#theoretically. if i actually go through with it. im still deciding whether or not i want to

[thegreatyin]

CAERU IS DOING WHAT

Oh, you didn't know?

Caeru's actual purpose as an alt account is to Seek The Name!! AKA the infamous Fallen London storyline that permanently and irrecoverably bricks your account forever upon completion!!!!

It's a whole thing.

He's 2/7 candles into it and everything :)

[cupcakeslushie]

Okay. I've been tip-toeing around this AU for a while now, but I just got caught up, and now I think I have a (decent) grasp on what's going on. So I wanna go over everything I know so far to see if I'm right or wrong on anything. Don't know if you'd be willing to correct me or not. Either way, I hope my mistakes can help you understand what to clarify to other fans like me. But, I also have some questions. You probably won't be able to answer most of them, but it's at least worth a shot.

First, where's Venus? Like, why is she not in your comics that are (sort of) separate frome the canon now story. The ones that skip to the future way after all the turtles reunite. Did she die? Did she escape? Is it because she wasn't introduced yet when you made those comics?

Two, why do you keep on making references to the future timeline? I know you're planning on possibly making your own stuff leading up to the events of the movie. It just gives me a jumpscare when I see certain...imagery in those comics. I guess you're hinting at what your version of the future apocalypse would look like, but it just hurts to see. Specifically in the comic explaining both the events and aftermath of the movie and the bad future timeline. It's starting to really confuse my brain as to where this story is headed. What's meant to be the main focus? The Hamto's reuniting? The aftermath? Or the future?

Third, did you make all those min-comics before you started the actual AU? Or did you do them during?

Fourth, are any of those mini-comics relevant to the actual story now? Or have you changed your mind on a few things? It's just that everything is so all over the place, I don't really know whether to trust if they're accurate. I know most of them are just there for funzies, but the longer ones concern me. I guess I'm just not used to the storyteller doing sequel, start, prequel, start, sequel, prequel, prequel, sequel, and then end. Or maybe it's just me, and I'm sleep deprived.

My little observation speech is gonna take a while for me to get out in your asks because when I get theoretical, my speech gets long, and my proper English goes down the drain. So I'll be back. I appreciate your work very much. Despite the pain it causes me, it's still amazing.

I’ll try my best to clear up what confusion I can!

1. As far as Venus. The answer is kind of a mix of, I was still figuring out her design and backstory while coming out with some of those early comics, and then, once I had that down, I wanted the boys to grow strong bonds as a main cast. That’s why a lot of the side characters are only making small appearances in the Sep!AU Life stories, as those are mainly for the boys reconnecting. (Usagi shows up the most because I love him and am totally biased towards him).

This maybe hasn’t been stated outright, but I wasn’t really expecting so many ppl to like Vee as much as they do, and now im trying not to spoil too much of her story. It’ll unfortunately just take us a while to get to the meat of it. Since the boys reconnecting takes up a lot of the early s1s2 story, Im trying to follow the familiar Rise blueprint of Draxum, Shredder, Krang, and then in s3 we’ll have crazy fun new stories with the extra characters.

Ive also decided to take this little nugget from one of the Q&As, and use it for Venus instead of Jennika. It was a much needed bit of inspiration to explain why Venus sorta disappears for a while and will go through some major physical changes (not yet revealed) before the family can figure out a way to reach her.

2. I’m not sure if you mean jump scared in a bad/triggering or neutral way, but if you need me to tag anything on those posts please let me know!

The glimpses of the future timeline, are being scattered throughout wherever they parallel the present story in little ways, but that’s only for now. As we get closer to the movie plot, bigger chunks of the future will be revealed, because the future versions of the boys will have a larger role to play in the present timeline. So we will need more backstory than what the canon got. And also I just enjoy drawing my future versions so sometimes I don’t think too hard on a reason. I just like throwing them at ppl with no warning or reason.

When s2 ends, I plan on collecting all the future related stuff that’s been released, and recapping it for easier reading. Right now, it’s just little sprinkles of foreshadowing to give ppl an idea that, ‘oh crap. The doomed timeline is a bummer’. In my mind, I guess i thought it’d be kinda like a fun scavenger hunt for clues, but maybe ppl don’t like that 😅

3. All of the side-stories were written as the main comic was/is being released. A lot of them resulted from asks that just spawned the need to expand on certain ideas, or a desire to give all the turtles their time to shine.

For instance, when I was doing Donnie’s section of the main comic, it was a good few months where we hardly saw anyone but him and Venus. I wanted to just mix it up, and give Raph some love with his ‘Raph Time’ short. When Leo was front and center in the main, we hardly saw the others, so Mikey and Donnie got their little ‘Secrets’ short (and it was also I fun thank you for EW making it so far in the tmnt sep competition).

4. Anything that has been reworked/revised or just plain dropped should have an ‘Edit’ note because yes—I have gone back and changed some things, but more so from the asks i got in the early days, and some movie idea drafts.

All the short comics done in the last year, especially the ones that are listed in my pinned post, are canon and fall somewhere in the timeline. They’re like supplemental reading though—extra meat to give the world and the characters more personality. They do have particular backstory plot and important info in them, but nothing that shouldn’t eventually be re-visited/repeated in the main story.

um I hope that cleared up some things! I know it’s kind of a crazy amount of lore. I’ve tried my best to organize it in the pinned post, huge timeline, and search bar tags, but I know it’s getting harder and harder for newer ppl to jump in as it just get bigger. Thanks for reading regardless!

[star-crossed-mid]

Little ramble on water boy 2 and red string cutter and their powers

The Goddess of Fate's power was the ability to change the future/fate of anyone. In some of the other gods stories it kind of seems like her power was just giving people a choice. I like to believe that MC has that power still but its more toned down as in she just talks to people about what choices they can make like idk telling leon to not kill everyone and wipe the universe teehee.

We see her power work in every story intentional or not. Maybe it was the king using the help of her powers to decimate the underworld or the simple acts of kindness performed through MC. Anyway, it can go into theories of dominos falling or butterflies flapping their wings that Clotho's power was very strong and had lasting impacts on a persons future.

Hue's power is clairvoyance, granted he can't use it without touching the person but he could still see into the future. He keeps to himself when he does this, only preparing for the inevitable.

I love that Huedhaut was the one to help Clotho figure out how to use her powers and incidentally was one of the first people who had his fate 'changed'. Whether his fate was actually changed by her or it was just him trying to create a logical answer to him catching feelings is wild.

One of my fav excerpts of them is I think in one of Hue's stories he gets surprised accidentally reading Clotho's future. He saw that they were dating before he even knew they were. Ended with both of them getting awkward about it and just acknowledging 'hey we're dating', and along the lines of him saying 'i've never had my own future spoiled'.

TLDR their relationship

One of the reasons Hue fell in love with MC/Clotho was because Clotho always forced Hue out of his comfort zone (at a reasonable level) and was his total opposite. Something refreshing, sun and moon.

Clotho definitely woke up Hue in the middle of the night to ask if he would still love her if she was a worm (and him in a begrudging state of total confusion would say yes, he loves them in any form, he loves their soul etc etc).

It's also to note that her power literally interrupts his. He can't see/predict the future if it's always changing. It was unpredictable for him. Which ties into the philosophy he learnt when we see him in S1 that he doesn't know how to process the illogical and irrational. He also gets a bit mad at MC when she brings up the concept 'fate' once again being a theoretical concept not set in stone. Huedhaut tries to grab onto any reason when it came to an emotional experience and it left him with centuries full of grief as to why Clotho did the things she did.

In a sense, Huedhauts season 1 reads like a ghost story. Clotho is the ghost that haunts MC, Hue, and some of the other gods. There's a famous quote by David Foster Wallace that says:

"Every love story is a ghost story"

Clotho haunts the narrative, and surely haunts Hue. Those versions of the goddess of fate with the god of Aquarius doesn't exist anymore, yet they still have a very persistent figure in the story. Clotho gave up (not sacrificed) herself/powers because she wanted humanity to feel the love that Huedhaut gave her, her last thoughts were literally of her and Huedhaut hugging the morning prior as she found comfort in the absolute. Huedhaut was near her/watched as she faded from existence. Everything she did, Huedhaut took it personal as Clotho's decisions were purely emotional.

Whether it was inconsistent writing or intentional, Hue's reasonings/graspings at Clotho changes throughout the story from (TLDR SUMMED UP)

"Oh gods I desecrated myself for love" "Did she love me or was she unhappy and decided to do that" blaming himself for not stopping her/finding a solution/not being smart enough at the time

it changes in his route a few times but I think its a realistic depiction for someone who didn't get closure and is heavily focused on reason. tldr im rambling love overcomes as a theme and love is good. Voltage I am begging please give Hue a good update also redo his promise of infinity.

hue and clotho/mc have that doomed yuri type beat also something about them just spreads tragedy i love them i have like 3 scm aus and one of them is dedicated to them entirely.

[mtsainthelens]

saw the new hunger games

spoilers under cut

that was pretty bad. there were a lot of things wrong with it so i theoretically have a lot to complain about but it was such a dumb fucking movie im not as energized as id usually be to talk about it. ill be quick

this movie had all the elements it needed to succeed and totally fucked it. the goals:

-create a convincing and interesting backstory for President Snow

-show how the games were transformed into a spectacle 

these goals were made explicit both in the marketing and through diegetic speeches within the movie. the premise of the story is that a young Snow serves as a mentor to a singer from district 12. she is the “songbird” to his “snake”…. pretty natural evolution from there to see how snow can make her into a celebrity and give Panem a good show. that had to have been the pitch to get this movie through the board. it’s a shame the movie just… does not follow through with it LOL. like thats blatantly the direction it seems to be going in for the first part of the movie. but the spectacle aspect gets completely buried because the capitol - who INSTRUCTED snow to make it into a show - keeps snubbing him and keeping him from acting. the “press tour” that was such a big deal in all the original hunger games is like two days in universe and about five minutes on the screen. completely overshadowed. there’s no camp or glamour. snow is just not a stunt queen here and i think that’s a shame. 

ok, so if the movie doesnt really show how the hunger games became a spectacle, what does it show?

i really couldn’t tell you. the games themselves are uneventful. the tenth annual games are set in what’s basically a parking garage, LOL. it’s a very dismal and marvel-esque set. there’s a real sense in this movie that the capital is still finding its stride and that a lot of things aren’t working for it just yet. the failing drones and the awkwardness of the announcer (this version’s caesar flickman) are nice touches, i really enjoyed them. but i dont think “the capitol is still finding its footing” is a good enough excuse to justify how shitty this year’s game was. excruciatingly boring, like they have no concept of history or the standard that the previous movies set. we all remember the clockwork arena.

so it’s not about the games, so i guess it’s about snow and his tribute lucy? 

well that sucks! they’re horrible characters, my god.

lucy is the worst offender. i know rachel zegler was a victim of conservative harassment recently so i feel a little bad to be trashing her performance. i genuinely dont know if its the fault of her or the script, but whatever it is, the effect is awful. genuinely reads like a parody of a wattpad protagonist. we are given that she is a singer. there is no substance to her besides that. she’s corny. she feels out of place in this setting and not in any charming way, its just annoying and off putting. kind of a manic pixie dream girl to snow. i think its very misogynist honestly? dont write women this way, she’s barely human.

snow is easier to watch and a more likable personality in my eyes, but he’s no better written. whereas lucy has no internal world, the inner workings of snow’s mind fold in on themselves. the movie swears that his motives make sense, that they aren’t confused, but they very obviously are. his allegiances and morals change on a dime. they cant decide whether hes sympathetic or if he is a young president snow and he can seemingly only be one at a time. i honestly got whiplash watching it go down. in fairness, its not like the movie doesnt try to offer motivation for the switches. theyre just not very good or convincing and its not enough to make me forgive them.

so the movie failed at what it set out to do. what else did it fail at? what did it actually do well? i will leave the rest of this review to explain, as well as some changes that i would have made had i been in charge.

the bad:

-pacing was off. movie did not need to be that long, many shots went on longer than they had to.

-costuming was also pretty bad. some of the tributes were wearing shein and fake jewelry 

-lucy escapes the arena not only alive but UNINJURED? peeta and katniss didnt get that. she was surrounded by rebar and murder and snow walked away w more injuries than her. insane plot armor. really dumb.

-there was a human zoo in this movie. in general im really conflicted about this “aracial” Panem. i know its a difficult subject to breach and im not sure what the alternative would be, but there’s something really fucked up about seeing a human zoo, a black child being hung, many of the tributes being people of color, and all of this being brushed over as if their race doesnt really matter and theres no larger historical context in which this movie exists. also this movie is loosely set in the 50s/60s. likewise making the Gamemaster a black woman. im not sure how i feel about it but i think more care shouldve been devoted to the handling of race in this movie.

-there are a couple scenes where an old analog tv is playing and its really obvious they added the scan lines in post-production. looks stupid as fuck. you couldve just used an actual analog tv.

-the rabies scene. lmfao. also i dont think thats how rat poison works but i could be wrong.

-a lot of the action sequences are very dumb and dont make sense. they build suspense and dont do anything to overcome it gracefully. this is really obvious when snow is trying to get his handkerchief into the snake pit without being seen and so he just…. walks over and does it LOL. and doesnt get caught or have to sneak really cause of plot armor. the arena has a lot of kids wandering around or hiding in places where it makes no sense for them to be, they kinda just wander on screen when its time for their cue and only get killed as needed, because someone else got their cue. no gravity or substance.

-lucy and snow’s performances arent just bad, they come across as anachronistic within the retrofuturist 50s setting. as my friend said they have “tiktok face”. theyre too contemporary for my taste

-snow looks like a skinhead towards the end and i dont like it

-arena sucked

-the hanging tree scene was soooo stupid. so was the katniss namedrop. made me wish i was watching a better movie.

-the movie didnt deserve to go on long diegetic speeches about its own themes. i guess im glad, cause i wouldnt have known what the fuck it was trying to do otherwise, but nothing that happened in the story supported what they were saying. sloppy.

the good:

-lucy’s dress was very pretty

-huge credit to the set designers who worked on the control room and the capitol. i see the retro futurist aesthetic you were going for and i appreciate it. mostly a good job, im sure if they let you into the arena you would’ve gave us something better.

-hunter schafer really sold it. i loved her performance even with what little screentime she had. brought some much needed warmth and humanity to this empty ass movie. my favorite character, easily. release the schafer cut.

-like i said, i thought the announcer’s performance was pretty good as well. i feel like jason schwartzman had a better understanding of the theme of “spectacle” within this movie than anyone else.

-i guess the lab was cool? the snakes definitely paled in comparison to other mutts in the series, but they were cool enough. i liked the scene where his classmate got poisoned.

-peter dinklage constantly sneaking hits of morphine was funny as fuck. 

changes:

if you asked me the one thing i would change to fix this movie, it would be any traces of the romance subplot. remove any traces of snow being a nice person. i would have preferred the mentor/tribute relationship to be shown as explicitly and inherently exploitative, because it is! you know damn well there was never any hope for them to be in a healthy relationship for as long as snow was loyal to the capitol. and the writers valued this relationship so much that to save it, they had snow rebel? president snow? the love story, the conflict that snow feels, its all so fucking trite and overblown. it didnt need to be there. just portray it straightforwardly, with snow being a charming person but never kind or counterculture enough to really risk lacy over the system. he should have been eviler and more clearly identifiable as his older self, because this version does not cut it. i hate a fake sympathetic bitch

-lacy shouldnt have won. doesnt that ruin the continuity established by the past books? just kill her in the arena. that had to have been in the drafts right? everything that happened after the arena was really convoluted and stupid and failing. lucy dies, wow so sad, i hate when girls die, but i sure did learn about show biz. that was my president snow impression, if you couldnt tell. that was from a better version of this movie.

-it wouldve been cool if instead of lucy being essentially a tiktoker, she had the personality of an early hollywood icon. kind of a judy garland figure. wouldve fit into the setting better and been more original as a concept.

ok end review! guess that wasnt very quick after all whoops.

[morizoras-cave]

Persistent (Request)

Marvel cast x f!teen!co-star!reader

Genre: angst-ish, fluff

Request Description: Hellooo! Could you write a all the marvel cast men x teen! reader? Like they all go out to eat and hangout at a mall or something and when she goes in the women’s part of a store while they are all on the men’s side, some creepy dude keeps on hitting on her and like after she tries to politely decline his attempts and stuff rdj and the rest are like nuh uh this ain’t happening lol

Warnings: language, hints at smexual stuff, harassment, persistent asshole 

(A/N): this story includes anthony mackie, winston duke, sebastian stan, chris evans, robert downey jr and mark ruffalo. im sorry i didnt include alllll of the marvel dudes, but i just find it hard to cram them all into one fic :((( ALSO sorry if the ending is shitty hgssghsgsh

“You don’t have to bring me with you.”

“It’s too late, we’re bringing you.”

“But-” 

“Y/n, you are not spending your birthday alone!” 

You and Anthony were bickering like always. There was a short break in filming the next marvel movie, and while many people, including you, were planning on going home for the week, Sebastian, Anthony, Winston, Chris and Tom and arranged a ‘guys night out’, if you will. 

You were going to enjoy your birthday that day with your family, but a couple of days before your family had cancelled, because of exams and overloading work. They promised you’d celebrate some other day, but you were still bummed out.

Anyway, Anthony had somehow reluctantly made you admit that you were celebrating alone, and had decided to instead drag you with him and the guys to their ‘night out’. 

“I don’t wanna come and just be a bother to everyone,” you mumbled. Anthony sighed and looked at you. He then diverted his eyes back to the road. 

“You’re not bothering anyone, N/n.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to cancel your plans to the strip club or whatever you were gonna do!” You stressed. Anthony gasped like a TV mean girl.

“Did you really think we were gonna go to a strip club? Y/n, that’s private business, you don’t do that with your guys.” 

“Well, what then?” 

The mall, apparently. 

You and Anthony both stood with your necks craned to look at the proud and boasting sign, ‘mall of America’. He’d shut up after your question and just parked the car, leading you to stand exactly there, in front of that famous mall. 

“You’re gonna go shopping?” you looked at him. 

“Yeah, and what about it?” 

Before you could start another argument with Anthony, you heard a familiar ‘hey!’ and snapped your head in the direction of the caller. Winston, Sebastian, Chris, Robert and Mark were all gathered together, seemingly waiting for you two. 

“Hey, there you are! We were waiting for you,” Chris said with his usual big, dorky smile on his lips. Him and Anthony hugged and then he pulled back to look at you. 

“Y/n, you okay with spending your birthday with us?” 

“Whatever, man,” was all you could say, making the group burst into laughter. 

You would never admit it to Anthony, or any of the others for that matter, but it was actually a lot of fun. You went into many stores for no apparent reason. The guys bought and helped you make a Build-A-Bear, which you named Svenbjorn, and he had a little detective suit and a little bag. 

