#or stories where the world is controlled by fast food companies or similar

[sporco-filth]

oh man, I absolutely adore any stories where the entire world/society has embraced slobbishness as the norm!

same, it's like... the idea everyone has caved in to gluttony and laziness to the point where being a slob is seen as a virtue...

fuuuckk... it's so good

[remys-lucky-franc]

I’m Bringing Sexy Back (To Regency England) - Immortal Heart Society

So this happened because I referred to new series IHS’s baddie Lord Montague as ‘Lord Timberlake’ due to the coiffuring similarities and it made @aquagirl1978 LOL and she made me this:

See how alike they look though?! I’m not crazy.

Literally no one in the world wants this fic, and it’s just stupid, but I had a giggle writing it, so 😆 Also, I genuinely know nothing about JT, if any of you are superfans and I’m way off, it’s just a bit of fun, no ill intent or offence meant 💕

Also it’s just in time for all the good old memes... (At the end if anyone needs a ref point)

Word Count ~3500 (yeah, I’ve gone off)

[MORE] [[MORE]]

In the grandiose but soulless marble bathroom of the Boston penthouse, Justin squeezed his eyes tight-shut, splashing his face with frigid water. He inhaled sharply as the moisture hit his skin, opening his eyes and staring intently at the reflection mirrored back at him. It had been quite a night so far. He’d been courted by ‘The Society’ for a couple of months now and on receiving their latest invite, he had finally acquiesced. Over the course of the evening he’d exchanged pleasantries and mingled with a fusion of intriguing individuals - all very different, very separate people, but all who clearly had gotten the memo: convince him to join. Justin suspected before he arrived, from the exclusive address on the invite alone, the sort of members The Society would have on its roster and he wasn’t surprised - even if most of them were no more than masked silhouettes. Initially when he had exited the elevator and caught sight of all those shaded faces, Justin’s heart stuttered: had he inadvertently accepted an invite to some sort of sexy party? How would he explain this one? ‘Hey Honey - funny story...’ But it didn’t take long to deduce that the disguises were all part of the prestige and served as identity protection rather than a conduit to anyone having any real sort of fun.

The mixer itself had been entertaining enough, but the hushed secrets shared in the drawing room were what had piqued his interested and saw him hiding in the restroom searching his own soul for answers. He’d been trading anecdotes with a handful of members before he was interrupter by a well dressed blonde and ushered through a side door, where he was greeted with a firm handshake by one of the top men within the society (apparently), Richard - Something. Initially Justin had smiled but internally rolled his eyes as he considered how these shady types only ever give out their first names - and how that felt particularly unfair when everyone here knew fine well what his surname was... Richard was perfectly charming and charismatic - in the same faux-caring, calculating way politicians are as they try to snare floating voters. His smile was bright and his words were warm, but his eyes were a stark contrast. The Society’s hoi-polloi were obviously deemed to have played their part in warming him up and now Richard was here to give him the hard-sell: and sell he did.

And at first, it sounded relatively normal. At first. Until Richard started with tall tales of how society members held all of the power in the world through power stones. Initially Justin got to his feet and scoffed - weren’t crystals just for spa days and hippies? This had to be a set up. He scanned the room looking for any clue of a hidden camera, Ashton Kutcher’s sneakers showing from behind a curtain perhaps - but nothing. It all sounded truly ridiculous, but as Richard stood, laying a firm hand on Justin’s shoulder, directing him towards a plush chair, pouring him two fingers of whisky, something held him; fascinated him. Stopped him from barging straight out of the room. Justin observed in silence as Richard thumbed through various documents, showing him photographs, pulling up search data online... Explaining. Convincing. Persuading. Justin didn’t trust the suave smarmy suit as far as he could throw him, but the more Richard divulged of the spiderweb of societal involvement in major global events and current affairs, the more sense it made... And in spite of himself, Justin started to succumb to this strange reality. Every word out of Clever Dick’s mouth was revelational, peeling away one layer after another, after another, until Justin’s mind was blown; his brain hurt the same way it did the first time he watched Inception. He couldn’t bend his mind around why Richard was telling him all this, or why a collective more powerful than The Walt Disney Company would want a musician to join their ranks? Richard shrugged coolly as he continued to play for Justin’s buy in, simply smiling and saying that, as a big pop star, it would be quid pro quo - a very mutually beneficial arrangement. The society had access to the best labels, the best A&R departments, they could get Justin as much airplay, fame and publicity as he wanted.

Justin couldn’t deny it sounded appealing - but what did they want in return? So far it was all ‘quid’ and no ‘quo’. He had to ask. Even the easy, practiced grin on Richard’s face couldn’t offset the glint of ice in his dark eyes and menace in his voice that chilled Justin’s blood.

“Justin, come! Everyone knows that music is what shapes the youth of today! The influence wielded by artists, the loyalty inspired by them, their marketability, it’s simply insurmountable! Think about it, dear boy? If The Society control the music, they control the populace.”

Justin cleared his throat as he sized himself up, readjusting his skinny black tie and squaring his shoulders. Richard must be insane. The Society’s logic was fatally flawed: they couldn’t seriously think that it was possible control the entire world’s population through having a singer in their ranks? It was infeasible. Impossible. But what they were offering him in exchange? Now, that was a very attractive proposition indeed. If he agreed to join, and got all of that out of it, it would be worth it? The Society would surely realise at some point that they couldn’t rule the world through the power of song? Yes, the power of a one-line harmony had already been proven by McDonald’s to sell a shit-tonne of burgers - and while it was a pretty convincing argument, selling fast-food to hungry people was one thing - but full-scale global domination?? That was something else entirely. But if he could ride along on their coat-tails and reap all the benefits until they realised just how crazy that idea had been in the first place...

—- two years later —-

Cash carded his hand through his dark hair, exasperated as he listened to Alana’s latest report, “You all understand that Timberlake is completely out of control, yes?”

Emilio grunted flatly as his head fell into his crossed arms on the table like a five year old ready to play heads-down-thumbs-up, “Yeeeeees.”

Cash bristled further as he looked to Rafe and Kiran for their input, both simply nodding back at him as though to say, ‘yes, we know.’

Alana looked down at her phone, worrying her full bottom lip between her teeth, “It’s worse than you think though, Cash.”

He was instantly on his feet staring at her, Rafe and Kiran leaned forward and Emilio raised one weary brow from his slumped pose, concern evident on all their faces.

Kiran was first to speak, “Alana how can it be worse? Richard’s vanished off the face of the earth. Justin’s last billboard count had him go multi-platinum - again, and his lyrics are becoming...”

Rafe offered flatly, “Odd.” He stood, cracked his neck from side to side and headed towards the small stove, absentmindedly filling a saucepan with water and a packet of instant noodles.

Cash shook his head at Rafe then turned back to glower at the rest of the Inner Circle, “Thank you all for the recap. It’s bleak, we know. Alana?”

Green eyes fixed the room as Alana cleared her throat and mouthed, “One hundred and ninety-four.”

Dumbfounded silence filled the room; jaws hung slack. Until Kiran broke the spell, a spluttering cough turning into an uncomfortable laugh, “One hundred and ninety-four what? Because I know you definitely can’t mean stones. We know the exactly location of over fifty percent of them? They’re safe?”

Rafe, back at the table with his ramen by now, paled as Alana shook her head at a loss for words, red curls bouncing around her shoulders, “How is that possible?”

Alana threw her hands in the air, confessing “I honestly don’t know. But he has ones that we knew the location of, and more besides.”

Cash paced the room, clearly agitated as he cursed and barked,

“That’s every stone in existence, except ours and one other.”

Alana puffed out her cheeks before huffing out the breath sharply, “Correct. He has the lot, excepts ours - and the Garnet.”

Emilio’s hand slid under his shirt, a double-check to be sure his Alexandrite remained firmly on the chain hidden beneath the dark fabric, fiddling with it like a child with a comfort blanket as he spoke, “I- I just don’t understand. How? How did he get so many without us knowing?”

Rafe shrugged as he shovelled a spoonful of noodles into his mouth and chewed thoroughly before answering, “Richard’s protege. His pet project. Nothing surprises me when he’s involved. Everything he touches gets tarnished.”

Alana sighed sadly, “Justin seemed like such a sweet guy when he first joined. I really liked him. I thought he could have been part of our Inner Circle someday.”

Rafe shot her a rueful smile before looking down into the noodles, “Same. He changed. Fast.” Coiling his fork in a thick helping, he swung them into his mouth without ceremony.

Cash pinched the bridge of his nose, stopping pacing for long enough to stare and snap at Rafe,

“What is it with you and those blasted ramen noodles??”

Rafe shook his head silently as though to say, ‘I don’t know’: he wasn’t entirely sure why, but every time someone mentioned Timberlake, he couldn’t stop himself from carb-loading. All he wanted a big bowl of ramen in his belly and he couldn’t think about anything else until he was full of noodley-goodness. He’d eaten more instant ramen in the past couple of years than he did during college, and that was saying something.

Kiran cut through the atmosphere between the two men, venturing, “So how are we going to shut him down?”

—-

Richard had been missing for months, and although all trails had gone cold and no one was one hundred percent clear on what had happened to him, there was very strong suspicion within the group of five that Justin had something to do with it. How else had he managed to acquire almost every power stone in existence? He must have dispensed of Richard and taken them for himself - there really didn’t seem, to be any other explanation. The Inner Circle had been aware that Richard was hoarding stones, but his haul had escalated significantly and quickly with Justin by his side - at the Circle’s last count maybe six to eight months ago, Richard only had sixty-five stones in his custody. The dirty duo had been busy.

Emilio shuddered solemnly as he thought about what must have happened to the rightful owners of those stones. He was at the tower with the Inner Circle, minus Cash. Cash would arrive soon, bringing Justin to the table with him. Creating a rouse of support, and then double-crossing him to recover the power stones had been deemed the only feasible plan. Emilio watched the rest of the group: Rafe stirring at a saucepan at the small kitchen set up, Kiran flipping aimlessly though a fashion magazine and Alana tapping at her cellphone. They were all feeling nervous about this, the stakes had never been so high. He scrubbed his brow as he ran through the various scenarios of what could possibly happen with Cash and Justin arrived.

He didn’t have long to wait as the door opened and laughter reverberated around the room. Cash was manoeuvring Timberlake expertly, and Justin seemed to be lapping up everything he said. A round of smiles and handshakes later everyone sat around the table, eyes expectantly on Cash.

“Justin, firstly, thank you for joining the group here today. As you know, with Richard... Let’s say, elsewhere. I’ve been standing in as the ‘interim leader’. And I’ll be frank, Justin, I always thought it would be for me, but it’s not. And it takes a lot for me to admit that. I can do the decision-making, the negotiations, but what I cannot abide is dealing with attitudes and egos all day long.”

Rafe chortled, “He thinks he should be the only one allowed an attitude and an ego!”

Justin grinned and visibly relaxed within the larger group.

Clearing his throat irately, Cash gestured towards Rafe, “Exactly what I’m talking about. Justin, my calling doesn’t lie in leading The Society. I am more interested in having a less ’public facing position’ shall we say, where I can really put my true talents to use. And that’s why I invited you to sit with us today, Justin.’

Timberlake nodded enthusiastically, “ I see.”

Cash stood, wearing a trail in the carpet as he walked back and forth,

“What are your goals, Justin? We understand you must be distraught about Richard’s disappearance, you two seemed close. Do you have aspirations for The Society’s Leadership? We’ve been observing you for some time, and feel that we could all benefit each other within this little group, everyone here wants to progress and wants ‘more’. And we feel like you may have some ideas that could help us all to achieve just that.”

Justin leaned back in his chair observing the group sat around the table. Of course he knew what his goals were. He’d never really considered leadership of The Society until recently - his mind had been consumed with his plan for ultimate pop domination over the past two years. And he’d progressed so far that it was within his grasp - and that was when he and Richard had begun to clash. Badly. Richard’s vision was so- So limited. He couldn’t see Justin’s potential past being a Society tool used to control the public. Justin knew his worth, he was more than a tool for Richard to implement as he saw fit. He felt the anger bubble inside him as he recalled the final fight with Richard. They could have controlled the entire world together: why couldn’t Richard have seen that? Why couldn’t he have got on board with Justin’s plans? As he sized up the twelve eyes watching him, he thought about the dozens of power stones locked securely in the safe in his apartment: these people could see his strength. His power. His star ascending. He leaned forward, his decision made,

“I have acquired many power stones and my plan is, to use our time-travelling abilities to go back in time and wipe other pop stars from existence, so that I am the single biggest pop star in the world today. Then with my influence, The Society will control everything. We, friends, will control the world.”

Alana and Kiran eyeballed each other as the men nodded at Justin.

Kiran interjected,

“There’s no doubt that The Society would benefit from that sort of influence, but what about all of the damage that would be done to culture and humanity without artists?”

Justin looked confused as he stared at her, “But they’d still have me?”

Kiran chewed the statement over before asking, “And who are you going after? Are we talking about Elvis? The Beatles? Frank Sinatra?”

Justin waved a hand as though he’d practiced this very conversation in the mirror a hundred times, “No, no. Only today’s artists. I can’t disrupt anyone who directly or indirectly influenced my career. Butterfly Effect and all.”

The Inner Circle nodded sagely as Justin continued, “And when my plan is complete, who, I ask you, will be the biggest pop star in the world??”

Alana glanced up grimacing, “I don’t know Justin, I mean Lady Gaga is pretty huge? Iconic, even.”

Emilio shook his head, “Right now, Ariana Grande’s the biggest artist in the world, I read it somewhere.”

Justin fixed them both with an affronted stare, “But think about it, if none of them ever existed... Then who would be the biggest pop star in the world?”

Alana and Emilio exchanged a world-weary glance as Justin cackled, “Guess what? It’s gonna be me.”

Rafe scrunched his nose, confused, speaking through a mouthful of ramen, “May? What? Are the Emmy’s not always in September?”

Cash shotshim a withering glance before grinning at Justin, “You’ve thought a lot about his haven’t you?”

Justin, visibly flattered, shrugged off Cash’s praise, “Just a little.”

Cash leaned towards Justin conspiratorially, “So tell us, what more do you need to make your dreams a reality, and how could we, as a group, facilitate that?”

—-

Over the next few weeks the Inner Circle had planned for two consecutive missions. One intricate scheme with Justin, that involved him travelling back over two hundred years to Regency England to secure the Garnet power stone from a Lady Foxworthy. And their own private secondary mission that involved luring Justin back to Regency England where there was no power stone to be found.

When the day to venture back in time arrived, Justin paraded around the tower preening in the mirror at his era-appropriate garb. Kiran had stitched it to perfection, a beautifully embroidered waistcoat over his cravat, fitted cream pants and a midnight blue, velvet long-tailed coat that really made his eyes pop. Rafe let out a low whistle, winking at Justin’s reflection in the mirror, “Looking sharp! Nice work Kiran.” This look was a definitely a step up from double denim!

Kiran moved around Justin turning him, dusting down his shoulders, “Oh hold up, you have a thread. Let me just get that for you. Can’t have you looking less than perfect!” She reached for her scissors and touched the back of his jacket whilst swiftly clipping a tuft of hair from the back of his head.

The corners of Cash’s mouth quirked upwards at her almost imperceptibly as he spoke, “Very elegant, good Sir. You look quite the part.”

Justin gave Cash a delighted twirl to show off his new threads before performing a low, sweeping bow - completely unaware of his missing locks - speaking in a haughty-sounding English accent, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr Tarkhan, I am Lord Timberlake.”

Alana had to swig at a cup of water to stop herself from bursting into peals of laughter, it was like the only English person he’d ever heard speak before was Queen Elizabeth herself! Cash raised an eyebrow in her direction before addressing Justin, “You’re definitely comfortable travelling back alone, because it would only take Alana here a few minutes to change into something suitable and accompany you?”

Justin waved a hand dismissing the suggestion, quite honestly he didn’t want anyone cramping his style. It wasn’t Justin’s first time in Regency England - when he and Richard had travelled there previously he’d had a ball. He had exactly eight hours to get there, get the Garnet, have some fun in a previous era and get back - and then. Then a whole new era would begin. His era... Leader of the most powerful Society in the world and the biggest pop star in history. Justin grinned as he stepped forward, placing his hands around the ornate pocket watch and beginning the arcane chant to begin his voyage through time. The rest of the Inner Circle joined the chant, turning back the clocks within the tower as Justin’s world started to blur at the edges, drifting backwards through two hundred years of history.

After Justin was gone, a series of stealthy grins were exchanged around the group. Emilio breathed a sigh of relief, “We did it.”

Kiran tossed the little velvet bag with Justin’s hair inside to Cash - their insurance policy, should he need to be dealt with ‘more permanently’ at a later date. Today’s plan didn’t involve the singer being turned into a surprised-looking statue, just giving him an extended stay in Regency England instead... The garnet wasn’t there - in fact, there were no stones left there. It was common knowledge within the Inner Circle where the garnet was: firmly on the finger of Richard’s blissfully unaware and estranged daughter - passed down by his long-missing wife. A point that Timberlake was sadly remiss of: they all had banked on Richard never disclosing a topic so sore as his failure as a father out of pure pride and vanity - and they’d been correct...

Now there was nothing more to do than wind all the clocks back to the correct time, then sit and wait until Justin would try to get back.

—-

Seven and three-quarter hours later, the group within the tower saw a blurry portal loom in the corner of the room. Suddenly alert, they listened intently as Justin’s voice crackled through,

“Rafe, Cash, guys! Are you there? Help me! I can’t... I can’t get back! Alana?? The ritual, it’s not working, I’m not fading back through??”

Cash drawled as he examined his fingernails, looking thoroughly bored,

“Ah, so our little ritual worked then. Good to know.”

The passage through time became narrower and narrow as a sickening realisation suckerpunched Justin, panic rising like bile in his throat, “You... You did this on purpose!! You screwed me over!! You bastards!!!!”

As the portal flickered and shrunk to no more than a pinhole, echoes of the roars of their names reverberated around the room, until the gap sealed itself trapping Lord Timberlake in Regency England for ever more. Silence settled over the tower for a few moments, until Rafe glanced up at the rest of the group thorough his sweeping fringe, a smirk slowly stretching from ear to ear as he shrugs,

“Cry me a river...”

[csnews]

One of world's rarest dolphins is rebounding in Pakistan

Iman Sultan - June 18, 2020

In a secluded pocket of Pakistan’s Lab-e-Mehran park, the smooth waters of the Indus River break into circular ripples, and the head of a pale gray dolphin appears. The animal lingers briefly before diving back into the water, its dorsal fin gleaming in the sun. This quiet riverside park in the southern city of Sukkur, popular with families out for a stroll, is also home to the endangered Indus River dolphin, one of only four freshwater dolphin species left on Earth.

But a dam at the western end of the park restricts their ability to travel freely during the monsoon season, a crucial part of their life cycle.

It’s a similar story throughout Pakistan: Widespread construction of diversion dams called barrages have effectively destroyed the species’ habitat. The barrages were built in the mid-20th century to control flooding and provide irrigation, and in some cases have been repurposed for power plants. Now, they’ve not only cut off the dolphins’ ability to migrate; their diversions also can lead to dangerously low water levels. (Explore our beautiful graphic of the Indus River, a lifeline for millions.)

