#my parents fucked up a lot but they way they raised us re: religion was perfect imho

[servuscallidus]

Was bored so I reread the Cain and Abel bit from the bible and it's much less graphic than I remember? Eight years old me could see a whole movie, including birthing scene, close ups of the kids, Cain being covered in thick, red, hair, the tent they were born in, everything. What was I on?

[tonydaddingham]

heh im happy to answer questions!! :D im actually not out to anyone online as muslim and so this is incredibly fun for me to talk about sgjkgh

metatron! now i have to be honest, i had never really heard of metatron till.. couple weeks ago when i watched s2! and it seems that this isn't an uncommon thing too, there's much more description of metatron in jewish literature than islamic, his name isn't mentioned in the quran at all iirc, but given the other similarities in religion i thought to look it up and found that! he exists! but i don't know what the whole.. beyond the veil thing entails, really. 😔 not even sure what this "veil" is. regarding metatron i have basically no knowledge at all. we're all learning here!

but! the free will discussion... oof. honestly this is a big topic. as it should be, but a lot of young muslim kids ask this question of.. if everything is predetermined, how can God judge us for our mistakes? we're told we have autonomy and choice to do what we want (which is what makes us human.) but Allah has also predetermined everything. uh. so [shrug] the analogy that stuck with me most was that if a child is given two options for food by their parent, the parent will know what they are going to pick, but they still have the choice. its flawed like all analogies but it is a good framework i think. there's also the thing about Allah knowing everything that will happen but not actively enforcing it? its definitely confusing. i hope i made any sense at all ;-; again happy to answer any questions if that has raised any but i can't.. promise i'll give good answers sjkfhgh [gestures at these paragraphs]

israfil! well, judgement and resurrection are very closely linked. iirc, israfil is the only being (along with god) to know when the day of judgement will happen. he'll blow the famous trumpet once to end all life on earth except himself, and blow it again to resurrect everyone that has ever lived. nods. the second coming doesn't trigger this, but it does signify the end of days.

i hope that answered everything? sorry this was so long 😭 in my defence . uh. i have no defence. my apologies. but thank you for asking all this!! its rare that ppl show interest in my little special interest <3 - 🌙

hello again 🌙 anon!!!✨ well in that case im very honoured you are sharing this with me, anonymously or not, thank you!! thank you for your follow-up ask too; hope you don't mind that i answer both on this post? keeps everything neat and tidy, especially if i need to refer back to it at any point!!!

i was going to put the rest of this ask under a cut but fuck it the below 2nd ask is SO IMPORTANT.

re: metatron, i did do a little bit of reading on their mention in the quran and it reads that uzair (who is possibly ezra?) is also the metatron...? not a question necessarily, just a mark of slight confusion that i need to look into further, haha!!!

free will: that's such a beautiful analogy... i guess it may not necessarily be a predetermination of only one path, but multiple different ones, and it's our choice which one we choose, even if god knows which one will be chosen. but that god doesn't tell us what will happen when we make that choice, because that would influence our decision, and as you said - either way doesn't enforce it. that i believe crosses over into some catholic thoughts on predestination, im not sure, but either way would strike the balance between god being omniscient, and her creations having free will - making the two compatible.

israfil: brilliant, thank you for clarifying, especially where the second coming might link to the day of judgement!!! follow-up q, i read a bit more about the day, and where (if ive read this right), each person had their book of deeds that supports whether they go to heaven or to hell. sort of related: where does the book of life fit into this in Islam? is each person's deeds reviewed, handed back to them in whichever appropriate hand, and they are then scratched from the BOL?

stars: that's... that's not brainrot talking, that's bloody ✨illumination!!!✨ wow!!! even if the star shower scene was before demons existed, the suggestion that the shower started after the angel who crowley was (AWCW) began to ask questions - something that firmly foreshadowed the fall - and given that aziraphale was the one to make him start questioning/then hurriedly cautioned him against asking them... the symbology of AWCW not necessarily protecting him from things that chase away demons, but protecting him from being implicated in whatever punishment was to come??? protecting him from the fall??? my GOD, im ASCENDING. oh my god oh my god oh my god

(wait --- going by the above from 🌙 anon, was i potentially somewhat right in this and this??? like obviously not exactly right, but that aziraphale was himself implicated in the fall, and AWCW protected him/defended him? FUCK)

[soulvomit]

I realize this sounds like “when I was your age” but really I mean no judgment of anyone. Childhood just was not aspirational for me. My family *needed* me to know about the World Outside. I had to know that murderers and sexual assault existed (and for that, I had to know that sex existed), I had to know about illness and death, I had to know that some people abduct and murder little kids. I had to know that people get murdered by authority figures because of their ethnicity or religion. I��had to know that authorities did not always have our best interests at heart and that my parents were the only trustworthy adults. I talked like an adult because parents trained me to talk like one. They rigorously molded my grammar and mannerisms and trained me to report on things that happened in my world with the journalistic “who/what/where/when/why/how.” Stories of the Holocaust were what I grew up with as cautionary tales, instead of fairy tales. I grew up with nightmares not about witches and demons and monsters, but nightmares about murder and genocide.  Being an innocent child, in need of perpetual adult vigilance and protection, was not an option for me. My parents simply couldn’t afford that for me, or for the rest of us. I had to know when to lie to adults and I had to know not to talk to strangers.  But for a part of my early life, the kids around me weren’t raised any differently, because we lived in poor areas. And it isn’t until my dad got a white collar job and we moved to the whiter side of Panorama City and I encountered WASP culture that I encountered the Middle Class WASP Ideal of Childhood. 

And that’s when I started running into what 90s autism authors refer to as “inability to grasp unwritten rules of society.” I kept offending these kids and I kept offending their parents. I didn’t know why, and nobody would tell me, because of the sheer fucking laundry list of things you’re not allowed to talk about in status-conscious white space. You’re just supposed to Get It, and the only way to Get It is if you were raised in that environment to begin with or went through some kind of heavy enculturation or re-education into it (and religious conversion is this for some people; my parents spent two years selling Amway and trying to be Mormons for *this exact reason*.)  For me it wasn’t neurology, it was culture. But for so much of my life, I didn’t have those words, I had no way to talk about my experience. I was *trained not to talk about it* to other kids and I had parents who themselves were kinda weird. I was lonely because my early life was alienating - and anyone would find it alienating.  If I *had* been raised in a more WASP-normative, conventional manner and I *still* didn’t grasp what I was being raised around, or I had social issues all the same, then we might be able to know what is “Soulvomit’s Brain” and what is... the actual world I lived in, and my place in it. There is a point at which the material reality of the world you’re in, and your place in it, are what shapes you.  Every kind of intervention I’ve ever gotten from the white middle class/upper class monoculture, has been from people whose worldview is based on the idea that the world is already good to them and they just need to *feel themselves better.* It’s like being trapped inside an invisible jar but you’re being told the jar is imaginary. The people around you don’t really see what’s different from them and just think you’re imagining your difference and that you could be just like them if you really wanted to. They don’t know what your day to day reality is like. And the alienation I had growing up as a secret Jew who superficially passed as WASP but wasn’t really accepted by Jewish kids (because of grades and social class), meant that I was taken for a *broken* WASP.  But for me, every attempt that started *inside myself* - my spiritual lost soul stuff of my 20s, a lot of trying to figure shit out via mental health interventions - ultimately led to a dead end. Even many subculture spaces tended to just lead to go *deeper inside yourself* for answers. The answer must be something internal to *you* and if only you could discover that thing... you’d be happy, right? What if you suspect that the world is the way it is, because it really is the way it is? When The Matrix came out, it spoke to me deeply. All of my life, I’d had that feeling, and here was somebody validating it.  People around me were raising their children in a fake fantasy world, and aspirational culture was all about keeping that fake fantasy world going for the rest of one’s life.  You weren’t supposed to know that the middle class WASP system was supposed to be the default, and that if you knew it wasn’t, you *weren’t ever supposed to tell anyone.* Ever. (And *that* is what I took away as subtext, with a lot of themes in “Fight Club,” including the “first rule.”) Your very existence in the presence of these people (especially if they were women and children) is seen as damaging their soul. You have to validate their worldview 24/7. You have to pretend that Santa and the Tooth Fairy exist and never, ever mention death in the presence of their children and heaven help you if murder and death are part of *your* ancestral stories, because that’s too dark and scary. You aren’t ever allowed to expose them to information they don’t already have. If you don’t validate their worldview, if you corrupt their children, if you in any way stop validating the assumed superiority of their systems... then it sucks to be you, I guess. 

[nametags]

But her emails...

I aim to be a woman of integrity. I’ve sat on the content I’m about to share for almost 6 years in part because it originally was a private conversation between me and a friend. A friend who happens to be a lead singer of a band, but a friend none the less. However the way people have been speaking about him and what’s been going on in the world lately, I couldn’t let this stay hidden anymore.

I’m tired of people claiming that because Patrick no longer uses social media (and hasn’t for damn near five years at this point) that somehow he doesn’t “care” or isn’t doing anything right now to help the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m also incredibly tired of people ignoring/belittling the fact that Pete Wentz is a biracial/black man in America. You really do not want the social media person in charge of Patrick’s account tweeting things out. It would be hollow and fake.

Below is both a transcript of the conversation I had with Patrick on 12/06/2014, a follow up message he sent to me 08/25/2015, and the accompanying screenshots. Unfortunately I do not have the tweet(s) that prompted me to contact him in the first place nor can I find screenshots of them to provide that context. An image of me and my younger brother Jacob when we met the band at Boys of Zummer will also be attached to demonstrate one of the people I was concerned about in my original email. 

The only redactions made were my personal email address and the name of a friend I referenced. Patrick deleted his email account at some point between late 2016 and early 2017. It’s only left in these screenshots as proof for those who knew the address before to see these were legitimate messages. I hope the content reveals not only where his heart lies not only then but where it is now. 

Allison White: So I caught the insanity way late, but it's a tricky spot to be in with what's going on. For most of my life, I didn't even identify with half of my race. I was raised with my mom's side of the family and it just didn't click for me. It really hasn't been until teen years and onward that I've opened my eyes to it all. And with that, I began to grow wary of authority in a way. Like I still believe that people go into law enforcement for the right reasons. The few times I have dealt with police officers personally I haven't been concerned, but I have noticed in the past few years that when I spot a police car on the road or an officer just out in public somewhere is if I look "white enough" or do I actually look like an adult who belongs in whatever space I am in. I know Trayvon Martin was murdered by a vigilante and not an actual officer of the law, but that was when I first started to fear for my little brothers. I knew both of them were the sort of young men that could get targeted and most likely justice would not be found for them. And then there comes this summer. With both the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases coming back with no indictment, it makes it feel as if it's just open season for black people to be hunted by cops. Which is hurtful for the cops who are actually in it to protect and serve, and every citizen who now has to wonder if they are next. I hope that your cousin is doing alright. I hope that people aren't making his job harder right now. Just I know for me right now with all that's going on I am definitely on the side of the protesters.

Patrick Stump: Brief for now; I'm sorry in all that you didn't notice that I'm squarely on the side of the protestors too. That's a failure of my wording

PS: The problem is that I so poorly expressed myself, people thought I was balancing the empathy to be spread across the black community and cops. That's a mistake on my part. I'm angry.

I'm angry that Mike Brown's case didn't yield enough evidence to indict. But that case was a very complicated one...Brown had just (allegedly) committed a violent crime and information was murky. As sure as I was that Wilson straight up murdered the Brown, I understood the limitations of the american Justice system given how little evidence there was. That's the unfortunate reality of justice is that it needs to be just. It needs to be 100%. We can't go in with "I know in my heart." And so that case pissed me off, but I understood it. 

With Eric Garner however, this just feels so flagrant. By no accounts was he violent, wasn't he doing anything that could even be misconstrued as life-threatening enough to even imagine defending the usage of deadly force. He was cooperating and they choked him to death on camera. That's fucked up. I'm pissed. I tried to be polite and sit back and not say anything, but I'm pissed.

However, my reason for discussing the side of the police as well is that human beings are complicated. When we boil people down to simplistic stereotypes, when we create a narrative of "Us VS them," we lose sight of the humanity of it all. You can't reason with a "Them." You can only reason with a person and it works better when you remember they're people.

I don't believe in enemies. I'm not religious but I love the way Jesus preached "Love thy enemy." That's hugely influential to me. Hugely important. That's the empathy I mean.

The other night I was holding my son and I thought to myself about a black girl I used to date. And how, we could have had a kid together. Maybe a little boy. And how, that boy could (by no action of his own) be killed just for the color of his skin. Like, I've heard and read words like that before, but to actually connect with it (on as small a scale as that) was horrifying. Gutting. For a little moment I thought, all this joy and all this beauty and somewhere, someone's having a black baby boy, loving him and feeling all the same things I feel for my son. But I wondered if in between their tired diaper changes and their burpings, if they were saying a silent prayer "I hope you don't get killed by a cop." If they say it constantly because they know how possible it is. Or even if he lives to be a 100, what black man won't have an unjust run in with the law? Not to make it exclusively a male issue but seriously, how many black men are in prison right now in America? That's a disgusting thing. The young parent of a young black boy probably considers that and that's maybe the most depressing thing I've ever tried to understood. That's a horrifying thing. There really still is a racial divide in this country, and to not be black is to not say those little prayers. We live in a supposedly free country. What about the pursuit of happiness? Who's defending the right of that little black baby boy born somewhere in America to just be an adorable little baby without any pretense? And when that baby grows up, who's defending his right to walk down a residential sidewalk and not expect to get pulled over and frisked? Maybe worse? 

So I'm angry. Just plain angry. But I didn't want to offend anyone so I expressed my anger in the lightest way I could think of. 

I'm not sorry for having an opinion, I'm sorry I explained it so poorly that you didn't know what it was.

AW: All of this is hard, and there is so much anger. You shouldn't ever be sorry for your opinions, and I am pretty sure you yourself have told people only be sorry for how you express your opinions. I wasn't upset with you or what you said, I just felt compelled to share that for me there's a knee jerk reaction to the image/idea of police and why.  This whole situation has been tough and it's been inspiring watching people across this country let their anger show and demonstrate in the streets against it. It makes me wish I was brave enough to take part in it out in the streets and not just online. 

I hope this collective anger and protest leads to real change. That in 2014 we are able to do the things they were aiming for in 1964. I mean recently the full letter the FBI sent to MLK to urge him into suicide was released and it just highlights the divide between how much has and has not changed. There's a lot of value in what religion is supposed to teach. Love thy enemy, love thy neighbor. True love and care for those around you is a great thing and certainly something I'd hope people identified with. 

The past nearly seven years there has been this push for hope and change. Maybe the country is finally reaching a point to make it happen?

PS: I have a funny feeling this is civil rights part 2. I'm proud of the protests. I'm so grateful our generation is angry about something it should be angry about for a change.

AW: An argument can be made that our generation (or just post baby boomer generations in general) have been taught and fed nonsense to keep us compliant, but that veers into a territory that I am not completely sure or comfortable with. Overall I do think that this is heading a direction that the powers that be are not ready for in the slightest.

PS: Where did I go wrong? What do people think I said? They're so mad at me, and none of the people have said anything I didn't mean. I'm not getting angry right-wing stuff, people are just calling me a racist. What did I say that was racist? What do I think that's racist?

AW: There's a strong immediate reaction right now of if you sound slightly in favor of the officers that did wrong that you are racist. The swift reaction and need to dogpile on is kind of crazy. I think people took the initial comment to mean "not all cops!!!!" In the same vein as "not all men!!!" and that's where the rage is coming from. 

AW: Just to be clear, those who matter know you're not racist. You have shown both in your words and actions where your beliefs lie. I don't know how to calm the masses right now because at least for the time being its not going to get through :(

AW: You could try a blog entry on tumblr?

PS: Nah, I think I've done enough damage for one lifetime. I think I'll keep it to myself but I appreciate your talking it through with me. 

AW: No problem. I am always willing to be a sounding board for that stuff if you need it.

