#most of them were super short! like under or just over 200 pages! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dillydedalus · 6 years ago

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what i read in january

too many books....

the unwomanly face of war, svetlana alexievich (tr. from russian) oral history of soviet women who served in ww2 (whether as soldiers, pilots, field nurses, laundresses etc, plus partisans) - interesting and harrowing, but honestly (& this just comes with the format i guess but it still made the book less enjoyable for me) pretty repetitive. 3/5

my sister, the serial killer, oyinkan braithwaite dark & snappy novel about beautiful ayoola, who has a habit of killing all her boyfriends, and her resentful but protective older sister korede, who always ends up cleaning up after her - until ayoola starts dating the man korede is in love with. not suuuper substantial, but an entertaining, twisty read with some hidden depths and great dark humour (ayoola about her trip w/ a boyfriend: ‘it was fine.... except he died’). 3.5/5

the private memoirs & confessions of a justified sinner, james hogg (uni) fucking wild ride of a book about (and mostly narrated by) a young calvinist radical who believes that, like, since he is one of the elect of God and his place in heaven is guaranteed no matter what he does, he might as well DO SOME MURDER!!! it’s fun, the theology is absurd, and one of the main characters (our young calvinist’s shapeshifting friend) is probably the devil! 4/5

friday black, nana kwame adjei-brenya collection of mostly speculative/dystopian short stories, some of which work very well, some of which don’t really. the stories based on racism in america are mostly very good, satirically heightening current issues to absurd levels while still feeling true. some others are not as good, including one where a man talks to the ghosts of the fetuses his girlfriend just aborted (like. bad.) the last story, a post-nuclear-apocalypse groundhog day type thing, is brilliant and i almost wish he’d turned into a novel/novella instead. 3.5/5

mythologies, roland barthes god, i wish french crit was always as fun as roro ‘kill the author’ barthes making fun of the myths of american evangelicalism and french imperialism. 3/5

moon of the crusted snow, waubgeshig rice set in a northern canadian first nations reservation, where one autumn, electricity, communications etc. fail. when no news (or scheduled deliveries of food etc) come from the south, the community has to figure out how to get everyone through the winter, relying increasingly on traditional survival skills. quiet & reflective twist on the post-apocalypse/social collapse narrative; occasionally the writing is a bit clumsy, but i’d still recommend it. 3.5/5

the haunting of hill house, shirley jackson a psychological haunted house story, more quietly disturbing than downright scary, but i really enjoyed the way the characters interact with each other and the visceral wrongness of hill house. also interested if anyone has done a queer reading bc i def feel like there’s some subtext between eleanor and theodora that plays into the horror (time to check jstor). and i just love jackson’s style of writing. 4/5

tentacle, rita indiana (tr. from spanish, i read the german translation) weirdo dominican queer post-apocalyptic time travel book involving yoruba/voodoo mysticism, time travel via anemone, art collectives, a trans protagonist who is the chosen one, destined to save the ocean, and a mention of einstürzende neubauten (automatic 0.5 point bonus). really cool! there is a lot of sexual & gendered violence so uh. that’s something to be aware of. 3.5/5

the orenda, joseph boyden ugh. so this is a historical novel set in 1600s northern america, centred around the huron/wendat nation and three characters: the wendat warrior bird, a jesuit missionary called christophe who lives among the wendat, and the young iroquois girl snow falls, who is... forcibly adopted?? by bird to replace his murdered family. interesting concept and a promising first third or so, but unfortunately the book is way too long, the characters and their relationships seemed shallow and their development was more Told than Shown to me, and it just never really came together for me. plus, halfway through i found out that boyden has apparently been either greatly exaggerating or completely making up his own native heritage so uh. bad. 1.5/5

nichts was uns passiert, bettina wilpert smart & very precisely observed story about an alleged rape in a lefty/academic social circle. anna claims jonas raped her at a party, while jonas says the sex was consensual. anna eventually goes to the police and as rumours begin to spread, the people around them begin to take sides and try to figure out how to deal with this thing that Does Not Happen To Us (the title) and is definitely not Done by People Like Us. in a smart twist, this is presented as testimonies collected by an unnamed first-person narrator who questions jonas, anna, their friends and family, which i found very effective as a narrative tool, making everything just ambiguous enough. ends on a legalese gutpunch. 4/5

o caledonia, elspeth barker lovely dark book about janet, outcast at school and in her family, always too intense, too earnest, too clumsy, as she grows up first in wartime edinburgh and then in an old house in the scottish highlands, feeling at home only among animals and the wild & harsh & romantic landscape. lyrically written, sometimes morbid and grim (the book opens with janet murdered at 16 y’all), but often funny and bittersweet as well. loved it! 4.5/5

espedair street, iain banks look, this is a novel about a burnt-out rockstar looking back on his rise to fame and wild life, which is like. incredibly unappealing to me from the beginning. tho i gotta give props to banks for managing to make me at all invested in this story with good writing & well-engineered weirdness - so i guess i need to read something from him where the very premise does not make me roll my eyes. 2/5

eiger dreams: ventures among men & mountains, jon krakauer i would never willingly go mountain-climbing but i sure am highkey obsessed with reading about it. this is a collection of short essays about mountain climbing, some about krakauer’s own experiences (trying to climb the eiger nordwand etc), some about special areas of climbing, infamous climbers etc, and krakauer is a good writer & funny dude (don’t smoke weed in your tent while on an expedition lmao). krakauer says in his foreword that “most climbers aren’t in fact deranged, they’re just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition”, which is a great sentence, but based on this and into thin air it seems like that’s in fact the same thing! 3.5/5

fool’s errand (the tawny man #1), robin hobb y’all. i missed my silly silly son fitz who is now significantly older than me, and i was immediately captivated even tho the first 200 pages are mostly fitzy’s Hermit Homesteading Routine with Occasional Visitors. i loved that shit. i loved fitz being reluctantly-but-maybe-not-that-reluctantly being caught in court intrigue & schemes again even more. anyway, hobb’s strength as always is amazing characterisation that makes every character immediately seem real & rich and the relationships between those characters, which are nuanced and fraught and painful and wonderful (also when will fitz & the fool kiss JESUS). also it made me cry a lot about nighteyes, so well done there. 4/5

anyway i am now forcing myself to not just abandon all else and just speed thru tawny man but i really really want to so everything else is going quite slowly

#this looks like a lot of books (and is actually a lot of books) BUT #most of them were super short! like under or just over 200 pages!#i love 'infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition' but yeah that does 100% equal 'deranged'#the books i read

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literaticat · 2 years ago

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I'd like to hear your thoughts on the types of picture books that are selling now and how they compare to the types that were selling when you first started agenting. Thanks!

Well, as I said a couple posts ago, when I started, it was the DARK AGES for picture books. We were selling them, as an agency, but they were not EASY to sell by any stretch, and when I started, I didn't even accept picture book author or illustrator queries at all, because I fancied myself a "YA & MG exclusively" agent. I did sell some, but only for authors that I already repped for novels. But I just didn't even TRY to sell enough of them to really have good data -- So my VERY early years can kinda be discounted.

(I do think the first ones I sold would still sell today, though. I know that because, well, they are books like OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW by Kate Messner, which I sold in 2008 and came out in 2009-10-ish, and I still am selling sequels to that book as recently as last month, it's going strong 10+ years later.)

But anyway -- I'll take a stab at, say, 10 years ago compared to today. 10 years ago it was really the "short - no SHORTER!!!" era. Which, yes, we still like short books, but at that time it felt virtually impossible to sell fiction picture books that were longer than like, 200 words. I had to explain that to authors A LOT. Now, authors are kinda used to that, so it's less jarring. . . and now, we sometimes DO see picture books that are longer, because publishers realized they were leaning TOO far in the short direction. Books like LITTLE WITCH HAZEL, which is quite a robust storybook, probably would not have sold ten years earlier.

10 years ago, graphic novels were not a huge thing for kids. ("That's not a picture book, JENN!", you exclaim -- Yeah I know, hear me out!)

So SMILE came out in 2010, and really introduced that as a viable kind of book for MG, but it took years for the category to truly gain a foothold and creep younger. There were no picture book graphic novels or early reader graphic novels back then. Now there are both, and hybrids, and they do well. I'm thinking of books like FOX + CHICK and its sequels -- it's packaged like a picture book, but is told in panels, and could be an early reader too. NARWHAL AND JELLY, which is an early reader / graphic novel / good for PB age kiddos. etc. Publishers are more open to sort of blending categories in this way for this age kid.

10 years ago, the "meta" and "interactive" picture books were taking off. By "meta" I mean, books where the character addresses the reader directly, and either knows they are in a book (so it's kind of a book about the book itself) or the reader is invited to interact with the character -- the classic examples are THERE'S A MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK and DON'T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS, both of which came out earlier of course, but in the early-mid 2010s, there was a rash of these kinds of books. Other examples of interactive books are like PRESS HERE, which came out in 2011 or so -- these books encouraged kids to turn the book upside down, touch things, say magic words for things to happen on the page, etc. And there were many sequels and copycats in the following years. For both these kinds of books, I think the market is pretty saturated, and unless it was bringing something WILDLY cool to the table, would be a tough sell.

On the nonfiction side, because "common core" was a new thing in 2010, books met common core standards started to be talked about a lot. I feel like we sold A LOT of picture book biographies and such. At this point, though publishers still theoretically like bios, most acquired SO MANY that their lists became overloaded with them, and now they may not even want to look at them unless they are SUPER special.

(Another category like that really blew up maybe ... um... around the mid-20-teens, like post-Obama administration -- for some reason... *cough*... was a rash of "GIRLS CAN DO IT! YOU ARE AMAZING!!!! DON'T LET BULLIES GET TO YOU!!!" kinda books - which, yes, they are still coming out -- but again, that is something publishers have seen A LOT of and probably not going to sell unless it's doing something spectacular and new.)

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spidermanifested · 4 years ago

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remember when i said in my post about how bido is unappreciated that id talk about why greed/bido is a good and important ship but thats a whole other post. well This is that post

the first and most important reason that greed/bido is a good ship is very simple and that reason is Bido Was In Love With Greed The Whole Time And Nobody Noticed?????? how come nobody noticed. i mean SOME people noticed but nowhere NEAR enough people noticed

when greed compliments bido for successfully proving that alphonse is just a soul bound to a suit of armor, he blushes and acts very flustered and happy. unfortunately this scene is not animated in either show (bido talking to greed is changed to be over the phone in 03, and in brotherhood the scene just gets skipped, HOWEVER theres a single shot of bidos face in one of greeds flashbacks that shows him blushing and looking directly at the camera. ie at greed)

also in the manga his first thought when the military shut down the nest was to worry about whether greed SPECIFICALLY was okay (i used this page in my other post as well but its important)

and in brotherhood he was shown to have actually followed greed through the sewers during his fight with bradley but could only watch from his hiding place as greed was defeated and taken away; remembering this is what gives him the determination to hitch a ride to central to look for him

did i mention he went all the way to central to find him!!! clinging to a MILITARY TRUCK no less. as a very obvious chimera if he had been found by any of those soldiers it would have been horrible for him and every other time we ever saw bido faced with danger he ran away from it. but he was brave For Greed. he went into the labyrinth under central For Greed, and didnt try to escape until he was convinced greed wasnt there. and when it turned out he WAS there (and had lost his memory and had been trying to kill him) he immediately dropped his guard and walked closer to him because that was greed and he trusted him despite everything that had just happened. in the manga he grabs onto greeds coat as he dies and it is just about the saddest thing ive ever seen in my whole life

and then of course greed starts physically shaking because what he just did was so awful his body knows he fucked up before his mind even remembers Why it was fucked up and he cradles bidos body in his arms and screams. unfortunately if we are to acknowledge bido as the gay icon he was, we also must acknowledge that he was buried

(by all rights bido SHOULD have survived. where is the fanfiction where he survives fullmetal alchemist fandom or are you too busy writing the same royai-gets-married-and-has-babies fic over and over again. actually never mind i greatly prefer that to all the pedophilia. but thats another Other post, that unlike this incredibly niche topic some other people have almost definitely made before me)

the thing about grido is you could make a huge tragic thing about it being unrequited and frankly thats Fair, greed does not seem one to settle down in a relationship and bido likely has a lot of self worth issues that would prevent him from confessing his feelings. but you cannot deny that greed cared about him. he praises him, he pats him on the head (!!)

he COMPLETELY breaks down after he realizes he killed him. bido was so important to greed, as were the rest of the chimeras of course but i think theres a valid argument to be made that bido in particular was special to him. theyve got a few things in common actually that i find interesting:

both like to just chill on roofs??? when greed is in lings body he sometimes just hangs out on top of a roof. bido does this too

they could have hung out on roofs together.......maybe thats why greed likes to be up there. because he hung out with bido on roofs a lot. please consider this possibility

both of them are accidentally rude to children. the same children in fact

greed is like 200 and looks 30 while bido is middle-aged and people think he is a baby for some reason?????

okay this is just straight up a headcanon and has no actual basis in the text or subtext of fma but I Think Bido Is Trans and was cast out by his family in his youth and greed would understand that experience!!!! having left his own terrible family because they wanted him to be someone he wasnt

and then there are the differences:

greed is very outgoing and bido is mostly pretty anxious, though he has outbursts of confidence; that might be because greed being nice to him has built up his self-esteem (the way he calls himself cool/awesome when he escapes from the elrics, directly followed by greed complimenting his skills, really makes me think this is the case)

one is tall and lean........the other...is short and fat....... i know its cliche but let me have this

bido overthinks things. greed is a jock. with their powers combined they can do things at a mostly reasonable pace (as long as bido doesnt just go along with whatever greed wants which is probably most of the time what happens)

bido is outwardly inhuman and weird-looking but is incredibly caring and hard-working and loyal and sweet. greed is the sexiest motherfucker alive but hes literally the personification of a deadly sin and at his core he is technically just a rock made of pain. but below these layers both of them want the exact same thing which is to care about others and be cared for in return

also you know that post about how ships between immortal people and super young adults (or worse, teenagers) are OUT and instead we should have stories about immortal people dating 40-something accountants. bido is the 40-something accountant. except not an accountant. you know what im getting at though hes an Established Adult

and bido DESERVES it, he deserves to be loved by the person he cares about more than anything, he has been through so much and gotten nothing but pain and he needs something good for a change!!! and greed DESERVES someone who will love him with all his heart and make him feel wanted no matter what. just, listen to me okay, they would make each other so happy

so!!! there are MANY reasons this ship is interesting and a million different ways you could go about exploring it and there is just NONE of it out there. for some reason the chimera that gets shipped the most with greed is dolcetto (though ive seen martel as well) and i think that is probably because they are more attractive to people (and also id wager more than a few dollars people simply see a dogman and his boss and go wild for the petplay angle). like you dont see any greed/roa either and thats very telling since roa appears with the other two almost every time and nothing about him is different except hes older and not as. pretty i guess???? in my humble onion hes hotter than either dolcetto or martel but thats neither here nor there

the important thing about bidos relationship to greed is that he might not have been transmuted with an animal with a strong sense of loyalty, but he didnt NEED to be, to be loyal to greed. he loved him entirely because he was human. and in the end he did the most for him out of any of the chimeras. unfortunately it was via dying but through the power of imagination we can collectively ignore that and pretend both he and greed survived, and greed went back to his original sexy, sexy body, and they made out on a roof for several consecutive hours. thats how im coping at least. thank you so much for listening to my unhinged rambling about lizard man who dies of fullmetal alchemist (gay edition)

#fullmetal alchemist (fullmetal alchemist)#bido #fma greed #grido

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coldasyou · 5 years ago

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How to gif without photoshop

Hello! By popular demand (of like 4 people) I am going to write out a tutorial of how I make gifs when I’m on my personal laptop and don’t have access to photoshop. There is another method I use with a different software that is a bit more complicated and if people are interested, I will make a tutorial of that method as well. I’ll do my best to keep this concise, so let’s get started.

Warning that this is VERY text and image heavy because I know how frustrating it can be when a tutorial feels like it’s skipping steps and I want this to be as clear as possible. Also please read this on desktop, tumblr mobile kills the quality of gifs inside text posts.

This is the video I will be giffing and here is the gif I will be making!

