#like it's a very interesting workplace but these people have definitely taken advantage of me

[angstigone]

rant about work

I have already ranted about this but it just further brew into me.

I am not going to lie, I can't wait to be finished with this job I am working.

it has been enriching and shit, but at the same time I have been working since april and just saw two paychecks (one of which was just partial); idk whether I'll get the august one before the end of august, as I was supposed to perceive it today but I didn't.

the whole system will go on holiday soon so I doubt I'll have anything before september and it'd be fine, if it wasn't the fact that they didn't tell me; like I was informed that the first paycheck would be in june because it's from public funds and for administrative shit they couldn't access before.

which is fine.

but in this case I wasn't informed and this pisses me off because I had shit to do as technically august is the month I don't have to worry about groceries or such as I am staying with my parents so although silly things - like doing my hair, going to a spa or getting some jewelry - I wanted to buy something with that money. had I known that I wouldn't be paid I'd have probably saved money or such.

I also worry a bit because basically for the moment I haven't had stuff to pay off for the house and I worry whether I'll have to.

like make no mistake: thankfully my parents are happy to support me, as they understood this work is an internship but I find it a bit humiliating and annoying, especially when it isn't a situation that's wholly on me as I have constantly done my work.

I low key hope that by max next week I'll have the paycheck but oh well, ugh, I honestly doubt it and this frustrates me to no end.

[everything-laito]

the FBI agent looking at my computer must be so incredibly concerned. Here’s Laito and Cordelia analysis, Part II

Hiya, Corn here! This is Part II of this analysis series! Part one’s here! 

Not getting into the trauma part of it yet. Just explaining abusive power dynamics and how incestuous relationships work. As well as Stockholm syndrome. Lovely! Lovely combo! Fuck!!!

Same trigger warnings as last time still apply!

As always, rant under the cuuuuut!

Ok, from last time, we’ve established the elements that were set in place for Cordelia to do this to Laito, when Laito’s trauma began, and the possible fact that he was groomed as a child for sexual exploitation. Wow. Yay. Amazing. This is so gross!!! Thanks, I hate it!!!! I know I usually cary these topics with just an informational tone but I just can’t with this ;lskfjklsajf But I’m here typing this, you’re here reading this, so let’s just get on with the grossness!

Section 3: Legal Definitions of Incest and Power Dynamics 

Now we’re gonna get into the flesh of the problem, and what we know happened. From last time, and common DL knowledge, Laito was coerced into having sex with Cordelia. I say coerced, rather than forced, because it’s not like Laito seemed to resist it. He seems to “willingly” give Cordelia that. Is dubious consent, consent? Oh fuck no, and dubious or coerced consent shouldn’t even count in here considering it’s straight up incest. Any type of incest, most especially between a parent and a child, is not considered consensual, even if it “technically is.” That’s how it’s handled in a court of law, at least in America (where I’m from and reside in), and I do agree with that morally as well. A “romantic” and sexual relationship between a parent (or adult family member; aunt, grandfather, etc) and a child (is just gross) preys upon the power dynamic between them. This isn’t any consensual BDSM power dynamic (obviously), or a constructive power dynamic in the workplace; it’s just a power dynamic already instilled into the relationship where it is taken advantage of. That’s not just fucked up incest, that’s an example of a toxic relationship from the get go. Also, there’s a power dynamic usually between a parent and child, but that doesn’t mean it’s always toxic. It just needs to be done responsibly, which good parents (or any adult in power) know how to maneuver around it and not take advantage of it for manipulation etc. 

In healthy relationships, you both start on equal ground. It usually never works out if you don’t see the other as an equal, whether you have a predisposed power dynamic at the beginning or not. I’m talking any relationship; family relationships, friendships, romantic, sexual, etc. Although you older folks might know about BDSM and how there’s a “power dynamic” instilled in the relationship, a chosen and consensual “power dynamic” still involves both parties seeing the other one as an equal––intrinsically. It’s just very different than a predisposed power dynamic. That even goes with friendship too! Or any kind of healthy, nontoxic social interaction! Taken directly from Psychology Today, “Shared power creates happy individuals and satisfying interactions.” People need to be on equal ground in order to have a healthy relationship. Which,,,, we know does not happen with Cordelia and Laito (and Laito and Yui for that matter, but that’s during another part of this series). An article I saw during the research of this explains further about how power dynamics can be constructive. This focuses more on the workplace, but it applies to this because it’s looking at the other person as another person (an equal) but uses that predisposed power for encouragement, empowerment, and constructiveness (like a good parent or adult role model would do). I hope this makes sense!

Basically Cordelia is abusing her power in order to do all this to Laito. That’s why grooming would make a lot of sense in this as well, because we know it’s definitely not the first time Cordelia has taken advantage of a power imbalance to her own selfish benefit. That’s why incest isn’t really explained with the same science as pedophilia. I forget if I’ve mentioned it before, but one way pedophilia can occur in a person if their brain was originally biologically wired in a way that sees children as sexual objects. With incest, it could also work like that as well, but it is mainly power abuse, like most sexual exploitation, harassment, assault, etc is. 

Section 4: Incest (I’d make a sweet home Alabama joke but that’s low hanging fruit)

Ok so now that we’ve gone over the legality of incest, and how power dynamics can be taken advantage of, we’re gonna look into the type of incest (yes apparently there are types) that Cordelia and Laito fits into. Also if this already wasn’t clear or anything, hi incest and pedophilia etc are forms of abuse, there is no justifying it at all. It’s abuse, no matter what’s said. I know these are fictional characters but I sometimes see Ayato x Cordelia and Laito x Cordelia etc posts and I kinda just wanna commit heinous crimes whenever I see that. Just the idea of that absolutely sickens me (on top of the abuse shown in DL already). Anyways, after all of that out of the way, let’s go into this. 

Since Laito is biologically 17, I’d say that he’s considered as a child (teenager) by demon world standards. We don’t know his age when Cordelia first physically exploited him, but we do know that his same “teenage” sprite is used during the flashbacks. Since his trauma fits so well with the aftermath definition of parent/child incest, I’m just gonna give y’all information on that. This is also called “child incestuous abuse,” which is also a form of child sexual abuse. 

I learned an interesting factoid researching this, and that is in Japan, the most commonly believed incestuous relationship was between mothers and sons. In the West, we think of fathers/daughters. In Japan, the media covers more on mother/son incestuous acts; while statistically, more father/daughter incestuous acts are taken place. Just something interesting(?) I found, and probably why DL chose that for storytelling too. 

In this Wikipedia article, taken from a scientific paper (I’d take it directly from the source but you need an account to get in and I think you need to pay for it), it says this:

A study of victims of father–daughter incest in the 1970s showed that there were "common features" within families before the occurrence of incest: estrangement between the mother and the daughter, extreme paternal dominance, and reassignment of some of the mother's traditional major family responsibility to the daughter.

Sure, this talks about father/daughter incestuous relationships, but if we take this and reverse most of the roles, it shows Laito’s situation to a T:

Estrangement between Karlheinz and Laito 

Extreme maternal dominance (aka Cordelia being very abusive/manipulative)

Reassignment of some of the parental responsibility to Laito (there’s many examples of “big bro Laito,” and Ayato and Kanato considers that they used Laito as a “sacrifice”––as a “shield” for the both of them. Sure this isn’t explicit parental responsibility shown through Laito but I’d say he acts more like a family member to Ayato and Kanato too)

Section 5: Stockholm syndrome? With parental figures? 

Laito had some interesting situations occur during this whole thing with Cordelia. One of the most infamous scenes from the game (that’s also illustrated in the HDB manga) is a flashback Laito has where he’s locked up, forced to see Cordelia and Richter have sex. He’s appalled by the fact at first, but then attempts to convince himself that he’s into it. However, I won’t get into the effects until the next part. 

I didn’t find much about Stockholm syndrome being in this specific case with incest and kidnapping a child etc. When you look up Stockholm syndrome related to parents you get quite the sexist “article” that definitely mocks the whole Stockholm syndrome thing and makes fun of guys being into Glee and such,,,, so that wasn’t a very helpful article. However, I’m just gonna mish mash and put a lot of concepts that we’ve learned together. But first, a look into Stockholm syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome occurs when an abuse victim develops empathy or even intimate feelings for their abuser or captor. This happens because any bit of kindness the abuser enacts towards their victim is taken so positively, that the victim “forgets” all the negative actions, and focuses on the positive ones. This isn’t some sort of “oh ya gotta think positive!” kind of thing, it’s how abusers get away with their bullshit and how someone can be so trapped in a relationship with them. It’s also called traumatic bonding or victim brainwashing (source). This doesn’t always happen with people who are held hostage, like in Stockholm syndrome’s name origin.

A parent’s influence can be a strong one. Doesn’t even have to be related to by blood. But a figure that is supposed to be nurturing—whether they are or not—still has power over the “child.” He definitely went through Stockholm Syndrome himself with Cordelia, considering the grooming and the “love”/hate relationship he has with Cordelia. I did some more digging, and apparently Stockholm Syndrome can still occur more commonly with sexually abused victims. Which we all know he is. With the possible grooming, on top of the power abuse and sexual abuse, creates an incredibly toxic concoction. Here we go. The (rotten) cherry on top. Directly from my HDB notes, here’s a snippet from his Maniac Prologue: 

Cordelia: Nnn…Hey, Laito. You are a good boy. Laito: …!! Cordelia: Right, Laito? Laito: Yeah, that’s right. I’m…I’m a good boy after all.  ーー Besides, I’m the type of person who only get more aroused from this kind of thing.

(from my notes:) Basically Laito convinces himself to be a “cuckhold.” It’s definitely implied how he just wants approval from Cordelia; this is how this abuse prolongs. 

(Also, if I ever said that Laito was locked up by Cordelia, my bad; it was Karlheinz who gave that order. I’m unsure where I ever said this, but I feel like I said it before, so I’m gonna clarify that right now too, oops! My memory hath failed me.)

Cordelia’s praise effects Laito in such a visceral way that he tries so hard to cope with the trauma in her favor. It’s incredibly messed up. But that’s the defining factor in this. From this, I do believe Laito has Stockholm syndrome on top of all of his issues. 

I think I’m gonna end it here for now. Didn’t expect to be this long, oops. Stay tuned for next time, where I’m gonna go over Laito’s trauma and how he’s been effected by it. Thanks for reading, FBI agent! And oh, you as well, dear reader! 

If you’ve read this far holy fuck I commend you -Corn

[kyndaris]

May I see the Face and not the Mask

While I don’t make perfect practiced poses, just like Isabella, there’s a lot that hides behind my smile. At the office and even among friends, I’ve adopted the role of being the one with all the jokes. The one that laughs the loudest even as I offer dark deadpan humour. In many ways it’s become my shtick and the way I deal with the challenges life has thrown us. And in this pandemic, if you aren’t laughing, you’re basically crying - either at the numbers that are dead and dying or because the human race is imbecilic. 

There’s a lot of pressure to pretend that everything is fine and that the world isn’t burning (somewhat ironic considering we had an electrical fire in the office not too long ago - I wasn’t there but gosh, it sounded so darn exciting). And that there is another song from Encanto that definitely that struck a chord with me. Surface Pressure. I may not have other siblings but I shoulder so many things and expectations that it’s a wonder I haven’t yet cracked from all the pressure.

In the workplace, I’m known as ol’ reliable. I help new staff that come through, answer questions and am trusted with all the hard work that no-one else can actually do even though they’ve already been there for years. And because I just don’t know how to say ‘no’ anymore, particularly now that I have to actually be an adult, I bend over backwards trying to get all my work done. All without the additional pay or privilege that comes with actually being a team leader or manager. 

That’s not to say that I want to be one. Oh no. The responsibility of actually managing people is terrifying. But I also hate that my kindness is being taken advantage of. Yes, I’m competent at what I do (and my talents are probably being wasted in an office job), there’s no denying that. And yet, to quote a song from the musical Six, ‘You must think that I’m crazy’ if I’m going to just allow people to steamroll right over me. ‘Sorry not sorry about what I said, I just wanted to have some fun. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t lose your head. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.’

Why aren’t we training up the others in the team? Why aren’t we giving them more opportunities to upskill?

Honestly, there have been moments when I fantasise about how freeing it would be to just walk away. 

Maybe if I were to fake my own death and then pop up in the life of luxury or as a Twitch Streamer or a New York Times best-selling author. 

Sometimes I wonder if I’m just very good at masking my own needs and wants very well. I feel like a fraud every time I walk into the office with pep in my step and a saccharine smile on my face. Because, truth be told, I’m really just dying on the inside.

Anxiety and melancholy have always been my two best friends through life. Some people worry about performance issues with a partner in bed. I worry about if I’m hitting or even exceeding KPI. In the dark of the night, the things that send a trickle of fear down my back is how well I’ve been doing and the things that I might have forgotten to do in the office – like printing off a letter and sending it out.

And it shouldn’t be like that!

It’s for that very reason I wrote my short story Splintered. I am so sick of pretending at being just one aspect of who I really am. Of showing people the masks I wear to fit into society that I forget who I am on the inside. It’s tiring and draining and sometimes I just want to give up the fight.

There’s a lesson to be learned here. About how society keeps pushing and pushing and pushing when all I want to do is lie still and just simply be. Is it any wonder that people like to hide in their houses such as the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan?

Maybe that’s why I felt so drawn to Ren, the main protagonist in the Rook and Rose series of books. It always feels like I’m living a lie. When everyone else seems to be taking photos down next to the pool, I’m indoors trying to get through the next big blockbuster game or watching through an interesting documentary about a serial killer on Netflix.

There’s a ton of labels out there in the world today. And there are so many people that just want to pigeonhole themselves into a role because it makes the world more understandable. This may not be politically correct, but you can be all those things AND MORE. There’s no need to limit your interests and hobbies to what is typical of a given label. Nor do you really need to label yourself just to feel that you belong to a particular group.

But maybe I’m just angry that I’ve been trying to find a place to call my own and I keep failing to make those connections to people I think I have the most in common with. Maybe I am just jealous of the closeness others display that make me wonder what if I had been the one to make the first move.

I have a ton of regrets and I’m not entirely sure where my life might lead. In desperation, I even downloaded Hinge as an experiment. The men I’ve chatted with have been nice, but there hasn’t been anyone I’ve clicked with just yet. I’ve tried matching with some of the women and non-binary individuals on the app, but so far…nothing.

Probably because I’m just another one of the ‘pick me’/ ‘not like other girls’ stereotypes that seem to rankle their sensibilities. A woman that hates wearing dresses? Plays video games? God, could she be trying any harder?

But really, the only reason I’ve liked them is because I just want tips. Like where to get their suits/ tuxedos, how they’ve managed to find the best guy-like shoes that are made for women, and if someone will GOSH DARN PLAY DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS WITH ME! I live with my grandmother and mother. One of whom doesn’t speak a lick of English! And the other is obsessed with reading Chinese isekai stories!

