#the idiocy yet EXTREME emotional intelligence

[chipen]

i cant believe im saying this but luffy I think has very much become my all time favorite anime protagonist

[byakuyasdarling]

• Nightmares •

Having nightmares a lot recently so — comfort post to hyperlink into my self ship masterlist for when I’m in that panicked state. More time to write unrealistic stuff, woo!! Cringe Time ✨

this post explains their relationship dynamic and especially the way Byakuya cares for her.

All under the cut :)

No matter if you read these or not, I hope you all have a wonderful day 💙💙

[DNI if you ship and post about Nae//gami. Block me immediately and leave.]

———————————————————————

S/I is extremely vulnerable to panic at night. It’s excruciatingly hard to get her to calm down once she has had a nightmare — yet alone get her back to sleep. Luckily, when she’s over with Byakuya, he’s able to soothe her back down.

• Nightmares •

When she springs up from a nightmare, Byakuya generally sits up with her for a few minutes while holding her hand: giving her time to explain what is wrong. He gently affirms her as she talks:

“I apologise — I’m so, so sorry. It’s ridiculous to be shaken up over such things. You’d — You would call me an idiot if I detail what the nightmare was about.”

“Don’t say such things about yourself.”

“It’s true, Byakuya! All of these nightmares are just in my head. They aren’t real, they can’t actually hurt me. The fact I get so worked up over these things is a clear demonstration of how idiotic I truly am!”

“I don’t deny that you are ... sensitive to emotion ... However, I believe your reaction to these nightmares are no demonstration of your self-proclaimed ‘idiocy’, and more rather a demonstration of your care and attentiveness to others.”

“Byakuya ... you don’t even know for sure what my nightmare was about.”

“You’re rather obvious, darling.”

“ ... I — I don’t want to loose my friends. A-and I don’t want to loose you.”

“I see ...”

“I had to sit around on my phone while messages flooded into my phone. I uselessly say by as I viewed these ... these gory images ... these desecrated corpses I once called the people close to me. I’m so useless — so very useless. How could I just sit around whi—“

“How many times must you make me repeat myself? You are not useless, don’t act so foolish and actually start thinking things through. How you act in dreams is by no means an accurate representation of your actual self.”

“But—“

“No ‘if’s, ‘and’s, nor ‘but’s about it. I’m not tolerating any derogatory remarks directed to yourself. It’s fine to be scared. I am certain you only have such emotionally draining nightmares because you care so deeply for others. However, insulting yourself for it is pointless.”

“Byakuya ... does all this — does all my emotions ... bother you? I know that you scrutinise all this as ... weakness ...”

“Don’t be ridiculous. When I say ‘I love you’, I mean I love all of you. You are very intelligent — and unlike others, your emotions don’t dwindle that.”

(Side note: Byakuya has a very black and white view of the world. Of course kindness doesn’t dwindle intelligence, but in his eyes it does — and because she’s the only emotional one close to him and has seen her academic abilities, he sees her as an exception.)

“My love for you isn’t ‘in spite’ of your emotions, silly girl.”

“Is it bad that I ask you so many times why you love me?”

“The answer should be obvious to you.”

“Because ‘I’m me’: quote on quote ‘talented, smart, beautiful, confident, passionate, and exceptional’. That does not qualify as an answer this time, Byakuya.”

“Am I incorrect?”

“I really am unsure how someone like you: the man who’s practically destined to guide the world, managed to fall in love with a simple girl like me.”

“Not many people manage to see what’s behind such a man. But you always have.”

“Oh Byakuya, how do you always manage to make me feel so special.”

“You’re only managing to recognise the way I see you, my darling.”

Forehead kisses from him are pretty much granted after that. He then takes her into his arms to lay her down against his chest once she’s calm.

From here it’s really a matter of getting her to sleep as fast as possible before she works herself up again. He rubs circles into her back and plays with her hair a little: occasionally interjecting rather basic affirmations in his rather raspy, sleepy voice. Just simple: “You’re okay now,” “I’m here,” “shhh sh sh sh shhh”.

After one of those talks, she gets very snuggly for the next day. She’s trying her best to express back all the love and gratitude she has for him <<33

I hope you all have an amazing day 💙💙

[pretoriuspictures]

https://www.talkhouse.com/on-the-virtues-of-cinematic-failure/

///

Most journalists who have spoken to me about my new erotic drama PVT Chat (starring Peter Vack and Julia Fox and streaming now on most VOD platforms) assume it’s my first feature film. Actually, it’s my third. My first two features never played a single film festival and haven’t been seen by more than a few hundred people (mostly friends and/or curious followers of my rock band, Bodega). They were financial failures (even though they were made extremely cheaply), but you couldn’t call them critical failures because nobody has ever reviewed them. I spent the last decade working on these films and yet their cultural footprint is practically nonexistent.

Despite that, I still believe in them and hope one day I’ll make a movie (or record) that inspires people to seek them out. My early cinematic attempts certainly failed at behaving like normal movies, but to me it is precisely this failure that makes them interesting.

Godard said of Pierrot le Fou (1965), “It’s not really a film. It’s an attempt at a film.” This is a purposefully cryptic statement, but I think I understand what he meant. There is a sketch-like quality to his films from that period. He was less interested in following a particular plot through to its conclusion than suggesting narrative ideas and moving on. He enjoyed employing classical narrative tropes but didn’t want to waste screen time on the proper pacing required to sell those tropes to an audience. Instead he filled his screen time with spontaneous personal, poetic, and political ruminations that occurred to him literally on the day of filming. Many found – and still find – this approach infuriating, but for a select number of Godard disciples, like me, this type of filmmaking is still revolutionary. I remember seeing Weekend during my sophomore year of college at the University of South Carolina and having my mind completely ripped open. Suddenly the world wasn’t a small, mediocre, predictable place – it was full of music and color and philosophy and eroticism. There were people out there genuinely disgusted with the status quo and boldly proclaiming it with style.

Godard’s work is a fulfillment of the dream of the caméra-stylo – a term coined in 1948 by Alexandre Astruc that argued it was theoretically possible for someone to compose a film with as much direct personal expression as exists in prose. In order to achieve this level of expression, one often needs to move beyond the realm of mere plot and narrative naturalism, the principle that what you are seeing on screen is real. (On most movie sets, the filmmakers and actors work overtime to sell this illusion.) Films that focus solely on plot, character psychology, and one literary theme have to direct the majority of their screen time toward plotting mechanics and emotional manipulation of the audience. What you gain in dramatic catharsis you often lose in intellectual honesty. There’s always a tradeoff. I am invested in a cinema of the future that veers toward self-expression, but doesn’t need to avoid dramatic catharsis as Godard’s films did. Certainly many filmmakers my age are working to achieve such a synthesis of intellectual directness and narrative pleasure. Experimentation is required and many “bad” films need to be made to pave the way for future successes.

I graduated college in 2010 high on this dream of the caméra-stylo and philosophy (my field of study) and in 2011 started filming my first feature, Annunciation, with experimental filmmaker Simon Liu. Annunciation is an “adaptation” of the Mérode Altarpiece, an early Northern Renaissance oil painting triptych by Robert Campin. The film features three short separate narratives, one for each panel of the famous 15th-century painting. I wanted the performances in Annunciation to be controlled and somewhat surreal, as if the whole film existed in a heightened but slowed-down hypnotic state; I was thinking about Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni and, of course, Godard (particularly his work from the ’80s). There is some plot, but the main goal of the movie was to reveal the miracle of existence in the everyday. And because the Mérode Altarpiece depicts the scene in Christianity where the Virgin Mary was impregnated by light alone, the film had to be shot on 16mm film.

Now picture this: a 22-year-old walks into a conference room in Midtown Manhattan and gives this pitch to a producer who was then investing in thriller movies: “Every time light strikes a piece of celluloid, a miracle similar to the Annunciation scene occurs: an image appears in the likeness of man that redeems our fallen world and reveals it to be the beautiful place that we take for granted in our normal day-to-day.” This wasn’t met with the enthusiasm I was hoping for. “Don’t you see,” I said, “this is a film about the ecstatic of the quotidian! This is a film that audiences will flock to! It could do for Williamsburg and Bushwick what Breathless did for Paris!” Looking back, I am both shocked and charmed by my youthful naiveté, courage and idiocy.

I was laughed out of the room, but the producer was kind enough to wish me good luck and welcomed any future pitches, should I come up with something any “normal” person would want to watch. I never thought of films in the tradition of the caméra-stylo as being elite works only for the gallery or the Academy. I, like Godard before me, have always assumed that audiences are intelligent and long for thoughtful, challenging movies. That belief I carry to this day and thankfully it sometimes seems to be true. How else could you explain the recent success of heady films by Josephine Decker or Miranda July?

Thanks to small donations from family members (and credit cards), I was able to shoot Annunciation without any official backing. I cast the film with a mixture of non-actor friends and some undiscovered Backstage.com talent and dove head first into the production. Right as our principal photography began, Occupy Wall Street gained momentum, so Simon and I spent time at Zuccotti Park filming our actors experiencing the movement. The hopeful promise of OWS seemed to reflect the yearning desire of our film’s protagonists as well as our own idealist cinema experiment.

When the film was finished and edited, I naively assumed that we were well on our way towards global cinematic notoriety. Surely, I thought, this important film that manages to blend fiction with actual footage of OWS would premiere at Cannes or Berlin and the Criterion Collection would issue the DVD shortly after. In actuality, it was rejected from every single film festival we submitted to.

Undeterred, I conceded that maybe there were a few minor structural flaws in the edit. It was probably a little too long and perhaps the three separate narratives would work better if they were crosscut more. A year later, this new edit was again rejected from almost 100 festivals. Stubbornly, I thought that perhaps what could really bring the movie together was a comic voiceover by my then cinematic muse Nick Alden (who is a lead in both Annunciation and my second film, The Lion’s Den). Audiences seemed to ignore the comic tone underlying Annunciation. If only I could unearth it, they wouldn’t be put off by the pretensions to greatness the movie wore on its sleeve. There is nothing so offensive to American audiences as pretentiousness.

I didn’t send the overcooked voiceover version to festivals. I knew it was forced and worked against the core concept of the film. But it was then that I started for the first time to have doubts about Annunciation. Maybe my film wasn’t as emotional or clever as I imagined. Maybe it was bad? “No,” I decided. The film, whatever its flaws may be, has value. Herculean delusions of grandeur come in handy when you are trying to become an artist.

I opted to edit the film back to its original state, but without some of the weaker, obviously didactic moments, then hosted a few local screenings in NYC (most of them at DIY venues where my rock band would play) and put the film up for free on Vimeo. Around this time, it occurred to me that editing Annunciation had been my film school. Failure is a wonderful learning tool. Editing the same raw material in a myriad of different ways taught me about pacing and tone. Still to this day, when I find myself in a certain state of mind, I open up the Final Cut sessions and do a new edit of the footage just for fun, like some sort of DIY George Lucas tinkering with the past. Last year during quarantine, I did a new edit of Annunciation and uploaded it to Vimeo without telling a single person. It has become my own little cinematic sandbox to play in.

When people did chance upon one of my myriad edits, they often commented that they enjoyed its style but found the acting too unnatural. My response to this was to make my next film, The Lion’s Den, a cheaper HDV feature that doubled as a political farce and an essay about naturalism in cinema. The film is about a group of ding-dong radicals who kidnap a Wall Street banker and plan to donate his ransom money to UNICEF so salt pills can be provided for dehydrated children. The UNICEF plot was drawn from Living High and Letting Die, a 1996 work of moral philosophy by Peter K. Unger. It was both a serious attempt at political philosophy and a total slapstick farce; I was imagining the comedy of errors in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game mixed with the Marxist agitprop of Godard’s La Chinoise.

The acting style in The Lion’s Den was purposefully cartoonish; at no point in the film could an audience member believe that what they were seeing was real. I like to think that The Lion’s Den was an attempt at theatre for the camera, part Shakespeare and part Brecht. This was my own personal response to our epoch’s hyperrealism fetish. At the time, I believed that the current obsession with neo-neorealism, mumblecore and reality TV was worth combating. Art with a realistic aesthetic, I thought then, was inherently conservative and accepting of the political status quo (whether the artists were aware of this or not). Art with an imaginative anti-realistic aesthetic, so I thought, was utopian. It opened new vistas and ways of thinking and being. It dared to believe in a more beautiful world than the one we are living in.