What you need:

A video to gif

For the best results, I recommend a video that is either 720p or 1080p (basically the higher the quality, the better). Videos with good lighting and bright colors also turn out the best. Unfortunately for me, I gif the TV show Prodigal Son a lot and that show has neither of those things, which is why my gif example is from that show; if you can make a scene with zero lighting or vibrancy look even somewhat decent, you can make anything else look good.

A video downloader or screen recorder

This is the video downloader I use and this is the screen recorder but basically any youtube video download website or screen recorder program works. Keep in mind that ezgif has a pretty low upload limit for videos, so if you want to gif something longer than like ~4 minutes, cut the video down to the specific parts you want first on a website like this one.

ezgif

A very straight forward website that anyone can access. You don’t need to download anything, it’s all online.

Bonus: Online Image Editor (not required, but I use this website to add text to gifs)

1. Making the gif:

Once you have a video downloaded, you go to ezgif.com and go to the section video to gif. Click choose a file, scroll to your downloaded video, and hit upload video. Your screen should look like this now.

There are two ways to pull out the sections of the video you want to gif. You can either write in the start and end time in the little sections (you have to convert them to seconds: for example, if my gif started at 1:16 and ended at 1:20, it would be 76 seconds and 80 seconds respectively). Or you can do the method that I feel is easier, where you go to the section you want it to start on, hit pause, and hit the blue button that says “use current position” then let the video play until it hits your stopping point, hit pause again, and click on the second “use current position” button.

Once you have the start and end time recorded, scroll down to the next part of the screen with the size options. For size, select “540xAUTO (for Tumblr)” since tumblr gif sizes start at 540p and go down the more gifs are in a row. For frame rate, try to do either 20 or 25; the higher the frame rate, the smoother the gif will look. If you are trying to gif something in 540p that is longer, you might need to chose 10 to keep it under 5mb, which is the tumblr gif size limit. For method, leave it on FFMPEG. Then hit, convert to gif.

your gif will now look something like this!

Now, this gif is currently 5.7mb, which is above the size limit for tumblr (5mb or above gifs will still play if I recall, but the quality will be really bad when you post them). If I was planning on keeping the gif this size, I would go back and change the frame rate to either 20 or 10 to get the size down. However, I am going to resize the gif to 268p, so I don’t need to worry about it being to big.

Using the correct gif size for tumblr is one of the easiest ways to make sure the gif looks good! For gifs that take up a whole row, the size should be 540p wide. For two gifs in one row, the size is 268p each. For three gifs in one row, the sizes are 177p, 178p, and 177p in that order. Here is a visual of it.

The next step would normally be resizing the gif, but Prodigal Son youtube videos come with a black banner on the top and bottom that I need to crop out. You will see a menu full of options under your gif, and you want to click on “crop.”

Cropping is pretty straight forward; you just move the little box over the part you want cropped, then hit the “crop image” button. Make sure width stays 540p!

Your gif now looks like this

Next, you look at the options under your gif again, and go to “resize.”

Again, resizing is pretty straight forward. I just put in 268 into the “width” section and leave the “height” section blank since the site will automatically resize the height. You can ignore the other menu options.

Your gif now looks like this

Next step is optional, but I usually do it. Once again, you go to the menu of options under your gif and select “speed.”

Speed is also super straight forward. I almost always reduce the speed of my gifs somewhere from 90% to 80% no matter what, just because I think it makes it look smoother. For gifs that are of short scenes that go really fast, I will reduce it to anywhere from 70% to 50%. You can try different speeds to test out what you think looks best. For this gif, I’m going to put it at 80%.

Here’s what we have so far. Congrats, you have made a gif!

Now for the fun part!

2. Coloring the gif

Go to the “effects” option, in the menu under your gif. You will see a LOT of options, but the panels I’m going to focus on are “colorize”, “brightness and contrast” and “color presets”. This section is going to vary a lot depending on what specific video you are giffing so remember to be flexible and try lots of different options out! It took me a while to get to a place where I can just eye a scene and know what settings to use. It’s super easy to go back and tweak a setting if the gif doesn’t look like how you want it the first time, but it’s a lot of trial and error.

The main option I focus on in the “colorize” section, is “saturation.” This is what will make all the color in your gif pop out. The saturation I use varies a ton; for scenes that already are colorful/bright, I usually keep it around 120 to 150, since you don’t want it to be over saturated. If I’m making an edit that is supposed to look toned down or more grey/neutral tones, I’ll decreases the saturation in the range of like 90-40. For a show like Prodigal Son, where there is basically zero color vibrancy, I tend to go full out with saturation, usually in the 150-200 range. For this gif, I have it all the way up to 200.

Next is brightness and contrast. This also varies wildly, but a good rule of thumb is I always try to keep my contrast at least 5 points higher than whatever my brightness is, it just makes the lighting more even. You need to find a good balance; obviously, the darker the scene, the higher you want the brightness and contrast, but if you go too high, the gif with be staticy/grainy. For Prodigal Son, which has horrible lighting, my brightness is anywhere from 10-30 and my contrast is anywhere from 15-35. For this gif, my brightness is on the lower side since the scene is outside in natural light; brightness is 16, contrast is 26.

After you get those settings, I go over to “color presets” section and click on the “tint” option. It will pull up a color chart that looks like this

You ALWAYS want the intensity up to 100. This part is where the most trial and error occurs; there isn’t any one color option that works for every gif. The shade I use most often is light red/pink or light blue/light purple. For scenes that are lacking warm tones (which is almost all of Prodigal Son) I tend to go to the light reds, and for scenes that are lacking cool tones, I go to the light blues. The light reds are best for making characters skin tones look more...like actual skin tones and not totally washed out. To select a color, you just move your mouse around the chart. This is the range of color codes I tend to use.

Again, intensity should be up to 100 (it automatically starts at 50 and I was too lazy to move it while getting screen shots :P).

For this gif, I actually used a new technique I’ve been trying out where I start with a light blue tint to even out the color tones, then once that gif is done, I go back to effects and add a layer of pink to make the colors brighter. Usually, one color works fine, but sometimes it’s hard to find a good balance (the red colors can get too red and the blue sometimes brings out too much of a yellow shade). For now, I have my color tint set at #eeebff.

Ultimately, this is what my effect settings look like and this is what the gif looks like now.

Now, like I said before, I added another layer of tint to this gif. All you have to do is go to the menu under your gif, and click on effects again.

It will take you back to the panel you were just on, expect now your colored gif is on the top and all the settings are blank again. The only setting you need to use now is the tint option; go there, and select a light red shade. I used #fff0f0.

And here is the final gif! To save it, just right click and hit “save image as.”

I know it seems like a long process, but once you get a hang of it, it goes by super fast, especially if all your gifs are coming from the same video.

BONUS: Adding text

If you are trying to gif something with dialogue or you want a quote to put over your gif, you will want to put text over it. ezgif has a “text” option that you can use if you want, but I personally don’t really like their font options, so I use the website Online Image Editor.

This is what it looks like. You can either hit “upload an image” and upload your saved gif, or you can go back to ezgif, right click the gif, hit “copy image url” and paste that url into the “upload from url” option. The web page should now look like this.

It’s pretty straight forward from here; click on the “add text” button and a menu will appear on the left hand with options for the text.

Type whatever you want the caption to be in the “type text here” box. This website has a ton of font options you can play around with, but when I just want to caption a gif, I stick with “Arial Bold Italic.” For a 268p gif, the font size should be 10-12, depending on how much writing you plan to put on each gif (if some gifs are going to have more writing than others, pick a smaller font size so it stays consistent!) When I make a 540p, the font goes up to 14-16. I use white for the color and black for the stroke. I make the strokewith 3 because it makes the caption stand out more. Once all these settings are selected, hit the “preview” button under the text box.

You can now drag your text anywhere you want on the image! The only bad thing about this website is that it doesn’t automatically center text, so you either have to eyeball it, or if you’re picky, like me, open up one of those online ruler applications and use it to measure out the center. For captions, I move the text just slightly above the bottom of the gif.

Finally, you hit apply. Once your gif has the text on it, all you have to do to save it is right click it and hit “save image as.” And here is the finished project!

That got a lot longer than I thought it would, but I hope it was informative! If anything was unclear or if you have further questions, feel free to send me an ask. Thank you for reading.

#gif tutorial #giffing tutorial #giffing #gifmaking #mine #my gifs #long post #I hope this makes sense lol #pls rb if it helped!!!#also if mobile doesn't keep the read more...idek

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cricketnationrise · 4 years ago

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Books I read in quarantine: Part 1

So on Friday, March 13, 2020 something not that chill happened. We all know what that was. Anyway for me the silver lining was that I got a lot of my TBR knocked out by not being at work. I read over 150 books from mid-march to mid-october.

1. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: yes, it had been on my list for a while, yes it was awesome, yes, its still worth the read

2. Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey: eh. listen. she’s one of the most prominent women in fantasy/sci-fi writing and that’s great. and maybe some the later books aren’t quite such a product of their time. but there are some aspects to the dragon “bonding” that feel especially uncomfortable and there’s a lot of violence toward women. so.

3. Briar’s Book by Tamora Pierce: I was in the midst of a Circle of Magic reread. Unfortunately for me, this one is about a plague. It’s still one of the best CoM books and I enjoy it immensely. Its definitely going to be harder to read from now on

4. The Tiger’s Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera: loved this. empress and ruler of the steppes as lesbians that also battle demons? i needed a family tree, but that’s normal for me. still need to get to the next one in this series.

5. Fablehaven by Brandon Mull: middle grade fantasy novel. i hesitate to say lighthearted because there are definitely some heavy themes, but all the fantasy creatures you encounter are cool AF and this one at least doesn’t end on a cliffhanger.

6. Magic Steps by Tamora Pierce: less strong than some of the others in the Emelan series, but has some cool worldbuilding that got better fleshed out in the Beka Cooper Tortall books. featuring UNMAGIC. v dark. also dance magic. and romance between two older characters

7. The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan: delightful romance, not super explicit, very wish fulfillment if your wish is to run away from your life in london and live off the proceeds of a mobile bookstore in a tiny town. which. is not unappealing.

8. Street Magic by Tamora Pierce: features 9 cats, street urchins, and a VERY TERRIFYING wealthy widow straight up murdering kids for fun and games, stone magic

9. Scythe by Neal Shusterman: okay so take our world and then solve all physical ailments and have everything run by the cloud. except that death is still a thing but only if you are picked by a Scythe. first book in a trilogy. fast paced, amazing, violent (someone gets their head cut off), standard dystopia stuff. you’ll want to have the next two books ON YOUR SHELF

10. Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke: there is definitely someone out there who will like this more than me. one of them is my roommate. it was just too dark of a friendship/enemyship for me. lots of unreliable narrators. and like, they were just kind of horrible to each other? the actual plot was kinda cool and i definitely would have liked it more if it ended lighter

11. The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. LeGuin: a giant of fantasy and science fiction. this was my first of her sci-fi stuff and the first of the hainish cycle that i’ve read. quick read. definitely makes you think.

12. The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark: number two in a series, but i didn’t know that going in. absolutely going to read the others. a cairo where all sorts of spirits and demons exist and actively interact with the “normal” world.

13. The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury: i’ve never been to france but this feels VERY french. magical realism about bringing the right book to the perfect reader. super cute.

14. Fire Starter by P. Anastasia: first of a series. i wanted to like this better based on the magic system. romance felt forced. also it turned out to be aliens. which like, not a problem, but don’t spend 100 pages telling me its magic and then boom alien virus. maybe the others are better, but i’m not going to find out.

15. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: i had to read this in middle school and definitely didn’t appreciate it enough. highly recommended.

16. A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies by Alix E. Harrow: a fantastic short story about reading, libraries, magic and supporting teenagers who need it. you can read it online or as part of Apex Magazine Issue 105 from Feb 2018.

17. On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden: really long graphic novel about a found family in space trying to do a good job repairing various buildings and stuff. enough queer content for anybody really. gorgeous art.

18. Doughnut by Tom Holt: book 1 in the YouSpace series. very discworld-esq except that its our own world plus a pocket dimension that’s only accessible with a lot of math and a prayer. hilarious at times, but a decidedly darker tone than discworld so just be aware if that’s not what youre looking for

19. The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind by Jackson Ford: teenage girl in california has powers that let her move things with her mind. works as part of a government program with a whole band of misfits. she thought she was the only one and then someone else starts doing crime (TM) and murder with telekinesis and she has to stop them. found family toward the end. graphic violence toward the end. wildfires.

20. Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts by Julian Rubinstein: what it says on the tin, basically. NONFICTION. this dude in europe had way too many day jobs that were actually crime and his story is WILD. last update i saw was that he was still alive, paroled from jail, and making pottery??

21. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon: 800+ pages of epic eastern fantasy. some dragons. a witchy big bad. betrayal. queer romance as a main plotline. magic. seriously good.

22. Transcription by Kate Atkinson: flashback within a flashback within a flashback and reversing that path as you move through the book. woman just wants a secretary job during the war. somehow ends up as a spy??? i liked it, i keep meaning to get more of her books

23. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire: first in the wayward children series. under 200 pages if you’re looking for a quick read. what happens to kids that have gone through a door, had an adventure, and then forced back into our world? they don’t quite fit. and when that happens they go to Eleanor West’s School. fantastic series that is still being added to (number 7 comes out next year). can be very dark/sinister at times. but theres a lot of queer representation and found family stuff to balance out.

24. Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire: book 2 in the wayward children series. focuses on Jack and Jill’s backstory of their time before book 1. they are from The Moors where a Vampire Lord and a Mad Scientist are battling against each other to keep the balance of the world with a village of innocents between them

25. Go Fish by Ian Rogers: short story published on Tor.com about a group of paranormal investigators. there’s a fish factory that no one will go in because it’s haunted and/or cursed and people have been dying from going in there

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thewebcomicsreview · 5 years ago

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So I've been following this one guy who gives really good writing advice, but lately he's been: telling people it's OK to skip the Intermission in Homestuck; defending bad writing as a "structural issue" (those poor writers, it's not their fault they've structured their story / writing process in a bad way); priding himself on making a half-assed "unfinished-on-purpose" comic review. This person was my main source of writing advice, so I don't know where to turn to. Any recommendations?

The only other webcomic review guys I’m aware of are the Bad Webcomics Wiki, but if you think I’m too nice on writers, they might be up your speed anyway and oh my god they just posted a review of a SpiderForest comic. Guess it’s time for

The Webcomic Review Reviews Webcomic Reviews

So, this is a review of a SpiderForest comic called “The Guide to a Healthy Relationship” which is a comic about LGBT people, and it’s being reviewed by the Bad Webcomics Wiki, so obviously there’s going to be a whole bunch of slurs, so consider that a content warning and I’m putting the rest of this behind a ReadMore

This is going to be slightly disjointed because the BWW review is disjointed, but I’ll do my best

We’re already in some factual trouble right on line one, since TGtaHR is a traditional webcomic and not a long-scroll mobile-friendly webtoon, nor is it hosted on webtoons.com. Is this nitpicky? Maybe a little, but we’re off to a poor start here.

This comic is just under 200 pages.

I feel like if you’re going to write a big thing attacking a webcomic’s story, you should try to have some kind of understanding of what that story is. I know what the story of Sinfest is, and Sinfest is a confusing nightmare.

Okay, so maybe the reason you think this story is bad is because it’s 2deep4u.

So, in the space of about twenty pages, we learn that Apollo had a friend named Julian who killed himself, and then we cut ahead to Julian drinking on the job, going to a party, taking drunks, and waking up naked in the bathtub covered in beer bottles, and the living room is full of too-hot-for-tumblr passed-out drunks. The Bad Webcomics Wiki calls this “Softcore porn that is never brought up again”, because the Bad Webcomics Wiki is written by high school dropouts for an audience they presume has never read the comic proper.

This debauchery is never brought up again because it’s not relevant to the plot, it’s relevant to the character. Apollo is fucked up because his friend killed himself when he was a teenager, and he deals with being fucked up by retreating into sex, drugs, and rock and roll. That’s what’s being established here. Also being established if you’re paying attention: Apollo has scars on his chest.

In chapter 1, Apollo goes to a party, the entirety of which is dedicated to him walking around naked, and we get a bunch of obviously sexual shots of his dick, clearly catering to the author's gay fetish. His boss goes to his place to check on him, and it is revealed he is a hoarder. This never comes up again.

