#that illustrated what the aftermath was like. which i am not going to describe

[cerealandchoccymilk]

hmm was just reminded of smth that's been simmering in our mind for years.

it's wild to me that people exist that don't really know the absolute horror of the atomic bomb. reading accounts since childhood (via textbooks, news articles, etc) of what happened on that day always fills me with so much fear and sorrow. you can also see the trauma of the bombing and fallout haunting japan through so much art, literature, etc etc (including anime and manga!!! popular ones!!!)

and yet people joke about nukes and nuclear war. everywhere

and i don't think we've ever shown it outright bc we tend to just play along but it's so distressing every time we see/hear a nuke joke in any context. i genuinely can't understand how anyone can possibly think it's funny.

[gojo-kisser-9000]

Hmmm my opinions on your fic. Lucky for you I’m somewhat decent at giving writing feedback.

I do like the idea of the AU a lot. Geto lives but is still the enemy is not very common at all. There were multiple set ups and clever follow throughs like Yuji’s makeup that was introduced as a joke hiding Sukuna’s tatts, or Geto only killing cursed spirits after they hurt a child. The themes seem to be about changing oneself for the sake of love. My main criticisms are length and pacing. There are so many interesting moving parts that could be more fleshed out. Fanfic gives you the unique opprotunity to really dig into the characters and make a reader feel like them.

For example, every human has their own unique way emoting. How someone shows embarassment varies from person to person. Someone might turn beet red from head to toe, another might have pink pool in certain locations and nowhere else. Sometimes the heat is felt everywhere or only in the cheeks. Those kinds of intimate details feel like they’re missing to me.

I also have a difficult time feeling the location. How the air feels, the temperature, the lighting etc helps set the mood and grounds a reader.

You can also use syntax to torment readers. Yuji is kind of dumb right? So when writing his POV the vocabulary and sentences can be simple. Just like him! And rather than saying a character is overwhelmed you can make sentences run on and on without commas or breaks to make the reader feel like they’re trapped with the character in their mental breakdown.

I also saw the comments on how writing action is difficult. I’m not very good at it either but I borrow from how Beserk shows Guts’s power. Rather than illustrating the moment of impact, it shows the initial swing of his sword and then the aftermath. For some reason when I write action like this it works for me.

My advice to you is reading things where these individual parts are done extremely well and then mimicking them in some capacity. Like have them open as a reference as you’re writing. It helps a lot. Do not forget to credit those inspirations!

You are so sweet thank you for all of this ‼️‼️ This advice means the world to me ♥️♥️

This helps SO much more with the other AU I have in the works, so I’m definitely going to revise the first three chapters before releasing them into the wild(AO3).

As for the vocabulary, that would always be my beloved friend and mutual @/catgirlkirigiri’s stong suit. Luckily, I remember things that in all seriousness Shouldn’t help me, but end up helping anyways! Case in point: they use a thesaurus website to change out words for more impact.

I admit, I shy away from action because of not understanding much of how it works. It’s easier for me to write emotion, especially when I’m having my overwhelming emotions or have been in a particular experience. I really did lose touch with describing how a character feels without having to state it, which is what I’ll be working on.

Something I Did try to do was keep Megumi and Gojo’s emotes similar, as Gojo was raising him during parts of the most impressionable years of his life.

The fic was initially going to be SO much longer; Kenjaku was supposed to be elaborated on, Choso and Yuji were supposed to meet, Jogo would NOT have survived, more elaboration on Yuji’s own gauntlet, Nobara and the twins were meant to get more chapters. And then the dreaded writer’s block hit. And my made up deadlines told me, “wow. You haven’t released anything. Better end it here.”

And then I did 💔💔

But I do have plans to revisit it soon. Make it better than it was, and absolutely try to use all the advice you gave.

Sorry if any of these sound like excuses, I’m just trying to explain more of how the process of writing my first actual fic was 💀💀 (Learning from my mistakes, I am now writing multiple chapters before releasing chapter one so I have more time to work on this before freaking out with Made Up Deadlines)(posting my writing always makes me believe I have deadlines or people Will Lose Interest and I don’t want that 💔💔)

And the thing I saved last because I felt a lil stupid: environmental lighting and such. I really, REALLY should have thought about this, ‘specially as someone who has been in theatre classes where these matter.

I’m able to (somewhat) capture it in my art (ignore how Megumi looks 💀💀 I need to go back and redraw him at some point [dont speedrun art late at night, it’s not healthy]), the blue of the aquarium shining on Megumi, Yuji seemingly consumed by shadows, being highlighted by the light Megumi stands in.

Ignore the background. I’m not good at drawing animals 😭😭 Or drawing aquariums for that matter. But even there, I tried to capture symbolism. The stingray and a blue head wrasse supposedly get along from what I’ve read (mutualistic relationship!), thought it was fitting for the (now scrapped) situation :)) [Once again please ignore how most of this looks, it’s not my best work]

[raenvs3000f24]

Blog 2: Environmental Interpretation

Environmental interpretation is a key role in my life in order to describe my perceptions felt towards the environment. When ever I walk around the nature, I always have a feeling in my mind to describe everything I see and interpret it. My role as an environment interpreter would also join together different types of people who also have the same passion as me in describing what they feel as they explore nature. In following the professional manners of interpreting, a great example is of Sam Ham’s elaboration of Bill Lewis prinicples in his thin book called “Interpreting for Park Visitors”. Sam emphasized the cornerstones of the interpretive approach to communication:

T (thematic with a focus on the main message conveyed)

O (organized to provide structure and meaning)

R (relevant to the audience)

E (enjoyable for the audience)

I always try to interpret the environment in a way that I can have a good foundation in making my interpretation enjoyable for the people who listen to it. To interpret the environment I have to implement this formula called TORE as illustrated by Sam Ham so that I can successfully elaborate on my environmental interpretation to the listeners. Alongside following Sam Ham’s illustration, I would also need proper perception skills in order to properly interpret what I explore. This means that I need to relate whatever I see in a good and proper context of life. For example, when I see the aftermath of a big rainful, I can perceive that the area turns a bit shinny in which there are rainbows, contrasting the area to be “lively” after a big diseaster.

Likewise, if I was to do environmental interpretation as a passion, my work would be among those people who are exactly like me that are also passionate to share their views regarding their perceptions of the environment. This is done in local whatsapp or facebook groups which are titled “Nature Interpretation” or anything of that sort. It can also be in big environmental protection appeals’ hall where people of the same passion join together and can interpret their perceptions regarding the environment as everyone having a mutual role.

If I was to choose a career in environmental interpretation, it would definitely be as a tourist guide. This is because as a tourist guide I would interpret to people I am guiding the perceptions that I feel as I walk around the fundamental areas being explored.

My role as an environmental interpreter has to entail my experience of exploring the nature as a tourist guide. In the picture above you can see a natural area of tree suburbs, grass and sunlight; while walking through this beautiful area I can describe that it is peaceful, quiet, and tranquile area which can be used for meditation or a light jog. As the course textbook of ENVS3000 under “Genuis Loci” states that a visitor should have a central experience of understanding the special values which answers the question “why was this place set aside”. I can simply answer this by saying that this place was set aside to give the planet what it needs. In other words, these trees provide the world with the protection to fight climate change by overcoming the green gasses. This is all done when the trees convert CO2 to soil which in turn causes oxygen to go back in the atmosphere, thus limiting the affect of the greenhouse gasses. This is where those I am guiding as a tourist guide can have a very good experience with me as I explain to them all my perception I have towards the fundamental area being explored.

And of course, all the people who are passionate about environmental interpretation have to promote this idea to other people so that it can grow in our community. As Aldo Leopard states “To promote perception is the only truly creative part of recreational engineering”. This is done where those who are passionate about the perceptions of the environment help people gain an understanding towards the unusual characteristics of the environment, thus promoting the use of environmental interpretation.

[mongooseblues]

Bless You Father for I Have Sinned (Fleabag, Hot Priest) 1/1

Did anyone watch Fleabag and/or want to read about a hot priest sneezing?

This works just fine as a standalone if u haven’t seen the show but for context: Hot Irish prob alcoholic “cool swear-y” priest and recovering sex addict and all-around hot mess main character (who doesn’t have a name) strike up a “friendship” that is just a poorly veiled excuse for spending time with someone they want very badly to fuck but can’t bc priesthood vow of celibacy and whatnot.

Here’s ~2k words in which I continuously get off on the idea of blessing a priest and unresolved sexual tension I also don’t resolve.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

“Fuck you, calling me Father like it doesn’t turn you on just to say it…”

It happens for maybe ten minutes before it starts to stick out to her. Because it’s cold, as it always is on early-spring nights in London, and while they’re both fully dressed (unfortunately), neither is probably quite dressed enough to be out in a garden at this hour. And they’re a bit drunk—not that drunk, they’re both pretty practiced—on the G&Ts he’s so fond of for whatever reason. He specifically likes the kind you get already mixed in a can, which are especially shit, but it’s almost endearing that he likes those in particular. Well, very endearing actually. Goddamn this man—or… hmm, poor choice of words.

It doesn’t really grab her attention until he combines the sniffling with pinching his nostrils together.

“You alright, you’re quite sniffly?”

“I know, I dunno what’s going on,” he says, and punctuates it with a harsher sniffle than the ones previously unacknowledged, “Think ‘m just cold.” He zips his sweatshirt up a bit as if to illustrate.

“We could get you a blanket and swaddle you up like baby Jesus.”

He laughs. She extracts from her coat pocket a pack of cigarettes, takes one herself and angles the carton toward him in offering. Mostly because she wants him to scoot closer to her on the bench as she flicks the lighter for him. The flame illuminates the angles of his face in orange, the back of his fingers grazing her hand by happy accident, and yes, it’s a little pathetic that this momentary skin-to-skin contact is as erotic as it is to her, but that’s what you get when you fancy a priest isn’t it?

“They’re always describing him as being swaddled. Odd word, swaddled. Sounds kind of violent.”

“It does kind of,” he agrees, leaning back against the bench and exhaling a stream of smoke into the night air. Her plan worked, he’s ever so slightly closer to her now, post cigarette exchange, close enough that when he sniffles she can feel the slight vibration of his shoulders through the loose fabric on her coat sleeve. It unites them like an accidental spark of electricity she can sense just faintly enough to feel jumpy. Or turned on. Or both.

She really shouldn’t be this shameless about trying desperately to corrupt a man of the cloth she wants to get under. Maybe she’d feel properly guilty if she wasn’t quite so fucking horny.

“So you did read more than just the passages I marked for you?” He asks, at once surprised and pleased and maybe nervous, grinning but also looking away for a moment as if he could disguise all of that.

“Not really, just the birth of the ol’ lord and savior. It seemed like it’d be climactic.”

“Was it?”

“Can’t say I climaxed reading it, no,” she says with a cheeky look that elicits the laughter she’s looking for, “No offense but it’s really quite boring, this book you love so much.”

“Yeah… that’s a tragically common sentiment among reviewers.” He’s scratching at his nose with the back of one wrist with such intensity it’s unmistakeable how much it’s bothering him.

“Don’t care much for the writing style either, I have to say.”

If the irritation could be resolved with a mouse-like scrunch of the nose he’d have figured it out by now, and clearly he hasn’t because he still has to shrink into his crossed arms like an accordion with a fairly high-pitched, vocal and thus somehow Irish-accented, “Hehh-ishhYUE!”

“Bless. The only way I was able to get through it was by imagining you in every speaking role.”

It’s a sentence meant to provoke him, not unlike most of her sentences, and for a minute as her eyes are on her own exhaled smoke and he fails to respond, she wonders whether it sounded even weirder than she meant it, but as it turns out he’s just about to sneeze again — squinting into the distance and bringing an arm to his face in slow motion.

“Mmff-SHOO!” He blinks in surprise as he resumes his previous position on the bench, now shifted just a bit farther away from her. Damn.

“Ugh, sorry. Every speaking role?? Ohfuck— ahh-ishSHEU!”

“Jesus.”

“You imagined me as Jesus??”

“No I mean Jesus, are you okay, did you catch something?” Of course she imagined him as Jesus.

“Ooh I hope not,” he says with a nervous look, “that’d be lousy timing.”

“The lord works in mysterious ways.”

“Thuh-that he does—” A sudden inhale, a crooked arm rising at a much hastened speed. It begins in a manageable way, somewhat controlled, but then it seems to get away from him.

“Hh… hehd’SHHUE!”

“Bless you, Father."

He mumbles a thank you bookended by soft snuffling.

“Maybe he’s sent you a plague of sneezing. He does that sometimes doesn’t he? Send plagues?”

His face just scarcely conveys amusement before it’s hijacked again by the same expectant expression, but he still attempts to talk through it, even as irritation becomes evident in every feature. “S-sometimes…”

She thinks about saying bless you in advance but decides instead to just wait for him to succumb to it. A flicker of lashes, a reveal of the very tips of canines, his entire face crinkles around his visibly twitching nose. It pulls him downward and then forward in that order, as he collapses into a crooked arm as if stumbling despite being seated.

An especially desperate, “hehhSCHOO!” that begins quietly but certainly doesn’t end that way.

“God bless you, Father, again.”

“Wow,” he says with a sniff, knuckles swiping under his nose in a single smooth motion, “Maybe I’m allergic to you. My body’s having a reaction.”

“Is it?”

An eyeroll and a grin, and then he goes back to scratching at his aggravated face in a manner that’s becoming aggressive.

“Well stop manhandling your nose that’s clearly not working.” Before she can think better of it, she takes his elbow to pull the offending arm away from his face. She can feel his muscles tense with the movement, but when she looks up at him there’s only a blurry-eyed smile chased by a nervous huff of a laugh. Another line she can’t uncross but doesn’t particularly want to.

The therapist hadn’t needed to point out that her all-consuming attraction to someone she couldn’t have was probably a healthy coping mechanism of her recently adopted abstinence. She hadn’t really expected this though — for her advances to not be rejected entirely. She hadn’t planned for hope to cease feeling like such a daft, one-sided notion.

