#i would say john but david looks more like joseph tbh

[cosmicyeehaw]

Asdhdjfk... ok Matthew Brue is what I imagine a young bby Jacob Seed would have looked like ❤

[obscureobsidianreblogs]

X-Men Characters Ranking (I) The Worst

These characters aren’t what I would call the worst in the sense that I hate them and I don’t want to see them ever again, because I don’t dislike them as much as I hate how writers have treated them, many of them being basically anything other than plot devices and never having a chance to become better characters. I don’t think there’s no hope for them, only that I haven’t seen them getting chances to prove me there is.

Thunderbird/John Proudstar

This character is a joke in the worst sense of the word, basically being known as “Guy who died and unlike the rest didn’t come back���. It has reached a point Joanthan Hickman needed to create an explanation in-universe to why the hell this is the case!!! The fact all of this happens to the first native american member of the team is unfortunate. Thank God John’s own brother James, Forge and especially Danielle Moonstar came soon after to fix that.

Slipstream/Davis Cameron

I don’t want to sound mean, I really don’t want to, but I really, really, really don’t care about this character. How’s possible for a legend like Chris Claremont, who created so many memorable characters, create one so devoid of any interesting quality? If you want a X-Men male character who’s a surfer, just go with Havok in X-Men Evolution. Her sister Heather is a slightly better case, mostly thanks to the revelation that she’s actually part of Shi’ar royalty and we see her dealing with her body changing while she discovers her inheritance.

Joseph

Initially introduced as a possibly rejuvenated Magneto who decided to undo Magneto’s wrongdoings, what could have been the perfect opportunity to develop the character of Magneto was quickly wasted when writers at the time thought It would be more interesting to make him the third party in a love triangle involving Rogue and Remy. The revelation he was actually just Magneto’s clon and his death proved how much they regretted creating him.

Feral/Maria Callasantos

Maria’s backstory on paper could be a perfect way to create a compelling character: abused since her childhood, and killed her stepfather to protect her sister. Unfortunately Feral was created by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld, who were more interested in action and fights than in writing compelling characters, and in Maria’s case it really shows. Her perpetual hostility towards her teammates quickly made her unlikeable, and soon after she was written out of the team. But while characters like Shatterstar have become fan favorites thanks to the works of writers like Peter David Feral has remained a character no writer has bothered to do anything with her, except depower her after the House of M event to later made Sabretooth kill her.

Maggott/Japheth

None of the characters that joined the X-Men after the events in Operation Zero Tolerance became universal fan-favorites, but while Marrow and Cecilia Reyes have managed to still pop-up here and there occasionally, Maggott quickly became the fandom’s punching bag, being an usual entry in the “worst mutants/powers” lists and soon after his debut became killed. In a concentration camp, just so his death could be anymore fucked-up. Yikes.

Omega Sentinel/Karima Shapandar

The idea of a biosentinel who still retains her humanity and which she uses to fight against her programming to team-up with mutants and become their friend instead of hunting them down is pretty compelling. Despite that Karima has become a punchline for her tendency to be a character who tends to get possessed or brainwashed too much in a franchise and a genre where character being possessed or brainwashed has become commonplace. It seemed like that cycle was finally going to finish after Brian Wood decided to published an all female team on his X-Men run and decided to make Karima turned back into a human but stay with her mutant friends, but all of that got thrown away when Jonathan Hickman took over, make her a biosentinel again and because he really wants to push the narrative of us vs them he made her team-up with the evil human organization who wants to wipe out mutants, because he says so. Thanks Johnny.

Lifeguard/Heather Cameron

Like I already said above Heather is a slightly more interesting character than her brother Davis, especially after the reveal of her Shi’ar ancestry and her transformation to a much more alien appearance. Although I must admit I initially dislike the character for completely petty reasons. More specifically, the fact she was introduced and paired up with Neal Shaara when Psylocke’s death was still recent, because Neal was sentimentally involved with her at the time. Shipping tends to do those things.

Stacy X/Miranda Leevald

The accusation of female characters being created just to eye-candy is one that I think gets thrown around in excess lately, but in the case of Stacy X it’s pretty much the perfect textbook example. She’s introduced as a prostitute, wears revealing clothing, her powers cause orgasms, flirts with a lot of her male teammates, and let’s not forget that infamous time Chuck Austen thought it would be a good idea to write her saying she was going to watch porn after getting in an argument. Classy. The worst part is that her example was so obvious that she never became really popular among fans, and the writers quickly got rid of her in the most unceremonious way possible, depowering her in the aftermath of House of M, without bothering to even give her the opportunity to be a better character. However, I think there’s still hope for her. In the recent Domino Annual Gail Simone gave her a heartbreaking moment in which Miranda had the opportunity to express how she dealt with her power’s loss and how it affected her.

Sunfire/Shiro Yoshida

I really want to like Shiro, I really do, the issue where he was introduced is still one of my favorites from the Neal Adams and Roy Thomas run. But it’s so obvious writers don’t know what else to do with him except remind people that he doesn’t like teamwork over and over again, feeling like an excuse to include him as little as possible. Also this is a much more shallow reason to dislike him, but I really think he needs an urgent redesign to get rid of that horrible mask.