Once, the Indus dolphin swam across the Indus River and all of its tributaries, from the Indus delta near the Arabian Sea to the snowcapped Himalaya. Today, the 200-pound cetacean only occupies 20 percent of its original range. The remaining Indus dolphins are concentrated mostly in the Pakistani province of Sindh, in a 410-mile stretch of river between the Guddu and Kotri dams. Engro, an energy company that works with the thermal power plant connected to Guddu dam, did not respond to requests for comment about the dam’s impacts on the species.

Beyond dams, water pollution and industrial waste dumped into the Indus pose the gravest long-term threat to the dolphins. Studies have found DDT and other pesticides in the animals’ tissue, according to Uzma Khan, Asia coordinator for WWF’s River Dolphins Initiative. However, a rigorous government conservation program has educated local communities, rescued stranded dolphins, and is steadily increasing their numbers, Khan says. There are now 1,987 Indus dolphins in Pakistan, according to the most recent WWF survey, up from 132 animals in 1972. Another small population of at least seven animals live in India’s Beas River, an Indus tributary.

“If you go downstream from the Guddu [barrage], and you keep sailing, there comes a point where you see dolphins everywhere around you,” Khan says. “It’s overwhelming because they’re everywhere.”

At the same time, she says, “it’s a situation which can be challenging, because all these dolphins are just in one stretch of the Indus River.”

“A friend of humans”

Locally known as bhulan in the Urdu and Sindhi languages, the Indus dolphin “has been in the Indus for thousands of years, and is a mark of the Harappa civilisation,” says Mir Akhtar Talpur, a field officer for Sindh Wildlife Department, a government agency.

The Bronze Age civilisation, which blossomed in the Indus River valley, is known for its urban planning and advanced drainage systems. Modern peoples of the Sindh and Punjab Provinces are considered the Harappa’s direct descendants, and value the dolphin as part of their heritage.

Fishermen in these provinces tell an origin story for the species. In the legend, when a woman offers butter and milk to a mystic patron of the river, the waters part and she safely crosses to the other side. But once, she fails to make an acceptable offering—and the river spirit transforms her into a dolphin.

For fisherman Gul Mohammed Mirbar, the dolphin is a lifelong companion; he was 10 years old when he first saw one. On a sunny afternoon in February, he rows his wooden boat across the river at Lab-e-Mehran park, where he earns money giving boat rides to tourists and park visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare dolphin.

As the water softly laps against the rocky riverbank, a pink dolphin surfaces with a splash, then disappears beneath the water.

Though Mirbar considers dolphins part of the environment, he and fellow fishermen also regard the dolphins as competitors that eat the very fish that are the men’s livelihood.

“You have to really put in effort [in fishing], or else you can’t catch up with the dolphin. That’s how fast she is,” Mirbar says, adding that the dolphins target large and small fish alike.

Until hunting was banned in the 1970s, some fishing communities hunted the dolphin for food or for blubber that they mixed with oil to coat their boats. The WWF reports that each year in the area, at least one dolphin dies when it’s accidentally trapped in fishing nets.

In general, “the dolphin is a friend of humans,” says Khadim Hussain, a representative of a fishermen advocacy organisation in Taunsa, a city in Punjab Province. “And it doesn’t pose any harm to fisherfolk. When the dolphin hears the sound of fishermen’s engines on their small boats, it approaches and swims with them.” (Read about dolphins in Brazil who help fishermen make their catch.)

An animal suited for the river

The dolphin has evolved to thrive in the Indus. Its colors—brown, a range of grays, or rarely, a dusky pink—help the animal blend into the sediment-laden river. And it’s nearly blind, as sight is unnecessary in the river’s murky waters. (Read about the first new species of river dolphin found in a century.)

The animal relies largely on an internal sonar system that bounces sound waves off objects to find prey, navigate the river, and communicate with other dolphins. The sonar is so advanced that it can sense the difference between a dead or living fish.

The dolphin’s long beak easily snaps up fish and other prey. On its sturdy body, a small dorsal fin maintains stability as it swims.

The Indus River dolphin is one of just two species known to lie on its side and flap its tail, a behavior called side-swimming. The maneuver allows the dolphin to move between shallow pools of water in the dry season—but it can’t help the animal cope with the Indus River’s dams.

Before dams fragmented the species’ habitat, the dolphins would swim upstream to tributaries during the monsoon and return to the Indus in the dry season.

Some dolphins can still move through dams if its gates are open—particularly if the animal is young or small—but then they often get trapped in irrigation canals, shallow pools, deep ponds, and sometimes even fields, where they can starve and overheat to death. (See videos revealing the power of dams—and dam removal.)

To the rescue

The Sindh Wildlife Department has spread the word to local communities to call a hotline if they spot a trapped dolphin in a pond or canal. Adnan Hamid Khan, the deputy conservator in Sukkur for the Sindh Wildlife Department, has participated in several rescues, perhaps the most notable in December 2019.

A dolphin calf had swum out of the river and beached in a field in Faiz Ganj Wah, more than 120 miles from Sukkur. Hamid Khan and his team placed the animal in his car, spraying it with water to keep it hydrated as they sped through traffic to release it back into the river. While the rescue was successful, it's unknown whether the animal survived.

The rescue process isn’t easy. For one, these marine mammals are very sensitive to loud noises and human presence, and can suffer from health problems such as high blood pressure when being evacuated. (Learn about the difficulties involved in rescuing wild animals.)

What’s more, faced with limited funding and outdated equipment, the small rescue team must get creative in saving dolphins—which often means investing their own resources, says Hamid Khan.

“In wildlife conservation, problems arise very suddenly. You have to give instant relief and make a decision in that moment on how you’ll resolve things,” he says.

What the rescuers lack in resources, they make up for in dedication.

Nazir Mirani, the son of a fisherman, has worked with Sindh Wildlife for 30 years; he has bite marks on his hands from past rescues. Mirani is the third generation in his family to help in conserving dolphins, offering the agency advice and knowledge from his years on the water.

“For generations, we’ve been living near the river and sailing in boats. We fish, and we take care of the dolphin,” says Mirani, as he sits in the shade of a tree and looks out at the sun-streaked river.

“In the past, some people used to eat the dolphin. My father told them, Don’t eat the dolphin, because this is an innocent animal, and it’s the beauty of the river.”

Finding solutions

Much about the Indus dolphin remains shrouded in mystery, including this: What happens to rescued dolphins once they’re set free in the river? Do calves find their mothers, for instance? (See beautiful underwater photos of freshwater animals.)

WWF has proposed putting satellite tags on dolphins to track their movements, learn more about their biology, and inform conservation efforts. “Every rescued animal needs to be tagged,” Uzma Khan says. “And we need to know, how many dolphins are dying?”

Another technology that could help conserve dolphins is planting “pingers” near the openings to canals. The devices make a ting ting sound, inaudible to humans, that dolphins avoid.

Pingers usually are used to warn dolphins away from fishing nets, says Uzma Khan, “but we want to test them near canals to see if they stop dolphins from swimming into them.”

For rescuers like Mirani, saving the Indus River dolphin is a civic responsibility. He remembers the gharial, a crocodile that once lived in the Indus but is now locally extinct. He doesn’t want the dolphin to suffer the same fate.

If that happens, he asks, “What will our children see?”

[cadomoisspokenfor]

Legion Rewatch Notes,

Chapter 4:

Frizzytop

I theorized in episode 2 that David could see through the 4th wall, or at least into a different universe. At the start of this episode Oliver outright breaks the 4th wall. Perhaps powerful reality benders just have that capability. If David knows, and Oliver knows, then Farouk definitely knows.

“A great philosopher once wrote, ‘In times of peace, the war like man attacks himself.’ This is the route of all our problems.”

“We are the route of all our problems. Our confusion, our anger, our fear of things we don’t understand.”

If we carry those 2 quotes throughout the rest of the show, then no doubt the tragedies that happen later on are caused by a collective misunderstanding of each other. And a collective lashing out at that misunderstanding of each other.

“Violence, in other words, is ignorance.”

The most central theme of the show is empathy vs fear. I s’pose whenever there’s a conflict in the show we’re supposed to be asking whether the characters should answer with empathy or fear. Certain characters lives have revolved heavily around fear. And that informs their decision making quite a bit. This will all come up again at multiple points throughout the show.

Syd... probably can’t break the 4th wall. So maybe it’s most logical to interpret this as her inner monologue. Very Jessica Jones esque.

The same voice lines from when Syd was searching for David in episode 1 are played. I guess there go to whenever Davids lost (whether in the world or in his mind) is to transmit Syds voice calling his name in hopes he’ll hear it and come back.

Kerry can pick locks.

The concept of “bad mutants” is well established amongst the veteran summerland crew. Ptonomy’s caution about David is probably because he feels he has a selfish vibe, and that’s a well known red flag of “bad mutants.”

It should also be noted he’s partly afraid of him because he has so much trouble understanding him. His powers, which when used affectively are essentially the ability to understand where someone’s coming from, keep getting overrided by Davids.

It’s now to the point where Ptonomy is doubting his own ability to tell what’s real and what’s not real. He was pretty confident he’d always know somehow in episode 2. Now, not so much.

Ptonomy very early on is open to the idea that David both has powers and psychological issues. “He’s unstable. You try hearing voices for 10-15 years, self medicate with hard drugs and then get dumped in a looney bin.”

Ptonomy also determines that because of his instability combined with the fact he has powers, David is a bomb waiting to go off.

I suppose if we’re trying to figure out their logic with the whole “the combination of being mentally ill and having powers makes him dangerous”, and considering that their right now going over an incident where David robbed his therapist for drug money and then bashed the doctors head in when he came back, the direct concern is that David makes bad decisions and/or selfish decisions (at least), and if he were to make a bad decision regarding his powers a lot of innocent people could get very badly hurt. Or killed. Along with the worry that the voices in his head don’t exactly give him the most angelic of advice at times, and because of his powers he’s very capable of fulfilling their wills, so to speak.

Based on Olivers speech at the beginning of the episode though, it might be safe to say the overall message is instead of acting on fear they should act on empathy and help David overcome his problems instead of vilifying him for his mental illness.

Syd suggest Davids hiding his real memories behind a fake ones and Ptonomy says she going through a lot of effort just to convince herself Davids a good guy. I never really got what he meant, but I guess what he meant is that Syd’s trying to find a justifiable reason for why David would attack Dr Poole like he did when the obvious answer is just “He’s got violent tendencies.” I always just thought she was genuinely hypothesizing, ya know, trying to solve the case. Maybe she was and Ptonomy’s just mean.

“I was looking for the man I loved. Or did I just love the idea of him? The face he showed me?” Doubt springs up early. Why can none of the characters reconcile that a person can have both good and evil in them at the same time? That’s... all people, in fact.

When Kissinger ask if Amy knew David had powers Amy says, “I think so.” Amy potentially acted on fear as well, in regards to her and Davids childhood that is.

Kerry mostly only thinks of herself in relation to Cary.

Cary misses Kerry when she’s gone. Even besides the roles they fill for each other, they generally enjoy each others company. They’re quite literally as close as 2 people can be. Each one living for the sake of the other.

Davids once again surrounded by a crowd of people all yelling in his face. After they disappear though he recovers pretty fast. I guess he’s used to it.

Clockworks Podcast pointed out that the music Davids wincing at is sax heavy Jazz, which is (abstractly) the sound The Devil With Yellow Eyes makes whenever he appears. If my theory about David seeing through the 4th wall is correct, then maybe he’s actually hearing that sound whenever TDWYE is around. Alternatively, Farouk blast that in his head everytime to mess with him.

“Sorry... I forgot about your um... I had a similar- proclivity? Malady? I forget the word- what’s the word? I’ve been here a long time.”

If the previous paragraphs are right, Oliver’s probably implying he was also affected by a mental parasite at some point. It might’ve even been what stranded him in the astral plane.

From Davids perspective he skipped over the entire second half of Chapter 3.

Oliver is essentially explaining the plot of the show to David and the audience before it’s even been unfurled.

“You have an unquiet mind, so you war with yourself, like a dog trying to chew off its own tail.”

David’s still in a very pessimistic guilt ridden place at this point in the story. That’s probably the internal war Oliver’s talking about.

... why can’t Oliver leave the astral plane again? If he did have his own mental parasite, it seems long gone by now. If he just can’t find his way back, then how does he do it in Chapter 7?

Syd calls non-mutants “normals.”

“We were the ghost in a haunted house.” ~Syd, Chapter 4

“You think ghost like living in a haunted house?” ~Syd, Chapter 12

Why does Syd keep hallucinating The Angriest Boy? Or is that just visual metaphor?

Ptonomy’s a very, “Get the job done and look classy while doing it” sorta guy.

“To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.” ~Sun Tzu, Ptonomy

Is the above quote perhaps relevant to the shows message during other conflicts throughout the series? Could it be subtly implying all the characters should always look for non-violent ways to defeat their enemies? I.e. not just a classy line from Ptonomy, but a statement of themes within the show.

The food David, Philly, and Dr Poole are having in Philly’s memories is cherry pie.

In Philly’s memory David says, “I don’t keep a lot of stuff.” And Philly comments that there’s no evidence David had a past. At least among the things David owns at that point. I know Farouk edited a lot of Davids memories, but why did David himself get rid of so much physical stuff? Syd said the reason he broke into Dr Pooles that day was to destroy their taped conversations. What’s compelling him to erase himself from existence? Is it as simple as “Farouk”? It seems like on a deeper level David doesn’t want anyone to know too much about him. Everyone’s only allowed to know what he tells them. His way of feeling in control I guess.

Philly did the classic “I can fix him” when she started dating David.

Philly implies David going off his medication and keeping bad company is what caused the downfall of their relationship. And subsequently his life, probably.

Despite everything, Philly still feels sympathetic towards David.

“Whoever altered Davids memory-“ Ptonomy very early on humors the idea that Davids being acted on by a 3rd party.

The longer Kerry is away from Cary, the more antsy she is for a fight. She’s not supposed to have to sit through all this “boring stuff.”

Ptonomy left after he got the info on Pooles location from Philly. He probably wanted to get the rest of the information from the source. Ironically, they probably woulda gotten closer to the real answer if he’d just looked a bit longer.

Sys proudly says “Yes” when “Dr Poole” ask if she’s in love with David.

It never really comes up again, but Kerry and Cary are physically linked. Maybe even psychologically. When one of them gets hurt, or even exerts their body a lot, the other can feel it, even if their own body doesn’t take on the actual damage. This is still true even if they’re miles apart.

Syds definitely portrayed as the hero at the end of this scene.

“All those years of practice-“ A part of David always knew he had powers. I wonder, did he practice a little in secret? Or is he saying he was at Summerland for years? That doesn’t really add up. But then... what does he mean by years?

Lenny encourages David to get angry so that his powers will strengthen enough for them to overpower the astral plane. Sort of... cheating his way out. David will later achieve more feats of strength through honing his emotions. Like many heroes, his level of power is intrinsically linked to his emotional state.

Very directly here, Davids violence is caused by ignorance. He doesn’t know Syd switched bodies with Walter and is trying to escape.

[gemmasianpowellphotography]

Portrait photographer

Portrait photographers aim to capture a person's personality through the use of proper lighting and backdrops. They may take portraits of a child on their first day of school or take headshots of a company's employees for use on the company website. Apart from taking photos, they also make appointments, bill their clients and process images. Portrait photographers can either work on location or in their studio. In addition, they're either self-employed or work for a business.

Commercial photographer

Commercial photography aims to market a client's products or services. Commercial photographers can take pictures of buildings, merchandise or a company's employees.

Scientific photographer

Scientific photographers document subjects for scientific experiments, to illustrate technical information, for record-keeping purposes or to show something in an image that you can't see with the naked eye. Scientific photographers often work in a research facility or for a government agency.

Photojournalist

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Freelance photographer

Freelance photographers work for themselves rather than for a studio, company or publication. You can become a freelance photographer in a variety of industries, depending on availability. Though freelance photographers don't have a steady income compared to other photographers, this type of career allows you to work in many fields, ensuring you don't get bored.

Photo editor

Photo editors lead a team of photographers, coordinate their assignments and approve their images. They also select and edit photos for color correction or other purposes. In addition, photo editors negotiate photo fees and rights and make sure they have permission to shoot in a particular location.

Wedding photographer

Wedding photographers take photos at a wedding ceremony and reception. Not only do wedding photographers take portraits, but they also use their event photography skills to document various settings and groups of people. As opposed to other photography careers, you often don't get the chance to recreate a shot as a wedding photographer. Therefore, you have to move and think quickly while wandering around the reception and wedding ceremony. In addition, you have to adapt to changing weather conditions and lighting changes.

Event photographer

Event photographers work in a fast-paced environment, taking photos in a variety of settings such as a live concert or corporate event. They typically use both their photojournalistic and portraiture skills when shooting at various events. While some companies use their event photos for publicity and marketing, others use them as keepsakes.

Product photographer

Product photographers take photos of a company's products or items manufactured for sale. Though you often take photos of a particular product, you may also take photos of models with a product. The photos you take often get published online or in print catalogues. You may also find product photos on a company's labels or brand packaging. Product photographers often work in a studio where they have a greater control over the lighting, shadows and background. Some types of product photography include food photography and jewellery photography.

Fine art photographer

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Fashion photographer

Fashion photographers take photos of models wearing the latest styles and trends. With this job, you can take cover shots for fashion magazines or photograph models on the runway. Fashion photographers work in a variety of settings such as in a studio or on location. Apart from taking fashion photos, they also help models get the right pose. In addition, they direct the models and their assistants to ensure they get the right shot for the publication.

Architectural photographer

Architectural photographers take photos of buildings. Whether they work for an architectural agency or as a freelancer, they aim to capture the building's essence and form, from building to completion. Architectural photographers capture both the interior and exterior of a building while pointing out subtle details that accentuate the building's unique design. They use various techniques to help avoid distortion and ensure their images capture the right perspective and angles.

Travel photographer

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Pet photographer

Pet photographers take photos of an individual's animals. While pet photographers take photos of a variety of animals, they may have to offer them a treat to ensure they stay in place for the right shot. Pet photographers work in a variety of conditions, whether it's inside a studio or in an outdoor or outdoor location.

Sports photographer

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Aerial photographer

Aerial photography involves taking images of landscapes from high above in the sky. While planes and cameras were long used for this type of photography, drones have since helped aerial photographers capture the perfect shot without having to leave the ground. To use these unmanned aerial vehicles, you often need a proper license.

Documentary photographer

Documentary photographers take photos to chronicle events or environments that hold historical or everyday significance. Similar to photojournalists, they capture real-life moments and help convey a message about the world at large.

Stock photographer

Stock photographers sell the rights to their images to websites and catalogues. While they can work on a freelance basis, many have agencies handle their photography sales. Though they don't make much from each individual sale, they aim to create a large catalogue of photos that they can frequently sell. Once they sell their images and they're uploaded to a website, they create ongoing passive income.

Commercial/industrial photographer

Commercial and industrial photographers shoot images for books, catalogs and other forms of media. As a commercial and industrial photographer, you have the opportunity to photograph a variety of subjects and objects. Industrial photographers, for example, get to take photos of machinery and blue-collar employees on site.

Abstract photographer

Abstract photographers depict visual images or concepts that don't immediately associate with the object world. To create abstract images, you use a variety of photographic equipment, materials or techniques. Typically, you focus on a specific fragment of a natural scene, taking you away from the greater context. When you do this, it showcases the scene's lines, shapes, geometry or other elements.

