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cupidologys · 2 months ago

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⸻ THE PRINCE(SS) & THE PROTECTOR [PT. 2]

pairing: zoro x reader

word count: 2.4k

synopsis: refer to the first chapter: HERE

note: this is the SECOND part of this fic: TPATP

^^please read the first part before this chapter, as it will be confusing otherwise :)

and yes this is the final part !

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

ZORO

Three months had passed along the winter winds. Spring was just behind the proverbial corner, peeking its blooming head around, awaiting the final frost’s imminent leave. For Zoro, this shift was taking far too long.

Why?

Because when the seasons changed, he would finally be able to see you again.

The message arrived last week. A letter, embossed with molten gold and folded into perfect fours, found its way onto the deck by way of carrier falcon in the early morning. It had been addressed to Luffy. For some reason, disappointment struck Zoro when the sender was revealed to be you.

He shook the strange feeling away and snatched the thick paper from Luffy’s hand to read over its contents. There was only a single sentence written on the sheet, penned in careful, familiar cursive.

Luffy jumped around, craning his neck—which was quite easy for him—to catch a glimpse of the message. “What is it? I want to see.”

Zoro ignored his captain, instead he folded the paper and carefully pocketed it.

“Well?”

A huge grin spread across Zoro’s face. “It’s time to get our crew back together.”

The Spring Solstice is approaching.

I hope to see you all there.

✧ ˚ 　· 　　 . 　

The Merry docked in the sparkling harbours of a bustling metropolis. It was early morning—too early—and Zoro could feel the grogginess of a sleepless night weigh his limbs down. Despite the ungodly hour, the marina was buzzing with activity. People milled around, conversations floating seamlessly through the air. Some were setting up shop for the day—rows of all kinds of stores lined the inner docks and stretched far into the heart of the city. Others roamed about in various fashion; some were tourists and merchants, and others native citizens. No matter the purpose or the cause, everyone had the same buzzy manner to them. As if something electric was in the air, charging the atmosphere.

Zoro felt it too. That energy. That excitement. His blood thrummed with it.

The sun had just peeked over the horizon, casting the glossy buildings and shores in rosy hues. Your native kingdom was a modernist's dream. A glowing hub of glass, electricity, and the constant momentum of new, inspired invention. The technology here was all encompassing. Neon lights lined the sides of glittering buildings—some of which occupied their own space in the sky, suspended above the first foundational skyline. The vehicles zipping around, at least what Zoro thought were vehicles, were strange, sleek models equipped with an array of digital enhancements. They could fly too.

It seemed everything here belonged more to the sky than the earth.

Twenty minutes swiftly passed, and the crew slowly filtered away, each member marching off with their own designation in mind. Luffy wandered, led by his nose, down the streets filled with food stalls. The others offhandedly mentioned their own plans and each went their separate way. They made a promise to meet up in time for dinner, which was when they’d planned on surprising you at the palace.

The invitation itself was vague, but the shiny embossment at the bottom of the paper was the royal seal, a symbol which would, at minimum, grant them an audience with the king—and subsequently you.

A familiar groan made Zoro look up as he readied his own supplies to head out.

Sanji was off in a corner conversing with one of the store owners. They were engaged in what looked to be a heated transaction of sorts where the prize seemed to be a mint-coloured fish the size of a pencil and just as slim. The cook waved his hands in exasperation as the short, stocky salesman stared up at him in defiance.

Zoro shook his head, unable to muster any enthusiasm as he left the two bickering men to their devices. Instead, he ambled away and toyed with the hilt of his swords as he did so, rolling the smooth leather against the calloused skin of his fingers in an effort to expel the frayed nerves that rolled through his veins, causing his anxiety.

The city, alive as it was, had a strange air about it. As Zoro gradually made his way through the harbour and down the smoothly paved walkways that led to the heart of the metropolitan core, it became clearer to him that something had occurred—something important.

Shops had [CLOSED] signs put up despite it being late morning, flowers of all kinds were strewn around and fashioned into careful decorations, and many wore outfits of muted colours—a sea of grey and black trickled through the nation’s paths.

It was as if the city itself was in mourning.

Zoro shut those thoughts away. Perhaps those were the trends of the time. Perhaps the flowers were a cultural custom. Perhaps he was imagining it all and the foreboding thoughts invading his mind were nothing but unwarranted paranoia.

Everything was fine.

Until it wasn’t.

✧ ˚ 　· 　　 . 　

Miraculously, the crew congregated at the palace entrance relatively on time. Getting through the gates was surprisingly easy, and gaining an audience with the king—your father—was even easier.

The tall, imposing man greeted the crew with a wobbly smile. His hands, weathered and wrinkled with age, gripped his staff tightly until his knuckles turned white.

Something was wrong. Zoro was sure of it. Where were you?

“I did hope to meet you all under better circumstances,” he began. His brows furrowed as he worked his next words out. “[Y/N] always spoke so highly of you all.”

