#police detectives aren’t masters of psychology

[materialgworl-ish]

Interrogation footage narrator: As you can see, this person that we know is guilty with the gift of hindsight is displaying (insert symptom of anxiety/neurodivergence). This means that they are a guilty, guilty criminal.

True crime fans: Wow this guy is a genius!

[project-paranoia]

Live Watch: S.C.I. Mystery Episode One

I enjoy camp because I've always enjoyed analysis and examination.  I enjoy looking at something from all sides, testing it with my fingertips. When I was a child I would sit for hours just looking at something until I had it all held in my mind and I felt like I understood it.  Camp necessitates that understanding the way that imitation and - good - parody requires it.  To quote Susan Sontag - who articulated what camp is so well - Camp is "a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylisation, theatricalisation, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content."  Because of this camp takes on head to head gender, sexuality, expectations, any sort of defined norm and sequins it up then shakes it down until understanding comes out.  When understanding something there are three major ways to work your investigation - what it is, what it's imitation is - the close but not quite, and what it isn't.  Camp handles all three, to quote again: "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp; not a woman, but a 'woman.'"

Why are we talking about camp?  Because SCI Mystery is some of the best kind of camp outside of drag or screaming about wire hangers.  It deals a lot with mental illness in a way that would destroy a serious show, but in this one "mental illness" is a metaphor for being marginalised and a way to talk about the mouse and cat in the room.  This show is about being queer.  About being gay loudly and quietly, about resisting specific labels and needing them, about the threat of a cure and the blessing of acceptance.  All the messy realities of queer life as varied as queer people. Like Lil Nas X's Montero, you can appreciate the effort without being comfortable with it. While the show's allegory of mental illness when many queer people are still told they are ill is done well and there is reason to the choices and tone, things are said which can be hard to hear.  Knowing they're there because they're hard to hear and have been heard doesn't help everyone.

With all that said, it's also a fun, silly bl drama.  Don't let the analysis scare you off.  While the information about camp can be something to be aware of, all this show requires to be enjoyed is a willingness to be amused and spooked in turns.

You know the drill, spoilers below!

* I have memorised the youku sound, I have a triggered response with it. Not all triggers are bad, this one reminds me of Guardian

* Welcome to episode one where we just leap in!  But don't worry, one of them has a cute earring and they are colour coordinated.

* Watching from youtube the episode is 38 minutes long while most of the others are 45.  Attach whatever emotion you want to that fact.

* The exposition is handily delivered by asking a question which tells us some things, thank you show, I appreciate it

* First episode and he's already giving his partner an in case I don't come back letter to be opened if he dies

*  Wait for me!~  Go!~~

* Slow walk with dramatic music: 1 (don't make this a drinking game You Will Expire) this time with bonus almost looking back

* I've seen a similar shot on Hawaii Five O

* Don't explain what's happening, just knock everything over with a jump kick in some absolutely spotless white tennies

* Running with dramatic music with bonus looking back: Does it count?  We have yet to hear back from the judges

* They leap into the water with an explosion behind them, we are less than 2 minutes in and I love that for them

* At first I thought the boats were making a big heart before I remembered that I am very silly and they are not doing that

* This one is going to be long

* I can see his pockets through his trousers, why are his trousers so thin?

* It's not kissing to dramatic music in the surf if it's CPR

* Each story line has its own intro and that's very sexy of them

* Slow walk/dramatic music: 2-6

* These people are totally goofy and and yet the Seriousness

* Two Weeks Ago!

* The police school bus has arrived to shoo away the crows circling around Dr. Zhan staring (dramatically) at the body

* Sport scar policeman dresses even more unprofessionally than Zhao Yunlan who at least looks like a detective who was jumped by so many criminals he just gave up wearing a suit and went for jeans. Chief Bai's clothes are so thin, I'm under constant anxiety someone is going to tear them off.

* Also several of the cast pictures on MyDramaList look like the pictures your auntie insists taking to send to your other aunties and I love that for them

* Triple axil spin from the victim, the judges are loving it - this is the camp I'm here for

* The dramatic slo mo and music budget for this show was so big, just as it should be

* He's mad because he's angy

*  Master Psychiatrist can tell all about the killer from crouching by the body, it's a trope and this is one of the few places I like it because it serves the show instead of the show serving it

* When you're almost boyfriend is going away for reasons and it's not your decision but you can't go with him because of your job so you're just low key bitter about it

*  "You can't control me"

* The pettiness between these two

* Professional women who worked hard to get where they are still are constantly obsessed with boys according to most cdramas

*The male posturing in those three second has accidentally circled back around to being gay in the way those bro shows accidentally do and I love that

* I live for this 80s-90s police chief perm

* The Pettiness

* I always tend to like doctor characters, I don't know why.  Even when they aren't my favourites I like them.

* She's kind of adorable, I like her (I've seen a lot of this show and every time I say I like someone it ends badly ;-; )

* "the victems"

* If you love Creative English, this is the show for you!

* Chief Bai's crew is trying so hard to get them back together

* Dr. Zhan is so good at psychology he can tell what someone looks like from some tire tracks - this trope is used all the time in crime shows, but they push it a little farther in SCI and it really helps the viewer know what the rules for the show are

* The scene in the psychiatrist's office hearkens back to queer coded villains and the way they're treated in old black and white horror cinema - but done so artfully it's almost invisible.  It's incredibly well done, and the awareness of tropes and types all throughout the series is tremendously successful as much as it's campy fun.

* There's also the trope of someone who manipulates someone into feeling like they've been "purified" and then weaponises them against the "filthy". And of course the fact that the killer's blade is a mirror - that he's killing in others what he sees in himself. This trope hasn't just been queer-coded but has been applied to any sort of physical or mental disorder. Thesis have been written about this trope and the anxiety attached to it. I can't write them better and this is long enough, it's just a small part of the excellent handling of the themes showing up in this genre and I wanted to point it out because it deserves appreciation for the skill and knowledge in the writing.  

* The whole you need evidence vs you're saying psychoanalysis isn't trustworthy feels very much like a coded angry exes discussion

* I love the establishing shots, so good

* He kind of deserved that door to the face, what was he even doing

* Police violence in crime shows is supposed to be a release for the viewer, but many countries have issues with police violence so it hits wrong.  Here it's far more performative in a way that at least has some awareness

* The weirdest phone call, you call someone to tell them something important and they say two things to you and hang up

* The tongue thing, why always the tongue thing?

* When a serial killer tries to compliment you by calling you a carnivore and you shut down the whole alpha male supposition by calling yourself a vegetarian

* At this point I've written almost fifteen hundred words and taken almost two hours to watch 23 minutes

* This is my life, these are my choices

* Dutch Angles

* You could make this conversation about being gay, I have had this conversation about homosexuality before

* Unfortunately while I had it I was on the bus trapped in a window seat

* The conversation didn't end with me saying something cool and everyone clapping

* They just got off the bus to go to work

* The banality of evil, yo

* Her shorts are Incredibly Short, good for her

* "arrest the perp behind my back" that's his job, broheim

* He doesn't ask why she checked behind their ears

* DUN dun dun!

* Slo mo file drop, and of course the file is blood stained and aged

* Chalk Art of Doom

* Chinese word play!

* Caught almost putting his coat over his crush, embarrassing XD

* Backstory!

*  I love all the little character details, I could quote lines I think are funny all day but that would start getting silly

* Bai Yu Tong is marked as clean and having OCD but we don't see what's apparently a huge character trait at all other than the all white, do love that he's good at cooking

* Dr. Zhan: Brilliant!  Genius!  Cannot feed himself.

* Dr. Gong has indifference level 100% which is true and also I love that for him

* I love that Wang Shao part of the team because he's good at making friends, I love that for him

* Poor Zhao Fu: scared of ghosts and dumb and sweet?  At least he has an 8 pack

* Jiang Lin is very tropey except the mention of her nearsightedness

* Ma Han's height 1.7m and legs 1.8m is hilarious and I love it

* I stopped recording the slo mo walks, but if you were drinking along with them you might be dead so I really appreciate you taking time out of your afterlife to continue reading.  We appreciate all our ghost readers

* And that's the first episode!  Thanks for making it to the end!

[somegirlsnerdywords2]

Anime i’ve Watched

That begin with a D (Part 1)!

Yep this is how i’m going to bring over all the anime and manga i’ve watched and posted about on the old blog. It’s not so detailed but it will have to do. Anything new I watch or read from this point on will have their own posts.

Dance with Devils:

Genres: reverse harem, demons, supernatural, romance, vampire, shoujo

Synopsis: Ritsuka Tachibana has always been a good student, so she is completely shocked when she is suddenly summoned by the student council. Even more, they seem to think of Ritsuka as a troublemaker. Led by the handsome Rem Kaginuki, the student council—also consisting of Urie Sogami, Shiki Natsumizaka and Mage Nanashiro—tries to question her, but it soon becomes clear that they have ulterior motives.However, this is only the beginning. When her mother gets kidnapped, her life is turned upside down, and Ritsuka gets drawn into a world of vampires and devils. Both groups are searching for the "Grimoire," a forbidden item allowing its owner to rule the world. The return of her brother Lindo from overseas gives her hope, but even he appears to be hiding something. In a world filled with secrets, Ritsuka questions whom she can trust in this dark musical tale, while the handsome and dangerous members of the student council compete for her attention.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 8/10

Finished airing in 2015 with a total of 12 episodes. 

My Thoughts: One of the better animes in the reverse harem genre. Little bit of fantasy, drama, romance. This one was actually a musical... or at the very least had a notable amount of musical numbers throughout the series. I do love me a good musical. To be fair this anime had some big issues, though if you’re just looking for a bit of halfway decent reverse harem fun this should suit you just fine!

Darling in the FranXX:

Genres: action, drama, mecha, romance, sci-fi

Synopsis:  In the distant future, humanity has been driven to near-extinction by giant beasts known as Klaxosaurs, forcing the surviving humans to take refuge in massive fortress cities called Plantations. Children raised here are trained to pilot giant mechas known as FranXX—the only weapons known to be effective against the Klaxosaurs—in boy-girl pairs. Bred for the sole purpose of piloting these machines, these children know nothing of the outside world and are only able to prove their existence by defending their race.

Hiro, an aspiring FranXX pilot, has lost his motivation and self-confidence after failing an aptitude test. Skipping out on his class' graduation ceremony, Hiro retreats to a forest lake, where he encounters a mysterious girl with two horns growing out of her head. She introduces herself by her codename Zero Two, which is known to belong to an infamous FranXX pilot known as the "Partner Killer." Before Hiro can digest the encounter, the Plantation is rocked by a sudden Klaxosaur attack. Zero Two engages the creature in her FranXX, but it is heavily damaged in the skirmish and crashes near Hiro. Finding her partner dead, Zero Two invites Hiro to pilot the mecha with her, and the duo easily defeats the Klaxosaur in the ensuing fight. With a new partner by his side, Hiro has been given a chance at redemption for his past failures, but at what cost? [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 6/10

Finished airing in 2018 with a total of 24 episodes. 

My Thoughts: Ohhhh how I wanted to love this one. After Kill la Kill I have the highest of hopes for anything Trigger releases but unfortunately they tend to fall short of my expectations... such a shame. The art, animation and themes were fantastic but that’s about where the good times end in all honesty. I will never forgot just HOW they operate the mechs.... those images will forever be burned into my memories.... so thanks for that I guess?? This series had it’s moments and wasn’t a complete dumpster fire but overall it just wasn’t anywhere near the masterpiece I hoped it would be. The disappointment factor probably took a few points off in the end. 

Deadman Wonderland:

Genres: action, sci-fi, shounen, horror

Synopsis: It looked like it would be a normal day for Ganta Igarashi and his classmates—they were preparing to go on a class field trip to a certain prison amusement park called Deadman Wonderland, where the convicts perform dangerous acts for the onlookers' amusement. However, Ganta's life is quickly turned upside down when his whole class gets massacred by a mysterious man in red. Framed for the incident and sentenced to death, Ganta is sent to the very jail he was supposed to visit.But Ganta's nightmare is only just beginning.The young protagonist is thrown into a world of sadistic inmates and enigmatic powers, to live in constant fear of the lethal collar placed around his neck that is slowed only by winning in the prison's deathly games. Ganta must bet his life to survive in a ruthless place where it isn't always easy to tell friend from foe, all while trying to find the mysterious "Red Man" and clear his name, in Deadman Wonderland.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 6/10

Finished airing in 2011 with a total of 12 episodes. 

My Thoughts: Just go check out the completed manga is you’re interested in this series and watch the anime for more content. Pretty cool premise with decent art and music but is incomplete and very unlikely to receive another season.

Death Note:

Genres: mystery, police, psychological, supernatural, thriller, shounen

Synopsis: A shinigami, as a god of death, can kill any person—provided they see their victim's face and write their victim's name in a notebook called a Death Note. One day, Ryuk, bored by the shinigami lifestyle and interested in seeing how a human would use a Death Note, drops one into the human realm. High school student and prodigy Light Yagami stumbles upon the Death Note and—since he deplores the state of the world—tests the deadly notebook by writing a criminal's name in it. When the criminal dies immediately following his experiment with the Death Note, Light is greatly surprised and quickly recognizes how devastating the power that has fallen into his hands could be. With this divine capability, Light decides to extinguish all criminals in order to build a new world where crime does not exist and people worship him as a god. Police, however, quickly discover that a serial killer is targeting criminals and, consequently, try to apprehend the culprit. To do this, the Japanese investigators count on the assistance of the best detective in the world: a young and eccentric man known only by the name of L. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 9/10

Finished airing in 2007 with a total of 37 episodes. 

My Thoughts: If you’re an anime fan and haven’t at least heard of Death Note you may have been living under a rock. Or maybe the only reason you know this title is because of that dumpster fire of a live action western remake... if so I am so so sorry. Strong beginning with an alright end. A great psychological series overall though. Unique and iconic. 

Death Parade: 

Genres: game, mystery, psychological, drama, thriller

Synopsis:  After death, there is no heaven or hell, only a bar that stands between reincarnation and oblivion. There the attendant will, one after another, challenge pairs of the recently deceased to a random game in which their fate of either ascending into reincarnation or falling into the void will be wagered. Whether it's bowling, darts, air hockey, or anything in between, each person's true nature will be revealed in a ghastly parade of death and memories, dancing to the whims of the bar's master. Welcome to Quindecim, where Decim, arbiter of the afterlife, awaits! Death Parade expands upon the original one-shot intended to train young animators. It follows yet more people receiving judgment—until a strange, black-haired guest causes Decim to begin questioning his own rulings. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 9/10

Finished airing in 2015 with a total of 12 episodes. 

My Thoughts: Now this was an interesting one! Here we have the concept of death in game form. Each episode a new player is introduced and our leading pair takes them through their chosen game. Morality, mystery and a dynamic leading pair are what drive this character driven series. You’re sure to experience a wide range of emotions while watching this anime and the opening theme was pretty good as well. Why not give it a go if it sounds like your kind of thing!?

Denki-gai no Honya-san:

Genres: comedy, seinen, slice of life

Synopsis:  Umio is a shy kid who just started his part time job at a manga store smack dab in the middle of the city. But his lifestyle isn't as glamorous as the neon lights that illuminate the city. Umio's closest friends are his co-workers who are all unique characters, to say the least, and although they're nice people, they have their quirks. They are a tight knit group of friends, have nicknames for each other and spend their weekends inside, sheltered from the extravagant scene happening on the outside. (Source: MU)

My Rating: 10/10

Finished airing in 2014 with a total of 12 episodes. 

My Thoughts: Something light after this unusually heavy themed list. A lovable cast of characters drive this situational comedy and it’s an abosulte joy to watch each and every one of the antics they manage to get up to. A great series to bang out on a day when you aren’t feeling so great and need a little something to lighten your mood. You’re unlikely to find any deep life lessons here but it’s sure to tickle your funny bone. 