The making of The Lion’s Den was extremely difficult. It was by far the hardest thing I have physically done in my life. At the time, I was malnourished and broke, not unlike the character of Jack in PVT Chat; my diet for that month we made the film consisted mostly of coffee, rice and beans, ramen, light beer, and the occasional waffle or fruit smoothie from the vegan frozen yogurt stall I worked at. Unlike Jack, my addiction wasn’t cam girls or internet gambling, but independent filmmaking. I begged, borrowed and scrimped $10,000 to make a film I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell. Despite having some key collaborators near the beginning of the shoot, most of the film was made with just me, the actors and a loyal boom operator, all living together in a house in Staten Island. This meant that I had to assemble all of the cumbersome lights for every setup, handle the art for every scene (which involved a lot of painting), block the scene and direct the actors, throw the camera on my shoulder and film, and then at the end of the day transfer the footage while logging the Screen Actors Guild reports and creating the call sheets for the next day’s scenes. Exhausted both mentally and physically, I often couldn’t stand up at the end of the day’s filming.

Once we’d wrapped and everyone had gone home, I stood in the middle of our set and played Beethoven on my headphones. Within seconds, I began bawling my eyes out, partly from exhaustion but also from the melancholy that all my friends had left and I was now alone for the first time in a month. I collapsed and slept for hours. When I woke up, it was my 26th birthday. I celebrated by watching Citizen Kane alone and then started the process of painting the walls back to a neutral white. The actor Kevin Moccia (who has been in all three of my films and actually works as a house painter) heroically came back to set and helped me. I told him that despite all of the agony of the past weeks (my bank account was now in the red, with overdraft fees piling up), I was happier than I had ever been. Working passionately on something that has great value to you is, without a doubt, the key to happiness.

Shortly after returning to the real world and my job at the vegan yogurt shop, I passed out while on the clock and was taken to a hospital by my very supportive girlfriend. Turns out, all I needed was an IV and some nutrients to get back on my feet, but unfortunately the trouble with The Lion’s Den had just begun. At some point, I formatted the production audio memory card and, in one instant, accidentally deleted everything on it. For the next two years, my friend Brian Goodheart and I worked with all of the actors to dub all of the dialogue and sound effects in the movie. Each actor had to completely re-do their verbal performance. It felt like remaking the entire movie. The result made the film especially un-naturalistic (which pleased me at the time) and it turned out far better than I think Brian and I expected.

By then, I had some hopes that The Lion’s Den could reach a small audience. It is aggressively philosophical but also features a love triangle, a car chase and a final shootout. Its comic style, I was hoping, would attract people who were put off by the purposeful flatness of Annunciation. Nevertheless, the movie was also rejected from every conceivable festival. I now realized that submitting an aggressively experimental narrative film without a single famous person in it to festivals is basically like flushing your money down the toilet. Yet I continued submitting, like an addict at a casino putting all of their savings on the roulette table. You never know, right?

In hindsight, I now see The Lion’s Den as a very angry film that perhaps uses comedy to soften the blow of some of its hotheaded fervor, and suspect some of its critique of capitalism and naturalism came from hurt and jealousy. “You think my work isn’t natural enough, eh? I’ll show you motherfuckers naturalism!”

Sometime in 2017, to my surprise I became smitten with certain neo-neorealist filmmakers (Joe Swanberg, in particular) and decided I wanted in on the mumblecore party, albeit from my own outsider perspective. I began to see how I could work symbolically with naturalistic performances, which led me to my latest film. PVT Chat is by no means a work of strict realism, but nevertheless focuses on believable dramatic performances. The film’s cast blends some actors from my past work (Kevin Moccia, Nikki Belfiglio, David White) with some heroes of the modern neo-neorealist indie cinema (Peter Vack, Julia Fox, Buddy Duress, Keith Poulson).

I want to end with a bit of advice to other filmmakers: Don’t put your self-worth into the hands of festival reviewers or distributors. The future of the moving image will belong to the films that are willing to risk cinematic failure. If you make an earnest film that doesn’t behave like a normal movie, I want to see it, even if it is full of technical or narrative mistakes (which it most likely will be). There’s no right way to make a movie. Follow the dream of the caméra-stylo and make a film that if nobody else made, wouldn’t exist.

[alittledropofheaven]

On the internet, where people become data and popularity is conveniently quantified, it’s easy to learn what a community values most. Twitter embraces celebrities and #brands. Reddit stans for Barack Obama and elaborate pop-culture GIFs. Quora is an asylum of techies questioning their morality and their stock options; its second-most-upvoted answer is a “soul-satisfying” account of a sales bro helping a homeless man.

On the Bodybuilding.com forums, the two most popular threads of all time are not about deadlifts, intermittent fasting, or maintaining motivation. They’re about women. Specifically, women Bodybuilding.com members would “love to pound.” While one thread features pictures of “petite/slim girls” and the other of “athletic girls,” both are an endless stream of lightly Photoshopped near-nudity and predictably lecherous comments. Both have been viewed almost 3 million times. And both are on the lone section of the Bodybuilding.com forums that’s explicitly unrelated to fitness: the Misc.

“Participate at your own risk, some content NSFW,” reads the description of the Misc. on the forums’ homepage. “U Aware?”

The number of people who are Aware, it turns out, is over 16 million. As of January 2018, these members of Bodybuilding.com have made more than 137 million posts on the forums, including 90 million on the Misc. The forums first became active in 2000, a time before Wikipedia and when “Skype” was neither app nor verb. Myspace—Myspace!—didn’t exist until three years later. The Misc., as the predominant section of an internet community with such immense popularity and longevity, has cemented its place near the top of Google’s search results for any query imaginable. To appropriate Rule 34, if it exists, there’s a Misc. thread for it. Online, at least, the Misc. is inescapable.

A cursory scroll through the Misc. reveals what it has in common with the still-popular internet communities it predates, Reddit and 4chan. There are the memes, comics, copypastas, acronyms, and slang recycled endlessly in a digital echo chamber largely devoid of moderation. There are the forum members—Miscers, they call themselves—who post, and post in, intentionally incendiary threads about whether tongue rings scream “cum dumpster” and how “Crossfit is gay,” then fan the flames for entertainment’s sake by doubling down on their inanity. There are moments ofuproarious, absurd, gut-busting idiocy. There are ideology-clarifying usernames (RICHSTRONG, MinisterOfLust, weightsb4dates, WishIWasJawBrah, MericaThatsWhy) and statement-making profile pictures (deliberately titillating yet invariably off-putting abdominal shots, monochromatic selfies, strategically underlit bicep closeups). There are trolls surely seething and/or laughing maniacally, their keystrokes like machine-gun fire, as they launch poorly punctuated ad-hominem attacks and, at their most destructive, encourage people to commit suicide. There are sexists, racists, xenophobes, and homophobes. There is the sense of being in a parochial, patriarchal madhouse where decorum has gone to die.

What emerges, when you spend enough time on the Misc., is a ghoulish portrait of a place that embodies the white, male id currently at the helm of S.S. America. The Misc. is a stone-faced Uncle Sam with Popeye’s forearms and a cocked pistol in each hand. It’s a screeching bald eagle with a foreign Bad Thing in its talons. It’s everything that defines America’s bro culture, magnified and weaponized. But it’s deeper than that.

“Bro-merican” culture is largely defined by the stratification of power and status, both real and imagined. So, too, is Bodybuilding.com, where a power imbalance is embedded in the structure and design of the site’s forums. Unlike on 4chan, where all posts are anonymous and ephemeral, or on Reddit, where the grand sum of a user’s upvotes has little value, Bodybuilding.com members’ reputation points, or “reps,” mediate and deeply influence community interactions. While reps are similar to Facebook likes—weighted such that getting either “repped” or “negged” by a user with hundreds of thousands of reps will drastically affect your own rep count—they function as the Misc.’s de facto currency. Your rep count is displayed next to your every post. It’s like your bank account balance flashing on your forehead whenever you speak.

Bullying by those with power (high-rep Miscers) and obsequiousness by those without it (low-rep Miscers) is rampant. Getting negged by a high-rep Miscer means potentially becoming a “red,” a user with negative reputation points, displayed beneath your username as a gradated red bar as jarring as a stop sign. If you’re a red, you’re a second-class citizen. Your posts might as well come with a disclosure: “I’m a worthless idiot. Please listen to absolutely nothing I say.”

The opinions and caprices of high-rep “green” Miscers, then, dictate the forum’s personality. Any Miscer brave enough to post contrarian ideas—including, and especially, those that are liberal and feminist—is often negged into oblivion. Bad joke misses the mark? Negged. Sincere comment comes off as sarcastic? Negged. The Misc. is an echo chamber in which “greens” are given a megaphone and a gun.

But in contrast with Reddit and 4chan, the Misc. has been filtered through and molded by bodybuilding subculture, a set of beliefs and customs rooted in the many manifestations of stereotypical masculinity: egotism, aggression, hypersexuality, über-competitiveness, entitlement. Insecurity, intolerance, misogyny. Bodybuilding, after all, is not about functional strength but about vanity and surface appearances, how masculinity is projected to the world. It fosters narcissism by trading in cosmetic superlatives: the highest bicep peaks, the most vascular calves, the most extreme V-shaped back.

The Misc. applies this dog-eat-dog frame of mind to every topic. Everything is a masculinity- or dick-measuring contest. Including, of course, the actual dick-measuring contests, because Miscers are nothing if not cripplingly aware of their own inadequate manhood. Swears and slurs are censored but their creatively misspelled phonetic workarounds are not, which makes for a forum full of “kunts” talking “chit” and menacingly telling each other to “pepper your angus” (prepare your anus). The most recurrent insults all concern perceived masculinity, or lack thereof. “U mad bro?,” a popular retort, juxtaposes one-of-the-guys slang with the notion that showing emotion means demonstrating debilitating weakness. A real bro doesn’t get mad, he only gets testosterone-fueled revenge.

Near the bottom of the masculinity totem pole are “low-T beta manlets”—that is, short, shy, effeminate guys. Lower down are “phaggots,” a word that gets tossed around the Misc. like salt at a Sichuan restaurant. Lest any Miscer think you’re a “phucking phaggot,” all posts about personal care, fashion, home decoration, or how to look like a certain actor/model/bodybuilder are appended with “no homo.” Yet shaky Misc. logic dictates that even if you’re a gay man, there’s still someone you genetically out-alpha and who is, therefore, below you: a woman.

While the entire internet is teeming with horny men whose dark loneliness and insecurity wears the cloak of misogyny, they seem to be especially vocal, and in especially high numbers, on the Misc. Every other thread is a depressing question (“Think she’s faithful to him?”) or a charged statement (“Drunk Sex > Sober Sex”) about women—their bodies, hitting on them, their innate tendency to cheat—and sex—where to find it, how to go “no contact” after having it, why she is fucking him.

The Misc.’s ties to PUA (pickup artist) forums and Reddit’s /r/TheRedPill, a perniciously misogynist, anti-feminist Reddit community dedicated to “discussing sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men,” are as well documented as they are unsurprising. One of PUA’s most frequent suggestions is to acquire “inner game,” or self-confidence through self-improvement. Miscers, being on what is ultimately a bodybuilding forum, have inverted that mantra—they’re going from the outside in. Look good, feel good.

Other elements of the manosphere, from cries of societal misandry to sexual techniques like kino escalation and shit-testing, permeate the Misc. All women are “thirsty sloots” to be conquered, their emotions and physical well-being to be toyed with for internet strangers’ entertainment. When, to the forum’s delight, a Miscer posts about a sexual conquest in lurid detail—a surefire way to rack up the reps—the verbs employed are barbaric: “took down,” “smashed,” “hit.” To have “oneitis,” or an obsessive and unrequited crush on one woman, is to be afflicted with a masculinity-destroying emotional disease, one that can be cured, naturally, by sexually subjugating another woman. Regardless of whether a Miscer is successful or is rejected in the pursuit of sex, the response is the same: “Sloots gonna sloot.”

