#substitute story saturday

[kiwi-but-the-bird-not-the-fruit]

Hii!

Could you do more nefero and F!Reader?

Hallo! yes ofc love these two

Male nefera x fem! Reader

She/her

Using [Name] as substitute for y/n

Fluff/Simp Nefero/sensual insinuations (hope that's alright it's not that strong but it implied they sleep together)

Headcanons! ( I liked the headcanon I made for clawdeen x reader requests so I'm making it for this couple. I hope you like it!!)

This is the present 18/19 pair (guess who's older hehe)

(If it's not what you wanted and you wanted just Fluff headcanon or short fluffy story,please request it again with a promt that can help me and I'll write the fluffy story for you, I don't like the thought that it's not what you wanted and I like to correct if the sensual insinuations made you uncomfortable )

(I'll only make changes if anyone just wanted Fluff and didnt seem to specify, only time I'll change something but you'll have to request again)

__________________________________________

-Nefero is the type of boyfriend to buy you anything you tell him you want but it's not In a "buy me this that i told you" it's a "i'm thinking about buying this book/eyeshadow palette"t and you want his opinion and a day later he's got it for you

"Nefie you really didn't have to-" you were interrupted "Nonese my jewel I wanted too plus I have to say that this pallet will look amazing with your makeup"

- he loves to be chest to chest with you hugging, seeing your gorgeous face/eyes and soft lip gloss covered lips makes him go crazy, so he'll end up kissing you and your neck while you giggle and put your hands through his hair sometimes tugging at the root cause that makes him melt.

- cuddling you is his hobby, you as the little spoon as he holds your waist his head in the crock of your neck inhaling your vanilla perfume, his hands will then go to your hip dips and he'll just have them there squeezing them at times while your busy playing a silly phone game.

"Yeah Nefie?" You ask "Nothing my jewel just wanted to squish you hehe" he giggles his voice vibrating at the back of your neck making you blush cause wow is he fine especially with his morning voice! Just thinking about it makes you melt

-speaking of squeezing your hip dips he'll squeeze them if your sitting on his lap facing him while you prep his face with kisses or when watching drama shows you turned around, he love your thighs looking at them, sitting on the floor in between them and if your wearing shorts he'll kiss the inner part of your thighs, he knows it's one of your favorite things you let him do.

-Nefero always goes with what you want and wants him to do with you. He's your personal sugar daddy but he's your actual boyfriend that NEEDS to spoil you rotten but you always stay humble.

-bless the undead soul of any manster that tries to flirt with you. He's towering over them like it's nobody's business. The same goes for you to any ghoul you are also tall so you can bring a ghoul down especially with your glare. It's not like they can steal him from you he's practically one step closer to tattooing your hickeys you give him

-he'll take you on dates every Saturday night to you guys favorite restaurants yes restaurants he'll tell his servants to make a wheel with all the options and you spin it, he loves how you light up and clap your hands in excitement

- when you and him go out on theses dates he'll wait outside sitting at the edge of your bed holding one of your plushies on his lap,as you get change you'll then model for him in three dresses and he decides which one goes well with his and you give your take,it's a nice conversation of just fashion coordination.

-Nefero can't deny the way you make him feel 24/7,365 so he's giving you mountains of gifts books,flowers, perfumes, clothes anything he thinks you'll like and they he just KNOWS you'll love

-Nefero loves your feminine style the skirts and dresses, jumpers with embroidery, bell bottoms with a cute top,he's on his knees

-His favorite thing you do is when you wear a red lipstick and kiss his face and neck letting every jealous ghoul know that he's yours.

-another last thing for now is that you lay on his body when sleeping over and just be calm as he strokes your hair happy to have you with him,he thinks great fully that you actually gave him a chance even after hearing all his dumb stuff he did he's just so thankful for having his jewel, his queen the goddess sent from heaven be his one and only love.

[janeyseymour]

Hey an idea for an epilogue to Love Thy Neighbor would be cool to see how they're doing maybe a year later when they've been living together for a while, or when they tell everyone else at Abbott that they're together. No pressure obviously, love the story!

your wish is my command, llama.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12.

Ousted

Summary: the crew finds out that you and Melissa are dating, and have been for quite some time.

WC: ~2.45k

Since Jared’s arrest with the police three months, a lot has happened. Ellie has only continued to grow and flourish into a beautiful seven year old (Melissa absolutely spoiled your daughter on her seventh birthday, claiming that she had six years of birthdays to make up for), you were able to get restraining orders in place against your husband while also getting all of the child support the bastard owed you and then some (thanks to your girlfriend’s connections), and you had moved into the apartment across the hall and in with the redhead of your dreams.

Ellie absolutely loves living with Melissa, although not much has changed even then. Before the three of you lived together, the redhead was often over at your apartment, and your daughter could usually find the two of you in bed sleeping in as much as you could with the little girl running around on Saturday mornings. You still take her the park consistently, and almost all of her routines are the same as they were when you lived in the apartment across the hall. Nevertheless, it doesn’t make your heart absolutely swell when your now seven year old proudly announces, “Mel! I’m home!” on the rare occasion that you and Ellie venture out without your girlfriend before sprinting to wherever the redhead is in the apartment and launching herself into Melissa’s arms.

What hasn’t changed is that only Barbara knows that the two of you are involved romantically. Everybody else just believes that the two of you are quite close and that you carpool to work because you live in the same apartment complex. It’s not that you’re hiding your romantic relationship- it’s just that you’ve never actually bumped into anybody outside of work because while they’re going out to bars, you’re at home or at the park with your girlfriend and daughter. Neither of you are particularly touchy at school either, so while you hold hands at the park or Melissa will set her chin on your shoulder at home, your work crew doesn’t see those soft, warm moments.

But today is terrible for you. You wake up with a groan, and your hand immediately flies to your lower stomach. PMS really is a bitch for you, and it doesn’t matter how many pills you’re on to try to combat those pains. Motherhood doesn’t stop though, and you go to roll out of bed to wake Ellie for school.

But a gentle hand stops you. “I got her today,” Melissa tells you in her deep morning voice. She sits up and runs a hand through her hair before making her way out of the bedroom and into your daughter’s. You hear Ellie squeal with delight at the sight of your girlfriend, and you can’t help the smile that washes over your face.

You know you have to get out of bed though. Work calls, and with the substitute shortage that seems to never end you know you should be there for your kids- even if it means teaching from your chair with the heating pad pressed up against your body nearly all day. So you roll out and get dressed as quickly as you can before heading into the bathroom to fix your face and ridiculous bedhead.

When you make your way into the kitchen, your girlfriend and your daughter are already eating breakfast and there’s a plate and mug of coffee just the way you like it in your spot. There’s also a glass of water, a few pills, and a hot water bottle waiting for you.

“Good morning,” you sigh as you take your place. Melissa immediately leans over and kisses your cheek. Ellie follows suit.

“Good morning, Momma,” your little girl squeaks out through a mouthful of egg.

You smile over at her before reaching for the medication and downing it with a gulp of water. The hot water bottle gets placed where you’re hurting the most, and you groan in discomfort as you pick up your fork.

“That bad, huh?” the redhead looks at you, clearly concerned at the amount of pain you’re in.

“I’ll be fine,” you grumble. “Just don’t let me forget the heating pad when we leave today.”

Melissa gives you a look of pity before finishing off her breakfast. She clears her spot at the dining room table before glancing to your daughter. “Go be a good girl and get ready for school on your own today?”

Ellie finishes off the last of her breakfast and races for her room.

“And brush your hair the right way, El!” your girlfriend calls after her. Ellie’s giggles can be heard from her room.

“Thank you,” you say quietly. “I don’t know if I could’ve handled getting her up and ready today.”

“Take it easy today, okay?” she tells you before kissing the top of your head. “I’ll take care of El today. All of you have to worry about today is getting through.”

The three of you are out of the apartment and in the car much faster than you had anticipated. And of course, you forgot the heating pad in your bedroom as you head out for the day, your mind only on the hot water bottle in your clutch. You only realize that once you’re in the staff lounge sipping on your second cup of coffee for the day.

“Fuck,” you whisper to yourself, but of course Melissa hears you. So does Ellie.

“Momma, you said a bad word,” your little girl scolds you.

“Momma forgot the heating pad today,” you groan as you hold your stomach.

Ellie purses her lips into a fine line, as does your girlfriend. “Oh.”

“Shit, I’m sorry I forgot to remind you,” the redhead places a gentle hand on your shoulder as she apologizes. “I’ll run back home and pick it up during prep today.”

“You don’t have to do that,” you sigh back. “I can survive the next eight hours.

You indeed, are barely surviving by the time your prep comes around, and your kids head off to their special class without you there to escort them down the halls. They make their way through the building silently, knowing how much you hate when they chatter in the hallways and wanting to make you proud. Of course, on her way back from dropping her own class off, Melissa runs into your class. She finishes taking them down to the music room before making her way into your classroom.

“Y/N? Hun?” your girlfriend knocks on the doorframe lightly, and the sight in front of her nearly breaks her heart. Your curled up in your desk chair as a few tears make their way down your face.

You brush away at your tears quickly, praying she hadn’t seen them. “Hey.”

She makes her way into your room, closing the door behind you. “Babe, are you really hurting that bad?”

You just nod. “I forgot the heating pad, my water bottle is cold, and I thought I had Midol here, but I was wrong.”

“Honey, I can run-”

“You’re not running home and missing your prep period because I’m an idiot,” you groan. “I’ll be fine.”

“At least let me heat up your water bottle for you.” She holds out her hand, expecting you to put the object in her hand.

You sigh in reluctance before giving it to her. “Thank you.”

“I’ll just be a few minutes. Do you need anything else?”

You shake your head. Melissa peers into your coffee mug, which is relatively empty, before plucking it off your desk and heading down the hall for the staff lounge. 

She returns a few minutes later, and you give her a grateful smile. She presses a quick kiss to your temple before she pulls a chair up next to yours and starts on her grading as her free hand gently rubs your back. With the warmth of her hand and the bottle pressed up against you, you manage to doze off. You only wake when she shakes your shoulder gently with an apologetic look.

“Huh?” you grumble as you open your eyes blearily. It takes a second for your eyes to focus again, but when they do she’s standing right in front of you with concern in her own sparkling green eyes.

“Babe, you fell asleep,” she tells you. “Are you really sure you’re okay?”

“Y-yeah,” you hum out as you stretch just slightly from being in a ball for the last thirty minutes. You go to stand to pick up your kids, but your girlfriend stops you.

“I got ‘em,” she promises. She returns with your kids a few minutes later.

By lunch, you’re absolutely drained. Your kids were being well-behaved for the most part, but there’s always shit that you have to deal with when it comes to them. You groan as you make your way down to the staff room, and when you expect to see your girlfriend she isn’t there.

“Anyone seen Melissa?” you ask as you grab your lunch from the refrigerator.

“She just left,” Janine says. “Said something about having to run out, but she’ll be back soon.”

You scowl as you sit down in your spot. You know where she went- home to grab your heating pad and Midol.

“Why?” the second grade teacher asks.

You shrug. “Just curious. She normally beats me in here.”

The redhead comes in about ten minutes later with your heating pad in hand. “Hey.” She plugs it in and hands it to you.