Devilman: Crybaby:

Genres: action, demons, horror, supernatural, ONA

Synopsis:  Devils cannot take form without a living host. However, if the will of an individual is strong enough, they can overcome the demon and make its power their own, becoming a Devilman. Weak and unassuming, Akira Fudou has always had a bleeding heart. So when his childhood friend Ryou Asuka asks for his help in uncovering devils, Akira accepts without hesitation. However, to Akira's surprise, the place they go to is Sabbath: an immoral party of debauchery and degeneracy. Amidst bloodshed and death, demons possess the partiers, turning their bodies into grotesque monsters, and begin wreaking havoc. In a reckless attempt to save his best friend, Akira unwittingly merges with the devil Amon and becomes a Devilman, gaining the power to defeat the remaining demons. Though it grants him great power, this new partnership awakens an insatiable and primeval part of Akira. Having the body of a devil but the same crybaby heart, Akira works alongside Ryou, destroying those that harm humanity and his loved ones. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

My Rating: 4/10

A 10 episode ONA that finished airing in 2018

My Thoughts: And we’re back at it with the dark stuff... I was not a fan. The art.animation had some real cool moments as did the music but it was just a bit much in my opinion. Rushed and nonsensical with characters I couldn’t care less about. Gratuitous violence and nudity. To be fair there are plenty who enjoyed this anime, unfortunately for all of you I was not one of them.

[return-of-a-space-cowboy]

Master of Puppets

(Yandere Risotto Nero X Female Reader)

Originally from my wattpad

Hope you enjoy

Ever since you were young you had an interest in forensics. You used to read about many of the murders that had shaken the world and watched many shows about how criminals had been brought to justice. You even had done projects on the subject for school passion projects.It was a life long passion that you persuaded, even thou your mother was hesitant on the idea due to the exultation of organised crime in Italy.

Eventually you had gotten the job you had been working so hard to get. You had finally become a forensic detective and it wasn't long until you had climbed through the ranks.

Now you were sitting at your desk in your bedroom. Looking through CCTV footage, scribbling down notes with one hand while eating take out butter chicken with the other.

Recently some rather strange death's had occurred. A man and his wife killed by a car that had bursted from inside of him, a man frozen under a lake in mid summer, a woman with several lacerations to her organs with no outer wounds, bodies of younger people found as old frail corpses and so on...

All of your coworkers had given up on the cases due to there not being and significant evidence to lead to any murderer, but you were determined to get to the bottom of whatever was going on.

As of now you had found a few suspects, it seemed that they had always been around the area during the murders.

Your phone began to ring. You quickly paused the video and put down your pen before answering.

"Hello,(Y/n) (L/n) speaking"

"Hello (Y/n), I was just calling to see how your going" a familiar soothing voice said. The voice of your mother.

"Oh hi Mom! How are you!" You said as you put another piece of chicken in your mouth.

"Good, how about you"

"Tired. Been looking over CCTV footage for hours now" you said as you started reading over your notes.

"(Y/n)... I worry for your safety, what if you get caught up with the Mafia"

"I'm fine trust me, I've got it all under control" you said as you looked up to the board you had just above your desk. Several pieces of string were placed around the board to link up several profiles.

"Just make sure to keep yourself safe" she said.

"I will" you replied.

"Well, good night (y/n)"

"Night Mom" you said before hanging up, placing down your phone and getting back to work.

As you continued your work you couldn't help but feel as if you were being watched. Sometimes you felt someone breathing on your neck or playing with the strands of your hair but every time you turned around there was no one there.

'maybe it's just the fatigue' you thought.

"your so close, the last piece is right next to you" a voice whispered causing you to frantically look around, you found nothing.

'I need some sleep' you thought as you hopped into your bed.

🔗🔗🔗

The next two weeks those same sensations kept happening and dreams of a pair of red irises watching you looped in your mind. Eventually sleep had become something you didn't get, making coffee your best friend.

Your phone rang

"Hello, (y/n) (l/n) speaking" you spoke robotically as you answered.

"We've got another case you might want to add to that large stack of yours" your work colleague, Monica said.

"Meet me at the station, I'm about to do a toxicology test" she said before hanging up.

🔗🔗🔗

You had been feeling a bit feverish all day but after seeing what you had just saw you couldn't help but make a rush to the bathroom and throw your guts up.

"(Y/n)... What's going on? Your usually good with this stuff" Monica said. You spat out the remaining vomit from you mouth before grabbing a handful of toilet paper to wipe your mouth.

"I haven't been feeling well lately" you said before walking to the basin to quickly wash up. You left the bathroom and grabbed a cup of water before heading back into the autopsy room.

"How the fuck did he get a pair of scissors inside his neck without any openings!" You exclaimed.

"That's what you've got to figure out" Monica said to you.

🔗🔗🔗

"No! You can't be serious!" You yelled at you boss.

"Listen to me please I am just one piece away from cracking this case, you can't just tell me to surrender all my evidence and pretend that this all never happened!" You please.

"(Y/n) this case has gotten to your head. I can't have one of my best detectives drop dead because they can't manage themselves" he responded.

"Please there must be another way?" You asked. He looked through his notebook before replying.

"I'll need you to get a psychological report, if they give you any requirements to continue working you must follow them" he said.

"Yes I will" you said

🔗🔗🔗

"So (y/n) tell me what's been troubling you lately" the psychologist said as he held his note book and pen ready to jot down some notes.

"Well you know about my work so I'll skip that" you said.

"But lately I've been this strange feeling" you said as you stared at the roof.

"Like what?" He asked.

"Like I'm being watch... Whenever I'm doing my work I get these occasional feelings. Like a breath on my neck or something playing with my hair some times I hear voices that aren't there" you explained and he jotted what you said down.

"And I've also been having this strange recurring dream..."

"About what?"

"I'm being stared at by someone in the inky abyss"

"Do you know who it is?"

"No all I can see are a pair of red irises. Eyes without a face, nothing else"

"Any psychological tests you've had before" he asked.

"Last one I had was a mandatory psychological profile to see if I was fit for the job" you responded.

"And it came back relatively clean, enough to get me the job" you continued.

After that he gave you a few tests before grabbing his laptop and typing up his diagnosis and printing it.

"Miss (Y/n) I'm going to give you a prescription for apo-seratine which you need to take one tablet with breakfast, I also have advised your boss that you must take two days off a week" he explained to you.

"Hopefully that will help you out, if you need to enquire about anything else please call me to arrange another appointment" he continued.

🔗🔗🔗

"Hi Mom" you said over the phone.

"Hi sweetie, how are you?"

"Good, I was just wondering if we could meet up? I don't have work today so I just thought that we could spend the day out!" You asked

"Yes of course, dear!" She replied.

"We could have lunch at that restaurant that I use to take you to when you were little"

"Sounds like a great idea" you replied

🔗🔗🔗

The day had been a blast, you a d your mother had gone on a big shopping spree and eaten some delicious food but great times never lasted forever and the train ride back would be long.

"Bye Mom" you said as she hopped in her car.

"Bye (Y/n), have a safe ride" she said as she started the car and drove off.

You began to walk to the train station but stopped as you heard a scream, you quickly ran towards the ally that it came from, you halted as you saw the scene in front of you. A man being torn up as another male watched. You quickly grabbed out you camera an began to film the gory sight in front of you. The man turned and you hid behind the wall.

Was this the missing piece that you were looking for. Was he the man behind some of the murders.

You saved the video before running out the ally and into the main streets. Your heart began beating rapidly and you breathing became heavy.

"Excuse me miss, are you lost?" A male voice said. You turned to see who it was, it was him, looking at you with his red irises with the rest of his eyes were black.

You quickly formulated a plan.

"Yes I am sir! Could you please help me get to my hotel, it's supposed to be a few blocks down but I've seemed to have lost my way" you explained while attempting a french accent.

"Sure I can help you" he said in a monotone voice.

You quickly pulled out a town map that you had fetched earlier.

"It should be around here, I'm just horrible at following maps" you nervously giggled as you pointed to the street. He gave a small grin.

"I'll take you there" he offered.

"Yes please sir" you said as you grabbed out your phone and quickly texted work, telling them to send the police.

🔗🔗🔗

It seemed as if everything was going as planned, the hotel was only a few metres. You just had to bare your nerves for just a little longer. He then grabbed you and pulled you into the back alley. You tried to scream but you mouth had been stapled shut.

You flailed in his grip.

"You were so close, weren't you?" He said as he grabbed your camera from your bag, crushing it.

"You had every piece..." He continued as he did the same to your phone before resting his head in the crock of your neck.

"But I just can't let you unearth our secret... But I've grown far to attached to you to kill you..."

[arecomicsevengood]

Quarantine Movies, Part 3

OLD BOYFRIENDS (1979) dir. Joan Tewkesbury

Not often I watch a movie and feel like “What the fuck is happening?” but I did with this one, written by Paul Schrader and directed by the screenwriter of Nashville. Talia Shire stars as a woman getting back in touch with her old boyfriends. She’s… recovering from a nervous breakdown? Sort of out for revenge? One ex hooks up with her again, and then, once abandoned, hires a private detective to track her down. A little boring at first, and then becomes baffling for most of its middle. John Belushi’s in it, playing a kind of pathetic schlub that feels convincingly like “the real Belushi” to me in the sense of me finding it uncomfortable to watch. I think maybe the film can be understood as a take on feminine psychosis in contrast to the masculine psychosis found in Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay. The psychosis here being this lack of self-knowledge that leads to manipulating people ostensibly towards the end of finding love.

KLUTE (1971) dir. Alan Pakula

Feel like I got the impression this movie was a joke from somewhere? Some Murphy Brown reference or something, playing to consensus of losers. (Edit: The joke’s in Wet Hot American Summer, but doesn’t really contain a value judgment about the movie.) It’s not great by any means but it’s not particularly tawdry given the subject matter. It is confusing that the movie is mostly about Jane Fonda’s call girl character, but the movie is named after Donald Sutherland’s character, who’s a detective. Maybe the joke was always just that people thought Jane Fonda played Klute. Movie digs into the sex worker’s psychology in a way that feels contemporary, except contemporary discourse doesn’t really allow for psychological insight, in favor of empty gestures towards representation. Sutherland’s out to solve a mystery, Fonda falls in love with him: I really did think this was smart in depicting a relationship where person was uncomfortable with the act of falling in love as running counter to their techniques of emotional distancing, except, I guess, for the fact that this is depicted in scenes of Fonda talking to her therapist that spell out what’s happening rather than depict this in a more organic way. But that it feels sort of shoehorned in is cool because the movie then largely has this mystery narrative it’s about. It is a little dull and could stand to be shorter, though the musical score does some nice grooves with dissonant elements on top, vaguely Morricone-style, though of course he’s got a deep body of work.

EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978) dir. Irvin Kershner

Criterion’s description of this chracterizes it as an “American giallo,” which seems about right. About a woman (Faye Dunaway) who takes violent/erotic photographs (shot by Helmut Newton) that coexist in both advertising and art gallery contexts. She starts having psychic visions of murder, the police are investigating her because some murders seem modeled after her photos, although that is not the case with any of the murders she has visions of, which then start to involve people she knows. So, like a giallo, there’s a lot happening, an interest in lurid style, and a disinterest in internal consistency as things ratchet up, and the twist ending (that the cop she started dating has multiple personality disorder) falls within that pattern as well. Not as good as the best Italian giallo, (which would I guess be Argento’s TENEBRE) or for that matter, the slasher movie HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, which is an American movie insane enough to exist in the same conversation.

THE GETAWAY (1972) dir. Sam Peckinpah

Steve McQueen gets out of prison and is immediately set up by the prison official, who his girlfriend (Ali MacGraw) slept with, to rob a bank. He gets double-crossed, and then goes on the lam with his girlfriend. While in the past I sometimes feel like I am listing the names of the actors as endorsements, I’m not really doing this with the cast of this movie or Old Boyfriends. Good action sequences and suspenseful moments. Feel like the iconic images in this are McQueen with a shotgun, blowing up cop cars. Peckinpah directs from a Walter Hill screenplay adapting a Jim Thompson novel. This predates Walter Hill directing movies for himself, but it’s interesting how much more flash there is to the action here than there is in The Driver, you can sort of detect certain elements as being Hill’s interest (like the suspense of being pursued) and other stuff being Peckinpah, like the baroque explosions of violence. I like all of it.

KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016) dir. Robert Greene

This isn’t very good. One half adaptation of the Christine Chubbuck story with a documentary about Kate Lyn Sheil. Sheil’s good in other things, this feels like a failed experiment. Weirdly this came out at pretty much exactly the same time as a movie about Chubbuck starring Rebecca Hall? The Rebecca Hall movie’s pretty great, and is an interesting performance, I would be interested in watching a conversation between the two actresses.

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1998) dir. Martin Scorses

A rewatch. Nicolas Cage plays an ambulance driver, Scorsese directs from a Paul Schrader screenplay. I like Nicolas Cage a lot, I like the cinematography in this one. I knew I would enjoy this, didn’t remember John Goodman being in it, Mary Beth Hurt is really good in it, mentioned her being good in Light Sleeper too, didn’t realize she’s Paul Schrader’s wife. Insanely hectic energy, shot through with hallucinatory holy light. Patricia Arquette is probably the weakest link in the cast, though it is her different energy that enables her to seem like a potentially redemptive figure for Nicolas Cage.

RAGING BULL (1980) dir. Martin Scorsese

This one’s a classic, but I didn’t like it the first time I saw it, over fifteen years ago, I think on account of being hungry at the time. Still, probably not my favorite Scorsese. The dialogue is interesting, due to De Niro’s character having a high level of aggression and paranoia, where pretty much everything that gets said to him he responds “Why do you say that?” which lends short scenes this circular quality. This reveals his character, in an efficient way, even though it makes the scenes feel insane and somewhat circular.

HOPSCOTCH (1980) dir. Ronald Neame

I liked this one a lot when I saw it years ago, didn’t really know the director’s pedigree came from doing Alec Guiness comedies. I don’t normally rewatch movie but my memories of this were very pleasant in a way suggesting it would be comforting. Walter Matthau plays a spy who is retiring but who gets everyone mad at him, which makes this kind of Prisoner-adjacent. He runs around, being the smartest guy in the room, having fun at being able to outsmart intelligent agencies. All of the globe-trotting of a James Bond kind of thing, but with none of the bloodshed. No one dies in this, uptight people just get mad at Walter Matthau being cool.

NIGHTFALL (1956) dir. Jacques Tourneur

Tourneur directed the original Cat People, which I love, and Out Of The Past, a classic noir I was not fond of when I saw it in college. This one’s good too, adapting a David Goodis novel. I know Goodis from a piece in Jesse Pearson’s magazine Apology, that makes the case he’s the best writer of crime fiction, on a sentence level. The dialogue’s good in this, but there’s also a cool structure: Following different characters, with it being fairly unclear what their relationship is to one another for a while, some flashbacks reveal things. The characters in this are pretty likable, Anne Bancroft is the female lead and the romance is believable. She plays a model, it’sf ascinating to watch movies made by a studio and realize they have the same woman designing gowns for all of them. Like they have the glamour provided in-house because it’s recognized that’s part of what people go to the movies for, but the the films don’t become ads for the designer or anything, like the way Jean Paul Gaultier’s designs function in The Fifth Element or something. Theme song is sung by Al Hibbler, who cut a LP with Roland Kirk.

5 AGAINST THE HOUSE (1955) dir. Phil Karlson

Criterion Channel has a collection of noir films Columbia put out, this is one of them, with a pretty good-sounding premise: Kim Novak is a part of a group of college friends that set out to rob a casino, but one of the group’s PTSD sabotages it. It ends up not really working as a heist film, for a number of reasons, one is that the “perfect crime” they engineer is not that intricate, the other, more important element is the characters are unbearably smug in a way that makes them really hard to deal with. Novak’s good in it, but no one else is: While the men are supposed to be funny, but aren’t, Novak sort of just has to be beautiful. She sings songs in this, and maybe there’s a voice double, but it seems she has a good singing voice. You can probably skip this one.

THE BIG HEAT (1953) dir. Fritz Lang

Not as masterful as the films Lang made in Germany, but still really good. A cop investigating a murder quickly gathers that a conspiracy is afoot, people make mysterious phone calls immediately after he interviews them, he gets his life destroyed, but keeps going. Gloria Grahame (who’s also in Nicholas Ray’s amazing In A Lonely Place) is great as a gangster’s party-girl-who-loves-money girlfriend who has her beauty and then her life taken away from her. There is an element of feeling like you’re seeing cliches be run through their paces, but I don’t mind, given the pacing. It’s mean enough you don’t know how dark it’s going to get. Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister who also appears in Nightfall, gets a nice role in this.