“Should I even be blessing you or is that overkill? Or am I even qualified to bless you? Can one bless a priest if they’re not like, anointed or something?”

“You can bless me,” he confirms, looking like he’s barely got a handle on controlling his own eyebrows. Or lips for that matter. God, that mouth, those lips. Parting by accident the way she’d like to make them open on purpose.

“Little greedy of you. You’re not blessed enough as is?”

“Neh—neverhurts…” He pitches sidewards with a slurred, tellingly tipsy, “hehh-ESHHyoooo!”

“Bless you…”

“Thank you,” he sniffles with embarrassed necessity, bringing the back of a sleeve to his nose.

“Hold on, I think I have some tissues,” she says as she feels around in her bag in the darkness, “Well, cocktail napkins at least.” Another knuckle brush as she hands them to him. How arousing. How pitifully arousing. She really should come up with ways to hand him things more often.

“Ahh you were holding out on me,” he says, and then after a gentle blow, “Sorry.”

“You are coming down with something aren’t you?"

He thinks about it, bringing the napkin away from his nostrils with a final follow-up dab. “I dunno, maybe?”

“Do you feel ill?”

“Mostly just very itchy.”

How many other chances will she get… She reaches a hand to gingerly press the back of her fingers against his forehead. He blinks a few times in response, rapidly and reflexively, and swallows back a smile. There’s a burning in her stomach that’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

“Um, you feel okay I think?” She says, attention course-corrected back to the cigarette crumbling in her hand, but still glancing at him to measure the aftermath of the relatively bold gesture and they lock smiling eyes in the process.

If he really wanted to ward her off he’s doing a phenomenally shitty job of it. She knows he wants her. God if only that was enough, to know he wanted her.

“I think you’re right I’ve been sent a plague of sneezing. Probably trying to tell me something.”

“Something about how your new friend could take care of you?”

He grins with half of his mouth. “Or something about how I probably shouldn’t be drinking G&Ts in the middle of the night with my new friend who I like a little too much.”

Oh he… really shouldn’t have given her that.

“ExxSHHUE!!” He shakes the whole bench with this, then straightens back up, not looking entirely recovered, and says almost to himself, “And about how I probably shouldn’t tell my new friend that I like them a little too much.”

“But you did anyway and he hasn’t, I dunno, smote you down yet.”

Irritation is still etched into his features, his chest slowly swelling with air, hastily fiddling with the napkins.

“Are you actually going to sneeze again? You haven’t finished?”

He shakes his head as his eyes close and seizes into a rushed, “hehESHHyue!"

“It’s a plague I can’t stop! Snf, it’s out of my hands."

She knows the night’s over, she does. She gets the sense that she’d been invited to overstay her welcome, but it’s getting past that point now. Whenever she leaves after being around him her face hurts from smiling like an idiot the whole time and she comes away aching in more ways than one. That ache is starting already, another sign they’ve stretched this interaction too long once again.

However, alcohol. “If you tell me to leave and you sneeze again perhaps we’ll know whether or not it was divine intervention.”

“He might just be punishing me now anyway,” he sighs, remembering a cigarette he may not have taken a single drag from, neglected and foreshortening in his fingers.

“We haven’t done anything we’re just talking. I’m a—what is it, parishioner?”

“That is a word, yes. Snf! Though it implies someone who’s actually going to church to, you know, practice their faith."

“I’m a parishioner here to…” she’s not even sure what to say, she still doesn’t know shit about Catholicism aside from the fact that it’s a massive cockblock, “seek your… counsel? Guidance? Guidance counseling.”

He puts a hand over part of his face, tired but amused. “You can’t act innocent even when you’re trying your best, can you?"

She almost snorts. Is this what he thinks trying her best looks like?—No, don’t actually say— “Who said I was trying my best?”

Why can’t she stop herself from saying things like that to him? The only thing that’s going to stop her now is a ‘no’ that’s actually firm enough not to give way when she presses against it relentlessly. He honestly needs to just get it over with before he really gives her too much to hold onto. She’s not going to win out over God, the guy’s pretty fucking stiff competition.

Goddamnit, just break her heart already, what the fuck is he waiting for? This should have ended ages ago, and now it’s getting dangerously close to too late.

Was it unfair to assume he’d be stronger than her? Or is he trying to hurt himself too? A duetted exercise in masochism, mutually assured destruc—

“—ESSHHYUE!” He looks at her through wet lashes, bleary and sheepish and drunk and cute and fuck.

She sighs loudly, looks skyward and says, “Right, you’ve made your point! I’m leaving!”

[suchalovelydisaster]

The King- a Sanders Sides Fanfic

What was Creativity like before he was split in two parts?

Link for ao3

Words: 1898

Terrifying. Inappropriate. Unwanted. Intrusive. Disruptive. Creativity replayed these words in his mind several times over. It was not uncommon for him to be shot down every once and a while by the other sides. Most commonly, these words came from Anxiety. But now these insults grew more frequent and became more attacking in tone. Goddamn Anxiety. He might as well be called ‘paranoia’ with the way he treats Thomas.

Anxiety’s presence had become more and more prominent over the last few years. By the age of fifteen, the King believed he held more sway over Thomas than any other side. Despite Logic doing his best to overrule any negative feedback that was presented by the other side, Anxiety worked his hardest to make Thomas feel more alone than ever before. Now, the King of Creativity must do his best to work Thomas out of this grave Anxiety has dug.

As he used his skills to aid Thomas in conjuring fictional worlds, he found the other side would retreat into his room. When the King would exercise his rights to fully take over. He could send Thomas into daydream mode and allow him to be free of whatever would trouble him.

Daydream mode, however, sometimes came with side effects. Once daydream mode began to fade out, toward the ends of Thomas’s day, vivid nightmares would occur. As Anxiety was able to re-emerge into the mind palace, the visions of fairytale creatures would morph into horrific alternate versions of reality. Realities in which Thomas did things that would have dangerous consequences. Visions where Thomas hurt those he held dear and had always been kind to him. Fear and paranoia would take the wheel and lead Thomas into late-night spirals that were difficult to escape.

As the night would go on with Thomas losing precious hours of sleep daydream mode could finally fully dissipate. Leaving the King vulnerable to whatever criticism he would soon face. The sides could finally retire to their rooms after Thomas finally fell soundly asleep. But sometimes the King would overhear things said by the other sides.

“I feel terrible for the poor kid, honestly.” He heard Morality say once. “He can escape for a little while and is then thrown into a spiral of terrifying visions.”

Terrifying, The King thought. Morality thinks what I can do is terrifying. A rush of guilt came flooding over the side. His purpose was to be Thomas’s creative center. He was supposed to help Thomas, not become a hindrance to his everyday life.

He flashed back to a time when Thomas was quite young. Elementary school, you would write a story and illustrate it. Thomas was never excellent at drawing but, as The King of Creativity, he would try his hardest. The details of the story were fuzzy to him but he remembered an illustration of Thomas electrocuting one of his older brothers. The King had imagined it as a funny joke, which is what Thomas’s classmates saw it as. Unfortunately, Morality did not see it that way. The King was told that it was inappropriate and terrible to even joke about hurting a loved one.

Despite this warning, years later, Thomas would be faced with nightmares worse than what his innocent third-grade sketches could ever predict. The thoughts of performing a heinous crime that he had read about in a crime-novel or speaking about his deepest secrets to those who would use it against them. Fear of alienation would stop Thomas from speaking about what he thought about.

Soon, a day would come when Anxiety would approach Creativity after a daydream mode experience gone awry. He had said to the King, “I heard Logic use a term to describe what happens to you toward the end of your little brainstorming sessions,” He had begun. There was a harshness in his voice, he also sounded mildly taunting, like he was going to say something the King wouldn’t like. “He called them Intrusive Thoughts.”

Intrusive Thoughts. The King looked at the darkly dressed side in front of him. “What does that mean?” He had asked. He knew that, if it were important enough for Anxiety to tell him this, these words did not have pleasant meanings.

“To my knowledge, the word ‘Intrusive’ means something along the lines of disruptive or unwanted.” Anxiety replied, his voice was eerily calm.

It was disconcerting to see the side that was responsible for Thomas’s fears speaking with such a mild tone. From an outside perspective, it was obvious Anxiety was trying to get under Creativity’s skin. From the perspective of the King, it was working.

“Take that as you will, your Highness.” Anxiety shrugged and walked away from Creativity. Leaving him alone with his thoughts.

Anxiety’s words ran through the King’s mind for a long time. Even as he prepared to go to sleep, the remarks haunted him. Now, as Thomas faced another restless night, so did the King of Creativity. As time passed, the King heard the other sides express their concerns about Thomas’s wellbeing. They blamed Creativity for the ways Thomas’s mind would sway to writing something unpleasant or dark. They would tell Creativity that they needed to have positivity and happiness in order to cancel out the effects of Anxiety’s fear. And despite some very good brainstorming sessions in daydream-mode, there was also the stray few that would end in disaster.

Intrusive...disruptive...unwanted. Anxiety’s words, once again, ran through his mind. The King was now feeling shameful and guilty about how he was trying to help Thomas. This time was different from the others, however. This time, the feeling was not gone in the morning.

As the sides began their days, the King woke up still feeling guilty about the night before. He began growing afraid to engage in daydream mode for fear of the consequences. This, however, left both himself and Thomas feeling worse than usual. Soon, his only form of escapism for Thomas was gone. He began growing more distant from the other sides and was unconsciously isolating himself. His insecurities began to get the best of him. There would be times when he would duck out entirely, in order to avoid judgment.

Thomas’s imagination was stuck in a slump. Normally, he was incredibly creative and could write a story with ease. Writing was one of the ways he escaped his anxieties and the rest of his troubles. Now, he was stuck in a place where he couldn’t think of anything to write and was falling deeper into his fears and worries.

One night, the King had come out in order to alleviate Thomas’s stress, after a particularly difficult day. He had hoped that emerging in dire circumstances would lessen the chances of things going wrong toward the end of daydreaming. The King saw the look of surprise on Logic’s face as he asked to enter daydream mode. He never asked for permission, however, he had thought that asking for permission would be less disruptive.

Everything was seemingly going according to plan until daydream-mode began to fade out. Thomas’s ideas of drafting villainous characters began to shift into thoughts of himself as the villain; wreaking havoc on the relationships he had worked so hard to build up.

As Creativity saw what was happening, he panicked and retreated into his room. He abandoned daydream mode without hesitation. Leaving the other sides to deal with the aftermath of another disaster. As he disappeared into his room, the King broke down. He heard the words of the other sides running through his mind. Terrifying. Inappropriate. Unwanted. Intrusive. Disruptive. The King paced back and forth throughout his room. Thoughts were rattling inside his brain.

Am I hurting Thomas? How can I get rid of all of these horrific ideas? I can’t keep putting Thomas through all of this. What is the point of trying to help? Would it be better for everyone if I just was gone for good? His mind raced with questions and fear. How ironic, the King thought. I have now become the anxious and insecure side.

With that thought, the King collapsed to the floor. Gripping at his bedframe for stability, began to sob with his thoughts becoming even more frantic. What is wrong with me? How do I fix this? How...? Why...? What...?

Without any warning, he was enveloped in darkness.

He was alone, standing by himself, in a void. His head was ringing and he felt like the world was spinning around him.

“Get rid of the bad creativity.” He heard his own voice echoing throughout his mind. “Fix yourself.” It now echoed.

Suddenly, the King felt a sharp pain go through his entire body. Almost as if he was being ripped apart. He screamed in pain and fell to the ground.

He was still surrounded by darkness, thus causing the pain to be even more concerning. What is happening to me? The agony continued, as the colors of red and green flashed in his vision causing him blacked out again.

Two boys woke up on the floor of the King’s bedroom. One dressed in white with a red sash. The other dressed in black with a green sash. The looked at each other with the same fearful expression.

“Who are you?” They both asked at the same time.

“I’m Creativity.” They both responded. They both talked about the memories that they had leading up to that point. The pain and then waking up to the sight of each other. They talked about who most likely represented good creativity and who represented bad creativity. They decided that they were twins and a result of the King’s breakdown.

“Does this mean that we’re both the King?” The side in black and green asked.

“I think I’m more of a prince now,” the red and white side responded. “Since neither of us is fully the King anymore.”

“Well, if you’re a prince the I’ll be a duke!” Exclaimed the boy in green and black.

The Prince decided to call himself Roman. He decided that the Duke would be called Remus. Their names were similar to the twins Romulus and Remus, in Roman myth. Because the prince represented “good” creativity and Romulus was who Rome was named for, the prince decided that Roman was a good fit.

As time would go on, Roman would become the prized brother. He was “Good Creativity” after all. Remus became rejected, taken in by Deceit, and the other sides that were considered to be bad or harmful to Thomas. The Prince seemed to forget the trauma that caused the King’s split. The Duke, however, would harbor those memories for a long time after being shut out by the “good sides.”

Later in Thomas’s life, Anxiety would become one of the “good sides” too. The side that caused Creativity the most pain before the split. Soon, Remus would grow aggravated by the amount of attention Anxiety was getting by the good sides. As Deceit would also make more frequent appearances in Thomas’s decision making, Remus grew more fearful that he was becoming the only rejected side left.

Remus decided that sooner or later he was going to get the attention he craved. He didn’t give a damn if he was considered a “bad side,” he just wanted to be heard and have his voice be listened to. He decided to use his own daydream mode.

[beloved-judged]

On the topic of possession

Upfront proviso: I’m not epileptic, I don’t have any seizure disorders, I’m not diabetic, etc. I also don’t have any diagnosed psychiatric disorders that would explain this.

Can we talk for a moment how scary being possessed is?

I understand that it’s necessary for me--I have the capacity, I’ve done it before, and I am willing to give up the relationship between consciousness and body as a service to my community.

But if I’m being honest, it makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A deep, atavistic terror that my conscious mind seems to be unable to talk the monkey and lizard in the back of my brain into accepting without it being a major point of crisis.