PS: I re-read my stuff; "I support our police," is the worst things said. I meant "I support the idea of police and the need for a police force we can trust on a national level," not "I support the police in NYC who are killing people and attacking protestors." That sucks.

AW: If you wanna try to clarify now you can. At least in your Google alert it only had one mention of he mess and it was a tumblr user supporting/defending you. 

PS: There's no fixing it. The Internet is unforgiving I think and the reality is, I said that. I didn't mean it in the way that it so obviously sounds, but I said that. So I deserve everything I get.

AW: It will most likely go easier if you let it ride out instead of trying to go out and fight it. That just gives the "he doth protest too much" air about it. Hopefully the energy behind letting you know you said something like that will dissipate sooner rather than later. And that it won't get big enough for someone to write a story about it. 

PS: Yeah. It'll sound like back-pedaling and glad-handing. Anyway, thanks for talking it through! 

AW: You're very welcome! Thank you for hearing out my side of it this morning.

PS:  I never would've ignored your side.

AW: Which is very much appreciated

AW: I say that because in the past two weeks I have lost a handful of friends because of all of what's going on and them being unable to understand how and why their words hurt me.

PS: Well that's awful and unfair

AW: It was but they were all from the "when I look at you I don't see black, I just see Ally" camp and then would go on to say things about stereotypes and "thugs"

PS: Yeah. Thug. "Oh that's so ghetto." Bullshit.

AW: When someone says "thug" it's always clear they wanna say the n word

PS: Or even if they're the kind of "Well meaning," person who knows enough not to say that word, they mean the same thing

PS: "Not like you. You're good"

PS: White America just needs to know what it doesn't know

PS: Or rather, understand that there are things they (we) will never understand. Not from a first person perspective.

AW: It always makes me want to scream. The erasure of identity so then the people known to them stay safe. It reminds me of something I witnessed the other day. My friend [REDACTED] from junior high is now an established lawyer. Needless to say he has been keeping up very much with the recent events. He made a post about it and one of his friends commented with "I wish you would go back to being my friend [REDACTED] and not my black friend [REDACTED]." Mind you there's no denying [REDACTED] is a black man. He can't pass in the slightest so the comment shocked and saddened me. Thankfully [REDACTED] handled it with poise and grace. 

PS: If you have to say you have a "black friend," then you probably don't. That's fucked. I guess I just genuinely didn't imagine how pervasive this stuff really is. Like, Pete and Joe and I have been talking a lot today. I was under the misapprehension that we grew up in a decently inclusive area. Just come to find out, nobody used those words around me. The whole time they were heckling kids like Joe and Pete. I thought racism was this thing that doesn't happen here. It's scary how much it's come out post Obama's election. Elected officials sending out mass e-mails of pictures of watermelons. I just didn't get it. Ignorance is bliss.

AW: It knows how to hide in plain sight, which is a lot of the problem. People are taught "don't be racist!!!!" Without being told exactly what racism is. People (myself included at times) aren't aware of words/phrases/ideas have nefarious ties until too late. 

PS: I think we get too caught up on words and not enough on what they imply. "Thug," means a prepackaged idea of a black male. It instantly limits his perceived intelligence, his perceived trustworthiness, his perceived value to society, and his perceived prospects in life. That's so fucked. We expect black men to go to prison. Not be doctors and lawyers. When a black man is a doctor or lawyer, we treat him like such a cool novelty. When a black woman asserts herself, she's so "Sassy." "You go girl." 

These little words and phrases feel harmless. They never were

AW: Those are the positives. Usually assertive black women are angry, mean. It's so fucked all around. 

AW: I really owe Pete for helping me be informed on Ferguson. He tweeted the hashtag the night the protests started in August and it helped me dive in. I am sure tumblr would have got me to it eventually, but seeing it from day one was a definite help. 

PS: You know part of my problem? I'm just not brave enough to say what I think. I'm just scared of offending people. Pete's not. He doesn't care. That's powerful

AW: It takes a lot to just put it out there. I am not sure if I had the amount of eyes on me that you do that I would be so "fuck you I will do/say what I want" as I am. Hell I become such a shadow of myself when at work with how quiet and polite I am. I mean I am still pierced and tatted with short hair so visually I say a lot, but then I watch my speech to make us for it. 

(Follow up on 8/25/2015)

Patrick Stump: That is amazing and I'm very flattered. By the way; Been thinking about our conversation from a year ago a lot. The takeaway is this: Saying "All lives matter," and "Not all cops," while literally true are contextually horrendous. Really awful. In retrospect I feel pretty awful about saying both. Specifically because "All lives matter," can carry a lot of implications. Who's lives? I meant by it that Latinos and Muslims are also unreasonably targeted/mistreated/murdered by cops. But is it as systematic or blatant as it is with darker skinned Americans? Not remotely. Furthermore, as a white man, I just need to remember how fucking easy I have it. It's easy for me to preach peace and unflinching patience when I've NEVER been a victim of the War On Drugs or the aftermath of straight up slavery. So there's a lot to think about in terms of what I, a white guy, have to say and do about the situation. But not a lot I have to say about the way it feels to be oppressed to the point of feeling like less than a citizen of this country. I shouldn't have spoken about it because I don't/can't know. Well-meaning white folks get to talk about policy changes and do everything we can to help, otherwise we should get the fuck out of the way. I'm sorry, really REALLY sorry to the world that I ever said either of those things. It's more than "Fuck the police." It's "Fuck this whole system." And as aware as I'd been, I hadn't realized how complacent in it I was. Anyway, disgusted I said what I said. Sorry to the whole world for being part of the problem

[welcometothebookreport]

In 2020, I read 40 books (with maybe a few more to be added after I post this) after discovering my love of reading all over again. I am not a very hard reader to please, so it will be rare for me to rate a book with a low score, so I doubt you’ll ever see any criticism from me. So, here we go!

A few things before I start: There are three series in this list (but technically only two, because I’ve only read Serpent & Dove so far) but I’ve limited myself to no repeat authors. That must have been the hardest part for me. Since Jessi went the extra mile and ranked them in order, I’ve decided to make myself suffer the same. And while most of these were not published in 2020, they were read in 2020.

I am (sometimes) a picky reader, but any book that is on this list, I have loved. I chose not to rate them because honestly, they would have all been high. I give ratings easily, and try not to pick things apart even for books I truly did not like.

Please keep in mind that I do my best to add trigger warnings, but you should always check for certain triggers before reading. Triggers vary for everyone.

10. Saint Anything by Sarah Dessen

Warnings: There’s a male character that’s a creep and you’ll spot him as soon as you crack this one open. This tale deals with Peyton being sentenced to prison, and their mother practically glossing over what he’s done by victim blaming.

I have read Dessen’s books since I was 13 and I truly still enjoy her stories as much as I did then. While this was a re-read for me, it’s a tie for my favorite book of hers. It’s tied with Along For the Ride.

Sydney is left in the aftermath after her older brother, Peyton, is sentenced to prison after a drunk driving accident that paralyzes a boy. Formerly in his shadow, Sydney struggles to discover what it is she wants, and how she wants to be seen as her own mother seems to gloss right over her. It’s a YA read that always feels like more than the romance that originally interested me.

9.  Serpent & Dove by Shelby Mahurin

Warnings: Misogyny. The church and religion plays an extremely heavy part of this plot, which was hard for me to get into. It’s clear that some characters do not value women in their actions and words toward Lou. It made me uncomfortable in spots because I just wanted to get past it, but I plan to read this one again since I know that it won’t bother me this time! Still, there is: violence in parts, religious zealots (in case that’s something that makes you uncomfortable like it did me), derogatory slurs toward women, and again, misogyny.

I finished this one two days ago, and I sincerely cannot wait to dig into the sequel. Lou is a witty, snappy character that was such a breath of fresh air from the normal. You usually see the male lead that’s a bit crude, a bit quick to pull the trigger, and the one that’s harder to crack. Is that what happened here? Absolutely fucking not. Shelby Mahurin took something I loved, enemies to lovers, and kicked its ass. Forced marriage? UM YES. A witch and a witch-hunter? Mortal enemies? Characters that can never possibly love each other? DONE DONE DONE.

It’s hilarious in parts. Serious when it needs to be. A bit spicy too, while not a lot, which I certainly appreciate. Reid’s character development is a wonder to watch, at least for me, and by the end of the book, I am so in love with him that I don’t know what to do with myself. I have so many annotations for this novel.

8. The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller

Warnings: There’s a fair bout of murder. Women are expected not to take lovers before marriage while men are not held to the same standard. Gross. Allessandra is continually underestimated so let me say: let the women do the work.

It’s called the Slytherin romance we’ve been waiting for, and I agree. While this is a shorter read, and a standalone, I was pleased with it. Both characters are incredibly ambitious, but it’s Allessandra that steals the show. The plan? To enter the palace, woo the king, and then kill him in order to take his kingdom. She’s wicked in all the ways I love.

I loved this book, and each page, but this was the line that will make me return to it: “I’m not a trollop,” I announce to the empty room. “I’m a sexually empowered woman, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

The Folk of the Air Series by Holly Black

Warnings: Aside from murder, there’s nothing that stands out to me as a trigger.

A series! The first! There’s something interesting about this series for me, and it’s that I didn’t fall in love altogether, all at once. It was gradual, like wading into water until it went right over my head. By the final fourth of The Cruel Prince, I was fully invested in this world and I absolutely needed to know how Jude and Cardan would become, well, Jude and Cardan.

As a YA series, I was not expecting the sheer amount of mystery, political intrigue, and plot twists that came with this series. However, I never knew what was going to happen, and if I did guess what was coming, Black had at least two more twists to send me for a loop. The Queen of Nothing was likely my favorite book of the series, with The Wicked King as a close second.

6. Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Warnings:  Discussion of attempted non-con assault, forced disclosure of sexuality

I laughed until my eyes watered and I nearly cried in this book. Delightfully funny, and snappy, RW&B delivers on everything I didn’t know that I needed. I had never read a book where LGBTQ was represented in such a positive light. As someone raised in a more conservative household, I’ve known my own sexual orientation for a long time, but this book made me feel like I could relax in my skin because this story was stunning.

Alex and Henry left me with so much hope that it’s impossible to ever put the lid back on. I’m so happy I read this.

(oh, god, we’re in the final five.)

5. The Caraval Series by Stephanie Garber

Warnings: Physical and emotional child abuse.

I could dedicate multiple posts to this series. Maybe I still will. While this is at number five, it’s my favorite series I’ve ever read. If I could only have one series to read for the rest of my life, I would choose this one. Hands down. Full stop. These characters live in my head constantly and I would give an obscene amount of things to read it all over again for the first time. I actually read this with two of my closest friends in our many book club, and we all loved it.

Doused in magic, this world is unveiled to us with excellent descriptions. Truly, Garber owned my heart within a few chapters. Scarlett is the elder sister, Tella the younger, and if you don’t love Tella by the end of Caraval, I promise you will. I know because I was skeptical, but here I am. I’ve said it to my friends, but Scarlett is the one who holds my hair while I have a hangover. Tella is the one that helps me start the bar fight.

With non-stop turns, and magic, everything comes to life on these pages. And the romance, the romance. Please, please give me my great love in this style. It’s not too much to ask for, is it?

4. Letters to the Lost by Brigid Kemmerer

Warnings:  loss of sibling, loss of parent, alcoholism, mention of infidelity, mentions of previous physical and emotional child abuse.

Mae sent this recommendation to me, and I devoured all of Kemmer’s books post-haste. Declan and Juliet fall in love without knowing who the other is, while also not liking the real version of their penpal. Juliet has lost her mother, and she’s treading water, but not well. Declan has suffered in the years that follow a family tragedy, and he’s not adapting to life with his new step-father.

But he opens with CemetaryGirl (Juliet) and it’s raw in the best of ways, and the openness between them that eventually moves from their bubble to reality is one of the most pleasing things to read. I’ve read it twice this year. I will read it again next year too.

I also read this twice this year and will for sure be reading it again in 2021.

3. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Warnings: Child abuse.

This was another novel that I fell in love with as I went, and that’s definitely because of the non-linear narrative. It was a little confusing, but I’m going to read it again someday since I know everything now! I read this to follow-up to Caraval with my book club pals, and it’s just what I needed to leave Caraval behind. Marco and Celia are incredible and I absolutely believe that the ending of this novel is one of the best endings I’ve ever read.

My book club has not finished this book entirely this so I’m not sharing any spoilers, but I would like to share one of my favorite quotes. “What did you wish for?” “I wished for her.”

2. Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton

Warnings: Cuba is in the middle of a revolution, and it’s tense in parts. There are some bittersweet elements and I think the parts of the ending are like the punch in the gut you need in order to wake you up and remember to live.

This was my first read once I really dug back into this hobby in August. It was picked by Reese Witherspoon for her book club, and she always picks good books. This is a dual timeline romance, and mystery. It’s an absolute stunner of a book. It’s a dear favorite to me now. I’ve never been to Cubs, or heard stories, but Cleeton manages to make you feel like you’re right there feeling saltwater spray across your face.

The romance made me feel breathless, but truly it’s the strong familial ties that make this such a beautiful gem. It leaves you with hope even in the dark and with love in the absence of it. I could scream about this book for the rest of my life, which I absolutely intend to do.

Favorite line? “You’re going to be difficult to walk away from, aren’t you?” “I hope so.”

1 In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren

Warnings? There are none that strike me. This is a lighthearted read that pulls at the heartstrings, but it’s by no means short on the laughs. And, I’m sorry for the long wall of text below.

In A Holidaze is the story of a woman stuck in her ways of never going after what she truly wants until a stray wish lands her in a time loop over the holidays. It's only after repeating the same day a few times that she quite literally says "fuck this," and starts living for HER. I really expected this to just be a Hallmark kind of read, but it was SO MUCH MORE. You should read it, even if it's after the holidays.

It's witty, and heart-wrenching, and it's just everything I didn't know I needed. Mae is snarky, and brave when she figures out that there is nothing stopping her, and the romance is - GODDAMN. Andrew. I need an Andrew and a fan.

It's not quite a love triangle, which was what I expected and I was so pleasantly surprised. I have grinned like a goddamn fool all day. I have giggled all day in front of customers, and my co-workers. I have nearly CRIED in my bedroom when my heart fell out of my ass and landed somewhere near my ankles, because hello, it's gonna get you.

This is going on my yearly re-read list for the holidays.

In the two days since I’ve finished, I’ve convinced my two friends in book club to read it, convinced Jessi to order it from Book of the Month Club, convinced another friend to read it, and bought it for Mae on Christmas day because her library had a six month hold and that was simply unacceptable.

[almarchive]

   hello, its nora n this is the ethereal but spoiled alma olive putnam. she goes by all 3 names cos she’s pretentious as fuck. raised in a farmhouse in vermont, never really had to work for anything in her life and doesn’t want to. studying class civ cos she thinks it makes her sound smart, but actually hates fuckin latin and just loves learning about feckless hedonism and the festivals of bacchus. was expelled from princeton in her first year so her parents basically paid her way into lockwood. loves the smell of libraries and listening to french music from a tinny record player in knee socks. bio is below the cut, like this post to be bombarded with plotting messages. i might forget tho so pls message me x

application template.

( elle fanning  / cis-female ) haven’t seen ALMA OLIVE PUTNAM around in a while. the ELLE FANNING lookalike has been known to be TENACIOUS & MAGNETIC, but SHE can also be FANCIFUL & DOUBLE-CROSSING. The 20 year old is a SOPHOMORE majoring in CLASSICS. I believe they’re living in FIDELIS but I popped by earlier and no one answered the door. ( nora. 23. gmt. she/her. )

aesthetics.

a red beret nestled on top of bright platimum locks, neck scarves tied around your throat the way they do it in french new wave films, running barefoot through the woods in feckless hedonism, china dolls with porcelain faces lined against the walls of your room, the mona lisa smile, knee-socks tugged over the hockey grazes on your knees, a forged botticelli drying on your easel, ophelia floating in the middle of a lake.

connection to tatiana & did they choose her name during the watershed?

alma saw her as academic competition and a threat to her de jure throne. in freshman year, tatiana got the role alma auditioned for in a university production. she’s disliked her ever since. alma abslutely chose tatiana’s name, and she’d do it again without hesitating. [that vine voice] I WON’T HESITATE, BITCH

the short form.