I also have no-one in my immediate vicinity of friends that seems to care about Critical Role! Can someone please just discuss how awesome Fearne Calloway and Laudna are? Or maybe we can chat about GameTheory and the hundred other things that seem solely to have piqued my interest but no-one else.

Why does it feel like every day that I have to hide all these things about me, smile and laugh when people talk about the weather, and why couldn’t I have made friends with the cool people in the grade below/ in another school/ somewhere halfway across the world/ only exist on the television that also SHARE THE THINGS THAT I LOVE!

Okay. That was my scream into the universe done for the day. I’m just going to find some dark corner to curl up in now and read trash fanfiction until I die.

[senorarelojes]

Fic: If You Want (1/1)

A while back, I put up a post asking for writing prompts, so I'm slowly making my way through them. This is for the very lovely @what-could-have-been!

Summary: This prompt from @what-could-have-been: "Dave and Alan (who don't know each other yet) coincidentally happen to go to the gym at the same time. Throughout their exercise they keep eyeing each other on different machines. Then they end up in the showers also at the same time (surprise!), Dave drops his soap or something else on the floor and Alan comes to "help". Aaaand you can probably guess the rest... I was also thinking they could be in their mid-20's or so?” Rating: Mature Notes: (In my head, this is early Music for the Masses era DM)

.

Alan liked Ultra Fitness because it was ten minutes away from his workplace, plus it was also along the way home. So it gave him less of an excuse to skip his workouts. Besides, he was already starting to see the results from his frequent visits. His arms were getting nicely sculpted and garnering compliments from the women in his office, and he could see the beginnings of a six pack in the mirror if he held in his stomach enough. So he made it a habit to keep going after work, even though it was more crowded at that timing.

Before he had ever stepped foot in a gym, Alan had been a bit apprehensive about the type of clientele that frequented gyms - for example, those beefy blokes with necks thicker than their heads who looked like they ate guys like Alan for breakfast. But to his surprise, most of the people at Ultra Fitness were nice, friendly and tended to mind their own business, which was a big bonus in Alan’s book. There were also all sorts of regulars, from the afore-mentioned beefy types to those who were just starting out and looked just as nervous as Alan initially had been. But overall, most of them looked like regular people, just like Alan himself.

By now, Alan had definitely become familiar with a few other people at the gym. There was Daryl, the manager at the reception who seemed to know everyone, as well as Martin and Fletch, two friends who mostly came to use the swimming pool or join the Zumba classes. “Great way to meet women,” Fletch had told Alan once with a wink, waggling his eyebrows as Martin had laughed in agreement. Alan had only smiled; he didn’t like flirting with women (or men) at the gym, thinking that people probably didn’t want to be hit on when they were breathless or sweaty. He himself didn’t want to be disturbed: he would just come in, say hello to Daryl as he signed in, grab a locker, pop in his noise-cancelling earbuds and do his workout in peace. That was his routine, and it only ever deviated if he stopped for a chat with Martin and Fletch at the water dispenser.

However, one day he came back from his workout to find a strange tattooed bloke trying to open his locker.

“Er, can I help you?” Alan said, as the man fiddled uselessly with the lock.

He jumped in surprise when Alan spoke to him. “Oh, sorry. I can’t seem to open my locker,” the bloke said, holding up his access card. The lockers at the gym were first come, first serve, and Alan had a special liking for Locker 101, which was located in a far corner, nearer to the shower stalls. Half the time, it wasn’t taken and he was able to grab it for himself. Alan often wondered who was the other person who seemed to like it just as much as he did, and sometimes beat him to it.

Alan flashed the man an apologetic smile. “Sorry mate, think you’re mistaken. It’s mine today,” he explained, holding up his own card to the lock as it whirred for a moment, then clicked open.

“Fuck!” The tattooed bloke was laughing now, face a little red with embarrassment. “Sorry-- it’s just that I usually snag 101, I must have forgotten today.”

“So it’s you,” Alan said with a laugh, before realising the tattooed guy was looking at him with curiosity. “I mean-- never mind.”

The bloke was smiling at him now. He had a really nice smile, which made him look rather boyish even though he seemed to be around Alan’s age. “Well, wish me luck in finding my locker, then,” he said, dropping Alan a wink.

“Good luck, mate.” Alan couldn’t resist watching him walk away in his fitting gym shorts - it was quite a view - as he began taking out his belongings for a shower.

***

After that, Alan began to notice the tattooed bloke around the gym more often. Like Alan, he did a fair bit of weight-lifting, but he also joined the group classes with Martin and Fletch, the three of them chatting and laughing with many of the female regulars after class. Alan found himself watching them at times, wondering how weird it would be for him to ask Mart and Fletch for Tattooed Bloke’s name. Sometimes he would catch Tattooed Bloke watching him in the mirror too, but Alan never seemed to be able to catch him, Martin and Fletch at the right time.

Thankfully, Alan finally learned his name when he was late to the gym one day, finding Daryl already in conversation with Tattooed Bloke at the reception. “Oh hey Charlie,” Daryl said when he spotted Alan, nodding at him as he handed him a towel. “Got held up at the office?”

“Something like that,” Alan replied, glancing over at Tattooed Bloke who was regarding Alan with great interest.

“Your name is Charlie?” he asked, a grin slowly growing on his face. “Was wondering what your name was, but I didn’t peg you for a ‘Charlie’.”

You were wondering what my name was? Alan wanted to ask, but instead he said, “I’m actually Alan, but Daryl got a kick out of my middle name when he did my membership card.”

“C’mon Dave, don’t you agree with me? Doesn’t ‘Charlie’ suit him a lot better than ‘Alan’?” Daryl asked the tattooed bloke, who was just grinning as his gaze rove up and down Alan’s body.

“Dunno, mate,” Dave said, his eyes lingering on Alan’s arms. “A rose by any other name, y’know?”

Daryl rolled his eyes. “You’re useless,” he complained, throwing a towel in Dave’s face as Alan chuckled.

Taking the towel away, Dave seemed hesitant, like he had something else to say to Alan. Unfortunately, the announcement for the start of the Zumba class blared through the gym’s speakers at that moment, leaving Dave grimacing in frustration.

“I’ll see you around, Charlie,” Dave told him with a wave, before he ran off to the dance studio.

***

Now that Alan knew Dave’s name and they’d been sort of introduced, he found himself wondering what would be a non-cheesy way to strike up a conversation with Dave on the gym floor. They would run into each other quite often; if Alan was using the squat rack, Dave would appear soon after and wait for his turn, often offering to spot Alan. Alan wanted to do the same when it came to Dave’s turn, but Dave seemed to have no end of friends at the gym who volunteered to spot him as well, so Alan had no reason to hang around unless he wanted to look like a lecher, drooling over Dave lifting weights.

That didn’t stop him from watching, though. Alan was very, very good at being very, very sneaky, and he used his abilities to his advantage, watching Dave doing deadlifts in the ubiquitous mirrors around the gym, Dave’s tattoos darkened by his sweat, his muscles gleaming as he huffed and pulled on the bar, his perfectly coiffed hair tumbling over his forehead as he bent down to re-rack the weights. Men like Dave were the reason Alan decided he might not be entirely straight, and that his experimentation in uni hadn’t been just a phase.

However, he still lacked the ability to tell if other blokes were straight, gay, bi or whatever else. Alan thought Fletch and Daryl were unequivocally straight, while Martin definitely pinged his gaydar - not that Alan was interested. As for Dave, he was still a huge question mark as far as Alan was concerned. Dave seemed to watch him a lot, but Dave also flirted with the ladies in yoga class as easily as breathing. So Alan decided to mind his own business, unless Dave made a move first.

After a particularly gruelling workout one evening - Alan really hated leg days - he pushed himself to the showers, picking his favourite stall at the corner and draping his towel over the door. The warm water felt like a relief on his shoulders, which were still sore from yesterday’s workout, and he groaned a little as he rolled his shoulders under the hot shower, cracking his neck before he went about shampooing his hair.

He was just done rinsing his hair when he heard someone stepping into the cubicle beside his, shutting the door and starting their own shower. Whoever it was had a nice voice, humming something that sounded like Sigur Ros. Alan listened absently as he slicked his hair with conditioner, wondering if he should get a haircut soon. His hair was getting a little too long to style into a quiff, and he wondered if he should ignore Flood’s advice and get an undercut this time.

He was just done rinsing out the conditioner when he heard someone curse, “Fuck!” as something clattered to the floor, sliding under the partition over to Alan’s stall. It was a bottle of Axe body wash, which the bloke beside him must have dropped.

Alan picked it up, holding it under the partition that separated their stalls. “This yours, mate?” he asked, but the bloke had already stepped out of his stall and was knocking on Alan’s door.

“Sorry, could you pass me my soap?” he asked, and Alan sighed before he stood up, opening the door to hand him the bottle.

His eyes widened when he saw it was a very wet and very naked Dave, who seemed just as surprised - and pleased - when he saw it was Alan. “Oh, it’s you, Charlie.”

Alan couldn’t stop his eyes from roaming even if someone had a gun to his head. He took in the clear view of Dave’s few tattoos, his smooth chest, his tight brown nipples, the heavy cock between his legs. “Uh, this is yours,” Alan said dumbly after a billion years had passed, holding out the bottle of body wash to Dave like a moron.

Dave licked his lips, stepping forward and backing Alan right into his shower stall again. “Mmm, thanks for your help, mate.” Dave was staring openly at Alan’s mouth now, his tongue running over his lower lip. “Reckon you could help me with something else?”

Alan was breathing hard, taking in Dave’s nearness and his brazen confidence, his seeming certainty in Alan’s attraction. “Help you with what?”

Dave finally took the body wash from him, tipping some into his hands and lathering them into a foam, smiling wickedly at Alan as he did so. “Help me soap up my back, yeah? It’s so hard to reach.”

Alan was distantly aware that this felt like some kind of porn scenario, but he couldn’t care less as he grabbed the shower gel from Dave, soaping up his own hands before he leaned in and kissed Dave hungrily, his soapy hands roaming all over Dave’s back. Dave moaned softly into his mouth, his hands running all over Alan’s chest before rubbing at his nipples, making Alan gasp into their kiss.

“Fuck, wanted you for ages,” Dave breathed out before nipping at Alan’s lips again, guiding them both under the stream of water. It was all so slick and hot and steamy, frotting against some handsome stranger in the gym shower stalls where anyone could walk past and hear their moans and gasps. As hard as Alan tried to be quiet, it became impossible when Dave wrapped a soap-slick hand around his cock, pumping him in swift efficient strokes that had Alan’s knees weakening in the shower.

“C’mon, Charlie, c’mon,” Dave whispered against the shell of his ear, his own cock pressed against Alan’s hip, hard and hot and insistent. Alan wanted so badly to wrap his hand around it, put it in his mouth, but he lost all train of thought when Dave bit down on his neck, his hand speeding up on Alan’s cock as he came all over Dave’s stomach in a hushed moan.

“Fuck, you’re so hot,” Dave nuzzled against Alan’s cheek with a soft gasp, Alan reaching down for a few clumsy strokes before warm spurts of come landed on his hip, quickly washed away by the stream of water.

They were both panting now, arms loosely wrapped around each other, Dave’s back still covered with soap. Once Alan realised this, he grabbed Dave by the shoulders to angle him towards the water and get it washed off. Dave initially was filled with panic, as though afraid Alan would shove him out of his stall. But once he figured out what Alan was up to, he laughed and pressed a kiss to the side of Alan’s head. His lips felt warm, nice.

“Can I take you out to dinner?” Dave asked quietly, rubbing slow circles over Alan’s shoulder. “I swear I wanted to take you out first before doing this, but-- fuck, you looked so fuckin’ irresistable, mate. All warm and wet, y’know?”

Alan had to chuckle in agreement. “Yeah, I do know.”

Dave pulled away to look at him. His eyes - green? brown? - were serious as they regarded Alan. “So it’s a yes to dinner, then?”

Alan rolled his eyes. “If you haven’t clued in to the fact that I just got you off in the shower, then I don’t know what to say.”

“Idiot.” Dave flashed him a sunny, relieved grin as he ducked out of the shower stall. “I’ll see you outside, then.”

***

Dave was waiting for Alan at the reception counter, chatting animatedly with Martin, Fletch and Daryl. However, he straightened up immediately when he spotted Alan, ignoring all of his friends at a drop of a hat. “Hey Charlie.”

Fletch was frowning deeply in confusion. “Wait, isn’t his name Alan?”

Alan shrugged at Fletch, smiling when Dave came up to him and took his hand in his, making everyone’s eyebrows shoot up to the ceiling. “A rose by any other name, y’know?” Alan quipped, grinning at a stunned Fletch.

“Hey, that’s my line,” Dave said with a laugh, tugging Alan by the hand and out the door. “Don’t wait up, fellas.”

[yuvon-writes-letters]

[Right on the top of the letter is a sighing girl drawn]

I really thought I could rest a few days before leaving. Like last time, ya know? I could've been more prepared. Didn't even get the call yet.

But I guess you're right. Exactly when you figured it out Jake did, too. (With a little bit help of goldie. They sent him the Tumblr conversation. The whole conversation. Without any comment.)

So yeah, either the MWAF knows where I work or (and that is a scary thought) even is there somehow sometimes.

Jake wanted me to promise to not go back there, but I couldn't. At least not for now. I want to go back there once, for now I shouldn't be in danger. At least not if he goes the same way as last time.

I should get a call from him later that day. And tomorrow I should find the raven note on my desk (after my lunch break). Later that day I saw the first time a guy with a mask. Then again the morning after I took the picture I sent TSB.

And that same evening I started hiding.

So I thought I still had some time...But it seems that isn't the case.

I would love to take Max, even though he can be a real asshole sometimes, but I don't believe that is clever. [The writing becomes shaky, almost unreadable to the end of the sentence]

I don't know anything anymore, just that I don't want all of this to happen again...

[Here are many ink blots, as if a pen was thrown on the paper]

Sorry..Sorry about that. My door bell started ringing. Surprise surprise, my idiot of a cousin. (I still love him though. Even if I'll never forgive him that he stole designs of me. Urgh. Sorry, nervous.)

He thought I acted weird when we texted earlier and my boss wanted him to check up on me.

What does a nervous little fox Liska do? (Little fox is a nickname he gave me when we were little xD I somtimes start using it when we're both in a weird situation)

He almost called the police, thinking I was in some weird 'abusive relationship' with, and I quite, "this Jake asshole".

It seems someone wrote him a text. An unknown number.

I already texted Jake about that..Any my guess is that the MWAF realised that he couldn't hack Jake anymore. So he tries different ways.

But it's fine now, I think I could convince him that everyone was okay. Even though now I have to take vacation with him. He wants to go tomorrow afternoon if I don't want him to call my parents. Why? That if I'm lying I'm not in danger anymore.