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958) dir. Irving Lerner

Oh, this one rules! Although I knew none of the people involved in it, everybody’s great. It feels slow as you watch it, it’s deliberately paced and seems to appreciate every scene on its own terms as a point of interest, rather than rushing through a plot. The score seems like it’s very close to just one instrumental piece, being used over and over again. About a dude, (who’s also in Kubrick’s The Killing, it turns out) becoming a professional hitman, and then flying out to California for a bigger job, where he has two people minding him. The hitman’s psychosis is not over the top, he just seems very self-contained, in a way that gets a lot of (almost) comedic mileage out of his interaction with other people

INVENTION FOR DESTRUCTION (1958) dir. Marel Zeman

This movie looks REAL weird and I have no idea how they got the effect? The degree of artificiality is highly distracting, in a way I don’t have a problem with in Guy Maddin or whoever. The whole thing sort of looks like the portraits of people that run in The Wall Street Journal? There are lines on EVERYTHING, like the sets are being made in this patterned way to replace color values. Everything looks artificial, but also collaged together. “Freely adapted” from Jules Verne, this involves boats, explosions, heists, etc. but all done in this sort of deep-focus theatrical staging that seems to combine animation and live action but in a way I can’t work out but also isn’t enveloping or convincing.

MAY FOOLS (1980) dir. Louis Malle.

I like a lot of Louis Malle, this seems vaguely like a deep cut, as I believe it’s unavailable on DVD. It takes place in France during the May ’68 protests, but is about a family getting together for a funeral/reading of a will. It’s suffused with weird free-flowing sexual energy, like everyone’s down to commit incest? Sort of in the name of revolution, but understandable as a movie in terms of being very french, and maybe something of a light comedy. (While Murmur Of The Heart also has incest in it, and is not a comedy, it’s very French.) People flirt with each other a lot, this is a pleasant watch if you are under quarantine and are fantasizing about casual sex or the overthrowing of the political class.

MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE (1980) dir. Alain Resnais

This, too, is very French. The spine of the movie is Henri Laborit lecturing, lending the film an essayistic aspect, illustrated with footage of lab rats, but also footage of people wearing mouse heads and human clothes, the best parts. The guy’s theories seem agreeable to me but I don’t know what other people think about them. They’re illustrated by the fictional life stories of three characters, whose lives intersect eventually in their adulthood, though the film starts with them as children. Resnais is interesting, I’ve seen very few of his films but they’re all radically unique, though united by this intellectual edge.

FUGITIVE KIND (1960) dir. Sidney Lumet

Lumet also had a long and varied career, but I essentially view him as a highly-skilled journeyman, I guess due to snobbish bias gleaned from secondhand takes. I’ll watch pretty much any of his movies though, and so I watched this Tennessee Williams adaptation. Not sure I’d seen Marlon Brando in anything before, though I thought it was funny to say I possessed “the raw sexuality of a young Marlon Brando” in college. This whole movie is about how hot Brando is, and how all women want to fuck him and how all the men resent him. You would think the heterosexual male default would be to not notice how hot a dude is, but Brando is both physically ripped but with a feminine face that makes me “get it.” There’s a poetry to his sensitivity, but also an element of threat to how basically everyone who gets along with him is at odds with the racist, patriarchal, and parochial attitudes of the small towns he travels through.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974) dir. Sidney Lumer

This is an Agatha Christie adaptation, where Hercule Poirot is played by Albert Finney, amongst a large cast of huge stars who are both hamming it up and not really doing anything. After watching two movies with Natasha Richardson, was nice to see her mom Vanessa Redgrave in something, though it’s a small part. The ending, where the detective works out that everyone schemed to commit the murder together and then decides that he will let them all get away with it, is fun, though by and large the “comedy” here feels a bit dated. This kinda feels like something that you would’ve seen already after having caught bits and pieces of it on basic cable growing up.

[edogawatranslations]

Danganronpa Kirigiri (3) - Chapter 3, Part 2

Table of Contents | Previous: Chapter 3, Part 1

“...E-Excuse me?”

“Miracles don’t occur without magic.”

“S-Stop joking around.”

“Come on, just a peck on the cheek is fine.”

“A-A peck on the cheek? That’s enough for you?”

Kyoko shot a look at me. “You’re willing to go along with that?”

“N-No way!”

“How disappointing,” Lico sighed. “Then I guess I’ll take my leave.”

“W-Wait!” I shouted as he began to stand up. “Fine, fine. Sit down.”

“Yui, are you sure about this?” Kyoko asked.

“What choice do I have? Besides, a kiss on the cheek is a normal greeting in some countries.”

“Then please, look more like you’re going to enjoy it,” Lico said, looking up at me.

“Can I say something first? A magic kiss, you know, is typically between a prince and a princess... What I’m about to do is just...”

“I know, I know. I wasn’t serious.” He raised up both of his hands in playful surrender. “I don’t need any magic. I was planning on being your ally from the very start.”

“You little...” I resisted the urge to punch the boy in the face. It wouldn’t be good to lose my cool.

“First, to respond to your question about whether or not I am aware of the contents of the Duel Noir, the answer is no. I know nothing about its contents, nor the solution. Think about it for a second. Would Ryuuzouji really divulge his secrets to me, someone he suspected of being Rei Mikagami?”

“You should’ve said so in the first place.”

“I might as well tell you, but I didn’t sneak into Ryuuzouji’s headquarters to pursue the world’s greatest mysteries. In fact, I’m investigating the Crime Victims’ Salvation Committee.”

“Why did you hide that from us?”

Frustration burned inside me.

“I was anticipating that you’d figure it out yourself. But that’s beside the point. Over the past year, I noticed a surge in the number of people approaching me. All of them were detectives sent by the Committee. I found out Mikado Shinsen has been trying to invite me to join his organization, and if I refused, I’d be met with death.”

Naturally, the Committee wished to obtain Rei Mikagami’s power; it made the most sense to scout high-ranking individuals when seeking additional strength.

“And so, I snuck into Ryuuzouji’s castle and have been tracking the Committee’s movements over these past few months. To tell you the truth, I fully intended on joining the Committee if they intrigued me enough.”

“Don’t you have any honor?”

“I don’t follow any guidelines as a detective,” he said with an impish smile.

Well, at least he admits it.

“But the Committee is devoted solely to creating mysteries. I love a good mystery myself, but designing exam questions isn’t exactly my cup of tea. That’s why my interest in the Committee faded. I would much prefer to be summoned to solve a Duel Noir challenge, but that’s hopeless with my rank...”

The greater the cost of a Duel Noir, the higher the rank of the summoned detective. An exorbitant cost would be necessary for a triple-zero class detective to be summoned, but from a psychological standpoint, I couldn’t imagine anyone having the mental toughness to willingly put themselves in such a situation.

“I’ll get to the point—I want to help you with the Duel Noir. I want to solve mysteries. Please, allow me to join you.”

“Geez, you could’ve saved us so much time if you told us all of this earlier!” I ruffled my hair in frustration. “I don’t know if this is just who you are or if something’s messed up with your brain...”

“Your way of thinking is quite simple.”

I punched him squarely in the face for his blunt remarks—in my imagination, at least. Somehow, I managed to muster the willpower necessary to restrain myself.

“But thanks, we’ll gladly accept your help. We’d be in a pickle otherwise,” I replied.

I offered my hand out for a handshake, but Lico just sat there smiling, not reciprocating.

“...What?” I asked.

“Are you satisfied with trusting me so easily?”

“You still got a problem?”

“Kyoko doesn’t appear to trust me the same way you do.”

Now it’s Kyoko, huh...

She was staring—glaring at Lico.

“Kyoko, what’s wrong?” I asked. “You don’t trust him?”

“Mikado Shinsen...” she muttered. “That man can disguise as anyone.”

Her comment took me aback. Mikado Shinsen—the Variationist, a master of illusion and disguise.

“I see, so you suspect me to be Mikado Shinsen?” Lico asked.

“That’s not possible,” I interjected swiftly. “Just look at him. He’s way smaller than Shinsen; he’s even smaller than you! The Shinsen we met at Norman’s Hotel was taller than me. No matter how talented a masquerader he is, he can’t physically shrink his body down to that size.”

“But he can make himself appear larger,” she remarked.

“Well, yeah... But Lico is smaller, so there’s no reason to suspect him.”

“But what if the boy before us is the actual Mikado Shinsen, and he disguised himself at the hotel? Shinsen was wearing some sort of disguise back then.”

“The possibility stands to reason,” Lico admitted.

“I-If that’s your logic, then even I could be Shinsen in disguise too.”

“No, I’m certain you’re Yui,” Kyoko responded.

“How can you be so sure?”

“...Y-Your body was soft,” Kyoko said, averting her gaze.

When she hugged me yesterday, she must have checked to see if I was the real deal...

“Lico, say something to counter her!”

"That’s quite difficult. Her claim can’t be disproven. No matter how much we discuss it, it’ll always come back to ‘Lico might be Shinsen, or he might not’ in the end.”

“Why do you always have to complicate things? All you need to say is that you’re not Mikado Shinsen!”

“I’m not Mikado Shinsen.”

But Kyoko’s piercing gaze showed no sign of relaxing.

“Can you really not trust him, Kyoko?”

“I’d say I trust him about 60%.”

“An oddly specific percentage,” Lico smirked, shrugging his shoulders. “How did you end up with that figure?”

“Your voice. You aren’t altering it. But Mikado Shinsen clearly had an adult male voice.”

“That’s right!” I exclaimed. “No matter how talented he is at disguises, he can’t replicate both a prepubescent voice and an adult voice.”

...But was something like that really impossible for Mikado Shinsen?

I forced myself to ignore the thought that crossed the back of my mind.

“So you’ve decided to trust me?” Lico asked.

“Like I said, I trust you 60%.”

“Both of you, shake hands and make up,” I urged. “At 60% strength is fine.”

Kyoko reluctantly stuck out her hand. Lico politely grabbed onto it and smiled.

“Alright, now we’re all friends. Lico, shake my hand too, since we didn’t earlier.”

I offered my hand out, and he went along. His hand was small like a girl’s. I couldn’t imagine Mikado Shinsen having such a tiny hand.

“Now we can finally get somewhere,” I said.

I started lining up the twelve challenge cards on the floor. The cards detailed cases that were either underway or imminent. And we had to solve all twelve of them.

I grabbed a retractable pointing stick from nearby and started leading the conversation like a commander, with Lico sitting politely on the floor and Kyoko on the edge of the bed.

“If we stick together as a group, there’s no way we can solve all the cases in time. We need to split up and conduct separate investigations. Any objections?”

The two of them shook their heads.

“Fortunately, twelve can evenly be divided by three, so we can each be responsible for four cases.”

As those words came out of my mouth, my head started spinning. Four cases? It took all my strength to solve just one case; how was I going to manage solving four at once by myself?

“First, let’s look up each of the locations where a Duel Noir will be held this time around, and divide them into sets of four based on geographic proximity.”

“Excuse me, Professor.”

“Yes, Lico?”

“If the murders have already occurred, we don’t need to go to each and every location individually. Since I can obtain any and all relevant police information, we might be more effective playing the role of armchair detectives.”

“But that means turning a blind eye and giving up on any crimes that haven’t been committed yet. We can’t knowingly do that!”

These challenge cards also warned of future crimes. Through intuition and reasoning, a detective could successfully prevent a murder from happening.

“But even so, I do think it’s impossible to solve them all,” Kyoko said, slowly shaking her head. “One wrong move and we may end up trapped in one place until the deadline passes, like back at Norman’s Hotel... Among these cases, there’s one set on a cruise liner; it might be stuck out at sea for the whole week once it sails off.”

“Y-Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Taking that into account, I believe it would be better to group the cases according to cost rather than location. We can divide them up between us by counting off from lowest to highest cost, and then we can tackle them in any order we want.”

“Then I’ll reorder these by cost...”

“Come on, hurry up,” Lico threw out his hands in boredom. “Just leave them all to me and I’ll be finished by the time limit.”

“Even for you, something like that is—”

“100% doable.” A cheerful expression formed on his face.

Such a task may have been well within his capabilities.

...In fact, this Duel Noir challenge may have originally been intended as a duel between the triple-zero class detectives, plus the Kirigiri family. Rei Mikagami joining the side of the detectives had to have been foreseen by Ryuuzouji, who probably considered the elusive figure, instead of me, as his true opponent. Or perhaps, that role was filled by Kyoko. Her low rank was only because she hadn’t been active as a detective for a long time, but Ryuuzouji and the Committee must have realized her rank didn’t reflect her true abilities.

The more I thought about it, the clearer it was that I had no business being part of this battle.

Maybe I should leave everything to him...

“I wonder which case will be the most puzzling.” Like an eager puppy wagging his tail after having received a new toy, Lico scanned the challenge cards with a spark in his eyes. “It’s not a real mystery unless at least two or three people die... A higher cost must mean a higher chance of a serial murder case. I can’t wait to see how these weapons are used. Haha....” He was getting worked up.

...No, what am I thinking?

While he was unfettered in his actions as a detective, he also lacked ethics and a sense of justice. His interests lay solely in the thrill of solving mysteries, and I bet he couldn’t care less about the outcome of a case.

I couldn’t entrust everything to him. But I didn’t have the skill to solve a case. If I even had a fraction of his genius, I’d go save people all across the world.

“...I’ve kinda lost all confidence.” I retracted the pointing stick and flopped down onto the ground.

“We haven’t even started our investigation,” Kyoko said.

“I know, but...”

My incompetence frustrated me. But if I kept staring at the ground and sulking, I’d truly end up hopeless. For now, I needed to face forward and stand tall.

“Kyoko, no matter what people say, it’s my duty to go out and save people. This is a battle over my pride as a detective.”

“Yui...” She stared at me with concern.

From her perspective, it must have been painful to watch me reaffirm my stubborn convictions like a straight-F student in high spirits right before a test.

But regardless, I resolved to move forward and trust in the hope that lay ahead.

“I have an idea.” Kyoko ran her hand down her braids. “I agree that splitting up is the best way to solve these cases, but how about instead of us investigating individually, you and I work as a team of two? Being together would feel more... reassuring.”

She had some difficulty finishing that last sentence.

I’d only weigh you down... I stopped myself from voicing those words out loud.

Suddenly, it hit me. In a Duel Noir, the criminal couldn’t lay a finger on the detective. As the summoned detective, I couldn’t be harmed.

That’s right—there was a role only I could fill.

I’ll be your shield.

“Let’s go with that plan. You focus on solving the mystery. Leave gathering evidence, beating up criminals, and everything else to me.”

“So I’m all by myself?” Lico interjected.

“We’ll divide the cases equally between us, so six each. You get two more mysteries to solve than if we split it three ways. Sound good?”

“Works for me,” he replied with a wide grin. His way of thinking was perhaps more simple than I imagined.

“Then let’s move on.” I picked up the twelve cards. “So as for dividing these up...”

“They all sound so intriguing, I can’t choose.”

“Don’t describe them like that. Lives are at stake.”

“Sorry,” Lico said with a petulant look. “But choosing one by one will waste time, so how about distributing them at random?”

“Hmm... That’s not a bad idea.”

Staring at the cards wouldn’t tell us anything more about what the cases would be like, so there wasn’t much of a point to pick based on personal preference.

“I’ll shuffle them.” Lico tightly grasped the twelve cards in his hand, before tossing them all up into the air.

And then...

“Hyah!”

Between his fingers were six darts, which he had pulled out of his suit on the floor. In one smooth motion, he flung all of them around.

One of them whizzed by my face, causing me to flinch backwards.

Thud, thud... Soft noises echoed out as the darts struck different parts of the walls and ceiling. Each one had pierced a challenge card. His abilities were truly superhuman. Looking carefully, I realized one of the darts had punctured my coat.

“What have you done?!” I shrieked.

“I’ll take the cases that were hit.” Pretending to not have heard me, Lico fluttered around the room and retrieved the darts.