Despite the Misc.’s obsession with women, it has the latent homoeroticism you’d expect of a website devoted to a male-dominated sport in which bronzed, muscled competitors get smeared with oil and put on thongs before preening onstage in front of other men. This is no more obvious than when discussing a “Chad.” While there is a 5,000-post thread asking what, exactly, defines a Chad, the consensus is that he’s shorthand for a tall, built, strong-jawed, big-dicked, thick-haired, financially successful, athletic, confident, funny, sociable man who, because of these eminently desirable qualities, has his pick of the XX-chromosome litter. You look at a Chad and say, “This guy fucks.” (The prototypical Miscer might be a “Sheldon,” minus any TV-driven connotations of high-level intelligence.) Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski is a stone-cold Chad. Chad Johnson of The Bachelor is a Chad, and not just in name. It’s no accident that “Chad” is one of the most generically white and straight names imaginable, nor that archetypal Chads are nearly always white and straight. The etymological origin of the name Chad is the Welsh word cad, meaning “battle,” a fact that would surely delight Miscers to no end.

The Misc.’s resident Chad is an Australian bodybuilder known by his Bodybuilding.com handle, Zyzz. In early 2010, Zyzz began regularly detailing his “aesthetic” lifestyle on the Misc. As the so-called and self-proclaimed “king of aesthetics,” and with the zingy catchphrases “U mirin’ brah?” and “U jelly?,” Zyzz became the preeminent demigod of the Misc., where he and his “Aesthetics Crew,” acolytes similarly lacking in shirts, body fat, and social grace, were #bodygoals and #squadgoals come to life. Pictures and videosof Zyzz fist-pumping shirtless in public, wrapping his tanned arms low around the waists of nipple-pastied ravers at festivals, adopting a Herculean pose while standing in a shopping cart—these were the icons of the Misc. religion. When Zyzz died of a heart attack in 2011 at the age of twenty-two, his death became the sixth-most-searched death-related topic in Australia that year. His Facebook page, still regularly updated, has over 400,000 likes.

Zyzz’s masculinity showed itself in vain but harmless demonstrations of grandiosity, but other headline-making Miscers have expressed theirs through violence and morally indefensible acts. Gable Tostee first became a Misc. star by posting screenshots of his Tinder and text conversations with women he “rooted,” or had sex with; he entered Misc. lore after creating an ill-advised thread titled “Regarding the balcony tragedy” in the wake of news that one of his Tinder dates had been found dead from a fall from his apartment balcony. (Tostee was later acquitted of murder and manslaughter.) A Miscer known as YaBoyDave secretly filmed himself having sex with women—“whale-smashing,” in Misc. parlance—and posted the videos on the Misc.; he served 10 months in jail and is now a registered sex offender.

Still worse was Luka Magnotta, a wannabe model whose desperately misguided attempts at fame led him to asphyxiate kittens on camera and, later, live stream the brutal murder and dismemberment of a Chinese student while music from American Psycho played in the background; he was arrested at an internet café in Berlin, alternately surfing for pornography and reading news stories about himself, and it was later revealed that he’d posted on the Misc. Most infamously, Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara shooter, was active on the Misc., starting threads like “Why do girls hate me so much?” and “I’m tired of seeing losers with hot chicks.” In the latter thread, he recalled being “disturbed and offended” by seeing a “short, ugly Indian guy driving a Honda Civic” with a “hot blonde girl in his passenger seat.” It’s the bro’s classic sense of entitlement: Why should someone less masculine than me have what I know I deserve?

Miscers reaching toxic masculinity’s most violent nadir are mercifully few and far between. Yet the obvious connection between these people is one shared by the vast majority of the Misc. They’re young, white men whose social and sex lives are marked by absence or humiliating rejection, and their worldviews have likely been shaped by those failures. Rodger, for one, admitted in his autobiographical manifesto to having “never even kissed a girl.” He was an “incel,” or involuntarily celibate. “Not getting any sex,” he wrote, “is what will shape the very foundation of my miserable youth.”

A pervasive negative sense of self, of disappointment about one’s past and simultaneous anxiety and hopelessness for one’s future, is to the Misc. what the iceberg was to the Titanic: visible if you know to look for it, destructive if you don’t, and lurking below the surface all the same

The running joke about Miscers is that they’re all sad, awkward, forever-alone virgins who don’t lift and are on the only non-fitness-oriented section of a bodybuilding website because they can’t get their shit together. It’s revealing that one of the Misc.’s celebrities—there’s a 24,000-word condensed version of his “saga” on a fan-made website dedicated to him—is a weird, often clueless Everyman. He’s neither egregiously out of shape nor conventionally “aesthetic,” and his videos show a distinct lack of social awareness, a trait cultivated, presumably, by a life spent behind a computer screen and under a barbell.

Users of other Bodybuilding.com sections and other internet communities entirely propagate this idea of the Misc. as a cesspool of beta males with hopelessly futile aspirations of being alpha. “They have to be some of the most insecure dudes out there,” a Hypebeast forum user said of Miscers. On another forum, a user wrote that the Misc. is “filled with people [who] make fun of autism, while at the same time they themselves complain about their jobs, women, etc.”

More often, however, the call is coming from inside the house. Miscers reveal their vulnerabilities and problems in earnest with critically self-aware, self-deprecating posts. There are countless threads about “beta” topics like being a virgin (a Google search of site:bodybuilding.com “virgin” yields nearly 70,000 results), undergoing hair loss, not knowing how to normally interact with women, and giving up entirely. The Misc.’sRelationships and Relationships Help sub-forum would be more aptly titled “Sex: Help.” The “Depression Discussion and Support Thread Part III” thread is “stickied” by moderators at the top of the Misc., indicating that it resonates with the community; “Part II,” before it got so long that a new thread had to be created, had 10,000 posts and 1.6 million views. After the two aforementioned pornographic threads of “petite/slim girls” and “athletic girls,” the most-viewed Misc. threads are one about “Beta/cringe” moments of social awkwardness and another that documents the 350-pound weight-loss journey of a Miscer named Wetbreasts. For many Miscers, undoubtedly, browsing those threads is either motivational or like looking in a mirror. Or both.

It might appear counterintuitive that unconfident, sex-deprived, socially awkward young men would congregate—by the millions—on a bodybuilding website. But that paradox is precisely what’s responsible for the Misc.’s enduring allure.

It goes like this: A young guy thinks that improving his body will improve himself, that lifting weights will make him more confident, which will make girls like him more, which will make him happier, which will get him laid. And so on. In search of guidance, he finds Bodybuilding.com, where, after analyzing fat-to-ripped or skinny-to-jacked transformation stories, he ends up on the most popular part of the website: the Misc. But in the Misc. he finds a different kind of self-help: a vibrant, active community of like-minded guys. Guys who’ve felt inadequate and lonely and somehow less than manly, who’ve struggled with women and friends and money and body image, who’ve laughed at internet jokes and self-referential image macros that no one found funny, much less comprehensible, in real life. With a newfound sense of solidarity, this young guy wades deeper into the Misc., a community that gets him, his worldview increasingly shaped by this bodybuilding subculture, his mind warped by the community’s devil-may-care, “LOL, nothing matters” ethos.

It’s this last quality of the Misc. that Miscers themselves most readily use to characterize the forum. They see the stupidity of getting worked up over little green internet squares. They don’t take themselves seriously—it’s a motley crew of dudes on a bodybuilding site, bro—so nor should anyone else. Their attitude, one adopted from the bro culture with which they’re intertwined, is predicated on actions not having consequences. Break shit and someone else will pay for it. Get blind drunk, scream offensive things in public, and your boys will carry you home. Sexually harass or assault a woman, more than one woman, dozens of women, and you’ll still be revered, promoted, elected. You’re just “bro-ing out,” man, be easy, be chill, have a beer, have a protein shake.

“bro that forum is a fucking laugh man, just need a sense of humour,” a Hypebeast forum user wrote, in a thread titled, “The misc section of the bodybuilding forums is full of clowns.” If you’re young, white, and male, with a sense of humor shaped by the internet and a sense of privilege shaped by, well, everything else, the Misc.’s “clowns” can certainly be hilarious. But the further you are from that in-group, the more those clowns start to look like a horde of disturbing, misogynistic Pennywises.

Zyzz was once your standard insecure teenager with bad hair and spaghetti-thin arms. “I remember feeling like a little bitch when I was out with girls, walking next to them and feeling the same size as them,” he said in an interview. Becoming “aesthetic” hid a profound insecurity. His no-fucks-given attitude hid a fierce desire to be wanted.

Miscers see only the mirage. To them, Zyzz was living, walking, flexing proof that an average guy could eventually open the door to the HBB-filled alpha-male kingdom by gaining confidence and an aesthetically pleasing body. But the king is no more. And not every guy in search of personal fulfillment finds the key to that door by picking up a barbell. Not every young, white male who’d otherwise troll Reddit or 4chan becomes, through bodybuilding, the type of bro who doesn’t spend time on internet forums because he’s too busy crushing it, whatever “it” is, in real life. The Misc.—an online fraternity of the average and awkward, a safe space of the resentful and lustful and doubtful—is for the bros still searching.

[fanfics-await-you]

Searching for a People (Chapter 3: Stay the Course)

Summary: The Winter Soldier is not the only asset that Hydra created nor is he the only one they’ve lost. When a highly powered individual breaks free from her shackles, redemption seems impossible. However, maybe she can find peace, perhaps even a home, with some dysfunctional superheroes with a flair for the dramatics.

Tags: some drama, mainly fluff, recovery

Notes: This will mainly be a fun series despite these first few bits.

Word Count: 1,178

SFAP Masterlist

Masterlist

———

“I will not wear handcuffs.”

Iron Man throws his arms into the air in exasperation and begins to mutter under his breath. Captain America’s smile, though still present, is becoming increasingly strained. Every passing minute is further convincing me that I’ve made the wrong choice.

“You’re a powered individual who created a human icicle not ten minutes ago and you expect us to trust you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then put them on.”

“No.”

“Argh! Steve, you deal with her.” This time, Iron Man walks away to collapse on a nearby crate.

The Captain contemplates me for a moment before looking down at my hands. My skin prickles for a moment before he scrambling to pull off his gloves. He offers them to me earnestly. I just look back at him.

He presents them again, “How about a compromise? You can’t freeze us and you’re free to move.”

The eagerness in his eyes to forge peace and help the wounded animal he sees before him almost mitigates my annoyance at his observation. So he’s already figured out I need to touch an object to manipulate it…there goes my element of surprise.

Careful to avoid skin contact, I take the gloves and consider them, “What happens if I take them off?”

“Then you’ll have picked a side,” his tone is casual, but the steel behind his eyes reminds me that Captain America had earned his military title.

I pause before responding, not at his words but because of my own realisation. How do I know he was an actual soldier? The thought had felt too subliminal to just be a guess, and only works to further cement his familiarity.

I slip on the gloves and present my hand to him, “Compromise it is, Captain.”

Captain America nods and shakes my hand while I resist the urge to throw him over my shoulder. Iron Man rolls his eyes from across the corridor but joins us nonetheless.

“Ok team, we’re on our way back. Cap’s picked up a stray, so watch out,” Iron Man speaks into some receiver and gestures for me to walk next to him, obviously not trusting me to walk behind him.

The Captain draws pace on the man’s other side and lets a few moments of quiet pass before speaking again, “Please, call me Steve. This is Tony.”

The olive branch is kind but also given in hopes of eliciting my name. The Captain’s hope will have to go unanswered as I don’t even possess the information to answer him. The closest things I have to names are the Wraith and Asset 26743. However, even those titles are now meaningless.

I don’t respond and the rest of the walk is endured in silence.

———

I stand before a semi-circle of individuals who ultimately look unextraordinary but somehow captured a HYDRA base.

“So, explain again what she does exactly?” An extremely disheveled man with a thick mop of dark curls leans towards me, curiosity swamping his face.

“As far as I, the resident genius, can tell, she can change the state of water molecules just by coming into contact with them. That means no touching, Bruce.” The man, who had stepped within arm’s length, quickly withdrew at Iron Man’s words.