Gregory, Janine, and Jacob all give each other questioning looks. Their looks only grow more confused when you take it from her hastily and press it against your abdomen.

“Melissa, I told you not to go home and get it,” you sigh as the pain starts to go away.

She just shrugs and hands you the bottle of pills she brought from home too. And then she presses a soft kiss to the top of your head before turning to get her own lunch.

That has Jacob and Janine’s mouths fall open.

“Close ‘em,” Melissa quips. “You’ll catch flies.”

“What- what was that?” Jacob points between the two of you frantically. “What was that?!”

Melissa rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t give them the response they’re looking for.

“‘Home’?” Janine searches for words. “A kiss on the head? What is going on here?!”

“We’re dating,” you sigh as your eyes flutter closed.

“Dating?” Gregory asks. “As in… you’re seeing each other romantically?”

“That’s kind of what dating means,” you quip.

“Since when?” Jacob asks. “Mel Mel, I thought we were tight!”

“We are, Jacob,” your girlfriend rolls her striking green eyes again as she sits down next to you. Now that the cat is out of the bag, you pull your chair a bit closer to hers and rest your head on her shoulder.

“Since when?” the man asks again.

Melissa takes a bite of her own lunch. “Officially? About nine months. Unofficially? The day I met Y/N and Ellie.” Your girlfriend looks to her work wife with a smile.

“You knew?!” Janine asks Barbara incredulously.

The kindergarten teacher just laughs. “Melissa is my work wife, of course I knew. Why do you think I’m Auntie Barb whenever Ellie sees me now?”

“Oh my god,” Jacob gasps. “It all makes sense now!”

“What’s the commotion?” Ava asks as she waltzes into the staff room. 

“Y/N and Melissa are dating,” Barbara tells your boss. “And everyone else just found out.”

Ava gives the two of you a look in approval, not that you see it with your eyes still closed. “Does this mean Melissa is now a milf too?”

“Ava,” Melissa warns lowly.

“What?” the principal asks. “We all knew you was hot, but now you’re like a mother- milf!”

“I am Ellie’s mother,” you grumble as you open your eyes to glare at your boss.

Ava gives you a smirk. “And we all done been knew you was a milf.”

“Ava, I swear to God,” you warn. “I am not in the mood for this right now.” You close your eyes again, and that gets your principal to quiet her mouth. It doesn’t get the others to stop asking questions though.

Melissa answers them, mostly shortly, for the rest of lunch. The bell rings, indicating that the lunch period and recess period is over though, and you groan as you remember you have to get through the rest of your afternoon with the kids.

Thankfully, they’re angels for you, and you have no doubt in your mind that your girlfriend gave the class a talking to while she was bringing them back in from outside. 

You head outside a few minutes late to monitor dismissal duty. When you get there, Ellie is already on Melissa’s hip and clinging to her as she animatedly tells the redhead about her day.

“There’s my little girl,” you sigh as you make your way up to them.

“Momma!” your daughter brightens at the sight of you. She reaches for you before remembering that you aren’t in the state where you can really hold her right now while standing up.

“You can cuddle your momma at home,” Melissa promises her. Ellie seems content with that compromise, laying her head down on the second grade teacher’s shoulder. 

Dismissal is over not much longer after that, and the three of you head home. Your girlfriend cooks dinner, you get your daughter to do the worksheet that her teacher sent home, and then you curl up on the couch like you usually do after a long day at work. Ellie snuggles right up to you and promptly falls asleep listening to your heartbeat as she watches her beloved Bluey.

Melissa reaches for the remote and lowers the volume of the television before speaking. “So, how do you feel about the group knowing? About us?”

You shrug against her. “I don’t mind- I’m surprised it took them this long to find out actually, but I’m shocked you ousted us with a kiss to my head.”

“You looked like you needed it,” she tells you before pecking your cheek.

You smile. “I did. And, thank you for bringing me the heating pad, as much as I was annoyed you missed some of your lunch.”

“Anything for my girl,” the redhead chuckles against you. “Think you’ll be feeling at least a little better tomorrow?”

“I doubt it,” you sigh. “You know how I am.”

“I do,” your girlfriend frowns just slightly. “We’ll make sure that we don’t forget the heating pad tomorrow though, yeah?”

You nod against her shoulder.

“And if we do, just know that I’ll run home again for you,” she promises you. 

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[mzannthropy]

Anne of the Island Book Club Chapter 25

Good to be back at Redmond again.

Anne contemplates going out vs staying in, but from the way they're described, both sound good.

Shall I spend it here where there is a cosy fire, a plateful of delicious russets, three purring and harmonious cats, and two impeccable china dogs with green noses? Or shall I go to the park, where there is the lure of gray woods and of gray water lapping on the harbor rocks?

LMM once again summarises life at Patty's Place in several paragraphs when I wish she gave us at least one scene of this. Slice of life was something she excelled at. I said what I thought of Jonas already, but it's good that he's a regular visitor at PP--and he clearly makes an effort in seeing Phil if he needs to get on a train. 'If he wanted to, he would' and clearly Jonas does. The geography here has always confused me, though. Where is this St Columbia, where is Bolingbroke and Prospect Point in relation to Kingsport? It's not that important for the book, but I like knowing where a story takes place (When I read something set in a real place, I always look it up on a map. I know many of these are fictional, but I'd like to have an idea.) I wonder, though, if there were many people who agreed with Aunt Jamesina about ministers laughing, and I wonder if this will have implications for his future employment.

Gilbert's conduct towards Anne has drastically changed, but it had to be that way. He shot his shot and it didn't go as he wanted, so he wants to move on--can't blame him. Funny that Anne is the one who believes that Phil is not just flirting with Jonas, but at the same time, hearing Phil and Gilbert chat and joke with each other makes her think she only imagined that look of pain in Gilbert eyes when she refused him. She knows Phil cares for Jonas only. (Actually--and this is purely theoretical, mind you--you could make an argument in favour of Phil x Gilbert. Sure, he is poor, but it's not like he doesn't have prospects, and with her connections she would be able to get him a good position once he qualifies as a medical doctor. They could be good for each other. But that would be a different story, not this one.)

If the real Prince Charming was never to come she would have none of a substitute.

This is actually valid. Don't settle, ladies. (I mean this as in your version of Prince Charming, whatever the characteristics may be. (I'm speaking to straight women here bc that's what I am, but it should go for everyone, I think.))

Okay but. I swear on the life of my cat I don't want to be heretical on purpose, I can't help being what I am, but that meet cute at the park is. Well. Cute.

I like parks. I go to one almost every day (I wfh and take a walk there on my lunch break). One of my favourite places in the whole world is a giant park (see my photography, in fact I went there just last Saturday and posted some pics here too). I also like pavilions (in fact I wrote an original story set in such a structure, where two characters get engaged). And he has a good entrance, though for us modern readers the meeting may seem a bit stereotypical. But he knows her name already from her reading a paper on Tennyson, and this is something that matters to her (I mean, she almost drowned RP-ing his poem). And then he sends her roses and a nice quote? I know he's not the one but I can't really see fault with anything here. And from what Phil says, Roy Gardner seems quite the catch. Maybe in a different story, not this one.

Poor Rusty got snubbed, though. Cats look at us like we're committing crimes against them when we don't pay attention to them for 5 minutes, so I imagine his "why you no love me no more?" must have been devastating.

Note, in Slovak translation he was always called 'Roy', I didn't know he was actually 'Royal' in the original. I will continue calling him Roy.

[cedric-k-rossignol]

We see undertaker dancing with a skeleton on cover of chapter 54, he has a bunch of crosses on his waist and from the size of the skeleton and the strings of corset behind it I assume that it belongs to a female the skeleton also has a crown of thorns ( same as the skeleton on his death scythe) then we have Claudia's locket which also has a crown of thorns on it....I like to imagine that the skeleton he is dancing with belongs to caludia , and we know that crown of thorns symbolises jesus , I don't think that's random and as far as i know yana , she doesn't put things for no reason .. the manga is full of references and symbolising, so even tho I know it sounds stupid but but makes me wondering is there is any connections between jesus and claudia? Like is undertaker religious? Is caludia jesus? I also reqd a crack theory somewhere that Undertaker is judas😂This is starting to sound funny but I really need to know, but unfortunately I will be 80 until these things get revealed in the manga🙂

Undertaker is Jesus confirmed.

I kid, I kid... Lest?

I don't know if you've read all my theories, but I've referenced Jesus in a loooooot of them, if not all of them, so I'm going to summarize the main points I've hit on Jesus/Christian symbolism in relation to Undertaker below, in no particular order;

Cedric K. Ros- was born on March 25, which is the Day of the Annunciation. This is the day in which the angel Gabriel appeared before Mary to tell her she would become pregnant with the Incarnation of God, aka Jesus.

The medieval French poem 'Floire et Blancheflor' tells the love story of a couple who are represented by roses and white lilies. In this story the lovers are born on the same day - 'Holy Sunday'. Claudia was born on Monday April 5, 1830. In 1830 the day of 'Holy Monday', a part of the holy week preceding Easter, fell on April 5th. I think Undertaker was born on Holy Monday as well - Monday March 25, 1331. Holy Monday is the day on which Jesus cursed the fig tree, cleansed the temple, and responded to the questioning of his authority.

The Campania Arc in which Undertaker's identity as a reaper is revealed takes place over the holy week preceding Easter. The ship departs on Holy Wednesday. The Aurora Society's meeting takes place on Good Friday, and the ship sinks early on the morning of Holy Saturday.

The crown of thorns on Claudia's locket, as you mentioned, as well as the laurel branches. Palm branches are blessed as part of the ritual in 'Holy Sunday', but in France laurel branches are often used as a substitute. There is a custom in which people lay the blessed branches on top of the graves of their loved ones as a sign of hope of resurrection.

The French Monarchy was in possession of the majority of the purported relics of the Crown of Thorns. The thorns were incorporated into several different reliquaries, and some were given/sold to other European monarchies. The 'primary' relic of the Crown of Thorns was held at Notre Dame in 1889, and Notre-Dame is featured heavily in the BOC opening.

In the First Legend of Merlin, a King is told he must sacrifice a half-mortal child to allow for construction of a tower he's attempting to build. The child (Vincent) brought forth to be sacrificed is sometimes referred to as the antichrist, although he has never been portrayed as a malevolent force.

Red roses and white lilies are flowers associated with the Virgin Mary; red roses representing her love of God, and white lilies representing her sexual and spiritual purity.

Undertaker wears a cassock beneath his funeral mute outfit, a piece of clothing usually worn by priests and monks.

If he drowned, him being reborn in water is reminiscent of a baptism.

I guess I associate Undertaker with Jesus moreso than Claudia, though I agree that the skeleton in the cover you're referencing is meant to represent Claudia. I do not see Undertaker as being associated with Judas (though I would like to read that theory if you don't mind sending it to me). I'll discuss the cleansing of the temple more in future theories, as I think it's the most relevant to Undertaker's dislike of Queen Victoria and his rebellion against reaper HQ. I interpret Undertaker as being a righteous figure - or at least, I believe that he sees himself as one. But then, don't we all? Still, I think he rebelled against his superiors because he discovered something he found to be amoral.