Thunderbird/Neal Shaara

His backstory, about discovering a new secret biosentinel program that took advantage of India’s most disadvantaged population while looking for his missing brother, is actually one of my favorites on any X-Men character, being emotionally compelling with some social critic sprinkled over it. Unfortunately once he joined the team the most he did was get romantically involved with female teammates, first with Psylocke, a reason I’m sure a lot of fans at the time hated him because she was with Archangel, although tbh it never bothered me that much, and then with Lifeguard. The fact that after Karima Shapandar, the character that got turned into a biosentinel while helping him look for his brother, joined the X-Men no one single writer bothered to make him meet her again despite it was confirmed he retained his powers after House of M shows how little interest writers were in him. Ouch.

Revanche/Kwannon

Although it seems like now with Fallen Angels and Hellions they are trying to make her a much more interesting character, there’s still the fact the character was created an introduced just to have a revealing twist about Psylocke’s body swap, and after the writers realised they didn’t know what to do with her and neither they wanted to fix that, they took the easy way and got rid of her making her contract the Legacy Virus so she could die and they could keep Psylocke being a sexy purple-haired ninja.

Vulcan/Gabriel Summers

I don’t think X-Men: Deadly Genesis is the unholy abomination many fans think it is, but even I admit they make Gabriel a character really hard to like. To begin with he’s supposed to be the third Summers brother, a mystery in the franchise that was introduced back in the 90s but that never got a satisfactory resolution, only a bunch of clues that lead nowhere and red herrings, in the main timeline at least, Claremont wrote in X-Men: The End the twist the third Summers brother was Remy all along. Anyways, so Gabriel is not only supposed to be the answer to a question fans didn’t care anymore at the time, but he was also part of a retcon, one related to a part as iconic to the X-Men cannon as it is the Giant Size X-Men published in 1975 and whose main point in the story was to show a dark secret Xavier hided to the rest of the X-Men (Still handled better than the bs Bendis wrote during the Original Sin event). But Gabriel, instead of first acting as confused as the rest of the X-Men team after they discover his existence, to later discover the truth of what happened, with him too enraged to listen to reasons and start to attack everyone wether what happened to him was their fault or not, Remender wrote Gabriel as a douchebag from the beginning, kidnapping Scott and Rachel and just being plain awful, especially to the one who was actually his niece. And then there’s the whole becoming the new Shi’ar emperor storyline that I couldn’t care less… Let’s see what Hickman does with him, although my hopes are not exactly high.

[baxterholmes]

Round-up of fine sentences, part 52

In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

-David Grann

All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep. 

-Kathryn Schulz

The first time Mason stood up after his surgery, he hadn't risen for so long—years, in fact—that the cartilage had dissolved in his knees, and his legs buckled. He had forgotten what it was like to just be in that position, how to deal with it, just as he'd forgotten what true companionship was, and how fast cars could go. The perspective overwhelmed him, the feeling of the walls coming in on him frightened him, distorted the sensation of being upright, making him cry out that he needed to sit back down. But he hadn't sat���he'd done his best, knees shaking, to try to stand there for as long as he could.

-Justin Heckert

I guess it’s a possibility. On the other hand, Donald Trump can be Donald Trump, but if he doesn’t help the people that need help, then he’s just a jerk. That press conference that he held berating the news media? I mean, how do you build a dictatorship? First, you undermine the press: “The only truth you’re going to hear is from me.” And he hires the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Steve Bannon, to be his little buddy. Bannon looks like a guy who goes to lunch, gets drunk, and comes back to the office: “Steve, could you have just one drink?” “Fuck you.” How is a white supremacist the chief adviser to our president? Did anybody look that up? I don’t know. How’s this interview going? Do you think you’re talking to a normal person here? Don’t I seem like I’m full of something?

-David Letterman

The screen porch was full of men, young men in checked suits and slouch hats, old men in derbies and frayed cuffs, crowding and jostling, each one beckoning and calling to me above the crowd. Their one distinguishing mark was a pencil in the right hand and a notebook in the left—a notebook open—waiting, virginally yet ominously portentous.

Behind them on the lawn was a larger crowd—butchers and bakers in their aprons, fat women with folded arms, thin women holding up dirty children so that they might better see, shouting boys, barking dogs, horrible little girls who jumped up and down shouting and clapping their hands. Behind these, in a sort of outer ring, stood the old men of the village, toothless, musty-eyed, their mouths open, their gray beards tickling the tops of their canes. Over behind them, the setting sun, blood-red and horrible, played on three hundred twisting shoulders.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed,” Mr. Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live long as God himself. Never.” 

-Elie Wiesel

If nothing ever changes, that does not relieve me of the responsibility to tell the truth as I see it. 

-Ta-Nehisi Coates

We are not really a particularly brutal people, certainly no more brutal now than we've been in other wars, acquiring it as the war goes on. But our machine is devastating. And versatile. It can do almost everything but stop. 