1. In this scene, there are two panels where you can see Apollo’s penis, one panel where you can see someone’s vomit-covered dick, and two panels where you can see a woman’s breasts. None of these panels of flacid dicks or sagging boobs are sexual, though. The dicks are unpowered, it doesn’t make a bit of difference guys, the balls are inert.

2. What the fuck is a “gay fetish” and how it different from just “being gay”.

3. I don’t know the author, even though we’re both in SpiderForest, so I don’t know where Dani The Carutor lies in the whole gender spectrum thingamabob, but I will note that “Dani” is usually short for Danielle. So maybe it’s not a safe assumption that the author is a man? I dunno. That’s just me, guessing people’s genders by screen name is hard, so I try not to lest I embarrass myself.

4.So, when you say Apollo is a “hoarder”, you link to a page showing his room is disgusting and covered in garbage

Is your takeaway from these panels....that Apollo is some kind of fanatic garbage collector? That his room is full of garbage because he actively works at having as much garbage as possible because he wants it?

There are a couple pages explaining Apollo's purple special snowflake eyes with some snowflake "disability".

Apollo has Ocular Albinism, which is a real condition that really exists, and really does give you purple eyes. It also gives you major vision problems, which are the context in which it gets brought up, because Apollo needs help crossing the road because he can’t see well enough in the light. So I don’t know what the scare quotes around “disability” are for. He can’t see. You could, if you were so inclined, connect this plot point with the way the chapter titles are named after mental conditions, and start to formulate some coherent critique with the seemingly cavalier way this comic uses disability, but that would require thought. It might even require research into difficult topics, because you’d ideally not want to make a fool of yourself talking about things you didn’t understand well enough to talk competently about.

Chapter 2 is the most pointless, as it is basically there to confirm what we already know so the author can insert a cringy buzzword (see image below)

Okay, so a couple of things

1. In what fucking universe is “tranny” an SJW buzzword? What the fuck are you even talking about?

2. Having the protagonist of your comic say someone is “smart, for a tranny” is like the least SJW thing you could possibly do.

3. Perhaps “Apollo is asking someone for help but casually insults her causing her to leave” is some kind of “character” moment? The author of this review is so /pol/-poisoned that they have no ability to understand “context” or “characterization” or basically any thing that exists.

4.Your list of the comic’s characters includes this bon mot:

So what the fuck? That’s so stupid I’d think it was an intentionally hypocritical joke if I had any reason to believe you were capable of it.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to revealing the boyfriend shit

I should point out that Apollo and Julian being boyfriends is something the BWW invented, the comic itself clearly states they were “best friends”, not boy friends. Couple of dudes being prudes.

Apollo believes that Julian faked his own death, which fucked up Apollo for years, and now that they’ve met each other Julian keeps ghosting him. Apollo’s motives for chasing Julian around are extremely clear.

That’s a scene transition, bay-bee!

Apollo finally gets ahold of Julian. Julian blows him off and Apollo gives up. There’s then a clear scene transition to Apollo, at a restaurant, talking about what we just saw. This is a perfectly clear scene transition, with a transitory panel and everything to indicate that this is the next day. It’s certainly more clear than Apollo waking up in jail in chapter 2 which you skipped over. Are you actually reading this comic at all?

You are such a fucking moron, holy shit.

Julian got beat up for being trans. It’s unclear if he’s actually trans or just a feminine-looking cis dude, but regardless it was bad enough to traumatize him and this all happened when he knew Apollo, who calls Julian his “best friend”, and says things like

There’s literally two dots here, and you’re unable to connect them. Galia even has the same hairstyle as Julian to make it visually obvious This Is What The Reference and you still missed it.

Julian and Apollo walk around the woods in their underwear for no reason whatsoever. Julian takes some drugs or something, and passes out?

Hm. Why does Julian go outside at night? I wonder if that’s explained in the comic?

Oh, I see. He went outside to smoke. But why did Apollo go outside at night?

Oh, he was looking out the window and saw Julian mysteriously go off into the woods. I guess that’s explained, too. I guess you just missed those pages

Julian takes some drugs or something, and passes out?

Huh, I wonder why Julian was asleep

Oh, he has Insomnia, so he took something called Halcion. I wonder what that is.

Oh, it’s a prescription insomnia medication. And you shouldn’t take alcohol with it, wow Julian is dealing with a super pushy alcoholic I should file that information away for later, like how knowing Wellbutrin’s side effects in teenagers were critical to understand Drop Out. Luckily webcomics are comics, on the web, and I can look this up!

He is then woken up by the fatty side character punching him. Somehow, Julian destroyed the kitchen, even though he was passed out - this is never explained, and makes no fucking sense

Sigh.

So, here are some hints as to what happened.

Julian has bruises all over his body, which you have consistently failed to notice.

Daniel, Julian’s friendly boyfriend, has like no negative reaction whatsoever to Brandon, some random dude, punching Julian in the fucking face

He even takes Brandon’s side and basically implants the idea that Julian did it into Julian’s head, and that last panel is rather threatening.

Julian took insomnia medicine, and fell asleep, and then got wrongfully blamed for destroying the kitchen by Daniel, who know’s that Julian was passed out and couldn’t have done it. Who actually did destroy the kitchen is a mystery, but Daniel is the most likely culprit.

it transitions into this trippy bullshit with blood, and body horror, and Julian's hair is suddenly short

It’s short because it’s a flashback to when he was a teenager, and he had short hair when he was a teenager so that literate people are able to understand this without getting confuzzled.

Apollo turning into Daniel in this trippy dream sequence is also pretty relevant!

Also, we have random nudity and sexualization of this sick person.

No, we have reveals that he’s in worse physical shape than we thought.

By the way, in your character list, you describe Daniel as

Daniel (Side Character): He may as well be a wall. This guy has no personality whatsoever. No quirks, no interests, no purpose outside of causing superficial melodrama.

If you’ve made it all the way to this point and not picked up on Daniel being an abusive boyfriend and the primary antagonist of the story, you may be beyond hope.

The rest of the chapter is Julian being angsty, and SO ILL while everyone talks about how weird he is

Again, that’s very clearly and obviously not actually what’s happening in the story.

What’s happening isn’t “Julian is sick lol”, it’s “Daniel is working to turn everyone against Julian”. That’s why he destroyed the kitchen and blamed Julian for it; to ensure that the other boys all thought Julian was a nutjob and thus keep them from reaching out to Julian and providing Julian with a guide to a healthy relationship instead of the abusive one he’s currently in. Your inability to read even slightly between the lines isn’t just distressing in terms of your inability to think critically about stories, it’s maybe worrisome re your ability to think about the real world, too. How are you this dense? It’s like watching Star Wars and not picking up that the empire and the rebellion don’t like each other. No wonder you’re confused!

Chapter 5 is still in the works. It jumps the shark right away with Apollo getting drunk and sleeping with Julian's boyfriend. The author makes Apollo the guilty party and not the boyfriend

The comic is fairly clear that Daniel is the bad guy

This webtoon is so convoluted there is no saving it at this point. Each chapter is titled after some mental illness such as 'Monophobia', 'Anxiety', 'Psychosis'. You think they would have some thematic meaning with each chapter being about one of those things. Nope, they're just titled like that to show how EDGY this webtoon is! You can taste the cringe. Julian's mental shit has no rhyme or reason - he will act sick when the plot calls for it, and if it has anything to do with the chapter's title, it is also crazy inaccurate.

The author of this review somehow managed to read the entirety of The Guide to a Healthy Relationship without picking up that Daniel was an abuser. The comic thus seems convoluted to him because he thinks all the things happening are random events without rhyme or reason because he has completely failed to notice the whole plot, which is not subtle. Just....fucking staggering incompetence, as a critic.

Guess you’re stuck with me, anon.

#Anonymous #The Guide to a Healthy Relationship #bad webcomics wiki #The webcomic review reviews webcomic reviews

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skiesdweller · 4 years ago

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It's not about glamour it’s about guts.

1 | Solo | Form my childhood I was attracted to aeroplanes of all kinds, largely due to family. My Grandfather was US Navy Pilot shot down over Vietnam.

My father was an Aviator with USAF and has flown B-52 Stratofortress and presently a successful airlines company CEO and Chairman. Now it was my turn. They say Fighter Pilots are not born, they are built and this is place where they make them Naval Air Station Kingsville

The Advanced flight training starts with a 900 page manual of F/A 18 he first Fighter Jet I will qualify on. Here we have already done our Introductory flight screening (IFS)

and Primary flight training. It also includes Centrifuge tests which simulates the conditions of stress and gravity inside fighter aircraft. The tighter the turn, harder the gravity pushes on him, which in technically called pulling Gs. And fighter jets do it more brutally than any machine on earth At 2G a 200 pound man can easily feel twice his weight. Take it upto 5g and the flight suit feels like 1000 pounds of lead. Once you start pulling Gs its like bench pressing your chest, everything is pulling down and its very hard to breathe. Under G load blood drains from the head and pools in the legs leading to tunnel vision or verse G lock i.e G induced loss of consciousness. Survival depends on mastering the Anti G Straining Manoeuvre, the trick is - tense the leg and stomach muscle so as to prevent the blood from hitting south. And to breathe in short quick burst. Abs tight, but tight and lift yourself from the seat. The G suite that I was introduced too basically had bladders in thigh muscle and abdomen which inflate under G forces at varying pressure to squish your lower extremities to keep the blood in your head. But for centrifuge test, the suit will not inflate, I need to prove that I can sustain high G forces completely on my own. I had to complete a series of tests culminating in 8Gs for 15 long seconds. My turn I witnessed the heavy pressure and pull, it was difficult to breathe but I heard be “aggressive.. be aggressive” clearly and altered my pace likewise. When I finished it I was already a little white but I passed it. Good Stuff, the instructor commented. Two veteran pilots lost the test. One at 8 seconds and the most experience at 14 seconds. So being a pilot is no guarantee you will qualify. So Mike lost by just one second, its harsh but it would be fatal in F/A 18 rushing towards ground at hundreds of miles an hour. It took Mike 3 seconds to recover but that threes seconds is the time a fighter pilot does not have, especially if he supersonic. It could mean entering in enemy territory, getting shot by sam for failure to evade, or crashing. None of which is acceptable. Mike will have another shot at this test. I was in for my next challenge. The Seat from hell. The Fighter pilot’s ticket to survival. In a F/A 18 it is Martin-Baker Mk.14 NACES (Naval Aircrew Ejection Seat ). These seats are fitted in 200 fixed-wing and rotary types with the most recent being the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II programme.

A pilot is snared in belts and buckles, four straps for the leg another six for the torso, pin a pilot to the seat during violent manoeuvres. They also prevent him from being torn apart if he has to eject. The Ejection seat may be a pilot’s lifeline but it will be most violent and terrifying rescue imaginable. Pilot and seat literally explode out of airplane, when they are clear, another charge blows the seat belts and deploys the parachute. It all happens in just two seconds. One of my greatest fears was having to parachute in open waters and its is critical to know exactly what to do in first few seconds after hitting the war. So as test I had get free from the harness after been thrown into Olympic pool before I get to pulled to the pool. Then get out from under the canopy before it pulls me under.

It was easy in the pool but imagine it in freezing Atlantic water. At this point everything I do is making life and death decisions automatic. After learning to survive and passing this phase and before spending time in a real cockpit of F/A 18 I will have to spend hours in simulator. Instructors throwing emergency after emergency, while I struggle to keep up, but eventually these procedures will be seared into my brain. While others went for Lunch one day I made a beeline for an open cockpit. I was going to save sitting in fighter aircraft for my first flight but there was too much to know. At the top of my list were critical emergencies that require a pilot to react instantly, the so called RED PAGES. In a machine as complex as F/A 18, failures are inevitable. Red Pages emergencies are inherently fatal. Things like Engine Fire that will cripple the jet; A fuel leak, Landing gear failure or a cockpit that suddenly fills with smoke, blinding the Pilot. Better to know where the switch is, if a lot has to think before acting in these situations, he will be hole in ground before he remembers the answer because if you are in supersonic fighter the question is not if the trouble will find you but when. In a life of fighter pilot there are no secrets, even if there is, there is always a witness. Every time a fighter aircraft leaves the ground the mission is tapped. The Heads up Display or HUD shows the pilot things like Speed, Altitude and G Forces. Everything a pilot sees is recorded and everything he says. Also my ride I discovered I had a companion, a computer one, and soon discovered that fighter pilots call it bitching Betty. More common are the troubles that a pilot runs into when he pushes the jet too far. The same traits that make fighter jets agile and manoeuvrable also make them extremely twitchy When they are driven to the limit. Once the plane looses control it will not be safe to control it until it reaches certain speed in situation where the plane does not reach that speed, all a pilot can do is take hands off the controls and wait, it’s ultimate faith and belief in a machine. The instructor talking about his experience when he recovered 2000 ft above ground and 3 seconds from oblivion. His HUD was a case study. This is the stuff we live for. Living life on the edge. Anyone can shoot bullets, but only few can call themfselves fighter pilots. The first test was pushing all of us Aviators to the limit. Last minute brushing up of details, sleep deprivation, stress. Unlike other exams in this exam the pass mark is 100%. For instructors demanding perfection is not unreasonable, it’s personal. After having cleared the test and surfing three weeks, it was time for some celebrations No G suites today, instead, I was siting up for our official welcoming party. Being a fighter pilot isn’t a job, It’s Life Walking through Air Worthiness check of F/A 18, every Pilot must know by heart. There are 155 checks before one even climbs into cockpit. When you sign on to fly jets it means a life time of sacrifice. Suiting up for F/A 18, is like gearing up for super bowl, it makes everything else you have flown seem like training wheels. And it was about to happen the first flight in Fighter Aircraft, but first I had to prove I have memorised the external safety checks, all 155 of them. Covering Everything from mechanical to animal. Then there are another 194 cockpit checks. As I climbed up the cockpit ladder, I was feeling a soft breeze behind my neck, a feeling of something important about to happen, a feeling one cannot imagine.After 194 checks, I had to 76 more checks before I even started the engine. And starting the engines involves 45 more, I felt I could get old waiting around for this. An Experienced Fighter pilot can knock off the whole work in under 5 minutes. Student Naval Aviators like me usually take three quarters of an hour. I took 38 minutes on my first and It was situation where I could not afford to make a mistake. My instructor in back seat is watching like a hawk. And Upfront the Heads Up Display (HUD) tape is recording every move I make and everything I say. “ All Set, 222 Taking Off my” first ever Fighter Callsign on a Fighter Aircraft. “Show me your Stuff man” The Air Controller replied to my information.” Pressing the throttle forward, this was the moment I have been waiting all my life. As the afterburners lit the tarmac up. “Nozzles Good , 100 Knots and takeoff”

“Good Job” The instructor sitting behind me said as the wheels left the tarmac. “All’s Up regain 220” Right away I was expected to master the basics. “I will try a roll” And I did.. Yeehaa..I could not control my excitement. “I’m gonna do one more.” My instructor just laughed. Rolls, Climbs, Stall Even though I was getting the most thrilling experience of my life, instructors were looking for discipline and level headed guy which is required in combat and it was just business for us. But at this stage, flying is an easy part, for an inexperienced pilot bringing an F/A 18 back to earth is the most dangerous and difficult part of the flight. For 44 years F/A 18 has proven its ability in combat theatres around the world. And it is dual engine plane, only experienced pilots gets to touch them and qualified ones get to fly them. It is whole lot different than F-16, but in hands a SNA ( Naval Aviator) on windy day it can also be treacherous. On the HUD on the left was the E bracket which tells the pilot, plane’s angle on landing, how high the nose is, E bracket helps insure a smooth landing. I landed a little harder than my instructor would have liked but I got it done without drama, and completed it successfully. After very flight there is a debriefing. This course is marathon and we athletes/ pilots have just begun our race. There are never enough serviceable jets and never enough time. One of the exercise I did was practise engine restart, the drill is straightforward, shutdown one engine, accelerate to 350 knots and relight it, at that speed air is driving the compressor like a windmill, so when the engine is reignited the turbines are moving fast enough to blow the heated air out of exhaust. If You fly too slow in this exercise, the hot air blast will be trapped and engine will overheat. Two cadets made a mistake, Mike was flying too slow so he had to do emergency landing with only one engine. The engine was unhinged and taken to sick bay for inspection, luckily for Mark, it did not suffer any damage. For Tim his missioned was cancelled as he dropped his ball pen into cockpit. That 10 pence plastic could jeopardise the entire flight safety, so the plane was rotunded till the pen was found. That means somebody else does not get to fly, due to Tim’s mistake. So around here we have rule, one pilot’s mistake is everyone’s lesson. Time for Solo flight, for pilots, they count their flying hours, for me this was hour one, minute one for a solo flight. “Alright Nose and Wheel Sten is up. I’m good to go” “Cleared to Take Off” Came the reply. That was what we had all prepared for Solo Sortie “EGT, Fuel Flow Nozzle, oil is good, Going to burner, Here we go Lift off” And I was wheels up in the climb “Gear flags up, 220” “Eat your heart out..this is fucking awesome”..I commented up in air. It was my first solo flight, at 20000 Feet. If anything goes wrong help I long far away.The Mission went smoothly I did all the patterns I had to complete and pulled in a little extra and landed safely. Right before Thunderstorms filled the sky. Flight Tradition Dictates that the a Pilot goes solo, he earns himself a callsign - a nickname that symbolises his identity. Squadron tradition demands a well stocked bar and well used gun barrel from nose of a jet. Getting a call sign is like Christening there it was “Hammer” and I had no say in it, and it was decided by mob rule by Instructors. Only in movies you get cool callusing like “Maverick” and “Iceman” here In this batch I was lucky.