It's worth noting in the story Floire et Blancheflor, the girl is a Christian and the boy is a pagan/Muslim (depending on which version you read) who converts to Christianity. There's also something to be said for the first king of the Francs, Clovis I, and his wife Clotilde, who is the patron saint of the lame. As in Floire et Blancheflor, Clovis was a pagan convinced to convert by his Christian wife. As the story goes, an angel appeared before Clotilde and gave her three white lilies, which Clotilde convinced Clovis to use as his insignia in battle. When he won, he converted, and so the fleur-de-lis became a symbol of the French Monarchy and their divine right to rule. Fleur-de-lis have been confirmed to decorate the sides of the ring Undertaker wears, and a fleur-de-lis was painted on the cheek of the doll-maker Drossel Keinz in season 1 anime, a character that I believe was inspired by Polaris (who I believe to be Joker), and who was in position of the other hope diamond ring.

So, was Undertaker religious? The Breton aristocracy in the 14th century was Roman Catholic, so yes, I do think he was religious. He also committed suicide in a time where it was very firmly viewed as a sin for which you could not repent. I also believe he is the 'Celtic Dragon' i.e. pagan, and I believe John Brown is an angel - soooooo tldr...

Is anyone's relationship with Catholicism straight forward?

Thanks for the ask anon. The religious symbolism is definitely significant and I will be continuing to explore it in future theories!

[democracyunderground]

THE END OF LAW

Robert Reich February 10th. The Trump regime is refusing to be bound by the federal courts. Where will this end?

Friends, He is the most lawless president in American history. He’s allowed Musk’s rats unfettered access to the Treasury’s payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed independent agencies without Congress’s approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians. And on it goes.

Republican lawmakers won’t restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I’ve ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, Tillis adds, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

We shouldn’t bellyache about Trump’s torching the Constitution?

As Trump’s marauding continues, America's last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately,” not the president.

Consider Trump’s freeze on all federal spending. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate money, not the president.

So far, two federal judges have stopped Trump’s freeze, pending full hearings on the lawsuits. But Trump is ignoring these court decisions and continues to freeze funds Congress has appropriated, notwithstanding.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, says the freeze will continue even though Trump's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has withdrawn the memo implementing it -- an Orwellian move that last week prompted U.S. District Judge AliKhan to reprimand the OMB.

“It appears that OMB sought to overcome a judicially imposed obstacle without actually ceasing the challenged conduct. The court can think of few things more disingenuous.”

On Saturday, federal district court Judge Paul A. Engelmayer temporarily denied Musk’s young recruits access to the Treasury’s payment and data systems, finding a risk of “irreparable harm.” The judge ordered anyone who had been granted access to the systems since January 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded” from it.

Well, good luck with that. How will Engelmayer know all copies have been destroyed in an administration that denies judges have the power to control what the president does?

Worse yet, Musk’s gang have access to the computer code. How will the judge prevent them from changing that code?

Another federal judge, John Coughenour, has blocked Trump’s executive order altering birthright citizenship, calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” The judge didn’t pull any punches:

“It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.”

Exactly. But how can Judge Coughenour guarantee that the Trump regime will grant citizenship to all children born in the United States to undocumented parents? Trump and Musk have tunneled into the entire federal government, even including the passport office (When transgender people try to renew, new passports list their sex at birth.)

Federal judges considering the legality of Trump’s mass deportations are bound by Supreme Court rulings that noncitizens have a right to due process before being deported — including the right to be informed of the charges against them, the right to an attorney, and the right to present evidence in their defense.

Here, too, Trump’s regime has ignored these rulings.

Meanwhile, in a lawsuit filed Friday, several “sanctuary” cities and counties are challenging both Trump’s executive order withdrawing federal funds from places that refuse to help carry out his immigration agenda and his Justice Department's threat to prosecute any jurisdiction that refuses to comply.

Plaintiffs are seeking to “check this abuse of power” by asking the courts to declare the Trump regime’s actions unlawful and prevent their enforcement.

The law is clearly on the plaintiff’s side. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the federal government cannot force cities and states to adopt laws or to enforce federal mandates.

But Trump isn’t budging.

Over the next months, these and dozens of other federal cases will be appealed to the Supreme Court — either by the plaintiffs arguing that Trump is ignoring lower-court decisions, or by Trump’s Justice Department appealing those decisions.

Then what?

You have every reason to be cynical about the current majority on the Supreme Court. But the cases I’ve just cited, along with many others, are based on the Supreme Court’s own precedents that say that Trump cannot legally do what he’s doing.

Yes, the Roberts court has shown itself willing to reverse its prior opinions (see: Roe v. Wade), but my betting is that at least on some of these issues the high court will rule against Trump.

All of which raises a final, perilous question: What if the Trump regime ignores the Supreme Court just as it has ignored lower courts?

In his 2024 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts anticipated this possibility, noting that judicial independence “is undermined unless the other branches [of government] are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.”

Roberts mentioned defiance by southern governors of the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Their defiance required that federal troops enforce the Supreme Court’s decision.

Roberts then commented on more recent defiance:

“Within the past few years … elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.

There’s no secret whom Roberts was referring to. His first initials are JD and he ought to know better. Vance graduated Yale Law School Class of 2013, and his wife, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.

Yet Vance said on a 2021 podcast, “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Here’s Vance in a February 2024 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: Vance: “The president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should. That’s the way the Constitution works. It has been thwarted too much by the way our bureaucracy has worked over the past 15 years.”

Stephanopoulos: “The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?”

Vance: “The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court — and, look, I hope that they would not do this — but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”

In other words, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there’s a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.

What then? Impeachment isn’t a possibility because Republicans run both chambers of Congress and haven’t exactly distinguished themselves with integrity or independence.

If Trump simply ignores the high court, is that the end of law?

Share

© 2025 Robert Reich

[cha-melodius]

Thank you all for the inspiration saturday/weekend tags @orchidscript, @three-drink-amy, @welcometololaland, @indomitable-love, and @14carrotghoul, I really WISH I could share some inspo photos with you but unfortunately what I have been writing this weekend is TOP SECRET. So instead, for SSS (thanks additionally for the tags @kiwiana-writes, @orchidscript, @tintagel-or-cockleshells) here's seven sentences from the YGM AU, which I will be back at soon.

Sharing an email excerpt this time that contains a line that had @celeritas2997 and @cricketnationrise yelling at me in the doc.

For a brief time I could imagine that, in some other universe, this could be my life. Then I came home and curled up with David, a cup of tea, and a new book. At least I can say I’m branching out from Austen, seeing how I’m sure I’ve read Pride & Prejudice no fewer than 200 times. Don’t even get me started on her others. Often I wonder if I’m using these stories as a wholly inadequate substitute, patching in the gaps in my own life that are destined never to be filled. Sometimes I think that it’s ok, that that’s what the stories are there for, after all. Sometimes I think maybe if I was braver I’d be able to go after what I wanted instead of just reading about it. Yours, H

Tagging folks who already shared inspo weekend posts to drop some tasty words (@indomitable-love, @14carrotghoul, @three-drink-amy, @clottedcreamfudge, @dumbpeachjuice) and additionally @nontoxic-writes, @lilythesilly, @myheartalivewrites, @leaves-of-laurelin, @celaestis1, @daisymae-12, @treluna4, @rmd-writes, @loki-is-my-kink-awakening, and whoever wants to jump in.

[misfitwashere]

ROBERT REICH

FEB 10

Friends,

He is the most lawless president in American history.

He’s allowed Musk’s rats unfettered access to the Treasury’s payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed independent agencies without Congress’s approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians. And on it goes.

Republican lawmakers won’t restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I’ve ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, Tillis adds, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

We shouldn’t bellyache about Trump’s torching the Constitution?

As Trump’s marauding continues, America's last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” 

This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately,” not the president. 

Consider Trump’s freeze on all federal spending. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate money, not the president. 

So far, two federal judges have stopped Trump’s freeze, pending full hearings on the lawsuits. But Trump is ignoring these court decisions and continues to freeze funds Congress has appropriated, notwithstanding.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, says the freeze will continue even though Trump's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has withdrawn the memo implementing it -- an Orwellian move that last week prompted U.S. District Judge AliKhan to reprimand the OMB.

“It appears that OMB sought to overcome a judicially imposed obstacle without actually ceasing the challenged conduct. The court can think of few things more disingenuous.”

On Saturday, federal district court Judge Paul A. Engelmayer temporarily denied Musk’s young recruits access to the Treasury’s payment and data systems, finding a risk of “irreparable harm.” The judge ordered anyone who had been granted access to the systems since January 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded” from it.

Well, good luck with that. How will Engelmayer know all copies have been destroyed in an administration that denies judges have the power to control what the president does? 

Worse yet, Musk’s gang have access to the computer code. How will the judge prevent them from changing that code?

Another federal judge, John Coughenour, has blocked Trump’s executive order altering birthright citizenship, calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” The judge didn’t pull any punches:

“It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.”

Exactly. But how can Judge Coughenour guarantee that the Trump regime will grant citizenship to all children born in the United States to undocumented parents? Trump and Musk have tunneled into the entire federal government, even including the passport office. (When transgender people try to renew, new passports list their sex at birth.)

Federal judges considering the legality of Trump’s mass deportations are bound by Supreme Court rulings that noncitizens have a right to due process before being deported — including the right to be informed of the charges against them, the right to an attorney, and the right to present evidence in their defense.

Here, too, Trump’s regime has ignored these rulings.

Meanwhile, in a lawsuit filed Friday, several “sanctuary” cities and counties are challenging both Trump’s executive order withdrawing federal funds from places that refuse to help carry out his immigration agenda and his Justice Department's threat to prosecute any jurisdiction that refuses to comply.

Plaintiffs are seeking to “check this abuse of power” by asking the courts to declare the Trump regime’s actions unlawful and prevent their enforcement.

The law is clearly on the plaintiff’s side. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the federal government cannot force cities and states to adopt laws or to enforce federal mandates. 

But Trump isn’t budging.

Over the next months, these and dozens of other federal cases will be appealed to the Supreme Court — either by the plaintiffs arguing that Trump is ignoring lower-court decisions, or by Trump’s Justice Department appealing those decisions.

Then what?

You have every reason to be cynical about the current majority on the Supreme Court. But the cases I’ve just cited, along with many others, are based on the Supreme Court’s own precedents that say that Trump cannot legally do what he’s doing.

Yes, the Roberts court has shown itself willing to reverse its prior opinions (see: Roe v. Wade), but my betting is that at least on some of these issues the high court will rule against Trump.

All of which raises a final, perilous question: What if the Trump regime ignores the Supreme Court just as it has ignored lower courts?

In his 2024 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts anticipated this possibility, noting that judicial independence “is undermined unless the other branches [of government] are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.”

Roberts mentioned defiance by southern governors of the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Their defiance required that federal troops enforce the Supreme Court’s decision.

Roberts then commented on more recent defiance:

“Within the past few years … elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.

There’s no secret whom Roberts was referring to. His first initials are JD and he ought to know better. Vance graduated Yale Law School Class of 2013, and his wife, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.