Zoro’s entire body tensed. Something was very very wrong.

Robin spoke up. “I apologize, Your Majesty, but what do you mean by that? Where is [Y/N]?”

The king’s expression falls. “I’m sorry… I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?” Zoro demanded, the thought of propriety forgoed. Anxiety bubbled up his throat like acid.

“The invitation was sent so long ago… I assumed that you received my letter regarding the news…”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The letter of…” His lips trembled. “Of passing. I am sorry. [Y/N] is gone.”

The room fell silent.

“What? What are—what do you mean?”

Luffy stared straight at the floor, still as a rock. The rest of the crew looked shell shocked.

Zoro whirled around on the older man, eyes flashing.

“Tell me!”

Despite the obvious tension rolling off of Zoro, the man’s expression only softened in pity.

“I’m sorry.”

“What… what happened?” Sanji rasped from behind. Zoro turned at the sound of his voice and blanked at the sight.

Why were they looking at him like that? Like their hearts were breaking?

“Zoro.” Robin rested a hand on his shoulder in comfort, which was strange considering the tears in her eyes. It seemed she should be the one comforted. But why?

Why were they all…

Realization dawned on him. Heavy. Precise. A shot to the heart.

The tributes.

The singular letter.

A city in mourning.

Zoro dropped to his knees. His ears rang as blood rushed through his head. The reality of it was hitting him all too fast.

No.

He had never known grief like this before. It didn’t come slow. It didn’t creep up on him. It was there. Raw. Searing. Instant.

Sobs broke out from behind, but he barely took notice.

There was no room to breathe, much less think or speak. He tried anyway.

“…dy.”

Robin furrowed her brows, confused. “What was that?”

“The body.”

When no one answered and the tense silence persevered, Zoro lost it.

“I said show me the damn body!”

The swordsman was yelling now, fueled only by pain.

Hate. Regret. Despair.

Such foreign feelings with such an intimate touch. They rolled through him in waves, never fully dulled, ebbing and flowing with the motions of thought and time.

His chest was hollow. Everything was hollow. Empty. Zoro didn’t think he’d ever feel whole again.

How could this have happened?

This couldn’t have. They were mistaken. They had to be.

He had to see the body. It couldn’t be you. It couldn’t.

The screams continued. Curses. He cursed the gods… the heavens… anyone and everyone. He must have looked insane.

He must have gone insane.

The king only shook his head, sadness clouding his expression.

“The fire… nothing was left. Only…” he trailed off, eyes wide and glistening. “Only bones.”

“Oh…God!” Nami gasped and covered her mouth. Her hands trembled as she struggled to keep her cries at bay.

The rest of the crew weren’t faring much better. Each crew member was equally just as shocked and devastated at the news of your death. Most hadn’t stopped crying.

Zoro didn’t cry. He didn’t say another word until they made it back to the ship hours later. The moment he reached the hallways leading to his room, he collapsed. Robin and Luffy, who had been with him, rushed to their friend's aid.

Zoro felt nothing. Numbness had spread throughout his body, paralyzing what little control he had over himself.

The two others tried to help—to console him—to no avail.

They were at Zoro’s door, hands on his shoulders in comfort and solidarity, when he finally spoke up. His voice was rough and cracked; his palm was splayed flat against the wooden panel in an attempt to keep himself upright.

“Leave me,” he gritted out. A final plea. An incontestable order.

And so they did. They left him to that room—to the privacy of the oak door that did little to obscure his pain or muffle the echoes of silent suffering.

For weeks after, the ship was haunted by the ghost of you—of the memories and people left behind, forever tainted. Life, as static as it felt, still moved forward. The motions of the everyday cycled through spring until summer made its way across the horizon. The crew worked tirelessly, taking on odd jobs here and there as they sailed to their next destination, far from the land you once called home.

An accident, the king had said.

Unpreventable.

Inescapable.

You were merely at the wrong place at the wrong time and dealt a tragic hand by fate. Zoro had never quite believed in fate, but now he held a newfound hatred for it.

“[Y/N] was supposed to come back.”

“Zoro…” Nami hesitated. This was the most Zoro had spoken in days.

“Some time would pass. Maybe longer than I wanted, but not more than half a year.” His voice faltered on the last part.

“Everyone would make up. Chopper would cry. Sanji and Usopp too, probably. The awkwardness would linger, but only for a little while. I had it all planned out; what I’d say when we were reunited. I’d apologize. Grovel. Beg on my goddamn knees if that’s what it took. It didn’t matter. I would have crawled through the dirt if asked.”

Zoro’s eyes were unfocused, gazing blankly into the far horizon. The crew stood across from him near the ship’s helm, uneasy and somber, blocking most of the view. Zoro continued to stare forward, unmoving. He wasn’t looking at them. Rather, he stared past them. Through them. Like they weren’t even there. He just…watched. Waiting in silence for something that would never appear.

