutual support, and trees were getting planted there, where fire reigned some time ago. The kid grew up, and had their kids. They lived in a small house away from the big city, where the big lanterns never brightened up the darkness of the night. They worked, they laughed, they loved. Yet every night, they left the cosiness of their shared bedroom to go onto the grass field near their house, letting the wind caress their skin with its refreshing breeze. They sat down on the soil, their head raised up towards the sky. And once again, they let their vast imagination fly between the stars that shined above, bringing lost stories closer to their land, guessing who hid within the brightness from their naked eye.

And once again, they smiled towards the stars, sharing their smile with those who needed it that quiet, cooling night.  

[barnesbabee]

terra || S.M || J.Y

Summary: After destroying the Earth the human race has to face their biggest threat yet: themselves.

Pairing: Jeong Yunho x Song Mingi

Words: wouldn’t you like to know weather boy

Genre: Miscellaneous 

⚠  dystopian!au, mentions of war, violence, mxm ⚠

A/N: Yes I’m back, there will be a part 2 to this, first time doing mxm if someone comes at me with their high morals I’ll just tell you to suck my left nut <3 also this is loosely based on The100 (the second picture is Sanctum lol), it’s based on seasons 1 and 2 (mount weather) I hope you enjoy it please reblog and give me feedback!!

ᴄʀ: ʙᴀʀɴᴇꜱʙᴀʙᴇᴇ

[PART 1] || [PART 2]

  The heat and natural catastrophes started rising as the years passed, and all of the nations in the world reunited the greatest people in their country to secretly come up with a solution to the world’s end. Bunkers, artificial planets, space stations… Everything was discussed with great detail, but there seemed to be no answer. 

  Bunkers? How long would the human race have to last in a bunker? Wouldn’t there be a lack of resources? Would the bunkers survive the threats they would be facing?

  There wasn’t enough time to think about an artificial planet, let alone begin to conceive one.

  A space station would have the same problems as a bunker would, with the additional problems of constantly fixing the spaceship with the few resources the race would be able to take with them.

  So, in pure despair, a german scientist blurted out what would become the savior to their lives: cryo sleep. 

  And so after nearly a day of being stuck in the stuffy, stress-filled room the crowd of geniuses and world leaders and began working on the salvation of the human race.

  There wouldn’t be enough space for everyone in the spaceships they’d create, as a matter of fact, why would there be? One would not want to re-populate the earth with the people who destroyed it… So each government made a list, of scientists, biologists, farmers, doctors… Everyone deemed essential for survival on earth. 

  The spaceships would be launched out in space all at the same time, however, every 100 years one would be awoken and would descend down to earth. If it was survivable, they would contact the other spaceships through the communication systems implemented on each ship, if not, they would die and the next ship would come 100 years after.

  And once everything was done and ready to go, a new uproar started. 

  Who would board the first ships, which were, undoubtedly, the most dangerous? How would the groups be divided?

   “The Russians are not boarding after us. What gives them the right!? Are the lives of the Americans less worth it!?”

    Profanities and insults echoed around the gigantic, Victorian room. The delicately sculpted walls and columns, carefully painted high ceilings and classic decorations certainly didn’t match the lack of respect and class of nearly every man and woman present.

   It seemed impossible to reach a consent. Some leaders wanted a spaceship for their people only, as they thought it would agree easily since their mindsets were very similar, and the chances of disagreement would be less. However, others debated that it would be better to have a mixture of knowledge and ways of thinking from different regions. 

   Nonetheless, the wiser populations created an alliance whilst all of them discussed loudly, deciding to leave the most problematic nations go in the first ship. If they didn’t agree they simply wouldn’t board.

   There were twelve ships on what became the Mission Restituimus. Iwen Restituimus, Helles Restituimus, Mosco Restituimus, Quitela Restituimus, Arak Restituimus, Champa Restituimus, Beerus Restituimus and Liquir Restituimus. Each of them named after each of the gods of destruction, as a punishment, as a reminder of what they had previously caused. Destruction upon Earth.

  And so, as cruel as it might have been, all of the leaders and people chosen to go boarded the ships, leaving the rest of the world to die without any help.

  A couple of years past and most of the remaining humans were wiped out. The water level rose, the plants died, and consequently so did the animals. With the lack of food and hydration, the race became weaker, and the last heatwave sent whatever was left of them to a better place.

   100 years passed… 200 years passed… 300 years past… 

    25% of what was left of humanity was wiped out almost instantly as they set foot on the ground. Some being able to survive a couple of days, some a couple of weeks… It wasn’t until Mosco R. that there was a chance for humans. 

   They were alive long enough to determine what wasn’t right with the atmosphere around them and what could possibly be harmful, so they could find a way around it. Months had passed and the crew, that stood on the reviving planet in good health, and they still hadn’t called the rest of the ships. 

   People started wondering why the assigned captain of the team hadn’t made that decision yet.

   “Dr. Vorderbruggen, I feel it is safe for us to call the rest of us down onto Earth.” One of the many geologists aboard asked.

   The tall, skinny woman with permanently disheveled hair took a good look at the male and pushed her thick glasses up her nose.

   “What if we didn’t?” 

    All of the heads present in the room turned to face her in confusion. The woman pulled out a book. One that seemed to have had a life as rough as theirs. She threw it in the middle of the makeshift table they had in the small, unstable shed outside of the spaceship.

    They all looked at it for a second before looking at her, as if saying ‘are we supposed to know by looking at it?’.

    She smirked before speaking, creating an eerie atmosphere that made most of the present people quite uncomfortable.

    “How would you like to have an infinite life?” 

    There was an immediate split reaction in the crowd. Some looked on, interested, and others were reluctant about her words.

    “I had previously been researching a way for humans to live longer, but then the Earth was destroyed. However this past month I’ve been studying it relentlessly and I believe I found a way to keep our conscience alive and our hearts beating forever.” 

    Silence. 

    The silence in the room was heavy. Playing with human life and modifying it was dangerous…

    “But, the bodies… What about the bodies? They’ll get older and eventually rot, won’t they?”

     The scientist walked away from the chair and circled the red button that allowed them to communicate with the other ships with her slim finger.

     “That’s where our colleagues enter. We can’t call them yet because we’ll need their bodies. I’m working on finding out how but I’m so, so close. Of course, I’ll need the help of others and it needs some perfecting and some extra details, but it’s doable. Definitely doable.”

    The geologist that had initially asked looked around. He couldn’t believe people were actually considering taking other people’s bodies for their own sake....

    “But Doctor, won’t that have moral implications? It’s the lives of other people! We can’t kill them for our lives to be perpetuated!”

     She looked towards the man threateningly.

     “Dr. Bankole, what caused the last world to collapse?”

     The man hesitated.

     “Uneducated individuals.” He answered, confidently.

     “Our differences. It was our differences, the divergent ways in which we were raised. There won’t ever be any differences if we maintain our people. There won’t be any wars, there won’t be any conflicts, and we can rebuild our planet. The more people we welcome, the more chance there will be for our demise to begin once more.”

   The geologist refused to accept it. He took a couple of seconds to process her words, before launching himself towards the button in a fit of desperation. The doctor tried his best to save humanity, but unfortunately the crowd who agreed with the woman held him down. She smirked, knowing that her plan would be followed along.

   And so it was. For hundreds and hundreds of years the bodies of the crews who arrived down on Earth would be replaced with theirs. Anyone who disagreed with the plan was executed on sight, as they couldn’t afford to have any conflicts at this point. 

   The new ships who arrived on Earth would always be confused. There were humans? So why hadn’t they been called? But of course, the residents would tell them that there was a malfunction in the system, and before the newcomers could question it or find out about the truth their bodies would be taken to what they called ‘The Ceremony’.

   This went on for centuries and centuries on end, each passing year humanity became more robotic and synthetic. That was, until Liquir Restitiumus: the very last one.

   It came down through the sky loudly, ripping through the atmosphere with immense force. The thrusters cause the small particles of dirt and little bits of rocks to disperse underneath the machine, and, when it finally landed with a violent ‘thud’, the crew stepped out. They all had their fingers crossed, as they didn’t want to be the only ones there. They wished more of them had survived. 

  “Liquir! Brothers and sisters welcome!” 

  Their smiles widened, as they realized they weren’t alone and that Earth was finally habitable. A man, no older than fifty, greeted them. He wore a long, pink tunic decorated with what seemed like gold-painted branches, and a green sash with some letters painted on.

   Yunho, a young philosopher that was among others, frowned. How long had they been among the stars? Had it been only 100 years? The way the man spoke, the way he dressed… It seemed as if they had created a cult in the relatively short amount of time they had been asleep. However, he said nothing. Yunho was more of an observer, he liked to collect information and think, create theories and hypotheses.

    “We were to call you, however one of our people destroyed the mainframe since he disagreed with bringing others over… We are Beerus, the ship just before you, unfortunately no other ships before us survived…” The male lied, as he guided the crowd as if they were their sheep.

   Everyone took the time to listen, wanting to gather all of the information they were missing. 

   After just a couple of minutes of walking they arrived at a rather humble camp. There were small, colourful houses built on top of trees, almost morphing with them had it not been for the flashy colours, and some big buildings on the floor. 

   “The four buildings down here are the storage houses, the hospital and the Hall. Up on the trees are the houses of my people. We decided it would be best to live where less creatures would reach us, but fortunately there aren’t many predators as of right now.”

   “Your… people?” 

   “Yes, me and my wife were chosen as the representatives of our community. She was the commander of Beerus and so we decided unanimously that she should remain in power.”

    Yunho frowned. He thought that the commander of Beerus was a young man… Actually he was pretty sure it was a young man. Yes… He remembered because the male seemed about his age, and he was surprised to see someone as young as him be chosen for the mission. Yunho remembered feeling sad because in another situation maybe they could have been friends, but they were instead being sent to their death (most possibly). 

   Still, he kept quiet.

   “I, Samuel, welcome you to Regnum de Caelo in the name of all of our community. I hope you are able to live happily here. The welcome ceremony is in about a week. We need some time for preparations! We will be taking your sizes for some fitting clothing and we will be running some tests to assign you a position, up until then, feel most welcome, brothers and sisters.”

   The man wasn’t lying. They did need to take their sizes and run some tests, but not for the reasons he had stated. They ran these tests to make sure the new bodies were assigned to the correct person. Some of them only needed new arms, some of them requested bigger legs, and the couple in charge took care of that for their people. 

   Yunho roamed around the strange place. It was home, but it didn’t feel like home. At some point he felt like his cryo chamber was more home-like than this eerie place… It looked like something very creepy that they had splashed some colour on to try their best and conceal the actual appearance of the place.

   “Hello young man.” A woman greeted, as she approached him. 

   She was much smaller, and had thick, black hair, that she moved out of her eyes so she could properly examine the male in front of him. Her clothes were very much like the previous man’s, the only difference being the colour pattern. 

   “Hi.”

   Yunho wasn’t very friendly in uncomfortable situations, and although he tried to shoot her his best smile, he knew he had failed. The woman didn’t seem to care, as she went on and on about how amazing the ‘New Earth’ was. 

   From his periferal, Yunho could see someone peeking at him through the window of the so-called Hall, but he paid him no mind. He was a newcomer, people ought to stare.

   “Ma’am, if you don’t mind me asking, you developed a new whole type of hierarchy in just 100 years?”

   She cocked her head to the side.

   “Yes, we did. Just like on Earth we needed someone whom we trusted and respected to set order and make decisions when needed, so who better than the person we chose as a leader for the ship team?” The lady’s lips were smiling, but her eyes looked dull, even dead.

    Yunho hummed and looked at the ground, pursing his lips and furrowed his eyebrows as he tried his best to recall the launching ceremony. Each commander stood on a pedestal and introduced themselves, as they waited for the crew members to be sorted, 99 to each. He was sure the commander of Beerus was a man and not a woman. That much he knew. Because even though they had been in cryo-sleep for 1200 years, the last thing on his mind before entering the cold capsule was the boarding ceremony. 

