#if st took place in the 2000s au basically

[353dcys]

y2k! mileven 🩷

[greenbagjosh]

21 April 2021 - the unfortunately named train that could, to the CH-IT border like it should

Grüezi Mitenand!  Bonjour!  Buongiorno!  Hi everyone!

Thank you for joining me on the third day of the April 2001 journey.  I had arrived on 20th April in Milano Malpensa and took the historic Postal Bus service called "FlyCar" to Lugano where I had been since.  Today we will go to Bellinzona (cantonal capital of the Ticino, with many castles near downtown), Locarno, and a couple of other places reachable by regional train.

The day started chilly, but unlike north of the St. Gotthard pass, there was little to no snow.  I woke up about 7 AM, used my ensuite shower and went downstairs to the breakfast room.  I was asked my room number and whether I wanted coffee or tea.  I was served at my seat, a couple of breadrolls, a plate of cold cuts and cheese and jams, including a pinky finger sized tube of liver sausage paté.  I ate and then let the hotel know I was going to be in Bellinzona most of the day.  I walked to the bus stop at Via Cattori (where I also took the bus on the 17th September 2000) to the FFS rail station.  I had a Swiss Pass that was valid for eight consecutive days, so I did not need to fill in the days for validation.  I just needed to go to the rail station ticket office, show my passport and rail pass, and let the staff validate the rail pass.  The difference between a Swiss Rail Pass and a Eurail Pass that includes Switzerland, is that the Swiss Rail Pass is valid for 99% of all public transit in Switzerland, the major exception being the section from Brig VS to Chur GR.  Postal bus fares are for the most part included.  

The 9:50 AM train to Bellinzona arrived at Track 3.  That is where most northbound quality trains board from, Track 2 is for the same trains southbound.  For example, just as the express train to Bellinzona arrived, there was a Cisalpino train arriving for Milan via Chiasso at Track 2.  Track 1 is for the local trains.  The train went on what I refer to as the "Pre-Ceneri-Base-Tunnel" route.  It arrived in Bellinzona about 10:25 AM.  Walking along Viale Stazione towards the Municipio di Bellinzona (city hall), the road was closed from Via Claudio Pellandini (goes to Hotel Unione at Viale Portone) to Piazza Nosetto.  As the day was Saturday, Piazza Nosetto was set up as a weekly farmer's market and second hand market.  As I happened to have my Panasonic CD player with me, I tried to find some interesting music, sadly there was nothing interesting enough or anything that I did not already have.  Instead I went to the Manor department store, in the bargain bin I found a CD, namely Cock Robin's greatest hits, including "Just around the corner".  Years later, Belgian singer Kate Ryan would make a French-language cover version of Cock Robin's "Promise", also on the CD.  

I walked around Bellinzona for a while to get to see the castles, for example, Castelgrande, Castello di Montebello and Castello di Sasso Corbaro which can only be seen from a distance.  About 12 PM it was time to go to the second city, so I took the 12:20 PM train to Locarno.  The route is basically flat all the way to Locarno.  While filming the train ride, I took a cable to connect the CD player to my camera, and I could play a CD over the camera microphone sound.  I did something similar on the 28th April with the train's onboard audio.  

When I arrived at Locarno about 12:30 PM, I did not want to immediately explore the city itself, I would do that a little later.  At the Locarno FFS station, there is also an underground station for an unfortunately named local train that serves between Locarno and the Swiss-Italian border.  The two trains that serve the underground station, are FART (Ferrovie Autolinee Regionali Ticinesi) and SSIF (Società Subalpina Imprese Ferroviarie) that goes to Domodossola.  The former makes more stops than the latter.  The train reached Camedo, the last station before the Italian border, at 1:35 PM.  I spent maybe half an hour walking around Camedo before returning to the train for Locarno.  The train took about 45 minutes to arrive at Locarno.  After leaving the rail station, I walked towards Lago Maggiore and Casino di Locarno.  About 3:30 PM I took the train to Giubiasco and caught another train to Lugano.  I took the funicular train from Lugano FFS to the old city.  After a half hour, I decided to take a train to Mendrisio.  I arrived at Mendrisio about 5:30 PM, and took the postal bus to Fox Town, which was still open.