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alextriestowritestuff · 4 years ago

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Blood Of Olympus Read W/ Me

This was the worst book of the series by far. I almost didn’t finish it. I think my thoughts are going to be rather short but they’ll still be below the cut for spoiler reasons. There will also be Trials of Apollo spoilers so I highly suggest not reading this if you haven’t caught up with those books! Let’s get into it.

I’d like the start by saying what I like: Nico/Reyna POV. I loved their relationship (which I didn’t see coming at all) it was very big sis-little bro vibes. I love that Nico finally found a place and his budding relationship with Will. What’s funny is though I knew Will would be his love interest (You can’t avoid them in fanfic at all) I thought he’d be more like super sunshine/super happy and that would contrast with Nico’s emo nature. But he was just chill and was like Nico, stop being a dumbass, we’re friends. I think fanfic gave me a different impression of what he’d be like (Granted I never read the fics, just summaries) and I was surprised that he was not like that. It’s not bad or good, just pointing it out.

Oh and Nico telling Percy he liked him and Percy just being like ‘say what?’ I didn’t expect Nico to actually fess up to that one but Percy’s reaction was gold.

The best moment in this book is Reyna taking down Orion by herself. She was that BITCH. Correct me if I’m wrong but the only other person who defeated a giant by themselves was Percy right? In the Battle of Labyrinth when he fights Antaeus? I think Antaeus was a half-giant though because Percy, a demigod, managed to kill him without the help of a god. Anyway, Reyna was everything in that scene. Oh I lied, he took down Polybotes too. They’d be unstoppable together (though I love Percabeth). She was about to sacrifice herself too!! What a queen. I respect the crap out of her. UM Jason you really picked the wrong girl lmao.

I appreciated the Thalia cameo (because again, I didn’t re-read the Lost Hero so I haven’t seen her since the last time I read the PJO series) and the mention of Zoe. I hope Kenzie didn’t really die though, I liked her.

And that’s all the good I have to say about it. Now for the bad...so much bad.

So after thinking about it, I realize that what makes HoO so different from its predecessor series is that there’s no consequences. The closest we got to consequences was Annabeth and Percy falling into Tartarus because they weren’t saved in time. No one important (protagonist/good guys side) died. Leo was resurrected (And I looked it up and found out that he came to Camp in the Trials of Apollo series so everyone knows he’s alive). Even for the Tartarus one, we didn’t even get a PTSD arc. It would’ve been helpful to have Percy or Annabeth’s POV in this book to wrap up that subplot. Instead we get two lines about their time in Tartarus and when Percy brings it up, Annabeth tells him not to mention it. So no PTSD arc. Got it. But we can just casually mention that Octavian committed suicide (which I don’t care for that ending at all). Right.

The HoO books are boring because there’s no consequences. I never felt true fear apart from Percy/Annabeth being in Tartarus. In the Last Olympian, mortals were put to sleep, Annabeth was gravely injured, Silena and Beckendorf died. Luke and Ethan died. There was no magical save for them. Blood of Olympus had NO stakes, coupled with a weak, slightly developed new characters made it a bad series imo. It also doesn’t deliver on the questions posed in the book.

Hazel’s curse is still active, no descendant of Neptune has taken it away. I read the wiki summary for every book of the Trials of Apollo (The last one isn’t out yet) and there’s no mention of her curse being lifted. I think Frank’s stick is resolved imo being that it’s safe in the fireproof pouch but for some readers, they don’t think that’s resolved. Kym told Percy he’d have to face his fatal flaw. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t feel as though he did. Percy also never helped Leo find Calypso but Ig that’s null because he never got the chance to. Also is Black Jack, Frank’s grandmother, Hylla okay? Orion said Hylla got away but I was hoping for another cameo.

Let’s talk about the villains/the entire quest of the Seven. The quest was boring, Nico/Reyna/Hedge’s quest was 100x more interesting and they were transporting a freaking statue. The quest of the Seven was fight this minor god/villain who is working for Gaea who promised them something (Even Jason has a line where he makes fun of this), outsmart/fight them, get to Athens where all the monsters are. Percy and Annabeth’s blood awakens Gaea. The gods come down which makes me angry because most of them weren’t helpful throughout the series. Poseidon wasn’t in this series at all. He didn’t even send a symbol or talk to his son who went missing. I’m pissed that the battle against Gaea wasn’t even in Athens! I’m pissed that they got slapped to New York, like what? The gods really couldn’t poof them back there, they gave some excuse but it was still bs. But I guess Rick needed Argo II to get back to NY so Leo can turn festus back into a dragon. But anyway, the gods come down, the demigods work with to defeat the giants in less than two pages. The giants that were poised as a massive threat for four books straight. Defeated in mere minutes. We don’t even get a cool battle description, they just hack and slash at them and they’re dead. Huh?

Percy, Annabeth, Hazel, and Frank were reduced to background characters and I understand they don’t have a POV but I never felt that characters who didn’t have a POV in a certain book were ever forgotten/not utilized. They didn’t really get to do anything.

We also don’t really see the Roman and Greek gods all that much. I know they’re the same people, different Greek and Roman personalities. But like I thought their Roman side could be seen a bit more but they were having difficulty maintain one persona throughout the whole series. I can tell you what the Greek gods are like and how they interact w/ each other based on the throne room scenes/anytime they help demigods in PJO/HoO. But Roman gods as whole? I can’t tell you how they even interact with each other.

But wait, it gets worse. There’s not even a formal recognition thing like there was at the end of the Last Olympian (where Percy is offered godhood and Annabeth is given position of architect) there’s a little meeting with the gods and the Seven in which Jason is like give minor gods shrine and the gods aren’t really all that interested in what he has to say. There’s no thank you demigods. No, thanks Annabeth and Percy for literally going through Tartarus and Hazel for sacrificing yourself at 13 back in the 1940s. And the rest of them sacrificed something too. Like damn, no wonder why Luke was always like the gods don’t care about their kids.

Gaea was built up to be a big bad (honestly not really, she talked trash the entire time/sent people to do her work) and the woman is easily overpowered by the three demigods. She’s not even awake for 20 minutes and she goes down. WHAT??

Overall, it was anti-climatic and totally did a 180 on everything else established in this series-the fact that Gaea was such a major foe and turned out not to be (that SEVEN demigods had to take her down, not just 1 like Percy’s prophecy) and the giants were to be feared too but they get taken down. At 200 pages in, I dead ass wanted to DNF, it was so boring. I gave it a one star because although the good I mentioned was really great, it doesn’t save the book. So for me, this series had every book be 3 stars or under except House of Hades. 5 books and I only really was able to like one and get through it easily and it still had issues. Like what?

Lastly, I want to touch on Jason. I still think he’s bland though I appreciated him giving Nico a hug at the end there. Again from ToA/being spoiled over the years, I learned that Jason died and I won’t be reading ToA but I read the summary of the book where he died and um, wow. I don’t feel anything for his death but the fact that he and Piper broke up sent me into a laughing/anger rage. Laughing because they really said ‘I love you’ at the end of BoO and they didn’t even make it a year lmao. And the fact that PIPER, miss always insecure in her relationship with him, McLean broke up with HIM. WOOOOOW. But it made mad because I listened to her complain/fawn over Jason for 4 freaking books (not counting tSoN) for NO REASON cuz they ended up breaking up. Overall, I appreciated what Jason, Hazel, Frank, and Piper did in the HoO series because they were helpful but I couldn’t connect with their characters. I’ll admit that in BoO we got a little bit more bonding between characters which is what I asked for in my last read with me and I like the Percy/Jason scene underwater and Piper/Annabeth scene from the beginning. I do think some relationships were summarized when they could’ve been shown--i.e. Annabeth/Reyna/Piper friendship but they have potential.

The bonding was good, it was just too late. It should’ve happened in MoA/HoH as well. Random but I also hate how Leo was treated (esp. by Jason and Piper) throughout the series and I’m glad he got out of that mess. He was reduced to a deus ex mechanic and that wasn’t cool. The Seven wouldn’t have been able to do this quest without him.

Sooo I guess this is it. I don’t think I’m going to read another Rick Riordan book again unless I hear something drastic happens to Percy or Annabeth/Any of the PJO characters and Reyna. I’m strongly reconsidering removing him as my fav author. I still love the PJO series but this one was not it. I don’t know if Rick was on a tight deadline for these HoO books but it was just poorly executed. I don’t regret reading the series, I think reading HoH was worth all the time I spent reading this series. I wish I had just read a summary of tSoN and MoA, especially because I already read them years ago and knew I wasn’t into them from my first read. I wasted my own time by doing that. So if I had done that I would’ve gotten to just read HoH and then only be disappointed by BoO as opposed to three books. It is what it is. It’s nice to be in the loop because I always see these things about HoO characters and spoilers so now I know how it went down.

But that’s it guys, thank you for reading this entire thread and the ones before it. I have a lot of opinions and I don’t think I’m in the minority by saying I didn’t like this series overall. I will get back to my writeblr content and I will leave you guys with my final ratings for the series (My rating system may seem generous compared to my read with me thoughts but I personally don’t give less than 3 stars to books that plot wise made sense. It may not be the most compelling plot or have the best characters but if it made coherent sense, I have to give it at least a 3.) :

The Lost Hero: This score is based off of my original reading in 2012/2013 and my thoughts on the main characters in that book, I give this a 3/5 stars

The Son of Neptune: 3/5

The Mark of Athena: 2/5

The House of Hades: 4.5/5

The Blood of Olympus: 2/5

Worst book of the series: Mark of Athena (Blood Olympus is a close tie but the Nico/Reyna really saves it from this spot) and best book- House of Hades.

#blood of olympus #rick riordan #Percy Jackson #Jason Grace #HoO #Percabeth #read with me #writeblr #alextriestowritestuff #not writing

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tumblingxelian · 4 years ago

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Yamcha’s Potential

OK, so I think I have done this before but I want to do it again, meaning I have to say.

Yamcha does not get enough respect and more to the point is underutilized.

Now there's lots of reasons for this but today I want to focus on numbers.

Also I'll be sticking exclusively to the Manga for this.

I am wholly aware numerical basis's for Ki are not always looked on well by the fandom, but honestly I have no major issue with the idea, just how it was executed with them ballooning so fast and small gaps making people irrelevant. If it had worked consistently how it had in the Radits battle throughout the rest of the numbers era and the percentages hadn't gotten so bloated, I think they'd be a lot more well regarded. (I've noted before Frieza'z base Ki could be 200 thousand & his max 1 million and functionally nothing would change in the story and some things might be a lot smoother, for example.)

But I am here instead to focus on Yamcha's frankly absurd growth rate.

For you see! Gero mistook Yamcha for Goku, and Gero based his expectations for Goku's Ki on his jump in power from a year with King Kai, but Goku didn't spend a year with King Kai he spent six months at most and maybe not even that, meaning whatever algorithm he was using should be doubled.

Let's do a quick bit of maths:

Goku had a Ki of 430 when he died (more or less) and was around 8000 when h returned, that means within the span of six months he multiplied his Ki 18.61 in six months.

Gero planned to release his androids in four years from the Sayian Saga (again, more or less) Meaning he had reason to believe Goku's Ki of 8000 would multiply by 74.44 in that time, but in reality, he should have been projecting it multiplying by 148.88 because as mentioned previously, he only trained for six months, not a year.

8000 times 74.44 = 595 520

8000 times 148.88 = 1,191,040

Or to put it simply, over a million.

Now even ignoring how wildly OP this makes the Cyborgs XD, that's a respectable growth rate, incredibly impressive really, certainly beyond anything seen before, but it doesn't even factor in the fact that Goku was training under a skilled master, or that he was training in a high gravity environment, sadly I don't know how to calculate the impacts of either mathematically, but still, his data was horrendously off.

So, long story short, Yamcha can be argued to have earned a Ki of around 1 million by the time the Cyborg Saga started. As we are only using the manga we have no idea how intense his training was, the splash page implies its fairly intense as he's framed right there along with everyone else, but we get no mentioned of a gravity chamber or a sparring partner, teacher or anything, add in that his relationship with Bulma decayed at this stage and he likely did much of his work alone, that's pretty dang impressive by itself I feel, but then let's remember his starting Ki.

When he died Yamcha had a Ki of 1430, he only trained with King Kai for maybe a couple of weeks, so I'll be generous and round that off at like, 2000 to make this clean, and whatever training he did post resurrections it probably wasn't super intense or lazy, but everyone was at peace so presumably no one progressed much (the fact he and Vegeta were attending the same BBQ says that much I think.)

Where am I going with this?

Well.

One million, divided by 2000, = 500, meaning if we apply this in reverse, in order to reach a level where he could be mistaken for Goku by Gero, Yamcha's Ki needed to multiple by the equivalent of 500 times a year minimum.

2000 times500 = 1,000,000

And that's not even accounting for the year where almost everyone had time off. That is an absurd growth rate and as far as we know it was achieved largely by self training with seemingly no or limited sparring partners and potentially equipment and this, all of this is me lowballing it based on the available data, when by all rights it could be much higher. So yeah, intentional or not, being mistaken for Goku implies a lot about his growth rate and potential I feel.

#DB #DBZ #DBS #Yamcha

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ghostsofmemories · 4 years ago

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Problems I’ve Been Having With Writing // How I Plan To Fix Them

Before reading this post, consider checking out the Teespring Shop with designs by myself and my friend Alexx, where 100% of the proceeds are donated to the Black Lives Matter organization.

It’s no secret that lately, working on my novel has been a struggle. I used to be able to write entire books with 80k+ words at 14, and now I’m struggling just to hit 10k in a project I’ve been working on for 3 months.

Some of this could be attributed to COVID-19, my crazy school schedule (with thankfully is over now), and my job. However, my main issues are with motivation, self-confidence, and remembering how prose works after over a year of writing only poetry. I did this under a cut because, well, it’s long.

Problem 1 - Motivation, Mental Illness, & Activism

Finding motivation these days is more than just difficult. As someone with chronic illness and also OCD, the urge to do things only when I’m feeling up to them and the desire to have a daily schedule (with writing included) are always at war, and neither of them winning. It’s impossible for me to do the same amount of work every day or week, but also hard to cope with the lack of stability.

On top of that, I’ve been trying using my platforms on social media to promote, donate to, and educate myself on the Black Lives Matter movement. As someone who uses social media (especially Tumblr, with its tagging system) to organize my thoughts on, and hold myself accountable for my writing, it becomes really difficult to manage both activism and writing on my social media - especially when the movements going on are more significant than what I have to say about my WIP.

The solution to both of these problems, as difficult as they are to manage, is finding balance. For OCD and chronic illness, I’m trying to figure out which parts of the day I’m feeling the most energized and motivated so I can schedule my writing around those chunks of time - which I think fall between 10am and 12pm.