You ate at a Denny’s, where Mark unfortunately, but rather predictably, spilled maple syrup on himself. Then you looked around stores for fancy suits and clothes and gifts for their loved ones. Your mood was brightened, and the guys sure didn’t seem to be displeased that you were there. 

“Let’s go in here real quick,” Sebastian had said, and everyone walked with him into the clothing store. You hadn’t actually bought anything that day, so you decided that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to look around a bit.

“I’m gonna go to the women’s section,” you said, pointing to the area at the other end of the store. 

“Sure,” Robert waved you off, as him and the others crowded around a blue suit. You rolled your eyes and bounded off to the women’s area. 

Your eyes found a pretty yellow shirt hanging on a rack near the back. You quickly made your way to it, standing and admiring it, checking the fabric and the price. 

“Hey, babygirl,” a cocky voice sounded beside you. You turned your head to see a boy around your age, an ugly smirk on his lips. His words almost made you vomit the Denny’s pancakes you’d just eaten, but you shook off the feeling. 

“Uh, hey,” you mumbled, turning back to the shirt. Now you fiddled with it nervously. 

“What’s a pretty girl like you doing here alone, huh?” his voice was strangely predatory, something about it just didn’t sit right with you. It made you feel alerted and uncomfortable. 

“Looking at shirts..”

“I bet you’d look good in this one,” he said. You didn’t have to look to know he’d found some sheer-ass, see through, titty exposer. You did however peep, and, yes.. You were right. 

“Look, I’m not interested,” you sighed. 

“That’s too bad, girlie, I could make you feel real good.”

You scrunched up your nose in disgust. Your fingers gave up their grasp on the shirt, deciding that it would be best to just get out of there. The sound of your boots hitting the shiny floor sounded, as you began padding away.

“Hey, wait, where are you going?” you heard him walking behind you, the action of persistence making your heartbeat speed up. You were now panicking.

“Hey! Why are you following her?” you breathed out in relief. Winston was standing not too far away, Sebastian and Anthony behind him. He had lowered his voice to sound more threatening, which you normally would laugh at, but considering the situation, you were pretty relieved he did it. 

All the three men looked pretty damn angry. You didn’t know how much of the conversation they’d heard, but obviously enough. Hearing another set of boots, you snapped your head to see Chris, Mark and Robert jogging towards the scene. You made eye contact with Chris, who furrowed his brows in confusion. 

The boy was now looking at the six angry and buff men, swallowing fearfully. He was shaking and surely starting to sweat. You smirked. Asshole. You walked over to stand between Sebastian and Chris.

“Are you okay?” they both murmured, searching your eyes worriedly. The fact that they were so protective of you made you smile a bit. Although, the thought that you needed several men with you to the mall to protect you kind of sucked.

“I’m alright,” you said. Meanwhile, Winston, Anthony and Robert were approaching the kid with disapproving looks. 

“Didn’t your mom ever tell you to respect women? Huh?”

“What’s your issue, kid? You had such a big mouth just a moment ago?”

“Don’t ever talk to any woman like that ever again, you hear me?” 

They didn’t even touch him, just the anger and seriousness in their voices and on their faces was enough to get the message into the kids head. He nodded, breath shaking. Then, he dashed off between Winston and Anthony, running out of the store, like a dog with its tail between its hind legs. 

When the other three turned back to you, they were still angry. 

“I can’t believe him! I can’t believe that asshole!” Anthony muttered, disbelief ridden in his voice. Winston had grown softer, looking down at you in concern. 

“Are you okay, N/n? He didn’t touch you, did he?” You could tell he was actually worried. 

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s okay, guys, it really wasn’t that serious,” you explained, wanting them to calm down. You couldn’t be the reason why their ‘guys night’ was ruined.

“Not that serious? Y/n, he wasn’t backing off when you told him to!” Robert seemed even angrier that you were denying the severity of the issue. You just shrugged.

“This kind of stuff happens all the time, this time I just had you guys with me,” you explained. By the looks on their faces, that wasn’t the most reassuring answer. In fact, even Chris and Sebastian and Mark (the sweetest human being ever, theoretically incapable of feeling anger) were angry now, scoffing. 

“That’s not- That’s-” Chris put his hands on his hips like an angry mom. Sebastian squeezed your shoulder, making you look at him, to see his jaw clenched. 

“Y/n, if that ever happens to you, no matter how big or small, just call us, please,” Anthony said, eyes catching yours to express how serious he was. You nodded. “I mean that shit.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll call you.” 

There was a moment of silence where everyone just basked in their anger, before Mark spoke up. 

“Hey, how about we just continue as planned and go watch a movie at the cinema?” 

Reluctantly, everyone started walking to the cinema. You noticed how your walking formation had changed, almost caging you in, protecting you. Although you, Mark and Winston kept a pretty solid conversation, you couldn’t help but overhear the other’s talking about how angry they still were. Of course, they had every right to. 

The night turned out alright again, as they slowly shook off their anger. The movie was great, and it created something new to talk about other than the ‘disrespectful little shit from earlier’. 

When Anthony drove you both back to the hotel you were both staying at, he had another serious conversation with you. He talked about staying safe and keeping a backup weapon and such.

He wasn’t usually serious, so you listened carefully. You were thankful that they had been there that day. So were they. And from that day on they all were a little bit more protective with you - whether it was in interviews or just in daily life - they kept you close and was always slightly suspicious of anyone talking to you. 

It meant a lot to you, and you thanked them, both for their protection, for an awesome birthday, and for one bitchin’ build-a-bear :)

___________________________

Tag List:

@hera-the-writer @marvel-madness @40srogcrs @whatthefuckimbisexual @snarky–starky @garbage-potato @eviemarvel @lozzypoz321 @allthecreativeonesaretaken @missamericana713 @rororo06 @shady80smusicsingercolor @ireadfanficforfun

[burnedbyshoto]

the marriage contract

chapter one: [begin this journey.]

— Just because your soulmate is Bakugou Katsuki doesn’t mean that he’s the one meant for you; in fact, he’s your worst enemy. With trouble brewing across the way, and with no one able to complete this job except you and Bakugou, there’s nothing you can do except go along with the mission. But wait, what?! You’re supposed to be married?!

pairing: pro hero!bakugou katsuki x pro hero fem!reader

chapter warnings: cursing

word count: 4,093

a/n: in this enemies to lovers story, only you get to decide whether you remain enemies, or if you succeed in becoming lovers. the choice to make is at the end of the story, good luck :D also, background on your quirk (sorry, I had to give you a quirk in order for this to work the way i see fit.) I won’t lie, im really nervous about all this... hopefully this is fun and won’t come and bite me in the ass.

Quirk: Water Sprout - using water from your body, you are able to extract and then use the water (that comes from your body or has come in direct contact with your fingertips) freely. Drawbacks include constant dehydration, dizziness, headaches.

bolded choice is the answer. ~ {masterlist}

[Begin this journey.]     [Turn back now.]

relationship status: enemies.

“You’re fucking with me, right?”

Cosmic and gods, there was nothing in this world that proved these existed.

Nothing.

Nothing in this world could show the nonbeliever that there was an outside force in the world that made people suspect that there were otherworldly ties. Not the appearance of quirks, which was proven to be a genetic mutation as part of humans' evolution, and even the sudden and ancient appearance of The Contract did anything to solidify this - well, at least to some.

Quirks were easy to understand.

Powers, drawbacks, uniqueness.

Oh, it was something that was still so new to the world that people enjoyed it so, but for The Contract, oh how that was different.

The Contract was what was the name of the world wide know phenomenon more known merely as soulmates. Everyone had a fated one, and you would know who they were because every once in a while, a simple choice would appear before you.

A this or that situation.

You would pick one of the options, and somewhere out in the world, there was a person who, despite their own free will, would succumb to your choice. It was as simple as choosing to make someone double knot or single knot their shoes, or sometimes as hard as pulling the plug on a stranger, you had no idea existed. But it had been generations since it had first appeared, and people had grown to accept the inevitable. Which, in turn, brought out new problems.

Soulmates, while fundamentally and theoretically excellent and good, seemed to shock people by the work that needed to be put into them to succeed. Two souls that were perfect for each other didn’t guarantee two people were perfect for one another. The blind, false, true love these people bragged and teetered on was ridiculous and often led to horrible breaks within soulmate bonds. People did not understand that soulmates - just as any other relationship - needed time to fester and grow. It wasn’t an over the counter remedy, it was two people trying to find similarities other than the gods and the cosmics wanting this.

It was rather rough, to say the least.

Most people didn’t mind the growth, waiting for their soulmate to become the person meant for them. Others, well, you were the perfect example of it.

Your entire life, you had thought your soulmate was an asshole, well, scratch that, he IS an asshole. Every chance he got, he would always pick the worst of the two options. He chose for you to reject pursuers in your school days, to trip your siblings, to yell at your parents when you were upset. He picked for you to get up early in middle school and train, to study for tests right when you were about to go out with friends. He was obviously picking the worst things for you (not that you were any better), and so by the bitter age of fifteen when you were put into Shiketsu High School, you were glad to pledge to be someone who wouldn’t accept the soulmate shit for anything.

If he was your soulmate, so be it, but he would never be your lover.

Things in high school and your last year of middle school went reasonably well, the choices the two of you had to make were simple enough. The worst one you remember seeing late one night at the beginning of summer break during your last year of middle school, two options illuminating before you.

[Accept his offer.]     [Decline his offer.]

There was no context for your choice.

But there had been a pit in your stomach, something telling you to chose the bottom one, and you did. Nothing consequential came from that, and you forgot about it with time.

High school went on with usual choices; both of you continue to choose the lesser of two options from what you could tell. The worst thing was rejecting your senior who had asked you out on a date (something he had told you to keep a secret from the school officials), and you had really wanted to go on a date with him… but nonetheless, you survived. Fresh out of high school with your official Hero License under your belt, you had been accepted into Rising Agency, a very new agency founded by a class older than you over at Yuuei - Class 1-A.

The prominent faces being hero Deku, Ground Zero, and Shouto.

Somehow you had passed the interview selection and had been accepted, and your first day went horribly. On account of your quirk, Water Sprout, you had woken up with a mouth drier than a desert, and like you always did, you grabbed your liter bottle and went to chug.

Only two options popped before your eyes the moment you moved the water to your parched mouth.

[Spill the water.]     [Safely drink the water.]

You had tried your hardest to get your lip to the opening, but you knew better. During the time The Contract appeared, time literally froze. Your soulmate was given up to fifteen seconds to choose the answer before the first choice was automatically selected. You had tried to suppress the scream at the back of your throat when the cold, cold water came splashing down on your chest. Spraying all over your bed.

The scream you made when you were soaked to the bone no doubt made your soulmate smile wherever he was.

So you were glad when his options appeared before you a few minutes later.

[Break the sink faucet.]      [Turn off the water.]

With a sniff, you held no remorse when your hand jammed out and hit the option he deserved.

You had arrived at the agency's front door within the next hour, your most formal business clothes were worn fresh and sharp. Your hand held your case with your hero costume and nerves at your stomach. This was it, you had thought, your hands sweating profusely, your mouth so dry you felt faint, and with a quick chug of your water, you entered the facility.

The agency smelled like Pine-Sol and sweets, and you found the front desk immediately but were off-put by a man who was already there. His back hunched over, arms crossed, and placed onto the counter as he seemed to be arguing with the receptionist.

Nearer and nearer you drew, and the more you began to recognize just who the man was: Ground Zero.

Calm down, calm down, calm down.

Your heart hammered viciously in your chest as you were finally in earshot of the conversation - it seemed that he was fighting over his new time slots for his routine patrols. But you were no stranger to his… vivacious temperament, and instead of addressing him first, you figured it was in the best interest to simply ask the receptionist what your first steps should be.

But as you opened up your mouth, your internal monologue of what to say blaring on repeat so that you wouldn’t mess up, the world froze, and you panicked.

[Ace the introduction.]      [Fumble the introduction.]

The world was still for five seconds, but never did you ever once experience someone moving within The Contract. So, when Ground Zero’s hand moved and punched in an option that was mirrored right in front of your mouth, you immediately felt the blood in your cheeks from seeing him recoil back to your heart faster than you could blink.

“Hi, I’m Hero, and I’m new? I’m looking for the y/l/n room?”

Horror struck through you immediately at the realization.

Ground Zero was yours...?

He was your…?!

You saw red.

“Hah? What kind of introduction was -- WHAT THE FUCK?!”

Your fist throbbed pathetically still curled near his face, and Ground Zero’s blazing, burning red gaze matched the blood pouring from his busted nose as you panted like a corned animal.

“YOU MADE ME WET MY BED, ASSHOLE!”

So went your first interaction with your soulmate.

Your fist connecting and shattering his nose. Three of his friends holding him back, and three trying to escort you away quickly. It was indeed one for the books.

But that was three years ago, and at the age of twenty-one, you could still not handle the sight, or the presence of your soulmate, and vice versa. The both of you were like oil and water, conflicting and fighting whenever left together for too long, unable to get along. He was not meant for you, and you were not meant for him - it was evident like night and day.

Right decisions were made, however, once knowing who the other one was. The both of you taking track of each other’s patrol schedules to make sure good choices were made at that time, just in case, but as soon as the other was off, payback was a bitch. The entire agency had learned that both of you were soulmates the same day the both of you found out, and there were actual looks of sorrow given to you from his friends?!

Not to mention that his nickname for you was bedwetter now, something that both infuriated and embarrassed you to this day.

Both of you were separated at all times, never once having to work together, that is, until today. A time where we find ourselves back in the beginning.

“You’re fucking with me, right?”

A part of you wanted to roll your eyes at Bakugou’s quip, but in all consideration, you agreed with him ultimately.

“Unfortunately, I’m not,” Yaoyorozu sighed, her mouth pinched and her hands passing both you and Bakugou a small stack of documents for you to read over. You took your file after placing your water bottle down and opened it immediately as Yaoyorozu continued to speak. “Kane, Bryan is an American man who has recently been on Japan’s watchlist. He is highly dangerous, evasive, and a hard man to pin anything on… all we know is that innocent people are going missing when they enter his land, and undercover heroes end up in the sea with no memories, or worse, dead.”

That took you by surprise, and your stomach twisted at that thought.

Heroes have turned up dead?

“I don’t doubt the seriousness that this Kane man brings, but no offense, Creati, why does it have to be a mission for Ground Zero and I?” you asked, your eyes flittering from the blurred photo of the man on your page onto the slightly frowning commandeer of this agency. “We aren’t exactly… a good fighting duo? If what I think you’re asking is correct, why not send in Deku and Ground Zero? They have the best duo track record, I’m sure that they’ll be able to apprehend this man better and faster than we can.”

Yaoyorozu sighed, her teeth tugging at her bottom lip while her fingers drummed on the table, obviously not comfortable telling the full explanation.

“Well, to be honest, he stays on a remote island nearby, and it’s very exclusive.”

You owlishly blinked at Yaoyorozu, who straightened in her chair, a new air of confidence flowing through her that made you almost ask if a choice had been made for her.

“Kane owns a private island that is known for its resort, and to enter the resort, there must be two truths to this,” her eyes were holding yours for a moment, they were deep, so dark that for a second you felt fear tickle at the back of your spine before she turned her attention over to Bakugou. “One: those who may enter must be in a romantic relationship.”

What?

“Two: they must be soulmates.”

“WHAT?!”

You blinked, your head snapping over at Bakugou, who had yelled the same words as you did, obviously not impressed with what they were now enforcing. Oh god, this was not what you were thinking at all!

“Why the hell does it have to check off those two boxes? I’m not going somewhere obviously dangerous and in the middle of nowhere with bed wetter!” Bakugou growled, his feet planted onto the floor as he had his upper lip pulled into a sour face of sorts. “I’ll do it with literally anyone else, ponytail!”

“Unfortunately, that’s not an option,” she sighed, her hand pushing through her bangs with a sad shake of her head. She looked tired, and her exhaustive eyes rose to meet yours, and his, and her voice was weak and oh so pleading. “There is some way they can tell if you’re soulmates, and those we sent out who weren’t already soulmates never made it in. You two are quite literally our only option, without the two of you, we don’t stand a chance.”

“So, can we act as estranged lovers then?” you questioned, your stomach twisting in the thought of having to display any sort of romantic displays with the man sitting right next to you. “We can be a couple trying to work on our relationship?”

Yayorozu gulped.

“W-We actually made profiles for the two of you…”

“And?” came Bakugou’s near whisper.

“Y-You’ll be acting as a, well, a newly married couple. This is your honeymoon… I know you two don’t have a good history, and your on field teamwork has never been tried, but I’m pleading to you two now, please consider. You have until tomorrow to tell me if you accept.”

If there had been a choice that appeared for Bakugou to make you slam your head through the desk, you would have thanked him for choosing it.

[Carry all the bags]     [Take only his bags.]

“Thank you!” you chirped with no pity for the situation you had just placed him in, the glint of a sneer flashing across Bakugou’s face was fierce as he took the bags of luggage the two of you had been given from your agency. This was it, it was starting.

The weight of what was to come of this was now starting to hit heavily, the importance of the diamond ring on your finger - a symbol of the fake marriage contract between you and Bakugou felt like a ton. There was no hiding the discomfort the both of you held when you had to act in love, your hand itching to leave his clammy, abnormally warm hands, and you never realized how he mumbled under his breath until you were forced to sit next to him on the private plane. But as you were given two days to prepare for this mission, it didn’t hit you what was happening until you unloaded from the plane.

From the initial observation of the island, you immediately recognized just why the owner was so elusive and able to keep his agenda hidden. The island's natural barriers were bright as day, the rocky mountains seemed entirely inhabitable, and the entire resort was located where the mountains met the beach. Tropics and natural waterholes existed in those parts before slowly blending into the white sand beaches with water so blue and clean that you genuinely wished you would be having a good time.

You hated having to remind yourself that you were here for the sake of a mission and not to simply lay out, well, it was easy to forget that until Bakugou was beside you, and you fought the instinctive reaction to scowl at him. In fact, with your gaze falling onto the blond-haired hero, you didn’t notice the small woman appearing from nowhere, a bright smile on her face and white linen clothes on

“Welcome to Hibani Island!” she chirped, her eyes closing in well-practiced greetings, she spoke with an accent, and with her appearance, you assumed she was American. “My name is Jane, and I’m here to welcome you to our wonderful island! May I please have your names and the choice you had upon arrival?”

Your greeting smile disappeared at that point, your head tilting in confusion, “I’m sorry, our choice?”

“Mhm!” Jane nodded enthusiastically, the same bright smile plastered on her face. “Our wonderful island works in mysterious ways! As you both know, our beautiful resort is only for those who are soulmates; after all, we would never wish to poison her beautiful nature with impure love! Upon entry, with the help of the island, I am able to procure a choice for you and your soulmate to make! Since I posed the question to you,” her glazed over eyes focused on you, “I would appreciate it if your partner answered!”