I took a postal bus to Melide but did not go into the miniature museum, instead I waited for a train to Lugano.  While waiting, I looked toward Campione on the other side of Lago di Lugano.  I saw a Cisalpino train pass by, but took a local train to Lugano.  From there I took the funicular to the old town, and to the Manora restaurant close to Piazza Alighieri Dante.  They were still open but were going to close at 9 PM.  I was able to pick my own ingredients for the pizza.  They cooked it in an oven that customers can plainly see.  I was not able to eat it all, so I took the rest of it to the hotel.  I took the bus back and went to bed.  I recorded maybe a couple of hours of Rete Otto and DRS 1.  One song I remember from that recording was "New Train" by the late John Prine (d. 7 April 2020).  

Tomorrow it will be very cold, so be ready for interesting landscapes, along the pre-Gotthard-Base-Tunnel route.  Monday at 6 PM is going to be the big show.

Auf wiederluege!  Au revoir!  Arrivederci!  Goodbye!

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

I’ve never asked this but, how come you don’t enjoy Ultimate Spider-Man? Personally I thought it was Bendis at his best.

It’s a few things.

I do not like how people treat it as interchangeable with616 continuity or pretend what applies to one applies to the other. Like peoplewere pointing to the Kitty Pryde annual as a good example of what you could doif Spider-Man wasn’t married, ignoring how 616 and Ult Peter are not the samebecause they’ve been through different experiences but also diverge in certainpersonality traits too, or at least the emphasis upon them. 616 Peter has moreserious guilt attacks and feels anxiety more acutely than Ultimate Peter, buthis humour is also subtly different.

Frankly Bendis’Spider-Man humour dialogue had nothing on the best of the 616 writersespecially Stan. This applies even more to other characters. Ultimate Mary Janeis a fine and dandy character unto herself but her backstory and personality isseriously different as is the way she and Peter connect to one another, even ifthe end result of her role is similar. Norman and Venom and Doc Ock similar areat best riffing upon aspects of their 616 selves and are frankly nowhere nearas meaty.

For all the praise Bendis got for ‘fixing’ Eddie Brock andVenom by not making him an alien, setting him up before he goes evil and givinghim a different motivation to hate Peter, when he actually BECOMES Venom he’sjust a gnarling growling monster for the most part whereas 616 Venom if nothingelse had  a personality. I could go on all day aboutthe changes Bendis made and how it made the characters lesser than what theywere before.

And you could sit there and say that hey it’s an AU so whyis that a problem.

Well the problem is it was never intended as an AU whereshit is different for the sake of it in the first place.

It was intended as a modern retelling of the Spider-Manmythology using the benefit of hindsight and filtering everything through thelens of him being in high school.

But almost immediately it began changing stuff for the sakeof changing stuff thus invalidating that point.

More frustrating though is that fans and Marvel treat the seriesas though it actually was the former as opposed to just being basically Bendis’personal AU spin on everything and talked it up as these amazing Spider-Manstories when they were literally just remakes of the older stuff.

If you want to see a modern retelling of the Spider-Manmythology using the benefit of hindsight and filtering everything through thelens of him being in high school the Spec cartoon is an example of that andwhilst it took cues from Ultimate fundamentally that was Lee/Ditko justupdated.

But my two biggest gripes come from Bendis messing withimportant foundational stuff to Spider-Man like making Nick Fury a huge dealand making Richard Parker a really important aspect of the series.

Peter’s parents being spies is dumb, no lie. But it can kindof work on account of them being dead, him not remembering them, them beingessentially irrelevant to him and them not being his parents in the importantsense of raising him anyway.

Uncle Ben is Peter’s Dad end of story.

In Ultimate though Bendis made Nick Fury a super spy head ofthis super spy organization an important character who can have a major shapingimpact upon Spider-Man’s life and arguably is a dark father figure. He also inthe Venom arc, Carnage arc, the Clone Saga and a few other places hyped upRichard’s (but noticeably not Mary’s) importance. Ultimate Peter is aSpider-Man who’s defined in an important way by the legacy of his biologicalfather, not Uncle Ben. To the point where Richard was the guy who originallysaid gr8 pwr=gr8 resp and Uncle Ben just passes it on to Peter.