Yet Vance said on a 2021 podcast, “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” Here’s Vance in a February 2024 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

Vance: “The president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should. That’s the way the Constitution works. It has been thwarted too much by the way our bureaucracy has worked over the past 15 years.” Stephanopoulos: “The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?” Vance: “The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court — and, look, I hope that they would not do this — but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”

In other words, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there’s a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.

What then? Impeachment isn’t a possibility because Republicans run both chambers of Congress and haven’t exactly distinguished themselves with integrity or independence.

If Trump simply ignores the high court, is that the end of law?

[benkyoutobentou]

31 Days of Productivity Reading もう一回！: Day 10

Before: I don't have a proper before, since I didn't get to write anything before I started reading and I just needed to finish ポーの一族 today anyways. But I can still tell you about my day before I started reading! I usually run errands on Saturdays and thus don't usually read too much. In addition to my usual errands, I also went to the craft store to look at their Halloween decorations and get some yarn. My next door neighbor is pregnant and I'd like to crochet her a baby blanket as a present! And then for dinner I made myself some chickpea tikka masala that was delicious.

After: Now on to the good stuff. I finished the last 90 pages of ポーの一族 and it hit the spot tonight. I've been in my usual late summer Halloween mood lately and the aesthetic of ポーの一族 was perfect. It's not very gothic in story or plot line, but the aesthetic is wonderfully gothic and just feels perfect to read on a rainy October day. It was just what I needed! The language in this series so far isn't very difficult, but I do find myself getting lost in all the hiragana. Sometimes I have to really think to be able to parse the words and separate them from each other, whereas I wouldn't have an issue if it just used kanji. I also noticed this in BASARA, but it seems like older shoujo series don't use the 々 marking. So for example, 日々 was written as 日び. I think ベルサイユのばら did it too, I'll have to keep an eye out for it next time I read a volume. If anyone here is into older shounen manga, I would love to know if they do the same thing!

Now, you might be noticing that ninety pages does not fulfill my goal of reading 100 pages of manga per day. I didn't really want to start something new knowing that I wouldn't have the time to fully get into it, so I decided to just continue on with 憎らしい彼 (a novel) which is on my tbr for the month. Because I started it in March and still haven't finished it. Don't look at me. So here's my ridiculous math: if my goal was to read 100 pages of manga per day or 25 pages of a novel, then one page of a novel is worth four pages of a manga. Therefore, if I have ten manga pages left of my goal, then I could substitute that for 2.5 pages of a novel, in this case 憎らしい彼. So that's what I did. After a little brain break, though, because I don't usually like jumping immediately from one thing to the next.

In the end, I read 8 pages of 憎らしい彼 for a total of 98 pages across both manga and novels. I'd say that fulfills my goal nicely. I would have read more, but it's getting late and I really should be getting to bed. Also, I've noticed that Nagira Yuu's writing tends to be a bit harder for me to parse. It's never bothered me too much, given that certain authors have writing styles that are easier to read regardless of language and even in my native English, but I didn't really feel that with this little excerpt I read tonight. Hopefully this means good things for my Japanese and wasn't just a lucky break. I've been feeling pretty solid with my Japanese level during this challenge, I can't wait for a book to come along and prove me wrong this month.

[ahwp]

This is the Sippy Saturday Podcast Brought to you by At Home With Piper and The Harrington Foundation.

Season 1 Episode 1: Life Be Lifin'

Piper smiles at the camera as she's given a countdown by her producer. As she’s given her cue, she parts her lips and begins her introduction from her seat on the blush pink couch.

Piper: Hey babes! Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Sippy Saturday Podcast, brought to you by At Home with Piper. Today’s episode is sponsored by The Harrington Foundation. I’m Piper, your host, and new bestie. As if you couldn’t tell by the sash and crown, it’s my fucking birthdayyyy!!! (She chuckles softly as she repositions the mic and opens a bottle of tequila, pouring a shot.) On tonight’s episode, it’s just me and you, talking about life and how it’s been whipping my ass for the past few years cause, baby, life has been lifing the fuck out of me. So grab a drink, if you’re smart, you’ve already made you a Sippy Saturday cocktail from my At Home With Piper website, grabbed your snacks, and are sitting comfy waiting on the tea. Let’s toast to a good night, the happiest of birthdays for myself and anyone else celebrating, and an amazing Episode.

(The scene cuts to a prerecorded clip of Piper making the drink of the night. )

Piper: Tonight’s Mocktail is one of my favs, the Spicy Paloma. The recipe will be linked below with some alcohol substitute for my drinkers out there. (She takes a sip and rocks side to side while tasting it. She taps the glass with her finger nails and smacks her lips) Mhm.. I’m telling you guys, you have to try it. It’s a must.

Piper: A few very important things to know about me, I’m a 28 year old entrepreneur and a mommy of 2. I’m in therapy weekly and it’s the only thing other than God, keeping me from ending a few mother fuckers. Praise God. My kids are my world. I love my babies with my whole being and wouldn’t trade them for the world. Now let’s circle back to therapy. Baby get you some! Okay? Okay! Cause listen, the shit I’ve experienced these past few years, was enough to make me lose my mind. I completely lost myself, I’m talking didn’t recognize myself in the mirror, lost. I was so sad and depressed and just pushed away everyone I loved. Looking back on my life, younger me never expected any of the things she has now. Not the money, the houses, the kids, the experiences, none of it. I didn’t expect a bad life, but I thought my life would be really simple. I’d still be back home, I’d own a modest house and I’d be a school teacher. I just wanted to be happy and content. Instead, I’m a single mom of two, and while I’m killing this shit, this shit is not for the faint of heart. Granted I do have more resources than some other moms and I’m not saying that it’s hard in that way, but let’s not act as though carrying, birthing, and then caring for life isn’t something hard that all moms struggle with despite finances. I had a solid plan for my life and while a lot of it has come to pass, this family dynamic is not what I expected.

I grew up going back and forth between Rhode Island and New York. I’m the oldest of 4 girls and I was the favorite. Sorry girls, but it’s true. Ask daddy. (She laughs.) Life wasn’t hard even when it was. My parents made sure we didn’t see or feel the hardships of a young married black couple living part time in uptown New York or the two bedroom flat in Rhode Island that they owned but could barely afford. It was during all the back and forth that I met my ex husband at 15. I plan to have him on here one day and we can tell that story then. But basically, we were together for 8 years before he moved to LA. I followed him months later. I was a kindergarten teacher and was in college getting my bachelor’s of nursing degree. I graduated and moved to LA and when I got here, all that sweet phone talk about what life would be if I moved out here turned into some “you need to find your self ” bullshit. (She lowers her voice to mimic her ex’s and laughs and takes another sip of her drink.) Granted, his arguments ended up being true. I had been with him since I was 15. I really didn’t know who I was as a woman without him. So we break up for a while and then get back to gather, have a kid and get married. This man was my first everything. The first man I ever loved no one could have told me, we wouldn’t have lasted. Not even a year into our marriage were we divorced. My life had become motherhood and trying to please him, while his life had become being our provider and protector and we lost one another. We both saw it and I thought we were working on it, and then I found out he had cheated. It was public. I was humiliated. I remember feeling like I had failed, my self, my son, my parents. I couldn’t understand how. I followed the rules. (She uses air quotes as she sets her glass on the table next to her) This was the first time i experienced depression. PPD and divorce was kicking my ass. I was hyper focused on my son to the point that I started to push away my friends, and I wouldn't even take care of myself. I would shower everyday and that was it. There were days that i didn't eat or sleep because I just couldn't bring myself to do anything that didn't involve taking care of Prince. When I finally snapped out of it and started to get a sense of myself again, I vowed to not date. Luckly, I had some friends talk some sense into me. This is when I met Greyson, my daughter's father. At the time, I was very new to dating. I hadn't been with anyone other than Caleb my entire life. I was naive and ignored key signs that this wasn't a good partnership simply because I felt wanted to feel loved and Greyson gave me that feeling. Let me take it a few steps back and reintroduce our story to you from the eyes of a whole woman. This is a part of my story and in no means do I mean to break Greyson down, but I will not lie. I was clearly in a manipulative relationship filled with gaslighting, and love bombing. In no way do I absolve myself of my poor choices in dating this man and then having a child with him, but I will not keep quiet or spare him simply to save face. I fucked up unintentionally, but his intentions were clearly malice from the start.

When I met him, I wasn’t trying or expecting to fall for anyone. I’d actually made up my mind that I’d be single and I just wanted to have some fun. Either way, we dated off and on for about 4 months before making it official. We took a trip together and we had sex for the first time. I ended up pregnant but I didn’t know that i was until until weeks later while I was dealing with the grief of losing my mom. I feel like this was the start of the major red flags in our relationship. This man would be extremely present and loving and then go missing for weeks at a time. Looking back on my pregnancy, I don’t have many fond memories. Was he there during my mom’s passing, yes, but beyond that it was very hit and miss. I didn’t get to enjoy it unless I was being celebrated by my friends. I had no shower, no gender reveal, and I only had a maternity shoot because I made myself do it. I really put on a happy face while going through hell. Not just because I’d lost my mom but because I was in an unplanned pregnancy with a man who would up and disappear on me with no warning and then come back and love bomb the fuck out of me and gaslight me to hell. I started to realize this in my pregnancy and for reasons known now, I thought I should hold on. I knew in my mind, that I could fix this. This was something minor. He wasn’t use to relationships and I was only use to the one that I’d been in for 10 years that had failed. So here I am, a year removed from a very long term relationship and in a very new relationship, unexpectedly pregnant, and my man was love bombing me. He was inconsistent and always in some shit. I put on a smile and took care of home. Things were not great but they weren’t bad. Thats what I kept telling myself. We had some work to do but nothing that couldn’t be repaired. That was my mindset, until I realized that I was in deed on some bullshit. My daughter barely knew her dad and I was okay with just dealing with that to save face. To hold out hope that he would fix things, that this relationship, wouldn’t be a failure. That I would get my happy ending. Well that shit ended in the fiery pits of hell. I was one foot out the door by the end of it and had left my own home and was staying with my sister Syx a few weeks before things ended. Do yall know this man had the audacity to ask me to change my name but wasn’t ready to marry me? Yeah. We had an entire argument about why I still have my ex’s last name and why he wouldn’t marry me because of it. Despite the fact that this was something discussed on one of our first dates. That moment was the defining moment for me. I knew things were done. How could you love me but have no regard for me or my son? A few weeks after we talked and were trying yet again, his disappeared and I havent seen or heard from him since. No calls to see his daughter, no desire to be a dad yet this child was something he wanted so bad. Needless to say, I was pissed. It was an anger I’d never felt before. It took me such a long time get myself out of that space but here we are. I was so angry that I wanted to physically hurt this man, not because of how he had done me but becauwe he abandoned his child. My daughter is the sweetest thing. She’s so loving and smart and I know we all say that about our kids but my babygirl is something so special and I’m so angry with myself for making the choice I made in her father because he’s just a sorry excuse of a man. I tried so hard to not talk down about him but how can you not tell the truth about a person? (She sighs and sits back) the honest truth is I feel like I’ve held myself back from moving forward by trying to protect him and his character. I’ve filmed this episode 5 or 6 times and each time has ended in me crying and cursing him out in the unholiest of ways. I’m talking certifiable unhinged behavior. My therapist got a big check after those sessions. What’s changed though is the fact that I know my kids are better off without him and his influence.