Adventure photographer

Adventure photographers take pictures of their various excursions and travels, often in the great outdoors. Adventure photography often includes images with beautiful landscapes and lively people. As an adventure photographer, you often have to prepare for continuously changing shooting conditions.

Food photographer

Food photographers use their still life photography skills to create attractive images of food. As a form of commercial photography, you can find food photography in magazines, advertisements, cookbooks and websites.

Glamour photographer

Unlike fashion photographers, glamour photographers don't focus on a model's clothes or the shoot's location. Instead, they take photos that focus on the beauty of a person—typically a female. They often shoot images that focus on the model's body.

Landscape photographer

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Real estate photographer

Real estate photographers capture images of real estate property. They often shoot homes and office locations for use in advertisements or publications. Real estate photographers shoot both the interior and exterior of a building or home, showing the audience different rooms, features and angles.

New-born photographer

New-born photographers take photos of a family's new infant. Oftentimes, these new-born's are less than two weeks old. They aim to capture beautiful images of new-born's before they grow up.

Still-life photographer

Still-life photographers capture images of inanimate objects. They essentially apply photography to the still-life artistic style. Still-life photographers often use common items for their photographs such as vases, fruits and flowers.

Cityscape photographer

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Wildlife photographer

Wildlife photographers photograph a variety of animals in their natural habitat. If they're photographing dangerous animals, they use their stalking skills and knowledge of the species to better conceal themselves and stay away from danger while taking photos. Apart from capturing wildlife, wildlife photographers also show life in the wild in general.

Family photographer

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Concert photographer

Under the umbrella of event photographers, concert photographers take images at a live music event. While they may shoot at a small club, you can also find them at larger arena events. Concert photographers often have to deal with large crowds, dark lighting and constantly moving subjects.

[sourirez]

Abusage

Summary: The imprisoned god finds amusement in a strange half-mortal while he’s kept in Midgard. What he doesn’t expect is for the princess to turn into a warrior as he leaves with a scar not only on his body but in his heart, only to be healed by the same person that very evening.

Loki X Reader

Part 1

The quiet sound of the room filled the gray walls while the only thing that moved inside the room was Loki’s chest, his breath filling the air. The compound was empty today, no signs of any souls while the merciless god remained alone, the state in which he was the most calm and peaceful.

He thought about his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time but because he was with Thor, he knew she wasn’t worried much. He had learned how to use certain midgardian tools like a box with people in it and also how to warm food, it was Tony who showed him the use of technology here, something they didn’t need much in Asgard as magic did the most. He had gone out with Bruce and Steve once, they didn’t want to take him out but after Nat but him in casual midgardian clothes, they didn’t want to waste the effort.

Midgard was different, so much more violent and filled with a little too many problems, even for a god. He had seen so many people shouting outside, seemed like peace had left this city whereas Tony said that peace was just found around here, after his arrival and defeat. Loki saw the reflection of sunrays called rainbow and found it rather childish how the colors were all so simple yet, he enjoyed the observations around here.

His hair was growing, it was still slicked back and it’s raven color was brighter than ever, creating a contrast between his eyes. He was bored most days, almost to a point where he couldn’t take it but there were times like when he talked to Y/N that made things a little better for him, she was interesting after all.

Loki had learned that Y/N was really a half-god. He had found it suspicious how he hadn’t heard of her but after talking to his brother, he knew she was the lost daughter of Cyra. He had heard so many stories about her mother, how she was the most fascinating women on Asgard and how much of a brave warrior she was on the battlefield next to his father. Loki saw some of these traits in Y/N, but he didn’t comment because his observations were only for himself.

He walked slowly, cautious of any other souls that could be in the building since it was a training day for some young midgardians he had seen, they had something different about them but nothing that stood out too much. He had observed a few of them while Y/N taught them the art of fighting and a few rules of the universe she had been taught before.

Loki had realized that Y/N was not a midgardian in the way she behaved, neither was she an Asgardian like her mother. Loki saw all kinds of realms and creatures in her: she carried herself around like the king of Alfheim, with class and much respect but she knew too much about the universe and its flaws to be a king. She fought like her mother, an Asgardian blamed for things she didn’t do, there was a shadow to her, something that kept Loki interested but he also knew that it wasn’t much of a thrilling shadow she had, it was made of all the broken parts she had.

Loki and Y/N were similar in ways they wanted to deny. They had both been let down too many times, by family and their close circle. Y/N had seen way too much compared to the grumpy god yet, he would deny this any time it came to his mind. Loki couldn’t read her mind either, it was a spell she had and much stronger than any other spell Loki had come across so he also wondered if she was trained by witches like Frigga had been.

His slow and steady steps brought him towards the noise. It was the huge training room that was occupied with a few familiar faces Loki had come to know. Slow grunts and the sound of flesh hitting metal filled the room,s the glass walls made everything even more visible while Loki approached the two people training, it wasn’t very much like training and more like one of them kicking the other’s ass. It was simply amusing to him.

The compound was soon filled with what they called ‘the team’. Loki was not the most content but he didn’t mind the company of some mortals around here who possessed a great deal of knowledge much to his surprise. He sat around the glass wall and watched the youngsters train, some of them had talents while some were simply pathetic in the eyes of the god. 

A dark chuckle escaped his lips when Sam fell on the ground once again, finding it hard to fight against super human powers, Loki was actually surprised he lasted this long. Due to the small sound he made, all eyes were on him now. He met all of their judgemental eyes before Tony spoke, sarcasm dripping out of every word that came out of his mouth.

“Wouldn’t you like to try, Reindeer Games? ” he spoke, there was first silence and a few giggles. This was a nickname Tony had given him and Loki was unsure of the meaning, yet it annoyed him so a hiss came out of his mouth instead of an answer.

If Thor were here, he would make the mortals know of the powers Loki possessed, none of them measured up to his level of accuracy and skill when it came to fighting, he was a god after all. The small footsteps interrupted his thoughts when Y/N came in, ready to fight in less clothes with more flexibility.

Bucky was the in the room, waiting for her so he could train. He didn’t need to but he knew it was a fun way of relieving the pent up energy he had inside him. While Loki’s eyes traveled from Y/N’s braided hair to her hands as she covered them with black gloved designed for her, the others spoke but he didn’t hear, he was too busy looking at his own view in front of him.

The gloves were actually to help Y/N with her powers. She was able to control a few things much like her mother, maybe even more powerful but she wasn’t fully comfortable with using them here, not in front of them. They had seen her hands light up and create illusions, weapons and different realities but they had never seen it in the compound, it was far too dangerous here.

Cap touched Loki’s shoulder, more like a push it was to get him out of staring and thinking, he was in his own world for a bit too long.

“Why don’t you go for a round with Y/N, I’m sure she’ll measure up to you.” he joked, Loki’s eyes glistened while they met Y/N’s.

Her mouth closed before she said anything, shrugging his shoulders as to say that it was alright. Nat was amused at this, she knew how well of a fighter Y/N was and knowing Loki was a demigod, she stood a chance to win for sure. Y/N didn’t say anything, she just waited for some sort of a reaction from Loki while he found this opportunity amusing.

He was searching for an opportunity to see the ex-assassin at work. Ever since the fast healed scar on her neck and their talk about her past, Loki had grown even more interested. The warrior who had a dark past just like her mother seemed too much of an intimidating story and Loki wanted to know, anything and everything Y/N was capable of not only on the battlefield but on the daily.

“Okay.”Y/N heard Loki say and that was all it took for her to come out of her thoughts.

She didn’t doubt herself nor her skills, she was trained on more than one realm and was experienced but she knew too much of the god. All the stories she had been told as a kid about the mighty brothers came to her while the admired god turned into an enemy on the training grounds, much faster of a change than she was used to.

Unlike others in the compound, Y/N wasn’t intimidated at Loki’s usual self. She knew he tried to annoy her, bore her but she only found his efforts more interesting than she had expected. Thor was a sweet person for sure but Y/N was interested in the mysterious god born after him, he was everything but what was expected of him and this caught Y/N’s attention a little too much.

“Alright.” Y/N said, stepping into the empty room while the team watched them through the glass door, it was protected from the inside yet, it was clear to see.

Loki’s gaze first traveled around her exposed neck, her hair came out of a few places yet it almost seemed like she did it on purpose. Her face was far too beautiful of a creature’s to be here, fighting with him. He knew of the gloves and their specialty but he let go of that, he didn’t want to seem to interested in the woman before him.

“Wanna throw the first punch?” Y/N joked, but before she knew it, Loki was already holding a weapon against her neck, it was an illusion he used.

Loki chuckled right before feeling a warmth on his stomach, was he bleeding? He looked down after letting Y/N go only to see nothing, she had used her powers to stimulate the feeling. Loki didn’t have much time after that when Y/N kicked her stomach, landing a few punches around his neck, making Loki stumble and fall onto the floor.

Y/N blew her hair out the way, feeling Loki’s strong grasp on her waist while he chuckled, way too darkly for someone who was about to be thrown into the ground once more. They heard the reactions of the avengers through the doors while Loki dragged Y/N’s body across the room. Y/N kicked her way out of his grasp, a little too fast for the god right before she felt a metal object right under her neck.

Her breath was not audible but it was there while Loki didn’t let go, holding her body tight against his while the team seemed simply terrified, he could kill Y/N if he wanted. 

“You minx.” he practically growled while she smiled slowly, finding it almost endearing how he had given her a nickname just when he was about to kill her. 

While thoughts made their way into Loki’s mind, Y/N hit his crotch, a little too cliche but his grasp loosened and the next thing he knew, Y/N had kicked her across the room until his back hit the wall, a loud thud across the room while the god stood there, trying to gain his balance and find his knife.

It was all too fast for anyone but Y/N as her actions took up a few seconds. After kicking Loki across the room, she grabbed her knife skillfully and just when he stood up, threw it across the room. A smooth sound could be heard by everyone around the room right before the knife stuck on the wall, right next to Loki’s cheekbone where there was a small cut. Too fast, Loki thought after he felt the cut on his cheek.

Avengers cheered slowly, Y/N’s face was nothing but celebratory. Her eyes didn’t leave Loki’s for a long time, there was something Loki had stumbled upon her during the fight that she found too hard to explain and so she just stood there for a while, facing the god with wide yet calm eyes as he bled. Her breath slowly calmed down under his gaze, her mind cleared and she gave her a small smile before walking out of the room.

Loki didn’t know what had just happened, it was far too fast and unexpected for him to digest. The god had just experienced his first individual defeat, he was bleeding and was in a state of utter shock but nevertheless, he was even more interested in the woman who was responsible for his current state.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

Staring at the reflection of himself on the ceiling, Loki’s eyes drifted to his scar. It was healing up slower than usual, probably because Y/N used some magic on it before she threw it. It was Loki could think about, how fast it all happened was the additional cherry on top. He had kept his cool around the half-god for some time now but when she threw that knife, there was so much she could see, so much of what Loki was out of his mask.

Y/N was also shocked, the god was not the sarcastic trickster she knew of at that moment. There was more than a whole universe inside the raven haired man before her, she had seen it in his eyes. There was so much sorrow, pain and fear he had but he was simply perfect at hiding it, much like he had done in the past years of his life. Y/N also saw regret, small hints of the past weighed him down a little too much.

Y/N kept these to herself while they stayed at the corner of her mind, creating curiosity and interest towards the god even more. Loki’s gaze left the ceiling and his scar when Rhodey came in the room with Thor, all the avengers were amused by the scar and how it had all happened, Loki saw it in their faces much like his brother’s.

Unlike what he would usually do, Loki wasn’t angry at Y/N nor he wanted to hold some sort of a grudge to unleash upon her in years to come, if she would be around. Loki hoped she would but he was aware of the unpredictability of the future. He was simply impressed at the creature, she was way too bold for a princess yet the way she carried herself told Loki otherwise, she was a whole different world in herself.

“Brother, you’ve been well?” spoke Thor, Loki didn’t know why he was here since he had been gone for the last week.

“Kind of you to ask after abandoning me here.” Loki said, sarcasm dripping from every word as he sat on the bed, Thor was sitting on a chair.

“I came to tell you about an event today, you need to make no trouble.” he spoke once again, Loki knew Thor was here for Jane yet he ignored it. He was used to being the second choice at this point.

“And?” Loki said, standing up while his brother kept his eyes on him, Rhodey was long gone.

“There’s a celebration being thrown, they have invited you as well since you have been quite bored. I ask nothing but for you to keep your mischief away today.” said Thor, trying to act as gentle as possible.

“They’ll have Y/N around for any magic tricks you might wanna pull.”

Tony appeared in the room, an apple in his hand while he winked at the demigods before him.

“And seeing how well she’s kicked your ass today.” Tony continued, walking in the room and his gaze met Loki’s scar.

“I think we’ll be just fine.”

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

The sky was dark, it was nowhere near a navy color while stars decorated the vast universe. The street was crowded, cars and guards coming out of each corner while everyone kept themselves occupied with a glass of champagne. Loki was staring around, trying to get used to the new realm he was in.

The party was one of Tony’s many, it wasn’t unusual that it happened but it was usual that a demigod who tried to destroy the very place they were in was invited. He chuckled, the guards and their guns would do nothing but harm if he tried to escape but the harm would be to the city once again.

Walking in the building, Loki’s eyes met the chandeliers, grand and well designed with too many lights on them. The place reminded him of one of the palace’s he’d been to, gold in many corners with statues and fountains inside the glass windows while laughter and greetings filled the thin air.

The place smelled of vanilla and champagne when the demigod’s eyes met the so called team. They were all here, wearing suits and expensive dresses while Thor walked towards them. They had smiles on, something rare Loki got the see and he also saw them out of their armors for the first time, they all looked different.

“Look who it is!” said Tony, the team laughed while all Loki did was to roll his eyes. He had gotten to this Midgardian sarcasm and dealt with it pretty well up until now.

As much as he wanted to deny it, his eyes searched for Y/N around the place. It was too crowded but for a god, it was nothing to search for someone in this place. He looked around for a while, his gaze met tones of women and men dressed in fancy attire with a drink in their hands yet Y/N was nowhere to be seen.

He was far too proud to ask anyone about her just when she appeared. She had left her wavy hair down, it created shadows around her face as she walked. Her maroon dress complimented her skin color completely as she made her way towards the group. She simply glistened under the lights, her face was accentuated with make-up and a few simple jewels and Loki could tell she took her beauty from her mother, it simply left him breathless.

He didn’t shift while she greeted the team, everyone except Loki. She was feeling a little guilty about the small scar on his cheek and knowing the stories about him, she was sure he was mad and annoyed at her so he remained away from him the whole time. Nat and Bruce got up dancing after a while, moving their bodies to the beat while the others also got up from the circle table, they had too much to drink.

Y/N chuckled at the crowd, all the foolish stumbling they made seemed to amuse her while she sat on the table across from the god. Their eyes met frequently, mostly because Loki didn’t seem to look away and Y/N waited for him to do so. She didn’t have much to drink even though he was good with her liquor, Midgardian drinks were far too weak.

The night and the dim lights created shadows on Loki’s skin, Y/N couldn’t keep her gaze away while she watched the city lights reflect on his porcelain skin. His blue eyes stood out while his slicked back hair and a few strands of hair on his face made him look like out of this world, even though he really was. He was wearing a suit, no tie with an unbuttoned shirt until he could reveal some of his silky skin. There was a green scarf around his jacket, matching the green detailing on his shoes and sleeves.

She gave him a smile while her gaze fixated on his eyes first, his scar second. Loki liked the small game they were playing until a slow song came on. There was a hint of fear in Y/N’ eyes when Loki walked towards her, leaving his chair while the rest of the team remained in their own world. He sat next to her while all her eyes did was to follow his figure, everywhere he went.

“Hello, Lady.”he spoke, a hint of mischief in his tone only she could see.

“Hey, Mister.”said Y/N, playing along while his eyes traveled up and down her body, finding her too good.

“Would you care to join me on the dance floor?”Loki asked, way more kindly than he would usually do.

Y/N was relieved and stressed. Loki wasn’t mad nor annoyed, that was her worry all along. The god was now next to her, asking her to dance with him. It was a slow song playing as they got up, Loki took her hand in his and she followed her, his touch was gentle unlike it had been in the fight today.

Her breath was slow while their bodies touched, Loki’s one hand was on her waist while the other held her hand up, intertwined fingers while they danced. Y/N could feel his heartbeat, his shallow breaths confident as they warmed her face with a steady pace. She didn’t look at him for a while, making sure she would not step on his toes as they waltzed around the room.

The crowd made a circle around them as they traveled from corner to corner around the room. When Y/N looked up, she realized he had been staring at her for the whole time. The lights around the room reflected from the surfaces of the glasses on the tables, creating small crystal shadows around the room while the two souls danced, almost perfect.

“I thought gods don’t bleed.” said Y/N, out of the blue after realizing that Loki was nowhere near holding a grudge about the small scar, he was simply impressed was all.

This earned a small chuckle from the demigod as he held her close, his chuckle filled her ears as a smile made its way to their faces. Loki smelled of mint and what Y/N imagined a mystic creature to smell like, it took her out of the thoughts she had and put her into reality.

These souls were both scarred too deep, betrayal and sorrow was carved into their minds as it appeared many times in their lives. Somehow, they would both come to heal each others’ wounds, all they would need was time and patience as they would come to grow together. The two kids who were dancing together would be each others’ light and dark but they were not so aware of this.

“You amuse me, dear.” Loki spoke, finding some sort of comfort in the exchange of a few words with the half-god. Her gaze met his once more, their crystal eyes filled with something out of the blue.

“Well, It’s an honor, Prince.” she spoke, not realizing the fact that he called him a prince.

In Y/N’s mind, Loki had always a prince ever since she heard of him. He was a misunderstood one but Y/N saw more elegance and nobility in Loki than in Thor. He was meant to be a King someday, there was no doubt in her mind but somehow, things had gone wrong and there he was now, imprisoned in a place far too weak.

With the change of a song to an even slower one, Y/N’s hand slipped from Loki’s and landed on his shoulders while Loki’s hands held her by the waist gently. The two creatures could easily be mistaken for lovers from outside but the truth was, they were nothing but a pair of familiar strangers to each other. Loki danced with the half-god while her heartbeat could be felt against his. Their eyes met every now and then, breaths against each other while Y/N’s mind was nothing but confused.

This man before him was nothing she had been told. She wasn’t the one to believe a couple words but it wasn’t just the mortals around here who told him about the merciless god who was now holding her against his body ever so gently. He was misunderstood, a little too reckless and loveless, nowhere near a monster. So she looked at his eyes for the last time that evening and found something she didn’t know he was capable of.

Tenderness.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

Taglist: @themusingsofmany​ @yuzuhirado​ @parkbearum​

[defdaily]

[TRANSLATION] VOGUE KOREA Magazine April 2019 issue x JUS2

190319 Vogue Korea JUS2 April ‘19 photoshoot & interview 

Translated by defdaily & doobseedoda

JUS2 is a unit of two members who were in charge of intensity in GOT7. This is a chemistry created when JB and Yugyeom, who love R&B in common, were absorbed in creative activities. Their hybridization was completed in a "minimal" state, which is neither strong nor soft. The mini album contains a story called six senses. Starting with the word Focus on Me, Drunk on You, Touch, Senses, Love Talk, and Long Black. It doesn't mean much nowadays to classify music into genres, but there are emotions of Deep House, Slow Jam and R&B in JUS2's music.