That is...no. You do NOT do that *glares at Webb movies*.

Spider-Man is defined by Uncle Ben first and foremost andshould be relatively down to Earth and normal, so spies or super spies shouldn’tfactor in in a huge way at all.

But Bendis didn’t do that and then he’s called the bestSpider-Man writer of the 21st century and USM the best Spider-Manseries of the 21st century. He didn’t do any of that whilst alsocreating less developed and nuanced versions of all the other characters.

I mean my God how can your take on Spider-Man be definitivewhen Jameson is barely in it and Bendis’ self-insert OC Kenny Kong gets morepanel time than Flash Thompson, the character who is literally on the firstpage of Amazing Fantasy #15.

He even went a step further and made Aunt May Peter’sbiological aunt because IIRC she was Mary’s sister, which is both overly neatimo and more poignantly takes away from the positive family message of theoriginal story. That blood doesn’t make family because 616 Aunt May had 0 bloodties to Peter but she adored him as her  son.

And then on top of all of that the decompression.

I.Effing. HATE. Decompression.

I loathe it. I despise it. I would kill it if I could.

Decompression was talked up as being this thing that had tohappen because comics were more cinematic but the truth is they weren’t, BENDISHIMSELF was the person who made them more cinematic because of the impact he hadand no one seemed to sit back and ask if it was even a good idea.

Decompression stories allegedly allow the stories more roomto breath and flow organically whilst also allowing writers to go deeper.

But in practice in USM and the majority of 2000s-2010s booksusing decompression aren’t like that.

They just take what would’ve been 1-2 issues worth of plotin the 1990s or 1980s and artificially stretch it out to pad for a trade.Basically a trade is the equivalent of what an issue or 2 of a 1980s comicwould’ve been.

Meaning you are spending more money for less content perissue or way more money for essentially the same content (not helped in USM’scase by it being mostly remixes of the old stuff anyway).

It’s not even more layered or nuanced or has deeper themesand stuff, it doesn’t even use the extra space for more action. Kraven’s LastHunt does all that but more stuff actually happens in that story than youraverage arc of USM or most 21st century decompressed arcs.

Issue to issue it actually destroys the flow of a storybecause whilst a 1980s multi parter would’ve had it’s own beginning middle andend per issue, that isn’t the case for USM and similar such decompressedstories.

If a decompressed arc was a 2 hour movie then issue 1 of 6would basically be giving you the first 20 minutes of a movie and asking you toremember it for 2-4 weeks until the next 20 minutes and on and on for the restof the arc. That is a horrible way to experience a story but that’s the point,because it wasn’t written to be consumed that way, it was written for you tobuy the trade i.e. the complete movie and consume the whole story in one hit.

Plus I heavily suspect decompression was employed as a wayfor the companies to justify doing less work per year. If every story is 6 partsthen a monthly series only needs to come up with 2 stories per year not at most12.

Like compare and contrast just how much characterdevelopment and raw plot occurs between USM #1-100 and say the first 100 issuesof Claremont’s X-Men. Or Spider-Girl #1-100. The differences are truly stark.

The ultimate (no pun intended) proof in the pudding for meis Bendis’ Daredevil run vs Frank Miller’s.

Bendis DD run is acclaimed, beloved considered one of thebest runs for the character ever. Miller’s run however despite being farshorter and not employing decompression is still regarded as THE  best, with plots from it forming the basis ofevery Daredevil adaptation since then, including the Netflix show. So Bendisusing decompression and having much more time and issues to work his magicstill wound up doing something not AS good not AS nuanced or fleshed out asMiller did with a different style and less time and issues.

How can that be possible if decompression allowes you to doall this stuff? Because decompression sucks shit is how and because in comicsits less about the space you have but how you use it.

[theclaravoyant]

Pride prompt Coffee shop AU wheee Skye is kicked out by her foster parents and she runs into May who decides to take her home where she lives with her girlfriend Natasha

AN ~ lucky you get to jump the queue as it allows me to cover a few further up the list as well :D I hope you all like your found families with an extra helping of Gay™ this time of year! also tagging @mocking-point who prompted me something similar a while back in relation to this fic (tw: abuse), and @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl, sorry I don’t write much Maria, but I put a little of her in here for you

main relationships: Skye & May, May x Nat. some background Skimmons.