    “But I was sure the commander of Beerus was a man-”

    “Annie! I’m sorry I must steal him away, I would like to perform his fitting.” 

    Yunho looked at the male that was gripping his arm. He was able to control his facial expressions, the surprise and confusion, but he was sure that was supposed to be the commander of Beerus…

   The woman gave him a weird smile, as if they were setting him up. As she walked away, the grip on Yunho’s arm grew tighter, and the other man only let go once they were by themselves, in a small room inside the Hall.

    “Are you out of your fucking mind!?”

   Yunho frowned, looking visibly offended at the male’s language choice.

    “Excuse me!?”

    The man took a deep breath and placed his hands on his waist.

    “Stop asking questions. Never ask questions, never doubt them.”

    “Why? What’s going on here is really odd and-”

     “It’s exactly because this place is odd that you need to keep quiet and stop doubting everything. If they think you’re onto them you won’t even make it to the Ceremony.” He explained.

    “I hope you realize I have no fucking idea what’s going on and I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

    The other male stopped in his tracks, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He quickly ran towards the window, made sure no one was outside, and then closed the makeshift blinds. He repeated the process with the small door and then pulled two chairs so the pair could sit down. The man’s antics stressed out Yunho a little bit. In the beginning he was confused, but now he was bordeline scared.

   “I’ll explain it to you. Just listen, ask later.”

   Yunho nodded as his eyes widened, ready for the explanation.

   “My name is Song Mingi, and you’re right. I was, and still am, the commander of Beerus. The crew that you see walking on Earth isn’t my crew, it’s Mosco Restituimus. When we first landed I had the same questions that you did, I kept asking around, I kept trying to understand what had happened. I’m an engineer, I even tried to go into their ship to figure out if they were telling the truth but I was caught. Two guards grabbed me and took me to a weird room, everything here seems makeshift and shitty but that room was oozing with technology that I had never seen. They strapped me down to a chair and put me to sleep. I was scared for my life when I woke up, I had no idea what they would do to me. I managed to escape, fucked up my back in an attempt to bite off one of the weird handcuffs. I freed myself from all of it and I was about to leave but I could hear someone speak at the end of the hallway. ‘Yes, he’s strapped down already and once you’re also secured we’ll begin the transfusion.’ I remember these words perfectly, they scared the shit out of me. I started panicking and sweating, but I decided that pretending I hadn’t escaped would be the best option. I placed the cuffs back in their place without strapping them, and soon enough two men came in. One laid down and I could see the other one strap him down and put him to sleep, just like he did to me. I had to take the chance. I took whatever sharp tool was in the operating table behind me and I stabbed him.” Mingi paused, he looked at Yunho, who seemed a little afraid of the way the man had just casually admitted to murder.

   Mingi proceeded to explain how he interrogated the other man once woke up, and he told Yunho everything. From who these people actually were to the Ceremony. 

   “I felt really nervous once I left the room, I had to pretend like there was a struggle. I told them the transfusion was successful but the other subject struggled and the doctor was killed. They seemed to believe me... After all these years they’ve become icredibly smart, but they fail to recognize many human behaviours, like lying.”

  Mingi could see the panic in the other male’s face growing as he finished his explanation. Before Yunho could stand up and dash, however, Mingi grabbed his shoulders.

    “Why… why are you telling me this!? What the fuck am I supposed to do now!? Did you just live among those people all these years!? How did you even survive-”

    “I had to go through procedures. I didn’t want to, but I don’t hate myself for doing it. It was the only way I could survive until the last ship, which was you, arrived. These people are almost 100% synthetic at this point, every single child that was born was either born dead, or with severe deformities that prevented them to be alive for longer than a couple days. I need help to save everyone. If we don’t take down the previous crew… They’ll take the last one hundred human bodies, and that will be the end.” 

   Yunho clenched his hands and pursed his lips. He was trying his best not to look like he was nervous, but the slight shaking and quivering didn’t help.

   “How many days do we have?” He finally asked, giving Mingi the response he was waiting for.

    Mingi smiled slightly, showing his small crescent eyes, that Yunho wished he could’ve seen in a scenario that wasn’t the possible ending of his kind. 

    “About a week. They like to get to know their future bodies before they make a decision and they also need to prepare for the Ceremony. We have about the same body structure, so it won’t seem suspicious if I walk around with you, they’ll just think I chose you.” 

   Yunho took a deep breath. He had no idea what he was signing up for, but he believed Mingi. The little unexplainable lies he had been told ever since he got here made him doubt this place, he didn’t feel secure, plus, the other male’s explanation made sense. 

   “And what do we have to do? I mean, do you have a plan?”

   Mingi raised an eyebrow at the stupid question.

   “I was here for over one hundred years, do you think I was just making friends?”

    Yunho blushed a little at his admittedly dumb questions. 

    “We have to kill them all.” Mingi told him.

    The male saw it coming. Of course that was it... It’s never just an on and off switch, it’s always war and death wherever they go.

    “I’m in.”

[funface2]

Best Dick Jokes Through History – Why Sexual Comedy About Men Is Important – Esquire

Blake Griffin landed a dick joke about Caitlyn Jenner at the Comedy Central Roast of Alex Baldwin, which aired last weekend. “Caitlyn completed her gender reassignment in 2017, finally confirming that no one in that family wants a white dick,” he said to roars of laughter. Was the joke offensive? Racist? Hilarious? All of the above? For her part, Jenner took the dick joke in stride. “Caitlyn was down for it,” one of the writers of the roast said. “She was like, ‘Well, you know, I’m gonna hit hard. I want them to hit me hard.’ And so we did.”

Dick jokes have existed throughout history in nearly every culture known to man, from the greatest literature of all time—Shakespeare and James Joyce—to ancient graffiti. “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!” some anonymous guy scrawled on the wall of a bar in the Roman city of Pompeii around 2,000 years ago. They have been staples of comedy for millennia for a reason: They’re nearly universally appealing.

“Whether you’re rich or poor or black or white, everyone laughs at a dick joke,” says comedian Aaron Berg, who hosts a recurring show at The Stand in New York City. (Berg also hosted a somewhat controversial, entirely satirical show called White Guys Matter that addressed some aspects of white male inadequacy.)

One comedian has elevated dick jokes to poetry, launching them into the realm of high art: Jacqueline Novak, whose one-woman off-Broadway show about blow jobs, Get on Your Knees, manages to make the dick joke both hilarious and high brow. She’s not the first woman to tell a dick joke, nor will she be the last, but she is perhaps the only one to devote a show almost entirely to the penis (with a few minutes sidetracking to ghosts) and be feted by The New York Times for doing so.

Novak, who has been called a “deeply philosophical urologist,” may represent a tipping point in dick jokes, because her show is finally allowing people to see the wisdom (yes, wisdom) in penis humor.

“I don’t even think of myself as like, interested in telling penis jokes. I certainly wouldn’t sit down and go, I’d love to do a show about penises,” Novak says. “I think it’s more like an investigation of my heterosexuality. Does [being heterosexual] mean I love the penis? I’m interested in the language that I’ve been expected to use or accept as legitimate about the penis. Here’s all the reasons that that’s ridiculous.”

Novak’s show is replete with riffs on our “ridiculous” penis language, from the fact that we say the penis is “rock hard”—”No geologist would ever say, this quartz is penis hard“—to the idea that the penis penetrates a woman—”You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up! Spit you out, and you loved every goddamn second of it.” In some ways, Novak is the perfect teller of the 21st century dick joke, not only because she is chronicling our hangups about the penis, but also because without a penis of her own, perhaps she is able to see the dick more clearly for what it is, in all its ridiculousness and beauty.

“You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up!”

But for the most part, phallic culture remains incoherent. Men are pilloried for exposing their dicks, while Euphoria is celebrated for its 30-penis episode; dick pics are critiqued like Picassos or seen as a public menace; judging a man by the size of his penis is perfectly acceptable or grossly objectifying; porn covers every inch of the internet, yet Facebook won’t accept ads for dildos. Dick jokes are still looked down on as cheap—to be fair, some of them are blatantly bad—but some comics say that isn’t always fair.

“Dick jokes, if you craft something amazing out of them, could be the funniest thing someone’s ever heard. And funny in a way that like, opens your mind up even,” says comedian Sean Patton. “That’s the most important kind of comedy, where you laugh at something to the point where you’re now a little more accepting of it. And that can range from anything to other people’s sexual orientation to accepting your own mental illness.” Patton’s own extended dick joke, “Cumin” on Comedy Central’s This Is Not Happening, has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube.

Jacqueline Novak performs at the 2019 Clusterfest in June.

Jeff KravitzGetty Images

Novak uses the blow job to critique cultural expectations of masculinity and the pressure women feel to become skilled at sexually pleasing men. “The teeth shaming starts early, of course,” she says in her show. “If you have your full set of teeth…don’t go into a room where a penis is. It’s not safe for him. Why would you put him at risk?”

Patton likens the dick joke to a “Trojan horse” of comedy. “You make them laugh hard at dick jokes, now they’re listening,” he says. “Then you can throw in something a little more meaningful, and they’re on board.”

Not that all dick jokes need to be intellectual to be taken seriously. The song “D*** in a Box” by The Lonely Island, featuring Justin Timberlake, won an Emmy. It turns out the concept wasn’t exactly new. “Decades before The Lonely Island, B.S. Pully was doing that in the ’40s and ’50s,” comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff says. “Pully would be holding a cigar box at his groin, walking down the aisle. [He would] start a show saying, ‘Cigar, would you like a cigar?’ Then he would lift up the lid, and there was a hole cut in there, and his dick was hanging out. The audience would go crazy.”

Dick jokes continue to thrive off audience reactions, according to several comedians I talked to. Bonnie McFarlane, who is best known for her appearance on Last Comic Standing and her Netflix documentary Women Aren’t Funny, began telling dick jokes when she started out in 1995. “You tell dick jokes because it’s a very male audience, so that’s what they want to hear about,” she says. “It’s been a thing since comedy started. People can really kill if they’re just doing dick jokes.” But there is a double standard, she says, when female comics are made fun of “for talking about their vaginas too much.”

That Novak, a female comic, is revolutionizing the dick joke makes sense, considering that historically, “the vanguard for so-called dick jokes and sexual material comes first and foremost from women rather than men,” Nesteroff says. He points to female comics Rusty Warren, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and LaWanda Page as “probably the four quote-unquote ‘dirtiest’ comedians of the ’50s and ’60s, more so than Lenny Bruce, more so than Redd Foxx.”

LaWanda Page performs for The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast in 1978.

NBCGetty Images

He also says African Americans pushed dick jokes further than any other ethnicity. African-American comedian Page’s albums from the 1970s were rich with dick jokes, referencing “the size of the man, the endurance of the man,” Nesteroff says. As Page recites in her 1973 comedy album Pipe Layin’ Dan: “Husband, dear husband, now don’t be a fool/you’ve worked on the night shift ’til you’ve ruined your tool/you’d better go hungry the rest of your life/than to bring home a pecker so soft to your wife.”

“LaWanda [told] dick jokes for the same reasons a lot of black comics do, because they had to come up in the chitlin circuit, which is basically comedy clubs or bars or places where only black audiences mainly go,” says comedian Harris Stanton, who has toured with Tracy Morgan. “When I started comedy [in 1999] I started in the chitlin circuit,” he continues. “Urban comedy became this big explosion in the United States. A lot of the young black comics couldn’t get into a lot of mainstream clubs, so they would have to perform wherever they could, and dick jokes were welcome to those places.”