—  born in vermont in a big old farmhouse. her great-great-grandfather moved to america as an immigrant and worked on a plantation, made his way up cos he could speak a lot of languages and therefore win more people over. for the last two generations, putnam men have owned the farm and do little of the dirty work. big in the meat industry.

— both her parents had large personalities, so alma’s never really been shy around adults, even as a kid she’d speak to them in a forthright, confident manner, and because she was always surrounded by adults, she’s always seemed a bit wise beyond her years. — very much a consolidation of every character in the secret history. has a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. obsessed with w.h. auden and the beat poets. — ”aestheticism is the only thing worth pursuing and even that is pointless” — is majoring in classical civilisation. can read ancient greek and latin. also speaks french. — studies hard and plays hard. she gets top marks but it’s because academia is literally her life, she loves the smell of libraries, the ancient smoke of learning, of feeling like old wine in a new bottle reincarnated from the bones of some old, dead witchy woman who invented a cure for cowpox or somethin. — isn’t a foward-planner, however. alma prefers to leave her options open, play the field, live in a spontaneous manner so her study style is mostly cramming a few days before a test, or staying up all night writing an essay on a massive adrenaline boost powered by red bull or probably adderall, scribbling (or typing) furiously into the night. — pretentious motherfucker. loves poetry, especially the romantics, loves morbid ones too, edgar allen poe, sylvia plath, allen ginsberg, she just loves them all. can’t get enough. her favourite films are like…. wanky artfilm independent european cinema. especially french new wave. “what do you think of goddard’s work??” while snorting a line off someone’s sink at 5am on a school night, but you can bet she’ll make it to that 9am class. — very intelligent and beautiful and knows both of those facts. plays devil’s advocate. humanitarian, vegan. — judgemental but takes great care not to appear so. petty and vindictive — just wants to be loved by all. a party girl ; doesn’t rlly enjoy it, jst feels she should enjoy it. — tries to be an enigma. wants to be mysterious and unreadable because that’s what books have taught her makes women desirable and interesting and cool. — obsessively devours mystery and thriller novels. she herself is a gillian flynn book waiting to happen. — act like the flower but be the serpent under it. is a user. manipulative. leads people on. will throw another student under the bus to demonstrate her own intelligence and integrity — heavily involved in the theatre society. loves attention. — has an addictive personality. seems unable to do anything in a small dose, she has to let it utterly consume her. with sports, she’s fiercely competitive, runs track, played lacrosse at school, now is a cheerleader probably. with alcohol, it’s never a shot, it’s a whole bottle – wine or whiskey – she’ll be table dancing before the night’s up and making out with someone she’ll regret in the morning. — her clothing style is like…. vintage thrift store but make it preppy. berets and cute hats, neck scarves, large fluffy cardigans or like those leathery jackets with big suede fringes on them, mini skirts (very 70s), and knee-high socks or boots. quite often she’ll be in sports kit, maybe a cute tennis skirt, n when she’s feeling casual she’ll wear like, a talking heads tshirt with a pair of mom jeans and converse, but otherwise, the library is her catwalk. — relates to ophelia from hamlet and sibyl vane in dorian gray. weirdly obsessed with women who commit suicide. loves jackson pollock paintings and abstract art. – likes old things. old books, old music, old houses, it reminds her of happier times like when she wasn’t alive. buys all her music on vinyl and has a gramophone because “the sound quality is better” kfdsjj.

plots.

here are some generic wanted plots but by all means message me so we can flesh them out more if any strike ur interest:

study buddies !! someone who is equally unprepared and so spends all night in the library with alma before a big deadline, maybe they even met in the library

if they’re from new england or vermont, then cousins . second cousins / extended family / family friends –  probably spat volavons on your character once as children, omg childhood friends !

people who live on the same floor and only know each other from brief interactions in the lift or the canteen

frinds !! unlikely friends !! toxic friends !! former best friends separated by sporting or academic rivalries !

hockey / cheer friends who are on other teams but who she absolutely loves playin against!!!

fellow academics who like meeting up to discuss latin and greek ! gimme a secret society bonding by their love of ancient learning

i reckon she’s in a lot of societies, definitely the film club, maybe works as a projectionist at the uni cinema if they have one so give me ppl affiliated with that, give me fellow wanky pretentious art-lovers and poets and historians who will go to museums and galleries with her and listen to the velvet underground on vinyl

people she gets mortally fucked off her tits with at parties

people who think she is throwing her academic potential away by caving to hedonistic impulse

people she has drunkenly made out with, hooked up with, or regularly sleeps with casually, maybe even a friend w benefits she is repressing feelings for, i love angst,

people she used to date or unrequitedly likes, but to them it’s just a physical thing, give me all the thirsty angst plots, and maybe some softness too, i need some religion in this girls life, she is a roman catholic after all

full biography.

alma olive putnam.

intro.

           the girl is a knife. razor-sharp, double-edged, the bright shine of a two-faced, lovely thing. silver like the secrets you magpie thief from other heads. you’re a scavenger of knowledge, of tidbits, of gossip to lock away for later use and late-night re-inspection. a mind is like a clock if you get to learn the pieces. bit by bit, you dismantle the inner workings of the brains that tick around you – how easy it is to change it’s path, how words and their meanings can make a person laugh or cry in an instant. to have the power to control that is to be a god. it’s the power trip you crave wielding pom-poms in your hands; a possessive need for control that a younger you, small and weak, never had as a child. small lips, smaller smile, a doll clutched in your too-hungry fingers, hard enough to shatter the bones of a real infant. you cut your hair with your mother’s kitchen scissors before the autumn falls, rendering you out of season, unfit for the cold weather that beats against the nape of your neck, where a stick-and-poke marks the star you were born under ; the bull. “mama, when will i be a queen?” as soon as they find a crown small enough not to slip from your head.

biography.

           if you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. hands red, stained by pomegranate seeds, the empty pulp of its shell splattered on your thighs you find yourself wondering – what would it be like to want? in the beginning, you never knew hunger. twins, born under the same star, you first, him second – a nuclear family. never a sister to compete with, you were always the cherry pie of your parents’ hearts. white-haired, blue-eyed, beautiful baby of mine. the townhouse in vermont and the summer house in lyon, you wanted for nought, showered with attention, saddled with gifts - hardly a wonder you came to rely on such affection as a confirmation of your own worth.

           at eight years old you first met death, blood on a gingham-print dress, a smear of it over your cheekbone and the pulp of a mangled animal at your feet murdered by the hands of a stable boy. “alma, my precious baby, you get away from that filth,” your mama would cry from the upstairs balcony – cigar in one hand and a bloody mary in the other – though whether the filth she referred to was the dead pig or the boy with a kernel of corn in his mouth, you never did find out.

           your family earned their keeps in farming, great-grandfather wolfgang hildegarde a german immigrant, great-grandmother maura lisbon a prairie girl. they fell hopelessly in love between troughs and pig-shit, working for three dollars a day at a farm their descendants would later own, trade deals with the indians, vacations to calcutta, your father todd putnam in the kind of sheepskin coat his father’s father could only dream of owning. he worked hard so that you’d never have to. your mama once asked – you heard it through the window, rounding cartwheels across the picket-fenced lawn – could he not find a respectable career rather than selling shrink-wrapped pork for a dime a dozen? that blood money had no business raising a child. you look far back enough, edie, your father had said in his low, strong voice that could bring a civil war to silence, and i think you’ll find that all money is blood money.

           language was never fickle on your tongue, french dinner time talk by the time you were out of your hush puppy shoes, your mama fixing the au pair a smile as she fixed herself another martini. you learned the clarinet at four and how to dance with the grace of a swansong at six, ethereal under a spotlight, an audience captive in the palm of your hand. by eight you knew that you’d always been destined to be loved. loved so hard they would want to taste you, bite into the soft plump of your cheek and eat you alive. that was how magnetic you wanted to feel. but mother hamsters eat their own young when penned in together too long, and soon you became too wild, too restless, another package on your father’s delivery invoice, box-shipped out to english boarding school.

           fitting in had never been something you had to concern yourself with. you were always the shiny new toy the other girls wanted to play with, bright like a dropped coin from a magpie’s beak. wherever you went, you seemed to leave a trail of awe, pig-tailed harriet’s adoring you, imitating you, teachers forgiving your class-time chatter for the sake of your wild heart and the restless spirit you possessed. tell us what it’s like in the states, alma. they’d coo, enamoured by your hollywood drawl. does your father own a gun? you hardly knew. barely even knew the colour of his hair, for the scarce amount of times he’d stoop to kiss your cheek, though you’d tell silver-tongued tales if it’d guaranteed you an audience. when you learned how to smile at the right times, and that flattery would get you everywhere, it soon became apparent that charm would pave the yellow brick road to success even when your lack of drive couldn’t.

           the road you followed – gum-snapping, roller-blading, friendship bands all up your arm – eventually led you to small-town fame. bright-eyed and gingham skirted, you’d always known you were more. there was a hunger in you to be something extraordinary, a want so adamant to be imagined and desired that it was almost savage. in leather-bound volumes and a circle of stones, you were helen of troy, the girl for whom they’d launch a thousand ships. but there’s so much rage within you, collecting like sawdust in cavernous parts. hockey helped. there was something grounding about the feeling of a stick clasped in your hands. sweat. stiff knuckles. feet pounding the earth. the smash of wood against flesh in the scram of a game, passed off as mere enthusiasm. “slipped, sorry.” hockey is the one thing you had that was yours alone – a feral instinct that motivates you to play; something primitive within you that sparks an energy like no other. on the pitch, you feel alive.

[wrckhvck]

         In PORTLAND, ME I found JAX COYNE, a child with the ability of BLOOD MANIPULATION. At first HE came off as IMPETUOUS but they also seemed GREGARIOUS. I was unable to procure the child, as an adult, they should resemble GRANT GUSTIN.  ( c, she/her )

hey hi hello everyone!  i thought my rping days were behind me but i loved TUA and decided to give this a go.  we’ll see how it works out shshshss.  i love yelling about riverdale ( so bad its kinda good ), shadowhunters, broadway, and love cats more than people and i’m super hyped to be here.  for a little more about jax, you can keep reading ~   also this is important !!! there are a lot of trigger warnings re: his past / life so i’m going to list them all here instead of in the tags at the bottom. you have been warned.   

           trigger warnings:  minor child abuse, child abandonment, domestic violence, negative self-talk, lack of self-esteem, suicidal ideation, self harm, self mutilation in the name of science, lack of self-worth, lack of self-preservation, unintentional suicide attempts, warped self image, bloodplay(ish), mentions of violence / self-violence.

        TLDR:  jax has a fucked up sense of self and likes to experiment on himself. proceed with caution i guess ???  

&. basics

full name: jackson ‘jax’ edward coyne

nicknames: jax, jaxxy, jack

age: 29

sexuality: pansexual

relationship status: single

date of birth: october 1

place of birth:  portland, me

gender & species: cismale, enhanced humanoid(?)

current location: unknown.

&. more basic info

languages: english, spanish, french. 

religion: n/a - he’s an atheist. 

education: BS degree in human biology concentration from the university of southern maine & MD from uConn school of medicine. 3 years studying to be a forensic scientist and now completing a one year residency/fellowship before getting board certified. 

occupation: forensic pathologist

drinks, smokes, & drugs: yes, no, yes.

&. personality

zodiac sign: ( references: one, two ) libra

mbti: ( reference link ) istj

likes:  emo music, pasta dishes, cats, supernatural (tv), black nail polish, coffee, true crime podcasts, greek yoghurt. 

dislikes:  socialization, herbal tea, vaping, people who don’t use their turn signals when driving, one way streets, mustard, taylor swift music, and reality tv.  

bad habits: bites his nails, picks scabs when you’re not supposed to, obsesses over getting song lyrics right, poor posture, obsessing over things that can’t be changed. 

secret talent: tattooing. he’s not licensed to do any work on anyone else, but he’s done a lot of the work on his sleeves himself.  he had his in love and death tattoo done when he was 16 and he’s been addicted ever since.  he was too broke to be able to afford constant work so he had to learn how to do it himself with a lot of trial and error.  

hobbies: listening to true crime podcasts, research, drawing/sketching, watching wrestling, boxing, studying, etc.  

fears: isolation, decision making, the future, responsibility, the truth about his origins. 

five positive traits: determined, altruistic, loyal, competitive & vulnerable

five negative traits: impetuous, cowardly, stubborn, blunt, & prone to self-harm in the name of science. 

other mentionable details:   jax has done some Questionable Shit TM in the name of science.  as he can control / manipulate blood, he’s frequently injured himself to test the extent of his abilities.  he’s also caused some health issues by increasing his blood pressure / fucking with the way blood is supposed to work that has landed him in the hospital a few times.  he’s also tried playing operation with himself and has been studying his genetics obsessively to try to figure what the hell is he / who he is.  he grew up thinking he was a monster (bc thats what they told him he was) so he sometimes considers himself more of a science experiment than a person.  

&. appearance

tattoos: he has full sleeves up and down his arms.  i can’t really find anything that suits it but i think the left side would be venom / symbiotes and  maybe some nightmare before christmas elements??? idk.  the other one would be like a graveyard kind of theme with like tombstones, skulls, some wild looking shapes and black roses..  he also has the album artwork from in love and death by the used on the side of his ribcage (x)   he also has the tattoo from supernatural (x) bc he’s a fucking dork and its his favorite show. 

piercings: nipple, septum, tongue. 

faceclaim: grant gustin.

&. family information

parent names:  helen & n/a. 

parent relationship:  he doesn’t have a relationship with his parents.  his mother gave birth to him at 17 - after having  not been pregnant until she went into labor - and always considered him an abomination. helen’s boyfriend broke up with her thinking she’d been unfaithful and wouldn’t believe that she hadn’t broken their agreement. they’d been saving themselves for marriage and were planning to get married the summer after they graduated.  betrayed by her love and judged by her extremely conservative, religious, family, helen found herself looking for love in all of the wrong places.  this love was never shared with her son.  when she abandoned him at a local orphanage, he was only 5 years old.  he never saw her again. 

sibling names:  n/a.  he doesn’t consider himself having any siblings. he bounced out of foster home after foster home and never made any lasting connections. 

sibling relationship: n/a

other relevant relative: none. he had a maternal uncle but he passed away when he was a baby. he never knew him. 

children: n/a

significant other / spouse: n/a

pets: he has a pet snaked named anguis. it means snake in latin. he thinks he’s clever. he’s not. sdkjgsds. 

