#ive also seen two posts here of similar veins

[taromilks]

Why are people so comfortable treating that captain guy from mouth washing like an animal. It's so weird. Just saw a tweet of an animatic where the premise is that one of the characters found one of those pet talking devices n gave it to him like he was a dog. So fucking weird

[rumpunch]

HIIII so… i finally got to see hadestown this weekend (the national tour production) w two of my best friends 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹 i knew we were gonna see it for months but i didnt want to post abt it beforehand / acknowledge it in any way after making plans bc i was scared i would jinx it like what happened when i posted / talked abt seeing shows on the west end and then covid hit and sent me home lol. but i can’t believe i finally saw it!! it doesn’t feel real and honestly didn’t until right now as im writing this….. being in the theater was truly an out of body (and mind lol) experience for better or for worse. this was my first time seeing a show since covid and im soooo glad it was this one given how much it’s meant to me for all these years 🥹💗

i have a lot of thoughts on the production and also the plot / story so here they are lol:

production thoughts

for context ive never seen a hadestown 👢 before, i told myself that i wanted my first experience of seeing it to be actually seeing it in person. but ive listened to the obcr 5798673594 times over the last 3 years and the songs have become thoroughly woven into my life... so that made for a really weird experience where i knew every word but was watching it unfold for the first time and yet i knew what was coming for the most part. that also could be chalked up to the fact that ive seen so many gifsets and have read so many posts about other ppl seeing the show so i did know about some visual things.. but yeah it was just weird what i knew / expected and what i didnt lol

my friends and i sat in the back right corner of the mezzanine (like the LITERAL corner. no chairs behind us or next to us and the exit right next to us) and sadly the balcony in the set was cut off for us so we had to keep leaning across each other or scrunching our heads down to see the action up there :~/ but it was ok

i think bc of the above two bullet points + the fact that i really did not let myself believe that i was going to see the show bc i was scared of jinxing it + me having depression / possible derealization issues that i did not have when i first got into this show... i was kinda numb the entire time which sucks a little. i cried a couple times (happy / disbelieving tears in road to hell (persephone's entrance specifically for some reason, idk why it wasnt the "aight"s LOL) and any way the wind blows, sad tears in doubt comes in) but i didnt really... process anything in the moment or really experience the epic highs and lows of it while watching it. i just generally wasnt very moved! and im processing the show right now for the first time. and that kinda sucks and is unlike me and unlike what i thought seeing it was gonna be like. in a similar vein i found myself really focused on whoever was in the spotlight and im kinda mad at myself for that bc this is a show where SO many little details / context clues are communicated when ppl are in the background. but its fine i guess, i may be in a weird place mentally but i got to see it and maybe i'll see it again someday and be more moved

the cast was PHENOMENALLLLLL. j antonio rodriguez was our orpheus and he was the standout for me, his singing and acting as were breathtaking! i was frustrated about hannah whitley (eurydice) though bc like (and i feel bad for saying all of this)... nobody can be eva noblezada but hannah was missing a lot of notes / singing off key and kept like.. idk what the technical term for it is but she was kinda singing on her own beat and adding in a lot of pauses or rushing into things instead of staying on pace with the music and also she kept kinda revving up into the high notes and all of it grated on me. but i grew warmer to her singing in act 2 and i really appreciated her acting throughout! i didnt rly have many thoughts about hades (matthew patrick quinn), persephone (maria christina oliveras), or hermes (nathan lee graham) aside from ADORING all of their performances and what they brought to the roles compared to the obc! and the fates (dominique kempf, belén moyano, courtney lauster) / ensemble (kc dela cruz, colin lemoine, sean watkinson, shavey brown, raquel williams) / musicians were INCREDIBLE and had such amazing chemistry with and between each other :~D

antonio made for a bolder more charming orpheus and hannah made for a darker moodier more tortured eurydice which was interesting. but (and maybe this was just me dealing with the whole numbness / already knowing what to expect thing) i wasnt really convinced about their love story (specifically the early parts of it in act i as they were falling in love) or that orpheus in particular was insecure and vulnerable to the fates. but they did have some good chemistry in act ii especially and i was rooting for them so hard despite knowing wht was to come :~(

i knew that on broadway they have that little elevator in the center of the stage so i was curious about how it would work in the tour and... they had this giant oven box thing with moving doors! i actually really liked that, it made the whole idea of traveling to / from hadestown seem more sinister. that said i was kinda bothered by it during doubt comes in because orpheus and eurydice had to walk around the entire stage to make sure eurydice was positioned in front / inside of the oven and it kinda spoiled the ending in a way (even though we all know how that ends)... im guessing that on broadway its less exaggerated and you dont see it coming bc all eurydice has to do is just move over to the side a little. but idk i'll finally let myself watch a 👢 and see what the difference is

i couldnt take my eyes off of hades and persephone during promises. they started the song with hades kneeling with his head against persephone's stomach and then he stood up and they just hugged.... for a LONG time. like at least 3-5 minutes. and i was like god i wish that were me and i was thinking about what that mustve been like for the actors playing them.. like if thats a moment that they share and look forward to or whatever bc i know i would. it made me think about jenna's dear baby monologue in you matter to me LOLLLL

i saw from another post i read on here (as i was pregaming for the show by scrolling thru my hadestown tag LMAO) that orpheus runs through the audience at one point? and he didnt do that for us that i saw which i was bummed about. maybe thats just a broadway thing

i had no idea the set splits open during wait for me!!! it was so cool

i also didnt know / fully realize that hades produces a flower for persephone during epic iii 😭 the tears in my eyes... also speaking of epic iii hades singing the lalalalalalalaaaa got a LAUGH and i was so MAD!!!!! i get that its kinda funny because it just sounds so weird in his voice and its a startling moment... but that pissed me off bc the moment is supposed to be so tender and heartbreaking and the audience didnt appreciate that.. augh.

since its pride month the set was initially lit up with rainbow lights and in act ii hermes had little rainbow tassles on the ends of his sleeves!! :~D

plot / story thoughts

another context bullet point to kick us off: i discovered hadestown in the spring / summer of 2019 which was an INCREDIBLY formative time for me and so many aspects of the show (creative expression as a tool / forum for bringing about the world as it could be (and illuminating the possibilities in the world as it is), discovering that you have agency, love / loyalty / betrayal / sustenance, finding your purpose, etc.) were profoundly relevant to things that i was awakening to at that exact place and time in my own life. so i went into this experience hoping to have more insights like the kind i had when i first listened to the obcr... and i didnt really. i mean i had some but they didnt feel as profound i guess? and again that may just be me having mental health issues now that i didnt have then.. but that was a thing that i was aware of and kinda sad about. so yeah

that said... the main thing along those lines that i did take away (which really only hit me while watching epic iii / promises) is like... love is agency is love is agency is love.... or something like that. at least that they coexist and happen together. the oppressive conditions in hadestown and the poverty in the overworld strip the gods and humans alike of... their humanity (which is weird to apply to the gods but still)! their sense of self, and their love for each other and the world. the moment that became clear for me was in epic iii when the workers took off their goggles one by one and it was like.. they could See again! they could see themselves and each other, they were holding hands with each other and singing together. and they saw a future that they could create together. and hades was letting persephone dance and she kept spinning away from him with her arms outstretched like a bird but then coming back... idk. im not articulating this well and i need to think about it more and let it simmer for a bit and maybe watch a 👢 to get all the details. but it was like yeah... the opposite of capitalism imperialism etc etc is love and agency and they go together and they are the same thing.

another thing i need to think about more: orpheus went to hadestown all by himself to get eurydice! how come he was so confident then? he was LITERALLY alone. he didnt know where she went or if she would come back with him. and he didnt have the workers following him (though they were there in wait for me swinging the lamps, but i interpreted them as being like... part of the scenery i guess). he was completely alone and operating off of hope AND THE FATES TAUNTED HIM TOO and he was like... fine! so then in doubt comes in.. when he has all these people including eurydice following him... like idk. maybe its just because he'd confronted hades who couldnt fully be trusted and he knew that eurydice had turned her back on him and stuff... like maybe its just because on the journey back he'd experienced things that caused him to doubt / mistrust the people he was journeying with / from and that's what made him vulnerable, not so much the physical loneliness but the emotional loneliness that comes with a betrayal. which is something i just realized typing it out lol. but that kinda agitated me bc its like... he was FINE the way up so why did he crumble on the way back :~(

doubt comes in is such a fucking GUT PUNCH btw. i wanted to cry harder but didnt let myself bc i didnt want to be too loud or soil my mask. but i was so so scared to see it and it devastated me. its just so... SAD. and its so... like i relate to / identify with orpheus SO much yes in part because of the creative expression / seeing the two worlds thing but also because of doubt comes in specifically. its just so so so sad. he had all of these people including the person he loved most cheering him on and echoing to him. and he couldnt hear them. and he couldnt internalize how much they loved and believed and trusted in him. and he turned. that is so wrenchingly real. and it hurt so bad to see it playing out on the stage knowing what was about to happen and then WATCHING it in all the brilliant horror. like thats another insane thing the way the lights get so wildly bright. actually now that i mention that i think the lights are brighter in hadestown when bad things are happening. like hades saying I CONDUCT THE ELECTRIC CITY etc etc. that could be a whole post. someone should make that

im thinking a lot about The Song and whose song it is and actually WHICH song it is. bc if you think about it... so we're introduced to the lalalalalalalaaaa and whatever song that is which builds in the epics. and that song incites a lot of action like orpheus (quite literally!) tuning out eurydice which causes her to choose to go to hadestown, and hades realizing what love is and whatever. but another song that is equally if not more catalytic is.... IF IT'S TRUE!!!! bc thats the song that sparks the revolution among the workers and gives orpheus hope that he almost lost after learning about eurydice's betrayal and inspires eurydice to fight for something instead of succumbing to her fate. and in wait for me reprise when eurydice is singing "echoing OUR song" "the falling of OUR feet" ... like they're not alone as just the two of them, the workers are coming too!! so which song is she referring to! what if it's actually "if it's true" and the hopes that orpheus has stirred up about what the world could be?

btw speaking of orpheus tuning out eurydice... im sure this point has been made 5476463979 times but its rly interesting to think about how love languages (for lack of a better way to put it, ik that can be kinda reductive) work in this show. eurydice and orpheus both attempt to address the storm but the ways they choose to do it are different / dont align: eurydice tries to manage the short term by searching for food and firewood, while orpheus works on the song that will bring spring back and stop this kind of disaster from happening again. but iirc they dont talk about how they're going to take these two different but equally important strategies — eurydice at least interprets the song as being unimportant and orpheus just... straight up seems unaware of the food / firewood thing also being important. so theres a communication failure and eurydice interprets the silence as abandonment (for good reason, also relatable) and turns her back (ha!) on orpheus. and then with hades and persephone... hades does all these big flashy power gestures to show his love for persephone but it's the exact opposite of what she wants and they dont see eye to eye about how to express their love for each other either. yeah

speaking of eurydice making that choice... like yeah. sigh. betrayal is such a huge thing in this show. trust and betrayal. eurydice was (kind of) leading orpheus through the immediate short term danger of the storm and she turned on him. and the fact that she did was part of the reason orpheus turned on her. they made their vows in promises that they would walk side by side but he couldnt get over it (partially bc they literally weren’t allowed to physically walk as they planned but still). and eurydice said "im right behind you and i have been all along" and its like no you havent been thats the entire plot of the show lol (again for understandable reasons but still!)

another thing im sure has been analyzed 456456984 times but its interesting to think about hermes watching everything playing out while knowing how it will end and not choosing to intervene. idk what that means and my laptop is running out of battery so im not going to dig into it but im just thinking on it. BUT ALSO THAT GOES FOR US AS THE AUDIENCE like so many ppl probably know how it ends and maybe some ppl are seeing it multiple times and its like... anyone could intervene and change the story (within reason ofc). also goes for the other ppl on stage too like the musicians etc. its just interesting to think about the implications of that and what would happen if someone tried it both "in character" and "out of character" i guess

its interesting to think about the role walls play in the show too. like the wall hades is making the workers build to keep out the "enemy" and keep them (him) powerful and prosperous in their (his) isolation vs the walls repeating the falling of feet, echoing songs... letting people know theyre not alone. and the fact that that doesnt happen in doubt comes in even though orpheus is being followed by a whole crowd basically. idk. fascinating

ok those are all of my thoughts i think! i also saw some interesting posts / takes that im going to rb again bc theyre on my mind as i interpret the show but i dont want to put them in this post bc theyre not my original thoughts. ty for reading if you did :~D this is a glorious new era in rumpunch nation im so glad and grateful that i can finally say ive seen this beautiful show!

[macgyvermedical]

A Nurse Wrote This Movie: A Medical Review of Knives Out

Whoa.

Honestly, all I can say, this movie was amazing.

I don’t think I’ve ever been treated to a movie that was both this complex and still this easy to understand. I wasn’t left wondering at the end, and despite the number of times my understanding of the central crime changed, it didn’t ever feel whiplash-y or like anything was played for shock value. It was a journey through the story and it was consistently enjoyable, all 130 minutes of it.

But please, seriously, go see it for yourself before reading this post, there will absolutely be spoilers and this is a movie you don’t want spoiled.

Before I really get into it, I want to tell you that the medicine (though, I suppose, particularly the nursing) in this movie was good. Really good. Much, much, much better than I expected. What I really, really appreciated was that the resolution of the case came from something that only a nurse would know. If i had to guess, not only was there a nurse consulting, but one was part of the central writing team.

There’s really only one scene to talk about, but it spans parts of the whole movie. Here’s my explanation/review of the evening meds scene and how it relates to real life and the rest of the movie. Apologies for the lack of relevant screenshots, once the movie comes out on streaming or DVD I will have more options. Also apologies in that I have only seen this once in theaters and I am working from memory.

PICCs:

One of the main characters, Marta, is a homecare nurse for the wealthy victim Harlan Thrombey. Early in the movie, we are given a scene where she is giving him two medications for a recent shoulder injury- ketorolac and morphine- before bed.

Harlan Thrombey has a PICC in his left arm that Marta uses to administer the medications. PICCs, or Peripherally Inserted Central Catheters, are medical devices that are designed to allow medical professionals to administer IV medications and draw blood without having to start an IV or stick someone with a needle. Once inserted, they can stay in for 6-12 months, and they’re really helpful for patients who either need IV fluids/medications at home (long-term IV antibiotic therapy, for example), or who require repeated doses of medications that could be damaging to the smaller veins that traditional “peripheral” IV catheters sit in (chemotherapy, total parenteral nutrition).

PICCs consist of one or more “ports” that are accessible from the outside (the blue nubs in the pic below, where the medication goes in), and a long, flexible tube that sits in a large, deep vein that ends near the heart.

We don’t know a lot about Harlan’s medical history in the movie other than the injury to his shoulder that causes him to need the pain medication. A shoulder injury alone would not justify the insertion of a PICC, so we have to assume that either he had an existing serious health condition like cancer, or the shoulder injury was really an infection in one of the bones of his shoulder, which would justify a PICC on the basis of needing IV antibiotics multiple times per day. Since they seem to have thought of everything else, I would choose to go with that.

Medications:

The first medication’s generic name is ketorolac. Ketorolac is an NSAID, similar to ibuprofen, and works by blocking some of the chemicals that cause pain and inflammation in the tissue. It’s usually not given long-term, but for short term things like surgery or an injury it works pretty well and decreases the amount of narcotic pain medication needed. For someone over 65, the normal schedule for ketorolac would be 15mg IV every 6 hours. Marta would probably keep him pretty close to this schedule, because it’s his primary pain control beyond heat, ice, elevation, and possibly some form of physical therapy.

Morphine is an opioid. It works by blocking pain signals in the brain. It’s been around for a while, works pretty well and pretty quickly, but it’s not great for long term use either due to the fact that the body builds up a tolerance to it and it has the potential to be addicting.Since Marta seems to offer it to him instead of stating she’s going to give it to him, it looks like it was prescribed for “breakthrough” or as emergency pain relief if the ketorolac wasn’t doing enough, which is a pretty typical way to prescribe pain medication.

Now, you’ll notice that despite it reading “ketorolac” on the vial, the characters refer to the first medication by it’s brand name “Toradol” throughout the movie. This impressed me because in a medical setting, we colloquially refer to some medications by their generic name, while others we refer to by their brand names. There’s no particular rhyme or reason to the colloquial naming (though age of the drug plays in), and you kind of have to work in medicine to know which is which. We typically refer to Toradol by it’s brand name, while we refer to morphine by it’s generic. If you asked me for ketorolac or Astramorph (a brand name of IV morphine) it would just sound... weird. But its something fiction gets wrong all the time and it’s cool they got this right. For consistancy, I’m going to continue using the generic name for both medications throughout this post.