African Americans were pioneers of the dick joke, but they definitely weren’t the only ethnic group telling them. Three of the other female sex-joke pioneers Nesteroff mentioned were Jewish. Pearl Williams was known for roasting overweight men when they entered the comedy club by asking, “How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?” Lenny Bruce, one of the most famous Jewish comedians, was arrested for saying schmuck on stage in 1962. Seven years later, another famous American Jew, Philip Roth, published Portnoy’s Complaint, which is essentially a 274-page dick joke, or so some claim.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?”

“I probably owe a debt to Philip Roth that I’m not even fully aware of,” says Novak, who is Jewish. She references him directly in her show, joking, “I went off to college feeling good. It’s a Catholic-ish college. Lots of virgin boys scurrying around, scrambling for sexual experience at parties. Not me. I’m a Jew and I did the coursework in high school, so I felt like a Philip Roth figure. A Jewish pervert ready to teach.”

Jewish male comics may be drawn to dick jokes, according to Berg, who is Jewish, because, “the fact that our penises were intruded upon at a very young age probably gives us a fixation on it and makes us want to talk about it more.”

Dr. Jeremy Dauber, the Atran professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University and author of Jewish Comedy, traces Jewish dick jokes all the way back to the Bible. The earliest case of laughter in Jewish tradition is Sarah’s laughter when she’s told that her 100-year-old husband Abraham will give her a child. It is “a laughter about male impotence,” Dauber says.

But comedians aren’t just laughing at penises anymore. Novak is going in the opposite direction. “I’m trying to restore [the penis] to true dignity.” Will her intellectual blow job jokes allow the dick joke to be taken more seriously? Will future comedians have to deal with the flack that Patton still gets in his reviews?

“Even like positive reviews, sometimes they’ll still point out there’s also a lot of cock, cock cock,” he says. “Why do you have to make sure everyone knows that you thought some of the subject matter was lowbrow?” He thinks reviewers roll their eyes at his dick talk because “everyone constantly is terrified that those around them don’t think that they’re that smart.”

Comedy is one of the only art forms that allows us to talk about male genitalia so openly and democratically. Whatever form the dick joke takes, from idiotic to intellectual, from poetry to prop comedy, as long as it gets a laugh, it should be celebrated. And there’s no better way to diffuse the angst surrounding the modern-day penis than a well-crafted dick joke. The more we laugh about penises (and not just at them), the happier the world might be.

Hallie Lieberman Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist, and the author of “Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.”  

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Bài viết Best Dick Jokes Through History – Why Sexual Comedy About Men Is Important – Esquire đã xuất hiện đầu tiên vào ngày Funface.

from Funface https://funface.net/best-jokes/best-dick-jokes-through-history-why-sexual-comedy-about-men-is-important-esquire/

[heartslogos]

newfragile yellows [461]

“Ah, I see. So you’re a situational idiot. That’s good to know.”

“A what?”

“You know, you’re almost scarily intelligent most of the time. It’s borderline unnerving.”

“Only borderline?”

“The things you are able to do and the subjects in which you have mastery or working knowledge on are so many and so esoteric that I was beginning to think that I was completely out of my league and that you might possibly be some kind of…I don’t know. Like. Threat to my existence?”

“And now I’m concerned about our relationship.”

“It’s just that, like, the power balance in intelligence was so unbalanced? One one hand, me. On the other. You. Who knows dead languages and studied architecture and is also able to make bombs from household cleaner on the fly, and can sew, and is also a pretty good geologist. It’s downright unfair. It makes me look terrible. Like you’re going out with me based on pity or something.”

“I’m very concerned about our relationship.”

“But now I know. It’s okay. It’s all okay. Because you’re a situational idiot.”

“I don’t know what that means, babe.”

“It means,” Ellana pulls her phone out, “That your genius leaves you in certain situations and you become a complete idiot. It’s a relief. A burden off of my conscience. There’s balance in this world. Equilibrium. Equivalent exchange.”

“That last one is an anime.”

“It’s all true.” Ellana taps something out on her phone. “So. My parent’s flight is late and your first reaction is to scope out the airport for some sort of crime. I love it. You do you babe. I’m just going to google flight conditions on their general air path in this direction and double check with information. You go do your super scary government agent thing. I’ll be here. Trying to patch into the airport’s shitty wifi to look this up.”

“If there was something wrong with your parents flight that was as ordinary as the weather it would be posted somewhere.”

And Bull has lots of enemies who would be delighted to know that he’s currently in a steady and healthy relationship with a civilian. Some of them probably even have connections to this very airport.

He has to figure out a way to get Ellana’s family to use official Inquisition transportation without them getting too weirded out by it. Maybe he can convince Trevelyan and Montilyet to buy out a taxi company or something and use it as a front. They could definitely use that for official business too, right?

“It’s only ten minutes, babe. Not that much of a delay. Chill.”

“I am chill!”

“Right. You’re also sweating a lot. Like a lot a lot. You’re really shiny. Glistening, even.” Ellana squints at him. “Are you nervous for this? You’ve met them before.”

“I know. But that’s before we started dating for real.”

“What, so we weren’t dating for real before that?”

“We were just friends then.”

“Just friends? Are you underselling the power of friendship? To me? Me! Bull, you’re walking a very, very thin line here and I would highly suggest that you consider your next words very carefully. As carefully as you would as if you were on the clock doing whatever it is you do on your top secret job things.”

“You know exactly what I mean and you’re giving me a hard time on purpose.”

“You’re such a high level government agent I had to get security clearance to date you because I’m a mere peasant — “

“You aren’t a peasant — “ Bull tries to cut her off before she can get too into this. It’s a lost cause and he should know better by now. Ellana could steam roll heads of state if he could get her in the same room as them.

She’s wasted in a field like art conservation. She can’t talk a painting into not being old and moldy.

“Who’s working off student loans and has two part time jobs without healthcare or a retirement fund. I can’t believe that you’re sweating over meeting my parents. My parents. My plain, normal, regular ol’parents. The rents if you will. My me-maw and pee-paw. Mums and peepums. My mommy and daddy. Just a retired tax accountant and real estate agent.”

“They’re your parents! You have a really strong relationship with them! I want to look good for them.”

“You and my dad went hiking together! You had this weird…manly bonding moment or something when you guys fell down an incline. I don’t know. You guys made it sound really weird when you told me about it. You and my mom send each other baking recipes and video chat each other while cooking! She taught you our family recipes and she hasn’t even let me or my brother so much as look at her while she’s cooking some of that stuff. Your relationship is probably stronger with them than it is with me!"

“You’re exaggerating.”

“My brother would literally rather ask you for advice instead of me. His big sister.”

“Wait, I thought — “

“He lied! I’m the elder one! You believed him? Oh my god. It’s like you’re dating me for my family. We don’t even come from money. You know what - that isn’t — whatever. Okay. Look. You’re a situational idiot. You’re so hardwired for the extreme that when faced with the mundane instance of my parent’s flight being ten minutes late you skip Occam’s Razor and go straight for security threat at the airport. And that’s just the flaw you have to live with. It’s the flaw that proves to me you’re real and not some insanely in depth hallucination my brain has made up for me.”

Ellana pats his arm. Then squeezes it. Then narrows her eyes and pokes it. Then smiles up at him.

Bull gives her a tolerant look.

“Feel real enough to you?”

“Unless I’m tripping way hard on some sort of hallucinatory airborne agent,” Ellana chirps out, turning around. “Okay. You stay here and keep an eye on the arrivals board. I’m going to hunt down someone who works here and isn’t building maintenance or retail staff from a store.”

[kosmikowboj]

CONSIDER:

A Voltron AU in which:

Lance is a marine biologist Keith and Lotor are chemists Hunk and Shay are geologists the Holt siblings are astrophysicists Shallura is an historian/archeologist power team

-the Holt siblings vehemently believe that aliens exist and Shiro argues with them for the hell of it -“historical proof???? N/A” -“THE PYRAMIDS SHIRO” -Shiro rolls his eyes but secretly agrees -Allura fights on the side of the holts rip Shiro -Lance calls every animal he studies his friend -Hunk also calls them friends -Keith does not see them as friends (at first) and Lance is offended -“what a cool specimen! Its camouflage is astounding. I wonder how exactly–“ -“first of all, Keith, Rosie is a she, not an it. And second of all, she is my friend, not a specimen. Oh look at how she’s waving her tentacles you upset her good job” -Rosie is a cuttlefish -Lance usually wears contacts but he has these big nerdy glasses on the days he either doesn’t feel like wearing his contacts or he forgets -Keith laughs at him whenever he wears his glasses to cover up the fact that he thinks they’re fricking adorable and he wishes Lance would wear them all the time -“Keith!!! Do the thing!!!” -“Lance there so many cooler things I could show you why are you so fascinated by me sticking copper in a Bunsen burner flame” -“DO IT” -Hunk had a pet rock as a kid (he probably still does tbh) -he makes the Research Team TM snacks, which they devour eagerly; he’s typically the one who gets them the energy for all-nighters with his high quality snicky-snacks -he and Keith are an underrated power team, working together to make a lot of synthetic crystals that well mimic their real counterparts and that sort of thing -Hunk is very good at what he does but Shay makes him very flustered ok -“mhm yes you have lovely eyes I mEAN erm those rocks are nice yes your rocks are nice WAIT uh–“ -Shay is secretly flustered by Hunk but she’s very good at hiding it -Klance doesn’t get flustered around each other like Shay/Hunk but the entire team still chokes on the romantic tension -“hey are you a chemist because we’ve got chemistry *finger guns*” -“yes???? I am a chemist???? we’ve worked together for years????” -“D:” -like cmon they aren’t even trying to be subtle -well Lance isn’t anyway -speaking of dorky crushes Lotor has a v big one on Allura -he reads lots of books about archeology and history so he can have sophisticated conversations with her; she enjoys them just as much as he does -Allura is a Queen TM and although she and Shiro are a fantastic pair and are like the mom and dad of the team she’s committed to her career and isn’t super interested in romance; both Lotor and Shiro respect this, and each other -Shiro takes a bit of time to warm up to Lotor because he was a latecomer to their team but they’re on pretty good terms now -they get coffee and have intellectual conversations about science sometimes -the Holts, Matt especially, are still kinda suspicious of Lotor, thinking that maybe he joined their team to steal their findings (he had worked with their rival team prior, so it’s a reasonable concern), but they’re slowly growing to tolerate him -Keith and Lotor get along surprisingly well, and mullet was the first to be okay with the new member of their team -that being said, they always argue over how their experiments should be conducted -“no no no, you’re doing wrong, if you put that in first then the reaction will–“ -“shut your crusty ass mouth, lotion” -“rude! at least the 80s don’t want my hair back” -“exCUSE YOU– you know what, new experiment, how about I pour this whole solution into your hair–“ -“nO” -Keith does not pour the solution into Lotor’s hair he’s too good for that -but yeah even though they bicker a lot they never actually offend each other and they’re pretty good friends -Hunk and Lance are similar to the Holts in their stance on Lotor, but are a bit more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt -lance and lotor ultimately bond in part over Keith because they both care about him a lot -Allura LOVES the Egyptian era and has a cat named Bastet -Shiro is a dog person but Bastet has grown on him

[just-some-other-reviews]

And here come the last review about the u-prince series. Well, I’m going to do a summary of all the series and rank them from the one I found the better to the one I disliked the most, so it’s not really the end, but it is, at the same time… Confusing… Right?

U-Prince the Series: The Ambitious Boss is a romantic school comedy. Mantou, the daughter of one of the most powerful mafia boss in Thailand, just finished high school. Being quite dumb, she has no aspiration to go to college. She, rather, wants to marry her fiancé, Li Tang. The problem is that Li Tang wants to study in economics. She accepts such thing and decides to enter the same university and faculty as her fiancé. The thing is that Li Tang isn’t the only mafia’s son that can be a potential fiancé. When her parents are aware that Li Tang wants to push back the wedding, they decide to promise her to the young man Mantou has, once, when they were six, rejected because he was too mean, Brian. He’s two years older than her and, by coincidence, he is the U-Prince of the Economics faculty.