&. biography

        it was a blustery october day when helen coyne doubled over in the park across the street from her house. she was meeting her boyfriend, edward lovington, and they had plans to get milkshakes and go to the movies.  instead she was rushed to the hospital under suspicion of a burst appendix, only to give birth to a healthy baby boy some minutes later.   this phenomenon would later be known to be the moment that 43 women around the world delivered babies without ever having been pregnant.  each child would have abilities beyond comprehension and some would go on to become students at the umbrella academy.  jax would not enjoy such a fate. 

      helen’s parents were extremely religious.  she and her boyfriend had pledged their chastity under the belief that they would be married come the summer and he believed her to have broken that vow.  he ended things with her and her family turned their backs on her.  only her brother kept in contact, allowing her and the baby to move into his guest house until they could get back onto their feet.  he was named jackson edward, after his maternal grandfather and his mother’s former love.  jax never met either man but had heard the story from his mother as he grew up.  to this day he doesn’t know why helen decided to keep him; why he wasn’t given up for adoption as a baby, or abandoned at the hospital on the day he was born. 

     desperate for love and looking in the wrong places, helen suffered a string of abusive and controlling men.  it was a circle of abuse that she seemed caught in, believing to her core that she deserved it because god had punished her.  this continued until jax was five, when her latest boyfriend scratched her face.  the cuts welled up - the first time a boyfriend had drawn blood in jax’s presence - but to everyone’s dismay, the wound coagulated and the blood disappeared, back where it came from.  her boyfriend would have killed them both - afraid of what he’d seen when jax yelled at him to stop - but his eyes ran red as the blood inside his body boiled and cooked him from the inside out.  the sound of his body hitting the floor was drowned out by helen’s screams.  jax was abandoned at a local orphanage days later, his mother unable to look at him as she believed he was a monster.  

        maine isn’t a big city.  the area they were in was extremely small, so whispers of what had happened to helen’s boyfriend ran rampant.  jax was branded a freak, kept in isolation at the orphanage in fear of what he’d do to the other children.  he didn’t understand his powers yet and believed what his mother said was true; that he was a monster and that he deserved whatever happened to him as a consequence of it.  he withdrew into himself and was selectively mute until his teen years, bouncing from foster home to foster home as he grew.   it was only when he was 13, now exploring his powers with a morbid curiosity he would later attribute to scientific hypothesis, that he started speaking again.  

     jax grew up very isolated and socially awkward.  he doesn’t always know how to talk to people or how to appropriately react in certain situations.  he’s very morbid, has a dark sense of humor, and has a lot of questionable interests.  his music taste is skewed towards screamo / emo music and heavy metal.  he prefers horror movies to essentially every other genre and spends hours listening to true crime podcasts and lives on CSI / Criminal Minds / SVU etc.  his favorite bands are my chemical romance, the used, saosin, underoath, black veil  brides, and disturbed. 

       academically, jax is kind of a genius.  he didn’t really have friends so he spent a lot of time studying.  he finds biology interesting because his own biology fascinates him.  he can control blood; can make it coagulate, raise his own blood pressure, and even create it from his own cells.  it doesn’t make sense.  it doesn’t fit into what he knows about the human condition and that fascinates him.  experimenting on himself has become second nature and he covered up the majority of the scarring with tattoos.  the only friend he ever had showed him how to do some of it himself as a teenager and he’s kept up with the hobby - buying cheap supplies online or cutting corners to keep up with the artwork decorating his body. 

     with two degrees under his bet, jax is swimming in debt.  honestly his checking account is a terrifying place to live.  he’s been low-key indulging in credit card scams for years to keep his head above water.  he has a ledger where he’s written down every card, every loan, and every payment he needs to pay back. it’s locked in a safe so no one can ever find it.  as a forensic pathologist he’ll make good money and hopefully be able to pay it all back before the cops come knocking down his door. 

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

I did my best to put it in some kind of order but it got messy and I'm helpless about what I should write even after having read the FAQ and more than 20 pages of your posts so bear with me, please. The more I studied the functions, the less I know. So I'm really annoyed when people do things in a certain way because that's how it was done - there's nothing wrong with sticking to tried ways but everyone should think why they do it instead of mindlessly following a set path. (1/???)

A note to readers: if I may ask, please hold back your own sarcasm and such.

I don’t explicitly set a length limit anywhere for asks as most people stop at a fairly reasonable 5 or 6 - I’ve gotten extremely long asks only a few other times and those were mostly overnight for me so I didn’t get to weigh in in medias res, so while this person definitely needs to work on editing there’s some good content. Had there been anything egregiously offensive, ignorant, or annoying I’d have been much more brusque or I’d just have blocked them; this was a genuine misread of the situation. It’s really hard for me to define what’s good to send for typing; it’s very much a case of knowing it when I see it and I know that can be difficult for some people to interpret. Answer is below the jump.

Hi anon,

I may have had some mild fun at your expense; when I see someone is 10 messages deep and talking about Mamma Mia I have to say I have concerns about their ability to decide what is relevant information.

Anyway I’m going to answer this piece by piece. This will not be my, uh, least snarky answer; the cost of doing business of mbti typing with me for no money is that I like to enjoy myself. But I will attempt to also provide a good faith answer as you have some solid examples within all this.

I did my best to put it in some kind of order but it got messy and I'm helpless about what I should write even after having read the FAQ and more than 20 pages of your posts so bear with me, please.

As you can see I will not really bear with you but I do appreciate you doing some research

The more I studied the functions, the less I know. So I'm really annoyed when people do things in a certain way because that's how it was done - there's nothing wrong with sticking to tried ways but everyone should think why they do it instead of mindlessly following a set path. (1/???)

I feel like people use this sort of language to be like “please don’t type me as a high Si user” when in fact this is EXTREMELY high healthy Si user. Thought it could be a lower Si user as well. Anyway, moving on

For example, it's sad how many people believe in God just because thats how they were raised without actually reading the Bible (no hard feelings to believers, I also believe)

I’m...not going to unpack that

I like to speak out loud some ideas with no thoughts of acting on them but some people tend to believe I'm dead set on the idea and it causes some misunderstandings. Also, I have at least 6 back up plans for my future in case some of them won't fly. (2/???)

Here’s the deal when people say they’ve studied EVERYTHING and then ramble on for a long time and can’t type themselves I often suspect the issue isn’t that they don’t know MBTI but that they need to learn themselves. Contingency plans tend to be Ne-Si; speaking out loud with no plans to act is pretty normal.

I plan on going to a country abroad in 2 years from now and I've already made plans what I want to see there. I have a list of places I need to visit arranged in order so I could visit as many places in the most effective way because I don't want to waste my precious time spend there. I also enjoy telling people about my plans of going there as it makes me really excited. The unknown excites me and I enjoy wandering around a city I visit for the first time because I don't know it.

I can’t type off of this specifically yet but it’s interesting because you have extremely detailed plans (more of a sensing thing) but for a trip that I can’t imagine you’ve finalized if it’s that far off.

Wandering around cities is great though, I agree with you there.

I'm also really good at remembering routes and getting to the destination. I like figuring out how to get there.

Maybe immature Si user actually? Getting really indignant about poor use of Si, plus that bit about the bible I said I wouldn’t unpack sounds like it could be as well especially if paired with Fe and/or Christian views of religion.

I'm a bit reserved at first as I need to test the waters before I decide I like someone. It takes me sometime to warm up but I actually enjoy small talk and feel tempted to speak to a cashier at shop or a fellow passenger at bus which isn't as socially acceptable at my country so I don't really do this - I don't want to come across as a weird person but at the same time, (4/???)

I'm not really bothered to play a social game and I often seem to be rude (resting bitch face, actually I'm not judgmental and I'm quite chill about most of things). I know in mbti e vs i isn't perceived in a traditional way but I identify as ambivert as most of people, heh. My introverted friends say I'm an extravert but extraverts find me a quiet girl. I'm also 9w1 if that helps.

Yeah I’m thinking ISFJ now honestly, not wanting to violate social norms, introverted but enjoys small talk, and 9w1 goes with ISFJ a lot.

I've been also always thought to be a smart one who knows a lot of stuff about many things (5/???)

I could say I'm a walking contradiction as I mentioned in my previous post btw I'm sorry I asked you to type me with a vague info, this time I put a lot of effort ♡ Oh god please don’t say you’re a walking contradiction, I truly believe your intentions are good here and I do not hold this against you but that phrase is what guys who think they’re going to make it in a band despite having no talent say in their tinder bios.

At first I was sure I'm Ne/Si but now I see a possibility of being Ni/Se.I often forget what I'm supposed to do as I've just done because I had this super relevant thing to write but I forgot, damn it.

You seem very nice and perhaps just sort of young so I would suggest...writing this in advance instead of stream of consciousness which might help you organize your thoughts and edit yourself a little? I’m writing this response in advance. Like 90% of my answers I write in a Google Doc and then paste it into the Tumblr askbox later. It’s great.

(6/???) I'm getting lost in the numbers

Hard same.

I'm also quite stubborn and I'll study a thing as long as it's needed for me to fully understand it - it drives me crazy when I study for an exam, I ask my friend for help because I don't understand the concept and she tells me I don't need to understand it, I just need to memorize it.

Sounds very much like Ti here, which fits the earlier typing of Fe-user.

I do things for 101% or I don't do it at all.

I’m guilty of saying this too; I think many people see this quality in themselves unfortunately and I’m not sure it ultimately means much.

I also have a friend who helps me to stay grounded as she remembers some stuff for me and I'm pretty sure I'll be lost without her (7/???) I didn't think I wrotesomuch

yeah...about that.

I'm quite oblivious on daily basis, I went through school hallway and didn't notice a big ballot box. I only notice things when i want to and it's not a natural thing for me. But when I do pay attention, I'm sometimes mischievous on purpose and enjoy pushing buttons of others. I work on not doing it, I promiseI have a great talent to focusing on irrelevant things and I struggle to do well in my infp teacher classes - even though I know I need a shitload of details from readings (8/???)

So here’s the thing: I really don’t think you use Ni. First of all, the stream of consciousness thing tends to be something Ni users don’t like to do in my experience: they like to edit. They also just...don’t sound the way you do? Like this is rambly but it’s coherent in a way an INFJ ramble of this nature wouldn’t be. You could be an INTP actually with rigid low Si and Fe instead of immature higher Si though. But I’m pretty confident at this point you use the Fe-Ti and Ne-Si axes.

One thing I do find funny, even though I suppose I set people up for it, is when I get asks that are like “here is the detailed description of when I didn’t notice a detail and here is what I didn’t notice”. Like, we do all miss things and while it’s more common in intuitives, my legally-blind-without-glasses Si-dom mother does this too because she can’t see for shit, so.

to do well in exam, I always choose things that aren't relevant to her. She's an excellent teacher and I enjoy her insights. As for Ni/Se, I'm amazed how many things my peers do without thinking about consequences. For example, I wouldn't drink till I'm unconscious because I know I would upset my parents. I perceived it as ni, might be wrong though.

You are wrong in that this isn’t Ni, it’s called basic self-preservation. I’ve gotten extremely drunk from time to time in my life but I have never gotten drunk to the point of involuntary passing out because that is when you fucking die. Your instincts are correct here, your reasoning about your parents is probably Fe, but your decision itself is not Ni.

(9/???) Now, I'm geniually sorry I wrote so much even though I'm not usually but this case is special

I appreciate the apology but this is something I often observe with people who use Fe: they’ll apologize several timesfor long asks or asks that ignore the FAQ or whatever, but like, they still do it. I’ve had to have this conversation IRL with Fe users actually, of “I’m really not looking for an apology, I’m looking for the thing you’ve apologized for to stop.” That is a whole other post about communication though that I may make tomorrow.

I'm also really into helping others[(what contradicts with my mischief, here we go again (I didn't like the 2nd part of mamma Mia as much as the first - it was too sad, I cried in the cinema and the holiday-happy-vibe was missing, it's off topic, isnt it, the second part is called mamma mia: here we go again and I liked the first part so much I watched it like 20 times and know all the songs by heart)] (10/???)

This was the point where I decided to start fucking with you and to turn off anon, not going to lie, because I hadn’t read the rest but I saw 10/??? after an off-topic post about Mamma Mia and was like “okay we’re going to finish it now”

Anyway from this whole thing I cannot decide if you are an ISFJ or INTP, but I’m going to guess INTP as the 9w1 might be what was making me think high Fe before.

[dudence-blog]

Just when I thought I was out...

What does it take to get me to do this again?

This.

It took this.

I just love dogs: I live in the downtown area of a gentrifying city. I have worked intentionally to become part of the community I joined, while respecting its roots—supporting local business, volunteering, etc. I know I have lots of unconscious racial biases, but I try hard to listen and not cause harm.

Dear I Love Dogs, this question goes on FOREVER.  You unironically use the phrase “dog parents”.  You also wrote “I usually operate with a fairly high level of emotional intelligence...”   Jeebus fuck, find a physician who can undo your rectal-cranial inversion and have your head extracted from your fifth point of contact.  Maybe they do think you’re a racist.  They certainly think you’re an asshole.  You should write them a note and slip it under their door so you can remove all doubt.

Sigh.  Okay.  Frustration is gone.  Now for useful advice.  Don’t write a note.  NuPru’s advice to apologize is spot on.  Since “apologize” didn’t pop into your head before “explain how I’m not really racist” I also suggest you do a little self-reflection on just how high your EQ really is.

Cousin: My cousin “Fred” and I grew up together. High school was very rough for him, but college is even worse. Fred has always been overweight and struggled with the opposite sex. His high school girlfriend broke up with him when she got accepted to a different college than he did. Fred hasn’t had a date since. He dresses like a slob, doesn’t shave, and does nothing but play video games and watch porn.

Dear Cousin, you don’t need to procure women for Fred.  Ignore NuPru’s advice about what you need to tell Fred.  Fred’s greatest limitation is not his misogyny but the fact that he is romantically unpleasant in every other way.  Don’t get me wrong, having video games and masturbating as a hobby isn’t a bad choice, but all things in moderation here.  Fred needs to become a person people want to be with if he wants people (read: ladies) to want to be with him.  Being overweight, not conventionally attractive, demeaning towards women, engaged in a lot of gaming and self-love are not, by themselves, barriers to getting laid.  But when you bring in the healing power of And to these traits you’re going to be doing a lot of self-love.  Straight-forwardly tell Fred that you’re not going to hook him up with anyone because right now he’s not someone you’d want anyone you know to hang out with.  You can be as kind or mean in this delivery as you wish.  But it’s a message that needs to be delivered.

Forgiving a May-December marriage: A few years ago, one of my closest friends started dating an 18-year-old girl. The relationship creeped me out because even though nothing seemed “wrong,” he was not anywhere close to being 18. I couldn’t see past it, so I pulled away from our friendship. Now it’s several years later, the couple is still together, and they’re talking marriage. The girl is now an age I consider old enough and wise enough to take care of herself, despite the age gap. Was I wrong to judge?

Dear Forgiving, see, this is question where Prudie’s recent joining of the patriarchy is failing him.  He sees “Older man dating young, but legal, adult,” and can’t wrap his mind around the idea that, sometimes, there are men who like young women, and there are women who also, like those older men.  So, where you’re seeing the okay to do something you want to do, he’s breaking out the “Maybe he was grooming her!”  First off, you know what, I’m going to say that you were wrong to judge them and to pull away from your friend due to this judgmental attitude.  But, we’re past this now, you miss your friend, your friend misses you, and you’re now comfortable with J. Howard and Anna’s relationship.  Re-engage with them, and if the topic of “why did we drift apart?” comes up, lie.

Heathen with hurt feelings: One of my best friends, “George,” got married this past weekend. We’ve been friends for about five years. I love his wife, “Alice,” too, who is kind and fun. They are a great match. I was around for a lot of the wedding planning, and I was aware they were planning a traditional Catholic ceremony as this was incredibly important to Alice’s parents and, to a lesser extent, Alice, who is a progressive practicing Catholic. George was raised Catholic but is now not religious. He made it clear to me that the ceremony was for Alice and her family. He expressed often how ironic he found it to be getting married in a Catholic church after he had distanced himself so much from the religion. Though I was expecting a traditional ceremony, I was honestly blown away by how regressive, patriarchal, and homophobic it was. It contained multiple, overt references to marriage as a union for a man and a woman. The theme of the homily was marriage as not about one’s own happiness but about servitude and sacrifice.

Dear Heathen, annnnnnnnnnnnd here we are.  The question that made me have to remember a Tumblr password.  “It contained multiple, overt references to marriage as a union for a man and a woman.”  Yes, because you were in a Catholic Church seeing two Catholics being married by a Catholic priest.  I was going to make a cheap-shot about your marriage recently ending and you taking a homily about sacrifice in a marriage, but that isn’t fair.  However, yes, a happy marriage does involve a good deal of sacrifice and servitude.  A marriage is not about you, or them, and if you make it so then you’re probably going to be disappointed.  But that is neither here nor there.  You wanting to have a conversation with George because his wedding to the woman he loves made you feel bad is an incredibly self-centered move.  You’re basically asking “How can I make one of the most important days of my friend’s life about how it hurt me?”  Actually, you know what, you’re not “basically” asking that.  That is what you’re asking.  You should totally ask him that verbatim.