Time moved forward still, stubborn in its momentum against those so desperate to stay tethered in its past.

It was early morning and not many of the crew were awake yet. Robin and Sanji were the only ones awake aside from Zoro, though they were more preoccupied with the swordsman than their own responsibilities.

Zoro was training on the upper deck. He repeatedly slashed his swords in a sharp movement against a steel mannequin. The poor thing was in tatters from the relentless onslaught of strikes and hits.

Robin, who was watching from a short distance away, asked: “Has he slept?”

Another slash. The training dummy rattled from the force as another gaping hole appeared in its extremity. It wouldn’t last much longer.

“No. But he doesn’t do much of anything. He drinks, sleeps, and trains to the point of exhaustion every day,” Sanji sighed, hand ruffling through his hair in frustration. “He barely even eats. I tried making his favourite meal last night but he couldn’t keep it down for longer than five minutes. I’m… concerned.”

“He’s lost some weight,” Robin noted with a frown.

“Yeah, well… he’s lost a lot of things recently.”

A pause.

“So have we.”

Sanji swallowed. The loss was still fresh in their hearts. Still raw and painful and devastating. Sometimes he’d forget for a little bit. He’d prepare a meal, share a laugh, or lose himself in a job, and for a second he’d forget all about the pain. But seconds were seconds and life moved fast—too fast for them to grasp those moments of peace and hold onto them like lifelines, which they so deeply resembled.

Zoro didn’t have the privilege of those moments.

Sanji turned to face Robin to address her, but kept his eyes on Zoro. “I’ve never seen him so…”

“Out of it?”

“I was going to say ‘crazed’. His screams… god, it sounded like he was the one dying. Right there. Right in front of us.”

“Sometimes, I think he might have been,” Robin answered, a sad finality in her words.

“How do we help him come back from this?”

“I don’t know if he will.”

Zoro could hear them, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Not anymore.

At least, not until a certain day, near the end of summer, when the sun hung low and the breeze turned kind. Luffy had convinced his first mate to accompany him to a small town for a supply run when Zoro had inadvertently found himself lost in the midst of the countryside.

After an hour-long trek, he had all but given up. In a bid to return to the ship, he had tapped the back of a stranger, prepared to ask for directions he inevitably would’ve confused as well, but as the hooded figure turned around, all thoughts emptied from his mind.

All Zoro could do was stare as you turned to him, familiar eyes locking onto his own glassy ones.

“[Y/N].”

You gazed at the man before you, a warm but confused expression graced your face.

Zoro didn’t look like he was breathing. He didn’t feel like he was either. He was too focused on you.

You who stood in front of him.

You who was alive.

You who was real. Not the imagined version that haunted his dreams on the nights he managed an hour or two of sleep.

You who looked at him like he was a stranger.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

—

˚ · . tags: @synchronised-beat @96jnie @guridoodles @metonimia-de-bellota @stranger-chan @sp1ng @diarythroughmylens @mitsureigen @kateswone @idx-xv @leafyturtle @lupidetenebris @captainsolare

#zoro fic #zoro x reader #one piece zoro #zoro fanfiction #roronoa zoro #zoro x y/n #zoro roronoa x reader #zoro #one piece #one piece angst #zoro x you #zoro angst #op zoro #one piece x reader

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probablyasocialecologist · 14 days ago

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The first thing you’ll notice — perhaps helped by a translation app, as tourists and monolingual English speakers are not among Familjny’s usual clientele — is that the food is outrageously cheap. Once you’ve worked out what dishes you want, you queue up to a little niche. You ask here for what you want, and you’ll be given a bit of paper. You take this to a larger niche, from which you can see the kitchen, and you give it to a uniformed staff member, who would usually be middle-aged or older. They will dollop the particular parts of your meal onto your plate. Then you sit down, and you eat it, and when you’ve finished, you put the plate and your cutlery onto a rack — there is nothing so servile as waiting staff. There are some drawbacks to this system, to be sure. I have only once or twice been in a milk bar that had a toilet, and because at lunchtime especially there are always a lot of people queueing, you are not encouraged to linger. You eat, and then you go home or back to work — but you’ll have been able to have a decent three-course meal of soup, a main course, and a slice of cake for the equivalent of, at the very most, £5, in a country where the cost of living is almost comparable to Britain’s.

[...]