My feelings on that topic were forced slightly over a week ago, following a pattern between the spirit and I. I have a picture of how things are to go, or I out and out tell the spirit that I would very much like not to have something happen, and pretty promptly afterward, that thing happens.

Say to the spirit that I’m okay with being followed around by, say, spiders, but to please keep the spiders out of my pajamas/robe and bed, dream the next night about a giant spider leaping out of my robe and pajamas to cling to me as I lay on my bed.

It feels, if it makes any sense, less deliberately provocative than illustrative of a relationship, and the fact that I am not currently setting the terms. I’m always free to walk away, but that’s not likely to happen given... well.... the vows I’ve made, the person I am, and the fact that there’s really not much of interest to me elsewhere in my life.

For whatever else can be said of the spirit, the life in me flows from them and they purchased me from me out right.

I suppose I pictured possession now that I have had certain rituals done to me as occurring under much more controlled circumstances--say, during ritual or otherwise under the supervision of my papa, while in his house.

It was foolish of me to think that. My experiences with possession before this point have not been controlled nor in the context of a church. They’ve been a two minute warning in the back of my brain (”lay down right now or fall down”), followed by my body getting up and taking care of some sort of business: frequently a conversation that the person being talked to absolutely refuses to tell me about later (or make eye contact), but the way they talk to and treat me frequently changes for the positive. Whatever happens tends to generate fear and respectful politeness.

Or in the case of slightly over a week ago, my consciousness being abruptly pushed aside with very little warning while driving, resulting in a massive multi-car crash that totaled an SUV around me (and I do mean totaled; the repair estimate was about twice what the SUV was worth and involved replacing practically everything under the hood and the hood itself), took out another vehicle, and landed me in the ER for about 11 hours.

I feel like I should say, at this point, that the aftermath of the crash involved no injuries aside from bruising. They looked for and didn’t find any biological cause, extensively scanning my brain and body, expecting to find massive bleeding or something really fucky in my blood chemistry, and instead found nothing to explain what happened. And meanwhile, I was apparently ‘conscious’ and doing stuff--I’m not a fan of doctors, but my affect in the medical records is listed as helpful, appropriate, and friendly, which it would damn well not have been if it was me.

This is also the healthiest my bank account has ever been, and all the things I need to do before I move closer to my temple have mysteriously been scheduled before I’m due to leave (several of them involve institutions that are usually very slow to schedule.)

The insurance company could not be more prompt or helpful, two words I’ve never been able to use to describe an insurance company in my life.

And every single safety device on the SUV failed, despite the crash occurring at slightly under highway speeds. I should have been a smear, especially since I ended up in oncoming traffic, crossing a median and several lanes during the course of the crash.

I didn’t even cut my lip, though I did bite my tongue, and the bruising is relatively minor.

This is all definitely something I had to appreciate in retrospect. Maybe ‘had’ is too strong, but my initial emotional reaction has been panic and anger, and I have previous experience with possession.

It’s one thing to lie down, get up someone or something else, and have conversations with people. Weird, uncomfortable, and hard to explain--par for the course in my life, which has essentially been wall-to-wall shit that reminds me how different I am from the people around me (and reminds them, which sometimes results in some unpleasant and occasionally dangerous social situations.)

It’s something else entirely to absolutely destroy an SUV around me and to stay ‘gone’ for almost half a day. Before this, the longest I’ve been gone was an hour or two, coming back to myself sober despite drinking heavily the whole time. Whomever it is borrowing my skin drinks like a fish--amounts that, frankly, I’d be very dead if I tried to emulate.

I’m really struggling with how to feel about this. On the one hand, I have a lot to be grateful for. It looks like I’ll be able to replace my vehicle with a much newer, nicer model, and I won’t have to worry too much about money during the move.

I am very grateful, but it took me a week to arrive at grateful.

On the other hand... my plans are definitely shot to shit. I had just bought that SUV (and it was hellaciously expensive to fix up so that it would run) specifically so that I could pack my stuff in it and move, and I cannot emphasize enough how creepy it is that I was driving at the time.

I could have really injured the other driver. I could have died (not that I would have known, because as far as my consciousness goes, there’s nothing between driving home from work and the ER a long time later.)

And honestly... the idea that I am not in control of myself all the time continues to creep me out. The authoritative way that I was just not myself is scary.

I am a little disappointed with myself, and my dreams reflect the disappointment I suspect the spirit feels about my response--literally dreams about shitting myself and trying to hide (but being unable to do so) while I clean myself up.

I feel like it would be reasonable for most anyone having the same experience to be freaking the fuck out, but I also know that what is reasonable for everyone else is not what is appropriate for me, if for no other reason than because I am able to be mounted and have done so before I knew about vodou. I had no idea what possession was the first time it happened, and thought I was going crazy, which lead me to a lot of time in therapy, during which they never discovered a reason for this to occur.

My discomfort does not constitute a good reason not to be possessed. Nor does it constitute an argument against possession. And I wish I had the kind of faith necessary not to have initially responded with terror and rage.

I wish I was able to face this with calm and trust.

Instead, I’ve been grappling with memories I put aside a long time ago and baffled rage.

And tears. Lots and lots of tears, which is also very unlike me.

[pjmendez]

Realising I can no longer do nothing

George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. ©CNN

I’m tired, just as much as every other Black person is, of seeing nothing change. Nothing has changed. We might like to think things have, and it might make us feel better to think things have, or that we don’t have the same problems here in the UK as there are in the US. In the UK we like to silence Black people bemoaning police brutality and institutional racism by talking about Black-on-Black violence, of knife crime and of Black music that appears to glorify intra-racial murder, even bringing up that old “Africans sold their fellow men as slaves to white people” chestnut without mention of any of the socio-economic, socio-environmental issues and nuances within those issues that result in things being the way they are in the present day. We don’t want, as British people, to be confronted with the idea that we have to change, that what we are doing is wrong; we like to turn a blind eye, as long as we are not the worst. We will do anything not to have to confront the idea that we are the worst, a fact most amply illustrated by the recent tabloid treatment of Dr Neil Ferguson on the day Britain became the country in Europe with the worst mortality rate due to Covid-19: anything to deflect from the fact that we, Britain, once leader of a great Empire, have sunk to the bottom, down there with the slime. We can look at what’s going on over in America and sleep soundly in the assumption that we don’t treat people that way or that “our” Blacks have it better. But to do so is to be complicit in the culture of a new Jim Crow, a global pandemic in itself, the epicentre of which is in the United States, of course, but one that we cannot afford to assume we are immune from or that isn’t already affecting us in any way.

This, in some ways, has been the most beautiful Spring of my lifetime. I’ve enjoyed the publication of my debut novel, and the response to it; the London I live in is looking its natural best. The sun shines every day. It’s warm; roses, azaleas and peonies are superabundant in deliciously saturated colours. But, otherwise, it’s also the ugliest Spring. Never before has it been more starkly presented to me, in measurable facts, the depth of inequality and injustice Black people are suffering here in the UK. Not only are we statistically more likely to be economically disadvantaged, with fewer opportunities for physical distancing and greater danger for exposure due to our likelier frontline jobs, we are seeing, in 2020, black men being stopped in their cars by police at a disproportionately high rate, and a ridiculously high mortality rate compared to other ethnic descriptions – this when, according to research published by the World Health Organisation, Africa is the least-affected region globally by Coronavirus (so far), flying in the face of any rabid eugenicist’s brainwave associating higher Black mortality rates in the global west with genetics. Not only do we have to wake up to a new morning and read about yet another person of our skin colour who has been brutally murdered by police or by a white supremacist father-son team sicced like dogs by their president to sniff out and kill Black people on sight, we also have to read about the memory of a Black woman, Belly Mujinga, being served the indignity of a closed case in favour of the person who caused her death. Which Black person would get off scot-free having spat at a white person, boldly claiming their fluids were positive for Covid-19? Which white person’s death would be shown on TV stations all over the world, their neck crushed for eight whole minutes under the knee of a Black cop? Simple role-reversals are just that – simple. They do not take into account the intersections from which Black and minority-ethnic and/or queer people have to negotiate their everyday lives in a structurally-racist world (which bell hooks has described as an imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy). No Black cop would ever rest his knee on the neck of even the most dangerous white suspect, because of the respect inculcated in us for even the evilest of white souls (remember the gentle way Dylann Roof, perpetrator of the Charleston massacre, was walked into custody?). Black people are allowed to be lynched for all the world to see; white cops think they’re doing the world a favour. And white people are not standing up for us. They are turning their heads away, as if racism is not their problem. Well, it is.

I get it. When I wake up, look at Twitter or Instagram and see another one of these stories come through, my immediate instinct is to turn away; nobody wants the politicised death of a stranger to be the first thing that confronts them, daubing over their waking dreams with thick, red graffiti. Part of this might be my own socialised British “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. But the greater part of it, I think, is a refusal to believe that this could be happening, in such a way, again, so soon after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor; news came through the next day of the death of Tony McDade, a black trans man killed by a police officer in Florida. But I first became aware of George Floyd’s death scrolling through Instagram with my coffee in bed. Ms Tina Lawson, mother of Beyoncé and Solange – two artists who have put their careers on the line to do their duty to protect their fellow citizens and draw attention to the issues they face – is usually one of the first public figures in my feeds to denounce and rally against police brutalities, posting strongly-worded statements, beatified pictures of the deceased, phone numbers to lobby the sheriff and mayoral offices most local to the killing, calling for a change of mentality and an end to racist violence. Ms Lawson shared George Floyd’s portrait, regrammed from Viola Davis’s earlier post; so soon after waking, I didn’t quite understand the context, and to my shame, I scrolled on. But I kept seeing this picture more and more, shared by African American celebrities, and other pictures of a cop kneeling down – the apparently-righteous kind of kneeling, as opposed to Colin Kaepernick’s apparently-radical kind of kneeling – but I didn’t understand. I didn’t get the picture. Because of its composition, and the expressive manner of its majority subject, a white cop, looking at the camera, straight backed, hand-on-hip, ageing but lantern-jawed like an everyday superhero just doing his job enforcing the law, I didn’t understand what was going on, and how this image connected to that of the large, friendly-looking black man Ms Tina Lawson had shared earlier. It wasn’t until later that I saw that there was a head beneath this white cop’s knee. Captions put words in his mouth redolent of the last of Eric Garner: “I can’t breathe”. Then it emerged there was a video. I refused to watch it. I did not want to see someone lose their life. I did not want to see someone pinned down, struggling, fighting, unable to free himself from beneath the grown man resting his entire body weight on their neck, losing breath, losing voice, losing consciousness, being disestablished from whatever threat they were deemed to be, being murdered. I did not want to see a Black person go through that, for all to see; what was once a sycamore tree, now a knee; what was once a gathered crowd of white nationalists attending a lynching for sport, now millions of people all over the world gawping at their smartphones. Again. If I see it happen to another Black person, in my mind, it’s happening to me. It drips poison into my ear, makes me think of all the ways I might be punished if I leave the house, while Black, travel while Black. Every microaggression leads to my unjust death, a life lived in vain. I am not alone in declaring murders of unarmed Black people to be deleterious to my mental health.

I successfully avoided watching George Floyd die, or entering into the outrage about his death, but then the video – which I today learned was shot by a seventeen-year-old Black girl of uncertain relationship to Floyd, and God knows what trauma she must be going through now – was shown on BBC News that night, uncensored. We watched an American man die on the news – an African-American man. Does that desensitise us? Does it not feed into the suspected narrative that Black people in death don’t deserve the same dignity as white people? This compounds the feared belief that I, a Black man, am less worthy than a white person. That I do not matter. That my body can be choked of life by someone trained to recognise me as a threat to life – whether I have a weapon or not – and paraded around the world. The outcry, by both Black and some white people, has been strong. But beyond a few moments of contemplation in the aftermaths of these deaths, nothing changes. The slaps in Black faces become increasingly insidious.

White supremacy is here to stay, whether its supreme leader gets four more years or not. This is a wave whose power and intention is not yet clear. I want to write a lot more about this. But to all the Black people and our allies suffering pain and anxiety today, I can only say this: stay strong. We are wonderful and amazing. We are a miracle. We are great. For all the hundreds of years of the Atlantic slave trade, when our ancestors had no rights, no self-ownership, no means of telling their own stories, were bred like cattle for best cotton-picking/cane-harvesting characteristics – the fact that we are alive and so many of us are thriving, winning, despite the obstacles in our path other ethnicities don’t have and/or put in place, is a miracle, and we deserve to take all strength and belief from that. We walked the earth first and will always. But we have to keep fighting. Dr Cornell West quoted Samuel Beckett when he urged us to “try again, fail again, fail better”. We can not let any death, any injustice, any microaggression go unchallenged. It is exhausting, and we have to keep questioning what we want equality with (this capitalist agenda? Really?). I’m not the cleverest, I’m not the bravest. But I have a voice, and I shall do my best.

#BlackLivesMatter

References: 

bell hooks | We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (Routledge, 2004)

Dr Cornel West in conversation with Anderson Cooper on CNN: https://twitter.com/AC360/status/1266532710266425345?s=20

Killer Mike’s address to protesters in Atlanta and other US cities: https://twitter.com/KingJames/status/1266630475709177856?s=20

© Paul Mendez, 2020

[hogwartsfirebolt]

FIC REC!!!!!

The Paradox of Active Surrender - @korlaena​ and @saulaie​ - 107k - Explicit

“When Draco shows up as a suspect in a murder case after eight years of no contact, Harry has to balance his professional life and his past friendship with Draco. As suspicion mounts against him, Harry knows he has to keep his distance, but Draco makes that difficult when he starts claiming that they have a Life Debt to settle. Harry wants to trust him, but what is he hiding and where has he been these long years?”

This fic is absolutely INCREDIBLE. Thoughts under read more. 

Have you seen that meme of a guy who opens a box unsuspectingly and out comes A BEAM OF LIGHT so unbelievably shiny that the guy is in shock and left wide-eyed, his hair rumpled and his breath labored? That was me with this story. 