No.  Don’t do that.

Ignore Prudie.  There is about zero approaches you can approach this issue in a way that is not an attack on George and Alice.  

[secretsfromwholecloth]

So. *cracks knuckles* I just got finished playing Pillars of Eternity for the first time this morning. I have opinions. They’re under the cut.

The map and pausing functionalities and the “just click on who you want this character to attack and we’ll handle the rest” combat brought the gameplay closer to what I’m used to from roguelikes (extremely low-res so you can see a huge amount of the area on the screen at once, turn-based gameplay that doesn’t require you to react quickly or aim well) and made the game actually playable for me, and I wish they were, if not standard-issue, then a lot more common. I hadn’t played a definable ~video game~ since I was about eight, as much because of gameplay that’s Not For Me as because of bad memories attached to them, and that might not have been the case had I had things like this available to me before.

The setting is fun and intriguing, though I’m still sorting through my feelings about its handling of religion (which has a certain tinge of “we wanted the color and variety of a polytheistic pantheon without having to consider actual polytheism”). I’ll be happy to continue spending time in Eora as I play through Deadfire and whatever future games there are in the series. (PoE III: Yezuha, anyone?)

I’ll take the opportunity to experience something different on future playthroughs, but I really do like my Old Vailian moon godlike artist cipher. I started thinking about Clelia’s personality when @bloodilymerry mentioned that her Watcher was keeping Durance around to keep an eye on him—what would my Watcher’s reasoning be? Because that is something that needs explaining; that guy’s a douche. So I thought, I know, I’ll base her on my twenty-something self who thought someone with misogynistic and white supremacist tendencies could be turned if I was only nice enough to him. That eventually turned into her acquiring my gender (some shifting combination of woman and agender, as befits a Vailian godlike), ancestry (or the Eoran equivalent, Old Vailian mother and alternately overbearing and neglectful Ixamitec father), early-twenties relationship situation (see below), and more besides, as I used the character and her interactions with others to basically relitigate my twenties. (I won’t say the entire decade was a blank loss, but I won’t not say it, either; this process has been quite healing, in its way.)

Where, where, is my option to hug my companions? Or various other characters, like Adaryc? They all need so many hugs. I shouldn’t have to headcanon all the hugs. This isn’t right.

Speaking of the companions:

Aloth: I loved elves when I was active in Tolkien fandom (though I was always Team Aragorn as far as that went). Intellectually, I’m well aware that he’s an adorable woobie who needs lots of hugs. “Abuse survivor falls in with a religious group led by not-great people to get away and then has to escape again from their saviors”? Relatable, I know some of those feels all too well. A romance that explicitly breaks free from the relationship escalator and rejects the weight of societal expectations of what A Romance(tm) should be? It’s like they read my mind. My real-life sexual history is full of Aloths, sad little cuties who needed me, and in my day I befriended more of them besides. I love his VA and think he did a great job. So why did I take until the endgame to start warming to the character? I have no idea. I’m still sorting through that.

Edér: Oh, Edér, why won’t they let me hug you? So in case you can’t tell, I love the big man to death, and his usefulness in combat (he’s nearly indestructible when fully leveled and given well-chosen, nicely-enchanted gear—he took down Concelhaut by himself, with a little help from figurines, after the rest of the party was knocked out) is only part of the reason he never left my party. I went for the mayor ending with him, because encouraging his god-bothering tendencies just seems cruel in light of what’s going to happen in five years. (Side note: “Eder”, accented on the first syllable, is a Basque name meaning “handsome”, and it was one of the proposed names for a character from Forbears who’s also a traumatized war woobie. I eyebrowed mightily when I first heard about our man here.)

As much as I ship Edér/Watcher on general principles, he and Clelia aren’t actually that compatible as a romantic couple per se—we see in a few places that he likes his women less sweet and more fiery, probably because at least part of him sees himself as a big, dumb brute who’s slow to catch onto people’s signals and at risk for hurting women without realizing it if they don’t make their opinions known by getting in his face and yelling. I have a couple of levels of headcanons for what their relationship is like:

If we’re hewing fairly closely to game canon, he loves her to pieces, and her flashes of ferocious protectiveness are kind of hot, but she mostly trips his “tiny baby, must protect” circuits, and it’s a relief to watch her get better and grow into someone who needs less babysitting. She’ll be romancing Tekēhu in Deadfire; he’s happy for them, and her continued fangirling over Edér is background noise at this point, not even really awkward anymore.

If I allow my headcanons to take flight a bit, both of them being lonely, touch-starved, and kind of messed up when they met led to him indulging her when she would want to paw at him at night, because hey, it’s actually kind of nice, especially compared to the loneliness of before, and by time they fight Thaos, they’re having “friends doing a nice thing for each other” sex on the regular but know a Proper Romance isn’t in the cards. Over the course of Deadfire, she gets into a triad with Rekke and Tekēhu, with Edér back in his old role as the beloved friend she sleeps with sometimes, and before anyone says anything, “AFAB person with two boyfriends and another male friend who takes the occasional turn in hir bed” is a spot-on description of my relationship situation from ages 19 to 22, right down to the friend being older than the others and a huge stoner. He wasn’t nearly as good a person as Edér, though.

Obsidian have priors, you know. Just ask Star Wars fandom about Bao-Dur. Let us romance the war woobies, Obsidian.

Kana: Another one who never left the party, due in equal amounts to his usefulness on the battlefield and my emotional attachment to him. I demand the option to throw my arms around his waist and smoosh my face into his solar plexus, goddammit. Especially when it turns out that the Engwithans were kind of terrible and the ironclad evidence of Rauatai’s link to them is destroyed and it breaks his poor heart.

Kana, at first, didn’t resonate with me as an immigrant’s child, in part because his second-generation experience was very different from mine, with parents who viewed their heritage as something to protect him from, rather than enthusiastically passing it down like mine did. But by the late game, I’d come to a new understanding of what his deal was: He was raised with no connection to his parents’ heritage besides them telling him a few “pirate stories”. But in Rauatai, he was physically different and subject to racism, and no amount of loud, enthusiastic patriotism ever quite made that go away, which meant that his parents’ choice to not give him anything else to cling to, rather than smoothing his path to integration, left him feeling alone and adrift. So he latched onto ancient times for that sense of having a place in history, and specifically the Engwithans, viewed as “everyone’s ancestors” in much the same way as the real world’s Greeks and Romans (after all, the Glanfathans and their direct connection to them wouldn’t have been more than a name to him then). If there was a link between them and something as foundational to Rauatai as the Tanvii ora Toha, and moreover if it was him and his work bringing that knowledge to everyone, then maybe he’d finally be allowed that feeling of continuity and belonging. Maybe he’d finally make sense there.

Durance and Grieving Mother: Apparently they had the same writer. The same male writer. Meaning that this man had the opportunity to add two nuanced, fully explored characters to this fantasy world, and he chose to give us a violent incel and a woman with no thoughts of anything besides babies and motherhood. I’m genuinely quite uncomfortable with this and glad they have no equivalent in Deadfire. I didn’t much appreciate having to keep Durance in the party so much to advance his quest, either, and their one-dimensional characterization and stilted dialogue felt like a poor fit with the rest of the game.

Fuck you, Durance.

Pallegina: I’d hug her, but she might run me through with her sword for trying. I’ll let her come to me when she’s ready for hugs. Her absolute certainty and confidence (only shakable by a sexy aumaua woman flirting with her, apparently) are wonderful to see, but maybe one day she’ll form an identity for herself that isn’t so tied up in the Republics and their government.

Sagani: She’s every working mom who knows she’s doing the right thing but still regrets spending so much time away from her kids, and I love her and want to hug her a lot. Also, Itumaak is cute, but Edér, no, wait until he’s had more than two days to get to know you before you try to pet him!

Hiravias: Go have a bath before I hug you. And yes, the racism you face is terrible, but could you shut the hell up about Pallegina’s cloaca? And keep a lid on the lewd comments in general unless it’s someone you have that kind of relationship with? (It’s absolutely in character for someone that lonely to be both desperate to keep the first friends he’s made in years and inclined to push their boundaries and test them to see if they’ll just abandon him like everyone else. And he does absolutely need some hugs. Still, though, dude, not cute.)

Devil of Caroc: Totally needs a hug, but I’m not sure she’d appreciate me just going up to her and giving her one. We can show we care about each other by making snarky comments instead.

Zahua: Poor, poor Zahua. Needs a bath first, but then so, so many hugs. Tied with Edér for loveliest voice in the game—hey, you two want to banter some more so I can sit here and listen to your voices?

Maneha: Girl, come here so I can hug you. I agonized over whether to have her keep her memory or not; I was thoroughly OK with her forgetting it, but reading over the endings, I think the one where she remembers is nicer. Also, she had some of the cutest banter in my playthrough, both her flirtation with Pallegina and her growing friendship with Kana, but...what’s that accent? Northern Cities? Midwest? It works for her, she sounds adorable, and of course I wouldn’t expect someone with her history to sound exactly like Kana, but I wonder a little what they were going for.

Fuck you, Thaos, you’re the worst. Lady Webb, you had atrocious taste in men.

Fuck you too, Simoc.

Ondra is less nice than she thinks, and I look forward to getting on her nerves in Deadfire.

Speaking of which, let’s get started.

[soulvomit]

80s/90s professional culture and recent self-help/"personal development" culture actually encouraged distancing from people whose lives were "too complicated." Too messy. "Don't associate with that person. They will ruin your life." About anyone who did not have the perfectly curated "I have it together, and am NOT NEEDY" image. Being seen as "together" was probably a proxy for social capital as well as "adulthood."

This probably started with people trying to enter the professional world in the mid-70s and still dealing with half of their social world living the poor young person crash pad lifestyle (because I argue that the cracks in the wall of the middle class may have already been appearing in the 1970s; people appearing to reject the "American Dream" may need to be analyzed as canaries and Cassandras) and the other half being on drugs.

For some people, like my parents, that's what it definitely was about. They had a baby/toddler and eventually they came to see their hippie and old school stoner friends as part of the instability they were experiencing. Some of these people eventually settled into full time jobs, but as of the mid-70s, plenty hadn't.

My parents couldn't live in hippie crash pads anymore. Not with a kid. They were running into too many issues with their equally unstable friends, and their financial situation trapped them in these spaces for years.

They drifted around to whomever would give them guidance - Amway (which had mainstream square culture values), a couple of attempts at religion.

They were typical.

At first this was just about trying to figure out how to live in an adult world still largely run on Silent Generation mainstream values.

For white, culturally middle class to affluent men, this was relatively straightforward: use the college degree or whatever existing skills and social capital you had, to get a traditional job. Male work culture of the 20th century very much assumed a wife was at home handling things. "Leave your personal problems at home" totally assumed someone else was carrying that bucket. It meant in the 70s and 80s as it had in the 50s, that a man's wife was handling all of the personal relationships and interactions that didn't have to do with his workday. His wife would be the stage manager of his non-work life from behind the scenes. That's what it REALLY meant to "leave your personal life at home."

But women were now working full time, middle class corporate jobs, too. And that same mentality was still the rule.

Codependency talk and a new re-embrace of corporate work culture, found their way into the same conversations, much the same way that government conspiracy theories, aliens, and New Age became bedfellows: because they shared the same shelves of the bookstore.

At around this same time you also started to see the growth of codependency ideas and later, a popular book called "Women Who Love Too Much." (A solid book, but needs an intersectional update.) WWLTM became a network of support groups in the 80s (...that helped my mom leave my dad.) But so many of the stories in WWLTM are of 30something women (often, ex-hippie) who had been exploited as the Giving Tree in 60s/70s culture, a specific gendered toxic dynamic.

But you know how we have all seen good memes go bad? Like, cultural appropriation being a solid analysis and real thing, but in the last 5 years, it's devolved into a set of arguments that in no way resemble the original thing? For that matter, remember when MRA culture was specifically about the legal rights of divorced men?

Yeah.

That.

That same thing is what happened to the growing 70s/80s culture of post-hippie "getting it together."

That very same thing.

In 1976, "getting it together" was relatively benign.

But by the 80s, it began to separate the people who'd played at the counterculture lifestyle from the people who had been trapped in it. Not everyone could "get it together." Because deindustrialization was already starting to be underway as the party was ending, and in many cases, because the American Dream simply had not been on offer to begin with.

If your only means of doing so was via a factory job or via even the shrinking number of nondegreed female-dominated non-care/nonservice jobs (how many career secretaries do you know now?) then you had way fewer options than did someone who could enter the computer field or become a professional. And fewer options than did someone who could fall back on fields that got to be the last dominos to fall (pro sales people could shift from industrial to tech or real estate), instead of the first.

What's happened is that the ONLY visible middle class narratives of the mid 70s and beyond, until the 21st, were yuppies. Everyone else was deplatformed.

The "getting it together" meme came to be a proxy for your very fitness as a human being. It now included a backlash against the sharing and mutual aid culture of counterculture spaces, because many white, middle class Boomers didn't really know how to navigate the social world outside of the Hayea Code curated world of their suburban childhood. They were the first generation to try to figure out how that worked, and many failed. They were navigating drastic changes in social norms. It became a commonly repeated meme that your problem was the people in your life. (Because it often was. But this went the way many culture memes do.) Fuck em, focus on your job and only the people who support your getting it together. But the milepost kept getting shifted. "Getting it together" in the early to mid 70s might mean just getting a job and a stable place to live. That's how it started for my parents. As of the mid 1970s, it started to become apparent to a lot of people that holding a corporate job and raising a school age child were both often totally incompatible with having your burnout friends stay up until 2am playing folk music (this was a real thing my family did before my dad got a middle class job) on a weekday, let alone traipse a variety of lost souls through your living room on any given day of the week.

But the mileposts for "getting it together" kept changing up (just as "getting it together" of the 70s turned into "early yuppie" of the 80s) and probably because corporate standards were always about curation and appearances, "getting it together" came to mean that you did NOT have a hippie crashing on your couch, you did NOT have complicated personal life in *any way*, you did NOT socialize in a space where everyone openly slept with the same people or had complicated breakups, you did NOT ever have complicated caregiving arrangements... basically, either you were heterosexually married or you were a very, very cool-as-a-cucumber, self-contained single who never, ever felt heartbreak.

This is the sociopathic core of yuppie culture.

My analysis will hit the 90s at some point, but we wouldn't have had the 90s without the 70s and 80s.

I'm sure lots of the Divorce Boom of the 80s followed on 70s people marrying for all the wrong reasons, because they were trying to "get it together." And sometimes "getting it together" meant different things to the two people.

My dad became an early techie and stayed relatively close to left wing and liberal culture. After he and my mom split up, he married the hippie of his dreams. And he made good incomes off and on, but also struggled off and on and retired in a trailer; he *would* have been much more successful if indeed he had played the yuppie social games, because he willingly took on dependencies that yuppies shunned. There was a strong meme in yuppie culture, fueled by codependency discourse and a warping of Women Who Love Too Much but also "positivity," of not ever helping people, of not being close to people who could potentially financially rely on you or take time away from your work. "They've all made their own bed."

If my dad had followed that lead - he might have become stable, he might even have become rich. But he married a precariat class ex-hippie who had multiple poor dependents, and formed some "found family" around their mutual friendships. And as the person in the group with the most money, he was often relied upon for help.

That's exactly what late-stage Getting It Together non-neediness discourse was supposed to prevent.

For my mom, "getting it together" meant doubling down on respectability politics and traditionalism, putting herself in rich circles, and marrying a professional man with square values. She scrupulously avoided anyone who could "take her down with them." Which is good advice in many cases but in yuppie parlance, effectively meant distancing from any person who was not in your aspirational social class, and distancing from any person in any situation you have left behind (she dumped her single friends once remarried, as instructed by this culture meme.)

The difference between the outcomes for my mom and dad:

My dad lives in a trailer with his wife and their cats, but he has a huge extended family of family and found-family. Lots of people care about him. He's not going to have the problem of being alone in old age.