I gathered the challenge cards that had fallen to the ground. I sat down next to Kyoko, and together, we looked through the six cases we were responsible for.

 Card 1:

Location: The Goodbye Bar — 20 million yen Weapon: Knife — 5 million yen Weapon: Charybdotoxin — 30 million yen Weapon: Rope — 3 million yen Trick: Locked Room — 20 million yen Total Cost: 78 million yen

Card 2:

Location: Museum of Medieval Torture — 30 million yen Weapon: Iron Maiden — 30 million yen Trick: Locked Room — 80 million yen Total Cost: 140 million yen

Card 3:

Location: Takeda Haunted Mansion — 30 million yen Weapon: Dotanuki Katana — 30 million yen Trick: Locked Room — 100 million yen Miscellaneous: Rubber Bands — 1 million yen Total Cost: 161 million yen

Card 4:

Location: Kareobana Academy — 30 million yen Weapon: Candles — 20 million yen Trick: Locked Room — 150 million yen Total Cost: 200 million yen

Card 5:

Location: Libra Girls’ Academy — 200 million yen Weapon: Iron Pipe — 3 million yen Trick: Locked Room — 150 million yen Total Cost: 353 million yen

Card 6:

Location: Twin Abilities Research Center — 50 million yen Weapon: Knife — 5 million yen Trick: Ultimate Locked Room — 500 million yen Miscellaneous: Chains — 3 million yen Miscellaneous: Padlock — 3 million yen Total Cost: 561 million yen

“Hey Lico, we’ve got a case I think you’d really love. Wanna trade?”

Of course, I was referring to the case with the highest cost. I wanted to avoid it, as the difficulty of a case increased with the cost.

Lico shook his head. “Please don’t show me something so intriguing...” he replied, writhing in ecstasy. “We’ll run out of time if we start discussing which one to trade for. It’s best if we call this final. Otherwise, I won’t be able to suppress my desires anymore.”

Showing him a picture of Stonehenge or the Pyramids of Giza would likely push him over the edge. I wanted to test that hypothesis, but now wasn’t the time to be fooling around.

“Only the costliest case has the trick listed as ‘Ultimate Locked Room.’” As always, Kyoko assessed the situation with a calm mind. “I wonder what kind of locked room is worth over 500 million yen.”

“Wait, is something like that really appropriate for my rank?”

A double-zero class detective was summoned for a 1.3 billion yen case. Was a 500 million yen case really within the range for someone without a single zero like me?

500 million yen seemed like enough to do just about anything. With that sort of money, the options for murder were vast. That would be true even if it were the criminal’s own money, but Duel Noirs felt more frightening because the funding came from the Crime Victims’ Salvation Committee.

“Now that we’ve divided up the cases, I should get going.” Lico stood up with the cards in his hand.

“You’re leaving already?”

“Yes, I can’t wait to open the doors to these locked rooms.”

“Wait, do you even have a place to return to?”

“I’ll be heading back to Ryuuzouji’s castle today.”

“Huh? But aren’t you two pretty much enemies right now? Will he even let you back in?”

“Ryuuzouji isn’t such a narrow-minded person. He won’t do anything cowardly like kill me in my sleep. Besides, I still have a duty that I need to fulfill.”

“A duty?”

“Obtain and transmit police information to the two of you. That was my original assignment, after all. If you need me, don’t hesitate to call at any time. I’ll provide you with any information you want.”

“You’re just like a spy. But I wonder if Ryuuzouji will really grant you access to the information under these circumstances.”

“Nothing to worry about there. He’s a fair person.”

Lico was right—I didn’t have any reason to doubt Ryuuzouji. If he wanted us out of the picture, he already had plenty of opportunities to get rid of us. Besides, he challenged me to a fair battle. His simple honesty may have been one reason that drove him to become a savior.

“Let’s do our best,” he said with a smile.

“Right. We’re counting on you, Lico.”

We walked out to the entryway of the dorm and bid farewell to each other.

Next: Chapter 4, Part 1

[leslie-red]

Connection chapter 1

Yes sorry there is not title for my chapters :) enjoy this chapter 1 the real one ! thank you for your reading , kudos and mostly comments <3 if you have some questions you can ask :)

Ruvik walks along Krimson City at a slow pace, looking down, his long floating white coat making him look even more like a ghost. Like in STEM. He hears screams, mostly perceives the children's ones. But he keeps moving forward like nothing happened. A small smirk eventually appears on his lips. He feeds from all this fear, he can feel it and in the real world it is more…"Delicious". If only he could…experiment more on it. He finally managed to escape from Mobius. They are so pitiful. Thinking they can restrain him. No one restrains him. Nowhere. He ends up hearing different noises. Noises he hasn't heard in a long time. Like alarms, red and blue colors and brutally, cars surrounding him, stopping him from moving further. Rage runs through his whole body, he still has his powers to destroy all those parasites. But Leslie stops him.

"Stop moving!" One of those microbes with a megaphone yells. Others are aiming at him with weapons. He closes his eyes, his first thought directed at Leslie. "Leslie…Let me do it. If I die, you will, too." And strangely, Leslie understands him.

He slowly raises his hand up, ready to reach the point of no return, when a familiar voice rises out of the chaos. He recognizes this voice, frightened but calm. He looks up for the first time and sees him. His "worst enemy", but one of the few people who have been the closest to him in all his existence. He says nothing, does nothing to show he has recognized Sebastian who's putting himself between him and the parasites. What is he doing? Sebastian still remains so intriguing.

"Don't shoot! I'll deal with him, alright? There are children! They mustn't see anything!" Ruvik smiles cynically. That dear Seb hasn't changed. Always worrying about others, even if it means saving Ruvik.

"Ruvik…" Sebastian slowly tries to get closer to the other man. He's not dreaming. Ruvik is really there. In all his glory. "I won't hurt you but you have to come with me…"

"What makes you think I would follow you?" This tone…Sebastian remembers it very well. The same he used in the elevator. Deep and calm. He doesn't know what to answer. They are enemies. But right now he doesn't want to act that way. He wants to save those people, even those stupid cops unaware of who they're dealing with, and spare them from an atrocious death.

"Trust me. I know you're doubting. But I swear, I won't do anything to you." Strangely, he ends up believing him. Last time they were face to face, they tried to kill each other and Sebastian didn't miss him. Just for that he could make him pay. But he has other concerns.

"You don't know how lucky you are of having already met me…Seb."

With that, he slowly walks towards Sebastian's car, without a single word. The brown-haired man stares at him with a puzzled look like he has always done and reassures the crowd, promising them that nothing will happen. He gets inside the car and as he sees Ruvik's sadistic smile, old memories reappear. The worst of them. It's rather Ruvik, who's comfortably sitting down, who doesn't know how lucky he is. And again…He has all the reasons to kill him. But a part of him refuses and he would give everything not to listen to it.

"So…" Ruvik begins on an amused tone. "You're lost in your thoughts?"

Seb slightly shakes his head. He hasn't changed at all. Whether in STEM or in the real world, Ruvik knows how to be annoying. He starts the car at full speed and heads to the police department. He's saving a special room for Ruvik. Where only him can get inside and see him.

At the krimson city police department, agents and detectives are surprised, even frightened, to discover that Sebastian Castellanos, known for being one of the most scrupulous cops, has brought back this psychopath many have heard about. But they ignore their shared past. And Sebastian, feeling the weight of their stares on him, tries not to pay attention to it. However, it amuses Ruvik. He hates being looked at, it even disgusts him sometimes, but he is currently pleased by it. He will change Sebastian's life. Once again, he knows it. Playing with him again. Sebastian was going to push Ruvik inside the room when one of his colleagues takes him aside. Seb can feel Ruvik stiffen, ready to defend himself. He doesn't want any damages…not anymore.

"Listen, Castellanos. You seem busy but there's a case that needs immediate attention…Look at this file."

The man hands him the file and Sebastian examines it with care. A picture shows a little girl, afraid…She slightly looks like his daughter…It upsets him.

"I'm going to take care of it." He says with a whisper. During those few minutes, Ruvik realizes that for the first time, he doesn't know what to think about it. Sebastian has changed. He looks more vulnerable. He made him that way. Even more affected by the things around him since his daughter's death and everything that happened in STEM. Sebastian became the perfect survivor. With perfect psychological damages. Always so fascinating. Sebastian keeps the file in his hand and lets Ruvik inside the room. Then, he turns towards his colleagues to give them an order.

"No one gets inside this room unless it's me. I'm going to deal with him."

He's forced to act like this. He doesn't want any carnage. He has already seen too much of it, and it keeps going. He knows his colleagues might think he's dealing with this case in a weird way, but he doesn't give a damn about it. Ruvik watches around the room in which he's currently kept in. Rather small, but not sordid nor stifling.

"Sit down." Seb orders him. He raises his eyebrows, surprised. So Seb, for a moment, thinks he's now the master of the game. "Let's make him keep that joy for a moment."

Ruvik sits down calmly, without breaking eye contact. Sebastian tries not to let himself be disrupted by this piercing gaze. He knows he's "studying" him. That's something he never ceased to do but him wants to change things. For the good of the world. Ruvik free, it only bodes horror.

"I've learnt about you. I've received some messages from this organization…Mobius." At those words, Ruvik rolls his eyes. Of course. How else would he have learnt about it?

"But I already felt it." Sebastian pursued on a softer tone. "As soon as I got out of STEM, it was rather painful, always the same headaches. Why?"

Ruvik stays quiet for a while before answering on a neutral tone, as usual.

"You're dealing with the aftermath, no one ever gets out of STEM unscathed. You either die in there, become a prisoner like me or by the greatest miracle, you get out and stay connected to it. You're kind of connected…to me." He finishes his sentence smiling like he once did while saying those words, "you are mine".

Sebastian sighs and slowly stands up, ready to pursue the conversation calmly.

"Ruvik, I won't hurt you. I just want to make sure that you, however, won't try anything. I don't want that anymore."

"This isn't about you." Ruvik retorts dryly, but Seb doesn't let himself be impressed by it anymore and leans against the table in order to be closer to his former enemy.

"You're wrong, as long as I will be connected to you, if not forever, everything you do and think about doing, it's my business."

Deep down, he's right. And somehow, this pleases Ruvik.

"You're interested by me, admit it."

"Ruvik…Of course I am."

He totally is. Ruvik came into his life and changed it in so little time, like a tsunami. He can't ignore it anymore. Ruvik starts to feel bitter at Sebastian's tone. A compassionate and calm tone. What game is he playing?

"You really aren't going to hurt me?"

"No." Ruvik laughs bitterly.

"Don't mock me."

"No, that's no my attention. I don't want it anymore, believe it or not I don't care. If I wanted to hurt you I would have already done it as soon as I found you in the middle of the city. I tried to kill you…I failed."

"I've completely defiled you."

Is it true? No, he was already defiled, since his daughter's death and Myra's vanishing. Even if he has a strange, disturbing feeling.

"No, Ruvik." He says with a wry smile. "You didn't defile me, you made me angry, you woke something up in me that I thought was gone, you probably…exhausted me after all you made me go through, the monsters I had the honor to meet…But you didn't break me. Now I feel…serene." It was sincere and at the same time he was trying to hit where it hurt.

"Stop. Shut up."

For the first time, Ruvik refuses to acknowledge that he changed someone's life to make him "serene", it's ludicrous. Like this way Sebastian acts towards him. The detective stands up, heading to a fruit cup.

"I'm sorry…" He says slowly. "We…Don't have pears or pumpkins." Ruvik gives him an odd look then remembers the paintings hanging on the walls of the Victoriano manor. "But we do have oranges. Do you want one?" He asks this time on a cheerful tone, which exasperates Ruvik. Right now, he would like to reduce him to ashes…Especially because he sees that Sebastian is sincere. Ruvik answers the question by shaking

his head, a dark look on his face. Sebastian smiles, far from surprised by his behavior. He knows it will take time until Ruvik accepts to become familiar with him.

"Everybody loves oranges. That's all I can give you for now, eating will do you good and I have a job to do."

Ruvik ends up eating the orange, his eyes never leaving Sebastian. He knows his job has something to do with the little girl on the picture.

"Are you intrigued by her?" He asks with a mysterious smile.

"I'm ready for everything." Sebastian simply replies, leaving the room. He turns around one last time and retorts on a tougher tone:

"Don't leave the room, Ruvik. I will come back. For now, you have nowhere else to go, and you know it. You won't make it out alive. You will need me. And I don't want a carnage anymore."

He refrains himself from doing anything, something his old self would have done, and it only amuses Ruvik who takes advantage of the situation once again.

"Alright, boss. Do your job, then."

Sebastian doesn't say anything else and closes the door, leaving Ruvik alone with his thoughts. Darker than anyone could imagine. He looks at the orange closely before sinking his long burnt fingers in it, picturing a brain instead of the fruit. "Indeed, Seb…Everybody loves oranges."

Ao3link

[firefighterkingdom]

#3 Fire Fighters & PTSD: What Are The Signs & What Can Be Done For It

Well, Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of FireFighter Kingdom. We’re on podcast, episode number three. My name is Vince Trujillo, I am the co host along with a professional firefighter and president of the New Mexico Professional Firefighters Association Mr. Robert Sanchez. Robert, how are you doing today?

Robert Sanchez: Good. Welcome all the audience on there from FireFighter Kingdom. We’re happy to have everybody here again, once again, trying to educate the firefighters out there, give them some new information.

Vince Trujillo: Yeah, and we have some really good information coming up today regarding mental health and firefighters. But quickly, before we go ahead and introduce our special guest for today’s topic, just a little bit more about Robert for those of you in the FireFighter Kingdom. Robert has been a proud member of the IAFF for over 19 years, and was the longest serving executive officer at the current Albuquerque Area Firefighters Local 244 Executive Board for the last 16 years. Robert has concurrently served as the president of New Mexico Professional Firefighters since 2019. Roberto, you’ve been with the organization for a long time and have done lots of things, man. Thank you so much for all you do.

Robert Sanchez: It’s my honor and privilege actually to be out there just helping firefighters. To be quite honest, firefighters, in the State of New Mexico, the men and women who are paramedic firefighters they’re the ones that make everything happen. And we’re just happy to be a tool for their resources and their success for sure.

Vince Trujillo: Well, as a member of the public, thanks for everything all of you do. So let’s get on with the podcast for today. We are really honored and privileged to welcome our mental health professional Dr. Troy Rodgers. A little bit about Dr. Rodgers.  Dr Rodgers is a police and criminal psychologist based in New Mexico. He has a master’s degree and a doctorate in clinical forensic psychology from the University of Denver. Dr. Rodgers has been the agency director for Public Safety Psychology Group LLC, PSPG, since 2004 and at the present time he works as a consultant psychologist for over 130 local state and federal law enforcement, fire, and correction agencies. Wow I think I got it all out. Doctor, thank you so much for coming on.

Robert Sanchez: Now that’s a whole other podcast I think just-

Dr. Troy Rodgers: I appreciate it.

Robert Sanchez: … the introduction for the doctor.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: I appreciate the time you took, and given the opportunity to talk about the brave folks who are serving New Mexico.