Ah, good to know I still have some tricks up my sleeve.

“A water magi? Elemental manipulation is old magic and rarely wielded on Asgard, but also much more than ice and steam, Tony. I would recommend caution, friends, as she is likely a very powerful witch.”

Fuck.

Iron Man smiles, apparently amused that I have been caught in my deception, “That is good to know because we’re taking Ms Magi with us.”

The statement is received without complaint, and the sole woman before me picks up a pair of cuffs silently.

I tense and flex my hands. “I am not your prisoner.”

Before anyone can move, Captain America quickly adds “It’s okay guys, she’s wearing gloves.”

Surprisingly, despite the Captain’s reassurance, chaos ensues.

“Sorry, what?!”

“You mentioned a frozen body not two minutes ago.”

“Cap, seriously, you cannot take in every reject you find. Take it from me, it’s how I got in this mess in the first place.”

“Rogers, I think you underestimate a water magi if you think gloves are sufficient protection.”

The Captain makes a ‘stop’ motion with his hand and the hubbub instantly quiets. Furtively, I am not only impressed with his control but also by his team’s obvious respect for him.

“Look. She chose to go against HYDRA and has agreed to compromise with us. I’m not saying that we’re all suddenly best friends but this is a start. Anyway, where would any of us be without second chances?” His words are received with unhappy silence.

However, the moment passes and the woman turns away to board the nearby quinjet. A man carrying a bow and the other on- Bruce shortly follow her. The burly (and notably handsome) man who revealed my secret continues to study me and I return the favour. There is a certain cheerfulness to him even now that could be easily mistaken for idiocy or battle-lust but intelligence glitters behind his eyes. Great, another one I’ve got to look out for. This is not going to be as easy as I thought.

Eventually, he turns towards the plane but not without pausing to whisper something Iron Man’s ear. His grim nod in response fails to fill me with confidence as he too enters the quinjet. Finally, it’s Captain America and myself left, both waiting for the other to move.

I could take him.

No.

I could just knock him out before anyone notice.

No.

I-

I will stay this course. For now.

“Don’t worry about them. They’ll warm up to you, I’m sure.” The persistent, small, and genuine smile remains pinned to the corner of the Captain’s mouth.

Christ, I’m thinking of knocking him out while he’s trying to make me feel better. I’d call him naive but the way he’s been subtly yet carefully watching my hands shows me otherwise. No, he’s not gullible, he’s just giving me a chance. The thought sticks in my chest as I nod and move to turn from him.

However, before I do, a few simple words find their way to the surface, “Thank you…Steve.”

I clamber into the plane to avoid his reaction and take a seat far from the others. I just need everything to stop, just for a minute, so I can try to piece my thoughts together. A few seconds pass and then a solid form installs itself in the seat next to me. For fuck’s sake, he’s really not going to leave me alone. I continue to stare at a single spot on the metal floor.

He doesn’t speak until the quinjet is at cruising altitude. “So, what can you tell us?”

I’m caught off guard. “About what?”

I feel, rather than see, him shrug in response. “Anything. Important things about HYDRA, yourself, your past…”

There’s a tiny shift in the water in the air that is imperceptible to everyone else but is like a slap in the face to me. I’ve got this, I don’t need HYDRA to be in control. A lapse in control, an emotional response to a stranger, would not and could not happen again.

“There’s not much to tell,” it’s not so much the truth as a not-lie, “They see me as a trained dog, capable of following orders but ultimately an animal. I was only told what was pertinent to my mission. As for me, they wiped my mind if I showed signs of anything from disobedience to memories. Sorry if you were looking for information but I’m coming up dry.”

The last sentence is sharp, dipped in resentment and buried frustration. However, Steve’s composure remains unwavering, only punctured by a tired sigh.

“That’s alright, I figured that you would have undergone similar manipulation and treatment. I just thought it wouldn’t hurt to try.”

“Then why am I here?” The question comes out in a humiliatingly desperate rush before I can swallow it.

No one responds, and so I finally look up to regard Steve. His face is indecipherable and it’s infuriating.

“Tell me! What’s my purpose if not for information or leverage?”

Understanding or grief or pity sneaks into his eyes and he ponders his own hands before responding. The chatter of the plane has long since gone quiet.

Steve’s words are clear among the still of air, “People don’t need to serve a purpose to be saved. You don’t need to serve a purpose. You’re allowed to just…be.”

I can’t find the words to respond so I simply return to burning a hole in the floor with my gaze. This, unsurprisingly, doesn’t stop him from talking.

“Let’s start simple, then…How about a name?”

“I don’t have one. I had a title and I had a number but they’re not even mine anymore.”

“Then pick one.”

I give him a look like a second head has popped out of his neck, “That’s not how names work. You can’t choose your own.”

He fires right back, “Why not? They took your name, so give yourself another.”

He’s prepared for this…I wonder why?

“I…I guess I choose Eve. That name is important, I just don’t know why.”

While the name is familiar, I’m also certain that it’s not my own. So, it only grows the list of things I’ve forgotten that are beginning to haunt me.

“Eve it is, then.” There’s a certainty in Steve’s voice that I envy, the ease in which the name finds its home on his tongue.

Despite other questions and statements thrown my way, I remain silent for the rest of the journey. The only word that my mind can deal with at the moment is ‘Eve’ and what it could come to mean.

[orionsangel86]

Part 2 - Episode Review of 12x15

Part 1 for 12x14 review

Of the past three episodes this one was my favourite, but of course it was, it had Cas in it - however small his part was. I think it was the best structured for the story as well though and for where it left us in terms of speculation and meta. Basically I have a lot to say.

Davy Perez returns for 12x15 and I think he had a lot of fun with this one. Lucille makes an appearance and I am sure that fans of the Walking Dead recoiled in horror watching Dean Winchester carry that horrid bat, I also enjoyed poor suffering Castiel dealing with the crazy “lizard people” man and the Queen making an appearance (much to Misha’s delight I’m sure).

Other smaller moments I liked – the overlapping conversations both Dean and Sam had to Cas and Mary respectively that led to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where it was easy to mishear Dean saying “I love you too” to Castiel. In a Perez episode. When his last episode was 12x12. Which was the episode where Cas confessed his undying love? Yeah that ain’t a coincidence guys.

Also Gwen was a totally awesome character of the week who was twice able to fight off a hellhound that she couldn’t see. Please keep giving us these awesome female characters show. We are starved and scramble for this kind of stuff.

Final small point - Winchesters in glasses *drools*.

For the longer meta points however I’ll start with something that grinded my gears on first watch...

Dean Winchester – No longer a Germaphobe?

Yeah this bothered me.. When did DEAN “bathing in purell tonight” Winchester not care about showering after getting covered in monster goop? There is only ONE OTHER time in the whole series that that was the case… Purgatory. Perez sure loves his call backs to previous seasons. I didn’t pick up on it at first and basically huffed a “that’s out of character” at the screen. But I have since thought about this and re-watched the episode a couple of times and well, its clearly a purgatory callback now. I had to kick myself for getting grumpy at first.

So why are we calling back to Purgatory Dean? Where it “felt pure” and his mission was to “find the angel” at all costs? I know Davy Perez is new, but I can’t imagine him getting the characterisation so wrong here, especially after what he has given us so far. Dean is in purgatory mode. He is going from hunt to hunt unknowingly from the BMOL’s leads and thriving in the kill. Could this be because after twice being told “you’re a killer Dean Winchester” he’s decided to accept it? The last time he truly embraced that killer side of him was in purgatory after all (the mark of cain does not count since he fought against it with every fibre of his being). I think the nod to Lucille also kinda comes into this here. Dean with a distinctive weapon, being the thing that the monsters fear most, it’s some very strong imagery. We are being lead to believe that Dean truly IS the “killer”, the “American Ketch” if you like. So of course I fully expect him to defy the BMOL expectations and fight against that eventually. Dean is on a journey of self-acceptance after all. When he realises he is SO MUCH MORE than just a “killer” (no matter how pure he felt in purgatory) his journey will be complete.

Sam and Lying

I have already covered this briefly in part 1, but Dean is our token excellent liar in this show and yet right now he really is on an honesty kick. Sam however, is not. “Oh so we lie?”  “Yeah. A lot” The interesting thing about Sam’s lying is that when he does lie, he generally thinks it is for the best. This is the case with their lies to Gwen and it is also the case with his lies to Dean about the BMOL. He thinks it will give his brother “peace” to just keep it to himself for the time being. Then he has this conversation with Gwen where she says:

“If I’d just told him, why couldn’t I just tell him the truth”

“but I didn’t, I lied, I lied to make things easier”

This show does love its character parallels after all. This one was pretty obvious. Marcus is Dean getting ripped to shreds by the hellhound, Gwen is Sam lying to make things easier.

Now aside from the uncomfortable wincest implications of such a mirror this is a good point. Because as I said about 12x14, Sam chooses the objective path rather than the emotional path pretty much all the time, because it is easier for him. He may be emotionally intelligent in how he deals with difficult situations generally, but when it comes to his brother and potentially difficult differences of opinion, he would rather keep things quiet.

(I will talk more about Gwen and Marcus as mirrors a bit later)

It is pretty clear to the audience that this conversation with Gwen is what makes Sam decide to tell Dean the truth about working with the Brits. It is evident of how far the boys have come that we are no longer seeing such a  toxic relationship of lying and sacrifice etc etc so much anymore (since it was getting super old). Though he still hasn’t told Dean all the details, and whilst Dean warns that “the minute something feels off we bail” I can’t see Sam actually bailing now. For some reason I reckon Sam has picked his side and is determined to set things right. I expect to see his relationship with Mick develop into almost trust by season end and I ALSO expect that another wedge will be formed between Dean and Sam because of this.

Crowley – rubbing off on everyone

I’m sorry I couldn’t help but make a joke about that line. Which I will never get out of my head! Crowley was really the star of this episode (mainly because Cas only had a small part and even my extremely biased self couldn’t give this one to him and that hot angel dude who was manipulating him). Nope Crowley wins it. He was brilliant. Crowley is still desperately trying to pull his “I don’t care about the Winchesters” act. I’m glad to see that EVERYONE sees through this at this stage.

I was talking to @purplesummer91 after watching this episode (we watched it together with pizza) about how I was so infuriated with Bucklemming for writing Crowley so fucking dumb in 12x13. For choosing to put Lucifer into a purpose built vessel and chain him up in a way that was clearly not going to go well for Crowley. We were both super pissed off about it. Even all the painfully cringe worthy exposition couldn’t save Crowleys character in 12x13. Bucklemming probably had some stupid plan for Lucifer to get out and rape a few more people before finally doing something really stupid and out of character for Lucifer and move to LA to solve crimes… pfft…

Davy Perez however, is now the hero who has saved the script, and Crowley, from their slimy incompetent hands. What he managed to do in this episode was actually have Crowley’s plan make sense again. His “ten steps ahead” speech was really clever of Perez. Giving Crowley the upper hand and putting him right back where his character belongs – as the smartest character in the whole fucking show. Now, I get bored of generic suit wearing demons and angels as much as the next person, and the weakest part of this episode was those two idiots trying to barter with Lucifer and set him free (everyone in hell should really know by now that you stick with Crowley if you actually wanna live at least a little while longer) and whilst I am really bored of Lucifer (and don’t like the season 12 rendition of him at all) I enjoyed watching Crowley beat him down again. It felt like some spiteful revenge on Bucklemming and their idiocy – your next job Davy is to bring Charlie back and have her joke about how terribly stupid her supposed “death” was and how only an idiot would really believe her quick thinking glamour magic from Oz to put the Stines off her trail (if you haven’t noticed already, I’m still super bitter).

Let’s talk about Drowley for a moment though. Because as @purplesummer91 and I discussed after watching, we still can’t believe this is still a thing. I mean, okay, sure. They had their fun together in early season 10, but the fact that the writers continuously bring this back and shove it rather graphically in all of our faces is something else. Never let a hater tell you that Bi!Dean is all in your head, or that you only want it for your ship… because NO ONE ASKED FOR FUCKING DROWLEY. The show chose that. They chose to shove that down our throats and practically make it canon. The fact that it is so fucking obvious in canon is still unbelievable every time we get another Drowley joke.