There was a silence, and it couldn’t have lasted any more than a few seconds in all reality. But in that still, you could feel the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up, there was obviously something entirely wrong here.

“A choice about who would carry the luggage in,” Bakugou calmly, smoothly answered, his voice somehow not picking up on any suspicion. “Be -- Y/n chose that I would carry them all.”

The way your name passed his lips made your spine stiffen, it felt weird, unnatural, fake.

Well, this entire thing is fake, you reminded yourself, grateful that Jane was at the moment impressed by Bakugou’s correct statement.

“Well, wonderful! I’m so glad that our island can greet two beautiful soulmates today! Your names? So that I may check you both in?”

“Nakamura Katsuki and Y/n.”

“Amazing! Let’s get you to the main lobby, and they’ll set you two love birds up!”

Thankfully, Jane was a woman who didn’t mind talking to herself the entire way over to the resort’s main lobby, she spoke wonders of how the hot springs were especially “magically” at night, and promised that a trip during that time would lead to “the best of fantasies.” The resort itself was oddly busy. Couples were everywhere, each in their own world, yet all orbiting around one another, never once mixing.

The white sundress you wore suddenly felt too simple, especially with the stupid designer wear most people were wearing.

Jane escorted you to the front desk, and with one last overenthusiastic smile, she disappeared.

“Check us in, Joo Dee just about made me fucking lose it,” Bakugou grumbled, his patience hanging on a much thinner thread than yours apparently.

“Glad to know it takes only one super smiley person to ruin your day,” you couldn’t help but snip, the rolling of your eyes only stopped when the front desk clerk began to walk over, a bright smile on his face, and his hand waving in greeting.

You opened your mouth, ready to begin talking when his welcome rang clearly in your ears, but just as it happened all those years ago, the world froze.

[Ace the introduction.]     [Fumble the introduction.]

The prideful, arrogant smirk on his face seemed to burn into your back as he stared from behind you.

“Hi, I would like it.”

Your voice gave out, and with burning cheeks, you and the front desk clerk stared at each other, the awkward silence biting into your throat. The clerks’ smile, breaking slightly in his second-hand embarrassment and wonder as to why you stopped talking, but despite wanting to continue speaking your voice refused to work again.

Bakugou Katsuki was an asshole.

“Are you here to check in?” he asked, his eyes searching yours in hopes that was what you were here for.

With a burning face, you nodded, and the check-in proceeded.

The clerk, who introduced himself as Ryan Locke, quickly checked you and Bakugou into your rooms. He pulled out a simple paper map and circled the small house - yes, small house - that the two of you would be residing in. Just as the package the two of you purchased, both of you would be here in two months, and the entire time everything would be included. Name it, and it would be brought to the room, well, house. You nodded, trying to take everything he was throwing at you in, not at all relying on Bakugou, who was standing by the window staring at the other guests with a frown on his face.

PDA was not something either one of you were comfortable with.

“Well, that’s it from me! Should you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to call!” Ryan smiles, the crinkles by his eyes creasing, even more, washing you over with ease despite the tension in your body. You heard Bakugou approach the two of you, and with him beside you, Ryan seemed to remember something as he rubbed the back of his neck. “And, there is a couples event tonight, should you and your husband want to join! Most couples do, and by the look of it, it may help re-spark things?”

A sour rancid taste crawled at the back of your throat as you awkwardly laughed, your fronts were weaker then you thought, and shook your head, “Oh no! That’s no issue! We’re actually here on our honeymoon,” your fingers pressed to your chest, your eyes trailing to where Bakugou was standing in hopes that it somehow looked romantic. Pet names were a thing, right? But what to call him? “Uh, K-Kacchan is actually super shy with PDA!”

You froze when the only nickname you’ve ever heard used toward Bakugou fumble clumsily from your tongue.

Kacchan?!

KACCHAN?!

WERE YOU SUDDENLY DEKU?!

“Oh! Yes, I understand now!” Ryan laughed, waving off his mistake, the apples of his cheeks dusting in what you could only pray to be embarrassment. “Well, if you want to help your Kacchan here express his love for you without care of the world, tonight’s session is the place to be!”

He turned and walked away with a final smile, most likely retreating to the ringing phone in the back room.

“I swear to god, do not ever call me that shitty nickname ever again, or else I’ll explode your ass,” Bakugou hissed, his hand grabbing you by the elbow as he had you in close.

“I’ll call you whatever I damn please!” you hissed back, ripping your elbow out of his hold.

You watched as his upper lip twitched, and he moved to go grab your luggage, something The Contract still held over him. You stood with the papers that Ryan had given to you, the stack of itineraries and options of what the both of you two could do while at your stay taking far more room in your arm then you thought was acceptable. Your concentration on your fake husband - as you kept vehemently reminding yourself - broke when the door opened and in walked a woman who was alone, and headphones on her ears. You offered her a smile when eye contact was made but did nothing more.

Bakugou leaned down, his hands lifting up the luggage, most definitely annoyed with rolling the large suitcases. But with the woman’s course and the way that Bakugou’s back was towards her, having not noticed her entry at all, you could see that they were going to collide. Essential items were in that suitcase, and you had no idea if they could break if Bakugou managed to drop them after crashing with her. But again, it would be payback for the embarrassing first encounter with Ryan!

But before you could make up your mind on what to do, the world froze.

[Crash into her.]     [Avoid her.]

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

(make sure to vote for the choice to be chosen!)  poll closes august 30 8am pst

[firelord-frowny]

honestly like!

i HATE!!!! the very CONCEPT of guns. and i’m theoretically SO fundamentally opposed to violence. 

but that opposition is based on an idealist assumption that no one is doing anything that they need to be stopped from doing. 

and there are obviously a fucking hell of a lot of people doing a fucking hell of a lot of vile shit, and no amount of ~peaceful protesting~ or litigating or campaigning or Reaching Across The Aisle is going to stop them, and it’s fucking RIDICULOUS that anyone at all thinks people should just wait patiently for The Powers That Be to spontaneously manifest a conscience and finally quit trying to maim and murder people For Funsies. 

i would LOVE it we could just hug them into submission and invite them over for tea and chit chat and take their ugly ass hand and smile at them and show them that I’m Just A Normal Person Like You and have them finally decide to stop wanting me to die. and honestly, some people REALLY CAN be reached through those kinds of methods. and i don’t think people should stop trying to do that. and if anything, i think MORE people need to be trying to do that.

but i ALSO think that more people need to start punching some bigots in the fucking face. 

if self proclaimed conservatives and right wingers and proud wimpy boys get to go around committing terroristic acts against other peoples, and if the politicians and ceos they stan for refuse to take any actions to stop them at best, and at worst go out of their way to FACILITATE the suffering of all but bigoted, well-off white people....

then we should get to punch them in the fucking face and not have anyone say WORD ONE about it. 

they wanna be all big and bad and parade around threatening and committing violence against teachers and health care workers and black people and asian people and jewish people and indigenous people and women of all backgrounds, then they should be fucking tough enough to cope with a goddamn punch in the face every now and then. they should WELCOME every fist that ever collides with their flesh. 

if they want a fucking fight, we should GIVE THEM A FIGHT! and make sure they fucking lose.  make sure the pathetic little ~civil war~ they’re begging for is HUMILIATINGLY short. chase their fucking asses into the most barren, useless parts of the world where they can be vile all by themselves. 

bc i SWEAR TO GOD, the only reason why these people have any power at all to impact anything or anyone is because people LET THEM. not because they’re soooo smart, or they’re soooo dangerous, or there are sooooo many of them. it’s STRICTLY because an enormous majority of bare-minimum-decent people care more about Taking The Moral High Ground than about actually doing what’s necessary to disable evil people from doing evil things.

This is a hella problematic way to put it, buuuut

black people know not to do or say certain things to a cop because we’ve been conditioned to fear the consequences of even the most benign ~infractions.~ We swallow our fucking pride and whip out those “yes sirs” and “no sirs” and we move slowly and we try to keep our hands visible at all costs because we’ve seen, over and over again, for DECADES (centuries, really) what those people might do to us if our hand isn’t totally visible for a fraction of a second. And sometimes it doesn’t even work. Sometimes we do everything in our power to demonstrate that there’s no need to hurt us, and we get murdered anyway. 

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE if those wack ass bigots could learn to fear the consequences of being disgusting out loud and in public? 

Imagine if, over the last several decades, malicious bigots were met with SWIFT physical consequences every time they did some fucked up shit. 

do you think they’d be so bold now? 

i don’t. 

i think if they thought for one second that whoever they pull a gun on might pull one out back at them, then they would keep their fucking mouths shut and behave. i think if they LEGITIMATELY thought that they’re actual lives and their actual freedom were at stake, they wouldn’t say SHIT. Because they know that whether or not they have to wear a mask or get vaccinated or whateverthefuck has absolutely NO real impact on their place in the world. there is NO. WAY. that they would be all up in arms over something so fucking absurd if they thought anyone would actually try to hurt them in response. 

they don’t think anyone is going to show up at their dumb lil protests with tear gas. they don’t think an angry BLM activist is going to shoot up their country club in retaliation against the oppressive policies they support. they don’t think anyone is going to stop them on the street and start screaming in their face and threaten to kill them. they don’t think they’re going to lose a damn fucking thing. they think they’re literally going to just waltz into some of the most secure buildings in the world and wreak havoc, and that NO ONE is going to do shit about it. 

that’s the problem :) :) :) :) :) :) 

the problem isn’t that these people exist. i mean, it fucking sucks that they exist and if they could somehow cease to exist, whether by alien abduction or some sort of freak simultaneous lightning strike or WHATEVER, i would be THRILLED. but just existing doesn’t hurt anyone. Having a stupid belief doesn’t automatically make someone dangerous. It just makes them a shitty person.

But to have a stupid belief and to feel SO ENTITLED to acting upon those beliefs???

those motherfuckers need to fear for their safety. those motherfuckers need to be SO PETRIFIED that they dig themselves underground and bury themselves alive and NEVER resurface. 

i don’t understand how, at this point, with over half a million people DEAD because of the actions of these assholes, and with thousands of people CONTINUING to drop dead over it every day, the so-called “good guys” still don’t see fit to resort to drastic measures to render these people INCAPABLE of causing further harm. 

so many people have died. not just in the time of covid, but decades before that. so many people are murdered in the name of carrying out the pettiest whims of the most wretched people on earth. People get injured. People get poisoned by their own water supply or the very air they breathe. People get sick because they’re forced to live under unhealthy circumstances, and then they DIE because they can’t afford treatment for the illnesses they developed because of the unhealthy circumstances that made them sick in the first place! Children starve. Global warming sets people on fire and drowns them and destroys homes and lives and landscapes. 

literally, at WHAT point does it become acceptable to finally just declare war on these fucking demons? WHEN do we meet them where they’re at and start punching back instead of just curling up and trying to survive the attack?

i KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW that there are groups out there who are taking direct action in some form or another. but CLEARLY it’s not enough.

and i ALSO know that there are MANY PEOPLE who have the actual skills and resources to stage a legitimate countereffort, and they’re just. not. doing it. 

we’ve got all these vile-ass ~ex military~ types boasting about their arsenal and how they intend to use it to reign terror upon innocent people. these fuckfaces who are LITERALLY HOLDING PUBLIC OFFICE and saying Out Loud that they want to attack us. and their peers exalt them for it. 

you CANNOT tell me that there are 0 ~ex military~ people who are sympathetic to the cause of resisting these malicious bigots. you CANNOT tell me that there aren’t people in public office who know that something MUST be done, and who have the POWER and ACCESS to do something - even if it’s “unlawful.” 

but they’re not doing it. :) because they’re weak. :) and they fear for their lives in a way that ~the right~ has NEVER had to contend with. A democratic state senator knows someone might hunt them down and try to kill them if they say anything ~too radical~. a republican state senator is confident that he could literally call for the public execution of someone and be met only with a pathetic verbal reprimand from some spineless liberal congressman who bends over backward to be Respectful And Fair as they gently try to explain why it’s not okay to facilitate mass death in every demographic but their own.

can somebody with the actual power and means to do so PLEASE start doing ANYTHING to terrorize these people back to the bland, tasteless, spiritually bankrupt cesspit they congealed in? When one of these american terrorists brandishes a gun in someone’s face, can someone PLEASE brandish their own gun right back at them? THEY should be the ones who are too terrified to speak up. Not us. THEY should be the ones compelled to look over their shoulder. 

im so sick of a world where mass suffering and exploitation are accepted as Just The Natural Order Of Things. instead of a harrowing dystopia that should be burned to the ground quick, fast, and in a motherfucking hurry.

[emsartwork]

Major Villains part 2!! The Wizards of the Black Circle, Valtor(baltor?), and Darkar/The Shadow Pheonix.

again, I changed a lot. I changed the Wizards’ signature color to green because i got SO TIRED of red and black villain color schemes. Also Valtor’s original outfit and hair was like. so bad. dont @ me you know im right.

The Wizards of the Black Circle are earthen born, and really really old, like crypt keeper old, older than Morgana, maybe as old as Faragonda. The reason they still look young is that they’ve retained use of their magic when the rest of the earth hasn’t, and they eat fairy wings. Wings are the outward manifestation of a fairy’s magic and form a sort of battery loop with the fairy’s natural magic production, sustaining and boosting for as long as the transformation is held. When ripped off, the loop is broken unnaturally and severely damages the fairy physically and mentally, usually they can’t transform again for a week to a month. The wings retain a large portion of magic, and by consuming them, the wizards supercharge their abilities and prolong their lives, if they had kept doing this eventually they would become faded like the ancestral witches in my other post, but it would take a while.

Ogron is from early Scotland, he was the one who forged the black circle out of iron. Iron is a notoriously difficult metal to enchant (the specialists ships and weapon bases are made of enchanted iron and are hard to destroy with magic). He practiced for years before successfully storing his magic in the black circle. He was always power hungry and calculated, he knew he wouldn’t be able to conquer the world without help, and began to seek out fellow wizards while spreading anti-fairy sentiments. It took him awhile to find people who were able to use the Circle with him, and went through a couple other Wizards before setting on the three others. He first found Gantlos in the Americas, the Anagan in Africa, and finally Duman in Southeast Asia. They all use the Black Circle as a magic vessel, and begin to actively hunt down fairies and other magic users or creatures. Morgana had only just taken the throne when they started, and as a young ruler, mistakenly believed these four posed no great threat and wouldn’t dare question her rule. However, the Wizards attacked Tir Nan Og and it’s sister island Neverland. They purposefully didn’t fully destroy everything, wanting to keep any magical artifacts intact for their own use, but did strike a serious blow to the benevolent magic users. Fear mongering lead to fewer people pursuing magic in hopes of not becoming a target. One of the Wizards’ only large scale attack was on Tir Nan Og, usually they prefered to lay traps and pick off solitary fairies. Eventually people began to shun magic users in common society, and many fled to the injured Tir Nan Og to avoid being attacked or killed. Morgana and all the fairies on Tir Nan Og placed a barrier around the island, and created the white circles out of glass and moonlight as keys. When the Wizards attacked the island again, they couldn’t break through the barrier with out completely draining the black circle, so instead they returned to their guerilla tactics, and attacked all the fairies bringing other people onto the island for safety. After they believed all the keys to be destroyed, they began to hunt down any fairies that might have escaped, using spells to track and locate sources of fairy magic all over earth. They eventually raised their power levels enough that they were able to surround Tir Nan Og’s barrier with one of their own, trapping the fairies in their own haven. They then spent the rest their time keeping an eye on the any potential magic users, placing more black circles around other sources of magic so it would be directly funneled into their reserves,  and manipulating governments and societies to their own will. They started several wars and were the cause of some natural disasters for the fun of it. Sometimes they take a break from ruling dull stupid humanity and will spend several decades sequestered away on an island or something. They also need break from each other and will go off on their own occasionally. They each have iron gall ink tattoos that keep them connected to the Black Circle.

Fun facts about the wizards because they’re like almost my fav villains. Ogron refuses to say whether his obnoxiously bright hair is dyed or not. Orgon usually prefers kilts, but tbh its hard to get a hold of one now-a-days unless you know how to use the internet. Orgons skirt is a shitty faux leather one from forever 21. Anagan is actually the most popular with the ladies~~ Gantlos is actually the oldest, and is potentially from before the Mayan civilization’s era. Duman is from Thailand and his skirt is technically a Sarung(which i think were used in Thailand but correct me if im wrong). Duman likes to change his hair color every couple years or so. Duman actually convinced Gantlos to dye his hair once but messed up the bleaching spell and oops now Gantlos is permanently blonde(and duman has one less rib) Anagan shaves his head every 20 years. The last time they were all involved in society was the 60s and they’re clothing reflects the mod/punk fashion at that time. Anagan and Duman barely tolerate each other in day to day situation, but their fighting styles actually complement each other pretty well. Ogron is a total narcissist and considers Gantlos the closest thing to an equal in the group. Gantlos spend the most time with duman so long as he’s not being too annoying(duman is basically the obnoxious little brother of all of them lmao)

Valtor isn’t “human” even in a loose sense of the word. He’s more like a homunculi created by the Ancestrals. As such he doesn’t need to eat or drink, tho he can enjoy both. He doesn’t necessarily have a “true form” as he can use his magic to mold and change his body as needed. His heart is a spark of the dragon flame and the shadow flame encased in the ancestrals magic. He was originally intended to be a servant, going out and physically searching for the dragon flame while the witches researched where the dragon could be hiding. He briefly took a young starstruck Ms Griffin on as an apprentice, but it didn’t last very long. After the witches were defeated he was still able to use remnants of their magic leaving him still very powerful, and connecting him to their spirits. He was defeated by Faragonda and the Company of Light, but being a homunculi powered by the dragon and shadow flame he couldn’t really be killed, so was banished to the frozen planet Omega as punishment. Valtor stores and channels his magic through his body, making him a sorcerer instead of a wizard. He resembles Dominians but this is thought to be because of his connection to the dragon flame.