As I'm growing, I’m learning more and more about myself and just life in general. For years, basically my entire life, I felt like a child needed both parents, or that I had to follow the rules if I wanted to be happily married or raise amazing kids and that’s simply not true. My babies are well rounded, well traveled, respectful, honest, and loving. I’ve done an amazing job. I have an amazing family and support system that loves my children like their own. I couldn’t ask for a better village. I believed that I my marriage would be successful because I’m a good woman who cooks, cleans, makes her own money and has other great attributes and talents. (Piper winks at the camera as she sips from her glass.) It didn’t take me long to learned that you can be perfect for someone and that shit can still go wrong. You can do your part, be the most loyal, humblest person and people will still fuck you over and walk all over you. Shit happens. Is it okay? No, but what can you learn from it? What is God trying to teach you? I feel like this past year has been the most important year of my life. I don’t work as hard, I spend more time with my kids making memories, my sister and I moving together and we’re raising our kids as a family and it’s the most wholesome shit I’ve ever done. I feel so at peace knowing that this year brought me peace by any means necessary. God did not play about me. He taught me patience, made me more aware of my own weaknesses and strengths, granted me favor and peace of mind while navigating all the shit I mentioned prior to now and the things I didn’t. He taught me the importance of letting things go so that I can move on. I’m a very empathetic person and I carry so much weight on my shoulders to understand everyone and to be understood. In the past that has caused me more hurt than anything. Instead of walking away, I’d try to fix things that don’t serve me. I don’t want to be that girl anymore. I can’t be her. I have two kids that literally don’t eat unless I feed them. They depend on me and I refuse to let them down. I say all do this to say, if you’re in a season where you feel like it’s blow after to blow, attack after attack, it gets better. If you’re in a place where you can’t look yourself in the mirror without crying or feeling like you e lost yourself, then wipe your tears and remind yourself who the fuck you are. That shit it momentary. It gets better. I don’t care what anyone says. It gets better because it has to. No weapon formed against you can prosper against you, because it’s not strong enough to. We’re not meant to stay down. We’re meant to learn something and then use it to bring ourselves as the other people like us out of that hole we feel buried in. Sometimes you need a little help. Therapy was quintessential in helping me through my toughest times. Because I want this podcast to be focused on purging the negativity and creating a positive environment for growth and development, I’ve created a foundation focused on supplying resources for those who just need a little help in life.

The Harrington Foundation is a non profit organization that is partnering with local therapists to bring free therapy to those in need in our local communities. This foundation is not only meant to bring forth grief counseling and mental health services to the community but other outreach programs like feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. Too often do we hear the stories of someone needing help with no one willing to give it. I will not be that person. If you would like to help the cause, feel free to donate at the link below or visit theharringtonfound.org. If you are in need of assistance in any way, be it therapy, paying a bill, help finding a home, contact us at 1-888-8888. We have funds readily available to help those in need. Thank you all for listening to me rant about my troubles and passion for growth. This has been the Sippy Saturday Podcast. Thank you for joining means I hope I see you next week. Love yall now bye! I got to go feed these kids. I didn’t even finish my drink Chile. (Piper laughs as the scene cuts to the ad for the Harrington Foundation and her other businesses.)

[transbookoftheday]

Elle Campbell Wins Their Weekend by Ben Kahn

Ferris Bueller's Day Off meets Gamer Girl for middle grade in this hilarious, heartfelt story about a non-binary kid trying to figure out who they are at home, at school, and in the fandom that changed their life.

All Elle Campbell wants to do is meet their hero, non-binary icon Nuri Grena. Well, okay, they'd like a bit more than that -- they'd like to learn how to do cat eye makeup, for queen bee Casey to stop critiquing their outfits, and for the finale of Elle's favorite show to have been less terrible. But meeting Nuri means the most of all.

So when Elle learns that Nuri is coming to town for book signing on Saturday, Elle is thrilled. It's the perfect chance to meet their hero! Elle's never been happier since they came out as non-binary, but they have a lot of questions -- questions only Nuri can answer.

But Elle's dreams are dashed when an altercation with a surly substitute teacher lands Elle in Saturday detention. Elle is ready to give up until their two best friends come up with a plan to bust them out of school. A plan so outrageous, it just might work.

Yet that's just step one. The kids also have to make their way across town with no money, no phones... and no driver's licenses. But they refuse to give up -- even if that means "borrowing" scooters from elementary school loan sharks, or winning a laser tag tournament with a cash prize.

Comic-author Ben Kahn makes their middle grade debut with this zany, heartfelt love letter to friendship, John Hughes movies, and the power of accepting who you are . . . even when there's no set map for where you're going.

[redwineconversation]

writing letters addressed to the fire (Galatarasay - Lyon Postgame Thoughts)

What did we learn about this game? Quite a lot, actually, even though it was at times a little boring.

Hegerberg got a decent amount of minutes, scored, and didn't get injured. Is it safe to say she's back? Not yet, but she is definitely getting there. There were a couple of bad misses which I am willing to excuse as rust, but the grace period isn't indefinite. The moment which really made me smile was when she tapped her imaginary watch as the Galatarasay players were rolling around during yet another break in play. Hegerberg has no patience for blatant time wasting, especially so early in the first half.

Both Dumornay and Diani were really bad this game. They both held onto the ball too much, made bad choices, and let the frustration of having a bad game get to them. If Diani gets in her head and goes quiet when things go wrong, Dumornay gets more erratic and the frustration becomes more visible. It's frustrating because I think she can be a really good player but she has got to start learning to manage her emotions better.

Carpenter was uncharacteristically sloppy in the opening 10-15 minutes of the game, but got better as the game progressed, and her cross for Hegerberg's goal was really good. She has improved a lot this season, be it because now there is genuine competition for her spot with Huerta, there is actual rotation, or maybe just the coach is good. Who knows? I will take it either way. But I think we're really seeing her grow as a player this season.

Renard was solid except for one nervy moment, which was also uncharacteristic. Sombath did good but isn't on the same level as Gilles. That being said, I'm curious what the lineup will be against Nantes. Lyon plays Nantes in Lyon on Saturday, and I think we will see more rotation ahead of the big Wolfsburg game next Tuesday.

Two comments about the substitutes: I'm surprised that Huerta came on for Bacha instead of Svava but will let it pass considering Lyon has two more games to play in the next 6 days; if Horan had missed the bicycle kick the way Becho did Twitter would have had an absolute meltdown and demanded Horan be sold effective immediately. Since they would never have double standards, I take this as they will join my incentive to get Becho to transfer to another team in the January window.

The biggest football crime is people pretending that Becho is good that Le Sommer plays on the same team at the same time as Hegerberg. I still feel to this day that Le Sommer doesn't get the recognition she so rightfully deserves. She is everything you could ever want in a footballer (barring maybe height?), and I just wish people would appreciate her more. As a romantic I would have loved her 50th UWCL goal to have been against Wolfsburg but I guess not all love stories happen when you want them to.

I keep thinking back to the start of the season when Mbock wasn't replaced, the Svava signing was announced, Bacha's surgery was announced, and Huerta was signed (not in that specific order). But I remember the absolute (and in my opinion, justified) outrage at what Lyon's defense would look like. There was a ton of doom predicting. There was absolute head loss. But look at where we are now: Lyon is top of the group, guaranteed to finish first, has only conceded one goal so far in the UWCL (TBD if that changes against Wolfsburg), two goals in the actual league.

We have to give credit where credit is due: Montemurro may not be a perfect coach, but he has done a really good job so far with Lyon. He has managed this team well and got them playing well. I am not certain that anyone can say with absolute confidence that they predicted Lyon's stats would look like they are now in Summer 2024.

[whileiamdying]

Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better

The Mamas & the Papas singer was known for her wit, her voice and her skill as a connector. For 50 years, a rumor has overshadowed her legacy.

Michael Putland/Getty Images

By Lindsay Zoladz Published May 9, 2024 Updated May 18, 2024

Onstage with her group the Mamas & the Papas at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, Cass Elliot, the grand doyenne of the Laurel Canyon scene, bantered with the timing of a vaudeville comedian. “Somebody asked me today when I was going to have the baby, that’s funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. The unspoken punchline — if you could call it that — was that she had already given birth to a daughter six weeks earlier.

“One of the things that appeals to so many people about my mom is that there’s a certain level of triumph over adversity,” that daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, said over lunch at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles on a recent afternoon. “She had to prove herself over and over again.”

Elliot was a charismatic performer who exuded infectious joy and a magnificent vocalist with acting chops she did not live to fully explore. July 29 is the 50th anniversary of her untimely death at 32, a tragedy that still spurs unanswerable questions. Might Elliot, who was one of Johnny Carson’s most beloved substitutes, have become the first female late-night talk show host? Would she have achieved EGOT status?

Half a century after her death, her underdog appeal continues to inspire. Last year, “Make Your Own Kind of Music” — a relatively minor 1969 solo hit that has nonetheless had cultural staying power — became such a sensation on TikTok that “Saturday Night Live” spoofed it, in a hilariously over-the-top sketch in which the host Emma Stone plays a strangely clairvoyant record producer. “This song is gonna be everywhere, Mama,” she tells Elliot, played by Chloe Troast. “Then everybody’s gonna forget about it for a long, long time, but in about 40, 50 years, I think it’s gonna start showing up in a bunch of movies, because it’s a perfect song to go under a slow-mo montage where the main character snaps and goes on a rampage.”

Cass Elliot performing on her television special “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore” in September 1973. After she went solo, she found it hard to shake her nickname.Credit...CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images

“S.N.L.” didn’t make a single joke about Elliot’s weight — something that was unthinkable half a century ago. During the height of her fame, Elliot seemed to co-sign some of the jabs at her expense with a shrugging grin.

“No one’s getting fat except Mama Cass,” the Mamas & the Papas sang in tight harmony on the self-mythologizing 1967 hit “Creeque Alley.” After the infamously tumultuous group broke up a year later, Elliot was a frequent guest on “The Carol Burnett Show,” where she occasionally went for the cheap laugh. In an otherwise uproarious sketch about two prudish women browsing a store’s “dirty books” section, Elliot holds up a book titled “Eat and Lose Weight” and says, “I got as far as ‘Eat’ and then I didn’t understand the rest.”

“As she had learned early on, the best way to deal with an uncomfortable situation is with humor,” Elliot-Kugell, who has her mother’s cascading hair and dry wit, writes in her new memoir, “My Mama, Cass.” But, as she said over lunch, that doesn’t mean her mother was always laughing on the inside. “That pain had to go somewhere,” Elliot-Kugell told me. “When I think about some of the things that had allegedly been said to her during her lifetime, you can’t hear that over and over and not let it hurt.”

But of course, the most enduring joke at her expense was the one she didn’t live to tell, or to rebut. Have you heard the one about the ham sandwich?