As soon as I opened the door to it, I was sucked right into the air of mystery and mysticism it is so carefully enveloped in. We step into a murder case, the aftermath of violence, shoulder to shoulder with Harry as he deals with a situation he’s obviously encountered before; he’s only thrown off balance when he spots Draco standing to the side, the only witness, and oh boy does it start to get interesting. He hasn’t seen Draco in eight years, and when he finally does, it’s as the only suspect of a murder.

I adore it! The ambience that the author set from the get go was immensely intriguing, I was plagued with questions after only a few minutes of reading, itching to know more, and the way information was handled was so clever, we find out about the case bit by hard earned bit. 

And, in the midst of this whirlwind of questions, we get to see the magic, which is one of the absolute highlights of this story for me. The incredibly visual way in which charms are described is something I have not seen the likes of in any fic before, and the life debt!!! It is such a creative take on the bonding trope! Not only does it make perfect sense, but it also provides some comic relief when we see the ways Draco tries to dissolve it and how offended he gets when Harry makes him work for it. 

The characterizations are spot on. Draco is prickly and snotty and clueless, but he’s also incredibly funny and clever and trying hard to be better; Harry is stubborn, still a bit hot-headed and overprotective, but he’s also hard-working, immensely kind and always willing to help. Their careers fit them like a glove. It’s not often that I enjoy such intense focus on Harry’s work as an auror, but here I just wanted more and more of it, because every second we see him, it comes through how much he loves it, how important it is to him to do as much as he can to help make the world a better place; and I don’t even know where to begin with Draco being a blacksmith. It’s such an unusual career, but somehow feels like a perfect analogy for who he is as a person: someone who makes beautiful things out of the toughest of materials.

They fall together beautifully, in between laughs and arguments, discussions and Seekers games and chocolate. My heart melted when I saw how evident it was that they were falling in love, even through all the hardship and obstacles that are thrown in their way, but it was also incredibly important to me to see how much they come to value each other as friends, and the way they build their trust little by little, the way they CHOOSE to trust each other. I think this is one of the reasons why when they finally sleep together, it reads as warm and wonderful and sweet. 

There’s a plot twist that involves animagus forms that I am ACHING to talk about. It would be immensely spoilery though, so I’m just gonna say, IT’S INCREDIBLE AND I WAS MIND BLOWN, I loved it so much. I also truly loved the plot line of Draco’s house, especially with how that ties in at the end 😭

The side characters are wonderful, so so wonderful and lively. The little we see of Ginny and all the Weasleys and the Slytherins, but also Susan, who I don’t usually see a lot of in fic and who was downright amazing and a total BAMF.

And last but not least: the illustrations. The illustrations. Saulaie is immensely, heart-wrenchingly talented, and whenever I scrolled and saw a new illustration my heart did a little dance, because they fit the story so perfectly in every way, the colors and the depiction of magic are incredibly, absolutely beyond stunning, Draco looks exactly the way I imagine him, and Harry stole my heart with every single piece we get of his unruly hair and slightly crooked smile. The illustrations transformed the experience of the fic completely, allowed me to immerse myself fully in the feel of everything as I got visual clues that helped me build an image of what I was reading. Simply perfect. 

This was a LOT longer than intended, but it’s coming right from my heart, which wouldn’t stay calm after I finished this at three in the morning last night and promised myself that I would write this rec as soon as I could form a coherent phrase. If you love case fic, mystery, animagus theory, magical theory in general, bonds, a drarry relationship that rings incredibly true to the characters and illustrations that are so beautiful they make you cry, this story is for you. If you read it and enjoy it, feel free to send me a DM to gush about it together ❤️ 

[dfpbetrayed-blog]

Modeling And The Tragedy Of Karen Mulder

The news that '90s supermodel Karen Mulder was arrested in Paris for making death threats to her plastic surgeon could be written off as, at worst, a punchline, or at best, the latest expression of an unbalanced woman's erratic behavior.

Karen Mulder was a blonde 5'10" Dutch teenager who shot to fame after a friend sent in pictures of her to the Elite agency's famous Elite Model Look competition. Within two years, Mulder had given up high school to work full-time for clients like Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Versace. She made the covers of British Vogue, Italian Vogue, and various international editions of Elle, among many other magazines. At 21, she bagged a multimillion-dollar multiyear contract with Guess? She was picked as one of Peter Lindbergh's iconic gaggle of leather-clad biker supermodels in American Vogue in 1991, when DUMBO was still thought of as a little dangerous.

That's Mulder second from the right, between Stephanie Seymour and Naomi Campbell. Her career, still managed by Elite, flourished through the 1990s. Mulder capitalized on her wholesome look with commercial gigs, like her two appearances in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, and she became a Victoria's Secret model. There was a Karen Mulder doll, made by Hasbro. Mulder dated a racecar driver, she dated Prince Albert II of Monaco, she dated a real-estate developer named Jean-Yves Le Fur. They broke up, but it was still Le Fur who picked her up off the floor of her Paris apartment and called the ambulance in the winter of 2002, after Mulder attempted suicide by overdosing on pain pills.

The suicide attempt and the coma she would lie in for two days following it came after Mulder had told the press, "From the beginning, I hated being photographed. For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, 'Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day." It came after she laid a formal rape complaint in France against Prince Albert. It came after she said, "My job distracted me from my worries. It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else." It came after a notorious appearance on French television where her various claims — that men at Elite had raped her, that she had been coerced into having sex to garner better contracts, that Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves in a ring that extended through the top echelons of French society, implicating politicians, members of the police, and other top officials, that her own father had raped her, that she had been sexually abused by a family friend from the age of 2, that she had been hypnotized and raped, kidnapped and raped, and raped some more — were regarded as so potentially libelous that France 2 not only never aired the segment, but destroyed the master tape. No matter: In a series of more-or-less coherent magazine interviews, Mulder repeated most of her accusations, and added that her agency had encouraged her to use cocaine and heroin. She told the Daily Mail, "They tried to turn me into a prostitute because they thought it would be so easy. I was raped by two bookers. I reported them and they were fired. Another time I was shut in the office of [a high-profile man from the modeling world] for a whole day. All these people who betrayed me I used to love very much. Then I realized how big the conspiracy was. It brought in the government and police, who both used Elite girls. People have tried to kidnap and poison me." 

Her suicide attempt came after she was packed off to Montsouris hospital and heavily sedated for five months of treatment for depression and anxiety. (Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men Mulder had accused of raping her, paid.) It came after Marie was filmed on hidden camera by the BBC trying to give a 15-year-old model £300 for sex, and bragging of how many entrants to the Elite Model Look competition — average age 15 — he was going to sleep with that year. It came after Mulder's attempt at a crossover music career resulted in the release of a cover of "I Am What I Am", which peaked at number 13 on the French pop charts in the summer of 2002. It was after recanting all her rape accusations, and explaining that she was in fact dealing with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse and had "gone overboard," that the former supermodel tried to kill herself. Since emerging from hospital, and until her arrest yesterday, Mulder has kept a low profile. 

How a woman like Mulder, one of those people who journalists are always quick to say "has it all," could fall so far, so fast is not really the question that commands interest here. We all know this story: it's got drugs in it, and predatory older men, and very young women, and the abject self-consciousness of the individual whose worth is in her pictures. It's always more or less the same story, even if Mulder, with her recantations and paranoid stories of kidnapping and poison at the hands of a shadowy "they," isn't always its most credible narrator. It's the story of Wallis Franken, of Ruslana Korshunova, of Katoucha Niane.

It's the story presented in a 60 Minutes segment from 1988 that reported, according to author Ian Halperin, "about the many models who had been drugged, raped, and sexually harassed by the world's top agency owners." (Halperin characterized the segment as "shocking.") It's the story of the BBC's undercover documentary of Elite executives offering to pimp out their models for drugs. (This was seen as "alarming" and "surprising.") It's the story models like Sena Cech are telling when they talk about being coerced into sex by photographers and clients at castings and on the job. (These accounts, and model Sara Ziff's documentary that provides one vehicle for them, were described in the Observer by writer Louise France as both "shocking" and "surprising.")

What amazes even more than how little the story actually differs from telling to telling, how fundamentally the same its elements remain, is our capacity for disbelief. It takes a certain dedication to one's own credulity to insist on being "surprised," "alarmed" and "shocked" by a situation that has been the subject of interest from such under-the-radar media venues as 60 Minutes going back a generation. As a culture, we have so far managed, through every news story and blog post and exposé, to maintain an innocence of the realities of the modeling industry that is almost touching. Or nearly culpable.

Our persistent willingness to be taken aback by the notion that wealthy, powerful, older men, when left in charge of a younger, poorer, female workforce, might generally act as something less than gentlemen, is testament to the power the multibillion-dollar fashion industry wields as an expert creator of narratives. It's this attitude of disbelief that allows agency directors to claim they had no idea some of their models were using cocaine and that some of their bookers were dealing it to them, or that some photographers like to sleep with models and some bookers encourage models to go along with it. Our endless capacity for shock is what gets Karen Mulder sedated and lets Gerald Marie retain, to this day, his position as head of Elite Paris.

 The longer we keep up our charade of disbelief, the less the industry will change. One of the most chilling scenes in Sara Ziff's documentary, Picture Me, didn't make the final cut. A model was talking about a photo shoot that took place she was 16, with what Ziff has described as "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names." When the girl left the studio to go to the bathroom between shots, the photographer cornered her in the hall. Then he started touching her dress. "But you're used to this," Ziff reported he said. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts.

 It's not strange to be handled like that." Then the world-famous photographer put his hand to her crotch and forced his fingers into her vagina. The teenager, who had never even kissed anyone before, just froze and waited for the man to walk away. They finished the shoot, and she never told anyone. The day before the New York premiere, she begged for the scene to be cut.

 But more and more models are speaking out. (I have.) If only we can dispense with our "shock" at what they have to say, perhaps this is an industry where some realistic chance for improvement remains.

[re-readingcomics]

Comics Read 5/30-6/18/2022

At some time during this pandemic time while I was mostly getting comic books through pre-order where it would be months or longer between purchase an receiving, I started to think of my own collection of comic books, (and for that matter, books and music) as a sort of autobiographical act. The idiosyncrasies of my choices make my collections unique and say a lot about who I am. I am a person in their late thirties who studied art history and attends a lot of museums. Which is why in this entry I am writing about owning two comic book biographies of seventeenth century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, both purchased in the post COVID reality.

These are I Know What I Am The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi by Dina Siciliano and Artemisia with text by Nathalie Ferlut and art by Tamia Baudouin. They could not be more different in style and approach without becoming about different subject matters. I mentioned my age and that I go to museums often to lead to the fact that I did go to the 2001 Metropolitan Museum of Art show Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi which paired paintings by the father and daughter based on the same Biblical and Classical tales. (Both of these books are more interested in the Biblical than neoclassical paintings.) Siciliano cites the exhibit’s catalogue as one of her sources in the extensive notes section of her book. Ferlut and Baudouin’s book doesn’t have a notes section nor do they list their sources, though they do have some beautiful full color reproductions of Artemisia’s work in the back. Siciliano’s work covers Artemisia’s whole life including rumors about her conception and speculation about her death. (The official cause is unknown, but there was a plague outbreak in Naples around the time she died.) Ferlut and Baudouin’s tale is an intergenerational one of Artemisia’s daughter Prudenzia learning of her mother’s past while Artemisia’s brother, Marco, convinces her to come to London and help their father, Orazio, in his later years, leading to an end of reconciliation. 

As you may have guessed from the previous paragraph, Siciliano’s I Know Who I Am is pretty text heavy. At some moments I really appreciate this. My art historical study of Italian art basically ends with the Mannerists, about a generation before Orazio. My knowledge of Italy has huge gaps in areas south of Rome, and as Artemisia spent many of her latter years in Naples I have to appreciate the historic detail she includes. Unfortunately, sometimes the text heavy detail makes it feel like the comic arts medium isn’t right for it. There is a lot to like about the art. Stylistically it draws on intaglio prints of the 17th century. There are great recreations of art discussed. It’s just a little stiff on the page, especially when it is being used to illustrate court transcripts. Periodically there are full page character portraits that have frames helping describe who these historical figures are. One of them is for Galileo, and in comparison to that, one most of the others’ frames are really bare. Which is a good example of the problems of this heavily cited book. In the sections where there is a lack of textual sources on which to rely, it is kind of choppy. I did find myself wondering if maybe building something around emotional truth rather than what can be found to be true. After reading the next book, I decided that for all the ways Siciliano’s book wasn’t a satisfying read, it was still the better choice.

Nathalie Ferlut and Tamia Baudouin’s Artemisia is told with a cruder art style than Siciliano’s and does little to mimic the style and technologies of its subject’s time period. This doesn’t have to be bad. It some ways the figures are less stiff and at one moment there is an interesting play on the fluidity between subject and model, making an interesting comment on how posing for Orazio affected Artemisia.

Both books have to cover Artemisia’s rape by Agostino Tassi, an associate of her father, and it’s aftermath. The aftermath includes both an affair with Tassi (Artemisia thought it would ensure that he would marry her after being “ruined”) to a well documented trial where Tassi was convicted, but never served his (light) sentence. Here the distinctions in storytelling style feel starkest. On the one had I think Artemisia’s depiction of the people around the attack, particularly the (false) family friend Tuzia feels more real. In some ways it seems to care about how it all affected Artemisia as a person more. I Know Who I Am also presents the rape as some result of a conspiracy, which may have some truth to it, but is confusing and does contribute to lessoning Artemisia’s perspective. But its depiction of the affair, while more sexually explicit, may be more responsible by not trying to dramatize it as a power play between Artemisia and Tassi.

The part where I really found myself preferring the I Know Who I Am approach to the material with regards to her marriage and entry to the Academia della Arte. The Siciliano book has Artemisia’s entry into the academy happen early in the marriage with little drama. Ferlut and Baudouin have it late after the marriage disintegrating over her husband’s jealousy of her success and independence. As I saw how much research went into the first of these that I read, I lost my patience with the second around this time. 