Lord Darkar isn’t an ancient entity, but he does possess one. The Shadow Fire is the ying to the Dragon Fire’s Yang, and originally both were considered neutral, keeping the light and dark in balance. Domino’s royal bloodline passed both the Dragon and the Shadow from one generation to another, but a young prince sought to possess both of the flames and summon the ultimate power. He killed and stole the Shadow Flame from it’s bearer, tainting it with blood and violence. His murder was found out and defeated by the holder of the Dragon Flame, and thrown into the then newly formed Obsidian as an execution. While it was hoped he would die in Obsidian and the Shadow flame would pass to a more worthy bearer, Obsidian turned out to be a pocket dimension instead of a death sentence, and he emerged again, was defeated again, emerged yet again, decided to be a little smarter, and found the Ancestral Witches to do his bidding. However, the witches eventually betrayed him, and sought to possess the Dragon flame for themselves, they created Valtor with sparks of both so he would, hopefully, be protected to both powers. Darkar’s time in Obsidian tied him to the pocket dimension, so every time he’s defeated he gets sent back there lmao. Due to the “equal-opposite” rule, When Obsidian was formed was also when the Relix was created, it holds the only power strong enough(theoretically) to destroy Obsidian in the power crystal, but using it is more than likely to destroy you in the process so it was sealed away with the codex. After the Winx defeat him he’s not destroyed, just sent back to Obsidian. The only way to kill him would be to separate the Shadow Flame from his body, or use the water stars on him.

[nastybangtan]

ive been thinking a lot about making a kpop blog?? but im so scared that ill just be blogging alone bc theres so many fans here that im just like a grain of rice in a giant ass rice bag, is it worth it though? i really wanna do it and hopefully meet people

Make one! As long as you make your blog unique in some way then you’ll be able to attract followers and make friends. But, even if you just make a regular ol’ blog you’ll still get followers and friends as long as you put in the work and effort. Not everyone is going to like your blog, not everyone is going to hate your blog. You’re going to attract the people that share the same values/interests as you for the most part so don’t worry about being a grain of rice in a giant ass rice bag. You’ll find your own cozy little niche to chill with, and trust me, a small niche where you feel comfortable is much better than trying to create/be a part of a giant group where you’re not appreciated for who you are. 

Maybe you already get it but let me explain further. Think of ARMY as the rice bag, and every individual ARMY as a rice grain. We’re all ARMY, we all love BTS. But, do we all get along with each other even though we share the same love for BTS? Not necessarily. (I stay away from those dramatic, believe in anything and everything army and theoretical army. Ain’t nothing wrong with them but I personally ain’t got time or patience for that shit.) So, even among the rice bag that is ARMY, you’ll experience stronger relationships with those rice grains who are compatible with you. And you’ll never know who you’ll meet or what you’re capable of if you don’t give it a try~! I found my little niche of thirsty, funny, philosophical, existential crisis coping yet optimistic ARMY.

I started my blog because I was thirsty af and felt the need to share my trashy smut. At first I was hesitant because I felt like army senpai would never notice me. But I kept it up and then I moved on to dabble in other skills like meme making (but is that even a skill), video editing, photoshop, etc. I met a lot of wonderful people and am glad to have affected others positively through my posts, videos, etc. (I’m creepy, I like to look at your comments and tags when you reblog so I can know if y’all are having a good time. :D) 

Also, just a quick thing (because I’m writing a book at this point. maybe I ought to actually just write a got damn book and get my big break, huh?). If people start reposting your content, just let it be. It’s inevitable and very frustrating. But,it means that your shit is good because people are stealing it. So, try to be happy about it if you ever decide to create your own content. Also, make sure you put tags in your posts so they come up when people search.

Thank you for reaching out to me bby. Give it a try! If you don’t like it then you can always shut your blog down but you’ve got to at least try it! Whether you choose to do something unique or not doesn’t matter. People who are compatible with you will naturally come your way. Good luck little one! You can always talk to me if you need anything or just want to chat~ Be happy~

[ts-nightingaleislands]

Episode #4- “if I have to do another tribal I'm gonna tonya Harding these bitches”- Austin

I have not gotten a chance to see tribal's entirety, but something did stand out. Tawni essentially implied that OG Thrush would stick together and do what it takes and it told me that perhaps there are people on that tribe unwilling to work with Petrel. I understand that we have our OG tribe but I will say that people who arent open to working with others may not be good for the long run so I think Im gonna try and evaluate a few things and go from there as far as maximizing my benefits

The Dylan blindside went very well. I would have very much preferred to see Tawni leave, only because she's still the person I've talked to least. Unfortunately, Cheatham and Austin both wanted her to stay, which is why we voted Dylan, who was a much more aggressive player than Amy. I figure that it's early on, a swap could come any day now, so I've been preparing for one. I've already tried to get a Tawni vote prepared in the event we lose, which was actually very easy because she told me she wanted to get rid of Noah and that's all he needed to be good with it. (It also helps that he was independently considering voting Tawni before I told him that). Cheatham and Austin would likely prefer to vote Amy, which I would not prefer. Amy is much less likely to betray me than Tawni as far as I can tell, and the absolute worst case scenario regarding a swap would make Amy an easy scapegoat vote if we lose. Tawni would be much harder to vote out in that scenario. Premerge is all about making strong connections to carry me through the rest of the game, just laying my foundation now. Austin and Noah both trust me so much, and then Cheatham appears to be seen as a fourth wheel to our alliance. Austin and Noah (especially Noah) are huge players, so if you're going to take a shot at my alliance, it would make more sense to get one of them, and Cheatham has already been seen to get votes on him due to certain aspects of how he comes off (blatantly refusing to work with people afaik?). I'm not the big guy in my alliance, but I'm not the expendable guy either. Right where I'd want to be. Assuming I can actually form strong social connections with everyone, and let's be honest, that's 50/50. Oh no do I need to take control of the game strategically to have a shot at winning?? Well if I do, the bigmovez part of my brain will have to wait until we merged, because I have already established that the premerge is a time for fostering strong connections!

Well that went according to plan and Dylan went home! Now it’s once i get tawni out (who was also against me) , i’ll get my idol! That really all i care about tbh so i have some safety come swap. Noah and I are THROWING this comp just to send home tawni and get ourselves an IDOL

So I have to pretty much start a majority alliance later though right now I am more focused on the challenge. As of this moment, I like the idea sharing going around for the challenge. Baby Got Back may be questionable to some but we just want to have fun! Im ready to get this going and just have a fun challenge with hopefully another win!

Im nervous sorta in that last time I had to edit the music video and it was ao stressful knowing if we lost it would be my fault. It does sorta deem AnnMarie is running into trouble so I might have to do it again unfortunately and its like ahhh

Pleaseeeeee have a tribe swap soon . I love my tribe but if I have to do another tribal I'm gonna tonya Harding these bitches .

Last night felt like a mess. Rizo joins a chat with Kyle and Tim supposedly to get info from and the belief is they may want to target one of us, meanwhile Gwen makes a chat with me and Sara calling it Detectives where we end up voicing concerns and sure enough Rizo and Tim's history is brought up. The girls and AnnMarie get sketched out from Tim and by association Kyle, Steven meanwhile is gaining cool points like Santa Claus and yeah. Im pretty certain its only a matter of time before peoppe search stuff about me but man this tribe is becoming a secret ball of chaos

And Liam is an unproblematic cool kid too

Well. I cried myself to sleep. And I woke up crying. I want to give up so bad. Cause it’s like at this point I have zero chance of winning so what’s the point. I don’t know anyone on the other side. My one ally in the game sucks ass. Granted my entire tribe does. And it’s like I’m assuming at this point we aren’t swapping and y’all are gonna keep us here until merge except there will be no one from my tribe left to merge. I’m just so fucking tired of trying

Wow, I can’t believe we won again. And in a landslide. It was a lot of fun making that video. And yes, that is a real snake. And no, I had never touched a snake before. And yes, it was weird. Okay, so here’s what went down over the past few days. Rizo told the CORGIS that Tim wanted to make an alliance with him and Kyle. I don’t know if that actually came to fruition yet, but after doing some digging, Chris found out that both Kyle and Rizo work for FedEx. Even though they live in different states, they may have bonded over this, or maybe they met at some point? No idea. Anyway, we are keeping our eyes out. This prompted Chris, Sara, and I to make a new sub-alliance called Detectives. We discussed the possibility of Rizo going rogue and we also discussed concerns about Tim. I did some research online and found Rizo’s Survivor audition video on Youtube. I think he may be a little more of a game player than we initially thought, but I mean, a lot of people in these ORGs apply for the actual shows. But it did make me and Sara question our Sunt alliance with him. I also did some digging on Tim and found out that he has played in a lot of ORGs and he has won, or done well, in a significant number of them. Reading reviews from his past competitors makes me even more nervous about him. They said that he was really great at game play and basically slayed the social game. He is way too much of a threat and we need him out of this game before he can manipulate people. And this makes sense with Tim’s Devils…I realized that he could have just told the whole tribe about the concerns with Noah, but he decided to just tell the girls. Now, sure, maybe this was out of the kindness of his heart, but based on the information that I found, I think that it was a strategic move to gain trust with us. Oh, and also, I accidentally almost blew up that alliance…we were talking about alliances and he said he was only in one alliance. However, I know that he has approached at least two other people with the possibilities of alliances, so I highly doubt that is true. Anyway, I mentioned it in the Detectives and Chris was like oh he has an alliance? But Sara and I saved it (I hope) by telling him that he was probably talking about the chat he made with the girls since the hosts technically had to call that an alliance. I think we’re good? I’m debating whether we tell Chris the name. Tim’s Devils is a total joke and none of the girls are actually loyal to it, but I don’t want the name coming back to Chris. He is still my #1 and I want him to be able to trust me. It was funny because when I was talking to Tim, he said we have a good alliance and I was like Tim’s Devils? And he asked how many alliances I was in. I was like ohhh I didn’t realize that was a real alliance because no one has talked in it. Then tried to cover it up with asking whether it is normal for people to make alliances before losing a challenge. Who knows if he bought it. I’m just going to keep playing up the N00B card for now. So everyone that I have talked to has said they are concerned about Tim. He is my target. So this could go two ways – either everyone really wants Tim out, or they really want me out and that’s the name they are giving me. I hope it’s the former, but either way it has been fun! If it is the latter, it was a great learning experience! It’s kind of hard to say what the next move is, since we don’t know if there will be a swap…and if there is a swap, who would be on my tribe. Ideally, we would have the majority in both tribes. I guess the most likely groups are 5v2 and 4v3. My only concern is that the other tribe might have the immunity idol. In that case, we wouldn’t be able to split votes in the 4v3 tribe. We could in the 5v2 tribe…I guess we will have to see when we switch tribes!

I just wanted to touch base cause I think theres a tribe swap. I also formed a pseudo alliance with kyle and rizo just in case we ever lose to make sure i have the numbers with the Tim's Devils alliance.

I'm in a bit of a peculiar position. Two people on my tribe, Noah and Austin, both appear to want to have me as their number one, both positioning themselves in such a way that it would be advantageous for me to side with them. If this is true, then I am probably in the best spot on this tribe, and I control the vote. Do I side with Noah and vote Tawni, who is much more likely to ditch me in a swap than Amy? Do I side with Austin and vote Amy, which would complete Austin's list and give us control of the idols? Do I vote Cheatham, because I've gone mad with power and it's theoretically possible? So many possibilities! However, the best one in my opinion is to vote Tawni out for two reasons: 1. She popped off at the challenge. Not like "oh no what a physical threat vote her out before she goes on an immunity run". But it's obvious that she put so much effort into the challenge, that even Petrel would recognize that. So if she's voted out, it's clear to everyone that the Thrush tribe may be a bit of a mess. And if we're so disjointed, in the event of a swap, we aren't a coalition worth toppling over. We're numbers they can use to fulfill their own objectives. 2. She never talks to me. Amy never talks to me, but she never talks to anyone. Tawni talks all the time to other people (or so I've heard). Voting her out reduces the number of options other people (Austin) have, forcing them to stick with me or jump into the unknown that is Petrel. I really hope this is the best move, and if I get 14th bc I'm swapfucked then >:( (i guess thats not as bad as a blindside tonight)

Wohooo “we won another challenge this is so great!” I must say I am impressed at how well my tribe is doing and it’s great I’m safe and practically made the merge. However how can I go to a merge and not know who to trust. I trust my corgi alliance and Kyle but Honeslty they haven’t been tested yet to see if they are loyal which is scary. Another calm round where I can’t go into the immunity pool or target someone in my tribe. I’m anticipating a tribe swap, I don’t really want one because if I get tribe swapped I’ll be upset but at this point I’m ready to get some gameplay going and hopefully Chris and myself or Gwen can get this game going.

Shit hit the fan I’ve got a great ally in Sara who filled me in on a lot about our tribe and the other tribe. We work really well together. Turns out there’s a 6 person alliance of Gwen Sara rizo Liam Chris and AnnMarie. Sara felt on the bottom, so she talked to me. She is in an alliance chat with me AnnMarie and Kyle. This alliance of six is supposedly falling apart though. This leaves Tim. He talked to me after my reward challenge win, and he seemed somewhat insecure about his place. He’s pretty much on the bottom. Me and Sara agree that he could be an easy target to keep our place in the game if we lose soon, or if there’s an unfavorable swap. Noah seems to be on the bottom of the other tribe, so that could help us in a swap as well. Tribal happens soon and I’m pretty nervous, not necessarily for what happened at tribal, but what might come after

This entire round has been a mood and I'm extra upsetty spaghetti that I wasn't around more to hassle people! Honestly, I'm just counting the days before I get caught for my shenanigans! I literally spilled the entire idea of the 6 person alliance (as well as other groups) to Steven this round because well, it's full of duos and I'm not any of their priority. Plus, I'm generally not an underdog in games, but I love working with the underdogs and I sorta see Steven as that. If he leaks all I told him, I'm probably screwed...but I think he trusts me because he was willing to pass info and strategize with me too. Lastly, Gwen and Chris are totally a duo and Tim is sketchy...that's all! :)

well, i lost my closest ally dylan so now im feeling pretty alone. i think i could be going this round but some people are telling me to vote tawni so im going to do that and hope it works. wish me luck!

Sooooo I just edited the entirety of the lip sync challenge and it was super fun to watch everyone dance and mess around with the lyrics. I wasn't in love with the song, but I gotta admit that the end result was really nice. Gwen helped out a ton by making a Google docs and organizing things. I'm super disappointed with the other tribe though. It had little effort, and Trent really tore into them. Trent also said that the horn girl had him cracking up. I'm the horn girl. I was very happy. I was told some very interesting stuff about Tim. I already had a pretty bad vibe from him, but I guess Gwen confirmed my inkling. I don't think I will be aligning myself with him during the game.

4 votes Tawni, 2 votes Amy.

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Toronto’s Aaron Sanchez reignites inning restraint debate