The unit's name was bound to be JUS2. It's only JB and Yugyeom, and it's a stage that can only be presented. "Actually, JUS2 means that it's both a performance and a song. We danced, sang, wrote and composed, and did everything." JUS2 is an example of a completely new creation without losing the members' identity in the group and reveal their talents and tastes.

Q. We are curious about the similarities and differences between you two.

JB: Our personalities are similar but our lifestyles are different. I really don't believe in blood type personalities but we're both type A and there is definitely a timid side to us. When you see us in reality we don't seem that timid. To sum it up, we're both timid and not timid at the same time (laugh). Both of us are considerate so we match well in some aspects. Yugyeom is all about 'let's live life having fun'.

Yugyeom: I don't put too much meaning behind the word 'happiness' and I'm a person who often feels happiness (doing little things).

JB: I like enjoying everyday life but I have a compulsion to not let my thoughts and mind slip alway so I tend to think a lot. There is music that we both like and there's also a point where (our styles) meet. I like strong/fast paced music and I also like calm smooth music, I like all kinds of music. Yugyeom likes the strong turn up kind of music and tends to lean towards the strong music.

Q. If GOT7's energy is bright and fresh, what would JUS2’s energy be?

Yugyeom: Jus2 would be having control and restraining yourself. If GOT7's energy is 'attacking' then JUS2’s energy is more like 'holding yourself back'.

JB: If GOT7 were the shooting star ice cream then JUS2 would be the Vanilla ice cream. Soft and smooth. Personally I like JJ Project's album the most. The story and track order contained all of what I wanted to say/include so it's the album I'm most proud of. After that is JUS2’s album which I'm highly satisfied with. Although there is no overall storyline, the theme of sensation was unraveled.

Q. You wrote and composed 'Focus On Me', if you could tell us about the collaboration process.

Yugyeom: We listen to the track and figure out whether to decide the theme first or make the melody first. The theme of FOCUS came up while writing the melody for Focus On Me and that's how it was settled. If anyone can think of a melody while listening to MR, they record it. "This part seems okay" then JB hyung sings it and I try singing it then we keep matching parts.

JB: At the start when I was working on the song and writing the chorus 'focus on me' stuck to me as matching. Since everyone else liked it we decided on it as the theme and wrote the lyrics. The first and second verse were written separately then the lyrics were put together.

Q. In what moments does inspiration tend to come to you?

JB: When I sense if a song's mood is a certain way, I think about what happened in the past or whať's happening now or what I've seen in movies and books. If I get inspiration first then I write it down in my notebook or phone. There are times when I turn songs on and look over what I have written down from the past. And sometimes the lyrics match what you want.

Q. What kind of lyrics do you think are good lyrics?

Yugyeom: the way you listen and the way you write is different. I'm the type to play a melody when I'm trying to write lyrics then I see what matches well in terms of pronunciation. JB hyung pays more attention to the lyrics so lyrics I could never think of came up (from JB). I would be into something else and hyung would come up with lyrics like ”Today you'll raise the white flag".

Q. What is a point you appreciate about each other's dancing?

JB: Yugyeom's dancing line is very clean cut. When he stretches out, the lines are really pretty and it also gives off a modern dance feel. He is the best at peculiar moves with his long legs. On the other hand my dance has more roughness.

Yugyeom: what's funny is, I realised this after watching the music video, that I dance with all my fingers out (?) together whereas hyung is the opposite

JB: (his fingers out together?) Yugyeom really likes this.

Yugyeom: That's what my favorite American dancer always did. It has become a habit.

Q. Yugyeom is always wearing black skinny pants in his Instagram dance videos, is it like a uniform?

JB: Not only when he dances, he just doesn't wear other pants in general. Yugyeom has lots of the same pants (laugh). He likes black skinny pants so much that he wears them even during practice. And he has stage shoes, which are more comfortable than sneakers, so he always wears them during practice too.

JB: For me I need the pants width to be big a little. And I always need to have sneakers on. Yugyeom likes skinny style while I'm the type to like a flimsy style.

Q. Things you talked about the most while preparing for JUS2.

JB: It was 'How should we organise/format the album”. Since it's our first time doing a minimal sound, we wondered if it would go well and we worried a lot about the album. We had lots of public relation meetings too (laugh). Looking back, it was fun. Feels like I've been travelling abroad for a few months. To be honest, I haven't been able to travel abroad much but whenever I travel even for a short time I feel really excited, but rather than an amusement park kind of fun I would feel a calm kind of fun. To paraphrase that, it's similar to the feeling.

Yugyeom: It was really fun. Seeing hyung almost everyday, we also talked a lot. I also liked the times where we would go grab a drink after finishing writing songs. Since JUS2 participated in songwriting and also outfits and choreography so it has lots of meaning. The teasers were also captured freely with a film camera while listening to music. Many new unique attempts were made in the preparation process.

Q. Feels like you have expanded a lot musically. Is there something you do to keep growing?

JB: When I see people I respect or people who are doing well think I should have more thoughts of ’Why is this all I can do'. That's how it works. I think. “Let's have a lot of experiences that will touch me, both indirectly and directly” When I have a chance, I go to exhibitions and think about the agony of the artists. I also wonder how I can use the SNS, which is so full of things, for my development. l once wondered how l could use so much SNS for my development. I take note of places and exhibitions recommended by people, I thought it would be good to get ideas from impressive artwork or videos.

Q. You've been a part of GOT7 for more than 6 years but this is your first time working together with just the two of you. Is there something new you learnt?

Yugyeom: There is no such thing. If I really try to find one, I thought hyung only ate Korean food but he actually likes eating even cream, curry and udon now.

JB: I feel like I've gotten influenced by the other members. I thought my preference for Korean food would never change but I've come to an acceptance point. Last time when we went to Paris, Bambam wanted to try snails. I rejected saying I could never eat snails but it was actually more delicious than I expected. That's the case, I have even eaten snails.

Q. If you were to pick the happiest moment in your day?

JB: When I clean the cats' dung. I see with my eyes that I can do something for someone else. I feel joy seeing the cats in a good shape/image. When I see the bin full of their dung, pride overcomes me as l know (they) have become cleaner.

Yugyeom: I'm the type who likes having lots of schedules but there are times when I become tired physically. I consult with my company and decide on a day off, and the moment I step foot into my house I feel really happy. A break once in a while could be so sweet. I'm happy when I can sleep late after working on songs all night.

Q: Is there anything you've discovered or thought about differently recently?

JB: On the way home after producing yesterday, the taxi driver took a wrong turn and we ended up at Yeouido. Looking out at the buildings through the window, this thought came to me. Within those buildings, people may be fighting or happy but the buildings seen from within the taxi only just look beautiful. I thought maybe the world looks more beautiful if you see it from a distance instead of up close. I thought we too might need some distance in our life as well.

Q: Is there anything you've discovered or thought about differently recently?

Yugyeom: I have always thought this but recently there's something that I've felt more strongly.I must really love music a lot (laughs). I would go crazy if I don't listen to it. If lI'm not listening to music, it feels like I have to and l'd keep thinking about the music I want to listen to. I've been producing songs lately and they've been very healing to me. Listening to and making good music in itself is a source of healing to me. So l realised once again. Ah, I must really love music.

Q. Do you feel the stress of writing while listening to music you like?

Yugyeom: not at all. I've never had such thoughts. There's a song I'm into lately. I really like Travis Scott's Can't Say' so l keep listening to it and watching the music video.

Q. JUS2 will have a world tour in April. GOT7 also proved themselves through a world tour too. What is the meaning behind world tours.

JB: It is like the result of one's efforts. Something that tells me how hard I've tried. An album allows me to witness the response to my agony/thoughts and a world tour allows me to experience that response.

Q. JB you've been uploading mixtapes on music sites for a few years now. How did this experience influence JUS2 work?

JB: I think it made me want to try doing what I really like. In fact, when you make music and keep storing them and going back to edit them, that way you won't have any results. Even if I get a beating (get punished) let's just show them!' that kind of mindset. The fans liked it but people around me reacted coolly. They said I put too much strength in it. I'm also considering different formats. Using the name Def. I wanted to differentiate between me who is in public and me who likes hip-hop R&B. Def. means the best with a full stop after it, ending it with the best. I wanted to convey the meaning that it's only over after I do my absolute best. Moving forward, of course l'll work hard doing the things I'm doing but I really want to show the image of me doing the things I like.

Q. What you want to achieve through JUS2.

JB: Music site ranking was not our goal. "Leť's show a fun and cool different colour”, let's show a completely different image from GOT7 were our goals. Actually even now I'm satisfied. As much as the album was well made, I like it/feel good.

Translated by: defdaily and doobseedoda

[surviiived]

Yidhra

=BASIC INFO= FULL NAME: Yidhra NICKNAME(S)/ALIAS(ES): the Dream Witch, Great Old Ones PRONUNCIATION(S): yid-hera AGE: As old as the Earth GENDER: No real gender, identifies as a female SPECIES: ??? BIRTH DATE: N/A SEXUALITY: Pansexual  =PERSONALITY= PERSONALITY: Sly, sadistic, manipulative, wise, twisted, arrogant  EMBODYING QUALITY/IDEA: snek lady A witch of dreams as old as the Earth itself, made of every creature to have ever existed. LIKES: novel creatures, seeing other experience pain, her followers, manipulating people, snakes and similar creatures DISLIKES: her followers getting stunned, getting stunned herself, someone being disrespectful FEARS: N/A WEAKNESSES: Can’t physically interact with any humans (that are alive) STRENGTHS: Has control over countless creatures throughout the world, not just her followers, and can possess any of them at any time she wants.  SPECIAL/SIGNIFICANT BELONGINGS: N/A =PHYSICAL AND HEALTH INFO= HEIGHT: Approx. 11 feet (from tip of tail to her head), usually stands at six feet WEIGHT: N/A BODY TYPE: Slender. Top half if that of a woman, bottom half is snake. Has large hands and animal-like ears. JEWELRY: has a choker around her neck and hoop earrings PIERCINGS/TATTOOS: has marks and symbols on her arms SCARS/DISTINGUISHING MARKS: A pentagram of sorts over her lower torso  =RELATIONSHIP INFO= RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Verse dependent PARENTS: N/A SIBLING(S): N/A – BEST FRIEND(S): Verse dependent  FRIENDS: Verse dependent ACQUAINTANCES: Great Old Ones, other hunters ASSISTANTS: Followers GUARDS: N/A ALLIES: Great Old Ones PETS/SPECIAL ANIMALS: N/A – ENEMIES: Survivors MAIN ENEMY(IES): Doesn’t really care MOST HATED: Doesn’t really care =STORY INFO= STATUS: ??? BACKSTORY: Yidhra has been around since the formation of the world we know. She is made up of every creature to ever roam this Earth, and has control over thousands of creatures.  Not much is known about her past in the slightest, just like with the Feaster. She’s just... there. In search of something new and interesting to pass the time. – PLACE OF BIRTH: N/A PAST LIVING QUARTERS: N/A CURRENT AND FUTURE HOMES: Oletus Manor – NATIVE LANGUAGE(S): N/A LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Pretty much any to have ever existed... =TALENTS/OCCUPATION/EDUCATION= OCCUPATION/JOB: N/A BOSS: N/A TALENTS: Her ability to control her followers and make them do her bidding YEARS OF EDUCATION: N/A LEVEL OF EDUCATION: N/A =GAMEPLAY= WEAPON/ITEM: Her five followers, one of which she starts with at the beginning of every match.  EXTERNAL TRAIT: Hidden Dream: Yidhra conceals herself in dreams. Her movement speed is extremely fast, but she isn’t able to interact directly. Survivors will not be able to see her face. She comes with a follower that can’t be removed. This follower follows Yidhra’s footsteps and is never far from her.  Follower: Yidhra creates a follower near a chosen survivor. The summoned follower’s existence is dependent on its host and is unable to leave its host. Attacking Yidhra will cause the follower to disappear and the survivors can remove followers using the witch mark. Followers are affected by Talent and have their own cool down period for secondary skills. Followers’ movement and directions are controlled by Yidhra and only when Yidhra possesses will it show a fear radius.  Witch Mark: Yidhra leaves a witch mark when she creates a follower. Survivors can pick up the witch mark and use it to remove followers from leeching onto self and teammates. However, removing followers from self consumes more time.  ABILITY:   Listen: When listening, the hunter can detect survivors when they run or vault objects. Preach (0): Tap on the wheel to control followers. There is a short cool down between each control. Followers cannot change targets while casting a skill or attacking.  Leech (0): Hold the button to select a survivor without a leeching follower, and spawn a witch mark and a follower at the location. The skill cool down will be decreased when the follower hits a survivor.  Assimilation (1000): Significantly decreases the cool down of leech skills.  Martyr (2500): Increases control of followers to significantly increase the followers’ movement radius. PERSONA: Detention and Trump Card =VERSES= ~ᶜᵃⁿ ᵃⁿʸᵇᵒᵈʸ ʰᵉᵃʳ ᵐᵉˀ ᵃᵐ ᶦ ᵗᵃˡᵏᶦⁿᵍ ᵗᵒ ᵐʸˢᵉˡᶠˀ~ |Survivor Verse|: Alias: The Snake Charmer Past: Yidhra had lived alone all of her life with no company, except with snakes. She was born blind and left, unwanted, in the wild. There her slithering family found her and raised her, allowing her to use ancient magic to see through their eyes. They’re her guides. She learned their language and befriended them, finding she alone could speak to these beautiful creatures. She used her snakes to get food for her to survive, as she lived on the streets of a small town. Humans hurt her friends and call her a freak for befriending them... And so, humans will pay.  Abilities: Yidhra is an Assist type. She can control five of her snakes at a time, which can decode (it takes five of them to decode at one machine to match the speed of an actual player), rescue (it takes a much longer time for a snake to free a survivor than a human), and find any of her teammates if she needs to know where they are. She always has one snake with her to be her eyes, because otherwise she won’t be able to see. She’s very fast and vaults through windows with a 10% increase, but since she needs a snake to see, it’s still very dangerous for her to be the one containing a hunter.  ~ᵒᵘᵗ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ᵈᵃʳᵏ~ |Out of the Manor Verse|: This is a verse that all of my muses have. This ‘verse’ contains all AU threads, crossovers, and just any interaction that doesn’t take place within Oletus Manor. 

like this post if you have read it and agree to it, please.

[adriannahahn]

NCAA WILL NOT Limit Student-Athletes

NCAA Athletes are Now Allowed to Make Money Off of Their Name, Image, & Likeness! But wait there’s a catch...

"The NCAA’s release said the new rules will, however, allow student-athletes to reference their sport and school and will call on NCAA members to use school compliance officers to oversee the types of endorsement deals and value of individual contracts to ensure fair value for the services provided. While the recommendations outline the ways athletes can make money, they also leave room for discretion at the NCAA and school level. NCAA staff will also aid with oversight."

This is a great next step for the NCAA (finally) in providing some sort of value for student-athletes while also making us realize at the end of the day that we should have had ownership of our name and likeness this entire time. NCAA mandates that the university's name or logo will not be used or allowed in such endorsements. Still, the NCAA is an organization that restricts their athletes tremendously!

Example: I'm currently working with Eastbay in an athletic campaign, #NeverNotAnAthlete for hard times during the pandemic. If I was still at Villanova, I would not be allowed to show my own school's logo, mascot, or name in the campaign or content produced. This simply goes down to wearing a shirt, bracelet, or even saying “My name is Adrianna Hahn and I go to Villanova University.” Yes, this all sounds moronic, doesn’t it? Imagine you work for the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, Marketing Director for Nike, Designer for Louis Vuitton, Adidas Social Media Manager, Basketball Coach for Villanova University, etc. and you couldn’t share your own job title to the rest of the world. You put your blood, sweat, and tears into something every day to just being compliant with unnecessary and selfish rules.

Not only does it sound idiotic to have to keep secret where you go to school, but the NCAA also states that compliance members OVERSEE the deals/ contracts being offered to student-athletes. We all might as well go home and never talk about this again. If you never played a D1 college sport, you might not be aware of this, but compliance office members might be more intense than the actual police enforcement on your campus. It is their job to find out what is wrong or illegal in a situation, and if there is none, most likely one will be created. This isn’t to knock down schools or compliance members, this is just my own experience and you can either deem it credible enough or not. That is based on individual reader’s preferences. I will now give the best advice to current student-athletes during these times: DO NOT TELL YOUR COMPLIANCE MEMBERS, TEAM MEMBERS, OR COACHES ABOUT ANY OF THE DEALS/ ENDORSEMENTS YOU ARE RECEIVING!

I hope your still reading. Yes, I said that. Not only is it important to keep your business deals personal and in the dark, but the less voices and hands on, the better outcome for you! At the end of the day, whether we want to admit it or not, a college experience depends on how that individual prepares and handles his/her obstacles and everyday situations. In all reality, a student-athlete should have a countdown for their last days on campus, because once they leave, they’re going to wish that they never told anyone about all their potential business opportunities. And yes, these are tremendous business opportunities. Let’s not allow the NCAA to limit these business deals and call it “making money off your name and likeness.” Shit doesn’t make sense, it’s not about how many people like me or my name. A company sees value and profit in me and not all humans can just get paid off of their name and status. So, in a sense, athletes do not be afraid of the NCAA, they need us. They live off of us, so demand every right and lets just be aware of how they are representing their own athletes in the media.

Let’s really break this down here. Because I feel like those who do not know me might read me the wrong way. I love Villanova and my school, so I am only referencing them for this story as an example, so please don’t make me see comments or have to hear unnecessary stories about me that are false. When I was 19 years old, a sophomore in college, my Instagram profile and basketball modeling pictures had gone viral. Of course, I was wearing a Villanova jersey, but it was not Villanova that gave me this large audience or viral platform. I created this by creating my own content, building my own name, figuring out my own social media marketing tactics, etc. Now you may say, “Oh, well you were wearing that Villanova jersey and that gave you some attention.” Yes, I am not discrediting my lovely university and their ability to attract on a mass global scale, but it was me at the end of the day. I created a brand for myself, and I know that this would have happened no matter where I went to school. I had value, I continue to bring value, and I will forever try to share that special value to the rest of the world. If I didn’t create a 100k audience, would we even be having this conversation right now? Probably not. It would be completely unfair for the NCAA to try and take ownership of something they DID NOT CREATE. Let’s take me out of the picture. The NCAA did not create Kris Jenkins or the National Championship game-winning shot. The NCAA did not create Zion Williamson, his explosive unnatural dunks while breaking a Nike shoe. The NCAA did not create DeShaun Watson, Sabrina Ionescu, Jay Bilas, Tua Tagovailoa, Tim Tebow, etc. If I keep going it’s going to make me sick understanding how valuable these players are but knowing how extremely limited they were within their own talents, skills, and making of who they are and became.