“Maybe you rubbed off on me, maybe I rubbed off all over you”. Thanks Crowley for that mental image. Where is Sam so I can borrow his brain bleach?

If you are doubting the impact of this line from a shipping perspective, ask yourselves this:  would that line have had as much impact if he had said it to Sam?

Yes, Crowley talks in innuendos, and loves to be overly sexual with the boys, BUT since season 10 and Crowley and Dean’s “summer of love” his sexual jokes have been almost exclusively to Dean. Because Crowley, being the intelligent guy he is, knows that they would have far greater effect on Dean – Since they are fucking true and there is nothing Dean can do about that. Crowley has been Dean’s subtextual ex-boyfriend for two and a half seasons now. This is not something we as fangirls wanted or needed, but the show went there. I’m never getting over that. Ever.

The other important Crowley point to talk about is how he was actually validated this episode for the good he has done. Dean’s sincere thank you for saving Cas, even though Crowley tries to brush it off as wanting to spare himself from the man pain, it is obvious at this stage that he cares for Cas (we talked about this in 12x12 anyway so I won’t go into detail). Sam’s thank you was even more heartfelt, and genuine and sincere, and Crowley didn’t even come back with a snarky remark that time, nor did he brush off Gwen’s hug which was extremely heartwarming. Oh Crowley, you big softy. We all know you still just want to be loved.

Castiel – Angel of Earth – Hunter of Lizard People?

Why is it every time Cas graces our screens I grin like an idiot in love. I was a bit sad that Cas’s role in this episode was so small baring in mind we don’t get him for another three episodes (which I’m slightly pissy about FYI) and we didn’t get him for the last two either. But, Perez seems to be becoming the next Robbie Thompson for giving us a lot of info and meta content in a short space of time.

Cas was so freaking adorable in this episode. Who would have thought that it was canon that Cas is a Beyoncé fan to start with – enough that he knows the name of her sister and used it as his alias. Honestly I can see Dean rolling his eyes but still gazing at him with heaps of affection. The upside down FBI badge really has become a running joke. Cas just isn’t quite there yet in his hunter skills. (all this means for me is that I hope by the end of the series we will get an episode where Cas swoops in like a skilled hunter, flashes his badge in sync with Dean and is perfectly able to interview a witness without any issues whatsoever – AND give them a classic flirtatious wink at the end.)

His utter exasperation over the conspiracy theorists lizard people story was hilarious. As was Cas banging his head against the door. Cas was so done with this guy. But at least he got his Kelly Kline lead.

I think it is important to point out that at this stage, Cas is so disillusioned with his siblings that the moment he sees one he pulls out his blade to defend himself. It breaks my heart but the Dean Winchester in me wants to scream out “Damn right you defend yourself sweetheart. You stab that dick with wings!” As hot as Kelvin is I just don’t trust him one bit. Nor do I buy what he is selling here. What I LOVE is that we are getting MORE unanswered questions to Cas too add to the heap we already have.

“You ever miss it? Upstairs?”

“I love Earth, smells like hay, but it’s not home is it?”

“imagine it Castiel, for you to come and go as you please, be part of your family, your true family again”

Castiel doesn’t answer ANY of these questions, he diverts them. And this is so so interesting to see happening in a script written by the same writer who gave us “Knowing you has been the best part of my life, you’re my family, I love you, I love all of you”. We KNOW as an audience that Cas has chosen who his family, his home is, and it’s not heaven. But the fact that the angels don’t know this, that they STILL think they can manipulate Castiel with talk of acceptance and power… I can’t wait for him to turn to them and basically say “fuck you guys. I am going back to my boyfriend because HE LOVES ME.” And honestly this is where all the coming out/non accepting family of a queer kid metaphors come into play and I LOVE THEM.

In fact the ONLY part of Kelvins whole little speech there that perked Castiel’s interest was mentioning Joshua and this:

”the gardeners got a plan, all we ask is that you hear him out for the greater good.” And at that moment we know Cas is done for, because his second biggest weakness (next to a certain Mr Humanity) is doing the right thing – doing it for the “greater good”.

Cas isn’t going back to heaven for acceptance, to get his ‘home’ back, or for power. He is going back because Joshua has a plan that may help ‘the greater good’ and that is a pitch that Cas can’t say no to. His face when Kelvin asked him if he was ready at the end, again, no answer. He didn’t look ready at all, and I HATE seeing Cas in pain. Especially since apparently we ain’t gonna see him again until 12x19 which I am super pissed off about. Urgh.

But I just need to mention that final moment, Dean Winchester looks down at his phone after Cas hung up and says “he sound weird to you?” we don’t get an answer from Sam but I would bet money on that answer being “no?” because only Dean has that connection to Cas that means he can tell if something is wrong over a fucking PHONE CALL. They are such husbands OMG. Dean is gonna be so upset when he finds out Cas has gone back to heaven. This is gonna hurt to watch.

Gwen and Marcus – Parallels?

The last point I wanted to talk about was how Gwen and Marcus appear to be a mirror for Sam and Dean’s relationship in the show. This was obvious when Gwen spoke to Sam in the car and Sam clearly took her experience and advice and was inspired to tell Dean the truth. The show does this A LOT with various MOTW characters being some way mirrored with the boys in order for the boys to learn a lesson of some kind. There are often multiple parallels in place however and the other parallel here was Dean and Cas. Yes, there are both Wincest and Destiel readings in this doomed couple. Am I happy about this? Not really, but the interpretation is there.

Now, obviously the wincest parallel is easily disregarded as a legitimate romantic thing because the show is NEVER gonna go there. Don’t stress people. That’s not what I’m saying. If it was I’d quit watching in a heartbeat. *shudder*. The meaning of the mirror here is that our Sam character Gwen, kept lying to the Dean character Marcus, which ultimately lead to Marcus’s death. Gwen blames herself for his death because she lied about her feelings for him.

There are multiple layers to this reading. Marcus was clearly in love with Gwen, he wanted her by his side and dreaded her leaving him to go to college. (this all plays nicely with the Winchesters history and Sam leaving Dean to go to Stanford). The main point of takeaway here is that Gwen didn’t feel the same way about Marcus that he did about her. Gwen wanted something more in her life, she wanted to pursue a future that she didn’t feel she could have with Marcus by her side. Is this foreshadowing of the Winchesters going their separate ways? Dean always has been the clingier of the two, and I have been saying throughout this entire post that Dean is emotional whereas Sam is logical. The situation matches Gwen and Marcus. Marcus was holding on to a dream ruled by his feelings, whereas Gwen was far more logical and rational about their situation. Is Sam going to break away from Dean? If he doesn’t break away? Could this lead to Dean’s doom?

Ultimately I don’t think this season is gonna end well for Dean – call it a hunch, but with the way Ketch was eyeing him up and the differences between them I dunno, I can just see a clash in the future that I think will involve Cas somehow… but that is pure speculation. I also think that this could foreshadow Sam choosing to go to the UK to learn with the BMOL…

The other parallel is similar. In this episode Cas struggles with choosing to leaving earth and going back to heaven. Leaving Dean. The difference is that unlike Gwen, we KNOW that Cas loves Dean. His feelings have been laid out in the text. But poor self-hating Dean doesn’t know that. Will Cas keep the fact that he went back to heaven/is working with heaven again from Dean? How will that affect their relationship? We know that Dean loves Cas, but we have yet to have the moment where he admits to Cas that he loves him too (which I will put money on happening by season end). Dean could EASILY view Cas’s heartfelt confession as platonic familial love and therefore feel rejected, especially if Cas now leaves him for heaven once again. Dean’s main issue throughout pretty much ALL OF THE SERIES prior to Cas’s break up with heaven in season 11 was that Cas kept leaving him. Ironic since they are now paralleled by a couple where the Cas mirror NOT leaving him and telling him the truth lead the Dean mirror to his death.

Basically this is how I see it. If Cas and Sam chose to stay by Dean’s side and keep secrets from him, then Dean is likely to die. If they are honest with him, and leave him, then he will live. Could this be foreshadowing an ultimatum somewhere along the way? If you leave Earth, return to heaven and stay away from OUR territory, then we won’t kill the man you love.

OR, If you go to London with us, work with us there, then we won’t kill your brother?

This is pure speculation of course, but I liked the parallel, and how it foreshadows Dean ending this season very much alone and feeling like he was rejected by choice.

How very heartbreaking indeed.

[b-does-the-write-thing]

Just read 'If The Shoe Fits', and I have to know whether Belle relinquishes the use of high heels or they come onto a different solution. :)

Well…I had every intention of writing something funny and instead decided this would be a perfect time to explore pregnancy footwear because why not?

With little to no warning, Gold’s brain ceased operating.

Uncertain how to take his stunned silence, Belle glanced down shyly as her hands fluttered nervously about the lace fringes of her teddy. The blush colored sheer fabric was pulled tight over her swollen belly leaving her breasts and legs on full display.

Due any minute, Belle glowed like a single candle in a dark hall. Her entire being radiated light and life into the bitter dark surrounding him. His mind rapidly catalogued her curves in all their glory, starting at the curve of her cheek to the swell of her bottom. He had no idea how long he silently stared at his estranged wife without processing why she was here. It only the sight of her tiny feet, swollen and red, crammed into stilettos that helped him find his voice again. “Belle,” he rasped though he could barely move his jaw much less his feet. “What are you doing?”

Misunderstanding, a fierce glimmer flickered to life in her eyes as her chin jerked up to glare at him. “What does it look like?” she snapped. “I’m seducing you.”

When was the last time he had her?

Nine months, his mind supplied helpfully.

Too long, his libido hurried to add.

Gold’s fingers twitched at his side but his brain and body had yet to sync up again. Their unborn son kicked, his movements rippling his mother’s taut belly and Gold’s brain short circuited again. His body, having quite enough of his mind’s inability to focus, took over and his hand reached slowly out to cover the small area where his son’s foot wiggled. The answering thump made the both smile goofily at one another before his other hand followed suit as he sank down to his knees.

Belle’s breath hitched a bit as he pressed his cheek against her belly. His shorter hair scraped across the thin fabric, the bristles tickling the sensitive skin. He moved slightly so his head did not rest against her but her hands pressed him closer. Gods, he had missed this. Her warmth cradled around him as if he too was safe in her womb.  His eyes drifted close as her fingers began to comb through his silver hair, fingernails gently scratching his aching scalp.

Belle leaned too far forward to reach the back of his neck and she teetered. He caught her soundly and with a grumble at his own idiocy, he stood back up and led her towards the cot in the far corner of the shop.

She protested but he didn’t listen to a word she said. Once he had her sitting, he knelt back down beside her and very carefully began to wiggle her left foot free of the ridiculous shoe. By the time he undid the straps around her ankles, her feet had red marks and a small cut from where her swollen feet had rubbed raw against the shoe’s edge.

His brave little wife was breathing heavily through her nose but when he glanced up at her, she straightened her shoulders and gave him a cool look. “I can take off my own shoes,” she said stubbornly.

He quirked a brow at her. Belle could barely sit upright due to the swell of her stomach much less fold in half to take these contraptions off. “While I don’t doubt you’d find a way, how did you even get them on in the first place?” he asked.

“Ruby helped,” Belle confessed and he nodded knowingly. Of course, Ruby would have thought nothing of it but Emma, Mary Margaret, and Ashley, all mothers, would have understood Belle’s reasoning but would have somehow managed to talk her out of trying to wear sky high heels at this late date.

“I made her,” Belle said stubbornly as she caught a look at his face. “I promised I wouldn’t walk around in them… I just…I didn’t feel like myself without them.”

He nodded as he liberated her right foot from its cage. This foot had a slightly worse cut and the forming of what looked like a blister on the back of her heel. He’d have to get some ointment from the bathroom but as he stood, she caught his hand in her’s.

“Don’t go,” she whispered. Her face upturned in supplication made his heart clench in his chest as if someone had it in their grasp. Belle’s hair, even more luxurious from the pregnancy hormones, tumbled over her breasts but it did not do much to hinder his view. His little wife’s small petite frame was still tiny but her curves had filled out enticingly and her cheeks were the colors of apples.