Making fictionalized biographies is hard, especially when one aspect of the subject’s life is better recorded than anything else. 

[quinn-tessentials]

5 Collections Gathered from Library of Congress

Collection: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives

This collection is influential for me because, I was drawn to the documentation work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke White, and their different ways of documenting people who were apart of the Resettlement Program or farmers, and sharecroppers. Roy Stryker, the Head of the FSA, would give these photographers a list of what to go out and photograph and then collect them into an archive. Stryker had a strong command, in the photos he wanted but Walker Evans did not want to conform to aestheticizing the people suffering from the aftermath of the Great Depression. Stryker, Lange, and Bourke-White, all shot from dramatized angels, altered the photos to suit their own narratives that would evoke more emotion from viewers, but Evans shot from straight on with no distractions. Although Evans did slightly alter his phots, but it was only ever to improve the composition of the photo, and not to aestheticizing people’s pain. To Evans he believed the word “documentary” meant not tampering with reality. As a young woman, living in an age where altering photos to meet today’s beauty standards, remembering the lesson in my own photography, that to capture reality means to capture the world in front of me and think of terms of composition instead of aesthetics.

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Collection: Posters: Artists Posters

             This collection includes over 85,000 posters from the 19th century to the present day, and contains many graphic design styles as Art Nouveau, Russian Constructivism, Art Deco, Bauhaus, etc… As a Communication Design Major, there is a lot I can learn from looking at past graphic designer’s work. Especially from the Artist A.M.Cassandre. His Posters were interesting in their visual styles but also in their clever word play. I would like to take that creative aspect of think of the whole image and put that into my own Design Styles

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Collection: Daguerreotypes

             This collection includes over 700 daguerreotypes where many of them are images of portraits but also includes early architecture and outdoor scenes. I enjoy looking at daguerreotypes because of the history of photography. As a photographer myself, I can learn from that history and implement my findings into my own work. Daguerreotypes often were used to be documentary and describe one’s likeness but at the same time does not tell us about what that person is like on the inside. But Albert Sands Southworth used daguerreotypes more like calotypes. Were the use wasn’t intended to capture the likeness of someone or something but was used in an artful way. One that which relied on posed lighting and subject, that imbued the scene with longingness and emotion. In my own photography I will implement that use of wanting to describe and capture a scene but imbue that scene with emotion that will resonate with the viewers.

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Collection: Korab Collection

This collection includes 800 photographs by Balthazar Korab that documented 19 architectural projects by Eero Saarinen. In my own photography and art, I am drawn to photographing architecture. From viewing this collection, I can learn how architectural projects were documented and photographed in the 1950’s-1960’s and implement that retro aspects into my own photography and post processing.

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Collection: Fine Prints

             As an artist I am fascinated and intrigued by many different mediums. The newest flicker of inspiration has been Print making. When viewing this collection, that only has stroked the fire within me to learn more about the process and eventually try my own hand at it. The ability to make detailed realistic or illustrative potential of the fine print making process intrigues & fascinates me. When I viewed this print from George Elbert Burr, where the print looks almost like a picture, it spoke to me in a way where I was in awe of the time and effort this must have took to capture such a picturesque landscape. 

[parsippanylibrarykids]

By: Miss Jen, Miss Katy, & Miss Melissa

Picture Books 

Barnett, Mac. The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse. ​(Grades K-2)  This clever picture book begins with a mouse that is quickly gobbled up by a wolf. Fortunately his new accomodations AKA the wolf’s stomach include a duck with kitchenware and jam. The duck states “I may have been swallowed but I have no intention of being eaten.” Award winning illustrator Jon Klassen’s artwork add to the charm of this folkloric tale. 

Colleen, Marcie. Love, Triangle.​ ​ (Grades K-2) Square and Circle have been best friends since they were first created. Triangle arrives on the scene and brings new ideas. Both Square and Circle want to be friends with Triangle which causes a split between the two buddies. This common friendship problem is resolved at the end of this geometric story.

 Daywalt, Drew. The Legend of Rock, Paper, Scissors. ​(Grades K-3) The origins of the classic schoolyard game are explained in hilarious detail. Will Rock, Paper, or Scissors be victorious? Rock is searching for a worthy opponent. Paper leaves the Empire of Mom’s Home Office after conquering the Computer Printer while Scissors defeats Dinosaur-Shaped Chicken Nuggets. Wacky inanimate objects come to life under the expertise of illustrator Adam Rex. Fans of Daywalt’s The Day the Crayons Quit will be equally as charmed by this book. 

Denos, Julia. Windows. ​(PreS-1) In this story, a boy of color dons a read hoodie, leashes his dog and ventures out into the twilight, where the windows are “blinking awake as the lights turn on a neighborhood of paper lanterns”. The reader gets to peer in at the small figures dancing, making dinner or throwing a party and watch as the color of the sky changes. The compositions are rendered in ink, watercolor, letterpress and digital collage. The narrative ends with a story shared and a snuggle. Readers will want to revisit this story over and over. Everyday routine turned to wonder on an evening walk filled with discovery. 

Dykman, Ame. Read the Book, Lemmings!​ (PreS-2) Another delightful collaboration by the team behind Wolfie the Bunny and Horrible Bear! Lemmings don’t jump off cliffs. It says so in the book that Foxy is reading. However, the three lemmings on the boat have not read the book and keep jumping into the water. After trying unsuccessfully to get the lemmings to read the book, Foxy realizes he is going to have to actually teach the lemmings to read before he can stop them. A funny read aloud! Children will love this book at storytime and at home. 

Jory, John and Benji Davies. Come Home Already!​ (PreS-3) The third hysterical picture book about Duck and Bear, unlikely pals. In this book, an excited Duck wants to hang out with Bear but Bear has left to go fishing for a whole week on his own. Bear is relieved to have some time alone. What will Duck do while Bear is gone? How will he survive without his best friend? 

Lamothe, Matt. ​This is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World. ​(Grades K-3) Seven children from Italy, Japan, Uganda, Russia, India, Iran, and Peru describe one day in their lives as they eat, play, and learn. An author’s note, a glossary, a map, and photographs of the families are included at the end of the book. This is an informational picture book that could be used in a social studies unit. 

Shannon, David. Bizzy Mizz Lizzie​. (Grades 1-3)  Lizzie is the busiest, buzziest bee in Hivetown. She longs to impress the Queen by winning a spelling bee contest, but she studies to the point of exhaustion on top of trying to juggle all of her other activities. When she dozes off in the middle of the competition, the only solution is rest. Lizzie finally learns to stop and smell the flowers. A book with a good message and wonderful illustrations will appeal to young readers. 

Tsurumi, Andrea. Accident! ​(PreS-2) When a little armadillo named Lola knocks a jug of red juice all over her family’s white sofa, she flees to the library to hide. But as Lola run through town, she is joined by many others who have also made a mess and want to hide at the library too, avoiding conflict. Fun and colorful illustrations are found throughout the book and children will be drawn to the intricate details. This book teaches that a mistake can happen due to thoughtlessness, carelessness or bad luck and that it is ok to call it an accident but also necessary to “make it better” and “own up to it.” 

Easy Readers 

LaReau, Kara. The Infamous Ratsos are Not Afraid. ​(Grades 1-2) Brothers Louie and Ralphie Ratso plan to clear out an abandoned lot in their neighborhood and create an arcade. The problem is that the house next to the vacant lot might be haunted. ​This is the second book in the series that began with the Geisel Honor Book, The Infamous Ratsos. 

Shea, Bob. Ballet Cat: What’s Your Favorite Favorite? ​(Grades 1-3) Ballet Cat and her cousin Goat are preparing a show for grandma and both want to prove that they are the best. Ballet Cat will come up with a fancy dance routine and Goat will perform tricks at his magic show. Which one will be her FAVORITE favorite? Terrifically fun third entry in this series. 

Snyder, Laurel. Charlie & Mouse & Grumpy. ​ (Grades K-1) This picture book/easy reader hybrid is the sequel to Charlie and Mouse. Charlie and Mouse are brothers who are spending time with their grandfather AKA Grumpy. In four short chapters, the trio discuss what it means to be “medium”, enjoy a special night while the boys’ parents go out, and choose the proper goodnight song. 

Yoon, Salina. That’s My Book! and Other Stories. ​(Grades K-1) Big Duck, Little Duck, and Porcupine are a sweet trio of friends that find the best use for books, plan a talent show, and dress like a pirate. The latest addition to the Duck, Duck, Porcupine series contains three short chapters with bold text in large speech bubbles. 

Juvenile Fiction 

Bartok, Mira. The Wonderling. ​(Grades 4-6) Number 13 is a groundling (half human/half animal) who lives in an orphanage run by Ms. Carbunkle. He is named Arthur by a fellow groundling when he saves her. The pair of new friends escape the “Home” and set off on an adventure full of danger, magic, and mystery. Fans of Erin Hunter’s Warriors series will enjoy this lengthy fantasy novel. 

Bradley, Kimberly Brubaker. The War I Finally Won. ​(Grades 4-6)  Picking up right after 2015’s Newbery Honor book The War That Saved My Life, this very worthy sequel continues the story of Ada, her brother Jamie, and their guardian Susan. Set against the backdrop of World War II (which is felt much more immediately in this novel), Ada struggles to deal with the aftermath of years of abuse by her mother. An emotional, yet rewarding book for fans of the first book or for readers who love excellent historical fiction. 

Broach, Elise. Trouble at School for Marvin & James. ​(Grades 1-2) This is the third book in the Masterpiece Adventures series featuring best friends, James and Marvin. James is a human and Marvin is a small black beetle. James decides to bring Marvin to school so he can experience James’ art class taught by beloved teacher, Mr. Chang. Mr. Change has blue hair and often quotes, “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents.” Marvin enjoys school until a sneeze separates him from James. This book is an excellent choice for new chapter-book readers. 

Clements, Andrew. The Losers Club.​ (Grades 3-6) Alec loves to read -- so much so that it gets him in trouble at school and at home. Even the head of the afterschool program at his school says he can’t just sit around by himself and read; he has to join a club. So Alec comes up with a plan to create his own reading club, which he names The Losers Club to deter other kids from joining. His bright idea backfires when it turns out to be the most popular club at school. There are tons of great books referenced throughout, and there’s a helpful list at the back of the book for bookworms who want to read them all! 

DeStefano, Lauren. The Girl with the Ghost Machine.​ (Grades 4-6) Emmaline Beaumont was 10 years old when her mother died; two years later, her father remains so consumed with grief that it’s almost as if Emmaline has lost both parents. In a desperate attempt to bring his wife back, Monsieur Beaumont tinkers with his “ghost machine” night and day. When Emmaline’s attempt to destroy the machine doesn’t go as planned, she and readers are left wondering if precious memories of loved ones are worth trading for the chance to interact with them one more time. Emmaline’s twin best friends, Oliver and Gully, represent the push and pull between hope and logic that plagues Emmaline and offers her new ways of understanding grief. Readers should be prepared for heaviness and sadness throughout. A story of loss, friendship, and resilience. 

Farrer, Maria. Me and Mister P.​ (Grades 2-5) Arthur is tired of his younger brother Liam’s behavior. He can’t even watch television with volume since it upsets his brother. Arthur decides to run away from home but he meets a friendly polar bear named Mister P. who alters his plans. Mister P. helps Arthur accept his brother’s differences. This quirky story is bibliotherapy for siblings of children with autism as well as a good read for children who like fantastical animal stories. 

Krishnaswami, Uma. Step Up to the Plate, Maria Singh. ​(Grades 3-5) Maria Singh lives with her family in Yuba City, California during WWII. Most of the community members are adha-adha (half and half) with fathers from India and mothers from Mexico. Maria’s teacher forms a softball team which Maria wants to join but she is not sure if her father will let her. Maria and her family struggle against discrimination from kids and adults. 

Middleton, Dana. Open If You Dare. ​(Grades 4-6) For Birdie and her best friends, Ally and Rose, the joy of finishing elementary school is overshadowed by their dread of summer’s end. With Rose unwillingly moving back to England, and Ally and Birdie attending different middle schools, their long, close friendship is coming to an end. In the meantime, Ally deals with problems on and off the pitcher’s mound, while Birdie follows the trail of mystery, and Rose rebels against her parents in a creative, yet destructive way. The story is set in Atlanta with well-drawn individuals from different generations. Tween issues are addressed from first crush to first steps toward independence. A rewarding chapter book. 

Morris, Chad. Mustaches for Maddie.​ (Grades 4-6) Maddie is a 12 year old girl who has a big imagination. When she is diagnosed with a brain tumor, she faces surgery and possible negative outcomes from the operation. She also faces middle school friendships and even jealous classmates with humor and bravery. Maddies loves fake mustaches so her supporters wear them. This book is based on the authors’ daughter and will appeal to readers who liked Wonder by R.J. Palacio. 

Pennypacker, Sara. Waylon! Even More Awesome​. (Grades 2-4) A Clementine series spin off which features another likeable kid. Waylon and Baxter are classmates who have to share a dog who lives in a shelter. The two boys can not be more different. While Waylon loves everything about science and following rules, Baxter is always in trouble and close to being a juvenile delinquent. When their dog, Dumpster Eddy, is going to be thrown out of the shelter he is living in, the boys come up with a plan to save him. A book about friendship, family, perseverance and hard work make this a wonderful book for reluctant readers. 

Schlitz, Laura. Princess Cora and the Crocodile. ​(Grades 1-3) Princess Cora never has a moment to play or relax as her parents, the King and Queen, are constantly training her to be perfect. She writes a desperate letter to her fairy godmother asking for help. A pet crocodile arrives the next day and he impersonates Cora so she can have a day off. Caldecott Medalist Brian Floca’s illustrations add to the humor of this story. 