For balancing activism and personal social media stuff, it’s a little more difficult. So far, I’m thinking the best way to deal with it is to link my main contribution to the movement so far (mine and Alexx’s Teespring shop) to all the posts that might lean on the personal/writing side, and continuing to uplift Black voices when they come across my dash, and actively seek them out when I have the energy to do so.

By no means will these completely solve the problems, but hopefully they’ll help me find time and energy to write when I can.

Problem 2 - Self-Confidence

Every writer has issues with not believing in themselves from time to time, but lately mine have become overwhelming. This could have something to do with the fact that I can hardly get words down in the first place. My mind has been very stubborn in allowing me to come up with words that flow in a narrative way, and I usually spend a lot longer on one or two sentences than I’d like to.

Similar with that issue, almost all of the writing I read is by, well, adults. Many of the writers I follow on Tumblr are also adults. I’m a month from seventeen, but I’ve always been told that I act or present as a lot older, so I guess I always expected my fiction writing would be as aged and confident as posts like this, my essays for school, and the research I put together for my own purposes. While my writing quality might read as a little older or more skilled than a sixteen year old, it still feels like it’s lacking in quality and like I haven’t progressed at all since my last novel (which directly ties into the next point, but I’ll get there in a minute).

The only way to get over this issue is to write and not stop because I think it’s bad. I know that. It’s easier said than done, of course, but I think that with time and a lot of forcing myself through is going to help.

Problem 3 - The Super Long Break I Took/Poetry

The last time I finished a novel was in December of 2018, so I’ve taken a break that lasted well over a year. I was still writing during this time, but it was pretty much all poetry, besides a few attempts that never got past a few pages and a WIP intro post (sorry about that, everyone).

Basically, I’ve forgotten how to write prose and storylines. That can be re-learned, though, which is why I’m sticking to OITW even though I’m beginning to realize I don’t love writing fantasy as much as I used to (I will still very gladly read it, though).

There’s another problem that came with that one, though, which sort of ties into my issues with confidence in my writing:

Poetry comes easily to me. I hear some novelists talking about their short ventures into poetry and how they would spend forever on a poem and how difficult it was, but that’s not what poetry is like for me. I grew up with my mom, my aunt, and for a short time my great grandma who were all poets. I was always exposed to poetry and felt a deep connection to it, which makes it simple (most of the time) to write.

Plus, due to the internet and me being me, I was exposed to the art of slam poetry when I was 13 (it’s something I daydream about, but my insecurities surrounding my stammer kind of stop me there. Plus I live in the middle of nowhere). Poetry is everything to me.

So you can imagine it’s a little frustrating that I can bust out a contest-winning poem in three minutes but struggle to write 200 words a week when I’ve been writing novels longer. This has honestly been one of the hardest parts of writing OITW - it’s harder than I expected it to be. The words don’t flow like they used to.

Combating this issue, while it’s taken a blow to my confidence, has actually been a little easier than I thought. I have to make myself write, of course, that one’s kind of obvious. But the one that I missed for so long was reading.

I’ve been reading almost nothing for the past year, minus a book I got for Christmas that, surprise surprise, got me inspired to write again. My best friend talked me into reading Carry On by Rainbow Rowell and not only is it awesome, I read the 500+ page book in under 48 hours. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that quick.

I’ve also been slowly making my way through A History Of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, but I think I need to re-start it because when I first started reading it, I was working a full time job, doing 5 classes for school, and struggling with my physical health (more than I usually am).

Reading isn’t going to make my prose read like water or anything, and neither are any of these other “solutions”. However, despite being a lot more easily said than done, I feel like they’re going to help. And let’s be real, I need all the help I can get.

Want to check out that shop but don’t want to scroll for a million years to get to it? Here it is again! We’ve raised over $100 for BLM and plan to continue selling these designs for donation indefinitely, unless we specifically take them down (though I can’t think of any reason we’d do that).

#writing #writing tips #writing advice #struggles #mental illness #writing with mental illness #oitw #writing problems #writing positivity

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kidgezine · 5 years ago

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FAQ

General Questions

Are these the same mods that did [insert failed zine here]? No. None of our mods have ever run a failed zine. Some of us have been contributors for them though so we know your pain. We are doing everything we can to be sure that doesn't happen to us. All our mods have access to the zine email and socials as well as contributor submissions so if one of us were to disappear the rest would be able to pull it together. Finances are being handled by our head mods (umbraja and kdxart) who are both professional graphic designers with experience in small business management and print publications. The rest of the mods are being given updates and could take over finances if the head mods were to die in a firey laptop explosion.

Are these the same mods that did last year's Kidge Zine? Yes. Most of us anyway. We lost a few but also added some new faces and learned a whole lot - mostly about the horrors of shipping and taxes. We did a good job last year and hope to do even better this time around! We've also padded our schedule so there shouldn't be as many delays.

I'm so excited - when will the zine come out? As of right now we are shooting for a delivery date of early June, 2020. We may have an early (kickstart) round of preorders in the new year (with Valentines Day merch) for those who are super dedicated to getting this thing made but that's not set in stone. We may modify the schedule if we fall behind or need to take more orders to reach our stretch goals. See our Tentative Schedule for more information.

OMG I NEED this, how can I help make this zine a thing? The best thing anyone can do is reblog our posts to help get the word out. If you want to do more you could make a money donation to help cover costs (and enter to win a Limited Edition Bundle). Just buy Pidge some coffee on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/kidgezine.

Zines are usually self-financing so why are you talking about money donations? Because it lets those of us who have extra money subsidize the cost for those that can't afford it so we all get a better product. A self-financed publication has to price itself to cover the full cost of production but that severely limits the number of artists and writers we can put into it and what merch we can sell alongside it. Last year we had over 50 contributors create a 200 page full color book with lots of merch and priced it all considerably under cost so that our community could actually afford to buy it. We still lost money in the end but it was less than our finance officer had put aside to cover it and that is thanks to the many, wonderful people who were willing to kindly donate.

How do I go about donating to help cover costs? First, thank you so much for the willingness to help out. All you need to do is buy Pidge some coffee on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/kidgezine. This will also enter you for a chance to win a Limited Edition Bundle when the zine comes out.

Are profits from zine sales going to a charity of some kind? No. Unless you would consider next year's Kidge Zine a charity, then sure. Truth is we don't expect to make money. We hope it does better than last year so we don't end up covering a loss but we're pretty sure it's not going to profit. In the very unlikely event that we do turn a profit the funds will stay in the Kidge Zine account for use next year.

Contributor Questions

Will contributors be paid for their work on the zine? We would love to pay our contributors but, due to legal and logistical concerns, the staff voted that no one should get paid for this endeavor - not even the staff. We are giving contributors a free digital copy of the zine and a discount on buying the physical copy and merch. The discount amount will depend on stretch goals so we can't provide specifics at this time.

I want to give you content for this zine, how do I do that? Read over the Requirements and fill out the applications listed there.

What kind of content is allowed? We're pretty chill but we do have a few Requirements to follow. Check that link for specifics but the short of it is pretty much anything featuring Keith and Pidge in some sort of fantasy situation. It doesn't have to be romantic, AUs and canon are both allowed, so long as those two are together in some way. We're not even going to limit it to the usual digital art and narrative writing so if you want to do something unusual give it a try. We'll accept: cosplay photos, sculptures, journals, poetry, songs, schematics, editorials, things I can't even think of right now - pretty much anything Kidge related is welcome.

I want to write but English is not my first language, is that OK? Some of my favorite authors don't speak English at all and some of my favorite fanfics are written by people who only know it as a second or even third language. So long as you can get your writing translated to English our staff will work with you to get it polished and sounding natural. You just have to be willing to go through that editing process with us.

Will everyone who applies be accepted as a contributor? We're going to try and include everyone but since the zine is a print publication it's going to cost real money for every piece we include. If we get too many submissions and put all of them in the book it would end up costing too much for most of y'all to afford. Nobody wants that. So we might have to leave some things out of the book itself but will be more than happy to include any work that gets left out in the pdf version so long as it follows all the rules. This will allow us to produce a better product while not excluding anyone from participation.

How will contributors be chosen? Our staff will use the samples provided in your application to judge your average quality of work so be sure to give us good examples. We will be looking at your work only, not your popularity or participation in the fandom, so don't worry if you're new to the ship or just don't know anyone. Some of our staff don't know many people and our production designer hasn't even seen the show (she just does very good work). Art will be judged on overall aesthetic, perspective/proportions appropriate for the style, composition/balance, and technique. Writing will be judged on overall readability, characterization, plot, style, and flow. We will not judge grammar because we want to include non-native English speakers. Just be ready for an editing process where we'll help you get the grammar fixed before publication.

When will I know if I'm accepted as a contributor? Acceptance emails will be sent out November 1st. Everyone should get an email so if you don't get yours then ask a mod to see what's up. We had trouble with emails getting lost in junk filters last year so be sure to check for that.

Do you have a deadline for submissions? We have multiple deadlines to keep y'all on track but the finished work should be turned in by February 15th. See the Tentative Schedule for more information.

Is this canon only or are AUs allowed? We're not gonna limit setting so canon or any other universe is allowed. Have fun with it.

What if I don't want to write/draw something Fantasy themed? Fantasy is such a broad theme that we are going to be strict about it this time but we're certain y'all will be able to find something you like that fits. Pretty much anything that's not limited by real world physics is, technically, Fantasy. So canon universe is Fantasy. So are superheroes, any sort of mythology, folklore, most horror, sci-fi, steam punk, supernatural, occult, and way too much else for me to list.

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erenthecoordinate · 6 years ago

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Hello. Please share your thoughts about the latest couple of chapters/Zeke's backstory.

Not gonna lie, this probably one of the most emotional chapters I’ve read in a while. I’ve been asking for a Zeke-centric chapter that would explain his motives and we got it in the classical heartbreaking fashion that this series is known to dish out. AND it includes an explosive cliffhanger that Michael Bay would be proud of and make a good portion of the fandom look at a panel at 200% zoom and contrast change for 3 days.

I think the last time I talked about Zeke on this blog, I mentioned that I believe there is a chance Zeke is being genuine with working on Eldia’s side, but it wasn’t yet clear how much he wanted to include Paradis in the fruits of his potential “free the people” plan. Yeah, so, things have changed obviously. But not as drastically as I was led to believe after chapter 112. By ch113, I figured there was more to the story with Zeke, since it seemed that his intentions for escaping was based on a time restraint and the fact he couldn’t trust Levi in the end. Fortunately for his fans and unfortunately for Zeke, Levi’s plot armor saved him this time. Only for fate to be teased once more! Ugh!

I’m going to give a few super brief hot takes that I posted before but Tumblr decided to throw it into the abyss the first time. This is going to be the least analytical and organized list I’ve ever written so be kind:

Finally, a flashback chapter of the most mysterious guy in this series

…AND HE’S CUTE!?

Oh my god.

Grisha and Dina are not the worst parents nor bad people but hell if they aren’t misguided, radical, and negligent of their only son.

This gives me middle school flashbacks.

I didn’t expect Zeke to suck at military training, to be honest. They really did just call him a child prodigy for his miracle abilities and the fact he betrayed his parents.

Which I don’t entirely blame him anymore…if it wasn’t his free decision, he was influenced by a replacement nurturing parental figure to do it. Ouch.

I was mad when these spoilers came out but now it makes sense why this is Zeke’s motive.

I’m pretty confident Eren is double crossing Zeke now.

Zeke is not dead. Levi is not dead. Splash text is clickbait.

I don’t even think Levi lost any arms, but we won’t know until 2 or 3 chapters from now. Hope he knows how to swim!

For wordy rambling, please read on--

As most of the fandom assumed, this chapter was going to be primarily a flashback containing Zeke’s childhood. And it’s a heavy reveal that spirals into his present-day motives. It opens up with another scene that illustrates exactly how mistreated and disrespected Eldians are, the janitor going so far as to question why they are “breeding” for more devils. This is unsurprisingly traumatizing to Zeke and those words are the seeds that flourish the plant of self-hatred soon to wreak havoc. On the other hand, Grisha vents his frustrations and feeds the idea that their only salvation is to be free from their internment. They have barely enough freedom to leave their residence and to do so require legal permission. At this point, we’re familiar enough with how Marley reacts to Eldians both in the past and present day and those views haven’t changed no matter the year. The story makes us aware that other nations prefer the race to be eradicated whereas Marley’s action is to keep them controlled, though of course there are people who support the former option. It’s demeaning enough to be ostracized but threatened with genocidal wishes from the general public induces a lot of paranoia and, in the Restorationists’ case, rage.

Zeke is considerably mellow though. There is no contempt because he’s too busy appeasing his parents. He struggles with his training and falls far too short from the other warrior candidates. But he is nothing but loyal to Grisha and Dina, even lying to his grandparents about how his father lectures him about their history. Zeke uniquely gets two different teachings, but interestingly we don’t see him doubting either of them. He seems to absorb more of what Grisha is saying, but doesn’t confess that to his grandparents, and simply nods and follows along to whatever is being read to him. Most of his anxiety is reaching the expectation of becoming a warrior like his parents wanted.

His parents don’t make it a mystery to Zeke that him becoming a warrior is part of their restoration plan. It’s not out of glory or that they want to best for him, but he is already exposed to the group as the one to save them all, a beacon of hope that the whole of the Eldian race depends on.

Of course, with the pressure on, Zeke cannot make the cut. A mix of physical weakness and mental turmoil has Magath questioning Zeke’s integrity. This brings him trailing behind his comrades, defeated, only to run into one of the current warriors playing catch with himself. This is where we get a first glimpse of Zeke’s hidden pitching talent. Tom Xaver, the current Beast Titan whose main job is a titan science researcher, is impressed and Zeke illuminates.

I know he murdered hundreds in very unkind ways, but it is a canon fact he is adorable.

Afterwards, Grisha, Dina, and their restorationist friend Grice become stressed with the fact Zeke isn’t performing to acceptable standards to even qualify to be a candidate of the warrior program, let alone having the chance to harness one of the titans. Zeke overhears this and is taken back by the urgency. Grisha takes notice and attempts to encourage his son by saying he is special and therefore he can succeed.

Immediately follows probably one of the most depressing, soul-crushing pages that doesn’t include death (unless you count the death of Grisha and Dina’s faith in their son). You don’t have to like Zeke to feel a twinge of relatability when he nearly breaks down from watching his parents turn away in disappointment. It’s the worst kind of rejection because there is no improving something you simply cannot do and don’t truly have a passion for, even if you fight tooth and nail for it.

Xaver comments on Zeke’s atrocious training attempt and Zeke admits that his parents are the reason he has to become a warrior. Xaver loosely describes the “perks” of being a warrior: harness unbelievable power, fight in wars, and die in 13 years by the teeth of your successor. Avoiding that fate doesn’t grant much freedom, but to Zeke, staying alive for as long as possible is good enough. To survive is fine. He doesn’t need to fight to be free.

Naturally, cruel circumstances bombarde Zeke’s world when he overhears that his parents are in serious danger of being discovered. He attempts to vere them to safer options so that they won’t be sent to Paradis, but Grisha and Dina immediately shut him down. Living in an oppressed system is damaging to their self-esteem. Revolution is necessary to change the world. Zeke is their golden ticket. There is a fatal risk to all this, but it is all for the name of their people. For those who died for trying to reach beyond their boundaries. Grisha omits his guilt over his sister’s death, saying what he wanted was simple. Did that deserve punishment? We already know his feelings about that, though.

Zeke on the other hand is convinced that it is all over for his family. The power others have over them is far greater than his parents can overcome. Xaver sees his distress and Zeke is quick to surrender any possibility of a long life, grateful he can hold onto memories of him as he eternally sleeps. Xaver is too fond of Zeke, though, and we learn he is the one who suggests Zeke turn in his parents in order to save himself and his grandparents. Zeke objects, of course, but it doesn’t take too long for Xaver to convince him that his parents cared more about their agenda than their child’s happiness and wellbeing. And then that all happens.

Several years pass, and Zeke has gone from adorable to totally handsome.

Err...and he has become a successor to the Beast Titan. He’s woven a close bond with this man to know progressions concerning his research. A lot of it is information we already know but to them it’s a mix of theory and hearsay. The new bit of information we gather is the theory that the Founding Titan can manipulate Eldian’s genetic makeup based on paths alone. It’s what has saved them from plagues in the past. Zeke recalls the janitor that harassed him and his parents years ago, and laments on the idea that the Founder can also prevent more Eldians from being born.