In Poland, the milk bar idea has been dated by some to the late nineteenth century, when the bulk of Poland, including Warsaw, was under Tsarist Russian occupation. Milk bars would offer locally produced food to benefit Polish farmers, and there would be no alcohol to cloud the minds of Polish workers, and also, importantly, little meat, which would make the food both cheaper and healthier. But nearly every milk bar in Poland was opened between 1945 and 1989, becoming the local example of a subgenre of cheap communal eating facilities built and encouraged by state socialist governments; what distinguishes it today is the fact that it still endures, for reasons which are complicated and surprising. Communal eating was regarded as being of crucial importance by Bolshevik thinkers from the start. Partly, this was a consequence of their pioneering feminism. Both for Lenin and for explicitly liberationist thinkers like Alexandra Kollontai, one of the central tasks of the revolutionary government that seized power in October 1917 was to free working-class women from ‘kitchen slavery’, as exemplified in the St Petersburg’s textile industry, which saw women work in factories all day and then go home and cook (and clean) for their menfolk. Early plans were highly ambitious, and they were integrated with avant-garde architecture and urban design; a few remnants of this programme survive in the larger cities of Russia, and Ukraine in particular. When researching a book on Soviet architecture in the 2010s, I went looking for a few of these, and the results were often sad to behold. In St Petersburg — then Leningrad — at the end of the 1920s, a team of architects, some of whom had worked with Vladimir Tatlin on his famous unbuilt twisting tower in tribute to the Third International, were charged with designing communal kitchens in the factory districts of the city. All three of them survive, but they have been turned into dodgy nightclubs, cheap malls, or worse: the finest of the group, a fabulous, dynamic, futuristic building, in the Narvskaya Zastava district, had been subdivided into little units by, among others, McDonalds. In Moscow meanwhile, enormous Constructivist bakeries were built around the city. One of the largest of them, Bakery Plant No. 5, was turned into a museum of Constructivism in 2022; the year, that is, of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a vainglorious nationalist slaughter that would have horrified the socialist modernists behind these buildings. In the 1920s, housing was sometimes built in such a way as to encourage its inhabitants to eat collectively. In Moscow’s experimental Narkomfin Communal House, duplex apartments were connected by a walkway to a restaurant, a library, a nursery, and a gym, with a roof garden on top; inside the flats, kitchens were either tiny or, in the ‘fully collectivised’ apartments, absent entirely, with the assumption that you could always eat in, or take your food from, the communal restaurant. For its Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg, this would liberate women residents entirely from the assumption — unavoidable in the early twentieth century — that they would be cooking the dinner. But in the Stalin era, Soviet food culture became much more hierarchical. These dreams of vast avant-garde dining halls serviced by streamlined, automated processes and administered by happy class-conscious workers were replaced with, at the top, a series of luxury restaurants for the nomenklatura; at the bottom, factory canteens; and, in between, the stolovaya — a network of public dining halls across the country, expanded especially in the more egalitarian Khrushchev era, during which period modernist glass box cafes also appeared in the larger urban centres, as a return to the 1920s dreams of automated communal luxury.

17 February 2025

#state socialism #poland #milk bar #food

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expatesque · 1 month ago

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Monthly Recap - Jan

Read

War and Peace, which I'm like 1/3 of the way through. I'm going to visit my grandparents so should get some good reading done next month, although I might choose some warm weather reads for laying by the pool.

Watched

Dial M for Murder, a really good, not scary Hitchcock ft Grace Kelly and a clever twist.

A lot of Star Trek, we're in deep Star Trek here.

Singles Inferno, Korean dating show on Netflix that's super interesting from a cultural differences perspective (also I'm obsessed with the like viewers panel within the show, shout out to short hair lady, she cracks me up).

The Brutalist. Whew, it was a lot.

The Great Big Tiny Design Challenge on Channel 4, a competition show about decorating a dollhouse that I think was custom made for me in a lab.

Did

Attended: Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, got a last minute return ticket for this and I am so happy I got to see it. Definitely my favorite piece of dance I've ever seen, just so stunning and interesting and sexy and perfect. Also saw The Importance of Being Earnest at the National, very entertaining, great costumes, but not a must see for me.

Played a lot of tennis, partly because Russian took a while to start back up so I had time to attend the Tuesday lessons. But also partly because I'm now in like 4 different tennis WhatsApp groups and played a lot through that!

Had two different dinners that I've been putting off, one with the first of my ex's friends, which was so so good to do. The other was with a new friend that I'm working on making a good friend and this was our first solo hang. I really like her, glad I asked her.

Goals and monthly poll under the cut.

Last Month’s Goals

Played a lot of tennis, especially as my Russian classes took a few weeks to start up again in the new year.

Goals under the cut.

🟧Use all class pass classes: Half tick on this one, didn't end up using that many passes but that was mainly because I was playing so much tennis. Still, it's important to balance tennis with other types of workouts so will aim to do better this month.

☑️Read a book: Giving myself a tick here despite not finishing because I read a normal book's worth of War and Peace (some 450 pages).

☑️New Recipes x2: Accidentally knocked this one out of the park this month, largely because I was delivered an entire Gusto box by mistake. Honestly, was not very impressed with their recipes - I think they were fine and convenient for people who can't cook but as someone who cooks a lot, they weren't always very efficient and could have packed in more flavor in places. Outside of the box, I made kimchi jiggae, chicken pho, and Konjac noodles with peanut sauce and tofu, none of which were great. Been weird about food this month, struggling to think of things I want to eat.