Vince Trujillo: Thank you both! Dr. Rodgers. A couple of things just for personally from my side of things. I was having a conversation with Robert a couple of weeks back in regards to some of the trauma and stressful situations that our firefighters run into.  And as we know from military service and trauma exposure is that these things can build up over time and can really affect our first responder and firefighters. And its something that we in the public maybe don’t think about as much. But the first people responding to a car accident, at home accidents, someone having an acute health crisis like a heart attack, even things like abuse, neglect, pretty much any number of different types of high intensity calls they may get on a consistent basis and have to deal with emotionally or mentally. And that’s why there are great people like Dr Rodgers who help them manage this. And that’s what we’re hoping to talk a little bit about more today. Talk about PTSD a little bit and then also talk about some of what you have to offer, and some recommendations for our firefighters out there. Robert,

Robert Sanchez: So great. So doctor, it’s been an honor working with you for the several years that you’ve been assisting firefighters. Obviously, you do a great job. On a consistent basis we use you, and we see a lot of successful results in our firefighters. And I want to thank you for that and I appreciate that. There’s times where I’ve called you at midnight, or one in the morning and ask you that you would assist us. Firefighters are seeing the public at their worst, and you come and assist and benefit our members tremendously. First thing I want to talk about is you hear about the exposures? You have the one incident exposure, and then you have the chronic exposure. Can you tell me what the difference to that is?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: One of the things that most folks don’t realize about public safety careers is that on a daily basis, folks are exposed to both ends of the spectrum when it comes to events. You’ll sit around and be bored for two, three, four hours, and then all of a sudden you’re dealing with a life and death situation. Or you’re seeing something that the general public is not exposed to, or they’re not aware of. Or they see it on TV, but they can turn the TV off. Public safety professionals aren’t allowed to do that. I often use the example that when you go through the Fire Academy you’re given a backpack. And that backpack you’re going to carry with you throughout your entire career. Every time you take one of those calls, one of those calls that’s difficult.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: That involves a child, that’s a death, that’s something along those lines. You throw a little rock in that backpack. First three, 400 rocks don’t weigh a whole lot. But when you get to three 4,000 rocks, that backpack weighs a ton. It has this cumulative effect. And that’s the buildup we talk about. A lot of folks can understand that one traumatic recall. But they don’t recognize that in addition to that one call, you’re carrying that backpack every day with that exposure that just continues, and is almost routine after four, five, six years of doing this.

Robert Sanchez: There’s one specific exposure that could cause you to have PTSD correct and be… So when you guys recommend someone they have PTSD, they’re diagnosed rather is a good word, and then there’s that one incident that could happen. Is there several exposure incidents that you might not know what’s affecting you and then it is.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: A lot of times folks will go through events, and they’ve learned how to compartmentalize, or to box it off, put it away and do their job. Folks are trained in a moment. “I’ve got to get things done. I’ve got to save people, I’ve got to help people.” So they may experience something, and not even realize that that experience was traumatic, or potentially traumatic, or contributed to potentially creating PTSD. And so they’ll go through two, three weeks, four weeks, and not realize that they haven’t been sleeping well, they haven’t been interacting well, they’re more irritable with family. So that event may have set the stage for another event to come, which compounds that makes it worse.

Robert Sanchez: So the more rocks in the backpack.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: More rocks in the backpack, and the more of those backpack, or more of those rocks that trigger that person. I always tell folks that stress is something that we all experience, but it becomes traumatic if it’s too personal. If it’s too similar to our own life, it’s too overwhelming and we can’t process it. So the more of those rocks you throw in, and the more the big rocks that come in, the more likely folks are to get PTSD.

Vince Trujillo: Doctor, just to interject real quick here, as far as the detecting is concerned, How do you detect it, and or how does the firefighter detect it, and what is the process in regards to treatment? How is it treated?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: How does it come around? A couple of things. One of the things I really emphasize when we talk with firefighters and first responders, many times, is that changes in behavior are a great indicator. If somebody was a very social person, and all of a sudden they’re isolating, they’re not talking with friends. If somebody was a happy person, and all of a sudden they’re irritable and angry. If somebody was slightly cynical, but now they hate everybody and they’re cynical in all their interactions. Those are all warning signs, and we encourage folks to talk with significant others, family, friends, spouse, so that they can give them that kind of feedback. Number one reason-

Vince Trujillo: I would guess that maybe it’s the people closest like family and friends that notice it more so they are the ones that sometimes raise concern first?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Hundred percent. Yeah. Saying that the number one reason why we get first responders calling us for some sort of intervention, or some sort of counseling is because a family member’s usually said, “I’m concerned about you.” I always tell a story years back at an individual I worked with, and the first phone call I ever got was him. Was a voicemail and he left a voicemail saying, “Hey doc, my wife says I’m an asshole. I need to come see you.” And that’s all he said. We actually started talking about it we realized that it was stress, trauma, depression coming in that was leading to irritability at home.

Vince Trujillo: And then once detected and someone has raised their hand and said there is an issue and need help, what are the next steps?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: There are a lot of different treatments. There are different ways to address it. One of the first things is actually coming into the office, sitting down with either myself or another clinician who’s familiar with the culture, the background. And getting a feel for what is the source of the problem, how severe is it, how many rocks are in that backpack per se. So we can quantify it. And then there are a lot of different approaches. One could be just talk therapy coming in once a week for the next six weeks. There’s other trauma treatments called EMDR, which is a specific protocol which addresses trauma and reprogramming the way the memory sees that trauma. We do other things like activity based work. One of the first things I assigned to most of my clients is you got to start doing sports, or running, or CrossFit, or those sorts of things because that physiologically will help the body.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Other things we start looking at is what are the habits. Has the person who’s experiencing some of this trauma develop bad coping habits like drinking alcohol. And alcohol in and of itself is not a problem. But when you’re drinking a fifth of vodka, and a six pack of beer to go to sleep at night, we got to talk about that. And I’ll get firefighters that say, “So is a half a fifth of vodka okay.” We can’t that but we got to have that discussion.

Robert Sanchez: So that’s how firefighters are they want to know an exact amount, so they can measure it out. Be precise.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Right, exactly.

Vince Trujillo: Now how do you see treatments and going through the process helping?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: In terms of cure rate? It’s a tough one to answer that question, or to respond to that question. But let me give you a little bit of an answer that will help relate to your folks is. I always tell folks everything that they’re going to experience, those sort of things we can manage. We can deal with coming in to that first step. We just learn how to cope with it better, how to work through it, how to manage the symptoms. Now, is it going to go away a hundred percent? Probably not. Some of the hypervigilance that folks experience, which is that being hyper aware loud noises, triggering them, those things. We can’t unlearn some of that, but we learn to manage it. We learn to have outlets that deal with it. We learn to process it. And going back to our backpack analogy, we learn to empty the backpack so that it’s not so heavy.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: It doesn’t have that burden. I had a first responder call me about a month ago, and thank me because he had done some work with one of my staff. And during our conversation he said he had one regret and I said, “What was that regret?” And he said, “I regret I didn’t call you guys three years earlier because I wasted the last three years being miserable when I didn’t have to be.” So a lot of it’s just learning to get through it, and manage it so you can get to a better place.

Robert Sanchez: And leading into that doctor, I want to talk about I hate to say it, and just being a firefighter myself. And knowing several men and women in the fire service that we deal with on a daily basis. Sometimes we all have that macho attitude, like it’s going to happen to me where I’m not going to show my weakness, or I’m not going to be that so-called person that has the problem. So we have that stigma in the fire service. And what can you talk about overcoming the stigma, and having a stigma in the fire service? Today’s day seems like it eases up a little bit on it, but there’s still that stigma and how do we get over that?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: One of the hard parts with mental health related issues is that we can’t see them. And because we can’t see it, it’s not like a broken leg, or a broken arm, or something where we can say, “Oh, that’s a problem.” So a lot of times we like to dismiss it, we like to move beyond it. Folks are trained in their academies push through this get stronger, those sorts of things. So one of the first ways to get beyond that is to teach folks the difference between something hurting and something being injured. I’ve been a coach for 20 years, and one of the first things I teach kids is that something that hurts that we’re going to work through, or is that something that’s injured that we need to fix? And if we look at mental health the same way it becomes less stigmatizing. This is something we can address, we can deal with, we can get through and get you to a better place. Because one of the things that public safety folks do a lot of times is they have the rule of three is what I always describe it.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: I’ve got to have three ailments before I’ll go to the doctor. I can’t just have a broken leg and a cold. I have to have a broken leg, a cold, and I’ve got an arrow in my forehead. Now it’ll justify me paying the 20 bucks to go for the. We got to get to where folks are dealing with it proactively ahead of time, and not seeing it as weakness.

Vince Trujillo: Why is it that some Firefighters may see some real issues more quickly than others. I’m assuming that is normal and therefore something that shouldn’t be compared from one person to another in that way?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: There are a lot of factors that contribute. People respond differently to different stimulus based upon their life experience. How they grew up, what kind of skills they were trained as kids, how much resiliency they’ve developed. Their personality style. You’ll meet some folks that are real happy, go lucky. Nothing tends to bother them. Some things just roll off their shoulders, whereas some folks worry a lot. They were raised in a household where mom was always worried. They were always hyper aware of things, and they take on that characteristics. And so a lot of what we see in terms of how the job affects people is their life experience will guide how they deal with things. They may view them differently. It may change their perceptions. I make a joke because I’ve got a 16 year old son at home, and he learned very early in his life that very few things in life are crises.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: You’re not potentially going to die as a result. And so he’s becoming a little bit awake, cynical in his perception and those sorts of things. But he’ll come home and he’ll say, “Hey dad, people at school were all worried about this crap. Nobody’s going to die. It’s not that big of a deal.” So his resilience based on what we’ve taught him is going to help him in the future. So a lot of it comes back to, what people were trained, what skills they have from when they were growing up.

Robert Sanchez: And most firefighters as you know doctor they retire early. So what I’ve seen happen quite a few times. They can go, 19 or 20 years and not have an incident until on their 21st year. Or there can be firefighters that’s in their first year they’re having a incident, or six months in. I guess that’s beyond me that’s up for the doctors to deal with.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: A lot of it’s luck or bad luck, however you want to put it. I’ll deal with folks that within that first year they’ve got a major traumatic incident. And then another one two years later, and then another one three years later. So some of it is just the cards you’re dealt, and how that affects you. Some of it is your ability to then manage those cards. One of the things that we actually see a lot of is folks do a really good job for those 20 years managing all those rocks. And then when they retire, and they’ve got time to think and time to, basically, relive everything they went through. That’s when it actually hits them. We’ll see that right after firemen a whole lot.

Robert Sanchez: So it could possibly trigger even after you’re retired then.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Right.

Robert Sanchez: That’s interesting.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: We actually see a pretty good amount of folks that do great their whole career, no major mental health stuff. And then three weeks after they retire, they’re in a pretty bad place because now they’ve got time. Now they’re bored. Now they’ve their identity in some way.

Robert Sanchez: We’re fortunate enough doctor as you know, I think a couple of years ago you helped testify in committees on our PTSD bill. So we’re lucky just not this session, but one before we were lucky to pass a House Bill 324 it’s now an Act. And we’re fortunate to do that. Can you explain? Knowing about that bill, again we talked about the chronic exposure and the one incident exposure. I know that before this bill took place and workman’s comp issues, if you had an exposure that you identified. And you reported it through the chain of command up to the workman’s comp level there’s treatment for it, and they’ll possibly pay for what they needed to pay for. Similar like breaking your ankle. So there was one time exposure, and it’s no different than a brain injury, or PTSD. But now we have the chronic exposure. Have you had any running’s with this bill and how we could change to the next legislature because I know there might be some issues.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Well, the big issue that we’re running into in this particular bill right now is this idea of, okay, now we’re equating PTSD with a lot of these medical issues, which is great. That’s movement in the right direction. We’re de-stigmatizing it, we’re understanding it. We’re seeing it’s real. One of the problems that we’re running into though is we don’t really have a comparison early on in the process to say, “Okay, did the job contribute to this or not?” So we’re getting a lot of folks who are saying, “Okay, did you have this when you came in, or did this develop over time?” So that’s one of these kinks we’ve been trying to work out. Okay, do we start looking at it at higher, so that we have a measure to compare 15 years from now, and say this person has changed based upon that cumulative exposure. So that’s one of the first issues we’re going to have to wrinkle out at some point.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: And then I think we’re also going to have to look at not just PTSD, what other things eventually are we going to equate with that. Like depression that comes from this, or other types of anxiety. So I think this is the starting point for a lot of this.

Robert Sanchez: Well, and I’m glad you brought that up about, kind of like a starting to… I guess when firefighters or first responders, or actually apply for the job, they get hired they take these psychic examinations. Is there going to have to be some type of examination for PTSD? So it would help in the workman’s comp issue of the proving to say that they didn’t have it before they got hired. Would you even recommend that, or do you think the bill should be, we should change the legislature?

Dr. Troy Rodgers: I’ve had a number of chiefs come to me and say, what do we do with this and how do we do it? And I said, I’ve been fairly straightforward at this point I said, “If the bill stays the way it stays, then we’re going to have to go to this approach where we’re doing a pre hire testing, so you’ve got a baseline.” So if the bill stays that way that’s going to be my recommendation. If we adjust it to look at things differently then maybe we don’t require that. But at this point that’s going to be a tough one because where workman’s comp is going to come in is they’re going to say, “How do you determine if the job is what contributed to this?”

Robert Sanchez: Absolutely. And again, being fortunate enough to represent the New Mexico Professional Firefighters or advocacy in the legislature, I look forward to working with you in the next coming sessions to see if we can change it where it actually benefits firefighters. But not only does it benefit the firefighters, it benefits their families.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Right.

Robert Sanchez: So thank you again for anything. Is there anything that you’d like to add? And again, it’s an honor with me working with you in the past years. And thank you for your constant giving back to firefighters, and it’s always a pleasure.

Vince Trujillo: Yeah, we have a few minutes left. What would you like to leave the firefighters with who are watching this right now doctor.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: A couple of simple things. Just one, thank you for what you do and what you do helps everybody because of the availability, that resource, that safety net for societies. That’s the first thing. Second thing that I want to leave with is just a reminder to the firefighters out there to take care of themselves. It’s very difficult to take care of other people when you’re not taking care of yourself, and so everything else will be compromised. Watch for those warning signs preemptively come in. I had a gentleman I worked with years back that used to call his sessions with me check-ins. He would call them, basically, he was maintaining his-

Robert Sanchez: Preventative maintenance.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Preventative maintenance. He actually equated it to a car. One time he’d come in about three or four times, and he’d come in about every five or six months. And after the third one I asked him, I said, “Hey, why are we meeting every five or six months?” He looked at me and he goes, “You see my truck outside your window?” And I said, “Yeah, I see your truck and he goes, that truck is 25 years old. And it runs like the day I bought it.” And I said, “Okay, I’m not quite getting what you’re saying to me here.” “Well, you know why it runs like that.” And I said, “Why?” And he goes, “Because every six months I take it in. I get tires rotated, I get it checked, I get all this stuff.” He goes, “So doc, I see you as my maintenance.” And I said, “Well, as long as you don’t tell anybody I’m changing your oil we’re good.” And I said, “We’ll keep doing it every six months.” He did that for the rest of his career.

Robert Sanchez: Well, that’s good to know. One thing I want to leave here is firefighters we’re human too. Sometimes we don’t think we are. And I know sometimes the public don’t think we are, but we have to deal with life issues just like everybody else. And that includes PTSD, depression or whatever the case that the job might bring with it.

Vince Trujillo: Yeah. It certainly does bring things down to reality. Especially, for a layman like me in regards to my public perspective is concerned. We don’t realize that quite frankly, that we expect our firefighters and our first responders to be superheroes, which in my head they are. But we forget about that human element. So thank you as far as I’m concerned for what you do for our firefighters. We couldn’t exist without them, especially during these crazy times right now. So I want to thank you, Dr. Troy Rodgers for participating today. Thank you for volunteering to come and do this podcast for our five firefighters out there. Please keep up your good work, and you stay healthy too.

Dr. Troy Rodgers: Will try.

Vince Trujillo: Thank you so much. And then on behalf of the Firefighter Kingdom and our outstanding host, Mr. Robert Sanchez, we’re going to be singing off now. Thanks so much for listening and hope everyone got some great information on PTSD and how it affects our firefighters. If you’re listening and enjoyed this, please subscribe to the podcast on ITunes & give us a review there. It really helps get the message out more. And share it with someone you know who could use the help. Firefighters thank you so much for everything you do. Robert…

Robert Sanchez: Again, it’s always an honor to do what we can to assist firefighters. And just looking forward to these podcasts. I think they’re more information, more informational to the firefighters. And don’t forget to give feedback on what else you would like us to have on here and to benefit firefighters. And again, peace out Firefighter Kingdom. Until next time, we’ll see you.

The post #3 Fire Fighters & PTSD: What Are The Signs & What Can Be Done For It appeared first on FireFighter Kingdom.

from FireFighter Kingdom https://ift.tt/3cEPgkM

[locksmithchamblee-blog]

Tips to Prevent Burglaries

Based on recorded instances reported to police across a selection of 94 countries there were over 5,250,000 burglaries globally in 2014. Add into that any number of unreported crimes and clear under-reporting from some countries (Sierra Leone 625, Jordan 3, for example) and you get a very large figure indeed.