“I’m just fetching a band-aid,” he assured her but as tears started to fill her eyes, he collapsed to sit beside her. The cot protested, a squeak of rusty springs, but they paid it no mind. “Sweetheart, sweetheart, what is it?” he demanded as his hand buried itself in her hair.

She leaned against him as she sought the same comfort she had given him moments ago as small sobs began to wrack her body. “I can’t do this,” she mumbled into his jacket. “I can’t, I can’t.”

His closed his eyes as her pain echoed in his chest but he only let it in for a moment. He remembered all too well the emotional whiplashes of pregnancy. Belle may have been…ahem…desirous of his attention but once faced with the actual beast…

He pressed a chase kiss to the crown of her head as he gathered her closer. “You don’t have to,” he assured her as he rubbed small circles into her back. “I understand.”

She pulled away from his chest to glare at him. “What do you mean I don’t have to?” she hiccuped. “I’m going to give birth any moment!”

His eyes widened as he realized what she had not been talking about not being able to sleep with him after all. “Oh,” he said, blinking rapidly. “I thought…I meant…” Before he could dig himself into this hole any further, he changed directions. “You will be a wonderful mother,” he told her fiercely. “You are everything a mother should be.”

“I’m not,” she hiccuped. “I’m impatient, and headstrong and- and Mary Margaret said I wouldn’t be able to wear heels anymore because-because I’d be a mother!”

He made a mental note to tell Mary Margaret to keep her opinions to herself but he chalked it up to a lost cause regardless. Snow White had never been one for gowns and heels, nor had her daughter come to think of it, but his wife had always enjoyed her shoes and skirts. Paired with her passions, bravery and staggering intelligence, it made her a formidable woman in her own right.

“Mothers like to tell expecting mothers all sorts of things,” Rumplestiltskin assured his wife as he drew her back to his arms. “In all my years, I’ve seen every kind of woman raise a child and I can assure you, their preference in shoes hardly signifies.”

“Oh,” Belle said lamely as her hands clutched at his lapel.

“However,” he continued as he kicked the shoes she had been wearing aside. “Perhaps no more stilettos until you’ve given birth.”

She gave him a watery smile. “You never liked my stilettos,” she said in a mock accusing tone.

“I liked that you liked them,” he reminded her. An old argument…one they had giggled about in bed. Belle shrugged as she wiggled her toes against his calf. The familiar gesture, was one he had never expected to experience again after everything. “Would you…would you like a foot rub?” he asked casually though he tried not to get his hopes up too much.

She nodded fervently and they shared a smile. His hand moved down to her bare knees before he drew her feet up and over his lap. Belle, unable to stay upright, leaned back on her elbows as he closed his hands over her left foot reverenlty. “I did quite like this part,” he confessed as he began to rub small circles into her sole.

Judging by her moans of relief and enjoyment, she had too. Their quarrels were not forgotten…but he could not quite talk himself out of this small oasis. As his knuckles worried out one knot, Belle went boneless as she collapsed backward. Her teddy fluttered about her hips, revealing the bare, swollen flesh beneath and Rumplestiltskin’s body went rigid as the blood rushed to his lower extremities.

His hands must have stopped their work because Belle rolled over to her side to glance up at him in question. “Sorry,” he managed as he tried to hide the evidence of his arousal by subtly shifting to the right. “Uh…anything else Mary Margaret said?”

Belle’s eyes followed him knowingly. “She did have some good tips on inducing labor,” Belle said as her thighs fell open. Rumplestiltskin’s mouth went dry. “That’s actually the reason I’m here…or one of the reasons…I was hoping you might…be interested in helping me try some of them?”

More than amenable, Rumplestiltskin threw all caution to the wind as he collapsed forward to worship his wife’s bare feet with his lips. He pressed kisses to the soles of her feet, brushed his nose against the small toes that wiggled in ticklish delight as he steadily worked himself up her calves, fingers caressing the underside of her knees before he buried his face into the heart of her sex and breathed in deeply the smell of her.

“Belle,” he murmured against the inside of her thigh as his fingers traced circles into her lower back. He could not see her face but her heartbeat thundered loud and strong against his cheek.

Her hips wiggled maddingly as she tried to urge him onwards and he smiled at her noises of frustrated exasperation. “Rumplestiltskin,” she growled after a moment. “If you don’t start making love to me this very moment, I’m going to wear nothing but stilettos for a year!”

He chuckled at the nonsensical threat but he obeyed without question. They came together awkwardly but tenderly before he collapsed to the side of her, clutching her to him as she might disappear from his arms. She seemed to have the same thought, her feet wrapping around his lower leg as if to keep him in place beside her.

“Rats,” Belle sighed as he pressed kisses to the back of her neck.

“Rats?” he echoed in amusement. “That bad?”

“No!” Belle hurried to assure him as she tried to roll over. He held her gently in place as his hands moved to gently follow the curves of her stomach. “No,” she repeated as she relaxed into him. “I meant…I was hoping my water would break.”

“During?” he said in horror.

She shrugged. “I want this baby out,” she confessed with a giggle. “I feel like I’ve been pregnant forever.”

Knowing Belle’s aversion to magic, he wisely did not suggest a magical solution. Besides, she snuggled closer against him, her feet touching his, and he thought he would see his very soul to never leave this cot but to spend an eternity with her in his arms.

–

Ha, well I can just see Belle stubbornly sticking to her footwear despite it all (especially when trying to feel sexy and comfortable in her own skin) and yes, I know canon Belle had a sped up pregnancy and I changed that a bit but oh well. Hope you liked it regardless. 

[shanicwinters-blog]

His piercing ocean blue eyes trap me. His matte pink lips entice me. I admire his face, regardless of his acne filled cheeks that he gets made fun for everyday. His blonde hair that sometimes looks dirty blonde & sometimes looks brown excites me. I admire his soul even though he can be heartless at times. I admire his body, built & sculpted from God himself. His soul, as close as souls can be. His mere idiocy but extreme emotional intelligence amuses me. As his bare hands make his way to cradling my small chubby face. As he always playfully abuses me but protects me at the same time. His greatness. His uplifting sayings. His downfalls. His innocence yet his bad boy quirk. He scares yet excites me. His adventurous attitude towards life. The way everything is a new experience waiting to make or break him. I admire him. I care for him. I might even love him. But I know I can’t. Because I have before. Back when he was my best friend. My everything & I ruined it. & even though we are still best friends, it will never be the same. & no matter what happens, I will always fall for him, time & time again. Regardless.

[jillmckenzie1]

Beyond, or: Daddy! Issues! In! Space!

We can all agree that Stephen Hawking was a pretty bright guy. He took a look at what humanity had been up to and was quoted as saying, “I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.”

If you’re in a pessimistic frame of mind, Hawking’s quote is easy to get behind. Due to pollution, environmental mismanagement, and climate change, bird populations in North America are plummeting. That’s only a single example of how our arrogance, selfishness, and ignorance damages the place we live in. Not to get too technical, but we humans can be pretty goddamn dumb.

Does that mean we’re doomed, and that the prudent thing to do is to hide under the covers until the end? Maybe not, because the rest of Hawking’s quote is, “But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.” He’s not wrong. For every moment of evil or idiocy we witness, there are just as many of grace and compassion.

Space travel provides the human species with more than scientific advancements and colonization opportunities. It allows us the chance to evolve, to embody the promise of what we can be. Filmmaker James Gray knows that space exploration is simultaneously external and internal, and his latest film Ad Astra explores that concept with intelligence and nuance.

There isn’t a whole lot that rattles Roy McBride (Brad Pitt). In the near future, he’s an astronaut, and he’s partially become a legend because his heart rate never rises above 80 BPM—even while he’s falling to earth. As McBride works on a gigantic space antenna, a power surge strikes Earth. Thousands are killed, the antenna is destroyed, but McBride manages to keep his wits about him and survive.

The other reason McBride is a legend? He’s the son of H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a fiercely intelligent astronaut who was the commander of The Lima Project. Their mission was to explore the outer reaches of the solar system and search for signs of alien life. McBride’s father has been off-planet for 26 years, and somewhere around Neptune, Earth lost contact with The Lima Project.

McBride’s BPM even stays under 80 when he’s given a mission. The surge originated near Jupiter, and it may have been caused by an antimatter device that McBride Senior was tinkering with. It’s possible that McBride’s father is alive. If so, is he behind the surge attack, and what are his intentions? Accompanied by Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), an old friend of his father, McBride must voyage to the Moon, Mars, the outer reaches of our galaxy, and the interiors of the human heart.

There’s been a bit of a renaissance in space cinema during the last few years. Films like Gravity and Interstellar have tried to provide a balance between hard science fiction and a meaningful emotional journey. For me, I waited for the Goldilocks Principle* to kick in, and I yearned for an astronaut movie that balanced out the emotional journey with astounding visuals. Ad Astra is precisely that movie.

Director James Gray isn’t quite a household name, and I imagine he prefers it that way. Take a look at his filmography and you’ll see that his interests lie in how experiences and exploration change people. He’s doing the same thing here as he did with The Lost City of Z, he’s just painting on a far bigger canvas. His film is handsomely shot and provides some mind bending visuals. While other directors would luxuriate in CGI, Gray frequently focuses on Brad Pitt’s face, providing us a window into his character. Before you worry that Ad Astra is going to be a cosmic snoozefest, I should mention to you the jaw-dropping set pieces that include a shootout on moon buggies and a zero-gravity fight between McBride and an extremely angry baboon. I should also mention the excellent set design, and Gray has taken great pains to depict what space travel is likely to look like in the near future.

Gray and co-writer Ethan Gross have written a smart and sophisticated screenplay with a great deal to say. Great art allows for a wealth of interpretations. You could certainly read it as a religious allegory, where a person journeys to meet their creator and discovers the truth of their purpose. I read it as more of an exploration of masculinity and how it’s affected by the bonds between a parent and child. A running voiceover by Pitt keeps the film’s point of view narrow, and that’s just as it should be. The more specific a screenplay is, the easier it is for everyone to relate.

The cast essentially exists to support Pitt at various stages, and that’s also just fine.** You’ll get Donald Sutherland for a few scenes as a grizzled ex-astronaut, a dash of Ruth Negga as a Martian administrator, and a pinch of Liv Tyler as McBride’s estranged spouse, all in service of illuminating different aspects of his humanity. 2019 is turning out to be a hell of a year for Brad Pitt, between this and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. He doesn’t often get the credit he deserves for acting skill, and as McBride, Pitt delivers career-best work. He’s playing a taciturn space jockey, but he never grandstands with his performance or becomes a stoic block of wood. Pitt’s McBride excels at emotional compartmentalization (as mandated by U.S. Space Command), yet discovers that emotions have a way of breaking free.

Ad Astra isn’t a CGI adventure perfect for date night, and it’s not a meditative rumination on the human condition playing in the cramped confines of an arthouse cinema. It’s more than that, a film made with impeccable craftsmanship, blazing intelligence, and emotional honesty. Ad Astra is a special film, the kind of film that isn’t made much now or back in the day. You owe it to yourself to see it.

  *Nope, this isn’t some goofy term I made up. You can read about it here.