Medication Administration:

Marta goes about injecting the ketorolac first. This was yet another thing that added a little spark of nursing realism to the movie, because while not everything was shown, what was shown was done accurately. Here’s the steps to administering an IV medication through a PICC:

Open syringe package (draw needle is usually already attached)

Draw up air into syringe equal to the amount of volume of medication you want to draw

Clean top of vial with alcohol swab

Insert draw needle into vial and inject air

Flip vial/needle upside down and draw medication into syringe, recap draw needle (label syringe if giving multiple medications/doses)

Unclamp the PICC port you want to use and clean the port cap with an alcohol swab

Twist a prefilled saline syringe onto PICC port cap, and inject 5ml saline into the port

Twist draw needle off of syringe and discard into sharps container

Twist medication syringe onto PICC port cap

Inject medication

Twist off medication syringe and discard

Twist saline syringe back onto cap, inject the remaining 5ml of saline to flush the entire medication dose into the person’s vein

Untwist the saline syringe and reclamp the port

They reference the dose of ketorolac as being 100mg. As I said above, the normal dose of ketorolac is 15-30mg IV, depending on age. For Harlan, being 85, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have gotten 15mg IV every 6 hours max. I think the mix up was intentional, meant to signal to the audience that she was supposed to give the whole vial of ketorolac with each administration, but only a portion of the vial of morphine per administration. Ketorolac does come in single-dose vials, however in this movie all vials were clearly multi-dose vials (which you can tell because the ketorolac vial says “30mg/mL” on the 10mL vial, meaning there’s 300mg of ketorolac in that vial, which would be about 20x the normal dose). 

Medication Errors:

Then she goes back to get the morphine, and realizes that she’s made a mistake. Instead of injecting the vial labelled “ketorolac” she’s administered the entire contents of the vial labelled “morphine”- 100mg, she thinks. That’s a LOT of morphine. Definitely enough for a fatal overdose in someone who’s normal dose is 3mg. 

Now, med errors are HUGE FREAKING DEALS in the medical world, and Marta would have faced substantial civil and possibly criminal charges. Assuming she survived this without jail time, she would face an investigation by her visiting nurse agency (if she worked for one, which they establish she doesn’t) and/or the board of nursing in her state, which would seek to determine whether this was negligence that lead to the med error (in which she would probably be fired/have her license suspended/revoked), or a systemic problem (in which case she would be in the clear).

I think Marta actually has a pretty good case for this being a systemic issue rather than a negligence one. The vials look extremely similar, and even if she had done everything she was supposed to do, its plausible this could have happened despite her reasonable efforts to prevent it (she could have put it down last minute and picked up the other vial by accident, and had the label facing the wrong way as she was drawing up the medication). If nothing else, since the morphine vial was not specially identified as a narcotic, it would at least shift some of the blame to the pharmacy that filled the prescription.

In the moment, though, knowing what we know about her mom’s citizenship status, this would have been a terrifying situation for her.

Plus, there’s the overarching possibility that she just killed this very powerful person who she’s been caring for for a long time.

Opioid Overdose:

Opioids bind to certain receptors in the brain, decreasing pain signals. Unfortunately, they also decrease signals in the part of the brain that controls breathing. At small doses this isn’t generally a problem, but in overdose situations it can cause respiratory depression (the person breathing too slowly to meet their needs) or respiratory arrest (the person stops breathing on their own entirely), which can lead to death.

A drug called naloxone (brand name Narcan) can stop an overdose by sitting on all those same receptors that an opioid would without actually blocking any signals, which stops the respiratory depression from the opioid pretty quickly. As mentioned in the movie, most pharmacies dispense a naloxone kit along with opioid pain medication, and was the “antidote” Marta was searching for.

Now, in opioid overdose all is not lost if you don’t happen to have naloxone available. Since the cause of death from overdose is lack of breathing, Marta could have called 911 and provided rescue breaths until EMS showed up with naloxone. Even if EMS were 10 or 15 minutes out, he could have easily survived this. But that wouldn’t have made for nearly the murder mystery.

Ironically, this is exactly what happens in the laundromat scene, when it is revealed that the housekeeper Fran figured out what was happening and was attacked with the real morphine vial. When Marta finds her, she immediately looks in her eyes (a hallmark of opioid overdose is pinpoint pupils) and begins providing CPR.

In some areas, community-level CPR guidelines have simplified to “if you find someone not breathing, start CPR”. This is due to the realization that most lay rescuers have a hard time finding a pulse quickly enough to use it to determine whether to start CPR, leading to fatally wasted time in an emergency. The thinking is that it’s better to have people do unnecessary chest compressions than not do necessary ones.

But healthcare professionals are obviously still taught to differentiate between patients who need full CPR and patients who only need rescue breaths, so assuming Fran didn’t go from talking to cardiac arrest from an opioid overdose in less than a few seconds, I would have expected Marta to give rescue breaths until the ambulance arrived.

The Resolution:

Towards the end of the movie, we find that the vials were switched already, and in subconsciously recognizing the (real) difference in viscosity between ketorolac and morphine, Marta had actually, tragically, saved his life. This was probably the best use of a nursing concept I’ve ever seen in fiction, the entire central point of the plot hinging on nursing intuition.

Kudos, writers, kudos.

[melforbes]

seaglass blue annotations

hello! i just posted the last chapter and thought i’d put together some ~fun context~ for that fic. it got way way more attention than i ever expected and for something i feel i didn’t put that much effort into i think i did in the end put a lot of effort into it so i might as well talk about it and answer some potential questions.

my favorite book of all time is the sunlit night by rebecca dinerstein (yes, that one) and something i find really compelling about that book is how sparing the prose is, forcing the reader to fill in certain gaps, and i think having to fill in those gaps makes the book a really acquired taste with which either you love it or hate it and there’s not really an in-between

i also really adore how in that book the natural world backdrop comes to life, something i find really challenging to write. recently i even read into thin air, the book about the 1996 mount everest disaster, and even though the writing was superb, i still had to google what the hillary step was because i couldn’t picture it on my own. i don’t know how people write nature because to me it feels damn near impossible, but this sparing approach really worked, so i thought i might try it out. i tend to be longwinded (gestures vaguely at this post) and wanted to have certain parts of this be a lot smaller and more contained without negating impact. whether or not i made it work is anyone’s guess. definitely not my normal style, so to speak

based on the comments i’ve received i think this might be everyone’s favorite part. in my mind age of consent by new order was playing in the background. in pretty much every fic i have a scene like this one and all of them are based on the poem first base gold by rh*annon mcg*vin from her book branches (censored because she has a tumblr and i don’t want her seeing this haha)

i absolutely can’t do the poem justice by describing what it’s about, but the simplest, most basic interpretation of the poem is that there is no better place to kiss than right here, right now, because of the past. i really like that imagery and tend to use it a lot. she as a writer has been a big inspiration for me and if you’ve read my fic true minds i should add that the nonfiction inspiration for that was directly as a result of one of her youtube videos. i particularly love how the last paragraph (stanza? im not a poet) is one big run-on sentence that’s jovial and tongue-in-cheek and colloquial and straightforward. it feels triumphant in a quiet way to me and i love how it’s done. obviously my attempts at something similar are nowhere near as insightful, but still, the most basic image of this is that there is no better place to kiss, and that’s how i felt about the two of them finding pudding in the supermarket

this part is autobiographical; while writing this last year, i went through six months of intravenous drug treatment, a month and a half of which involved long days of doctor visits on every weekday. when you’re on stuff like that for a long time you end up with a central line for better access (potential plot hole in all of this: scully never had one) but for a month and a half i got poked almost every day and strangely enough it got harder over time. the first couple you never feel, but a week or two later you start flinching, and if the needle goes in the same vein each time, it hurts the more it gets prodded. i reached a point toward the end of the in-office visits in which i would bleed a lot every time i got poked, and i can’t watch anything like that happen to me so i was looking away each time, and when i felt that the nurse was done, i would look back over, and sometimes i would be looking down at a pool of blood that i hadn’t expected to see. it’s weird, you don’t actually feel yourself bleeding, i would’ve expected a hot bloody feeling but instead it felt like nothing. and when i say a pool i mean that it would drip down beneath my elbow, stain the sheet they’d put underneath, and i wouldn’t get all of it off until i showered. i didn’t necessarily find it scary, but it was surreal and kind of pulled me out of normalizing the experience i was having. for a very long time needing iv drugs was my greatest fear and i was surrounded by that then and fine, and then, there was blood all over my arm, and like, haha, this is actually not fine. you’d think something else would’ve been scarier, but it wasn’t. and now looking back at this paragraph i wish i’d edited it differently but hey that’s life

i’d never really understood the purpose of religion as a self-driven part of life until i took anatomy in college. i was raised catholic and though culturally i understand having a religion and being raised with one, i’ve never really reached for religion when i wanted answers, and i haven’t personally understood why that’s someone’s first option. and i know there’s been plenty of commentary on the hypocrisy of dana scully as a catholic who believes in science, yada yada yada, i think everyone has read all of that by now. but what struck me while learning anatomy is that there is a kind of neuron we don’t know the function of. there are four kinds of neurons, and one of them is still a mystery to us. and then, there’s all of these different parts of human bodies that exist in a certain perfect way, but why do they exist like that? to support life, yes, but why is it that we can make comparisons? why were irises not the same color? and we name valves of the heart after religious figures. we are so hell-bent on meaning that something literal will never be enough. and all of that made me think that dana scully has god to fill in what science won’t answer, at least not yet. and there’s definitely a bigger conversation about science as denial of indigenous cultures that i am nowhere near qualified to start. after taking those classes, i think i would be more shocked if she wasn’t religious. you can ignore pretty much all of the paragraph above but it was important to me that at some point in this fic she willingly conceded that she didn’t know what would happen and that she didn’t have answers. with illness, there is no logic, there’s no thinking your way out of it, and i think that would plague her for a long time. to me, she only would accept her death when she could say she had no idea what would happen, she has no answers, there’s nothing filling in her gaps anymore, and she’s comfortable with that. and i put all of that in a paragraph about my thoughts on god because it made sense to me. there are times that just feel like you’re in a movie and there’s no one else you can say caused them. it’s not enough to build belief on but it’s enough to bring a certain kind of wonder. also one time my parents insisted on watching stripes because it was so funny and when watching it none of us found it funny at all and my parents grimaced and were like what were we on that made that good back in the day so that’s in here now haha

and now, the biggest question: does she die at the end? when i came up with the idea for this fic, i knew the beginning and ending but not the middle, and i posted this as a smaller project (ie: chapters below 3,000 words) while illness made my bigger projects harder to work on and essentially flew by the seat of my pants the whole time. i wrote the last line a long long time ago and have always seen the ending as written as the concrete ending. when i started writing this, i never intended for there to be a definitive answer to whether or not she dies. i like premature endings (the ending of girls burn brighter comes to mind) and i think that this works better without saying whether or not she lives. and i also have a hard time with giving a definitive answer because this fic very much is about death and having her die would, of course, be traumatic, but showing her living instead i think ruins any takeaways people could have. i’ve never had cancer but as a chronically ill person i think i can speak to how you never actually win with illness; the best you can do is tie, and sometimes, no matter how much effort you put in, you “lose” anyway, you lose spectacularly, and all of your effort was for nothing. i wholeheartedly believe that humans can’t emotionally or logically process natural disasters or illness, hence why much of the talk about illness in this is from mulder’s perspective as he experiences her terminal illness secondhand; that way, he doesn’t need to (but still likely will) find logic or reason or meaning for death from a terminal illness, so his discoveries and his coping mechanisms aren’t as urgently needed. had i written a chapter that describes how she lives, i think that the discussion of death in this would be voided altogether. and i also don’t believe the ending would be much different whether she lives or dies; there’s still the need for death acceptance and talking about dying, whether or not she lives, and none of the story in this fic would have happened had the characters known she would live. the whole point is not knowing.

for a little while i toyed with writing an unofficial sequel of sorts in which i spelled out what i think happens after the ending, but after realizing that that would end up being longer than the original fic and would also have some massive plot holes, i decided against it. i do have my own version and i don’t want to share that version because i never really intended for my version to be some kind of genuine sequel in which every question gets answered and everything is wrapped up and happy ever after and whatnot. it was just where my brain wandered in the same way it wanders when i watch an open-ended movie. all of that to say, if you think she lives, then she lives. if you think she dies, then she dies. it’s your decision. i’d much rather you choose than me. i never marked this as “major character” death on ao3 because, well, she doesn’t die in this fic. whether or not she dies after the fic ends, that’s for you to decide. 

thank you for taking the time to read my writing. i never expected this to blow up (it blew up for me at least, for a while it was my most popular fic ever, with i think thousands more hits than anything else i’d written) and the response has been mind-boggling and wonderful. i don’t respond to comments often because it makes me feel like a pompous jerk (”thank you for enjoying this! i, too, enjoy this thing i have written! oh ho ho!” is how it sounds to me in my head, whereas when other writers respond to comments to me it just looks like thanks man have a good day, feel free to call me a weenie) but i’ve appreciated all of them very much. THANK YOU! i hope your new year is a Whole Lot Less Shit than 2020. i don’t plan on writing more msr because i don’t really have any ideas for them. thank you for making my last time special <3

[red-elric]

so ive read fruits basket like twenty times, and over the last couple of years i noticed that, each time, i was drawn more and more to the characters of kimi and momiji, and identified with them in a way that was really confusing to me because i didnt really think i *actually* had a very similar personality to either of them? (discord friends may disagree but, well, this whole post is going to be about people and characters who change up their personality to be more likable.) i got all introspective about it and finally came to a conclusion about their characters that i subconsciously knew already: the key similarity between the two of them and myself is the way we very carefully layer subtle personality masks for ourselves to protect ourselves and to seem more approachable and likable without actually being vulnerable to other people. (other characters in furuba do this a lot too--key examples that come to mind are tohru, kagura, and yuki--but i care more about momiji and kimi so this is about them.)

to clarify a bit what i mean by this, ill start with a personal example. ive always been pretty good at remembering people’s names, especially if i think theyre cool and want to become friends with them, but i noticed around middle school or high school that people subconsciously find it intimidating/stalkerish if you know their name and they cant remember yours, especially if youve only met once. on the other hand, if they *do* remember your name, and you admit to not remembering theirs, they feel empowered and sympathetic to your situation; and if neither of you remember the other’s name, you have a moment of solidarity that can lead to a more relaxed relationship. so, i started pretending to have a manageable amount of trouble remembering the names of people i wanted to be friends with. the first two or three times that i meet someone, at some point i will use “clarifying their name” as a conversation starter, ie: “you’re....[], right?” or “is it []?” this is a small effect of a pattern of behavior i tend to follow: feigning incompetence to gain trust and camaraderie. is it manipulative? absolutely, but harmlessly so. its directly derived from my own social anxieties, but its a relatively healthy way to feel more connected with my peers and to stop feeling ostracized by people who resent me for being “smarter” than them--something i struggled with a lot in my youth. momiji and kimi dont put up the *same* masks as myself, but they are both rather adept at maintaining their own masks, and are both incredibly socially perceptive in the same way that i am: they analyze people’s reactions to their behavior and sculpt themselves to get the reaction they want.

lets take a look at what this means for kimi. surface level, kimi seems pretty cookie cutter--sure, shes a little chaotic, but she fits quite nicely into the femme fatale/dumb blonde trope (even though shes not blonde). but did you know that shes actually at the top of her class? its subtle, but to me its always been obvious that shes actually incredibly intelligent and constantly manipulating people to suit her needs. there are easy examples of this, of course: flirting with a teacher to get a new whiteboard, anyone? but there’s one scene that’s always spoken volumes to me about her character, and that’s the one-off joke where kakeru starts to say some “secret” about her, clearly joking, and she immediately shuts him down by cutting him off with “don’t say unnecessary things!” and elbowing him in the side, all while still smiling cheerfully. the subtlety of this is that, with her reaction, she’s actually imitating their audience: yuki. it’s yuki she doesn’t want to know about whatever kakeru knows, so she shuts down kakeru in a way we’ve seen yuki yell at kakeru whenever kakeru makes idiotic jokes. the physical attack, the angry smile, accusing kakeru of saying something annoying, but that doesnt really matter; none of these are particularly characteristic to kimi, she causes as much chaos as kakeru on a good day, but they’re incredibly recognizable to yuki. her reaction is familiar to yuki, and it invokes an assumption that kakeru is making a lame joke, not trying to reveal one of her deepest, darkest secrets, and it works because yuki would react completely differently if kakeru tried to tell someone about *his* secrets. yuki doesnt pursue the subject further, kakeru bounces back easily and doesnt give it a second thought, and kimi is safe. so, we can tentatively say that kimi has a habit of reflecting other’s expectations to hide her true self.

now, is this one scene enough on its own to prove this idea? of course not. however, when we view her actions as a whole we start to see a pattern. we see several instances where kakeru will say something stupid and kimi will listen, encourage it, or say something just as stupid back; it’s only when he tries to reveal something about *her* that she shuts him down. we see subtle signs of genuine anger when he tries to reveal her secret: the overly violent jab, the tensed vein/angry eyebrows, etc--not very characteristic for happy-go-lucky, flirtatious kimi. and, of course, we have several examples of how she manipulates a) men into buying things for her, granting her favors, leaving their girlfriends for her, etc; and b) women into feeling inferior to her, feeling aggravated with her, and thinking she’s incredibly troublesome but knowing that they can’t argue with the men about it. overall, its not a far stretch at all to think she’s manipulating everyone around her to avoid revealing information about her true self: a proud, intelligent woman who enjoys causing chaos, but is also very manipulative and controlling to the people around her and hates being vulnerable.

momiji is in some ways similar, and in other ways very very different. most people--especially characters in the story with him--tend to put momiji in this “sweet, innocent child” box. it’s not just his height--his fashion, mannerisms, outlook on life, etc are all very reminiscent of someone much younger than he is, and people tend to *treat* him like he’s much younger than he is. even if they know intellectually that yes, momiji is significantly older than he appears, it’s very easy for the older sohmas to treat him as a troublesome but still loved younger sibling--someone to be taken care of, not taken too seriously, someone lovable. i’ve seen several people point out that part of *why* momiji does this is because he subconsciously feels that hes not allowed to act like an older sibling (to momo), so he acts as a younger sibling in an effort to get a similar sort of familial bond without overstepping the boundaries that his family instilled in his mind, and i agree. i believe momiji has a habit of feigning youth to more easily bond with the people he loves. his childish actions and behavior make him easier to deal with, and also give him a little more leeway to do things that would normally frowned upon if he appeared older, ex: sleeping in a bed with tohru, wearing a girl’s uniform top to school, taking any chance he can get to be physically affectionate with people, indulging in sweets and candy, etc.