I mean, he's not fully wrong. Just that he doesn't have the facts right. (Which he couldn't. I'm still surprised that me being a suspect of kidnapping Hannah or helping a wanted hacker didn't go beyond Duskwood. But that's good.)

Oh and also, Jake just answered, he thinks it's good if I just go with Max in the moment. I think he stalked his Facebook profile. (Max did taekwondo for many years. Facebook tells his story)

But yeah, I am very sorry if this is an unsorted letter, not much happened and still many unsaid thoughts crossed my mind.

Liska🐾🔥

Ps. Also Jake wants me to thank the both of you for taking care of me when he couldn't. And still doing it.

And that I say that he's still not pleased with my decision to go to work tomorrow.

Lis,

So, Goldie's really taking more of an active role, now. I sort of thought they were finished until we massively fuck up again, but I guess they just don't want us to ask them questions or something. Interesting.

I wonder if that means the TSB timeline is still continuing

So the raven note on your desk comes tomorrow? I really wouldn't assume you're safe 'til then, but I guess if your Jake can't convince you, no one can XD

Still. Maybe now-ish would be a good time to take a long trip somewhere sunny. And crowded. Preferably with as many people as possible, who will notice if you go missing.

This is not going to happen again. We have several Jakes and two fairly smart people plus me helping you, PLUS an entity on your side, PLUS the advantage of knowing AND HAVING DOCUMENTATION on exactly how the previous timeline went. All we have to do is figure out a place you'll be safe, and bam, we're done.

...That's a pretty good opportunity, honestly. I agree with your Jake, you should go with your cousin. Though I'm curious what exactly the MWAF said to your cousin that convinced him that you were in danger. You might want to make sure that, a., the MWAF didn't suggest a location and you're not going there, b., your cousin turns off GPS tracking on his phone or just leaves it at home, and c., that your cousin doesn't post pictures of you on social media wherever you go.

Don't worry about the letter not being neat and stuff, I don't care too much about that. As long as

One sec Jessys texting me

Nothing important, she's still trying to test if I've been kidnapped or not without saying it outright. I lost my train of thought from earlier. Oh well.

You're welcome, Jake :) And I definitely emphasize with you on that one -_-

Passing the letter over to my Jake now.

(The handwriting changes to Jake's.) Hello, Lis.

Your workplace is very clearly an unsafe environment, but upon reflection and having read ahead and read Max's offer, I believe you actually should go into work, at least for the day. It will give less of our cards away to the enemy. However, do be vigilant. We know that our actions have already changed the timeline to at least some extent, the breadth of which is still unclear.

I am not entirely sure what the kidnapper would gain from having your cousin watching carefully over you in the window of time the kidnapper would have taken to track you down, however. Could it be possible that Goldie was the one to send your cousin the message, rather than the kidnapper?

I concur with Yuvon that the previous timeline's events will not repeat, however, for the exact same reasons she listed, though I will edit it slightly: we have three Jakes and three intelligent people working on the case, including Yuvon. I think I may need to speak with her about this.

Most of the advice I would have given about precautions for the vacation with your cousin has already been covered by Yuvon :)

You are welcome, Jake.

I noticed that in my agitation from your last letter, I accidentally skimmed over some key points. My apologies. I'll answer them now.

I will attempt to find a good point to bring up the matter with her, but she is busy enough trying to mitigate the concerns of the "Crow Crew" that I do not think that should be done at the current moment.

While I am... fond of the "underlying desire" theory, I do not, on reflection, believe it. The fact that she would subconsciously choose me, rather than a family member or a friend she has known longer than myself, seems unlikely. Especially not when she had been quite incensed at me very, very recently. It simply makes no sense.

Though, admittedly, if the situation was reversed, she would likely be

The stasis wavering is both good and bad news. It has been both a benefit and a detriment thus far. Ensure that the group does not draw the kidnapper's ire instead, without alerting them that you are in danger, should they break loose of the stasis alone. Until then, based on the results from Yuvon previously contacting them, I suggest you avoid contact unless they open communication first.

Good luck, Lis and Jake.

—Jake & Yuvon

(The letter tucks itself into the paper clip with the others.)

[thedreadvampy]

So this was sent to me by @atiredpan weeks ago when the White Jon conversation was very live and I'm posting it (belatedly) with their blessing (they didn't want to put it up publicly and have it seem like an attack which I really very much appreciate but wouldn't have minded) and I percolated for a few days and then got very busy for a few weeks. Response follows.

So I feel weird about how I'm responding to this stuff, I'm launching rapidly into taking about/explaining my own experience in a way I'm worried maybe comes across as a direct comparison. It kind of feels like I'm talking in a way that's like brushing off your experience and saying OK BUT HERE'S WHY I'M RIGHT and that's not what I'm trying to do, it's just that there's not much I can usefully add to what you've said - you know your experience better than I do, and I'm not gonna go around trying to read into it or reexplain it. So I'm going to talk about where I am/have been coming from, but not with the intention of countering your points, all of which I think really resonate.

First off, the post where I was like "Jon is white and if you disagree you're Wrong" was, unreservedly, just a shitty post and I'm not suprised it upset a lot of people. I'm really very sorry about that, it was thoughtlessly written and pretty stupidly posted.

I totally get that my whiteness has fed into how I hced Jon (and as I think I've said before I saw Jon a certain way well before I engaged with any fanworks, just as you did). There's a lot of reasons I imagined Jon as white from pretty early on, a non-negligible one of which was like...That's Jonny. This is a podcast by Jonny, about a character with the same name and mannerisms as Jonny, and Jonny is extremely white. It would have felt weird, when I was listening to TMA as a Friend Podcast, to stick a brown face onto what at least appeared at the time to basically be a self-insert character of my white friend. Now that's a really personal thing informed less by the story and more by the circumstances under which I've interacted with it, but it certainly laid a baseline. I didn't really have a clear mental picture of Jon (or most of the characters) for a looooooong time (for an artist I'm really not a very visual thinker) but I had a few sort of mental sketches (Jon is short white balding and awkward, Martin is tall biracial and scruffy Basira is fat and somali Melanie is my friend from work etc) which I developed a long time before I encountered fanworks.

I saw the alienation you mentioned and I connected it to class and gender, not race, because I’ve met a lot of cis men, white and otherwise, who interpolate trauma, class insecurity, insecurity about their own abilities, and so on into withdrawal, denial and snappiness. So for me I had an interpretation of that element of his personality which was pretty much race-neutral, and then I had these existing cues leading me to assuming he was white (largely that Jonny is white, but also wee stuff in the story that...it’s not like anything substantial enough to remember, let alone justify, but there were certainly interactions that pinged whiteness for me personally)

There are actually iirc a few throwaway references to Jon being promoted above more qualified candidates throughout (or at least I thought I knew that before s5), but the time I decided I thought White Jon was an obvious conclusion was of course the conversation where Sasha expresses frustration about it. and the context of that conclusion (at least as far as I can see) wasn't "people of colour can only exist in subservient positions/defined by oppression" but was informed by two things that were going on with my life around the time that episode aired

I had been having several conversations with friends of mine (and largely friends of Jonny's) who work in London in the museums/archiving sector and who are the only women of colour in whole departments or even whole museums, and who experience so little career mobility compared to their less-qualified white counterparts (we're talking about women graduating top of their class at Oxbridge with anthropology or library science masters and stellar original research, with a decade or more of impeccable work experience and acting up, being left in internship and low-grade positions, while white men who "fit the culture" but have 0 museums experience sail into upper management positions and then stay there until they retire). So I'd come almost directly from these conversations into what to me sounded like exactly the same gripe in TMA.

I'd been at that point working for about a year and a half on co-coordinating the anti-oppression committee in my workplace, which was a very Good Progressive Activist Charity with Good Lefty Principles, and over the course of experience sharing and discussions both with colleagues of colour and along lines of wealth, disability, class etc, I was very much confronted with the realisation of how much 'being adequately qualified' meant different things for middle-class good-university white men vs much more highly skilled and hardworking women of colour or people of different class and wealth backgrounds. Obviously I'd known that before in principle, but not really having been in Salaried Workplaces (as opposed to like. service and retail hourlies) I hadn’t got so up close and personal with it. So that was also very fresh in my mind, this like...big substantial experience of how Good, Well-Meaning, Caring, Thoughtful, Woke white men just........did not need to think about this. at all. and were startled and discomforted to face it. and that this was also true of most white middle-class women. and these conversations were really carved down the middle between white middle-class European women saying ‘this is such a surprise when we have such an equitable hiring policy and diverse staff, that there’s this gender gap’ and women of colour in the room wearily saying ‘yeah, there’s a gender gap, there’s always a gender gap and it is always a racialised gender gap’ so yeah I was definitely thinking about the intersection between being passed over at work because of gender and because of race.

The point about Tim is interesting because I think for me what’s getting lost is that I don’t think Jon is entitled as like...a Character Trait. He’s not like...Toxic Masculinity Man. He is very anxious about boundaries and about his own capacity to do harm. But it has to be pointed out to him where he’s doing harm. He doesn’t notice where he’s been unfairly advantaged, and that’s to me much more reflective of most people’s relationship to white or male entitlement. 

As I say, that exchange with Tim and Sasha cemented the Jon Is White hc in my head specifically because it was so reflective of conversations I had had with women of colour working in similar workplaces, about white men, usually about white men they generally liked or at least didn’t have beef with beyond their unfair advantages. 

It seems odd to me to frame ‘bitching about your boss on your friend’s behalf to make her feel better’ as more similar to white entitlement/white privilege than any of that tbh? That’s just...being friends with someone? 

Anyway I recognise that it’s not white entitlement to accept a job. Obviously it’s not, it’s just sensible under the circumstances, you get lucky and you grab it. For me my sense of Jon as white-because-of-this is not “he took a job he shouldn’t have taken,” it’s more about his obliviousness to the impact he has on others, and also primarily how people react to him. The interaction between Sasha and Tim is saturated with the of course it would be him I mentioned above, but even before that he walks through the world not expecting to have to think about anything but his conscious decisions, and he’s caught aback when people see him as out of place or as having power above his station.

I think it’s impossible to extricate ‘this is where my head was at’ from that interpretation, and also like obviously my own whiteness is a big factor. And not just my own personal whiteness but the place I grew up (which was 98.3% white) and the world which reflects back whiteness. So this is in no way intended as a bolshy This Is The Correct Headcanon the way my Bad Post was bc examining it I’m like...yeah I mean this is about how I personally interpreted this based on where I was at at the time. But I do feel like there’s some communication gap in what it is about this unqualified promotion thing that pinged me - it’s not that All Bosses Must Be White And All Brown People Must Be Downtrod, it’s something quite specific about the tone and tenor of the interactions around the getting-a-job.

But also? Idk. Kind of unrelatedly, and people obviously should feel free to disagree with me on this, it feels kind of off to frame this as defaulting to a white Jon? I sort of think that my idea of Jon as white is very much not ‘white until proven otherwise’ - part of the reason for my original strident tone was that I felt that I was being expected to drop a headcanon I had for specific reasons and default to the fanon version of Jon without actually having any reason other than ‘this is how the community thinks he should look,’ and without really understanding anything about what that means, and while obviously defaulting to a non-white headcanon isn’t like...entrenched in the way that defaulting to a white headcanon is, it does seem to me like this is perhaps part of why white fans slap brown skin onto a character without thinking into what that means or why they’re doing it.

The thing I’m struggling with as regards my personal headcanon here is that I could decide to only ever draw Jon as Fanon Jon, but it wouldn’t be because I had strong reasons to see him that way, it wouldn’t be the same as why you see Jon as brown, or why I see like...Melanie as Indian, it would literally be Default To Standard in a way it isn’t for you. And I don’t feel that I have Defaulted To Whiteness, or where I have it is for reasons specifically to do with Jon (I visualised Jon as white because I visualised him as Jonny, who is white), not because I think every character is White Until Proven Otherwise. Like, my reasons for understanding Jon as white may be bad reasons, but they are reasons, not post-hoc excuses (I can’t like...prove that. but I know it to be true at least on a conscious level). I didn’t go Oh Jon Is White Because Everyone Is Unless I Have Reason To Think They Aren’t, Hooray, Here Is A Post-Hoc Justification For Why It Isn’t Racist To Think That. So while I am totally on board with the idea that it may be shitty, harmful or poorly thought through to hc Jon as white, I’m not sure I can fully see it in myself as being default. But I do understand that that isn’t necessarily what came across in my original short post.

Honestly, the reason I took issue with Fanon Jon and Fanon Martin in such a bolshy way in the first place was that I didn’t get why these characters were universally seen as Asian and white, respectively, and had such strong and consistent fanon images, when none of the other characters did, and when I was seeing people drawing people like Sasha and Melanie and Tim as white way more when in my mind there was no reason to assume they were white. On an emotional level I guess I think either there’s Fanon As Lore, or there’s no fanon (and I prefer the latter) and my discomfort came from the place that the one character I absolutely saw as coded as white in the core cast had this one really specific Ambiguously Brown Fanon Look (which from what I’d seen at the time didn’t seem to be like...backed with anything or coming from any personal interpretation for most of the white fans I was seeing on like Twitter and Tumblr) but white headcanons are everywhere for characters like Melanie or Sasha or Georgie, who seemed to me to be unambiguously people of colour, or characters like Tim or Martin (who could perfectly reasonably be people of colour and who I hc as Rroma and biracial respectively)? I don’t know, it’s difficult to express, but I find it frustrating.

[my-miraculous-headcanons]

Kim Possible AU

In which Marinette is in gymnastics, is childhood friends with Adrien, and somehow became an agent-for-hire when someone accidentally dialed her number to call for help instead of actual, professionally trained agents. That’s right, they called a preteen for help, didn’t have the time to call anyone else, and rolled with it.

Also Adrien is a total goofball with a hairless cat. He still has both his parents, who start out overprotective but gradually loosen the reigns when it becomes clear that his friend will keep him safe.

(The reason I put gymnastics and not cheerleading is because I’m pretty sure that’s an exclusively American thing? Besides, gymnastics kind of makes more sense, skillset-wise.)

Origins

     • Marinette took gymnastics since she was seven, mainly because her clumsiness had been turning into a bit of a problem. (Parents start to get worried when their child’s having genuine physical difficulty in not hurting themselves. They thought gymnastics would help her learn balance, and also allow her to burn off some of her natural childlike energy.) By the age of eleven, Marinette is the best in her class, and is thinking about entering competitions.

     • Adrien is Marinette’s childhood best friend. Along with gymnastics, Marinette also started taking ballet, which is where the two met. Adrien was taking ballet because both his parents had taken it, and also because he thought it would be fun. Since he’d been taking it longer than Marinette, he helped her out in class, and the two have been inseparable ever since.