My mom really does risk being alone in old age because her whole social world was oriented around social capital pissing contests and that only works as long as you actually have the money to purchase a substitute support net.

[empty-dream]

Me watching Fate/Apocrypha ep 13

With that piano intro, it feels like there is a narration saying “Once upon a time, in an ancient babylonian flying fortress”

If there is any book with that intro I’d read the shit out of it

Sieg be like “I’ve seen too many shit I should apply to become the new wonder of the world”

Sieg: “I’m sorry I was reckless” Astolfo: “bOI THAT WAS NOT RECKLESS THAT WAS STUPID AS FUCK AND THAT’S ME SAYING” Sieg: “But I have a wish I wanna save my friends in the middle of war” Astolfo: “oKAY COOL ME PROUD”

Shit the loony witch shows up

I made an entire post consisting of me contemplating the new op and ed bc it’s long and full of thought HAHA jk it’s shit

Hi kids welcome to the church in the fortress 2 weeks ago the cinnamon and the sinnamon met each other

Shirou: “We’re catholics, we should understand each other.” Jeanne: “Dude, just because I have the same religion as you, as 1.1 billion other people do btw, doesn’t mean I agree to everything you do, especially if it involves stealing most magical thing ever and smiling sinisterly.”

Wow Shirou raises his voice that’s 5* rarity

Shirou: “I didn’t have my master die in my arms, wait 60 years, and manage this dangerous team of nukes all by myself for being defied by a 16 yo rapunzel hourglass saberface”

Jeanne: “Goddamnit you’re a HEROic spirit be a HERO for once!” Shirou: “Nah, I’m outta the club I can do whatever I want.”

Semiramis: “Are you saying my master breaks the rule?” Jeanne: “Are you teasing me with that question or are you just deaf and stupid?”

Semiramis be like “What? You think me, a beautiful poisoner queen who murdered my husband slyly and got into his throne, as the one capable of corrupting an innocent-looking yu-gi-oh-haired young man like my master? I’m offended.”

Guys you’re late to Vlad’s funeral

Shirou: “It’s all peaceful, no fighting whatsoever with your masters.” The AKA team: “BULLSHIT.” Shirou: “But hey it was really no fighting!”

Get you a wife like Semiramis- No wait, don’t make her your wife just make her fall hard for you she wishes she was your wife

Karna’s level-headedness is truly something, I must say

Shirou: “Thank you very much” Karna: “Not now, bitch”

I still find it funny that Karna seems like the first one in AKA team to be fine with Shirou as his master but in the end he’s the only one who never accepts Shirou. My boy.

Shirou: “All of you, become my bitches now.”

Celenike have you learned nothing from Gordes’s experience?!

Wow scratching head until it bleeds is actually one of things I consider creepy and disturbing

But why does it sound like she’s breaking her skull instead of scratching and if she indeeds breaks her skull why is she alive?

You don’t wanna dirty your hands killing Sieg? Bitch you hold human entrails with the same hands might as well cut your hands right now

Astolfo: “There’s no point in me killing Sieg!” Celenike: “There is! I’m horny now!”

Too late, her brain moves to between her legs now.

Sieg’s fate is to be stomped by masters of Yggdmillenia

Grossest slasher movie idea: Celenike is jealous towards Sieg because Astolfo emotes so much around him instead of when she tortures Astolfo so she decides to stomp Sieg and force Astolfo to kill him while she gets hot watching it.

Wow that’s a very ugly face of dying. I’d make the same face as Sieg too.

I CAN HEAR THE CHEER OF PEOPLE FOR MORDRED AT THIS VERY MOMENT

It’s like Kairi and Mordred just drive around and happen to see the nasty quarrel and be like “well that’s one cockroach to kill” so they stop to behead Celenike and then goes off again.

I think servant disappearing into light is engineered to be as slow as it can to give them time to speak dramatic last words huh?

Astolfo: “I don’t wanna drag you into this war.” Sieg: “I already dove head-first to save my friends so technically I’m already in this war too”

HAHA WORLD RECORD OF SERVANT TRYING TO KILL THE MASTER Sieg you’re beginning to become a funny man

I don’t know if Achilles clicks his tongue because Chiron rejects Shirou’s offer to join red faction or Semiramis belittles Chiron but either way he really cares for his teacher :’))

Semiramis: “How about you remember you’re in my home?” Chiron: “How about you remember I can bomb your home?”

Remember 2 weeks ago when I said there are only two sane men on board? That’s excluding the attacked-by-headache red servants, but now you get why I say that.

Shirou: “Jeanne I don’t really wanna kill you actually” Jeanne: “Asshat your face looks like you really wanna kill me slowly”

Wow I don’t expect them to actually detail Karna’s gesture

Mordred, making the most grandiose entrance ever.

I was thinking, why would Mordred charge into an enemy fortress without her armor, like maybe she would but her master would not. So I just conclude maybe A-1 can’t afford to animate her armors ._.

Semiramis: “You wanna betray us?” Mordred: “You tried to betray us first!” Semiramis: “I will behead you, traitor!” Mordred: “First, it’s you  it’s you who is the traitor here. Second I beheaded someone on the way and I’m not shy to do it again!!”

Mordred vs Semiramis is kinda like a battle between parent and child with lots of foul languages

Seriously Mordred is the hero of this episode and her trashtalking doesn’t disappoint at all

Like I said, I’m surprised Karna’s gesture is detailed because it’s clear he realizes first hand than Mordred is coming and actually wants her to clear the mess and help Jeanne and Chiron escape and he doesn’t do anything to stop them and he smiles in satisfaction when it’s all done. Like, my boy. My dear boy.

Semiramis: “You think you can do something? Everything you can do, I can do it too!” Avicebron: “Well I do battles too, unlike your shit caster” Shirou: “He’s got a point, hon.”

A saberface stood in the middle of dead people on a war. Great, wanna bet Fate/Extra will have umu do the same thing too?

The wish of salvation is never wrong. The method you try to achieve it, however, often falls into the nope scale.

Wow I also didn’t expect they would include the crushed homunculus in this scene too.

When even Fiore tells you to shut up then you need to evaluate your life

I wanna laugh because Sieg is nonchalantly running into the room like he’s late for class but can’t give a shit to the professor in front of him

Ah I see, A-1 make a huge change in this scene.

Gordes: “Y-YOU!” Sieg: “Surprises bitch I bet you thought you had seen the last of me”

People die when they are killed is so last year, Gordes.

Sieg: “Guess who just became a new master?” Black faction: “No way!” Sieg: “That’s right! It’s me!”

Caules close up is always welcome, babe.

Astolfo is also nonchalantly late into the class and only bothered about how to pose.

Leader!Homunculus: “You keep surprising us” Sieg: “I died twice already and the surprise will just keep on coming, mate.”

Nice speech Sieg!! Cementing the fact that he is the anti-thesis of Shirou and that he is the main protagonist, in case anybody forgets.

Also it kickstarts Fiore’s existential crisis but hey that’s for another episodes okay.

Caules did you just tell Gordes to count to ten??? You. You are fucking perfect my darling.

Chiron: “Master, Caster betrays us. And he’s going to get Roche.” Fiore: “Wait that’s too many news for 2 minutes.”

I guess no matter how much of a genius you are, if you’re young and a shut-in you will always remain naive.

Originally in the novel, if I am correct, this scene is where Gordes shitting around and treats Sieg as Siegfried. Astolfo full-on roasts Gordes and pours salt on his wounds, and also makes jabs about the stolen grail. Fiore is suspicious that Astolfo might be the one killing Celenike, which is actually normal thing to do, but he might or might not even notice that. Caules honestly agrees that the homunculi’s lifespan won’t allow them to do everything they want, which is cold, but in line with the fact that he’s, at his core, blunt. I guess A-1 decides to change it so that Sieg has time to deliver the speech?

Well it’s a shame Astolfo roasting is skipped tho. But I think I like the speech. If that’s how they try to make Sieg likable (I heard he’s not very likable back before this adaptation?), I think it works with me.

NEXT: Servanger 2.0

[sramister]

Yeeeeeeeeeeee so like. I gotta a pretty small group of people I chill with. and like theyre all dudes. and theyre all so FUCKIN DUMB sometimes. Like im sorry but dude... why are boys so fuckin dumb lmao. fuckin they all always gotta be so manly its a n n o y i n g. Jokingly called one gay because he was eating nuts, dude he started going o f f "I get more pussy than any of you in the fucking chat" (Probably cause im straight and the other dude is a virgin bc religion? also boy you havent been laid in months fuck outta here) "I would fucking kill any gay guy that started hitting on me" (Dont worry bud you're not that attractive. & also youre the reason people hate straights lmfao what the actual fuck you aint gotta be so violent) it was w i l d. So fragile. I can't deal with it its so funny. and if I call them out on it their like "no im very confident in my sexuality." ya oke bud. s u r e. Literally never once have I gotten angry when people thought I was lesbian? Legit just gotta be like "oh haha nah sorry, u cute tho." AND OMFG THIS IS MY FAVORITE. theyre all younger than me by a year, but they all try to act older and dad-like. they thing theyre so wise, always sending stupid ass motivational quotes that stay at home mom Karen would share on fb with a picture of minions. I told them their advice was dumb and meaningless and they got so mad. legit I said "Youre copy and pasting proverbs and mark twain quotes into the chat and they dont mean anything" so they tried to be like "god youre so negative. wtf" an im just like "ye sure bud. but what if, I just straight up know shit aint always magic and rainbows bc ive been raise in shitty situations. like sorry I didnt get to be raised by two parents who both make six figures and can give me everything ive ever wanted asap." THEY GOT MAD ASF. "Youre only a year older than us. stop acting like you know everything youre not so wise yourself." like ye son I know. thats why I dont ask people my age for legit advice. bc we're all fucking dumb. dont know s h i t. and then they were like yea sure okay whatever. N ya know, theyre too manly. they cant be wrong. so thats how shit ends. "yea sure whatever" later that day I made another joke about one of them being a hick bc thats our joke and he got mad and so I sent "Yall so easy to instigate wtf I aint even gotta try with yall." dude tries to analyze me and fuckin fails. "I think you try and instigate us to keep us from attacking you and focusing on your problems." so i sent "ya sure. you can think that but youd be wrong lmao" (Cause 1. I know my problems and I actually work to fix my shit, so I have few issues atm. 2. they dont let me talk when we're in person. straight up they can ask me something like "what happened to your mom" and Ill start to answer, and they cut me off.) OKAY AND THEN EVEN LATER THAT NIGHT SHIT STARTED OVER ME BUYING A RICE COOKER. DUDE SAID ONLY ASIANS LIKE RICE AND IM LIKE YA OKAY SURE LETS FORGET ABOUT ALL THE OTHER CULTURES THAT LIKE RICE TOO. WE LEGIT WERE EATIN SPANISH RICE THE DAY BEFORE LMAO. So like dude sent some shit like "I only like american shit" and I go "You like very little bc not a lot of american lmao." and somehow that made him go straight to beer. So for 15 minutes we argued about beer. He didn't understand that beer is not american. he kept saying "budweiser is american beer." Like ye ur right, but that doesnt make all of beer American. "We have our own brewing methods, so its american." "okay but like. that doesnt make beer american? it just means weve found another way to make it?" "all beer would taste the same if americans didnt make new things" MY DUDE ITS CALLED A RECIPE LMAO. HE COULDNT UNDERSTAND. THAT FUCKIN JUST BECAUSE WE HAVE OUR OWN METHODS AND RECIPES DOESNT MEAN BEER IS AMERICAN. YEA WE GOT AMERICAN BEER. BUT THAT DOESNT MAKE BEER AMERICAN. BEER HAS BEEN ALONG WELL BEFORE AMERICA. DUDE WAS KILLING ME. and omg I need to make a sep post about the arguement about what is and isnt american even though the shits legit written down lmao. that was i n t e n s e. Home boy left the group chat. sent me a bunch of bs "insults". oh god it was f u n n y a f. stay tuned

[almarchive]

     hello, its nora bringing yet another problematic character. this is a spoiled daddy’s bitch, raised in a farmhouse in vermont, who’s never really had to work for anything in her life and doesn’t want to. studying class civ cos she thinks it makes her sound smart, but actually hates fuckin latin and just loves learning about feckless hedonism and the festivals of bacchus. was expelled from princeton in her first year so her parents basically paid her way into lockwood. loves the smell of libraries and listening to french music from a tinny record player in knee socks. has a twin brother called otto who is basically guy bellingfield from the riot club and tbh knowing my lack of self control i‘ll probs end up bringing him here too.

bio is below the cut, like this post to be bombarded with plotting messages x

it might be HER SOPHOMORE year but I still think ALMA OLIVE PUTNAM looks exactly like ALICE PAGANI and sometimes I think the FEMALE is actually them. Of course I’m wrong, as they’re 20 and studying CLASSICAL CIVILISATION while living in AUDAX here at Lockwood. The TAURUS can be rather TENACIOUS and MAGNETIC, but also kind of FANCIFUL and DOUBLE-CROSSING. Their most played song on Spotify was LAISSE TOMBER LES FILLES by FRANCE GALL, so I think that says a lot.

THE SHORT FORM.

—  born in vermont in a big old farmhouse. her great-great-grandfather moved to america as an immagrant and worked on a plantation, made his wa up cos he could speak a lot of languages and therefore win more people over. for the last two generations, putnam men have owned the farm and do little of the dirty work. big in the meat industry.

— both her parents had Large Personalities, so alma’s never really been shy around adults, even as a kid she’d speak to them in a forthright, confident manner, and because she was always surrounded by adults, she’s always seemed a bit Wise Beyond Her Years. — very much a consolidation of every character in the secret history. has a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. obsessed with w.h. auden and the beat poets. — ”aestheticism is the only thing worth pursuing and even that is pointless” — is majoring in classical civilisation. can read ancient greek and latin. also speaks french. — studies hard and plays hard. she gets top marks but it’s because academia is literally her life, she loves the smell of libraries, the ancient smoke of learning, of feeling like old wine in a new bottle reincarnated from the bones of some old, dead witchy woman who invented a cure for cowpox or somethin. — isn’t a foward-planner, however. frida prefers to leave her options open, play the field, live in a spontaneous manner so her study style is mostly cramming a few days before a test, or staying up all night writing an essay on a massive adrenaline boost powered by red bull or probably adderall, scribbling (or typing) furiously into the night. — pretentious motherfucker. LOVES poetry, especially the romantics, loves morbid ones too, edgar allen poe, sylvia plath, allen ginsberg, she just loves them all. can’t get enough. her favourite films are like…. wanky artfilm independent european cinema. especially french new wave. “what do you think of goddard’s work??” while snorting a line off someone’s sink at 5am on a school night, but you can bet she’ll make it to that 9am class. — very Intelligent and Beautiful and knows both of those facts. vocal feminist. soapbox sadie. Very Passionate about Issues. plays devil’s advocate. humanitarian, vegan. — judgemental but takes great care not to appear so. — just wants to be Loved By All. a party girl ; doesn’t rlly enjoy it, jst feels she Should enjoy it. — tries to be an Enigma. wants to be mysterious and unreadable because that’s what books have taught her makes women Desirable and Interesting and Cool. — obsessively devours mystery and thriller novels. she herself is a gillian flynn book waiting to happen. — act like the flower but be the serpent under it. is a user. manipulative. leads people on. will throw another student under the bus to demonstrate her own intelligence and integrity — heavily involved in the theatre society. loves attention. — has an addictive personality. seems unable to do anything in a small dose, she has to let it utterly consume her. with sports, she’s fiercely competitive, runs track, played lacrosse at school, now is a cheerleader probably. with alcohol, it’s never a shot, it’s a whole bottle – wine or whiskey – she’ll be table dancing before the night’s up and making out with someone she’ll regret in the morning. — her clothing style is like…. vintage thrift store but make it preppy. berets and cute hats, neck scarves, large fluffy cardigans or like those leathery jackets with big suede fringes on them, mini skirts (very 70s), and knee high socks or boots. quite often she’ll be in sports kit, maybe a cute tennis skirt, n when she’s feeling casual she’ll wear like, a talking heads tshirt with a pair of mom jeans and converse, but otherwise, the library is her catwalk. — relates to ophelia from hamlet and sibyl vane in dorian gray. weirdly obsessed with women who commit suicide. loves jackson pollock paintings and abstract art. – likes old things. old books, old music, old houses, it reminds her of happier times like when she wasn’t alive. buys all her music on vinyl and has a gramphone because “The Sound quality is Better” kfdsjj.