Xaver reacts somber over this concept. He confesses that he used to have a family under disguise as a Marleyan. It wasn’t until after his wife found out and killed herself and their son out of shame and disgust that he ultimately decided to become a warrior-- so he could die in the most glorified way possible, I guess? In that time, he was dedicated to his research more than anything, but overall expressed he virtually replaced the void in his heart with Zeke’s presence, which explains why he was so important to him. It’s kind of touching that they both found each other to fill in roles that were empty in their lives. Xaver still exhibits a great deal of self-hatred, something that Zeke can relate to. At this point, he declares his motive of taking the Beast Titan, recovering the Founder, and stop the cycle of suffering by effectively ending the existence of Eldians altogether. It’s...certainly a goal, albeit a method of giving in to their circumstances and accepting that they cannot fight against this oppression, so that the best thing to actually do is not exist. Because no matter what they do, to exist is to suffer, and what kind of life is that?

The flashback closes with Levi overhearing Zeke mutter that the only salvation for Eldia is their euthanasia, and that all the deaths he is responsible for was a method of setting them free. Of course, Levi doesn’t buy it and prepares for another round of Chopped. Zeke appears to be only partially lucid when he shouts for his dead mentor to watch his next move.

In a matter of seconds, Zeke jerks the string that pulls the fuse and Levi looks to try to make a quick escape. Zeke risks it all in an explosion that splits his body in parts, though it looks like his neck and head are still intact. Meanwhile, Levi is blown back a distance with some blood trailing from his body due to ambiguous injuries. And there is our cliffhanger of the volume!

I know I basically just summarized the chapter with some flavor additions, but there are a few things that drove me to a pit of emotions and questions during the spoiler drop. Context from the fully translated chapter fixed a lot of my primary thoughts.

The Zekecrets

First big gain from this chapter is Zeke’s motive! Finally, the zekecret is out! And it’s rooted from a traumatic childhood and is buzzing with controversy. I can’t say I agree with Zeke’s idea of ending the Eldian race by sterilizing them and killing those that he can. But I will say that considering his experiences as a child and that discussion with Xaver had inspired this motive and, therefore, makes a lot of sense. We’ve seen Zeke as a kind of chessmaster with many tricks up his sleeve yet was a shroud of mystery. He has killed without mercy, he has betrayed his country, and he has turned that people he claimed to protect into Titans. But to him, these deaths are convenient and align to his ultimate goal.

It’s honestly hard to believe that a character that has convinced people that his empathy level is so low that he barely even forms any attachments (as evidence with his betrayal) started off as an extremely sensitive and emotionally intelligent child. His confidence is constantly challenged because of his blood from both sides. His parents put him on a pedestal because his relation to them is what makes him special and therefore he must succeed. On the other front, he is subjected to harsh ostracization from the general Marleyan public for simply being Eldian. And at training, being the weaker of the child soldiers, he is put down by instructors and his trainee peers. And even so, he still finds a bit of salvation in learning how to pitch while having some close conversation with a kind stranger. Where he can’t find affection and acceptance in one area, he finds it in Xaver.

Still, the reality is that he is given these expectations that he himself simply has no strong drive to achieve nor the physical strength. He presses on for the sake of his parents, but only his success will gain their acceptance and...he is unable to do it. I think the most heartbreaking thing about this is that he accepts that he is somewhat of a tool for their agenda yet he sticks his neck out in hopes that he gets affectionate attention from his parents. The fact he watches a child play ball with their father on his way home show that it’s an attention he craves because he doesn’t receive it often. Even when he knows they are soon to get caught, Zeke’s first instinct is to say his goodbyes and surrender to whatever fate has in store for him. To him, he is useless to carve his own path. He has failed his parents, the Restorationists, the whole Eldian race, and himself.

Parenting Contrast: Grisha&Dina v Carla

I do briefly want to say that I don’t think Grisha and Dina were bad people, they are bad (not worst) parents and were too radicalized in their beliefs to realize that their son was emotionally struggling with self-esteem issues. Anything they knew about Zeke was very on the surface. Their priority was the revolution. They manufactured a child for this due to their ignorance and anger. But I don’t think they didn’t care about Zeke at all. Zeke, to them, was to gain just as much of a positive outcome and life of freedom if he succeeded. They were never aware of the pressure they put on Zeke. Grisha later assumed that their negligence was the reason for Zeke’s betrayal and he never blames him for it.

Ironically, though, Eren is the appropriate child Grisha could have had for his revolution before it rapidly failed. Second time’s the charm? This is likely due to Eren’s lack of responsibility. There were no dire expectations until later in his life. Carla parented opposite of Dina and Grisha, believing that not everyone has to be special to be great. Eren had more options open to him.

Regardless, I don’t think Grisha quite parented the same way as he did with Zeke, but it may have been a bit difficult to keep reactions to certain circumstances subtle. I don’t know if we’ll ever get more insight about why Eren used to be a weird loner kid that followed life through “the strong conquer the weak” system. I just have a sneaking suspicion that it’s due to indirect mimicking of Grisha’s behavior. After all, a real issue in this series are ignorant adults. Or sometimes kids are just weird and easily influenced. Unfortunately, in the end, Grisha does resort back to pressing responsibility on his second son, most likely because of their dire situation and Eren’s willingness to break free. Because Eren is his son, of course.

Bit by bit, however, Zeke seems to be progressively aware of the obsession his parents have over their revolution plan. They spend very little time with him, so he is often spending time with his grandparents, effectively keeping the cover up for his parents. And any time they do spend with him is spent reversing the studies he has learned at school. Zeke accepts the lessons but isn’t enthused. I mentioned that he doesn’t really seem to question which history is correct and which isn’t; he doesn’t cast doubts on either and it’s difficult to say whether Grisha’s teachings were ones he felt were more accurate or that he was just parroting in order to gain approval. A majority of his interactions with his parents are “yes” and nods.

When Xaver comes into the picture and Zeke projects him as a father figure, he becomes more aware of his parents’ actions. Which is why I don’t think it was especially a struggle for Zeke to believe Xaver when he told him that his parents don’t really care about him and that it’ll be worth selling them out if it means he and his grandparents get to live. Zeke is very good at shutting down his emotions at this moment. He is, however, not without heart though, because he continues to nurture that fondness for Xaver, who he is later a successor to. In fact, he is the reason why Zeke entertains the idea that Eldians should stop reproducing.

The Plan and is Eren actually part of this?

This is where things get controversial, of course. On one hand, technically, no longer existing means that they would no longer have to suffer. Zeke says those on Paradis are ignorant to what the world has in store for them. This isn’t to buy more time to properly unite with other nations, it was time to stop reproduction altogether and (probably) eliminate the Eldians on Paradis. To Zeke it’s merciful to end this. But it’s still genocide. And I don’t believe this is the ultimate answer nor do I believe Eren is actually going to end up accepting this plan.

Unlike Zeke, Eren grew up with an everlasting flame that urged him to seek freedom in every format. Freedom of his environment, freedom of his choices, etc. He too gets weighed down by crushing expectations, becoming something of a tool for the military and government to achieve victory, but it is something that he genuinely wants. Included, he still had the compassion of his comrades. He wished them long lives. He believes that people deserve to live simply by being born into the world. Their existence gives them the right to freedom. It gives them a chance to fight. Sterilization is a big surrender. Death and prevention of life, robbing that choice from others, is completely contradicting to anything Eren has ever learned, said, or believed in. And I think his reaction to Willy’s words at the festival is a key indicator that his intention is to keep the Eldians alive. I’m not sure how far ahead Eren is in terms of double crossing his brother, but at the very least, I think that if he knows Zeke’s true intentions, he has found or is finding a way to skirt around that option and use Zeke for his own plans.

I plan to write a progression meta theorizing Eren’s motives that edits and re-publishes with every reveal in each chapter but basically my guess is that Eren does know what Zeke wants and that he has been playing along with Zeke’s orchestrated plan, festival, Warhammer Titan, prisonbreak, etc. to earn loyalty points. Which unfortunately included him killing innocents in the process. But if Zeke really does believe their deaths are their true freedom, then Eren has to convince Zeke that he believe the same too. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t internally struggled as a result. But for now, Eren’s individual thoughts remain an enigma so it’s difficult to pinpoint his exact intentions at the moment.

Explosive (haha) End

Anyway, the other big thing was Zeke’s dramatic escape act which required an enormous explosion and the splitting of his own body. Uh, yuck! But I can’t help but feel a bit tickled that we actually have a panel with Zeke’s detached ass in the air. His torso, including his neck and head, are more or less together, so he can easily pull off the Reiner trick to implant his brain to elsewhere on the nervous system so that he can regenerate from there. So, yeah, Zeke will be fine. And probably pantless if he can’t recover his lower half.

Levi, on the other hand, has no regenerating powers and appears pretty injured if the blood splattering off his body is anything to go by. He wasn’t as close to the explosion, so it’s possible any injuries he sustained are because of the shooting debris and/or his sword, which he still had out in front guarding his body prior to the fuse going off. I remember when the first grainy image of this panel came out and everyone was zooming in and tracing areas to figure out if Levi lost anything. I think it’s consensus now that Levi has both legs intact and at the very least his left arm. The only big question is whether his right arm is there and any other injuries on his torso or face that may exist. If you want my personal visual analysis and theory, I think his injuries are not fatal nor crippling, meaning all his limbs are intact, but he probably has decent sized gashes on his body to have him temporarily side-lined. I think the angle of the drawing and multiple gradients to indicate fast motion and blood direction is meant to give the reader uncertainty but in the end it’ll reveal that nothing was lost. At least, I hope so. It would be absolutely disheartening and irresponsible to put him out of commission for the rest of the series and the rest of his life-- I think out of all the suffering Levi has gone through, he definitely doesn’t deserve to feel completely useless to do anything, Plus it’d be extremely underwhelming to set your strongest and most popular character on the bench before the big climax.

I will say that Levi is definitely not dead, though. None of the notable deaths we’ve seen have been obscured by body angles. They’ve been explicitly shown without debate on their status, Erwin and Sasha especially. I believe the only off-screen deaths the series has had was Moblit and Ymir, and even then the scenes before then leave you no doubt to their inevitable fate. Even Marco eventually got a scene of his death. And neither of these deaths happened as cliffhangers. But false death cliffhangers have always been a thing in the series. Plus, I think Levi is far more deserving of a multi-panel, half chapter death scene if he were to die at all.

I do think he will land in the river and those injuries will prevent him from fighting effectively against the current to stay in his location. I believe the convenient landscape was rather deliberate as it gives Zeke enough time and lonesomeness to recover and seek Eren. Really, the explosion was an excuse to remove Levi from the scene and quickly be transported elsewhere. But I want to bet we won’t find out Levi’s fate for another couple chapters. Because Isayama is just that cruel!

....

Sorry this got extensive. I’m still building up on these thoughts, so nothing is definite or without possibility of change. But to summarize, Zeke’s childhood is sad, his plan is genocide and Eren ain’t about that life, Yeagerbros are dramatic people and forever interesting to me, and Levi is alive and battered but not handicapped.

That said, I would love to hear from everyone else about what they thought of the chapter. Were you sympathetic to Zeke’s backstory? Is he irredeemable? What’s Eren’s role in all this? Does he actually subscribe to Zeke’s scheme of eliminating all Eldians to end their suffering, or does he have other tricks up his sleeve? Is Levi alive? How bad are his injuries? Does he know how to swim?

Will I ever recover from the emotional rollercoaster this chapter has put me though?

Thanks for sending this ask! I haven’t meta’d in a while and this honestly is inspiring to write again!

#zeke yeager #eren yeager #grisha yeager #dina yeager #carla yeager #levi ackerman #tom xaver #meta #analysis #theory #chapter reaction #my post #Anonymous

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immagettinmyshittogether · 6 years ago

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Worthwhile distractions

So I’ve been having a little trouble keeping up with some shit lately. A couple weeks ago I got hit with a MASSIVE cold/flu/something. So my diet went out the window in favor of chicken noodle soup and spicy food to clear my sinuses and whatever the heck comfort food I needed to get through the day. Considering how sick I was, honestly, I suspect that my body was burning more calories than normal anyway just to fight it off. And I don’t seem to have gained or lost much weight in the last few weeks, so I think my hypothesis is probably pretty close to true. But I was so sick that I honestly couldn’t think straight for several days. Of course, the days that I was the most sick were Friday through Sunday. So I didn’t miss any work. I just spend the entire next week sniffling and taking dayquil.

Needless to say, for the second time, I missed a writing deadline. My writing income has dropped considerably (which thanks to the two month delay in Amazon sales, I won’t notice until the end of January). Partly because of missed deadlines, I’m sure, but also partly because I think the series I’ve been working on just doesn’t have as big an audience as I thought it would. I was trying to shift from straight up smut to smutty romantic smut. It appears that for short-term and short story/serial publishing, the lowest common denominator might be a better thing to aim for. My sales have been practically nil, and my Kindle Unlimited reads have been a little below average. I haven’t had the heart to check my book rankings, but I know they’re lower than they were the last few months.

Author’s note/edit after posting - I realized that I hadn’t updated anything about last month’s sales. Last month jumped up to over 150. It was on target to hit 200 until Thanksgiving came around and I missed my first deadline.... then it kind of hit a stasis that week, and I basically didn’t earn hardly anything for the entire last week of the month. Still, I’m afraid to look at my current projected monthly income based on what I’ve made so far this month. It ain’t gonna be pretty.)

Then the shit kind of hit the fan at work. I work on a college campus, so these last few weeks of the semester are just kind of a run-up to the end. Always busier than usual, often with higher stakes in order to make sure shit gets done in time. So the next week after being sick has been one of the busiest and most stressful weeks of the semester. I’ll explain the details under the ‘keep reading’ line if you’re curious.

I did manage to get the story out late. So I still managed to publish once my brain was functioning. Unfortunately, I’m finding that at the moment, my usual after-day-job home environment isn’t really conducive to my current writing. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m writing smut, and I have trouble focusing on that with my spouse in the room. Or, more likely, it’s because my spouse has ADD and needs constant background things going on, like youtube videos or something, in order to concentrate. Whereas I don’t, and those things are distractions for me.

I’m wondering if I should just wrap up the various series that I have going now and call this experiment in writing a minimum of a short a week what is was: an experiment. But with winter vacation coming up for me, I will have the chance to sit at home and write without distraction for a few weeks. So I’ll at least try to catch up on my work then and get a good backlog to keep posting.

The pen name I was using for this smut is not one I ever planning on using to make a living. I was just using it to force myself to write something out of my comfort zone, get some experience writing on a long-term repeated deadline, and get a feel for online publishing.

I have learned a bit about serial publishing. And I’m starting to understand why all the old classic serial publishers tried to make things as salacious as they did. In the fast-paced world of publishing, the most important thing is just to grab people’s attention. After that you can worry about quality.

I also had another pen name that focused more on the romance side of things rather than the smut side of things... but that’s an entirely different market, and it generally requires a longer time investment and longer stories. And when all I can do at the moment while I’ve got my day job is about 5k words per week, the smut seemed to be the better option to focus on.

So this winter break might be a turnaround. A chance to try something else. Or a chance to at least finish up my work on one pen name.

But back to the now. this week, since the series I was working on was doing so badly, I decided to put it on hiatus and go back to one that I’d wrapped up the first arc and put on hiatus. The one that had caused my numbers to kinda explode last month. I had an idea for a nice little intro story that was not only holiday-themed, but would be able to stand alone months from now, and would work as a good introduction to the second arc. So I started churning along. I had a lot of stuff to do around the house to start getting ready for the holidays, but my spouse was going to be out of the house for about five hours on Saturday, so I decided to pace myself. Get half of it written Friday, half Saturday. And I was on track. I was about 3.8k words in on the ≈5k story. And I’d already found a suitable image to photomanip into a decent cover for publishing. (Something that often takes a while, sorting through image sites, finding something that fits what I need, but doesn’t run afoul of Amazon’s fear of butts on cover art. Just once, I want to find a picture of a sexy model who would look good on a smutty book cover who’s wearing regular underwear, and not a nigh-invisible thong. The problems of a smut writer.)