**I should also mention the quietly weird cameo appearance by Natasha Lyonne as a Mars gate agent.

  from Blog https://ondenver.com/beyond-or-daddy-issues-in-space/

[yesdanielblisslove]

The Specialty of Self-Defense for Self-Survival

Time, talk and strategies, are essential basic originations of building up an individual self-defense procedure. Set aside the effort to learn and change the self, and all its multidimensional multifaceted nature, into an increasingly edified rendition of the first layout. The base plan of oneself ought to advance profitably and continuously, but then, a large portion of us try not to change without question. By concentrated reflection each snapshot of consistently, one endeavors to state the vivacious change of their brain. By which the body, its physicality, changes. Or on the other hand, if not, the totality of the individual changes and not positively. A declining nature unfurls. But, the psyche is a dream that is self-made by the mind's all encompassing exertion to fathom, comprehend and develop. In the individual specialty of self-defense for self-survival, preventiveness means well-thought preparing, practices and methods for individual advancement. It is a procedure by which one changes himself or herself for one of a kind separated improvement. The individual outlook does not mind what others think or do or accept. Freedom of the self is of essential concern. Subjugation has close fondness for the desires for unjustifiable privilege. Every snapshot of life is a thankful energy about time. While dairy cattle and sheep eat, the guard dog keeps the watch. The person is prepared, as disagreeable predators plot their plans. Protective expectant mental cheerful readiness foresees the definitiveness for individual understanding about human instinct. One can without much of a stretch disregard the thorough of learning and appreciate the intemperance of quick satisfaction. In any case, obliviousness in the act of tenacious ineptitude welcomes the hazard of abrupt irrevocability. There's constantly a back-and-forth among life and passing. To keep away from the difficulties of self-order and individual adequacy, chances lethal outcomes. Time is of the embodiment, talk is of phenomenal worth, and strategies stay basic to appropriate individual wellness in managing the showdowns of life. In the craftsmanship and the specialty of self-defense, there are numerous perspectives to be comprehended. Most extreme in this domain is simply the need for dominance. Offers to miserable reasons are mental injustices to abstain from being a solid and dependable individual. Cautious strategies along this line of reasoning has numerous applications, from work to entertainment to social survival. With regards to defensive countermeasures, it includes mind-body coordination. Mental readiness is critical to creating and at last advancing one's psychodynamic center for the specialty of self-defense. It's a totality of living and flourishing in close association with other individuals. Such welcomes finding out about things like spatial energetic willingness, visual sharpness, relational proxemics, non-verbal communication, etc. As utilized here, "protective" ought not be confused. Some should seriously mull over the term as backward, non-emphatic or even aloof. Others lean toward words like hostile strategies and whatever may pass on preparation. Be that as it may, rather, it ought to be seen as the totality of mental, just as physical, generally speaking wellness to win in some random setting. Protectiveness ought not be misconstrued, yet observed as presence of mind and creative mind released to be imaginative. By and large, the idea is about close to home insurance, security, opposition, spread and disguise and numerous different viewpoints. Since people can't be trusted totally and superbly, safety measures are constantly vital. Dangers come in different structures, from the exceptionally inconspicuous to the perilously obvious. Menaces appear in all sizes and shapes utilizing changed ploys and plans. There are mind games and mentally injurious ploys, too physical interruptions into individual space. Also, it's up to you about what reaction thought vital for every novel circumstance. Individuals act dumb for a variety of reasons. People appreciate being flippant, sluggish, voracious and selfish. Regularly such jokes concern enthusiastic adolescence, the same number of don't try to grow up. In collective associations, natural experiences reach out from environment to consecrated corridors of the scholarly community. From the workplace to the play area, the meeting room to the stockroom, it's tied in with managing a variety of human connections. In this way, the craft of self-defense means getting the hang of, rehearsing and utilizing a scope of strategies, contingent on the circumstance. Notwithstanding mental development in structure certainty and center, one must think about the resistance. Restricting powers could be anybody at wherever you happen to be. Here and there, the cooperation might be only a question of "verbal jujitsu". On another event, the gathering could require progressively physical mediation notwithstanding the psychological part. Time might be rapidly conclusive or drawn out, as in a business related gathering or the like. Talk could envelop the shrewd mind by which you outsmart the enemy. Since numerous individuals miss inconspicuous insinuation and figurative ramifications, the chances are to support you. A great many people practice idiocy by method for horde false notions of derivation. In the specialty of self-defense in a reverting world, being cautious consistently involves social survival strategies. Making due in a post-current "feel better" society, where popular culture implies shortsighted speculation for quick delight, you must be alert. It means rehearsing certifiable guarded measures to manage basic dangers on various degrees of connection. Such involves both mental and physical "fighting". By apparently able utilization of social position, language and motion, shrewd and sly individuals can sound extremely persuading, despite the fact that they likely are tricky and untrustworthy. Take the continuous "firearm banter" for instance, or any genuine exertion to display proactive cautious countermeasures. Phenomenal fanciful babble of flawed guess proliferates among the "counter firearm" advocates. The vast majority work thusly in any case. That is, they are very lacking in applying sensibly deductive thinking. Basic reasoning, imaginative strategies and innovative activities are generally without steady nearness in consistently talk. By sluggish and ravenous methods, a great many people simply blunder through their alert presence, step by step, step by step. In the mean time, supposed "shrewd individuals" can be idiotic, forceful and perilous, offering genuine dangers to other around. Some even get the opportunity to settle on choices about open arrangement, which is alarming but an inauspicious reality. They don't need to utilize physical nearness to scare others. They attempt to utilize their reasoning procedures. Luckily, with centered certainty, preparing and discipline normally connected day by day, one can outmaneuver the stupid. In time, with "x-beam" vision of wary instinct, one can defeat the stupidity of the pompous and transparent the imprudence. Similarly as tricky as a physical danger is the "shrewd domineering jerk" who figures the individual in question can abuse your own limits of psyche and body. As harassing individuals come in every single size, shape and circumstances, you must be inventive in beating them. While some of them originate from the consecrated lobbies of the scholarly world, purportedly as "peers", some live in the blessed foyers of chose workplaces. These sorts are especially guileful. In that capacity, the idea of individual security and protective strategies changes to the circumstance. Predators are in the work environment, recreational scenes, the diversion settings, the area and wherever else there are individuals. You never escape them and they show up when you wouldn't dare hoping anymore. While wickedness will never be killed, figuring out how to adapt to it maturely involves psychophysical cautious countermeasures. The rehearsed assurance of quiet control of every one of your faculties must stay lively exertion of self-change. Difficulty is the thing that others make, development and development is the thing that you self-advance. For the foes, be alarm and careful about their utilization of emotive words, counterfeit analogies, whimsical however dull stories, disagreeable jokes, scapegoating and unacceptable absurdly imagined representations. Frequently, they act dumb intentionally to escape moral duty and later considered responsible for their activities. Stupid, juvenile, pompous and unevolving individuals are the emblematic portrayal of the "zombie end of the world" that encompasses us. They are simply most of the selfish and qualified individuals who contribute for the possible death of the human species. Generally, you approach your day, mind your own particular manners, and remain strategically arranged to manage any dangers to your self-being. Moreover, stand prepared to protect those in your consideration, or those with whom you have fortified in a common partnership. Every day is one in which viable social basic instincts are surveyed, assessed and overhauled as important. From basic speculation abilities to more up to date assets contemplations, you consider your advancing perspective. You must be rationally taught and arranged to make a move. Similarly as with harassing practices, such things become a matter of gamesmanship. These days, it doesn't take a lot to be more intelligent than the normal individual. You defeat, outlive and out move the restriction at each chance. Many will attempt a wide range of things to delude your tangible limits. People are proficient at trickiness, craftiness and cheats of each kind. When emotionalism is permitted to supersede judiciousness, a planned and restrained reaction winds up testing. A specific the circumstance can regress rapidly. We need to remember that the "foe" can be anybody, anyplace and particularly yourself by method for self-uncertainty and wavering. To state that you should "know your foe" additionally implies you should look in the mirror. Business Name: Tokon Martial Arts Street Address: 1920 Terracina Drive Suite 200 City: Sacramento State: CA Zip Code: 95834 Phone Number: 916 835 7717 Website: www.TokonSacramento.com Business Email: info@tokonsacramento.com Business Hours: Mo - Fr 5PM - 8PM Saturday: 8:30AM to 11AM

[joroanblog]

The Specialty of Self-Defense for Self-Survival

Time, talk and strategies, are essential basic originations of building up an individual self-defense procedure. Set aside the effort to learn and change the self, and all its multidimensional multifaceted nature, into an increasingly edified rendition of the first layout. The base plan of oneself ought to advance profitably and continuously, but then, a large portion of us try not to change without question. By concentrated reflection each snapshot of consistently, one endeavors to state the vivacious change of their brain. By which the body, its physicality, changes. Or on the other hand, if not, the totality of the individual changes and not positively. A declining nature unfurls. But, the psyche is a dream that is self-made by the mind's all encompassing exertion to fathom, comprehend and develop. In the individual specialty of self-defense for self-survival, preventiveness means well-thought preparing, practices and methods for individual advancement. It is a procedure by which one changes himself or herself for one of a kind separated improvement. The individual outlook does not mind what others think or do or accept. Freedom of the self is of essential concern. Subjugation has close fondness for the desires for unjustifiable privilege. Every snapshot of life is a thankful energy about time. While dairy cattle and sheep eat, the guard dog keeps the watch. The person is prepared, as disagreeable predators plot their plans. Protective expectant mental cheerful readiness foresees the definitiveness for individual understanding about human instinct. One can without much of a stretch disregard the thorough of learning and appreciate the intemperance of quick satisfaction. In any case, obliviousness in the act of tenacious ineptitude welcomes the hazard of abrupt irrevocability. There's constantly a back-and-forth among life and passing. To keep away from the difficulties of self-order and individual adequacy, chances lethal outcomes. Time is of the embodiment, talk is of phenomenal worth, and strategies stay basic to appropriate individual wellness in managing the showdowns of life. In the craftsmanship and the specialty of self-defense, there are numerous perspectives to be comprehended. Most extreme in this domain is simply the need for dominance. Offers to miserable reasons are mental injustices to abstain from being a solid and dependable individual. Cautious strategies along this line of reasoning has numerous applications, from work to entertainment to social survival. With regards to defensive countermeasures, it includes mind-body coordination. Mental readiness is critical to creating and at last advancing one's psychodynamic center for the specialty of self-defense. It's a totality of living and flourishing in close association with other individuals. Such welcomes finding out about things like spatial energetic willingness, visual sharpness, relational proxemics, non-verbal communication, etc. As utilized here, "protective" ought not be confused. Some should seriously mull over the term as backward, non-emphatic or even aloof. Others lean toward words like hostile strategies and whatever may pass on preparation. Be that as it may, rather, it ought to be seen as the totality of mental, just as physical, generally speaking wellness to win in some random setting. Protectiveness ought not be misconstrued, yet observed as presence of mind and creative mind released to be imaginative. By and large, the idea is about close to home insurance, security, opposition, spread and disguise and numerous different viewpoints. Since people can't be trusted totally and superbly, safety measures are constantly vital. Dangers come in different structures, from the exceptionally inconspicuous to the perilously obvious. Menaces appear in all sizes and shapes utilizing changed ploys and plans. There are mind games and mentally injurious ploys, too physical interruptions into individual space. Also, it's up to you about what reaction thought vital for every novel circumstance. Individuals act dumb for a variety of reasons. People appreciate being flippant, sluggish, voracious and selfish. Regularly such jokes concern enthusiastic adolescence, the same number of don't try to grow up. In collective associations, natural experiences reach out from environment to consecrated corridors of the scholarly community. From the workplace to the play area, the meeting room to the stockroom, it's tied in with managing a variety of human connections. In this way, the craft of self-defense means getting the hang of, rehearsing and utilizing a scope of strategies, contingent on the circumstance. Notwithstanding mental development in structure certainty and center, one must think about the resistance. Restricting powers could be anybody at wherever you happen to be. Here and there, the cooperation might be only a question of "verbal jujitsu". On another event, the gathering could require progressively physical mediation notwithstanding the psychological part. Time might be rapidly conclusive or drawn out, as in a business related gathering or the like. Talk could envelop the shrewd mind by which you outsmart the enemy. Since numerous individuals miss inconspicuous insinuation and figurative ramifications, the chances are to support you. A great many people practice idiocy by method for horde false notions of derivation. In the specialty of self-defense in a reverting world, being cautious consistently involves social survival strategies. Making due in a post-current "feel better" society, where popular culture implies shortsighted speculation for quick delight, you must be alert. It means rehearsing certifiable guarded measures to manage basic dangers on various degrees of connection. Such involves both mental and physical "fighting". By apparently able utilization of social position, language and motion, shrewd and sly individuals can sound extremely persuading, despite the fact that they likely are tricky and untrustworthy. Take the continuous "firearm banter" for instance, or any genuine exertion to display proactive cautious countermeasures. Phenomenal fanciful babble of flawed guess proliferates among the "counter firearm" advocates. The vast majority work thusly in any case. That is, they are very lacking in applying sensibly deductive thinking. Basic reasoning, imaginative strategies and innovative activities are generally without steady nearness in consistently talk. By sluggish and ravenous methods, a great many people simply blunder through their alert presence, step by step, step by step. In the mean time, supposed "shrewd individuals" can be idiotic, forceful and perilous, offering genuine dangers to other around. Some even get the opportunity to settle on choices about open arrangement, which is alarming but an inauspicious reality. They don't need to utilize physical nearness to scare others. They attempt to utilize their reasoning procedures. Luckily, with centered certainty, preparing and discipline normally connected day by day, one can outmaneuver the stupid. In time, with "x-beam" vision of wary instinct, one can defeat the stupidity of the pompous and transparent the imprudence. Similarly as tricky as a physical danger is the "shrewd domineering jerk" who figures the individual in question can abuse your own limits of psyche and body. As harassing individuals come in every single size, shape and circumstances, you must be inventive in beating them. While some of them originate from the consecrated lobbies of the scholarly world, purportedly as "peers", some live in the blessed foyers of chose workplaces. These sorts are especially guileful. In that capacity, the idea of individual security and protective strategies changes to the circumstance. Predators are in the work environment, recreational scenes, the diversion settings, the area and wherever else there are individuals. You never escape them and they show up when you wouldn't dare hoping anymore. While wickedness will never be killed, figuring out how to adapt to it maturely involves psychophysical cautious countermeasures. The rehearsed assurance of quiet control of every one of your faculties must stay lively exertion of self-change. Difficulty is the thing that others make, development and development is the thing that you self-advance. For the foes, be alarm and careful about their utilization of emotive words, counterfeit analogies, whimsical however dull stories, disagreeable jokes, scapegoating and unacceptable absurdly imagined representations. Frequently, they act dumb intentionally to escape moral duty and later considered responsible for their activities. Stupid, juvenile, pompous and unevolving individuals are the emblematic portrayal of the "zombie end of the world" that encompasses us. They are simply most of the selfish and qualified individuals who contribute for the possible death of the human species. Generally, you approach your day, mind your own particular manners, and remain strategically arranged to manage any dangers to your self-being. Moreover, stand prepared to protect those in your consideration, or those with whom you have fortified in a common partnership. Every day is one in which viable social basic instincts are surveyed, assessed and overhauled as important. From basic speculation abilities to more up to date assets contemplations, you consider your advancing perspective. You must be rationally taught and arranged to make a move. Similarly as with harassing practices, such things become a matter of gamesmanship. These days, it doesn't take a lot to be more intelligent than the normal individual. You defeat, outlive and out move the restriction at each chance. Many will attempt a wide range of things to delude your tangible limits. People are proficient at trickiness, craftiness and cheats of each kind. When emotionalism is permitted to supersede judiciousness, a planned and restrained reaction winds up testing. A specific the circumstance can regress rapidly. We need to remember that the "foe" can be anybody, anyplace and particularly yourself by method for self-uncertainty and wavering. To state that you should "know your foe" additionally implies you should look in the mirror. Business Name: Tokon Martial Arts Street Address: 1920 Terracina Drive Suite 200 City: Sacramento State: CA Zip Code: 95834 Phone Number: 916 835 7717 Website: www.TokonSacramento.com Business Email: info@tokonsacramento.com Business Hours: Mo - Fr 5PM - 8PM Saturday: 8:30AM to 11AM