two things draw momiji’s true personality out of its shell: his growth spurt, forcing people to acknowledge his actual age, and the breaking of his curse. late game momiji, to me, has always seemed bitter, tired, and sarcastic, as opposed to the sweet, energetic, and sincere front he’d put on for most of the series, which is very interesting to me. of course, you’d normally *expect* someone who’s gone through as much as momiji to *be* bitter, tired, sarcastic, etc; however, when he puts his child-like mask on, it’s easy to pretend that he’s this loving, saintly child who bears no ill will towards anyone, who can be knocked to hell and back and still stand back up to smile again. and i do think it’s true that momiji has an incredible capacity for forgiveness and love, but there’s also no denying that he has a limit, and we can see that during his first conversation with akito after his curse breaks. this, i think, is the most raw, true representation of momiji in the whole story; momiji has lost his link with the family he made for himself in the zodiac, he’s been physically forced to grow out of his persona, he’s finally seeing that his primary abuser is really not so powerful after all, and he’s forced to finally confront the fact that, while his curse, the thing that caused most of the troubles in his life, is broken, the impacts it already had on his life won’t magically go away. momiji in this scene seems completely disconnected from akito, who is still caught up in the curse, still desperately trying to hold everything together; in his lowest moment, we can finally see momiji, not as an all-forgiving saint, but as someone who just wants to start over. he’s not happy that his curse ended; id even go as far to say that momiji, out of every zodiac, is the one who most wishes it was still around, for the bond that it gave him with the other zodiacs and as something he could pin the blame on for his family struggles. which is why it is so sad to me that his was among the first to break.

now, yall probably know by now that i am a momimi bitch, so lets talk about them together. most of the people i see shipping them--and i fully admit, this is how i started shipping them--simply just say “same energy,” make a few cute headcanons about how they’d use each other for clout, and call it a day. this is perfectly fine. however, here at Overthinking It Inc., we take it a few steps deeper. personally, i have a hard time getting invested in a ship unless i can see how the characters compliment each other, how they help each other grow, and how they could genuinely enjoy each other’s company enough to pursue a romantic relationship. it took a little bit of obsessive extrapolating, but ive finally figured out just *how well* momiji and kimi compliment each other.

momiji, at the end of furuba, is going through a metamorphosis. he’s been forced out of his childish persona and into the life of an adult rather quickly, and he takes the opportunity to try to become more true to himself. we can see, in the last few chapters, the beginnings of bounds of growth; however, i imagine that there is a significant “awkward” period in his growth. judging from what i know about his character, i believe he would, in his effort to be more honest and confident, overcompensate a bit; he would become overbearing, intense, perhaps even oversharing. he might have a tendency to try to figure out what’s “wrong” with his friends and family, might always be trying to “fix” everything. i could easily see him, in fact, develop a bit of a selfish attitude (albeit rooted in kindness--it is, after all, still momiji); in his journey to stop letting people walk all over them, i believe he might become prone to walking over people himself. he’d have no idea where the lines are, where someone’s limits are, because he never had the chance to test them out in his youth, and because the people in power in his life (his parents and akito) never respected anyone else’s limits. enter kimi: tough, walled off, and incredibly secretive, though she tries to hide it. momiji, with his social perceptiveness, would notice at some point how difficult it is for her to form genuine, emotional connections with others, and would feel the urge to help her, to draw her out of her shell, not realizing that she doesnt necessarily want to be understood, nor that she’s (now entering headcanon territory, be warned) *scared* of those kinds of relationships. she’d take it, for a while, but there would come a time when she’d snap. this would do wonders for helping momiji figure out where the boundaries are, and how to be more aware of other people’s wants and needs (and it is something that tohru, reserved little wallflower that she is, would never be able to do for him).

kimi, on the other hand, has not quite started developing her character at the end of the manga. i like to apply all sorts of believable anxieties onto her: maybe she regrets not having an easy connection with other girls, like she does with boys. maybe she refuses to believe in the familial structure (that momiji idolizes). maybe she’s so used to playing the part of the homewrecker that, when she finally realizes that she’s found something or someone she truly loves, she doesn’t know how to handle it, and always worries that somebody’s going to take it away for her. maybe she views connections with others, or vulnerability, as a weakness, something that could be used against her, and tries to do everything she can to wall people off and hide her true feelings. well, good news for her, momiji is the resident king of loving family structures. family is something he truly loves and understands, from how much he’s admired it from afar, and been grateful for the family he’s made for himself in hatori, tohru, and the other zodiac. he’s well primed to help her understand what a true family is like, that real love is a good thing, not a scary thing, and that it’s okay to be vulnerable sometimes. this big, sweethearted doofus who somehow managed to see how much she was struggling under the many layers of masks that she hides beneath? there’s no way kimi wouldnt fall for him. and she, this girl who challenges everything he believes in, teaches him valuable lessons about how far is too far, and is basically the most fun person he’s ever met? there’s no way momiji wouldn’t fall for her.

i believe the two of them would start things off as almost a play; theyd portray a satire of the ideal male and female celebrity couple rather easily; theyd lean into the standard boy and girl roles almost ridiculously so, drawing attention to the absurdity of the standard relationship and somehow flirting through it. kimi, as we know, likes to pretend to be this helpless, flirtatious, “i couldnt possibly do anything on my own, oh whatever shall i do O3O” caricature of the feminine “ideal” to draw men in; momiji, i feel, would respond to that with a dorky, happy-go-lucky, “i can help you with that, miss ; )” caricature of the masculine, “ideal” gentleman, just for fun. theyd put on a show, for each other, for their peers, and for themselves, but they would eventually run into some troubles (detailed above). things would be tense, but theyd keep up their personas--why would they *ever* admit to their flaws to the outside world, theyre perfect? their friends would notice, of course, but wouldnt be able to do much about it; in the end, the only people perceptive enough to read through the bullshit of one is the other. theyd come to an understanding--spoken or unspoken (with the subtleties of their relationship, its not unreasonable that they could change their entire perspective of their relationship with just actions, not direct words or conversation)--and shift back into their previous, flirtatious relationship, except its different this time. because now, they understand each other, they love each other, theyre practically reading the other’s mind, and theyre perfectly in tune. rather than putting on masks to hide from each other, they wear one together to hide from the world--but, they think, that’s probably enough.

[tcfkag]

Spoonie Life: My Last Week (fun with complications)

So, I’m having a really rough week. It feels like literally the second I get a break from one thing or a handle on another, then another thing pops up. I never get a break and it is exhausting. And sometimes it just makes you feel so alone because even those that support you - and I have a hugely supportive community of people in my life - just can’t understand. I’ve been feeling increasingly depressed and anxious and alone and my therapist does not have any availability to see me...possibly for months. So I wanted to just write up everything I’m going through because sometimes that helps but also because hopefully some of you may have gone through some similar things (esp. blood clots and ovarian cysts) and could give advice and/or just support. 

Here’s a (not so) short summary of shit that’s been going on lately (in list form because why not). Don’t feel like you have to read it all. I know everyone has their own things going on. But I just needed somewhere to vent and while I shared some of this on FB, I also feel freer to be honest and just fully disclose how hard this is for me here. Sometimes that’s one good thing about this hell site - less reason to self-censor and try to sound positive/hopeful/happy when I really truly am not.

Last Monday (the 15th), I finally finished three months of IV antibiotics I was on for an intra-abdominal abscess (an infected collection of fluid that was right underneath my diaphragm which meant that, for a while, it hurt to even take a breath). 

Good news right? Stopped it about a week ago which is awesome because the antibiotics were infused two hours x three times a day (i.e. six f*cking hours a day that I was connected to an IV bag).

But, I knew I would need a follow-up CT scan that was scheduled for this past Wednesday....and who knew what that would show.

Towards the end of last week, I started feeling very tired all the time. And then my physical stamina just suddenly....decompensated abruptly. I would get tired doing anything. Monotasker and I went to the grocery store and halfway through, I had to sit down (or risk passing out). After a few minutes, I told him “we need to get out of here” so we rushed through the rest of the basics we needed. And then while he checked out, I sat on a bench near-by. My heart was racing, I was out of breath, I was dizzy and light-headed, and just generally felt like I had run a 5K. 

The first couple times this happened I thought “well, maybe I’m out of shape, I *haven’t* been working out at ALL lately. But then I remembered, it was what - a week ago that I attended NYCC where sure, I got tired sometimes and had to sit down once in a while, but it was nothing like this. And I knew that fitness doesn’t decompensate like that....it’s sad that when confronted with such a serious health issue that my first reaction was to just....blame myself. Right away.

So last Sunday (a little over a week ago), I went into the ER to get checked out. I hoped it was something SIMPLE, like dehydration or maybe my anemia had gotten worse or low levels of some kind of electrolyte imbalance. Anything that could be handled in a single evening. Three guesses about whether that was really the problem (though if you’ve followed me for more than a hot minute, I’m sure you know that the right answer is...because of course, NOTHING is ever simple).

At the ER, they decided to do the CT scan I was supposed to have that Wednesday just to make sure there wasn’t anything they were missing. And while the abscess they had been treating was largely unchanged (so they are going to stop the antibiotics), they also found that I had a blood clot in my pelvis. This is my third blood clot but the other two (a DVT in 2008 and a PE in 2015) were both post-surgical. This is my first blood clot that happened “spontaneously”. The admitted me to the hospital for about 48 hours and put me on a heparin drip until they could get a blood thinner arranged to release me and send me home. 

A few observations and factoids about blood clots and their treatment for those who are interested.

People with Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis (i.e. IBD) are more prone to blood clots. If you have IBD (or any autoimmune disease actually), you should be aware of this risk and know the signs of blood clots (esp. after surgery) and make sure to take preventative measures like standing up to walk around on long flights.

 Traditionally, blood clots were treated with the blood thinner warfarin (Coumadin is its brand name). It takes a few days to get to the correct level in your blood, so you have to be on injections of another blood thinner Lovenox (twice a day, at home, injected yourself) until your “INR” reaches the right level in your blood. While on warfarin you have to have regular bloodwork to check your INR - every few days at first, then weekly, and if you’re on it long term the tests become less common.

This is very challenging for me - after ALL the health issues I’ve had, my veins are completely shot. Even basic blood work is a challenge.

There is a newer genre of blood thinners out there called DACOs - you’ve probably heard of them (they include Xarelto and Elliquis) which are better for a couple reasons, I guess, but the main one for me is the lack of required blood thinners. Three guesses on whether my health insurance approved them? NOPE. They sent me into pre-authorization hell (which frequently means “nope never going to happen” but in this case I hope means “well if your doctor pushes hard enough, we’ll give in eventually).

Question: has anyone gotten one of the DACOs approved? Is there anything specific that you had to prove? How did it end up working out?

If you are someone who menstruates, just be aware - going on a blood thinner can cause your period to start early (mine started less than two days after starting them - at least a week or two early) AND it will make your period longer and heavier. 

P.S. - the GYN I saw yesterday said that Xarelto would make that even worse which leads into a later part of this post, but basically she said it was really important that I get my IUD replaced if I was going to be on Xarelto long term.

Since this is my third blood clot, it may mean that I will have to be on blood thinners permanently, which I’m not looking forward to AT ALL. Because really, do I need another medical complication? The answer is no. No, I do not. WHICH MAKES THE NEXT PART OF THIS POST IRONIC.

So this is the part of the post that I could actually use some advice on. 

So for a while, maybe as long as a year, every CT or MRI I’ve had has included a note from the radiologist saying that a benign ovarian cyst was seen on the scan (or sometimes it was called an “inclusive cyst” from the ovary into the peritoneal area. It would sometimes “recommend follow up with a GYN”. Okay....fair enough.

When I asked my GI and my PCP about it a long while ago (maybe even two years ago), they both sort of just said “sure you should see an OB-GYN about that at some point” but really didn’t follow-up on it. And then time passed because I had a LOT of other health issues that took precedence.

Sometime nine-months to a year ago, I started having pain in the area where my rectum used to be, especially when I was sitting at my desk at work. There were days it was so bad that I could not sit directly on my butt at all and had to constantly find different positions. And on those days, I would frequently also have pretty severe pain in my pelvis. For months I basically ignored it...again, I have chronic pain and I had bigger fish to fry. Again, it got put on the back burner. Until one day it was so painful I was crying at work. So I called my PCP who also called my GI and he looked at my scan and said “it’s probably that cyst, you should see a GYN....” Still no urgency (and my PCP even said “I don’t know i it’s that - sometimes doctors like to blame cysts when they just don’t know what else is wrong.”) Again and again, this cyst was acknowledged but treated as no big deal - a nuisance to be dealt with eventually.

Side note: at no point in this did my PCP or my GI bother to ask me about pain with sex, despite that being a somewhat obvious question.

So nine months ago (or so), my PCP finally did get me a referral to see someone in the minimally invasive surgical OB-GYN office. I called to make that appointment and was told “you cannot see a surgeon until you’ve seen one of the GYNs” so I got an appointment for several months later with a GYN in the office. 

Then, I had to cancel two different appointments with her because I kept being sick and/or in the hospital...and of course, each new appointment was two-three months later. 

So my appointment with the GYN (who was lovely) was yesterday. She told me that my cyst (which is in both the ovary and the peritoneum) is now the size of a GRAPEFRUIT! It is almost certainly to blame for the pain I get sometimes in my (former) rectal area and the pain I have when I have sex. She said that even if it’s “benign”, if it’s symptomatic like this, I shouldn’t have to live that way. For the first time, I had a doctor who I felt like was taking this issue seriously even though it wasn’t related to my IBD and was “just” a lady issue. (Though to be fair to my PCP, she has taken it seriously in the past, but it’s just not her specialty).

This GYN also said she’d be willing to take me to the procedure room and sedate me to put an IUD in, whether I have surgery or not because I had such a bad experience getting it last time!!! I really loved that she took my concerns about that seriously. Bless her.

So the (very extended) upshot is that I made an appointment with the minimally invasive surgeon who I was supposed to see SIX-NINE months ago (who, amazingly enough, had an appointment available MONDAY) and I may need to have another surgery to take care of this cyst. This cyst that wasn’t always the size of a grapefruit....but years of being told that it was benign, to “check it out” eventually, and having all of my other health needs take precedence has now left me here. With a huge cyst that has ruined my sex life and is starting to seriously impact my everyday life too.

TL;DR? I have TERRIBLE LUCK. ESPECIALLY this week. And I’m just feeling absolutely overwhelmed, lonely, and frustrated. And if you’ve had experience having surgery for an ovarian cyst, especially one that’s “including” on something outside the ovary, I’d really appreciate your thoughts on the procedure and whether it helped and was worth it.

[siverwrites]

Press Start Letter

AO3: Siver

There are some pretty big groups here, so I’ll try to keep things short. Prompts are just possible starters. As long as the DNWs are avoided it’s all good! Really can’t go wrong taking anything from my Likes list. A lot of found family vibes happening in this batch so anything in that vein in particular is great.

All requests are for fic or art. Art: Interactions of some sort: emoting at each other, talking, sharing some activity, taking a walk, hugs are always welcome, soft things, whatever suits the pair/group

Likes: fluff, hurt/comfort, comfort, missing scenes, friendships, long-term friendships, close relationships of any sort whether romantic or platonic, familial bonds, found family, sickfic, AUs, fandom crossovers or fusions, angst with a happy end, bonding, cuddling/hugs/holding, banter, mutual care and support, emotional bonding, loyalty, pre-canon, post-canon, reuniting, slice of life

DNW: NSFW, non-con, dub-con, underage relationships, unrequested ships, infidelity

Ghost Trick

I love this game, its characters and pretty much everything about it, so whatever you want to do will be great I am sure. New timeline mysteries and missing memories are always welcome where it makes sense. Alternate timelines and what-ifs are cool to explore. Fluff, comfort, family found or otherwise and friendships are always a go. Any combination of these characters is more than welcome too!

Alma & Emma: Friends! Mom-friends? Knew each other before the girls were born? Is Alma Emma’s beta-reader?Is a certain detective husband merely a great inspiration and Alma is endlessly amused?

Alma & Sissel: That cat is Strange shenanigans. Alternatively Alma knows and teamup times of any sort! Or just some good old comfy cat times

Cabanela & Jowd: Close friends (or more), partners. Determination and loyalty. Really can’t go wrong with anything and these two. Case fic? Just time spent together? Mutual insufferability? Nothing like it!

Cabanela & Kamila: Best weird cool uncle! Best cool niece (whether kids are a what do situation for Cabs or not). How do they spend time together? How does he spoil her rotten?

Cabanela & Missile: Loyalty to the max--of course they get along. Anything cute/fun for these is welcome. Dog snuggles! Dance lessons! Rookie Detective Missile is on the case bark bark!

Cabanela & Pigeon Man: I’m always down for anything during the year they worked together. Alternatively what the heck might pull them together in post-game?