For years, the origin of the story that Elliot died from choking on a ham sandwich — one of the cruelest and most persistent myths in rock ’n’ roll history — was largely unknown. Then in 2020, Elliot’s friend Sue Cameron, an entertainment journalist, admitted to publicizing it in her Hollywood Reporter obituary at the behest of Elliot’s manager Allan Carr, who did not want his client associated with drug use. (Elliot died of a heart attack, likely brought on by years of substance abuse and crash dieting.) But that cartoonish rumor — propagated in endless pop culture references, from “Austin Powers” to “Lost” — cast a tawdry light over Elliot’s legacy and still threatens to overshadow her mighty, underappreciated talent.

The Mamas & the Papas: Denny Doherty, Michelle Phillips, Elliot, Scott McKenzie (who joined a later version of the group) and John Phillips.Credit...Bentley Archive/Popperfoto, via Getty Images

ELLIOT’S SISTER, LEAH, coined a phrase for the strong, brassy way everyone in their family sang: “the Cohen Honk.”

Cass was born Ellen Naomi Cohen into a music-loving household in suburban Baltimore. Her stage name partly came from her father’s penchant for calling his spirited daughter “the mad Cassandra.” She was a precocious, uncommonly bright child who, in the years after World War II, liked to ask dinner guests what they thought about the “world situation.” In high school she was known for her bold, slightly unkempt personal style that flew in the face of 1950s decorum. According to her biographer Eddi Fiegel, Elliot sometimes wore “wild combinations of Bermuda shorts and high heels, with white gloves to cover her bitten-down nails.”

Many people in Elliot’s life trace her struggles with her weight to when she was 6 and went to stay with her grandparents while recovering from ringworm. They fed her well, as grandparents sometimes do, and she quickly became self-conscious about her size. By high school, she had been prescribed Dexedrine, an amphetamine then used as an appetite suppressant. “The thought that something is wrong with you is bad enough,” Elliot-Kugell writes, “but the idea that a pill or a drug might fix you can be even more dangerous.”

Still, Elliot showed remarkable self-belief. The book recounts her telling anyone who would listen “that one day she was going to become the most famous fat girl that ever lived.”

She struck a deal with her parents: If she moved to New York and didn’t find musical success in five years, she would come home and study a more respectable field, like medicine. She left home in late 1960; “California Dreamin’” was released in December 1965. She later told an interviewer: “I really just made it under the wire!”

Broadway was Elliot’s first love, but folk music was the style of the day. She brought her own distinctive flair to it in her early groups, the Big 3 and then the Mugwumps, which featured a Canadian tenor named Denny Doherty. After the Mugwumps’ split, Doherty fled to the Virgin Islands with his new friends John and Michelle Phillips to work on material for a yet-unnamed group. Elliot had sung with them casually while they were all hanging out — at least once when they were all on LSD — and she knew her voice was the missing piece in their sound.

But John, the bandleader, was brutishly reluctant. According to Scott G. Shea, a biographer of the Mamas & the Papas, Phillips “had a vision in his head” of “a group that not only sounded like an electrified Peter, Paul and Mary, but also looked like them.” Shea puts it bluntly: “Michelle was to be the centerpiece, and, in his mind, Cass was too fat to even be considered.”

The group projected a chumminess that was central to their appeal, but few people know how hard Elliot had to push to become part of the band. She showed up unannounced in the Virgin Islands hoping to ingratiate herself, but Phillips wouldn’t budge until an act of fate intervened. While walking down the St. Thomas alley that the Mamas & the Papas would later immortalize in song, debris from a construction site hit Elliot on the head and knocked her unconscious. John Phillips would later claim that Elliot’s concussion caused her vocal register to change, and it was another of those stories Elliot learned to repeat with a self-deprecating joke.

“The real story is that John didn’t like my mother’s look,” Elliot-Kugell writes. She believes “he made up the story about a fake increase in vocal range to justify his choice to finally add my mom to the band months later.”

Elliot went solo after the short-lived group’s demise, buoyed by the success of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” a Mamas & the Papas single on which she sang lead. The final solo album she released, in 1973, had a pointed title: “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore.” “The moniker of ‘Mama�� had always felt like a reference to her size — that is, ‘Big Mama’ — and she hated that,” Elliot-Kugell writes.

From left: Joni Mitchell, Elliot and Judy Collins at the Big Sur Folk Festival. Elliot became known as a connector in the Laurel Canyon scene.Credit...Sulfiati Magnuson, via Getty Images

Elliot remains an underrated heroine in the story of the Laurel Canyon scene, not only as a musician but also as an amiable hostess who knew how to link up like-minded people. Doherty liked to call her “the Puppeteer.”

In 1964, she introduced her friends John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky; they became the Lovin’ Spoonful. When she heard that David Crosby and Stephen Stills had begun making music together, she suggested they add a high voice to the mix, and brought them Graham Nash. “I will give you a hundred dollars,” David Crosby told Elliot’s biographer, “if you can find a single person who says they hated Cass.”

But there was also something bittersweet about Elliot’s kinship with all these men. “I think part of the reason they all adored her is they weren’t threatened by her,” Elliot-Kugell said. “She knew more about these guys and had a relationship on a deeper level than some of their own wives or girlfriends had.” She added with a wry chuckle, “Did that mean she didn’t want to jump into bed with half of them? She probably did!”

Elliot’s unrequited love for her bandmate Doherty was perhaps the hardest to bear, especially after he and Michelle Phillips had an affair that nearly broke up the band before their first album was even released. Elliot had been smitten since the night they met, at a Greenwich Village bar where they each threatened to drink the other under the table, and eventually decided to drink … under the table. As he put it in his one-man show about the group’s history, “I knew she loved me, and I loved her too, but not like she wanted me to. She did weigh 300 pounds, and I wasn’t man enough to deal with that.”

The most difficult passages of “My Mama, Cass” are those in which Elliot-Kugell reckons with her mother’s persistent loneliness. “After the shows, when they’re screaming her name onstage and she’s bowing, she was the only one going back to the hotel by herself,” she said. “Everybody else had someone, and she didn’t.”

Elliot’s need for love and companionship is what drove her to the decision — relatively radical for a famous woman in the late 1960s — to become a single mother. When she learned she was pregnant at the height of the group’s success, after a brief fling with its touring bassist, she was defiant in her decision to raise the child on her own. “As it turned out,” Elliot-Kugell writes, wrenchingly, “my mom’s desire to have someone in her life who wasn’t going to up and leave her was what led to her desire for a child. It’s how I came to be.”

The Mamas & the Papas onstage in 1966. The group split two years later.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

WHEN I FINALLY got Sue Cameron on the phone, she was calling from the Atlantic Ocean, “somewhere between Bermuda and Portugal.” A journalist for more than 50 years who has published a book titled “Hollywood Secrets and Scandals,” she sometimes gives lectures on cruise ships. She was happy to reminisce about her old pal. “She had a big smile and this wide open face, very happy to see people,” Cameron said. “You just would immediately love her and want her to be your best friend.”

Cameron met Elliot when she interviewed the Mamas & the Papas in 1966; they realized they were neighbors and quickly became “sit-by-each-other’s-pool kind of friends.” Cameron has stories, like the one about the night they ran into Ann-Margret and Elliot delivered the perfect one-liner about her massive engagement ring (“I could skate on that”); or all the times Elliot would walk around with a credit card in her shoe because she didn’t like to carry a purse.

Her most painful memory is her final dinner with Elliot at Mr. Chow in the summer of 1974, before Elliot left for London. She’d never seen her friend so happy. “It was just a magical moment,” Cameron recalled. “It was just, like, the crescendo of her being. She’d had some TV specials, she was now going to go do a big nightclub act. Everything was fabulous.”

After a two-day stint of partying in London, Elliot told her friend Joe Croyle — a dancer in her show who was crashing with her at Harry Nilsson’s pad — that she was going to take a bath and turn in early because she was exhausted. Croyle figured she would be hungry too, so he fixed her a sandwich with ham, the only thing he could find in the fridge, along with some Coca-Cola. The ham sandwich, the cruelly cartoonish symbol that would come to define Elliot, was actually a gesture of care: a friend making her a meal she never got to enjoy.

Cameron heard about Elliot’s death in the newsroom of The Hollywood Reporter, where she was working at the time: “I kicked into professional mode and said, no one else is going to write that obit. I’m going to do it.” She tracked down Carr by phone in Nilsson’s apartment. “He could barely speak,” Cameron recalled. She asked what happened, and he said he didn’t know. “‘Oh, wait,’” she recalled him saying. “‘I see a half-eaten ham sandwich on the night stand. That’s good. You tell everybody that she choked on a ham sandwich, do you understand me?’”

“And I did it,” she added, “because I wanted to protect Cass.”

What was she protecting her from? “I was not aware of a lot of drugs,” she said. “I just wasn’t one of those people. And I had some suspicion around the time that she was going to London that she was on some sort of pills, but I didn’t really know anything.” In a split second, Carr and Cameron decided there was less shame in a woman ridiculed for her weight choking to death than there was in her having a drug problem. “What a terrible thing,” Cameron said, “but I was in too much of a state of shock to clean it up.”

She, too, is confounded by the story’s persistence. “Of all of the things I’ve done,” she said, “this ham sandwich has followed me my entire life.”

That story had long haunted Elliot-Kugell, too, though she felt some closure after Cameron privately divulged its origins to her when they met for lunch in 2000. Elliot-Kugell is cleareyed about what probably caused her mother’s death: “I mean, look. She was up for 48 hours, and she was at a party. Do the math.” But she doesn’t want to dwell on that. “The thing that was really important for me was that I didn’t want to write a salacious book,” she said.

In some sense, any memoir by a child of the Mamas & the Papas exists in the shadow of Mackenzie Phillips’s 2009 bombshell, “High on Arrival,” in which she accused her father John Phillips of sexual assault. But Elliot-Kugell’s memoir belongs on a different shelf entirely. It is a humanizing portrait of a woman whose legacy has, for far too long, been reduced to an outdated urban legend.

And it is a tale of an imperfect mother and a grieving daughter, of loss and long delayed catharsis. A few weeks before we spoke, Elliot-Kugell went to visit her mother’s grave. “It’s always weird when I go there, because I never know what to say,” she said. “But that day felt a little different because when I went up to the grave, I just said, ‘Hi.’ Like the way I would greet one of my cousins, or somebody who I know really well who I haven’t seen in a while.”

“I thought to myself, ‘Why, why why does it feel like this?’” she said.” All at once it dawned on her: “After going through this experience, I feel closer to her.”

Read by Lindsay Zoladz

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

[tomatosoupgroup]

screenshot saturday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so uhh

this'll be a short one

sorryyyyyyy

I DO HAVE STUFF FOR YOU THOUGH

for example....

you might be wondering what the hell this is

this is a background for the visual novel aspect of the game!

well, an unfinished one.

i based it off this screenshot i took off google maps!

some of the things i need to add are

well

pretty much everything lol

but let's be more specific:

you see how in mine, all the textures seem flat, while in the real photo, the textures are defined?

bit funky innit

the thing is uh. i have no idea how to add texture like this in pixel art.

ive tried many times and it just looks really bad lmao

so i've done some research, and i think what i'm looking for are called "clusters"

never heard of those before

also whenever i look up a tutorial for drawing them they just basically say "just draw these funny shapes!" and i'm like "okay but wHERE. YOU CANNOT JUST TELL ME TO DO THING. I NEED CONTEXT FOR THING. OOGA BOOGA BANG ROCK WITH STICK"

completely unrelated but i've noticed that whenever i get two ads on youtube, i can't skip them both at once

like when i press the skip ad button, it just goes to the next ad

don't know if this is only happening to me but it is REALLY annoying

fuck you youtube

i suppose i should dedicate the end of my post to the project itself.