And then I got a message from a friend in need. I won’t go into too much detail, but it is someone who had just lost their job, suffers from severe anxiety and depression, and even if the big S word that so often goes along with situations like that hadn’t come up, I still would have done the same thing. I had pants on, brushed my teeth, and ran out the door in record time. (Even if said friend could afford a car, the anxiety issues are bad enough to make driving unhealthy and unsafe) And my spouse got home right around the same time we got back to our house. So we spent the night helping a friend in need. Needless to say, I really don’t feel too bad about missing the third deadline. Some shit is more important. My spouse and I may be super introverts who are terrible at most socialization related things... but even if we’re crap at helping a friend in need, we’re still going to try.

Right now, my spouse and I aren’t in the best place financially. I’m not in the best place health-wise. But I’m still working at it. I’m still getting my shit together. And as I was just reminded on Saturday, I’m not the only one. For everybody out there... if you have too much shit to handle, call a friend. Somebody. Anybody. As I mentioned, my spouse and I are NOT great at being sociable and helping people. We’re actually pretty terrible at keeping in touch. We hadn’t talked to this friend in a few months. But even we were able to help, just by being there and hanging out with someone who wasn’t safe to be alone.

Sometimes we can’t keep our shit together. And that’s nothing to be ashamed about. Sometimes all we can do is try to keep afloat and look for something to hold onto. And sometimes, we can be that something to hold onto for someone else.

... I still have a lot of shit to get done this week, though. After two weeks of neglect when I should have been preparing for holiday visitor (I was hoping for visitors plural, but c’est la guerre. Siblings are all on various coasts, and we can’t always find a way to get together. Especially since only two of the five of my generation can really AFFORD to travel), my house is a MESS. And I still have that story to finish.

Day job explanation time. My official job title on campus is ‘proctor’. Basically, it means two things: I administer makeup and online tests in my office/testing lab, and I keep copies of certain paper tests for a few departments on the smaller satellite campus where I work. There are two main departments that I mostly proctor tests for, one uses the computers in my lab, so all I have to do is check students in. But the other uses paper tests, and I proctor makeups for that department as well as provide the paper tests for the teachers to use in their class.

Unfortunately, the copier on my floor is showing signs of wear and tear. Once you get over about 50 pages in one sitting, it starts to overheat and jam. So this year, they decided to limit the number of pages per copy job to 50. And with good reason. Unfortunately for me, I need to copy rather large batches of tests. And I can’t go to the other copier several floors down, because 1) I can’t leave my lab for more than a few minutes at a time, in case a student comes by with a narrow time window before their next class to take a test, and 2) I’m only scheduled/paid/officially on duty during the lab hours, so I can’t stay late or come in early to do copies.

Needless to say, my first thought was to see if I could just send my print jobs off to the print shop on campus and have them do them all and deliver them. Unfortunately, I need a digital copy to send to them for that. And in spite of the fact that I requested this at the beginning of the semester... all I’ve gotten from that department are the practice tests, not the actual tests. And of course, the practice tests are small enough that I can copy those just fine.

So I’ve been breaking the rules and doing batches of 60-75 pages whenever I can. But that’s still only 15 copies at a time, and I need something like 400 copies of each test. And the copier is occasionally down for a day or so when something breaks and they have to wait to get the part to fix it. And Murphy’s law seems to be in full force, because when I need to refill my inventory, it’s always fine on the days that I have a steady stream of students in my lab, and down the days that I have a trickle and therefore plenty of time with no students so I can close up the lab for five minutes.

The finals, of course, are 8-10 pages each, depending on the class. Which means that I can literally only do 5 copies at a time if I follow the rules. And there’s a hard deadline as to when I need to make sure that I have enough for every teacher. That deadline, of course, being after the last few weeks of classes, when students realize that they REALLY need to get in to take that makeup test and raise their grade before it’s too late.

Thankfully, the department actually got around to sending me a digital version of the finals. So I sent those off to the print shop, several weeks ahead of the due date, and I set the deliver due date as last Thursday at the latest, since I don’t work Friday, and I knew some teachers were letting students who couldn’t be there for the final take their test on Thursday or Friday before finals week. I gave them explicit instructions to deliver it to my lab, warned them that the lab is locked for test security reasons while I’m not there, told them where to get the key, and asked them to email me if, for any reason, they couldn’t deliver the tests.

I got to my lab in the morning to find... no delivery. I checked the support ticket. It said that they were finished 9 days ago... but neither one actually had a digital signature of who finished it. That day just so happened to also be the busiest test day of the semester. The department that uses computer tests in my lab had a final due date for the last chapter that day, so every semester that is always my busiest day. So as soon as I was relieved for my fifteen minute break, instead of taking my break, I ran downstairs to see if perhaps they simply didn’t read the delivery instructions and left the tests in the (thankfully locked) employee mailroom. (Which, coincidentally, is where the good copier is. This will be important later.)

So when I got back from break, the first thing I did was look up how to contact the print shop. Other than submitting a print request... there was nothing. I could look up the employees and email them, but there was no formal support ticket. Only a print request ticket. So I emailed the supervisor of the department.

An hour later, I finally had a moment with no students in the room, so I could make a phone call without worrying about disturbing people testing. So I called the print department. It rang four times... and went to voice mail.

I waited a minute, tried again, just to see if I got unlucky and just missed someone. Still voicemail. So, even though I hate using the phone because that means they’ll call me back instead of emailing, and I can’t really talk when there are students testing, I left a message.

By the end of my shift... still nothing. Nothing at all. And I knew that at least one teacher needed a few copies BY THE NEXT MORNING because he had students who couldn’t be there during finals week. And, just to add insult to injury, because of the holiday coming up, we had to submit our time sheet early this week. So I had no way to report extra time spent staying late to deal with this issue. But the teachers all depend on me, so I printed out a copy of each of the tests, and I was in the middle of composing an email to let the teachers know that I would drop off an unstapled copy and a copy of the answer key in their mailboxes, so that if they desperately needed it, at least they could use the copier right next to their mailbox to make as many as they need for class.

While I was doing that... the phone rang. It was the print shop. Apparently they had finished my print job early, and set it aside and forgotten about it. It was just sitting in a corner of the room, on the main campus several miles away from the satellite campus. She apologized for forgetting about it, said that it was loaded in the delivery vehicle trunk, and as soon as the delivery person got there the next morning he would head over.

Since I didn’t know when he would actually get there, and when teachers would start needing the tests, that still didn’t change much for me. I thanked her for getting back to me, told her that if that should be fine, and just amended the email I was sending out to let them know that the tests SHOULD be there by the morning. But just in case, I was still going to drop off the unstapled copies. (Plus two stapled ones for the teacher who mentioned needing a couple by Friday morning) I’m still not sure how I can report the extra 37 minutes of overtime I had to spend doing that, since the time sheets are already in... and I can’t just add it to next week, because I won’t be working next week.

But I got to work today and... the tests were here. And things have been slow enough that I’ve been able to write this huge freaking post with only a few interruptions here and there. (Okay, now that I’m done helping someone, interruptions here, there, and the one while I was trying to hit post.)

#getting my shit together #writing blog #writing blues #life blog #life blogging #i did mention weight loss #but not very much #stress #work stress #work blog #i'm not actually pulling my hair out #but it came close

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ayearofpike · 6 years ago

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The Visitor

Pocket Books, 1995 162 pages, 42 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-87270-2 LOC: PZ7.P626 Vi 1995 OCLC: 33376660 Released November 1, 1995 (per B&N)

Mary Weist has lost her boyfriend to a tragic accident, and is shutting everyone out since his death. But there’s a bigger problem, or at least more intensive inner voices telling her friends and family that there was more to it than anybody knew. Mary has her own secrets that she’s keeping from the community, sure, but she slowly comes to learn that she’s not the only one. In fact, she eventually finds out that she had secrets she didn’t even know about.

I mean ... talk about misleading back copy, right? Yeah, Tom is important to this book, but the story is about Mary, who doesn’t even get mentioned here. Tom shows up about halfway in, and his whole job was to try to make Mary realize the truth of the secret she had ... suppressed? forgotten? We can discuss it more when we get there.

Also, this book inspired its share of hate and anger when it came out. We were used to this epic about vampires, and now we have two stand-alone novels in a row clocking in at under 200 pages. Plus this one reads super fast. I think I did it in less than two hours this go-round. Maybe at the time it came out we felt cheated of explanation and exposition, but honestly? This is a tight horror/suspense story that neither gives us too much nor expects us to make up too much. Maybe the story doesn’t even need to be this long, though I didn’t feel it was excessively padded.

It opens with Mary getting ready to go to a party that she doesn’t really want to attend. It’s been a month since her boyfriend died, but she’s been talked into this party by his best friend (who by the way also wants to jump her bones). He’s got her there because her boyfriend’s younger brother also plans to go and wanted to talk to her — not about his death necessarily, but just about the guy. It turns out that the brother has felt his continuing presence, which weirds Mary out so much that she goes outside. Her ride comes and gets her after a while, saying that the host (another ex-girlfriend of the dead guy) wants to try to get in touch with him with an Ouija board. Pike Trope #1: check!

The party dies out enough that they have a smaller group to try to reach Dead Boyfriend: Mary, Brother, Other Ex, Horny Ride, and Superfluous Redheaded Twins That Supposedly Help Boost Ethereal Signal (I’d like to call this Pike Trope #2, but I think it was only in one book unless you count the short story that mentions the book). They get the board going, and it starts to talk specifically about Mary: that once, long ago in Egypt, she lived and pretended to be a god. Obviously Other Ex thinks that Mary knows more than she’s letting on about how Dead Boyfriend kicked off, and is asking specific and pointed questions to the Ouija board, the answers to which seem to throw Mary under the bus. Still, the godhood bits are maybe too subtle or unrelated if we’re assuming Other Ex just wanted to implicate Mary (and because she’s taking notes, I think we’re supposed to understand that she’s not even touching the indicator anyway). Still, she doesn’t answer questions and she leaves with Horny Ride without completing the communication.

So they go back to Mary’s house, where Horny Ride gives her a full-body massage in front of a roaring fire (Pike Trope #3), and she tells him about a story she was writing the day she met Dead Boyfriend: an Egyptian goddess is buried alive, but Mary didn’t know why or what happened, and in walking through the woods looking for inspiration she met him. So the message from the board hits close to home. After no sex, Horny Ride leaves and Mary throws on a robe and drives out to Dead Boyfriend’s grave, where she lies down and dreams about his death. (Pike Trope #4: dreaming backstory!) Evidently, they had broken into the school to precount the votes for homecoming queen, and when a frightened security guard with a shaky trigger finger found them, Mary basically told him where to stick it. So he acted all big, and she tackled him, and in the scuffle the gun went off, thereby creating Dead Boyfriend. What we didn’t know before — the real mindfuck revelation that does more to explain Mary’s mental state and personality than anything else — is that she continued to fight with the guard, specifically to press his gun against his head and force him to pull the trigger.

Obviously Mary has never told anyone this story, but it goes a long way toward both understanding her aloofness toward anything and everything now as well as giving us a little more justification and understanding for what we’ll learn as the story goes along. But for now, she gets up and goes home and goes to bed, but is awakened by a bright light in her backyard. She has to put on a new robe to check it out, as her first one is dirty, but what she finds outside is a flying saucer. Before she has time to even think about what it’s doing or what she should do about it, there’s a bright flash and she finds herself lying on Dead Boyfriend’s grave again. Obviously this is a dream, so she walks back home and goes back to bed. But when she wakes up in the morning, there are TWO dirty robes on her chair.

She goes to work and tells her boss about the flying saucer encounter, and he suggests that this is probably related to her traumatic experience (though he has the civility to accept that she does not seem to be making it up). That night she dreams of an invisible being in a desert who slowly makes herself visible to the people and shapeshifts into a body pleasing enough that they begin to worship her. There’s our Egyptian goddess! Mary’s not prepared to write this all off as either suggestibility or coincidence, so she calls up Horny Ride in the middle of the night and tells him to come right over, bringing Brother and his Ouija board so they can try to figure out what is going on and who they were talking to before.

Before they can even ask the board a question, it spells out this poem about how all love, all burn, all die. It calls this the “Prayer of the False God,” which also appears as the book’s epigraph. Pretty ballsy of Pike to quote HIMSELF in his own book. I wonder if the poem came first and he built the story around it. But the presence doesn’t hang out very long this time, and the guys leave and Mary falls back asleep. The spaceship shows up again, and she tries to call Horny Ride, but the voice on the other end of the phone isn’t him. Mary thinks it’s the Ouija board, and when she says she wants her boyfriend back it says that her desires make her nightmare continue. Whatever that means.

Back at school after the weekend, there’s a new kid. If you guessed it’s Tom, you’re right! Mary is drawn to him for some reason, and goes so far as to take him for a ride after school. They go for dinner, take a walk in the woods, and end up naked in front of Mary’s fireplace again. (Yes, Pike addresses the parents: they’ve left town for the week, even though neither one really wants to leave Mary alone.) But this time it’s the dude who stops the sexytimes, echoing her rationale for not wanting to do Horny Ride. They hang out for another day without talking, and that night the spaceship comes again. This time Mary sees an actual alien, and reaches out to touch it, which sucks her into a vision of the past.

(Aside: I’m kind of pissed off that I didn’t take this book with me to Roswell when I was there three weeks ago. Would have made a more fitting picture for the the entry, right?)

This vision describes Clareesh, a fourth-dimensional extraterrestrial being visiting ancient Egypt who wants to meet humans despite directives not to be seen. She vibrates down to a visible frequency, then reads the humans’ minds and adopts the physical form that they find most pleasing. They take her for a god and worship her as such — all except the one woman who Clareesh mirrored for a moment while getting her bearings in a human body. This woman wants to be beautiful and immortal like Clareesh, and after 30 years she starts to get peeved that Clareesh isn’t sharing her secrets. So she raises a mob against her and threatens to kill her lover if Clareesh doesn’t make with the youngifying. Obviously alien physiology is different from human, and unfortunately so long in a human body has stunted Clareesh’s supernormal powers.So there’s nothing she can do as this angry power-grabber gruesomely kills the young man and buries them both together in a stone tomb. And she can’t get out, no matter how she claws and tears her fingers against the rock.

When Mary comes to, she’s back in bed, and there’s dried blood on her sheets. Message, obviously. So the next day she doesn’t hang out with Tom, but she follows him after school as he wanders aimlessly around town. At one point a car hits a fox dead-on, and Tom picks it up and cradles it to his chest. And it wakes up and licks his face and runs away. Mary stops following at this point, and Tom doesn’t come to school the next day because what for. This pisses off Other Ex, who assumes that Mary has given him what he came for and threatens that through the power of her father the mayor, she’s convinced the police to reopen the case of Dead Boyfriend. Mary’s pretty sure that Brother blabbed some of the stuff she told him about the night he died, but apparently it was Horny Ride, grumpy about Mary’s interest in Tom and looking to get his dick wet SOMEWHERE. What a fucknuts.

She has to go to work, and tells her boss a little more about what’s been going on. She leaves out the zombie fox, but not much else. The boss, in turn, tells a story of a spirit that rose up out of the cemetery nineteen years ago, while he was lost on a walk, and read his mind looking for pregnant women in the area. The one it fixated on — one he didn’t even think of as pregnant, because she hadn’t revealed it yet — was Mary’s mom. So he figures that there must be something larger going on related to her and it’s manifesting somehow now. Mary thinks of Clareesh here, but isn’t sure why.

She goes back to the clearing where she found the alien, because she’s pretty sure Tom is going to be there. When he is, she pulls a gun and tells him to bring her boyfriend back to life. He asks if she’s sure she wouldn’t like to go back to the spaceship with him, and she’s adamant: all she wants is her boyfriend. So they dig him up, and Tom embraces him, and pretty soon they’re both moaning in pain: the boyfriend because his soul is back but his body is still dead and a month stiff and rotten, Tom because this act has drained all of his energy and he is about to die.

Whatever, right? My boyfriend’s back! Only he isn’t really happy about it. Mary takes him back to her house and soaks him in the bathtub, thinking it’ll warm and limber him up, but all it does is pull embalming fluid out. She thinks maybe he needs something to replace the fluid with, so he can properly live again. Blood! Pike Trope #4! Of course — they would have drained it all at the funeral home and now he needs some. So she calls up Other Ex and says she did tamper with the homecoming queen vote and that she’s willing to share the real ballots if they drop their investigation. They meet at the movie theater, and before Other Ex can say boo Mary fucking WHALES her in the head with a hammer and drags her home, to be blood for her love.