Now this may seem like a depressing statistic, but the good news is that a good deal of them could be prevented by following some simple steps. A combination of awareness, common sense and a little self-education can help you protect your home or business.

1.      Be overt with your solutions.

Burglars don't like security systems and unless they've deliberately selected you they will move on to an easier target. Signs work as a deterrent, whether it be 'alarm system installed', 'Warning: Smoke Screen', 'Beware of Dog', 'SmartWater in use' etc. Advertising the risks will make a burglar take the path of least resistance.

2.      Be aware of your surroundings.

By this we mean make sure windows and doors are closed and locked when you're not in (on all floors). Leave lights on, or have them on timers. Devices that mimic the flickering of TV screen are now readily available as well. Reduce the efficiency of their hiding places, like cropping back bushes and hedges.

Be aware of daytime scams as well, if someone suspicious knocks on your door, always use your door viewer and chain, ask for ID. Be polite, tell them you're not interested and ask that they leave. If they are particularly convincing then ask them to call back later while you call the company they are representing. Be mindful of distraction techniques as well. Someone could be trying to sneak in round the back while you are busy at the front door. Feign needing your glasses or fetching a letter or the like and quickly check (and lock) the other entrances.

3.      Actually have a working security system.

Fake cameras and boxes with flashing LEDs are all well and good, but you run a bit of a risk that experienced criminals might be able to discern them. A loud alarm, the prospect of being on CCTV footage or getting DNA-marked is enough to stop some burglars, the opportunistic ones in particular - though you might need something a bit more hardcore to stop a really determined one. For businesses a remote monitoring system works wonders.

For domestic, you could install motion-activated home security cameras so you can check on your home throughout the day using your phone. Plus, you'll receive an alert if the camera detects motion, so you can evaluate the situation immediately. Or you could just scare them witless with a security fog/strobe combo and be done with it (but we are going to say that aren't we!) Remember to arm your system each time. And test it regularly.

4.      Have bright lights.

Burglars hate bright lights. The brighter the better. And noise. They don't like loud noises either.

5.      Try and mix up your routine.

Be a bit unpredictable. This will totally unsettle anyone watching you or your business waiting for the opportune moment to strike. A recent study carried out in the United States suggests that most domestic robberies occur during daytime hours - between 10am and 3pm. Makes sense, most people will be at work or school reducing the chances of being seen / caught. Consider popping home for lunch some days.

Businesses should vary the times they make trips to the bank as well.

When you go on holiday make sure you ask a friend or neighbour to pop round now and again for a check, take out your rubbish etc.

6.      Get a dog.

Going back to point 1 for a moment, if you've got a 'Beware of the Dog' sign then why not get a dog as well. Your best friend, your security guard, your new fitness partner!

7.      Never hide a spare key outside.

It won't matter if it's under the mat, or cunningly concealed in that realistic rock. Leave one with a friend/neighbour instead.

8.      Use other hiding places.

Speaking of hiding, there are a whole host of affordable and effective concealment devices out there. The old faithful tin of beans, the fake plug socket. It's worth looking into these. Burglars want to be quick, in and out in minutes, they will go for the obvious first like jewellery and cash in the master bedroom. They certainly won't be in your food cupboard.

9.      Go for quality.

It may be tempting to get a security system installed on the cheap, but you'll regret scrimping on costs. Ideally you want good quality gear that conforms to Standards, installed by accredited engineers. Then you can guarantee it will at least work when needed. Rather than niggling over price, just consider how much value you put on the following: peace of mind, protecting your family, protecting your business / staff, protecting your stock, downtime with no stock, increased insurance fees. It's so important to get it right. Most companies offer a monthly fee so you don't always have to worry about finding a lump sum all at once.

The FBI conducted some research in 2014 that concluded the average amount (dollar value) stolen in each domestic burglary (US) was $2,251 - and that doesn't include repairs or emotional/psychological damage. Food for thought.

They also calculated that less than 14% of all burglaries (again US) resulted in an arrest, citing the extreme difficulty in solving this type of crime. And even if the criminal is caught, you may not get your property back.

The moral of this tale is that prevention is key. Stop them before they start.

Original Article Here: Tips to Prevent Burglaries

Related Article Here: Burglary Prevention Tips: Four Ways To Prevent Home Break-Ins

Burglary crime rate is very alarming. Secure your homes now by investing on home security system.  Locksmith Service Chamblee can help you with this!

[classicfilmfreak]

New Post has been published on http://www.classicfilmfreak.com/2017/02/02/bulldog-drummond-1929-starring-ronald-colman-and-joan-bennett/

Bulldog Drummond (1929) starring Ronald Colman and Joan Bennett

“I’ve been bored too long.  I can’t stand it any more.  I’m too rich to work, too intelligent to play—much.  I tell you, if something doesn’t happen within the next few days, I’ll explode.”    — Bulldog Drummond

The movie private detective Bulldog Drummond has a long history, equal to most of the other sleuths who were more or less his contemporaries in the 1930s and ’40s—Charlie Chan, the Crime Doctor, Philo Vance, the Thin Man and a host of others.  They owe a considerable debt to nineteenth-century writers who originated the fictional detective—Edgar Allan Poe (The Gold Bug and Murders in the Rue Morgue), even Charles Dickens (the uncompleted Mystery of Edwin Drood) and, of course, the most recent of these, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose Sherlock Holmes adventures began in 1886 with A Study in Scarlet.

As suggested, British writers, many of them women, seemed to have had an edge on the detective genre, soon known as the masters of the drawing room mystery, where mental deductions and armchair sleuthing were the rule over physical action.  The best known writers include Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton and, most recently, the late P. D. James.  And Herman C. (“Sapper”) McNeile, a World War I veteran born in Cornwall, England, created the first of ten Bulldog Drummond novels in 1920.

The screen Drummond, like some of the other series, had a variety of actors playing the detective.  Both the British and Americans had a go, including Ralph Richardson, Ray Milland, John Barrymore, Tom Conway (though better known for the Falcon series) and John Howard, as well as Australian Ron Randell and Canadian Walter Pidgeon.

The obvious Bulldog Drummond actor missing from this list is Ronald Colman, who made the first sound version of a Drummond mystery, Bulldog Drummond, in 1929.  It was also his first sound picture.  While the film has a largely British cast, except for two Americans, heroine Joan Bennett and baddie Lilyan Tashman, it is stoutly American in its production.  It was the last film for director F. Richard Jones, who, like Tashman, died in his mid-thirties.  Sidney Howard (Gone With the Wind, 1939) wrote the screenplay, which, in the opening credits, is quaintly “adapted for the talking screen.”  The dual cinematographers are George Barnes (Rebecca, 1940) and Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane, 1941).  Set decoration is by none other than William Cameron Menzies, best remembered for Wind and, as director, for Things to Come (1936).  (In 1934, Colman would star in a sequel, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, with Loretta Young.)

Despite those previous decades of silent films, Bulldog Drummond avoids most of the trappings and techniques of that era—it is, in fact, one of the best of the early talkies.  But, with sound still in its infancy, and with many improvements yet to be made, the film cannot entirely divest itself of the past.

For one thing, it is basically set-bound, although one of the best camera shots—chiaroscuro and all (Toland, Barnes or both?)—is the night “exterior” (probably a set) of a tall, castle-like nursing home.  Tashman’s general delivery and mannerisms, with eyes cast melodramatically here and there, are leftovers from the previous style of acting when stars had to exaggerate expressions to compensate for the lack of a voice.

Movie-goers are now so accustomed to a musical soundtrack that the absence of one leaves an obvious vacant space waiting to be filled.  Colman and Bennett’s romance, however, is so tepid and undeveloped that any romantic music is hardly missed.  There is main title music and a few seconds of “The End” music.  The not-bad Viennese waltz used in both was possibly composed by the music director, Hugo Riesenfeld.  It’s conceivable: he was born in Vienna and had quite an impressive music résumé prior to his appointment, in 1928, as director of all music productions for United Artists.

The Drummond story is so quick-paced and Ronald Colman so active—one wonders whether he adapts to the tempo or sets it—that much of the time the music is unmissed.  Joan Bennett, by contrast, is a little low-key and underplays her role, though she was perhaps never lovelier, only nineteen at the time.

After some stock footage of London landmarks, the camera enters a men’s club where silence, with an exclamation, is an imperative.  In a long tracking shot, an attendant conveys a serving tray through a lobby of elderly men reading newspapers and books in their isolated nooks.  He drops a spoon, prompting an outcry from a patron.

At a corner table are two men.  One (Claud Allister) wears a monocle and tilts his head back, giving the impression of looking down his nose, a semblance to aristocratic pomposity he will maintain throughout the film.  “That’s the third spoon I’ve heard drop this month,” he says with a la-di-da inflection to his British accent.

The second man, wealthy Captain Hugh Drummond (Colman), a veteran of World War I, disagrees with his best friend, Algy Longworth.  “I wish somebody would throw a bomb and wake the place up.”  Followed by Algy, he walks out of the room whistling, to the shock of the old men.  In a later film, Top Hat(1935), Fred Astaire does a brief tap-dance in another snobby Englishman’s club.

A drink at the club’s bar, Drummond says, hasn’t made him feel better, that he’s bored.  When Algy suggests he advertise for excitement, he puts an ad in the newspaper.  One reply offers possibilities, and he sets out for the Green Bay Inn where a young woman, Phyllis Benton (Bennett), fearing she’s in danger, has reserved a room for him.  Algy follows in a second car, accompanied by Drummond’s valet, Danny (Wilson Benge).

Phyllis tells Drummond that something is amiss at a hospital where her wealthy uncle, John Travers (Charles Sellon), is being treated by Dr. Lakington (Lawrence Grant).

Later, she mistakes the silhouette of Algy and Drummond for the people she believes are following her and runs away, only to be caught my Dr. Lakington, Irma (Tashman) and Carl Peterson (Montagu Love), and taken to the doctor’s nursing home.

Drummond follows, knocks on the door and conducts a rather civil conversation with the culprits, but he sees how Travers is being treated for what the doctor vaguely identifies as a psychological illness.  Drummond affably says good-bye, as if his suspicions aren’t aroused.

He drives off, stops a short distance down the road and sneaks back to the nursing home to rescue Phyllis, sending her off with Algy and Danny.  He then eavesdrops on the resident trio who try to force Travers to sign over to them his jewels and securities.

After now rescuing Travers, Drummond returns to the inn, but the criminals have followed him.  He quickly disguises himself as Travers, and the unsuspecting crooks take him to the nursing home.  When they do realize it’s Drummond, they tie him up and threaten to torture Phyllis to learn Travers’ hiding place.  Drummond says Travers is at the inn, and while Irma and Peterson go to check, Phyllis frees Drummond.  In a struggle, Drummond strangles the doctor.

After all this running around—many scenes of cars racing back and forth in the night—Peterson now returns.  Drummond disarms him and calls the police, but the policemen who come are Peterson’s gang in disguise.  While calling the real police, Phyllis persuades Drummond to let Peterson go, confessing in a soft, meek (unconvincing?) voice that she loves him.

“Why haven’t you ever said that before?!” he asks, as he puts down the receiver to embrace her.

[uhxrp]

hunters

I. OVERVIEW

the hunters are the ones that take it into their own hands to protect the weaker species from harm. they are most knowledgeable about supernatural creatures and the best ways to incapacitate them.

for most, they are raised in the life and are taught how to defend themselves against other creatures and, when the time is right, how to kill them. but sometimes, it is a loved one being harmed by a supernatural that leads to someone taking up arms against supernaturals.

hunters are thought to be mortal humans, however after the salem trials they were cursed by a few dozen witches, and have become their own species entirely, one with supernatural gifts. passed through the bloodlines and through the oath, hunters are cursed from birth or undergo transformation when they take the oath. for centuries, the hunter's council have managed to keep this hidden, but now supernaturals are starting to detect the hunters are just like them.

II. STATISTICS

hunters believe themselves to be more or less nothing more than enhanced humans, with the secret of their species being hidden to almost all making them think their abilities are simply skills passed down through their bloodlines, or things they've worked to improve based on natural talent after they take up the oath.

LIFESPAN

the average lifespan of a mortal is 79 years, though this may change depending on things like gender or country of origin. due to the nature of their jobs though, hunters rarely live to their twilight years.

CREATION

some hunters are born into bloodlines, while others fall into the job and are transformed from ordinary humans when they take the oath. through bloodlines, the curse is directly active and often creates more powerful hunters. while hunters who are transformed when they take the oath have a watered down version of the curse, and often have lesser abilities. rarely, do hunters who take the oath reach any higher ranks.

TRANSFORMATION

a hunter can become a therian, shifter, spirit, or vampire through transformation. after transforming, they keep none of their previous abilities or traits. because of the nature of transformations as well as their previous oaths, hunters in particular have painful transformations and often feel a sense of being 'cursed' afterwards.

PROCREATION

hunters can procreate with other hunters, always resulting in hunter children regardless of if those children end up taking up the oath. they can also have children with humans, also resulting in their children being hunters.

hunters can also procreate with gifted mortals, shifters, therians, and witches; their children will have a 50/50 chance at inheriting the gifts of either parent. while they can also procreate with fey and merfolk, the societal demands for those species mean such pairings are rare; often, these pairings can result in magical anomalies, and so have nearly always been avoided. these pairings are very rare due to the nature of hunters vs supernaturals.

III. GOVERNANCE

hunters usually work as families, with their gifts and knowledge passed on through the bloodline. their governing authority seems to be whoever is the head of that family. not knowing their gifts comes from a curse, hunting families seem to think their true hunting abilities comes through time and the knowledge passed down.

often this creates a hierarchy overall, with true hunting families looking down upon those who take the oath without familial ties. those hunters who are self-taught have more limited gifts, with the oath watering down the curse, and often rarely reach expert level. because of this, they are seen as lesser hunters, and often meet their end early.

IV. ALLIANCES

known as the protectors of mankind, hunters have limited alliances, as most look down upon supernaturals. since the emergence of supernaturals, the government has granted hunters more power, and often positions within police departments.

humans hunters have always had a common goal: protect human life from the supernatural. as such, the bond between the two species is intrinsic and unwavering.

V. FOES

unfortunate as it may be, all species that aren't hunters or humans are deemed supernaturals in the eyes of hunters, leading to bad relationships because of this. there is the possibility of hunters not following traditions, but these values are in the oath taken that created and still creates hunters, and it is something taken very seriously by almost all hunters.

VI. PHYSIOLOGY

BEGINNER

- PURPOSE a hunter's greatest gift is their purpose. this is based on the fear of extinction. when facing a supernatural creature, a hunter can grab hold of this and outrun, outperform. a vampire would be chasing their dinner, but the hunter would be running for their life, something that adds to their will to survive.

- WEAPON PROFICIENCY (MINOR) hunters are trained from an early age with knowledge passed down by generations of those before them how to master any weapon within reach. they learn how to use a pencil as a stake, where to punch to break the sternum, how to defend when you can't play offensively. at a minor level, a hunter only knows some of this information. they haven't been hunting long enough to know how to use everything, but what they do know they're good enough with to survive.

- PARANORMAL EXPERTISE (MINOR) this is the ability to possess extensive knowledge and experience in battling paranormal creatures. at a minor level, a hunter knows the basics.

NOVICE

- MARTIAL ARTS INTUITION (MINOR) the user can intuitively understand most martial arts, using them like the user trained them over years, which most hunters have.

- INDOMITABLE WILL the user has unnaturally strong willpower, enabling them to be immune to all forms of temptation including subordination manipulation, telepathy, mind control and subliminal seduction. through their will the user can face great physical pain and psychological trauma and will refuse to surrender no matter how much the odds are stacked against them, possibly up to the point of cheating death and pushing themselves past their own limitations.

COMPETENT

- WEAPON PROFICIENCY (MODERATE) hunters are trained from an early age with knowledge passed down by generations of those before them how to master any weapon within reach. they learn how to use a pencil as a stake, where to punch to break the sternum, how to defend when you can't play offensively. at moderate level, the hunter is more than good enough with their weapons, they're fantastic. they have trained relentlessly and know how to use what they work with.