David Lengel: Aaron Sanchez is the whiz of the Blue Jays gyration, at least for one or two more starts Lets start with the obvious: nothing not renowned surgeon Dr James Andrews , not agent Scott Boras , not Washington Nationals and New York Mets general managers Mike Rizzo and Sandy Alderson , not Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz knows the right path when it comes to protecting young arms. When young Nats hurler Stephen Strasburg was controversially shut down in September of 2012 and New York ace Matt Harvey blew through his innings restriction last-place season, both were coming off Tommy John elbow surgery: Aaron Sanchez, the Toronto Blue Jays 24 -year-old ace at the center of the latest innings debate has not, farther muddying the questions. Jays GM Ross Atkins, who along with their Ceo and President Mark Shapiro have been deliberating a decision to pulled the former reliever from the starting gyration possibly sooner rather than later, is smart enough to realize that he doesnt know whats right either. Theres not data either way, Ross told TSN radio in Toronto on Tuesday. With all the unknowns winging around Toronto, heres what we do know: Sanchez is the centerpiece of what is arguably the best starting rotation in the American League. Hes run 17 starts without a loss, a long time active unfold in MLB, while compiling a 2.71 ERA during a season in which hes become a legitimate Cy Young candidate. Sanchez is also efficient, averaging 14.9 lurches per inning, good enough for sixth in MLB. Why is Atkins preparing to remove Sanchez from the spin? At 139.1 innings thrown this season, Sanchez has already eclipsed his 2014 high marking of 133.1 innings, who the hell is thrown between the Blue Jays and their bush league affiliates. In a disagreement where home-grown pitching whizs are a scarcity, the Jays are highly motivated to keep Sanchez health for the long term. In addition to theoretically protecting Sanchezs prized right arm, the move too mounts up what could be a formidable 1-2-3 bullpen perforate together with set-up soldier Jason Grilli and closer Roberto Osuna. It could help a aid core that ranks 11 th in ERA, but that thought also presumes Sanchez has no editions moving back to relief work. Replacing Sanchez in the spin “wouldve been” inconsistent Francisco Liriano, acquired at the non-waiver trade deadline, with journeyman Scott Feldman waiting in the backstages if that didnt work out. We feel like transitioning him[ Sanchez] to a relief character would be the best act for us being in Play 7 of the World Series, said Atkins on a conference call following the deal for Liriano. Interesting thought, specially when you consider the dogfight Toronto are in to even reach the playoffs, let alone the World Series. When Strasburg left the spin in 2012 the Nats had a 6.5 tournament NL East lead in early September. Meanwhile, the fact that one is well aware right and wrong for Sanchezs health in the long run isnt continuing those working in Toronto and beyond from taking slopes. On Wednesday, Torontos SportsNet5 90 radios Andrew Walker said its crazed to throw him 240 innings![ that number would be reached only if Sanchez finished the season and the Jays experienced an extended playoff pas ]. Categorically insane! Smoltz, who sloped both as a starter and then in the bullpen, told Torontos The Fan radio on Wednesday that he doesnt like the space Toronto are handling the situation. Going to the bullpen and youre not the closer has a lot more of an effect on your forearm and organization than parties recall because you dont have a characterized capacity. Its not like they go in the seventh inning of every competition were gonna get him up and get him in. When youre a top-line starter, which I make[ Sanchez] is, you got to make sure that that becomes the DNA of this player. Jays starting catcher Russell Martin has discovered the majority of members of Sanchez innings up close. I dont like it, Martin said here on Sportsnets Tim& Sid show. You got a guy who is cruising, testifying no mansions of tirednes … How many stressful innings has he had? I dont think hes had too many, you know? His innings are pretty scavenge … if the guy is completely healthy and putting up character start after quality start, I dont even know why its a discussion right now. Thats merely my views. Im not the one attracting the fibres. Martin wants to win and apparently, so do his team-mates, so such a move could potentially stir the clubhouse negatively at exactly the incorrect time. Throw out all of the unknowns in the health question and youre left with a pure baseball decision. Removing a Cy Young candidate shapes little to no sense, and risks derailing all the momentum the rejuvenated franchise is hold. Canadas team are poised to break through the 3 million marker in attendance for the first time since 1993 and are among the favourites to reach the playoffs and potentially acquire their third World Series title. They should be all in for today , not tomorrow. Video of the week On Sunday, Cincinnati Reds hurler Homer Bailey accomplished his long wander back from Tommy John surgery, sloping well in his first major league tournament since April of 2015. But he was still rust-brown: with runners on the recess in the sixth, San Diegos Wil Myers took off for residence after Bailey turned his back following a stroll, spanning the plate easily to steal a operate. Bryan Price came out to discuss the play with the adjudicator, but “havent had” recourse after given to understand that his pitcher was sleeping at the rotation. Cue the lulluby … Quote of the Week Ken Rosenthal (@ Ken_Rosenthal) August 2, 2016 To those upset with first version of Puig story: Im with you. I take great pride in accuracy. It infuriates me that a key item was wrong. Thats Ken Rosenthal rationalizing for his Yasiel Puig story that said that the Dodgers outfielder had stormed off after learning he wouldnt be on the team airliner to Denver. When Rosenthal learned that Puig wasnt at the ballpark, and thus could not have stormed off “the authors ” evidenced genuine class in admitting the error, and also added that the information came from informants, but thats not an justify. Its my work to check everything thoroughly. Puig, who was replaced by the incoming Josh Reddick and sent down to the children by LA, was sympathetic. Yasiel Puig (@ YasielPuig) August 2, 2016 @ken_rosenthal don’t annoy bro, we all become blunders #puigyourfriend #seeyousoon Whos closer to victory: Donald Trump or the Cubs? Well, the New York Post produced some little-known photos of the Trumpsters wife Melania this week, and, depending on your disposition in life, that could be considered either a win or a loss. However, the flap with Humayun Khan must be a black mark species wherever youre standing. When you weigh it all up, Le Grande Orange has been playing from behind all week. Meanwhile, the Cubs experienced a walk-off win on Sunday against the Mariners thanks to pitcher Jon Lester, who cant throw to first base but can lay down one heck of a bunt. While in the very same recreation, pitcher Travis Wood made a fantastic catch up against the ivy in left field. And all that came before Chicago wiped the Marlins: Cubs get the edge this time around. How did the minors piss off Goose Gossage this week? By Miamis Derek Dietrich stripping off his uniform top after snapping an 0-20 slump with a pinch-hit walk-off triple to defeat the Cardinals on Sunday, thats how. Goose would go gonzo if he saw this. Meanwhile, Goose continued to stick to his AR-1 5s concerning the practice baseball is heading. While addressing young musicians in Maine over the weekend, Gossage told the girls: I said my agreement about at-bat moves and remaining video games in check. Nobodys overtaking the light to teach these boys how to play. They reach so much money, theyve got a bunch of coach-and-fours that have never been in the big league that exactly tiptoe around these people. I was taught how to deed. You act like health professionals. Ive said my armistice. The activity, in my views, is going to hell. Actually, based on Dietrichs physique, it looks like the game is going to the gym. Nine expects in order 1) Has there ever been a Subway Series with less sizzle than the 2016 publication of Mets v Yankees? One New York radio host said it best: this line is more like a wake. The Mets are sinking fast under the weight of incredible harm issues, and the Yankees are eventually in full rebuilding mode after coping Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, Ivan Nova and Carlos Beltran. All the Yanks have now is bringing up the children and deciding whether or not the Yanks preserve Alex Rodriguez around long enough to thumped his 700 th home run or precisely release him, the latter of which is being reportedly being seriously considered. Meanwhile, the Mets, who are clinging to National League wild card hopes, acquired Jay Bruce from the Reds, in a move that also adjusts up what could be one of the most difficult outfield the defence of all-time: Yoenis Cespedes( now on the disabled list) in left field, Curtis Granderson in middle and Bruce in claim. If Braves fans to benefit from pray for rainfall after Spahn and Sain, Mets fans better better start praying for strikeouts and ground balls on every slope. Perhaps John McEnroe can help with that? Give that serviceman a contract! 2) Can the Colorado Rockies form the playoffs? Its not beyond reasonable suspense, even without Trevor Story, who may be lost for the season after sustaining ligament shattering in his left thumb. The Rox, who held on to their key element at the non-waiver trade deadline, are 14 -5 since the infringe. Most of this Rockies guide has come on the road where their pitching has been far superior. In Colorado, where the staff members almost always suffocates in Denvers thin air, theyre rock bottom in team ERA rankings with a 5.98 marker. Fantastically, along the road, the Rox have given up 98 fewer operates, posting an Period of 3.62: thats third in the NL, in front of the Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, St Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants. Tyler Chatwood is 6-0 with a 1.30 Era in nine away starts, and 4-6 with a 5.69 ERA in 10 home starts, which is ridiculous. Naturally, their greatest obstacle to contacting the season is their own stadium, where unfortunately they have 32 competitions continuing against 26 on the road. 3) Wednesday was D-Day for baseball and softball, in addition to providing athletics climbing, skateboarding, surfing and karate: all endeavors being considered for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. All five became the slouse, but dont reckon for a minute that MLB will halt their season to send actors: their brass are fully committed to constituting the World Baseball Classic the crown jewel of international play-act. Still, that doesnt mean it isnt good for the athletic or the players. John Blundell (@ JBMLBPR) August 3, 2016 Last time baseball was an Olympic sport( 08) these guys won bronze. Strasburg, Fowler, Cahill, Arrieta. #mlb #Wbsc pic.twitter.com/ ZLzpfQDGkU 4) Heres a downer kindnes of the official Instagram of Skeeter Duffy, Matt Duffys large-scale feline TAGEND Thanks for all your lovin’ San Francisco. We’re gonna miss ya. Onwards to Tampa! #furrevergiant #duffcat #duffmanforever #byeSF A photo posted by Skeeter Duffy (@ duffcat3 5) on Aug 1, 2016 at 9:17 pm PDT Duffy, who was sent to the Giant as part of a cope to for hurler Matt Moore, was the felines meow in San Francisco last season, playing the hot corner in place of the departed Pablo Sandoval. Duffy broke out, positing an unexpected. 762 OPS, but hasnt been able to match that Giant spark in 2016. Now he and Skeete, who has over 15,000 folloers on Instagram, are apparently patronizing for Iams and catnip after a long transcontinental flight to Tampa, a true-life blow to felines in the Bay Area. UPDATE: its too hot for Skeeter in Tampa, so hes staying with Duffys mothers. 5) Heres a record you require no part of: the Los Angeles Dodgers, currently in second place in the NL West while guiding the wild card race, have made 22 musicians on the disabled inventory this season, that after starting 2016 with 10 players on the DL. Only the 2015 New York Mets can pair these sort of harm numbers, and on the bright side for LAs love, many of whom are in a nasty feeling with Clayton Kershaw not eligible to pitch until late August, New York won the NL East. 6) Just periods after putting together one of the best, if not the good bullpen in baseball, the Indians rotation received a punch with Danny Salazar thumping the DL with elbow inflammation. Clevelands righty hurler abode his shortest start to the season while get pasted by the Twinneds on Monday and had what was supposed to be a precautionary MRI on Tuesday. Salazar had given up 21 moves over his last five starts after allowing merely 23 moves over his first 15 starts of the season. Cleveland are trying to acquire their first World Series entitle since 1948 and are four games up on the Beast in the AL West. 7) On the heels of the Tribe are the red hot Detroit Tigers, who have won eight straight recreations while going health at precisely the right time. With a payroll of roughly $200 m, the team werent prepared to attain meaningful adds-on at the busines deadline, but they are getting buttress in matters of the activations of Jordan Zimmerman and JD Martinez from the disabled schedule. After being left for dead by most experts picking the Royals to repeat as AL Central champs this season, the Tigers ought to have hang about thanks to a high-powered offense driven by Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler and JD and Victor Martinez. Now their pitching staff are coming around with their second half ERA dropping by 1.33 to 3.14. With tough line against the Mets, Navigator, Red Sox and Rangers coming up, the next few weeks will show us how real Detroit are. 8) Joey Votto is having an interesting era with love lately. On Monday Joey Votto desegregated it up with a person in a Reds jersey while chasing a fouled ball into the stands. Cut4 (@ Cut4) August 3, 2016 It took some innings, but Joey Votto& a @Reds fan sorted everything out. Full Story: https :// t.co/ iCNjYJulXz pic.twitter.com/ bwznPWocJB Votto apologized, but the mea culpa comes just days after he chastened a young love who asked for his batting gloves in San Francisco. Melanie Nichols (@ kiasuchick) July 27, 2016 Kid asks for Joey’s batting gloves. Votto responds “You’re sitting in the figurehead row, you’re elite. This isn’t a ‘Make A Wish’ situation” … Im all for messing with followers as long as its kept flare, but the Make–AWish Foundation crack is totally unnecessary. 9) And ultimately, on Tuesday, umpire Bob Davidson encountered a devotee at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. Philly Influencer (@ PHL_Influencer) August 3, 2016 A fan was ejected from video games by home plate umpire Bob Davidson pic.twitter.com/ k7gwhG9K2l Davidson has a reputation for confrontation, but it seems the veteran ump got it right this time, speaking to the fan about homophobic heckling before security questioned the offender to leave. People heartened me, said Davidson. which is unusual in this town for me Read more: www.theguardian.com http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/08/30/torontos-aaron-sanchez-reignites-inning-limit-debate/

[fancycollectionfury-blog1]

Would it be cheaper to insure honda civic or honda accord?

"Would it be cheaper to insure honda civic or honda accord?

I'm talking about general prices for each of them, I'm thinking accord is cheaper because its cheaper and non sporty and a family sedan can anyone tell me how much they pay for their inusrances?

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://saleinsurancequotes.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

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Who has the cheapest full coverage insurance in ca?

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How much more dose car insurance costs for teens than middle aged people and why?

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What are some cheap Auto Insurance Companies?

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By how much car insurance will go down after 1 year NCB?

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CALIFORNIA DRIVERS-Insurance question?

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Would it be cheaper to insure honda civic or honda accord?

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My parents just lost there health insurance. ?

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Car insurance help needed ASAP thanks.?

Ok. My father has his own jeep insured in his own name.He has owned the jeep since 2005 and he still has it this day.He has a 9 year no claims bonus on it.He is insured with FBD insurance.His insurance is commercial. Now I have my own car which was only bought recently but I put my car in my fathers name.Now the reason been is because im trying to get my insurance cheaper.Now I dont want any comments saying that its insurance fraud because every one is broke now and trying to get things cheaper just like myself here.Now what I was thinking if I were to go with a differant car insurance company than his and if he were to go as main driver and me as named could he say that he uses the jeep for commercial use and the car for private use? If that works can he put his 9 year no claims bonus on my car which is in his name so ill just say he owns it for now one.So can he put his 9 year no claims bonus on my car aswel as his own jeep aswel.Because if that worked I would get mine really cheap?So if that would work,I know that if i were in an accident his no claims bonus would be gone but my father trusts me to be a carefull driver. I only want proper answers to my question and thanks very much for the help and it will be much appreciated for it.I live in Ireland aswel ok....Thanks very much.""

Why is my car insurance so expensive? Can someone who knows the facts please explain?

I am 19 I drive an old 1997 Nissan I've only been in one wreck but that was over 3 years ago. I've been driving since I was 16. My mom is now making me pay my own insurance, and she said it would be around $600. This is insane to me. I don't understand why insurance is so expensive especially if you have been a safe driver for years. I feel like you are just throwing away money for nothing. Could someone explain why car insurance is so expensive and why do you think mine is so high?""

""If I Buy Rental Car Insurance, do I or My Personal Car Insurance Pay Anything?""

If I pay for insurance offered by the rental car company, do they pay for everything in the event of a collision? Or, does my insurance still have to pay some of the liabilities? Do I have to pay my deductible? I am simply trying to understand how this works. I have no plans to buy the insurance since I have my own insurance and my credit cards also pay.""

1999 Camero Insurance Question.....?

Hi, my son is turning 16 and our friend has a camero that his is going to give him a good deal on and I know because its a sports type of car insurance is going to be expensive and he is young...... does anyone have a quote or in the business and has a ballpark number? Thanks""

How much is your monthly car insurance bill?

indicate your age and if you have full coverage. I want to know if what I'm paying is average. I'm under 25 and I was involved in an accident.

Totaled car w/no insurance please help?

ok bought a new car in oct 09 then it was stolen I made an insurance claim and they dropped me so I paid 3000 to get it fixed after that I didn't insurance back on it because I couldn't afford it at the time it was $412 a month so I finally was able to get insurance and no one would insure me had almost 8 pts I'm 23 and high risk finally my brother totaled the car and I have 17000left to pay and have not missed any payments should I tell the finance co? This just happed and it's still at the police impound he did not hit anyone I just have a fast car and he hit 3 light poles! Should I file bankruptcy? Get it off the lot? Tow it to the dealership? Tell the finance co please help what's the next steps I have no one to help

Can I own a car and have someone else insure it?

Ok I'm 19 and currently own my own car and the pink slip is under my name but I know if I get insurance right now it will be high so I was wondering if my dad can insure it while I drive it under my name. I live in California and my dad has State Farm. Thank you.

How much would my insurance be if i owned a tuner car like form fast and the furious?

because i am 16 right now, and in the future ( 20's) i want to work on one, how much would my insurance be for it?""

PA insurance laws?

Anyone know what the laws are in PA when you buy a car from a private owner? How long do you have to get insurance? I already have it on my car .. and I'm getting this new one and not transferring the insurance until the next day. What are the laws? Is it like inspection that you have 10 days?

Will my insurance go up more?

So a months ago my car insurance went up because of a driving ticket and i just go another...will my insurance go up even more or what will happen????

Do you have to have car insurance just because you have a drivers license?

My mom is bent on the idea that just because I have a drivers license I have to have car insurance as well. I go away for college and I dont drive all year long. We have a family car that I drive once or twice over the summer but other than that I don't get behind the wheel of a vehicle. I don't have any problem with just not driving at all. Am I really legally obligated to have car insurance even though I do not drive? Will it somehow make me less likely to get insured in the future if I remove myself from her insurance package now?

Globe Life Insurance Policy for children?

I've had a Globe Life insurance policy for my Daughter since just after she was born, didn't really think about it as it seemed like a great idea when I got their information in the mail. My Daughter will be 8 years old this February, I simply want to do whatever is best for her. I guess my question is three-fold, am I doing the right thing with this, is this a good policy to have, and lastly should I continue with this? Maybe one more, should I increase the coverage?""

Cheap car on Insurance ?

whats the cheapest car on Insurance in ontario canada?, i need 4 doors small car""

""Cheapest car insurance in St.Cloud, MN?""

Cheapest car insurance in St.Cloud, MN?""

Can I get money back if I cancel my car insurance?

I share a car with my mum but she doesn't allow me to use it, so I figure it would be best to cancel my insurance policy if I get some money back. I only need a car to get home from work on a Thursday night but I have asked my boss if I can do an earlier shift so I can get a bus. He is letting me know if I can do this by the end of next week but in the meantime I would just like to know if it's worth cancelling. The policy runs out in April, I live in the UK and I'm with Zurich if that helps.""

Insurance Nissan 350z?

I was wondering how much it is for insurance for a nissan 350z i'm 18 and haven't driven yet! Maybe somebody can help me

Will i still be insured to drive a car that i took off my insurance policy yesterday?

I have bought a new car and changed my insurance over to that car, just yesterday. However i still have my other car for a day or so and was wondering is there any leeway when insurance is swapped over from car to car to still use my original car?""

Does an 800cc motorcycle's insurance cost much more than a 600cc?

I found a bike I was thinking about buying to learn on today. I like the bike and can't beat the price. I read on yahoo answers soeone said 750cc bikes are actually 749 b/c insurance goes up significantly after that. Is that true? I'm not getting the bike because I want a bigger bike, Id be perfectly happy with a 600 but its a good deal for this bike I found. Will i save alot on insurance and just wait to find a 600cc?""

What happens if I get caught without car insurance?

I'm 16 and I live in AZ. What would happen if I was caught driving my mom's car without insurance? I have my license and never got caught breaking the law. What would happen to me? Car insurance is about 150 a month and I could buy a new car instead of paying that.

Help! Car insurance question?

I am 16 years old and i want to buy my own car. I want to buy something a little older that looks nice, is more reliable, and has more features than a new, cheap car. But some people told me that the insurance premium will be based on the value when the car was new. Is this true? Am I really going to have huge insurance costs on a car that isnt worth that much anymore? PS: I live in alberta, canada my budget is about $5000-$12000""

Can I Buy Car Insurance Without Having A Car?

I'm not planning on driving anyone else's car it's just that my mom doesn't want to put me on her insurance because she says that it'll be too expensive for her (even though I would pay her for my piece). Thing is I don't have a car yet but do plan on financing a ar very soon. I've been pre-approved so I'm pretty much set to go but want to just drive my car off the lot without any problems. Also, does 'non-owner's' insurance like roll over should you buy a ar yourself? Like say for instance I did get non-owners insurance, drove my mom's car and then finally got enough money to buy my own car, can I use the same insurance?""

How much would insurance usually raise adding a minor on it?

How much would insurance usually raise adding a minor on it?

Would it be cheaper to insure honda civic or honda accord?

I'm talking about general prices for each of them, I'm thinking accord is cheaper because its cheaper and non sporty and a family sedan can anyone tell me how much they pay for their inusrances?

Car insurance for someone who only drives 1000 miles a year.?

I drive 800 to 1000 miles a year ( just groceries shopping mostly) and have to pay the same insurance premium as someone who drives 10,000 miles a year. Allstate doesn't care if I drive anything less. I spend more on car insurance than I do on gas. Does any car insurance company give a break to people who barely do any driving?""

Auto insurance quotes in New Jersey?

Hi, where can I get auto insurance quotes for New Jersey area? I need to compare quotes online and hoping to save some money. Currently I think I'm paying way too much for it.""

Cheap car insurance with DUI?

I'm really struggling to pay rent along with everything else, and now I have to pay car insurance or else my registration will be suspended. I can barely afford to buy food with my part time job and school. Is there a really cheap car insurance company that accept DUIs? I don't have bad credit and have ALWAYS paid my bills, I just need something relatively cheap or else I have no idea how I am going to stay under a roof with food. I live in northern California if that matters. I'm 24 and got my DUI 3 years ago. I had actually got stopped because of my light.""

How much would it cost for a 19 year old and 24 to get full coverage medical and dental insurance?

Hi I'm looking to get myself and husband full covered medical and dental insurance monthly priced? we live in florida. I want to do like a family plan maybe. If you could give me seperate prices on the dental and medical, it will be greatly appericated:)""

Do you need insurance for a scooter under 50cc in Pennsylvania

Car Insurance Question?

I have bad dmv record. An accident, a failure to yield and 2 speeding tickets within the last 3 years. I totalled my car and can only affod a car I can buy cash, which I have 18,300 dollars currently. Is there a max of how much the car can be worth for liability through the insurance agencies? I am thinking of spending about 14,000 cash and just getting liability. Is this a good idea? Or should I get a cheaper car? Help is very much needed. Thank you""

Do you think it far we can't get tags with out car insurance?

car insurance is a good thing to have, but do you think the Govener is going to far....?????""