☑️Go to a new museum: The Estorick Collection, a small museum in Islington that features Italian modernist art from approx the 1910s-1970s. Really interesting collection and museum. We happened to go when a tour was on and I highly recommend that; it's an eclectic collection without a lot of big, recognizable names (outside of some excellent Modiglianis) so having the context of a tour is very helpful. It felt like a higher level art history course and was a good reminder that the dominant narrative around the story of art is a massive oversimplification.

☑️Go to an Exhibition: Hew Locke, What Have We Here? at the British Museum. So, so excellent, cannot recommend enough. Locke is an artist whose work interrogates imperialism and colonialism, and this exhibition presents his works alongside objects in the collection. He also provides his witty, personal commentary on the objects chosen on yellow signs that pepper the exhibition. A truly innovative, thought provoking, and beautiful exhibition. This is really one of things museuks with massive, diverse collections like the BM can do better than anywhere else. Go if you can. Also went on a Young Patron's tour of the Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the V&A that was spectacular - the curators were hilarious and the lights going out 10% of the way through added an indescribable je ne sais quo.

☑️Go to a show: check, see above.

🟧Crochet: Better this month, can still improve.

❌Write More: More than last month, still bad.

🟧Lay morning foundation: I've got a good set of things I do in the morning, the issue is starting them at a reasonable time. Room to improve.

☑️Budget: Barely, so ready to be employed again.

❌Memorize a poem: RIP, no. Swear next month.

🟧Russian flashcards: Could still be better, but improvement.

❌Screen time: Latest android update really did my phone in, for almost the whole month I couldn't track screen time which was definitely a bad thing. Tracking is back now, gotta be more on this.

🟧Job prep: Meh, need to do some more, especially now that things are actually moving.

☑️World of Interiors: Read the Dec issue, fun and cool as always. This is a good thing to keep on the list.

☑️ Nutrition: This wasn't explicitly on my list but over the course of the month I started to shift what I eat to be more protein oriented and I've really been liking that. I feel fuller for longer, so planning to keep at it.

Next Month’s

Carrying Over

Use all class pass passes

Four new recipes

Read a book (/War and Peace progress)

Visit a new musuem

Go to an exhibition

Go to a show (nothing scheduled yet)

Crochet

Job stuff

Write more

Morning foundation

Budget

Russian flashcards

Screentime

World of Interiors

New

Send a postcard to Taylor (Bermuda friend, going to try to do this at least monthly this year)

#monthly recap #about s

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darkwingphoenix · 4 months ago

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@loominggaia Memes! Hot and Fresh!

Amber and Kitsu at the store, buying their female relatives pads:

(Wait, do sirene have periods? I assume gorgons and cecaelia don't, but what about sirene or other species?)

Everyone when me, @loominggaia or @niittinaatti post memes, lore, fanfics, or animations:

Demons when they need money for an apartment and also food

Skylie in a random village in Evangeline

Columbina and Sandrone in a nutshell (Sandrone's a yandere dedicated to Capitano and will harm/kill ladies who try to get with him, Columbina's just fucking insane sometimes)

Skylie to her parents

Me to everyone who passes by my AU:

Skylie and Janella Vokz on Vibing With Vokz, just vibing (Janella is having Skylie do the wrong answers)

Skylie's gnomish spec ops arriving to Marduk Hill, transmuting the Modernist Army into animals before controlling them to just dance, led by Gnome King Mimsical The Whimsical:

youtube

Champion to Skylie

Qara to Saraia, then Skylie shutting down and destroying the Zareenite flying fortress

Industrialists Be Like:

youtube

Skylie once she gets really good at her complex-as-shit summon-beasties-use-tendrils-swordsmanship martial style

Skylie packing her mega-storage shoulder bag (She puts in her entire cosplay repertoire, with like 30 different basic outfits to embellish for cosplay, like 300 fully functional weapons, including like 69 guns, hundreds of unique swords she commissioned by that dworfen divine of smiths after she proved she'd only use her weapons for cosplay and self-defense, hundreds of hats and shoes, enough food to feed her and Rook for 10 months, her personal copy of her Genshin Impact novel series, like 20 Visions to hand out to unsuspecting fools, 20 crates of condoms big enough to fit a family of dworfs inside, 20 hilichurls, 10 koholasaurs and a vishap, a rig of tepetlisaurs, a gang of yumkasaurs, 5 golden rings, a stable of horses, 20 months of birth control, a tent, and a partridge in a pear tree)

Skylie and Oberon fighting over Skylie's phone (Those things are manufactured to be able to break a concrete floor if they get dropped and survive a nuclear explosion)