Rated T mostly for swearing and some sexual references, but in this fic Skye is underage, so I won’t be writing any smut for it, though I am open to other prompts in this ‘verse.

Read on AO3 (~2000 words)

Where the Heart Is

There was always a place at Mack’s with her name on it, the manager had told Skye once. She’d been grateful for it at the time, but never more than in this moment, as she hissed and swore at her computer screen and its crappy wifi and everything that her day, so far, had been. She had a backpack, a duffel, and her computer bag surrounding her like rounded wagons; all her belongings in the world not even reaching the other side of the booth. She had a table at Mack’s with her name on it, and not much else except the tears running down her face.

“Shit- fuck – shit!” she muttered, wiping furiously at her tears and raking her hair back in one hand. Lincoln was out of town, Fitz and his mother barely had enough room for themselves, and Jemma was probably having her own ass handed to her right at this very moment. Mack had his daughter to think about, and Skye had way too much damage to bring herself to taint their lives with hers. She dragged her hands down her face, all the guilt and fear and panic combining into bitter-tasting, gut-wrenching shit.

“Can I help you?”

Skye was almost feeling too bad to be ashamed as she looked toward the source of the voice. It was an older woman, Chinese like her – and American-born too, by the sound of things. She looked… not emotionless, exactly, nor uncaring. A little bored, perhaps, and more than a shade judgemental, Skye would say, about the tirade of curses she’d been muttering for a while now. She took a moment to wonder why one of the staff hand’t asked her to be quiet or to leave, before she realised that the woman was still standing there.

“Sorry,” Skye said. “I got – I got kicked out again, that’s all, from this foster home place, and normally I’d crash at my friend Hunter’s but he’s got this new asshole landlord so I can only ask maybe one night out of him and everyone else I know can’t help so basically I’m fucked and I’m going to have to go back to St Agnes and then I’m really fucked and –“

The woman’s facial expression had barely changed. Maybe it wasn’t the swearing she’d hated, Skye speculated. Maybe it was just words.

“Sorry,” she said again. “Thanks for your concern but basically, unless you’ve got a spare room I can have for – well, pretty much free at this point – no, you can’t really help I don’t think.”

Skye turned her attention back to her computer screen, and to the swarm of Facebook messages that announced disappointment after disappointment. She closed the page and opened another blank one. There must be some kind of work-sharing, noticeboard exchange site that would help her out, surely. But what would she find there? Would she be willing to – what was it called, ‘bang for roof’? Was that even legal?

“Why’d you get kicked out?”

Skye jumped.

“Je-sus!” she exclaimed. The unflappable Asian woman was still there. Her odd, hard-to-read expression mad Skye want to spill all her secrets. She was homeless and crying in a diner anyway; what did she really have to lose?

“I had sex,” Skye confessed. “In their house. With a girl.” She shook her head. “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure which part bothered them more, but I know what I’ll be hearing from the nuns about.”

She rolled her eyes, and put a smile on it. The stranger’s face changed. It was hard to tell, moving from one emotion to another on such a small scale, but there was something in it, Skye was sure. And it was something that, bizarrely enough, made her feel hopeful.

The woman took a pen out of her pocket, reached for a napkin, and wrote down an address.

“My name is May,” she said, sliding the napkin to Skye. “There’s a room here, if you want it.”

Skye felt her stomach twist. Her instincts made her want to trust May, but they’d also let her fall in love with the last place she’d stayed, and she’d been all but chased out over the threshold just now. Clearly her radar was off. At least on www.4-let.com she knew she could trust that sketchy feeling.

But when she looked up to decline the offer, May was gone.

-

She wasn’t sure what made her keep the napkin. Desperate times called for desperate measures, she supposed. For whatever reason though, it wasn’t long before it was playing on her mind again. Skye lay wide-awake on Hunter’s couch, staring up at an old, familiar stain on the roof. She’d spent many a comforting night on this couch, but this one seemed to get longer and harder as it went on, as if the bed and the roof were screaming at her in a language she could barely understand, that tonight was the last night she would even have this.

Unless.