Cabanela/Jowd: No infidelity please. So, this could be a no-reset scenario, something during the game events–ch.9 and ch.15 stuff is always great. Or on a less angsty route, it is the ot3 or some kind of happy V. but Alma’s simply not involved if they’re at work, she’s at work, or a trip or she’s on a trip, etc, so the focus is on their end.  Fluff, bonding, banter, travel, domestic stuff, on-the-job antics either at the station or out on a case.

Cabanela/Jowd/Alma: Post-game. All the polyamory fluff! Domestic fluff, travel fluff, vacation fluff, road trip, picnics, beach trips, train trip? etc. Go for a date whatever a date might entail for these three. Hugs, snuggles, and love.  Light angst is fine too, as long as they get a happy end.

Jowd & Lynne & Memry: Detective group/mentor shenanigans. Likely chicken.

Jowd & Pigeon Man: Old friends. Anything from their past working together, or new timeline working together! Jowd’s gotten strange. There’s a meteorite. PM is intrigued.

Jowd & Sissel: Detective and Ghost Cat. Working together!

Kamila & Amelie: Anything friendship is good. Current ages or future fic/art when they’re older!

Lynne & Memry, Lynne/Memry: The Odd Girls working together drawing all the oddest cases!

Pigeon Man & Blue Doctor: Who is the Blue Doctor. How long has he been around? How might they meet and what do think of each other?

Rindge & Lynne & Memry: Odd Girls + trying-to-be-normal Rindge in an odd world. Contrasts! Clashing ways of working that manage to work!

Sissel & Missile & Lovey-Dove: The animals just hanging out doing animal things. The animals getting on a mission of their own?

Cabanela: Anything Cabanela being his sparkly determined Cabanela self. Something during his five years goal? Day to day life? A hobby? Post-game fun times? Just. Cabanela.

Crossover settings are cool too. Some other settings that I like born of Discord Talks:

FFVI: Half esper Sissel? Magic infused Cabanela with the Empire working in secret? Jowd suplexing a train? Returner Lynne somewhere back there? General Final Fantasy VI shenanigans with these characters. World of Balance? Reunions in the World of Ruin? Opera Cabanela. More info here https://archiveofourown.org/series/1169099 or here: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1196335 or here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16407494

Ivalice: Viera Cabanela! Nu Mou (Tactics Nu Mou specifically) Jowd and family! Anything here. I am more familiar with Tactics versions but anything goes. Fluff? Intrigue? Mist frenzied Cabanela and after effects–maybe the first time Jowd’s seen this happen, and particularly startling from the usually controlled Cabanela who relies more on magic?

FFX: Summoner Jowd, devoted guardian Cabanela who hates this whole process, but isn’t about to leave Jowd. Something during the journey? Something with Yunalesca? Even shortly after it’s all over but they have this new world and old scars to contend with?

Crystal Chronicles: No idea what races they’d be but if there’s something fun to be had here, fly at it. Lilty Jowd? Yuke Cabanela (got that tall bird thing going)? Something more fitting? Something something miasma, something crystals. A moment in their caravan journey?

Trails Series: The cast in Zemuria! Dominion Cabanela undercover in Arc-en-Ciel. What might his stigma be? Knight Alma of the Gralsritter assigned with Cabanela. Crossbell Chief of Police of Jowd separated from Alma some years previously to some disaster (like the manifestation of Cabanela’s stigma) and doesn’t know the other two are alive, along with his daughter Kamila who’s learning all she can about orbal tech. Reuniting! Hermit Pigeon Man orbal scientist and contact for Jowd? Is Lynne a Detective under Jowd or a Bracer? What of Memry? Other ideas entirely!

Trails in the Sky | Sora no Kiseki

Anything in any of the three Sky games or something in between them. Missing scenes, scene extensions, travel along the roads, airship travel times, etc. Ample opportunity for anything in the Garden in 3rd. I love these characters, their world, their relationships or potential for.

Estelle Bright & Cassius Bright: Any kind of father-daughter bonding time. Pre-FC, post-SC before she and Joshua set off, post-return to Liberl, anywhere something can fit really.

Estelle Bright & Olivier Lenheim | Olivert Reise Arnor: Estelle is perpetually and understandably exasperated with him, but what about a quieter moment? Parting ways after SC, or some encouragement at some point during SC for Estelle, or Estelle catching Olivier in an off moment (example: like their talk about the dreams from Luciola).

Estelle Bright & Tita Russell: Sisters! Anything showing a sisterly bond is great.

Julia Schwarz & Mueller Vander: They share the same role with drastically different charges. Relate to one another in some respects? Do some training? Commiserate? Encourage through some similar worries for Kloe and Olivier respectively?

Kevin Graham & Ries Argent: Kevin is a dumbass and is lucky Ries is patient for this self-deprecating fool. More seriously anything about their relationship is good during 3rd or post-3rd (nothing that could spoil Cold Steel III or IV please)

Olivier Lenheim | Olivert Reise Arnor: Just Olivier being Olivier during his Liberl travels either when he’s alone or while he’s with the group, whether it’s outrageous Olivier or quiet time Olivier with a hell of a long road ahead of him on this battle he’s chosen.

Kloe Rinz & Julia Schwarz: Beyond their bond as knight and princess I think they love each other platonically. Sisterly? Something showing their close bond. Helping each other out? Julia protects Kloe but Kloe protects her back in turn? Talks of duty but also personal wants?

The Legend of Heroes VII | Zero/Ao no Kiseki

These games hit my found family buttons hard. Anything portraying some kind of relationship among these characters is awesome. Any combination of these characters is more than welcome too!

Elie MacDowell: Explore Elie’s thoughts and feelings on everything that’s happening in Crossbell. What about her personal feelings on the Croises and betrayed by Mariabell? Her feelings on her own standing and what she wants?

Cecil Neues & Ilya Platiere: They’re an odd friendship and both married to their work but they make it work. Anything exploring their friendship or the time while Ilya was hospitalized--hard on both of them in different ways.

Elie MacDowell & Tio Plato & KeA: Girl’s day out! Aidios knows they could use one. Some kind of Mishy involvement is a bonus (or a necessity in Tio’s eyes).

Lloyd Bannings & KeA: Lloyd is the daddest of dads. Lloyd and KeA time of any sort is good.

Lloyd Bannings & Randy Orlando: They’ve both lost family but they can be brothers for each other. Supporting each other

Randy Orlando & Tio Plato: Big brother Randy and little sister Tio? They both lost their childhoods. Something to relate on?

Rixia Mao/Ilya Platiere: While Ilya clearly cares for Rixia, Rixia’s love may be one-sided (for the time being at least, perhaps more in the future?). Rixia’s thoughts and fears while Ilya is hospitalized. Once awake, Ilya’s concerns for what Rixia really wants and her place--she belongs with Arc-en-Ciel and they both know it

Sergei Lou & Alex Dudley: Past working together or connections in current time. Wildly different personalities but Dudley still listens to Sergei. Anything exploring their working relationship, or anything exploring them off the job on break.

Sergei Lou & KeA: Grumpy uncle Sergei cannot resist the charms of KeA. Anything familial (possibly despite himself) between these two.

Shizuku MacLaine & KeA: Let these kids be happy. Give them a good time together.

Wazy Hemisphere & Noel Seeker: The temporary SSS members, outliers that never quite fit the same as our core four. They’re completely different in personality but how might they connect at least for a little while?

Randy Orlando: Always interested in anything exploring Randy’s struggles with home and family and where his place is (the night he runs away included!). He belongs with SSS but it’s hard for him to see. Also appreciate how casino owner Drake looks out for him. He’s cared for even if he can’t always see it!

Trails of Cold Steel | Sen no Kiseki

Following the theme of these games, bonds! Old bonds, new bonds, forming bonds!

Elliot Craig & Fie Claussell: They don’t get much interaction in-game all told, but I have a special soft spot for a budding friendship between them. School days activities or something during the month they (and Machias) spent in the Celdic area between CS I and II?

Fie Clausell & Instructor Beatrix: Fie finding comfort in Beatrix’s presence. Beatrix looking out for her.

Olivier Lenheim | Olivert Reise Arnor & Alfin Reise Arnor & Mueller Vander: Olivier is Too Much. Alfin is Too Much. What is a Mueller to do when he’s got both of them around?

Olivier Lenheim | Olivert Reise Arnor & Alfin Reise Arnor: Alfin is very much Olivier’s sister. Little sister and big brother shenanigans! Or maybe something welcoming him back to Erebonia?

Olivier Lenheim | Olivert Reise Arnor & Mueller Vander, Olivier Lenheim | Olivert Reise Arnor/Mueller Vande:  Gen or romance slant. I’m good with either or one with shades of the other. I enjoy Mueller and Olivier’s closeness and how they contrast each other. Olivier’s more eccentric and flamboyant nature, but also his more serious side. And Mueller’s regular exasperation with him, but also his care for him. Being there for each other. I’m fond of the little things like how Mueller always calls him Olivier even in Erebonia when Olivert’s identity is known and public. Heimdallr fun or trouble (Olivier…). Planning against Osborne. Look after a tired Olivert? Something during the civil war when they’re in the west?

Principal Vandyck & Instructor Beatrix: Both are more than they appear. I loved the Instructor teamup in the last part of CS I and these two have a history. Explore their connection, or reminiscing. Would also be interested in their activities during Trista’s occupation.

Towa Herschel & George Nome & Angelica Rogner: Anything exploring their friendship, or perhaps something during their time as the proto Class VII or their memories of that time in comparison (or contrast) to the new Class VII?

Mueller Vander & Elise Schwarzer: Elise is sliding into a similar role for Alfin as Mueller for Olivier. Maybe he can give her some advice? Or the two stand by while their respective charges/friends are <vague gesture> That. One way or another the siblings are a handful and Mueller and Elise know it (and if forced into honesty wouldn’t have it any other way).

Pyre

Another case of give me all the found family joys. Daily activities while they travel? Post Peaceful revolution activities? (Note: I’m good with any of the _ae options for Vagabond girl for naming purposes)

Big Bertrude & Volfred Sandalwood: I adore their close friendship and that it came about from Bertrude’s unrequited love, but it’s okay, better than okay! Anything between them in their history, or during the Nightwings travels or post revolution would be great.

Big Bertrude & Sir Gilman: Big snakes and little snake. Grump and enthusiast. Awkward mutual (grudging?) respect?

Jodariel & Sir Gilman: Contrasts in everything from personality to size. Something exploring that would be great

Tariq | The Lone Minstrel & Big Bertrude: We don’t see a lot of interaction between them. How do they get along? What stories might they share? An appreciation for music or something to tolerate? What does a day in the blackwagon look like between them?

Tariq | The Lone Minstrel & Sir Gilman: The Moon and the Wyrm. Music and Knighting. Just these two interacting somehow

Vagabond Girl & Jodariel: Jodariel going mom-mode on _ae? Or just a big hug? _ae being far more enthusiastic than Jodi is used to these days?

Vagabond Girl & Sir Gilman: So much energy!

Volfred Sandalwood & Sandra: So much potential for interaction as a reader. And snark. And an unimpressed Sandra. But on some things they can maybe agree...

Volfred Sandalwood/Tariq | The Lone Minstrel: Something gentle for the tree and the moon who somehow fell for him, any time period

Ti'Zo: Imp doing imp things. Anything Ti’zo will make me happy

FFVI

All that travelling time is ripe for more interaction or character exploration. Equally interested in what they might be doing after the world is saved too.

Cayenne Garamonde | Cyan Garamonde (FFVI): Where does Cyan go when the world is saved? What is a new home for Cyan? Alternatively a look at Cyan’s time during the year between the World of Balance and the World of Ruin

Celes Chere (FFVI): Opera Celes! Celes time away from the party after Vector. Celes after the world is saved--what does she do, where does she go?

Edgar Roni Figaro & Setzer Gabbiani: King and Engineer in a mechanical moving castle? Pilot of the only airship? They could have some great talks. Maybe some proposed airship upgrades?

Thank you for anything you do!

[squatlord-draws]

┗┃・ ■ ・┃┛

GOD ITS ABOUT FUCKIN TIME I CLEAR THE DOCKETT

hey everyone how yall been doin lol, been sittin on a lot of these nice messages for a while now

it’s okay take your time

anonymous asked:

I've never had any interest in Star Trek or (sci-fi in general tbh) and I figured I'd probably never watch it but like... Ur undertrek au... It's filling me with Temptation. Also I love love love how you portray Chara. Or well I love how you portray literally everyone tbh you're just amazing holy shit?? I hope you have a nice day

undertrek is such a self indulgent thing and i would absolutely LOSE it if someone started watching ST because of it. i mean let’s be clear here, the original show is such a vastly different beast than the following series’ (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, STD) and im primarily a fan of ToS--though when i started drawing undertrek, i hadnt seen the original series? in retrospect i’d like to go back and change some of the toning, to leave behind the more grounded feel of the post TNG-verse, and do more of the romanticism of ToS

god what a choice fuckin ask, thank you for submittin this

anonymous asked:

Would chara ever actually admit that they actually real love sans and sees him as family?

they see him ...... as a real pain in the ass

anonymous asked:

God I love how smug charas and sans relationship is

they’re the actual best

anonymous asked:

I see charas and sans relationship like rons and aprils in parks and recreation

ron from aprks and rec: rat piss

grabnok-destra asked:

Are Chara and Asriel ever happy? :( I want them to be happy.

i’d say they’re happy a lot, actually

anonymous asked:

I would fight your chara in a darkened alleyway

god you’d fucking win

Anonymous said:

While chara is possessing frisks body where does frisk go?

spectral chuck. e. cheese ball pit

Anonymous said:

You are the squat lord, lord of those who squat

i am no lord. i am only a simple jock. i pump iron like everyone else, one arm at a time, at the same time

Anonymous said:

I'm so split against either having sans and chara get along because they are super similar or them hating each other because the "fuck that stupid ass skeleton" and "haha fuck u too :)))" trope is my favorite

you dont gotta be split . it can be both. you can have it all. we can all have it all

Anonymous said:

I've probably said this a thousand times in my tags but I just??? Love your style so much it brings a smile to my face every time I see it, the way each character looks is just absolutely fantastic and floors me every time, not to mention your oc's are so much fun to look at and I love them? And your humor is always so on point.... thank you so much for sharing ur art with us

OH I LOVE THIS THANK YOU !!! <33333

Anonymous said:

You are one of my favorite undertale blogs ily

thanks i have a comic where sans calls me a horny baby

@georgetheblob​ said:

You're one of my biggest expression inspirations. Your work is all so fun and entertaining and I hope to someday achieve what you do with your work with my own work.

this is so wonderfully kind of you to say ! it always makes me happy to know others enjoy my stuff < 33

Anonymous said:

love your awesome art by the way, alphys, sans is spying on you and gathering science information. trust me.

he’s stealing all your really good kissy cutie headcanons & posting them as if they were his own, the unforgivable bastard

Anonymous said:

God I love your chara they are so true to character it's scary

i was gonna make some kind of stupid joke to deflect how genuinely happy i get when people call my chara writing in character, but i’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time researching different veins of meta & also reading a ton of childhood psychology books, and there’s no amount of deflection that can erase that bizarre aspect of myself

Anonymous said:

I want your chara to brawl with a random pedestrian

good news there’s a guy in an alley that just fucking killed them

Anonymous said:

I always thought your username was squad-lord

what’s a squad to a lord?

Anonymous said:

I really adore your character designs dude. You use strong basic shapes in a way I don't see artists do a whole lot and their personalities (and the way you characterize them in your comics) just comes across so well, I'm a big fan of all of it.

im really glad ! it’s all a learning process and im really tryin to do what i can to have fun, and make (hopefully) good stuff

Anonymous said:

I will always see chara as a lovable shit head till the day I'm lowered in my grave

sans: why have you killed everyone

chara: im just quirky like that

Anonymous said:

Asriel!!! Is!!! A!!!! Good!!! Boy!!!!!

HEY HE’S A GOOD BOY ! I LOVE THAT GOOD GOAT BOY

marv0 said:

you...you talented...

you.... you thank you............

Anonymous said:

I would fight 10 grown men for chara

well there’s a guy in the alley & another guy who’s watching so you could always go fight them

Anonymous said:

Can I just say ur amazing

oh thank you !

Anonymous said:

your art is amazing and i really like it!!! i hope you have a good day/night!!!

Oh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! two really nice ones in a row im diggin it lmao

grabnok-destra said:

Wait...did you ever make a Frisk for your Star Trek stuff?

hell yeah my dude, i love em. love to draw em someday

Anonymous said:

Mmmm those are some good toes squat, nice big ol Toes

i fucking know it’s you sans

@talifu​ said:

Your Chara is the best Chara I've ever seen (Also your expressions give me life)

THANKS I LOVE EM

Anonymous said:

Lord your depiction of Alphys is the absolute greatest no one else captures her quite as well

she’s really fun ! i feel like she’s the one ive improved the most on as far as her visual appeal, my stylization on her face wasnt ... like ... super great for a while there. im really happy with the general look ive got for her, though. she’s also super fun to draw as a ferengi too lmao

grabnok-destra said:

I actually would like to see Adult Frisk again. Maybe harassing Chara and Asriel by making them join family bonding time/doing healthy exercises or some shit. I dunno, you've always drawn Adult Frisk like they're a huge ball of positive energy and I'd like to see more of it.

it’s been awhile since i’ve drawn adult frisk, i just didnt realize that people care all that much ? tbh i dont really care all too much for them ... i like the design and all, but i just think kid frisk is a lot funnier, and i have more fun drawin their amorphous kind of shape anyways. 

im generally pretty insecure about what people think about how undefined all my art decisions are anyways, and adult frisk i always kind of assumed people thought was ... shitty ? maybe a bit too self indulgent ? i dont know. i should draw em again. they got great hair

Anonymous said:

You're a legend, you know that right?

did this ask get sent before or after i tweeted about sans suckin toes

Anonymous said:

I LOVE your Asriel, he is a good boy but also a bit snarky and has some flowey traits still, I love him

asriel as i like to write him is an asriel who wants to believe it was the flower thing that made him such a shit head, but he was always kind of a shit head, the flowey thing just sort of aggregated it

Anonymous said:

sans + blue belly

hey

Anonymous said:

I love how you draw sans as a shoe with a face

please do not ever email me pictures of your shoes because they sound horrifying

Anonymous said:

Can we see more flowey? I missed the edgy piss child

honest to god you are so right . why dont i ever draw him ? he’s literally perfect? he literally did nothing wrong, ever?