Swanson, Matthew. ​The Real McCoys. ​(Grades 3-5) Moxie McCoy is a fourth grade detective who faces her biggest challenge yet in this fun chapter book. When someone kidnaps beloved school mascot Eddie the Owl, Moxie is on the case-but she is forced to solve this new mystery on her own since her best friend, and fellow detective, has moved away. Moxie finds clues and points fingers but she needs help to find the owl mascot. Enter Milton, Moxie’s smart little brother. Can the real McCoys solve the crime of the century? 

Wilson, Amy. ​The Lost Frost Girl​. (Grades 4-6) A modern day fairy tale about a girl who discovers that she is Jack Frost’s daughter. Owl is a twelve year old girl with a quirky mom, a dad she has never met, a cool best friend named Mallory and a boy who gives her weird looks at school. When she finds out that Jack Frost is her father, she is determined to meet him and delves into Jack’s wonderful and wild world of winter. She realizes she is part human/part fay and has special powers of her own. A tale of family, friendship and magic and embracing who you are meant to be. 

Zemke, Deborah. The Curse of Einstein’s Pencil. ​(Grades 2-3) This second story about Bea Garcia will appeal to fans of Judy Moody. Bea is initially excited when the smartest girl in school, Judith Einstein asks her to be a partner in the geography contest. Then Bea wonders if the secret to Judith’s intelligence is her pencil. Bea takes Judith’s pencil when it rolls on the floor but the effect on her life and friendship is not what she expected. 

Graphic Novels 

Hale, Shannon and Pham, LeUyen. Real Friends​.​ (Grades 3-6) Shannon Hale, author of the bestselling Princess in Black series, debuts her first graphic novel: a memoir of her childhood friendships from kindergarten through sixth grade. Friends, rivals, and frenemies drift in and out of Shannon’s life, but her mean older sister remains a constant menacing presence. Readers will find much to relate to: neighborhood friends who move away; the dread of finding out that all of your friends have been assigned to another teacher. Hale as an adult narrates the story with a welcome perspective, acknowledging when she herself was a bad friend or seeing the dynamics of a situation more clearly in hindsight. Fans of Raina Telgemeier will love this. 

Jamieson, Victoria. All’s Faire in Middle School​.​ (Grades 4-8) From Victoria Jamieson, who won a Newbery Honor for Roller Girl, comes another middle grade graphic novel. Imogen has been homeschooled her whole life; her world revolves around the local Renaissance Faire where her parents work. But now she’s ready for her biggest challenge: middle school. Imogen’s unconventional background makes it difficult for her to fit in, but is she willing to do what it takes to conform? Recommend to fans of Raina Telgemeier. 

Siegel, Mark. The Sand Warrior. ​ (Grades 3-5) The Five Worlds is a galaxy of five planets filled with different species. Oona Lee teams up with An Tzu, a boy from the poorest slums, and Jax Amboy, a lonely star athlete. They discover that they may be able to light five ancient beacons and save the Five Worlds. Hand this fantasy story to fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender and the Amulet series. 

Biography 

Guglielmo, Amy and Tourville, Jacqueline. Pocket Full of Colors.​ ​(Grades K-4). Mary Blair is remembered today as one of the greatest and most influential Disney animators, but at the time, her use of color was considered “too vivid, too wild.” When her all-male colleagues at Disney reject her ideas, she strikes out on her own, where she finds huge success as an illustrator and set designer following her own vision. Finally, Walt Disney himself asks her to come back; she’s the only one he will trust to design the now-classic ride It’s a Small World. Gorgeous brightly-colored illustrations evoke Blair’s distinctive style. An author’s note is included at the end of the book. 

Meltzer, Brad. I am Sacagawea. ​(Grades 1-3) Sacagawea’s story is the latest addition to the Ordinary People Change the World​ best-selling biography series. Sacagawea was the only Native American to join Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Children will learn about the traits that made Sacagawea a trailblazer and the significant contributions she made to the world. A timeline and photos are included at the back of the book. Christopher Eliopoulos’ illustrations reflect his origins in the comic industry. He recreates lively scenes from Sacagawea’s life. 

Rosenstock, Barb. Vincent Can’t Sleep. ​(Grades K-2) This picture book biography of Vincent Van Gogh explores his life especially his troubles with insomnia. He had trouble sleeping as a child, an adolescent, and as an adult in the hospital. The text is short but lyrical while the illustrations in acrylic, pen, and watercolor reflect the night sky and his iconic work, The Starry Night. An author’s note and sources are included at the end of the book. 

Nonfiction 

Burcaw, Shane. Not So Different. ​(Grades 1-3). Shane was born with a degenerative muscle disease, and he’s never been able to walk. People always seem to ask him the same ten questions, like “How do you eat?” or “Why is your head so big?” Answers to these and more are accompanied by funny photographs. Through Shane’s funny and frank stories--he once broke his expensive motorized wheelchair by using it to lift his brother to dunk a basketball--readers will learn that they’re not so different from him after all. A nice introduction to disability for younger kids. 

Burns, Loree Griffin. Life on Surtsey: Iceland’s Upstart Island​. ​(Grades 4-7) In 1963, an underwater volcano off the coast of Iceland erupted, creating a new island formed from rock and ash. Scientists realized they could use this new island to study how life takes hold in a new environment. What are the first plants to grow on the bare rock? When and how do birds, insects, and other animals arrive? The book follows a team of scientists who return to the island every year to study the changes; full-color photographs document their journey and the changing island landscape. It’s a great introduction to how scientists really work, full of details that kids will love. (On a deserted island, how do you go to the bathroom?) A glossary and bibliography are included at the end of the book. 

Chin, Jason. Grand Canyon.​ (Grades 3-5) Some may think of the Grand Canyon as just a “big hole in the ground,” but through gorgeous and detailed illustrations, Chin reveals the complex ecosystem it hosts and what it tells us about our geological past. As a father and daughter hike through the canyon, the reader learns more about what makes each level of the canyon unique. Die-cuts reveal fossils in the modern-day, and when readers turn the page, they are transported back millions of years, to what the landscape looked like when each fossil was formed. Further scientific information, an author’s note, and sources are included at the end of the book. 

Eggers, Dave. ​Her Right Foot. ​(Grades 3 and up) A beautifully illustrated book about the history of the iconic statue along with humor and interesting trivia during the first part of the book. The second part of the book talks about the statue’s feet and how the back of her right foot is actually lifted as if she is going somewhere. No one ever seems to talk about the fact that the statue of liberty is walking; she is on the move. If the statue of liberty is a symbol of freedom, if the statue of liberty has welcomed millions of immigrants to the United States, then how can she stand still? 

Harris, Chris. I’m Just No Good At Rhyming.​ (Grades 3-8) Fans of Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, or Jack Prelutsky will enjoy this volume of humorous poetry for kids. Lane Smith’s hilarious illustrations add to the fun.

Rose, Deborah Lee. Beauty and the Beak. ​(Grades 3-5) An Alaskan bald eagle lost most of her beak after a poacher shot her. She was unable to eat, drink, or preen without her beak. The eagle later named Beauty was sent to the care of biologist Veltkamp at a raptor center in Idaho. Since Beauty’s beak did not regenerate, Veltkamp enlisted the help of a dentist and an engineer. Together they fashioned a beak for Beauty using a 3-D printer. This nonfiction animal rescue story has similaries to stories by the Hatkoffs including Winter’s Tail. 

Roy, Katherine. How To Be An Elephant. ​(Grades 3-6) A stunning look at how a newborn elephant matures into a capable member of the herd. This book emphasizes how an infant elephant learns through her family herd an array of skills that are necessary to keep up; from learning to walk and swim right away, projecting her voice, using her nose to eat and smell and keeping cool with her large ears. Large illustrations of calves with their herd are interspersed with captivating diagrams and smaller images work well together. A carefully researched book and a must have for all elementary school collections.  

[violetganache42]

My Thoughts on the Logan Paul Controversy

WARNING: The following post contains descriptions of the graphic material that was recorded on Logan’s most recent vlog, which was thankfully taken down. It also consists of opinions on his and Jake’s unforgivable actions prior to this incident, as well as cursing and the possibility of some heated rage, in which I would like to apologize for in advance. If I also come off as rude in some aspects, then I’m sorry for that too. No one ever thought 2018 was going to start off like this and leave them with intense fury over it. I would also like to apologize if the topics of depression, mental illnesses, and suicide upsets or triggers anyone who is reading this. That is not my intention whatsoever. This is my overall opinion on a very controversial issue and I don’t mean to upset or trigger anyone in doing so. With all that said and done, reader discretion is advised.

Okay, I never talk about them, but because of what recently happened, I want to quickly address the elephant in the room: I hate Jake and Logan Paul. Actually, “hate” is not the right word to describe them; how about “loathe?” Maybe “despise?” “Spite?” “Resent?” Whatever the word choice is, the two are both terrible celebrities together and individually for a variety of reasons. 

As you already know, both Jake and Logan achieved their fame back in 2013 when Vine was around, achieving 5.3 million and 3.1 million followers respective by the time of its shutdown. When they switched over to YouTube on November and September of 2016 accordingly, it all went downhill from then on. In general, they spew diss tracks at each other, churn out frantic videos in order to gain viewership and consume free online content, and sell merchandise from their clothing lines instead of being TV actors. The only problem is kids between the ages of 8 and 15 aren’t necessarily part of America’s economy, so combining their focus on this specific demographic with their insatiable thirst for fame and greed, it’s basically a lose-lose situation for them. But that’s not all I have to say about them because looking at them individually, they have their own brand of problematic behaviors and content.

In Jake’s case, he endured the most controversy because he’s been exposed as nothing but an annoying douchebag who did the following: made racist remarks on his minor characters in his videos, accused of emotionally abusing and manipulating his ex-girlfriend Alissa Violet, cyberbullied and brought down people online, constantly disrupted his peaceful neighborhood and his neighbors with his stunts and pranks, delivered pop culture phrases in an obnoxious manner during an interview that came off as—how the kids describe stuff nowadays—“cringey.” Not to mention his atrocious music video for his song “It’s Everyday Bro” dealt some serious damage to his career by receiving over 3 million dislikes on YouTube. He even got fired from Disney mid-season of Bizaardvark on July 24 for acting like his fame gives him the freedom for doing whatever the fuck he wants. What grinds my gears about him is he made all these apology videos and keeps claiming that he’s changed and moved on, but there is strong evidence that proves otherwise.

As for Logan, he has managed to escape controversy up until now by having roles on films and TV shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Weird Loners, Airplane Mode, the YouTube Red film The Thinning, and in the upcoming movie Valley Girl, taking part in a partnership with Dwayne Johnson, and opening his own brand called Maverick. Heck, his diss song, “The Fall of Jake Paul,” had managed to gather better reception from his fans, scoring only 173,000 dislikes, which is far less than the 3 million dislikes from “It’s Everyday Bro,” because of the actual effort put into it and the massive controversy Jake currently has. Of course, it still doesn’t change the fact that he is still a horrible person when you consider the info above, and his newest vlog helps showcase it. Without further ado, it’s time for me to stop talking about the past and focus on the present… and boy, do I have a lot to say about this.

For those of you who not aware or are just hearing about this, allow me to explain what exactly happened; however, I am generously giving you the choice to skip this because what I am about to describe may make you feel uncomfortable. For those of you brave enough to read the issue, please keep scrolling.

Earlier this week, on New Year’s Eve, Logan and three of his friends were traveling in Japan when they stumbled upon Aokigahara, which is best known as the country’s “Suicide Forest.” They all ended up going in the forest when they discovered the corpse of a man who hung himself, one of the most common methods suicide victims use to kill themselves in there. One of the friends was feeling uneasy about what they were witnessing, and despite his seriousness, Logan laughed it off and soon referred to it as “a moment in YouTube history,” only for him to get one hell of a reality check. As of now, so many people via YouTube and Twitter have reacted in absolute anger and/or disgust at what he had done and have been calling out on it, including Robyn from Anime America, Joey the Anime Man, Gaijin Goombah, Lost Pause, Game Theory, Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Game of Throne’s Sophie Turner, JackSepticEye, Stefan Karl, and even PewDiePie of all people. The immense amount of backlash had gotten to a point where he deleted the video and posted two apologies, one each on Twitter and YouTube. I will get to those later, but for right now, let me give my input on this.

First off, let’s break down the group’s reaction. Since the video was removed, I was able to find snippets of their dialogue from it thanks to CNN, which can be found here.

Logan: This is a first for me. This literally probably just happened.

Friend: I don’t feel good.

Logan: What, you never stand next to a dead guy?

Friend: No.

Logan: *laughs* It was gonna be a joke. This was all a joke. Why did it become so real?

Friend: Depression and mental illnesses is not a joke. We came here with the intent to focus on the haunted aspect of the forest. This just became very real.

Oh, boy. Where do I even begin with this? Logan, your friend is absolutely right. Depression and mental illnesses are not jokes, let alone FUCKING suicide! This was his first time seeing an actual dead body with his own two eyes and you laughed it off like it was nothing! For all we know, this could’ve been your first time seeing like this too, but why the fuck would you joke around like that if you were originally planning to explore the Suicide Forest’s haunted atmosphere?! It completely depletes the initial intent of your plans for your vlog all because of your “humor” in this! On a side note, whoever his friend is, can we please give him a round of applause for having the knowledge to understand what is and isn’t a joke? Because at least he gets the situation they were in.

And that brings me to another point I want to bring out: why he was joking around with what he saw. After they all ran out of the forest and into the parking lot, Logan said this that really caught my attention:

Logan: “…the smiling and laughing… is not a portrayal of how I feel about the circumstances. Everyone copes with shit differently… I cope with things with humor.”

WHAT?!

I’m sorry, but no! That is utter bullshit! Using humor to cope with something such as fear is fine, but using it to deal with the fact you stumbled across a REAL corpse?! That’s crossing the line! It helps illustrate that what you did was inhumanely wrong, and you know what?! The backlash proves it! When it became known to the public with around 6.5 million views, the viewers were repulsed by what you did! You showed them, from fans and people who don’t like to YouTubers, celebrities, and the media, that you have zero respect for the suicide victims through your insensitivity and voyeurism of this seriously important subject!