[danicathough-blog]

Dearest Darling Dumbfuck Danica,

I’m going to write this because on occasion you seem a little panicky and concerned that I might be seeking other things, that I may have other girlfriends, that I might have an ulterior motive etc. Usually these occasions are when you speak to crazy people who have yet to actually meet me or learn anything about me, or converse with teasing friends. Sometimes they are because I reveal certain things about myself and my desires that you may then rashly conceive as the only or primary reason for my interest in you.

I want to tell you what you are to me. It’s not easy to describe the feelings and emotions that you invoke, and I am fully aware that you are far from a fan of them anyway but I’m going to try to do my best, with the hope that this page will be a reference for you if you’re ever doubting my sincerety.

I like you a lot. From your first inbox message to me - I will be honest - you came across as another autistic spaz customer with nothing remarkable about you whatsoever beyond your probably ability to name all of the ‘My Little Pony’ characters. It was only when we talked that I realised that you were very different. Your sense of humour was great and you were quick-witted and intelligent. I was genuinely sad when we stopped talking and you just disappeared because I thought that you were a very cool person and I would have liked to have gotten to know more about you. In time, I forgot about that and perhaps a year passed. I didn’t ever have any more customers like you or leave anyone as silly feedback. I didn’t invite anyone else to Skype. I talk to a lot of people on there, I talk to a lot of people at work. I talk to people in my daily life and I was never so interested as I was, albeit momentarily, in you.

When we started talking again, I was really not expecting it to be you at all. It made me happy that you were still alive and kicking, seemingly well and still a funny, smart, playful, impertenent little nerd. We talked and we talked and the more that I learned about you the more of an affinity I felt with you. I’ve felt close to people before, I’ve had similarities and felt familiarities before and I’m sure that the memory of those feelings has been blunted and dulled by the passage of time, but I am equally as positive that they were never quite so pronounced as they are with you. I knew that there was a very real connection and the fact that we did see eye to eye on many things encouraged me. You made me smile and made me laugh and I loved having the same impact on you. It was great that we broadly shared the same politics, television, musical tastes, literature interests and so on. It was fantastic that we’d get each others stupid references to things that other people wouldn’t or that we’d both find we’d read the same news articles and learned the same facts. All the small things made me feel ever more connected with you. I had a strong desire to know and learn more about you, about your dreams and desires, about your hopes, about your past, about your future, about who you are deep inside.

I liked everything that you told me and the more that I would look at you when we started camming together, the more I’d notice tiny little movements, mannerisms and micro expressions. Again, they all appealed to me, this time to the side of me that deals with physical attraction. I thought that you were so pretty and so nice to look at. Your smile and laugh would make my heart raise in my chest and seeing a frown on your face made it drop. I know pretty girls, I know intelligent girls, I know whimsical girls, I know girls with a nice smile and girls with great hair and girls who can make me laugh and girls who get all A’s in every subject. I know people who I think will have a bright future and have a positive impact on the world. I didn’t know any girl or person as well rounded in all of those areas and more as you. I didn’t know anyone that I found so attractive, so smart, so entertaining and silly and so analagous with everything that I’ve ever liked or wanted - all at the same time. It was and still is insane and when the idea of meeting in person came up I wanted it like I’d never wanted anything before so that I could confirm my reaction to you wasn’t just just over-the-top insanity and that you really were “all that”. I knew that we’d get on and that we’d enjoy each others company, I just never predicted how much or how happy it would leave me.

When I first saw you walking towards me at the train station, it was apparent that you were physically everything I desire. The camera didn’t do you justice at all, you are stunning. I know that beauty is all in the eye of the beholder and that many people have many different preferences, but you are so all-round classically beautiful that I damn near fucking died on the spot. To me, and I’m positive to many other people, you look like you’ve stepped right out of a fairytale. I could photograph and paint and stare at you all day. Cheese, I know. Gayness, I know. You are just so attractive to me. The moment that you opened your mouth I was relaxed. The first step that we took alongside each other, I was comfortable. There was no awkwardness, there was no unfamilarity, no wariness. It was as if I had known you for my entire life, and all of my prior feelings for you that I had been telling myself were idiocy and nuts were only amplified when in your company. I knew right than that I genuinely felt for you and that we really did have a rare connection. It is beyond laborious and problematic to try to create that kind of a feeling artificially with someone, to try to evolve things to such a level where you just “get” each other and know each other and feel like one entity. Open to each other. Serene and at ease. With you, everything was tranquil from the first second and I was completely carefree without having to pretend that I am anyone or anything else.

Certain things happened that day that I would never have commited to with anyone else. Certain things that went against all of my strongly held core beliefs and dogma. And they felt so perfect and so right and so natural that I do not regret them and never will. On that day and in the days and weeks since, I have seen more sides to you.

Your extremely hot side is one of those, and you turn me on to no end. The chemistry between us is incredible. It really is. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t before experienced the levels of excitement and pleasure that I feel with you. Believe me, it would be hard to emulate with anyone else. The underlying invisible connection that we exclusively share gives me a feeling of oneness with you that is hard to explain but that makes our fucking and our kissing and our hugging and our transition from one to the other and back again just out of this world. I know, cheesy again, but FUCK. When I’m on top of you with your legs over my shoulders and we’re looking in to each others eyes... Your nose twitches, you click your tongue off the back of your teeth and make a stupid remark and we laugh. Then I push in to you and we kiss. It all feels perfect and pure and amazing and great and better-than-anything. It’s not easy to put in to words. It’s even less straightforward when I’m trying not to put an emphasis on the sex, rather just point out how fucking beautiful and unequaled it is with you. It’s not the prime thing, it’s not what I seek. The point of me writing this is for you to understand and believe that it’s not my sole desire. It is A desire, because you are just so fuckable and pretty that I’d be insane not to want to be inside of you a lot of the time. As much as your gorgeous body and filthy mind distract me, sex isn’t the only desire.

It’s difficult with you because if we’re discussing sex then it’s fine, except when you start to perhaps feel that I’m only interested in “taking advantage” or seeing you as a stupid girl and so on. Then when we’re discussing love and emotions, it’s gay and you don’t want to hear it so much. It’s hard to know how to tell you what you are to me without traversing too far one way or the other. I don’t want to displease you or cause you discomfort. I don’t want you to feel as though I’m being too heavy. I just want you to know that while the sex is incredible and exciting, I have a multitude of desires and feelings for you that started sprouting when we first began to talk and are growing every day. There’s no question of me being in this for any one thing. I am in this because you are a beautiful, imaginative, astute, witty, facetious, sexy little shit and you give me a reason to wake up every day and something happy to think about. No pressure, you aren’t the only reason and I’m not going to die if it ends but you are a wonderful reason for me to open my eyes in the morning nonetheless.

What we have isn’t something that I expect to hold on to forever. Not that I won’t try, because I will. We’re always evolving and changing and re-shaping ourselves and we all have our own paths and desires and perhaps ours will eventually change. I’m not under any illusion that you’re going to be in to me forever but while you seemingly are I would love to be with you and enjoy the journey, living one day at a time and supporting and helping you in any way that I can. I want to share all that is mine with you, inside and out. I want to help you discover things that you may not have without our unity, I want to help you realise your hopes and follow your dreams. I want to learn from you in the same way. I want to have adventures with you, I want to travel and explore and probe and prospect and voyage and discover things. I want to really live with you and I hope that what we have and are building lasts for a protracted time because I know that my connection to you will be lifelong and that whatever may happen in the future, we will still respect and love each other in some capacity. Right now, I do believe that I love you in the capacity of a lover. It looks nuts on paper, but all of the right circumstances and all of the right feelings are there. I am in tune with you like no other. All of the special chemicals are rushing throughout my brain and coarsing through my veins. You might think it’s “gay” and “emo” and you’re probably wondering why I even wrote this whole thing. I figure that if people can write 1,000 words on a shitty school subject then I can write 2,000 on why I love you and why I care about you more than just wanting to fuck you. I do want to fuck you, though. I want to fuck you lots and lots and live out all of your deepest and most secretive fantasies. Then I want to hug you and I want to kiss you and I want to learn something new together and read the same book and watch the same movie and visit the same beautiful places side by side. Maybe even hand in hand if you can handle public displays of affection one day.

You’re an incredible girl with a huge amount of potential and so much already going for you. You’re slick and witty, brilliant and silly. The way that you look at me and the feeling of your hand in mine when I touch you makes me feel electric. The way we have dumb little mini grin-offs where we stare at each other and sort of start to just crease up our faces kills me. There are so many small things that make me want you and love you and desire for you to be happy and flourish. I can only do my best to help with that and if I ever sometimes fail then I’m sorry in advance. My intentions with you are honest and my feelings are true. I hope you have real feelings for me or I may have to hide in a cave for a good while.

You’re really the most perfect dickhead that I know.