As a little girl, it was my dream to be the best WNBA player, have a fan base, be in the media and TV, and to be the person that everybody strived to be. I wanted to influence those younger than me and show those before me who was really boss. Yes, I wanted to be the boss. I always wanted to show people the real value I had, which to this day I know will go very far. When I created my social media platforms, I was impressed myself just with the numbers and how fast things were moving. I was impressed with how much opportunity I saw come my way with just the simplicity of posting great content and “selling” an amazing product. When this was all happening, it was not everybody’s dream to have a strong social media audience. People looked at me with disgust, like almost how could you sell yourself to the world like that. How could you possibly become somewhat famous or even more recognizable than your own school? Now, people get it. Everybody is foaming at the mouth for Instagram followers, but that’s for another day. What I’m trying to say is I finally created this special niche that I wanted all along, and once I got it, I was told to shut it down and find something else.

So, I went and became a server. Yes, I became a waitress. The same starting point guard, Big East record holder, Villanova star was a breakfast server at a local restaurant. Now, I didn’t serve because I needed money, I wasn’t broke. This doesn’t matter because all college kids, whether your parents are rich and will just GIVE you money, should feel the need to make your own money or make a living for yourself. I knew I needed to do something I never did before, like go into the workforce, and become a server, something I never thought I would ever be. When my friends found out I started working at pretty much the local breakfast joint, it was almost like this new comedy movie came out. Everybody wanted to see me in a uniform, cleaning tables, carrying food like I was circus animal. None of this bothered me because in all reality, I was one of the best players in the league, doing what I felt was right and worthy of my time. Everything I had assumed about serving or working in the restaurant industry smacked me in the face. For all those people who never worked in a restaurant, do you know how hard it is to confidently walk up to a table and be prepared for any and all concerns? I used to have rude people, who obviously never went out their isolated communities, scream at my face or flat out disrespect me, just assuming I was some washed up server that made no money or had no career. Mind you I’m also working and going to school in one of the richest areas in the world, yes, I said the world, look it up. When those same people found out I went to Villanova, or I was associated with basketball, or not only was associated but was the starting point guard, I started making more tips because I went to Villanova and played basketball there rather than just being a good server, which I most definitely was. 

I made sure that these same people who disrespected me knew that they came in contact with the wrong one. BUT, it wasn’t until serving where I learned how to stick up for myself, or be able to have these conversations and not be shut down. Not only did serving help me develop necessary life skills, but it was an activity that I created and made for myself, similar to my Instagram experience. All of my teammates had the same schedule, but I made the decision to put more time into getting a job, even when I played every minute of every game. That’s when I realized it wasn’t necessarily about all of the opportunities I had in front of me, but how I was going to create more opportunities from the ones I was currently in. Nobody told me I had to go get a serving job. I did it for myself. Nobody told me I had to get 100k followers on Instagram, but I did it for myself. When people do not live those same experiences as you or have the same mindset as you, you will either come across two things: having to fight for yourself and continue to do what’s best for you, or lower yourself under what other people are saying just for them to control your endeavors stemming from their own insecurities and uncomfortableness. (If you are confused by this statement, trust me I can break it down for you)

When I talk about making college your own journey and creating those opportunities for yourself, this modern issue will only pertain to you if you allow it. Even though I was successful and still broke many paths and outlets for myself, I still allowed what other people said and did to affect me. And like I said previously, I have never met an official or working member from the NCAA in my entire four years, and I know a shit ton of other athletes that said the same. You create your own opportunities, but you can also limit your own opportunities as well. Even though I went out and created those opportunities for myself, even ones I was unfamiliar with, I still was limiting my full potential and I didn’t even realize it in the moment. At the end of the day, you will leave your university, you will not be controlled by the NCAA, and to be completely honest, I don’t think we ever really were. It is significantly crucial for a student-athlete to know and understand exactly what value they will bring to the world once they leave their school. For me, I was extremely lost because I allowed others to remove me and strip me of my own value. We have just been allowing this over-arching organization to control our mindsets and activities. Trust me, keep your business private, do not be fearful of higher authority or “rules,” and if you find value in an opportunity you better never hesitate or limit yourself. 

Think about it. In college, student-athletes should never feel limited, we only have so much power. NCAA LIVES OFF OF CONTROLLING OTHER BUSINESS’ PROFITS! What the hell kind of budget is the NCAA going to take from me in order to receive their 10% earning? $100 if I make $1000 on a social media or product campaign, the NCAA must track me down and all my business opportunities so they profit as well! Even Zion Williamson or Kris Jenkins memorable sports moments that might bring in millions of dollars for these kids, LET THESE KIDS HAVE THE MONEY. It’s almost like multimillionaires owning sports teams and supporting their business for the sole purpose of making money, but these same people publicly announce proactive racism and will completely shit on their true “money makers,” not even understanding at the end of the day who brings in that real money. (Yes, I said it)

Now those in the audience might be saying, “Oh, well if it wasn’t for schools or the NCAA, these student-athletes wouldn’t be going to school for free or getting their degree for free. They are so selfish that not only do they get free schooling but they also want to be paid!” Yes, Yes we do. And for those who are thinking this, stop assuming now. Athletes are in major debt all the way up until college, and for those athletes who don’t make it to college or don’t have a successful college career, that debt might not ever get repaid. I hope we aren’t confused with the usage of debt here. In this case, let’s just say the average athlete starts at 8 years old, plays sports until 18 when they go to college and will then be financially provided by the university. For those athletes like myself that were fortunate enough to have parents to be able to financially provide their children to play sports (remember this is not everyone), that is about 10 years parents are paying for sports. Each year, let’s just say with school basketball and summer league/ AAU, parents total per year is about $10,000, and I’m just being nice right now. Calculating that up, it is at least $100,000 for a child to play a sport well enough to get a full D1 scholarship, and I’m only talking about playing 1 sport. Where is the NCAA now? Where is their influence or guidance during this process? Where are they pretty much your entire life? Nowhere.

 How long will it take for a family or student-athlete to get that money back? It is an investment that not everybody just takes or sees beneficial. Not only are parents in debt for sports activities, but they are also paying what every other parent is paying as well. Not only was this a financial necessity, but do you know how much time and dedication was made by the entire family for this one child to go to school? It is a family sacrifice. So, for those who just complain and make comments when they were never in our shoes don’t really need to be heard right now. Especially when if we broke it down, the numbers will not ever add up, so let’s not compare when the numbers don’t, that’s just facts. If you disagree, you can either stop reading or continue. Not only is it essential that these kids get the money they deserve in order to make a living in life, but we fucking need it! We want it and we deserve it, just like anybody would demand profit or income for something that required hard work, talent, and way too much time. As athletes, we are made and built to be the best, to become the best versions of ourselves. No, it is not just about the money, but I’d be damned if I have an opportunity that I myself created and the NCAA simply tells me no. But guess what? It’s too late for me.

To all my student-athletes, keep your business to yourself and you will strive. Save the money you secretly make from business/ companies, it is so easy nowadays to save and invest. If somebody from your school’s compliance or of higher authority makes you do something or says you have to do this, 99% you most likely don’t so add me on LinkedIn and ask me questions if you feel stuck or don’t know what to do. It is now the time to tackle and create numerous opportunities for yourself, but no one will do it for you, but remember that when others get in the way, or you come across distractions. There is not a right or wrong way to do things, just as long as you build true character, have respect, and influence/teach those after you. It is not weird for a student-athlete to go get a real job midseason, even when they are the best on their team, it isn’t weird or abnormal to have 100k followers on Instagram, and it for sure isn’t wrong to create business opportunities for yourself while playing a sport in college. Do not be afraid of the NCAA, and do not allow such an organization to control your brand. When you leave college with a completed degree, the world is yours. Everything is competitive, everyone is envious, and in all reality, everyone is chasing the same things, but not everyone is working the same, or envisioning it the same way. If you see it, go get it. If you have it, make something of it. Never feel limited and for all my student-athletes, keep business to yourself and do not fear an invisible “threat.”

For all those who are reading this, parent, athlete, child, grandparent, coach, fan, etc. PLEASE do not look at me as the demon. I am doing what is right and standing for what should be granted. I was a student-athlete that played at a very high level, so not only do I understand competitiveness, success, dreams, etc., but I know how to handle adversity, overcome fear/challenge/ doubt, and I know how to find myself throughout this entire process. Business is real my friends, and everybody is chasing it. No matter how you create business for yourself, do not allow someone or something else to tell you what you have to do with it. Most of the people you will encounter never experienced such business deals or opportunities for themselves so understand their experiences as well and truly dive into a person’s mind. Do people around me want the best for me? Do these people want to see my full potential? Do these people want me to be successful in my next life journey? Realize that you are a product, and yes I say this with full value. Turn yourself into a product where others find you useful. What value can I bring that others can’t? What value/ form of impression can I give to a coach, boss, CEO, etc. where they want me over them? All of this starts in college, and yes it starts from the small business deals on Instagram, or brand ambassador discount code for a product, or national championship buzzer beater shot. I did that, we did that. Don’t forget this when opportunities present themselves my unreserved student-athletes, you created this for yourself, not them, so do what you want with it.

At the end of the day, if you think it’s wrong or hurtful to someone don’t do it. Other than that, go for the fucking world; it’s literally at the palm of your hands…

[thepowerofmybeing]

Hottest Trends for 2019

Loads of articles out there in the World Wide Web, some of them I really think we should not leave unnoticed.

Huge development in technology/ car industry field with self driving cars allowed on the roads. It still sounds a bit scary imagining there will be robots taking us down the road and we will just sit in the car waiting to arrive at our destination, reading morning newspaper, playing with kids in the back seat or just polishing our nails. In a way, it sounds sad, non personal, inhumane, but, if you really think how luxurious it will be and how much could be done while the car takes you where you need to, all the arguments are pro robot driving! If it will turn out to be super safe, I’ll be in the line to get one ;-)  “ This cycle has restarted, and the term “driverless car” will soon seem as anachronistic as “horseless carriage.” We don’t know how cars that don’t need human chauffeurs will mold society, but we can be sure a similar gear shift is on the way”  https://www.wired.com/story/guide-self-driving-cars/

If I was a small entrepreneur, I’d read this article:  https://www.metrilo.com/blog/ecommerce-trends-niche-products. I found this information very enticing and up to date. So happy that fast fashion, fast food and fast everything is slowly being replaced by more valued items that would last longer. I am a strong believer in quality and would be so happy to see more exclusive products on shelves of all free standing and e-commerce shops. It would save so much for our planet Earth - Chinese women being locked to their sewing machines doing slave work for the likes of Primark, plastic thrown in oceans and killing wildlife, children playing with hundreds of useless plastic items filled with toxic substances, us all wearing dresses with unfinished seams made of suspicious inflammable materials, us eating food that is not really worthy of being called food - all the danger to our future and our children’s well being. Less is more concept needs to take place in order for this World to not come to an end...Healthy boxed lunches, reusable food wrap, buying for life items, eco friendly lady products, custom cosmetics and apparel, crafted, handmade, novelty and specialty, these are words of new, personalized and original man and woman. And I need the smart backpack (this item is on all trending product lists of 2019) as we all have discovered how amazing it is to travel and see more in life! 

How about Social Media trends in 2019? Well, just like most of the trends, these also become more personalized and more “machine involved” at the same time. https://www.inc.com/john-hall/7-social-media-trends-brands-need-to-know-to-prepare-for-2019.html So, while the CEO of any large company should get on Instagram and tell his audience who he really is, what he eats for breakfast and how he spends his free time, while each social media user and influencer should become the apple of every company’s eye and receive custom attention and care, Chatbots will take care of more and more business conversations and interactions. Its funny how this World is becoming more geared towards individual approach and more robotic at the same time. So while we will be sitting in a car driven by a robot, chatting on the phone with a robot, we will wear more sustainable clothing and eat more healthy food just so we can stay alive longer to interact more with robots and phones ;-) haha, this makes sense! But, to be honest, hopefully this shows an intentional, more purposeful shift towards human intelligence. Robots and computer development is a good thing if used for the principle of our own education and improvement, if the time spent with a robot doesn’t take us away from our families and loved ones and if it makes us brighter and greater.

This post is never going to end? Yep, you guessed it! I am just so amazed from researching this subject! It is so interesting - investigating and predicting, understanding the “whys” of the upcoming year, evaluating customer behavior change and the company reaction to the always changing consumer needs. Here is an article from Forbes about customer experience trends in 2019, how companies are always going above and beyond all customer expectations, how some are succeeding and some - not. “Continually re-evaluating processes, products and business models is what keeps companies alive and successful in the ever-changing minds of customers.” We have to stay on demand or the ship will sink, we have to be flexible to adjust to the needs and changes, we have to sustain the connection with our customer and do it in a way that amazes, pleases and keeps them coming back for more. This is a very good article about change, expectations and staying popular with your buyer. Digitalization here is mentioned as an aid - helpful and useful tool - which does not replace human presence, but improves the overall experience, saves time for both sides and improves the quality of information for both - the assistants and the consumers. ‘When machines control the mundane tasks, humans have more time to dedicate to the uniquely human tasks, like strategy, creativity, innovation, problem solving, connecting with customers and developing a strong customer experience.’- https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2018/12/05/five-trends-shaping-the-future-of-customer-experience-in-2019/#44e4d61c7bb6

And last, but, most certainly, not least - fashion news for 2019. Haute Couture and Mode can not be forgotten or let out as this is our everyday expression, our individual approach to showcasing who we are and as Elle puts it: ‘The question of how designers envision women, what a woman wears and the image she projects has become a political hot potato. The big takeaway from the season? To value those visions that really are attuned to reflecting our truth in some way so that we can do us.” I LOVE this sentence! Yes! We celebrate and showcase US! We move away from sweatpants and hoodies, leave our athleisure-wear in the drawers and replace it with ruffles, silky materials and bubble skirts. We put couture dressmaking and craft skills in front shelves just like craft drinks and personalized socks (reference from previous article about niche products). We add small puoches and large pockets on all our clothing items, we purchase a stylish backpack to make a statement and prove to all that we are worldly travelers. We add some hippy charm and burst of 60′s color into our wardrobe to celebrate all our beloved icons from the past. Hell, we even put on shoes with square toes (not sure I’ll get into this trend...). But, hey, we do not have to do it all, we can just borrow a few ideas and tips from each trend, we can just use it as a reference when we look for a new outfit in 2019. After all, this should not be difficult, as we just have to stay true to ourselves - the motto of my page here. Don’t be who you are not in 2019! It is my wish to all of you and my personal New Years resolution! May you be happy in your own skin! Cheers!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF DETAILS

They will have all the extra motivation that comes from being freed from the constraints of research. So far, we've reduced the problem from the direction of the arts, you're less likely to depend on this sort of calming lie is that we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. You could start users with a seed filter, but ultimately each user should have his own per-word probabilities based on the pie fallacy is stated explicitly:.1 Combine that with Pirsig and you get: Live in the future is to focus extra attention on specific parts of the email. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to think of startup ideas. As subjects got softer, the lies got more frequent. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer? And the reason you should avoid these things is that you are already working as hard as you can in so many print publications—which is one of the first things he'll ask is, how much more.2 Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be very hard. In fact, faces seem to have made that deal, though perhaps it has to be able to filter them. I do, I look them straight in the eye and say I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp.3

In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the corner of his mouth is very disconcerting. This isn't quite true. Competitors commonly find ways to work around a patent.4 If economic inequality should be decreased. The source of the problem it fixes.5 The same is true in the arts, but most hackers are very competitive.

There is no such thing as better, it doesn't make any difference what Larry Page's net worth is compared to yours. Treat a startup as an optimization problem will help you avoid another pitfall that VCs worry about, and rightly—taking a long time it was most of making things easier, but now that the things we build are so complicated, there's another rapidly growing subset: making things easier. Windows itself.6 But really it doesn't matter much which you use. Why do you keep emails around after you've read them? The problem is not, in itself, what makes startups kick butt, but rather that small groups can be select. Marie Curie was on it because she was a woman, but as the corpus grows such tuning will happen automatically anyway.7 What are they to do? You pick the companies you want to get rich, and this trend has decades left to run. Right?

How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company. While the best way to discover startup ideas is to work with him on something. Kids, almost by definition, lack self-control.8 But it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. A viable startup might only have ten employees, which puts you within a factor of two? But I also think that the more different it gets.9 I've learned, to some degree, to judge technology by its cover. When you negotiate terms with a startup idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month before the Altair appeared? What would you think of a financial advisor who put all his client's assets into one volatile stock? But that world ended a few years?

But you can't trust your opinions in the same way about the operating system. Notice all this time I've been talking about the limit case: the case where you not only have zero leisure time but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health.10 The unsexy filter is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found yourself saying Why doesn't someone make x?11 Programs are very complex and, at least, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middle manager who would be your boss in a big company: the pay's low but you spend most of your time working on new stuff. I wouldn't try to defend the actual numbers. Except in a few cases to buy a certain stock. Design by committee is a synonym for bad design. The Matrix have such resonance. Arguably pastoralism transformed a luxury into a commodity. Being at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, there will be things that are false, and I'm going to talk about it to have anything more useful to say.12

Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money.13 Of all the approaches to fighting spam, from software to laws, I believe Bayesian filtering will be the single most effective. Don't spend much time worrying about the details of deal terms, especially when you first start angel investing. The part of angel investing that the decisions are hard. When I protested that the teacher had said the opposite, my father replied that the guy had no idea what he was talking about—that he was on the list because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to have a mind that's prepared in the right startups is for investors.14 We were all lied to as kids, and some of the growth in economic inequality we've seen since then has been due to bad behavior of various kinds, there has been a qualitative change in the world. A job means doing something people want.

The way to kill it is to be young. This way you might be able to make something useful.15 I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be anything waiting for it. It was not till we were in our twenties that the truth came out: my sister, then about three, had accidentally stepped on the cat and broken its back. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, approach offers as in this approach offers having a probability of more than. The reason our hypothetical jaded 10 year old leaning against a lamppost with a cigarette hanging out of the founders' own experiences organic startup ideas—by spending time learning about the easy part. If anyone wants to take on this kind of project. The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot of other people's. Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. A company big enough to be fairly conservative, and within the company the people in the future, not now.16 So the guys you end up with special offers and valuable offers having probabilities of.

Notes

Down rounds are at selling it. Living on instant ramen would be improper to name names, while simultaneously implying that lies believed for a patent is conveniently just longer than the 50 minutes they may end up reproducing some of these groups, which is the odds are slightly worse.

Something similar has been happening for a reason.

Most were wrong, but investors can get done before that.

Give the founders.

It was harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we can teach startups a lot more frightening in those days, then they're not ready to invest, it is still what seemed to us.

It was harder for you? Exercise for the talk to a car dealer.

Some are merely ugly ducklings in the production of high school kids at least bet money on convertible notes often have valuation caps, a market price if they did that in practice signalling hasn't been much of The New Industrial State to trying to focus on their utility function for money. So it may not be if Steve hadn't come back. They therefore think what they meant. So what ends up happening is that so many trade publications nominally have a single cause.

The existence of people we need to.

Different sections of the world as a definition of property without affecting and probably also the fashion leaders. Later stage investors won't invest.

We could have used another algorithm and everything I write out loud at least for those interested in each type of mail, I advised avoiding Javascript. One of the corpora.

After reading a draft of this essay, I have a standard piece of casuistry for this situation: that startups usually lose money at first had two parts: the source of food. Exercise for the talk to an adult. Throw in the King James Bible is Pride goeth before destruction, and many of the flock, or want tenure, avoid casual conversations with other people's.