Dang, that was a long summary. As always, I tried to put the less spoilers it was possible into the review, but some might have escaped me, so please stay careful as you read.

As all the U-Prince series, the story is really cliché and usual (like the fighting scenes by example). Personally, this time I didn’t really mind it because I thought that, overall, the story was quite nice. Yet, I’m not here to only put this lakorn under a good light. This part of the u-prince series is more a comedy than the rest of the series, so it uses the same (annoying) effects as many comedies. There’s a lot of zoom-in and sound effects, which are tiring as the lakorn progresses. You know, a little bit of them aren’t really annoying, but too much of them can make the lakorn get heavier than it should. But, even with this small issue, most of the lakorn is quite light and most of the scenes are hilarious (I mean, I’ll talk about it further into the characters section, but let’s rest it to that for the moment). The lakorn is short and well-paced. It’s easy to watch and I felt as if it was quite addicting. I meant, I wanted to know what was going to be the ending (even though the progression is predictable). I mean, it was probably the part of the U-Prince that I finished the quickest and that I skipped the less part right after The Lovely Geologist. Also, this part is full of feel. I was so emotionally involved in it (with no apparent reason).

For the characters I’ll start by treating of the female lead, so I wouldn’t have to talk about her later in the review. She the usual dumb female lead. She has no idea of what she wants to do in her life. She’s blinded by love (and luckily the U-Prince isn’t Li Tang, but Brian because I probably wouldn’t have liked this lakorn as much as I did if it was Li Tang) and can’t open her horizons. She’s extremely frustrating because she lacks insight, but, at the same time it’s what make this lakorn so funny. I mean, her reactions are gold. She undramatize all the situations to which she is confronted (even though sometimes you really want to strangle her… But maybe it’s just me being frustrated…).  Also, she often isn’t really coherent. She tends to be really dumb and then suddenly really smart, which is kind of confusing. But now let’s pass to Brian. At first I found him a bit creepy. He keeps a picture of the six years old female lead in his wallet… Well… You could say love at first sight, but I kind of find it creepy. As the lakorn progresses he’s revealed to be such a sweetheart with pure emotions (even though he’s annoying as fuck because he keeps saying bad words to the female lead and teases her). Also, he’s probably the only character who isn’t self-centered and wants for everyone to be happy and is even ready to sacrifice himself for such thing. I mean, yes, he’s cliché, but I still love (maybe not love… Ah… I don’t know, I get too involved in my lakorns) him. Then I should write about the second male lead (because I won’t talk about the second female lead, since it would be somewhat of a spoiler if I did so, but bear in mind that she’s annoying and I truly hate her), Li Tang. I was fine with him being cold and don’t like the female lead, but I wasn’t okay with his sudden interest in her that put some drama in the lakorn. I mean, he only liked her because he knew that Brian wanted her. He’s childish and truly I would have got really mad if he was the male lead because he doesn’t even deserve the attention he receives from everybody.

I’ll conclude here. This review is longer than I thought it would be. The plot would be worth a 8/10. The characters a 2.5/5 since they don’t really grow through the lakorn with the exception of the female lead. And the tearjerker factor would be a 2/5.

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story  - Part 24

 - 

Ava joined our group of friends in the winter of 02′ and for some part of my life, she became my best friend. She had spent the last year since she had moved from Moscow being a part of the popular group of girls in our class and i had never said anything to her at all. She was bored of those girls I think, or had gone through them all one at a time till they were done with her. She never fit in with them, since she was heavy. We were all amused as she told us all about how strange and insecure the popular girls actually were when they were home. It made me feel normal. Ava was incredibly funny and energetic, almost too much. She was an addictive character you don’t meet everyday and could really throw you off course – in a good way most of the time, but if you were around her too long, your identity would begin to disappear. She could break people's resolve very easily, which is why I became friends with her so quickly, when ordinarily I am the sort of person who takes a lot of time to make new friends. She would give you that feeling you might get when you have been laughing hysterically for hours with people, and everything seems funny to you and you have kind of lost grip of yourself and something feels wrong but your brain is filled with happy dope. 

It had it's pros and cons. We ended up getting along great since we were both very strange. I would come up with some insane comedy routine and ideas - i would make up characters and scenarios, and Ava would just pull out this insane impromptu reactions and additions i would never think of or would not imagine being acted out in such a way to what I had said, and people legitimately thought we were both completely insane. Something was always greedy and gleeful in her eyes - a little crazy. She had a way of demanding attention. I remember I was quite nervous to reach out and try to befriend her, but I called her and she instantly took well to it. I don’t think i had ever gotten so close to another person that fast.

Ava lived in the hills above Kendrick, miles away from civilization, close enough to where she could have gone to the Moscow high school instead. For whatever reason she decided to attend Kendrick's school. Her father was a well known geologist. He worked at the University of Idaho, and the other half the time he was down in Brazil or Argentina or someplace doing rock stuff. The house they owned was pretty nice. It was old like my house was. But it was in the middle of a field that stretched as far as the eye could see. Going off the highway. You would drive onto one gravel road, that was really more of a farmer's road. You would drive for ten miles out into this field, and then you would take yet another more gravelly gravel road and drive another two miles, and you would be at her place. The surroundings were bleak. The home was well furnished. She had one older sister named Ana, but she was in college. A few dogs. 

Her mom was kind of distant and moody. I never really did understand that lady. She never seemed to leave the house, instead she would sit outside and look out at the fields listening to NPR until the sun went down. She was a retired social worker and she was unprofessional in that she told people her client’s secrets because she was kind of judgy that way.. In her youth, she had partied with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Then she had moved to England for ten years, and eventually came back and settled in Moscow, before retiring to look out over the barren wheat fields. It didn't seem like she had any visitors. Once every couple of years she would travel to France or Italy. And maybe once every three months, she would attend another rich person's party. Ava always bragged that her mom was friends with Steve Miller. Yet, as much as I don't understand why she was here of all places, I suppose it really was a good thing elite liberal families to move to rural places like this. It fights back the culture of red solo cups, conservative values, and Kid Rock and the like.

Their home had two living rooms, and a sitting room. And all these other rooms. It was really a nice place. Ava had a lot of Italian and Greek in her blood, and their kitchen had a lot of Toulouse-Lautrec paintings and the like. There was also a smaller home off the property, a barn for her two horses, and this other little building that looked like a tattered barn, but inside it was actually an opulent mini mansion that was her father's study. It had bookshelves up to the ceiling, classy lighting. Years later I was watching the television show Hannibal, and it looked a little like Hannibal's office. And past that, there was this pond that was actually slimy and disgusting but I ended up swimming in it anyway that summer. It was filled to the brim with bold catfish who would try to eat you if you stayed still for too long. One of Ava's horses was named Molly. She was old, and pretty nice. The other one was this Arabian horse named Chimo. Chimo was the fucking devil. When Ava was showing me her barn one time, he galloped up to me, and he tried to bite my face with his big awful teeth. Ava always had to shove him away roughly for him to not try to hurt people. And then she would always tell you that he didn't mean it, and he would never hurt anyone – but yes, yes he would. He was the devil.

Despite Ava's nice house, I always grew bored and weary up there. For one thing, it was far out of the way of anything remotely fun. The store was twenty five miles back into Kendrick. There were no trees. The nearest neighbors were three miles away, and they were old farmers. Ava and her mom had a strange relationship. I didn't get it at all. Ava's mom might come up and ask Ava if she wanted some ice cream, in a very calm voice. Ava would fly off the handle FUCK YOU MOM! And then her mom would calmly walk away and say Okay Avaaaaah. She always said Ava's name really long. Then, Ava would make a small mistake like accidentally rip a page in a book, and her mom would freak out at   her, call her a fat cow and fly into this rage over something that seemed to me as incredibly petty. But then, if Ava accidentally burned down a barn – she didn't do this, but she was very unruly and did a lot of things like this – her mom would just sigh and would not reprimand her in any way. I didn't get it. I think it made Ava a little crazy. On one hand, she was spoiled rotten, and on the other, her mom was at random intervals, verbally abusive.

Ava's dad was nice when he was around – which was infrequently, but very loopy to me. I had heard that he had some kind of mental disorder that had made him dangerous, but was now treated so long as he took his medication. He always seemed a bit off, but I understand it's the price you pay when you have a mental illness sometimes. He had had a rough life. He had been disowned by his family. They had made all their money on illegal cheating on horse racing back in the early 20th century, and had sided with Hitler in Nazi Germany, and were a part of the Nazi party themselves when WW2 happened. His mother had been a Nazi youth who had met Hitler. And they still agreed with the Nazis to this day. Ava's dad had tried to become a painter, and they had scoffed at him and took his funding away. He hated his family, understandably and never spoke to them again. I think he probably had Bipolar. I can't say for certain, but he seemed to be that way. Ava was larger like him, she had his dark hair, and his thicker build.

I would get uncomfortable at Ava's house because she would ask you what you wanted to do, and then when you said something she didn't want to hear she started getting aggravated and upset and before you know it she would start calling herself a stupid bitch over and over. So, you would feel nervous, stuck up in the hills, not being able to casually go home, with Ava, her mother and father all in their strange modes. Ava was also OBSESSED with Orlando Bloom. Ava jumped from crush to crush pretty frequently, but Orlando Bloom was god to her. She had posters of him all over her wall, some as Legolas and others not, as well as one of Heath Ledger in A Knight's Tale. She went to see Lord of the Rings herself probably forty times. And she wrote Orlando Bloom about three times a week. He never wrote her back. Over the course of that winter, she was becoming more and more depressed, as though he were her husband and he was willfully ignoring her. In her mind, she was meant to be with Orlando Bloom. There could be no other way. When Ava didn't get her way, or felt bad about herself at all, this dark cloud would descend and she would begin accusing everyone of hating her. It was strange to be accused of hating her because Orlando Bloom was not writing her back.

As it happened, there was this senior in the school named Brandon who looked like Orlando Bloom in the vaguest of ways. He was probably the coolest kid to have gone to Kendrick high school. He ended up meeting an Irish girl and moving to Ireland. Ava liked him also, but it was really just a surrogate kind of deal. His mother had a party one time, and she and her mother had been invited. At this party, she met this guy who knew some of the people who had worked on set with the LOTR cast, and he himself had auditioned for the role of Legolas. He had seen Orlando come on set. She was absolutely crazy about this connection and was dearly hoping it would bring her closer to Orlando Bloom.

She ate a lot. She actually ate more than me. She would eat three bowls of cereal, an omelet, two sandwiches, a wheel of cheese, three large cups of milk, ten cookies, and a gallon of ice cream in one go. I felt awkward and tried to eat all this with her but despite the fact that I had a large appetite myself, I was floored at the end of the omelet. But if you stopped eating, she would start calling herself fat and being really awkward and start saying you were calling her fat, so you had to eat. And sometimes at school, she would get really upset about how heavy she was. She would throw tantrums at Sarah and Katie because they were tiny and didn't understand what it meant to be fat. Eventually, I remember in an attempt to even things out, I was like 'Ava, I am fat too. I think if I was going to lose weight I would probably need to go on a diet. We aren't born with the same bodies'. This was the first time I had ever suggested to myself that I needed a diet, and it also made Ava furious at me for a short time.

She also had a few ingrown hairs (often happens to girls with course dark hair) on her legs, and she would pick at these ingrown hairs till they were scabs. Any blemish that was on her body, besides her face she would pick at till they bled. So for a time, she was covered in scabs. And she thought she had a disease. But we all watched her pick at them. I think Ava was suffering from a personality disorder at the time. And she would call herself ugly, and she wasn't ugly in the least. She had a gorgeous face, and in a certain angle she could look like Gwen Stephani a little bit. It really was hard to be her friend sometimes. I really liked her because she was very fun, and dynamic and interesting. She was probably the most likeable person I had ever met up to that point. Adults hated her because she was unruly and she would always accidentally break things. She got complained about for yelling. But it was so funny you really could not tell her to stop.