Not even your “Viewer Discretion is Advised” banter helped prevent this from happening, which leads me to readdressing your target demographic! For all we know, there could have been little children watching this and they would have either been scared that they saw the same hanging corpse or influenced negatively as shown by this tweet below!

“The other day my 7 year old sister showed me logan pauls video on the dead body and i was disgusted and told her to turn it off.My sister is 7 YEARS OLD and loves and watches logan paul all the time. later we went outside to do painting and she painted a hanging man in a forest” — Aoife Dormer (@aoife_dorma)

If anything, you could have emphasized your warning on how there are graphic material that are not suitable for children/minors, replaced “Advised” with “Recommended,” and made the video 18+ so that they would’ve been unable to watch it! Even so, it still didn’t change the fact it broke one of YouTube’s policy: prohibiting the depiction of violent, gory, or graphic material in a shocking, sensational, or disrespectful manner unless the footage is used for educational or documentary-based purposes. I’m not gonna touch upon how the staff aren’t pressing this forward or why they didn’t react sooner, but I digress. In my opinion, not changing the rating of your vlog—and having it violate a YouTube policy regardless—was part of a completely careless move on your part.

Oh, and this doesn’t end there; this actually leads into my next point: the apologies and the aftermath.

In the midst of the swift outcry of the enraged public, Logan deleted the video and tweeted an apology on New Year’s Day at exactly 10 PM about what he posted, but instead of taming the flame, it made things worse… and I can easily tell why. Much like the last remark, this one contradicts what he says.

“I didn't do it for views. I get views. I did it because I thought I could make a positive ripple on the internet, not cause a monsoon of negativity. I intended to raise awareness for suicide and suicide prevention and while I thought, 'if this video saves just ONE life, it'll be worth it,' I was misguided by shock and awe, as portrayed in the video.”

Dear God, there is a shit ton wrong with this tone-deaf apology it makes me want to scream! What pisses me off the most is his claim and there is strong proof in not only this tweet but also in my thoughts on the vlog that highlights how that is bullshit as well!

You should’ve thought about your actions ahead of time! You were given multiple choices on what to do when you and your friends encountered the hanging dead body in Aokigahara: “Should I keep this vlog?” “How should I feel about or respond to this?” “Should I edit it out or leave it in?” “How will everyone else react?” At the end of the day, you chose the wrong choices and it resulted in heated negative consequences.

You were NOT raising awareness for suicide prevention, which is the main reason why this tweet makes me livid! The vlog proves you laughed at what you saw and cracked jokes about it, despite your friend’s input on this unsettling discovery! A lot of people, even YouTube, agree that the material was shocking for the viewers, you sensationalized at said material, and you were outright disrespectful about it by treating suicide like a fucking joke through your “coping mechanism!”

You were not “misguided;” basically, this third reason ties in with the second one.

Because of this, an insane amount of criticism was unleashed, with Sophie calling Logan “an idiot,” his claim “mocking,” and his apology “self-praising,” Aaron referring to him as “pure trash” who can “go rot in hell,” and surprisingly Rebecca Black stating that how someone with “such power and influence could intensify “an entire family’s grief beyond measure.” And guess what? She is right! One of the people calling out on him was Anna Akana, who and her brother both had to deal with the loss of her sister after she committed suicide! Not only that, but there are also people struggling with depression and have contemplated suicide, especially in Japan, who are infuriated and sickened by what they watched/heard because they knew what he did was an epitome of bad publicity... No, “bad” isn’t the best way to describe this; what they discovered was appalling publicity! It’s even worse when you realize publicity is one of the main contributors to suicide contagion, especially when a young age group is exposed to it! Given Logan’s fanbase mainly consists of children and young teenagers, that vlog was a repulsive influence on them and would most likely worsen suicide contagion despite it being removed from YouTube, which reiterates Aoife’s tweet about her younger sister painting a lynched man! The damage has already been dealt and it pisses me off so much that he would influence minors like that!

And that is just the tip of the iceberg because he posted a longer apology video on YouTube the next night amid the rampaging counteraction. Did it do anything to at least settle this dispute? Let’s find out.

“I've made a severe and continuous lapse in my judgment and I don't expect to be forgiven. I'm simply here to apologize. So what we came across that day in the woods was obviously unplanned and the reactions you saw on tape were raw and they were unfiltered. None of us knew how to react or how to feel. I should have never posted the video. I should have put the cameras down, stopped recording what we were going through. There's a lot of things I should have done differently but I didn't and for that from the bottom of my heart I am sorry. I want to apologize to the internet, I want to apologize to anyone who has seen the video, I want to apologize to anyone who has been affected or touched by mental illness or depression or suicide but most importantly I want to apologize to the victim and his family. For my fans who are defending my actions, please don't, they don't deserve to be defended. The goal with my content is always to entertain, to push the boundaries, to be all inclusive. In the world I live in I share most everything I do. The intent is never to be heartless, cruel or malicious. Like I said I made a huge mistake. I don't expect to be forgiven. I'm just here to apologize. I'm ashamed of myself. I'm disappointed in myself. And I promise to be better. I will be better. Thank you.”

*frustrated sigh* Oh, dear Lord. There is a reason why posted the transcript of his apology than share the video itself, which I’ll get to after I give my two cents on this. ...Ever since last night, I had a difficult time trying to find a way to reply to this. I read a couple articles saying the video was emotional and somber because of how he was on the brink of tears and it left me at a point of uncertainty; I kept asking myself if he really does deserve to be forgiven or not, but after seeing other posts and getting an update on his newest video, it snapped me out of my state and told me that forgiving Logan would mean defending him, just like his fans... and there was no way in hell I would succumb to a level as low them supporting him. So with my spark reignited, it’s time for me to break this shit down once again!

Logan, let me start this bit off by saying this: it is far too late for you to apologize. What you did was irredeemable, vulgar, disgraceful, and plain rude of you to not only those suffering from depression, mental illnesses, or suicidal issues, but to the entire country of Japan. During your trip, you behaved immaturely by making a complete racist jackass out of yourself in front of foreign tourists/residents while wearing a kimono and made a complete fool out of Americans and Westerners, but your vlog on New Year’s Eve took it too far! You desecrated a corpse, went through him to see if he had any of his belongings with him, laughed and joked about it, and showed no remorse or empathy about what you and your friends came across! Because of you, Japan is now coated in anger; you made them hesitant on us being part of the 2020 Olympics, Tokyo tweeted at you to get out, and you’re now denounced by the Japanese Suicide Prevention Group all because you ridiculed their strict laws and significant efforts into helping lower suicide rates and gave a giant middle finger to country in general by treating it like it’s a fucking playground! What you did was an act of pity because of the imminent backlash and I will never. Forgive. You.

That’s not all; as it turns out, even though Logan clearly said he doesn’t expect forgiveness, his fanbase—like I’m gonna call them by their referred fandom name—still forgave him because they believe “he didn’t mean it” and even had the audacity to attack a Japanese vlogger named Reina Scully in a racist manner all because she criticized his Suicide Forest vlog. ...Okay, first: WHAT?! Second: THE FUCK?! Like before, I apologize for suddenly snapping, but that’s NOT how you defend someone! You do not make harass the harasser by sending them racist remarks, let alone telling her and the Japanese to kill themselves! That is just sick and inhumane! No wonder people are telling others to stop supporting the Paul brothers; their fans are worse than the commonly known bad fandoms!  *sigh* Well, at least it was best of me to not apologize to Logan because there was no way I was going to stoop as low as them. It was also perfect timing on my part because I recently discovered on that his apology video was monetized; in other words, he made thousands of dollars off of it...

Holy fuck! This is all kinds of despicable and messed up! Making between $8.5K and $68.1K off of a simple apology?! Now I am so glad I ultimately kept to my opinions about this sicko instead of accepting him like his other fans because this is one of the many examples of being greedy and money-hungry. 

Because of this, people immediately took to Twitter to repeatedly slam him until it was promptly demonetized. Shortly thereafter, conflicts began to surface regarding YouTube; a petition opened up calling for Logan to be banned from the site (which now has over 130K signatures) and many are giving the website and its staff flack for being hypocritical of the way they review the content of videos. To be honest, I don’t blame them. Although I’m glad they commented on the issue, it obviously wasn’t enough. What used to be a site that got its start from cat videos has become its own economy with terrible decisions they’ve made, from the Fair Use dilemma to labeling LGBT+ videos as “mature content.” Seeing how significant the past few days has become, they really need to wake up, get their humungous sticks out of their asses, and actually contribute than just simply stating what rule Logan violated. Regardless, with all of these factors combined into one, it is easily safe to say this second apology was typically a clear bust.

And what does Logan do now that both apologies were shown to be practically useless? He announces his hiatus last night on Twitter, stating he is “taking time to reflect.” Of course, and not surprisingly, there is a long thread which consists of a division between his effortlessly influenced fandom of youngsters and those who despise him for what he has done, both over the years and on New Year’s Eve.

...I’m done. I’m fucking done. I’m not dealing with this shit anymore. Everything about this is wrong and I am certain I am going to get a headache out of this. I don’t care if he is “reflecting;” knowing him, he is still going to be the same idiotic frat “celebrity” that he is, especially when Maverick Apparel came forward today to say they lost $4 million in profit because of him… and Jake dissed in him in one of the most inappropriate ways ever. Ugh!… Can this nightmare end already?! I swear, it keeps finding ways to make me want to continue this rant! Well, guess what? Not. Anymore. I am concluding this right now and I don’t care what will happen to these two sickos in the near future.

*sigh* Well, to wrap things up, Logan is nothing but a stupid, inane, thick-skinned, money-hungry, thoughtless jackass who only cares about getting richer and, much like Jake, using his fame to do whatever the fuck he wants because he believes there is no such thing as “bad publicity…” until now, that is. He may have been able to dodge controversy in the past, but thanks to his obnoxious, immature personality, he has made him a danger to three important fields after his trip to Japan; he has demonstrated how much of an inadequate influence he is to juveniles countless times in the past and has managed to do so once again with his now-deleted vlog, he has made the entire Japanese country hate him for even stepping foot on their cherished land, and he has sparked yet another battle against YouTube’s policies and regulations.

Logan, I’m going to say this once and only once: it is your fault you showed Japan just how disgustingly inhumane you are by not only fucking around with their cherished laws, traditions, culture, history, and landscape. It is your fault for recording the footage of the corpse, laughing and joking about it, and not giving a single shit about suicide, depression, and mental illnesses. It is your fault you unleashed hell on earth that pitted most of the social media users against you. It is your fault for creating your half-hearted apology tweet and your equally monetized apology video that only added fuel to the fire. It is your fault Japan hates you for treating them poorly. It is your fault you’re now facing serious consequences after showing the world what you did in front of that dead man. It is your fault for ending 2017 and starting 2018 on abysmal notes. I hope your multi-millionaire empire crumbles by having the YT staff banning your vlog channel. I hope the actions you—and Jake—have illustrated over the years and the consequences you face will deal more major blows to your precious careers.

To everyone reading this, I want to say I am genuinely sorry that you saw that vlog or heard what has been going on. I am even sorry at myself for subjecting myself to this horror of learning who the Paul brothers are just to get this rant out of the way. They have a horrible sense of humor and none of the stuff they do is funny, let alone how serious suicide is.

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US, claiming an average of 44,965 American lives every year, and for every 25 attempts that are made, it annually costs the country $51 billion. In Japan, despite now having over 21,000 people claiming their lives every year—with the majority caused by men—and its suicide rate declining, it still remains as one of the highest rates when compared to other countries. The most common place for the Japanese to kill themselves is in Aokigahara, which has received its infamous nickname, “the Suicide Forest.” It earned its name and has become the 2nd most suicidal place on Earth because around 100 Japanese residents travel there to commit suicide because of its thick trees and its seclusion; two of the frequent ways they kill themselves is through drug overdose or by hanging themselves though other methods are not uncommon. Since then, Japanese officials have been putting their best efforts to decrease the suicide rate.

Suicide is an urgent situation, with depression being the #1 cause of it if left untreated, undiagnosed, or ineffectively treated and mental illnesses, disorders, and contributors such as physical ailments, previous suicide attempts, limited access to mental health treatment closely following suit and cannot be left unnoticed. If you or a loved one is experiencing suicidal thoughts or actions or have had a series of suicidal thoughts or actions, it is not too late to seek help. Whether it is in America, Japan, or anywhere else in the world, call the numbers below based on what country you live in:

United Kingdom: 116 123

United States: 1-800-273-8255

Canada: 5147234000

Mexico: 5255102550

Ireland: 116 123

Brazil: 212339191

Argentina: +5402234930430

Spain: 914590080

Portugal: 225 50 60 70

France: 0145394000

Greece: 1018

Germany: 08001810771

Italy: 800860022

Poland: 52770000

Holland: 0900-0113

Denmark: +4570201201

Sweden: 46317112400

Finland: 040-5032199

Norway: +478153300

Belgium: 1813

Austria: 017133374

Switzerland: 143

Egypt: 7621602

South Africa: 0514445691

Israel: 1201

India: 8888817666

Australia: 131 114

New Zealand: 045861048

Singapore: 1800 221 4444

Philippines: 028969191

Russia: 0078202577577

China: 85223820000

South Korea: 112

Japan: +810352869090

You can also donate to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or any resourceful suicide prevention organizations you know because your gifts will serve them as a reminder that you are contributing to fight against this worldwide epidemic.

Don’t wait. Call now or donate to help save a life.