Marital status for car insurance?

trying to fill out an insurance quote and wondering what i come under for the maritial status, been living with my gf for around 6 ish months and we are engaged. these are the options i was given. married single common law partner(separate) civil partnership""

What should I do when the at fault party has no car insurance?

I got into a minor car accident, it was the other party's fault but he doesn't have car insurance. Because it was a rental car, my own car insurance is not going to cover. ...show more""

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So my boyfriend's insurance went up a lot due to 2 accidents in the same year to the amount he is unable to afford to drive. We are considered Common law now... He needs to be able to drive due to his job he has to get to different locations! We thought about joining our insurance and downing to one vehicle to try and save money to see if that made a difference but the bottom line is we need to down his insurance so he can still get to site... Any ideas?

What's the cheapest way to get insurance when your 17?

I just bought a car and when i found out how much i had to pay i was shocked i heard something about saying you live in a different address from your parents or something i don't remember please help.

Insurance question?

I just bought a 2008 Honda Accord, exl, 4 cyl. I can't even drive it because I dont have insurance, what is the cheapest (most affordable insurance) I should get, i am 20 years old living in ontario california.""

2013 mustang v6 insurance?

I'm 16 years old my dad took me to look at a 2013 mustang v6 the other day I just want to know the avg. rates for it I live in Katy Texas 16 years old Male Don't have a driving record but I had my permit for 10 months I think I will be under their insurance Don't say I should just get a **** car and wait for a mustang.

Car Insurance (Geico) ?

My parents don't have me on their insurance but I have a license does geico know I have my licence because I live with my parents? And by how much will they raise the insurance cost if they put me on?

Auto Insurance Help....?

I need insurance on my car, and i don't fully own it, my name is on the title and i finaced it so i have a lien on it....i'm only 20 so full coverage is pretty expensive! would it be possible for my dad to be able to add me to his policy?""

Car insurance help?

Around how much is car insurance? Am I looking at like 50 bucks a month? 500 bucks a month? I really have no idea. Any help is appreciated.

Do you have health insurance?

If you dont then why ?

""If i borrow my friend's car for a road trip, what about insurance?

i have insurance for my car and my friend has insurance for her car. if i borrow her car for a few weeks (out of state road trip) do i need to get extra insurance?

Insurance for my business?

I run a small local business that is a Pet Waste Removal service. My question has to do with insurance. I don't know much about insurance and I'm pretty lost right now. I'm the only employee. I go to someones house and scoop their pets poop. Do i need insurance for this business and if so what kind and why? How about being Bonded? Thanks I appreciate your help..

Best insurance in Illinois?

I am a young adult, soon I will start going to college and I would like to know what insurance would be best and cheapest, because I will need a lot of money for college. Thanks in advance""

How much have your insurance rates gone down since the affordable care act (0bamacare) has passed?

You know , making it more affordable to keep the coverage you want ? Bonus question . How has the Medicare your parents paid into their whole lives improved their ...show more""

How much would car insurance for a 17 year old driver?

for a used hatch back that costs around 500

Do you have health insurance?

if so, how much is it per month? how old are you? what kind of deducatble do you have? feel free to answer also if you do not have insurance.""

""Young driver insurance, should I get a tracker on my car?""

hi, I am 18, male and have my test in 2 days, I have been looking at cars and insurance but no one will even give me a quote on normal insurance. I have found a 1.0l lupo 51 plate and got a quote for 3400 with the tracker thing that records speeds, acceleration, breaking and that? just wondering should i do that or what? I don't want to be limited too much and feel im being watched. Anyway, does anyone know any companies that will even give me a quote? I know its not going to be cheap because of my age and sex but a price would be nice without that annoying box thing or should I just take the tracker insurance? Thanks in advance""

Tips for cheaper insurance?

I'm 18 year old male so obviously my insurance is a bomb. I passed my test last February 2nd. I have been insured for a 1.0 litre corsa which was around 2,500 a year which is ridiculous, my mate has been driving for about 2 year and his insurance is under 500? I was on my mams insurance with her no claims and all that stuff, keep it in the garage at night, do 6000 mile aYear etc.. I don't really fancy having a tracker, could someone tell me some cars that are cheap on insurance and some good cheap insurance sites? Thanks""

Would it be cheaper to insure honda civic or honda accord?

I'm talking about general prices for each of them, I'm thinking accord is cheaper because its cheaper and non sporty and a family sedan can anyone tell me how much they pay for their inusrances?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-i-purchase-car-tow-home-without-insurance-bonnie-taylor"

[sambuckner-blog1]

Mastery Journal - Gregory Go Boom

‘Gregory Go Boom’ is in my opinion one of the most entertaining short films of all time.  The story follows a parapalegic young man played by Michael Cera that wants to go out into the world on his own. The comedy comes, when Gregory gets exactly what he wants in his steps to becoming a man but it takes him to a breaking point thus, he set himself on fire. To place this story in a specific genre I would have to say that it is a dark comedy with a real satirical tone. Sets and costumes design for the short film do not appear to be very extravagant. The story follows a young man growing up in a trailer home in the modern world so it doesn't cause for much crazy design work to create a whole imaginary world. Throughout the film his clothing appears typical as does the world around him. The only special effects work required throughout the whole film is actually the ending when Gregory has finally had enough with life and decided to theoretically "GO BOOM" and set himself on fire.

In discussing the camera work and cinematography of ‘Gregory Go Boom’, its has a very interesting way of being shot. Overall I would say it was shot very basic but it did however use both a deep depth of field as well as a shallow depth of field. The reason I say this is because a lot of the shots appear to be a super flat singular background but it shifts into a more dynamic shot with depth in the background. One example in the film is when Gregory rides on his electric wheelchair past the train tracks on the old dirt road. The shot is flat because we only see the Train behind him but would it technically be considered a deep shot as well because we can see the sky above the train and the gravel below it.  

After the camera work I'd like to the Sound that I feel also plays a big role in this film, whether it is diabetic or non diabetic music as well as dialogue. The films score is very unique in setting a tone for the film to let you know that it is still suppose to be a comedy although such dark things occur. One interesting point in the film that stood out to me the most is when Gregory is in a woman house and her boyfriend comes home. He begs for forgiveness at the door while he breaks inside the house, but rather than have him act it out they put the dialogue on a loop about 4 times. Im still not completely sure why this was done. Perhaps it was to explain him creating a distraction while he tries to break into the house.

Throughout the film we see editing use to eliminate a lot of time and still manage to get the story across. The most noticeable cuts I love throughout the film are the two scenes involving the Gas can. Gregory goes to the gas station appearing to just have to use the bathroom but is asked to by something for use. He then yells that he wants a gas can. The man responds by asking him what for as Gregory responds in an undermining why "gas". From this point it cuts to him leaving the station with his gas can. The gas can the comes back in the very end of the film when Gregory has reached his limit and drives his electric wheelchair out to an empty field and begins to poor gas onto himself. The screen then cuts back and flashes back with an image of himself on fire briefly before it cuts to credits.

Watching this film really helps me to understand how editing can be everything when making a zero to low budget film because it allows you to create the illusion that something happened without actually having to do it. This also falls inline with practical challenges you may have to face. Editing allows you to create thoughts in the audience heads through connection points without actually having to be visible for the audience itself.

Overall, I feel as though the short film ‘Gregory Go Boom’ is a great film and entertaining story and any aspiring filmmakers should give it a look, especially those interested in the zero to low budget range of film work. The film utilizes every element of film making to its highest extent and really gives you a grasps of connecting with the character.

[viralhottopics]

Libor scandal: the bankers who fixed the worlds most important number | Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch

The Long Read: With arrogant disregard for the rules, traders colluded for years to rig Libor, the banks lending rate. But after the crash, the regulators were on their trail

At the Tokyo headquarters of the Swiss bank UBS, in the middle of a deserted trading floor, Tom Hayes sat rapt before a bank of eight computer screens. Collar askew, pale features pinched, blond hair mussed from a habit of pulling at it when he was deep in thought, the British trader was even more dishevelled than usual. It was 15 September 2008, and it looked, in Hayess mind, like the end of the world.

Hayes had been woken up at dawn in his apartment by a call from his boss, telling him to get to the office immediately. In New York, Lehman Brothers was hurtling towards bankruptcy. At his desk, Hayes watched the world processing the news and panicking. As each market opened, it became a sea of flashing red as investors frantically dumped their holdings. In moments like this, Hayes entered an almost unconscious state, rapidly processing the tide of information before him and calculating the best escape route.

Hayes was a phenomenon at UBS, one of the best the bank had at trading derivatives. So far, the mounting financial crisis had actually been good for him. The chaos had let him buy cheaply from those desperate to get out, and sell high to the unlucky few who still needed to trade. While most dealers closed up shop in fear, Hayes, with a seemingly limitless appetite for risk, stayed in. He was 28, and he was up more than $70 million for the year.

Now that was under threat. Not only did Hayes have to extract himself from every deal he had done with Lehman, he had also made a series of enormous bets that in the coming days interest rates would remain stable. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, would surely cause those rates, which were really just barometers of risk, to spike. As Hayes examined his trading book, one rate mattered more than any other: the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, a benchmark that influences $350 trillion of securities and loans around the world. For traders such as Hayes, this number was the Holy Grail. And two years earlier, he had discovered a way to rig it.

Libor was set by a self-selected, self-policing committee of the worlds largest banks. The rate measured how much it cost them to borrow from each other. Every morning, each bank submitted an estimate, an average was taken, and a number was published at midday. The process was repeated in different currencies, and for various amounts of time, ranging from overnight to a year. During his time as a junior trader in London, Hayes had got to know several of the 16 individuals responsible for making their banks daily submission for the Japanese yen. His flash of insight was realising that these men mostly relied on inter-dealer brokers, the fast-talking middlemen involved in every trade, for guidance on what to submit each day.

Brokers are the middlemen in the world of finance, facilitating deals between traders at different banks in everything from Treasury bonds to over-the-counter derivatives. If a trader wants to buy or sell, he could theoretically ring all the banks to get a price. Or he could go through a broker who is in touch with everyone and can find a counter-party in seconds. Hardly a dollar changes hands in the cash and derivatives markets without a broker matching the deal and taking his cut. In the opaque, over-the-counter derivatives market, where there is no centralised exchange, brokers are at the epicentre of information flow. That puts them in a powerful position. Only they can get a picture of what all the banks are doing. While brokers had no official role in setting Libor, the rate-setters at the banks relied on them for information on where cash was trading.

Most traders looked down on brokers as second-class citizens, too. Hayes recognised their worth. He saw what no one else did because he was different. His intimacy with numbers, his cold embrace of risk and his unusual habits were more than professional tics. Hayes would not be diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome until 2015, when he was 35, but his co-workers, many of them savvy operators from fancy schools, often reminded Hayes that he wasnt like them. They called him Rain Man.

By the time the market opened in London, Lehmans demise was official. Hayes instant-messaged one of his trusted brokers in the City to tell him what direction he wanted Libor to move. Typically, he skipped any pleasantries. Cash mate, really need it lower, Hayes typed. Whats the score? The broker sent his assurances and, over the next few hours, followed a well-worn routine. Whenever one of the Libor-setting banks called and asked his opinion on what the benchmark would do, the broker said incredibly, given the calamitous news that the rate was likely to fall. Libor may have featured in hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans and derivatives, but this was how it was set: conversations among men who were, depending on the day, indifferent, optimistic or frightened. When Hayes checked the official figures later that night, he saw to his relief that yen Libor had fallen.

Hayes was not out of danger yet. Over the next three days, he barely left the office, surviving on three hours of sleep a night. As the market convulsed, his profit and loss jumped around from minus $20 million to plus $8 million in just hours, but Hayes had another ace up his sleeve. ICAP, the worlds biggest inter-dealer broker, sent out a Libor prediction email each day at around 7am to the individuals at the banks responsible for submitting Libor. Hayes messaged an insider at ICAP and instructed him to skew the predictions lower. Amid the chaos, Libor was the one thing Hayes believed he had some control over. He cranked his network to the max, offering his brokers extra payments for their cooperation and calling in favours at banks around the world.

By Thursday, 18 September, Hayes was exhausted. This was the moment he had been working towards all week. If Libor jumped today, all his puppeteering would have been for nothing. Libor moves in increments called basis points, equal to one one-hundredth of a percentage point, and every tick was worth roughly $750,000 to his bottom line.

For the umpteenth time since Lehman faltered, Hayes reached out to his brokers in London. I need you to keep it as low as possible, all right? he told one of them in a message. Ill pay you, you know, $50,000, $100,000, whatever. Whatever you want, all right?

All right, the broker repeated.

Im a man of my word, Hayes said.

I know you are. No, thats done, right, leave it to me, the broker said.

Hayes was still in the Tokyo office at 8pm when that days Libors were published. The yen rate had fallen 1 basis point, while comparable money market rates in other currencies continued to soar. Hayess crisis had been averted. Using his network of brokers, he had personally sought to tilt part of the planets financial infrastructure. He pulled off his headset and headed home to bed. He had only recently upgraded from the superhero duvet hed slept under since he was eight years old.

Hayess job was to make his employer as much money as possible by buying and selling derivatives. How exactly he did that the special concoction of strategies, skills and tricks that make up a traders DNA was largely left up to him. First and foremost he was a market-maker, providing liquidity to his clients, who were mostly traders at other banks. From the minute he logged on to his Bloomberg terminal each morning and the red light next to his name turned green, Hayes was on the phone quoting guaranteed bid and offer prices on the vast inventory of products he traded. Hayes prided himself on always being open for business no matter how choppy the markets. It was his calling card.

Hayes likened this part of his job to owning a fruit and vegetable stall. Buy low, sell high and pocket the difference. But rather than apples and pears, he dealt in complex financial securities worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His profit came from the spread between how much he paid for a security and how much he sold it for. In volatile times, the spread widened, reflecting the increased risk that the market might move against him before he had the chance to trade out of his position.

All of this offered a steady stream of income, but it wasnt where the big money came from. The thing that really set Hayes apart was his ability to spot price anomalies and exploit them, a technique known as relative value trading. It appealed to his lifelong passion for seeking out patterns. During quiet spells, he spent his time scouring data, hunting for unseen opportunities. If he thought that the price of two similar securities had diverged unduly, he would buy one and short the other, betting that the spread between the two would shrink.

Everywhere he worked, Hayes set up his software to tell him exactly how much he stood to gain or lose from every fraction of a move in Libor in each currency. One of Hayess favourite trades involved betting that the gap between Libor in different durations would widen or narrow: whats known in the industry as a basis trade. Each time Hayes made a trade, he would have to decide whether to lay off some of his risk by hedging his position using, for example, other derivatives.

Hayess dealing created a constantly changing trade book stretching years into the future, which was mapped out on a vast Excel spreadsheet. He liked to think of it as a living organism with thousands of interconnected moving parts. In a corner of one of his screens was a number he looked at more than any other: his rolling profit and loss. Ask any decent trader and he will be able to give it to you to the nearest $1,000. It was Hayess self-worth boiled down into a single indisputable number.

Tom Hayes was a phenomenon at UBS, one of the best the bank had at trading derivatives. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

By the summer of 2007, the mortgage crisis in the US caused banks and investment funds around the world to become skittish about lending to each other without collateral. Firms that relied on the so-called money markets to fund their businesses were paralysed by the ballooning cost of short-term credit. On 14 September, customers of Northern Rock queued for hours to withdraw their savings after the bank announced it was relying on loans from the Bank of England to stay afloat.

After that, banks were only prepared to make unsecured loans to each other for a few days at a time, and interest rates on longer-term loans rocketed. Libor, as a barometer of stress in the system, reacted accordingly. In August 2007, the spread between three-month dollar Libor and the overnight indexed swap a measure of banks overnight borrowing costs jumped from 12 basis points to 73 basis points. By December it had soared to 106 basis points. A similar pattern could be seen in sterling, euros and most of the 12 other currencies published on the website of the British Bankers Association each day at noon.

Everyone could see that Libor rates had shot up, but questions began to be asked about whether they had climbed enough to reflect the severity of the credit squeeze. By August 2007, there was almost no trading in cash for durations of longer than a month. In some of the smaller currencies there were no lenders for any time frame. Yet, with trillions of dollars tied to Libor, the banks had to keep the trains running. The individuals responsible for submitting Libor rates each day had no choice but to put their thumb and forefinger in the air and pluck out numbers. It was clear that their best guesses were unrealistically optimistic.

A game of brinkmanship had developed in which rate-setters tried to predict what their rivals would submit, and then come in slightly lower. If they guessed wrong and input rates higher than their peers, they would receive angry phone calls from their managers telling them to get back into the pack. On trading floors around the world, frantic conversations took place between traders and their brokers about expectations for Libor.

Nobody knew where Libor should be, and nobody wanted to be an outlier. Even where bankers tried to be honest, there was no way of knowing if their estimates were accurate because there was no underlying interbank borrowing on which to compare them. The machine had broken down.

Vince McGonagle, a small and wiry man with a hangdog expression, had been at the enforcement division of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in Washington for 11 years, during which time his red hair had turned grey around the edges. A practising Catholic, McGonagle got his law degree from Pepperdine University, a Christian school in Malibu, California, where students are prepared for lives of purpose, service and leadership.

While his classmates took highly paid positions defending companies and individuals accused of corporate corruption, McGonagle opted to build a career bringing cases against them. He joined the agency as a trial attorney and was now, at 44, a manager overseeing teams of lawyers and investigators.

McGonagle closed the door to his office and settled down to read the daily news. It was 16 April, 2008, and the headline on page one of the Wall Street Journal read: Bankers Cast Doubt on Key Rate Amid Crisis. It began: One of the most important barometers of the worlds financial health could be sending false signals. In a development that has implications for borrowers everywhere, from Russian oil producers to homeowners in Detroit, bankers and traders are expressing concerns that the London interbank offered rate, known as Libor, is becoming unreliable.

The story, written at the Journals London office near Fleet Street, went on to suggest that some of the worlds largest banks might have been providing deliberately low estimates of their borrowing costs to avoid tipping off the market that theyre desperate for cash. That was having the effect of distorting Libor, and therefore trillions of dollars of securities around the world.

The journalists sources told him that banks were paying much more for cash than they were letting on. They feared if they were honest they could go the same way as Bear Stearns, the 85-year-old New York securities firm that had collapsed the previous month.

The big flaw in Libor was that it relied on banks to tell the truth but encouraged them to lie. When the 150 variants of the benchmark were released each day, the banks individual submissions were also published, giving the world a snapshot of their relative creditworthiness. Historically, the individuals responsible for making their firms Libor submissions were able to base their estimates on a vibrant interbank money market, in which banks borrowed cash from each other to fund their day-to-day operations. They were prevented from deviating too far from the truth because their fellow market participants knew what rates they were really being charged. Over the previous few months, that had changed. Banks had stopped lending to each other for periods of longer than a few days, preferring to stockpile their cash. After Bear Stearns there was no guarantee they would get it back.