Ava first befriended Katie, and this was the beginning of the eventual undoing of Katie. Katie was gullible. Ava and Katie hung out a bunch together. There was one time where Katie chewed Ava out, when Ava foolishly grabbed Katie's rifle and began pointing it at everyone. Katie took the rifle away and was very angry. To Katie's credit, she was and probably still is as responsible as a person can be with a deadly weapon. But other than that, she sort of singled Katie out, and befriended her for about a month. They ran around learning Middle Earth language. When she got Katie alone and in a trusting situation, she started telling Katie that Samantha and Sarah were against her, and probably me too, but honestly nobody ever went against me because perhaps I was too small a fish. Nothing was actually going on of course. Nobody hated Katie. Ava was taking small things and making them huge and embellishing on them to turn Katie against us and make her act out. Ava was in her own way, intentionally wrecking the group so she could dominate it. Katie was a gullible trusting person and she believed every word of this nonsense. So there was this bizarre weekend where Katie and Ava were together and sending angry emails to Sarah and Samantha. I sat drawing at the table, not really sure what the hell everyone was so mad about.

When Ava had Katie good and upset, she then turned on Katie and came back to Sarah's side. I really didn't see it like this then. It took me a few years later to track all of Ava's moves and fully realize the game. This left Katie feeling mistrustful and permanently alone. Poor Katie stopped smiling and would sometimes walk away from us upset. I tried to talk to her, but she would just say she was depressed. I don't think she even understood what had happened, or ever questioned Ava's intent or that she might have been lying.

Katie also started getting mad because she felt that Ava and Sarah had both at times drawn realistic art, and Katie felt that realism was hers. This only made her seem more ridiculous to Sarah, who wasn't really interested in realistic art at the time. We couldn't help but make jokes when we turned on Public Television and Bob Ross would be painting something realistic. 'Oh look, he's stealing from Katie. He can't do that!' Katie's mom also didn't want me to come over to visit ever again when I accidentally tracked mud on their carpet. So it was hard for me at least, to get Katie alone so I could ask what was wrong. Ava in the mean time was now going to befriend Sarah. Samantha wasn't really buying any of this. She didn't think Ava was as funny as we thought she was, and Sam at this time was starting to care more about boys (will get into this later). So now Ava was kind of the dominant leader of Sarah and me. Not completely, but kind of.

Honestly, sometimes I just kind of wanted it to just be Sarah and I again. Neither one of us really started problems that bad. Since Sarah had stopped insulting me, we got along great. We would spend hours playing Final Fantasy 9 or Zelda for 64, eating popcorn and chocolate covered raisins or draw and talk about our comics. We would stay up late and ask each other questions about the boys we liked. There was never any conflict. It wasn't easy, but I would generally try to tell her if I was upset with her. And we both pondered about life just a little more thoughtfully, and had the same strange experiences. One time, Sarah and I were talking on the phone and someone in her basement picked up the basement phone and said something to us. It was a man's voice. We could tell it was her phone because there was this certain way that it clicked when it came on that was distinct. But there was nobody downstairs. The doors were all locked, and you could look and see the doors from the upstairs. Things like that always happened to Sarah and I.

Samantha had become very infatuated with some guy named Samuel who lived in Texas. She had met him on a chatroom. She was intent on marrying him. Andy no longer meant much to her. Around this same time, there was an assembly, because we had this guest theater group from Lewiston come to do a show. Basically, it was like, three stories of twenty-odd year old actors and actresses acting like they were teenagers in 'teen' situations. One took drugs, one drove drunk and the other got pregnant. They were these highly emotional, highly charged scenes of fighting and internal dialogue until the worst of the worst was upon them. And the actors would scream and cry. In the end, the druggy one overdosed and almost died, the drunk driving teen accidentally got into an accident and killed someone, and the pregnant teenager was all well, pregnant. And in the end, the actors/actresses would cry out THIS IS REAL! This Is Real Life, and they would convince you for a few moments that they were just acting out what had actually happened. We were all blown away at the time, but it was actually rather corny.

Anyway, after this, they basically said at one point that teenagers were not capable of being in love. Which is bullshit. But that was their argument for abstinence. So, Samantha did something I did not expect. She stood up and boldly argued that they were wrong before the whole school. It really became a debate that the actors and actresses lost. Sam really broke it down. At first, I had just kind of assumed the actors were right, and then she addressed it by breaking it down to what they meant, and in a way that made me realize that I had been wrong. It was really an interesting moment for me, and I really admired her bravery. So I called Sam after school to tell her what a great job I had thought she had done, and also that I really believed in her relationship with this Samuel fellow. We got to talking, and we had not been that close since kindergarten, honestly. She started complaining about Sarah though. And once she started, she could not stop. It was really strange. All these years, Sam had disliked me, and liked Sarah. Now, she was fond of me and she hated Sarah secretly. It was all very strange to me. She complained about some really small stuff. There was one time where Sarah's breath had smelled, and she had told Sarah, and Sarah had said she had eaten garlic that morning. Sam was adamant that Sarah had been lying, and had in fact, not brushed her teeth. She was REALLY mad because she felt that Sarah had scratched her Eminem Show cd. After awhile, she was starting to sound obsessed with bashing on Sarah. And of course, I was told not to tell anyone

I kind of broke down and told Sarah. I felt like it was only fair for Sarah to address herself to Samantha. It didn't seem healthy for Sam to vent at me, and I didn't want to hate Sarah. So I told Sarah, who would talk to Sam about it, and I knew that Sam would be furious at me for having told Sarah what she had said (that might be the most 8th gradery sentence I have written in awhile). And so for that very brief time, Sam and I were friends again, but it was over before it ever really began, and we went back to mild tolerance for the rest of the time I knew her. I probably did the right thing, but heck, it doesn't matter anymore. And who but I would hold onto such pointless information?

School dragged along. There was a Drug Free after school club that was started for the seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. Kyle joined, my friends did, and so I did too. We had to take a pee test to prove we were drug free. The class was mostly an excuse for all of us to get together and cook up fried Twinkies and snicker bars every two weeks. Mrs. Kerrick had started it. I liked Mrs. Kerrick, though we were never really all that close. She taught both my math and earth science classes. She was pretty competent when it came to teaching. But people laughed at her because she was very heavy, and she dressed somewhat provocatively. I never really cared, but she also flirted with the teenage boys. It got to be pretty carried away. She would insinuate things. Anyway, I eventually got kicked out of the Drug Free thing.

The reason for that was, that in earth science we were all supposed to group up with the person sitting nearest to us and take chemicals and make them crystallize. It had something to do with learning about the earths molten rocks that dried. Everyone was kind of rowdy. I ended up with Karlie (as you will remember her as the unwell girl from 7th who used to talk to me). Karlie and I paired up, and Mrs. Kerrick told us all very seriously that we were not for any reason at all, to drink or eat any of the chemicals in the box. But as we all worked on making our crystal things, I looked over, and there was Zack, taking spoonfuls of this stuff and drinking it in the hopes I imagine of getting high. I thought that was pretty funny, so for shock value, I pretended to Karlie that I had drank the poison as well. Obviously it wasn't poisonous else Zack would have keeled over, and I just was making a joke. I hadn't taken any of it in, I just moved the spoon away from my mouth to make it seem as though I had taken a bite.

Karlie said OH MY GOD! YOU DRANK IT! And I hadn't. I assured her I was joking, but she ran up to the desk and pointed at me and told Mrs. Kerrick something, and then Mrs. Kerrick looked fatigued and panicked and she ran me into the hallway and said we were going to have to call some poison control people and take me to the emergency room. It took everything I had just to convince her that I had been joking. She barely believed me, but gave in due to it being her worst nightmare. It really gave her a fright, and I felt very embarrassed. She gave me a detention anyway – which I took, because it would at least be a new packet other than Ten O'clock Tim or whatever, and told me not to come to the next Drug Free party. I suppose I could have gone anyway, and she would not have kicked me out. I could have gone to the one after that, but I just decided to quit. I wasn't mad at her at all. She was just honestly panicked, quite understandably. The joke was harmless, but it was dumb. And as far as I know, Zack never died, despite eating the stuff like pudding. I never knew if he got high off it though.

I asked Karlie why she hadn't told on Zack. She didn't say much. I think it was probably because she had a crush on him. Rumor has it, she had written this twelve page fan fiction of Zack having bizarre standing up sex on the beach with her. Someone had stolen it from Karlie and gave it to Zack. I could tell that she was sort of crazy about him by the way that she looked at him all the time.

If you would like to read my whole life story so far, here are all the parts i have written 

PART 23 - http://tinyurl.com/yac6sk3g

PART 22 -  http://tinyurl.com/yat6cfnw

PART 21 -  http://tinyurl.com/y783egno

PART 20 - http://tinyurl.com/y8jskymt

PART 19 - http://tinyurl.com/rfhbms8

PART 18 - http://tinyurl.com/ycrznrwk

PART 17 - http://tinyurl.com/y77unlng

PART 16 - http://tinyurl.com/yadpsv8c

PART 15 - http://tinyurl.com/yb3lt6k5

PART 14 - http://tinyurl.com/yb4cfedq

PART 13 - http://tinyurl.com/yalanq9s

PART 12 - http://tinyurl.com/yc79mw94

PART 11 - http://tinyurl.com/yc9qhj84

PART 10 - http://tinyurl.com/yb734w24

PART 9 - http://tinyurl.com/yc2t6vfw  

PART 8 - http://tinyurl.com/ybl37utq

PART 7 - http://tinyurl.com/ybvo283g

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

[esrescuer]