(I realized that I never said we’re back in a small town: Seedmont, Idaho, population unspecified because Pike has finally learned something about small towns. That’d be Trope #1.5, I guess.)

While Mary is refilling her dead boyfriend with live blood, Horny Ride and Brother drop by. They’re looking for Other Ex, who has evidently disappeared. Mary’s salty about Horny Ride being only worried about his new cock sheath, and she dismisses them out of hand. Back with (Un)Dead Boyfriend, he wants to know how she brought him back, and she tells the whole story, actually not leaving anything out for once. He explains that, yes, his soul is back, but his body is still dead, and that she has to let him go for both of their sakes. So she takes him back to the cemetery and shoots him in the head right next to his grave, which ... how do you kill a dead body with a magically infused soul? Did the bullet just make an easier hole for the soul to get out? But he’s dead again, and she suddenly realizes:

She is Clareesh, given a second chance to sacrifice herself and step away for the good of humanity rather than stroking her own vanity. And she failed.

Tom is still alive, and now she recognizes him as her second-in-command from the good old fourth dimension. She gives him her life energy and orders him to call the spaceship and leave her on Earth. Which he does, after he buries her undead body with her redead boyfriend, to struggle for another five thousand years.

The epilogue takes us back to the party, where it’s Boyfriend, surprisingly not dead, who is against the idea of using an Ouija board to get in touch with Mary, who was killed when she resisted the security guard at school. It tells them that there is nothing more to be afraid of, and then swiftly goes silent, leaving Not-Dead Boyfriend to mourn at Mary’s grave, where he thinks he hears a moan from under the earth.

The Visitor is probably too long by half, but it tumbles along smoothly. I don’t blame Pike for dragging it out; there’s no way his audience was going to be happy with an 80-page book. But it probably would have worked better in one of his short story collections coming up quick. I’m not mad at it, even as it pulls from so much of what he’s written before, because every author does that. Maybe I needed this distance from the original context, coming as it did in the middle of TWO separate book series, to appreciate this one on its own merits.

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What Republicans Are Running For President This Year

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What Republicans Are Running For President This Year

The This Sounds Crazy But Hear Me Out Wild Card

GOP Senator Roy Blunt Says 2022 Will Be a Great Election Year for Republicans

Mike Lindell

Donald Trump wasnt the first celebrity businessman without any experience in elective office who got traction in a Republican presidential primary. In 2012, it was former Godfathers Pizza CEO Herman Cain. In 1996 and 2000, it was magazine publisher Steve Forbes. Back in 1940, utility executive Wendell Willkie snagged the GOP nomination.

Today, who is the most famous, politically active Republican businessman? MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. That may sound crazy, but no crazier than what we experienced in 2016.

Lindell is a leader of the bitter-enders trying to overturn the democratic results of the presidential election. He claims to have spent $1 million on legal work and Stop the Steal rallies to support Trumps delusional cause. On December 19, he tweeted out a call for Trump to impose martial law in these 7 states and get the machines/ballots! though he soon deleted the post.

He became a conservative darling in part because he heavily marketed his pillows on Fox News; in the second quarter of 2020, MyPillow was Fox Newss top advertiser, spending more than double the amount of the second-place company. But now he accuses Fox News, and its early call that Biden won Arizona, of conspiring to defeat Trump

What to watch for in 2021:While Lindell has been thinking about a Minnesota gubernatorial bid, he has managed to visit neighboring Iowa several times in 2020. Lets see which state he campaigns in more in 2021.

Filed Under:

Former Un Ambassador Nikki Haley

Haley gets a lot of buzz, and she has been actively courting attention since leaving the Trump administration almost two years ago. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump even considered pulling her in last summer to replace Vice President Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket to help with Trumps ailing numbers among women a move the husband-wife White House duo fervently denied.);

Haley moves up a notch based on consistent exposure since June, a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention on Monday night, and a strong showing of 11 percent support in the most-recent 2024 poll.;

The former South Carolina governor can stake claim to being popular among the world of Washington pundits and professional political types, many of whom were interviewed for this story and spoke very highly of her. But she has also been dinged by some operatives as more of a media creation than a serious contender for 2024.

Leaving the job was hard, but putting family first was more important. And I think now its about taking it a year at a time, she said earlier this year during a meeting of the Federalist Society.

William Henry Harrison Vs Martin Van Buren

Aware that Van Burens problems gave them a good chance for victory, the Whigs rejected the candidacy of Henry Clay, their most prominent leader, because of his support for the unpopular Second Bank of the United States. Instead, stealing a page from the Democratic emphasis on Andrew Jacksons military exploits, they chose William Henry Harrison, a hero of early Indian wars and the War of 1812. The Whig vice-presidential nominee was John Tyler, a onetime Democrat who had broken with Jackson over his veto of the bill rechartering the Second Bank.

Studiously avoiding divisive issues like the Bank and internal improvements, the Whigs depicted Harrison as living in a log cabin and drinking hard cider. They used slogans like Tippecanoe and Tyler too, and Van, Van, Van/Van is a used-up man, to stir voters. Harrison won by a popular vote of 1,275,612 to 1,130,033, and an electoral margin of 234 to 60. But the victory proved to be a hollow one because Harrison died one month after his inauguration. Tyler, his successor, would not accept Whig economic doctrine, and the change in presidential politics had little effect on presidential policy.

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Im Running For President Because Its Time For New Leadership Because Its Time For New Energy And Its Time For A New Commitment To Make Sure That The Opportunities Getting Out There Being Able To Hear Peoples Concerns Address Them With New Ideas Has Been An Extraordinary Experience He Said

Biden thought hard about running in 2016, but he decided against it, being so soon after his son beaus death and. Running for president of the united states is an. But there is so much more to it. Joe biden opposed president reagans peace through strength that led to the fall of the berlin wall. And speaking of brand image i read the program of warren recently, and was tempted to give her a french honorary citizenship as she is trying to import.

Eight Republican 2024 Candidates Speak In Texas Next Week But Not Trump

WASHINGTON, April 30 A Republican Party event in Texas next week will hear from eight potential candidates for the partys presidential nomination in 2024, without former President Donald Trump, a source involved in the planning said on Friday.

The May 7 event at a hotel in Austin is being co-hosted by U.S. Senator John Cornyn and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, to thank donors who helped fund a voter registration drive and get-out-the-vote efforts in the state.

High-profile Republican politicians who are considering whether to seek the partys nomination in 2024 are expected to speak to the crowd of about 200 donors.

They include former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and U.S. senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott and Rick Scott, the source said.

The event comes as Republicans wrestle with whether to try to move past Trump in the next election cycle or fall in line behind him. Trump told Fox Business Networks Maria Bartiromo on Thursday that he was 100% considering another run after losing in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump was not invited to Texas, the source said. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was invited but was unable to attend, the source said.

Many Republican insiders doubt Trump will follow through on his musings about running for president in 2024, leaving a void that other party leaders will seek to fill.

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Notable Candidates Include Individuals Who Have Qualified To Appear On Enough State There Were 21 Candidates On The Ballot Each In Vermont And Colorado

Bush said in retrospect that the divisiveness of the primary challenge might have cost bush reelection. There are several people running for the republican nomination, but given the current president is a republican, he is the only one that matters. Notable candidates include individuals who have qualified to appear on enough state there were 21 candidates on the ballot each in vermont and colorado. While the republican and democratic nominees will be on the ballot in all states, independents must meet an array why is he running for president? Former congressmen joe walsh announces republican presidential primary challenge.

But it can be repaired by someone who can lead, and i ran for president to win and make a difference in our great country, swalwell photo: Since the current president is democrat, we already know who the democrat running for president will be . The only other person running worth mentioning is bill weld, former governor of massachusetts, who was the libertarian nominee for vp back in 2016. Other republicans have made it quite clear they dont see a path to the nomination for anyone but trump in 2020. I think that as a republican party, we have lost our way. mark sanford.

Lincoln Chafeewho Is He

The failson scion of a Rhode Island Republican family, Chafee served in the Senate as a Republican ; as governor, as an independent and then a Democrat ; and then ran for president as a Democrat in 2016.

Is he running? No. He filed papers to run for the Libertarian Party nomination on January 5, but dropped out on April 7.

Why did he want to run?

Who wanted him to run?

Could he have won the nomination? Given that he dropped his bid even without any serious rivals in the race, apparently not.

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Abortion Rights Drinking Age Drugs And More

At present, Weld is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Self-described as strongly pro-choice when it comes to abortion rights, he is also said to believe that drug use should not be considered a criminal offense. He feels the drinking age should be lowered but has not stated at what age it should be set.;

When it comes to matters of the military, Weld also draws a conservative line. He feels that America should withdraw its troops from foreign engagements and that the countrys efforts and resources should be refocused on domestic issues, in order to prosper.;According to Aljhazeera.com, Weld previously supported bans on assault weapons in the US.

Sen Elizabeth Warren D

Colorado’s only Republican governor elected within last 50 years says presidential race is over

After establishing a presidential exploratory committee just before New Year’s Day 2019, Warren officially joined the race in February with an event in Massachusetts.

“This is the fight of our lives,” the senator said. “The fight to build an America where dreams are possible, an America that works for everyone. I am in that fight all the way.”

The progressive candidate who ran against corruption and pumped out more than 50 policy proposals during her campaign, suspended her run after a lackluster finish in all four early voting states and on Super Tuesday — where she even came up short in her home state. Her best finish was in Iowa, where she came in third.

“I will not be running for president in 2020. But I guarantee I will stay in the fight for the hard-working folks across the country who’ve got the short end of the stick, over and over,” she told reporters at a media availability in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 5.

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Cancellation Of State Caucuses Or Primaries

The Washington Examiner reported on December 19, 2018, that the South Carolina Republican Party had not ruled out forgoing a primary contest to protect Trump from any primary challengers. Party chairman Drew McKissick stated, “Considering the fact that the entire party supports the president, we’ll end up doing what’s in the president’s best interest.” On January 24, another Washington Examiner report indicated that the Kansas Republican Party was “likely” to scrap its presidential caucus to “save resources”.

In August 2019, the Associated Press reported that the Nevada Republican Party was also contemplating canceling their caucuses, with the state party spokesman, Keith Schipper, saying it “isn’t about any kind of conspiracy theory about protecting the president;… He’s going to be the nominee;… This is about protecting resources to make sure that the president wins in Nevada and that Republicans up and down the ballot win in 2020.”

Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina’s state committees officially voted on September 7, 2019, to cancel their caucus and primary. The Arizona state Republican Party indicated two days later that it will not hold a primary. These four were joined by the Alaska state Republican party on September 21, when its central committee announced they would not hold a presidential primary.

Virginia Republicans decided to allocate delegates at the state convention.

Dwight D Eisenhower: Campaigns And Elections

The Campaign and Election of 1952:

During an extraordinary military career, Dwight D. Eisenhower had done some things that few, if any, Americans had ever experienced. But he had not done something that was extremely commonhe had never voted. Yet in 1948, many Americans hoped that the general would cast his first ballotfor himself as President. Even Harry S. Truman tried to interest Eisenhower in a run for the presidency. As the election year of 1948 approached, Truman, who became President when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, seemed to have little chance of winning a full term of his own. In a private meeting, Truman proposed that he and Eisenhower run together on the Democratic ticket, with Eisenhower as the presidential candidate and Truman in second position. Eisenhower rejected this astonishing offer and probably thought that he would never again have to consider the possibility of a run for the White House. He also spurned requests from prominent Republicans that he seek the GOP nomination for President.

Campaign Difficulties

“There was a time when I thought he would make a good President… That was my mistake.”

President Harry Truman, 1952

The Campaign and Election of 1956

The President Prevails

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Presidential Campaign And 2011 Hints At Presidential Run

In 2000, Trump for nomination as the Reform Party candidate for the but withdrew from the race in February 2000. A July 1999 poll matching him against likely Republican nominee and likely Democratic nominee showed Trump with seven percent support.

In 2011, Trump against President Barack Obama in , making his first speaking appearance at the in February 2011 and giving speeches in early primary states. In May 2011, he announced he would not run, and he endorsed in February 2012. Trump’s presidential ambitions were generally not taken seriously at the time.

Trump As A Stalking Horse

Of course, there was plenty of speculation during the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination that Trump was trying to sabotage the GOP candidates by saying outrageous things and making a mockery of the process in a bid to help Hillary Clinton win the election.

“Donald Trump is trolling the GOP,” political reporter Jonathan Allen wrote. Trump also threatened to run for president as an independent, a move many believed would siphon votes from the Republican nominee as other, similar candidates have done in the past.

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Former Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo

If the 2024 election turns into a foreign policy debate, the 57-year-old Pompeo is in a strong position with his background as former secretary of state and CIA director.

During Pompeos recent speech at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa, he gave a preview of some of the lines that might end up in his presidential stump speech. He said hes spent more time with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un than any other American, including basketball star Dennis Rodman, and talked about the threat he sees from China. His mention of the U.S. moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem during his tenure was met with applause.

Before serving in Trumps Cabinet, Pompeo blasted then-candidate Trump as an authoritarian. Pompeo made the remarks the day of the Kansas caucus in 2016, quoting Trump saying that if he told a soldier to commit a war crime, they would go and do it. Pompeo said the U.S. had spent 7½ years with an authoritarian president who ignored the Constitution, referencing former President Barack Obama, and we dont need four more years of that.

Pompeo served three full terms representing Kansas in the U.S. House before joining the Trump administration. He and his wife, Susan, have one child. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and Harvard Law and served in the U.S. Army.

Donald J Trump Vs Hillary R Clinton

The 2016 election was unconventional in its level of divisiveness. Former first lady, New York Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to be nominated by a major party in a U.S. presidential election. Donald Trump, a New York real estate baron and reality TV star, was quick to mock fellow Republicans running for the nomination as well as his democratic opponent.

In what many political analysts considered a stunning upset, Trump, with his populist, nationalist campaign, lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College, becoming the nations 45th president.

Popular Vote: 65,853,516 to 62,984,825 . Electoral College: 306 to 232 .

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Former South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg

Buttigieg first made a national name for himself with a bid for Democratic National Committee chair in 2017. He was the youngest candidate in the 2020 race, and could have become the first gay man to be elected president.

While he trailed many of his opponents in name recognition early on, Buttigieg argued that he could represent a generational shift in government, and speaks frequently of issues that will affect younger Americans, such as tax reform, gun control and climate change.

“I get the audacity of somebody like me talking about running for this office, but frankly it’s a leap for anybody,” Buttigieg said on ABC’s “This Week” in February. “And yet all of the people who had that job have been mortals who just bring their experience to the table. My experience is that of guiding a city through transformation, and I think a mayor at any level has the kind of executive frontline government experience and, by the way, problem-solving experience that we need more in Washington right now.”

Late on March 1, following the South Carolina primary and ahead of Super Tuesday, he said “the path has narrowed to a close” and announced that he was suspending his 2020 presidential campaign.

Trump Remains 2024 Candidate Of Choice For Most Republicans Poll Shows

How GOP retirements are making the 2022 midterm elections a Trump referendum

59% of Republican voters said they wanted Trump to play prominent role in party, but tens of thousands left after Capitol riot

If the 2024 Republican presidential primary were held today, Donald Trump would be the clear favorite to win big. That was the message from a Politico-Morning Consult poll released on Tuesday, three days after Trumps acquittal in his second impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.

Among Republican voters, 59% said they wanted Trump to play a prominent role in their party, up a whopping 18 points from the last such poll, taken in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. A slightly lower number, 54%, said they would back Trump in the primary.

Tens of thousands of Republicans left the party after the Capitol insurrection, and a majority of Americans have told other pollsters they would like to see Trump banished from politics.

Though the 45th president will be 78 by election day 2024, he will be able to run again if he chooses, having escaped being barred from office after a 57-43 Senate vote to convict with seven Republican defections but 10 votes short of the majority needed.

Mike Pences life was threatened by Trump supporters at the Capitol, as the vice-president presided over the ratification of electoral college results confirming Trumps defeat by Joe Biden. He placed second in the Politico-Morning Consult poll, with 12%.

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