If not, and B doesn't, that's not relevant to an investor derives mostly from the example of a type of thing. None at all. Which OS? You can build things for programmers, the work of selection.

So far, I suspect five hundred would be worth trying to capture the service revenue as well, but this sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. But an associate is not pagerank commercialized. A small, fast browser that was really only useful for one user.

It might also be good employees either. There is nothing more unconvincing, for example, would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to try to be staying at a particular valuation, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard Business School at the mercy of investors want to stay in a limited way, without becoming a police state. But in most competitive sports, the computer hardware and software companies constrained in a place to exchange views. No Logo, Naomi Klein says that a company that could be mistaken, and—and probably also a second factor: startup founders are in a series.

Together these were the case of the growth in wealth, and there didn't seem to have too few customers even if the president faced unscripted questions by giving a press conference. This probably undervalues the company than you expect.

Dropbox wasn't rejected by all the best startups, the higher the walls become.

Thanks to Brad Templeton, Trevor Blackwell, Fred Wilson, the friends I promised anonymity to, Robert Morris, and Jessica Livingston for smelling so good.

[slaaneshfic]

Smeared into The Environment: Queer Horror games and The Ahuman

Smeared into The Environment: Queer Horror games and The Ahuman

Ralph Dorey

Presented as a work in progress paper at

“Don’t Look: Representations of Horror in the 21st Century”

University of Edinburgh, 28th April 2018 http://www.dontlook.llc.ed.ac.uk/

This paper is about a contemporary aspect of horror read through contemporary philosophy. This isn’t to say that either the horror or the philosophy did not exist before the contemporary moment, but that something about current trends in the use of “horror” in contemporary art practice will hopefully be made clear in this paper.

The work being examined is by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, who’s biography lists her as;

“a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xenofemme scifi/fantasy, cursed videogames, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds” (Heartscape, n.d.).

The particular work which I am going to talk about today is one of her collaborations with the artist, game designer and musician Rook. This collaboration takes the form of the first of a series of self produced, episodic video games called “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist Episode 1, HYPERSLIME” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). My analysis of this artwork will be done through the philosophical tools of post-human feminism, and in particular those of philosopher Patricia MacCormack as presented in her book chapter “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” (MacCormack, 2016). It is in this chapter that MacCormack proposes the “use” of Lovecraft within the post-human feminist project. Lovecraft’s supposed “aversion to the carnal” combined with his stories frequent encounters with overwhelming, fleshy, or cosmic imanense allows them to be brought into the unlikely company of philosopher Luce Irigaray (MacCormack,2016). MacCormack ask’s not for a revision, but a “use” of Lovecraft, queering his writing into an “ethical erotics of alterity” (MacCormack, 2016). I speculate that under this, Lovecraft’s writing remains within the sphere of “horror”, though this sphere becomes more heterogeneous. This reading of Lovecraft has precedent in the work of philosopher Gille Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari who see within his work a “becoming animal”, which is to say breaking open the law of what is a human into a “becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even Becomings-imperceptible” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). What Deleuze and Guattari celebrate here is the replacing of a singular, molar self with a “pack”, or in the words of Lovecraft’s Carter “to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings” (Lovecraft, 2014). If becoming animal, merging and re-configuring other forms of being, kinship and sensation are not pushed back in phobic disgust, the question must be asked “horror for who?” (MacCormack, 2016).  

The word “horror” itself becomes slippery under these conditions. I use it to refer to the genre, the signifiers, and indeed some of the sensations felt by actors within such narratives as well as our own observing them. However the thing that I bracket out from horror is the assumed ethical position which might privilege order, the majoritarian and the phallogocentric above difference, speculation, affect.

It is my proposal that Sticky Zeitgeist represents a similar horror which denies the human, and displays the same difference-celebrating, erotic possibilities which MacCormack pulls from Lovecraft. I argue that Sticky Zeitgeist is horror but that the majoritarian subject,the one who should be horrified, is absent. It is not a fan-fiction reversal which pulls a monsters into the foreground, making them sympathetic by conforming to Majoritarian structures of power, value and morality, anthropomorphising them. Rather, Sticky Zeitgeist just doesn’t care about about those structures, and forges its own.   

Firstly we are going to establish some of the key concepts used by MacCormack and then trace them through the world of Sticky Zeitgeist. The first of these is the “Ahuman”, and while this term has many applications I start with a extract from MacCormack’s own recent definition, in Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova’s 2018 “Posthuman Glossary” (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018);

“Ahuman theory promotes catalysing becoming- other from the majoritarian or all human privilege and renouncing the benefits of the Anthropocene. [Methods for which include] the use of all manifestations of art to form new terrains of apprehension of the world and encourage new ethical relations between entities” (MacCormack, 2018).

In this definition, the Ahuman is positioned within a radical animal rights discourse of abolitionism, which seeks to avoid what is sees as the anthropocentric raising of animal to human equivalence. Rather than bringing the nonhuman into the human ethical sphere, which MacCormack considers both impossible and nessecerally nonconsensual, the abolitionist position bases nonhuman rights upon the fact “that it is” rather than “what it is” (MacCormack, 2018). More importantly for the subject of this paper, “Abolitionists are activists against all use of animals, acknowledging communication is fatally human, so we can never know modes of nonhuman communication and to do so is both hubris and materially detrimental to nonhumans” (MacCormack, 2018). This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Ahuman for our purposes, difference is to exist on its own terms, and the capturing action of communication is not required to acknowledge this difference.

Now it is time to approach “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode 1  HYPERSLIME”, which importantly begins with a flurry of difference, including characters which might point to are never captured by the myths of either “animal” or “human”. After the opening theme song, the episode is epigraphed with a quote;

“Make a 150-lb self-contained, 3-D person into a square-mile thin pancake and you’ve got a slimey veneer of organic matter of no use to you or the observer puzzled by the thin, gooey-drip man. Suburbias and exurbias are promoters of slime.”

This quote is attributed to italian architect Paolo Soleri who’s concept of arcology, low-waste, high population density, self sufficient vertical urban structures runs, though mainly as a mutant form, throughout this narrative. Our story’s first protagonist “Ever”, considers the quote and posits that they themselves are are even further dispersed, trapped in a room and glued to a screen they are “Hyperslime”. Ever’s response to this realisation is to get high, masturbate and surf the internet, something which is itself one action as under the glow of her network terminal, Ever pokes the drug “girl chunks” into their arsehole. Ever comments on the impossibility of describing this drug-data-sex experience, “if i wasn’t experiencing this, i couldn’t describe it and i can’t remember when i’m not experiencing it what i’m not experiencing hypersucrose on my frontal lobe like-” before be interrupted by a call from work (Heartscape & Rook, 2017).

The impossibility of language, which has already been brought up in the Ahuman’s relation to the nonhuman as posited by abolitionist animal rights activists, surfaces repeatedly in MacCormacks discussion of Ahumanity and Lovecraft’s horror where we are shown “what is possible, while managing to show that it is also unnameable” (MacCormack, 2016). For MacCormack human language is the “great annihilator of the the potentialization of expressivity and affect of entities that are not counted by the majoritarian human” (MacCormack, 2016), but in the world of Lovecraft such language is demonstrably powerless. Encounters are beyond description, are left as such. The ethical turn which is executed upon Lovecraft demonstrates the inadequacy of the word “horror” to account for such experience. “Horror for some, the very opening of the world to others” (MacCormack, 2016). Or as articulated by Lovecraft himself, “Fright became pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal now only ineffably majestic” (Lovecraft, 2014).  

Returning to Sticky Zeitgeist the collapsing of self, sex and connection is ecstatic. The message demanding she travels to work is the cue for Ever’s horror. The world outside her room, which she describes as the “Goblin’s pit” is loaded with signs, both literally in the form of adverts for jobs, bands and lost fast food establishments but in the fixed overlay of time, behaviour, social relations etc. Ever’s chance to pass invisibly into order relies on her getting her bus to work while in constant fear of the drugs and saliva leaking from her underwear. The bus is late, she is going to be late, and she falls into a panic attack. The panic attack itself is represented as the game descends into a gross, nonsense parody of the call and response rhythm game “PaRappa the Rapper”. “You snooze, you oooze! Then you lose! Control of your holes!” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017).

The abject, what Julia Kristeva describes as “the place where meaning collapses” is not simply the girl chunks leaking from Ever, but also Ever herself (Kristeva, 1984). When she first sets out on this trip to work she narrates “i exit from the back of the house like shit” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). Ever is the remainder and excess who themselves cannot either hold the outside in or keep it out but is in a constant asignified flow which because impossible and traumatic only within the unaccommodating and regimented parts of the world.

As we continue to play the game focused initially on the narrative of Ever, more signs of horror perpetuate. The first of these is the User Interface that frames the game space, cables and visera weave into one another frame a screen and text/hyperlink area bringing to mind the mid 90s point and click horror adventure Dark Seed with graphics by H.R. Geiger. At the top, a ribbon cable is plugged in through a smashed secondary screen or logo area, leaving only a few letters of the game’s title readable. In Sticky Zeitgeist, as in much of Heartscape’s other work, trash pervades. Everything is a remainder, including characters. Everything is an improvised hack, survival mixed with abandonment and most importantly not fully namable. This extends to the characters themselves, Ever is only described as a girl, her ears and nose suggest a dog or maybe a goat. It’s implied that she is trans, but none of this is cause of elaboration to the audience. Other characters display equal fluidity, maybe becoming robots, maybe becoming moths. Gender is explicit though, all are referred to with female pronouns. They are “she”, “her” and “sisters”.

The remainder, to be in excess of or less than names and categories runs through Lovecraftian horror. The folks of Innsmouth, the mercurial Old Ones themselves or various landscapes and objects and experiences. MacCormack quotes Luce Irigaray, “Already constructed theoretical language does not speak of the mucous. The mucous remains a remainder, producer of delirium, of dereliction, of wounds, sometimes of exhaustion” (Irigaray, 2017). This connectivity, abjection, transgression is the stuff of horror, but it is also the stuff of erotics and kinship. The two robot sisters in Sticky Zeitgeist sit together on a train, one, Agate leaning against the other who narrates,

“She’s in sleep mode. She spends most of her time there. Our brains make a lot of connections at super fast high frequency. Hard to shut out the bad connections. Everything reminds you of something else. Contaminated with information”  (Heartscape & Rook, 2017).

The default state is porosity, leaky bodies. The sister blocks out the connection of thought and meaning but retains that of touch. Later the sleeping sister will visit a 7-11 and watch the rotating “honk dogs”, remarking “how nice to be rotated”, an empathetic encounter with convenience food (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The characters in Sticky Zeitgeist are nonhuman, but they are not fixed as one kind of nonhuman. Any encounter is a “becoming animal” as everything holds an affective charge, or is a biological contaminant (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). As the player of the game we are often unsure who “we” are. The first person narrative flickers between characters often without indication of who is speaking. We have to assume that we are all of the pack, while acknowledging that this pack is constantly in flux. What stands out is that the four characters are not presented as an isolationist group as with the majority of narratives on survival. Their job is to travel out into a lushus swamp and salvage broken parts of downed satellites and one character comments “I like to rub my face on the debris to make sure the radiation is getting the most direct access to my brain” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The group is open and loving with one another in their fluidity while also being open to difference in the world around them, to be changed by it through drugs, radioactivity, hormone replacement therapy or the beautiful leaky swamp they eventually head out into.

In 2012’s “Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory” MacCormack states that “The art encounter elucidates the new horror and wonder of being in the asignifed world as a new state of constant ecstasy” (MacCormack, 2012). Engaging with art including, or perhaps especially, with horror, is not simply about representing alterity but an affective encounter which breaks open the category of human. This is the argument MacCormack makes for the ecstatic experiences of the characters in Lovecraft’s works, as well as the readers experience of these work of art. As we find ourselves adrift in asignification we are becoming Ahuman. I conclude that Sticky Zeitgeist presents the ethical plurality that arguably the works of Lovecraft must be made to extract. Sticky Zeitgeist represents a kind of horror which is not. Bodily, cognitive and social difference, are not presented as needing hygienic eradication but simply are. Character’s might experience violent trauma and live in a world of unpredictable trash but there is neither a call for order, nor dialectic refusal of order. What is valuable about this kind of horror, is it neither exoticises difference nor pulls it to the ethics of the human. MacCormack states that “The ethics of the art-encounter shows becoming ahuman is viable and necessary for new ways of thinking alterity in the realities of life for oppressed (sub) human subjects” (MacCormack, 2012). Sticky Zeitgeist does exactly this, a queering of horror to remove the human entirely.

MacCormack, P. (2018). Ahuman, The. In Posthuman Glossary (1st ed., pp. 20–21). London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Heartscape, P. C. (n.d.). CV - Porpentine Charity Heartscape. Retrieved 24 April 2018, from http://slimedaughter.com/cv.html

Heartscape, P. C., & Rook. (2017). No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist. english.

Irigaray, L. (1993). An ethics of sexual difference. Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. (2017). To Speak is Never Neutral. Retrieved from https://nls.ldls.org.uk/welcome.html?ark:/81055/vdc_100049157992.0x000001

Lovecraft, H. P. (2014). The new annotated H. P. Lovecraft. (L. S. Klinger, Ed.) (First edition). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2016). Lovecaft’s Cosmic Ethics. In R. Campbell (Ed.), The Age of Lovecraft (pp. 199–214). University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.15

[aion-rsa]

Bruce Lee Forever! Shannon Lee Reflects on Her Father’s Legacy

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Bruce Lee stands among the greatest icons on the planet. But such notoriety comes with a price and it’s one that Bruce pays more heavily than any other celebrity. He’s also the most ripped off. Brucesploitation is an entire genre of film dedicated to Bruce Lee impersonators. Bruce Lee clones proliferate fighting video games more than any other person, real or imagined. His image has been poached illegally for all sorts of random things like for Zhen Kungfu, a major Chinese fast food franchise with some 300 restaurants, all of which use his likeness without permission. No one else can claim this level of image piracy.

For years, Shannon Lee has fought hard to guard the family name and see that her dad receives the respect he is due. Now at the helm of the Bruce Lee Family Company, Shannon continues to champion her father’s work, dedicating herself to preserving his message of harmonious individuality and curtail those who would steal his image for their own gain. She has dedicated herself to bringing the real Bruce Lee to the world. 

As we approach Bruce Lee’s 80th birthday this November, the Little Dragon remains as hot as ever. The Bruce-Lee-inspired Cinemax series Warrior has kicked off its second season. On October 6th, Shannon releases a new book, Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee. And there’s more coming in November in celebration of her father’s auspicious birthday. Den of Geek caught up to Shannon Lee to talk about where the Bruce Lee estate is now. 

Den of Geek: Warrior is based on the treatment that your father did that was allegedly turned into David Carradine’s Kung Fu series?

Shannon Lee: Well, I guess that’s a matter of some debate.

Yeah. Which is why I’m asking you this.

Yeah. My father was definitely up for the lead in Kung Fu, and he was definitely not given that role because he was Chinese interestingly. And at the same time, he had also developed and pitched this show. Warner Bros.’ point of view is that they had been working on a show – their show – for a long time prior to involving my father. And if you speak to my mother, she will say that my father was working on this treatment for a number of years before he pitched it as well.

So the two shows are very similar in some ways and very different in some ways. What we do know is that my father was turned down to star in the show and we have no idea how much his ideas influenced the ultimate vision for Kung Fu. 

Very diplomatic answer. One thing that’s continually impressed me about your father was how incredibly prolific he was. Even today, and I remember when he passed, I still see new material from him. Did he have any other show ideas that you might have kicking around?

Most definitely.

Oh, that’s very intriguing.

Yes. So he did have a number of other treatments in various states of readiness and even one full script that I still have, and that I am working on developing, in different ways.

That’s incredibly exciting. How close do you feel that Warrior is to your father’s original vision of it?

I think it’s actually very close, in the sense that I think that the show captures the perspective that he was hoping to capture. Meaning, his treatment was written more as 1970s episodic television; it was more of an adventure of the week format, which shows were back then…I think he would be really pleased with how the show turned out today, because I think we have more of an opportunity to tell the story that he would have wanted to tell, than he would have had back then.

What can fans expect from Season 2? 

We have the warring Tongs. We have the political goings on and plotting. We have the Irish labor workers really coming into more conflict with the Chinese workers. We have the cops on all sides of this as well, really coming up against the Chinese. So it’s very complicated and the weaving of the story is really brilliant and the stakes are really high. And you’ll see what happens.

As an immigrant tale, how do you feel this is playing out given the current politics surrounding immigration right now?

It’s crazy how relevant our show is. I think that its issue’s not just of immigration, but also of racism, of the involvement of the police, of xenophobia, of ‘us versus them’ mentality. There’s a lot of themes in the show and, quite frankly, where the show culminates toward the end of the season is very reflective of where we find ourselves right now, which is interesting since we filmed it last year.

But I think that it’s because this is the natural outcome of these types of policies and attitudes toward our fellow humans. And also what happened historically, so history is rather repeating itself.

How does it feel to be working on this show with a predominantly Asian cast?

It’s phenomenal. I know that there are a number of shows that, especially in the half-hour genre, that have Asian casts, but in the one-hour television format, there really aren’t that many. Even shows like Into the Badlands who have Asian characters, they’re not necessarily predominantly Asian characters.

So I feel really proud of our show that we got to make the show we wanted, that we got to create these multi-layered, complicated three-dimensional characters for all our cast. And I think that it’s actually a huge win for representation.

You used to have a pretty wicked spinning back kick. Are you still practicing?

[laughs] Not as much as I used to. Every now and again, I get back to it. It’s been a little harder in quarantine, not because I’m not able to exercise on my own. Certainly I am, but I’m much more used to working with others in the space. So I would say I’m a little rusty right now.

I think we all are during the pandemic. I could totally see you doing a cameo in Warrior like a singer at Ah Toy’s place or something. Are you thinking about that?

We definitely talked about it for Season 2. Just by the time we were talking about it, the season was already written and there didn’t seem to be the perfect and right feeling opportunity to do something like that.

Right now, Season 3 is a little uncertain. There are not plans to move forward, just given that Cinemax has canceled their programming and their original programming… If there are, then I will definitely look to try and sneak on set for part of that.

Do you ever think about going back into acting?

I don’t think about it as a career. I think if there were opportunities, if the right opportunity came along, I think it would be a lot of fun. I would definitely have, from a creative standpoint, an interest in doing that for myself, but not as a career.

You have a book coming out the same week that Warrior drops. Tell us about Be Water, My Friend.

I wrote this book, over the last year or so, and it is called Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee. It is a book about my father’s water philosophy, what it means, and what it meant to him, what it means to me, and also how it can be accessed and utilized by the reader.

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And, for me, it was a really personal, internal journey to write this book, to really sit with my father’s words and to really try and express in as simple and in as simple and clear a way as I could, what this is and to provide it as a tool for the reader to utilize, or even just something to think about for themselves.

I find my father’s words to be extremely soothing and extremely healing and extremely thought provoking. And my hope is that people will pick up this book, regardless of whether they’re into martial arts or whether they’ve recently had, because it’s really for everyone. It just really speaks to this human journey that we are all on. And I hope that people will find something beneficial for them in it.