And other tales from the intersection of science and airport security Martin J Cohn / University of Florida ED YONG MAY 23, 2017 When Martin Cohn passed through airport security at Ronald Reagan Airport, he figured that he’d probably get some questions about the 3-D-printed model of a mouse penis in his bag. The model is 15 centimeters long, made of clear translucent plastic, and indisputably phallic— like the dismembered member of some monstrous, transparent, 11-foot rodent. One of Cohn’s colleagues had already been questioned about it when she carried it on an outward flight from Gainesville to Washington D.C. She put it through the security scanner, and the bag got pulled. A TSA official looked inside, winked at her, and let her go. She was amused but embarrassed, so Cohn offered to take the model home on the return flight. Once again, the bag was pulled. A TSA officer asked if Cohn had anything sharp or fragile inside. Yes, he said, some 3-D-printed anatomical models. They’re pretty fragile. The officer pulled out two models of mouse embryos, nodded to herself, and moved on. “And then,” Cohn recalls, “she pulled out this mouse penis by its base, like it was Excalibur.” What is this? “Do you need to know or do youwant to know?” said Cohn. I’m curious, she replied. “It’s a 3-D print-out of an adult mouse penis.” A what? “A 3-D print-out of an adult mouse penis.” Oh no it isn’t. “It is.” The officer called over three of her colleagues and asked them to guess what it is. No one said anything, so Cohn told them. They fell apart laughing. In previous years, Cohn has flown with the shin bone of a giant ground sloth and a cooler full of turtle embryos. Just last month, Diane Kelly from the University of Massachusetts, who studies the evolution of animal genitals, was stopped by the TSA because she was carrying what is roughly the opposite of Cohn’s item: a 3-D-printed mold of a dolphin vagina. “Technically it’s not even my dolphin vagina mold,” she says. “I was carrying it for someone.” Other scientists who responded to a call for stories on Twitter have flown with bottles of monkey pee,chameleon and skate embryos,5,000 year old human bones, remotely operated vehicles, and, well, a bunch of rocks. (“I’m a geologist. I study rocks.”) Astrophysicist Brian Schimdt was once stopped by airport officials on his way to North Dakota because he was carrying his Nobel Prize—a half-pound gold disk that showed up as completely black on the security scanners. “Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?” they said. “The King of Sweden,” he replied. “Why did he give this to you?,” they probed. “Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.” Anthropologist Donald Johanson has flown with probably the most precious—and the most famous—of these cargos: the bones of the Lucythe Australopithecus, who Johanson himself discovered. In a memoir, he recalls having to show her bones to a customs official in Paris. The man was an anthropology buff, and when Johanson told him that the fossils were from Ethiopia, he said, “You mean Lucy?” “A large crowd gathered and watched as Lucy’s bones were displayed, one by one, on the Customs counter. I got my first inkling of the enormous pull that Lucy would generate from then on, everywhere she went.” Several people have stories about more animate luggage. Jonathan Klassen from the University of Connecticut studies leafcutter ants, and the permits that allow him to collect wild colonies stipulate that he must hand-carry them onto planes. “Inevitably, some poor security officer gets a duffle bag full of 10,000 ants and gets really confused,” he says. Indeed, many animals have to be hand-carried onto planes because they don’t fare well in the cold of cargo holds, (and often can’t be shipped for similar reasons). That’s certainly the case for the amblypygids—docile relatives of spiders with utterly nightmarish appearances—that Alexander Vaughan once tried to carry onto a domestic flight. “My strategy was to pretend that everything I was doing was perfectly normal,” he tells me. Cohn, who’s based at the University of Florida, studies genitals and urinary tracts, and how they develop in embryos. Around 1 in 250 people are born with birth defects affecting these organs, and although such changes are becoming more common, their causes are largely unclear. By studying how genitals normally develop, Cohn’s hoping to understand what happens when they take a different path. And like many scientists, he is working with mice. He recently analysed a mouse’s genitals with a high-resolution medical scanner. To show his colleagues how incredibly detailed the scans can be, he used them to print a scaled-up model, which he took with him to the conference in DC. And because the conference was just a two-day affair, Cohn didn’t bring any checked luggage. Hence: the penis in his carry-on. Scientists, as it happens, are full of tales like this because as a group, they’re likely to (a) travel frequently, and (b) carry really weird shit in their bags. Others were more upfront about their unorthodox cargo. Ondine Cleaver from UT Southwestern Medical Center once tried carrying tupperware containers full of frogs from New York to Austin. At security, she realized that she couldn’t possibly subject the animals to harmful doses of X-rays, so she explained the contents of her bag to a TSA agent. “She totally freaked out, but had to peek in the container,” says Cleaver. “We opened it just a slit, and there were 12-14 eyes staring at her. She screamed. She did this 3 times. A few other agents came by to see, and none could deal with the container being opened more than a bit. But they had to make sure there was nothing nefarious inside, so we went through cycles of opening the container, screaming, closing it laughing, and again.” They eventually let her through.Many scientists have had tougher experiences because their equipment looks suspicious. The bio-logging collars that Luca Borger uses to track cattle in the Alps look a lot like explosive belts. And the Petterson D500x bat detector, which Daniella Rabaiotti uses to record bat calls, is a “big, black box with blinking lights on the front.” She had one in her backpack on a flight going into Houston. “The security people said, ‘Take your laptop out,” and I did that. But they don’t really say, ‘Take your bat detector out,’ and I forgot about it.When the scanner went off, she had to explain her research to a suspicious and stand-offish TSA official, who wasn’t clear how anyone could manage to record bat calls, let alone why anyone would want to do that. So Rabaiotti showed him some sonograms, pulled out her laptop, and played him some calls—all while other passengers were going about their more mundane checks. “By the end of it, he said: Oh, I never knew bats were so interesting,” she says. Many of the stories I heard had similar endings. The TSA once stopped Michael Polito, an Antarctic researcher from Louisiana State University, because his bag contained 50 vials of white powder. When he explained that the powder was freeze-dried Antarctic fur seal milk, he got a mixed reaction. “Some officers just wanted to just wave me on,” he says. “Others wanted me to stay and answer their questions, like:How do you milk a fur seal? I was almost late for my flight.” Airport security lines, it turns out, are a fantastic venue for scientists to try their hand at outreach. Various scientists are said to have claimed that you don’t really understand something if you can’t explain it to your grandmother, a barmaid, a six-year-old, and other such sexist or ageist variants. But how about this: can you successfully explain it to an TSA official—someone who not only might have no background in science, but also strongly suspects that you might be a national security threat? Can you justify your research in the face of questions like “What are you doing?” or “Why are you doing it?” or “Why are you taking that onto a plane?” Cohn did pretty well to the four assembled TSA agents who started quizzing him about his mouse penis. They noticed that the translucent object had a white tube inside it, and asked if it was a bone. It was indeed—the baculum. “I explained to them that most other mammals have a bone in the penis and humans have lost them,” says Cohn. “I do outreach at the drop of a hat, and I’m ready to teach a bit of evolution to the TSA if they’re interested. And they were freaking out.” Eventually, Cohn asked if he was free to go. You are, said the agent who first looked inside his bag. And then: “I gotta go on break, my mind is blown.”

[sorayahigashikata]

Chapter 90: "LIKE A COCKROACH."

[ntrending]

Everything you need to know about uranium

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/everything-you-need-to-know-about-uranium/

Everything you need to know about uranium

Yellowcake uranium. (Nuclear Regulatory Commission via Flickr/)

Since the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth identified uranium in 1789, atomic number 92 has become one of the most troubling substances on the planet. It’s naturally radioactive, but its isotope uranium-235 also happens to be fissile, as Nazi nuclear chemists learned in 1938, when they did the impossible and split a uranium nucleus in two. American physicists at U.C. Berkeley were soon to discover they could force uranium-238 to decay into plutonium-239; the substance has since been used in weapons and power plants around the world. Today, the element continues to stoke international tensions as Iran stockpiles uranium in defiance of an earlier treaty, and North Korea’s “Rocket Man” leader Kim Jong-un continues to resist denuclearization.

But what is uranium, exactly? And what do you need to know about it beyond the red-hot headlines? Here we answer your most pressing nuclear questions:

Where does uranium come from?

Uranium is a common metal. “It can be found in minute quantities in most rocks, soils, and waters,” geologist Dana Ulmer-Scholle writes in an explainer from the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. But finding richer deposits—the ones with concentrated uranium actually worth mining—is more difficult.

When engineers find a promising seam, they mine the uranium ore. “It’s not people with pickaxes anymore,” says Jerry Peterson, a physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. These days, it comes from leaching, which Peterson describes as pouring “basically PepsiCola—slightly acidic” down into the ground and pumping the liquid up from an adjacent hole. As the fluid percolate through the deposit, it separates out the uranium for harvesting.

Uranium ore. (Deposit Photos/)

What are the different types of uranium?

Uranium has several important isotopes—different flavors of the same substance that vary only in their neutron count (also called atomic mass). The most common is uranium-238, which accounts for 99 percent of the element’s presence on Earth. The least common isotope is uranium-234, which forms as uranium-238 decays. Neither of these products are fissile, meaning their atoms don’t easily split, so they can’t sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

That’s what makes the isotope uranium-235 so special—it’s fissile, so with a bit of finessing, it can support a nuclear chain reaction, making it ideal for nuclear power plants and weapons manufacturing. But more on that later.

There’s also uranium-233. It’s another fissile product, but its origins are totally different. It’s a product of thorium, a metallic chemical much more abundant than uranium. If nuclear physicists expose thorium-232 to neutrons, the thorium is liable to absorb a neutron, causing the material to decay into uranium-233.

Just as you can turn thorium into uranium, you can turn uranium into plutonium. Even the process is similar: Expose abundant uranium-238 to neutrons, and it will absorb one, eventually causing it to decay to plutonium-239, another fissile substance that’s been used to create nuclear energy and weapons. Whereas uranium is abundant in nature, plutonium is really only seen in the lab, though it can occur naturally alongside uranium.

How do you go from a rock to a nuclear fuel source?

People don’t exactly lay out step-by-step guides to refining nuclear materials. But Peterson got pretty close. After you’ve extracted uranium from the earth, he says chemical engineers separate the uranium-rich liquid from other minerals in the sample. When the resulting uranium oxide dries, it’s the color of semolina flour, hence the nickname “yellowcake” for this intermediate product.

From there, a plant can purchase a pound of yellowcake for $20 or $30. They mix the powder with hydrofluoric acid. The resulting gas is spun in a centrifuge to separate from uranium-238 and uranium-235. This process is called “enrichment.” Instead of the natural concentration of 0.7 percent, nuclear power plants want a product that’s enriched to between 3 and 5 percent uranium-235. For a weapon, you need much more: These days, upwards of 90 percent is the goal.

Once that uranium is enriched, power plant operators pair it with a moderator, like water, that slows down the neutrons in the uranium. This increases the probability of a consistent chain reaction. When your reaction is finally underway, each individual neutron will transform into 2.4 neutrons, and so on, creating energy all the while.

Uranium glass dinnerware. (Deposit Photos/)

Any fun facts I should take with me to my next dinner party?

Try this: In PopSci‘s “Danger” issue earlier this year, David Meier, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab, talked about his work to create a database of plutonium sources. Turns out, every plutonium product has a visible origin story, because “there’s not one way of processing it,” Meier says. The United States had two plutonium production sites. While the intermediate product from Hanford, Washington (the Manhattan Project site from which PNNL grew) was brown and yellow, the Savannah River site in Akon, South Carolina, produced “a nice blue material,” Meier says. Law enforcement officials hope these subtle differences—which may also correspond to changes in the chemical signature, particle size, or shape of the material—will one day help them track down illicit nuclear development.

Or, dazzle your guests with a short history of radioactive dinnerware. The manufacture of uranium glass, also called canary glass or Vaseline glass began in the 1830s. Before William Henry Perkin created the first synthetic color in 1856, dyes were terribly expensive and even then they didn’t last. Uranium became a popular way to give plates, vases, and glasses a deep yellow or minty green tinge. But put these household objects under a UV light and they all fluoresce a shocking neon chartreuse. Fortunately for the avid collectors who actively trade in uranium glass, most of these objects aren’t so radioactive as to pose a risk to human health.

Last one: In 2002, the medical journal The Lancet published an article on the concerning potential for depleted uranium—the waste leftover after uranium-235 extraction—to end up on the battlefield. The concern is that its high density would make it an incredible projectile, capable of piercing even the most well-enforced battle tank. Worse yet, it could then contaminate the surrounding landscape and anyone it.

Written By Eleanor Cummins

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Bristow’s masterstroke gives Barrick control of Newmont’s Nevada assets — but now he must deliver

One day after announcing a deal to effectively create the world’s third largest gold company, Mark Bristow, chief executive of Barrick Gold Corp., stayed in Elko, Nevada — a dry, rugged city situated near the Carlin Trend, one of the world’s richest gold mining districts — to assemble the team responsible for executing his promises.

For decades, Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. and its archrival Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corp., the two biggest gold mining companies in the world, have fuelled a large part of their growth through discoveries along the Carlin Trend, and tried numerous times to reach an accord to work together there.

Now, Bristow, 12 weeks into his tenure at the helm of Barrick, is holding up a joint venture agreement with Newmont to share assets in Nevada, which he claims will save both companies US$500 million per year, and billions of dollars over the long run. What’s more the deal was ramrodded through in a matter of days while Bristow proposed a $17.8 billion hostile offer to takeover all of Newmont.

In the end, Bristow agreed to drop his hostile bid in exchange for a 61.5 per cent cut of the revenues from the joint venture and control of the Nevada mines and infrastructure. The joint venture will produce 4.1 million ounces of gold this year, making the Nevada complex the third largest gold producer in the world.