     • Adrien helped Marinette build a website to help get her name out there when they were eleven. They took videos of her doing a couple moves, and added a contact number. Unfortunately, (or, rather fortunately, actually,) Marinette’s number is very similar to a number for a group of agents who do pretty dangerous, life-saving jobs. 

     • Marinette’s first call is from a man requesting for help at a rather big bank in Paris, not far from her house. Being eleven, she doesn’t really understand that this is probably something she should inform the police, rather than handle herself. So, she and Adrien (who she sneaks out of his house) rush over, and save the day themselves.

     • Adrien had videotaped the impressive gymnastics Marinette had pulled off in order to safely get through the security lasers and shut them off. After that video was posted, she started getting calls on a much more regular basis, all from people in need of help. It wasn’t the sort of attention she was looking for when making the website, but she can’t deny she doesn’t love her new job.

The Present

     • By the ages of 16, Marinette and Adrien have travelled all over the world, gaining favors from a bunch of grateful individuals, and are pretty dang famous. They aren’t necessarily given special privileges at school, but if things are urgent, then they’re allowed to leave and makeup missing work online. 

     • Adrien is still a model, still plays piano, still takes Chinese, and still does a lot of different sports. On his own, he’s actually pretty famous. However, in this world, it’s pretty much impossible for him to display the ‘perfect, gentlemanly son’ persona when most of the world has seen videos of him screaming at the top of his lungs, running around in his underwear because somehow his pants got pulled off again. Yeah, he’s a straight A student with the classic, rich people training, but he’s still an utter dork and everyone knows it.

     • Marinette, while still taking gymnastics, has lost interest in making it a life career when she already sort of does it already. She’s picked up other interests, one of them being fashion design when Adrien had introduced her to what goes on behind the scenes in his workplace. She’s good at designing stylish, yet very practical outfits, and made uniforms for herself and Adrien for their ‘side jobs’ as agents-for-hire. 

     • While Adrien isn’t necessarily incompetent, he’s more of the ‘do first, think later’ type of guy when it comes to their dynamic, which often leaves Marinette to do the planning and problem-solving. At this point, it’s kind of abundantly obvious that, while Adrien is academically more profound, Marinette is vastly more analytical, and probably has a ridiculously high IQ if they ever bothered to check. 

     • There isn’t a main villain. Papillion doesn’t exist because Gabriel is completely aware of what his son is doing, still has his darling wife, and has literally no reason to waste his money on illegal activities. He’s a big name in the fashion world, it’s not like he’s looking for world domination or something stupid like that.

     • (I’m sure you’re wondering why the fuck Gabriel Agreste would let his only son go off on dangerous adventures like that on a daily. Well, he didn’t at first, but over time Marinette proved to be a more effective bodyguard than Adrien’s actual bodyguard, so he became more chill. Also, Adrien’s the face of his company, and with all the brave and daring things he’s done alongside Marinette, his popularity ratings are through the roof. Son has fun, is well-taken care of, still performs exceptionally in all his extracurriculars, and does well by the family business? It’s a win-win on all sides.)

     • I would make Lila Shego, except Shego is an actually likeable villain who’s genuinely smart, badass, and fun to watch. So, idk who Shego is, definitely not any of the catty girl rivals Marinette has to put up with, but you can’t have a Kim Possible AU without Shego, so she’s definitely in there. 

     • Max is probably Wade. Honestly makes the most sense, but here’s a suggestion: Max and Kim are the ones who contact Marinette when she has a mission. Max is great with numbers, technology, etc, but Kim’s expertise in completely random shit like sports, terrain, and necessary gear needed for specific situations makes him a valuable asset to the team.

     • We all know who Chloé is going to be, I don’t even need to say it but I will anyways. Say hello to our Bonnie, everyone. She was probably in that ballet class with Marinette and Adrien too, years ago. 

     • While Tom Dupain is still a baker, in this AU Sabine Cheng went on to pursue her dream as a literal rocket scientist, and succeeded. So, Sabine is basically Dr. James Timothy Possible. 

     • Adrien has a hairless cat named Plagg. His father is allergic to fur, and Adrien’s allergic to feathers, so he was sort of limited to pets like fish or lizards, neither of which he really wanted. He found Plagg outside gorging himself on camembert by a dumpster. Having been previously a street cat, Plagg’s growth was stunted, so he stayed pretty small.

     • Luka is obviously Josh Mankey. Marinette and Luka date for a while, but eventually break up on mutual terms due to him not being able to handle some of the dangerous things that pop up in her life often. While he doesn’t panic when things go south, he’s not really physically equipped to protect himself... He’s a musician, not a fighter.

     • Listen, y’all can fight me, Marinette’s longest relationship before finally getting together with Adrien is going to be with Kagami. Kagami handles the dangerous things that go on in Marinette’s life perfectly well, and they date for several months. Eventually, they do break up, but still remain good friends. (This is the period in which Adrien realises he’s jealous of Kagami, and has feelings for Marinette.)

Get Together

     • For those of you who haven’t watched Kim Possible, (and honestly what the hell are you even doing with your life if you haven’t,) Kim and Ron get together at a school dance (prom, but I don’t think prom exists in France,) and share a slow dance with each other. Uhhh so basically think Despair Bear, except Adrien and Marinette are wearing fancy clothes, just got together, and share a kiss in the end.

     • Marinette had recently broken up with Kagami before the dance, and is a little upset over not having a date when she already made herself a dress. Adrien is dealing with his realisation that he likes Marinette romantically, but keeps quiet about it and gives her a shoulder to cry on because she’s hurt, and he’s not going to take advantage of that. He suggests they go to the dance together as friends.

     • Kagami is there, and Adrien confronts her as to why she had broken up with the most amazing girl in Paris. She tells him that she came to the conclusion that, though she loved Marinette with all her heart, Marinette clearly had someone else as her #1. Kagami was sick of having to compete for that position when the other person didn’t even need to try. Adrien is left baffled by this.

     • Marinette overhears this as she’s walking over to ask Adrien for a dance. Kagami looked past Adrien’s shoulder, directly into Marinette’s eyes, and smiled knowingly. Then she walked away, sipping at her drink. 

     • Adrien turns around, pretty green eyes latching onto hers, and Marinette immediately understands what Kagami had meant. A slow song comes on, and she asks him to dance. Things fall in place from there.

     • (Of course, after they’ve kissed and become a couple, some dumb villain is going to inevitably crash the party and try to kill Marinette, as usual, but they deal with it like they always do.)

Alright that’s the end! This was an almost completed draft of mine I had, and since I’ve been lacking on content recently, I thought I’d quickly polish this up a bit and post it. I also have some other completed things I could polish up on, but eh, don’t feel like it right now. Enjoy!

(And maybe tell me how you’d imagine your favourite KP episode would go with Marinette and Adrien as the protagonists instead!)

[odanurr87]

Flash Review: What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim?

Park Seo-Joon as Lee Young-Joon, and Park Min-Young as Kim Mi-So.

Release date: June 6 - July 26, 2018

Episodes: 16

Available on: Viki

Summary: Lee Young-Joon is the Vice Chairman of the YumYung Group, a large corporation and the family business. He’s smart, successful, and supremely confident to the point of narcissism. Kim Mi-So has been his secretary for the past nine years, proving herself to be extremely efficient in the execution of her duties and the only person who can keep up with his ego and intellect, anticipating her boss’ will and seeing it carried out. One day, out of the blue, Kim Mi-So announces she has decided to quit her job and start a new chapter in her life, what takes Young-Joon entirely by surprise. This event forces the two to review their relationship, as Young-Joon realises he doesn’t want to let her go, and Mi-So starts seeing other sides of her boss’ personality as she realises he might have feelings for her. As this is a kdrama, the return of Young-Joon’s hated older brother, Lee Seong-Yeon, complicates matters when he suddenly enters Mi-So’s life, turning himself into a rival romantic interest. Meanwhile, Mi-So starts looking into an old kidnapping case connected to the two brothers.

What I liked:

The pacing and execution of the romantic relationship. One of my main complaints when I reviewed The Secret Life of my Secretary (TSLS for short) was that I felt that show took too long to develop the relationship between the boss and his secretary, dragging the deception more than it should have, and even when the leads eventually admit they have feelings for each other, 24 episodes in, it didn’t quite feel believable and the wrap up felt a bit rushed. The Vice Chairman and Secretary Kim manage to get there by Episode 8, selling it every step of the way, giving us another eight episodes to see how their relationship progresses and concludes. Romantic misunderstandings, that staple of most romcoms, are thankfully kept to a minimum, something I was extremely grateful for. For instance, when the beginning of one such misunderstanding rears its ugly head at the end of Episode 8, Secretary Kim doesn’t waste a second to clear the air with the Vice Chairman and declare her feelings for him, marking the beginning of their romantic relationship. They still have their disagreements (Secretary Kim is definitely not a pushover) and face their share of obstacles and objections to their relationship; we see how their relationship plays out in the workplace, sometimes with hilarious results (Mi-So can be very protective of her boyfriend!); we’re treated to the expected bouts of jealousy from the two leads, the apparently required drunk scenes, etc. In short, it’s what you’d expect from a good Hollywood romcom but longer.

The absence of the “family member X trying to usurp power from the lead brother” trope. So refreshing to do away with this trope every once in a while. You will find no evil conspiracy here directed at any of the leads, a staple of kdramas where a chaebol’s involved, giving us more time to explore the relationship between the Vice Chairman and Secretary Kim, which is frankly what this show is all about. We still have that jerk relative that shows up to cause trouble, but he’s mostly harmless. I will address this plot in the next section.

The humor. The humor in this show is comprised of four elements, which I’ll proceed to highlight in bold. If you’ve watched the show, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is Kang Ki-Young, who plays Young-Joon’s best friend, councilor, and president of the Yumyung Group, Park Yoo-Sik, as he does a fantastic job providing comic relief, taking advantage of the fact that he’s the only person who can make fun of Young-Joon and get away with it. I particularly liked his interactions with his clumsy and forgetful secretary, a pairing many viewers shipped. While I was taken aback by how much I liked him in Bring it on, Ghost, I was definitely less surprised to see what a great job he did here. Easily the best supporting character in the show. However, I feel Park Min-Young’s Kim Mi-So gives him a run for his money, not for being a prankster but because of how she reacts in any number of situations (as does Yoo-Sik), from trying to hide her boyfriend from her sisters, through punching a stuffed cow to make room for her virtual boyfriend, to trying to suppress her feelings of jealousy when faced with the prospect of having a rival for Young-Joon’s affection. You could call it situational humor perhaps, but seeing Mi-So’s facial expressions and her demeanor in these situations is priceless. These two are not the only actors/characters who partake in the show’s humor, but I believe they’re the standouts. Next on the list are the show’s well-placed sound effects, from weather effects to animal sounds, which really bring out the humor in certain situations. The sound effects in this show are 100% on point. Last but not least is the inclusion of a certain animated devil who pops up from time to time when Young-Joon or Mi-So are having lewd thoughts. As Young-Joon says at one point, “Fighting!”

Secretary Kim’s many facial expressions. Pity the sound effect wasn’t timed right in this scene.

What I didn’t like:

The older brother and the execution of his storyline. Perhaps I am less inclined to like his character because I initially watched the episodes out of order. During the first few episodes, Young-Joon’s brother, Seong-Yeon, clearly appears as the more likable of the two, returning home after years abroad, ready to make amends, only to find a brother who has nothing but contempt for him and a family who still favours Young-Joon. One should sympathize with him under the circumstances. However, for my part, Seong-Yeon showed his true colors even before he regained his memories. As I mentioned earlier, his return also results in the two brothers holding an undeclared contest for Mi-So’s affections, with Seong-Yeon believing he has the upper hand because of a past connection with her. When Seong-Yeon boasts how he’s going to exploit this connection to get her that was the moment I went, “This dude’s an asshole. He’s really going to exploit a painful memory simply to one up his brother.” Young-Joon, on the other hand, was actually doing his best to protect Mi-So from it, even at the risk of losing her. However, beyond Seong-Yeon’s likeability as a character, from a narrative standpoint, I just can’t believe the two brothers haven’t settled their score after two decades. Further, his transformation from jerk to good brother after he regains his memories seemed a little rushed, a little forced, with some scenes seemingly set up to cast him in a more favourable light. I have my strong doubts that someone who’s experienced that kind of mental trauma would make such a recovery in such a short amount of time (days? weeks?). Ultimately, he came across more as a plot device than a character.

How the parents handled the kidnapping. Letting your kids believe a lie for decades is not the way you handle a traumatic experience! It strikes me as unbelievable, irresponsible, and utterly reproachable, that the parents would rather scar their children for life than send them to therapy, especially when time proved that the lie had not improved the brothers’ relationship and possibly made it worse. There’s also some inconsistency with the character of the mother, who at one point looks to Mi-So to take care of Young-Joon, hinting she knows of their relationship, only for her to later ask Young-Joon not to date Mi-So because that would make Seong-Yeon unhappy. The gall of this woman. Fortunately, Seong-Yeon intervenes (this is the favourable light scene I mentioned earlier), as the mother was about to make yet another parenting mistake. I’m also slightly skeptical she didn’t figure out the truth behind the kidnapping earlier, specifically, the moment Mi-So’s involvement is revealed, a secretary Young-Joon personally selected over more qualified candidates. It’s a relatively minor detail though.

OTP: Damn, these two can kiss! If that’s not chemistry, I don’t know what is. Every moment these two are together is just perfect. I’ll admit I disliked Young-Joon’s unhealthy possessiveness, but I understand this was a conscious choice to show how much his character changes as a result of his love for Mi-So, eventually willing to let her go and choose a new path. I know some people disapproved of Mi-So’s decision to stay as Young-Joon’s secretary, seeing it as a regression and arguing she should try something new, but I disagree. At the end of the day, what’s important is that Mi-So is no longer pressured by circumstance to follow a path but is now finally able to decide for herself knowing she has someone in her life who will support her regardless. I’d question the timing of her decision but not the decision itself. She can always quit later. I also appreciated this show wasn’t afraid of showing the two characters actually tie the knot. Makes for a good change of pace.

Verdict: Initially, I dropped this show like a bomb in the middle of the first episode, as the thought of having a hardcore narcissistic boss as one of the leads did not appeal to me one bit, and having just finished watching the disappointing The Secret Life of my Secretary I really didn’t want to waste much more of my time on a show that promised to be similar. I was utterly wrong, as it turned out. What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim? is a great office romcom, with Park Seo-Joon and Park Min-Young easily delivering on the romance and the comedy, aided by Kang Ki-Young and a solid supporting cast. This is an easy recommendation and definitely worth watching multiple times.

Rewatch meter: High

[workersolidarity]

I feel the need as a true believer in Socialism, as a Marxist Leninist knowing full well the conditions of Neoliberal Capitalism and Imperialism in which we live, to warn people about the rampant Wage Theft Employers are getting away with.