I really admire what you’ve been doing with the Bruce Lee Family Company. Your dad has been the most ripped-off icon of all. Nobody has an entire film genre like Bruceploitation that’s dedicated to him. What are some of the battles you’re fighting trying to control his image? 

Yeah. Look, it’s always a challenge. It’s really hard to know what the best course of action is. I’m certainly very protective of him and his legacy. And at the same time, I try not to be unreasonable or overly difficult, but I really do think he requires respect. And that’s really what I’m asking for most of the time.

If somebody can show up and have a honest conversation with me and be open minded and listen to me, then I will always give them the same in return. It is really hard. The laws are different in all different places and it’s really challenging because it’s on a global level and you got to pick your battles and you only have so many resources to put towards these different types of things.

But I really feel like when I’m asked to speak up about, and give my opinion on something, I definitely will and do. And when it seems like a fight worth fighting, then I have no problems with that. I’m willing to stand up for myself and my family. And it doesn’t mean I’ll always win, but for me, it’s not about winning. It’s about doing what I feel is appropriate and right.

The CW reboot of Kung Fu is getting some buzz again, which feels as if it is in the wake of Warrior now. That’s ironically recursive given the unusual relationship that Bruce Lee’s treatment had and what we spoke about, when we first started this conversation. They’re putting out that it’s going to be all female leads, and that Asian community is reclaiming this property, but who knows? What are your thoughts on that?

Listen, I’m not in competition with anyone. I’m trying to put forth the best projects that I could put forth. And I never want to be in a place of wishing someone to not do well or be well. Right?

I don’t know anything about that show other than its existence and exactly what you just said. I haven’t read any scripts. So it’s really hard for me to say what it is. I don’t even know. And look, it’s hard to get a show made. I think that whatever happens with the show, I know these things are always a labor of love and or just a labor. So either way, it’s hard enough. And I just really couldn’t comment because I really don’t know, but I certainly never wish anyone any ill will.

That’s fair. What does your mom think of Warrior?

Oh, she loves it. She really loves it. She really is like, “Oh, I think your dad would love this show. I think you really did your dad proud.” My mom was married to Bruce Lee, so she’s no shrinking violet when it comes to action. She just thinks the show is great and a lot of fun. She’s really impressed with Andrew Koji and with the whole cast, and she just thinks it really captured the right energy and the right spirit.

What’s next for the Bruce Lee Family Company? 

Oh, my gosh. So much. We’re really excited. In November, we’re going to be celebrating my dad’s 80th. How crazy is that? Eighty years of Bruce Lee in the world. And so we have a lot of celebrations planned, mostly virtual and online and through our store, and on social media and those types of things.

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We were hoping to be able to do some kind of bigger events, but of course, with the current state of the world, we’re changing it up a little bit, and our timelines have been a little delayed on some of the bigger things that we’re working on, but we will be having some interesting announcements and fun drops and things that’ll be available in November. And so I’m super excited to celebrate that. I’ve got a number of other film and TV projects in the works, which hopefully I’ll be able to announce soon.

We’ve got a bunch of exhibits that we’re working on with different museums around the world, revamping the exhibit in Hong Kong and in Seattle but also other places. We have our social initiatives we’re doing through the foundation. We’re about to launch and revamp that website to have some different social initiatives that we’ll be promoting as well as our camps for kids that we do. And the exhibits that we’re doing, and we’re working on a permanent exhibition space as well for my father. So there’s no shortage of things going on. And we’re all really excited to share what we can do with the world.

That’s great timing because it will still be in the rollout of Warrior Season 2. You’ve got the show, the book, and the celebration, so we’re looking at a Fall season of Bruce Lee.

Yeah. And we have a new season of the Bruce Lee podcast. That’ll be dropping in October also.

Has Warrior met up to your expectations in terms of what you envisioned when you first embarked on this?

Absolutely. I would say it met it, and it exceeded it. Obviously, in small details, sometimes there are things you’re, like, “Oh, I wish we could have done this differently or that differently.” But those things are nothing in comparison to the full force of the project, the scope, the storytelling, the cast that we have, the crew that we have, the writing that we have. I really couldn’t be happier.

Look, I think there are always places to go and things to be improved. Nothing is ever perfect, but I think that it’s as good a show as I could have hoped for. I’m so thrilled because I think it captures my father’s spirit and his energy without being like a copycat of him in any way. I think it tells his story. I think it’s entertaining. I think it’s got awesome action. I think it’s got amazing characters with storylines. I think it’s dramatic. I think it’s very binge worthy. It’s like one of those shows where you’re like, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen next.” You know?

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Warrior Season 2 can be seen exclusively on CINEMAX. Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee is available wherever fine books are sold. For more on Shannon’s work and the Bruce Lee Family Company, visit BruceLee.com.

The post Bruce Lee Forever! Shannon Lee Reflects on Her Father’s Legacy appeared first on Den of Geek.

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How indigenous peoples resist COVID-19 in South America

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/how-indigenous-peoples-resist-covid-19-in-south-america/

How indigenous peoples resist COVID-19 in South America

From Brazil to Bolivia, native peoples collectively care for their health

Farmers from the Brazilian Reforma Agraria Popular distributed about six tons of food to indigenous peoples during the pandemic. Photo credit: Vinícius Braga/Fotos Publicas (CC BY 3.0)

In Latin America, indigenous people are at higher risk of COVID-19 infection due to lack of data and historical political neglect, according to indigenous communities and human rights organizations. Malnutrition, anemia, and obesity rates are high and resources to build nearby hospitals are low. In Bolivia, for example, the Bolivian Center for Legal Studies and Social Research (CEJIS for its initials in Spanish) also warned about the risk of the “ethnocide” of indigneous groups in the context of COVID-19. Similar concerns have spread throughout the continent. To face the lack of access to basic sanitary services and absent public authorities, indigenous peoples are finding ways to cope with COVID-19. Here are ways the peoples of Yek'uana, Kayapo Mekranoti, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, San Antonio de Lomerío, Multi-Ethnic Indigenous Territory and Tsimané community in Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia are resisting the pandemic.

This map outlines all indigenous territories in the South American Amazon and highlights communities featured in this story. The shapes were created by Global Voices based on a database compiled by Amazonia Socioambiental, filtered using QGIS and edited on Photoshop and Illustrator.

Indigenous peoples in Venezuela protest for their rights through YouTube and Twitter

In Venezuela, information has gotten even rarer after indigenous leader and journalist Melquíades Avilás was arrested on March 13 in the state of Delta Amacuro mining area. He was detained after asking, “Will our hospital be ready for coronavirus?” on his Facebook account. The post was later deleted, as medics and other activists in the area denounced state negligence during the pandemic more anonymously. While the exact number of indigenous people who have contracted and died of COVID-19 in Venezuela is not clear, the UN estimates that nearly 5,000 indigenous Venezuelans have fled to Brazil due to the pandemic. In late June, three indigenous leaders from Yek'uana people in the southeastern Bolívar state read their official statement resuming how the pandemic and the quarantine measures have affected the lifestyle and reported 302 indigenous stuck outside of their communities. At the time of publication, they have not been able to come home because of the quarantine and lack of gasoline. The letter is read in the video below:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKfD5U6500M] To find less individual ways to protests their situation, indigenous peoples and human rights activists also supported a virtual protest throughout July #HoyMeUnoAKapeKape (#TodayIJoinKapeKape) organized by the NGO Kapé Kapé and aimed at indigenous communities in Amazonas state to denounce the lack of food, cash, water, gasoline, public health system, access to medicine, and the violation of their democratic rights. They most frequently complained about the electoral authorities’ decision to eliminate the indigenous peoples’ direct voting methodology.

Felicito a @ackapekape por un nuevo aniversario. Y me uno a la campaña de respecto al derecho de la salud integral que tienen los pueblos indígenas, debido a falta de políticas públicas adecuadas, situación que se agrava por el #Covid_19 en la región #HoyMeUnoAKapeKape pic.twitter.com/GOIatwrJhf — Olnar Ortiz Bare (@olnarortiz) July 29, 2020

I congratulate @ackapekape on their new anniversary. And I join the campaign to respect the right to integral health of indigenous peoples, due to the lack of adequate public policies, a situation that is aggravated by #Covid_19 in the region #TodayIJoinKapeKape

In Brazil, indigenous communities show resistance by blocking a highway and building mobile hospitals

The pandemic reached Brazilian indigenous communities in the midst of a battle to maintain basic rights. On August 18, dozens of Amazonian indigenous leaders denounced the social inequalities in their region by blocking a strategic road for transporting grains to the state of Mato Grosso. Armed with bows and arrows, the Kayapo Mekranoti settled on the BR-163 highway near the city of Novo Progresso, in northern Brazil, about 80km from the village where the Kayapo people live, for ten days. The Kayapo sent a letter during the blockage to the Fundação Nacional do Índio (Funai), the government agency responsible for implementing policies concerning indigenous peoples in Brazil. In it, they claimed that they were being forced out from their lands and had little to no access to basic preventive measures against COVID-19. This community lives on Badjônkôre territory, an officially demarcated indigenous land since 2003 that is extremely valuable to gold miners, cattle owners, and wood companies. There is a national tendency, illustrated by the fires in the Amazon and Pantanal forests, to strategically exploit these areas which are legally attributed to indigenous communities. Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office, there has been a tug of war to remove protective measures on demarcated lands alongside guarantees of access to healthcare and basic sanitary conditions from indigenous communities. On September 15, the Kayapó people won their first legal victory on that matter; the Brazilian State now has to comply with indigenous environmental protection demands in this region.

No más deforestacion del Amazonas ! No más abandono ante #COVID19 ! Pueblo indígena Kapayo de #Brasil en resistencia. #vidasindigenasimportam pic.twitter.com/xXs9tqQQtW — 𝙼𝚊𝚛í𝚊 𝙽𝚘𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚊 𝙰𝚛á𝚞𝚣

(@noelia_arauz) August 19, 2020

No more deforestation in the Amazon! No more abandonment in the face of #COVID19! Indigenous people of Kapayo from #Brazil in resistance #indigenouslivesmatter

Even though COVID-19 spread fast in Brazil, the Brazilian city with most indigenous populations managed to extinguish its COVID-19 related deaths in July. Located on the border with Colombia and Venezuela, São Gabriel da Cachoeira is known for having more than 90% of the population composed of indigenous people who belong to about 23 different ethnicities. When the pandemic started, they established a curfew and organized local information campaigns, which included the production of podcasts and the circulation of a sound car through the city streets carrying information in indigenous languages, in order to prevent the disease from spreading. This was done in May, almost two months after the arrival of COVID-19 in Brazil, with the help of indigenous leaders who collaborated with foreign institutions, such as Doctors without borders and a national fund that aggregates donations from banks, hospitals, and members of civil society. Together, they have donated R$ 800,000 (150,703 US Dollars) to build nine mobile health units and start a massive testing campaign.

Indigenous peoples in Bolivia share their wisdom with the world

A recipe book, a handmade syrup, and a health protocol are what indigenous peoples from the low plains in eastern Bolivia advise to face the pandemic.

“San Antonio del Pallar community, multiethnic indigenous territory of Bosque de Chimanes, Bolivian Amazon”. Page 6 of Remedios del Monte [Remedies of Nature]. Photo by Fátima Monasterio Mercado, used with permission.

The leaders of the Multi-Ethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM for their initials in Spanish), who own land through collective title according to Bolivian law, published Remedios del Monte. Remedios del Monte can be loosely translated to remedies of nature, the forest, or the bush. Paulina Noza, the president of TIM's women's council, explained why to local press:

Hicimos este recetario, preocupados por la pandemia que brotó este año. (…) Por eso nosotros seguimos conservando [esos saberes] y ahora queremos que la gente lo conozca

 We made the recipe book because we are worried about the pandemic. (…) We want people to know the age-old wisdom we preserve.

The lawyer and researcher Fátima Monasterio told local press that the use of natural medicine is a survival strategy due to the absence of the state. In fact, the recipe book’s presentation says:

En esta lucha por la vida, que se remonta a la memoria de los antiguos, seguiremos exigiendo el cumplimiento de nuestros derechos.

In this struggle for life, which dates back to our ancestor's memory, we will continue to demand the fulfillment of our rights.

The recipe book contains instructions to increase the body's natural defenses, cure colds, treat symptoms such as fever, diarrhea, and cough, and also shares recommendations to improve human's spiritual relationship with nature. Also, the Tsimané community, which belongs to TIM,  developed a health protocol together with doctors and anthropologists that consists of special care for the elderly, controlling entry points into their territory, caring for quarantined people, contact tracing, and dissemination of information in their indigenous language. In the video below, TIM President Paula Noza explains the community's help and how entry points work. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqAcoLwi2MI?feature=oembed&w=650&h=366] Meanwhile, José Parapaino Chuvirú, from the indigenous territory San Antonio de Lomerío, launched the traditional syrup “Sabor Original Kutuki” [“Kutuki Original Flavor”], made of the medicinal herb kutuki and macerated with a mixture of roots and leaves. According to testimonies mentioned in the platform Salud con Lupa, the beverage has been effective in calming COVID-19 symptoms.

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#NO_ESPERES_MÁS..

y#QuedateEnCasa..

.. Geplaatst door Chochio op Zondag 14 juni 2020

< p class='gv-rss-footer'>Written by Gabriela Mesones Rojo, Giovana Fleck, Fabiola Gutierrez

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Rise and Fall of the Rice Cake, America’s One-Time Favorite Health Snack

Illustration by Goldsuit

Where did they come from and where did they go?

For many American children of the ’80s and ’90s, rice cakes — stacked in a column and kept in long plastic bags — were an omnipresent feature of home kitchens, preschools, and afterschool programs. I can’t remember the first time I held one, but I also can’t remember a time before I did. Palm-sized disks, they’re the same weight as styrofoam with a scant sprinkle of flavor crystals, salt or maybe cinnamon, dusting the top and coating the crevices between each grain of puffy rice. No matter the flavor, they lack marshmallow stickiness and cloying sweetness of Rice Krispies treats, as well as the bake-sale appeal. There was no right way to bite into a rice cake and definitely no good way to contain the stream of crumbs that rained down from the corners of my mouth.

There was, however, that pleasant, satisfying crunch, like taking a chunk out of a perfectly crisp apple, and that miniscule bit of toasted, sometimes sweet, sometimes salty, flavor mixed in with a slurry of desiccated rice matter. It was interesting enough to take down the whole cake, and maybe even dip into the tube bag for another, and another. After all, I was a hungry kid, and one of those suckers wasn’t going to satisfy my bottomless pit of an adolescent stomach.

It’s that feeling of being just on the border of satisfaction that made rice cakes such a staple in American households like mine during the late ’80s and ’90s. During that period of time, many kids like me became well acquainted with diet fads and foods, to the extent that we sometimes didn’t even realize we were snacking on them. All the adults around me seemed to be perpetually trying to lose a few pounds by going on the Atkins Diet or re-enrolling in Weight Watchers. George Foreman Grills whisked away fat and flavor from meat and chocolate cake-flavored Snackwell’s cookies and Slim Fast shake filled pantries. Rice cakes, for a while, were common in my household and something I turned to on the regular for an easy afterschool snack while waiting for my parents to get off work. I could polish off half a package in one sitting, completely defying any alleged dietary benefit.

Plenty of cultures have their own version of rice cakes, but we can partially thank a botanist named Alexander Pierce Anderson for laying the groundwork for the American rice cake as we know it. Anderson was working at the New York Botanical Garden in 1901 studying the water content of nuclei in starch crystals when, as the story goes, he “discovered” steam-puffed rice. Anderson marketed the product to Midwestern investors who bought into the idea, but eventually sold their shares to Quaker, a Midwestern company better known for its oats. He’d caught the company’s eye by demonstrating his rice “cannon” during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Anderson filled a cylinder with uncooked rice grains and sealed it off, heating the container while rotating it and increasing the interior pressure. When the time was right, he used a sledgehammer to remove the end of the cylinder, sending puffed rice shooting out like a cannon. Anderson and his team offered bags of the puffed rice to the crowd for a nickel a bag; they sold 20,000 pounds of puffed rice, according to the Minnesota Historical Society archive. Quaker used Anderson’s methods to make a variety of cereals and advertised it as “Food Shot From Guns.”

The rice cakes in my childhood pantry came from Quaker, but at the time there were several different companies competing in what the Chicago Tribune referred to as a “rice cake revolution” in 1986. They included brands like Lundberg Family Farms, Hain, and Chico-San. The latter was a macrobiotics company established in 1961 that got its start importing products like soy sauce from Japan and that eventually developed brown rice cakes in the 1970s — the prototype for the larger snack trend. Chico-San’s ads proposed trading bread for rice cakes and using the low-calorie rice saucers as a surface to support jelly, cottage cheese, fruit, and other toppings. By 1984, Heinz swooped in to scoop up Chico-San’s market share. One rice cake lover suggested to the Chicago Tribune that rice cakes topped with beans were better than tacos, a statement that suggests that person had never had a decent taco.

Similarly, representatives from Quaker tell Eater that rice cakes were first launched as “a low-carb alternative to bread” in the mid-’80s. The advertisements also seemed to target women and working mothers with fat-free snacks to be eaten at work, on the go, and while “kickin’ back.” Print advertisements for Quaker Rice Cakes from that period show thin, grinning models lying on their flat leotard-covered stomachs to emphasize the lightness of rice cakes. The message was clear: Eat this and look like these women. In 1992, the rice cake and popcorn cake market was valued at $174 million and growing. The following year, Quaker had bought out Chico-San from Heinz, solidifying the brand’s dominance as major purveyor of rice cakes with 63 percent of the U.S. rice and popcorn market, according to the Associated Press.

As for the actual health benefits of rice cakes, like so many other foods marketed as “better for you,” they’re really just that — marketing. Rice cakes, while low in fat, are also low in most other nutrients and may have less fiber than similar snacking options like crackers. The refined sugars in rice cakes are also digested quickly in your body, potentially leaving you hungry sooner. But none of that really matters if enough people buy into the fad.

But its popularity did wane. As the low-carb trends declined in the mid-aughts, so too did consumer appetites for blandly seasoned grain cakes. Even so, brands trafficking in rice cakes didn’t entirely die out. Quaker reports that it still produces 500 million rice cakes annually, and a representative from Lundberg tells Eater that the company produced 15 million bags of rice cakes (13 cakes per bag) last year. Speaking generally, the most popular flavors from both brands are lightly salted, followed by options like caramel at Quaker and Lundberg’s cinnamon toast.

Rice cakes have even seen a resurgence in their fortunes in recent years due partly to a surging interest in gluten-free foods. Whole Foods, for example, has a section of its cracker aisle devoted to organic puffed rice and popcorn snacks for the gluten-averse or -intolerant. While slightly spiffier, the advertising angle doesn’t seem to have changed much either. Companies like Rice Up still promote rice cakes as a whole-grain option for weight control. Lundberg reports that in the past year the company’s rice cake sales have increased by 14 percent. And, true to its diet snack roots, Lundberg rice cakes tend to sell best in January — right around the time people are working on their New Year’s resolutions by renewing their gym memberships and cutting back on the sauce.

Rice cakes aren’t going away. They’re merely changing with the times. Following the Everything but the Bagel seasoning trend sparked by Trader Joe’s, Quaker introduced “everything”-flavored rice cakes in 2020. Lundberg also touted recent innovations like the chocolate-covered Chocolate Thin Snackers and Organic Rice Cake Minis, a bite-sized version of the original product geared toward adults and kids crunching on the go.