ANOTHER QNA!

Q: Will you charge money for the game?

A: Complicated question.

this game is the epitome of a passion project in my eyes. it is a story i am telling not for any of my own personal gain, but simply because i feel like it is a story that needs to be told.

but enough of all this sappy shit, i'll just explain it simply:

when this game eventually comes out, i will either:

a: open the game up to donations (like the "name your price" thing), the majority of which will go to charity and anyone who helps on the project or

b: make the game 100% free.

Q: Do you accept fanart of the characters?

A: UH

YEAH????

if you draw my characters i will literally go bonkers /pos style

i unfortunately don't have an official ref sheet for any of them yet, but i'll be able to provide substitutes if asked

i think it would be cool to feature some of the fanart in the credits! (with permission from the artists, of course!) but that may take up too much space so i'll have to think it over.

tldr i fucking love fanart

Q: What about NSFW?

A: ...

Okay.

Listen.

I HIGHLY advise against it. I'm a minor and that's just like. weird.

Even after I turn 18, it'll still be weird because they were characters I first drew up when I was 16.

but at the same time, i accept that this is the internet, and that some gooner supremo will eventually stumble across this game :/

so i just have one definitive request.

PLEASE

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

DO NOT INCLUDE CHARACTERS WHO ARE UNDER 18

for example:

You may remember Silhouette.

they are CANONICALLY 13.

so like. keep them out of it.

i don't care if they're "just a character". you could say my fist is "just a body part" right before i bash your face in

if you want, i can provide the ages for any character you ask. i have a whole spreadsheet!

so please.

anyways that's gonna do it for today

to everybody who isn't youtube: i love you and thank you for being here

i will see you next week!

[umichenginabroad]

Stockholm Week 4: From Northern Lights to Polar Plunging

Core Course Week is the official name of this week. I have been waiting for this week because it was my first trip outside of Stockholm. During the core course week, you travel to another city in Sweden or even another country for three days with classmates and course advisers in your core course. It is a packed schedule full of both academic and cultural activities! 

My Engineering Sustainable Environment in Scandinavia course traveled to Umeå in the second half of the week from Wednesday night to Saturday. This post is focused on my time in Umeå! 

Before the actual trip, we got a sneak peek of what our academic tours would look like. On Monday, we had an academic visit to Norrenergi's district heating plant in Solna. Looking at the reactors and walking around the plant was very different from reading about the process. 

The building was full of rooms that surprised me, just like this (this is wastewater collected in the city). Although it was wastewater, it didn’t smell too bad! 

2/7 Wed: Night Train to Umeå

On Wednesday, I packed everything in a carry-on and left for the Central Station at 10 pm. 

Taking a night train was on my bucket list. BUCKET LIST! I have been and will be saying this many more times but I am not lying. I’m a month into my studying abroad semester and already checking off several activities on my bucket list! 

The train station gave off a Hogwarts vibe and the inside of the train made me think that I was a cast member in the Murder on the Orient Express movie. Two/three of us were each given a triple room to stay the night. 

POV from my bed 

Although we had to wake up at 7 in the morning, we were too excited to sleep. We talked, took a bunch of photos, and played card games before finally going to bed. 

I took the victory in the second round of BS ٩( ᐛ )و

I fell asleep soon, looking forward to what will happen tomorrow. 

2/8 Thu: Academic Plant Visits

When we woke up to get ready, the water didn’t come out. It was an experience to wash my face and brush my teeth with a water bottle. 

The first thing we did after getting off the train was eating breakfast at Umeå University. It was followed by a series of academic sessions on sustainability and food, as well as coffee substitution and sustainability. 

It was such an aesthetic building!

Later in the day, we went on another academic visit to Umeå Energi Heating Plant. The most interesting fact I learned was that plants openly communicate and collaborate without competition because they are in different municipalities. Since they do not have to compete in any way, workers genuinely consult each other and happily share insights on ways to improve their facility and process. It naturally made me think about what makes this possible and how this positive environment can be replicated in the U.S. 

We were also given a chance to see the waste bunker and incinerator. 

Doesn’t this remind you of Toy Story?

After the two-hour trip, we had a group dinner. The good thing was that it was in a boat.

Boat restaurant! It didn't move though

The bad thing was that it took three hours. THREE hours for dinner! But the long wait let us bond over our various conversations. Besides, the long wait was THE reason why we were able to catch this view of the sky.   

There were disputes about what this light is, but I am just going to let myself believe that it was the northern lights with a hint of clouds

Our attempt in capturing the "Northern Lights"

We were returning to our hotel when we saw the ice castle with slides. Are we college students if we don’t go sledding at night?  

As educated students, we made a single file line to take turns going down the slides 

The vicinity was full of our laughter and I absolutely loved it. I made another core memory that day :) 

2/9 Fri: - Horse Carriage for Northern Lights 

I started the day with a breakfast buffet provided by the hotel. Due to the last-minute cancellation of the academic visit at city hall, we finished our breakfast leisurely and had about two hours to wander around the neighborhood. The frozen lake was our destination. 

The combination of warm sunlight and flakey snow brought me so much joy. At that moment, I understood why people need to live next to nature. I never knew all I wanted was just to lie down, buried in snow, feeling the warmth of the sunlight. 

Couldn’t be happier

This was a church next to the lake

Group lunch and the last academic visit at the Vakin Waste Water Treatment plant were next up. 

I was holding on to my phone for my dear life because all the floors and stairs had holes in them - I also held on to the rails for my dear life

However, the real fun was waiting for us in the evening. 

Finally, it was time for the Northern Lights hunt on a horse carriage. I bundled up, layer after layer, to prepare for the freezing weather in the forest (my two thermal socks were not enough to prevent my toes from freezing). 

Photo credit to Tia <3  My phone was not good enough to capture the faint light in the pitch-black darkness ;-;

It was still an extraordinary experience even though we didn’t see the northern lights. Fika around the fireplace in the middle of the woods was such a special moment. 

The guide couple's dog made it 1000000 times better. She was SO pretty &lt;3

Afterward, we grabbed a full meal at MAX for dinner. Then we all met in one of our hotel rooms and played games before going out to a pub close by. The nightlife gave us the full experience at Umeå. 

2/10 Sat: Polar Plunging and Sauna

The last day of the Umeå trip began with a polar plunge and a sauna. The plunge itself wasn’t bad at all; the worst part of the event was walking on ice bare feet. 

Cold, cold ice (literally) water

The wooden sauna took two hours to reach 40 degrees Celsius, which was just enough to thaw our numb tuckles (credit to you know who). 

After the plunge and sauna, I oddly felt warmth inside my body. Before trying it out myself, I doubted the locals when they said the plunge is good for your body and makes you warm all day. In a sense, it was a true cultural experience because I suddenly understood Swedish culture. Freedom to roam, the concept of Lagom (not too much, not too little: just the right amount), and people being reserved for the most part began to make more sense in my mind. 

The sun came out as we walked back to the bus destined for our hotel

The short but memorable trip to Umeå ended with a 6-hour train ride back to Stockholm. Even the train ride back felt shorter than what it was. I think it was because I wanted it to last longer. 

The train ride back with a beautiful sunset ended the trip on a perfect note. 

2/11 Sun: Cafe Hops  

As much as I wish this semester was just a casual life abroad, it is called study abroad for a reason. It was time to do my work!

Like a typical college student, I started my work on Sunday. But I’m a student studying abroad, so I met up with my friends to eat brunch and do homework together at cute cafes. 

This blog is the last task for me today. It marks the end of my long week. I hope you had a great week as I did! 

I’ll see you again next week with new events :) 

Hey då, 

Jiwoo Kim 

Chemical Engineering

DIS Study Abroad in Stockholm, Sweden

[livseses]

Fuck, shit, as well as damn it ("blast it all to the lower depths" as Ny would say). Idk if we posted this nonsense already. But fuck it. Gonna post it anyways.

Lol

Lmao

Fucking ha even

So we got

DID

(Pt: So we got DID)

We found out from our therapist the other day that she had updated our diagnosis. She went on leave for a few months, and we had a wonderful substitute therapist who had experience treating DID. After she had gotten back she consulted with said substitute and they both agreed that our symptoms matched up more with DID than OSDD-1.

We were fine with this, and she explicitly said that it was due to the memory issues. When we walked through the DES and diagnostic criteria, we didn't think our memory was "beyond normal forgetting". 8-9 months later, and a fresh set of eyes on us, and she got enough of a picture to check that box.

The only real complaint is that we don't know when we would have found this out, because it had come up from an unrelated conversation. But we've come to trust her well enough to believe that it was a simple mistake and not something more abusive of her authority.

But it's left us in a funny place. We've always thought our memory was shit, but not that shit. ADHD working memory out the door, and SDAM tossing the video feeds into the garbage. Nothing dissociative for the most part. Just weird brain quirks with memory.

But after getting hit with this, it's been, like I said, kinda funny feeling. Hell, read the first paragraph. We had agreed yesterday to pick my girlfriend up from work today, and didn't remember that until after the missed calls. That kinda shook us.

We've had missing days a plenty. Times where we were jazzed by the realization that Friday was one (1) day closer than we thought. Times where we were the opposite of jazzed because we missed a class (or a fucking final exam) because we thought we had another day left in the week.

We don't remember more than a handful of experiences from before college, and they dwindle the further back we go. But we know the facts. This kid with our deadname did/said/experienced X, Y, or Z. That kind of stuff. That's always been our memory. That's always been "normal forgetting".

Appointments, obligations, scheduled tasks. They all get missed until we can't do anything about them. We rely on routine. Therapy a 4 pm on Tuesdays. Oh it's at 3? Or on Monday? Guess we're not going. Need to call the doctor during business hours. But it's the weekend so we can't. Oh now it's the evening so we can't. Whoopsie, it's Saturday again and we need to call the doctor during business hours. Oh and file those papers before the kidos arrive at preschool. Gotta remember to file those papers. But it's time to prep for class and all the prep is done so we're incredibly bored and twiddling our thumbs. Kiddos are here but FUCK forgot to file the papers. Maybe after class? Oh yeah, all the tables are clean and nothing else to do but head home so that we can scream and panic because we need to file those papers in the morning before the kiddos get to class.

I don't recall telling this story before. Wait no, the bored look in your eyes reminds me that I saw that look last time I told you this story again.

It's strange and surreal right now to hammer home that yeah, this isn't "normal forgetting". Fuck I remember thinking that maybe the ADHD memory poo would count enough for criterion B. How much does our memory suck and we've just compensated hard? How much do we forget that we forget?

There's something important I need to stress btw. All of this ramble, all of these memory issues, all of this forgetting and amnesia? All of it is irrespective of switches and headmates (save maybe the lost days). DID and plural memory issues almost always treat forgetting as something done between members. It's so frequently held that the memory is held by someone else.