About two months ago I took a job as a Shift Manager at Marco's Pizza in Louisiana. The Franchise Owner gave the interview and hired me at $9.50 an hour with the understanding that my pay would go to $10 once I was trained.

Within a week I knew this job would be a problem. On my fifth day I worked a shift with the Owner who immediately began barking and yelling at me within minutes of clocking in. With utter disdain in her voice she told me she was very "disappointed by my performance" and that after a week I should have "most of the job down".

No joke, she expected that my years of Management experience meant I should have the entire job at a completely different business down pat by my fifth day.

Long story short, I noticed that my pay didn't seem right. My first two paychecks had been higher than subsequent ones.

Well, I just found out that without any disciplinary actions on my record, without any official or even verbal warning, my pay had been cut behind my back. In fact, I still don't even know exactly how much I'm making, but it's closer to the Federal Minimum Wage.

Mind you my last job was as an Assistant Manager at Family Dollar where I earned $11 an hour and never had a single complaint with regards to my work performance.

Well I've been taken advantage of and mistreated by employers one too many times and this is the last straw. According to Louisiana Labor Law (a Right-To-Work State with almost no Worker Rights at all and no Minimum Wage), my employer can lower my wages or hours without reason at anytime. HOWEVER, I MUST BE NOTIFIED BEFORE SUCH PAY CUTS TAKE PLACE.

Therefore I looked at local laws, contacted a Law Firm specializing in local Employment based cases and while I await a response I've decided a plan to get payback and fight back.

I've downloaded a call recording app and tested it. I've set it up to immediately begin recording all incoming or outgoing calls within one second of being answered. I set it to maximize the recording quality and got the Owner's cell number.

Having dealt with this entitled, Pettty Bourgeois woman on a multitude of occasions now, I know her temper and need to always prove her power to do what ever she likes is likely to also be her biggest weakness.

I'm planning out a call structured in such a way as to bring these qualities of hers out and get her to admit on the recording that she violated the work contract by not notifying me of my pay cut.

I plan on filing an official suit against her immediately afterwards and knowing her, she'll likely fire me in a blatant case of retaliatory dismissal, which would raise the matter from a minor local matter, to one that puts the business itself at risk.

I then plan on contacting her Business Partners and alerting them of not only my own case, but various instances I've been witness to of retaliation on employees as well as blatantly illegal violations of minimum wage laws of store Drivers I've witnessed countless times. It's literally a business strategy of hers, not on occasional thing.

I hope that by making it clear just how unstable and reckless this woman is, that her Business Partners will recognize the liability she's become and sue for control over the company as the financiers.

Finally, I very much intend on making my case as Public as possible and involving the Corporation, not because I believe they can be held legally responsible, I'm well aware they can't, but so that the company will pull their licensing agreements with the Franchise, putting them out of Business and thoroughly ruining her life and career once and for all.

Then she can finally know what it's like to work for garbage wages for en employer that treats you like shit.

I'm not interested in getting money out of this. I could give a fuck less. I'm interested in taking out the career of the worst Employer I've ever had in my life, and one who regularly violates the Law and then makes her employees as miserable as possible on top of it.

She is truly the Boss from Hell. If I had the time, I would recount story after story after story of how this woman leverages her position of power over Workers to purposely and obviously make them as miserable as humanly possible. I've never in my life encountered a more horrible human being. And I look forward to thoroughly destroying every aspect of her life.

I would also recount more detail in the various plans I've carefully been making to do just that. But thats the basic gist of my plan. No one should have to live with an employer like this. Especially the most powerless workers in our society.

As if these jobs weren't horrible enough as it is. Someone like this comes along and enjoys making people feel as awful as possible. Her insults, condescension and now wage theft make her the worst human being imaginable.

I will truly truly enjoy ruining her life. Guess she's never employed a Marxist-Leninist before.

Anyone reading this, if you ever find yourself working in Hellish conditions like this, DON'T WAIT TWO MONTHS OR LONGER LIKE I DID! GET OUT OF THAT TOXIC STRESS INDUCING SITUATION AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE, CONTACT ANYONE YOU CAN TO MAKE SURE THAT EMPLOYER CAN'T JUST KEEP TREATING WORKERS THIS WAY. NO ONE DESERVES THAT.

I also understand quite well how trapped a person can feel in a nightmarish job like this. Some resources do exist however and you must do all you can to take advantage of any Social Services you can find in your area to help you escape a bad boss as quickly as you would an abusive partner! Abuse is abuse no matter whom it comes from and you NEVER deserve to be abused by someone in a position of power! No one does!

It's so important people learn not to put up with abuse, sexual or any other kind of harassment, wage-theft or any other form of abuse. In the age of Neoliberalism, Employers think they can get away with anything. And sadly they often do! But most of the time they aren't getting away with it because of the weak Labor Laws, though that's absolutely a HUGE problem, but instead they get away with it because people STAY QUIET ABOUT WORKPLACE ABUSE!

Don't stay quiet if you have any other option! Please? Please, it's going to take all Workers to defend all Workers from these widespread abuses of power. We can only stop it by working together and no longer staying quiet!

I also advise all Workers to LEARN YOUR RIGHTS!

Yes many States in the US have incredibly lax Labor Protections, or none. Or they have laws specifically designed to protect EMPLOYERS instead of Workers. That's why it's so important to learn Federal Labor Laws, State Laws, and even your local city ordinances which may protect you further depending on where you live. And I definitely do not recommend doing anything like I'm doing without first making sure you're not breaking any laws yourself. In some States, recording a person in a phone call without their permission is against the Law and can get you into a hell of a lot of trouble! Don't get yourself in trouble with the Law for any shitty Employer! Make sure you fight back against workplace abuse LEGALLY!!!!

This has been a Socialist/Communist/Labor PSA.

Workers Of The World, UNITE!!!

[tetrakys]

Trois Allumettes - Chapter 3

“Are we allowed to have coffee?”

I looked up from pretending to tidying up the café and saw the first costumer of the day. Clemence was at a rodeo competition an Hyun was ill, it was the first time I had to take care of business all by myself.

“Castiel! And… Lysander! Hi!”

Caught off guard, a weird high-pitched sound came out of my mouth. My heart skipped a beat when Castiel moved and I saw who was behind him. I cleared my throat and blushed.

“Relax, it’s just us” he added smirking.

“Sure, you surprised me, that’s all. I’ve been waiting for a while for a costumer to deign to sit down, I thought it’d never happen.”

“Is the waitress so disastrous? Does she chase all the costumers away?”

Castiel and his teasing, some things never changed. I cast a glance at his companion, he seemed to be far away, with his head lost in the clouds.

“That must be it, I’m a real walking disaster.”

We kept our light banter for a few more minutes while I fixed their coffees. I was surprised to find out that, even though he spend most of the time playing and touring with his band, Castiel was also a student at Anteros academy. Once the coffee was ready they both went to seat outside while I headed to the kitchen to add some sugar.

There, I grabbed the sugar and took the opportunity to look at my reflection in the stainless steel countertop. This morning I had decided to take advantage of the fact that I was going to be alone and forgo the uniform, and thank God for that! I wasn’t wearing anything particularly smart, just black jeans and an old shirt with some ruches on the front I had since high school, but it was still better than those hideous brown apron and cap.

“Here you go” I said, setting both cups in front of them.

“Thanks” one said while the other nodded, sipping the coffee “You wanna sit down a second? We can talk a little.”

“Um, sure, why not…” I pulled a chair out and sat at their table.

“I have to admit, coffee is pretty good” Castiel said with a small hint of surprise in his voice, I just smiled at him.

“By the way” he continued “did Rosalya make it home ok after the concert?”

“Yes, I called Leigh to make sure of it.”

The first words I heard Lysander speak in 15 minutes. I knew he wasn’t very talkative but he actually seemed a little upset. Then it registered what Castiel had actually said and felt my blood curdle. I thought back on the unusual conversation that had taken place last weekend. I preferred not to stay on the subject.

“She seemed a little tipsy… that happens.”

“You aren’t mad at her?” I asked surprised.

“If I had to get upset with all the slightly drunk people I run into while I am touring, I’d never finish. That said I could have done without certain comments, but I’m not going to make a fuss about it.”

“Yeah, haha, Rosalya definitely spells it out…”

“That’s the least you can say” he replied with a smirk.

Castiel kept drinking his coffee and I watched him on the sly. He was older, but… not in the bad sense of the term. I got the impression his features were sharper, and he felt more comfortable about his looks… Whether you liked it or not, he pulled it off well. I then looked at his companion.

It felt strange, at first, to know they were friends, but I could see it now. They were so different and yet, on a deeper level, there was something quite similar. Castiel had matured but he was still part defiance, indifference and a pinch of anger, all wrapped up with a nice big bow of sarcasm. Lysander instead… I didn’t know anything about him really, but I could feel it, hiding behind that calm exterior, there was something rough, possibly angst and definitely a little pain. I suddenly felt the overwhelming need to help him any way I could, whatever it was that was tormenting him.

Throughout high school, Rosa and Alexy had always warned me that my constant meddling in other people’s business was going to get me in trouble at some point. I could see the sense of those words and, as I grow up, I became less nosy and more reserved. But now, looking at his quietly sad demeanour, I felt sixteen all over again.

A few minutes later Nina, a high schooler frequent costumer who I had gotten friendly with, came with a bunch of classmates. Castiel and Lys tried to help me, but the thirsty teenagers were over excited, made a mess and left without buying anything. I didn’t miss the interested looks Nina was throwing in the guys direction, one in particular.

While I was heating up the coffee and serving it in a couple of to go cups so that Castiel and Lys could take it with them (apparently they were going to rehearsal) I ended up burning my hand with hot water. Castiel came running with a dishtowel in his hand, filled it up with ice cubes before gently pressing it on my burn.

“That must have hurt, but it’s superficial.”

“Thanks…” He kept my hand in his, gently pressing the cold towel against the burn.

“Are you going to be alright?”

“Yes, thanks, it was right when it happened, the pain is gone now”

“And so is Lysander… where is he?” Castiel looked around, but the place wasn’t that big, Lysander must have left, but why did he? We suddenly heard the door opening.

“Oh, hey Lys, where did you…”

The words died on my lips.

“Oh damn…”

It wasn’t Lysander.

“Here I was planning on sitting down for a coffee, I guess I’ll go somewhere else.”

“Nathaniel…”

“I knew I should’ve left earlier, this café definitely attracts a bad crowd.” Castiel replied with disdain.

That’s all I needed, a confrontation with these two bull-headed guys at my workplace… It had been over four years since I had seen them at it. And I hadn’t really missed it. They kept spitting poison at each other for a few more minutes until things started to get out of hand, it seemed like they were going to fight in the middle of the café, I had to break it up.

“Come on, she is right, we are going to scare the costumers” said Castiel, suddenly coming back to his senses.

“I don’t give a da…”

“I said let’s go. If you want to talk, we’ll do it elsewhere, not here.” Castiel stood up, his fists clenched. He was pretty impressive like that. Nathaniel bit his lip and walked off towards the alley without looking at him. Castiel stared at his back with a surly expression and, after a few words, he left in the opposite direction.

Once they were both gone I released a sigh of relief I didn’t realise I was holding. What was wrong with them?!

“That escalated quickly”

“Wha… Lysander! Where have you been?” he was standing at the doorstep, looking at me apologetically.

“I’m sorry, I was going to intervene if things got out of hand, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I know Castiel, he is not the type.”

He must be referring at adult Castiel, because high school Castiel? He was definitely the type. Nath, on the other hand, was a whole other story.

“You were here the whole time? You disappeared, we thought you were gone.”

“I left to buy this” he said coming closer, placing something on the counter. Ointment and dressings.

“Oh…” I replied stupidly. In the skirmish I had completely forgotten about my injury. I looked at my hand, it was red and felt like I was being pierced by hundreds small needles. Taking me gently by the hand he lead me to a chair and sat in front of me.

“T-Thanks… you shouldn’t have, really. Let me at least pay you back.”

“No need” he replied while applying aloe vera on the burn. I moaned in relief at his gentle massage, it felt amazing. “How are you so good at this?!”

He smiled mischievously at my words “You might have noticed I can be quite absent-minded” the understatement of the year, but I didn’t point it out, my hand still in his. “Being the type of person I am and growing up on a farm… well, I had to learn from a young age to take care of small injuries.”

“What?” I replied surprised “you lived on a farm?”

“Rosalya never told you? Leigh and I… our parents are… were farmers.”

I rummaged through my memories trying to remember “If she did, in high school, I must have forgotten.”

I was shocked, Lys a farmer? I had to admit I was a city girl and had no idea of what country life looked like, but if I had to picture it… Lysander was the last thing to come to my mind. With his classy clothes and refined attitude… he felt really out of place.

“Did you like it?” I blurted out after a few silent moments, while he wrapped my hand in gauze “I mean, did you like growing up on a farm?”

“Yes and no” he simply replied, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. However, me being me, I had to open my stupid mouth and say something. When he was done treating my hand, I timidly entwined my fingertips with his and said “Are you okay, Lys? I know we don’t really know each other much and I don’t want to sound intrusive but… you look… sad.” His eyes met mine, surprised “I just want you to know that you can talk to me if you…  if you want to.”

He lowered his head and stared at our hands for a while, I thought he was going to tell me to go to hell, or at least leave, but he started caressing my fingers absentmindedly and said slowly “It’s funny that out of all the people closer to me… my brother and my best friend, Rosa… it was someone I just met to notice there was something wrong with me.” I stared at him in silence, not wanting to interrupt him. “It takes someone very special to care about a stranger” he added with a small smile, and I felt my heart sink a little “thank you, Candy.”

I didn’t know what to say, it stung a little that he still considered each other as strangers, but before I could reply he added “Don’t worry about me, my low spirit this morning is completely due to the fact that I lost my notepad. It’s not the first time and won’t be the last, but this one in particular had all my latest creations and I was thinking of adapting some to Castiel’s music” he added with a grimace “you must think I am a lost cause.”

I knew there was something else there eating him, apart from his lost notepad but… suddenly a light bulb went on in my head.

“Lys!” I said grabbing his hand “Wait!”

I run to the kitchen, quickly grabbing my bag and, rummaging through it, I immediately found what I was looking for. I run back to him and placed a black notepad in his hands. He just stared at it, utterly surprised, then opened it and leafed through the pages like he couldn’t believe every word was really there. “How…?” he managed to ask after a few moments.

“I found it a few days ago on a bench in the quad. I wanted to take it to the lost and found office but I totally forgot. And well… as I personally found out… there really isn’t a lost and found office, it’s just the admin officer and believe me… this pad was safer with me” I was rumbling a little “I swear I didn’t open it.”