- ENHANCED COMBAT this is the ability to possess superhuman levels of hand-to-hand fighting skills and excel in various forms of combat.

- PARANORMAL EXPERTISE (MODERATE) this is the ability to possess extensive knowledge and experience in battling paranormal creatures. at a moderate level, a hunter has encountered supernatural beings and have learned as they have, knowing more strengths and weaknesses as they go on.

PROFICIENT

- MARTIAL ARTS INTUITION (MAJOR) the user can intuitively understand all martial arts, using them like the user trained them over years, which most hunters have.

- ENHANCED TRACKING the user can track others down easily via various means, ranging from scents to footprints. with enough experience, the user can follow tracks that are days or even weeks old. some users may be able to reconstruct what has happened by sniffing around the area they are searching.

EXPERT

- WEAPON PROFICIENCY (MAJOR) hunters are trained from an early age with knowledge passed down by generations of those before them how to master any weapon within reach. they learn how to use a pencil as a stake, where to punch to break the sternum, how to defend when you can't play offensively. at this level, the hunter has the ability to understand and use any and all weapons with the proficiency of a master.

- SUPERNATURAL DETECTION this is the power to sense and identify supernatural phenomena. hunters with this ability know when they are near a supernatural even if they cannot discern type. trouble is, much to some hunters' concern, this power is also triggered in the presence of fellow hunters.

- PARANORMAL EXPERTISE (MAJOR) this is the ability to possess extensive knowledge and experience in battling paranormal creatures. at a major level, the hunter is almost a master in knowledge of supernatural strengths and weaknesses, how they work and what they want. they don't know everything, but they do know too much for supernatural comfort.

VII. WEAKNESSES

while talented fighters, hunters can still be killed by mortal means, by either damage to their body or mind. however, they are more durable than most humans, and can overcome minor injuries to fight off their attacker. much like humans, they are immune to the magical properties of iron, faith weaponry, and silver, but can still be harmed with these objects should they be used as a weapon, for example a silver cross used to stab or an iron rock used to stone.

hunters can also be detected by species with supernatural detection.

(note: we would like to note that we do allow the use of creative weaknesses in play, such as a witch and human coming up with their own decision on how their abilities counteract one another, but we urge you to remember that we are trusting you to keep this balanced and fair. as such, the weaknesses we list will be minimal but are by and far not a full list of possible weaknesses. should we notice a character who seems too powerful, you will be asked to bump that character back down or be denied continued play here on unholy for the sake of creative freedom for all members. this includes the knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the species that your character would have here on unholy.)

[collymore]

Medical eugenicism, the new affordable fad of the privileged elite rich in Nazi-Zionist Britain!

By Stanley Collymore

 Eugenicists assiduously at work in the United Kingdom as they

have been for decades now, going back to pre-World War II.

Now no longer capable in the 21st century to assertively

rationalize their delusional and white supremacism

through inhumane and diverse acts of barbarism,

sadistically and characteristically inflicted on

allegedly inferior races and subject peoples

universally, and in terms of these actions

varying from the Transatlantic Slavery to ongoing activities

of contemporary racism, they instead seek to embark on

another deceitful ploy, to attempt at reinforcing their

dwindling self-confidence, distinctly and grossly

embroidered hubris and, incontrovertibly, the

outright challenges presented to them from

those they’ve previously and consistently

debased as their victims in the genuine

and emotionally charged superiority

stakes, pertaining to human kind.

 So why try to stop them, these endemically ingrained

and demented fantasists, who, it’s a safe bet to play,

will inevitably get their natural and warranted

comeuppance anyway? For Nature, as all

sensible, sane and intelligent persons

know, works in mysterious ways

its wonders to perform, and most undoubtedly

will always hit back in its inimitable way

and time against these egotistical and

self-serving wannabes deities; and,

in this progression, address their

own made, and Frankenstein-

style monsters to pitilessly,

understandably, as well

as lethally maul them

in impeccable irony

through their sick

attitudinal and

crazed stance

towards life

generally.

 © Stanley V. Collymore

4 August 2017.

  Author’s Remarks:

They happily, these well-heeled and so-called privileged elites, send off at the most affordable opportunity and also at the earliest age possible to these exceedingly expensive private and boarding schools, in order to initiate and subsequently reinforce their sumptuously bought and paid for futures, these bevy of invariably cuckoldedly-produced children of theirs. Often as is the case the resultant outcome from totally weak, compliant and dimwittedly whored upon husbands by adulterous wives and the biological mums of these very children, or else through a mutually agreed understanding with their female spouses, in legal name only, by husbands whose azoospermiac condition or more likely their Queer-dictated propensities masked by convenient but deceptive “conventional marriages” preclude or directly disqualify these men from physically adding to humanity’s population tally by producing offspring of their own.

 Yet ironically and even pathetically in their utterly fraudulent and vainglorious self-aggrandizement these husbands, openly and haughtily exuding all the classic traits of delusional narcissism, nevertheless, in their bizarre desire to be deemed as “macho males” boastfully undertake to characterize themselves as the biological dads of children whom they evidently father but, in reality, obviously didn’t sire, nor realistically could they ever have done so.

 Then with their sojourn at these expensive public schools at an end these essentially illiterate – you’ve only got to briefly listen to them speak and you’ll quickly understand what I mean – distinctly ill-informed about all manner of world affairs, as well as markedly incompetent as regards everything they either try to undertake or actually do, head off automatically for the so-called prestigious universities of Oxford or Cambridge, where numerous places at these “privileged elite” institutions are customarily set aside for them.

 And here at home, as it were, among the identical backgrounds of similarly privileged elite professors, dons, lecturers, tutors and the rest of them either running or employed in the purportedly prestigious colleges that nepotistically and in typical cronyism fashion these “educators” are entrusted with, each new intake of rich, thoroughly spoilt and vainglorious addition, as all previous ones were, from these grossly and grotesquely discriminated in favour of expensive public schools, know perfectly well that during their drug-infested – cocaine is their preferred substance – stay at Oxford or Cambridge Universities, academic excellence or personal merit, even if these were achievable by this incorrigible bunch of intellectually impoverished retards which self-evidently they are not, aren’t a priority, and never will be, as regards the “attainment” of their “degrees”, courtesy of the entrenched Queer, Dyke and paedophile-practising ring of academic staffers that these privileged public schools’ undergraduates and even post-graduate students willingly prostitute their sexual favours with in return for their “academic qualifications”.

 And now fully armed with these useless “academic” pieces of paper and a matching ability on their part in relation to their lack of competence, suitability for anything of significance, or of any beneficial good to their society, their wider communities specifically or humanity in general, however as is normally expected of them these new employment and generally head hunted recruits head off automatically to the influential and powerful world of finance: hedge funds, banking, insurance, the City of London incestuously-interlinked Cabals of corrupt and manipulative investments, the Stock Exchange and all the rest of them. Likewise, government created quangos, commercial multinational corporations, influential think tanks, high-ranking NHS directorships and other managing executive positions; top jobs in the Civil Service, and most especially so as part of the decidedly comical and ludicrously self-named First Division, and most notably too the Home Office; the top brass of the UK’s military even though they’re customarily consigned to deskbound jobs at the MoD and seldom, if ever, find themselves on frontline duties or put in harm’s way. Then additionally there are fast track elevations through the judiciary, other law enforcement agencies and certain elements of the British police forces like the Metropolitan Police; and, of course, politics and government. Essentially, cornering every important segment of British society. And accounts for the inescapable air of distinctive incompetence and widespread mediocrity that inimically permeates virtually every aspect of purportedly conventional life across the entire spectrum of the United Kingdom.

 But that said it’s a state of affairs that in one way or another has been in continuous existence since the acquisition of an empire, of which it was routinely, hubristically and exaggeratedly boasted that the sun didn’t set nor would God in his infinite wisdom ever allow that to be the case, that comprehensively transformed the insignificant and essentially backwater European island of Britain into the global empire that it became, enabling these preposterous, long and deeply ingrained class prejudices to be codified into the ostentatious and detectably risible art form they’ve unmistakably become. And together with white British barbarism, imperialism, colonialism and invasive racism viciously directed against the native sons and daughters of these colonial countries formulated on Britain’s part, its invidious culture of white superiority and naked supremacism against all others, and specifically so those who didn’t and still don’t look like them or have the same skin colour as themselves.

 However, with the Empire finally gone and fortunately no realistic chance of it ever coming back, a redundant Britain, still unable to come to terms with its psychologically devastating loss, has enthusiastically like the clapped out whore it has allowed itself to become and ever keen to ingratiate itself, for a diversity of sick reasons, with Rogue State USA the since 1945 dominant pimp on the block, having initially thought that this was the only way to maintain its appurtenance as a pseudo-world power and correspondingly as an exclusive white racial entity, and most certainly so among its financially well-heeled and “privileged elites” have quite predictably taken to and are now in the process of enthusiastically embracing medical eugenicism as another desperate means on their part of attempting to reinstate their obsessive need to be regarded, and automatically respected  by the lower classes and inferior races, as humanity’s master race. Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, wherever they now are, must be pissing themselves with laughter. While those who sacrificed their lives for the advent of a better world must understandably be wondering what on earth was the point of it all.

[iwanttosleeppls]

Beautiful Brains

• David Dobss

• National Geographic

• http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text

• Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Their most exasperating traits maybe the key to success as adults.

Although you know your teenager takes some chances, it can be a shock to hear about them.

One fine May morning not long ago my oldest son, 17 at the time, phoned to tell me that he had just spent a couple hours at the state police barracks. Apparently he had been driving “a little fast.” What, I asked, was “a little fast”? Turns out this product of my genes and loving care, the boy-man I had swaddled, coddled, cooed at, and then pushed and pulled to the brink of manhood, had been flying down the highway at 113 miles an hour.

“That’s more than a little fast,” I said.

He agreed. In fact, he sounded somber and contrite. He did not object when I told him he’d have to pay the fines and probably for a lawyer. He did not argue when I pointed out that if anything happens at that speed—a dog in the road, a blown tire, a sneeze—he dies. He was in fact almost irritatingly reasonable. He even proffered that the cop did the right thing in stopping him, for, as he put it, “We can’t all go around doing 113.”

He did, however, object to one thing. He didn’t like it that one of the several citations he received was for reckless driving.

“Well,” I huffed, sensing an opportunity to finally yell at him, “what would you call it?”

“It’s just not accurate,” he said calmly. “ 'Reckless’ sounds like you’re not paying attention. But I was. I made a deliberate point of doing this on an empty stretch of dry interstate, in broad daylight, with good sight lines and no traffic. I mean, I wasn’t just gunning the thing. I was driving.

“I guess that’s what I want you to know. If it makes you feel any better, I was really focused.”

Actually, it did make me feel better. That bothered me, for I didn’t understand why. Now I do.

My son’s high-speed adventure raised the question long asked by people who have pondered the class of humans we call teenagers: What on Earth was he doing? Parents often phrase this question more colorfully. Scientists put it more coolly. They ask, What can explain this behavior? But even that is just another way of wondering, What is wrong with these kids? Why do they act this way? The question passes judgment even as it inquires.

Through the ages, most answers have cited dark forces that uniquely affect the teen. Aristotle concluded more than 2,300 years ago that “the young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.” A shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Talewishes “there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” His lament colors most modern scientific inquiries as well. G. Stanley Hall, who formalized adolescent studies with his 1904 Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, believed this period of “storm and stress” replicated earlier, less civilized stages of human development. Freud saw adolescence as an expression of torturous psychosexual conflict; Erik Erikson, as the most tumultuous of life’s several identity crises. Adolescence: always a problem.

Such thinking carried into the late 20th century, when researchers developed brain-imaging technology that enabled them to see the teen brain in enough detail to track both its physical development and its patterns of activity. These imaging tools offered a new way to ask the same question—What’s wrong with these kids?—and revealed an answer that surprised almost everyone. Our brains, it turned out, take much longer to develop than we had thought. This revelation suggested both a simplistic, unflattering explanation for teens’ maddening behavior—and a more complex, affirmative explanation as well.

The first full series of scans of the developing adolescent brain—a National Institutes of Health (NIH) project that studied over a hundred young people as they grew up during the 1990s—showed that our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our 12th and 25th years. The brain doesn’t actually grow very much during this period. It has already reached 90 percent of its full size by the time a person is six, and a thickening skull accounts for most head growth afterward. But as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.

For starters, the brain’s axons—the long nerve fibers that neurons use to send signals to other neurons—become gradually more insulated with a fatty substance called myelin (the brain’s white matter), eventually boosting the axons’ transmission speed up to a hundred times. Meanwhile, dendrites, the branchlike extensions that neurons use to receive signals from nearby axons, grow twiggier, and the most heavily used synapses—the little chemical junctures across which axons and dendrites pass notes—grow richer and stronger. At the same time, synapses that see little use begin to wither. This synaptic pruning, as it is called, causes the brain’s cortex—the outer layer of gray matter where we do much of our conscious and complicated thinking—to become thinner but more efficient. Taken together, these changes make the entire brain a much faster and more sophisticated organ.

This process of maturation, once thought to be largely finished by elementary school, continues throughout adolescence. Imaging work done since the 1990s shows that these physical changes move in a slow wave from the brain’s rear to its front, from areas close to the brain stem that look after older and more behaviorally basic functions, such as vision, movement, and fundamental processing, to the evolutionarily newer and more complicated thinking areas up front. The corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s left and right hemispheres and carries traffic essential to many advanced brain functions, steadily thickens. Stronger links also develop between the hippocampus, a sort of memory directory, and frontal areas that set goals and weigh different agendas; as a result, we get better at integrating memory and experience into our decisions. At the same time, the frontal areas develop greater speed and richer connections, allowing us to generate and weigh far more variables and agendas than before.

When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible. But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily. It’s hard to get all those new cogs to mesh.

Beatriz Luna, a University of Pittsburgh professor of psychiatry who uses neuroimaging to study the teen brain, used a simple test that illustrates this learning curve. Luna scanned the brains of children, teens, and twentysomethings while they performed an antisaccade task, a sort of eyes-only video game where you have to stop yourself from looking at a suddenly appearing light. You view a screen on which the red crosshairs at the center occasionally disappear just as a light flickers elsewhere on the screen. Your instructions are to not look at the light and instead to look in the opposite direction. A sensor detects any eye movement. It’s a tough assignment, since flickering lights naturally draw our attention. To succeed, you must override both a normal impulse to attend to new information and curiosity about something forbidden. Brain geeks call this response inhibition.

Ten-year-olds stink at it, failing about 45 percent of the time. Teens do much better. In fact, by age 15 they can score as well as adults if they’re motivated, resisting temptation about 70 to 80 percent of the time. What Luna found most interesting, however, was not those scores. It was the brain scans she took while people took the test. Compared with adults, teens tended to make less use of brain regions that monitor performance, spot errors, plan, and stay focused—areas the adults seemed to bring online automatically. This let the adults use a variety of brain resources and better resist temptation, while the teens used those areas less often and more readily gave in to the impulse to look at the flickering light—just as they’re more likely to look away from the road to read a text message.

If offered an extra reward, however, teens showed they could push those executive regions to work harder, improving their scores. And by age 20, their brains respond to this task much as the adults’ do. Luna suspects the improvement comes as richer networks and faster connections make the executive region more effective.

These studies help explain why teens behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday. Along with lacking experience generally, they’re still learning to use their brain’s new networks. Stress, fatigue, or challenges can cause a misfire. Abigail Baird, a Vassar psychologist who studies teens, calls this neural gawkiness—an equivalent to the physical awkwardness teens sometimes display while mastering their growing bodies.

The slow and uneven developmental arc revealed by these imaging studies offers an alluringly pithy explanation for why teens may do stupid things like drive at 113 miles an hour, aggrieve their ancientry, and get people (or get gotten) with child: They act that way because their brains aren’t done! You can see it right there in the scans!

This view, as titles from the explosion of scientific papers and popular articles about the “teen brain” put it, presents adolescents as “works in progress” whose “immature brains” lead some to question whether they are in a state “akin to mental retardation.”

The story you’re reading right now, however, tells a different scientific tale about the teen brain. Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain—call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.