PLOTS.

here are some generic wanted plots but by all means message me so we can flesh them out more if any strike ur interest:

study buddies !! someone who is equally unprepared and so spends all night in the library with alma before a big deadline, maybe they even met in the library

if they’re from new england or vermont, then cousins . second cousins / extended family / family friends –  probably spat volavons on your character once as children, omg childhood friends !

people who live on the same floor and only know each other from brief interactions in the lift or the canteen

frinds !! unlikely friends !! toxic friends !! former best friends separated by sporting or academic rivalries !

hockey / cheer friends who are on other teams but who she absolutely loves playin against!!!

fellow academics who like meeting up to discuss latin and greek ! gimme a secret society bonding by their love of ancient learning

i reckon she’s in a lot of societies, definitely the film club, maybe works as a projectionist at the uni cinema if they have one so give me ppl affiliated with that, give me fellow wanky pretentious art-lovers and poets and historians who will go to museums and galleries with her and listen to the velvet underground on vinyl

people she gets mortally fucked off her tits with at parties

people who think she is throwing her academic potential away by caving to hedonistic impulse

people she has drunkenly made out with, hooked up with, or regularly sleeps with casually, maybe even a friend w benefits she is repressing feelings for, i love angst,

people she used to date or unrequitedly likes, but to them it’s just a physical thing, give me all the thirsty angst plots, and maybe some softness too, i need some religion in this girls life, she is a roman catholic after all

FULL BIOGRAPHY.

alma olive putnam.

intro.

            The girl is a knife. Razor-sharp, double-edged, the bright shine of a two-faced, lovely thing. Silver like the secrets you magpie thief from other heads. You’re a scavenger of knowledge, of tidbits, of gossip to lock away for later use and late-night re-inspection. A mind is like a clock if you get to learn the pieces. Bit by bit, you dismantle the inner workings of the brains that tick around you – how easy it is to change it’s path, how words and their meanings can make a person laugh or cry in an instant. To have the power to control that is to be a God. It’s the power trip you crave wielding pom-poms in your hands; a possessive need for control that a younger you, small and weak, never had as a child. Small lips, smaller smile, a doll clutched in your too-hungry fingers, hard enough to shatter the bones of a real infant. You cut your hair with your mother’s kitchen scissors before the autumn falls, rendering you out of season, unfit for the cold weather that beats against the nape of your neck, where a stick-and-poke marks the star you were born under ; the bull. “Mama, when will I be a Queen?” As soon as they find a crown small enough not to slip from your head.

biography.

            If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Hands red, stained by pomegranate seeds, the empty pulp of its shell splattered on your thighs you find yourself wondering – what would it be like to want? In the beginning, you never knew hunger. Twins, born under the same star, you first, him second -- a nuclear family. Never a sister to compete with, you were always the cherry pie of your parents’ hearts. Raven-haired, blue-eyed, beautiful baby of mine. The townhouse in Vermont and the summer house in Lyon, you wanted for nought, showered with attention, saddled with gifts - hardly a wonder you came to rely on such affection as a confirmation of your own worth.

            At eight years old you first met death, blood on a gingham-print dress, a smear of it over your cheekbone and the pulp of a mangled animal at your feet murdered by the hands of a stable boy. “Alma, my precious baby, you get away from that filth,” your Mama would cry from the upstairs balcony – cigar in one hand and a bloody Mary in the other – though whether the filth she referred to was the dead pig or the boy with a kernel of corn in his mouth, you never did find out.

            Your family earned their keeps in farming, great-grandfather Wolfgang Hildegarde a German immigrant, great-grandmother Maura Lisbon a prairie girl. They fell hopelessly in love between troughs and pig-shit, working for three dollars a day at a farm their descendants would later own, trade deals with the Indians, vacations to Calcutta, your father Todd Putnam in the kind of sheepskin coat his father’s father could only dream of owning. He worked hard so that you’d never have to. Your mama once asked – you heard it through the window, rounding cartwheels across the picket-fenced lawn – could he not find a respectable career rather than selling shrink-wrapped pork for a dime a dozen? That blood money had no business raising a child. You look far back enough, Edie, your father had said in his low, strong voice that could bring a Civil War to silence, and I think you’ll find that all money is blood money.

            Language was never fickle on your tongue, French dinner time talk by the time you were out of your Hush Puppy shoes, your mama fixing the au pair a smile as she fixed herself another martini. You learned the clarinet at four and how to dance with the grace of a swansong at six, ethereal under a spotlight, an audience captive in the palm of your hand. By eight you knew that you’d always been destined to be loved. Loved so hard they would want to taste you, bite into the soft plump of your cheek and eat you alive. That was how magnetic you wanted to feel. But mother hamsters eat their own young when penned in together too long, and soon you became too wild, too restless, another package on your father’s delivery invoice, box-shipped out to English boarding school.

            Fitting in had never been something you had to concern yourself with. You were always the shiny new toy the other girls wanted to play with, bright like a dropped coin from a magpie’s beak. Wherever you went, you seemed to leave a trail of awe, pig-tailed Harriet’s adoring you, imitating you, teachers forgiving your class-time chatter for the sake of your wild heart and the restless spirit you possessed. Tell us what it’s like in the States, Alma. They’d coo, enamoured by your Hollywood drawl. Does your father own a gun? You hardly knew. Barely even knew the colour of his hair, for the scarce amount of times he’d stoop to kiss your cheek, though you’d tell silver-tongued tales if it’d guaranteed you an audience. When you learned how to smile at the right times, and that flattery would get you everywhere, it soon became apparent that charm would pave the yellow brick road to success even when your lack of drive couldn’t.

            The road you followed – gum-snapping, roller-blading, friendship bands all up your arm – eventually led you to small-town fame. Bright-eyed and gingham skirted, you’d always known you were more. There was a hunger in you to be something extraordinary, a want so adamant to be imagined and desired that it was almost savage. In leather-bound volumes and a circle of stones, you were Helen of Troy, the girl for whom they’d launch a thousand ships. But there’s so much rage within you, collecting like sawdust in cavernous parts. Hockey helped. There was something grounding about the feeling of a stick clasped in your hands. Sweat. Stiff knuckles. Feet pounding the earth. The smash of wood against flesh in the scram of a game, passed off as mere enthusiasm. “Slipped, sorry.” Hockey is the one thing you had that was yours alone – a feral instinct that motivates you to play; something primitive within you that sparks an energy like no other. On the pitch, you feel alive.

[robotslenderman]

MOAR ME Turian Headcanon

(More of my headcanon -- baby turians, Citadel relay statue and Keeper “religion”, what it’s like for a turian to romance a human)

Moar turian headcanon, based on turian languages and bonding. It’s loooooong, so I cut it. I come up with so much worldbuilding headcanon all the time but uh, I never realised just how much until I wrote all this out and saw how long it was. Oops.

Turians are shorter than most aliens up until puberty, which starts at around 9/10 years of age when they’re about 4 feet high, at which point they skyrocket. By the time they’re the age of majority, at 15 years old, they’re as tall as mature adult humans.

Turian vocal chords also don’t develop until puberty. Until then, they communicate with whistles, purrs, growls, rumbles, etc -- a language sophisticated enough that adult turians can understand them, but too basic and context-reliant for universal translators. Aside from that, it’s basically seen as its own language -- there’s a sound for “sir”, a sound for “fuck you”, a sound for “hungry pls feed me”, a sound for “I’m hurt”, etc.

It’s considered a private, home-language -- much like how someone living in Australia might speak English in public but then switch to their native language at home, turians never use this language in public but will use it at home (in addition to their native, spoken tongue) around immediate family, close extended relatives, mates and very, very close friends. It’s considered too intimate to use around anyone else. They’ll use it at home to supplement their spoken language -- in combination, not in an either/or fashion. It’s almost always the language a turian uses to say “I love you”, which can confuse lovers of other species at first.

There are, however, exceptions. Adult turians will use this language with any child, no matter who’s watching, so long as the child is “young enough”. Adult turians might also use it to soothe spooked animals, or incredibly shaken crime/disaster victims. C-Sec officers and hospital staff tend to use it a lot in their line of work.

The “child language” is region-dependent -- much like any other language, different sounds mean different things depending on where a turian grew up. But because of the limited “vocabulary” and how context-dependent a sound is, a kid can generally understand someone who speaks another “child language” pretty quickly, and adults can likewise pick up a kid’s native language and adapt to it.

Who adapts to whom depends on rank -- if a child turian is speaking to, say, the Primarch, the child will adapt to the Primarch’s child tongue as a sign of respect. If a C-Sec officer is trying to soothe a shaken child, the officer will adapt their language to the child’s. If two foreigners raise a child in a new region and the child goes to school and winds up picking up a new child language, the kid will end up using two different child languages and won’t have a problem switching between the two.

Children learn the “child language” from their parents. Adult turians communicate with newborns and toddlers exclusively in this language (which is how children learn it to begin with), but as children get to around four years old, adults start combining the child tongue with their adult tongue. By then the children have already begun to learn the adult tongue simply through watching and listening to their parents, but won’t be able to learn to speak it until puberty.

Child turians learn to read and write long before they are able to physically speak, and tend to use this method of communicating in classrooms (eg, to communicate the right answer during a verbal quiz, which is more common in an alien/Citadel school than a turian one). It can be very disorienting for aliens to be IM’d by a squeaky growly turian kid.

Much like adults do with their mates, teenaged turians still learning to use their vocal chords will use the child tongue in combination with the spoken tongue with other kids and close teachers, but will make a great effort to use only the adult tongue with adults and teachers they don’t know well. It can be difficult at first, but adults in most regions are very, very patient with letting the young take their time learning to make the new sounds, and while it’s totally fine to coach the young through making new sounds, it’s taboo to rush them or show any signs of impatience.

Turians mate for life (metaphorically speaking). Unlike humans, who tend to be serial monogamists or even poly, turians fall in love only once. They can crush on just about anyone before they are “mated” (meaning, fallen in love, not literally had sex), but once they’re attached to someone enough and cross the threshold, that’s it. It’s considered a sign of very bad character if a turian doesn’t alert someone to their growing feelings before they cross the threshold.

While it doesn’t excuse his dickery, this is the biggest reason why Septimus Oraka was totally fucked up by how his relationship with Sha’ira turned out. Most turians would roll their eyes because you shouldn’t have gotten attached to her, she’s the Consort, you should have known better and would also sneer at him for how he reacted to it -- but they’d also sympathise, because ouch.

In cross-species relationships, this was rarely a problem before humans came onto the scene -- asari are widely educated in other species and don’t tend to date as widely as humans do once they hit the “mother” stage and maidens tend to avoid bonding too closely to a turian. Turians rarely bonded with batarians or other non-council species, but it did sometimes happen and trip them up. Turians who bond with salarians often don’t have a problem because the salarians are like “Yeah, cool, lifelong friend!” and the turian either is totally unfazed by not having a sex life or just has casual sex, and the salarian is more like a queerplatonic partner. Quarians tend to be discriminated against by turians enough that bonding with one is rare.

However, when turians started having relationships with humans, being rejected by the one they were mated to became a. Huge. Problem. There’s a reason, aside from good ol’ racism, why turians tell each other “you shouldn’t date humans!” Out of all species turians bond with, human monogamist relationships tend to be the most temporary, and it hurt a lot of turians like a bitch.

Despite turians bonding to a mate only once in their life, they view sex as very separate from love and have no problems with casual sex. Some turians choose to only have sex with their partner once they’re “mated”, but it’s just as common to have casual sex outside of the relationship when they’re separated. Much like how humans have different sexualities, turians have different levels of sexual attraction to people who aren’t their mate -- some turians feel sexual attraction and drive exclusively with their mate, some turians only feel sexual attraction to others when their mate isn’t around, some turians continue to feel sexual attraction whether they’re with their mate or not. Different turian cultures have different attitudes to these sexualities.

Turians who bond to someone who dies or doesn’t return their feelings aren’t doomed to live life alone and lonely. While it hurts like hell, many turians move on and end up in a queerplatonic relationship with another turian in the same situation. Some turians also end up in a relationship with a turian who’s bonded to them in a one-way bond. 

This partner is often completely aware that their romantic love is unrequited and accept this, because many semi-bonded/widow turians will treat their new partner with the same level of commitment as they would a “real” mate. But much like human relationships with each other, this is a conscious choice -- and a turian who isn’t bonded back with their partner may still end up rejecting them. 

This, however, is viewed with the same taboo that human divorce was. It’s also very controversial in some turian cultures -- some turians believe such unions can never last because it’s not a “real” relationship if only one party is bonded to the other, some turians think it’s totally understandable that the unbonded turian may leave the bonded one. On the other side, some turians think that the unbonded turian must take it as a very serious level of commitment and if they leave it’s a poor reflection on the turian themselves, or even on the turian that bonded to them. Different cultures have different attitudes as being more prominent, whereas some cultures stigmatise the one-way-bonded-partnership entirely unless they publicly claim to be friends.

Some apparent one-way-bonds, however, are totally platonic on both sides as some turians are completely aromantic and have never romantically bonded to someone.

Having said that -- some aromantic turians still bond to another individual in a way that’s very similar to a romantic relationship, but without romantic feelings. The turian feels the same deep sense of attachment and commitment and love, but without the romantic feelings. Some turians are not only aromantic and/or asexual, but also a-bond -- they don’t bond to one individual at all, and prefer to go through life with a group of friends or on their own or some combination. Much like queer sexualities were in human history, turians who were either aro or non-bonding turians were stigmatised hundreds of years ago, however in modern society it’s now commonly accepted.

Turians bunk in hammocks in the military, and use circular nest-shaped beds full of pillows outside of it. Because of their shape, sleeping on human/asari beds are deeply uncomfortable for them. Their cowl gives them back/neck pain if they sleep on their back in such a bed, and their wide hips and shoulders give them neck and lower back pain if they sleep on their side. Sleeping on their stomach is also uncomfortable. In hammocks, turians contort into a certain position to be able to sleep and are able to use the slope of the hammock to rest their heads on their cowl, but it’s not as feasible on a horizontal surface.

A romanced Garrus adapts to sleeping in Shepard’s bed by using a lot of pillows. When he’s in the battery, he sleeps in a hammock.

Turians are somewhere between warm blooded and cold blooded -- their bodies generate heat, but they also get a lot of their heat from Palaven’s hot environment. If they had hotter body temperatures, they wouldn’t be able to cool down enough to survive Palaven’s environment.

Because of this, turians are extremely sensitive to cold.

Turians love snuggling up to humans because humans are like body-sized hot water bottles. Even after the turian’s temperature stabilises, the human is neither too hot nor too cold for the turian.

Lastly -- turians tend to have a pecking order even within families and between them, and use eye contact accordingly. Pecking orders are relative; a family might be considered “above” another, but on an individual level the firstborn kid of the “dominant” family may be considered dominant above a kid in the other family when it’s just the two of them. The “dominant” turian will make eye contact, but the subordinate turian won’t. Turians get very uncomfortable without the framework of a clear pecking order, because they’re used to either being totally in charge or having their hands held. A turian subordinate being treated like a human one -- that is, following orders but expected to be able to take initiative -- would stress a turian out and is signs of an incompetent superior.

Some turians, however, can’t handle the clear-cut rigid binary of turian relationships -- Garrus is one of them, and that makes it difficult for him to get along with other turians. These turians are almost always good leaders, but because they’re not capable of being happy following someone else’s leadership they question, they really struggle to be able to stay inside that framework long enough to get promoted to a position of leadership. Turians like this often handle alien environments better, though not necessarily -- human superiors don’t enjoy being questioned any more than turians do.