Anonymous said:

JESUS SQAUT.,,...every time you post a bunch of happy stuff I know it's a build up to some sads and I'm still never prepared when you post it

it’s like a mob psycho counter w/ posts about horny sans until i post a picture of chara’s horrible corpse bleeding out on the ground

@luptaccos​ said:

Toriel wearing a Snail! Heaven! Now! shirt is the most genius and in-character thing I've ever seen, congratulations I love you

i think probably toriel listens to a LOT of podcasts, and references them constantly.

Anonymous said:

I love the way you portray undertale characters tbh- you're really good at giving them a lot of personality in a simple looking style! Not to mention your take on them in general being A+ :D You've been one of my favorite fanartists since the fandom was young, and even though I'm not particularly active in it anymore myself, I still really enjoy the things you draw!

it’s gonna be like 5 years from now and im still going be drawin flowey sayin “piss” & i really am not going to have a good explanation for anyone for why its like this

thank u tho im glad you like it <3

@hadjiiembercolgatenerdmctillhawk said:

i accidentally misspelled your name as squadlord, is that okay

god there are so many missed connections goin on in my ask box its wild

also hell yah . i think im just essentially squadlord by proxy at this point anyways

Anonymous said:

In loving that spooky eye on the left

i took too long to respond to this so now i dont know what this was in reference to, so now im just, stuck with this eye mystery . eye just dont know what theyre talkin about

@maple-maypole said:

Aahh, your art is awesome. Please don't let that just slide, I mean it. You have one of the most unique and easily recognizable artstyles I've seen in the few years I've spent in The Webz(tm), so alive and stylized but also so grounded and sharp. Your lines are amongst the best I've ever had the joy to look at, they are without a doubt my favorite thing about your art, only coming close those simple and yet so great characters designs and shapes. I could go on and on. Thanks, really. Ur cool.

oh thank you so much !! one of the greatest pleasures ive had in my art up until this point is improving on my linework, and it always means a lot when people say they like it ! it’s so hard being an artist because i always want to draw in the style of other artists, so its always good to know that others like this weirdass style ive got lmao

Anonymous said:

Pom Farr Chara

ch... chara horny ....

actually i cant be all that sarcastic about it b/c star trek really DID just have it be a thing where vulcans gotta fuck or they die, like that’s a goddamn universal fact. chara is technically vulcan so i guess they also gotta fuck or theyll die

god undertrek is such a fucking good au

Anonymous said:

What's the kids favorite music??

chara: bad youtube edits of the hotel mario theme

asriel: paramore, paramore adjacent

frisk: also the hotel mario theme

Anonymous said:

Your glutes must be hella toned o lord of squats

i had pretty major knee surgery over the summer so a lot of my leg muscles atrophied pretty badly, actually :(

i’ve been pretty bummed about that. i’m able to walk now, but the strength still isn’t quite there. i’m at the point where i can get back into weightlifting, though, so i just need to actually sit down & write down my fitness plan for the week. 

i’ll be honest the name squatlord is partially ironic but i’m not kidding about how good, important, and helpful squatting is as an exercise. it really targets those major leg muscles that are vital for just about any physical activity we engage in as humans -- and since my goals are primarily strength training & some amount of bulking, it’s pretty important to have squatting as a major aspect of that training. it’s just been months at this point, though, and getting back into a regular exercise routine is always difficult. it took years for me to even have a schedule at all. totally worth it tho, i fuckin adore bein a full time jock lol

also “squat” is a god damn hilarious word and my domain IS this fuckin leg flexin, i was lyin before, i am absolutely the lord of this horrible sweaty realm, i fucking own these legs & i fucking own these squats

Anonymous said:

I love you're Azzy so much no matter how you draw him

i love him too i always feel so guilty im drawin him in a way people dont like lol ... i just want everyone to love my beautiful goat son, and his beautiful longface

Anonymous said:

i seen your twitter account. I know how deep the horny sans well goes.

[logan-are-you-okay]

Anti’s Backstory part 5

Nurse: “Sir, I need you to calm down so we can check what’s wrong.”

Jack: “No! I want my Dr!”

Nurse: “Then who’s your doctor then?”

Jack: “You just kicked him out of here when I asked! I don’t trust any of you fuckers!”

Jack then starts pulling on his brown hair. The pain was so intense that he keepings trying to hurt himself in other places so he can focus on something less mild.

Nurse: “Sir. You need to take a deep breath so we can put in your IV.”

Jack: “Fuck you!”

He doesn’t mean to be rude, that isn’t the kind of person that he is. But when he is basically feels like he’s getting his leg pulled off, that can cause a little manners to change.

Somehow the nurse... with ten other nurses are able to get Jack’s IV into his arm where the release a drug to help him with the pain so it doesn’t hurt as much anymore. Once he’s finally able to calm down he looks at the nurse how was talking to him.

Jack: “Sorry... I didn’t mean to swear.”

He the proceeds to rub the back of his neck in embarrassment.

Nurse: “It happens all the time. The Dr will come in soon to see what is the problem.

Jack: “Thank you.”

Even though his leg still hurt like hell, he did want to calm down. Acting like that wasn’t something That he liked to do. Even if it was just from the pain.

***

Schneeplstein keeps pacing around in the waiting room. Jacks only been back there for a couple hours, but it feels like an eternity. It was absolute torture to not know what was going on. Why would they just leave him to think of all the bad possibilities that could be happening? Randomly a nurse from the front desk walks over to Schneeplstein.

Nurse: “You’ve been here for quite awhile. Do you want anything to drink or eat?”

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Not really. I just want to know what’s going on so my heart can stop having heart palpitations.”

Nurse raises her eyebrow. She didn’t know if he was joking or not, but that was really weird to just randomly say.

Nurse: “Heart Palpitation?”

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Skipping heart beats. I basically said it because my hearts going time million miles an hour, so it feels like it’s skipping beats.”

Nurse: “Oh, Okay. Is there anyone you need me to check on to see if they’re in stable condition?”

Schneeplstein’s eyes light up. If she could do that, why the hell wouldn’t they just come out and say that he’s fine. God, this hospital needs better protocols.

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Sean McLoughlin.” (I DONT KNOW HOW TO SPELL JACKS LAST NAME)

The nurse goes back to the front desk and types in Jack’s name. Surprisingly, he’s been able to see visitors for the past hour.

Nurse: “He’s stable, you can go back and see him. Room 24-A.”

Without a second thought Schneeplstein runs through the automatic doors to the room the nurse said. He didn’t even say thank you, he was to worried about Jack.

***

Once he gets inside the room, he sees a nurse changing out the IV fluid while Jack was asleep. At least he was able to calm down. Schneeplstein then goes over and sits down in a chair next to Jack’s medical bed. The new nurse notices that he just came in and recognize him almost instantly.

Nurse: “You said you where in the middle of getting your License right?”

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Uh... yeah, Something on those lines, sure.”

Nurse: “Well his broken leg was worse than we thought. There’s a certain medical term that you wouldn’t have learned yet. When the leg broke it ruptured a vein and the blood started to clot and run up to his chest. That was the stinging pain that he felt that went to his spine. Also the bone wasn’t fix back into its original place when it was attempted to reset it. Which confused his brain and heart which sent blood to his lungs.”

Dr. Schneeplstein: “What the fuck!? How on earth does that happen. He was fine until he tried walking around!”

Nurse: “It takes a while for the syptomes to accrue.”

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Is that why he’s wearing a breathing Mask?”

The nurse nods and then leaves after finishing changing Jack’s IV fluid. Schneeplstein then looks over Jack who looks like he’s having a nightmare. To bad they can’t help with that part. He sighs to himself, and decides to grab his phone and take a picture of Jack. Knowing that he had blood in his lungs, means that he’s going to be stuck here for quite awhile. Schneeplstein then uploads the photo to Jack’s twitter and tells them briefly of what happen acting as if he was Jack, and that a friend took the picture while he slept.

Almost instantly people start freaking out and wishing that he’ll get better. That’s one thing Schneeplstein loved about Jack’s community that he created. All the love and support, them never thinking he was just doing it for popularity. Schneep then looks over at the clock hanging on the wall.

7:48 AM.

Wow, time passed a lot faster than he has expected. Since Jack’s asleep there’s no point in him being awake. So he props himself against the chairs and falls asleep.

***

Jack jumps awake from the nightmare he was having. It felt so real, and it didn’t help that the breathing mask felt like it was suffocating him. He makes an attempt to take it off, but Schneeplstein stops him from doing so.

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Don’t take it off Jack! You need it to help you breathe!”

Jack: “I can breathe just fine Schneep, I don’t need this to help me.”

Schneeplstein then makes a very stern look at Jack, which prompts him to keep the mask on.

Dr. Schneeplstein: “I know you made a video about your broken leg, but I posted a picture on twitter saying it. You scared the living daylights out of me you know.”

Jack: “I didn’t CHOOSE to break my leg you know.”

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Whatever, but lots of people are wishing you to get better.”

Jack starts smiling. He hasn’t ever been really Hurt while doing YouTube, so having people send ‘get well’ stuff was amazing. Even all of Twitter was filled with getting better fanwork. It was amazing.

Suddenly a Doctor walks in... they think? He wasn’t wearing the usual uniform that the other doctors were wearing. He had on a long polo shirt, with scruffy gray hair. He then walks over to Jack and takes of the air mask. Instantly earning him an angry Schneeplstein to stand up.

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Hey!”

The Doctor?: “He doesn’t need it anymore, he’s able to breathe fine now.”

Schneeplstein quickly looks over at Jack to make sure he can breathe alright, which thankfully he can. He then looks over at the so called doctor. Schneep May not be licensed, but he knows that, that would not be acceptable.

The possible doctor then sits on the bed next to Jack, which instantly raised some concerns. Doctors where NOT suppose to do that. Jack has a pretty good bullshit detector, and this man was setting it off like wild fire. But he still wanted to be nice.

Jack: “So... what brings you in Doctor?”

Defiantly a doctor that doesn’t look suspicious at ALL: “I just wanted to warn you, not to be as crazy next time you decided to make woopy.”

What the fuck!? Who the hell was this man to assume such a thing, he probably doesn’t know a thing about what happened so he just assumed!? This made Dr. Schneeplstein’s blood boil!

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Excuse me!? How dare you come in here and assume such a thing! We where not having sex Mr. He’s basically my brother and we’re not gay!”

Jack gets startled in surprise. He has never in his life seen Schneeplstein so mad at someone, he was the most down to earth person out of any of them.

Jack: “Woah, Schneep calm down a little bit.”

Not going to lie, Jack didn’t like how the so called doctor assumed. Maybe it’s because Schneep didn’t have a shirt on, or maybe because they where both guys. It doesn’t matter, but Jack still didn’t like the looks of this doctor.

The doctor: “It’s just common sense to me. But, we would like to give you something for the pain you might be experiencing.”

The doctor turns around to pull something out of his pocket.

Jack: “But.... I’m really not feeling any pain right now?”

The doctor then turns back around carrying a injecting kneedle filled with... a glowing green liquid!

Jack: “Oh hell no! Keep that away from me!”

Jack practically throws himself off of the bed away from the doctor. Pulling out his IV from his arm and the heart monitor which made it sound like he flatlined.

Thankfully Schneeplstein caught Jack in his fit of escape so he didn’t hurt his leg anymore. Even though he barley caught his arms. Even though it sent a sting down Jack’s entire body when hisbleg barely hit the floor.

The doctor: “What? It’s just going to help with the pain.”

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Jack what on earth are you doing!?”

Jack might have had very little sleep last night, but he was still able to put two-two together. Even though it was decades ago, this man looked very Similar to what Anti described in his journal. The gray shaggy hair and age range! Also the glowing green liquid isn’t something just to randomly had. Even jack matched the serial kidnappers victims al except the age range. Maybe it was his son who wanted to replicate his father’s legacy?

Jack: “I don’t want to be anywhere near this psycho!”

Even though Schneeplstein didn’t know what was going on, he didn’t want to be anywhere near this dude either.

The doctor rolls his eyes and leaves the room. However as he leaves, he drops a bar code out of his pocket and doesn’t even notice. But, Jack did. Schneeplstein sets Jack back into the medical bed and reattaches everything to where it’s suppose to be and grabs the bar code off the ground. He then inspects it, but he notices Jack becoming relatively antsy as he does.

Dr. Schneeplstein: “Why are you so excited?”

Jack: “Can I see that real quick?”

Schneeplstein shrugs his shoulders and hands it over to Jack who quickly takes a picture of the bar code and it takes him to some weird website. Schneeplstein looks over Jack’s shoulder and gasps at what the first thing that pops up.

Jack: “What the fuck?”

The first that that appears is a picture of Jack from when he dyed his hair back to its original brown color. The whole website was in a green and black, and there was descriptions of him all over. ‘Age, 27. Hair, Brown. Eye Color, Blue.’ There was very personal stuff on him that he didn’t expect to notice. However one thing stood out to him the most. ‘Resembles subject 748-YB. The one subject who was succefulky able to perform all tests on, yet to far of an extreme to which he died and couldn’t reconnect. Tests have yet to be conducted.’

Normally this would be weird on its own, but after reading Anti’s journal, it’s pretty obvious that subject 748-YB was Anti.

(Doesn’t really have much of Anti, but I’m setting up for something)

[genevievedanielle]

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about people being worried about Jon and Daenerys and how their relationship will play out in season 8, but I honestly think there’s nothing to really worry about. For one reason, there has been so much emphasis put into their storyline this season and bringing them together that I just don’t see it blowing up the way people are thinking it’s going to. Everyone on the show this year has been all about this love story and how it’s playing out, writers, press, actors, D&D, directors, and so on. Of course they want us to worry and think there’s going to be drama, it’s a drama series. Knowing what we know from the Alan Taylor interview and what George said about Jon and Daenerys kind of being the whole point, I’m not too worried about Jon and Dany.

“There’s been an inevitability to the two of them coming together. It’s been foreshadowed over and over again, and those who know the books know it’s inevitable, but that doesn’t tell you anything about how it’s going to play out or how it’s going to go. I remember when I was doing Season 1 and we were on location in Malta, and George R. R. Martin came to visit. He was sitting in a chair, and he was being really quite open about things that were to come… but it was early days and nobody was paying attention to the show. We didn’t really know what a phenomenon it was going to be, and I think he was being less guarded than we’ve become since then. Anyways, he alluded to the fact that Jon and Dany were the point, kind of. That, at the time, there was a huge, vast array of characters, and Jon was a lowly, you know, bastard son. So it wasn’t clear to us at the time, but he did sort of say things that made it clear that the meeting and the convergence of Jon and Dany were sort of the point of the series.” - Alan Taylor

For years we’ve had the show and books build up these two characters who are on these parallel journeys. We’ve seen how closely related everything that happens to them is and for them to come together and finally be on this path together, I just don’t see it suddenly forking. Especially when you think about the fact that the two of them just happen to represent ice and fire, which you know, the book series is called ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, so that’s kind of a giveaway. Now, I know there are people who will think, well now that we know Jon is Rhaegar’s son, we know he’s both. Well, yes, he is, but Jon has always identified with the Stark side of himself more, not just because he thought he was a bastard of Ned Stark, but because that’s the element he represents. He was raised in the North, he’s at home in the North, he goes to the wall which is made of ice and protects the realms, he goes beyond the wall and he works with the Freefolk in the North, the Stark family motto is “Winter is Coming”. Daenerys has always been fire, she walked into a funeral pyre and came out unharmed with dragons, she burned the Kahls and came out unharmed, she could withstand heat that others couldn’t like the boiling bath in the first episode, her family motto is “Fire and Blood”. So obviously with that much emphasis on both there has to be a payoff and I can’t see why there would be such an emphasis placed on both their journeys and the similarities if they didn’t have a role to play together. Even lines that are said to them are similar, like when Ygritte says, “You know nothing, Jon Snow”, it always reminds me of Dany’s handmaidens saying to her, “It is known.”

As for the revelation of Jon’s true parentage and the effect that’s going to have, yeah there’s going to be some, but I don’t think it’s not going to be as big an issue as people believe it’s going to be. I think there may be an instant concern on Jon and Dany’s part on the fact that they’ve fallen for each other and now with Jon being the son of Rhaegar and having a claim to the throne how does that effect them. But that being said, I don’t think Jon will suddenly go back on his word to Daenerys. His word is his oath and Jon is very much like Ned in the fact that he’s honourable and keeps his word. That’s why he couldn’t lie to Cersei in the Dragonpit. It would have made everything easier and that much smoother if Jon hadn’t declared his support for Daenerys, but Jon honours his promises and he’s given his word to Dany that he’ll back her claim to the throne. Jon has never desired to be a king, he just wanted to be a part of a family. When he was a child he dreamt of being Lord of Winterfell because that would mean he was a true Stark and not a bastard child. The only reason he became King in The North was because of his desire to help people so when the North elected him he accepted the role and he’s seen that same desire in Daenerys, so there’s no reason for him to suddenly turn on her. I don’t think we have to worry about them being on opposing sides, they know what their priority is right now, the White Walkers, and Jon loves Daenerys and she loves him, I can’t see them being ripped apart, not with the way they’ve been built up.