Saraia, Skylie and Darshaan making monsters (Darshaan and Mankind's Disgrace are the same dumbass for this evaluation)

Skylie accidentally making a song when a Zareenite venue forced her to go out way too early for her concerts (She was spending too long on her cosplay, which the venue thought was stupid)(She's having a LOT of anxiety the entire time)

Roshava, more often than most

A Zareenite manager's expectations of their employees

Everyone when Sai and Justinia are in the Evangeline Palace:

youtube

Skylie, Cyana, Angeline, Amber, Maui, Citrine and Rook at the Evangeline Palace for dinner (Cobalt invited them)(Amber was made to work in the kitchens by accident)(Cyana bluffed)

The Reformists and Knights of Favonius in Evangeline before Cobalt sided with them (Someone asked is Sai had dat ass)

Skylie and Darshaan sharing one brain cell

Amber as an infant eating fudge rounds

Random divines meeting Skylie at the DivineCon Skylie made

Skylie for no reason

Sai seducing Cobalt in their bedroom

Skylie meeting (And adopting) a 2 year old human girl who turns out to be a divine locked at 2 years old (First scene and the food scene are within a few hours of each other, the dancing scene is 30 years later, the fire is a century after, and the last 2 scenes are after 1,000 years, and she's still a toddler)(Her name is Mualani)

Skylie's adopted divine kids, the House of the Hearth, often

#the ole meme bakery #best meme bakery this side noalen #looming gaia #Youtube

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blurban-form · 5 months ago

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Blocks Minisode

A lot going on in this short! Bluey and Bingo create an interesting week for Nana and Bob by her agreeing to leave their block city in place.

At the start, Mum and the kids just rush out but Bluey asks just before they leave if the block city can stay up, and this seems to be something that’s happened before and Nana quickly says it’s ok. Bluey and Bingo like leaving their sprawling cities up for long periods (understandable)

It would have been easier for Nana to snap a digital photo on her phone, take it all down, and then recreate it just before Bluey and Bingo returned! But then it wouldn’t be funny!

City planning

Everything falls down because all the buildings are joined with ribbons? Not sure why they were, either just decorations or maybe pretend walkways? Good for connectivity but it makes the city fragile in the event of natural disasters like Bob!

The transport system is Brio trains rather than toy cars everywhere. Good city planning.

The city Bluey and Bingo build is all towers spread out, very Le Corbusier modernist planning, maybe inspired by the Gold Cost where Nana and Bob live?

Weather

Never heard the term “synoptic charts” with regard to TV weather forecasts, but yeah, that’s a term for the future outlook, what the weather is going to be. Do they say this in Australia?

Even though Bob thinks it’s a sun in the forecast, the next day is pouring rain! LOL.

Other stuff

This episode is detail heavy!

Nana and Bob have a Dyson vacuum.

They have one of those lady-with-balloons ornaments that was at the garage sale.

A lot of art and photos of the family throughout the apartment!

They have Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients recipe book, @beeclops posted this already: https://www.tumblr.com/beeclops/763390417473519616, meaning like the Wiggles, there’s a dog-equivalent of Jamie Oliver in the Bluey universe.

The jar with a logo must be something. Not sure if it’s this one, but likely? Rosella is an Australian food company.

Like I say, a lot in a short episode! Good stuff.

#Bluey city planning #Bluey apartment life #Bluey

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cooking-pol-martin · 1 month ago

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Green Bean Time Machine

There's this literary concept of a madeleine, which is a metaphor for something that causes you to be mentally transported back to a moment in time. It can be a taste, a smell, a sound which provokes an involuntary memory. The concept comes from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time)*. The main character takes a bite of a madeleine dipped in tea -- a madeleine is a small cookie -- which overwhelms him with memories of his childhood, the recounting of which fills seven volumes and became a Modernist classic.

There's something of a visual joke about this at the end of the movie Ratatouille -- yes, I mean the cooking rat cartoon -- when the antagonist-critic takes a bite of the titular dish and you see a series of flashbacks of his childhood. (Arguably, the way our cooking rat links experience to memory is one of the theses of that movie, such as it is.) Smell and taste can be deeply, personally evocative, bound as they are to cultural identities individual, familial, and societal.

Which is why I say with some horror that Pol Martin's "Fresh Green Beans with Sour Cream Sauce" transported me back to the 1970s, an involuntary reverie of a particularly turgid period in American cooking. I didn't even know I had those memories.

Before I get into the way-back machine and start working through my generational trauma, I should probably detail the cooking process. First off, Pol had me get out a big pot, fill that bad boy with water, and then boil the ever living fuck out of a pound of green beans. It wasn't as horrific as the boiled leeks, which. I then was to make a roux and pour in reserved water from cooking the green beans, which resulted in a thin, unpleasantly gray gruel. The sauce was finished with not enough sour cream to ungruelify it. Serve over the beans, etc.