He finally seemed to get out of his stupor. Looking at me again he smiled, but not one of his usual small melancholic smiles. This one was the real deal, a big, bright, full toothed smile.

“It might seem crazy to you I know… but when I noticed it was gone, it felt like a part of me had also disappeared. Like I was missing a piece of my soul.” I was suddenly in his arms, he was hugging me and he was so taller and bigger then me that I was completely enveloped by his embrace. “Thank you Candy, you really are amazing.” He said to my ear.

“Not a stranger then?” I whispered.

He pulled away a little, just enough to look at my face, which I was sure was on fire in that moment.

“I mean… I saved your soul, and you saved my hand… I think it’s enough to upgrade our relationship from strangers to, maybe, friends. Isn’t it?” I joked with only a small hint of panic in my voice. I was almost proud of me.

“It is” he replied, suddenly serious, looking at me straight in the eyes. His arms still wrapped tightly around me. My mind went blank and I had no idea what was happening, but the sound of the door opening was like a bucket of water in my face. I jumped out of his embrace in time to see Hyun entering the café.

“Hyun! Hi! Are you okay? Weren’t you ill?”

He looked between me and Lysander, uncertain.

“Yes, well, I felt bad you were here alone and I came to help. I am feeling better.”

“Lysander, this is Hyun my co-worker, and Hyun this is Lysander a… friend” I said with a small smile, and saw him hiding his while shaking Hyun’s hand.

After a few conventional words Lys, notepad in his hand, left to join Castiel for rehearsal.

“Was that really a friend or…” Hyun asked once we were alone, blushing.

“Or…?” I replied, rising an eyebrow.

“Nothing, it’s none of my business. Go have lunch, I am going to take care of things while you have a break.”

I thanked him and went to the kitchen to find a plate of food he had left for me. Seriously, the guy was sweet but he could be very nosy when he wanted.

However, I had no idea how meddlesome he could be until later that night, when he came back to the café and found me in the arms of someone else.

//////////////////////////////////////

Back to Chapter 2

Go to Chapter 4

[impeach-trump2018]

Cole Launius

English 212

Professor Kim Lacey

30 June 2018

Analytical Reflection

            This class was a great surprise for me. I had no idea that the course would be based off of this great book. As I engaged in the reading and further went through the subjects inside with my review of “The Truman Show,” my ability to identify with the surveillance around me grew as I gained more insight and information. The issue at hand is not only a matter of unethical decision making above the governed heads, but also the idea that surveillance and the lack of privacy can create a negative impact on the human condition. Surveillance culture is exemplified in today’s society primarily through films, music, and art, and informative pieces all in which I intend to dive into as I examine and reflect on a world surrounded by the camera lens.

          I think that ethically speaking we can all agree that it is wrong to invade someone else’s personal space. According to information from The University of Tennessee at Martin, surveillance involves paying close attention to someone else, and to me that is another reason it is made unethical because everyone deserves their own space and privacy and by watching closely, that perimeter is destroyed. It is annoying to find yourself being watched by the overhead camera in the local Walmart or VG’s, but when someone gets close to you it rekindles a different kind of emotion. One that makes you question the persons upbringing and their morals to go along with it. “Stop reading my texts,” your friend yells as you lean back into your seat in the car. Why do you feel the need to read what I am saying? Why are you so interested in my conversations? Did your parents teach you any manners? It becomes more of an issue of ethics than it does about us solely being watched and recorded for other purposes. Trust and privacy go hand and hand, and when someone’s privacy is compromised by the public environment, they tend to lose trust and have more opposition. In an example from a clip from “The Dark Knight,” Batman attempts to link all cell phones in the city together to create a virtual map to find his objective.

          Surveillance changes the way people act around each other and in public especially. For a moment I had reacted with such hostility when I first had discovered that I was constantly being watched and others reassured me that I no longer had any privacy. I would stand taller, push out my chest and walk like I had just done a great workout at the gym. I am a very big fan of Hip-Hop and moreover I have noted that most of the artists that I listen to have a gig for fashion. They are always wearing something extravagant in the spotlight. Said perfectly by 2 Chainz in one of his songs, “Feds Watching,” he states that he will be dressed accordingly if they are watching him. This is most definitely interesting because he chooses to boast about changing his view under surveillance because I am sure he wears sweatpants lounging around the house. Another unfortunate way that people change and act differently when being watched is in a show called “Hansen Vs Predator.” In this show Chris Hansen creates a fake meet up with creeps on the internet and then interviews them right on the spot to find out why they choose to do what they do and try to trap young children. When watching the predator as Chris enters the room, his facial expression changes so quickly, you know he knows something went wrong, and that now he is being watched very closely.

          A few pictures I happen to come across on the global web reminded me that those cameras we see in our peripheral are not about just keeping us out of danger and harm’s way, but it is about the politicians, according to Mike Harris from The Telegraph. And I also agree, that anything related to the law never is about the people first, but the ones who put it into effect. The first image scripted, “We need rules that limit our leaders’ power more than we need rules that limit our rights.” I really felt as if I related to this quote or even wrote it because it seems like a thought that would come screaming out of my head in the middle of the night. How doesn’t everyone in the world agree with what this says? It makes more than complete sense, think about it. If we live in a democracy, then we have the ultimate say, yet we don’t, and we are still under claims as a democracy. If the people truly had the power, not power restricted by congressmen, we could change the way things are imposed on us all and put the spotlight on the ones who get to make the big decisions. Another photo that I saw was more of a political cartoon if anything, but it still recreated the idea of militant opposition towards the government. The cartoon was an army ranger pointing a gun to an unarmed victim, with the victim saying not to shoot, but also the ranger looking back at a tv recorder saying, “don’t shoot!”  The irony of this situation is also a great factor and a reason why I chose to include it. You are pointing a gun at someone, yet yelling at a camera not to record? Sounds like something fishy is going on.

          In life today people and companies, and the government use surveillance in other ways as well. One common way surveillance is utilized in today’s economy is that there is a lot of online traffic so app developers share information gained from watching users and allow them to shape apps and clothing and shopping related goods to a specific audience and you could be targeted depending on what you post. You may post different things to avoid this then becoming someone you’re not. This is called social sorting when companies take advantage of your information that you post to social media sites. There are also other ways that surveillance can cause change within someone. For example, if your co-worker is staring at you everyday after work, you might get a new car, or park in a different spot to get away from the state of being watched in your own space.

          Cell phones, iPads, MacBooks and cameras have taken over the life of the youth. Then there are memes which have taken over the internet. What is ironic is that as the amount of surveillance in the world increases, the more we joke about being watched and create memes about it on our social media sites. But the fact that we are creating jokes and messing around with being watched and surveilled by the government and others is kind of scary. Why are we joking about having zero sense of privacy around us and for others? That is unnatural and strange, and it is upsetting to think that everyone else in society has come to accept being watched all of the time. Surveillance has had its way weaving into everyones lives so easily because it was not a choice but an unfortunate and irreversible consequence.

 Works Cited

 Always, Clean Music, director. 2 Chainz - Feds Watching. YouTube, YouTube, 7 July

          2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pkd2lUxwQE.

Borg, Anna. “EurWORK European Observatory of Working Life.” Finland: Wage

          Formation | Eurofound, 31 July 2014, www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/

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          workplace.

Daily, Crime Watch, director. Hansen Vs Predator. YouTube, YouTube, 15 Sept. 2016,

          www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOBgE10sEQE.

DeGeurin, Mack. “Mass Surveillance Memes Show Our Collective Anxiety Over

          Government Spying.” Motherboard, Motherboard, 2 Apr. 2018,

          motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmg3ky/surveillance-memes-nsa-fbi-

          facebook.

Ellis, Daniel, director. Bragging Gone Wrong. YouTube, YouTube, 21 Apr. 2015,

          www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ9kKgZ0-pM.

Gleisner, David. “This Is My Jam: Government Surveillance Memes.” Are There Really

          3,700 Abortions Each Day in the U.S.?, North by Northwestern, 29 Jan. 2018,

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          memes/.

Harris, Mike. “The Politics of Surveillance Are about Politics, Not Keeping Us Safe.”

          The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 4 Nov. 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/

          uknews/crime/11975759/The-politics-of-surveillance-are-about-politics-not-

          keeping-us-safe.html.

Legend, Dark, director. The Dark Knight. YouTube, YouTube, 10 Dec. 2015,

          www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo.

Macnish, Kevin. “Surveillance Ethics.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008,

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Moran, Sean. “Surveillance Ethics.” Philosophy Now: a Magazine of Ideas, Philosophy

          Now, 2015, philosophynow.org/issues/110/Surveillance_Ethics.

Munn, Nathan. “How Mass Surveillance Harms Societies and Individuals - and What

          You Can Do About It.” CJFE | Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, 8 Nov.

          2016, www.cjfe.org            how_mass_surveillance_harms_societies_and_individuals_and_what_you_can_d

o_about_it.

OB, Andres, director. Robert Downey Jr. Blooper. YouTube, YouTube, 18 July 2015,

          www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCC5SfQHOfo.

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[aion-rsa]

How Patty Jenkins Steered the Wonder Woman 1984 Ship

https://ift.tt/37yG4ON

If you ask the cast of Wonder Woman 1984 pretty much any question about the film, they will find a way to gush about how much they love working with Patty Jenkins. Did Pedro Pascal bring any of his past characters into his new role as Max Lord? No, but it took a new level of vulnerability that Patty supported him through. Has Kristin Wiig always wanted to play a villain? Yes, and almost no one has asked her—except for Patty, apparently. 

“[Patty is] like a Japanese sword,” says Wonder Woman 1984 star and producer Gal Gadot to Den of Geek and other outlets during a 2018 set visit. “No, really. It’s the same wonderful creative rule of hard smarts, see the bigger picture and the macro and the micro and everything. She has all the same qualities but now everything is quicker. She’s been there, she knows how it works. She has the same clues that worked with us in the previous one, and it’s just like this very smooth process.”

“Once Patty lands on an idea, it seems like it’s fully formed and she knows everything about it,” adds Chris Pine. “Since I’ve met her — she pitched me the first story — I’ve never met someone more self assured and more knowing about what she wants, how she’s going to do it, why she’s doing it. She is a machine. She is just a glorious machine to behold. A samurai sword is a good allegory.”

Even though Jenkins was not signed on to direct a sequel when she was making Wonder Woman, she still discussed prospective narrative plans with Gadot and Pine, starting about halfway through production.

“We were fantasizing about the next one if the first one would succeed,” recalls Gadot. “Then, we already started to talk about the story of this one. With Patty, it’s just a different work process. She’s very, she’s engaged. She’s very much engaging with all of us. And we all have a lot of say, into our character. Of course, the big broad vision is Patty’s. But she gives a lot of liberties and we do what we believe is right for the character. So I’m very, very lucky to work with her again.”

Jenkins wanted to do a second film in the franchise so that she could tell a Wonder Woman story past the origin tale of the character.

“She’s only Wonder Woman in the last scene of the [first] movie,” says Jenkins during a recent Wonder Woman 1984 press conference. “So I found myself really craving doing a movie about Wonder Woman, now full-blown Wonder Woman. And then I started reflecting on what I felt was going on in our world and what Wonder Woman would want to say to the world. And the story came out of that.”

Unlike the first film, Jenkins wrote the screenplay for WW84, along with Dave Callaham and Geoff Johns, the latter of whom also worked on the story with Jenkins. She ultimately found her way in with a compelling question. 

“The last one was [Wonder Woman’s] discovery of humanity. Now, how does she live within humanity? And by the way, she’s not perfect either. So her own struggles and journey to do the right thing, which is so universal to all of us. Being a hero is not an easy thing, it’s actually a super difficult thing. So that I was really interested in too, of like, what does it feel like?” 

Many critics who have screened the film already have commented on the broader themes, and how WW84 aligns so well with 2020. It’s impressive, considering how long ago it was written. Says Jenkins: “I found myself saying there was something about what the world wants to talk about right now, and she happens to have this lasso of truth, and truth ends up figuring in very large.”

And while Wonder Woman does exist within the larger DCEU, Jenkins and producer Chuck Roven have been clear that this is a standalone film. And while there might be some easter eggs, Jenkins said she and Geoff Johns were both really excited to tell this exact story. 

“I’m not a huge fan of like doing chapter two of a seven chapter story. That’s just not my jam. I feel like that may happen in the way background, but every movie in my opinion that I want to make should be its own great movie,” Jenkins said on set. “So I have my own ideas about what her overreaching arc is, of the whole thing, but it’s the story first.”

No offense intended towards Superman, but do you feel like after this success of the first movie that Wonder Woman has become the new core of the DC universe now?

Fans and casual viewers might be excused for wondering if Diana Prince hasn’t eclipsed Clark Kent, in the DCEU if nowhere else. Certainly, a strategic advantage of both films taking place pre-2017 is that Jenkins and Gadot get to play with a pre-Justice League world. 

Jenkins says, “I think that she planted her foot strong in the world. I mean I think that she’s a very strong core right now, and I think that there are lots of other great things that had been planted before and will be planted after. But I do I feel like she sort of landed and set her place in this world, and hopefully things are influenced by each other when they work in that way.”

In order to bring this new story to life, Jenkins wrote and directed a script for a much more complex film, logistically. Producer Charles Roven likewise glowed about Jenkins, calling her amazing to work with and sharing insight into the reality behind the scenes of a massive film like WW84.

“We expanded the global footprint of the places where we shot,” Roven said. “We shot in Virginia. Then we went to the UK and we also, after that, we went to Spain and then we went to the Canary Islands. So our global footprint really expanded significantly. And of course that makes it very, very complicated.”

Much will be made of Jenkins’s hiring of Cirque de Soleil performers and her decision to rely as much as possible on practical effects, and rightly so. The Amazons look powerful and natural because they’re really running, jumping, riding, and flipping through the air – the CGI is  used to augment their natural abilities. In the case of Lily Apsell, who plays young Diana, she trained to run an obstacle course. CGI was used to add more dangerous elements that she doesn’t directly interact with that add to the suspense of the scene and maintained the actor’s safety. 

As Pine put it, “That’s less about the hugeness of special effects, rather than making the special effects work for the realism of the film.”

For Jenkins, it’s important to carry the realism over to the characters too, especially villains. Without spoiling anything, there’s no moustache twirling in WW84. Pedro Pascal’s Max Lord and Kristin Wiig’s Barbara Minerva are on the more complicated end of the spectrum.

As Gadot puts it, “When I first read the script, I told Patty, ‘Wow, I like I like them as much as I like Diana and Steve.’ … I’m so tired of the obvious villain, the German soldier that you know from the get-go, okay he’s the bad guy — they’re like real people. Just like you, and you, and me. We can see ourselves in them. And they’re not bad people per se. But they just didn’t make the right choice at the right time. And I find it so interesting and so appealing, and I actually care about them.”

Read more

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While the script certainly helps, so much of that comes from the performances of Kristin Wiig and Pedro Pascal. 