The hairs tingled on her arms. It almost felt like the napkin was whispering to her, keeping her up until, at some point, she must have drifted off because she did remember waking, and what was there to wake from if not sleep? She felt about as fresh as the towels in Hunter’s bathroom, but nevertheless, she did manage to drag herself to the kitchen for a coffee and a bagel. Munching on one of the small joys she still had left in life, Skye pulled the napkin out of yesterday’s jacket pocket. It no longer seemed so menacing in the daylight, but for that unsettling feeling of wanting to trust it that came over Skye again.

Desperate times, she reminded herself, and took a picture of the napkin with her phone. On the sheet itself, she scrawled:

In case I get murdered, I’m at this address.If you haven’t heard from me by 5pm, call me, then call police.

Being back at Agnes was better than being dead, after all. Skye capped the pen with a short, sharp, satisfied sigh. That was it now, she thought. She’d committed, to the visit at least. No backing out.

It was with this attitude – albeit a little battered from her shift at work – that Skye got off the bus later that afternoon in front of an old blue and white colonial, behind a low brick wall and a slightly scrappy garden. She let herself through the gate and took a deep breath as she approached the door. It certainly felt like finding a new home, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. And, she recalled, it was the middle of the afternoon. If May had any kind of regular adult life, there might not be anyone home after all.

Skye was contemplating bailing when a smiling face appeared from around the corner of the house. It was another woman, a little younger than May, with short flame-bright red hair. She carried a small potted plant in one hand and a trowel in the other, which Skye thought was a little odd given the state of the garden, and in the middle of the day, but it was not the strangest thing she’d ever seen. Certainly not as strange as giving a crying girl in a coffee shop your home address.

“Hi,” greeted the woman. “Ni hao.”

“Uh, hi,” Skye greeted eventually. “Sorry, I don’t – I don’t speak much Mandarin. I’m a California girl.”

“What brings you to these parts then, hm?” the woman asked.

“I’m looking for May?” Skye pulled out her phone and showed the woman the photo of the napkin. “She gave me this.”

The woman smiled fondly at it.

“Alright then. Come on in, I’ll give you the tour. I’m Natasha by the way. Call me Nat.”

“Skye.”

She followed Nat inside and was shown around; upstairs, downstairs, the bathrooms, the kitchen. When they got there, Nat offered her a drink, and started making coffee before she could answer.

“Any questions?”

Skye was distracted by the pictures on the fridge. This was definitely May’s house. In fact, judging by some of these photographs, it was May and Nat’s house. Skye smiled, feeling her heart clench at a particularly domestic shot of the two of them: a younger couple, in front of their home – sold! – and both of them with matching smiles, broad and toothy, and with their arms around each other, as if they’d been laughing before the shot or about to collapse into it. It felt like such a distant dream, that she could be that happy. It was heartening beyond what she could have imagined, to feel that happiness – and so much more – in the bones of this house.

Nat sidled up beside Skye, smiling to herself.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” Skye said, blushing a little as she turned away from the fridge and accepted the coffee Nat held out. Nat shrugged.

“We wouldn’t keep them on the fridge if we didn’t want visitors seeing,” she explained. “And it’s not like you wouldn’t figure it out, if you moved in. We like to get any awkward questions out of the way early.”

Skye nodded. “I can appreciate that.”

“May tells me that shouldn’t be a problem with you though, should it?” Nat raised an eyebrow, the implication so unavoidable that Skye blushed a little.

“I guess not,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t bother you?”

“Only after 9pm on a school night.”

Skye snorted.

“And you’re telling me I can stay here – for as long as I want – for free?”

“As far as we’re concerned? Absolutely. Legally? That’s a different matter. Fortunately, we have a lawyer coming to help us out. May’s with her now.”

“You knew I was coming?” Skye wondered. Nat smiled cryptically.

“May did.”

“How? Even I didn’t know I was coming ‘til this morning.”

“Yes you did,” Nat replied simply. Skye raised her eyebrows, but drank her coffee. It was a stranger day than she’d been expecting, but she knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.

There was a knock at the door and then it opened, and a tall dark-haired woman with a face that reminded Skye of an eagle marched through it enthusiastically, tailed by May, who was even smiling a little. She knew Skye would be here, and she knew that Skye would be impressed that she’d been anticipated.