This view will likely sit better with teens. More important, it sits better with biology’s most fundamental principle, that of natural selection. Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them—angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling—then how did those traits survive selection? They couldn't—not if they were the period’s most fundamental or consequential features.

The answer is that those troublesome traits don’t really characterize adolescence; they’re just what we notice most because they annoy us or put our children in danger. As B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College who has spent nearly a decade applying brain and genetic studies to our understanding of adolescence, puts it, “We’re so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It’s exactly what you’d need to do the things you have to do then.”

To see past the distracting, dopey teenager and glimpse the adaptive adolescent within, we should look not at specific, sometimes startling, behaviors, such as skateboarding down stairways or dating fast company, but at the broader traits that underlie those acts.

Let’s start with the teen’s love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected.

Seeking sensation isn’t necessarily impulsive. You might plan a sensation-seeking experience—a skydive or a fast drive—quite deliberately, as my son did. Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.

This upside probably explains why an openness to the new, though it can sometimes kill the cat, remains a highlight of adolescent development. A love of novelty leads directly to useful experience. More broadly, the hunt for sensation provides the inspiration needed to “get you out of the house” and into new terrain, as Jay Giedd, a pioneering researcher in teen brain development at NIH, puts it.

Also peaking during adolescence (and perhaps aggrieving the ancientry the most) is risk-taking. We court risk more avidly as teens than at any other time. This shows reliably in the lab, where teens take more chances in controlled experiments involving everything from card games to simulated driving. And it shows in real life, where the period from roughly 15 to 25 brings peaks in all sorts of risky ventures and ugly outcomes. This age group dies of accidents of almost every sort (other than work accidents) at high rates. Most long-term drug or alcohol abuse starts during adolescence, and even people who later drink responsibly often drink too much as teens. Especially in cultures where teenage driving is common, this takes a gory toll: In the U.S., one in three teen deaths is from car crashes, many involving alcohol.

Are these kids just being stupid? That’s the conventional explanation: They’re not thinking, or by the work-in-progress model, their puny developing brains fail them.

Yet these explanations don’t hold up. As Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist specializing in adolescence at Temple University, points out, even 14- to 17-year-olds—the biggest risk takers—use the same basic cognitive strategies that adults do, and they usually reason their way through problems just as well as adults. Contrary to popular belief, they also fully recognize they’re mortal. And, like adults, says Steinberg, “teens actually overestimate risk.”

So if teens think as well as adults do and recognize risk just as well, why do they take more chances? Here, as elsewhere, the problem lies less in what teens lack compared with adults than in what they have more of. Teens take more risks not because they don’t understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently: In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do.

A video game Steinberg uses draws this out nicely. In the game, you try to drive across town in as little time as possible. Along the way you encounter several traffic lights. As in real life, the traffic lights sometimes turn from green to yellow as you approach them, forcing a quick go-or-stop decision. You save time—and score more points—if you drive through before the light turns red. But if you try to drive through the red and don’t beat it, you lose even more time than you would have if you had stopped for it. Thus the game rewards you for taking a certain amount of risk but punishes you for taking too much.

When teens drive the course alone, in what Steinberg calls the emotionally “cool” situation of an empty room, they take risks at about the same rates that adults do. Add stakes that the teen cares about, however, and the situation changes. In this case Steinberg added friends: When he brought a teen’s friends into the room to watch, the teen would take twice as many risks, trying to gun it through lights he’d stopped for before. The adults, meanwhile, drove no differently with a friend watching.

To Steinberg, this shows clearly that risk-taking rises not from puny thinking but from a higher regard for reward.

“They didn’t take more chances because they suddenly downgraded the risk,” says Steinberg. “They did so because they gave more weight to the payoff.”

Researchers such as Steinberg and Casey believe this risk-friendly weighing of cost versus reward has been selected for because, over the course of human evolution, the willingness to take risks during this period of life has granted an adaptive edge. Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations. “The more you seek novelty and take risks,” says Baird, “the better you do.” This responsiveness to reward thus works like the desire for new sensation: It gets you out of the house and into new turf.

As Steinberg’s driving game suggests, teens respond strongly to social rewards. Physiology and evolutionary theory alike offer explanations for this tendency. Physiologically, adolescence brings a peak in the brain’s sensitivity to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that appears to prime and fire reward circuits and aids in learning patterns and making decisions. This helps explain the teen’s quickness of learning and extraordinary receptivity to reward—and his keen, sometimes melodramatic reaction to success as well as defeat.

The teen brain is similarly attuned to oxytocin, another neural hormone, which (among other things) makes social connections in particular more rewarding. The neural networks and dynamics associated with general reward and social interactions overlap heavily. Engage one, and you often engage the other. Engage them during adolescence, and you light a fire.

This helps explain another trait that marks adolescence: Teens prefer the company of those their own age more than ever before or after. At one level, this passion for same-age peers merely expresses in the social realm the teen’s general attraction to novelty: Teens offer teens far more novelty than familiar old family does.

Yet teens gravitate toward peers for another, more powerful reason: to invest in the future rather than the past. We enter a world made by our parents. But we will live most of our lives, and prosper (or not) in a world run and remade by our peers. Knowing, understanding, and building relationships with them bears critically on success. Socially savvy rats or monkeys, for instance, generally get the best nesting areas or territories, the most food and water, more allies, and more sex with better and fitter mates. And no species is more intricately and deeply social than humans are.

This supremely human characteristic makes peer relations not a sideshow but the main show. Some brain-scan studies, in fact, suggest that our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply. At a neural level, in other words, we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. Knowing this might make it easier to abide the hysteria of a 13-year-old deceived by a friend or the gloom of a 15-year-old not invited to a party. These people! we lament. They react to social ups and downs as if their fates depended upon them! They’re right. They do.

Excitement, novelty, risk, the company of peers. These traits may seem to add up to nothing more than doing foolish new stuff with friends. Look deeper, however, and you see that these traits that define adolescence make us more adaptive, both as individuals and as a species. That’s doubtless why these traits, broadly defined, seem to show themselves in virtually all human cultures, modern or tribal. They may concentrate and express themselves more starkly in modern Western cultures, in which teens spend so much time with each other. But anthropologists have found that virtually all the world’s cultures recognize adolescence as a distinct period in which adolescents prefer novelty, excitement, and peers. This near-universal recognition sinks the notion that it’s a cultural construct.

Culture clearly shapes adolescence. It influences its expression and possibly its length. It can magnify its manifestations. Yet culture does not create adolescence. The period’s uniqueness rises from genes and developmental processes that have been selected for over thousands of generations because they play an amplified role during this key transitional period: producing a creature optimally primed to leave a safe home and move into unfamiliar territory.

The move outward from home is the most difficult thing that humans do, as well as the most critical—not just for individuals but for a species that has shown an unmatched ability to master challenging new environments. In scientific terms, teenagers can be a pain in the ass. But they are quite possibly the most fully, crucially adaptive human beings around. Without them, humanity might not have so readily spread across the globe.

This adaptive-adolescence view, however accurate, can be tricky to come to terms with—the more so for parents dealing with teens in their most trying, contrary, or flat-out scary moments. It’s reassuring to recast worrisome aspects as signs of an organism learning how to negotiate its surroundings. But natural selection swings a sharp edge, and the teen’s sloppier moments can bring unbearable consequences. We may not run the risk of being killed in ritualistic battles or being eaten by leopards, but drugs, drinking, driving, and crime take a mighty toll. My son lives, and thrives, sans car, at college. Some of his high school friends, however, died during their driving experiments. Our children wield their adaptive plasticity amid small but horrific risks.

We parents, of course, often stumble too, as we try to walk the blurry line between helping and hindering our kids as they adapt to adulthood. The United States spends about a billion dollars a year on programs to counsel adolescents on violence, gangs, suicide, sex, substance abuse, and other potential pitfalls. Few of them work.

Yet we can and do help. We can ward off some of the world’s worst hazards and nudge adolescents toward appropriate responses to the rest. Studies show that when parents engage and guide their teens with a light but steady hand, staying connected but allowing independence, their kids generally do much better in life. Adolescents want to learn primarily, but not entirely, from their friends. At some level and at some times (and it’s the parent’s job to spot when), the teen recognizes that the parent can offer certain kernels of wisdom—knowledge valued not because it comes from parental authority but because it comes from the parent’s own struggles to learn how the world turns. The teen rightly perceives that she must understand not just her parents’ world but also the one she is entering. Yet if allowed to, she can appreciate that her parents once faced the same problems and may remember a few things worth knowing.

Meanwhile, in times of doubt, take inspiration in one last distinction of the teen brain—a final key to both its clumsiness and its remarkable adaptability. This is the prolonged plasticity of those late-developing frontal areas as they slowly mature. As noted earlier, these areas are the last to lay down the fatty myelin insulation—the brain’s white matter—that speeds transmission. And at first glance this seems like bad news: If we need these areas for the complex task of entering the world, why aren’t they running at full speed when the challenges are most daunting?

The answer is that speed comes at the price of flexibility. While a myelin coating greatly accelerates an axon’s bandwidth, it also inhibits the growth of new branches from the axon. According to Douglas Fields, an NIH neuroscientist who has spent years studying myelin, “This makes the period when a brain area lays down myelin a sort of crucial period of learning—the wiring is getting upgraded, but once that’s done, it’s harder to change.”

The window in which experience can best rewire those connections is highly specific to each brain area. Thus the brain’s language centers acquire their insulation most heavily in the first 13 years, when a child is learning language. The completed insulation consolidates those gains—but makes further gains, such as second languages, far harder to come by.

So it is with the forebrain’s myelination during the late teens and early 20s. This delayed completion—a withholding of readiness—heightens flexibility just as we confront and enter the world that we will face as adults.

This long, slow, back-to-front developmental wave, completed only in the mid-20s, appears to be a uniquely human adaptation. It may be one of our most consequential. It can seem a bit crazy that we humans don’t wise up a bit earlier in life. But if we smartened up sooner, we’d end up dumber.

[collymore]

By Stanley Collymore

Eugenicists assiduously at work in the United Kingdom as they have been for decades now, going back to pre-World War II. Now no longer capable in the 21st century to assertively rationalize their delusional and white supremacism through inhumane and diverse acts of barbarism, sadistically and characteristically inflicted on allegedly inferior races and subject peoples universally, and in terms of these actions varying from the Transatlantic Slavery to ongoing activities of contemporary racism, they instead seek to embark on another deceitful ploy, to attempt at reinforcing their dwindling self-confidence, distinctly and grossly embroidered hubris and, incontrovertibly, the outright challenges presented to them from those they’ve previously and consistently debased as their victims in the genuine and emotionally charged superiority stakes, pertaining to human kind.

So why try to stop them, these endemically ingrained and demented fantasists, who, it’s a safe bet to play, will inevitably get their natural and warranted comeuppance anyway? For Nature, as all sensible, sane and intelligent persons know, works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform, and most undoubtedly will always hit back in its inimitable way and time against these egotistical and self-serving wannabes deities; and, in this progression, address their own made, and Frankenstein- style monsters to pitilessly, understandably, as well as lethally maul them in impeccable irony through their sick attitudinal and crazed stance towards life generally.

© Stanley V. Collymore 4 August 2017.

Author’s Remarks: They happily, these well-heeled and so-called privileged elites, send off at the most affordable opportunity and also at the earliest age possible to these exceedingly expensive private and boarding schools, in order to initiate and subsequently reinforce their sumptuously bought and paid for futures, these bevy of invariably cuckoldedly-produced children of theirs. Often as is the case the resultant outcome from totally weak, compliant and dimwittedly whored upon husbands by adulterous wives and the biological mums of these very children, or else through a mutually agreed understanding with their female spouses, in legal name only, by husbands whose azoospermiac condition or more likely their Queer-dictated propensities masked by convenient but deceptive “conventional marriages” preclude or directly disqualify these men from physically adding to humanity’s population tally by producing offspring of their own.

Yet ironically and even pathetically in their utterly fraudulent and vainglorious self-aggrandizement these husbands, openly and haughtily exuding all the classic traits of delusional narcissism, nevertheless, in their bizarre desire to be deemed as “macho males” boastfully undertake to characterize themselves as the biological dads of children whom they evidently father but, in reality, obviously didn’t sire, nor realistically could they ever have done so.

Then with their sojourn at these expensive public schools at an end these essentially illiterate – you’ve only got to briefly listen to them speak and you’ll quickly understand what I mean – distinctly ill-informed about all manner of world affairs, as well as markedly incompetent as regards everything they either try to undertake or actually do, head off automatically for the so-called prestigious universities of Oxford or Cambridge, where numerous places at these “privileged elite” institutions are customarily set aside for them.

And here at home, as it were, among the identical backgrounds of similarly privileged elite professors, dons, lecturers, tutors and the rest of them either running or employed in the purportedly prestigious colleges that nepotistically and in typical cronyism fashion these “educators” are entrusted with, each new intake of rich, thoroughly spoilt and vainglorious addition, as all previous ones were, from these grossly and grotesquely discriminated in favour of expensive public schools, know perfectly well that during their drug-infested – cocaine is their preferred substance – stay at Oxford or Cambridge Universities, academic excellence or personal merit, even if these were achievable by this incorrigible bunch of intellectually impoverished retards which self-evidently they are not, aren’t a priority, and never will be, as regards the “attainment” of their “degrees”, courtesy of the entrenched Queer, Dyke and paedophile-practising ring of academic staffers that these privileged public schools’ undergraduates and even post-graduate students willingly prostitute their sexual favours with in return for their “academic qualifications”.

And now fully armed with these useless “academic” pieces of paper and a matching ability on their part in relation to their lack of competence, suitability for anything of significance, or of any beneficial good to their society, their wider communities specifically or humanity in general, however as is normally expected of them these new employment and generally head hunted recruits head off automatically to the influential and powerful world of finance: hedge funds, banking, insurance, the City of London incestuously-interlinked Cabals of corrupt and manipulative investments, the Stock Exchange and all the rest of them. Likewise, government created quangos, commercial multinational corporations, influential think tanks, high-ranking NHS directorships and other managing executive positions; top jobs in the Civil Service, and most especially so as part of the decidedly comical and ludicrously self-named First Division, and most notably too the Home Office; the top brass of the UK’s military even though they’re customarily consigned to deskbound jobs at the MoD and seldom, if ever, find themselves on frontline duties or put in harm’s way. Then additionally there are fast track elevations through the judiciary, other law enforcement agencies and certain elements of the British police forces like the Metropolitan Police; and, of course, politics and government. Essentially, cornering every important segment of British society. And accounts for the inescapable air of distinctive incompetence and widespread mediocrity that inimically permeates virtually every aspect of purportedly conventional life across the entire spectrum of the United Kingdom.

But that said it’s a state of affairs that in one way or another has been in continuous existence since the acquisition of an empire, of which it was routinely, hubristically and exaggeratedly boasted that the sun didn’t set nor would God in his infinite wisdom ever allow that to be the case, that comprehensively transformed the insignificant and essentially backwater European island of Britain into the global empire that it became, enabling these preposterous, long and deeply ingrained class prejudices to be codified into the ostentatious and detectably risible art form they’ve unmistakably become. And together with white British barbarism, imperialism, colonialism and invasive racism viciously directed against the native sons and daughters of these colonial countries formulated on Britain’s part, its invidious culture of white superiority and naked supremacism against all others, and specifically so those who didn’t and still don’t look like them or have the same skin colour as themselves.

However, with the Empire finally gone and fortunately no realistic chance of it ever coming back, a redundant Britain, still unable to come to terms with its psychologically devastating loss, has enthusiastically like the clapped out whore it has allowed itself to become and ever keen to ingratiate itself, for a diversity of sick reasons, with Rogue State USA the since 1945 dominant pimp on the block, having initially thought that this was the only way to maintain its appurtenance as a pseudo-world power and correspondingly as an exclusive white racial entity, and most certainly so among its financially well-heeled and “privileged elites” have quite predictably taken to and are now in the process of enthusiastically embracing medical eugenicism as another desperate means on their part of attempting to reinstate their obsessive need to be regarded, and automatically respected  by the lower classes and inferior races, as humanity’s master race. Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, wherever they now are, must be pissing themselves with laughter. While those who sacrificed their lives for the advent of a better world must understandably be wondering what on earth was the point of it all.