-Michael Herr

And at this point, what kind of person are you if you're not rooting for Bill May? Bill May, who will swim in a pool that still has some kid poop in it so he can get an extra hour of practice. Bill, a man who swam with women training for the Olympics, women who could complain about how tired they were and how sore they were, and Bill would keep his mouth shut thinking how he'd kill to be on the road they were on. Bill, who learned from me that it was Judy McGowan, the president of USA Synchro, who did not request the vote that day in 2001, on the day she promised she would -- she'd been ready to ask for the vote but was stopped by the president of FINA at the time and told that it was not in the best interest of the sport and its place in the Olympics to bring men in just now.

Yes, when Bill heard this from me, his immediate and only reaction was to say what respect he has for Judy, doing the right thing for the sport, fighting the way she always has for synchro, that it must have been a tough decision and that if she had received that vote, if he had been allowed in, well, he might even have been deprived of this moment he was having now, and what a shame that would be. Bill May, who represents the gifts that hard work and good intentions can sometimes bring. And now it's time to ask yourself again: At this point, what kind of person are you if you're not rooting for Bill May? 

- Taffy Brodesser-Akner

He says that when he works out, he’s either thinking of the things that make him angry in the world and using that anger to strengthen himself, or his mind is completely blank—“nothing but hollowness”—as he’s subsumed in the moment. After 20 more minutes of weightlifting, sweat lines his thick brow and drops mark his path across the floor. And as he continues, he sweats even more. This is an unusually chilly morning in San Diego, where he lives, and the cool air seeps in through a window and starts to collide with the heat he’s producing. Before long, some of the moisture on his head and neck turns into an eerie, ghostly vapor.

As he pumps his weights, Jocko is literally steaming.

-Michael Mooney

Propping herself up on her peace-sign-covered pillow, she opens Instagram. Later, Lila will give her a Starbucks gift card. Her dad will bring doughnuts to her class. Her grandparents will take her to the Melting Pot for dinner. But first, her friends will decide whether to post pictures of Katherine for her birthday. Whether they like her enough to put a picture of her on their page. Those pictures, if they come, will get likes and maybe tbhs.

They should be posted in the morning, any minute now. She scrolls past a friend posing in a bikini on the beach. Then a picture posted by Kendall Jenner. A selfie with coffee. A basketball Vine. A selfie with a girl’s tongue out. She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear. 

- Jessica Contrera

I think I did: the only apartment with a better view than the best apartment in the world was the same apartment. Except for the one across the Park, which had the most spectacular living room in the world. No one had ever seen a granite house before. And, most important, every square inch belonged to Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. “Trump”—a fellow with universal recognition but with a suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable inconvenience, a creature everywhere and nowhere, uniquely capable of inhabiting it all at once, all alone.

-Mark Singer

Bonus: 

I’ll give you an example. In the first volume, there’s a chapter called “The First Campaign.” Everyone I talked to about Johnson’s first run for Congress would say, I never saw anyone who worked as hard as Lyndon Johnson. Well, it’s one thing to tell that to the reader, but how do you show it? Who would really know what this means?

I thought, There’s one guy who’s with Lyndon Johnson most of the day, and it’s not his campaign manager, it’s his chauffeur! Because in the Texas Hill Country, a lot of anything is driving—that’s ninety percent of the time. His chauffeur was a guy named Carroll Keach. He lived in some place outside Corpus Christi, and it was hard to get to. It was, like, a 180-mile drive or something. But I kept going back to him.

He wasn’t a loquacious Texan, he was a laconic Texan. I would ask, What was Johnson doing between campaign stops? And he would say something like, Oh, he was just sitting there in the backseat. I just had to keep asking him questions. I mean, you’re driving, Carroll, and Lyndon Johnson is in the backseat? What was he doing in the backseat? Finally, he told me that Johnson often would be talking to himself. So I’d call and say, Carroll, when you said he was talking to himself, what was he saying? Finally, Carroll told me, It was like he was having discussions with himself about whether he had had a successful day, and if he had made a good impression on voters or not. So I’d say, What do you mean by that? How do you know that’s what he was talking about?

“Well, lots of the time, he felt he wasn’t doing too good. And he would tell himself that it was his own fault.”

“What do you mean, he would tell himself it was his own fault?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

So I’d call him later and ask again, and I’d finally get something like, Well, Johnson would say, Boy, wasn’t that dumb! You know you just lost that ballot box. You lost it, and you need it. And he would talk out—rehearse, over and over, out loud, what he would say to the voters in that precinct the next time.

It was Ed Clark, who they called the secret boss of Texas, who was one of the first people to say to me, I had never seen anyone work that hard. And finally, after looking at documents like Johnson’s daily campaign ­agenda—which Johnson would put little handwritten notes on—and doing all these interviews, I was able to write, “ . . . and Clark didn’t know how hard Lyndon Johnson was really working. No one knew, with the exception of Carroll Keach, because only Keach, alone in the car with Johnson for hours each day, knew what Johnson was doing in the car.”

That’s just one example of the kind of work that can go into making a scene.

-Robert Caro