Good turian superiors tend to recognise the occasional odd duckling like Garrus, and see their potential. They’ll try to mentor the restless rebel long enough for them to make it into a higher position. This rarely works; most turians that give orders still have to report to someone else at the end of the day. At the end of the day, turians like Garrus have to find their own way, and once they do, they become highly respected by the hierarchy, and by the rebellious youths who are in the same circumstances they once were.

[jammixes-blog]

Zero

Zero is at the center of everything. That's a Good point. However, as a hockey score, like 0 for the Canadiens and 6 for the Maple Leafs. That sucks, as a Canadiens fan. Hockey and sports teach us about loyalty. Even if T.O is my home, i stick to my team. For basketball, the Raps are my team. For football, it can only be the Niners or Raiders. For baseball, the Yankees, since i could see the stadium, from my apartment in the projects, at 164th and Grand Concourse, in the Bronx. They won that year! For soccer, the French team, then, Germany, since i was 4 years old. For tennis, i don't follow anymore. But, for wit, it's definitely Marx, not Karl, but Groucho. What a kool-ass Genius. If didn't have fun with him, he, at least, tripped you out, pretty sure of it. A lot of Geniuses hate to be previsible, they'll do the opposite of what you expect. To show you that your expections have no weight in their life. Expect away, and you shall be deceived. Surrender to God, and you shall be rewarded. Those who have expectations haven't thought thoroughly... Let It Grow. Nothing stays around, Good or Bad. But, the bad feels like an eternity, while the good feels like a snap. The people you love, and who love you, should be your reason to live...as long as you can. I refuse, for people who love me, to sacrife their life, for me. I've made my prayers long time ago, i want to sacrifice myself for them, body, mind, and soul. Otherwise, i wouldn't be able to live with myself. My Pappich, my Mamouné, and my PC, are more important to me, than myself. I would rather be broke, with the people i love, than rich, alone. If i had it, i would trade all the money in the world, for the Health of the people i love. No one you love can ever be replaced, by all the money in the world. If i have to be a monkey, in a circus, to raise money, to save the life of someone i love, i'll do it. Money is just a concept, that's my Craft, i can come up with money, anytime, all i need is a good business partner. But, the life of my loved ones is something i cannot create... It takes a Dad and a Mum to create a little Revolution... Leaving before time is not an option, when it's possible to stick around...at least for people who love you. There is no way i would allow anyone to sacrifice themselves for me. And, if it's a question of money, i want none of it. No one is dying, if they refuse to. You get what you want, in life. If you have to struggle to live, do it. If someone who loves you insists of giving you money to heal, take it. I won't take money that comes from a human being paying it with their life. The way things work is not always we want things to work. This is where God intervenes, in the shape of others. No one can decide anything for me, or in my name, since i am a sane and responsible adult, legal in every way. But, they can treat me to the drink of their choice. I trust my talent, but not my business sense, i am not brilliant or cunning with money. At least, i am conscious of my weakness. It can be fixed, with the right partner or woman. The only place that is priceless is between the arms of a loved one. The secret to love is to love life. The secret to life is to live love. The Heart feels what the Mind doesn't know. Where there's life, there's love. And vice-versa. Love is the Greatest engine of Humankind. The purpose of loving is living. Roses will alway grow. There will always be a Spring, in every Garden. It's natural. Winter never lasts. The Sun always comes back. Canada prepares the soul to the harshest winters, as well as the most Glorious summers. With a Majestic fall, in the middle. The soul is a Fire that can't be estinguished. Love is a lesson in itself. Everybody can talk about love, but very few people practice it. Canada is worth every drop of Maple Syrup it produces. Which is a poor Metaphor for every drop of life Maple Trees Give us. In as much as "The Art of War" is impressive with wisdom, it omits a Major fact: "everything is 99.9% able to be calculated. Always be conscious of the 0.1%. This is what makes of a Master, a Genius. This 0.1% is actually the cornerstone of any speculation. La paix intérieure n'a pas de prix, mais, elle demande des sacrifices et une croyance aveugle en Dieu. To surrender to God is priceless. It transcends colour of skin, religion, sexual orientation, money, or social class. I am proud of who i am. Anyone who has a problem with it should solve that problem, without me. i have no time or energy for evil ego games. My opinion is as important as your opinion. And vice-versa. Unless you are a twat, tweeting metaphors from a night no one wants to see, during the day, in the light, and in the Sun. The Good news is, so far, in this world: you can pretty much do what you want, and be who you want, as long as you are Good to others and respect the Rule of Law. Those who fuck with you, then, are called: Criminals. As long as no one complains to my face, i assume, rationally and sanely, that i am not behaving out of the bounds society defined, in an arbitrary way, or going against the laws. Thus, i am a freeman, to do, think, and feel the way i choose and want. Something i want every human being to feel entitled to. I will only respect the judgement of Judges, appointed in La Hague, or locally, for an objective opinion. And i will only obey my parents, for their subjective love. Magic is performed to see, what we refuse to see. And, Magik is made to feel, what we have a hard time to feel. I suspect John Lennon had contacts with the O.T.O, in New York. I was tempted to join, when i was 24 years-old, in NYC. The lore of Knight Templars is small enough to fit a human Heart, but big enough to flood the whole World. The difference between "Night" and "Knight" is that the former brings Darkness, while, the latter spreads Light. The current US Pestilence and his Vice are Nights of the Ka Ka Kon. Their secret handshake is to poo on each other's face. I have no secrets, for anyone. Out of laziness. I'd rather be honest and spend time and energy with the people i love, or doing what i love, than waste time and energy wasting everyone's time and energy on bullshit. There are no secrets worth holding on to, for the Good people who want Everyone to go forward, happier, and richer, in every way. 1 dot alone can define ALL other 1 dot. It's never too late to be too soon. Let every page you write on be dedicated to God. Then, whatever expectation you have will be exceeded. You'll make sure of that, reading, re-reading, and verifying... To be square and on the level means that you are conscious of having a unique body, mind, and soul...to improve and work with. Then, you have to step up, three times, to be a fully Grown Rose, a Master. If you don't let the Kundalini snake go through your energy centers, then, you have never lived, since you never breathed. The nazis understood the "Vril", discovered, for the West, by a French diplomat, stationed in India. This was their only real weapon. However, the "Vril" was discovered long before, by Templars. The "Vril" is the result of an Alchemical process, within the Initiate. At that point, the Alchemist has no more ego and can feel raw energy, as it is, without getting filtered. Meditation, through any belief system, when performed properly, can harness this energy, in the body, the mind, or the soul. Like nazis stated, it can make the mind perceive an hour as a second. If you meditate enough, it becomes an instinct and a reflex. Suddenly, opening your "3rd eye" takes no effort. Channeling 1's energies enables 1 to affect the whole universe. The Truth is not as hard to find as the sources that try to cover it make it look like. We live more in an Age of Misinformation than an Age of Information. To get the real news, one has to know how to read in-between the lines. Even information, nowadays, has become esoteric. Individual Privacy, on the left-hand path of things, has become a Public Domain item. Hopefully, not for long. Privacy is what makes most of us feel Good, Safe, and Comfortable, at Home. This is vital to maintain a Fair, Compassionate, and Free society. No one Nation or valley made out of silicon is going to jeopardize this Basic Human Right, enforced by The Hague. It's called a "Crime Against Humanity". Human dignity is not a subject of debate or subjective preference, it's a birthright, bestowed upon every human being, at birth, and monitored by The Hague, legitimized by every Nation. It's not a joking matter, it's a very serious offence. We all decided, after WWII, that no one was allowed to fuck with an Innocent human being, body, mind, or soul, without paying exemplary damages and being severely punished. And, if that human being's family is targeted as well, then, no matter the immunity of the culprits, they will be tried and judged. Hitler preferred suicide, other self-proclaimed world leaders face 4 walls, for life. Knights do not knight themselves. Fake knight and fake leader, spreading terror and bullying everywhere, through all media available, in any way, re-tweeting neo-nazi propaganda. That's a Fool waiting to get hanged, with his Vice. As far as i am concerned: "You Are Fired, With Your Vice!". Verdict: Evil, inadequate, and counter-productive. Tendency to antagonize and provoke all Good people, out of resentment and jealousy. Unfit to be a team player or beneficial contribution to anyone. A parasite that has to be punished and discarded, as an example for lazy evil bully, self-serving racists, everywhere. In a world that needs healing, love, and compassion, your place is between 4 walls. Time to have fun, respect, and build bridges. We'll give you walls, no worries, and glass windows too. Your turn to dance, monkey and his Vicr, the rest of us are Good human beings. As for the valley with silicon, your execs are going to join their teachers and masters, penniless. I'm the 1 in charge of re-distributing, fairly, the money they owe ALL of us. But, start forgetting about Google, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo, Apple, et al. We can create, and we will, better local alternatives. They WERE evil. Americans voted a leader who is an evil ego-centrical maniac racist who bullies the world and behave as an asshole so that America can be lazy and self-righteous, even with its failure to be productive, in any industry. Are Americans Good people? Do they deserve respect, compassion, or consideration? Right now, NO. They got sloppy, lazy, and racist. They are nullifying their own self. What's the beneficial use of such an America, to the world? It's a burden and an unfair punishment to the Fair, Happy, and Free World. And, it's an insult to human dignity, very few people would die for an "American Dollar" nowadays. In fact, ironically, but inevitaby, my 1 Rupees, from 1974, are going to be worth much more, soon. By the end of the day, the real fool is the one who tried to fool everybody else. Those who tried to spread "terror", daring to call their latest operation "Isis", are the ones who are going to be terrorized, with no delay, naked, at the mercy of the whole world, without any veil. Those who need love, have to Give love, first. Otherwise, you get caca, for giving caca. I need Love. I'm not ashamed of it, i don't function on Hate. I would do anything for love, but, i'll do nothing for hate. On the contrary, that's when i'm ready to fight, with more love than evil idiots can take. Something in tune with the "Art of War", which hints subtlely that once you conquer Hearts, you've won already. Although your army is ready to sacrife their life for you, just the consciousness of it will get the whole army safe and your victory...certain, over Evil, no matter how big the ranks are. The Heart is the most powerful and priceless weapon. One big heart can defeat an army of a Million mercenaries, easily. I need my Boss, a Woman, desperatly. No ego about it, and no fucking around, she'll boss me around, i'm that weak, alone. But, i always fucked it up. Or, others do it, for me. My prayer: "God, give me a fair chance with Pauline, please. I'll have to surrender and learn, as usual. But, this time, let me try, please.". As a human being, how do i choose a partner? Feeling. Beauty is a subjective perception. Everyone is beautiful to someone . That's beauty in itself. Finding beauty is an expression of love. That excludes pedophilia and vices, like the ka ka ka, or racism. That's called perversion, it's evil. I never understood pedophiles, but i always wanted to kick them, in the nuts. And, now that i have 2 nieces, Amayayus and Puce, i feel even more protective. I will destroy anyone who fucks with my 2 angels. No pity, there, i'm out for serious damage i won't kill, by principle, but make damages that can't be fixed. I hope Americans start getting the drift and get their Heart, not their wallet, to wake up. The leader and his Vice, you elected, are raping, or trying to, the world, the little girl, thinking it's ok, in your name. While, you know very well that you are getting fucked in the ass, too, without giving your consent. Are you a nynphomaniac (wrong spelling, you get it, in your face, fairly), are you evil, or just fucking too lazy to react? Bottom line, you take care of beinging down the rapists, or, the rest of us will do it, for a fee, which will cost you enough to hurt and remember, for a long time. Americans will become 2nd rate expats, anywhere. And their allies, like Saudi Arabia, punished and humiliated, ad well. Iran? Nothing against, personally. A Great Nation, with Great minds, abd a Great history. Ad a Lebanese Maronite, threatened? Not in the least. I side by Aoun, finally. Why not a Lebanon with different religions respecting the same Constitution. Shiite Muslims have, they let Maronites be Presidents? Althougj they are a demographic majority. Respect. They respect, i respect. As for Saudi Arabia, i lived there, they're animals, protected by the USA. I've seen public executions, of unfaithful wives, stoned to death. What an inhuman Nation. Then, there are cities of GIs, beyond Saudi legislation, where US citizens get Syrian, Ethopian, and Saudi whores, can smoke weed and drink alcohol. The US embassy is the place to get Red Label, for $300 a bottle. This is tbe Nation that forbids anyone who is not Muslim, to go to Mecca, as ifcthe Vatican was only for Catholics. I was not able to go there, unless i converted, for a year, to the Muslim religion and shavedcmy head. Fuck that, i'll keep my caca colour iquama (id), since i don't have a green iquama, reserved for Muslims. Between Saudi Arabia and Iran, i'll choose Iran. It did not detain the Lebanese PM, to show that it is the USA of the region, pooing on fellow arabs. What an evil place, Muslims, Sunii and Shites should team up to denounce such profanity. Did Mohammed intend for obscure tribes, in the Saudi desert, to be costodians of the holy Ka'ba, for most Muslims? No, he didn't. If Saudi Arabia haf no petrol, no one would give a fuck. But, the US did and fucked the UK on it, they had a legitimate colonizer claim. Trurh is, Mecca beĺongs to eveyone, i hope to go back tbere, one day, to see the stone, as a Maronite. As for Saudi Arabia interfering with Lebanon, back off. If a Maronite like me endorses Aoun and is willing to evolve and embrace Lebanese Shites and Iran, get the fuck out of our politics. You can buy our real estate for your vacations, being free, unlike home, where GIs fuck Princes in the ass, daily, to have fun. But, don't fuck with our cedar. Unlike your sand, It's solid, legitimate, and here to stay, despite the US dick in your royal Saudi ass. In my country, i could be President. I refuse my Dad to sacrifice his life for it. By right, i comecfrom the tribe Napoleon, Macron, and even Iran will protect. The USA trying, through its clownish leader, to descredit me, as insane, to steal the Cedar, ain't going to happen. To the Initiate, evil is trying to conquer the Cedar, through me. Not happening. By luck, i happen to be a Good Genius. My Dad's life is not a bargaining token, to spare my life, i refuse. All the money he got should heal him. I refuse to have him allocate it to me, in front of the whole world. I want the US Pestilence to try to kill me, since that's what's been going on. It's not you get my Dad, evil motherfucker, instead of me. My Dad gets healed and i provoke you to a Gentleman's duel. Do you know what Gentle and Man mean? You motherfucker. I am provoking donald trump of my asshole. You leave Dad alone, parasite, scumbag, son of a bitch's bitch. You wanna kill someone, hitler wannabe, come to me, evil coward weasel pedophile motherfucker. Prove to the world that you have a legitimate or Goid reason to fuck with me, my Dad, or my tribe. You fucking weasel cannibsl. I will kick you in the balls so hard, if you have any courage, son of a vermine, that you will never know what pkeasure feels like. You are evil and doomed, your days are counted, you know it, sad buffoon, you are like hitler in his bunket. Except, you are a weasel, scares scumbag. WE will hang you. Soon. Americans don't give a fuck about Lebanon, they think it might be in Europe or Africa. That's how much they care about the World. Basically, that's how much they care about you, if you are not a state, in the US of my Ass. That's why, 1 Nation, 1 Vote, is so crucial. It's called Fairness and Balance. Until Americans ammend their Constitution and kick out the Tweeting Pestilence, and its Vice, they are Perskna Non Grata worldwide. As long as the Pestilence and his Vice are in powet, all Americans are KKK, lazy-ass blood -sucking ticks, on the ass of yhe world. They will be bullied, fucked around, and treated as bad as possible, everywhere in the world, to make them feel home. Oh, yeah, i forgot raped and fucked in the ass, unfairly. What a Nation of losers!!! @trumpeddevilhangedproperlyaccordingtocraftrulesfortraitorsandimitations. When you expect something, you get nothing. But, when you expect nothing , you always get Something, in Return.