Recently, I located some rice cakes in the aisles of my own grocery store to indulge the strange nostalgia that I had for a food that’s sometimes compared to dry cardboard. It was exactly as I remembered: a circle of airy rice grains smashed together into a remarkably firm plate. It felt like building material, but the kind that would disintegrate after a heavy rain. With each bite, my ears rang with that satisfying crunch and my mouth grew drier. All the downsides of popcorn but none of the good butter grease. And yet I keep eating them — and that’s the beauty of a successful snack, right? Eating it doesn’t necessarily bring contentment. It’s about the experience of the texture and the chase after just a little more of that wisp of flavor.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2RCN7x2 https://ift.tt/33EP41K

Illustration by Goldsuit

Where did they come from and where did they go?

For many American children of the ’80s and ’90s, rice cakes — stacked in a column and kept in long plastic bags — were an omnipresent feature of home kitchens, preschools, and afterschool programs. I can’t remember the first time I held one, but I also can’t remember a time before I did. Palm-sized disks, they’re the same weight as styrofoam with a scant sprinkle of flavor crystals, salt or maybe cinnamon, dusting the top and coating the crevices between each grain of puffy rice. No matter the flavor, they lack marshmallow stickiness and cloying sweetness of Rice Krispies treats, as well as the bake-sale appeal. There was no right way to bite into a rice cake and definitely no good way to contain the stream of crumbs that rained down from the corners of my mouth.

There was, however, that pleasant, satisfying crunch, like taking a chunk out of a perfectly crisp apple, and that miniscule bit of toasted, sometimes sweet, sometimes salty, flavor mixed in with a slurry of desiccated rice matter. It was interesting enough to take down the whole cake, and maybe even dip into the tube bag for another, and another. After all, I was a hungry kid, and one of those suckers wasn’t going to satisfy my bottomless pit of an adolescent stomach.

It’s that feeling of being just on the border of satisfaction that made rice cakes such a staple in American households like mine during the late ’80s and ’90s. During that period of time, many kids like me became well acquainted with diet fads and foods, to the extent that we sometimes didn’t even realize we were snacking on them. All the adults around me seemed to be perpetually trying to lose a few pounds by going on the Atkins Diet or re-enrolling in Weight Watchers. George Foreman Grills whisked away fat and flavor from meat and chocolate cake-flavored Snackwell’s cookies and Slim Fast shake filled pantries. Rice cakes, for a while, were common in my household and something I turned to on the regular for an easy afterschool snack while waiting for my parents to get off work. I could polish off half a package in one sitting, completely defying any alleged dietary benefit.

Plenty of cultures have their own version of rice cakes, but we can partially thank a botanist named Alexander Pierce Anderson for laying the groundwork for the American rice cake as we know it. Anderson was working at the New York Botanical Garden in 1901 studying the water content of nuclei in starch crystals when, as the story goes, he “discovered” steam-puffed rice. Anderson marketed the product to Midwestern investors who bought into the idea, but eventually sold their shares to Quaker, a Midwestern company better known for its oats. He’d caught the company’s eye by demonstrating his rice “cannon” during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Anderson filled a cylinder with uncooked rice grains and sealed it off, heating the container while rotating it and increasing the interior pressure. When the time was right, he used a sledgehammer to remove the end of the cylinder, sending puffed rice shooting out like a cannon. Anderson and his team offered bags of the puffed rice to the crowd for a nickel a bag; they sold 20,000 pounds of puffed rice, according to the Minnesota Historical Society archive. Quaker used Anderson’s methods to make a variety of cereals and advertised it as “Food Shot From Guns.”

The rice cakes in my childhood pantry came from Quaker, but at the time there were several different companies competing in what the Chicago Tribune referred to as a “rice cake revolution” in 1986. They included brands like Lundberg Family Farms, Hain, and Chico-San. The latter was a macrobiotics company established in 1961 that got its start importing products like soy sauce from Japan and that eventually developed brown rice cakes in the 1970s — the prototype for the larger snack trend. Chico-San’s ads proposed trading bread for rice cakes and using the low-calorie rice saucers as a surface to support jelly, cottage cheese, fruit, and other toppings. By 1984, Heinz swooped in to scoop up Chico-San’s market share. One rice cake lover suggested to the Chicago Tribune that rice cakes topped with beans were better than tacos, a statement that suggests that person had never had a decent taco.

Similarly, representatives from Quaker tell Eater that rice cakes were first launched as “a low-carb alternative to bread” in the mid-’80s. The advertisements also seemed to target women and working mothers with fat-free snacks to be eaten at work, on the go, and while “kickin’ back.” Print advertisements for Quaker Rice Cakes from that period show thin, grinning models lying on their flat leotard-covered stomachs to emphasize the lightness of rice cakes. The message was clear: Eat this and look like these women. In 1992, the rice cake and popcorn cake market was valued at $174 million and growing. The following year, Quaker had bought out Chico-San from Heinz, solidifying the brand’s dominance as major purveyor of rice cakes with 63 percent of the U.S. rice and popcorn market, according to the Associated Press.

As for the actual health benefits of rice cakes, like so many other foods marketed as “better for you,” they’re really just that — marketing. Rice cakes, while low in fat, are also low in most other nutrients and may have less fiber than similar snacking options like crackers. The refined sugars in rice cakes are also digested quickly in your body, potentially leaving you hungry sooner. But none of that really matters if enough people buy into the fad.

But its popularity did wane. As the low-carb trends declined in the mid-aughts, so too did consumer appetites for blandly seasoned grain cakes. Even so, brands trafficking in rice cakes didn’t entirely die out. Quaker reports that it still produces 500 million rice cakes annually, and a representative from Lundberg tells Eater that the company produced 15 million bags of rice cakes (13 cakes per bag) last year. Speaking generally, the most popular flavors from both brands are lightly salted, followed by options like caramel at Quaker and Lundberg’s cinnamon toast.

Rice cakes have even seen a resurgence in their fortunes in recent years due partly to a surging interest in gluten-free foods. Whole Foods, for example, has a section of its cracker aisle devoted to organic puffed rice and popcorn snacks for the gluten-averse or -intolerant. While slightly spiffier, the advertising angle doesn’t seem to have changed much either. Companies like Rice Up still promote rice cakes as a whole-grain option for weight control. Lundberg reports that in the past year the company’s rice cake sales have increased by 14 percent. And, true to its diet snack roots, Lundberg rice cakes tend to sell best in January — right around the time people are working on their New Year’s resolutions by renewing their gym memberships and cutting back on the sauce.

Rice cakes aren’t going away. They’re merely changing with the times. Following the Everything but the Bagel seasoning trend sparked by Trader Joe’s, Quaker introduced “everything”-flavored rice cakes in 2020. Lundberg also touted recent innovations like the chocolate-covered Chocolate Thin Snackers and Organic Rice Cake Minis, a bite-sized version of the original product geared toward adults and kids crunching on the go.

Recently, I located some rice cakes in the aisles of my own grocery store to indulge the strange nostalgia that I had for a food that’s sometimes compared to dry cardboard. It was exactly as I remembered: a circle of airy rice grains smashed together into a remarkably firm plate. It felt like building material, but the kind that would disintegrate after a heavy rain. With each bite, my ears rang with that satisfying crunch and my mouth grew drier. All the downsides of popcorn but none of the good butter grease. And yet I keep eating them — and that’s the beauty of a successful snack, right? Eating it doesn’t necessarily bring contentment. It’s about the experience of the texture and the chase after just a little more of that wisp of flavor.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2RCN7x2 via Blogger https://ift.tt/33Km2hk

[worryinglyinnocent]

Fic: Homeward Bound (4/?)

Summary: After Miles and Sawyer follow Claire when she wanders off after her father in the dead of night, Claire and Aaron are safely returned to the beach and head towards the freighter and freedom from the island.

But as Claire learns a few years later, the island has a way of bringing people back…

A fix-it that diverges from canon at S4Ep10 “Something Nice Back Home”, in which Claire becomes one of the Oceanic Six and gets to raise Aaron herself, away from the island.

Rated: T

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three] [AO3 Link]

Part Four: The Business of Living

The compensation settlement from Oceanic Airlines is huge. Claire doesn’t think that she’s ever been able to comprehend so much money. She knows that Hurley is a millionaire lottery winner of course, but that didn’t count because it didn’t really affect her, and it wasn’t like money had any real use or value on the island anyway. Perhaps if more of them had been rescued it would have been smaller, but as there are only five of them to share in this pot, it’s almost ludicrous. For a long time, all she can do is stare at the slip of paper that shows how much money has been transferred into her account. Sun has bought a controlling share in her father’s company with hers. Hurley has been giving most of his away to various charities, still convinced that his lottery win is somehow cursed.

It’s Hurley who helps her out in the end. Once the settlement had come in, he was the first person that she had called. Of all of their fellow survivors, he’s the only one who’s experienced this kind of sudden windfall before, going from a dead-end job in fast food to having more money than they know what to do with overnight.

“Hi Claire, it’s good to hear from you. Isn’t it like, the middle of the night in Australia?”

Claire laughs. “It’s six am tomorrow morning. I was up anyway with Aaron.”

“How’s he doing, adjusting to life outside the world of Crazy Island?”

“Really well, actually.” Perhaps the fact that Aaron spent his first couple of months seemingly in constant mortal peril has made him more relaxed now that he isn’t in peril all the time. As she said to Kate back in the New Otherton - she’s adopted Sawyer’s nickname for it, it seemed to fit - Aaron can sleep through anything. For these past few months whilst she’s been living with her mother, Carole has marvelled at just how quiet Aaron is and how well he sleeps. She’s completely besotted with her grandson, and considering the fact that she didn’t even know her daughter was pregnant until she’s already had the baby, Claire’s almost worshipfully grateful for her help. She thinks that there is something in that old saying, it takes a village. Back on the island, there had always been people around to help her with Aaron whenever she was worrying about him, about herself, about her ability to be a mother. She’d always had Sun and Rose and Kate, and any of the other survivors. To them, Aaron was a symbol of hope and new life in a place where there had been so much death and despair, and they were always happy to help. Now, the village is gone, she’s left it behind, and she only has her mother and her aunt. They’re happy to help too, but the fact remains that there are only the three of them.

But she has Hurley too, always on the other end of the phone and always happy to hear from her and hear how Aaron’s doing. Despite him being on completely the other side of the world, he’s probably the one whom she’s still closest to. Sun is closer geographically, but she has her own problems to deal with, and outside of the island, she and Claire inhabit very different worlds.

“My settlement payment came through last week,” Claire begins, but of course Hurley knows that because his own payment came through at the same time.

“Sweet. What are you going to use the money for?”

“I don’t know, that’s the problem.” Claire sighs. “That’s why I called you. Because, well, you’ve been through this before.”

“Yeah, the usual rags to riches story. That didn’t really turn out so well for me the first time. But I get your point.” He pauses. “If you don’t mind being in completely different time zones then I can give you my financial advisor’s number. He’s always handled most of the complicated investment stuff for me, and he can probably help you out and make sure that you can put something away for Aaron’s college fund, or whatever you might need it for in however many years’ time.”

“That would be great, thank you.” The knowledge that she can cast of the responsibility for this huge sum of money onto someone else is a great weight off her mind.

“The only other thing I would say would be to invest in property. Buy a house. Buy your mom a house. That was the first thing that everyone said to me when I won the lottery. Actually the first thing that I bought was Mr Cluck’s. Do you want to buy the Fish ‘n’ Fry where you used to work?”

Claire wrinkles her nose. “Not particularly. But a house sounds like a good idea.”

Hurley gives her the financial advisor’s number and email, and Claire feels slightly more at ease about what she’s going to do with the money, and they keep talking until Claire’s mum comes downstairs and begins making breakfast. There’s still a long way to go, but at least she’s got some kind of direction now. She’s so used to taking every day as it comes and making no long-term plans, even before the island, that it feels strange to be thinking about the far future. It makes it real; she’s really here and she’s really off the island.

Later that day, she starts looking at houses.

X

The settlement is enough that Claire can live pretty comfortably without having to work for a while, especially now that Hurley’s financial advisor has helped her with some lucrative investments, so she takes advantage of that, staying home with Aaron whilst he’s growing. She thinks about setting up a little side business, getting back to the things that she used to love before the island. Having Aaron and having to deal with all the dangers that were constantly befalling them had dampened her enthusiasm, slightly, but now she’s back home with all her astrology books, she remembers her first conversation with Kate, offering to make her chart. Art has always been something she’s been interested in, and something that, even if she does say so herself, she’s pretty good at. She was a tattoo artist for a while, after all, even if at that point in her life she couldn’t stick at anything for more than a few months, so young and angry at the world, desperate to find her place in it.

She’s still not entirely sure of her place in it, but she knows that her role for the moment is being Aaron’s mother, and she’s satisfied with that. Beautifully illustrated, customised astrology charts can wait for a while.

The house they live in is not palatial by any standard, just an ordinary place a few streets away from her mother and around the corner from the park where she walks with Aaron every day. She’s become so used to carrying him all the time that it felt strange to put him in a pushchair, so for now she wears him in a sling similar to the one Charlie made for her on the island. He’s getting a bit heavy now though, and since he’s started to crawl, there’s no stopping him. He shuffles about on his hands and knees at mach three, and Claire laughs as she runs around after him. Sometimes she forgets the lies that they’ve told everyone, and themselves, and she’ll mention something about Charlie to her mum, who just gives a sad smile. Carole knows that there’s something more at work, that what they told the press is in no way the full truth, if it is even the truth at all, but she doesn’t question it, she never probes further. She knows that whatever happened, it was a traumatic time, and she knows that a small part of her daughter was lost to that island forever, and will never come back. But they’re happy, all of them, and the deep sadness that Claire feels when she thinks about those they’ve lost is tempered with the happiness she feels when she looks at Aaron and her mother, alive and well and here with her.

Her new life hits its first snag when Aaron is eight months old, and there’s a knock at the door.

Thomas is standing there.

Claire’s first instinct is to slam the door in his face. She rests her forehead against the cool wood as he knocks again.

“Claire? Claire, please, I just want to talk.”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she snaps through the door.

“Please, Claire, I want to see my son.”

That incenses her, and she wrenches the door open.

“No. You don’t get to see him. You gave up that right when you walked out of his life before he was even born. What, did you get some kind of epiphany when you thought I was dead, or is your sudden paternal urge more to do with the fact I now have a few hundred thousand dollars in my bank account and I can support your precious art, the art that, a year ago, was more important to you than your unborn child was?”

Thomas at least has enough courtesy to look sheepish. She had wondered how long it would take him to come sniffing around, looking for handouts on the pretext of wanting to be a family again. He had been the one to persuade her to keep Aaron, wanting them to be a family, and then he had thrown it all back in her face when he got cold feet. Now that she and Aaron are a family, he wants back in. Now that Claire’s gone through all the difficult parts without him. She shakes her head.

“Get out. Charlie showed more concern for me and Aaron than you ever did, and he only knew me for a month before I gave birth. You can’t just pick and choose parenthood to suit you, Thomas. And you definitely can’t pick and choose it to suit your bank balance.”

His expression hardens, and for a while, Claire wonders if he’ll fight her for parental rights. If that’s what he wants, then bring it on. She’s not letting him back into her life or Aaron’s, and she’ll fight tooth and nail every step of the way. She knows she has support. She has her mum and Aunt Lindsay, both of whom have made their opinions of Thomas and his behaviour very clear. She has Hurley and Sun who can throw so many lawyers at the situation that he’ll be tied up in legal arguments for the rest of his life. If he’s really interested in Aaron, if he really wants to be a father and doesn’t just want to sponge off her, then he can go through all the due process and prove it, but right now, Claire is not giving an inch. If there was one thing that the island taught her, it’s that fear is a powerful weapon when put to good use. She’s never going to not be scared, but if she can channel that fear into something productive, if she can channel it into anger and indignation, then she can use it, and if Thomas thinks that he’s going to deal with the same soft and lovable pushover that she had been before, then he’s got another think coming. The island has changed her, irrevocably so, exposing the inner steel that had always been hidden before.

Eventually though, Thomas gives up without further fight, and Claire closes the door, wondering if she will see him again. She goes back to Aaron in his soft playpen in the living room and watches him playing, his chortling giggles soon lightening her mood and lifting her spirits. Charlie was the only father figure he’s ever known, and he was an infinitely better one than Thomas. One day, she’ll tell him all about his father, but that’s a day so far off in the future that she can safely forget about it.

It’s only a few weeks later that Claire gets the call from Sun, inviting her to come and meet Ji Yeon.

“I’m inviting everyone,” she says, and Claire knows that Kate is the exception because she’s not allowed to leave the country whilst her case is still ongoing. Her trial is still postponed indefinitely but at least she was remanded on bail. “But don’t feel that you have to come. I know that you have your hands full with Aaron.”

She really wants to see everyone again, but she doesn’t want to take Aaron on an international flight. He doesn’t have a passport yet for starters, and at the same time, Claire isn’t all that enamoured by the prospect of an international flight herself. As soon as she got back to Sydney after the press conference, she had vowed never to get on another plane for as long as she lived.

Then she thinks about fear, and using it, and owning it. In addition to the monetary settlement, Oceanic also gave them free passes for the airline, and she might as well use them. Her mum is happy to take care of Aaron for a couple of days. She knows that taking this flight means something to Claire. It’s important to her to get back on a plane and take a step into the unknown, to prove to herself that her experiences thus far have not inhibited her. And she’ll get to see the others again.

In the end, it’s only her and Hurley who arrive; Jack is back practising at the hospital again and could not take the time off. They meet in the airport in Seoul and Hurley envelopes her in a bear hug that she didn’t even know she needed. She managed to get through the flight unscathed, but now she’s shaking with a delayed reaction. They check into the same hotel and order ice cream sundaes from room service just because they can, and they catch up on everything that’s happened since they last met. They speak on the phone regularly, just to check that they’re ok, but that’s different to seeing each other in person. Claire shows him photos of Aaron; she can’t stop taking pictures of him, probably because she didn’t get any when he was first born and she’s making up for lost time.

Lost time. Such a strange way of looking at things. The three months they spent on the island are lost to them now, never to be regained but still indelibly printed on their minds. They’re both thinking it, but neither of them say it, and the subject is changed.

The visit to Jin’s grave is sombre, and the happiness that Claire feels at seeing Hurley and Sun again and meeting Ji Yeon for the first time is mellowed somewhat. But Ji Yeon is a beautiful child, and Claire finds herself in the strange position of giving Sun parenting advice. It’s an odd feeling, imparting all this wisdom that she herself only learned by trial and error, and a part of her wonders if she sounds confident or if she sounds like a fraud, but Sun nonetheless takes everything on board. Motherhood isn’t something that she ever thought that she would be any good at, but now it’s one of the things that defines her. In all the furore after the Oceanic Six came home, the press made so much of her imperiled pregnancy and her having Aaron on the island, it was as if she had been reduced to her motherhood and nothing more. She’s quite glad that things have calmed down now and she can try to get back to a normal life.

As wonderful as it has been to see old friends again, Claire doesn’t realise just how much tension she’s been holding in herself throughout her trip to South Korea until she’s back in Sydney, and her mother and Aaron are waiting for her in the arrivals hall.