Both Bristow and Newmont chief executive Gary Goldberg are celebrating the deal, but some analysts and investors question whether the cost savings will accrue equally to both sides, and whether the size of the estimate is accurate.

“Despite people going into a stir about whether I can do these things, I’ve shown them that I can,” Bristow told the Financial Post in an interview from Elko.

Gary Goldberg, chief executive officer of Newmont Mining Corp.

Still, many in the industry are questioning what will happen after a two-year standstill agreement between the two companies that prevents hostile bids expires, and the rivalry resumes. By then, Newmont’s Goldberg will be gone, having announced his retirement later this year.

For now, the two companies’ consolidation in Nevada opens a new chapter in the history of the Carlin Trend, where Newmont derived about 1.7 million ounces of gold and 32 million pounds of copper in 2018, and where Barrick derived 2.3 million ounces of gold in 2018.

The gold belt runs several dozen miles long and several miles across in northeastern Nevada, and occupies a central role in Newmont’s history, which poured its first gold bar there in 1964.

According to a Newmont spokesman, it’s where the company discovered new ways to dig up and separate out “microscopic gold.” Today, geologists use the term “Carlin-type mineralization” to indicate ore where gold is present yet nearly invisible.

By contrast, Barrick only arrived in the area in 1986, but derived 52 per cent of its gold from the area in 2018, and is in the process of defining new deposits that will extend its production there.

Goldberg told the Financial Post he’s been wondering why the two companies don’t share resources in Nevada since he visited the area in the 1990s while still working as an energy executive at a different company.

“From that time, I always marvelled at why were these things being run separately rather than finding a way to work together,” he said. “When I joined Newmont in 2011 that was something I had at the forefront.”

Over the years, the two companies contemplated sharing assets and even merging, most recently in April 2014. That last round of talks fell apart acrimoniously and former Barrick chairman Peter Munk, who passed away last year, said at that time it was “difficult to make a deal” with Newmont because it had a different culture, and was “not shareholder friendly.”

In the intervening years, the companies did strike agreements: They’re co-owners of a mine, and Newmont processes some of Barrick’s ore at its mill. Still, because their shareholder base overlaps significantly, there’s long been pressure to find greater synergies.

This fall, Goldberg said he sensed an opportunity to re-initiate discussions when Bristow moved into Barrick’s long empty CEO suite after his former company, Randgold Resources Ltd. was acquired for US$6 billion. The pair had only met a couple times, Goldberg said.

“It looked like an opportunity for us to sit down, so I was hopeful that we could,” Goldberg said. “We had favourable email exchanges right up until the end of January.”

That month, Newmont had announced it would pay a 17 per cent premium for Goldcorp, which was trading at its lowest point in more than a decade, in a US$10 billion deal.

Goldberg said Goldcorp had essentially been working on “a volume strategy” of increasing its gold production. Newmont can increase the value of the company’s assets by changing the way the mines are managed, and focusing on free cash flows, he said.

But the market reacted negatively to his idea, and Newmont’s share price plummeted 11 per cent on the day the deal was announced.

Bristow said the poor reaction created an opportunity and he pounced.

A gold mine in Nevada.

“Barrick has been trying to get this Nevada deal done for 20-plus years,” he said. “We engaged repeatedly and Newmont decided to put itself in play and we engaged in the public forum.”

In February, Barrick made a hostile offer that called for Newmont to end its pursuit of Goldcorp and for its shareholders to accept an eight per cent discounted buyout.

A principal rationale for the deal, Bristow said, would be $4.7 billion in synergies in Nevada over the next 20 years.

Many analysts have speculated that Bristow never believed the bid would succeed.

“Maybe Mark never intended the merger, maybe the no-premium offer was a way to get the Newmont guys to wet their pants and do the Nevada JV,” said John Tumazos, an analyst and investor with Very Independent Research.

Earlier this month, as thousands of mining executives gathered in Toronto for one of the largest conferences of the year, and on the night that Barrick hosted a cocktail event at a club downtown, Bristow flew to New York to meet Goldberg for dinner.

“Effectively Newmont has lower grade ore (in Nevada) and very significant infrastructure,” said Bristow. “But the ounces are similar and Barrick has high grade ore bodies and lots of growth, but it would have to put that infrastructure in, and there immediately is the synergy.”

On Monday, they announced the terms of a joint venture: Barrick would drop its hostile bid and both parties agreed to a two-year standstill that prevents hostile bids. And they will create a joint venture to share assets, with a projected cost savings of US$500 million per year or US$5 billion over the next 20 years.

But all the details of those cost savings haven’t been spelled out. Some savings, such as liquidating excess parts for trucks would be a one-time event, while other synergies, such as consolidating the teams that work on trucks, would create savings every year.

All synergies would not necessarily accrue equally: Barrick likely would have needed to build a roaster to process its ore and Tumazos estimated that would have cost US$700 million. Instead, it can use Newmont’s existing roaster.

“That’s a one-time saving that accrues to Barrick not Newmont,” said Tumazos, who added that the greatest benefits will likely occur in the first few years.

He said Newmont’s water rights and its political clout in the state of Nevada are difficult to value, so total synergies are tough to calculate.

Newmont, however, immediately moved the focus back to its proposed acquisition of Goldcorp and issued a proxy to shareholders to vote on that deal on the same day that it announced the JV with Barrick.

The Barrick joint venture could complicate its Goldcorp acquisition since it theoretically increases Newmont’s net asset value by making its operations more efficient. Goldcorp shareholders are now in line to receive 35 per cent of Newmont, but that’s based on its value before the JV deal was completed.

“It’s possible (Newmont) shareholders would want to re-negotiate merger terms with (Goldcorp),” Scotiabank analyst Tanya Janusconek wrote in a note earlier this week.

If the deal with Goldcorp goes through, Newmont will find itself in new partnerships with Barrick including a gold mine in the Dominican Republic and a gold and copper project under development in Chile.

That close relationship has stoked speculation that the companies will continue to contemplate further consolidation. Macquarie Capital Markets Ltd. analysts wrote that the JV was “a possible half-step on the way to an eventual bigger deal,” and there could be a friendly deal during the standstill because of the possible synergies.

Meanwhile, Tumazos, who opposes a merger, said the two companies may have to spend the next few years selling off assets from their recent mergers, depending on the gold price, which would delay any future deal.

By the end of the year, however, Goldberg will have departed. The Newmont CEO insists there was nothing unusual about the timing of his retirement, announced simultaneously with the largest gold acquisition of his career.

Goldberg also said he had been pushing for a joint venture all along, and the final deal made sense — the stakes in the joint venture were based on analysts’ consensus of each companies’ net asset values. He said that he plans to visit the Dominican Republic with Bristow this summer to review the mine there, but his main focus at the moment is the acquisition of Goldcorp.

“Once the (JV) transaction finally closes, we can get on with Barrick working to develop the synergy values they’ve promised into the market, and us supporting it,” he said, “but us really getting on with our Goldcorp transaction.”

• Email: gfriedman@nationalpost.com | Twitter: GabeFriedz

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Best Dick Jokes Through History – Why Sexual Comedy About Men Is Important – Esquire.com

Blake Griffin landed a dick joke about Caitlyn Jenner at the Comedy Central Roast of Alex Baldwin, which aired last weekend. “Caitlyn completed her gender reassignment in 2017, finally confirming that no one in that family wants a white dick,” he said to roars of laughter. Was the joke offensive? Racist? Hilarious? All of the above? For her part, Jenner took the dick joke in stride. “Caitlyn was down for it,” one of the writers of the roast said. “She was like, ‘Well, you know, I’m gonna hit hard. I want them to hit me hard.’ And so we did.”

Dick jokes have existed throughout history in nearly every culture known to man, from the greatest literature of all time—Shakespeare and James Joyce—to ancient graffiti. “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!” some anonymous guy scrawled on the wall of a bar in the Roman city of Pompeii around 2,000 years ago. They have been staples of comedy for millennia for a reason: They’re nearly universally appealing.

“Whether you’re rich or poor or black or white, everyone laughs at a dick joke,” says comedian Aaron Berg, who hosts a recurring show at The Stand in New York City. (Berg also hosted a somewhat controversial, entirely satirical show called White Guys Matter that addressed some aspects of white male inadequacy.)

One comedian has elevated dick jokes to poetry, launching them into the realm of high art: Jacqueline Novak, whose one-woman off-Broadway show about blow jobs, Get on Your Knees, manages to make the dick joke both hilarious and high brow. She’s not the first woman to tell a dick joke, nor will she be the last, but she is perhaps the only one to devote a show almost entirely to the penis (with a few minutes sidetracking to ghosts) and be feted by The New York Times for doing so.

Novak, who has been called a “deeply philosophical urologist,” may represent a tipping point in dick jokes, because her show is finally allowing people to see the wisdom (yes, wisdom) in penis humor.

“I don’t even think of myself as like, interested in telling penis jokes. I certainly wouldn’t sit down and go, I’d love to do a show about penises,” Novak says. “I think it’s more like an investigation of my heterosexuality. Does [being heterosexual] mean I love the penis? I’m interested in the language that I’ve been expected to use or accept as legitimate about the penis. Here’s all the reasons that that’s ridiculous.”

Novak’s show is replete with riffs on our “ridiculous” penis language, from the fact that we say the penis is “rock hard”—”No geologist would ever say, this quartz is penis hard“—to the idea that the penis penetrates a woman—”You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up! Spit you out, and you loved every goddamn second of it.” In some ways, Novak is the perfect teller of the 21st century dick joke, not only because she is chronicling our hangups about the penis, but also because without a penis of her own, perhaps she is able to see the dick more clearly for what it is, in all its ridiculousness and beauty.

“You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up!”

But for the most part, phallic culture remains incoherent. Men are pilloried for exposing their dicks, while Euphoria is celebrated for its 30-penis episode; dick pics are critiqued like Picassos or seen as a public menace; judging a man by the size of his penis is perfectly acceptable or grossly objectifying; porn covers every inch of the internet, yet Facebook won’t accept ads for dildos. Dick jokes are still looked down on as cheap—to be fair, some of them are blatantly bad—but some comics say that isn’t always fair.

“Dick jokes, if you craft something amazing out of them, could be the funniest thing someone’s ever heard. And funny in a way that like, opens your mind up even,” says comedian Sean Patton. “That’s the most important kind of comedy, where you laugh at something to the point where you’re now a little more accepting of it. And that can range from anything to other people’s sexual orientation to accepting your own mental illness.” Patton’s own extended dick joke, “Cumin” on Comedy Central’s This Is Not Happening, has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube.

Jacqueline Novak performs at the 2019 Clusterfest in June.

Jeff KravitzGetty Images

Novak uses the blow job to critique cultural expectations of masculinity and the pressure women feel to become skilled at sexually pleasing men. “The teeth shaming starts early, of course,” she says in her show. “If you have your full set of teeth…don’t go into a room where a penis is. It’s not safe for him. Why would you put him at risk?”

Patton likens the dick joke to a “Trojan horse” of comedy. “You make them laugh hard at dick jokes, now they’re listening,” he says. “Then you can throw in something a little more meaningful, and they’re on board.”

Not that all dick jokes need to be intellectual to be taken seriously. The song “D*** in a Box” by The Lonely Island, featuring Justin Timberlake, won an Emmy. It turns out the concept wasn’t exactly new. “Decades before The Lonely Island, B.S. Pully was doing that in the ’40s and ’50s,” comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff says. “Pully would be holding a cigar box at his groin, walking down the aisle. [He would] start a show saying, ‘Cigar, would you like a cigar?’ Then he would lift up the lid, and there was a hole cut in there, and his dick was hanging out. The audience would go crazy.”