While that's true in many cases, it's absolutely not universal. Our Dx comes from our recurrent gaps in our recall that's not consistent with ordinary forgetting. Not an inability to recall the memories of other headmates. Hell our most recent experience with that was when Ny agreed to pick up my gf, and she forgot; we all forgot.

Maybe that's a nitpick. Maybe I'm being particular. Maybe I'm annoyed. I don't know that our treatment would be any different if we kept OSDD-1 under the notion that DID required intra-idenity amnesia.

But yeah memory is fuck. Ramble is done. I hope this isn't something we posted yesterday or something. But if it is, that's pretty fucking funny to us.

-Faye

[turtlethon]

“Night of the Rogues” (part 1)

Season 7, Episode 19 First US Airdate: November 20, 1993

The Turtles are forced to take on a group of their most notorious foes that have been assembled by Shredder.

We continue our journey through the seventh season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with “Night of the Rogues”. David Wise is the credited writer for this story, which crams in so many notable TMNT characters that one Turtlethon entry isn’t big enough to cover everything! This one will be split into two parts, the second appearing on Saturday.

We kick off today with the Turtles watching April report from outside of a courtroom, where she interviews the city’s crime commissioner. The un-named official takes credit for the recent reduction in crime, a claim that rubs the Turtles the wrong way. Raphael is particularly resentful, feeling that the work the team has been doing in battling evil goes entirely unappreciated. Splinter steps in to suggest that Raph shouldn’t bear any ill feelings towards humans, and that the the team may need their help soon enough.

Following her report April alerts the Turtles to a break in at the city’s Hall of Records. The team arrive to find Shredder, Rocksteady, Bebop and Krang (in his bubble walker) rooting through files. A battle follows that quickly spills out into the street, at which point Shredder grumbles some standard guff about the Turtles pushing him too far, and one of the glaring issues with we’ll have to deal with moving forward becomes apparent: as James Avery has now departed from the series, Townsend Coleman will be our substitute Shreds for today and the remainder of the season.

As Shredder comes out on the losing end of a fight against the Turtles, getting covered in tar in the process, Krang manages to get the documents they came for. He has the villains regroup, leading to their escape via transport module. With the police approaching, the Turtles also retreat. Raphael continues to be bitter, noting that the cops will no doubt take credit for the work carried out by our heroes.

Shredder is seen wiping off the tar in the Technodrome and declares his intention to defeat the Turtles once and for all. Krang tries to have him maintain focus, pointing out that the Scheme of the Day is already in motion and will be a better use of his time, but Shreds won’t listen. Bebop and Rocksteady are keen to help their boss out, but for the second episode in a row find themselves surplus to requirements: this time they’re sidelined in a far harsher fashion than before, both being dropped through a trap door. Shreds declares that Bebop and Rocksteady have failed him for the last time, abandoning his henchmen to begin plotting his revenge against the Turtles.

As the Turtles try to piece together what the Technodrome crew were doing in the Hall of Records, Shredder is seen performing repairs on his old robot Chrome Dome before passing through a portal to Dimension X on a recruitment mission. Later, he returns to meet up with Krang, who again scolds him for not concentrating on their mission, a journey to the sewers to begin an excavation project imminent. Shredder is thrilled at the news as this road trip will grant him an opportunity to invite other villains to join his new anti-Turtle faction.

We briefly check in with The Boys, who remain trapped in the shaft beneath the trap door. Rocksteady worries that they may spend the rest of their lives in this confined area, but Bebop quips it may only be for the rest of the episode. Meanwhile April checks through computer data for the Turtles and finds that the records stolen by Shredder and Krang relate to the layout of the sewers in 1895. Unbeknownst to our heroes, their old foes are already at work underground. Krang informs Shredder that the stolen notes point out an area where the workers were unable to drill down and place a pillar, a sign that whatever lies beneath is impossibly tough. Disinterested, Shredder wanders off to work on building his new gang.

The Turtles use the details provided by April to approach the area where Krang has set up his excavation project, but encounter Shredder along the way. The masked villain announces that he’s fighting his hated foes for the last time, leading Raph to counter by asking if this means he’s leaving the show (a joke that’s a little on the nose given that Shredder’s voice actor just did). Shreds reveals to the Turtles his new all-star villain team, five of whom are established characters who have appeared in previous episodes alongside two who are new to the show. Let’s look at each of them in the order they’re revealed:

THE RAT KING (Townsend Coleman): One of the most prominent recurring bad guys outside of the Technodrome crew, the Rat King is a burly fellow who resides in the sewers and commands an army of rodents. Carried over from the Mirage TMNT comics, he first appeared in the ‘87 cartoon in “Enter the Rat King”, which established his desire to capture Splinter and have the ninja master do his bidding. Rat King’s prominence and status declined following the destruction of his hypnotic flute by Splinter in “Were-Rats from Channel 6”, only making two additional appearances in the years that followed.

SLASH (Pat Fraley): Introduced in season four’s “Slash - The Evil Turtle from Dimension X” (which is also how Shredder introduces him here), Slash is a super mutant turtle who began life as Bebop’s secret pet before becoming a deranged villain hell-bent on finding the palm tree from his old pet bowl, which he refers to as his “binky”. His debut episode ended with him being sent into Dimension X in a rocket designed to transport garbage. He would return in season six’s “Donatello Trashes Slash”, having had super intelligence bestowed upon him following an encounter with a group of aliens. After a fall that restored him to his usual dopey self, Slash was sent back into space by the Turtles.

LEATHERHEAD: A Cajun alligator transformed following the contamination of a Florida swamp, Leatherhead debuted in the season three adventure “Leatherhead: Terror of the Swamp”, an adventure in which the Turtles would travel to the Everglades to aid their old friends the Punk Frogs. After his defeat, he would resurface in New York a few episodes later that year in “Leatherhead Meets the Rat King”, which set up a rivalry between the two villains. Season four saw the two bad guys patch things up to take on the Turtles together in “Splinter Vanishes”. Normally voiced by Jim Cummings, today the role is handled by Townsend Coleman.

TEMPESTRA (Gaille Heideman): A video game boss brought to life, Tempestra was defeated at the conclusion of the only episode she appeared in – season four’s “Leonardo Versus Tempestra” - having been sucked back into the circuit board of the arcade machine she originally emerged from. Now she’s back... somehow?!

SCUMBUG (Barry Gordon): A mutant cockroach appearing here for the first time, possibly at the request of Playmates although given that his toy was released in 1990 the retail window for this figure had likely passed by this point. His file card bio explains that he was an exterminator hired to deal with a roach problem in the Technodrome that wound up being mutated. Whether this origin applies to the TV incarnation of the character is anyone’s guess. It’s implied that the Turtles have had prior interactions with Scumbug off-screen that we as viewers never witnessed.

ANTRAX (Pat Fraley): The other new character introduced here, Antrax is an axe-wielding alien ant who is said to be Krang’s executioner from Dimension X. This is consistent with the file card bio for his toy, which like Scumbug’s was a few years old by the time this episode made it to broadcast.

CHROME DOME (Peter Reneday): A giant robot warrior who was introduced at the conclusion of the prime-time special “Planet of the Turtleoids”. Chrome Dome was swiftly defeated by the Turtles, and hasn’t been seen again in the series until now; while still towering over the other villains, he’s considerably smaller here than he was in his first go-around.

Shredder’s new strategy involves paying the assembled group of villains to finish off the Turtles for him, presumably with the thinking that if each of them was able to get somewhat close to defeating our heroes individually, then together they can pull it off. He leaves the team to do their thing, and initially this strategy seems effective as the Turtles are forced to fall back. The Rogues – I suppose we can use that as their collective name – pursue the green team, each of them using their own unique skills and powers to put their enemies on the defensive.

Regrouping, the Turtles are forced to accept Raphael’s original suggestion of retreating, but find themselves backed into a tunnel where the only means of escape is via a steep drop into the sewer’s streams. The group take the plunge, with the villains keen to follow them until Rat King points out there are countless directions that the sewer system could have flushed them down.

At this point, we get the worst “ah gah-rawn-tee" in the history of the series. I wonder if Townsend Coleman was asked to dutifully fill in for James Avery and Jim Cummings at the last second, because none of the usual energy he brings to the role of Michaelangelo is present in his performances here as Leatherhead or Shredder. Anyway, Tempestra seems to be emerging as the effective leader of The Rogues, and suggests they draw the Turtles out of the sewers by creating chaos above ground.

The Rogues split into duos, with Chrome Dome and Antrax destroying civil war statues while the Rat King and Slash target a pizzeria. A ceremony is taking place outside “Ye Olde Pizza”, where a man explains to a crowd that the business was the first restaurant built in the city, “over 400 years ago”. Did Walter Raleigh found this fucking enterprise?! Rat King and Slash watch as the building is officially recognised as a historic site – I mean yeah, I guess it really would be – and therefore it’s precious enough to be worth destroying to attract the attention of the Turtles. Rat King apparently has a new flute, either that or David Wise has forgotten that he had the flute destroyed in season four. Waves of rats emerge from the sewers and begin chewing on the building’s foundations.

Tempestra causes chaos at Channel 6, creating an indoor storm that allows Burne to get a great one-liner in about having “to cancel the news on account of the weather”. Vernon tries to escape but is captured by Leatherhead.

April uses her Turtlecom to inform the Turtles of the various upheavals being caused by The Rogues. The Turtles pick up on the real intentions of the villains, figuring that if they show their faces, they’ll be doing exactly what they’re expected to. Raphael suggests that this is an indicator they should allow the humans to deal with things on their own, but is outvoted by the others who remind him that they’re “supposed to be heroes”, and reluctantly ends up tagging along.

Shredder meets up with Krang, whose excavation project is about to hit paydirt. The masked villain suggests that the reason everything seems to be going so well is that Bebop and Rocksteady aren’t around to mess up. Back in the Technodrome, The Boys have been stuck in the trap door shaft for so long that they start wondering if Shredder is okay, and begin looking for a means of escaping in order to help him.

Leonardo confronts both Chrome Dome and Antrax as they destroy the city’s stock exchange building. Initially Leo puts up a good fight, but it doesn’t take long before he’s captured. Elsewhere, Michaelangelo fittingly steps in to save Ye Old Pizza from Rat King and Leatherhead, but has the entire building dropped on him before being restrained too.

Scumbug seems to have been tagging along with Tempestra and Leatherhead this entire time, getting no screen time during the whole villainous city rampage bit until now. He winds up cornering the remaining Channel 6 crew of Burne, Irma and April on his own, until Donatello and Raphael step in. The Turtles find themselves defeated as the roach mutant uses his toxic gun to create a hole in the floor; Tempestra then emerges and uses her weather ability to knock her enemies through it. Leatherhead is close by, and together the three villains manage to restrain Donnie and Raph with an energy net.

Having captured all four of the Turtles between them, the reunited Rogues shove the green teens into a room within the roof-mounted mascot statue of a pest control company. Chrome Dome produces a time-controlled disintegrator that will vaporise anyone and anything in the vicinity when it goes off, and the group leave the Turtles to die as the second act ends.

...Continued in the next Turtlethon entry - see you on Saturday!