So I served this nonsense up, and the family set to eating. My first bite and I started to feel things: the almost overdone-ness of the vegetables married to a dairy-based sauce with virtually no seasoning transported me back to a place I can barely articulate. This dish isn't something my mom would ever make -- she could actually cook, even in the 70s -- but I have the phantasmagorical sense of church potlucks and luncheons after funerals of relatives I can't even remember. It was firmly disquieting.

My youngest kid, a senior in high school, piped up: "Can you take constructive criticism?" You bet your ass, kid. I'm already way ahead of you.

Meanwhile, sitting next me at the table, my husband was grubbing. "This is just great!" he cried. What the actual fuck.

After a fair amount of crosstalk, arguing, and shuddering from yours truly, the family decided that the longer you were alive during the 1970s, the more likely you were to enjoy this Pol Martin green bean abomination. My memories of that decade were created when I was largely prelinguistic, and feel broken and dark, unformed. My husband has a couple years on me, apparently long enough that unpleasantly gray gruel transported him to a place that made sense.

There's a reason my folks largely checked out of popular culture during that period -- beyond the way that having small children ruins your cultural engagement -- and that's because the 1970s sucked. I can see how my dad shakes his head when he talks about the 70s: the American people felt betrayed by Watergate, and the hard-fought successes of the Civil Rights movements bled out, literally, into a dozen political assassinations, domestic massacres like Kent State and the fucking horror shows of the Vietnam war and the illegal and immoral bombing of Cambodia. The first political event I remember was Carter being voted out of office in 1980, God rest his soul. The relationship with the current cultural moment feels grimly parallel.

Phew.

I didn't mean to get so serious in this here blog where I lightheartedly cook some nonsense recipes from a French Canadian chef, but here we are. Food culture is culture, and I suppose it's inevitable that one of these recipes would act as madeleine for memories that have whatever the inverse of nostalgia is.

*I know that reading seven volumes of a 100 year old French novel isn't on anyone's to-do list, but I'm telling you: that shit is some massively entertaining grandiloquent bitchiness.

#pol martin #stunt cooking #pol martin's supreme cuisine #green beans #madeleine #Marcel Proust

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billscheft · 1 month ago

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Found out today that the most important teacher I ever had, Peter Brush at Deerfield Academy, went to Heaven last month. Here's a tribute I wrote for the Alumni Magazine when he retired five years ago....

You wouldn’t have wanted to be me at 15. Five-foot-two, one-oh-five, pre-tetracycline skin. A run-of-the-mouth, overly sensitive Jewish boy in a sea of cocky Gentiles with straighter teeth and clearer paths.

No, you wouldn’t have wanted to me. Unless you knew where I was going for fourth period. Latin IV-V. With Peter Brush.

The first day of my sophomore year, I traipse into Latin IV-V and Mr. Brush handed me a slim, gray volume. Catullus. 37 years later, this anthology of 116 poems by the First Century BC Latin lyric poet and elegist remains the most influential book I have ever read. This rollicking ride of joy, sorrow, prosaic scorn, withering commentary, gleeful vulgarity, grandiose self-consciousness and epigrammatic angst is as galvanizing as it was when it first appeared on my horizon in September 1972, a mere 2030 years after publication.

Mr. Brush delivered that book, and then delivered the artist in that book. With his formidable gifts of wordplay, Catullus taught me the value of the word and showed me the possibilities of becoming a writer. That I make my living as a writer today has much to do with Catullus, and more to do with Peter Brush.

Mr. Brush (who never allowed himself to called Dr. Brush, despite a PhD. in Classical Literature from (ED University of Toronto? Michigan? Yale?) was as humble as he was hilarious. His teaching philosophy was based on attraction, not promotion. He was twinkly and mischievous and having a post-Modernist ball with languages not dead, but immortal. And he made the pursuit relentlessly accessible. All we had to do was keep up.

Voices and dialects and stories and spontaneous digressions into art, culture, food (a doorstop-heavy cake made from a 2200-year-old recipe every Christmas) and sports (a quiz every Monday if Yale football lost. Mercifully the Elis were great then.) punctuated by bizarre snippets off his Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Outside the classroom, he was a steady blur of guidance, expertise and goodwill. Dorm master, gourmet cook, long-time track and cross-country coach, amiable towel and jock thrower.

No better guide on this three-year path, which began with Catullus and cantered through Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Virgil, Lucretius, Cicero, Juvenal and five terms of Homeric Greek.

I arrived in Cambridge in the fall 1975 with large scholarly plans. My college major was never in doubt, and was the only academic warmth of those four years. But I became a sportswriter, a comedian, a television writer and now a novelist. The last time I saw Mr. Brush, at my 20th reunion, I began to apologize that I had not delivered on the unspoken promise of those three years sitting in his class, next to the Wollensak. He stopped me, and said, “But we had a lot of laughs, didn’t we?”