Pascal is quick to credit Jenkins: “I call it the Patty Jenkins experience. You can’t get away with something that is the typical. It has to be a complete and have all the risks, and all of the danger, and ultimately the humanity, no matter how dark of a character it is to make the experience as honest as possible.”

“I wasn’t surprised because of all of her films that I’ve seen before and the performances that are in these movies. But I definitely didn’t know if I would be able to get there and I owe it to my director. I completely owe it to my director, if it worked.”

Reader, it worked.

He’s certainly not alone in his sentiment. 

Kristin Wiig shared, “The wardrobe and the costumes and all of that definitely helped, and again, like Pedro was saying, working with Patty and trying to figure out who she is with every stage. But I’ve never done anything like this before.” 

“It was very scary because I could visualize what I didn’t want it to be more than what I did want it to be. But I felt very taken care of and it was an amazing, scary, but fun experience for me,” Wiig said. “I was really shocked and happy and of course felt extra pressure when [I] signed on and when I was talking to Patty about it. But yeah, and I’m superhero geek. I see all the movies, I’m at the theater, I’ve seen all of them. I was obsessed with the first one. So to know that I was going to be in it, and that I got a chance to be a villain, and that Patty believed that I could do it, it was an amazing life experience for me.

It’s not unusual for stars to applaud their director on a press tour, but Patty Jenkins’s cast takes just about every opportunity to do so (though Pascal gives a lot of compliments in general, to everyone.) Having seen the final product, Jenkins backs up her good process with a good movie. In an industry that is so unequal when it comes to gender representation and opportunity both in front of and in particular behind the camera, it’s gratifying to see, especially considering that Warner Brother executives were so slow to secure Jenkins for the sequel. Not only was Jenkins not locked into directing a possible sequel in her initial contract, but subsequent contract negotiations took longer than expected as Jenkins fought to be paid the same as any male director would expect to receive after such a box office success. 

But, for the cast, it’s not just about making a good movie; it’s about having a good and competent boss, and a safe and supportive workplace (not that the two aren’t usually related). That, among other things, seems to be, as Pascal called it, “The Patty Jenkins experience.”

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“There’s something about working with a director that is completely there with you,” says Gadot. “For you, behind you, beside you, and to guide you. That gives us the freedom to really let go and take all the risks that one can be very frightened to take if you don’t have such a partner.”

The post How Patty Jenkins Steered the Wonder Woman 1984 Ship appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3rcI0nJ

[entirebodyexercise]

The Art of Mindful Movement

The variety of things we are 'meant' to do for our wellness can be overwhelming. Workout, consuming tidy, hanging out with our household, obtaining adequate rest, lowering screen time, spending time in nature ... For those people hardly finding the moment to manage exercise as well as diet, this can be discouraging. The idea of resting still for five minutes and breathing appears like a little a waste when there are just 45 mins sculpted out in the day for health-related things. Most of us do not feel like we have time to meditate when a week, not to mention on an everyday basis.

Can Movement Be Meditation?

It is obvious that reflection is helpful. A 2014 study review wrapped up reflection brings about activation in the components of the brain associated with processing, self-regulation, focused problem addressing, flexible behavior, and interoception. It's virtually as though reflection is the remedy to an over-stimulated, go-go-go state of mind. Of course, the constantly on-the-go, over-stimulated individuals would certainly a lot rather do an HIIT workout compared to remain still. A conundrum.

What if including a conscious activity technique elicited comparable feedbacks in the mind as meditation? And also just what if relocating mindfully boosted performance?

Jon Kabat-Zimm, designer of the Mindfulness Based Anxiety Decrease strategy (MBSR), specifies mindfulness as 'the understanding that arises via listening deliberately, in the existing moment, and also non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience.' Focusing on the job at hand as well as checking your partnership to the task as opposed to considering the next set, the music, or just what your boss said to you at the workplace is mindfulness. This could be done anytime, anywhere, as well as does not need sitting on the floor.

Research also suggests basic reflection techniques could bring about enhanced electric motor control, an enhanced capacity to spot subtle ecological adjustments, as well as much better self-correction to successfully complete a motor task when these modifications occur. These all seem like advantages if our goal is boosted physical performance, do not they?

Increasingly, scientists are stating motion can cultivate mindfulness when attention is routed in a specific way. This readies information for those of us struggling with the idea of meditation. ' Yes! Let me relocate as opposed to sit still! As well as get the exact same advantages!'

It Doesn't Have to Be Tai Chi

Don' t blunder conscious activity for very easy movement. To keep concentrated interest or to practice open surveillance (a reflection method that just suggests to observe what you are experiencing, without judgement) implies lowering interruptions as well as exploring the top quality of the motion, rather utilizing pressure. It becomes much less about exercise and more about curiosity and open-mindedness.

Moving slowly and also mindfully does not exactly match the objective of a conventional exercise. How can mindful activity be integrated without giving up the total objective of fitness?

The good information is health and fitness does not have actually to be compromised, if anything, exploring these concepts will likely boost fitness. The idea of mindful movement could be used in any type of fitness setup using noticing, sensation, and also adjusting.

Sensing describes the concept of taking a moment before your workout to feeling you. What is your physical state? What is your emotional state? Just what are you experiencing? Can you sense your breath? Can you pick up the ground? Taking 2-3 mins before the start of your exercise to ask yourself these inquiries makes you present. It sets you approximately be mentally taken part in the job at hand.

A fantastic means to do this is during joint mobility work. If you actively relocate your joints with numerous ranges of activity before your session, use this as a chance to examine in and also see just how you are really feeling and moving. And also if you do not do joint prep job, including 5 minutes of it could be a rewarding endeavor.

Feeling is the monitoring of exactly how you are doing a motion. As you move with your warm-up, for circumstances, can you feel on your own using unnecessary pressure? Or possibly if you're hypermobile, you do not seem like you're utilizing sufficient control. What can you do to earn the movement smoother, extra fluid? Can the top quality of the task be boosted without giving up ease?

This could also be used throughout the workout itself. If you are fighting with a certain ability, significantly lowering tons as well as moving with the workout gradually is a method to connect with the motion. One concept behind how this works is through the effect this carries the main nerve system. The main nerve system is included 2 branches: the sensory (afferent) anxious system and also the electric motor (efferent) nervous system. Self-awareness originates from the info we obtain from these 2 system.

Adjusting implies utilizing the details you discover from picking up and also feeling making an ability extra reliable. If, for example, you are moving slowly via a light deadlift and also you see (feeling) throughout the concentric phase of the activity you change your weight a little to the right to end up the lift, you can remedy this by telling on your own to remain focused as you do the following few. Your mind sends details to your motor (efferent) system via responses you obtained from noticing your weight on the flooring using your afferent system.

Obviously, just how you do a specific skill or workout is mosting likely to look various when you speed the workout approximately actual time and also load it sufficient to supply the proper stimulus for strength conditioning, but stepping back periodically as well as slowly points down will not lower performance. It might even enhance it.

Don't Price Cut Movement for Recovery

Another means to implement mindful motion into an exercise is to do it on recovery days. There are numerous types of relocating that enhance recognition and urge open monitoring. This is not to be perplexed with vinyasa circulation or a level 2-3 power yoga course with HIIT included. Instead, points like tai chi, restorative yoga exercise, qigong, as well as Feldenkrais are all types of corrective motion that could assist you establish focused attention and also mindfulness without disrupting recovery. They have the added advantage of being 'novel,' or consisting of activities that are most likely outside your typical collection. Novelty calls for focus, which means discovering a martial art, parkour, MovNat, or various other 'edge' exercise techniques breeds concentrate, though they most definitely do not fall into the restorative exercise category.

Focused focus has in fact been revealed to boost discerning and executive focus, or the capacity to concentrate on the task available. You know exactly how often you space out throughout your exercises and also discover on your own considering the meeting you have with your manager later on? The much better your exec focus, the less your mind will certainly wander and also the a lot more existing you will certainly be, not just throughout your exercises, but in life.

' But wait,' you may be believing. 'I don't have time to devote a whole additional hr on my day of rest to slow, laborious techniques created for old and sick people.' The excellent news is, with the net, there are lots of options offered to these forms of conscious motion that do not need leaving the house. Numerous of the on the internet options have courses that differ in length, from 10-60 minutes. Additionally, study recommends these types of techniques boost complete body control. For those of us aiming to enhance athleticism in any pastime or sport, this is possibly beneficial.

Emphasis Inward While You Trendy Down

So far, our choices for integrating conscious activity into our existing exercise program include during the workout, as part of ability job, as well as on day of rest. The last means to incorporate conscious activity into your existing routine is throughout the cool-down. As opposed to taking yourself via a stretching routine, core job, or whatever your common cool-down contains, try making little, straightforward activities that collaborate with your breath. This could be an extremely simple yoga routine, a gentle circulation that takes area on the flooring, or (my personal fave), a handful of somatic motions. Before lifting to leave, invest 2-3 minutes focusing on your breath. Not attempting to change it, just concentrating on it. Feel where your inhale goes, feel just what occurs when you breathe out. If your mind wanders, notification that and also return to concentrating on your breath.

It might possibly be suggested that every workout needs to be mindful, however I do not always assume that's the case. There will certainly constantly be days we require an exterior stimulation to obtain going, whether it's songs, an intense exercise, or brainless cardio. However, if each exercise does not have an element of focus and interest, you are doing on your own a disservice. Attention is like a muscle, it has to be worked progressively gradually for it to ever before boost. And also, like exercise, by exercising just a little of mindfulness in the beginning, over time, you will be able to exercise it increasingly more till it penetrates various other areas of your life.

[stemiafricablog]

Women Breaking Ceilings Series: Meet Kolisa Yola Sinyanya

Highlighting Kolisa Yola Sinyanya, a PhD candidate in Oceanography at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a nominee of the inspiring fifty women in STEM South Africa, 2019.

Can we meet You?

Kolisa Sinyanya is a PhD candidate in Oceanography at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She is a member of UCT’s Advancing Womxn fellowship, Ocean Womxn. She holds a BSc Biological Sciences and Botany Honours degree from Walter Sisulu University and a Masters degree from the University of Cape Town. In 2020, she represented UCT’s Oceanography Department at the international Ocean Sciences Meeting, which was held in San Diego, California in the United States. Kolisa was one of the guest speakers at this year’s STEMi Ocean’s Oceans Day. In 2019 She was nominated as one of the inspiring fifty women in STEM South Africa and was additionally nominated as a Black Women In Science South Africa fellow in that same year. She is a science communication fanatic not just in Africa but globally and was runner up on FameLab which is the biggest science communication competition in the world. Kolisa has also taken part in TEDxUCT where she spoke about being born into apartheid, having her first steps into education under Bantu Education and fiercely building her career to what it is today. She runs a blog (www.womeninsciencehub.com) where she highlights women in STEM from all corners of the globe. Kolisa is obsessed with SCIENCE!

So tell us why you got into STEM?

Science fascinates me and this started very early in my life. I was a very curious kid who always wanted to understand the science behind how most things work. I always knew that I wanted to be a scientist but did not think it would actually happen. Additionally, my parents always knew this, supported and encouraged me to take the STEM path. This combination of curiosity, desire and ambition, and support created the perfect stimulant for me to go for it. These are some of the reasons why I’m in STEM.

What is the one thing you would like to change or address in STEM for girls in Africa?

African girls are generally underrepresented in STEM subjects at lower grades, globally. This has implications in how interested and how high the chances are for African girls to show interest in STEM later in life. It is therefore important to recruit girls for STEM subjects and activities sooner during their upbringings. Moreover, it is highly important to have highly achieved and upcoming African women who are visible and have voices in STEM fields. We therefore should not just preach that representation matters, but we need to show up as African women in STEM and be the representation we speak of.

Do you have role-models? If you do, why did you choose them?

I definitely have role models. My mom has been my role model since childhood. In fact, I am the woman you know today because I absorbed a number of qualities from her that nobody can ever take away from me. She taught me to be a go-getter, my mom is the type of person who never gives up and I see that in myself. One of my mottos in life is, “winners never quit, and quitters never win”. Additionally, I have chosen my other role models because they model to me what a woman in STEM is what we can achieve and how to handle the negatives which come with being a woman in STEM and leadership.

Please tell us about the challenges you have faced as a woman in STEM and how did you overcome them?

Being a woman in STEM has several challenges and for us black women it is even more intense as we have to face gender-based discrimination and racial profiling. The most prominent challenge for me is having to handle individuals who try to make life hard for you (and unwittingly themselves) in the workplace. I’m not sure if I can call it overcoming, but I usually use such incidences to my advantage and most importantly they become a page in my story and enhance my lessons on how to deal with the various challenges in the workplace.

What is your advice to young girls or budding women in STEM?

My advice to young girls and budding women in STEM is to be brave! Go for your dreams because you can never know what you are capable of and your full potential until you apply yourself. Seek advice and keep your eye on the prize.

What comes to your mind when you hear “Women Breaking Ceilings”?

This question made me a little emotional because I am about to describe what I think “Women Breaking Ceilings” is and you have chosen me to be one of these women. That is surreal. To me, these are powerful women who have changed the world/ are changing the world, challenge the status quo and are creating a new improved high definition image of what a woman is. These are independent women, conquerors in their respective fields, they are innovative and an embodiment of “some women fear the fire and some women simply become the fire!”.

This month is Women’s month in South Africa. Do you have anything you’d like to share with young women and girls as we celebrate Women’s month for 2020?

I would like to encourage all women and girls to be their own blessers (South African jargon for sugar daddy). Having your own can save you from a lot of violence and dismay. Happy Women’s month to everyone.

Please share your social media handles you would love people to reach you on.

LinkedIn: Kolisa Yola Sinyanya

Twitter: @Kolie_Yola

Instagram: @kolieyola

Thank you.

[mistyandmatt]

It’s winter and it’s hot here…Dubai travels

In preparation for this ‘round the world journey, I spent a great deal of time researching and preparing for this leg of the trip. I say that because 1. I’ve never been to the Middle East and 2. There are a lot of social and religious rules that have to be followed when visiting the area. You see, being a caucasian, American woman most certainly has it’s advantages on any given day, but when traveling to a middle eastern country, the situation is just not the same. I did a lot of internet searching, watched a lot of You Tube videos on how to correctly tie a headscarf, and ensuring my clothing (which you know I had to be highly selective of on the trip due to the totally different climates we are going to) was socially and religiously appropriate. I told Matt we would just see what it was like when we got there and then I would adjust as needed.