[pudgy-puk]

post #7000

so in honor of how tomorrow, all of us will be piling onto the theater ship prima vista, which plays the story of the zodiac braves, and now docks over kugane (where the wandering minstrel will reinterpret the battle with shinryu, jazz it up and set it to song and lo, we will have a new EX trial), i have a gift for you, and it comes in the form of a new analytic lens for the history of the final fantasy series:

what if i told you every single 2-D FF game was a play—was theater?

here, i will expand on that. by saying that they are plays, i don’t mean they’re staged shows so much as i mean that they are play scripts, of the sort you have probably encountered in various language/literature classes that include theatrical stuff as texts to study, the standout here being teaching shakespeare as literature. and actually, older drama is very good for illustrating this point, because the scripts have very simple direction, with much room for interpretation and ambiguity. this describes old sprite-based final fantasy games very well. i would argue that playing a 2-D final fantasy game is much like reading plays as literature. the characters, with their makeup and costumes, being squished into 16-bit sprites, introduced with a short line (“a mysterious young woman, born with the gift of magic, and enslaved by the gestahlian empire…”)? dramatis personae. characters moving on simple grid backdrops as simple blocking instructions and set design guidelines. the sprite games had a very few simple signifiers, such as animations-of-the-sprite or thought-bubbles-with-hearts-in-them etc. to communicate the character’s emotional state during scenes, functioning like [angrily], [enamored], or [shocked] direction notes in a play script. and, of course—the silence of it all, dialogue standing alone and quiet, with none of the grounding and contextualization and narration to peer into character’s inner lives that happens in novels or other forms of literature. there is, in old-school final fantasy games, a level of ambiguity unavoidable in the final product that simply could not have made it past storyboards in modern games.

for a general dramatic example, consider kain’s little mind-control problem throughout ff4 (the character, best friend of the hero cecil, is mind-controlled by main antagonist golbez to turn him against those he loves, whose magic can prey on kain’s jealousy, resentment, and insecurity festering in those relationships to effect the mind control). we are given bare, silent dialogue and flat animations to communicate the character’s struggle to control himself and his regret and shame following episodes of this, because it’s a sprite game. (given this, is it any wonder that this character so often falls flat with players)? for a general comedic example, consider the character of ghido, in ff5—a wise old turtle mentor figure, providing the heroes with guidance, assistance, and truly scathing sarcasm (“what the warlock seeks is in the great forest of moore.” “the forest of moore?” “trees, my dear boy, lots of them”). imagine what a voice actor and animator with good comic timing could do with that character.

and for an example of how much is left ambiguous: consider ffvi’s opera aftermath. not the actual performance—the scene immediately following, that introduces and establishes setzer’s character, that demonstrates celes’ cleverness, ruthlessness, and chutzpah, that develops locke’s relationship with celes and sabin’s with edgar’s by revealing the truth behind an event (at that point) long past. with the dialogue as script, the animations as rough blocking and directions, and the characters’ sprites as guidelines for costuming—give that, a brief synopsis of what happened before and character personalities, and time to workshop and rehearse to five good actors, they should be able to deliver three or four or more variations on that scene that communicate radically different things without much difficulty.

and beyond acting: costume design, set design, lighting, all of these things are communicative. is the blackjack interior well-kept? is it in disarray? is it perfectly orderly, but covered in dust? these things tell us different thing about the airship, and about its owner. and—recreating setzer’s costume, such as his coat, from the sprite (ignoring concept art and going solely on what’s in the game itself): is it old, or new? in good condition? in a state of disrepair, or obviously-has-been-repaired? is it heavy and stiff, or light and easy to wear? does it fit setzer perfectly, or is it too large or too small? how does he wear it? all of these things, again, inform the character and thus the scene differently. all of these are necessarily left ambiguous because of what a sprite game is and how it must work.

now, of course there are some key differences, but even these can inform and inspire analyses in fun ways. the biggest difference is that the custom is, in serious game thought, to consider each of these individual games their own discrete text, finished, complete, whereas in theater, a script that is unperformed is incomplete. the performances and realizations of the script are needed for the thing to be fully complete. consider how this does and does not apply to remakes, re-rereleases in analysis!

to be honest, this lens of formal analysis is something i think about a great deal when it comes to ffxiv—because although the array of resources to draw from is much larger than the sprite games, i still think about actions as stage directions and blocking in the majority of content—how it is rare for characters to perform actions other than the basic player-accessible emotes or stock npc emote actions, and thus by so doing imbue the scene with extra meaning (e.g. zenos’s hauling yotsuyu up by her hair, both his action and her pained expression and pose in response). in this simple formal way, ffxiv is itself (inadvertantly or not) a classic throwback.

and speaking of classic throwbacks within the series as a whole—consider ff9, the origin itself of the theater ship prima vista that we’ll be seeing tomorrow. the entire game is heavy with the history of the games prior that it chooses to make public and displayed rather than more layered in and circumspect; it is also riddled through and through with references to theater. and i am not sure these things—this choice for their self-conscious and self-celebrating flagship game—was unconnected, unconscious. the theatrical elements of ff9 are surface (the protagonist is an actor on that theater ship prima vista, there are play scenes both as opening and as closing) and structural: characters have soliloquys and asides, the five-act structure is followed religiously.

and, lastly: in light of all i have just said, consider what it says about developers’ relationship with their audience that the two leads of that game, zidane and garnet/dagger, are respectively an actor and a devoted theater aficionado, that she asks him to “kidnap” her and he does so, and together they go on an adventure and fall in love.

[socialcoldstreams]

Los Angeles Times says"Forget free speech"

True:

Facebook is not required to provide the online equivalent of an endless Open Mic Night to Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan or anyone else.

Source: Forget free speech. Facebook should ban Alex Jones or anyone else who violates its rules – Los Angeles Times

The idea is that a private business should have sole control of their content.

Newspapers have long championed free speech, even advocating that journalists have more rights to free speech protections than the general public.

Thus it is odd for newspapers to advocate for suppression of speech.

The challenge is always – who gets to decide what speech to suppress?

Do only powerful entities like corporate newspapers and social media corporations get to decide?

I was taught in high school and college that the proper response to speech we do not like is more speech – not shutting off those we oppose. Guess I am old fashioned but I believe that is still the proper response.

Do censorship and net neutrality go together?

Social media companies are private businesses and therefore, may control the content on their platform.

Social media companies promote net neutrality – arguing their content must be compulsorily carried by third party private business that deliver Internet data services.

Social media companies want it both ways – to be a private company that is free to censor while simultaneously forcing other businesses to carry their own speech. Under net neutrality, Comcast or AT&T must carry all of Facebook’s traffic without restriction.

That would be net neutrality for us, but not for you!

Is social media like a telephone company and not liable for content?

Social media companies say they are like a telephone company and not liable for user speech on their platform. This gives them a “safe harbor” against being liable for content posted by users. However, once they begin to edit that content, they act like a publisher, potentially liable for their content. Except that Federal law lets social media delete any content they choose.

Social media companies want it both ways: they want to be not liable for user content but simultaneously want to edit/censor content like a traditional publisher.

Offensive speech should be countered with more speech, not censorship

I am generally not familiar with those who were banned by Facebook other than what I have seen in news stories. I have seen a little of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones output and I don’t like it. I am not supportive of the thoughts expressed by those with these bizarre views – but I support the view that their offensive speech should be countered with more speech, not censorship.

(Update: These individuals have extreme views that few support and are certainly poor examples to use in defending free speech. After I wrote this post, I did, however, find other examples of dissent on less inflammatory topics that were silenced by those in power.)

I am not defending their speech – but am questioning the appropriateness of corporations silencing them. Corporate publishers and broadcasters already censor speech frequently as the examples, below, illustrate. There is a slippery slope and we are quite a ways down that slope as made clear by these real world examples.

Zuckerberg accused by Facebook co-founder of censoring speech

“The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech,” Hughes wrote. “There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

Propaganda Impacts of Censorship by Corporations

In Spokane, Washington, the local newspaper publisher is a family dynasty dating to the 19th century. They publish the paper, own a TV station and used to own an AM radio station, and are the largest land owner in downtown Spokane, plus they own another 100,000 or so acres in the county and an adjoining county and prime real estate in Spokane Valley.  They also own the mountain top antenna site used by other TV and radio stations (which may enable them to influence other broadcasters). The publisher has used their media properties to control the public dialogue (look up the River Park Square parking garage fiasco – more here.)

When the Northtown Mall was opened, the local paper refused to run ads for stores there because it would conflict with the paper’s ownership of downtown real estate and would impact retailers in downtown (supposedly the downtown lease agreements included a percent of revenue to the landlord/publisher). When public measures went up for a vote – measures that involved spending taxpayer’s money to enhance the downtown area or areas located near the publisher’s properties, you can guess how the paper spun the news. The full story of corruption is lengthy.

They could this because at one time, a single family controlled over 80% of the ad dollars in the Spokane market!

Regarding the RPS fiasco – “Spokesman-Review editorial writers continued to treat all dissenters as crackpots.” The editor called the Mayor a “civic terrorist” for his opposition to the garage.

Not surprisingly, in the lead up to and aftermath of the RPS fiasco: “According to an independent analysis commissioned by the Spokesman in 2007, it had allowed River Park Square developer Betsy Cowles to influence the editing of its stories, some of which hyped up the deal and downplayed its dangers.” [Betsy Cowles is part of the Cowles family that owns the media empire and real estate businesses.]

In other words: propaganda messaging, in part, by “lying by omission”: Everything the publisher says is true, but by omitting critical information, the overall conclusion is not true.

This is also known as “What You See Is All There Is”.  Given factual – but censored – arguments, the reader or viewer is steered to the desired conclusion, unaware that other facts may present a different view. I have an example of WYSIATI in action here.

This example illustrates how a private business with large market share strongly influenced public policy through its power of censorship. None of this involved hate speech are advocating violence.

Shadow Banning

A shadow ban is one the person who is censored is led to believe their content is public. For example, you post a Twitter tweet and you can see it yourself (when logged in). But no one else can see it. Facebook does this, as do moderated newspaper comments

A factual comment I wrote, quoting directly from a U.S. government agency web site in regards to a public policy, was shadow banned by our local newspaper. I could see the comment when I was logged in, but when logged out, my comment was not there. Logged back in, and there it was. My comment had been shadow banned by The Oregonian newspaper.

My comment was not controversial, cited actual data, provided a citation to the U.S. government agency source, and an explanation of the methodology used. I asked The Oregonian for an explanation and they did not provide any.

I could only guess that The Oregonian was censoring facts that were inconsistent with their reporting. Not cool.

Yes, they are a private business and have a right to censor anything they want – but can I trust the Oregonian to deliver accurate news when I know they censor factual, reliably sourced information that contradicts their report? Answer: No, I cannot.

Compare the Oregonian’s actions to those described for Spokane, above. In both examples, corporate publishers controlled the public dialogue on public policy through enforcement of WYSIATI.

The Facebook group page originally associated with this blog, was shadow banned by Facebook for six months before I discovered this had occurred. I believe it was due to a technical error on FB’s part, not because the content here questions the role that social media propaganda plays in our society. But – FB had the mechanisms in place to erroneously and secretly shadow ban users.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is a user content web site that purports to offer travel information and user written reviews of travel destinations and service. For years, TripAdvisor deleted negative reviews – and did not disclose this to users of the web site. This included deletion of information about serious crime activities – resulting in travel to destinations that were not safe.

Having been de facto censored for unknown reasons by our local newspaper, for innocuous speech based on factual data, that cited references and clearly explained the methodology – I find corporate censorship of speech troubling.

Particularly when they promote free speech for themselves but not for others.

What happens when most public discourse takes place on corporate platforms and corporations choose what will be published and what will be silenced? (Answer: See Spokane!)

More posts on shadow banning here.

Los Angeles Times says”Forget free speech” was originally published on SocialPanic

[oosteven-universe]

Stabbity Ever After #1

Stabbity Ever After #1 Scout Comics 2018 Created & Written by Richard Rivera Illustrated by Ryan Kincaid Coloured by Liezl Buenaventura Lettered by Jaymes Reed      This alternate reality version of Stabbity Bunny takes place nowhere near the world of the regular series. This is for those who crave unbridled mayhem and long to see the ultimate bunny fury unleashed! Stabbity takes on the fairyland inhabitants who stand in his way as he fights to rescue Grace from an evil sorcerer.      By now we all know what has been going on with Stabbity and that mum knows everything as well. So I love that she treats Stabbity as his own person whether he’s active or not. The opening here says or should I say shows us all we need to know well kind of. It is kind of a perfect series of unfortunate events as a portal opens a prototypical wizard pops through takes Grace and Stabbity follows on his own. Now we are off to the races as they say as Stabbity has work his way through this strange land to save Grace!      They say a picture is worth a thousand words and seeing Stabbity in this fairyland kind of place is almost picturesque. So it isn’t long until things start to head south for Stabbity. I mean c’mon this is just utterly fabulous and if you are a fan of Deadpool and it seems that half the population is at this time you need to do yourself a favour and start reading this. I love the tongue in cheek manner of the storytelling and the complete and utter irreverence that is shown in these pages. It is mindless violent fun in the most innocuous of ways imaginable and yes this is a completely meant for adults only which is perfect in my opinion.      I am always surprised and impressed by the fact that Richard is able to bring some much life and characterisation to Stabbity. Those that can talk well they are easy to flesh out through dialogue and then they actually assist in Stabbity’s characterisation is exceptional writing. I mean the only others who could do this as well were Wolfman & Perez when they created Jericho so Richard and Ryan are in damn company here. Still that smile on his face as he cuts a swath through fairyland and the fact we see his intelligence at the same time yeah this is why the whole thing works so well.      Ryan does some really nice work here. I can’t describe fairyland but I feel like this is the comics version of that we saw on Dirk Gently Season Two. I really do like that Ryan keeps everything kind of on an even keel, there isn’t anything different in the linework regardless of person, race or whatnot and that’s great to see. Also that this is ultra-violent but not gore centric is fantastic and I do like that when we do see the aftermath it looks like the rings in a tree. The utilisation of page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective shows off a strong eye for storytelling. While I would like to see more backgrounds it isn’t always possible. ​      At first I thought this might be a one-shot until the last page then I thought if this is going to be a limited series I'm so totally down for that. I mean who doesn’t love seeing Unicorns, Faeries and the like being sliced and diced with a Ginsu, careful the Slap Chop might come get ya! This pure adult entertainment, nearly mindless but amazingly well crafted and executed. You aren’t going to find this kind of stuff anywhere else.