With so much at stake, lenders had become fixated on what their rivals were inputting. Any outlier at the higher that is, riskier end was in danger of becoming a pariah, unable to access the liquidity it needed to fund its balance sheet. Soon banks began to submit rates they thought would place them in the middle of the pack rather than what they truly believed they could borrow unsecured cash for. The motivation for low-balling was not tied to profit many banks actually stood to lose out from lower Libors. This was about survival.

Ironically, just as Libors accuracy faltered, its importance rocketed. As the financial crisis deepened, central bankers monitored Libor in different currencies to see how successful their latest policy announcements were in calming markets. Governments looked at individual firms submissions for clues as to who they might be forced to bail out next. If banks were lying about Libor, it was not just affecting interest rates and derivatives payments. It was skewing reality.

There was no inkling at this stage that traders such as Hayes were pushing Libor around to boost their profits, but here was a benchmark that relied on the honesty of traders who had a direct interest in where it was set. Libor was overseen by the British Bankers Association (BBA). In both cases, the body responsible for overseeing the rate had no punitive powers, so there was little to discourage firms from cheating.

When McGonagle finished reading the Wall Street Journal article, he emailed colleagues and asked them what they knew about Libor. His team put together a dossier, including some preliminary reports from within the financial community. In March, economists at the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella group for central banks around the world, had published a paper that identified unusual patterns in Libor during the crisis, although it concluded these were not caused by shortcomings in the design of the fixing mechanism.

A month later, Scott Peng, an analyst at Citigroup in New York, sent his customers a research note that estimated the dollar Libor submissions of the 18 firms that set the rate were 20 to 30 basis points lower than they should have been because of a prevailing fear among the banks of being perceived as a weak hand in this fragile market environment.

While there was no evidence of manipulation by specific firms, McGonagle was coming around to the idea of launching an investigation.

In 2009, Hayes was lured away from UBS to join Citigroup. The head of Citigroups team in Asia, the former Lehman banker Chris Cecere, a small, goateed American with a big reputation for finding new ways to make money, had been given millions of dollars to attract the best talent and Hayes was his round-one pick.

It wasnt just the $3m signing bonus that had won Hayes over. The promise of a fresh start at one of the worlds biggest banks, with him at centre stage in its aggressive expansion into the Asian interest-rate derivatives market, had proved too tempting to resist. After persuading him to join, Cecere boasted to colleagues that hed found a real fucking animal, who knows everybody on the street.

Citigroup in Canary Wharf, London Photograph: DBURKE / Alamy/Alamy

Cecere set in motion plans for Citigroup to join the Tibor (Tokyo interbank offered rate) panel which, Hayes would crow, was even easier to influence than Libor because fewer banks contributed to it. Hayes wanted to hit the ground running when he started trading, and being able to influence the two benchmarks that helped determine the profitability of the bulk of his positions was an important step. Another was bringing Citigroups own London-based Libor-setters on board.

On the afternoon of 8 December, Cecere was at his desk on the Tokyo trading floor. He had an office but seldom used it, preferring to be amid the action. He believed that six-month yen Libor was too high. After checking the submissions from the previous day, he was surprised to see that Citigroup had input one of the highest figures.

Cecere contacted the head of the risk treasury team in Tokyo, Stantley Tan, and asked him to find out who the yen-setter was and request that he lower his input by several basis points. It turned out the risk treasury desk in Canary Wharf was responsible for the banks Libor submissions.

I spoke to our point man in London, Tan wrote back to Cecere that afternoon. I have asked him to consider moving quotes [lower].

Cecere checked the Libors again later that night and was annoyed to see that Citigroup had only reduced its six-month rate by a quarter of a basis point.

He wrote to Tan, Can you speak with him again?

The following day, Tan went back to the treasury desk in London as requested. He also forwarded the message chain to Andrew Thursfield, Citigroups head of risk treasury in London. The response he got back from his UK counterpart left little room for misinterpretation: it was a thinly veiled warning to back off.

Hayes, who sat just behind his boss, was not on the email chain, but Cecere sent it to him.

Thursfield was a straitlaced man in his forties who had spent more than 20 years in risk management at Citigroup after joining as a graduate trainee. He saw himself as the guardian of the firms balance sheet and didnt take kindly to being told how to do his job by a pushy trader who knew nothing of the intricacies of bank funding.

Rather than lowering the inputs, Thursfields team increased its submission days later, pushing the published Libor rates higher. Hayes would have to try a different tack. On 14 December he sent an email to his London counterpart, asking him to approach the rate-setters directly.

Do you talk to the cash desk and did we know in advance? Hayes asked, referring to the banks decision to bump up its Libor submissions. We need good dialogue with the cash desk. They can be invaluable to us. If we know ahead of time we can position and scalp the market.

What Hayes didnt realise was that no amount of schmoozing was going to get the rate-setters onside. Unlike some banks, Citigroup was taking the CFTCs investigation into Libor seriously. In March 2009, Thursfield had personally delivered an 18-page presentation via video link to investigators on the rate-setting process. The cash traders werent about to risk their necks for someone they didnt know who worked on the other side of the world.

It wasnt just that they knew they were being watched. Thursfield was not only a stickler for the rules but had taken a personal dislike to Hayes when the pair had met three months earlier. It was October 2009, shortly after Hayes had accepted the job at Citigroup, and his boss had sent him to London to meet the banks key players.

Good to meet you. You can help us out with Libors. I will let you know my axes, Hayes said by way of an opening gambit when he was introduced to Thursfield.

Unshaven and dishevelled, Hayes told the Citigroup manager how the cash desk at UBS frequently skewed its submissions to suit his book. He boasted of his close relationships with rate-setters at other banks and how they would do favours for each other. Hayes was trying to charm Thursfield, but he had badly misjudged the man and the situation. The following day Thursfield called his manager, Steve Compton, and relayed his concerns.

Once you stray on to talking about Libor fixings, I mean we just paid another $75,000 bill to the lawyer this week for the work theyre doing on the CFTC investigation, Thursfield said. Whoever is the desk head, or whatever, [should] have a close watch on just what hes actually doing and how publicly. Its all, you know, very much barrow-boy-type [behaviour].

The knock on Hayess door came at 7am on a Tuesday, two weeks before Christmas 2012. Hayes padded down the bespoke pine staircase of his newly renovated home in Woldingham, Surrey,to let in more than a dozen police officers and Serious Fraud Office investigators. A year before, he had been fired from Citigroup, and shortly afterwards returned to the UK, where he married his girlfriend Sarah Tighe.

Hayes stood at his wifes side as the officers swept through the property, gathering computers and documents into boxes and loading them into vehicles parked at the end of the gravel driveway. The couple had only moved in a fortnight before. Their infant son was upstairs in bed. Traffic was heavy by the time the former trader was led to the back of a waiting car. The 20-mile crawl from Surrey to the City of London passed in silence.

Bishopsgate police station is a grey, concrete building on one of the financial districts busiest thoroughfares. In a formal interview, Hayes was told he had been brought in to answer questions relating to allegations that between 2006 and 2009 he had conspired to manipulate yen Libor with two of his colleagues. Hayes responded that he planned to help but would need time to consider the 112 pages of evidence so would not be answering any questions that day. It was late when he arrived back in Surrey.

In June, Barclays had become the first bank to reach a settlement with authorities, admitting to rigging the rate and agreeing to pay a then-record 290 million in fines. From the moment Barclays had settled, sparking a political firestorm that burned for weeks, Hayess destiny had been leading to this point. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which had previously resisted launching a probe into Libor rigging, was forced to reverse its position and on 6 July issued a statement announcing it would be undertaking a criminal investigation. That week the government launched its own review into the scandal. The British public and its politicians were out for scalps.

On 19 December, eight days after his arrest, Hayes was at home on his computer when a news bulletin popped up with a link to a press conference in Washington. As cameras flashed, Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Departments criminal division, took turns outlining the $1.5bn settlement the authorities had reached with UBS over Libor. The Swiss bank, they explained, had pleaded guilty to wire fraud at its Japanese arm. Then came the sucker punch.

In addition to UBS Japans agreement to plead guilty, two former UBS traders have been charged, in a criminal complaint unsealed today, with conspiracy to manipulate Libor, said Breuer. Tom Hayes has also been charged with wire fraud and an antitrust violation. Neither Tan nor Cecere has ever been charged with wrongdoing.

At that moment the full horror of the situation hit Hayes for the first time. The two most powerful lawyers in the US planned to extradite him on three separate criminal charges, each carrying a 2030 year sentence. Less than 24 hours later, a member of Hayess legal team was on the phone to the SFO to discuss cutting a deal.

Fighting the charges seemed futile: the UBS settlement made reference to more than 2,000 attempts by Hayes and his colleagues to influence the rate over a four-year period. He was the star attraction, the Jesse James of Libor, as he would later tell it. The US authorities had yet to issue extradition papers, but it was only a matter of time.

So began a race to convince the SFO to take on Hayes as a sort of chief informant, who in return would receive leniency and, more importantly, an agreement that he would be dealt with in the UK.

To secure this arrangement Hayes had to agree to tell the SFO everything he knew and promise to testify against everybody involved. Crucially, he also had to plead guilty to dishonestly rigging Libor. It was not enough to admit trying to influence the rate. He had to confess that he knew it was wrong.

During two days of so-called scoping interviews to test his knowledge of the case, Hayes talked openly about his campaign to rig Libor, for the first time in his life. At the SFOs offices near Trafalgar Square he admitted he had acted dishonestly and brought the investigators attention to aspects of the case they knew nothing about. The interviews covered everything from his entry into the industry and his trading strategies to how the Libor scheme began and the various individuals who helped him rig the rate. They barely had to prod to get him to talk. Hayes seemed to relish reliving moments from his past. His voice sped up when he talked about heady days piling into positions, squeezing the best prices from brokers and playing traders off against each other.

The first thing you think is wheres the edge, where can I make a bit more money, how can I push, push the boundaries, maybe you know a bit of a grey area, push the edge of the envelope, he said in one early interview. But the point is, you are greedy, you want every little bit of money that you can possibly get because, like I say, that is how you are judged, that is your performance metric.

Paper coffee cups piled up as Hayes went over the minutiae of the case. At one stage, Hayes was asked about how he viewed his attempts to move Libor around. The exchange would prove crucial.

Well look, I mean, its a dishonest scheme, isnt it? Hayes said. And I was part of the dishonest scheme, so obviously I was being dishonest.

Main photograph: Tom Archer/Barcroft Media

This article is adapted from The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the Worlds Most Important Number by Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch (Wiley, 19.99). To order a copy for 16.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

Read more: http://ift.tt/2jv9Go2

from Libor scandal: the bankers who fixed the worlds most important number | Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Toronto’s Aaron Sanchez reignites inning restraint debate

David Lengel: Aaron Sanchez is the whiz of the Blue Jays gyration, at least for one or two more starts Lets start with the obvious: nothing not renowned surgeon Dr James Andrews , not agent Scott Boras , not Washington Nationals and New York Mets general managers Mike Rizzo and Sandy Alderson , not Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz knows the right path when it comes to protecting young arms. When young Nats hurler Stephen Strasburg was controversially shut down in September of 2012 and New York ace Matt Harvey blew through his innings restriction last-place season, both were coming off Tommy John elbow surgery: Aaron Sanchez, the Toronto Blue Jays 24 -year-old ace at the center of the latest innings debate has not, farther muddying the questions. Jays GM Ross Atkins, who along with their Ceo and President Mark Shapiro have been deliberating a decision to pulled the former reliever from the starting gyration possibly sooner rather than later, is smart enough to realize that he doesnt know whats right either. Theres not data either way, Ross told TSN radio in Toronto on Tuesday. With all the unknowns winging around Toronto, heres what we do know: Sanchez is the centerpiece of what is arguably the best starting rotation in the American League. Hes run 17 starts without a loss, a long time active unfold in MLB, while compiling a 2.71 ERA during a season in which hes become a legitimate Cy Young candidate. Sanchez is also efficient, averaging 14.9 lurches per inning, good enough for sixth in MLB. Why is Atkins preparing to remove Sanchez from the spin? At 139.1 innings thrown this season, Sanchez has already eclipsed his 2014 high marking of 133.1 innings, who the hell is thrown between the Blue Jays and their bush league affiliates. In a disagreement where home-grown pitching whizs are a scarcity, the Jays are highly motivated to keep Sanchez health for the long term. In addition to theoretically protecting Sanchezs prized right arm, the move too mounts up what could be a formidable 1-2-3 bullpen perforate together with set-up soldier Jason Grilli and closer Roberto Osuna. It could help a aid core that ranks 11 th in ERA, but that thought also presumes Sanchez has no editions moving back to relief work. Replacing Sanchez in the spin “wouldve been” inconsistent Francisco Liriano, acquired at the non-waiver trade deadline, with journeyman Scott Feldman waiting in the backstages if that didnt work out. We feel like transitioning him[ Sanchez] to a relief character would be the best act for us being in Play 7 of the World Series, said Atkins on a conference call following the deal for Liriano. Interesting thought, specially when you consider the dogfight Toronto are in to even reach the playoffs, let alone the World Series. When Strasburg left the spin in 2012 the Nats had a 6.5 tournament NL East lead in early September. Meanwhile, the fact that one is well aware right and wrong for Sanchezs health in the long run isnt continuing those working in Toronto and beyond from taking slopes. On Wednesday, Torontos SportsNet5 90 radios Andrew Walker said its crazed to throw him 240 innings![ that number would be reached only if Sanchez finished the season and the Jays experienced an extended playoff pas ]. Categorically insane! Smoltz, who sloped both as a starter and then in the bullpen, told Torontos The Fan radio on Wednesday that he doesnt like the space Toronto are handling the situation. Going to the bullpen and youre not the closer has a lot more of an effect on your forearm and organization than parties recall because you dont have a characterized capacity. Its not like they go in the seventh inning of every competition were gonna get him up and get him in. When youre a top-line starter, which I make[ Sanchez] is, you got to make sure that that becomes the DNA of this player. Jays starting catcher Russell Martin has discovered the majority of members of Sanchez innings up close. I dont like it, Martin said here on Sportsnets Tim& Sid show. You got a guy who is cruising, testifying no mansions of tirednes … How many stressful innings has he had? I dont think hes had too many, you know? His innings are pretty scavenge … if the guy is completely healthy and putting up character start after quality start, I dont even know why its a discussion right now. Thats merely my views. Im not the one attracting the fibres. Martin wants to win and apparently, so do his team-mates, so such a move could potentially stir the clubhouse negatively at exactly the incorrect time. Throw out all of the unknowns in the health question and youre left with a pure baseball decision. Removing a Cy Young candidate shapes little to no sense, and risks derailing all the momentum the rejuvenated franchise is hold. Canadas team are poised to break through the 3 million marker in attendance for the first time since 1993 and are among the favourites to reach the playoffs and potentially acquire their third World Series title. They should be all in for today , not tomorrow. Video of the week On Sunday, Cincinnati Reds hurler Homer Bailey accomplished his long wander back from Tommy John surgery, sloping well in his first major league tournament since April of 2015. But he was still rust-brown: with runners on the recess in the sixth, San Diegos Wil Myers took off for residence after Bailey turned his back following a stroll, spanning the plate easily to steal a operate. Bryan Price came out to discuss the play with the adjudicator, but “havent had” recourse after given to understand that his pitcher was sleeping at the rotation. Cue the lulluby … Quote of the Week Ken Rosenthal (@ Ken_Rosenthal) August 2, 2016 To those upset with first version of Puig story: Im with you. I take great pride in accuracy. It infuriates me that a key item was wrong. Thats Ken Rosenthal rationalizing for his Yasiel Puig story that said that the Dodgers outfielder had stormed off after learning he wouldnt be on the team airliner to Denver. When Rosenthal learned that Puig wasnt at the ballpark, and thus could not have stormed off “the authors ” evidenced genuine class in admitting the error, and also added that the information came from informants, but thats not an justify. Its my work to check everything thoroughly. Puig, who was replaced by the incoming Josh Reddick and sent down to the children by LA, was sympathetic. Yasiel Puig (@ YasielPuig) August 2, 2016 @ken_rosenthal don’t annoy bro, we all become blunders #puigyourfriend #seeyousoon Whos closer to victory: Donald Trump or the Cubs? Well, the New York Post produced some little-known photos of the Trumpsters wife Melania this week, and, depending on your disposition in life, that could be considered either a win or a loss. However, the flap with Humayun Khan must be a black mark species wherever youre standing. When you weigh it all up, Le Grande Orange has been playing from behind all week. Meanwhile, the Cubs experienced a walk-off win on Sunday against the Mariners thanks to pitcher Jon Lester, who cant throw to first base but can lay down one heck of a bunt. While in the very same recreation, pitcher Travis Wood made a fantastic catch up against the ivy in left field. And all that came before Chicago wiped the Marlins: Cubs get the edge this time around. How did the minors piss off Goose Gossage this week? By Miamis Derek Dietrich stripping off his uniform top after snapping an 0-20 slump with a pinch-hit walk-off triple to defeat the Cardinals on Sunday, thats how. Goose would go gonzo if he saw this. Meanwhile, Goose continued to stick to his AR-1 5s concerning the practice baseball is heading. While addressing young musicians in Maine over the weekend, Gossage told the girls: I said my agreement about at-bat moves and remaining video games in check. Nobodys overtaking the light to teach these boys how to play. They reach so much money, theyve got a bunch of coach-and-fours that have never been in the big league that exactly tiptoe around these people. I was taught how to deed. You act like health professionals. Ive said my armistice. The activity, in my views, is going to hell. Actually, based on Dietrichs physique, it looks like the game is going to the gym. Nine expects in order 1) Has there ever been a Subway Series with less sizzle than the 2016 publication of Mets v Yankees? One New York radio host said it best: this line is more like a wake. The Mets are sinking fast under the weight of incredible harm issues, and the Yankees are eventually in full rebuilding mode after coping Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, Ivan Nova and Carlos Beltran. All the Yanks have now is bringing up the children and deciding whether or not the Yanks preserve Alex Rodriguez around long enough to thumped his 700 th home run or precisely release him, the latter of which is being reportedly being seriously considered. Meanwhile, the Mets, who are clinging to National League wild card hopes, acquired Jay Bruce from the Reds, in a move that also adjusts up what could be one of the most difficult outfield the defence of all-time: Yoenis Cespedes( now on the disabled list) in left field, Curtis Granderson in middle and Bruce in claim. If Braves fans to benefit from pray for rainfall after Spahn and Sain, Mets fans better better start praying for strikeouts and ground balls on every slope. Perhaps John McEnroe can help with that? Give that serviceman a contract! 2) Can the Colorado Rockies form the playoffs? Its not beyond reasonable suspense, even without Trevor Story, who may be lost for the season after sustaining ligament shattering in his left thumb. The Rox, who held on to their key element at the non-waiver trade deadline, are 14 -5 since the infringe. Most of this Rockies guide has come on the road where their pitching has been far superior. In Colorado, where the staff members almost always suffocates in Denvers thin air, theyre rock bottom in team ERA rankings with a 5.98 marker. Fantastically, along the road, the Rox have given up 98 fewer operates, posting an Period of 3.62: thats third in the NL, in front of the Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, St Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants. Tyler Chatwood is 6-0 with a 1.30 Era in nine away starts, and 4-6 with a 5.69 ERA in 10 home starts, which is ridiculous. Naturally, their greatest obstacle to contacting the season is their own stadium, where unfortunately they have 32 competitions continuing against 26 on the road. 3) Wednesday was D-Day for baseball and softball, in addition to providing athletics climbing, skateboarding, surfing and karate: all endeavors being considered for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. All five became the slouse, but dont reckon for a minute that MLB will halt their season to send actors: their brass are fully committed to constituting the World Baseball Classic the crown jewel of international play-act. Still, that doesnt mean it isnt good for the athletic or the players. John Blundell (@ JBMLBPR) August 3, 2016 Last time baseball was an Olympic sport( 08) these guys won bronze. Strasburg, Fowler, Cahill, Arrieta. #mlb #Wbsc pic.twitter.com/ ZLzpfQDGkU 4) Heres a downer kindnes of the official Instagram of Skeeter Duffy, Matt Duffys large-scale feline TAGEND Thanks for all your lovin’ San Francisco. We’re gonna miss ya. Onwards to Tampa! #furrevergiant #duffcat #duffmanforever #byeSF A photo posted by Skeeter Duffy (@ duffcat3 5) on Aug 1, 2016 at 9:17 pm PDT Duffy, who was sent to the Giant as part of a cope to for hurler Matt Moore, was the felines meow in San Francisco last season, playing the hot corner in place of the departed Pablo Sandoval. Duffy broke out, positing an unexpected. 762 OPS, but hasnt been able to match that Giant spark in 2016. Now he and Skeete, who has over 15,000 folloers on Instagram, are apparently patronizing for Iams and catnip after a long transcontinental flight to Tampa, a true-life blow to felines in the Bay Area. UPDATE: its too hot for Skeeter in Tampa, so hes staying with Duffys mothers. 5) Heres a record you require no part of: the Los Angeles Dodgers, currently in second place in the NL West while guiding the wild card race, have made 22 musicians on the disabled inventory this season, that after starting 2016 with 10 players on the DL. Only the 2015 New York Mets can pair these sort of harm numbers, and on the bright side for LAs love, many of whom are in a nasty feeling with Clayton Kershaw not eligible to pitch until late August, New York won the NL East. 6) Just periods after putting together one of the best, if not the good bullpen in baseball, the Indians rotation received a punch with Danny Salazar thumping the DL with elbow inflammation. Clevelands righty hurler abode his shortest start to the season while get pasted by the Twinneds on Monday and had what was supposed to be a precautionary MRI on Tuesday. Salazar had given up 21 moves over his last five starts after allowing merely 23 moves over his first 15 starts of the season. Cleveland are trying to acquire their first World Series entitle since 1948 and are four games up on the Beast in the AL West. 7) On the heels of the Tribe are the red hot Detroit Tigers, who have won eight straight recreations while going health at precisely the right time. With a payroll of roughly $200 m, the team werent prepared to attain meaningful adds-on at the busines deadline, but they are getting buttress in matters of the activations of Jordan Zimmerman and JD Martinez from the disabled schedule. After being left for dead by most experts picking the Royals to repeat as AL Central champs this season, the Tigers ought to have hang about thanks to a high-powered offense driven by Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler and JD and Victor Martinez. Now their pitching staff are coming around with their second half ERA dropping by 1.33 to 3.14. With tough line against the Mets, Navigator, Red Sox and Rangers coming up, the next few weeks will show us how real Detroit are. 8) Joey Votto is having an interesting era with love lately. On Monday Joey Votto desegregated it up with a person in a Reds jersey while chasing a fouled ball into the stands. Cut4 (@ Cut4) August 3, 2016 It took some innings, but Joey Votto& a @Reds fan sorted everything out. Full Story: https :// t.co/ iCNjYJulXz pic.twitter.com/ bwznPWocJB Votto apologized, but the mea culpa comes just days after he chastened a young love who asked for his batting gloves in San Francisco. Melanie Nichols (@ kiasuchick) July 27, 2016 Kid asks for Joey’s batting gloves. Votto responds “You’re sitting in the figurehead row, you’re elite. This isn’t a ‘Make A Wish’ situation” … Im all for messing with followers as long as its kept flare, but the Make–AWish Foundation crack is totally unnecessary. 9) And ultimately, on Tuesday, umpire Bob Davidson encountered a devotee at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. Philly Influencer (@ PHL_Influencer) August 3, 2016 A fan was ejected from video games by home plate umpire Bob Davidson pic.twitter.com/ k7gwhG9K2l Davidson has a reputation for confrontation, but it seems the veteran ump got it right this time, speaking to the fan about homophobic heckling before security questioned the offender to leave. People heartened me, said Davidson. which is unusual in this town for me Read more: www.theguardian.com http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/08/30/torontos-aaron-sanchez-reignites-inning-limit-debate/