I think where the drama is going to come in is going to be in Jon’s struggle with who he is, is he Rhaegar’s son or Ned’s. He will obviously come to terms with the fact that yes, he is the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna, but he is also the son of Ned Stark, even though Ned was his uncle, he was raided by Ned and Ned loved him. He is still the brother of Sansa, Arya, and Bran, even though he’s their cousin. He may have been named Aegon Tararyen at his birth, but he’s still Jon Snow. I don’t see him suddenly proclaiming himself to be Aegon Targaryen either, he may go by Jon Targaryen, but who knows. No matter what or who his parents actually are, he’s still a Stark. Lyanna was a Stark, so like Ned told him in the first episode, the same blood runs in his veins. And technically, he’s still the Lord of Winterfell, Robb named him as his heir and the North elected him so that’s not going to suddenly change (at least not in the books, I don’t think the show even mentioned the fact that Jon was named Robb’s heir). I think Dany may wonder if Jon will still support her claim for the throne since he has one himself, and there will probably be characters that try to convince her he will for drama, but I think it’s going to come down to the fact he’s honourable and they’re a good team. Jon’s struggle to understand who he is may put a bump in their relationship (no baby pun intended), but it should resolve quickly. There’s only 6 episodes left, not a lot of time to get caught up on stuff like that. They’ll most likely end up ruling together because they’re in love with each other and they are stronger together.

For all the people who keep pointing out that it’s incest, yes, by our standards and in our world it is, but Game of Thrones is a fantasy series set in a fictional world that operates with different social norms and customs than ours. On top of that the show is also based on some historical events from our world and historically, especially in royal families, there were aunts and uncles married to nephews and nieces. There are tons of examples and here are just a few; 

Philipp II married Anna of Austria, the daughter of his sister Marie. 

Archduke Charles II of Austria married Maria Anna, daughter of his sister Anna.

Philipp IV married Marianna of Austria, daughter of his sister Maria Anna. 

Antoinette Marie of Wuerttemberg married Ernst I of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Marie's mother Antoinette of was the sister of the groom. 

D. Maria I of Portugal married her uncle, Pedro de Bragança.

Their son Pedro,"product" of uncle and niece was married to his own aunt Maria Francisca.

The great granddaughter,  D. Maria II married her uncle D. Miguel. 

King Fernando VII married his niece Infanta Isabel of Portugal. 

Joanna of Naples married her nephew, King Ferdinand II of Naples. 

Infanta Benedita married her nephew, José, Prince of Brazil.

To us it’s totally gross and taboo, 100% wrong, but that’s because we understand genetics whereas they didn’t. They thought they were keeping their bloodlines pure. It was totally common historically, especially in royal families, so I get why it’s not a big deal in the Game of Thrones universe. To me, I can get over incestuous relationships from the past because it’s weird to me, yes, but I have more information than they did and they thought it was a good thing to keep their bloodlines pure. So yeah, think about the fact that this history is what George R.R. martin is basing his book series off and it’s a bit easier to overlook. George R.R. Martin has also really laid groundwork to help make this connection less uncomfortable for book readers by talking about it, something the show did considerably less of. In the series Targaryens marry family members all the time “to keep their bloodlines pure”, Daenerys actually thought she would marry Viserys some day before he sold her to Drogo because that’s what their family did and when you think about it Jon and Dany are actually further apart in terms of genetics than most Targaryens. There’s also Starks who married uncles and nieces in the books and history of the Game of Thrones world, so it’s not a total foreign concept to Jon. Even when it’s suggested that Victarion marry Asha/Yara it’s not a big deal, it’s more so, “Oh I never thought of her that way before, but now that you mention it...” So it’s not a weird concept in this world like it is to us, so get over it.

Now onto the fact that there’s a very high possibility (almost a certainty) that Daenerys is going to end up pregnant with Jon’s child. I don’t think Jon would stay away if she’s pregnant, he loves her and has stated that he doesn’t want to father a bastard child because he knows what that is. Daenerys has also had prophecies about her being able to have children and while she believes she can’t, I do think Jon, the white walkers, and Viserion’s death fulfils the prophecy about her having children again. With all the emphasis put on the idea of each of them and their children the last 2 episodes, it seems highly likely a Targaryen/Stark/Snow baby is coming and since the series is named A Song of Ice and Fire, wouldn’t it kind of make sense that their child is the Prince Who Was Promised and that could be why no character 100% fits the bill just yet.

All in all, I’m pretty positive that Jon and Daenerys are going to end up together and whatever happens to one will probably happen to the other based off the parallel nature of their storylines. The only thing that scares me is the fact that George R.R. Martin has said that there will be a bittersweet ending. With that in mind however, he has also said her loves the ending of LOTR and thinks it’s a perfect bittersweet ending, so if that’s what he’s going for, I can get onboard with that. I also, personally think that in some ways the bittersweet ending will mean in terms of Jamie, perhaps he’ll be redeemed as he dies and that will be bittersweet. I’m hoping Jonerys gets a more sweet ending.

[actionfigurebullshit]

I Spent All Day Working On This - New Collaborations and Documentation

Hours of a Saturday spent trying to adhere to a nebulous and completely imagined aesthetic, for a scene for a video which probably won’t be on screen for more than two seconds... and it’s still not quite right! Maybe it was this illustration which made me decide I needed to blog about this new project of mine.

I spoke to an old acquaintance of mine about Jane’s death a couple weeks ago. I stated that I wasn’t sure I’d be making videos anymore in light of the fact so much of what I’ve done over the past several years, as far as video making goes, was supporting Jane’s projects, which unlike my own, were actually produced and finished.

This acquaintance has known about my film making interest since I was a teenager- maybe he didn’t like the idea of me giving it up, or maybe he simply saw an opportunity for his creative outlet and my own to cross paths. He has a band, and wanted me to select one of their songs to use in a music video. Ultimately, he chose this one for me, and I was unsure about it at first because the idea I dreamed up would have been outside of my scope of illustration and animation skills- think of the gruesomeness of Garbage Pail Kids, but animated, organs pulsating, twitching, spurting. Eventually, I started thinking about 8 bit viscera- NES games like Lifeforce where so many levels feature “organic” themes to it

What I ended up envisioning was the suggestion of a NES style video game, which explains the wildly inexplicable events that take place in the video. Imagine a Dr. Mario style playing field, except the “jar” is a stomach, and the “pills” are candy, now throw in some Arkanoid style brick breaking, side scrolling space shooting, and worlds that look like something from Sim City, Final Fantasy IV, and the Game Over screens from Tetris, depending on your height off the ground, and you get... this.

I want to treat this new collaboration like an audition, so I want to aim high, work hard, and stay positive. That being said, it can be very daunting. Like Action Figure Bullshit, I can’t help but think to myself “I can’t do this!” and “What the hell am I doing!? I’m heading straight for disaster!”. Those thoughts are distracting, but it’s nice to have somewhere to vent. In the AFB notebook, many pages had some variant of “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!” written in the margins. Since I want to extend that positivity to my new notebook devoted to this project, I’ll have to dump the negativity somewhere else... why not here?

It seems strange for me to start writing about making a music video when this is supposed to be a blog for my action figure bullshit... project..., but there’s actually quite a bit of overlap, if not in content, then in execution. Like I said, I have a notebook for this project. By coincidence, it has a black cover, too. To be cute, I could say it’s black like VHS tape... I might go with that, too, especially since I have an unofficial, sort of subconscious color coding system with these ordinary 70 sheet spiral notebooks. Colors such as Green, Purple, and Blue are reserved for other productions, for instance... and if only I could find a School Bus Yellow-Orange notebook again...

So, it’s the same thing as with AFB. I have scenes in my head that go along with the imagery. Even if I feel like “it’s too much” to animate or similarly outside of my range of abilities and resources, I still write it out and draw it out. I find that video production- at least from my perspective of someone who does it as a hobby and uses old and/or shitty programs to do it, the journey through the project is likely more significant than the finished result, meaning that a big reason I feel like I can’t do something is because I can’t see the end point, but I can’t see the end point because it hasn’t been defined yet. How many times does an idea morph along the way, with each new day, each new page, each new second of video? I can’t see the end result because all the in between steps haven’t been put in place yet.

Or to put it another way, I try to replace “I can’t do this.” with “I can’t do this yet.”, which satisfies that need inside of me to be negative and put myself down, but also puts in a qualifier that makes this doubt both okay and filed away so I can continue to forge ahead. So far, I’ve head to hit any significant block. If there’s a challenge to an idea or scene, a solution is never too far away.

Did you see that word, CHALLENGE? It’s another one of those things you might read in a self help book- struggles should be seen as challenges to overcome, puzzles to solve, not obstacles to avoid, sign posts telling you to turn back.

So here’s what’s going on:

I have a song, which I’ll call “Track #4″. It’s about 150 seconds long (and I say this instead of 2 minutes, 30 seconds for a reason), with maybe an additional 30 seconds of footage to bookend the music. Those bookends are well defined and could be filmed today (they’re the only live action bits in the video so far). As for the main part with the music, over a third of that, 56 seconds, has virtually every single second illustrated and described in a loose storyboard kind of format. The rest is in my head, but still needs to be documented. I’m a big believer in the “write it out” idea- these notebooks have helped me take that to an admittedly eccentric level, but I have success with it, and fun, too! Isn’t that weird? That there would be, not only fun, but a feeling like the notebook is as much a part of the project as the video.

Once I’m done drawing out every scene for this fever dream, I’ll then move on to what I guess you could call “sprites” because so much of this, I want to look like something in the vein of Parodius, Dr. Mario, all those trippy-ass games which I have so much nostalgia for. Actually animating this is a scary idea, because I feel like it will be a failure on my part if I don’t get the 8 bit aesthetic down. It’s not a requirement, and “The Journey” through this project could lead me to an acceptable alternative-- I shouldn’t get ahead of myself, though. This is what can trip me up. I’m worrying about how to animate little candies and blood vessels and Moai heads when my focus should be on documenting what I imagine for the video, let the rest come later!

Still, sometimes creativity strikes in such a way, you can’t help but work on a part that’s further down the road, possibly down a road you’ll never travel- such as this screen, but that’s part of the bookend, which is so separated from the rest of the video, it’s almost like a different video, like a framing device, and one that’s a lot less complicated than the main course.

One final thing- and one which gives more reason to blog about this on the AFB blog- I might use AFB characters in one particular scene.

Picture the game over screen from TETRIS, specifically the “B-Type” game. Clear 25 lines on Level 9, Height 5, and you see various NES characters on a multi-tiered platform celebrating your victory. Now picture this as a building that’s not too far away from the “action” of the video, and these characters are looking on... when suddenly, an Arkanoid type capsule (similar, but legally distinct! Actually, it would look more like the paddle from Alleyway) appears and abducts some of the characters and takes them on a wild ride into this weird semi-organic machine with a terrible sweet tooth.

Those characters: Greta, Trent, and Douglas. I’d love to have a little nod to AFB, and I’d love to animate some “bridge lurch” if they come under attack from something. We’ll see.

If I keep blogging about this video, I’ll go into more details, such as why looking at the video in terms of a pile of seconds is extremely important.

[macgyvermedical]

Thanks for your reply. I didn't quite know how to send you the Kingsman screenshots so I made a tumblr post with them, I'll send you the link in a second. Btw, one thing one cannot see in the caps is that the heart rate is actually changing in the scene where he wakes up, which is sth I don't see often on TV.

No problem!

(And thanks for your reminder! I know I haven’t done much on this blog recently… I have very little motivation for a lot of things as of late and this week in particular sucked pretty terribly, but I’m going to try to answer the best I can)

Disclaimer: I’m not an ICU nurse, nor have I seen (or read fanfic of) this movie. Everything is based on my critical care classes/clinicals in nursing school and my conjecture as to what happened based on what I’m seeing in these screen shots.

From what I’ve seen of ICU settings, this was pretty well done. They clearly did their research and/or hired a consultant when designing this set. Certain things I particularly appreciated were the presence of a central line (an IV that ends in a large, central vein- necessary for drugs that could injure smaller vessels, like many that would be used in an ICU setting), the not-overly-neat wires/tubes/hoses, and the changing vitals on the monitor screen.

(The following is mostly an explanation of what you’re seeing in the screenshots- nitpicks and a real-life pic for comparison at the end)

Here’s what’s present in a couple of those screenshots:

Monitor display: Showing two leads’ worth of ECG readings (green), heart rate (green), central venous pressure (the pressure in the vein that carries blood into the heart- yellow), oxygen saturation (blue), and non-invasive (cuff) blood pressure (purple).

The blood pressure cuff: Hooks up to the monitor display and will cycle (take a reading) at set intervals. While manual blood pressure is taken by listening to a pulse as the cuff slowly deflates, automatic cuffs sense vibration in the blood vessels as the cuff deflates, which can be interpreted by the computer.

Hardwire ECG leads: These are leads that go directly from the pt and physically plug into the monitor. They measure the electrical activity of the heart and present a graph of that electrical activity. They are common in ICU settings but mean the pt has to be physically disconnected if they ever want to get out of bed. 

Pulse-Ox/SpO2: This is a device that optically or physically measures pulse (which can be different than heart rate as measured electrically) and optically measures oxygen saturation. In this case, it would be helping to determine whether the ventilator settings were correct.

Syringe pumps: syringe pumps are used when only teeny-tiny volumes of medication are needed. They’re a lot more common in pediatric settings, but are definitely used in adult ICUs for very high potency drugs (especially drugs to increase blood pressure, sedatives, and painkillers). Syringe pumps are usually not the only pumps in the scene though- likely there would be at least a few “line pumps” controlling delivery of larger volumes of fluid like IV hydration, antibiotics, and electrolyte replacement fluids that come in hanging bags. Line pumps look like this:

(EEEP EEEP ………… EEEP EEEP

Endotracheal (ET) tube and securement: This is a tube that goes from just outside the pt’s mouth to their lungs, maintaining the pt’s airway and allowing the ventilator to deliver breaths while the person is paralyzed/sedated and unable to breathe for themself. The securement device keeps it from accidentally coming out or moving out of place. Missing is an NG or OG tube to deliver tube feedings, which would be necessary in this situation.

Central Line: This is an IV with a very long catheter (tube) that is placed in a vein (inserted surgically into the arm or upper chest) and that ends near the heart. This allows for administration of drugs/fluids at high pressure/volume and administration of drugs that could harm smaller peripheral veins. Simple versions (PICCs) may just provide reliable IV access to people who don’t have great veins, but they can be very advanced and include monitoring devices built in.

Because the monitor display is reading central venous pressure (CVP) (something that can only be measured by a sensor very near the heart), this guy’s central line is one of the more advanced ones (I’m still not seeing the external component to the CVP monitor but maybe its just hiding).

Also I’m going to guess that his injury has something to do with his chest and they’re monitoring for tamponade/pneumothorax? Because he seems a little young and healthy to be stricken with heart failure.

Peripheral IV: In addition to the central line, he’s also got a peripheral IV. These are much shorter catheters (about two inches at most) that can take IV fluids and many IV medicines that don’t need to go in a central line.

Miami-J collar: These are hard collars that do not allow movement of the neck (versus the soft foam ones that are for comfort only). Usually you see them in the field when injury is suspected, and they’re taken off once it’s ruled out in a hospital. The fact that he’s wearing one in this scene means that they’ve done the necessary imaging and determined that his neck was indeed injured in whatever happened to him. I’m guessing this guy was in a coma for a while (it would be arguably more important when he’s awake and moving around, so I’m guessing he had some time to heal and they took the collar off).

Ventilator: These devices breathe for pts who can’t breathe on their own, or assist for pts who find breathing prohibitively difficult. The screen shows a real-time graph of the breaths delivered and how much air was given with each breath.

There’s really not a whole lot that I’m downright “well that’s not realistic” about, but here are a couple nitpicks based mostly on ease of nursing care for him:

How would you suction that ET tube? (I’m sure there’s a way to do it but I’ve only ever used in-line suction before and it seems strange that this setup doesn’t have that given this movie came out so recently)

Why no line pumps? Why is EVERYTHING going through a syringe pump? That seems tedious…

Why are no lines labeled? That seems dangerous and confusing…

If they gave him a CVP monitor, why not also give him an arterial line? Especially since they’re probs going to need lots of arterial blood samples to make sure the vent settings are working right and it would be easier than sticking him that many times IN AN ARTERY…

Feeding tube- if he’s out as long as I’m guessing he’s out for (via the collar) and there’s no problem with his digestive tract, I’m gonna guess he’ll need some food (but tube feeds are rather icky for the whump community, so I get why they omitted it aesthetically).

Compare the screenshots you took with a similar scene from an actual ICU:

NOTE: I got this pic from a google image search, if you recognize it and would like it removed, let me know!

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[asfeedin]

Here’s who is winning (and losing) during Q1 earnings seasons so far

The Street was bracing for a mixed earnings season. While the impact of the coronavirus has, in many cases, been immediate and dire, corporate earnings for the first quarter are on a lag. “Two-plus of the three months were pretty decent,” says Charles Schwab chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders, making earnings for the quarter as a whole “not terribly relevant.”