“This is Maria,” Nat said, gesturing between them. “This is Skye.”

“Maria Hill,” the other woman said, holding out her hand. Her suit and stern features gave Skye the impression that she’d be just as straight-laced as May, but there was a sparkle of amusement in her eyes. “Ace attorney. Welcome to Nat and May’s Forever Home for Wayward Gays. It’s nice to meet you.”

Skye blinked, confused, and forgot the actual shaking part of the handshake for a moment.

“Forever what-now?”

Nat groaned. May rolled her eyes.

“Nothing,” Maria brushed her off with a cheeky shrug. “It really is nice to meet you. It’s just, these two get me around for custody stuff fairly often, that’s all. There’s often sensitive issues at play and it’s nice to have somebody from, you know, ‘the community’ on the case.”

“You’re – I mean you’re –“ Skye glanced at the photograph on the fridge. “Too?”

Maria shook her head.

“Ace, baby, all the way. But we take all sorts here.”

“Really?” It was not lost on any of them, the way Skye’s face lit up, and she blushed a little. After so many years being raised by a stifling church, and their network of often-just-as-stifling foster applicants, this was starting to feel like a whole new world. And she thought of Jemma, and if that went wrong, and of what if it did and they could live here, together, in this little piece of freedom. And even if they couldn’t – which would be good, of course, if Jemma could stay with her family who loved her – Skye could feel herself breathing easier here already.

May pulled something out of her pocket, and put it on the counter. A key.

“It’s yours if you want it,” she said.

Skye didn’t have to be asked twice.

[angsarapblog]

It was a relaxed day in Sydney after our conference so we decided to look for a spot near the Harbour Bridge and found this place called Ribs and Burger. We then agreed to stay here for a while and chill out before our next adventure which is to just cruise around the harbour. It’s quite a big place which I think gets busy during the lunch hours but it was way past that time when we paid this place a visit so we don’t know but basing on the number of seats available and its location I bet I would fill up on peak times.

It is a burger place but it is one of those good ones, I live in New Zealand and burgers there trust me are the best in the world, I travelled more than 30 countries now and still New Zealand have the best ones, so hopefully you trust me if I say a burger is good, like this place. Ribs and Burgers like most New Zealand burgers use good quality ingredients, like good quality Angus beef which are grass fed, hand prepared and hormone free; and you can see the difference once you took a bite. That is why we tried one of their Wagyu Big Cheese 200g (AU$15.90) which is served with Vintage cheddar, pickles, caramelised onions, mustard, BBQ & Aunty Joan’s pink sauce, by default it was cooked medium for maximum juiciness and tenderness.

Then for a change we gave the Crispy Chicken Burger (AU$12.90) a try, basically a free range Crispy fried chicken breasts served with tomato, onion, slaw, house mayo and BBQ sauce. This was also good but honestly the beef burger was amazing I would definitely prefer that.

We enjoyed our burgers with their Famous Chips (AU$6.90) which again is as par as New Zealand amazing potato chips. Thick cut, just enough for a good bit, crispy on the outside and fluffy on the insides. It is then served by your dip of choice like Chilli Mayo, Aioli, Ranch, Chilli Sauce and/or Blue Cheese Ranch (AU$2.00 each).

Another specialty here is their thick shake and trust me it is so heavenly! it’s like melted ice cream more than a thick shake, sweet, tasty, cold a perfect way to end that good burger. We ordered the Salted Caramel Thick shake (AU$8.50) and all I want to do is to sip that all day.

It was good that we stayed in here, now we got introduced to a good burger place which is quite hard to find nowadays, most of them are pretentious, they just serve you with something exorbitantly priced to gain popularity and/or looks fantastic, majestic and massive which looks good for Instagram but is either sloppy, does not taste good or using 5#!t ingredients. I love this place, they serve honest to goodness straight forward burgers, simple and delicious plus you get the bonus of a very chill location with good views and great staff.

Ribs & Burgers Address: 88 George St, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia Phone: +61 2 9251 4488 Website: http://ribsandburgers.com

Ribs and Burgers (Sydney, Australia) It was a relaxed day in Sydney after our conference so we decided to look for a spot near the…