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Toronto’s Aaron Sanchez reignites inning restraint debate

David Lengel: Aaron Sanchez is the whiz of the Blue Jays gyration, at least for one or two more starts Lets start with the obvious: nothing not renowned surgeon Dr James Andrews , not agent Scott Boras , not Washington Nationals and New York Mets general managers Mike Rizzo and Sandy Alderson , not Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz knows the right path when it comes to protecting young arms. When young Nats hurler Stephen Strasburg was controversially shut down in September of 2012 and New York ace Matt Harvey blew through his innings restriction last-place season, both were coming off Tommy John elbow surgery: Aaron Sanchez, the Toronto Blue Jays 24 -year-old ace at the center of the latest innings debate has not, farther muddying the questions. Jays GM Ross Atkins, who along with their Ceo and President Mark Shapiro have been deliberating a decision to pulled the former reliever from the starting gyration possibly sooner rather than later, is smart enough to realize that he doesnt know whats right either. Theres not data either way, Ross told TSN radio in Toronto on Tuesday. With all the unknowns winging around Toronto, heres what we do know: Sanchez is the centerpiece of what is arguably the best starting rotation in the American League. Hes run 17 starts without a loss, a long time active unfold in MLB, while compiling a 2.71 ERA during a season in which hes become a legitimate Cy Young candidate. Sanchez is also efficient, averaging 14.9 lurches per inning, good enough for sixth in MLB. Why is Atkins preparing to remove Sanchez from the spin? At 139.1 innings thrown this season, Sanchez has already eclipsed his 2014 high marking of 133.1 innings, who the hell is thrown between the Blue Jays and their bush league affiliates. In a disagreement where home-grown pitching whizs are a scarcity, the Jays are highly motivated to keep Sanchez health for the long term. In addition to theoretically protecting Sanchezs prized right arm, the move too mounts up what could be a formidable 1-2-3 bullpen perforate together with set-up soldier Jason Grilli and closer Roberto Osuna. It could help a aid core that ranks 11 th in ERA, but that thought also presumes Sanchez has no editions moving back to relief work. Replacing Sanchez in the spin “wouldve been” inconsistent Francisco Liriano, acquired at the non-waiver trade deadline, with journeyman Scott Feldman waiting in the backstages if that didnt work out. We feel like transitioning him[ Sanchez] to a relief character would be the best act for us being in Play 7 of the World Series, said Atkins on a conference call following the deal for Liriano. Interesting thought, specially when you consider the dogfight Toronto are in to even reach the playoffs, let alone the World Series. When Strasburg left the spin in 2012 the Nats had a 6.5 tournament NL East lead in early September. Meanwhile, the fact that one is well aware right and wrong for Sanchezs health in the long run isnt continuing those working in Toronto and beyond from taking slopes. On Wednesday, Torontos SportsNet5 90 radios Andrew Walker said its crazed to throw him 240 innings![ that number would be reached only if Sanchez finished the season and the Jays experienced an extended playoff pas ]. Categorically insane! Smoltz, who sloped both as a starter and then in the bullpen, told Torontos The Fan radio on Wednesday that he doesnt like the space Toronto are handling the situation. Going to the bullpen and youre not the closer has a lot more of an effect on your forearm and organization than parties recall because you dont have a characterized capacity. Its not like they go in the seventh inning of every competition were gonna get him up and get him in. When youre a top-line starter, which I make[ Sanchez] is, you got to make sure that that becomes the DNA of this player. Jays starting catcher Russell Martin has discovered the majority of members of Sanchez innings up close. I dont like it, Martin said here on Sportsnets Tim& Sid show. You got a guy who is cruising, testifying no mansions of tirednes … How many stressful innings has he had? I dont think hes had too many, you know? His innings are pretty scavenge … if the guy is completely healthy and putting up character start after quality start, I dont even know why its a discussion right now. Thats merely my views. Im not the one attracting the fibres. Martin wants to win and apparently, so do his team-mates, so such a move could potentially stir the clubhouse negatively at exactly the incorrect time. Throw out all of the unknowns in the health question and youre left with a pure baseball decision. Removing a Cy Young candidate shapes little to no sense, and risks derailing all the momentum the rejuvenated franchise is hold. Canadas team are poised to break through the 3 million marker in attendance for the first time since 1993 and are among the favourites to reach the playoffs and potentially acquire their third World Series title. They should be all in for today , not tomorrow. Video of the week On Sunday, Cincinnati Reds hurler Homer Bailey accomplished his long wander back from Tommy John surgery, sloping well in his first major league tournament since April of 2015. But he was still rust-brown: with runners on the recess in the sixth, San Diegos Wil Myers took off for residence after Bailey turned his back following a stroll, spanning the plate easily to steal a operate. Bryan Price came out to discuss the play with the adjudicator, but “havent had” recourse after given to understand that his pitcher was sleeping at the rotation. Cue the lulluby … Quote of the Week Ken Rosenthal (@ Ken_Rosenthal) August 2, 2016 To those upset with first version of Puig story: Im with you. I take great pride in accuracy. It infuriates me that a key item was wrong. Thats Ken Rosenthal rationalizing for his Yasiel Puig story that said that the Dodgers outfielder had stormed off after learning he wouldnt be on the team airliner to Denver. When Rosenthal learned that Puig wasnt at the ballpark, and thus could not have stormed off “the authors ” evidenced genuine class in admitting the error, and also added that the information came from informants, but thats not an justify. Its my work to check everything thoroughly. Puig, who was replaced by the incoming Josh Reddick and sent down to the children by LA, was sympathetic. Yasiel Puig (@ YasielPuig) August 2, 2016 @ken_rosenthal don’t annoy bro, we all become blunders #puigyourfriend #seeyousoon Whos closer to victory: Donald Trump or the Cubs? Well, the New York Post produced some little-known photos of the Trumpsters wife Melania this week, and, depending on your disposition in life, that could be considered either a win or a loss. However, the flap with Humayun Khan must be a black mark species wherever youre standing. When you weigh it all up, Le Grande Orange has been playing from behind all week. Meanwhile, the Cubs experienced a walk-off win on Sunday against the Mariners thanks to pitcher Jon Lester, who cant throw to first base but can lay down one heck of a bunt. While in the very same recreation, pitcher Travis Wood made a fantastic catch up against the ivy in left field. And all that came before Chicago wiped the Marlins: Cubs get the edge this time around. How did the minors piss off Goose Gossage this week? By Miamis Derek Dietrich stripping off his uniform top after snapping an 0-20 slump with a pinch-hit walk-off triple to defeat the Cardinals on Sunday, thats how. Goose would go gonzo if he saw this. Meanwhile, Goose continued to stick to his AR-1 5s concerning the practice baseball is heading. While addressing young musicians in Maine over the weekend, Gossage told the girls: I said my agreement about at-bat moves and remaining video games in check. Nobodys overtaking the light to teach these boys how to play. They reach so much money, theyve got a bunch of coach-and-fours that have never been in the big league that exactly tiptoe around these people. I was taught how to deed. You act like health professionals. Ive said my armistice. The activity, in my views, is going to hell. Actually, based on Dietrichs physique, it looks like the game is going to the gym. Nine expects in order 1) Has there ever been a Subway Series with less sizzle than the 2016 publication of Mets v Yankees? One New York radio host said it best: this line is more like a wake. The Mets are sinking fast under the weight of incredible harm issues, and the Yankees are eventually in full rebuilding mode after coping Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, Ivan Nova and Carlos Beltran. All the Yanks have now is bringing up the children and deciding whether or not the Yanks preserve Alex Rodriguez around long enough to thumped his 700 th home run or precisely release him, the latter of which is being reportedly being seriously considered. Meanwhile, the Mets, who are clinging to National League wild card hopes, acquired Jay Bruce from the Reds, in a move that also adjusts up what could be one of the most difficult outfield the defence of all-time: Yoenis Cespedes( now on the disabled list) in left field, Curtis Granderson in middle and Bruce in claim. If Braves fans to benefit from pray for rainfall after Spahn and Sain, Mets fans better better start praying for strikeouts and ground balls on every slope. Perhaps John McEnroe can help with that? Give that serviceman a contract! 2) Can the Colorado Rockies form the playoffs? Its not beyond reasonable suspense, even without Trevor Story, who may be lost for the season after sustaining ligament shattering in his left thumb. The Rox, who held on to their key element at the non-waiver trade deadline, are 14 -5 since the infringe. Most of this Rockies guide has come on the road where their pitching has been far superior. In Colorado, where the staff members almost always suffocates in Denvers thin air, theyre rock bottom in team ERA rankings with a 5.98 marker. Fantastically, along the road, the Rox have given up 98 fewer operates, posting an Period of 3.62: thats third in the NL, in front of the Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, St Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants. Tyler Chatwood is 6-0 with a 1.30 Era in nine away starts, and 4-6 with a 5.69 ERA in 10 home starts, which is ridiculous. Naturally, their greatest obstacle to contacting the season is their own stadium, where unfortunately they have 32 competitions continuing against 26 on the road. 3) Wednesday was D-Day for baseball and softball, in addition to providing athletics climbing, skateboarding, surfing and karate: all endeavors being considered for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. All five became the slouse, but dont reckon for a minute that MLB will halt their season to send actors: their brass are fully committed to constituting the World Baseball Classic the crown jewel of international play-act. Still, that doesnt mean it isnt good for the athletic or the players. John Blundell (@ JBMLBPR) August 3, 2016 Last time baseball was an Olympic sport( 08) these guys won bronze. Strasburg, Fowler, Cahill, Arrieta. #mlb #Wbsc pic.twitter.com/ ZLzpfQDGkU 4) Heres a downer kindnes of the official Instagram of Skeeter Duffy, Matt Duffys large-scale feline TAGEND Thanks for all your lovin’ San Francisco. We’re gonna miss ya. Onwards to Tampa! #furrevergiant #duffcat #duffmanforever #byeSF A photo posted by Skeeter Duffy (@ duffcat3 5) on Aug 1, 2016 at 9:17 pm PDT Duffy, who was sent to the Giant as part of a cope to for hurler Matt Moore, was the felines meow in San Francisco last season, playing the hot corner in place of the departed Pablo Sandoval. Duffy broke out, positing an unexpected. 762 OPS, but hasnt been able to match that Giant spark in 2016. Now he and Skeete, who has over 15,000 folloers on Instagram, are apparently patronizing for Iams and catnip after a long transcontinental flight to Tampa, a true-life blow to felines in the Bay Area. UPDATE: its too hot for Skeeter in Tampa, so hes staying with Duffys mothers. 5) Heres a record you require no part of: the Los Angeles Dodgers, currently in second place in the NL West while guiding the wild card race, have made 22 musicians on the disabled inventory this season, that after starting 2016 with 10 players on the DL. Only the 2015 New York Mets can pair these sort of harm numbers, and on the bright side for LAs love, many of whom are in a nasty feeling with Clayton Kershaw not eligible to pitch until late August, New York won the NL East. 6) Just periods after putting together one of the best, if not the good bullpen in baseball, the Indians rotation received a punch with Danny Salazar thumping the DL with elbow inflammation. Clevelands righty hurler abode his shortest start to the season while get pasted by the Twinneds on Monday and had what was supposed to be a precautionary MRI on Tuesday. Salazar had given up 21 moves over his last five starts after allowing merely 23 moves over his first 15 starts of the season. Cleveland are trying to acquire their first World Series entitle since 1948 and are four games up on the Beast in the AL West. 7) On the heels of the Tribe are the red hot Detroit Tigers, who have won eight straight recreations while going health at precisely the right time. With a payroll of roughly $200 m, the team werent prepared to attain meaningful adds-on at the busines deadline, but they are getting buttress in matters of the activations of Jordan Zimmerman and JD Martinez from the disabled schedule. After being left for dead by most experts picking the Royals to repeat as AL Central champs this season, the Tigers ought to have hang about thanks to a high-powered offense driven by Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler and JD and Victor Martinez. Now their pitching staff are coming around with their second half ERA dropping by 1.33 to 3.14. With tough line against the Mets, Navigator, Red Sox and Rangers coming up, the next few weeks will show us how real Detroit are. 8) Joey Votto is having an interesting era with love lately. On Monday Joey Votto desegregated it up with a person in a Reds jersey while chasing a fouled ball into the stands. Cut4 (@ Cut4) August 3, 2016 It took some innings, but Joey Votto& a @Reds fan sorted everything out. Full Story: https :// t.co/ iCNjYJulXz pic.twitter.com/ bwznPWocJB Votto apologized, but the mea culpa comes just days after he chastened a young love who asked for his batting gloves in San Francisco. Melanie Nichols (@ kiasuchick) July 27, 2016 Kid asks for Joey’s batting gloves. Votto responds “You’re sitting in the figurehead row, you’re elite. This isn’t a ‘Make A Wish’ situation” … Im all for messing with followers as long as its kept flare, but the Make–AWish Foundation crack is totally unnecessary. 9) And ultimately, on Tuesday, umpire Bob Davidson encountered a devotee at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. Philly Influencer (@ PHL_Influencer) August 3, 2016 A fan was ejected from video games by home plate umpire Bob Davidson pic.twitter.com/ k7gwhG9K2l Davidson has a reputation for confrontation, but it seems the veteran ump got it right this time, speaking to the fan about homophobic heckling before security questioned the offender to leave. People heartened me, said Davidson. which is unusual in this town for me Read more: www.theguardian.com http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/08/30/torontos-aaron-sanchez-reignites-inning-limit-debate/