Leaving Tokyo on one hand was a bit sad, as we were just getting to know Matt’s family and somewhat adjusting to the ways around town, but on the other hand, I was starting to get antsy and was ready to move on towards Dubai. Maybe it was the weather (it was cold, and mainly cloudy while we were there-that’s depressing for me), maybe it was all the strange food I’d been challenged to consume over the past 10 days, or maybe I was just seeking some bit of normalcy somewhere since I clearly was the outsider on this leg of the trip. Want a slice of humble pie? Go to a country like Japan with 127 million people where you are one of only a few who can’t read or speak the language. You’ll realize your place in the world real quick. I guess I don’t know why I thought I would get normalcy in Dubai, but my instincts (and research) implied Dubai was supposed to be like the “Las Vegas” of the Middle East (more on this in a bit), that seemed like something I knew and could understand.

We switched over to Emirates Airline for this trip, as I wanted to see how the service and quality were compared to other airlines we had taken. I know, I know, my instinctual quality assurance/continuous quality improvement personality is on all the time, even on vacation. The airline was nice, but Japan Airlines still seems to rank higher on my “best airline to fly.” What’s comical about that though is that when we were talking with the Emirates Flight Attendants, they report that the girls who work for JAL have a lot of “work drama between each other.” Workplace environments around the world seem to be the same everywhere, always some kind of drama going on. I was hopeful that was just an American thing, nope, totally universal. Our twelve hour flight seemed quite quick as we slept most of the time, so we were ready to go when we arrived in Dubai at 5:00 am local time.

We only planned four days in Dubai, as we had just a handful of things we wanted to see and do before moving on to our next destination. The weather was 75 degrees and sunny when we got there(hallelujah), so we were looking forward to a brief warmup before we head back into the cold again. Since we were only staying a few days, we decided to splurge a bit and stay at a fancier hotel. You all know that we never do that, in fact, it’s really against our vacation morals and values to do so, but knowingly and willingly(and maybe telling Matt I got a good deal on it), I booked us a few days at the Waldorf Astoria out on the Palm (palm tree shaped man-made island outside of Dubai proper). Between the nice hotel and the warm weather, my normalcy meter finally shot up. We then found a place for breakfast that served actual eggs and other breakfast foods, we had a another win!

Our first stop for the day was to the Sheikh Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding” for a tour of the remaining “old town Dubai,” and for our first visit to a real operating mosque. I loved this as our first experience here, as no question was off limits and the center prides themselves on being an open space for people to come learn and understand the culture and religion in a safe space. I got the chance to not only learn more about the Islamic religion, but also the social, family, and religious norms that go along with it. Our tour guide was fabulous and did a great job explaining everything to our eclectic group. I now understand the prayer schedule and commend all the Muslim men (and women) who are fully committed to their religion because they (the men) literally have to go into a mosque building 5 or 6 times a day to pray and be present with God. I mean, I can’t find the time to go to the bathroom that many times a day, therefore, I could never make it as a Muslim on that principle alone. I realize the societal norms here are arranged on this schedule, but that just seems extremely excessive (not to mention time consuming). I found fewer differences and more similarities in their religion and lifestyle of those practiced at home. In the end, everyone seems to be seeking the same things, its all just interpreted and practiced a bit differently. We had the chance to drink coffee (which has a process and is different than American coffee, as is the art of drinking it-anyone have a “silent server” at home?), as well as had the chance to eat dates and luqaimat(donuts), just as you would if you were a visitor in a Muslim home. So much about the home structure, the male and female role in the household, and the openness to welcome visitors was rather intriguing. We would highly recommend doing this experience if you have the chance to go to Dubai. It was a great way for us to start off our trip here.

We then moved on to see what the Dubai Mall was all about. This place is known for all the high end shopping, vending machines that sell gold, and a place to find just about every super car you could imagine, but also includes an ice skating rink, a huge aquarium, and these choreographed fountains (similar to the Bellagio Fountains in Vegas) that put on quite the show. This was a chance for us to get in some walking after being cooped up in the plane so long. We finished the day by having dinner poolside at our hotel, where I could soon slip away for some good sleep in a super comfortable bed (remember, we’ve been sleeping on a small mattress on a tatami floor for the past 10 days, so this was going to be like sleeping on the clouds).

The next day we got up and headed to the traditional spice, textile, and gold souks to see what kind of interesting finds we could muster up. I tell Matt, just keep walking, these people will haggle you, so you just have to keep going. Why are we not even three stores in and Matt starts “making friends.” Dammit Matt. So Matt’s new friend wants me to buy gold from him and proceeds to personally escort us around the souks. That was very nice of him (he had alternate plans), but unfortunately what he didn’t realize is that he hooked up with a real nice guy an and then me, whose middle name is “likes to mosey.” Hours later we’d visited all the souks (still with this personal escort) and I spent way too much money on tea, silks, gold, and saffron (even with haggling with them) then I want to admit. It’s fine, I hope people are up for a tea party when we get home, because I have several years supply now. Needless to say, Matt (who really doesn’t even want to be at the souks) ends up back behind one of the souks (we all know you aren’t supposed to go back there-hasn’t he seen any movies at all?), as they are trying to sell him fake watches. Again, Mr. Naivety isn’t clueing into my “we have to go because we have a tour we have to get to,” and proceeds to continue talking with these guys. I laid down the law, said we were leaving and escaped yet another crazy situation Matt got us into. Thanks Matt, thanks a lot.

We really did have a tour to get to, as the most exciting part of the trip for me was just about to happen. Since we decided to come to Dubai, I wanted to ride camels in the desert. I mean, when else am I going to get to ride a massive animal through the Arabian desert? So, I booked us this camel riding tour that also included a night of activities in a Bedouin camp. These are the traditional camps that desert travelers would set up when searching for water in the desert. Our tour guide from Viator tours picked us up at our hotel and drove us an hour and half into the middle of the Arabian desert. During the ride, he gave us all the inside details about Dubai (including things they probably don’t want others to know, but oh well). Once there we got loaded up onto our camels (my camels name was Simone, and Matt’s camel’s name was Goad. He was making groaning sounds, which I later found out that meant he was grumpy. Go figure, Matt is used to me, so working with a grumpy camel-he should be a pro! Our camel guide was from Pakistan and laughed at my off the cuff, socially and politically incorrect jokes, so I think he had a good time with us. Don’t mind these pictures of us on camels, my legs looks like the size of Texas (who would have thought on an animal so large I would look so big as well) and well Matt’s shorts now have a bit of a racy look to them-looking good Matt, nice legs there. After the camel ride (which is way harder than it looks, and definitely harder than riding a horse), we arrive at our Bedouin camp to watch some falconry and settle in for an evening of traditional Arabian music and cuisine (yes, this includes eating camel, but not the one’s we rode out on and al harees, which are foods traditionally served at weddings). Matt smoked shisha and I got henna done, all while we made new friends from France and South Africa. Again, we would highly recommend this tour above all others if you want a real authentic experience in the desert. Seven hours later, we returned to the hotel totally exhausted, but had a wonderful experience.

After sleeping in a bit, we spent the next morning and early afternoon exploring Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi was about an hour and half drive from Dubai, and is one of the more conservative emirates of the UAE. We went to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (which is absolutely beautiful by the way), as well as had a chance to see the Emirates Palace Hotel (also very beautiful) and Etihad Towers. We finished the day having afternoon tea and pastries at the Desert Palms Polo Club of Dubai. I know this is a bit out of the norm for desert life, but it was recommended so we went. I’m glad we did because the pastries were phenomenal, the polo fun to watch as well.

Dubai was a great place to stop for a few days, rest a bit and see some of the massive structures, unique modern architecture and historical character this place has created. Dubai has many characteristics that resemble that of Las Vegas (big structures and buildings, fancy fountains, big, flashy everything-it’s their goal to have the biggest of everything in the world), yet there is virtually no crime, everything is automated (the police don’t even pull you over, they just ticket you from cameras everywhere), and there is minimal debauchery anywhere. I think they said that Dubai is the third safest city in the world. Who knew? And definitely not what I expected. So, imagine a very conservative Vegas, without gambling and drinking, then you have Dubai.

In many ways we came here seeking a variety of different cultural and lifestyle experiences that would push us completely out of our comfort zone and with some things it did. I mean, before I struggled to understand why women would want to wear the full abaya, but after doing it a few times during this trip, I can totally get behind wearing it with the headscarf on any given day. It’s really like a comfortable nightgown, and that headscarf did wonders to conceal my double chin-#Winning The women do it both out of respect, but also because they want to bring back tradition to their culture, similar to what women are now doing in Japan by wearing kimonos, and not just for wedding or special occasions. I mean, you never have to do your hair, figure out what you are going to wear, and you can go “full ninja” as they refer to it (full face covered except your eyes), say at the grocery store, when you don’t want to be recognized). Overall, all the people we interacted with were extremely friendly and very helpful. Although 80% of the people that live here are from other countries, we still found that we got an authentic experience none the less.

Overall, we found that Dubai is in more ways than just one, a lot like Oklahoma. A country, rather than just a state, dependent on the “black gold” of the earth to fund their sheer existence. If they haven’t seen how well that’s worked out for us, they should probably check that out. The one thing I can say is they at least they continue to build their infrastructure and economy on tourism as their “Plan B” because when the well becomes dry, as it inevitably will, they might actually be able to make it as a civilized place of existence. Come see the place if you haven’t been, it’s worth three or four days as a stopover city. We don’t recommend coming in the summertime, as apparently you can fry eggs and bake cookies on the concrete, as it gets so hot (we heard close to 120 degrees during the day). It’s wintertime and we saw 75-80 degree days.

As we continue our journey west, we are excited to explore the U.K. for the next several days. I’ve finally found a destination I might actually not stick out like a sore thumb. I’m also secretly hoping for a spotting of the Royal Family, let’s hope my years of stalking them on the internet will provide me some insight on the best location to do so!

See you all in London!

[manmachinesolutions]

Best Things About Facility Management

Facility management (FM) is a strong profession that incorporates numerous controls to guarantee the usefulness, comfort, wellbeing, and effectiveness of the manufactured condition by coordinating individuals, spot, procedure, and innovation. The International Organization for Standardization characterizes FM as the "organizational function which integrates people, place, and process within the built environment with the purpose of improving the quality of life of people and the productivity of the core business.”

Facility management services are a bunch of upkeep benefits that are used by organizations, associations, and lodging social orders towards a coordinated way to deal with the different everyday exercises and support the board. The facility management organizations guarantee that the region under their influence or the executives is run easily, productively and monetarily with the usage of expert nature of day by day administrations, for example, Engineering maintenance administrations, security services, parking services and so on.

Average facility management will have a few verticals, all of which go under a solitary umbrella to give modified upkeep and services resources. There are numerous facility management organizations in Delhi that are huge associations in themselves with bespoke answers for a wide range of building social orders and associations and so on.

Services Delivered by Facility Management Agency:

Any of the facility management organization will surely have one or many combinations of the below-written services. The facility management services in Delhi NCR can be more than below listed:

·         Engineering Services:

The most common engineering services creates a section of the overall facility management organization’s responsibilities. Engineering services like electrical maintenance, HVAC, plumbing, lifts, energy, and utilities are all the segments of maintenance services given by the facility management firms.

·         Soft Services:

If thinking apart from the main maintenance services, the facility management companies even provide multiple soft services like cleaning, janitorial services, landscaping, and the security services which forms a section of daily activities of real estate assets like commercial centers, malls, cinemas, offices, certain organizations, and house complexes.

·         Workplace Solutions:

Most of the quality facility management firms in Delhi NCR cater to workplace solutions that aid the smooth working of certain organizations and offices. These comprise but are to restricted to mail, reception, reprographics, catering, concierge, transport and other archiving services. Sometimes the goods and courier transportation even included along with the services of trained cleaners and drivers.  

·         Occupancy Services:

Apart from the services mentioned above, most of the bigger facility management companies even provide a strict solution to space planning, taking over the preventive and breakdown maintenance projects, energy management functions, and others.

Nowadays, with increasingly more demonstrable skill and specialization entering a large portion of our workforce necessities, a great facility management services accomplice can have a ton of effect in how a working environment of a private society is overseen and run, and over the long haul can demonstrate to be very gainful to the association financially just as having an incredible perceptual return. With that in mind, it is extremely uncommon currently to see the bigger associations have an in-house office supervisory group since it is awkward and costly to keep up such a large number of various capacities that are particular and need consistent preparing and staff compromise. The main special case can be the neighborliness brands, lodgings and so on which have the facility management as a center ability.

When considering the overall segment, the facility management firms have easily taken away a huge burden of regular maintenance aspects from the plethora if the companies and organizations and have easily permitted them for concentrating better and form their own particular section of competency.

What is the Requirement of Facility Management in Business?

Facility management organizations can be named as the emotionally supportive network of the business firms. These are the organizations that serve their customer organizations by chipping away at non-center concerns. Once re-appropriated, these business firms would then be able to focus on their center functions. A facility management organization is outfitted with experts in a specific activity that empowers the business firms to get proficient assistance for their prerequisites.

We as a whole know, not every person is great at everything. Each individual is allowed only 24 hours every day. Taking a shot at all the components alone is absurd. This is the place the requirement of facility management organizations develops that furnishes the business firms with various services. Thinking about the ancient days, the facility management organizations were given a low-level status when contrasted with others. They were known to deal with the little extra necessities of the business firms. However, with the developing interest, they transformed into proficient organizations having a specific set of working responsibilities for each expert post.

However, let me clear the requirement for facility management firms in-depth.

·         Maximum Value at Minimum Cost at Business

When any of the business firms re-appropriate their necessity, they tend to avail the expert services at a cost lower than what they would have brought about whenever did themselves. Additionally, the nature of work wouldn't be the equivalent. This is because the facility management organizations are furnished with demonstrable skills and have all the necessary advantages to carry out the responsibility. Along these lines, they will tend better value at an equivalent expense.

·         Strategic Business Plans

For the work redistributed to the business firm, the facility management organizations have a vital arrangement alongside a vital direction towards the specific work. This vital arranging and bearing emerge because of the polished methodology present in each assistance. They have the direction to arrive at a definitive objective by satisfying the organizations' requirements.

·         Effective and Strategic Management

Where these facility management organizations are redistributed with a specific work, they can deal with the work successfully. The customer organizations center around their center working and redistribute different services so they can be satisfactorily overseen. Expertly dealing with a specific work makes the work finished with higher worth and more noteworthy effectiveness.

·         Efficient Professionalism:

The workers in the facility management organizations are outfitted with required information, skills, and experience. They can break down, pass judgment and take care of the issues. The facility management firms have their thorough criteria for choosing their workers. Likewise, they are given further preparing to guarantee that the work is viably overseen and performed. Therefore, every one of these variables leads to an expert group and subsequently expert assistance.

Facility management firms have a very significant role in the growth of any company. These companies are set up on large-scale parameters. One can easily avail of the best professional and efficient services from the facility management firms in Delhi NCR. In a place like Delhi NCR, there is a great and increasing demand for facility management firms. To avail a quality service of facility management service, visit us at https://www.manmachinesolutions.com/