The best description I ever heard of success was “service plus faith.” I have little knowledge of his life before Deerfield. I don’t need it. Peter Brush is as successful a person as I have known.

Atque in otium, doctor, ave atque vale.

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justforbooks · 2 months ago

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The Sound of Utopia by Michel Krielaars

A revelatory account of the composers and performers whose lives were determined by the whims of a dictator

The fact that Joseph Stalin loved music and believed it mattered was both a blessing and a curse for the men and women who made it. If your work found favour you were treated as a secular god with all the trimmings – palatial apartment, good food and freedom to roam as far as the decadent West (assuming you came back when called).

But for those who offended Stalin’s arbitrary and shifting tastes it was another matter. The Father of Nations regularly took time out from his busy killing schedule to vet each new classical music record that came across his desk, noting on the sleeve whether it was “good”, “average” or “rubbish”. A bad rating could earn you a stint in the gulag or, if there were aggravating circumstances (homosexuality, say), a bullet in the back of the head. It has been calculated that 68 composers were sent to Siberia during Stalin’s 30-year reign of terror. Hundreds of other musical artists, from virtuoso composers to popular songbirds via second violinists, were consigned to oblivion when the paper trails concerning them were deliberately destroyed.

In this revelatory book, the Dutch journalist Michel Krielaars goes in search of the musicians who thrived and failed (or both) under Stalin. Although they themselves are long dead, their children and grandchildren are eager to talk, not so much to put the record straight as to build it from scratch. These elderly keepers of the flame arrive for their rendezvous with Krielaars carrying dog-eared letters, smudgy newspaper cuttings and hissy old vinyl recordings that bear witness to long-silenced genius. Krielaars, who worked as a newspaper correspondent in Moscow between 2007 and 2012, speaks Russian and knows the culture’s tender spots, especially now that Putin is reviving the Soviet playbook of violence and silence.

Any account of music under Stalin must begin with Sergei Prokofiev. Having seen out the chaotic aftermath of the revolution by settling in the west, the prolific composer and pianist allowed himself to be talked into returning to the Soviet Union in 1936. He hadn’t achieved quite the international stardom that he thought his due – the Americans preferred Stravinsky’s extravagant modernist style – and Stalin was desperate to lure the maestro home to show the world that the communist utopia was a paradise for innovative artists. Prokofiev got a hero’s welcome, a stream of commissions, a luxurious four-room flat and permission to import a particularly flashy Ford car.

Initially the composer upheld his part of the bargain, writing in Pravda of his eagerness to move towards a musical “new simplicity” away from the cosmopolitan polyphony of his earlier work. In 1939 he even went so far as to write the repulsive Zdravitsa (Hail to Stalin) to celebrate the dictator’s 60th birthday. It wasn’t enough, though, to keep Prokofiev safe, and in 1948 he was accused of “formalism”, which was defined as producing “confused, neuropathological combinations that turn music into cacophony”. He died four years later, on the same day as his dictator.

Much of the anxiety faced by Prokofiev and thousands of others arose from never knowing where you stood. Words warped and changed their meaning, fixed principles turned out to be written on water and the knock on the door could come at any moment. Prokofiev’s longtime frenemy Shostakovich was condemned in 1948 for the dreaded “formalism”, yet by the end of that year he was honoured with the title Folk Artist of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. Three Stalin Prizes for his film music followed.

The stories concerning less familiar names are even more poignant. When Vsevolod Zaderatsky died within months of Prokofiev and Stalin, no one noticed. He had blotted his copy book very early on with a brief stint teaching piano to the little Tsarevich Alexei. Formally identified as a counter-revolutionary in 1926, all Zaderatsky’s manuscripts were destroyed. After serving a couple of jail terms he gritted his teeth and wrote an opera called Blood and Coal. But it wasn’t enough, and by 1937 Zaderatsky was hauled up for producing “propaganda for fascist music” (playing Strauss, in other words). Sent to the gulag, he composed music in his head, wrote it on scraps of waste paper, and then, on his release, worked the best of these up into 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano. None were published or heard in his lifetime, although you can catch a rare recent performance on YouTube.

Zaderatsky came from Ukraine, that cultural and artistic powerhouse which produced so many of the musicians who appear in The Sound of Utopia. In addition to Prokofiev, there is Sviatoslav Richter, Heinrich Neuhaus and Klavdiya Shulzhenko, AKA “the Russian Vera Lynn”’ who warbled her way through compositions such as the Brick Factory Song’ and Mine Shaft No 3. In these circumstances it is only fitting that Michel Krielaars ends his book by warning that Russian music is once again being weaponised against Ukraine by a political dictator with a tin ear. In 2022, a few days after the invasion, a Moscow concert featuring work by the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov was disrupted when Russian police stormed on to the stage and shouted at everyone to go home. Silvestrov is now living in exile.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Michel Krielaars #The Sound of Utopia #book review

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