Dick jokes continue to thrive off audience reactions, according to several comedians I talked to. Bonnie McFarlane, who is best known for her appearance on Last Comic Standing and her Netflix documentary Women Aren’t Funny, began telling dick jokes when she started out in 1995. “You tell dick jokes because it’s a very male audience, so that’s what they want to hear about,” she says. “It’s been a thing since comedy started. People can really kill if they’re just doing dick jokes.” But there is a double standard, she says, when female comics are made fun of “for talking about their vaginas too much.”

That Novak, a female comic, is revolutionizing the dick joke makes sense, considering that historically, “the vanguard for so-called dick jokes and sexual material comes first and foremost from women rather than men,” Nesteroff says. He points to female comics Rusty Warren, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and LaWanda Page as “probably the four quote-unquote ‘dirtiest’ comedians of the ’50s and ’60s, more so than Lenny Bruce, more so than Redd Foxx.”

LaWanda Page performs for The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast in 1978.

NBCGetty Images

He also says African Americans pushed dick jokes further than any other ethnicity. African-American comedian Page’s albums from the 1970s were rich with dick jokes, referencing “the size of the man, the endurance of the man,” Nesteroff says. As Page recites in her 1973 comedy album Pipe Layin’ Dan: “Husband, dear husband, now don’t be a fool/you’ve worked on the night shift ’til you’ve ruined your tool/you’d better go hungry the rest of your life/than to bring home a pecker so soft to your wife.”

“LaWanda [told] dick jokes for the same reasons a lot of black comics do, because they had to come up in the chitlin circuit, which is basically comedy clubs or bars or places where only black audiences mainly go,” says comedian Harris Stanton, who has toured with Tracy Morgan. “When I started comedy [in 1999] I started in the chitlin circuit,” he continues. “Urban comedy became this big explosion in the United States. A lot of the young black comics couldn’t get into a lot of mainstream clubs, so they would have to perform wherever they could, and dick jokes were welcome to those places.”

African Americans were pioneers of the dick joke, but they definitely weren’t the only ethnic group telling them. Three of the other female sex-joke pioneers Nesteroff mentioned were Jewish. Pearl Williams was known for roasting overweight men when they entered the comedy club by asking, “How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?” Lenny Bruce, one of the most famous Jewish comedians, was arrested for saying schmuck on stage in 1962. Seven years later, another famous American Jew, Philip Roth, published Portnoy’s Complaint, which is essentially a 274-page dick joke, or so some claim.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?”

“I probably owe a debt to Philip Roth that I’m not even fully aware of,” says Novak, who is Jewish. She references him directly in her show, joking, “I went off to college feeling good. It’s a Catholic-ish college. Lots of virgin boys scurrying around, scrambling for sexual experience at parties. Not me. I’m a Jew and I did the coursework in high school, so I felt like a Philip Roth figure. A Jewish pervert ready to teach.”

Jewish male comics may be drawn to dick jokes, according to Berg, who is Jewish, because, “the fact that our penises were intruded upon at a very young age probably gives us a fixation on it and makes us want to talk about it more.”

Dr. Jeremy Dauber, the Atran professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University and author of Jewish Comedy, traces Jewish dick jokes all the way back to the Bible. The earliest case of laughter in Jewish tradition is Sarah’s laughter when she’s told that her 100-year-old husband Abraham will give her a child. It is “a laughter about male impotence,” Dauber says.

But comedians aren’t just laughing at penises anymore. Novak is going in the opposite direction. “I’m trying to restore [the penis] to true dignity.” Will her intellectual blow job jokes allow the dick joke to be taken more seriously? Will future comedians have to deal with the flack that Patton still gets in his reviews?

“Even like positive reviews, sometimes they’ll still point out there’s also a lot of cock, cock cock,” he says. “Why do you have to make sure everyone knows that you thought some of the subject matter was lowbrow?” He thinks reviewers roll their eyes at his dick talk because “everyone constantly is terrified that those around them don’t think that they’re that smart.”

Comedy is one of the only art forms that allows us to talk about male genitalia so openly and democratically. Whatever form the dick joke takes, from idiotic to intellectual, from poetry to prop comedy, as long as it gets a laugh, it should be celebrated. And there’s no better way to diffuse the angst surrounding the modern-day penis than a well-crafted dick joke. The more we laugh about penises (and not just at them), the happier the world might be.

Hallie Lieberman Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist, and the author of “Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.”  

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If It Doesn’t Suck, It’s Not Worth Doing

YOUR SUCCESS MANTRA FOR 2018.

According to psychological research, the anticipation of an event is almost always more emotionally powerful than the event itself.

The dread of asking your boss for a raise is paralyzing and can last months. Yet, once you get yourself to finally do it, it’s over before you know it.

The excitement of attaining some object or objective can become obsessive. Yet, shortly after you obtain your desire, you’re bored and in search of something else.

“We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them,” says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, Cornell psychologist.

Interestingly, your mind can seduce you so much so that the idea of something becomes more satisfying than the thing itself, so you stop at the idea and never make it real. Ryan Holiday points this alarming fact out in his book, Ego is the Enemy, where he argues that a primary obstacle to success is the idea of success.

It’s so easy to dream.

It’s easy to tell people about your ambitions. It’s easy to create vision boards and write down your goals. It’s easy to stand in front of a mirror and declare affirmations.

And that’s where most people stop.

The very act of dreaming stops you from achieving your dreams.

You’ve played-it out in your mind with such intoxicating detail that you become satisfied enough. You become numbed. And you deceive yourself into believing you’ve actually done something productive.

Consequently, when you attempt the activity itself, you immediately hit a stone wall of resistance. More often than not, you quickly distract yourself from the discomfort with some form of momentary pleasure. Yet, Robert Greene explains in his book, Mastery, that you can learn to love this internal resistance. In his words, “You find a kind of perverse pleasure in moving past the pain this might bring.”

How To Get Out Of Your Rut

In his book, Living with a SEAL, Jesse Itzler tells the story of being inspired by a certain Navy SEAL and consequently inviting him to live at Itzler’s home for a month. Itzler admitted being in a personal rut and wanted to shake himself out of his routine.

Day 1: “SEAL” asked Itzler, “How many pull-ups can you do?” Itzler squeaked out eight shaky pull-ups.

“Take 30 seconds and do it again,” SEAL said. 30 seconds later, Itzler got on the bar and did six, struggling.

“Take 30 seconds and do it one more time,” SEAL said. 30 seconds later, Itzler got on the bar and did three, at which point his arms were exhausted.

“Alright, we’re not leaving here until you do 100 more,” SEAL stated. Itzler was puzzled. “Alright, we’re gonna be here a long-time. Cause there’s no way I could do 100.” However, Itzler ended-up completing the challenge, doing one pull-up at a time. Thus, SEAL convinced Itzler that he could do way more than he thought he could.

The principle SEAL taught is what he calls the 40% rule — which essentially means people feel maxed-out mentally and physically, and thus stop, when they are at only 40% of their actual capacity. Going past this 40% capacity is when it becomes uncomfortable. Thus, SEAL’s mantra, “If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.”

The Power Of Objective-Based Pursuits

“The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents — will you learn how to focus and move past boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?” — Robert Greene

Like Itzler who shattered a mental barrier by completing 100 pull-ups, you too can get out of your rut by pursuing tangible objectives.

The concept is: Do something and don’t stop until it’s complete, no matter how long it takes.

Your goal is to learn how to accomplish hard things without continuously distracting yourself. You want to develop what Greene calls “A perverse pleasure” in experiencing internal conflict, and sitting with it.

This concept is embedded in Crossfit. Unlike most people, who check their smartphones between exercise “sets,” at Crossfit, you have a specific objective and you kill yourself until it’s done.

If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.

You can apply this principle to anything and everything. You can do a homework assignment and just do it until it’s complete. You can write an article and stick-to-it until it’s published. You can do 100 pull-ups, or run 5 miles, and go until you’re done. Who cares how long it takes?

The Greatest Opportunity In History

In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport states the following:

“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”

Without question, we live in the most distracted time in human history. It is almost impossible to remain focused on a single-task for more than a few minutes at a time.

The law of opposites is in affect. With every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. While most of the world is becoming increasingly distracted, a select few are capitalizing on this fact. There is also a widening chasm between the spiritual and secular — where the two used to be synonymous.

Hence, Economist Tyler Cowan has said, “Average is over.” The middle-class is gone. Either you’re among the select few who are thriving, or you’re like most people who are distracted, overweight, and struggling.

The choice is yours.

When something sucks, do you quit? Or do you push-through and eventually enjoy the satisfaction of growth and success?

Anything worth doing is going to suck at the beginning. Anything worth doing is meant to require pain and sacrifice. Herein lies the problem facing America, which originally was built on the moral of impulse control. What once used to be a country filled with people sacrificing momentary pleasure for a better future, the overpowering message of today is live for the moment.

And that’s exactly what people do. They live for this moment. Consequently, when something sucks, or becomes hard, most people quit. Most people indulge themselves in momentary satisfaction at the expense of a better future.

To make matters worse, the twin “truth” of today’s culture is love yourself for who you are. The self-esteem movement of the late 20th century is an enormous contributor to America’s faltering success.

People are taught to love themselves regardless of their performance. Thus, they justify mediocrity. Yet, Asian’s and other immigrant groups who often are considered to have low self-esteem consistently outperform American’s who have high self-esteem.

Unlike in other parts of the world where hard work is seen as a virtue, the repeated phrase in America is: “Don’t work too hard!” Success these days is to get as much as you can for as little work as possible.

In the book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld explain thatmost successful people not only control their impulses, but also have animplicit sense of inferiority.

These people may have confidence, yet, they remain unsure of themselves. They have a chip on their shoulder due to being oppressed in some way. So they continuously push themselves, regardless of how successful they become, to prove themselves. They are never satisfied with what they’ve done. They continue to feel inferior.

These very traits are awarded in today’s economy because they are so rare. Again, few people control their impulses, but instead live for the moment. And few people, especially in America, have any sense of inferiority. Rather, most people have bought into the myth that you must first love yourself before you can become successful.

Garbage.

True confidence is earned. It’s earned by succeeding. Not by wishing for success. Meta-analytic research confirms this.

True confidence emerges when you consistently push-through things that suck. The longer you sit with the boredom, pain, and discomfort — and actually create something meaningful, the more confident and successful you will be.

Hence, Ryan Holiday explains in an interview with Lewis Howes: you are rewarded for the work you actually accomplish. Not the promises you make.

Doing the work is hard.

Getting into elite physical condition is brutal.

Building deep and committed relationships is nearly impossible. Most marriages end in divorce.

All of these things “suck,” at least initially, and in-the-moment. However, if it doesn’t suck, it’s not worth doing. And you absolutely can learn to endure the discomfort of the moment to build a life worth having.

If you’re stuck in a rut, like Itzler, challenge yourself to complete specific objectives — no matter how long they take.

Pleasure Vs. Happiness

“A life that doesn’t include hard-won accomplishment and triumph over obstacles may not be a satisfying one. There is something deeply fulfilling — even thrilling — in doing almost anything difficult extremely well. There is a joy and pride that come from pushing yourself to another level or across a new frontier. A life devoted only to the present — to feeling good in the now — is unlikely to deliver real fulfillment. The present moment by itself it too small, too hollow. We all need a future. Something beyond and greater than our own present gratification, at which to aim or feel we’ve contributed.” — The Triple Package

True happiness — joy — is fundamentally different than momentary pleasure. Not to say momentary pleasure is inherently bad. However, it often gets in the way of something more real and lasting.

Anything worth doing brings a satisfaction that distraction never can. Don’t give into the resistance. Push through the difficulty. That’s where a joy that those who stop will never taste.

Said Geologist James Talmage:

“Happiness leaves no bad after-taste, it is followed by no depressing reaction; it brings no regret, entails no remorse. True happiness is lived over and over again in memory, always with a renewal of the original good; a moment of pleasure may leave a barbed sting, [as] an ever-present source of anguish.”