So far, roughly half of companies have reported. According to a Refinitiv note on Wednesday, there have been 90 negative EPS preannouncements issued by S&P 500 companies, versus 42 positive ones. But much like the GDP report for the first quarter, which came in at -4.8%, first-quarter earnings won’t “tell you all that much about the depth and scope of the impact of the lockdowns,” suggests LPL Financial equity strategist Jeff Buchbinder.

Most estimates show that year-over-year earnings growth for the quarter is down about 15% or 16%, and BofA Global Research noted on Wednesday that based on actual values and the latest consensus estimates, “[year-over-year] revenue growth [is] –0.5%.” For those who have already reported, earnings and sales growth came in “10.9% and 0.4% weaker than expected at the start of the season, respectively, while earnings growth ex-financials has surprised to the upside by 2.5%,” according to BofA research.

But the picture is extremely murky, given the unprecedented business shutdown. According to BofA Global Research on Monday, about 100 companies in the S&P 500 suspended guidance. Yet a large portion of companies in the S&P 500 haven’t been issuing quarterly guidance for a while, even pre-coronavirus, and Schwab’s Sonders suggests the slew of companies withdrawing or not issuing guidance now will only accelerate that trend even after the crisis is largely over.

Instead of guidance numbers, “what I think is most important to try to glean from commentary on calls is what the more macro implications are,” Sonders tells Fortune. Alternatively, she suggests taking note of “What does your balance sheet look like? Do you have cash flows to stay afloat for x period of time? Have you started to lay workers off? If you have, are they furloughed or permanent layoffs? Have you taken government assistance?”

Meanwhile, LPL’s Buchbinder is not suggesting investors look on the sunny side. In fact, he believes investors should watch for “credible downside risk estimates” from companies.

“Investors are looking for comfort: How bad is this going to get in the second quarter?” he says. “The big question, though, is where’s the trough? The companies that can give people an idea of where that trough is are going to perform better.” So far, it’s the big tech names that are doing just that, he says.

Looking back, full-year 2020 earnings estimates were close to $180 earnings per share to start the year. Now, the most optimistic projections are $132. Both Sonders and Buchbinder think those earnings estimates need to come down further still (Sonders estimates it will be around $100 when all is said and done).

Yet perhaps more than ever, strategists note there’s a big gap between winners and losers, and the first-quarter earnings season only emphasizes the “stock-pickers market” we’re in, says Buchbinder.

Winners

Tech has obviously been hot, even before the coronavirus. But now, Sonders suggests there is even “more dispersion in terms of the prospects for individual companies, even within the same sector.”

A couple standouts?

Microsoft surprised the Street on Wednesday, beating earnings per share estimates of 1.26, reporting 1.40. Revenue, meanwhile, topped $35 billion (also above expectations), driven in part by the company’s strong cloud business. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote that the “[work from home] and COVID-19 environment [is] another catalyst driving Azure/Office 365 growth,” as Azure revenue growth was “robust” at 59%. The analyst also raised his price target from $210 to $220 per share.

Another tech name that (happily) surprised investors on Wednesday was Facebook. The company posted revenues of $17.7 billion (versus the $17.4 billion estimate), up almost 18% from the first quarter of 2019, and saw 2.6 billion monthly active users (higher than expected). Yet in comments that are starting to sound very familiar to analysts this season, Facebook’s CFO David Wehner told CNBC that “[the] outlook is really uncertain. We have a really cautious outlook on how things are going to develop.” 

Of course, Tesla was a stock many investors had their eye on, having traded up over 200% in the past year. The Elon Musk–led company managed to post a profit in the first quarter at $16 million, also reporting 1.24 adjusted earnings per share versus an estimated loss of 0.36 earnings per share. Yet Tesla also had negative free cash flow of $895 million—jeopardizing its previously stated goal of getting free cash-flow positive for 2020.

Alphabet missed earnings estimates, reporting $9.87 per share, but beat revenue estimates, reporting $41.2 billion on Tuesday—up 13% from the previous year. Yet investors were somewhat encouraged that, despite a drop in ad revenue in March, execs told analysts, “Based on our estimates from the end of March through last week for Search, we haven’t seen further deterioration in the percentage of year-on-year revenue declines” in April.

For the Street, Twitter’s earnings fell somewhere between a win and a loss: The company beat earnings estimates, reporting earnings of 0.11 per share versus the 0.10 estimate on Thursday before market open, but the stock quickly traded down some 7% by midday on discouraging remarks about a slowdown in advertising revenue. While the company eked out an earnings beat, Twitter also didn’t provide guidance for the second quarter, and is suspending full-year guidance.

Even hotly anticipated Amazon earnings fell into a vein similar to Twitter’s: The coronavirus staple stock missed estimates on earnings but beat revenue expectations, posting $75.5 billion. Investors were dismayed after markets closed on Thursday, trading the stock down around 5% in after-hours trading, after the company announced it plans to spend its entire estimated $4 billion operating profit in the second quarter on coronavirus-related expenses. Yet cloud computing and online shopping were bright spots for Amazon, as the company saw Amazon Web Services revenue top $10 billion. “COVID’s impact accelerates the secular shift to e-commerce [U.S. e-commerce represents 12% of retail sales], and Amazon is well positioned to continue taking share,” Oppenheimer analysts wrote on Monday.

Losers

LPL’s Buchbinder suggests that “essentially all of the [overall earnings] misses came from the big banks” this time around.

JPMorgan kicked off its first-quarter earnings with a largely disappointing show, reporting earnings per share of 0.78 cents, missing the 1.84 estimate, while profits dove 69%. One ominous point was the bank’s $6.8 billion reserved for loan loss provisions. Perhaps the only bright spot was the bank’s record trading division revenue, up 32% to $7.2 billion.

Wells Fargo also disappointed, posting earnings per share of just 0.1 cent, versus a 0.33 cent estimate. The bank set aside some $3.1 billion for loan losses as well.

Bank of America hasn’t fared much better, reporting a first-quarter profit decline of 45% to $1.79 billion for its consumer banking business. The bank reported EPS of 0.40 cents a share, versus 0.46 cent estimates. Of note, loan losses would only mount this year, potentially continuing into 2021, CFO Paul Donofrio told analysts. To boot, the bank also set $3.6 billion aside for loan-loss reserves for the quarter, in line with peers JPMorgan and Wells Fargo.

One company feeling the brunt of global shutdowns is McDonald’s. The company reported that earnings fell 17% in the first quarter, missing estimates. The global fast-food chain also withdrew its 2020 outlook and long-term forecast, issued back in February, owing to the uncertainty surrounding the evolving coronavirus environment worldwide.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski warned analysts: “We expect the second quarter as a whole to be significantly worse than what we experienced for the full month of March.”

Given the way projections are heading overall, he’ll certainly have company.

More must-read finance coverage from Fortune:

—Latest round of unemployment claims puts real jobless rate near Great Depression peak —Buccaneers of the basin: The fall of fracking—and the future of oil —Cybercriminals adapt to the coronavirus faster than the A.I. cops hunting them —3 ways COVID-19 impacted Microsoft’s latest earnings —Inside the chaotic rollout of the SBA’s PPP loan plan —Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs —WATCH: Why the banks were ready for the financial impact of the coronavirus

Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.

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Tags: 2020 earnings, alphabet earnings, bank earnings, coronavirus, coronavirus earnings, earnings, earnings season, facebook earnings, Heres, Losing, microsoft earnings, Q1, Q1 earnings, Seasons, winning

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[metawitches]

Review

Hanna is an Amazon Prime original series which is based on the 2011 film of the same name. The series stars stars Esme Creed-Miles as Hanna, a 15 year old girl who’s been raised alone in the woods by her father and trained to be a survivalist and fighter; Joel Kinnaman as Erik Heller, Hanna’s father and a former agent who took his infant daughter on the run to escape the relentless pursuit which killed Hanna’s mother; and Mireille Enos as Marissa Wiegler, a rogue CIA agent who’s been hunting Heller and his family for many years and will stop at nothing to find them.

Amazon is advertising the story as “equal parts high-concept thriller and coming-of-age drama”. I can’t help but notice the similarities to Les Miserables and the Jean Valjean/ Cosette/ Javert storyline, one of my favorite stories of all time. In this version, Cosette is the star, and gets to show what she’s made of.

But, never fear, if you don’t like 19th century French literature or operatic 80s musicals. This is a thoroughly modern action-mystery-thriller in the vein of Hunger Games or Nikita. Hanna has been trained by her father since birth and has extraordinary talents, but she doesn’t know who she is to the outside world, or why she’s being hunted. Her father has kept her sheltered from the rest of humanity, but has taught her as much as he could about the world from their cave in the forest.

It’s a pleasure to see Joel Kinnaman and Mireille Enos again. Kinnaman spends much of the episode under a scruffy beard and many layers of ragged clothes, gruffly training his daughter, but his soulfulness still comes through. You can see in his face all of the reasons that he works his daughter so hard, from terror that they’ll be found to the immense love that caused him to give up everything else in his life for her. Though Enos’ screen time is brief in this episode, she establishes her character’s determined, efficient, malevolent essence. Esme Creed-Miles is wonderful as normal girl who’s without ego or pretense, but who’s curious and intelligent. And a highly trained fighter, who’s able to take down a man twice her size in less than a minute with her bare hands.

I can’t wait to watch this character discover what the rest of the world thinks of teenage girls. I’ve seen what an adjustment it is for homeschooled girls when they’re fully immersed into sexist cultural situations for the first time, after being raised in egalitarian homes and homeschool groups. I’ll be interested to see if the writer and creator of Hanna, David Farr, who is a middle-aged man, has any concept of what Hanna, the ultimate homeschooler, would face, beyond being underestimated as a fighter. Given the way her first period is handled in the pilot, my guess is most issues pertaining to her gender will be given lip service, then glossed over.

The pilot serves mainly as set up for the rest of the season. Virtually all of it takes place in the forest, near Erik and Hanna’s cave hideout. By the end of the episode, their lives have been turned upside down and it’s clear that the rest of the episodes will be completely different. We aren’t given more than a hint of the origin stories for Erik, Hanna’s mother, Johanna Zydek, or Wiegler, or told why they’re mortal enemies. That’s left to unfold at a later date, probably as Hanna herself unwinds the mysteries of her life. All we know is that Johanna died while she, Erik and Hanna were trying to escape from Wiegler and her team. Erik took the baby and ran, sucessfully disappearing into a forest in Eastern Europe for 15 years.

As already noted, the pilot spends most of its time in the woods, and that can get a bit slow here and there. I would have preferred that they shave one or two minutes from the middle of the episode and use the time to make the events in the opening more clear. The opening scenes are action-packed and fast-paced, but it’s hard to figure out what’s going on, particularly the important details of the baby snatching sequence, if you don’t already know what’s going to happen. Taking a little more time to establish the characters and the setting in the opening would solve those issues and would make the forest scenes more suspenseful and meaningful.

Overall, I like the premise and the cast. The series was filmed on location across Europe, so the scenery should be enjoyable. Episodes one and two have a female director, Sarah Adina Smith, which is always a good sign.

Amazon plans to drop the rest of the season in March.

Recap

In Romania, in 2003, Erik Heller who’s wearing Ryker’s sleeve, drives a car to a hospital and experimental lab facility which is guarded and fenced, with signs posted saying Danger-Keep Out- Authorized Personnel Only. Possibly it’s a secret government facility. On his way there, he stops and tosses the keys into some woods. It’s not clear if this is his car or a stolen car.

At the gate, he shows an ID. It’s most likely his, since he puts it right next to his face and the guard shines his light on both. Once inside the hospital, he sits in the lobby waiting area, very stiffly, and watches the clock for more than an hour, until 3:00, when the shift changes. An announcement over the intercom sends the shift that’s ending into a decontamination shower, which makes it absolutely clear that this is not a normal hospital.

As they walk by the waiting area, Erik blends in with some of the staff on their way to the showers. While they’re showering, he steals coveralls and another ID from a man about his size and coloring. Then he makes his way through security and into another part of the hospital. In this part of the facility, dogs can be heard barking and whining as they’re experimented on.

Erik goes past the animal experiments and finds the human nursery, which is filled with at least 20 infants. He finds the one he’s looking for, unhooks her from the IV tubing attached to her arm, and puts her in a cart that he’s grabbed in the hall. He tries to keep her calm by telling her that he’s taking her to her mommy.

The owner of the ID and coveralls discovers they’re missing. Erik races down the hall with the baby and out a back door, emerging in the trash disposal area, where an open incinerator is burning. He uses cable cutters to clip a hole in the fence, but it’s slow going. As he finishes, security guards enter the area, searching for the intruder. He pretends that he’s throwing trash in the incinerator, but when the baby makes a noise, he has to fight the guards.

One of the guards ends up in the incinerator, which was clearly not what Erik intended. In the moment, he had no choice, but, right afterward, he looks wild-eyed over having murdered someone. We aren’t told whether he just wanted to avoid murder on this mission or has never killed anyone before.

He gets the baby from her hiding spot, goes through the fence, and runs for the car, which his wife Johanna has waiting. Johanna runs to meets him and takes the baby. They get in the car and drive away, chased by guards and guard dogs from the hospital who shoot at them. The guards are on foot, so Erik, Johanna and the baby get away.

The next morning finds them safely at the Motel Liniste. Johanna sings to the baby, while Erik is shirtless. We know that nothing is too wrong with the world, because 5 minutes into the show, Joel Kinnaman is half-naked.

Just as Johanna gets up to get ready to leave, the evil government agents arrive. The Hellers throw some clothes on, pop the baby in a car seat, and jump out a window. They quickly find an unlocked car, and Erik hot wires the ignition while Johanna buckles the baby seat in. I can vouch for the fact that these are two equally difficult tasks.

They take off, with evil government agents shooting at them. We get our first look at Marissa Wiegler, who is or will become Erik’s nemesis. She has very short, no nonsense hair and a serious expression as she tells an underling that the Hellers will try to reach Bukovina Forest. She wants him to call base, now.

The Hellers have a decent head start on the evil government agents, but the agents are so evil that they bring in a helicopter, which shoots at the car from above. Erik turns into some woods, which gives some cover, even though there are no leaves on the trees. He reaches a field, and tells Johanna that they have to cross the field, then they’ll be safe, because after that, the forest stretches for hundreds of miles.

She doesn’t think this is a great idea, but he goes for it, at top speed. The helicopter is waiting, and shoots out one of their tires. It might also shoot Johanna in the head. Erik loses control of the car and it spins into a tree, with Johanna’s seat taking the brunt of the damage. She’s dead and her head is bloody. It could simply be from hitting her head during the accident, but there’s a splatter pattern on the ceiling that says gunshot to me. Either way, Wiegler is responsible for her death.

Erik realizes that she’s dead, and takes a brief moment with her, but he knows the helicopter will be there before long.

As Wiegler watches the car from the air, it’s bursts into flames. Everything inside the car will have been killed. The helicopter lands, and she takes a closer look. Meanwhile, Erik runs through the forest with the baby.

Fifteen years later, the baby, Hanna, is a young woman who is out deer hunting. She shoots a doe, then kneels to gut it. As she’s working, a man appears behind her. When she realizes that he’s there, she charges at him and they fight. After a minute of hand to hand, they are lying on the ground and she has him in a choke hold.

She lets him go, and after he has a moment to recover, he tells her that it was good, but he could have killed her before she even realized he was behind her. She wouldn’t have gotten a second chance. The man is Erik. He is now bearded and wearing layers of clothes, since it’s winter.

They live in a cave, where almost everything they use is handmade from wood or the animals they hunt. That evening, over dinner, Erik quizzes Hanna in what seems to be a nightly ritual. First, he asks if she’s hurt and they go over what went wrong with the fight training. It took her three seconds to realize he was there. She promises to do better next time. He has her repeat it in German and French. Then he asks her to name three great American movies (Godfather, Jaws, Casablanca) and three Beatles songs (Love Me Do, Let It Be and Help).

Then they go over the rules: Humans beings are dangerous and not to be trusted. If she sees one she to come and find him. If she can’t find Erik, she should hide, and if she can’t hide, she should attack.

Later, in bed, Hanna carves something on the ceiling with a pocket knife. Then she discovers that she’s gotten her period. Given the way she reacts to the blood, it seems like it’s the first time. All we’re shown is her calmly exploring the situation, no discussion with her dad or dealing with clean up or catching the blood. I’m not sure what the point of the scene was, other than to let us know that she’s physically mature, so she can start dating. It brought up more questions than it answered.

One day, as she sits on a rock ledge over a gorge, carving wood, an airplane flies overhead. Hanna jumps up and runs with it, following it until she reaches a stand of trees with red lines painted on them. They are the boundary of her territory. SInce she and Erik came to the forest, she’s never been past the line. She doesn’t pass it this time, either, but it’s obvious that the boundary is starting to feel like a cage that she wants to escape.

Everyday, Erik and Hanna spend hours training. He trains her in hand to hand fighting, shooting, and physical conditioning. As she runs up and down the mountain, he adds rocks to her backpack and tells her to keep going. Eventually, she’s a sharpshooter, at peak levels of strength and endurance, who can punch a tree down.

But she’s still tempted by the red markings on the trees. Erik explains that the people who killed her mother are still out there, and want to kill them. She infers that he intends for them to never leave the forest, and he agrees. Hanna wants to know what he’s training her for then. He explains that he might not always be there to protect her, so she needs to know how to protect herself. But he doesn’t want her to worry, because hopefully that’s a long way away.

Hanna goes back to the red lines again, and makes her footprints in the snow look like she approached the trees, then walked away. Erik is chopping wood. She climbs one of the trees, then uses branches and her strength to move from tree to tree until she’s a significant distance into the forbidden zone. When she reaches and area without snow, she drops to the ground and runs off to explore.

She finds a stream, then hears the sound of a chain saw slicing up logs. She approaches the boy, Arvo, who’s cutting up the wood. He stops and speaks to her, first in Polish, then English. She doesn’t answer him much. He shares his snickers bar with her.

She finally talks to him when he takes out his phone to call his father. She grabs the phone from him, then hurts his arm. She tells him not to call his father. He gets in his 4-wheeler and leaves. As he’s going, she asks him not to tell anyone about her.

Erik is angry that evening, because he couldn’t find Hanna while she was with Arvo. He knows that she left their area. Hanna refuses to answer his questions, and asks why she has to tell him everything, while he tells her nothing. She wants to know who killed her mother. All Erik will tell her is that they’re bad people, but that answer isn’t enough for her anymore. She storms off to her bed. He pulls out a small metal box that holds his keepsakes and looks at a photo of Wiegler.

When Hanna goes back to find Arvo again, he pretends to be upset with her, but he gives her another snickers bar and chats her up. He takes her for a ride on his four-wheeler. They go to a huge satellite dish and climb up onto the bowl of the dish to look at the stars. Hanna points out all of the stars and constellations. Arvo shows her a satellite moving across the sky.

He’s just in the midst of making his move on her, when security guards show up with dogs. The dish had some kind of sensor next to its ladder, which caught them climbing up. They climb down the ladder, and Arvo puts his hands up.

Hanna runs away, as fast as she can. The guards shoot at her, which seems like an overreaction for security guards who’ve caught a couple of kids at a communications satellite, but who knows.

She makes it back to the cave and Erik questions her about Arvo and the security guards. She asks if he thinks the guards will come after them, and he says he doesn’t know.

Later she tells him that Arvo tried to kiss and touch her. Erik says that it’s just the way boys are.

He figures out that she wants to go out into the world, even if it’s dangerous, so he takes out the photo of Wiegler and tells Hanna that this is the woman who killed her mother. If they’re leaving the forest, they have to find her, before she finds them. Hannah understands that this is what Erik has been training her for, and she’s sure she’s ready. He’s not as certain.

Wiegler is now married, with a child who’s around 7 years old, and living in France. She’s lost her punk look and has gone for the look of the perfectly groomed suburban working mom. While she’s at the park with her family, one of her minions, Carl Meisner, brings her the latest on the Heller case.

According to the NATO Security Attachment, three nights ago some kids broke in at the Kvansk Satellite Installation in Northern Poland. They arrested 17 year old Arvo Gombrowitz, from Poland, but the girl who was with him ran away and disappeared into the forest. Arvo told them that she was about 16, lived in the forest with her father and wouldn’t tell him her name.

Meisner says that he knows she still has a red flag on Agent Erik Heller. Wiegler tells him that Erik was last seen 15 years ago, 60 miles south of there, when he killed his girlfriend and disappeared with his baby daughter. She gives Meisner a strange, fake smile, then tells Meisner to keep the report on the satellite break in off the grid. She wants to talk to the security crew that found the kids in one hour, using an encrypted line, in her office. After he leaves, she gets another strange look on her face. This time it’s scared and horrified, like something awful is about to start up again.

Hanna wakes up in the middle of the night and sits in the cave entrance, looking at the stars. She hears 3 helicopters approaching and wakes up Erik. It takes another minute before he can hear them. They quickly pack up their most important possessions and escape the cave. The tac team find the cave soon after.

The forest is swarming with operatives with orders to kill Erik on sight and but to take Hanna alive. Wiegler is watching from her office in France. Erik and Hanna take down one operative, and Erik takes his gun, but Hanna says that she can feel that they’re surrounded by many more. Within moments the soldier’s superior is trying to raise him on the radio.

Knowing that they’re about to be caught, Erik and Hanna decide to split up so they’ll be harder to catch. He goes over their plans with her: If they can’t find each other, Hanna will send a postcard to Peter Olsen at the address he gave her. Then she’ll go to Berlin. 224 Heine Strasse. She’ll go there everyday at noon. If anyone asks where she lives, she’s supposed to say that she lives in Amsterdam, Holland and she goes to the Klaus Kohle Gymnasium. It’s a very good school. She also has a dog named Bruno. And Marissa Wiegler can’t be trusted. She lies.

They hug, and Erik tells her to get moving. He runs in the opposite direction. She picks up the soldier’s radio and runs. A soldier sees Erik and gets him in his sights. He’s given to command to take the kill shot. Hanna realizes what’s about to happen and whispers, “Help me,” into the radio. The soldiers figure out where the radio is and use the signal to find her. She’s huddled under a tree, and tells them that her daddy left her. He told her she was too slow.

Wiegler watches helmet cam footage of the interaction. She asks if Camp G is still open. Meisner tells her that it’s unofficially open, She wants Hanna taken there as a terror suspect. But officially, Hanna doesn’t exist. She orders them to monitor the Polish borders for Heller, and to continue the shoot on sight policy.

Hanna is taken to one of the helicopters. Erik sees her leaving and is at a loss. As the helicopter takes off, Hannah sees beyond the forest for the first time. The sun is rising.

Commentary

Amazon may re-edit the pilot when they release the rest of the season in March, in which case I’ll rework this recap to fit the new version.

If Erik has an ID for the hospital/lab, that means it’s very likely that he worked there. What did he do there? Is that how he met Hanna’s mother? Is Hanna his biological daughter? Is he enhanced as well? Was Johanna?

The three great American films are odd movies for anyone to pick in 2018, but especially a 15 year old girl. I could see a movie buff including one on the list if they were into that genre, but there ought to be something from the 80s or 90s on the list, if Dad’s trying to get her to blend in.

There’s obviously some kind of past between Erik and Wiegler, but what is it? Were they work partners? Lovers? Are they siblings? Did he kill someone she was close to, or vice versa? Did he start out as just another case, but now he’s ‘the one who got away’? She’s so much of a Javert, pretending this isn’t of personal importance to her when it is, that it could be he made everyone question her sense of duty and honor, and she can’t forgive that.

Hanna has some kind of enhancements. Her hearing is better, she’s strong, she has amazing endurance. She’s not at a superhero level, but she’s at the peak of human performance or something like that. Is she genetically enhanced, and was her mother genetically enhanced, or was there a serum in the IV Erik had to remove before he took her from the hospital?

After 15 years of paranoia, shouldn’t Erik and Hanna have packed up and left the cave after she almost got arrested at the satellite, and the kid she’d been with was arrested? He knew Wiegler would never stop looking for him, and she didn’t. So why didn’t they leave? Was he too comfortable and settled in there?

Sources:

Indiewire.com- ‘Hanna’ First Trailer: There’s a Baby Missing and It’s Probably Coming to Kill You

Deadline.com- ‘Hanna’ Fights ‘To Be Heard’ in Super Bowl Spot for New Amazon Series

  Images courtesy of Amazon.

Hanna Season 1 Episode 1: Forest Review and Recap Review Hanna is an Amazon Prime original series which is based on the 2011 film of the same name.

[thisdaynews]

It’s unjust to say I’m silent on killings by herdsmen – Buhari

New Post has been published on https://www.thisdaynews.net/2018/06/27/its-unjust-to-say-im-silent-on-killings-by-herdsmen-buhari/

It’s unjust to say I’m silent on killings by herdsmen – Buhari

It’s unjust to say I’m silent on killings by herdsmen – Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday faulted those who accused him of being silent on killings being carried out by suspected herdsmen in parts of the country.

He said there was injustice in such aspersions.

According to a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, the President spoke during an interactive session with stakeholders in Jos, Plateau State, over the recent attacks that left scores of people dead.

Buhari said people were blaming him for not talking to the herdsmen probably because he looked like them.

He appealed to Nigerians to avoid inflammatory utterances that could endanger peace or promote conflicts.

The President said, “Whatever is being given to the media, we have to be very responsible about it.

‘‘Take for instance the situation in Benue. The Benue subsistence farmer knows that the Nigerian cattle herder that he knows doesn’t carry nothing more than a stick, occasionally sometimes something to cut grass to feed his cattle.

‘‘But the present herder, I am told, carries AK47 and people are even blaming me for not talking to them because maybe (they say) I look like one of them.

‘‘There is some injustice in these aspersions.”

Buhari directed security chiefs in the country to remain vigilant and ensure the protection of lives and property.

He also urged traditional and community leaders to complement government efforts by persuading their constituencies to tolerate one another for peace and unity in the country.

The President added, “I will continue to pressurise members of the law enforcement agencies directly under me by the constitution as the Commander-in Chief.

“About eight days ago, we had five hours security meeting of the service chiefs and the Inspector-General of Police.

‘‘What happened here in Jos is very bad. The question of leadership, from your household to whatever you are, is justice. The bottom line is justice.

‘‘That is why wherever I go, I will always appeal to the leadership of the communities and the law enforcement agencies, to always have control over their constituencies.”

Buhari, who was accompanied to the meeting by Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State and his counterparts from Kebbi and Niger, condoled with the affected families, the government and people of the state, and wished those injured a speedy recovery.

Others in his entourage were the ministers of Defence, Mansur Dan-Ali; Interior, Abdulrahman Danbazzau; and Information and Culture, Lai Muhammed.

Also with Buhari was the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshall Sadiq Abubakar and the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris.

The major stakeholders in attendance were senior government officials, National and State House of Assembly members, traditional rulers, leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria and the Ja’amatu Nasril Islam in Plateau State.

The President’s visit came less than 24 hours after a similar visit by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) who met with the stakeholders.

Earlier in his remarks, Lalong blamed parties in the conflict in the state for reneging on their agreement to maintain peace, leading to the recent upsurge in violence, after nearly three years of calm and normalcy in the state.

“We are concerned as a state that the sophisticated weapons used in these attacks, from the evidence on the ground and the narrations of victims, are not those conventional to our environment for self-defence but reflective of a terrorist invasion.

‘‘It, therefore, demands a justified response like that which was undertaken to address the Boko Haram insurgency,” he said.

The governor also requested that given the number of villages completely ravaged in the violence, the Federal Government should establish an Emergency Special Intervention Fund to help reconstruct the destroyed communities.

Killings, senseless, barbaric, says NLC

Meanwhile, the killings attracted more condemnations on Tuesday with the Nigeria Labour Congress saying that the government must design a framework for peace to end the bloodshed.

The congress said it was disturbed by the range of targets, the duration of the attacks and the scope of casualties and destruction.

The NLC President, Ayuba Wabba, said in a statement in Abuja that the statistics were numbing, describing the incident as senseless and barbaric.

He added that it threatened to shatter once and for all the bonds of brotherhood and peaceful co-existence.

According to him, the security agencies, though stretched, must be seen to do more to restore the confidence of the civil populace.

“If the emerging allegations are true that the attacks went on unchecked for hours, then something needs to be done about the reaction time of our internal security operations in the state.

“Beyond this, the Federal Government and Plateau State Government in consultation with the parties to this bloody conflict should design a framework for an enduring peace,” Wabba insisted.

He called on the governments to quickly move to rebuild the devastated communities and restore shattered lives while admonishing the victims against reprisals, stressing that it could not bring the much needed peace in the state.

Speaking in the same vein, the Nigerian Baptist Convention, FCT chapter, and the Christian Association of Nigeria, North-Central geopolitical zone, condemned in strong terms, the killings.

FG has failed, says CDHR

The Committee for the Defence of Human Rights said the killing was a sign that the Federal Government had failed.

The CDHR in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Henry Ekine, decried the state of insecurity in the country.

According to him, the right to life is guaranteed under Section 33 of Chapter IV of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, as amendment, as well as under the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (Article 4); the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (6) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 3).

The CDHR said, “The state has the primary responsibility to ensure the security and welfare of the people, as provided under section 14 (2) (b) of Chapter II of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, as amendment.

“Such mass killing was apparently akin to genocide and indicative of a failing state. The government has indeed failed in its core responsibility to protect lives and property of citizens at all times and in all parts of the country.”

Atiku condemns killings

Also a former Vice-President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and a former Minister of Special Duties, Alhaji Tanimu Turaki, condemned the killings.

The two chieftains of the Peoples Democratic Party made the condemnation in separate interviews with journalists after their interaction with the Forum of  PDP Former State House of Assemblies Presiding Officials in Abuja on Tuesday.

Atiku, a PDP presidential aspirant, who described the killings as unfortunate, stressed the need to adopt measures including community dialogue to address the lingering crisis.

He said, “I just listened to a former deputy speaker, a lady for that matter, and she made two points; hard and soft powers in resolving the crisis. I like that idea.

“It is not every security breach you can you use hard power on. You need to establish dialogue between the leadership of various communities that lived together over the years.”

On his part, Turaki, another PDP presidential aspirant condemned the killings saying every single life that was lost had the potential to do a lot for Nigeria.

He attributed the killings to the failure of the APC-led Federal Government and failure among various security agencies.

“If you recall, few months ago the National Security Agency had appeared before the Senate and disclosed that the greatest problem that the Nigeria security agencies have today is that the agencies work at cross purposes. There is no cooperation, there is no synergy.

“If critical security agencies are not sharing information or working together then how do you expect them to come up with tight security architecture that will safeguard the lives and property of Nigeria? And that is what is happening.’’

He commiserated with the people and government of Plateau over the loss of lives.

Buhari not doing enough to end killings – Reps

Also, the House of Representatives said President Buhari must take immediate steps to halt the killings by herdsmen in the country.

It noted that the country could not afford to continue to lose its citizens as if human lives no longer matter.

The Leader of the House, Mr. Femi Gbajabiamila, told The PUNCH in Abuja that to contain the killings, the President and the government should think harder about the appropriate measures to bringing a lasting solution.

Gbajabiamila added, “The President and the government will continue to do all they can to arrest these killings and surely more needs to be done.

“It is absolutely difficult to understand why human life should be so cheap.

“Christians are being killed; Muslims are being killed. What is important is that they are human beings and the killings must stop.

“This is a strange phenomenon in Nigeria. Perhaps, it requires government to think outside the box and do something extra-ordinary.

“It requires an urgent and surgical fix.”

PFN tells Buhari to stop killings, warns against reprisal

On its part, the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria commiserated with the families of the bereaved and urged Nigerians to refrain from reprisals to enable the government to perform its constitutional responsibilities.

The National President of the PFN, Rev. Felix Omobude, in a statement on Tuesday, lamented that the lives of Nigerians had been cheapened by mindless criminals who swooped on unsuspecting residents and killed them without restrictions.

He, therefore, called on President Muhammadu Buhari to live up to his responsibility of ensuring the safety of lives and property, adding that “any government that cannot protect its people does not deserve to remain in office.”

The cleric stated, “President Muhammadu Buhari should immediately bring the mindless killings going on in the country to a halt because Nigerian lives, whether Christians or Moslems, are very important.  The perpetrators of these dastardly acts must be fished out and punished appropriately.”

Omobude added, “Never in the history of Nigeria have the lives of Nigerians been so cheap. Today, people in any guise can kill with impunity and get away with it.

“Hundreds of people are being slaughtered at regular intervals and the criminal elements seem not to be brought to justice. There is the need for our government and security forces to be proactive instead of reactionary.

The President had after a closed-door meeting with government officials, security agencies and traditional leaders in Plateau State said he was committed to the protection of lives and property and would not run away from the responsibilities for which he was elected in 2015.

The President appealed to the people to bury their differences and work together for the peace of the state.

IG removes Plateau CP

However, Idris has removed the Plateau State Commissioner of Police, Undie Adie.

The removal of Adie followed the killing of more than 100 people by herdsmen in three local government areas of the state on Sunday.

The spokesperson for the Plateau State Police Command, Matthias Tyopev, a Deputy Superintendent of Police, in a statement on Tuesday, stated that a Deputy Commissioner of Police, Bala Ciroma, had replaced Adie.

Tyopev stated, “Today, 26th June, 2018, a new commissioner of police, Bala Ciroma, has assumed duty as the Commissioner of Police, Plateau State command.”

He also said the IGP had directed Adie to report to the force headquarters in Abuja.

The new commissioner, who is from Yobe State, was previously a deputy commissioner of police, criminal investigation and intelligence department, at the force headquarters in Abuja.

Osinbajo confirms arrests of suspects

Also on Tuesday, Osinbajo confirmed that some persons had been arrested in connection with the killings.

According to a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mr. Laolu Akande,  the Vice-President disclosed this during a meeting he had in the state on Monday with the leaders and representatives of communities related to the conflicts.

Osinbajo did not however disclose the number of the suspects arrested.

APC govs to visit Plateau on Friday

The Imo State Governor and Chairman, Progressives Governors’ Forum, Rochas Okorocha, has indicated that the APC governors will visit Plateau State on Friday.

The governor disclosed this on Tuesday at the Sam Mbakwe International Cargo Airport on arrival from Abuja after the national convention of the party.

According to him, while on the visit, the governors will assess the situation and interact with the governor of the state.

He said, “I, with the rest of the governors of APC, condemn in its entirety these unwarranted killings of innocent souls, and shedding of blood. We have called them insurgents. We’ve called them Boko Haram, we have called them all kinds of baptismal names and because the situation is not properly defined, most people hide under the cloak of religion of Christianity or Islam to create harm.”